Voice assistants could ‘hinder children’s social and cognitive development’ | Technology

From reminding potty-training toddlers to go to the loo to telling bedtime stories and being used as a “conversation partner”, voice-activated smart devices are being used to help rear children almost from the day they are born.

But the rapid rise in voice assistants, including Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri could, researchers suggest, have a long-term impact on children’s social and cognitive development, specifically their empathy, compassion and critical thinking skills.

“The multiple impacts on children include inappropriate responses, impeding social development and hindering learning opportunities,” said Anmol Arora, co-author of an article published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

A key concern is that children attribute human characteristics and behavior to devices that are, said Arora, “essentially a list of trained words and sounds mashed together to make a sentence.”

The children anthropomorphise and then emulate the devices, copying their failure to alter their tone,

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Blinken: US will ‘look for ways to facilitate technology services’ to Iranians to maintain access to internet amid blackouts



CNN

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the Biden administration “will certainly look for ways to facilitate technology services being made accessible to people in Iran” amid widespread internet outages during the nationwide unrest.

Anti-government protests have raged across Iran after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the nation’s morality police in mid-September.

Last week, the US Treasury Department issued a general license meant to allow companies to provide services for internet access to Iranians without fear of sanctions.

At a press conference Tuesday, Blinken noted that the new general license “authorizes companies to provide things like cloud services, privacy technology, security technology, hardware and software to enable the Iranians to better communicate among themselves and also with the rest of the world. ”

“Individual companies can come to us, to OFAC in this case, to determine whether their technology fits under the license,”

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Technology produces more than 100 medical microrobots per minute that can be disintegrated in the body

Emergence of a game changer in the field of medical microrobots.

Credit: DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology)

Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST, President Yang Kook) Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering collaborated with Professor Sung-Won Kim’s team at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, and Professor Bradley J. Nelson’s team at ETH Zurich to develop a technology that produces more than 100 microrobots per minute that can be disintegrated in the body.

Microrobots aiming at minimally invasive targeted precision therapy can be manufactured in various ways. Among them, ultra-fine 3D printing technology called two-photon polymerization method, a method that triggers polymerization by intersecting two lasers in synthetic resin, is the most used. This technology can produce a structure with nanometer-level precision. However, a disadvantage exists in that producing one microrobot is time consuming because voxels, the pixels realized by 3D printing, must be cured successively. In addition,

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Technology System Aims to Protect Whales from Ships

Scientists have developed a technology-powered mapping tool to prevent ships from hitting whales in areas off America’s west coast.

The system is called Whale Safe. It uses equipment placed in the ocean to identify the presence of whales in the surrounding area. The tool also records shipping activity and ship speeds. The collected data is then sent by satellite to scientists who examine it and seek to provide guidance to ship operators.

Developers of the system say it produces near real-time information about nearby whale movements.

Whale Safe has already been operating near ports in southern California. It was recently launched to the north in San Francisco Bay.

There is a problem in the bay with ships hitting whales. Last month, wildlife officials reported the latest suspected case. A humpback whale washed ashore in the San Francisco Bay with injuries suggesting the animal was killed in a ship strike.

The

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CIA Just Invested In Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Tech

As a rapidly advancing climate emergency turns the planet ever hotter, the Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: “To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again.” Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile funders and investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital — and, according to the public portfolio its venture capital arm released this month, the CIA.

Colossal says it hopes to use advanced genetic sequencing to resurrect two extinct mammals — not just the giant, ice age mammoth, but also a mid-sized marsupial known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that died out less than a century ago. on its websitethe company vows: “Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat.”

In-Q-Tel, its new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital

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