Nearly half of US companies intend to eliminate Bachelor's degree requirements for some job positions next year, a new survey has revealed.

And 55 percent said they'd already eliminated degree requirements this year, according to an Intelligent.com survey of 800 US employers, carried out in November.

It comes after Walmart, IBM, Accenture, Bank of America and Google announced similar plans.

The survey found that the same employers that have already eliminated Bachelor's degree requirements were far more likely to continue doing so.

Some 80 percent of those people joined the company without a four-year-degree.

Earlier this year, the company expanded the program with the goal of filling 20 percent of its US entry-level roles.

'A person's educational credentials are not the only indicators of success, so we advanced our approach to hiring to focus on skills, experiences and potential,' CEO of Accenture North America, Jimmy Etheredge, told the outlet.

In October, Walmart eliminated college degrees as a requirement for hundreds of its corporate roles, saying it would get rid of 'unnecessary barriers' that prevent career advancement.

It said job applicants would start seeing updated job descriptions next year.

In particular, it said it will waive the need for a university degree if candidates can show they have gained the necessary skills through alternative prior experience.

'While degrees should be part of the equation and in some cases even required, there are many roles where a degree is simply unnecessary, including at corporate headquarters,' a blog post from the retailer read.

But while some companies appear to be spearheading the movement, those that haven't made changes thus far appear less likely to do so in the future.

Among the companies that didn't eliminate bachelor's degree requirements in 2023, only 9 percent said they anticipate doing so next year.

As part of the survey, employers were also asked what types of positions they were most likely to eliminate degree requirements for.

Among the 55 percent who eliminated bachelor's degree requirements, 70 percent did so for entry-level roles, 61 percent for mid-level roles and 45 percent for senior roles.

And of the 95 percent of employers who have bachelor's degree requirements, 24 percent require these degrees for three-quarters of their jobs and 27 percent say they require a degree for about half of their positions.

A report published by the Burning Glass institute last year described the growing trend of cutting degrees as a requirement as 'an essential step in reducing inequity in the American labor market.'

↪ https://www.dailymail.co. .. s-walmart.html

@sin

AmericaÂ’s mental-health crisis drove suicides to a record-high number last year.

Nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. lost their lives to suicide in 2022, according to a provisional tally from the National Center for Health Statistics. The agency said the final count would likely be higher. The suicide rate of 14.3 deaths per 100,000 people reached its highest level since 1941.



The record reflects broad struggles to help people in mental distress following a pandemic that k*lled more than one million in the U.S., upended the economy and left many isolated and afraid. A shortage of healthcare workers, an increasingly toxic illicit drug supply and the ubiquity of firearms have facilitated the rise in suicides, mental-health experts said.

“There was a rupture in our economic health and social fabric. We’re still experiencing the aftereffects of that,” said Jeffrey Leichter, a psychologist who connects mental health and primary care at Sanford Health, an operator of hospitals and clinics in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa.

Men 75 and older had the highest suicide rate last year at nearly 44 per 100,000 people, double that for people 15-24. Firearm-related suicides become more common with age as people experience declining health, the loss of loved ones and social isolation. While women have consistently been found to have suicidal thoughts more commonly, men are four times as likely to die by suicide.



Some groups remain at extreme risk. suicide rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives are almost double the rates for other Americans.

But there is some evidence that efforts to reach people in crisis are helping. suicide rates for children 10-14 and people 15-24 declined by 18% and 9%, respectively, last year from 2021, bringing suicide rates in those groups back to prepandemic levels.

Life expectancy in the U.S. improved to 77.5 years in 2022 from 76.4 in 2021, largely because of fewer deaths from Covid-19, a separate report from the statistics agency showed. In 2021, life expectancy in the U.S. fell to the lowest level since 1996 after Covid-19 and opioid overdoses drove up deaths.

Adults are learning how to talk to children about suicide, said Dr. Katie Hurley, senior clinical adviser at the Jed Foundation, a suicide-prevention group. More work is necessary to reach women 25-34, she said. They were the only group of women for which suicide rates increased significantly in 2022.

“They’re taking on young adulthood while the world is on fire,” Hurley said.



Officials are trying to widen familiarity with a national suicide and Crisis Lifeline that received a nationwide number, 988, last year. About 6% of some 5,000 respondents in a study published in October in the journal JAMA Network Open reported using 988 when they were in serious psychological distress. About a third of them said they would use the lifeline in the future.

