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SpaceX is poised to launch the world’s largest commercial communications satellite.

On Wednesday (July 26), a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch Maxar Technologies’ largest ever satellite, the Jupiter 3. The communications platform will join others in the Hughes Jupiter satellite fleet already in orbit, which provides broadband internet services to North and South America. According to a Hughes statement, the satellite will be the world’s largest commercial communications satellite once it’s fully deployed.

In Denver, people can now turn their bilingual skills into cash — and perhaps a promising future — thanks to a first-of-its-kind program being rolled out by the Denver Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs in which residents will be able to get free interpreter training and a chance at contract work with the city.

DOIRA officials are looking for anyone who is proficient in English and one of more than a dozen listed languages, including Vietnamese, Amharic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, French, Burmese, Karen, Farsi, Somali, Nepali, Korean, Urdu, Haitian Creole, Khmer Armenian and Swahili, and are open to those who speak additional dialects, as well.

With the city welcoming more and more foreign-born residents — including refugees looking for help with local services — the Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs is in need of interpreters. It plans to start training polyglots next month, with classes beginning on August 21 and running for about three weeks.


City officials are looking to train anyone who is proficient in English and one of more than a dozen languages, including Cantonese, Arabic, Spanish and Swahili.

“Guarding The Digital Frontier. AI As A Cyber Weapon”

Thank you!


Chuck Brooks is an Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University’s Graduate Cybersecurity Risk Management Program, where he has taught courses on risk management, emerging technologies, and cybersecurity.

Scientists adding a human intelligence gene into monkeys — it’s the kind of thing you’d see in a movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But Chinese researchers have done just that, improving the short-term memories of the monkeys in a study published in March 2019 in the Chinese journal National Science Review. While some experts downplayed the effects as minor, concerns linger over where the research may lead.

The goal of the work, led by geneticist Bing Su of Kunming Institute of Zoology, was to investigate how a gene linked to brain size, MCPH1, might contribute to the evolution of the organ in humans. All primates have some variation of this gene. However, compared with other primates, our brains are larger, more advanced and slower to develop; the researchers wondered whether differences that evolved in the human version of MCPH1 might explain our more complex brains.

Article from 2019

https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/6/3/480/5420749


The show provides a glimpse into humanity’s astonishing diversity. Social scientists have a similar goal—understanding the behavior of different people, groups, and cultures—but use a variety of methods in controlled situations. For both, the stars of these pursuits are the subjects: humans.

But what if you replaced humans with AI chatbots?

The idea sounds preposterous. Yet thanks to the advent of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), social scientists are flirting with the idea of using these tools to rapidly construct diverse groups of “simulated humans” and run experiments to probe their behavior and values as a proxy to their biological counterparts.