Author Archives: Carol Edwards

When you set aside the corporate gimmicks and ad campaigns, Mother’s Day is simply an opportunity to honor the mom — or mom-like figure — in your life for her sacrifices, wisdom, and love. 

But it’s also a chance to think about motherhood in general and how we can support moms everywhere, regardless of whether they’re a blood relation. You can begin by learning more about the various challenges mothers face in the United States and abroad, and then follow-up with action by lending your voice or dollars to an important cause working to reduce or eliminate those disparities. 

More about Women, Social Good, Activism, Gender Equality, and Mother S Day

Hoping to invest in the next Bitcoin? Keep an eye on Facebook. No, but really. According to a Cheddar report, the company is hard at work on its own cryptocurrency. 

Cheddar, citing sources familiar with the matter, claims that Facebook users could use the new “digital token” to buy and sell through the platform. The social network is also “exploring other ways” that it could use such a currency. 

Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that Facebook planned to “go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of” new technologies such as cryptocurrency.  Read more…

More about Facebook, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Cryptocurrencies, and Tech

A new day, a new glaring hypocrisy from the Trump administration.

Today’s scandal comes from White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly. In a new interview with NPR, Kelly complained that immigrants crossing the border weren’t good fits because they “don’t have skills” and “don’t speak English.” 

Thanks to the good humans of Twitter, we now know that’s apparently true of Kelly’s own ancestors, some of whom were unable to read or write English and would be classified as “unskilled.”  

Monica Pattangall, who goes by the Twitter handle @Yokumbrook, first made the discovery on Ancestry.com. She shared it with Jennifer Mendelsohn, who included it in her project Resistance Genealogy. (Mendelsohn also recently tracked fellow Tomi Lahren’s ancestry, whose been known to make similar nativist statements.) Read more…

More about Watercooler, Xenophobia, John Kelly, Culture, and Politics

NASA announced that it’s sending a helicopter to Mars in a little over two years. 

If successful, this aerial Mars explorer, with a body about the size of a football, would be the first helicopter to fly on another planet. 

NASA hopes to launch the prototype to Mars with the agency’s 2020 rover, which is designed to hunt for signs of past life on the red planet.

“After the Wright Brothers proved 117 years ago that powered, sustained, and controlled flight was possible here on Earth, another group of American pioneers may prove the same can be done on another world,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.  Read more…

More about Space, Nasa, Mars, Mars Rover, and Helicopter

Whether you’re a queer person aching for representation or a straight human looking for a good time, we are all searching for the same thing in life: quality lesbian sex scenes.

Historically, they’ve been excruciatingly hard to find. That’s why it’s delightful to see newly-released indie drama Disobedience get it mostly right. Neither a heteronormative pornographic fantasy nor a dry, anthropological account, Disobedience manages to depict queer sex without exploiting the actors performing it.

Bonus: It’s super hot.

More about Entertainment, Rachel Weisz, Rachel Mcadams, Disobedience, and Culture

Google Duplex, the human-sounding AI assistant that can make phone calls for you, stunned us when it was demoed earlier this week.

While impressive, Duplex has also received backlash in the past few days, leaving Google to stress about transparency in the technology, reports CNET.

“We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement via email.

“What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product.”  Read more…

More about Google, Artificial Intelligence, Ai, Google Io, and Google Io 2018

The encrypted messaging app Signal is wonderful — assuming it works as intended. 

That last bit was thrown into question yesterday when Motherboard reported that a quirk of MacOS meant that, if you happened to be using the Signal MacOS desktop app, messages could remain on your computer even after they had been removed from the app. 

Thankfully, that has now been fixed.

The problem was first highlighted by security researcher Alec Muffett, who pointed out on Twitter that Signal messages — even those that should have expired thanks to the app’s Disappearing Messages feature — remained in his MacOS notifications bar.  Read more…

More about Privacy, Encryption, Signal, Tech, and Cybersecurity

As if we needed more reasons to be freaked out by increasingly powerful digital assistants, there’s a new nightmare scenario: The music you listen to or conversations you hear on TV could hijack your digital assistant with commands undetectable to human ears. 

This is known as a “Dolphin Attack” (because dolphins can hear what humans can’t), and researchers have been aware of the possibility for years. The basic idea is that commands could be hidden in high-frequency sounds that our assistant-enabled gadgets can detect, but we are unable to hear.

More about Tech, Gadgets, Siri, Artificial Intelligence, and Alexa

The subscription fervor that’s grown from Netflix to MoviePass is making its way to the road.

Invites through the Lyft app started going out this week to high-frequency “insiders” who want a chance to sign up for a $200 per month plan. (Note: That will set riders back more each month than Amazon Prime’s new annual rate.)

Once on the waitlist for the all-access pass — an upfront subscription for a certain number of rides each month — users can opt into a Lyft ride pass the company is testing out. The plan includes 30 standard Lyft rides. At $6.67 per ride, that could save a few bucks on longer, more expensive routes. Read more…

More about Lyft, Ride Hailing Apps, Subscription Services, Tech, and Transportation

It was possibly the most mind-blowing tech demo in years: During the opening keynote of the Google I/O developers conference, CEO Sundar Pichai showed the company’s AI-driven Assistant making a phone call to a business and carrying out a verbal conversation with the person who answered.

What made the demo of the feature, called Duplex, so amazing was the Assistant’s command of natural language – saying “um,” “mm-hmm,” and “ah” at various times – was so masterful that it was apparent the person on the other end had no idea he or she was talking to a machine. It was a very specific situation, but Google Assistant had effectively passed the Turing test. Read more…

More about Google, Podcast, Ai, Mashtalk, and Google Assistant