Month: November 2022

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Teens don’t seem super concerned about social media’s effects on their lives

https://www.engadget.com/survey-teens-social-media-pew-research-193509564.html?src=rss

With widespread misinformation, echo chambers and dubious fact-checking — not to mention Twitter appearing on the verge of collapse — you might expect today’s teenagers to view social media as a cesspool. But a survey released today by the Pew Research Center paints a significantly less dire picture of how today’s teens perceive social media’s effect on their lives.

The Pew Research Center polled 1,316 American teens ages 13 to 17 between April 14th and May 4th, 2022. Much like a previous version of the poll from 2018, the adolescents reported a more nuanced — and often rosier — experience than adults who grew up in pre-social-media eras may expect.

Eighty percent of teens surveyed say what they view on social media makes them feel more connected to their friends’ lives, while 71 percent report that it gives them a place to express their creativity. Sixty-seven percent answered that it connects them with people who support them during tough times, while fewer — 58 percent — say it makes them feel more accepted.

Most teens describe social media as a largely neutral experience, with 59 percent saying it has neither a positive nor negative effect on them. Still, it skews more positive than negative as more adolescents say it’s been more favorable (32 percent) than unfavorable (nine percent).

The data shows 80 percent of today's teens believe social media makes them more connected to their friends' lives.
Pew Research Center

However, some of the teens polled expressed concerns. Thirty-eight percent said they feel overwhelmed by the platforms’ daily drama, while one-third say they feel like their friends are leaving them out of things. Another 29 percent report pressure to post content receiving many likes or comments, and 23 percent describe social media apps as making them feel worse about their lives. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021, Meta knew its product made teen girls feel worse about themselves — and proceeded to downplay it.

Online privacy is a hotbed issue in today’s climate, and teens don’t report high levels of confidence — or concern — about social media companies harvesting their data. Sixty percent of teens say they feel little to no control over how companies collect and use their data. However, only 20 percent report feeling very or extremely concerned about data collection. More than double that (44 percent) describe having little or no concern about how much social-media companies like TikTok and Meta know about them.

Only one in ten teens polled say they use social media to encourage political action or post about social issues. An even lower rate (seven percent) reported posting hashtags related to political or social causes. (Not being old enough to vote may be the simplest explanation for that.) However, among those who engaged in online activism, that rate more than doubled among Democrat or left-leaning teens (14 percent) compared to Republican or right-leaning teens (six percent).

Teen girls report feeling overwhelmed at higher rates than their male counterparts: 45 percent to about one third. Higher rates of girls also answered that social media has made them feel left out. Older girls report more caution about posting content that others could use against them: Half of girls aged 15 to 17 say they often or sometimes decide not to post content out of fear of embarrassment. Lower rates of younger girls and adolescent boys report the same.

Self-reporting surveys can illustrate the polled groups’ perceptions about how social media affects them. Still, it would be a mistake to assume that it always reflects reality. Past studies focused more on measurable effects have concluded it depends primarily on how you use it. For example, those who use social media to connect with others benefit more than those who passively read content.

One issue the survey didn’t address was the rate of teens using social media. Although Gen Z — to which most of today’s teens belong —still has high social media usage, it’s the only generation showing declining use. Maybe growing up on social media has led to a generational indifference.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

November 16, 2022 at 01:48PM

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Coffee Expert James Hoffmann Answers Coffee Questions From The Internet

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2022/11/16/coffee-expert-james-hoffmann-answers-coffee-questions-from-the-internet/

James Hoffmann answers the internet’s burning questions about coffee. What’s the difference between drip and pour over coffee? What’s the difference between iced coffee and cold brew? Does darker roast coffee have more caffeine?

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via [Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News https://ift.tt/McSpnPt

November 16, 2022 at 05:46AM

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Electric air taxi company Archer plans $118M Georgia factory

https://www.autoblog.com/2022/11/15/archer-air-taxi-atlanta-factory/


ATLANTA — A California company seeking to build small electric aircraft says it will invest $118 million to construct a plant near Atlanta, eventually hiring up to 1,000 people.

Archer Aviation, based in Santa Clara, California, said Monday that it would seek to build its aircraft adjoining an airport in Covington, Georgia.

Archer is one of many companies trying to build electric air taxis. Archer’s plan involves a battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing craft with six propellers, holding four passengers and a pilot. The propellers would pivot allowing the aircraft to take off and land like a helicopter and fly like a plane.

The idea is that such craft could be used for short flights, especially in urban areas. United Airlines last week said it would fly the craft from downtown Manhattan to United’s hub at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, cutting a trip that can take an hour by car in congested traffic to 10 minutes.

United earlier put down a $10 million deposit to buy 100 aircraft from Archer for $1 billion. United later put down a $15 million deposit for 200 aircraft from another company.

