Las Vegas Strip to see lane closures Thursday-Sunday for free F1 fan event – Fox 5 Las Vegas

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  1. Las Vegas Strip to see lane closures Thursday-Sunday for free F1 fan event  Fox 5 Las Vegas
  2. Formula One fan fest Strip road impacts underway  Las Vegas Review-Journal
  3. Local economists expect Formula 1 race to bring billions to Las Vegas  KTNV 13 Action News Las Vegas
  4. Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix tickets going for as much as $10K  Washington Examiner
  5. Las Vegas Grand Prix hotel rates raised more than 300%  KTLA Los Angeles
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Las Vegas Strip to see lane closures Thursday-Sunday for free F1 fan event - Fox 5 Las Vegas

Las Vegas Strip Icons Set for Demolition, Implosion – TheStreet

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In Las Vegas, everything becomes part of the show. That might be a person playing plastic bucket drums for tips to full-fledged spectacles like the soon-to-be-removed Volcano at the Mirage or the fountains at Bellagio.

On the 4.2-mile stretch that makes up the Las Vegas Strip you literally have every kind of show possible -- from massive stars to drunk people who don't even know they've become performers. You can get your picture taken with a lot-rent Elmo, an endless array of showgirls and topless policemen/firefighters, or meet someone dressed as Spider-man, Batman, or even Optimus Prime.

The spectacle never ends and that has been an important part of how major players including Caesars Entertainment (CZR) and MGM Resorts International (MGM) build their massive Las Vegas Strip resort/casinos. Everything is oversized and designed for maximum visual impact.

Whether you're swimming under a replica of the Eiffel Tower at Caesars Paris Las Vegas or posing near a faux Statue of Liberty at MGM's New York New York, the whole Strip has been built to get your attention. That can be in gig ways -- like the statues dotting Caesars Palace -- or a more subtle piece of art/visual curiosity someplace else.

And, Las Vegas does not let its buildings go quietly. When a casino's life comes to an end, it generally gets one last spectacle -- an implosion -- where the building is brought down in front of a cheering crowd. Now, a number of sites on the Las Vegas Strip appear headed for that glorious end.

Image source: Shutterstock

Las Vegas has a long history of implosions that saw some famous names not only disappear from the Strip, but do so in grand fashion. An implosion, of course, is the opposite of an explosion where a building is brought down on itself.

Vegas.com shared a list of some of the city's most famous implosions including:

Many of these sites went on to host even more-famous properties. Aladdin, for example, is now the site of Caesars Planet Hollywood property while Desert Inn's location now hosts Wynn Resorts (WYNN) two Las Vegas Strip properties.

In most cases, an implosion isn't the end. It's a step toward something new rising at that location. That's what's about to happen in two key spots on the Las Vegas Strip.

Billionaire NBA owner Tillman Fertitta, who owns the Golden Nugget on Fremont Street bought a parcel of land on the Las Vegas Strip earlier this year. He recently filed plans to build a 43-story resort casino on the property at Las Vegas Boulevard and Harmon Avenue. He also pulled demolition permits for the buildings that currently sit on the lot, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.

The site currently hosts a recently-closed motel and some shuttered souvenir shops.

Earlier this year, "New York investment firm Gindi Capital also landed county approvals for a three-story retail complex on 9.5 acres just south of Fertittas spread. It would span more than 300,000 square feet and replace a cluster of existing properties, including the now-shuttered Hawaiian Marketplace," the paper reported.

Those properties, including the well-loved Hawaiian Marketplace, appear set for demolition as well although no timetable has been set.

In addition, Reno real estate firm Tolles Development plans to build a nearly-2 million-square-foot industrial park about 25 miles south of the Strip. That would involve getting rid if the legendary Terrible's casino, which sits on the property.

If we do implode it, well do it up Vegas style, Tolles partner Cory Hunt told the Review-Journal

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Las Vegas Strip Icons Set for Demolition, Implosion - TheStreet

White House insists it’s not using Facebook censorship portal despite Jen Psaki’s ‘flagging’ admission – New York Post

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  1. White House insists it's not using Facebook censorship portal despite Jen Psaki's 'flagging' admission  New York Post
  2. Probe Launched Into DHS' 'Taxpayer-Funded Censorship Campaign'  Daily Signal
  3. Probe launched into Homeland Securitys 'taxpayer-funded censorship campaign'  The Center Square
  4. Fact Checking as the New Censorship Surer Than the Old Type  Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
  5. Report: U.S. DHS worked directly with Facebook, Twitter to censor "disinformation"  Niche Gamer
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White House insists it's not using Facebook censorship portal despite Jen Psaki's 'flagging' admission - New York Post

Campus self-censorship is equal opportunity New York Daily News

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A common refrain on campuses today is that students are likely to self-censor their views and ideas. Looking at the data, this is an experience shared by nearly all students and amongst almost all races.

In 2016, when students were asked about the security of their freedom of speech, almost three-quarters (73%) felt secure in their First Amendment right, according to a Knight Foundation study. In 2021, that number declined to 47%. During that time, nearly two-thirds (65%) of students felt their school stifles free expression, up from 54% in 2016.

Harvard University students Anwar Omeish, of Fairfax, Va., center, and Salma Abdelrahman, of Miami, right, chant slogans as they protest a scheduled speaking appearance of author Charles Murray on the campus of Harvard University, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, in Cambridge, Mass. (Steven Senne/AP)

There is a rampant culture of self-censorship. As a professor, I see this all the time in class and during campus events; students anxiously want to ask questions or make particular points but opt to say nothing instead.

Data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)s new study of almost 45,000 currently enrolled students at more than 200 colleges and universities around the nation provides a deeper look at how students think about self-censorship. Disturbingly, the desire to silence dissent is not only widespread, but also far too common across all racial and ethnic groups.

Some claim that speech codes and other restrictions on free expression on campus are necessary because free speech, as currently defined, effectively silences minority groups. They say as a corrective, its important to be far more sensitive to the harm that words can do creating safe spaces and, in some cases, silencing controversial speakers.

But data from FIRE shows that the racial differences between how young people perceive campus climates is minimal. Fifty-six percent of Black students report that they limit what they say out of concern for reactions a number far too high. Fifty percent of Hispanic students, 56% of Asian students, and 54% of white students report doing the exact same thing.

In a time and culture where peer approval is high, significant numbers of students, no matter their background, live in fear of damaging their reputations due to simple misunderstandings over words or actions. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic and 64% of white students are either slightly worried or very worried about harming their reputation over a misunderstanding. The figure is even higher for Asian students at 74% but notably lower at 53% for Black students. Black students are the least likely to live in fear of social consequences from speech. This powerfully runs against much of the diversity, equity and inclusion messaging.

Unsurprisingly, roughly half of Hispanic (49%), Black (48%), and Asian (53%) students note that they regularly feel some or more pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes. For white students, the numbers are almost identical at 51%.

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For a set of institutions which theoretically exists to promote curiosity and critical inquiry, the fact that intellectual controversy is now actively avoided by almost half of the student body represents a failure of the educational process itself and this should give presidents, trustees, faculty, students and all supporters of higher education pause.

