DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ How deep is the ocean? Deeper than the highest point on Earth's surface, by more than a mile
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-22 | by ( Jessica Orwig | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

The ocean is significantly deeper than the highest point on Earth's surface. If you took the highest point on land and submerged it, you would still have more than a mile between you and the deepest point in the ocean. The Challenger Deep is the deepest point on Earth. In 1960, oceanographer Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh descended to the lowest point on Earth, Challenger Deep, at a record 25,979 feet below the surface. Scientists have sent half a dozen unmanned submersibles to explore Challenger Deep including Kaiko, which collected over 350 species on the seafloor between 1995 and 2003.

Persons: Cuvier, Robert Smits, Herbert Nitsch, Nitsch, We've, Ralph White, Mariana Trench, Trench, Jacques Piccard, Don Walsh, Victor Vescovo, Vescovo Organizations: Service, USS Triton Locations: California, Austrian, Mariana, Everest

☆ London's solar street thrives on people power
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-15 | by ( Natalie Thomas | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

[1/5] Roofers install solar panels on the roof of renegade artists Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell's house in London, Britain, June 6, 2023. Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell raise funds to install solar panels on the rooftops of all the houses on their street. After raising 113,000 pounds ($141,000), partly through crowd-funding publicised by sleeping on their roof for three cold, winter weeks, artist couple Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell have arranged for solar panels to be installed on dozens of houses on their street. Households powered by solar panel-derived electricity draw less power from the national grid, cutting energy bills, and they can also sell any excess energy back. Industry analysts say community projects tend to be more efficient than individual solar installations as costs fall with scale.

Persons: Dan Edelstyn, Hilary Powell's, Hilary Powell, Anna Gordon LONDON, Powell, Ejaz Hussein, It's, Rebecca Dibb, Ofgem, Edelstyn, Sachin Ravikumar, Barbara Lewis Organizations: Industry, Octopus Energy, Community Energy, Thomson Locations: London, Britain, Waltham Forest

☆ Bezos is back at it with another hot yacht summer
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( Lina Batarags | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Recent photos show Jeff Bezos hanging out with his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, on a yacht in Portofino. Per reports, the ship in question is Bezos' $500 million yacht, Koru, which set sail in February. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez hanging out in Portofino, Italy. Bezos and Sanchez were also photographed on the yacht off the coast of Spain in May, shortly after they hit up Coachella. And you can't see it in this recent series of photos, but Bezos' yacht is adorned with a female bust, which people have been speculating is modeled off of Sanchez.

Persons: Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez, She's, You'd, it's, didn't, Bezos, Sanchez, Lloyd Blankfein, Kloss, David Geffen's, Bezos didn't Organizations: Morning Locations: Portofino, Italian, Rotterdam, Italy, Spain

☆ What Does it Take to Run a Museum? The Job Description Is Changing.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-06 | by ( Robin Pogrebin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“You have to be an octopus, and the new generation of museum directors will have to be entrepreneurs,” said Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum. “The field is going through seismic change and we need leaders who can stay grounded among the disruption. Climate activists announced plans to protest the Museum of Modern Art’s fund-raiser on Tuesday to draw attention to its board’s ties to to the fossil fuel industry. And museum staffs have not been shy about going public with criticisms of their own institutions. Some institutions worry that it will become more difficult to attract potential leaders who increasingly see director positions less as a way for them to share their aesthetic tastes, and more as a path to no-win managerial headaches.

Persons: ”, Anne Pasternak Organizations: Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Whitney, Climate, Modern

☆ Italy is a bargain for vacationing Americans. Not so much for Italians
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-05 | by ( Bob Pisani | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

Rimini, Italy. The Jersey Shore, but not Unlike Americans, Italians do not just plunk down their beach bag and dive in the ocean. A bargain for Americans, but not for Italians Italy is heavily reliant on tourism. For Americans, Europe in general but the smaller cities of Italy in particular are a great value. It's a bargain for Americans but, for most Italians, even those prices are out of reach.