Mental-health care is harder to find than before the pandemic. About half of people in the U.S. live in an area without a mental-health professional, federal data show, and some 8,500 more would be needed to fill the gap. Most people rely on family doctors for mental-health care, said Leichter at Sanford Health.

suicides are difficult to predict even by clinicians, research shows. Talkspace, an online therapy provider, is using artificial intelligence to help mental-health providers identify patients at risk for suicide. New York City this month said it would make a Talkspace app called TeenSpace available free to teenagers 13-17.

“People are feeling worse,” said Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, a psychiatrist and Talkspace’s chief medical officer. “That’s why people are using these services more.”

↪ https://www.wsj.com/healt .. -2022-02eb10ea

Niagara police are asking for the public's help in identifying the suspect wanted for fatally stabbing a man early Wednesday morning.

elementary kids gonna have bb guns these teachers got ptsd

An estimated 49,449 people died by suicide in 2022, the CDC said.

The number of suicides in the United States has hit a record high, new provisional federal data shows.

In 2022, an estimated 49,449 people died by suicide, which is 3% higher than the 48,183 people who died in 2021, according to a report published early Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

The suicide rate increased by 1% in 2022 to 14.3 deaths per 100,000 from 14.1 per 100,000 in 2021, marking this as the highest rate seen since 1941, according to the report.

The authors said when the final data for 2022 is collected, they expect the number of suicides to likely be higher as additional death certificates with pending causes of death are ruled as deaths by suicide.

"Reporting of suicides in particular can be delayed due to investigations regarding the cause and circumstances surrounding the death," the authors wrote.



For the report, the NCHS looked at 2022 death records received and processed as of Aug. 6, 2023, and compared it with 2021 final data.

When broken down by s*x, the suicide rate for males was 1% higher in 2022 than 2021 at 23.1 per 100,000 compared with 22.8 and 4% higher for females at 5.9 per 100,000 compared with 5.7.

Among males, suicide rates declined for those ages 34 and younger and increased for those 35 and older. The report found that for females, rates fell for those ages 24 and younger and rose for those 25 and older.

Although the percentage increase was greater for females, the provisional number of suicides for males in 2022 was 39,255, nearly four times that of females at 10,194.

By age, rates for those under age 34 fell between 2021 and 2022 and increased for those aged 35 and older. The report found that the rate was highest for those aged 75 and older and lowest for those aged 10 to 14.

There were also disparities when it came to race/ethnicity. American Indians/Alaska Natives had the highest rate at 26.7 deaths per 100,000. However, the rate was 5% lower in 2022 compared with 2021 and was the only group to experience a decline in rates, although this decrease was not deemed statistically significant, according to the report.

All other race/ethnic groups experienced a 1% to 3% increase in suicide rates, but according to the report, none of these changes were deemed statistically significant either.

suicides have been steadily increasing during the 21st century, leading to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issuing a call to action in 2021 on a national strategy for suicide prevention as well as a youth mental health advisory.

Last year, the federal government launched the 988 suicide & Crisis Lifeline for people to call or text if they or someone they know is experiencing a crisis.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or worried about a friend or loved one, call or text the suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for free, confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

↪ https://abcnews.go.com/He .. y?id=105204012

Young Danbury mom from Brazil k*lled in murder-suicide was a 'great person,' friend says





Mellyssa Pereira DaCosta, who was k*lled on Nov. 20 in a murder-suicide, was well-known in the city's Brazilian community, a friend said.

DANBURY— The local Brazilian community is mourning the death of a 21-year-old mother who was the victim of a murder-suicide last week.

Mellyssa Pereira DaCosta, who came to Danbury from Brazil when she was pregnant with her 1-year-old child, was k*lled Nov. 20 at a Griffing Avenue residence where she had been living.

Lucio "China" DeSouza, who owns the Danbury Brazilian community newspaper, Jornal Comunidade News, said Pereira DaCosta was well-known and well-liked.

"She knew everybody," he said.

Pereira DaCosta worked in Danbury at the Portuguese Cultural Center, which includes a bar, restaurant and catering hall, DeSouza said. He often talked with the 21-year-old when he came in after playing soccer.

"She always treated people very nicely," DeSouza said. "She was a great person, she'd help everybody. She was a very good friend to the people she worked with."

