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Would a ‘SNAP’ program for broadband help bridge the homework divide?

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Sarah Kelsey is an instructional coordinator at Greenup County School District in eastern Kentucky. Her school population is mostly rural and internet access is limited. “The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a lot of unequal learning experiences for our students,” Kelsey said. “About 25 percent of our students don’t have access to internet, which is causing a great deal of students to fall behind.” The experience of Greenup County Schools   is unacceptable, but unfortunately all too common. At a time when access to educational opportunities are so critical for long-term success, an estimated 17 million students in unserved and underserved communities lack the connectivity that makes distance learning possible. And new research from the Morning Consult shows that while more than three quarters of parents and teachers are concerned about today’s homework gap, more than 70 percent also expect the traditional classroom learning environment to rely more heavily on technology after the pandemic. If we think this is a problem just for parents, we are wrong. Policymakers and business leaders should also be concerned. The digital divide has been with us for much too long, and now poses a crisis to education that threatens an entire generation of leaders and innovators. The stakes are high, and Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy online learning platform, described them to us: “Even when the school districts, the cities and the local telecom carriers have done heroic efforts to get kids internet access, there are still 10-15% of the kids that are disengaged. If we don’t really engage them, we are going to see long-term consequences for economic viability.” (Khan Academy is among our collaborators as we work to bridge the homework gap by providing free services, devices and educational content to schools and communities.) AT&T is helping by providing free hotspots and internet to students around the country. Earlier this year we provided Sarah Kelsey’s district in Greenup, Ky., and more than 100 organizations and schools with free wireless hotspots and connectivity as part of our $10 million Connected Nation commitment. And today AT&T is committing more than $2 billion to deepen our relationships while expanding affordability and subsidies over the next three years to help bridge the digital divide Read More …

Qualcomm’s next CEO has seen the future of wireless, and (shocker) it’s called 6G

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On June 30, Cristiano Amon will become Qualcomm’s fourth CEO, succeeding Steve Mollenkopf. Amon, who currently is president of the wireless technology giant, first joined Qualcomm in 1995 as an engineer. After stints at Vésper, a mobile carrier in Brazil; Ericsson; and Velocom, Amon returned in 2004 to run the San Diego-based company’s semiconductor business. He spoke with Fast Company editor in chief Stephanie Mehta about the future of wireless and the next problems his technologists will tackle. Edited excerpts follow. Fast Company: What do you see as the biggest differences between the Qualcomm you joined in 1995 and the company today? Cristiano Amon: When I started there were about 3,000 employees, and we didn’t even have half a billion in revenue, but we had this incredible CDMA (code-division multiple access) technology. I was fortunate enough to join before it was ever launched. It was very disruptive for digital communications. It was such an incredible company. I fell in love with it. Fast forward to where we were now. Qualcomm has been defining innovation in the world of communication, from 3G to 4G to 5G. We’re now we’re in an incredible position that there’s demand for technology, and we can make a difference in every single industry. It’s an incredible journey, and while we are now a very large company, we haven’t lost that entrepreneurial spirit. I think of founding CEO Irwin Jacobs as the builder, and his successor, Paul Jacobs, as presiding over the massive explosion of smartphones Read More …

‘Black Panther 2’ is supposed to film in Georgia. Why are Disney and Marvel so quiet?

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Earlier this week, two prominent Black filmmakers took a stand against Georgia’s new, restrictive voting laws by pulling their upcoming project out of the state. Emancipation , a slave drama starring Will Smith and directed by Antoine Fuqua for Apple TV, will no longer be shooting in the Peach State. “At this moment in time, the Nation is coming to terms with its history and is attempting to eliminate vestiges of institutional racism to achieve true racial justice,” Fuqua and Smith said in a joint statement . “We cannot in good conscience provide economic support to a government that enacts regressive voting laws that are designed to restrict voter access.” The laws , signed by Republican governor Brian Kemp in the wake of Georgia’s Democratic victories in the presidential and Senate elections, disproportionately restrict voting access for Black and poor voters through things such as limiting the number of ballot drop boxes and narrowing the window to request an absentee ballot. The backlash from Democrats has been fast and furious. President Biden called the new laws   “un-American” and “sick,” equating them to “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Fuqua and Smith aren’t the only ones in Hollywood who have taken a stand against the laws, but they are an overwhelming minority. With the exception of a few other voices, including Ford vs. Ferrari director James Mangold and actor Mark Hamill, who have vowed not to film in Georgia—one of the biggest production hubs in the country due to generous tax incentives and an abundance of sound stages—for the most part Hollywood has remained mum on the subject. A few conglomerates, such as Comcast (owner of NBCUniversal), AT&T (owner of WarnerMedia), and Viacom have expressed their unhappiness over the legislation but have stopped short of saying they would not film in the state. AT&T said that it was working with members of the Atlanta and Georgia chambers of commerce to support “policies that promote accessible and secure voting while also upholding election integrity and transparency.” (In Atlanta, local business behemoths Coca-Cola and Delta were faster to take strong stands against the laws, though under public pressure and with predictable backlash.) Other broad-ish efforts have included an open letter published in the New York Times and Washington Post on Wednesday that called out efforts to restrict voting access but did not name Georgia specifically. The letter was signed by companies including Amazon, Netflix and Apple, and individuals such as J.J. Abrams, Shonda Rhimes and Samuel L. Jackson. But several weeks into the controversy, neither Disney nor its Marvel division, which are reportedly ramping up to start shooting one of the most high-profile projects of the year in Georgia in July, have made a public statement—and that silence is increasingly deafening. That project would be Black Panther 2 , the follow-up to the 2018 blockbuster. Buzz about the film’s shoot increased with the news of Emancipation ‘s relocation on Monday. Here is yet another high-profile Hollywood production steeped in racial justice themes and with a virtually all-Black cast, and one with significantly more global awareness. If any single project could serve as a platform for Hollywood’s condemnation about what’s going on in Georgia, it’s the Marvel tentpole Read More …