Moreover, when it comes to self-imposed silence, there are barely any differences among students of different racial backgrounds. This fact calls into question the narrative that many minority groups are unable to speak freely or comfortably in academic settings. Regardless of race, most students are uncomfortable speaking up in class; narratives about some students being able to speak with others cannot are deeply divisive and irresponsible.

Finally, few racial differences exist among attitudes towards limiting the free expression of others. For instance, in terms of shouting down speakers to prevent them from speaking on campus and sharing their views, 63% of Black students believe that there are cases where doing so is acceptable. The data also shows that 62% of Hispanic students feel the same way, along with 67% of Asian students and 62% of white students. When asked if they would approve of blocking fellow students from attending an event, only 38% of Hispanic and 39% of Black students can think of cases where such physical engagement could be justified.

Again, racial differences are minor and often overstated.

Self-imposed silence on collegiate campuses today is a disturbing and almost universal experience for our nations undergraduates. Self-censorship rates are far too high across the board and the data demonstrate that students of all racial backgrounds live in fear of questioning the narrow, rigid ideologies espoused on their respective campuses. If universities truly believe in free expression and open inquiry, they should ask themselves why so many students do not feel the freedom to do so. Furthermore, they should stop their offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion from using supposed discrimination as justification for speech restrictions.

Higher education must work to bring students of all backgrounds together to promote viewpoint diversity and reverse this disturbing trend of censorship.

Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Abrams is currently on the board of directors of FIRE.

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Campus self-censorship is equal opportunity New York Daily News

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, world’s most powerful rocket, launches after three-year hiatus – CNN

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  1. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, world's most powerful rocket, launches after three-year hiatus  CNN
  2. SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket, on Space Force mission  CNBC
  3. SpaceX launches first Falcon Heavy mission since 2019 from Florida  Reuters
  4. SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launches for the First Time in Over Three Years Most Powerful Operational Rocket in the World  SciTechDaily
  5. With The SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch A Success, Can You Invest In Elon Musk's Mission To Mars?  Forbes
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SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, world's most powerful rocket, launches after three-year hiatus - CNN

NATO chief urges Turkey to endorse Finland, Sweden accession – ABC News

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  1. NATO chief urges Turkey to endorse Finland, Sweden accession  ABC News
  2. Time to finalise Sweden's and Finland's entry to NATO, Stoltenberg says  Reuters
  3. Turkey Unlikely to Sign Off on Swedish NATO Bid Before Year-End  Bloomberg
  4. Turkey continues to block NATO membership for Sweden despite Russia threat  Washington Examiner
  5. Turkey is in no rush for Finland and Sweden to join NATO  DW (English)
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NATO chief urges Turkey to endorse Finland, Sweden accession - ABC News

Press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Trkiye, Mevlt avuolu – NATO HQ

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  1. Press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Trkiye, Mevlt avuolu  NATO HQ
  2. Trkiye's support to Ukraine reduces 'some effects of brutal war,' NATO chief says  Anadolu Agency | English
  3. NATO chief to visit Trkiye  Hurriyet Daily News
  4. NATO chief in Trkiye to discuss grain, Nordic countries NATO bids | Daily Sabah  Daily Sabah
  5. NATO chief hails Trkiye's support to Ukraine, role in fight against terror  TRT World
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Press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Trkiye, Mevlt avuolu - NATO HQ

SpaceX Mars program – Wikipedia

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Proposed human Mars program by SpaceX

The SpaceX Mars program is a set of projects through which the aerospace company SpaceX hopes to facilitate the colonization of Mars. The company claims that this is necessary for the long-term survival of the human species and that its Mars program, including the ongoing development of the SpaceX Starship, will reduce space transportation costs, thereby making travel to Mars a more realistic possibility.

Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX, first presented his goal of enabling Mars colonization in 2001 as a member of the Mars Society's board of directors. In the 2000s and early 2010s, SpaceX made many vehicle concepts for delivering payloads and crews to Mars, including space tugs, heavy-lift launch vehicles, Red Dragon capsules. The company's current Mars plan was first formally proposed in 2016 International Astronautical Congress alongside a fully-reusable launch vehicle, the Interplanetary Transport System. Since then, the launch vehicle proposal was altered and renamed to "Starship", and has been in development since. The company has given many estimates of dates of the first human landing on Mars.

SpaceX plans for early missions to Mars to involve small fleets of Starship spacecraft, funded by publicprivate partnerships. The company hopes that once infrastructure is established on Mars and the launch cost is reduced further, colonization can begin.

The program has been criticized as impractical, both because of uncertainties regarding its financing[1] and because it only addresses transportation to Mars and not the problem of sustaining human life there.

Before founding SpaceX, Musk joined the Mars Society's board of directors for a short time. He was offered a plenary talk at their convention where he announced Mars Oasis, a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse and grow plants on Mars, to revive public interest in space exploration.[2] Musk initially attempted to acquire a Dnepr ICBM for the project through Russian contacts from Jim Cantrell.[3] Russia became unreceptive to Musk's approach and on a journey back from Moscow, Musk worked on a spreadsheet and announced they should build the rockets to do it themselves. This was a change of direction from a small publicity mission to try to generate the will to go to Mars towards believing the problem wasn't the will to go to Mars but the how it could be done.[4] This lead to the formation of SpaceX.[5]:3031

SpaceX is privately funding the development of orbital launch systems that can be reused many times, in a manner similar to the reusability of aircraft. SpaceX has been developing the technologies over several years to facilitate full and rapid reusability of space launch vehicles. The project's long-term objectives include returning a launch vehicle first stage to the launch site in minutes and to return a second stage to the launch pad following orbital realignment with the launch site and atmospheric reentry in up to 24 hours. SpaceX's long term goal is that both stages of their orbital launch vehicle will be designed to allow reuse a few hours after return.[6]

The program was publicly announced in 2011. SpaceX first achieved a successful landing and recovery of a first stage in December 2015. The first re-flight of a landed first stage occurred in March 2017[7] with the second occurring in June 2017, that one only five months after the maiden flight of the booster.[8] The third attempt occurred in October 2017 with the SES-11/EchoStar-105 mission. Reflights of refurbished first stages then became routine. In May 2021, B1051 became the first booster to power ten missions.[9]

The reusable launch system technology was developed and initially used for the first stage of Falcon 9.[10] After stage separation, the booster flips around, an optional boostback burn is done to reverse its course, a reentry burn, controlling direction to arrive at the landing site and a landing burn to effect the final low-altitude deceleration and touchdown.

