The New York Times The Next Trick: Pulling Coronavirus Out of Thin Air A decade ago, when firefighter John Burke earned his master’s degree in health care emergency management, he wrote his thesis on pandemic planning. So when the coronavirus hit last spring, Burke, now the fire chief in Sandwich, Massachusetts, was ready. “I had my playbook ready to go,” Burke said. Testing for the virus was a top priority, so he connected with a private laboratory to ensure that his firefighters, who… Source link

“Hey Google, take me home” is a voice command you can use to immediately get directions home from Google Assistant. Google Take Me Home is available on iPhone and Android in the Google Maps and the Google Assistant apps. iOS users will need to install the Google Assistant app to use this feature. Visit Insider’s Tech Reference library for more stories. … Source link

When Luke Stark sought money from Google in November he had no idea he’d be turning down $60,000 from the tech giant in March. Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, studies the social and ethical impacts of artificial intelligence. In late November, he applied for a Google Research Scholar award, a no-strings-attached research grant of up to $60,000 to support professors who are early in their careers. He put in for the award, he said,… Source link

He put in for the award, he said, “because of my sense at the time that Google was building a really strong, potentially industry-leading ethical AI team.” Soon after, that feeling began to dissipate. In early December, Timnit Gebru, the co-leader of Google’s ethical AI team and a prominent Black woman in a mostly White, male field, abruptly left Google. On Wednesday, December 2, she tweeted that she had been “immediately fired” for an email she sent to an internal mailing list. In the email… Source link

Just one month removed from a $120 million dollar financing round, London-based cryptocurrency giant Blockchain.com announced Wednesday it raised another $300 million to reach a $5.2 billion post-money valuation. The Series C funding round comes as the 10-year-old crypto company reported hitting 31 million verified users across 200 countries. Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith said the company has been able to raise $1.5 billion since its founding as institutional interest continues to swell with… Source link

Axios Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis President Biden is putting Vice President Harris in charge of addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, senior administration officials announced on Wednesday.Why it matters: Just as President Obama tasked Biden with fixing the U.S. economy after he assumed office in 2009, Biden is putting his own vice president in charge of a problem threatening to overshadow the new administration’s successful launch.Get market news worthy of… Source link

The SEO community has been rumbling over the past few days over a new study shared by SparkToro which suggests that more than two-thirds of Google searches now result in no click-through at all. As explained by SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin: “From January to December, 2020, 64.82% of searches on Google (desktop and mobile combined) ended in the search results without clicking to another web property. That number is likely undercounting some mobile and nearly all voice searches, and thus it’s… Source link

When Luke Stark sought money from Google in November he had no idea he’d be turning down $60,000 from the tech giant in March. Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, studies the social and ethical impacts of artificial intelligence. In late November, he applied for a Google Research Scholar award, a no-strings-attached research grant of up to $60,000 to support professors who are early in their careers. He put in for the award, he said,… Source link

Bloomberg Biden’s Likely Tax Wins Are Personal-Rate Hikes, Audits of Rich (Bloomberg) — Democrats will likely prove successful in raising individual income tax rates and in strengthening audits of wealthy Americans as they work on overhauling the U.S. tax code in coming months.That’s a key takeaway from a survey of 15 current and former White House and congressional aides specializing in tax policy completed by Bloomberg this month. A tax on unrealized capital gains, as envisioned by… Source link

(Bloomberg) — The leaders of the three most popular social media platforms are at odds over the thorniest public policy question they face: who’s responsible for policing the content that appears on their pages. At issue is a decades old law that protects social media companies from liability over content posted by users. The heads of Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Twitter Inc. are all slated to appear before a House panel Thursday to testify about the spread of false… Source link