February 25, 2024

Sunday, February 25,2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

Joe was prescient in 2020. He was also right.

Biden-Harris campaign statement on Donald Trump’s assault on the Latino community.

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Where does the GOP stand on the Alabama ruling on IVF?

We know where the Orange Monster now claims to stand, but looking around, I would say, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” not if we vote.

First, The House.

166 House MAGA House members, including Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as 3 Senators are co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, which the GOP has on deck.

Next, the Senate.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee sent this 👇 out.

The backlash must have been a tidal wave to elicit such a quick response and demand for a position contrary to the views of most Republican officials.

And then, Trump appointee judges.

Touch to activate.

From Senator Tammy Duckworth.

Another Fact.

In case you missed this in yesterday’s Roundup. . .

Trump claimed to be at something called The Black Conservative Federation on Friday.

Touch to see who is in the room.👇

Biden-Harris campaign statement on Donald Trump and Black America.

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One more thing on Trump.

Donald J. Trump Is Racing Against Time to Find a Half-Billion Dollar Bond.

After losing two civil trials, the former president must find a bonding company that will vouch for him — or his real estate empire is threatened.

Former President Donald J. Trump stands to lose signature properties if he cannot find a bonding company to back him.

Donald J. Trump is on the clock.

The $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump in his civil fraud case took effect on Friday, placing the former president in a precarious position.

Now, he must either come up with the money quickly or persuade a company to post a bond on his behalf, essentially vouching for him to the court with an I.O.U.

The bond is likely to be his best bet: Mr. Trump, who also faces an $83.3 million judgment in an unrelated defamation case, does not have enough cash on hand to do it all himself, according to a recent New York Times analysis of his finances. If Mr. Trump can find a bond company willing to do a deal this big, it will require him to pay the firm a fee as high as 3 percent of the judgment and to pledge collateral.

The bond would prevent the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the civil fraud case against Mr. Trump, from collecting the $454 million while Mr. Trump’s appeal is heard. Without it, the attorney general, Letitia James, is entitled to collect at any moment.

Ms. James is expected to allow Mr. Trump up to 30 days, but if he fails to secure a bond by March 25, and an appeals court denies him extra time, he has a lot to lose. The attorney general’s office could seek to seize some of Mr. Trump’s properties in New York, perhaps even a crown jewel like Trump Tower or 40 Wall Street.

“The attorney general is in the catbird seat and can make this a very unpleasant experience for Trump,” said Mark Zauderer, a partner at the law firm Dorf Nelson & Zauderer who is a veteran New York business litigator and has secured many appeal bonds. (New York Times.. click here to read the whole article).

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This past week was the stock market week of a tech company named Nvidia, a supplier of chips needed for Artificial Intelligence.

Billionaires are being made. Change is going to happen. Where are women in the AI universe?

The women in AI making a difference | TechCrunch.

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here.

As a reader, if you see a name we’ve missed and feel should be on the list, please email us and we’ll seek to add them. Here are some key people you should know:

• Irene Solaiman, head of global policy at Hugging Face

• Eva Maydell, member of European Parliament and EU AI Act advisor

• Lee Tiedrich, AI expert at the Global Partnership on AI

• Rashida Richardson, senior counsel at Mastercard focusing on AI and privacy

• Krystal Kauffman, research fellow at the Distributed AI Research Institute

The gender gap in AI

In a New York Times piece late last year, the Gray Lady broke down how the current boom in AI came to be — highlighting many of the usual suspects like Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Larry Page. The journalism went viral — not for what was reported, but instead for what it failed to mention: women.

The Times’ list featured 12 men — most of them leaders of AI or tech companies. Many had no training or education, formal or otherwise, in AI.

Contrary to the Times’ suggestion, the AI craze didn’t start with Musk sitting adjacent to Page at a mansion in the Bay. It began long before that, with academics, regulators, ethicists and hobbyists working tirelessly in relative obscurity to build the foundations for the AI and GenAI systems we have today.

Elaine Rich, a retired computer scientist formerly at the University of Texas at Austin, published one of the first textbooks on AI in 1983, and later went on to become the director of a corporate AI lab in 1988. Harvard professor Cynthia Dwork made waves decades ago in the fields of AI fairness, differential privacy and distributed computing. And Cynthia Breazeal, a roboticist and professor at MIT and the co-founder of Jibo, the robotics startup, worked to develop one of the earliest “social robots,” Kismet, in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Despite the many ways in which women have advanced AI tech, they make up a tiny sliver of the global AI workforce. According to a 2021 Stanford study, just 16% of tenure-track faculty focused on AI are women. In a separate study released the same year by the World Economic Forum, the co-authors find that women only hold 26% of analytics-related and AI positions.

In worse news, the gender gap in AI is widening — not narrowing.

Nesta, the U.K.’s innovation agency for social good, conducted a 2019 analysis that concluded that the proportion of AI academic papers co-authored by at least one woman hadn’t improved since the 1990s. As of 2019, just 13.8% of the AI research papers on Arxiv.org, a repository for preprint scientific papers, were authored or co-authored by women, with the numbers steadily decreasing over the preceding decade.

Reasons for disparity

The reasons for the disparity are many. But a Deloitte survey of women in AI highlights a few of the more prominent (and obvious) ones, including judgment from male peers and discrimination as a result of not fitting into established male-dominated molds in AI.