SpaceX intended (from at least 2014) to develop technology to extend reusable flight hardware to second stages, a more challenging engineering problem because the vehicle is travelling at orbital velocity.[11][10][12]Second stage reuse is considered paramount to Elon Musk's plans to enable the settlement of Mars. Initial concepts to make the second stage of Falcon 9 reusable have been abandoned.[13]

As early as 2007, Elon Musk stated a personal goal of eventually enabling human exploration and settlement of Mars,[15] although his personal public interest in Mars goes back at least to 2001 at the Mars Society.[5]:3031 SpaceX has stated its goal is to colonize Mars to ensure the long-term survival of the human species.[1]

Starship's reusability is expected to reduce launch costs, expanding space access to more payloads and entities.[16] According to Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer and advocate for human exploration of Mars, Starship's lower launch cost would make space-based economy, colonization, and mining practical.[17]:25,26 Lower cost to space may potentially make space research profitable, allowing major advancements in medicine, computers, material science, and more.[17]:47,48 Musk has stated that a Starship orbital launch will cost less than $2million. Pierre Lionnet, director of research at Eurospace, claimed otherwise, citing the rocket's multi-billion-dollar development cost and its current lack of external demand.[18]

Starship is designed to be a fully reusable and orbital rocket, aiming to drastically reduce launch costs and maintenance between flights.[19]:2 The rocket will consist of a Super Heavy first stage or a booster and a Starship second stage or spacecraft,[20] powered by Raptor and Raptor Vacuum engines.[21] Both the rocket stages' body are made from stainless steel, giving Starship its shine and strength for atmospheric entry.[22]

Methane was chosen for the Raptor engines because it is cheaper, do not build up of soot,[23] and can be produced on Mars via the Sabatier reaction.[24] The engine family uses a new alloy for the main combustion chamber, allowing it to contain 300bar (4,400psi) of pressure, the highest of all current engines.[23] In the future, it may be mass-produced[23] and cost about $230,000 per engine or $100 per kilonewton.[25]

Starship is the launch vehicle's second stage and will serve as a long-duration spacecraft on some missions.[26] The spacecraft is 50m (160ft) tall[27] and has a dry mass of less than 100t (220,000lb).[28] Starship's payload volume is about 1,000m3 (35,000cuft),[29] larger than the International Space Station's pressurized volume by 80m3 (2,800cuft),[30] and can be even bigger with an extended 22m (72ft)-tall volume.[31]:2 By refueling the Starship spacecraft in orbit using tanker spacecraft, Starship will be able to transport larger payloads and more astronauts to other Earth orbits, the Moon, and Mars.[31]:5

SpaceX plans to build a crewed base on Mars for an extended surface presence, which it hopes will grow into a self-sufficient colony.[32][33] A successful colonization, meaning an established human presence on Mars growing over many decades, would ultimately involve many more economic actors than SpaceX.[34][35][36] Musk has made many tentative predictions about the date Starship's first Mars landing,[37] including 2029.[38]

Musk plans for the first crewed Mars missions to have approximately 12 people, with the goals of "build[ing] out and troubleshoot[ing] the propellant plant and Mars Base Alpha power system" and establishing a "rudimentary base." He has claimed that, in the event of an emergency during travel, the spaceship would be able to safely return to Earth.[39] The company plans to process resources on Mars into fuel for return journeys,[40] and use similar technologies on Earth to create carbon-neutral propellant.[41]

The program aims to send a million people to Mars, using a thousand Starships sent during a Mars launch window.[42] Proposed journeys would require 80 to 150 days of transit time,[43] with averaging approximately 115 days (for the nine synodic periods occurring between 2020 and 2037).[44]

In November 2005,[45] before SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, its first rocket,[46] CEO Elon Musk first referenced a long-term and high-capacity rocket concept named BFR. The BFR would be able to launch 100t (220,000lb) to low Earth orbit and equipped with Merlin 2 engines. The Merlin 2 is in direct lineage to the Merlin engines used in the Falcon 9 and comparable to the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V.[45]

In July 2010,[47] after the final launch of Falcon 1 a year prior,[48] SpaceX presented launch vehicle and Mars space tug concepts at a conference. The launch vehicle concepts were called Falcon X, Falcon X Heavy, and Falcon XX; the largest of all is the Falcon XX with a 140t (310,000lb) capacity to low Earth orbit. To deliver such payload, the rocket was going to be as tall as the Saturn V and use six powerful Merlin 2 engines.[47] Around 2012,[49] the company first mentioned the Mars Colonial Transporter rocket concept in public. It was going to be able to carry 100 people or 100t (220,000lb) of cargo to Mars and powered by methane-fueled Raptor engines.[50]

The SpaceX Red Dragon was a 20112017 concept for using an uncrewed modified SpaceX Dragon 2 for low-cost Mars lander missions to be launched using Falcon Heavy rockets.

The primary objective of the initial Red Dragon mission was to test techniques and technology to enter the Martian atmosphere with equipment that a human crew could conceivably use.[51][52] The series of Mars missions were to be technology pathfinders for the much larger SpaceX Mars colonization architecture that was announced in September 2016.[53] An additional suggested use for a mission called for a sample return Mars rover to be delivered to the Martian surface.

On 26 September 2016, a day before the 67th International Astronautical Congress, the Raptor engine fired for the first time.[55] At the event, Musk announced SpaceX was developing a new rocket using Raptor engines called the Interplanetary Transport System. It would have two stages, a reusable booster and spacecraft. The stages' tanks were to be made from carbon composite, storing liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Despite the rocket's 300t (660,000lb) launch capacity to low Earth orbit, it was expected to have a low launch price. The spacecraft featured three variants: crew, cargo, and tanker; the tanker variant is used to transfer propellant to spacecraft in orbit.[56] The concept, especially the technological feats required to make such a system possible and the funds needed, garnered a large amount of skepticism.[57]

In September 2017, at the 68th Annual International Astronautical Congress, Musk announced the BFR (Big Falcon Rocket),[58] a revision to the Interplanetary Transport System's design. The rocket was still going to be reusable, but its launch capacity to low Earth orbit was reduced to 150t (330,000lb), and its body was smaller. Unlike its conceptual predecessor, the potential applications for the BFR were more varied. Variants of the BFR would be able to send satellites to orbit, resupply the International Space Station, land on the Moon, travel between spaceports on Earth, and ferry crew to Mars.[59] In April 2018, the Mayor of Los Angeles confirmed plan for a BFR rocket production facility at the Port of Los Angeles,[60] but it was cancelled around May 2020.[61]

A year later in September 2018, Musk updated about the spacecraft's new two forward flaps at the top and three larger aft flaps at the bottom. Both set of flaps help control the spacecraft's descent, and the aft flaps are used as landing legs for the final touchdown.[62] Two months later in November 2018, the rocket booster was first termed Super Heavy and the spacecraft was termed Starship.[63]

Starship's development is iterative and incremental, marked by tests on rocket prototypes.[64][65] The first prototype to fly using a Raptor engine was called Starhopper.[66] The vehicle had three non-retractable legs and was shorter than the final spacecraft design.[67] The craft performed two tethered hops in early April 2019 and three months later, it hopped without a tether to around 25m (80ft).[68] In August 2019, the vehicle hopped to 150m (500ft) and traveled to a landing pad nearby.[69]