After building a prototype weighing 3,330 pounds (1,510 kilograms), the company plans to unveil a production model dubbed “Midnight” on Wednesday, aiming for it to enter service in 2025. The U.S. Air Force is also evaluating the company’s aircraft for possible use, Archer has said.

Archer is still seeking Federal Aviation Administration certification, but says it could get it in 2024. The company says it wants to produce 650 aircraft per year at the Georgia site, possibly scaling up to 2,300 per year. Automotive firm Stellantis, owner of Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep and Ram, is providing manufacturing and engineering help.

Archer said it expects to get a roughly $40 million incentive package from Georgia and local governments, including the donation of 96 acres (39 hectares) of land at Covington Municipal Airport, a cash grant from the state, and other tax incentives. Those would often include a property tax break as well as a job tax credit that could be worth $15 million to Archer over five years, as long as employees make at least $31,300.

State and local officials did not immediately respond to questions Monday, including the decision to incentivize a startup in an unproven industry.

The company said it chose the Georgia location for locally available workers, the ability to conduct test flights, affordable construction costs and good highway, rail and air connections.

“Our eVTOL technology can transform how urban and rural communities live and commute and this factory can create pathways to highly skilled manufacturing hobs and other ladders of social and economic opportunity,” Archer CEO Adam Goldstein said in a statement, using an acronym for electric vertical takeoff and landing.

Archer said it expected to borrow money from Georgia-based Synovus Financial Corp. for the plant’s construction, which is expected to begin and conclude in 2024. The company went public last year, raising about $850 million. It lost $91 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, reporting $600 million in cash on hand.

Georgia economic development officials have been focusing on recruiting electric car companies, landing major plants from Rivian Automotive and Hyundai Motor Group last year. Norwegian batter startup Freyr announced a $2.6 billion plant in Georgia on Friday, joining an already-constructed electric battery plant owned by South Korean firm SK Innovation.

Georgia Economic Development Commissioner Pat Wilson said economic recruiters focused on aerospace had worked with Archer, saying “technology and innovation continue to drive change across strategic industries.”

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/72gktrv

November 15, 2022 at 01:12PM

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Someone Uploaded All 285 Issues Of Nintendo Power To Archive.org

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-power-archive-org-magazine-1849785150


Few gaming magazines are as beloved as Nintendo Power. In the NES era, it offered many young Nintendo fans their first glimpse of the upcoming games that fired their imaginations, and poring over the detailed maps and tantalizing bits of info was a ritual almost as enjoyable as playing the games themselves. Discontinued in 2012 (though revived as a podcast five years later), the official magazine was an essential source of reviews, previews, and strategies. Now, thanks to community projects and audacious archivists, every single issue of the legendary magazine is yours to view.

Uploaded to Archive.org today by Gumball, all 285 issues of Nintendo Power are now unofficially available in .cbr format. At just over 40 gigabytes for the whole shebang, the vast majority of the collection comes courtesy of Retromags, a community-run project dedicated to archiving classic video game magazines. A couple of remaining issues were sourced via Reddit by Gumball. Scanned in full color, the collection is a wonderful way to browse through gaming and media history.

Gumball is no stranger to gathering video game print materials, as they state in a Reddit comment, “I’ve been collecting manuals and stuff for systems I grew up with.” “It is a big piece of a lot of kid’s childhoods and gaming history, so I think it’s important that they are available for everyone to read,” they say.

The escalating Reddit post is gaining a lot of attention and appreciation from gamers who have either been looking to complete their own collections or to find the couple of missing issues that weren’t in the Retromags collection. “I just wanted to get every issue in one place,” Gumball says in another Reddit reply. “The ones that I could not find were issues 208 and 285. Retromags did not have them [but] a dude over in the r/DHexchange happened to have both of these [and] allowed me to complete the set.”

Unfortunately, Nintendo’s history with these sorts of efforts isn’t exactly comforting. But as physical media, especially printed manuals and magazines like Nintendo Power, become harder to find, having access to archives like this is an essential way to preserve this history.

via Kotaku https://kotaku.com

November 15, 2022 at 11:20AM

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Consumer Reports finds hybrid cars are more reliable than gas-only models

https://www.engadget.com/consumer-reports-hybrid-reliability-ev-phev-170003341.html

Hybrid cars aren’t just valuable for their fuel efficiency, apparently. Consumer Reports has published annual reliability survey data indicating that hybrids are generally more reliable than their gas-only equivalents. Hybrid cars were the most reliable among vehicle types, with their SUV siblings ranking third. Certain models were stand-outs, including the Ford Maverick pickup, Lexus NX luxury SUV and Toyota Corolla sedan — they all had above-average reliability on top of major fuel savings.

