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As more of our daily activities take place online, we believe it’s time to consider how this may eventually play out; if tomorrow’s city dwellers prefer the metaverse to brick-and-mortar stores and other urban amenities, what will it mean for cities and what purposes will cities ultimately serve? As professors in the departments of urban environment and digital culture we delve into this question and examine how the metaverse could profoundly change our relationships with urban spaces....

Pages-long terms of service agreements have been a pain in the neck for ages, but a new bill introduced in the US could be our savior. The Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability (TLDR) Act, introduced by a bipartisan trio of Senators Bill Cassidy and Ben Ray Luján, and Congresswoman Lori Trahan, aims to shorten ToS documents, so they’re as easy to read as nutrition labels on packaged food. Oh, and you’ve gotta give them props for the acronym, which is also the same one for the now-common phrase Too Long; Didn’t Read....

This pioneering move comes from Boris Johnson, the newly crowned prime minister, as well as Matt Hancock, the current Health Secretary, who already has a reputation for being one of the few tech-conscious members of government. Regular readers of TNW will recall when he launched his own ill-fated social network to connect with constituents. The government claims this AI initiative will improve care and cut waiting times for vital procedures....

Countries around the world are making drastic changes to laws in an attempt to reduce their carbon footprint and become more environmentally conscious. Many countries, including the UK, are focussing on transport and the automotive industry. Utilizing more renewable energy and increasing dependence on electric vehicles should see a decline in carbon emissions. In 2018, transport accounted for 33% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions. The UK has brought plans to ban the sale of new petrol, diesel or hybrid cars forward from 2040 to 2030....

— Julio Ricardo Varela (@julito77) January 20, 2021 As noted by Julio Ricardo Varela of Latino Rebels the Spanish page is directly accessible from the White House website’s main menu, or at whitehouse.gov/es. There are new La Casa Blanca Twitter and Facebook accounts too. You might recall that upon the Trump administration taking over the website, the Spanish version was promptly removed. At the time, then Press Secretary Sean Spicer blamed the removal on the fact the administration has “a lot of work to do....

It’s never easy to start something completely new. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions of Americans into the uncomfortable realization that their current or regrettably former occupations just don’t provide the future or security they want anymore. People need to work in stable, growing industries with strong wages that set workers up for a sound future. Last year, there were 26.4 million software developers in the world, with 4....

Check out these sweet deals on gear and gadgets included as part of this Memorial Day sale, with savings of up to more than $100 off. Mu6 Space 2 Smart Active Noise Cancelling Headphones ($136 with promo code: SUMMERSAVE20) Built with a powerful 40mm dynamic driver and a cutting-edge polymer diaphragm for distortion-free bass and a balanced soundstage, the Space 2’s top-level active noise cancellation locks out 96 percent of all outside noise energy and plunges you into an immersive audio experience....

TLDR: The 2021 Instagram Growth Marketing Bundle can help novice Instagram brands become online marketing powerhouses, growing followers and profits from the social platform. If you thought teenage girls, celebrity influencers, and overly enthusiastic grandparents were the only ones on Instagram, you haven’t been paying attention. Sure, pictures of celebrities doing their thing and every meal ever served fill typical Instagram feeds. But brands that aren’t paying attention to the Insta-revolution are missing out big time....

The system makes its assessments by analyzing reported COVID-19 cases and deaths, rates of positive tests, face mask rules, social distancing policies, and changes in testing. It also incorporates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index, which assesses how individual communities are prepared for hazardous events based on factors including poverty and population density. It then predicts how fast the virus is spreading by estimating how many days it will take for the number of cases to double....

The World Health Organization estimates that between 4 and 10 in every 1,000 people suffer from epilepsy-related seizures. According to numerous studies, 70 percent of those afflicted have symptoms that can be mitigated with medication. The problem is that many patients are unable to tell when they enter the preictal stage (the period directly before a seizure occurs) when such intervention would be effective. Professor Magdy Bayoumi and researcher Hisham Daoud, the duo who created the system at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, want to take the guesswork out of seizure prediction....