Mk1 was destroyed November 2019 during a pressure stress test and Mk2 did not fly because the Florida facility was deconstructed throughout 2020.[70][71] SpaceX began naming its new Starship upper-stage prototypes with the prefix "SN", short for "serial number".[72] No prototypes between SN1 and SN4 flew; SN1 and SN3 collapsed during pressure stress tests and SN4 exploded after its fifth engine firing.[73] Starship SN5 was built with no flaps or nose cone, giving it a cylindrical shape. The test vehicle consisted of one Raptor engine, propellant tanks, and a mass simulator. On 5 August 2020, SN5 performed a 150m (500ft)-high flight, successfully landing on a nearby pad.[74] On 3 September 2020, the similar-looking Starship SN6 successfully repeated the hop.[75]

SN8 was the first complete Starship prototype and underwent four static fire tests between October and November 2020.[76] On 9 December 2020, SN8 flew, slowly turning off its three engines one by one, and reaching to an altitude of 12.5km (7.8mi). The craft then performed the belly-flop maneuver and dove back through the atmosphere. As it tried to land, an issue with fuel tank pressure caused the prototype to lose thrust and impact the pad.[77] On 2 February 2021, Starship SN9 launched to 10km (6.2mi) and crashed on landing, similar to SN8.[78]

A month later, on 3 March 2021, Starship SN10 launched on the same flight path and landed hard, crushing its landing legs[79] and exploded, probably due to a propellant tank rupture.[79] Starship SN11, on 30 March 2021, flew into thick fog along the same flight path. During descent, the vehicle exploded, scattering debris up to 8km (5mi) away.[80] Starship prototypes SN12, SN13, and SN14 were scrapped before completion, and Starship SN15 was selected to fly instead.[81] The prototype features general improvement on its avionics, structure, and engines, incorporating prior prototype's failures.[82] On 5 May 2021, SN15 launched, completed the same maneuvers as older prototypes, and landed softly[81] after six minutes.[83]

In July 2021, Super Heavy BN3 conducted its first full-duration static firing, lighting three engines.[84] A month later, using cranes, Starship SN20 was stacked atop Super Heavy BN4 for the first time. SN20 was the first to include a body-tall heat shield, made of hexagonal heat tiles.[85] In October 2021, the catching mechanical arms were installed onto the integration tower, and the first tank farm's construction was completed.[86]

SpaceX aims to perform the first Starship orbital test flight in 2022.[87] During the test flight, the rocket is planned to launch from Starbase, after which the Super Heavy booster will separate and perform a soft water landing around 30km (20mi) from the Texas shoreline. The spacecraft will continue flying with its ground track passing through the Straits of Florida and then softly land in the Pacific Ocean around 100km (60mi) northwest of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. The spaceflight will last ninety minutes.[88]:24

SpaceX has not detailed plans for the spacecraft's life-support systems, radiation protection, and in situ resource utilization, technologies which are essential for space colonization.[89]

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SpaceX Mars program - Wikipedia

That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots

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That

You know that "research" going around saying humans are going to evolve to have hunchbacks and claws because of the way we use our smartphones? Though our posture could certainly use some work, you'll be glad to know that it's just lazy spam intended to juice search engine results.

Let's back up. Today the Daily Mail published a viral story about "how humans may look in the year 3000." Among its predictions: hunched backs, clawed hands, a second eyelid, a thicker skull and a smaller brain.

Sure, that's fascinating! The only problem? The Mail's only source is a post published a year ago by the renowned scientists at... uh... TollFreeForwarding.com, a site that sells, as its name suggests, virtual phone numbers.

If the idea that phone salespeople are purporting to be making predictions about human evolution didn't tip you off, this "research" doesn't seem very scientific at all. Instead, it more closely resembles what it actually is — a blog post written by some poor grunt, intended to get backlinks from sites like the Mail that'll juice TollFreeForwarding's position in search engine results.

To get those delicious backlinks, the top minds at TollFreeForwarding leveraged renders of a "future human" by a 3D model artist. The result of these efforts is "Mindy," a creepy-looking hunchback in black skinny jeans (which is how you can tell she's from a different era).

Grotesque model reveals what humans could look like in the year 3000 due to our reliance on technology

Full story: https://t.co/vQzyMZPNBv pic.twitter.com/vqBuYOBrcg

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 3, 2022

"To fully realize the impact everyday tech has on us, we sourced scientific research and expert opinion on the subject," the TollFreeForwarding post reads, "before working with a 3D designer to create a future human whose body has physically changed due to consistent use of smartphones, laptops, and other tech."

Its sources, though, are dubious. Its authority on spinal development, for instance, is a "health and wellness expert" at a site that sells massage lotion. His highest academic achievement? A business degree.

We could go on and on about TollFreeForwarding's dismal sourcing — some of which looks suspiciously like even more SEO spam for entirely different clients — but you get the idea.

It's probably not surprising that the this gambit for clicks took off among dingbats on Twitter. What is somewhat disappointing is that it ended up on StudyFinds, a generally reliable blog about academic research. This time, though, for inscrutable reasons it treated this egregious SEO spam as a legitimate scientific study.

The site's readers, though, were quick to call it out, leading to a comically enormous editor's note appended to the story.

"Our content is intended to stir debate and conversation, and we always encourage our readers to discuss why or why not they agree with the findings," it reads in part. "If you heavily disagree with a report — please debunk to your delight in the comments below."

You heard them! Get debunking, people.

More conspiracy theories: If You Think Joe Rogan Is Credible, This Bizarre Clip of Him Yelling at a Scientist Will Probably Change Your Mind

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That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots

Jeff Bezos’ Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom

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Jeff Bezos' ex- housekeeper is suing him for discrimination that led to her allegedly having to literally sneak out out of his house to use the bathroom.

Jeff Bezos' former housekeeper is suing the Amazon founder for workplace discrimination that she says forced her to literally climb out out the window of his house to use the bathroom.

In the suit, filed this week in a Washington state court, the former housekeeper claimed that she and Bezos' other household staff were not provided with legally-mandated eating or restroom breaks, and that because there was no "readily accessible bathroom" for them to use, they had to clamber out a laundry room window to get to one.

In the complaint, lawyers for the ex-housekeeper, who is described as having worked for wealthy families for nearly 20 years, wrote that household staff were initially allowed to use a small bathroom in the security room of Bezos' main house, but "this soon stopped... because it was decided that housekeepers using the bathroom was a breach of security protocol."

The suit also alleges that housekeepers in the billionaire's employ "frequently developed Urinary Tract Infections" that they believed was related to not being able to use the bathroom when they needed to at work.

"There was no breakroom for the housekeepers," the complaint adds. "Even though Plaintiff worked 10, 12, and sometimes 14 hours a day, there was no designated area for her to sit down and rest."

The housekeeper — who, like almost all of her coworkers, is Latino — was allegedly not aware that she was entitled to breaks for lunch or rest, and was only able to have a lunch break when Bezos or his family were not on the premises, the lawsuit alleges.

The Washington Post owner has denied his former housekeeper's claims of discrimination through an attorney.