Danbury's Brazilian community was shocked when Pereira DaCosta was k*lled. Her child's father, 28-year-old Dheraldy Mendes Caldeira, stabbed her in the head and neck before turning the knife on himself, police said. Their child was present when the incident unfolded, police said.

The two met in Brazil when she was 18 or 19 and Mendes Caldeira told her aunt that he wanted to take the young woman to the United States where his father lived, DeSouza said. By that point, she was pregnant with Mendes Caldeira's child, he said.

Brazilian newspapers said Pereira DaCosta was studying while living in Danbury. At the time of her death, she and her child were living on the third floor of the same Griffing Avenue three-family house where Mendes Caldeira lived, DeSouza said.

The mayor of the small Brazilian town where Pereira DaCosta grew up is helping to have her body brought back to the country so she can be buried by her family, DeSouza said.

"Everyone is very emotional in Brazil," he said. "She grew up in a small town."

The couple's child was unharmed in the stabbings and is in the custody of the state Department of Children and Families.

"Thankfully, the child is safe and is in the care and custody of the department," DCF spokesperson Peter Yazbak said in a statement on Monday. "ItÂ’s our priority to place children with relatives or those with who they have a familial relationship whenever possible. We pursue all potential family placements for children whether thatÂ’s in state, out of state or even with family residing outside of the country."

↪ https://www.newstimes.com .. a-18517545.php

It affects men as well as women, and is wider for the well-educated



bese people experience discrimination in many parts of their lives, and the workplace is no exception. Studies have long shown that obese workers, defined as those with a body-mass index (bmi) of 30 or more, earn significantly less than their slimmer counterparts. In America, several state and local governments are contemplating laws against this treatment. On November 22nd, one such ban came into force in New York City.
Yet the costs of weight discrimination may be even greater than previously thought. “The overwhelming evidence,” wrote the Institute for Employment Studies, a British think-tank, in a recent report, “is that it is only women living with obesity who experience the obesity wage penalty.” They were expressing a view that is widely aired in academic papers. To test it, The Economist has analysed data concerning 23,000 workers from the American Time Use Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Our number-crunching suggests that, in fact, being obese hurts the earnings of both women and men.



The data we analysed cover men and women aged between 25 and 54 and in full-time employment. At an aggregate level, it is true that menÂ’s bmis are unrelated to their wages. But that changes for men with university degrees. For them, obesity is a*sociated with a wage penalty of nearly 8%, even after accounting for the separate effects of age, race, graduate education and marital status. When we re-ran our analysis, using a different dataset that covers nearly 90,000 people, from the Department of Health and Human Services, we got similar results.
The conclusion—that well-educated workers in particular are penalised for their weight—holds for both s*xes (see chart 1). Moreover, the higher your level of education, the greater the penalty. We found that obese men with a bachelor’s degree earn 5% less than their thinner colleagues, while those with a graduate degree earn 14% less. Obese women, it is true, still have it worse: for them, the equivalent figures are 12% and 19%, respectively.




Your line of work makes a difference, too (see chart 2). When we crunched the numbers for individual occupations and industries, we found the greatest disparities in high-skilled jobs. Obese workers in health care, for example, make 11% less than their slimmer colleagues; those in management roles make roughly 9% less, on average. In sectors such as construction and agriculture, meanwhile, obesity is actually a*sociated with higher wages.
These results suggest that the aggregate costs of wage discrimination borne by overweight workers in America are hefty. Suppose you a*sume that obese women, but not men, face a wage penalty of 7% (the average across all such women in our sample) and that this is the same regardless of their level of education. Then a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that they bear a total cost of some $30bn a year. But if you account for both the discrimination faced by men, and for the higher wage penalty experienced by the more educated (who also tend to earn more), the total cost to this enlarged group more than doubles, to $70bn per year.
What can be done? Several cities, such as San Francisco and Washington, dc, already ban discrimination on the basis of appearance. A handful of states—including Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Vermont—are considering similar bills. The ban New York City began to enforce on November 22nd prohibits weight-based discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodation such as hotels and restaurants. Alas, it is unlikely to accomplish much. When we restricted our analysis to workers in Michigan, where a similar ban has been in place for nearly 50 years, we found the obesity wage penalty to be no lower than for America as a whole. Outlawing prejudice is one thing. Ironing it out of society is quite another. ■7

↪ https://archive.ph/ZbXcv# .. -1017.0-1039.1

Yea FVCK BRANDON JOHNSON.

Nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana donÂ’t need state approval to grant degrees

SPRINGFIELD, La. -- Arliya Martin accepted her high school diploma with relief and gratitude.

It was her ticket to better-paying work, she felt, after getting kicked out of high school and toiling for eight years at factory jobs to support her children.

“This is a new path for me to get on with my life,” she said.

But Martin didnÂ’t take any classes or pass any tests to receive her degree. She got it in July from a school where students can get a high school diploma for $465.

Unlike public schools, formal homeschooling programs or traditional private schools, nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana donÂ’t need state approval to grant degrees. Nearly every one of those unapproved schools was created to serve a single homeschooling family, but some have buildings, classrooms, teachers and dozens of students.

While unapproved schools account for a small percentage of the state's students, those in LouisianaÂ’s off-the-grid school system are a rapidly growing example of the nation's continuing fallout from COVID-19: families disengaging from traditional education.

U.S. public school enrollment fell by more than 1.2 million students in the first two years of the pandemic. Many switched to private school or told their state they were homeschooling. Thousands of others could not be accounted for at all, according to an analysis from The a*sociated Press and its partners.

The students in Louisiana's off-the-grid school system aren't missing. But there's no way to tell what kind of education they're getting, or whether they're getting one at all. Over 21,000 students are enrolled in the state's unapproved schools, nearly double the number from before the pandemic, according to data obtained through a public records request by the AP and The Advocate, a partner news outlet in Louisiana.

To supporters of the system, avoiding state oversight is entirely the point. Advocates say Louisiana's unapproved schools are a natural extension of the doctrine of parental rights.

The place where Martin got her diploma, Springfield Preparatory School, bills itself as an umbrella school for Christian homeschoolers. Most students there do attend the school to work toward an education through actual classes or tutoring.

However, principal Kitty Sibley Morrison is also willing to grant a diploma to anyone whose parents say they were homeschooled, even years earlier.

“Sometimes it takes two or three times to explain to them that they are free,” Sibley Morrison said. “Their parents are in charge of them, not the state.”

Sibley Morrison says she is not selling diplomas, but rather lifetime services for homeschooling families.

“We’re not here to make money,” she said.

Yet a list of prices is taped to the front window of the school building: $250 for diploma services, a $50 application fee, $35 for a diploma cover and $130 to walk in a cap and gown at a ceremony.

The number of students in unapproved private schools like Springfield has nearly doubled, from around 11,600 in the 2017-18 school year to over 21,000 in 2022-23, according to state records.

There’s precious little information available about these schools, which the state calls “nonpublic schools not seeking state approval." To start one, an adult must only report their school's name and address, their contact information and how many students they have. Some schools have whimsical names such as the “Ballerina Jedi Academy” and the “Unicorn Princess School.” Others proclaim their independence with names like “Freedom First.”

Most of the schools are tiny, single-family home schools. However, last year, 30 of LouisianaÂ’s unapproved schools reported they had at least 50 children enrolled.

There is no way for the government to verify safety, quality or even whether a school exists, said Laura Hawkins, a former state Department of Education official who worked on its school choice efforts up to 2020.

The department warns parents on its website that it cannot confirm whether these organizations even meet the legal definition of a school.

“We didn’t want to give parents or anyone a false sense that we knew anything about these schools, should they exist,” Hawkins said, “that we could attest to their safety, that we could attest to their actual educational program, anything.”

Louisiana has two options for homeschooling.

Parents who want their child to receive a state-recognized high school diploma can apply for the official home study program. They must submit documentation such as test scores or copies of the studentÂ’s work to show their child has received 180 days of schooling at the same quality as a public schoolÂ’s. The state-recognized diploma is more widely accepted by colleges and allows students to qualify for a popular in-state scholarship program.

Alternately, families can set up their own private school without asking for state approval. There are no requirements to prove a child is getting an education. In fact, these schools donÂ’t even have to submit the names of the students who are attending.

At least two unapproved institutions have had abuse scandals, but the state Department of Education says it has no authority to do anything in response.

“By law, the LDOE does not have oversight over these schools,” said Louisiana Department of Education spokesperson Ted Beasley.

