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☆ Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

When computer scientists at Microsoft started to experiment with a new artificial intelligence system last year, they asked it to solve a puzzle that should have required an intuitive understanding of the physical world. “Here we have a book, nine eggs, a laptop, a bottle and a nail,” they asked. “Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner.”The researchers were startled by the ingenuity of the A.I. “Place the laptop on top of the eggs, with the screen facing down and the keyboard facing up,” it wrote. “The laptop will fit snugly within the boundaries of the book and the eggs, and its flat and rigid surface will provide a stable platform for the next layer.”

☆ Ukraine banks’ robust health masks big challenges
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-11 | by ( Pierre Briancon | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +8 min

Across the banking sector, deposits are as abundant as they’ve ever been, and the country’s lenders have found ways to remain profitable. The National Bank of Ukraine, the country’s central bank, deserves plaudits for both its preparations before the war and after it began. NPLs crept up to 38% of total sector loans as of January 1 this year, according to the central bank. It has the equivalent of $4.8 billion in non-performing loans, a staggering 67.5% of its loan portfolio, according to central bank numbers. The fact that Ukraine’s banks not only still exist but are thriving is an achievement in itself.

☆ Hurricanes of Data: The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Porter Fox | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +35 min

The Tiny Craft Mapping Superstorms at Sea Shortly after dawn on Sept. 30, 2021, Richard Jenkins watched a Category 4 hurricane overrun his life’s work. That August, a sister ship, SD 1031, successfully entered Tropical Storm Henri, but only in its early stages. Hurricane research, modeling and forecasting requires many terabytes of data for every square mile the storm passes through, including vitally important sea-level data from inside a storm. The next day, the depression was upgraded to a tropical storm and officially given the name Sam. And four months later, Tropical Storm Megi killed more than 150, wiped out several villages with landslides and displaced more than a million people.

☆ Banks Are in the Grips of Investor Crisis of Confidence
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-07 | by ( Telis Demos | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

WSJ’s Ben Eisen explains what the bank’s crisis means for customers, investors and the industry. Illustration: Preston JesseeFirst Republic Bank ’s seizure and sale to JPMorgan Chase was supposed to be a cathartic moment for American banks, the denouement of the financial system’s latest crisis of confidence. The relief lasted for barely a day. On Tuesday, shares of regional banks were plunging, with a handful of them dropping by double-digit percentages. At one point on Thursday, the KBW Nasdaq Regional Banking Index was down by 15% from the prior week, though it rallied back on Friday to finish the week down 8%.

☆ Senators say new US Postal Service pay plan will cut rural worker compensation
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: 1 min

WASHINGTON, May 5 (Reuters) - A group of six U.S. senators on Friday urged the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to delay implementation of a new compensation system that it says will reduce pay for tens of thousands of rural postal delivery workers. The senators -- Democrats Ron Wyden Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Ed Markey and John Fetterman and independent Bernie Sanders -- in a letter to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said the automated Rural Route Evaluated Compensation System should not be used "until the system’s serious flaws are rectified." They also asked how USPS "will reimburse rural carriers for lost earnings when the system makes an inaccurate determination about their routes." Reporting by David ShepardsonOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ Opinion | First Silicon Valley Bank, Now First Republic. How Worried Should We Be About a Financial Crisis?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Amit Seru | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Just in the past few months, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank have failed. Rapidly rising interest rates create perilous conditions for banks because of a basic principle: The longer the duration of an investment, the more sensitive it is to changes in interest rates. When interest rates rise, the assets that banks hold to generate a return on their investment fall in value. Thus, increases in interest rates can deplete a bank’s equity and risk leaving it with more liabilities than assets. So it’s no surprise that the U.S. banking system’s market value of assets is around $2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value.

☆ ECB to stop reinvesting cash in largest bond scheme
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +2 min

"The Governing Council will keep reducing the Eurosystem’s asset purchase programme portfolio at a measured and predictable pace," it said. "In line with these principles, the Governing Council expects to discontinue the reinvestments under the APP as of July 2023." Redemptions fluctuate, but about 148 billion euros' worth of debt held under the APP expires in the second half of the year. That means a halt to reinvestment would see an extra 58 billion euros' worth of maturities on top of the currently scheduled 15 billion euros per month. At 7.7 trillion euros, the ECB's balance sheet is already more than a trillion euros below its peak size but remains well above its historical average.