"We have investigated the claims, and they lack merit," Harry Korrell, a Bezos attorney, told Insider of the suit. "[The former employee] made over six figures annually and was the lead housekeeper."

He added that the former housekeeper "was responsible for her own break and meal times, and there were several bathrooms and breakrooms available to her and other staff."

"The evidence will show that [the former housekeeper] was terminated for performance reasons," he continued. "She initially demanded over $9M, and when the company refused, she decided to file this suit."

As the suit was just filed and may well end in a settlement, it'll likely be a long time, if ever, before we find out what really happened at Bezos' house — but if we do, it'll be a fascinating peek behind the curtain at the home life of one of the world's most powerful and wealthy men.

More on billionaires: Tesla Morale Low As Workers Still Don't Have Desks, Face Increased Attendance Surveillance

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Jeff Bezos' Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom

Hackers Just Took Down One of the World’s Most Advanced Telescopes

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ALMA is one of the largest and most advanced radio telescopes in the world. And for reasons still unknown to the public, hackers decided to take it down.

Observatory Offline

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory in Chile has been hit with a cyberattack that has taken its website offline and forced it to suspend all observations, authorities there said.

Even email services were limited in the aftermath, illustrating the broad impact of the hack.

Nested high up on a plateau in the Chilean Andes at over 16,000 feet above sea level, ALMA is one of the most powerful and advanced radio telescopes in the world. Notably, ALMA helped take the first image of a black hole in 2019, in a collaborative effort that linked radio observatories worldwide into forming the Event Horizon Telescope.

Thankfully, ALMA's impressive arsenal of 66 high-precision antennas, each nearly 40 feet in diameter, was not compromised, the observatory said, nor was any of the scientific data those instruments collected.

In High Places

What makes ALMA so invaluable is its specialty in observing the light of the cooler substances of the cosmos, namely gas and dust. That makes ALMA a prime candidate for documenting the fascinating formations of planets and stars when they first emerge amidst clouds of gas.

Since going fully operational in 2013, it's become the largest ground-based astronomical project in the world, according to the European Southern Observatory, ALMA's primary operators.

So ALMA going offline is a distressing development, especially to the thousands of astronomers worldwide that rely on its observations and the some 300 experts working onsite. Getting it up and running is obviously a top priority, but the observatory said in a followup tweet that "it is not yet possible to estimate a date for a return to regular activities."

As of now, there's no information available on who the hackers were, or exactly how they conducted the attack. Their motivations, too, remain a mystery.

More on ALMA: Astronomers Think They Found the Youngest Planet in the Galaxy

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Hackers Just Took Down One of the World's Most Advanced Telescopes

Chinese Spaceplane Releases Mystery Object Into Orbit

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After launching into orbit three months ago, China's top-secret spaceplane has released a mysterious object, which is now circling the Earth behind it.

Spaceplane Buddy

After launching into orbit roughly three months ago, China's top-secret spaceplane has released a mysterious object, which is now circling the Earth behind it, SpaceNews reports.

There's very little we know about China's "reusable experimental spacecraft," except that it launched atop a Long March 2F rocket back in August. We don't know its purpose, what it looks like, or what cargo it was carrying during launch — but it's an intriguing development, nonetheless, for China's reusable launch platform.

Mysterious Object

The object was released between October 24 and October 31, according to tracking data being analyzed by the US Space Force's 18th pace Defense Squadron.

We can only hazard a guess as to what the mysterious object's purpose is. According to Harvard astronomer and space tracker Jonathan McDowell, it "may be a service module, possibly indicating an upcoming deorbit burn."

Based on the size and weight of payloads Long March rockets usually carry, China's mysterious spaceplane is likely similar to the Air Force's X-37B spaceplane, which is similarly shrouded in mystery and currently on its sixth mission.

We also don't know when the Chinese model will make its return back to Earth, but given recent activity at the Lop Nur base in Xinjiang suggests, it may land there in the near future, according to the report.

It's a puzzling new development for China's secretive spacecraft — but it does raise the possibility of a renewed interest in spaceplanes, a potentially affordable and reusable way to launch payloads into orbit.

More on the spaceplane: China Launches Mysterious "Reusable Test" Spacecraft

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Think Tank: Is AI the Future of E-commerce Fraud Prevention? – WWD

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Theres a lot of debate about what Artificial Intelligence really means, and how we should feel about it. Will it transform our world for the better? Will the machines take over? Will it simply make processes we already perform faster and smoother? As Gartner says in A Framework for Applying AI in the Enterprise, The artificial intelligence acronym AI might more appropriately stand for amazing innovations that do what we thought technology couldnt do.

One way and another, were talking about smart machines machines that are trained on existing, historical data, and use that to make accurate deductions or predictions about examples with which theyre presented. The applications are wide-ranging, from medicine to retail to self-driving cars and beyond.

For e-commerce, AI means the ability to deliver capabilities that simply were not possible before. There are two main directions in which this expresses itself:

1) Uncovering trends and audiences: A well-trained e-commerce AI can identify trends of buyer behavior, or interests in new products or experiences and adapt quickly.

2) Personalization: The experience can be tailored to each customer in ways that were not an option when companies had to configure/design the experience for everyone at once (or maybe have a few versions based on geographies). Customers can be offered the information and products they want, when they want them, in the ways that are best suited to them.

Why Ive Come to Love AI

As someone who travels a lot, I often have a fairly complex customer story when I shop online. I might be on a work trip to China, using a proxy to shop on a favorite U.S. store with my credit card, which has a New York billing address, sending something to an office in San Francisco to pick up on my next stop. Theres a good chance Ill be on a mobile device, and since I like to explore new things, Im often buying something of a kind Ive never bought before.

All of this makes me unpopular with e-commerce fraud prevention systems. Ive lost count of the number of times Ive been rejected, or delayed for days while my order is painstakingly reviewed. Sometimes Ive moved on by the time the package finally arrives at the place to which I had ordered it.

The thing is, I get it. I was a fraud prevention analyst myself, back in the time before AI was an option. I know exactly how hard these transactions are to get right, from the human perspective. I know how long it can take to review a transaction, and that as an analyst the tendency is always to play it safe even if that means sending a good customer away.

AI isnt a magic tool, but properly leveraging AI can enable retailers to eat the cake driving their sales upward by creating frictionless, speedy buying experiences for consumers and have it, too be completely protected against online payment fraud.

The 3 Unmatched Advantages of AI-based Fraud Protection Systems

Scale:An AI system can look at 6,000 data points in every transaction, and match them with billions of other transactions to look for patterns, discrepancies, and simple coincidences of events in just a fraction of a second. This means that all fraud decisions can happen 100 percent in real-time, regardless of how much traffic the site is receiving, or whether the fraud team is down with the flu.

Accuracy:In the last year a well-built and trained fraud protection AI has proven repeatedly that it outperforms even the best human reviewers in accuracy. For retailers the reduction in false declines (good customers mistakenly rejected as fraud) means more sales, and happier consumers, and the reduction in fraud chargebacks means lower costs, and lower risk. Beyond that, it enables new business models that were previously considered too risky, like the growing popularity of the try-and-buy model.