You can talk to this new digital re-creation of Albert Einstein

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A maker of “digital humans” for customer service and chat applications has developed a digital version of Albert Einstein that you can talk to, either by speaking or typing. The company, New Zealand- and Austin-based UneeQ, worked with Hebrew University to get the Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s look, voice, and mannerisms right, Daryl Reva, its senior VP of marketing, told me. Wolfram Research, the creator of the WolframAlpha “computational intelligence” tool, contributed the natural language engine and knowledge base that acts as the digital human’s brain, Reva says. If you’d like to ask Albert some questions, click here . Since the Einstein character wasn’t designed for open-ended chats (UneeQ has another digital human called Sophie for that), he won’t answer just any question, but seems to respond best to questions on a finite set of subjects. You can ask digital Einstein questions about the theory of relativity and about his early life, for example. I asked him how he does his hair, and he was ready for me Read More …

This musician is calling on Spotify to ditch any plans to track listeners’ emotions

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Earlier this year, Spotify elicited sheer panic when it was granted a patent for analyzing users’ voices to decipher their emotional state and then make music recommendations to match. Under the patent’s description, Spotify would also be able to use your speech to identify gender, age, accents, and even if you’re with someone or alone. It’s just a patent and that technology may never find its way into the platform. But in an era of surveillance capitalism and ever-heightening privacy and data concerns, artificial intelligence that tries to feed you music based on what it thinks you’re feeling seems like yet another dystopian future that’s almost here. After all, emotion-recognition technology is already being used in marketing, security, and hiring. But musician and activist Evan Greer is doing what she can to make sure Spotify’s patents never become a reality. [Screenshot: Evan Greer] In conjunction with the release of her single “Surveillance Capitalism” off her new album, Spotify Is Surveillance , Greer is also calling for Spotify to ditch any plans of surveilling its users. Launched in partnership with nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, where she is the deputy director, StopSpotifySurveillance.org lays out the stakes of the issue at hand and provides a petition to sign. “The fact that Spotify filed a patent for this type of emotional surveillance and manipulation is beyond chilling,” Greer said in a statement. “It’s not enough for them to say that they have no plans to use this technology right now, they should publicly commit to never conducting this type of surveillance on music listeners.” To drive that point home, Greer explains the song “Surveillance Capitalism” is meant to underscore how the internet still has “the potential to profoundly transform our society for the better, abolishing false scarcity, and enabling universal access to human knowledge and creativity, while ensuring marginalized and independent artists and creators are fairly compensated for our labor. “But if we allow a small handful of companies to dominate the web and the music industry with a parasitic business model based on surveillance and exploitation,” she adds, “we’re headed for the opposite: a dystopian future where algorithms decide what we see and hear based on profit, rather than artistry.” [Screenshot: Evan Greer] Greer isn’t the only one pushing back against Spotify, which hasn’t faced the same kind of attention as other large tech firms regarding privacy and surveillance. The digital civil rights group Access Now has also demanded that Spotify withdraw any plans to implement its patent. “This technology is dangerous, a violation of privacy and other human rights, and should be abandoned,” the nonprofit wrote in a letter to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, which was reported by Axios . Read more about StopSpotifySurveillance.org here and check out Greer’s album here . The proceeds from the song will be donated to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) to support their #JusticeAtSpotify campaign. Read More …