It starts in college: 78% of women responding to the Deloitte survey said they didn’t have a chance to intern in AI or machine learning while they were undergraduates. Over half (58%) said they ended up leaving at least one employer because of how men and women were treated differently, while 73% considered leaving the tech industry altogether due to unequal pay and an inability to advance in their careers.

The lack of women is hurting the AI field.

Nesta’s analysis found that women are more likely than men to consider societal, ethical and political implications in their work on AI — which isn’t surprising considering women live in a world where they’re belittled on the basis of their gender, products in the market have been designed for men and women with children are often expected to balance work with their role as primary caregivers.

With any luck, TechCrunch’s humble contribution — a series on accomplished women in AI — will help move the needle in the right direction. But there’s clearly a lot of work to be done.

The women we profile share many suggestions for those who wish to grow and evolve the AI field for the better. But a common thread runs throughout: strong mentorship, commitment and leading by example. Organizations can affect change by enacting policies — hiring, education or otherwise — that elevate women already in, or looking to break into, the AI industry. And decision-makers in positions of power can wield that power to push for more diverse, supportive workplaces for women.

Change won’t happen overnight. But every revolution begins with a small step. (Tech Crunch).

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New Yorkers are in mourning for our beloved Flaco.

If you haven’t been following the tale of Flaco, the Eurasian owl escapee from the Central Park Zoo, the articles below will bring you up to speed about the bird that enthralled our city and now is mourned by New York.

Death of a beloved New York City owl, Flaco, in apparent building collision, devastates legions of fans.

Tributes poured in Saturday for Flaco, the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl that became a feel-good New York story after escaping its Central Park Zoo enclosure and flying free around Manhattan.

Flaco was found dead on a New York City sidewalk Friday night after apparently flying into a building. It was a heartbreaking end for the birders who documented the owl’s daily movements and the legions of admirers who eagerly followed along.

“Everybody feels the same, they’re devastated,” said Nicole Blair, a New York City artist who devoted much of her feed on the X platform to photos and memes featuring the celebrity owl with checkerboard black and brown feathers and round sunset-hued eyes.

Staff from the Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center, declared Flaco dead shortly after the collision. A necropsy was expected on Saturday.

The normally vocal owl whose hours of hooting became a nightly song in the Upper West Side had been quieter in the days before his death, said David Barrett, who runs the Manhattan Bird Alert account on X and tracked reports of the owl’s activities.

Barrett had wondered whether Flaco had gone off to explore other neighborhoods, but news of the death made him suspect he had become ill, he said Saturday.

“He hadn’t gone anywhere. He was just being quiet in his old neighborhood and that, I say, suggests he was not well, he was not feeling up to hooting,” Barrett said.

Flaco was freed from his cage at the zoo a little over a year ago by a vandal who breached a waist-high fence and cut a hole through a steel mesh cage. The owl had arrived at the zoo as a fledgling 13 years earlier.

Flaco sightings soon became sport. The majestic owl with a nearly 6-foot wingspan spent his days perched on tree branches, fence posts and fire escapes and nights hooting atop water towers and preying on the city’s abundant rats.

Like a true celebrity, the owl appeared on murals and merchandise. A likeness occupied a spot on Blair’s New York City-themed Christmas tree, right next to “Pizza Rat,” the infamous rodent seen in a YouTube clip dragging a slice down a subway stairwell.

“I got to see him on my birthday,” Blair said of her encounter with Flaco in Central Park in the fall. “It was kind of an unbelievable situation, and I’m like, this is the best birthday present ever.”

But she and others worried when Flaco ventured beyond the park into more urban sections of Manhattan, fearing the owl would ingest a poisoned rat or be killed in traffic.

“The vandal who damaged Flaco’s exhibit jeopardized the safety of the bird and is ultimately responsible for his death,” the zoo said in a statement Friday. “We are still hopeful that the NYPD which is investigating the vandalism will ultimately make an arrest.”

Flaco fans on Saturday shared suggestions for a permanent bronze statue overlooking New York City. One requested that the owl’s remains be buried in Central Park.

“Flaco the Owl was, in many ways, a typical New Yorker -- fiercely independent, constantly exploring, finding ways to survive ever-changing challenges,” read a post on the X platform, reflecting a common sentiment. “He will be missed.”

Barrett said visitors were dropping by a temporary memorial at the owl’s favorite oak tree in the park to lay flowers and share memories.

“Seeing an owl at all is special,” he said. “Seeing an owl well, consistently day after day, that’s quite a special thing. And that’s something Flaco delivered.”

On Saturday evening, the Central Park Zoo reported that the initial results of a necropsy showed that Flaco had died of acute traumatic injury. He had substantial hemorrhaging under his sternum and around his liver, as well as a small amount of bleeding behind one eye. Tests to determine whether the owl had been exposed to toxins or infectious diseases will take longer to complete.

So ended an improbable adventure for a large, fiery-eyed bird who captured the public’s attention in New York and beyond by showing he could thrive on his own, at least for a time, despite having lived nearly his entire life in captivity. (Associated Press).

“Flaco would have turned 14 next month. And while the hazards presented by the urban environment almost guaranteed an early death, his life as a free bird inspired a passionate following that was obvious in the widespread grief that greeted news of his demise.

Breanne Delgado, 34, was among those in the park [who came to pay tribute to Flaco.] She placed dried red roses at the base of an oak along the park’s East Drive and said she is writing a children’s book about Flaco, calling him a “muse.”

(New York Times).