Adaptivity:In fraud prevention, one of the great challenges is the speed of learning necessary in order to deal with new fraudulent modaoperandi. If a fraudster finds a new technique that works, it will spread like wildfire and hundreds of fraudsters will attack thousands of retailers at once. An AI-based solution is the only realistic way for retailers to fight fraud together in this highly dynamic environment, combining their efforts and sharing data in a centralized way to prevent fraudsters from abusing one retailer after another. In fact, AI has the potential to actually reverse the asymmetry and push the fraudsters back. From the criminal point of view, if a new method to defraud is blocked almost immediately after it is first conceived and tried out, it isnt worth investing in.

AI is the future of e-commerce fraud prevention. It brings scale, accuracy and adaptivity to improve customer experience, block fraud and increase sales. Some retailers have already started leveraging AI, and theyre gaining a competitive advantage in this highly competitive field. Better fraud prevention is about to become standard. No site can afford to get left behind.

Michael Reitblat is chief executive officer of Forter.

For More Business News From WWD, See:

Amazon, Wal-Mart and Apple Top List of Biggest E-commerce Retailers

Consumer Preferences Reshaping Retail Landscape

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Think Tank: Is AI the Future of E-commerce Fraud Prevention? - WWD

With AI, Yanbu has become smarter and safer – SmartCitiesWorld

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Artificial Intelligence, as a key part of any smart city initiative, can help keep people safe. Yanbu has successfully shown how AI manages some pressing issues amid urbanisation. As one of the biggest cities in Saudi Arabia, Yanbu has applied Huaweis Intelligent Traffic Management system to reduce road fatalities, with the ultimate goal to change the behaviour of road users and thus becoming a smarter, safer and better city.

As urbanisation progresses, innovative technologies are applied to help build or rebuild cities. Governments and administrations are thus looking for more diverse ways to manage increasing complex issues related to peoples livelihood. Meanwhile, the number of vehicles and how well the road systems are developed have become major indicators to reflect the level of urbanisation.

While such developed cities are getting busier, so are their traffic. The World Health Organisation has estimated that about 1.35 million people are killed on roadways all around the world each year. It means an average of 3,700 road fatalities were recorded every day. More than half of these are pedestrians, motorcyclists, and cyclists. In advanced cities, the number is even higher as traffic control is much more complicated than we could imagine.

Saudi Arabia is a forerunner in embracing digital innovations and new technologies. In 2016, the country announced the Vision 2030 programme, aiming to transform into a smart nation with a series of goals to achieve in three key stages. As one of the major industrial cities of the country, Yanbu Industrial City has taken up the same vision and begun its transformation.

Yanbu Industrial City, commonly known as Yanbu in short, is a major Red Sea port city in the Al Madinah Province of western Saudi Arabia. It has a population of some 240,000 in an area of roughly 606 square kilometres. Many of them are foreign expatriates working in the oil refineries and petrochemical industry.

Though most of them are from Asia, there are still large numbers from the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Known for its industry activities, especially when it is the worlds third largest refining centre, the road traffic is usually busy.

Saudi Arabia is a forerunner in embracing digital innovations and new technologies

Like all other stories of advanced development, Yanbu began with a limited number of surveillance cameras at some major interactions. The devices couldnt do more than just capturing still images, not to mention any functions like video recording, zooming, or some sophisticated recognition and search capability.

The set-up was simply not enough to catch up with the rapid changes stemmed from enlarging population and more frequent road commutation. And with limited surveillance, people just didnt care much about breaking traffic laws putting road users in a more dangerous situation.

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can play a big role. Collaborating with Huawei, Yanbu installed the e-Police system in 2019. The eyes of the system are indeed the 256 high-definition cameras working at 16 major intersections, providing numerous quality images and videos, which allow authority to trace vehicles or impose different controlling measures to keep the whole road network smooth and safe.

The upgraded hardware in the software defined cameras (SDCs) can feed data into the system to further action. The track-and-trace and the occasional real-time controls require more than just sophisticated programming gimmicks.

Not only are the cameras come with improved image quality and 20 TOPs computing power, but the systems are optimised for extreme environments with intelligent light compensation mechanisms.

Pattern recognition is not new to AI, so the system is already capable to run video search based on license plate number and structured vehicle data such as makes and colours, looking to find out the vehicles of interest.

The Intelligent Traffic Management System (ITMS) puts AI into a more intelligent practice by running smart algorithms to automatically identify traffic violations, such as running red lights, crossing lanes, reverse driving, and lane marking infractions, etc. The query response is much faster, running about 100,000 data records and getting a response within seconds.

The precision is also stunning at 50-centimetre lane-level track recognition, with target and tracking recognition rates both over 95 per cent per cent. Traffic incidents can be detected in just eight seconds, with a monitoring distance of 200 metres, covering the major parts of the scene. Violation snapshots and information are then transferred to the central platform for unified storage and query, while the system automatically processes violation cases.

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With AI, Yanbu has become smarter and safer - SmartCitiesWorld

AOC Says Her Twitter Account Broke After She Made Fun of Elon Musk

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Another day, another Elon Musk feud on Twitter — except now, he's the owner of the social network, and he's beefing with AOC.

Latest Feud

Another day, another Elon Musk feud on Twitter — except now, he's the owner of the social network, and he's beefing with a sitting member of Congress.

The whole thing started innocently enough earlier this week, when firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY, and better known by her initials, "AOC") subtweeted the website's new owner.

"Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that 'free speech' is actually a $8/mo subscription plan," the New York Democratic Socialist tweeted in a post that, upon Futurism's perusal, appeared to load only half the time.

Sweat Equity

Not one to be shown up, Musk later posted a screenshot of an AOC-branded sweatshirt from the congressperson's website, with its $58 price tag circled and an emoji belying the billionaire's alleged affront at the price.

In response, Ocasio-Cortez said she was proud her sweatshirts were made by union labor, and that the proceeds from their sales were going to fund educational support for needy kids. She later dug in further, noting that her account was "conveniently" not working and joking that Musk couldn't buy his way "out of insecurity."

Yo @elonmusk while I have your attention, why should people pay $8 just for their app to get bricked when they say something you don’t like?

This is what my app has looked like ever since my tweet upset you yesterday. What’s good? Doesn’t seem very free speechy to me ? pic.twitter.com/e3hcZ7T9up

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 3, 2022

Bricked

To be clear, any suggestion that Musk personally had anything to do with any Twitter glitches on AOC's part would seem ludicrously petty. But then again, this is a guy who once hired a private detective to investigate a random critic.

Occam's razor, though, suggests that it was probably AOC's mega-viral tweet that broke the site's notoriously dodgy infrastructure. Of course, that's not a ringing endorsement of the site that Musk just acquired for the colossal sum of $44 billion.

More on Twitter: Twitter Working on Plan to Charge Users to Watch Videos

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Huge Drone Swarm to Form Giant Advertisement Over NYC Skyline

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Someone apparently thought it was a great idea to fly 500 drones over NYC as part of an ad experiment without much warning.

