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Twitter Investor Sues Elon Musk in a Bid to Force Through $44 Billion Takeover

Engadget reported:

It’s not only Twitter that’s trying to force Elon Musk to buy the company for $44 billion. An investor filed a proposed class action lawsuit to try stopping Musk from backing out of the deal. Luigi Crispo’s suit accuses Musk of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty to Twitter’s shareholders, according to Bloomberg. It claims he offered feeble “rationales for reneging on his contract.” Two “corporate acquisition entities” connected to the deal are also named as defendants.

Musk last month attempted to wash his hands of his bid to buy Twitter, claiming the company made “false and misleading representations” and that it misrepresented the number of bots and fake accounts on its platform. Crispo concurred with Twitter’s claims that Musk is using false claims about bots and spam to wriggle out of the deal without a valid legal standing to do so. Also like Twitter, Crispo is seeking a court order that would require Musk to complete the buyout.

After he tried to back out, Twitter swiftly sued Musk in an attempt to make him “honor his obligations” and buy the company. Last week, Musk made a counter filing, which remains sealed for now. A judge granted Twitter’s request for an expedited trial, which is scheduled to start on October 17th and last for five days. Its shareholders will vote on the takeover on September 13th.

Most U.S. Public Schools Plan to Keep Masks Optional for Start of Classes

CNN reported:

Students are heading to another school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but this time, there seem to be fewer discussions and fretting about masks and other mitigation measures — despite a rise of infections sweeping the country.

Most of the largest public school districts in the United States are not requiring masks for the new school year, making masking “optional” as students return to classes and the highly transmissible BA.5 subvariant spreads.

Across the country, “schools have become more relaxed in their mask policies,” said Gladys Cruz, president-elect of the School Superintendents Association and district superintendent for Questar III in New York.

Although there is the possibility that such policies could change if COVID-19 case rates rise or fall, everyone in a district might not be receptive to change, Cruz said.

D.C. Schools Expand COVID Vaccine Mandate, Unlike Most Other Districts

The Washington Post reported:

D.C. students who are 12 and older must be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this upcoming academic year.

The youth vaccine mandate in D.C. is among the strictest in the nation, according to health experts, and is being enacted in a city with wide disparities in vaccination rates between its White and Black children. Overall, about 85 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 15 have been vaccinated against the virus, but the rate drops to 60 percent among Black children in this age range.

If the city does not close this gap but does strictly enforce the vaccine mandate this fall, students of color — who experienced disproportionately large academic setbacks during the pandemic — could be at home in significant numbers next academic year.

“Our goal is that no child should miss a single day of school,” Asad Bandealy, the chief of the D.C. Department of Health’s Health Care Access Bureau, said at a news conference this week at Mary’s Center, a community health clinic where children can be vaccinated. “And that means we need to get started now.”

Starlink: Why is Elon Musk Launching Thousands of Satellites?

BBC News reported:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has been launching thousands of satellites into orbit. Many people say they’ve seen them in the skies.

They’re part of the Starlink project, which aims to provide high speed internet services from space, to remote areas on Earth.

What is Starlink and how does it work? Starlink provides internet services via a huge network of satellites. It is aimed at people who live in remote areas who cannot get high-speed internet.

“There are people in the UK in that category, but more across the world, in places like Africa,” says Dr Lucinda King, Space Projects Manager at the University of Portsmouth.

Starlink’s satellites have been put in low-level orbit around the Earth to make connection speeds between the satellites and the ground as fast as possible.

These Companies Know When You’re Pregnant — and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

Gizmodo reported:

In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million dollar market, and Target wanted a way to pepper these moneymakers with promos and coupons before its competitors did the same.

Pole obliged. After crawling through the freight of sale data from statewide shoppers on Target’s public baby registry, he came up with a “pregnancy prediction” score that the company would internally assign to each of its regular customers. If you believe the rumors (not everyone does), Target’s algos were so accurate that the company sent coupons for cribs to a teenage girl before her own father knew she was due.

A decade later, the story reads less like a quirk of capitalism and more like an ominous sign. Now it’s not just Target, every company is hounding you for data. And thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow Roe v. Wade, a good chunk of the nation’s police and private citizens can go after people seeking abortions and the doctors that would serve them if there’s enough evidence.