One of the most infamous is T.M. Landry in Breaux Bridge. A 2018 New York Times investigation found the school abused kids and made up transcripts to get students into Ivy League schools. It was still open as of last school year with 15 children, according to state records. Another unapproved school in Baton Rouge, Second Chance Academy, has come under scrutiny since its head teacher was arrested on charges of s*xually abusing students.

Louisiana's unapproved private schools came into being in 1980 when Christian ministers who ran small private schools joined forces with the budding homeschool movement to push for the deregulation of private education. Lawmakers eliminated the requirement for private schools to have at least 50 students and state-certified teachers.

Opponents have tried on multiple occasions to get the law repealed but faltered in the face of lobbying efforts from Christian homeschool groups.

Today, over a dozen states allow families to open a private school as a form of homeschooling, including California, Illinois and Texas, according to the Home School Legal Defense a*sociation. Around half the states require those schools to teach basic subjects such as math and reading; Louisiana isn't one of them.

Springfield Preparatory consists of two low-slung buildings on SpringfieldÂ’s main street. One is an office, the other a former restaurant space where Sibley MorrisonÂ’s daughter and other teachers lead classes on art, music and more. State records say 250 students attend, though Sibley Morrison said the school doesnÂ’t really keep count.

Some homeschooling families come for art or science, others for services like career guidance, test prep and “explanation and support in their parental rights,” said Sibley Morrison. Some, such as Arliya Martin, go straight for a diploma.

Kicked out of high school during 10th grade for what she said was self-defense during an altercation, Martin tried a military-style program for at-risk youths, but finished without her GED.

“At 17, I was already by myself. I had my son at 18, and it was just work, work, work,” she said.

Then, this summer, she met Sibley Morrison. At 75, Sibley Morrison has been involved in homeschool education since the 1970s and says her mission is to provide an alternative to the “godless” public education system.

Within days of meeting Sibley Morrison, Martin visited her office and had a diploma in her hand.

The document was backdated to 2015, when she would have graduated high school. It also said she had completed a program for graduation “approved by the Louisiana Board of Education,” which isn’t true. After inquiries from AP, Sibley Morrison said there had been a mistake and that the document would be corrected.

Signs at the school advertise “state-approved” diplomas, even though the state has not approved anything about the school. Sibley Morrison says she can use those words because she encourages each family in her program to simultaneously sign up for the state-approved home study program.

She says the diploma recognizes the value of educational experiences outside the classroom.

“I think you’re working the oil field, you’re working the McDonald’s, all of that is just as valid as what the classroom was,” Sibley Morrison said. “That’s my point, and that’s why I sleep well at night — because I feel good about the parents having alternatives in raising their children.”

After learning later that her diploma is not approved by the state and might not be accepted by some colleges, Martin said she did not feel deterred. Friends and family members have gotten diplomas from the same school and gone on to college and successful careers, she said.

In Sibley Morrison's view, parents are the only people who get to decide if and when someone was sufficiently educated.

“When parents say, ‘My child is ready to go into the real world’ — I take their word for it,” Sibley Morrison said.

Angela Grimberg, the executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, pointed out Louisiana law states that parents who want state approval must apply within 15 days of starting homeschooling. Backdating a diploma that claims to be state-approved would thus be “fraudulent,” Grimberg said.

Beasley, the Department of Education spokesperson, said diplomas generally cannot be awarded retroactively. Asked if any government agency has authority to take action if a school sells diplomas, Beasley suggested making a report to the state attorney general's consumer protection division.

The attorney general's office did not respond to a request for comment.

A diverse spectrum of families have come under Springfield Prep's umbrella, united by the feeling that public school just does not work for them. Among others, there are families who want more flexibility and freedom, students sick of unfair discipline and post-pandemic chaos, and conservative parents who disapprove of books a*signed in public school.

Jamie Vander Meulen thought public school wouldnÂ’t be a good fit for her three daughters, who all have dyslexia, so she started her own unapproved private school. Her girls learn with her in the morning and then take enrichment classes at Springfield, dabbling in everything from harp to Irish dance. They've also participated in a homeschooling co-op hosted at Springfield.

Vander Meulen's 8-year-old girl, Ruby, described school as “really fun,” “artsy” and “magical.” Her daughter Rose, 12, said she likes that she can learn at her own pace and spend more time on topics she loves, including science and World War II.