Droning On

Someone thinks it's a great idea to fly 500 drones over New York City to create a huge ad in the sky on Thursday evening. Because New Yorkers certainly don't have any historical reason to mistrust unknown aircraft over their skyline, right?

As Gothamist reports, the drone swarm is part of a "surreal takeover of New York City’s skyline" on behalf of — we shit you not — the mobile game Candy Crush.

Fernanda Romano, Candy Crush's chief marketing officer, told Gothamist that the stunt will "turn the sky into the largest screen on the planet" using the small, light-up drones.

Though this is not the first time the Manhattan skyline has been used as ad space — that distinction goes to the National Basketball Association and State Farm, which did a similar stunt this summer during the NBA draft — local lawmakers are ticked off about it nonetheless.

"I think it’s outrageous to be spoiling our city’s skyline for private profit," Brad Hoylman, a state senator that represents Manhattan's West Side in the NY Legislature, told the local news site. "It’s offensive to New Yorkers, to our local laws, to public safety, and to wildlife."

Freak Out

Indeed, as the NYC Audubon Society noted in a tweet, the Candy Crush crapshoot "could disrupt the flight patterns of thousands of birds flying through NYC, leading to collisions with buildings" as they migrate.

Beyond the harm this will do to birds and the annoyance it will undoubtedly cause the famously-grumpy people of New York, this stunt is also going down with very little warning, considering that Gothamist is one of the only news outlets even reporting on it ahead of time.

While most viewers will hopefully be able to figure out what's going on pretty quickly, the concept of seeing unknown aircraft above the skyline is a little too reminiscent of 9/11 for comfort — and if Candy Crush took that into consideration, they haven't let on.

So here's hoping this event shocks and awes Thursday night city-goers in a good way, and not in the way that makes them panic.

More drone warfare: Russia Accused of Pelting Ukraine Capital With "Kamikaze" Drones

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Huge Drone Swarm to Form Giant Advertisement Over NYC Skyline

US Gov to Crack Down on "Bossware" That Spies On Employees’ Computers

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In the era of remote work, employers have turned to invasive

Spying @ Home

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic drove a wave of working from home, companies have been relentless in their efforts to digitally police and spy on remote employees by using what's known as "bossware." That's the pejorative name for software that tracks the websites an employee visits, screenshots their computer screens, and even records their faces and voices.

And now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an agency of the federal government, is looking to intervene.

"Close, constant surveillance and management through electronic means threaten employees' basic ability to exercise their rights," said NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, in a Monday memo. "I plan to urge the Board to apply the Act to protect employees, to the greatest extent possible, from intrusive or abusive electronic monitoring and automated management practices."

Undoing Unions

In particular, Abruzzo is worried about how bossware could infringe on workers' rights to unionize. It's not hard to imagine how such invasive surveillance could be used to bust unionization. Even if the technology isn't explicitly deployed to impede organization efforts, the ominous presence of the surveillance on its own can be a looming deterrent, which Abruzzo argues is illegal.

And now is the perfect moment for the NLRB to step in. The use and abuse of worker surveillance tech in general — not just bossware — has been "growing by the minute," Mark Gaston Pearce, executive director of the Workers' Rights Institute at Georgetown Law School, told CBS.

"Employers are embracing technology because technology helps them run a more efficient business," Gaston explained. "… What comes with that is monitoring a lot of things that employers have no business doing."

Overbearing Overlord

In some ways, surveillance tech like bossware can be worse than having a nosy, actual human boss. Generally speaking, in a physical workplace employees have an understanding of how much privacy they have (unless they work at a place like Amazon or Walmart, that is).

But when bossware spies on you, who knows how much information an employer could be gathering — or even when they're looking in. And if it surveils an employee's personal computer, which more often than not contains plenty of personal information that a boss has no business seeing, that's especially invasive.

Which is why Abruzzo is pushing to require employers to disclose exactly how much they're tracking.

It's a stern message from the NLRB, but at the end of the day, it's just a memo. We'll have to wait and see how enforcing it pans out.

More on surveillance: Casinos to Use Facial Recognition to Keep "Problem Gamblers" Away

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US Gov to Crack Down on "Bossware" That Spies On Employees' Computers

China Plans to Send Monkeys to Space Station to Have Sex With Each Other

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Chinese astronauts are reportedly planning to let monkeys loose on their brand-new space station to have them have sex with each other.

Chinese scientists are reportedly planning to send monkeys to its new Tiangong space station for experiments that will involve the animals mating and potentially reproducing, the South China Morning Post reports.

It's a fascinating and potentially controversial experiment that could have major implications for our efforts to colonize space: can mammals, let alone humans, successfully reproduce beyond the Earth?

According to the report, the experiment would take place in the station's largest capsule, called Wentian, inside two biological test cabinets that can be expanded.

After examining the behavior of smaller creatures, "some studies involving mice and macaques will be carried out to see how they grow or even reproduce in space," Zhang Lu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said during a speech posted to social media earlier this week, as quoted by the SCMP.

"These experiments will help improve our understanding of an organism’s adaptation to microgravity and other space environments," he added.

Some simpler organisms, including nematodes and Japanese rice fish, have been observed reproducing in space.

But more complex life forms have struggled. In 2014, a Russian experiment to see whether geckos could produce offspring in space failed when all the critters died.

And the failure rate for mammals, so far, has been total. Soviet Union scientists got mice to mate during a space flight in 1979, but none of them gave birth after being returned to Earth.

In other words, getting monkeys to reproduce on board a space station will be anything but easy. For one, just dealing with living creatures in space can pose immense challenges. The astronauts will "need to feed them and deal with the waste," Kehkooi Kee, a professor with the school of medicine at Tsinghua University, told the SCMP.

Then there's the fact that astronauts will have to keep the macaques happy and comfortable, something that experts say will be challenging since long term confinement in the spartan environments of space habitats could cause immense stress for the simians.

And even if astronauts successfully set the mood for the monkeys, the physics of sex in space are predicted to be challenging.

"Firstly, just staying in close contact with each other under zero gravity is hard," Adam Watkins, an associate professor of reproductive physiology at University of Nottingham, wrote in a 2020 open letter highlighted by the SCMP. "Secondly, as astronauts experience lower blood pressure while in space, maintaining erections and arousal are more problematic than here on Earth."

With its new space station in nearly full operation, China isn't shying away from asking some big questions — but whether these experiments will play out as expected is anything but certain.

READ MORE: Chinese scientists plan monkey reproduction experiment in space station [South China Morning Post]

More on sex in space: Scientists Say We Really Have to Talk About Boning in Space

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China Plans to Send Monkeys to Space Station to Have Sex With Each Other

Announcing the AI Innovation Awards winners at Transform 2020 – VentureBeat

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Last Chance: Register for Transform, VB's AI event of the year, hosted online July 15-17.

