Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
A Texas A&M committee agreed that the university was wrong to fire a professor earlier this year after a controversy over a classroom video that showed a student objecting to a children’s literature lesson about gender identity.The internal committee ruled that the university didn’t follow proper procedures and didn’t prove there was good cause to fire Melissa McCoul, who was a senior lecturer in the English department with over a decade of teaching experience. Republican lawmakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott, had called for her termination after seeing the video.The committee unanimously voted earlier this week that “the summary dismissal of…
Harry Stebbings isn’t shy about sliding into inboxes. And he’s persistent — just ask Marc Benioff.Stebbings, the 29-year-old founder of venture capital firm 20VC, interviewed the Salesforce CEO in 2023 for his podcast. He wasn’t the easiest guest to score, but Stebbings was committed to getting him on the show.Stebbings spoke about his strategy for getting Benioff to say yes — which involved sending 53 cold emails over a year — during a November 12 episode of the “Biography” podcast with Wouter Teunissen. It’s a skill that Stebbings has honed over the years of hitting up potential guests.Stebbings shared his…
ChatGPT just added a group chat feature, which is intriguing and slightly confusing. You add your friends to a new chat inside the app, and then as you and the real humans chat away, the AI chatbot can weigh in as needed.Like I said, intriguing. The idea of moving your group chat with friends to something that lives inside ChatGPT is, well, somewhat headache-inducing, if only from a privacy and security standpoint. I won’t even touch on the freakiness of moving our social lives into an AI chatbot app — I’ll let you ponder the implications of that all on…
Thomas Lee Young doesn’t sound like your typical Silicon Valley founder. The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup using AI to prevent industrial accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he finds amusing enough to mention when he’s first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of substantial oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure because his entire family worked as engineers, stretching back generations to his great-grandfather, who immigrated to the island nation from China.…
GRAYS HARBOR COUNTY, Wash. (AP) — A Washington state man is believed to be the first person to die from a rare strain of bird flu, but state health officials said Friday the risk to the public is low.The man, an older adult with underlying health conditions, was being treated for a bird flu called H5N5 after becoming seemingly the first known human infected by the strain, according to a statement from the Washington State Department of Health.The man from Grays Harbor County, about 78 miles (125 kilometers) southwest of Seattle, had a backyard flock of domestic poultry that had…
Everyday tasks like clearing the dinner table and loading the dishwasher are a major dexterity challenge for home robots that can require a lot of training data and capital.A new startup says it spent less than two years and a fraction of the costs to figure it out.On Thursday, Sunday Robotics emerged from stealth to demonstrate Memo, a fully autonomous home robot on wheels that can complete household tasks.A video posted on X by the company’s cofounder, Tony Zhao, showed Memo move from the dining room to the kitchen to clear the table of dishes and load them in the…
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. flu season is starting slowly, and it’s unclear if it will be as bad as last winter’s, but some health experts are worried as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Friday shows a new version of the virus has emerged.An early analysis suggests current vaccines may still be somewhat effective against the new version of the flu, which has been the main driver of recent infections, CDC data shows.Some scientists and medical professionals are more worried about disappointing vaccination rates, a main reason why flu hospitalizations and deaths were unusually bad…
In 2017, Google was criticized for a bad emoji. This week, CEO Sundar Pichai fixed it. How he did this says a lot about the progress Google has made in generative AI.The internet giant schooled the rest of the tech industry when it launched its latest model, Gemini 3, on Tuesday. It followed that up by rolling out an upgraded image-generation tool called Nano Banana Pro, which is churning out impressive, realistic pictures, diagrams, and charts.Google proved that AI scaling laws still work, just as its rivals are being questioned. The stock jumped to a record, making the company worth…
Sierra, a 21-month-old, San Francisco-based startup that builds customer service AI agents for enterprises, announced on Friday that it reached $100 million in annual revenue run rate (ARR). The company’s rapid growth suggests that businesses across industries are embracing AI agents. The startup’s growth rate surprised even its seasoned co-founders, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Google alum Clay Bavor, who wrote on their blog: “That’s a heck of a lot quicker than we expected.” Sierra’s customers include tech companies like Deliveroo, Discord, Ramp, Rivian, SoFi, and Tubi, as well as well-established businesses outside of the tech sector, such…
Over the last few years, TCL has established itself as one of the top TV brands for affordable yet reliable displays. The best TCL TVs are much cheaper than direct rivals from LG, Samsung, and Sony, but they still deliver impressive performance. This is especially true of the company’s QD-Mini LED models, which are often sold at fantastic discounts.My team of reviewers and I test the latest TVs every year, and TCL’s offerings continually rank among our top recommendations for overall value. The QM8K earns my highest recommendation thanks to its exceptional brightness and fantastic local dimming control. But shoppers…