“You learn it and you can keep doing it, so it stays in your brain,” Rose said.

Some of those science classes are taught by Harper Mumford, another mom in the co-op. Mumford says other parents thought she was crazy when she started homeschooling. But since the pandemic, families have less trust in public school.

“Before, it seemed more of like a cooperation between schools and parents for education,” she said. “Then I think when those mandates started happening, it didn’t seem so much as a cooperative effort.”

Khyli Barbee, 15, celebrated her graduation from Springfield Prep in August with 22 other students. She said her public high school in Biloxi, Mississippi, had become “crazy” since the pandemic, with rampant bullying and drug use.

“I just wanted to hurry up and get out of school,” she said. She didn't have to take any classes to get a diploma: “You just paid to walk.”

On the July day when Sibley Morrison handed Martin her diploma, she advised her on next steps, describing scholarships she could use to go to community college.

“If you want our help,” Sibley Morrison said, “you just come on back over here and we’ll help.”

“Y’all seem like good people who know how to help,” Martin said. “So I will be back.”

___

Charles Lussier of The Advocate contributed from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

___

The a*sociated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

↪ https://abcnews.go.com/US .. oved-105174292

KEY POINTS
-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday at the New York Times DealBook summit that artificial intelligence will be “fairly competitive” with humans in as few as five years.
-Huang sees an emergence in off-the-shelf AI tools that companies will tune according to their needs, from chip design and software creation to drug discovery and radiology.
-NvidiaÂ’s AI chips are so hot that revenue tripled in the companyÂ’s fiscal third quarter.


Nvidia
CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that artificial intelligence is gaining on humans.

Speaking at the New York Times’ annual DealBook summit, Huang said that if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is defined as a computer that can complete tests in a “fairly competitive” way to human intelligence, then “within the next five years, you’re going to see, obviously, AIs that can achieve those tests.”

NvidiaÂ’s business is booming because of the surge in demand for high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) that are needed to train AI models and run hefty workloads across industries like automotive, architecture, electronics, engineering and scientific research as well as for OpenAIÂ’s ChatGPT.

Revenue in NvidiaÂ’s fiscal third quarter tripled, while net income climbed to $9.24 billion from $680 million a year earlier.

In the interview Wednesday, Huang recalled delivering “the world’s first AI supercomputer” to OpenAI, after Elon Musk, who co-founded the AI project before departing it in 2018, heard Huang speak about the device at a conference.

“Elon saw it, and he goes, ‘I want one of those’ — he told me about OpenAI,” Huang said. “I delivered the world’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI on that day.”

Regarding the recent chaos surrounding OpenAI, its board structure and the ousting and subsequent reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, Huang said he hoped things were calming down.

“I’m happy that they’re settled, and I hope they’re settled — it’s a really great team,” Huang said. “It also brings to mind the importance of corporate governance. Nvidia is here 30 years after our founding, we’ve gone through a lot of adversity. If we didn’t set up our company properly, who knows what would have been.”

Huang predicted that competition in the AI space will lead to the emergence of off-the-shelf AI tools that companies in different industries will tune according to their needs, from chip design and software creation to drug discovery and radiology.

Huang was asked on stage to rank the success of various companies in the AI market.

“I’m not going to rank my friends,” he said. “I’ll admit it, I want to, but I’m not going to do it.”

One reason the tech industry is still years away from AGI, Huang said, is that although machine learning is currently skilled at tasks like recognition and perception, it canÂ’t yet perform multi-step reasoning, which is a top priority for companies and researchers.

“Everybody’s working on it,” Huang said.

And the technology is moving forward very quickly.

“There’s no question that the rate of progress is high,” Huang said. “What we realize today is that of course, what we can do today with these models and intelligence are related, but not the same.”

↪ https://www.cnbc.com/2023 .. n-5-years.html

Spying on presidents used to be a tough business. One of the great unsung heroes of American history was a formerly enslaved woman named Mary Bowser, a spy who infiltrated the family of Jefferson Davis as a domestic servant, and eventually landed a full-time job in the Southern White House, the political seat of his Confederacy. Armed with a photographic memory and an all-access pass to the inner workings of the Davis administration, she fed details daily to the Union army, which Ulysses S. Grant called the “most valuable information” he received from the Southern capital during the war.

