Amazon.com Inc.'s new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the company's most serious effort yet to turn its e-reader into a productivity tool. But with a starting price of $630—making it the priciest Kindle yet—Amazon will need to persuade even its most loyal readers that the upgrade is worth it....
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Electronic gifts are very popular, and in recent years, retailers have been offering significant discounts on smartphones, e-readers and other electronics labeled as "pre-owned." Research I have co-led finds that these pre-owned options are becoming increasingly viable, thanks in part to laws and policies that encourage recycling and reuse of...
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The Australian Federal government's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, commonly referred to as the "social media ban," is now in effect....
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From automatically generated overviews to chatbots in spreadsheets, so-called artificial intelligence is increasingly being integrated into our watches, phones, home assistants and other smart devices....
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From ancient slavery to the factory floor, progress has often relied on the exploitation of human beings. We might like to believe those days are well behind us. But in the digital age, AI and the metaverse risk repeating that pattern with new forms of invisible labor and inequality....
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A modeling study shows how, under some conditions, increasing numbers of households with rooftop solar panels can lead to higher rates for those without their own solar system. When utility customers cancel their accounts after switching to residential solar panels, the utility must spread their fixed costs around to a...
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A popular portable phone charger sold online has been recalled after reports that it can overheat and catch fire, federal officials said....
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The humble pocket calculator may not be able to keep up with the mathematical capabilities of new technology, but it will never hallucinate....
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The world is loud. A walk down the street bombards one's ears with the sound of engines revving, car horns blaring, and the steady beeps of pedestrian crossings. While smartphone alerts to excessive sound and public awareness of noise exposure grows, few tools help people take protective action....
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Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people's feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do....
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CISPA researcher Tejumade Àfọ̀njá has co-authored a new international study that uses food as a starting point to reveal significant cultural blind spots in today's AI systems. The study also introduces a new participatory research approach to create more inclusive datasets and evaluate biases in AI models....
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A new device uses focused sound cues to keep users grounded amid digital distractions, with possible benefits for anxiety and ADHD as well....
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When Kendrick Lamar began his Super Bowl halftime show earlier this year, he picked a stage design likely familiar to anyone tuning in: a square, triangle, cross and circle....
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Remember Animal Crossing: New Horizons? During the height of its popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, the game, built for the Nintendo Switch console, was averaging 1 million copies sold per day. Now, almost six years since the start of the pandemic, University of California, Santa Cruz Professor of Computational Media...
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