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A sedan was introduced to give the car a more traditional appearance, and in 1981, designers mocked up a full-size clay model of a Taurus hatchback (platform ...

This 1981 hatchback proposal for the first Taurus (below) wasn't chosen, but the aerodynamic shape and the doors that wrap into the roof made it to production. "The revolutionary design was a bit jarring to some," Myler says. "The car was developed by one team, Team Taurus, from start to finish.

China has carried out a land-based missile interception test that "achieved its expected purpose", the Defence Ministry said, describing it as defensive and ...

"This test was defensive and not aimed at any country." Beijing has tested missile interceptors before; the most recent previous public announcement of a test was in February 2021, and before that in 2018. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Before, if you walked in Johnson City, you would just hear kids laughing and giggling. Now you don't hear that. All you hear is construction.

A model exists in Tompkins County, where Cornell University commits $250,000 annually to a community housing development fund held by the county and City of Ithaca. “We need to start by prioritizing the needs of our most vulnerable residents, and then building a strategy from there.” “And go live in student housing.” As of 2016, nearly half of homes in Johnson City were built prior to 1939. She wants money to flow into the village, but not at the expense of low-income residents. At the Save-a-Lot, Eve Francis points to a nearby grassy field. Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the move would help spur economic development and create jobs in the village, which has suffered from the loss of manufacturing giants like the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. Stenger, as well as village, county and state leaders, say that will bring more people and money to Johnson City. The buildings BU acquired exist mainly within a few blocks of each other. But much of the land the university’s foundation purchased—or received via donation from Broome County—had homes on them. She can pull her young granddaughter, who shows off a Moana-branded umbrella, in a red fabric wagon to and from errands. It’s the sound of Binghamton University (BU) expanding its Johnson City campus.

Google is charging some small businesses for email and other apps after more than a decade of free use. Business owners say Google is being callous.

The number of users still on the free legacy version from years ago have numbered in the thousands, said a person familiar with the tally who asked for anonymity because the person was not allowed to publicly disclose those numbers. Apple would cost $50 and ProtonMail $160. Google would give him three months free and then charge the same amount as Apple for a year. Years later, he added his brother-in-law, Mesam Jiwani, to his G Suite account when he started a business of his own. “Moving to a Google Workspace subscription can be done in a few clicks.” Google stopped new free sign-ups in December 2012 but continued to support the accounts of what became known as the G Suite legacy free edition. But some business owners said that as they mulled whether to pay Google or abandon its services, they struggled to get in touch with customer support. He had to figure out whether to continue using Google or find another option. Google also said people using old accounts for personal rather than business reasons could continue to do so for free. In recent years, Google has more aggressively pushed into selling software subscriptions to businesses and competed more directly with Microsoft, whose Word and Excel programs rule the market. Google launched Gmail in 2004 and business apps such as Docs and Sheets two years later. They can’t help but feel that a giant company with billions of dollars in profits is squeezing little guys — some of the first businesses to use Google’s apps for work — for just a bit of money. That’s what compelled me to make the decision to go with Google versus other alternatives.”

Framingham teacher Colleen Gazard, who will retire after 34 years, taught Michael Ouellette during her first year. His son, Isaac, is in her last class.

On March 11, 2020, in-person learning in Framingham shut down due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She used to “play school” as a second grader. In 1988, Gazard was halfway through her second year as a Title I teacher at McCarthy Elementary School, working on math and reading with economically disadvantaged students. Newly minted teachers should also not be afraid to make mistakes. From the vantage point of a teacher, Gazard has watched technology burrow its way into the classroom. She remembers Michael Ouellette as a quiet, hardworking kid who loved to write. “‘Well, how do I turn it on? In her decades-long career, Gazard said she “learned because (she) made a lot of mistakes.” Gazard said she often hears parents of the children she taught in the 2019-20 school year say they feel they and their children were “robbed” of a full year of memories. “It was such a great year and then, all of a sudden, it was over,” said Gazard. Isaac is a coincidental bookend to her decades-long teaching career. Isaac Ouellette, an 8-year-old boy who moved to Framingham from Los Angeles, is among her second-graders this year.

Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the ...