☆ JPMorgan could be the banking sector’s biggest hero — or biggest risk
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Krystal Hur | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

And as the bank swells in size, so does the potential risk it poses to the nation’s financial system. Some experts say they’re concerned that JPMorgan’s continued intervention during times of crisis has broader implications for the banking sector, the US financial system and its regulation. And with every failed bank that JPMorgan snaps up, the conundrum becomes clearer: JPMorgan is essentially the biggest risk to the financial system — and every time it expands to uphold the sector’s stability, so does its risk to the financial system. It has “that ability once again, to signal to the world that JPMorgan is a fortress, JPMorgan is the ultimate. But recent failures and the missteps that led to them indicate that deep flaws underline the financial system.

On that unredacted form, Kacsmaryk reported owning about $2.9 million in stock in the Florida-based supermarket company Publix. Federal judges are only required to report financial holdings in ranges, and don’t have to provide exact figures. One possible source of the Publix stock Kacsmaryk reported in 2017 is the judge’s grandmother. In 2020 and 2021, less than 4% of officials required to file judicial financial disclosures requested redaction, according to reports from the Administrative Office of the US Courts. In any case, experts said, the judge’s redacted report prevents transparency that litigants deserve.

Illustration: Preston JesseeBanks are turning to an obscure government-linked lender to shore up their balance sheets following the industry’s rockiest period in years. The Federal Home Loan Bank system—established during the Great Depression to help promote mortgage lending and now a source of liquidity for banks of all stripes—issued a record $495 billion of debt in March to fund loans, which are called advances, the system’s Office of Finance said. Banks ramped up borrowing that month as customers pulled out deposits and investors panicked over failures that threw the stability of the U.S. financial system into question.

☆ If Western Civilization Dies, Put It Down as a Suicide
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-18 | by ( Gerard Baker | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

At the start of that period, banking was still dominated by a blue-blood class. But the tickets were available mainly to men from the right sort of background. Instead a complex system of semiotics did the job of weeding out the riffraff. A flattened vowel pronunciation, a vulgar word for lavatory, the wrong sort of shoes, and you were excluded without even understanding why. In Britain, the system’s overseers had an acronym by which the untouchables were designated: NQOCD, for “not quite our class, dear.”

Paris CNN —France’s top court on Friday approved the government’s unpopular plans to raise the age of retirement by two years to 64, a huge win for President Emmanuel Macron in the face of mass protests across the country. The Constitutional Council – akin to the US Supreme Court – struck down some elements of the new law, but the most controversial element remains: the gradual upping of the retirement age. Sweeping protests have paralyzed major services across France year this year over Macron’s proposed changes to the pension system. Ahead of the ruling, heightened security was in place in Paris amid expectations of spontaneous protests. With regular, incremental increases, by 2030 the retirement age will have reached 64.

Depositors were draining their accounts via smartphone apps and telling their startup networks to do the same. But inside Silicon Valley Bank , executives were trying to navigate the U.S. banking system’s creaky apparatus for emergency lending and to persuade its custodian bank to stay open late to handle a multibillion-dollar transfer. The depositors won the race. Regulators shut down SVB around the time a multibillion-dollar cash infusion was set to arrive, marking the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

☆ 5 jaw-dropping things GPT-4 can do that ChatGPT couldn’t
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-16 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the next-generation version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins its viral chatbot tool, ChatGPT. The company said GPT-4 recently passed a simulated law school bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. Providing more precise responsesCompared to the prior version, GPT-4 is able to produce longer, more detailed and more reliable written responses, according to the company. One early user said it provided in-depth suggestions for pickup lines based on a question listed on a dating profile. “They can produce inaccurate information from time to time and can be black-box in nature.”For now, OpenAI said GPT-4 users should exercise caution and use “great care” particularly “in high-stakes contexts.”

☆ Bank runs don’t change Fed’s focus on high prices
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Ben Winck | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

The federal government took emergency action to stave off other implosions, but SVB’s collapse cast a shadow over the Fed’s next rate decision. Economists at Goldman Sachs and Barclays scrapped their forecasts for a rate hike and now expect the central bank to hold rates steady when it meets on March 22. That is three times the central bank’s inflation target. Inflation remains much too hot for the Fed’s liking, and the central bank has more reason to repeat February’s 25-basis-point hike than to deviate from it. Its last policy meeting concluded with the central bank lifting the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to a range of 4.5% to 4.75%.

LONDON, March 9 (Reuters) - The European Union's financial watchdogs will test the financial sector's resilience to shocks that could derail the bloc's push to meet a 2030 deadline for slashing carbon emission. This will need extra investments totalling 350 billion euros ($370 billion) a year over this decade, not all sourced from the public sector, meaning a stable financial system will be needed for raising funds. "As part of this work, we would also appreciate any insights into the financial system’s capacity to support green investments under stress." Any "policy relevant" conclusions should be provided to the commission no later than the first quarter of 2025, Berrigan said. "Results should be as differentiated (notably by countries, types of financial institutions, economic sectors) as possible," he said.

