Flipboard now lets you follow local news for 1,000+ cities and towns

In January 2020, Flipboard—the magazine-esque app for reading and sharing content from a multitude of sources —introduced a new feature designed to help people find local news . At launch, it covered 23 big cities, such as Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Read More …

Here’s how human consciousness works—and how a machine might replicate it

I recently attended a panel discussion titled Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines. At one point during the evening, a philosophy professor from Yale said that if a machine ever became conscious, then we would probably be morally obligated to not turn it off. The implication was that if something is conscious, even a machine, then it has moral rights, so turning it off is equivalent to murder. Wow! Imagine being sent to prison for unplugging a computer. Should we be concerned about this? Most neuroscientists don’t talk much about consciousness. They assume that the brain can be understood like every other physical system, and consciousness, whatever it is, will be explained in the same way. Since there isn’t even an agreement on what the word consciousness means, it is best to not worry about it. Philosophers, on the other hand, love to talk (and write books) about consciousness. Some believe that consciousness is beyond physical description. That is, even if you had a full understanding of how the brain works, it would not explain consciousness. Philosopher David Chalmers famously claimed that consciousness is “the hard problem,” whereas understanding how the brain works is “the easy problem.” This phrase caught on, and now many people just assume that consciousness is an inherently unsolvable problem. Personally, I see no reason to believe that consciousness is beyond explanation. I don’t want to get into debates with philosophers, nor do I want to try to define consciousness. However, the Thousand Brains Theory suggests physical explanations for several aspects of consciousness Read More …

With this Black History Month misstep, Google forgot how racist the internet is

This February, Google made it easier for everyone to support Black businesses with its “search Black-owned near you” feature. This new feature has been heavily advertised and promoted. However, businesses and customers noticed a downside to Google’s Black History Month stunt: a surge of overwhelmingly racist reviews on business profiles. We live in a world where online reviews matter. After stock trading app Robinhood shut down Gamestop’s stock purchases, thousands of angry people took to the Google Play Store reviews section of the app. In just one day, Robinhood’s rating fell from five stars to one star and Google swept in to delete nearly 100,000 negative reviews, saying that the reviews were “inorganic.” Forbes reports that 93% of people read local reviews to make a shopping decision Read More …

COVID-19 was a disaster for organ transplants. Here’s how they’re recovering

Organ transplants in the United States have been increasing over the last several years. In 2019, transplants from deceased donors rose by 10% while living donors increased by 7%. The growing system combines education, technological advances, various research, and public policy work to save lives off the 100,000-person waitlist. While kidneys are the top organ in transplant numbers, other key organs transplanted in America include the liver, heart, and lungs. The transplant community has been working together for years to increase organ donations for those in need. Experts say that deceased donors alone will not resolve the waitlist. Organizations like the American Kidney Fund (AKF), among other things, work to get rid of kidney disease in the first place. They provide education and access to resources to help make it easier, and encourage living donors to save a life. As a kidney donor myself, I can confirm that multiple organizations work hard to make organ donation a safe and rewarding experience. Despite the progress in recent years, more living donors are necessary. Especially now. Beginning in late March of last year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the U.S., the country’s transplant system came to a screeching halt. Deceased donor donations dropped by 50% and living donor donations dropped by 90%. “The pandemic caught everybody off guard,” says Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at United Networks for Organ Sharing (UNOS). “Nobody really saw it coming. Transplant is really a collaborative process by nature.” In order for a surgery to be successful it requires both the transplant center and the donor hospital to be fully operational and functional, along with the organ procurement team for deceased donor organs; potential recipients and donors also have to have access to healthcare. Not only did COVID-19 affect all these groups individually, but it only takes one of them with a problem to disrupt the entire system. Waves of impact Once the pandemic hit, healthcare resources had to pivot Read More …

How a tiny startup is reinventing the DVR for the cord-cutter era

The rise of cord cutting and streaming video was supposed to render the digital video recorder (DVR) irrelevant. In theory, you shouldn’t need to record anything when services like Netflix and Amazon Prime make everything available on demand. But now that every big media company has its own streaming service, all that instant gratification has come at a cost. Watching TV now means bouncing between a dozen different apps, each with its own separate menu system, catalog, and watch list. Read More …