These days, it’s a whole lot easier. While researching our new book, The Secret Life of Data, we gathered some sensitive information from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach club, which he used as a base for political operations both during and after his presidency. He even referred to on several occasions as his “Southern White House.”

We didnÂ’t have to risk life and limb, posing as the help and smuggling information out through a well-funded spy ring. All we had to do was sign up for an online service, enter the address of Mar-a-Lago, and click a button. Within a few minutes, we had a report profiling thousands of visitors to TrumpÂ’s club over the course of an entire year, including details like where they likely live and work, their ages, incomes, ethnicities, education levels, where they were immediately before visiting, and where they spent their time on the property once they got there.

This wasn’t some dark web hacker thing. No Bitcoin was exchanged. The service we used was perfectly legal and freely available on the open web, one of dozens of “data brokers” that collect and trade in consumer data. It’s a $300-billion-per-year business — about the same as the gross domestic product of Hong Kong. This particular data broker, called Near, uses smartphone location data to trace the foot traffic of about 1.6 billion people across 70 million locations in 44 countries.

Near isnÂ’t set up to spy on U.S. presidents, current or former. Their typical customer is a retail business, using location data to track the origin points of visitors to brick-and-mortar stores so it can market more effectively. But, on the other hand, itÂ’s not set up not to spy on presidents, either. Once data gets collected and analyzed, thereÂ’s no telling whoÂ’s going to use it or for what purposes; it has its own secret life. And that can be pretty dangerous both for individual privacy and, on a bigger scale, for democracy itself. ThatÂ’s the main point of our book and the reason we wanted to see what we could do with NearÂ’s data.

Fair is fair, so we decided to spy on ourselves first. Near showed us daytime and evening locations a*sociated with visitors to one of our homes between December 2020 and December 2021, including a teaching a*sistant, several of our childrenÂ’s friends, and, presumably, food delivery workers, our mail carriers, and an exterminator. It showed traffic spikes when we had large outdoor parties. It showed the most common age of visitors was under 18 (accurate, as we had two school-aged children), that 50 percent of our visitors were white, and that the median household income of our visitors was $96,487 (about $20,000 below the local average).

Then we turned our sights on Mar-a-Lago. While our home traffic hovered around 100 people, mostly originating within a 10-mile radius, Trump’s visitors during that same year numbered in the thousands from all over the globe. Checking tabs conveniently labeled “Common Evening Location” and “Common Daytime Location,” we were able to identify the likely homes and workplaces of any given visitor, marked as dots over buildings on a map. Is this Mary Bowser-level spying? Definitely not. Can it give you valuable information about Trump and his circle? For sure.

The vast majority of Mar-a-Lago visitors typically spend their days and nights in the U.S., east of the Mississippi. But that makes the exceptions — the far-flung travelers — stand out on the map of the globe like sore thumbs. Even though the data is technically “anonymized” (we can’t see the age, income, or ethnicity of a specific visitor, let alone their name), the pinpoint locations of where they spend their days and nights makes educated guesswork pretty easy.

For instance, one of the dots on the map is a private residence in Akure, a mid-sized city in southwestern Nigeria. That’s a seemingly unlikely origin for a Mar-a-Lago visitor, especially considering that Trump famously referred to African nations as “sh*thole countries” and accused Nigerians of living in “huts.” Who would spend their days in a house on a small, walled-in lot on the corner of Fabusuyi St., Akure, and then fly all the way to Mar-a-Lago?

A few minutes of Googling gave us a very likely answer: Abraham O. Adeyemi, a pastor at the Fellowship Baptist Church Akure, about 20 minutes up the road from the private residence a*sociated with the Mar-a-Lago visitor. There are two pieces of evidence that suggest Adeyemi was Trump’s visitor. First, amidst anti-abortion, anti-masking, and anti-vaccination memes, Adeyemi’s Instagram profile features a photo of his wife standing in a walled green lot in front of a white-roofed building, a strong match for the satellite photo of the property on commercial mapping platforms. Second, and far more compellingly, Adeyemi tweeted a video of a Nigerian pro-Trump parade in October 2020, which Trump retweeted and posted to Facebook on Election Day, commenting, “A parade for me in Nigeria, a great honor!”