The “ 30-Minute Ick Factor” is when people mean to check their social media briefly but then find that 30 minutes have passed, and when they realize how much time they spent, they have this sense of disgust and disappointment in themselves. It’s important to note that the custom lists significantly reduced dissociation for people—but they did not significantly affect time spent using the app. On Twitter, custom lists are a feature that already exists; it’s just not the default option. Let’s shift the responsibility of designing safe and fulfilling experiences from users to the companies. It’s impossible to ever fully catch up on a social media feed, especially when you consider the algorithmically inserted content such as Twitter’s trending tweets or TikTok’s “For You” page. The design of social media can have a lot of power in how people interact with each other and how they feel about their online experiences. For example, we’ve found that social media design can actually help people feel more supportive and kind in moments of online conflict, provided there’s a little bit of a nudge to behave that way. You could be doing the dishes, start daydreaming and not pay attention to how you are doing the dishes. They also had the option of viewing a usage page that showed them statistics such as how much time they’d spent on Chirp in the past seven days. During these activities, your sense of reflective self-consciousness and the passage of time is reduced. It’s a powerful way that these apps are designed to keep us checking and scrolling. Amanda Baughan, a graduate student specializing in human-computer interaction, a subfield of computer science, at the University of Washington, believes that interdisciplinary research could inform better social platforms and apps.

On the evening of October 24, 1978, President Jimmy Carter sat up straight behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, interlocked his hands, ...

The combination of deregulation, financialization, and monopolization has been causing inflation in many sectors for decades; what’s different now is that in the aftermath of the disruptions caused by the pandemic and by the effects of decades of corporate outsourcing and downsizing, the same three forces are amplifying inflation throughout the whole economy. If Biden is to escape the same fate as Carter, he and his allies need to avoid being led astray by economists in thrall to their own models and do a better job of showing the American people that they have a plan that addresses inflation’s root cause: abusive corporate power. Studies by the Kansas City Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank suggest that such profiteering could be responsible for as much as one-sixth of the ongoing rise in inflation. On an earnings call in January, Union Pacific promised that due to “our disciplined pricing approach, we expect to yield pricing dollars in excess of inflation dollars”—in other words, we promise to deliver still-higher profits by further jacking up prices beyond what it costs to run the railroad. This meant that the flying public just had to take it when consolidating airlines increasingly under the control of financiers like Lorenzo and Carl Icahn began using their unregulated market power to push through more and more reductions in the quality of the product. It should come as no surprise that other members of the oligopoly are engaged in the same pricing and allocation “discipline.” Rather than build its fleet size back up to meet surging demand, the Avis Budget Group holding company, for example, bought back 20 percent of its outstanding stock in just four months late last year. It learned instead that it could pull in record profits just by selling off one-third of its inventory into a red-hot used car market while jacking up the price of renting the remaining cars in its diminished fleet. The “New Deal faith in the science of the regulatory art,” Kennedy said at one point, was “a delusion.” The overarching theory was that if the government would just get out of the way, market competition would lead to greater efficiency and therefore to lower prices for consumers. To avoid that fate, we must counter the false narratives peddled not only by Fox News but also by out-of-touch establishment economists who would have Americans believe that too much liberal government is to blame for inflation, and not the predations of unregulated monopolies. Carter told the nation that his administration was “cutting away the regulatory thicket that has grown up around us and giving our competitive free enterprise system a chance to grow up in its place.” As evidence, he pointed to a bill he had just signed that stripped the Civil Aeronautics Board of its power to regulate airline fares and routes. Worse, the new burst of inflation was accompanied by stubbornly high unemployment, creating a return of dreaded “stagflation.” According to one of his key advisers, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter worried that if they didn’t come up with something new and substantive to say that night, “we’ll be laughed at.”

Meta wants to make it clear it's not giving up on high-end VR experiences yet. So, in a rare move, the company is spilling the beans on several VR headset ...

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The social media giant, formerly known as Facebook, has been working on several prototype VR headsets to make virtual worlds appear more realistic.

Meta also reduced the distance between the eye and the VR display to reduce the bulk of the headset. Later this year, Meta is expected to release a new, more expensive VR headset called Project Cambria, which will be the company's first VR headset with eye tracking. What's notable is that Zuckerberg and Abrash acknowledge that current VR displays still don't rival the quality of 2D displays on a TV or smartphone. Even after years of development, Half Dome isn't ready for consumers because Meta is trying to make sure eye tracking and other parts of the device work properly. And reducing a headset's weight will enable people to be in virtual worlds for a longer time. Holocake 2, though, requires lasers to make its holographic lens optics work, and finding consumer-ready lasers that would work in headsets is still tough. During the video conference, Zuckerberg and Meta employees showcased an illustration of Mirror Lake, one of the company's most ambitious projects. And it still has to address harassment and privacy in virtual worlds, problems Meta has struggled to combat on its social media sites. The company has tried to clear out its list of projects -- Meta has reportedly scrapped a smartwatch and postponed the release of AR glasses -- to cut down on expenses. The company is making a long-term bet on what comes after the mobile internet, pinning its future to the metaverse. In a video conference, Zuckerberg said the resolution is good enough for people to see objects clearly from 20 feet away. "We're in the middle right now of a big step forward towards realism."

