Author: KnowledgeHippo

H. Bruce Franklin, a self-described Maoist whose dismissal from Stanford University in 1972 for an anti-Vietnam War speech became a cause for academic freedom — and who in the following decades wrote books on eclectic subjects, including one credited with helped improve the ecology of New York Harbor — died May 19 at his home in El Cerrito, California, near Berkeley. He was 90.The cause was corticobasal degeneration, a rare brain disease, his daughter Karen Franklin said.Dr. Franklin was a tenured English professor and author of three scholarly books on Herman Melville when he was radicalized in the 1960s by…

The US economy continues to throw curves and the May jobs report is the latest example.Employers added 272,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, well above what economists had expected as hiring had gradually slowed. That’s up from an average of 232,000 jobs over the previous 12 months, muddling the picture of an economy easing to a more sustainable pace.More worryingly for the Federal Reserve, which meets next week and again in July, wages rose 4.1 percent from a year ago – a sign that inflation may not yet be beaten.”For those who might have thought they…

Last month, Meta announced that it was going to expand its AI services worldwide, and the company informed users in Europe that it would use their public information to train its AI services starting June 26.Notices sent to Facebook and Instagram users in Europe informing them that their public posts could be used to train AI services, including Meta’s chatbot, sparked privacy concerns and backlash as users wondered where the policy change will be implemented.But for those living in the United States, where online privacy laws aren’t as strict, Meta AI already uses public posts to train its AI. It’s…

Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline-powered models, mainly because the batteries cost so much. However, new technology could turn these expensive devices into an asset, providing owners with benefits such as reduced utility bills, lower rent payments or free parking.Ford Motor, General Motors, BMW and other automakers are exploring how electric car batteries could be used to store excess renewable energy to help utilities deal with fluctuations in energy supply and demand. Automakers would make money by acting as middlemen between car owners and electricity suppliers.Millions of cars could be seen as a huge energy system that, for the…

The American Cancer Society has launched an ambitious, large-scale study focusing on a population that has long been overlooked despite high rates of cancer and cancer-related deaths: black women.The initiative, called VOICES of Black Women, is believed to be the first long-term, population-based study of its size to zero specifically on the factors driving cancer prevalence and deaths among black women.The researchers plan to enroll 100,000 cancer-free black women, ages 25 to 55, in Washington, DC and 20 states where most black American women live. Individuals will be surveyed twice a year about their behaviors, environmental exposures and life experiences…

Six months into the Israel-Hamas war, the people of Gaza are facing a hunger crisis that the United Nations says is bordering on starvation.The crisis in Gaza is entirely man-made, the result of Israel’s war against Hamas and a near-total siege of the territory, aid experts say. Conflict was also at the root of two other disasters in the last two decades that have been labeled by a global authority as famines, in Sudan and Somalia, although in those countries drought was also a major underlying factor.Here’s how Gaza got to this point.Food shortages in Gaza have been created by…

Critics of standardized testing have long raised concerns that the tests helped fuel inequality because some wealthier students boosted their scores through high tuition prices. However, recent studies have found that test scores help predict college grades, the likelihood of graduation, and post-college success, and that test scores are more reliable than high school grades, in part because of grade inflation recent years.But Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest, an organization that opposes standardized testing, said Thursday that the Opportunity Insights analysis had been criticized by other researchers. “These scholars say that when you eliminate the role of…

NPR is facing both internal turmoil and a firestorm of attacks from prominent conservatives this week after a senior editor publicly claimed the broadcaster has allowed liberal bias to influence its coverage, jeopardizing its trust with the public.Uri Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, wrote in an essay published Tuesday by The Free Press, a popular Substack publication, that “people at every level of NPR have coalesced comfortably around the progressive worldview”.Mr. Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist, criticized NPR for what he said were a series of journalistic errors in its coverage of…

Apple announced Thursday that it will loosen limits on repairing newer iPhones with used parts such as screens, batteries and cameras, reversing its past practice of using software to encourage people to work with new and more expensive Apple-approved parts.The change comes weeks after Oregon passed a law banning Apple’s practice of linking components to software, known as “component pairing.” Similar bills are being considered in Colorado and more than a dozen other states. Apple had opposed the Oregon law before its passage, saying customers could become vulnerable to security risks if Apple were required to allow lower-priced components made…

Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and then pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical dominance abusers use to punish their partners, died on 18 March at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. 82.His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was likely a heart attack that occurred while on a Zoom call with women’s advocates in British Columbia.Through studies that began in 1979, Drs. Stark and Flitcraft became experts on intimate partner violence, sounding the alarm that abuse—not car accidents or sexual assault—was the biggest cause of injury sending women to emergency…