Persons: Federico Fellini, Vita, It's, Fellini, He's, That's Organizations: Istock, Getty, Ferraris, cabana, Business, Tourists, gondoliers, OECD, European Union Locations: Rimini, Italy, RIMINI, ITALY, Jersey Shore, Ancona, Emilia, Romagna, Europe, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ravenna, Jersey, Cattolica, Adriatic, Croatia, Albania, Venice, St

☆ Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Kevin Roose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

executive in San Francisco, I spotted a strange sticker on his laptop. The sticker depicted a cartoon of a menacing, octopus-like creature with many eyes and a yellow smiley-face attached to one of its tentacles. Forget about chatbots and compute clusters — I needed to know everything about the Shoggoth, what it meant and why people in the A.I. The executive explained that the Shoggoth had become a popular reference among workers in artificial intelligence, as a vivid visual metaphor for how a large language model (the type of A.I. system that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots) actually works.

Persons: ”, “, ChatGPT Locations: San Francisco, A.I

☆ Video may show an octopus waking up from a nightmare, scientists believe
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-28 | by ( Alia Shoaib | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

A video shows an octopus appearing to wake up from sleep in distress. The behaviour looked similar to waking up from a nightmare, scientists said. One of the study's co-authors noted that it would be difficult to study an octopus' brain activity and determine whether they actually dream. Robyn Crook, an associate professor of biology at San Francisco State University, told Live Science that the octopus' behavior could have been due to senescence, which is when an octopus' body starts to break down before death. "I don't exclude that senescence could be one of the drivers of this," Ramos told Live Science.

☆ How the New ‘Little Mermaid’ Goes Back ‘Under the Sea’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( Mekado Murphy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

So right about here, as the turtles start to move, then you see, O.K., there’s a little bit of dance starting to happen. And I took a page out of Walt Disney’s playbook, and I worked with the Alvin Ailey Company. He had worked with the Ballet Russe Company when he created ‘Fantasia.’ And I thought that was such a brilliant idea. And then we found all these sea creatures that actually lent themselves to dance naturally. These are all real sea creatures.

☆ A world in three islands on the Mediterranean
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Pavlo Fedykovych | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +16 min

CNN —In the middle of the Mediterranean Sea lies a small country made up of three inhabited islands and irresistible allure. Across its three inhabited islands – Malta, Gozo and Comino – you’ll find every sun-soaked aspect of the perfect vacation. The solution: Marsaskala, towards the southeastern tip of Malta island. Mellieħa Bay and St. Paul’s BayBugibba is a classic seaside resort town in St. Paul's Bay. The population is a modest two people, there are no cars, and no signs of globalization – just the untouched Mediterranean.

☆ Is This Octopus Having a Nightmare?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Carolyn Wilke | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Costello the octopus was napping while stuck to the glass of his tank at the Rockefeller University in New York. A minute later, Costello scuttled along the glass toward his tank’s sandy bottom, curling his arms over his body. “This was not a normal octopus behavior,” said Dr. Ramos, who is now at the University of Vermont. Perhaps Costello was having a nightmare, he and a team of researchers speculated. They shared this idea and other possible explanations in a study uploaded this month to the bioRxiv website.

☆ A Queer Punk Vaudevillian’s Surreal Take on ‘Titanic’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Melena Ryzik | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In some ways, turning the movie “Titanic” into a farce about climate change makes a lot of narrative sense. In other ways, “Titanic Depression,” a new multimedia performance, could only have come from the madcap brain of Dynasty Handbag, the queer vaudevillian with punk origins and questionable taste in unitards. The 1997 movie was a blockbuster, sure, but Dynasty Handbag’s vision may be even more epic than James Cameron’s. Billy Zane’s villainous snob is replaced by a dildo in a black loafer. And Dynasty Handbag, the alter ego of the artist Jibz Cameron, inhabits all the parts.

☆ OpenAI CEO wows lawmakers at closed dinner: 'Fantastic…forthcoming'
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Lauren Feiner | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to an engaged crowd of about 60 lawmakers at a dinner Monday about the advanced artificial technology his company produces and the challenges of regulating it. The wide-ranging discussion that lasted about two hours came ahead of Altman's first time testifying before Congress at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy and technology hearing on Tuesday. The dinner discussion comes at a peak moment for AI, which has thoroughly captured Congress' fascination. "There isn't any question where he pulls back on anything," she said, adding that lawmakers had very thoughtful things to ask. Khanna said the question of openness of the model is something he's discussed with Altman before, though not at Monday's dinner.

