The future of search-and-rescue robots might be centaur, not human

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Canadian transit agency teases amazing new transportation technology: the bus

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Last week, one of Toronto’s regional public transit services teased a radical, futuristic mode of transportation on Twitter. In a dramatic video full of lightning strikes and movie trailer music, GO Transit asked viewers to imagine this scenario: you hop in a vehicle, slide into a comfortable seat, and text or browse cat memes until you arrive at your destination. Best of all, you never even need to input where you’re going. The vehicle just gets you there . And then pow! Another lightning strike! Surprise! It’s a bus! It’s like the self-driving car is already here. Read, sleep, watch and text. Experience. The Bus. From GO. The GO Bus. #GOxAutoShow pic.twitter.com/AjKylnfBzo — GO Transit (@GOtransit) February 14, 2019 The cheeky video makes a decent point. Mass transit already offers some of the benefits we’re trying to wring out of not-quite-here-yet technologies like self-driving cars. Yes, there are problems with even the best mass transit systems, like poor infrastruc...
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Amazon’s plans for a New York office are under new scrutiny

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A month ago, when Amazon announced that it would build regional offices in New York and Virginia at great expense to the taxpayers there, I wrote that it had misunderstood the moment : Perhaps the furor over Amazon’s regional offices will blow over. But it’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run. Today, Amazon met the room: 150 protesters who showed up to the first New York City Council hearing about the plan. According to reports from the scene, demonstrators’ concerns start with the $3 billion in incentives that New York plans to give Amazon in exchange for locating there — and, it says, creating 25,000 jobs. Here’s Leticia Miranda in BuzzFeed : ”You’re worth a trillion dollars,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told the ...
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Why Twitter should ignore the phony outrage over “shadow banning”

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A consequence of covering the intersection of social media and democracy is that sometimes you wind up having to discuss things that are very dumb. The somewhat infuriating controversy over Twitter’s “shadow banning” of prominent conservatives — something that it is in no way doing — is one of them. And yet how Twitter reacts to the attendant criticism could determine whether the company ever gets a handle on the abuse its platform is so well known for. Yesterday I mentioned a misleading story in Vice whose headline then stated, falsely, that “ Twitter is ‘shadow banning’ prominent Republicans like the RNC chair and Trump Jr.’s spokesman .” (It has since been changed.) That story drew from a Sunday piece by Gizmodo that described how some “controversial” accounts were being “demoted in search results.” The first thing to note about this story is that it begins and ends with which accounts are suggested when one begins typing in a name in the Twitter search box. That’s it. The very...
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