No, I Will Not BeReal

The Atlantic reported:

Clearly, people want something from social media that they aren’t getting. It’s something they think they remember getting at one point, but which is now being held away from them by the machine. Some people describe that disappointment elliptically, saying that they are exhausted by “the algorithm” or by “surveillance capitalism.” What they’re really desperate for is connection without the anxiety of performance. They want something real.

They’ll try anything, and right now, they’re trying a French app called, appropriately, BeReal. Created in 2020 and now sitting near the top of the charts in Apple’s App Store (ahead of TikTok, Instagram, and Google Maps), it has taken off in the United States in the past several months. Its official description has a “WARNING” with 10 bullet points. “BeReal is life, Real life, and this is life without filters,” one says. “BeReal won’t make you famous. If you want to become an influencer you can stay on TikTok and Instagram,” reads another.

How it works: Once a day, at a random time, users receive a push notification telling them that it is time to “BeReal.” That means they have two minutes to post whatever they’re really doing at the moment by taking one photo with their smartphone’s outward-facing camera and one selfie at the same time. These are rendered as a single image, with one photo positioned in the top-left corner of the other.

There’s a Monkeypox Testing Bottleneck

Wired reported:

When the first case of monkeypox was confirmed in the United States, the country’s public health laboratories had the ability to run 6,000 tests per week. That was way more capacity than needed—until monkeypox started spreading faster than public health officials had anticipated. There are now approximately 5,000 confirmed cases in the U.S.

For patients, testing is crucial, because a positive result is needed for accessing TPOXX, an antiviral medication that is being used off-label to treat monkeypox. “Having a test result is a self-advocacy tool,” says Keletso Makofane, an HIV epidemiologist at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. “If you don’t have a test result, you don’t have evidence of your condition.”

Testing has since expanded to around 80,000 tests per week, after five large commercial laboratories partnered with the federal government to boost the nation’s testing efforts. But while the ability to run more tests has improved, there are still barriers that prevent people from accessing them. And although states are required to report cases of certain diseases, monkeypox isn’t one of them. That makes it difficult for public health officials to gauge the true size of the outbreak and who the disease is infecting, in order to break the chains of transmission.

Why Meta and Alphabet Should Dance on TikTok’s Grave

Forbes reported: 

The United States has a TikTok problem, and it is about to get a lot worse.

Executives at Snap (SNAP) announced on Thursday that sales and profits came-in below plan as the social media company faced competition for advertisement spending. Shares lost 39%. Investors are focused on financial metrics. That view is too small.

TikTok is short form video platform owned by ByteDance, a Chinese conglomerate. Executives in China claim the businesses operate independently. They say data for TikTok’s American members is stored in Singapore and the United States, not China. Until a month ago there was no direct evidence any personal information was ever been accessed by employees based in China.

Buzzfeed News reported last month that this is no longer true.

Leaked audio recordings from 80 internal meetings reveal that Bytedance employees repeatedly accessed non-public data from American TikTok users. Data collected from Americans is supposed to be stored on Texas-based servers controlled by Oracle (ORCL), under the Project Texas agreement.

Can Artificial Intelligence Really Help Us Talk to the Animals?

The Guardian reported:

A dolphin handler makes the signal for “together” with her hands, followed by “create.” The two trained dolphins disappear underwater, exchange sounds and then emerge, flip on to their backs and lift their tails. They have devised a new trick of their own and performed it in tandem, just as requested. “It doesn’t prove that there’s language,” says Aza Raskin. “But it certainly makes a lot of sense that, if they had access to a rich, symbolic way of communicating, that would make this task much easier.”

Raskin is the co-founder and president of Earth Species Project (ESP), a California non-profit group with a bold ambition: to decode non-human communication using a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning, and make all the knowhow publicly available, thereby deepening our connection with other living species and helping to protect them. A 1970 album of whale song galvanized the movement that led to commercial whaling being banned. What could a Google Translate for the animal kingdom spawn?

The organization, founded in 2017 with the help of major donors such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, published its first scientific paper last December. The goal is to unlock communication within our lifetimes. “The end we are working towards is, can we decode animal communication, discover non-human language,” says Raskin. “Along the way and equally important is that we are developing technology that supports biologists and conservation now.