☆ Pro Take: Can Nickel, Cobalt and Other Battery Metals Be Sourced Sustainably?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-11 | by ( Yusuf Khan | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +6 min

Lockheed Martin and Norway’s Storebrand also have recently sold their interests in deep-sea mining companies. Others including German luxury carmaker BMW have said that, given environmental concerns, they won’t use battery metals sourced from the deep sea. More than a dozen countries are concerned about the environmental impact of the practice and are calling for a moratorium on seabed mining. A nickel mining site on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Proponents of deep-sea mining say the nascent practice is a less harmful way to extract nickel than how the mineral is currently sourced in Indonesia.

☆ AI is doing the work of 250 people at an energy company and satisfying customers better than trained workers, CEO says
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

The CEO of Octopus Energy says AI is doing the work of hundreds of people at the company. He said emails written by AI delivered better customer satisfaction than trained workers. The CEO of Octopus Energy, a UK-based household energy supplier, says artificial intelligence is doing the work of 250 people at the company. Now, AI replied to more than a third of customer emails, which is the work of about 250 people, Jackson said. Representatives for Octopus Energy did not immediately respond to Insider's request for further comment.

☆ Why ChatGPT developer OpenAI is the No. 1 company on the 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 list
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Julia Boorstin | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +7 min

Microsoft unveiled new versions of its Bing internet-search engine and Edge browser powered by the newest technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Of the 50 companies on this year's list, 21 told us that AI is critically important to more than 50% of their revenue. Half of the companies in the top 10 of the 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 list feature key use of AI, and notably, they represent a diverse range of industries and use cases. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a keynote address announcing ChatGPT integration for Bing at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, Feb. 7, 2023. The call to slow down is, in fact, less safe than what they're proposing," he said, referring to OpenAI and Altman.

☆ Strange, 7-foot-long cannibalistic fish with fangs that live in the deep sea are washing up on the West Coast and scientists don't know why
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-06 | by ( Kelsey Vlamis | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Lancetfish live in the deep sea, have fanged jaws and long scaleless bodies, and eat their own. The cannibalistic fish has been washing up on the West Coast, but scientists can't explain why. Video taken in California in 2021 shows a lancetfish flapping its jaw and writhing on the sand. Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest on the culture & business of sustainability — delivered weekly to your inbox. The video shows the lancet flapping its fanged jaw and writhing wildly on the sand.

☆ Check out the 18-page pitch deck that AI startup Papercup used to raise $20 million and help media and entertainment companies reach new global audiences
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Lucia Moses | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Papercup is a UK-based startup that's helping media and entertainment companies find global audiences. Read the pitch deck Papercup used to raise its $20 million Series A round. Digital media and streaming companies are increasingly looking overseas for growth as the US market for subscribers gets saturated. Its most recent round was its $20 million Series A last year led by Octopus Ventures; other investors included Local Globe, Sands Capital, and Sky and Guardian Media Ventures. Check out the deck that helped Papercup raise its $20 million Series A round.

☆ A woman has accused Trump of groping her on a flight: 'Like he had 40 zillion hands'
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Aditi Bharade | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Jessica Leeds, 81, said Trump molested her on a flight with what seemed like "40 zillion hands." Leeds testified that a flight attendant invited her to sit in a first-class seat next to Trump. Leeds accused Trump of trying to put his hand up her skirt, after which she "managed to wriggle out" and went back to her seat. Leeds, a retired stockbroker, is one of the 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s, including his ex-wife Ivana Trump. On April 4, in a Manhattan courtroom, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 low-level felony charges of falsifying business records.