That trustworthiness doesn’t always extend to other electrified cars. The publication found that plug-in hybrids aren’t as reliable. Toyota’s Prius Prime and RAV4 Prime are less reliable than their conventional hybrid versions, and the Chrysler Pacifica hybrid was one of the most unreliable vehicles in the survey. EVs continue to struggle, too. While there are some exceptions, such as the "outstanding" reliability of the Kia EV6, the category is still plagued with glitches — and not just Tesla’s build quality issues. Ford’s Mustang-Mach-E dipped to below average due to its electronics flaws. Only four out of 11 models with enough survey data had average or better reliability.

A straightforward hybrid isn’t always the best choice, either. Consumer Reports warns that BMW, Mercedes, Ram and others offer "mild" hybrids that don’t offer much in the way of fuel savings, and are sometimes focused more on adding power. These vehicles weren’t included in the hybrid reliability rankings.

The greater reliability of hybrids isn’t a total surprise. While they offer improved fuel economy, they’re ultimately based on familiar model lines using well-established combustion engine technology. EVs are more likely to be brand new models based on young electric motor systems and don’t have years of refinement.

Automakers will have to improve their safety tech if they want to stay in Consumer Reports‘ good graces, whatever powertrain they’re using. As of November, the outlet will penalize models that don’t include pedestrian-aware automatic emergency braking as a standard feature. CR will also stop handing out bonus points to vehicles that only have blind spot warnings (they’ll need rear cross traffic warnings as well) and forward collision alerts. This will theoretically push car creators to strengthen their default safety packages and potentially save lives.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

November 15, 2022 at 11:04AM

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MIT solved a century-old differential equation to break ‘liquid’ AI’s computational bottleneck

https://www.engadget.com/mit-century-old-differential-equation-liquid-ai-computational-bottleneck-160035555.html

Last year, MIT developed an AI/ML algorithm capable of learning and adapting to new information while on the job, not just during its initial training phase. These “liquid” neural networks (in the Bruce Lee sense) literally play 4D chess — their models requiring time-series data to operate — which makes them ideal for use in time-sensitive tasks like pacemaker monitoring, weather forecasting, investment forecasting, or autonomous vehicle navigation. But, the problem is that data throughput has become a bottleneck, and scaling these systems has become prohibitively expensive, computationally speaking.

On Tuesday, MIT researchers announced that they have devised a solution to that restriction, not by widening the data pipeline but by solving a differential equation that has stumped mathematicians since 1907. Specifically, the team solved, “the differential equation behind the interaction of two neurons through synapses… to unlock a new type of fast and efficient artificial intelligence algorithms.”

“The new machine learning models we call ‘CfC’s’ [closed-form Continuous-time] replace the differential equation defining the computation of the neuron with a closed form approximation, preserving the beautiful properties of liquid networks without the need for numerical integration,” MIT professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus said in a Tuesday press statement. “CfC models are causal, compact, explainable, and efficient to train and predict. They open the way to trustworthy machine learning for safety-critical applications.”

So, for those of us without a doctorate in Really Hard Math, differential equations are formulas that can describe the state of a system at various discrete points or steps throughout the process. For example, if you have a robot arm moving from point A to B, you can use a differential equation to know where it is in between the two points in space at any given step within the process. However, solving these equations for every step quickly gets computationally expensive as well. MIT’s “closed form” solution end-arounds that issue by functionally modeling the entire description of a system in a single computational step. AS the MIT team explains:

Imagine if you have an end-to-end neural network that receives driving input from a camera mounted on a car. The network is trained to generate outputs, like the car’s steering angle. In 2020, the team solved this by using liquid neural networks with 19 nodes, so 19 neurons plus a small perception module could drive a car. A differential equation describes each node of that system. With the closed-form solution, if you replace it inside this network, it would give you the exact behavior, as it’s a good approximation of the actual dynamics of the system. They can thus solve the problem with an even lower number of neurons, which means it would be faster and less computationally expensive.

By solving this equation at the neuron-level, the team is hopeful that they’ll be able to construct models of the human brain that measure in the millions of neural connections, something not possible today. The team also notes that this CfC model might be able to take the visual training it learned in one environment and apply it to a wholly new situation without additional work, what’s known as out-of-distribution generalization. That’s not something current-gen models can really do and would prove to be a significant step towards the generalized AI systems of tomorrow.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

November 15, 2022 at 10:03AM

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Martin Shkreli Tells Do Kwon ‘Jail’s Not That Bad’

https://gizmodo.com/pharma-bro-crypto-do-kwon-terra-luna-1849761877


If you find yourself listening to free advice from notorious fraudster and pharmaceutical price-gouger, Martin Shkreli, then it might be time to re-evaluate some things. And that’s exactly the scenario Do Kwon, Terra’s disgraced CEO and “not on the run” fugitive, ended up in on a Tuesday podcast stream.