To kick off three days of AI panels, discussions, fireside chats, and networking at Transform 2020, VentureBeat presented the second annual AI Innovation Awards. Drawn both from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge, and experience of our nominating committee members, these awards give us a chance to shine a light on the people and companies making an impact in AI.

Amid four nominees in each in our five categories Natural Language Processing/Understanding Innovation, Business Application Innovation, Computer Vision Innovation, AI for Good, and Startup Spotlight the winners have emerged.

Natural Language Processing/Understanding Innovation: StereoSet

Research continues to uncover bias in AI models; StereoSet is a dataset designed to measure discriminatory behaviors like racism and sexism in language models while ensuring that the models otherwise offer strong performance. Researchers Moin Nadeem, Anna Bethke, and Siva Reddy built StereoSet and have made it available to anyone who makes language models. They maintain a leaderboard to show how models like BERT and GPT-2 measure up.

Business Application Innovation: Jumbotail

Jumbotails technology revolutionizes traditional mom & pop stores in India, often known as kirana stores, by connecting them with brands and other high-quality product producers to help them emerge as modern convenience stores. Jumbotail does so without raising the cost to customers, by collecting and mining in real time millions of data points everyday. Thanks to its AI backend, Jumbotail became Indias leading online wholesale food and grocery marketplace, with a full stack that includes integrated supply chain and logistics, as well as an in-house fintech platform for payments and credit. The insights generated and tech developed around this new business model empowers producers and customers, and is poised to extend to other continents.

Computer Vision Innovation: Abeba Birhane and Dr. Vinay Prabhu

In their powerful work, Large image datasets: A pyrrhic win for computer vision?, researchers Abeba Birhane, PhD candidate at University College Dublin, and Dr. Vinay Prabhu, principal machine learning scientist at UnifyID, examined the problematic opacity, data collection ethics, labeling and classification, and consequences of large image datasets. These datasets, including ImageNet and MITs 80 Million Tiny Images, have been cited hundreds of times in research. This paper is under peer review, but already its resulted in MIT voluntarily and formally withdrawing the Tiny Images dataset on the grounds that it contains derogatory terms as categories as well as offensive images, and that the nature of the images in the dataset makes it infeasible to remedy the problems.

AI for Good: Dr. Timnit Gebru

Dr. Timnit Gebru continues to be one of the strongest voices in the AI community fighting racism, misogyny, and other biases not just in the actual technology, but within the wider community of AI researchers and practitioners. Shes the co-lead of Ethical AI at Google and cofounded Black in AI, a group dedicated to sharing ideas, fostering collaborations, and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black individuals in the field of AI. Her work includes Gender Shades, the landmark research exposing the racial bias in facial recognition systems, and Datasheets for Datasets, which aims to create a standardized process for adding documentation to datasets to increase transparency and accountability.

Startup Spotlight: Dr. Daniela Braga, DefinedCrowd Corp

DefinedCrowd Corp creates high-quality training data for enterprises AI and machine learning projects, including with voice recognition, natural language processing, and computer vision workflows. The company crowdsources data labeling and more from hundreds of thousands of paid contributors and passes the massive curation on to its enterprise customers. Customers include several Fortune 500 companies. The startups cofounder and CEO, Dr. Daniela Braga, has credentials in speech technology and crowdsourcing dating back nearly two decades, including nearly seven years at Microsoft that included work on Cortana. Shes led DefinedCrowd Corp through several rounds of funding most recently, a large $50.5 million round in May 2020.

We congratulate these winners, and all the nominees, for their important contributions to the field of AI!

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Announcing the AI Innovation Awards winners at Transform 2020 - VentureBeat

Elon Musk Meeting With Advertisers, Begging Them Not to Leave Twitter

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Advertisers are fleeing Twitter in droves now that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken over control. Now, he's trying to pick up the pieces and begging them to return.

Advertisers are fleeing Twitter in droves now that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken over control.

Ever since officially closing the $44 billion deal, Musk has been busy gutting the company's executive suite and dissolving its board. Senior executives, as well as Twitter's advertising chief Sarah Personette, have departed as well.

After all, Musk has been very clear about his disdain for advertising for years now.

The resulting uncertainty has advertisers spooked — major advertising holding company IPG has already advised clients to pull out temporarily — and the billionaire CEO is in serious damage mode.

Now, Reuters reports, Musk is spending most of this week meeting with advertisers in New York, trying to reassure them that Twitter won't turn into a "free-for-all hellscape."

According to one of Reuters' sources, the meetings have been "very productive" — but plenty of other marketers are far from satisfied.

Advertisers are reportedly grilling Musk over his plans to address the rampant misinformation being spread on the platform, a trend that Musk himself has been actively contributing to since the acquisition.

And if he's succeeding in ameliorating advertisers in private, he's antagonizing them publicly. On Wednesday, Musk posted a poll asking users whether advertisers should support either "freedom of speech," or "political 'correctness'" — a type of false dichotomy that echoes the rhetoric of far-right conspiracy theorists and conservative pundits.

"Those type of provocations are not helping to calm the waters," an unnamed media buyer told Reuters.

Some are going public with the same sentiment.

"Unless Elon hires new leaders committed to keeping this 'free' platform safe from hate speech, it's not a platform brands can/should advertise on," Allie Wassum, global media director for the Nike-owned shoe brand Jordan, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

So far, Musk's plans for the social media platform remain strikingly muddy. In addition to the behind-the-scenes advertising plays, he's also announced that users will have to pay to retain their verification badge, though he's engaged in a comically public negotiation as to what the cost might be.

He's also hinted that previously banned users — former US president Donald Trump chief among them — might eventually get a chance to return, but only once "we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks."

The move was seen by many as a way to wait out the impending midterm elections. After all, Twitter has played a huge role in disseminating misinformation and swaying elections in the past.

While advertisers are running for the hills, to Musk advertising is clearly only a small part of the picture — even though historically, social giants like Twitter have struggled to diversify their revenue sources much beyond display ads.

Musk nodded to that reality in a vague open letter posted last week.

"Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!" he wrote in the note, addressed to "Twitter advertisers."

Big picture, Twitter's operations are in free fall right now and Musk has yet to provide advertisers with a cohesive plan to pick up the pieces.

While he's hinted at the creation of a new content moderation council made up of both "people from all viewpoints" and "wildly divergent views," advertisers are clearly going to be thinking twice about continuing their business with Twitter.

With or without advertising, Twitter's finances are reportedly in a very deep hole. The billions of dollars Musk had to borrow to finance his mega acquisition will cost Twitter around $1 billion a year in interest alone.

The company also wasn't anywhere near profitable before Musk took over, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a single quarter.

Whether that picture will change any time soon is as unclear as ever, especially in the face of a wintry economy.

But, of course, Musk has proved his critics wrong before. So anything's possible.

READ MORE: Advertisers begin to grill Elon Musk over Twitter 'free-for-all' [Reuters]

More on the saga: Elon Musk Pulling Engineers From Tesla Autopilot to Work on Twitter

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Elon Musk Meeting With Advertisers, Begging Them Not to Leave Twitter