Meta's Starburst virtual reality prototype doesn't look anything like a traditional headset. From some angles, it looks like someone ripped the guts out of ...

We have gone through the settings for the most popular (and problematic) services to give you recommendations. Meta’s revenue growth has begun to slow and Reuters reported last month that the Reality Labs division could not afford to pursue certain projects. Unlike other experimental headsets Meta showed off, Holocake 2 is fully wearable and functional — it can connect to a computer and run existing VR software without a hitch. If you were wearing a traditional VR headset, you'd find that the focal distance is set a few feet in front of you. That is, looking through Butterscotch shows you less of the virtual world in front of you — but what you can see looks very clear. And for now, that seems unlikely to change. Varifocal lenses, then, are a like pair of glasses with a life of their own, moving around to keep virtual objects in focus no matter where they are. But the tiny screens inside current VR headsets can’t get close to that crispness — they have too few pixels, stretched across too wide a space. But despite the wave of metaverse hype Zuckerberg launched after laying out that vision last year, Meta’s prototypes offer a palpable sense of just how far the company is from delivering on that promise. Researchers had to narrow the field of view to about half of what you’d see through the Quest 2. And the screens inside them need to be sharper, smarter, and brighter than anything out there right now. Future headsets need to be sleeker than the ones we have now, and yet more capable.

Meta's VR prototypes Starburst, Butterscotch, and Holocake seek to fulfill the "visual Turing test." The only problem is, they won't be consumer-ready for ...

"It tastes like the future." As hard as it is to build the first version of something, it can often be even harder to get it into a shipping product. Meta says it's PC tethered, so it's not a freestanding device like the Quest. And it wasn't mentioned that Holocake 2 could support varifocal and eye-tracking. The light source needed to achieve that slim frame? They did not note how many nits Starburst was capable of, but the prototype is so heavy that it requires two external handles to hold in place and is "wildly impractical," Zuckerberg noted. The chunky curved lenses of the Quest 2 have been replaced by a holographic lens, which is significantly flatter but affects incoming light in the same way. This tech works like autofocus on a camera: it adjusts the clarity of an object based on its distance from you. But the presentation was touted as a "media roundtable" and, to our knowledge, no policymakers, regulators, developers, and researchers were invited to this presentation. Now, on to the tech. That doesn't seem to be the point. The names of the devices — Starburst, Butterscotch, Holocake — were as dreamy and delicious as their potential. The prototypes were built to overcome four elements of the human visual system — focus, resolution, distortion, and high dynamic range — to achieve a level of visual realism that is indistinguishable from reality.

As the highest court announces decisions, a law professor explains how cases get there.

“In holding that you couldn’t have segregated government schools by race, that overruled an earlier case … that said you could separate the races and [that would be considered] equal,” Russell said. In the United States, the Supreme Court is the court above all others. Russell said that the court will reverse precedent only on rare occasions. Board of Education, in which the court declared in 1954 that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, as an important example of the court reversing precedent set by an earlier case, Plessy v. Maryland, a case involving the two states and what their rights to the Potomac River are. There are four categories of cases that fall into the court’s original jurisdiction.

A cracked tooth, crown or filling may be a clear signal something is amiss, but there are less dramatic signs to watch for. People with sleep bruxism, for ...

“A guard puts space between the upper and lower teeth to protect them and allows the jaw muscles to relax.” A guard customized for you ($324 to $788) is usually more effective than an over-the-counter product, and is sometimes covered by insurance. So can increasing your awareness of the behavior. Conditions that affect the central nervous system, such as dementia, Parkinson’s disease or stroke, can cause or exacerbate bruxism. The condition, called bruxism, can apply up to 200 pounds of force to the teeth. Certain medications — such as some antidepressants and antipsychotics — can also increase the risk. Habits such as alcohol and tobacco use hike the likelihood, too.

WASHINGTON — Maryland and Virginia politicians vying for the prize of a new FBI headquarters have just a few months left before a crucial federal government ...