☆ Australia's Origin Energy raises earnings view on unexpected UK gains
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-30 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

May 1 (Reuters) - Australia's Origin Energy (ORG.AX) on Monday sharply raised the full-year earnings outlook for its key energy markets division for a second time, helped mainly by a stronger-than-expected contribution from U.K.-based energy retailer Octopus Energy. Origin now expects underlying earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for its energy markets division for fiscal year 2023 to be between A$950 million ($628 million) and A$1,200 million, much higher than the prior range between A$600 million and A$730 million. Origin holds a 20% stake in Octopus Energy, which last year contributed a loss of A$36 million to Origin's EBITDA. Shares of the Sydney-headquartered company were up 0.4% at A$8.38 by 0017 GMT. ($1 = 1.5124 Australian dollars)Reporting by Himanshi Akhand in Bengaluru; Editing by Christian SchmollingerOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ TympaHealth, a startup making hearing tests more accessible, just raised $23 million with this 27-slide pitch deck
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Riddhi Kanetkar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

TympaHealth has raised $23 million from Octopus Ventures for its hearing assessment platform. The London-based startup aims to make hearing diagnostic tests more accessible outside of hospitals. A startup that enables clinicians to perform hearing assessments outside of hospital settings has raised $23 million in fresh funds. TympaHealth founder and CEO Dr Krishan Ramdoo said the goal of the company was to make hearing and ear care more accessible. Despite this, waiting times for hearing services can stretch from 12 to 16 weeks given increasing pressures on the National Health Service's hearing care services, Ramdoo added.

☆ Jeff Bezos, accidental style icon, was spotted at Coachella in a butterfly-print button-down shirt
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Cheryl Teh | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed up at Coachella in a butterfly-print button-down shirt. "Looks like a low budget Fast and Furious scene," wrote Redditor RuckOver3 in a post that was upvoted more than 34,000 times as of press time. Bezos was spotted at the festival with his partner Lauren Sanchez, Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, and Jenner's partner, Corey Gamble, per TMZ. wrote Redditor BarfJello, in a comment that had been upvoted more than 13,000 times as of press time. "Looks like the average Coachella attendee," wrote Reddit user electricman420.

☆ A World Heritage Designation Can Be a Blessing, or a Curse
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Ginanne Brownell | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This article is part of our special report on the Art for Tomorrow conference in the Italian cities of Florence and Solomeo. MOMBASA, Kenya — It is a tale of three cities. Locals and tourists jockey for space in the zigzagging alleys, with shops selling everything from silver jewelry to body products made with locally grown baobab. And between the two sits Old Town Mombasa and at its eastern tip, Fort Jesus, an imposing 16th-century structure built by the Portuguese, its multiple openings offering glorious views of the Indian Ocean, and gentle breezes that help stave off the coastal heat. But while these streets are busy, too, here in Old Town Mombasa, it’s mostly locals, unlike in the other two locales, where throngs of tourists flood the streets.

☆ How parents can help kids overcome 5 friendship hurdles
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Phyllis L. Fagell | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +8 min

You can’t choose your children’s friends, but here’s how you can help them manage five frustrating friendship pitfalls. If they squeeze too tightly, the friend will want to get away.”Encourage your children to befriend their friend’s friend. “The idea is to help them understand that (true) friendships are bidirectional.”Share the concept of a “hot and cold” friend, too. 4: Your child can’t let go of a grudgeHow parents can help: Two fifth grade girls came to my counseling office for help resolving a conflict. 5: Your child frequently fights with friendsHow parents can help: If your children are triggered, ask them what the incident means and why it’s happening.

☆ Sudan fighting: Doctor describes being stuck with her family in the chaos
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Celine Alkhaldi | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN —Two men are battling for control in Sudan, but stuck in the middle are the country’s people. Since the fighting began last Saturday, CNN has been regularly in touch with Iman Abu Garjah, a British-Sudanese doctor who became stuck while visiting family to celebrate Ramadan. I’m just really, really tired. “[On Thursday] we all just felt really tired, we were still fasting in the midst of all of this, and everybody’s sentiment was Ramadan just has to come to an end. “If we focus on the good stuff, we have oil, we have electricity, we have running water because the water tank is working.

☆ Little Journey helps children prepare for hospital procedures and clinical trials. Check out the 12-slide deck it used to raise $3.1 million.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-18 | by ( Riddhi Kanetkar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

London-based Little Journey has raised $3.1 million for its children's health platform. The startup helps children and families prepare for hospital procedures and clinical trials. Check out the 12-slide deck Little Journey used to raise the fresh funds. A startup that has developed a platform to support children and their families during hospital procedures and clinical trials has just raised $3.1 million. Little Journey makes children aware of who they're meeting and where they're going and gives them coping strategies before their clinical procedures.

Search resuls for: "Octopus"

25 mentions found