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Both the “pharma bro” and the crypto-crash king made surprise guest appearances on a livestreamed episode of the Up Only podcast, a cryptocurrency interview show. And listening to both men repeatedly defend themselves basically unquestioned is as cringe-worthy as you might imagine. Gizmodo scanned through the podcast to find the highlights, so you don’t have to. But first, some background.

Former pharma executive, Martin Shkreli, was convicted on multiple fraud counts in 2017 after raising the cost of life-saving drug, Daraprim, by 5,000%. The cost of one pill for the anti-parasitic medication, commonly used by immunosuppressed people like AIDS patients, skyrocketed overnight from $13.50 to $750 under Shkreli’s leadership at Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli was released from prison earlier this year, after serving a shortened sentence, and has since pivoted into the crypto-sphere. The price of Daraprim, however, remains above $700 per pill—though the drug costs pennies to make.

Do Kwon is the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, a blockchain platform most known for it’s very unstable, “stablecoin” terraUSD. The cryptocurrency was at one point the fourth most popular, and was supposed to be pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. But it ended up in a death spiral to zero this past May. Investors lost everything. South Korean authorities issued a warrant for Kwon’s arrest in September over allegations of fraud and tax evasion. He reportedly fled his home country and has been evading law enforcement since. Most recently, he’s been rumored to be hiding out in Europe.

Kwon hopped on the podcast first, at around the one hour and 12 minute mark. (Note: the entire episode is a full two hours and 38 minutes long.) He began his appearance on the show by chuckling and admitting “okay, like I’m on the run.” and then said he was on a boat, though it was unclear if he was joking. From that introduction, he then weighed in on the ongoing collapse of crypto firm FTX.

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“Crisis management is not easy. But you know just from the hate that’s spreading across the Twitter timeline, it doesn’t really seem like average users understand the complexity,” Kwon said, defending FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Asked for specific crisis management tips, by one of the podcast hosts, Kwon said, “I don’t think I’m the best person to ask.” Then, he defended his own actions and his crypto company’s collapse, claiming that terraUSD’s death spiral was out of his control.

And, in case you were worried about how Kwon has been doing since May, don’t. Apparently, tanking $60 billion of other people’s money has given the CEO a nice break. “It’s sort of given me a lot of time and headspace to think about interesting things…I hadn’t coded in some time, but [now] you know I’m just picking up projects that I think are interesting, and it’s fun,” he said.

One of the podcast hosts described Kwon as “sociopathic,” and shortly after—as if summoned Beetlejuice-style—Martin Shkreli popped in at around the 1:34:00 mark to offer his own two cents on FTX.

Clearly, Shkreli likes the sound of his own voice because he talked extensively, dropping attention-grabbing anecdotes like how, allegedly the CEO of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, once personally tried to sell him Brazilian real estate.

Then he addressed Kwon directly, “Hey Do, I just wanted to let you know jail’s not that bad. It’s not the worst thing, you know. So don’t fret if that… I hope it doesn’t happen, but if it does happen it’s not that bad.”

When questioned about why he’s gotten into crypto since leaving prison, Shkreli claimed he’s actually been in crypto for awhile, even through his incarceration.
“I’ve been around the hoop for awhile, just quietly. I mean, you can’t make too much noise while you’re in prison. I started in around 2014,” he said—adding that he thinks cryptocurrency is a “fascinating space.”

He then spent a lot of time waxing poetic about how “there is no honest actor in crypto,” before facing some light questioning from the podcast hosts. In a defensive moment, Shkreli delivered maybe the most painful line of the entire debacle. “I was acquitted of most of my charges. All my investors made three to five times their money. So, in terms of deceit, a lot of people asked me if they could ‘be deceived more Daddy,’ because I was a pretty good investor for their portfolios.” Yikes.

At one point, a show host asked Shkreli, “Do you ever think you went too far on the drug prices.” And the ex-exec immediately responded, “I don’t.” He went on to explain that, actually his price gouging was a good thing because the pharmaceutical industry needs to be “well capitalized and profitable and sustainable.”

“I don’t think you have to be a nice person,” he said. “There need to be some drugs that are very expensive.”

So on the off chance that you too, are looking for advice from that guy: He predicted that five to ten crypto funds will survive long term, similar to the fallout from the 1990’s internet boom. Shkreli also said he thinks Bankman-Fried will face jail time over FTX’s failure and that Binance’s pending acquisition of the rival firm will fall through.

As a bonus: he claimed to be texting with noted grifter, Anna “Delvey” Sorokin during the podcast and ended his time on the show by doing part of Up Only’s sponsored FTX ad outro.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

November 9, 2022 at 10:53AM