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(Reuters) — Nearly a third of more than 40 large companies seeking U.S. bankruptcy protection during the coronavirus pandemic awarded bonuses to executives within a month of filing their cases, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings and court records.

Under a 2005 bankruptcy law, companies are banned, with few exceptions, from paying executives retention bonuses while in bankruptcy. But the firms seized on a loophole by granting payouts before filing.

Six of the 14 companies that approved bonuses within a month of their filings cited business challenges executives faced during the pandemic in justifying the compensation.

In the ’90s, Jeff Bezos rented a house in the Seattle suburbs where he would launch an online bookstore from his garage. That house — billed as the birthplace of Amazon — sold last year for an estimated $1.5 million.

So, you’ve set aside a chunk of change to build a new gaming PC and are just waiting for AMD and Nvidia to launch their next-gen GPUs, is that it? A solid plan, except for one thing—your next build is already obsolete. That’s because whatever you spec’d out is undoubtedly sitting on an AMD or Intel foundation, and didn’t you hear, x86 computing is basically dead. Finished. Kaput. We’re on the cusp of the end of an era, and all because Apple is dumping Intel for ARM.

Okay, maybe not, but that’s essentially the case made by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who led the development of Mac computers in the late 1980s. In no uncertain terms, he says Apple’s decision to phase out Intel CPUs in favor of its own silicon based on ARM will force “PC OEMs to reconsider their allegiance to x86 silicon…and that will have serious consequences for the old Wintel partnership.”

Do you agree with these predictions?

The first few months of 2020 have radically reshaped the way we work and how the world gets things done. While the wide use of robotaxis or self-driving freight trucks isn’t yet in place, the Covid-19 pandemic has hurried the introduction of artificial intelligence across all industries. Whether through outbreak tracing or contactless customer pay interactions, the impact has been immediate, but it also provides a window into what’s to come. The second annual Forbes’ AI 50, which highlights the most promising U.S.-based artificial intelligence companies, features a group of founders who are already pondering what their space will look like in the future, though all agree that Covid-19 has permanently accelerated or altered the spread of AI.

“We have seen two years of digital transformation in the course of the last two months,” Abnormal Security CEO Evan Reiser told Forbes in May. As more parts of a company are forced to move online, Reiser expects to see AI being put to use to help businesses analyze the newly available data or to increase efficiency.

Continue reading “AI 50 Founders Predict What Artificial Intelligence Will Look Like After Covid-19” »

The two parental species diverged more than 184 million years ago.

How far would you go to bring back the one you love? Theo James and Stacy Martin star in #ArchiveMovie — on digital July 10.

The plaintiffs allege that the tech giants used people’s pictures obtained without permission to train their technologies.

(MENAFN — The Conversation) A large crack, stretching several kilometres, made a sudden appearance recently in south-western Kenya. The tear, which continues to grow, caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse. Initially, the appearance of the crack was linked to tectonic activity along the East African Rift. But although geologists now think that this feature is most likely an erosional gully, questions remain as to why it has formed in the location that it did and whether its appearance is at all connected to the ongoing East African Rift. For example, the crack could be the result of the erosion of soft soils infilling an old rift-related fault.

The Earth is an ever-changing planet, even though in some respects change might be almost unnoticeable to us. Plate tectonics is a good example of this. But every now and again something dramatic happens and leads to renewed questions about the African continent splitting in two.

The Earth’s lithosphere (formed by the crust and the upper part of the mantle) is broken up into a number of tectonic plates. These plates are not static, but move relative to each other at varying speeds, ‘gliding’ over a viscous asthenosphere. Exactly what mechanism or mechanisms are behind their movement is still debated, but are likely to include convection currents within the asthenosphere and the forces generated at the boundaries between plates.

Google’s Arts and Culture vertical has been known to release fun apps and tools to help people engage with art and history. In 2018, it launched a feature to let you find your fine art doppelganger by taking a selfie, and more recently it added ways for you to apply filters to your photos to take on the style of masters like Van Gogh or Da Vinci. Now, the company is launching a web-based AI tool to let users interact with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and also help researchers decode the symbols with machine learning. It’s called Fabricius, named after the “father of epigraphy, the study of ancient inscriptions,” according to Google, and will let you send roughly translated messages in hieroglyphs to your friends.

Fabricius has three sections: Learn, Play and Work. In the first part, you go through a quick six-stage course that introduces you to the history and study of hieroglyphs. There are activities here that include tracing and drawing a symbol, with machine learning analyzing your drawings to see how accurate you were. For example, my drawing of an Ankh symbol after having seen it for five seconds was determined to be 100 percent correct, while my attempt at a sceptre was deemed 98 percent accurate.