As far as we can tell, there’s no public record of Adeyemi ever visiting Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, there’s nothing particularly sinister about it, either. If Trump wanted to invite a staunch supporter to his private property, that was his right. Same goes for the visitor we traced back to a business address on the outskirts of Moscow registered as the office of a petrochemical company called Agro Allied Agency, or the other we digitally followed to a residential and business complex in Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine which has been the site of some of the most intense f*ghting of the war. (Representatives for Adeyemi and Trump did not respond to Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment.)

We’re probably not the only ones looking. Plenty of other people are interested in finding such things — not just legitimate actors like journalists and prosecutors, but also dangerous ones, like blackmailers and foreign intelligence organizations. And that makes brokers like Near a serious liability in a data-saturated world.

And Trump isnÂ’t the only one at risk. Every one of us leaks massive amounts of data every day of our lives as we go about our regular business. As Dennis Crowley, the founder of a location technology platform called Foursquare, tells us, many of the apps on our devices are data harvesters posing as something more innocent, like little digital Trojan horses.

“A lot of sh*tty poker games and solitaire games and flashlight apps and Tamagotchi stuff was just designed to collect location data and sell it to third-party brokers,” Crowley says. And that data never disappears, he says. Even though most of it has no practical value today, brokers keep it anyway, because hard drives are cheap, and there’s no telling what may become valuable in the future — say, if a private real estate developer suddenly gets elected to national office.

We managed to spy on a sitting president in his own home from the comfort of our couches just by messing around with the free version of a single data brokerÂ’s web app. Now imagine what a dedicated forensic team could do, working 24/7, with access to the full paid services of every commercial data broker, in addition to all of the other data sources out there, from high-tech hacking to old-fashioned surveillance. ItÂ’s one of those cases where reality is actually worse than the stories told in dystopian sci-fi and superhero movies.

ThatÂ’s why, if weÂ’re ever going to get out of this mess, preserving individual privacy and the conditions for functional democracy, we all need to start thinking about technology the same way we think about supervillains. When Congress writes new laws, when big tech companies introduce new tools to the market, and when businesses and consumers invite new apps and gadgets into their homes and workplaces, itÂ’s not enough just to take tech at face value. A data broker is never just a marketing service and a sh*tty poker app is never just a game. TheyÂ’re cracks in the foundation of our society, and they can be exploited to tear it apart.

↪ https://www.rollingstone. .. at-1234897098/

Another kid shot in Memphis smh


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MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A 9-year-old girl is in the hospital Tuesday after being caught in the crossfire of a domestic dispute while riding in the car with her mother, Memphis Police say.

Around 2 p.m., officers were flagged down at the intersection of Poplar Avenue and East Parkway North, where they found the girl with an apparent gunshot wound.

The child was taken to Le Bonheur ChildrenÂ’s Hospital in non-critical condition.

We watched as the childÂ’s mother talked to investigators on the scene. Police say itÂ’s believed that her boyfriend fired into her car while three of her children were with her.


Photo by David Royer, WREG
Children caught in the crossfire of Memphis gun violence is a sad but common sight at Le Bonheur ChildrenÂ’s Hospital, where Dr. Nick Watkins works in the emergency room.


“Not only as a healthcare provider but as a resident of the city of Memphis and community member, it’s heartbreaking to see this. It’s devastating, not only for the families directly involved but for everyone around them,” Watkins said.

An emergency room doctor at Le Bonheur says there has been a record number of child gunshot victims treated at the hospital this year. @murderers you gotta teach them how to carry themselves.

Over the weekend, a 7-month-old baby was shot after a stray bullet flew into her Highland Heights home. Her injuries required brain surgery.

Baby undergoes brain surgery after she was shot
“We’re all mourning these injuries and deaths that we see,” Watkins said.


According to data from Le Bonheur, the hospital has treated 160 gunshot patients this year, surpassing last yearÂ’s total of 150.

Watkins said most of the gunshot patients are older children and that the hospital is working with policymakers and grassroots organizations to get to the root of the problem.

“We are seeing an increase in the amount of young children even infants who are affected by either unsecured firearms in the home or family member’s homes or bystanders in domestic disputes,” Watkins said.

Police havenÂ’t said what charges the suspect could face.


The investigation is ongoing. If you have any information, call CrimeStoppers at 901-528-CASH.

↪ https://wreg.com/news/loc .. ot-in-midtown/

Teen and innocent bystander shot aboard subway train in Brooklyn