Mondly takes learning a new language out of the traditional classroom setting. The service takes a combination of neural science principles and technology to help users become fluent faster. The unique approach starts with tailoring the learning experience on the user’s native language. Other language learning apps on the market force users to learn a foreign language from English. However, Mondly is able to allow their users to learn 33 different languages from their native language including: Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and more....

You may not have heard about a small, but not insignificant change that recently rolled out on wrist-worn Fitbits all around the globe. Certain Fitbit models could now monitor for sound at night, scanning to detect any sign of snoring. That’s just the latest indication of something doctors have known for years: snoring is no joke. In addition to the psychological effects of disrupted sleep for sufferers and their partners, snoring can also be a sign of sleep apnea and other potentially severe breathing problems that can come while you’re asleep....

They appear approximately one hour before dawn, skittering from dumpster to dumpster along old paths they have worn down with time. I am trying to track their movements, to understand how far they go and how often. But it’s clear to me that the traditional detective approach isn’t going to work. There are too many and they move in places where I can’t follow. I’ll have to track them a different way — I’m going to need some rat DNA....

The company was founded by AJ Keller, a former Boeing employee, who worked on robots, and Alex Castillo, an ex-Netflix engineer in 2018. Last year, the company showed off its Notion device for the first time. The founders told me that their concept is not too much different from what Neuralink is doing. Just like the Musk-backed company, Neurosity wants to enable actions through brain waves. But you don’t have to implant a chip in your brain to begin controlling things....

For decades, scientists have tried to create computational imitations of the brain. And for decades, the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, computers that can think and act like humans, has continued to elude scientists and researchers. Why do we continue to replicate some aspects of intelligence but fail to generate systems that can generalize their skills like humans and animals? One computer scientist who has been working on AI for three decades believes that to get past the hurdles of narrow AI, we must look at intelligence from a different and more fundamental perspective....

— Cory Reppenhagen (@CReppWx) August 23, 2019 Bridenstine’s not just the head of NASA, mind you, he’s also a good friend of President Donald Trump’s. That friendship represents his only qualification for the job — typically you’d expect the person in charge of our national space program to be a scientist. He is not. He is, however, a former climate change-skeptic and current critic of the government’s continued spending to combat the growing climate crisis....

The Ghaziabad police force had filed a complaint against Twitter, journalists Mohammed Zubair and Rana Ayyub, and online media entity The Wire, for allegedly creating communal tension through tweets. Those tweets had a video of an elderly Muslim man being assaulted in the city. In a statement, Twitter said that it has complied with a legal request and referred to its content restriction policy: India’s IT Minister, RS Prasad, criticized Twitter last for failing to comply with India’s new social media policing rules on time and not taking any action on tweets related to the UP incident....

However, Twitter is now testing a feature that will let you remove a follower from your list. This will boot them out of your followers list without blocking, and preventing them from seeing your tweets at all. To do that, go to your Followers list from your profile, click on the three-dot icon, and select “Remove this follower.” To remove a follower, go to your profile and click “Followers”, then click the three dot icon and select “Remove this follower”....

The info comes from the ever-reliable Jane Wong on Twitter, who showed screenshots of an updated settings menu that includes the words “request verification.” There’s a new section on the Account menu in the settings called “Personal Information,” which shows “Profile,” and “Request verification.” Beyond that, the menu is empty. (I’m not Twitter employee. I’m not tech support) pic.twitter.com/ED58QsD7kM — Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 7, 2020 Twitter later confirmed the feature to TechCrunch, and specified that it will, for the first time, publicly reveal who or what qualifies for the blue check mark....

At a press conference on Thursday, government officials said the network would run alongside the existing Web, as a parallel internet for transmitting sensitive government and financial information. That extra security derives from a complex phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. While today’s internet transmits information by encoding data in photons, the quantum network will entangle pairs of photons so they’re inextricably linked. As TNW’s Tristan Greene explained in a previous article: “You’ll keep one of the photons, send someone else the other entangled photon, and then anything you do to your photon instantly happens to the other person’s photon....