☆ CFPB: What it does and why its future is in question
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Jeanne Sahadi | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

The CFPB’s missionThe agency was created after the 2008 financial meltdown, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The broad purpose of the CFPB is to protect consumers from financial abuses and to serve as the central agency for consumer financial protection authorities. It is charged with implementing and enforcing consumer protection laws, making rules and issuing guidance for consumer financial institutions. And it is the place consumers can go to lodge complaints about financial products and services. “It has completely changed the consumer financial marketplace.

☆ Microsoft Windows 11 update puts AI-powered Bing front and center
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-28 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

(A preview version of the AI tool remains available on a limited basis.) Last year, Microsoft unveiled several AI-powered Windows 11 features, such as quieting background noise like lawnmowers and baby cries on video calls and automatic framing so the camera follows the speaker’s movements. A look at the new Bing on Windows 11 MicrosoftThe Bing integration is just one of several notable updates coming to Windows 11. Apple users will now be able to receive iOS alerts and messages directly on their Windows 11 devices, potentially chipping away at Apple’s closed ecosystem. It’s also adding a Recent Websites feature that allows users to transfer their browser sessions from their smartphone to their Windows PC.

☆ Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Trump’s election fraud claims, court document reveal
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-16 | by ( Oliver Darcy | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

New York CNN —The most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election despite the right-wing channel allowing lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on its air, damning messages contained in a Thursday court filing revealed. In one set of messages revealed in the court filing, Carlson texted Ingraham, saying that Sidney Powell, an attorney who was representing the Trump campaign, was “lying” and that he had “caught her” doing so. Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”The messages also revealed that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, did not believe Trump’s election lies and even floated the idea of having Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham appear together in prime time to declare Joe Biden as the rightful winner of the election. In a statement, Fox News argued that the Thursday court filing contained cherry-picked quotes lacking context.

☆ Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon preview
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-07 | by ( Mike Andronico | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon fleshes out the franchise’s backstory in the form of a pastel-colored adventure that challenges you to control two characters at once as you solve puzzles and take down enemies. Bayonetta Origins, which casts you as a young girl named Cereza (who, spoiler alert, would eventually become Bayonetta) is decidedly not that. The takeawayNintendoI came into my Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon demo with mild expectations, and came out itching to spend more time with Cereza and Cheshire. If you own a Nintendo Switch, it should be on your radar — even if you’ve never played a Bayonetta game before. Bayonetta Origins is up for preorder now and hits stores on March 17, and we’re already looking forward to playing more.

☆ Principal at Virginia school where 6-year-old shot teacher removed as students return to class
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-30 | by ( Marlene Lenthang | Marlene Lenthang Is A Breaking News Reporter For Nbc News Digital. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

The principal of the Richneck Elementary School in Virginia, where a 6-year-old boy shot his first-grade teacher, has been removed from her post as children return to classes Monday for the first time since the shooting with new security protocols. The school system’s superintendent, George Parker III, was ousted from his job on Wednesday in a 5-1 vote at a school board meeting, effective Feb. 1. With the departures of the principal and assistant principal, Karen Lynch, the district's Extended Learning Supervisor and an experienced elementary school principal, will serve as the administrator on special assignment at Richneck, coordinating the students’ return to learning, Price said. Back to school: clear backpacks, metal detectors and security officersSchool will look a little different for Richneck students returning Monday. Since the shooting, the boy has been in a hospital receiving the “treatment he needs," it said.

New York CNN —The Federal Aviation Administration plans to dramatically accelerate replacing the safety system whose failure led to a nationwide air travel grounding earlier this month. The 30-year-old NOTAM, or Notice to Air Missions, system provides potential flight hazard information to pilots and air traffic controllers. The FAA said it now requires “at least two individuals to be present during the maintenance” of the NOTAM system. Still, it’s another critical tool for air safety. It was the first nationwide grounding of the nation’s air traffic system in 20 years, since the days following the September 11 attacks.

☆ DOJ appointee releases new plan for ‘tenuous’ Jackson water
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( The Associated Press | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

The plan would relieve the water system of its debt and introduce a new billing model that would become effective in the budget year that begins on Oct. 1. Jackson is struggling with access to safe drinking water after a disruption at the water processing facility. The plan would change the way Jackson issues fees for water use. The new rate structure would reduce the system’s dependence on city water meters, which have been mired in problems, Henifin said. The metering bill isn’t the only legislation advancing in the state legislature that would impact Jackson’s water system.

☆ Consumer Reports calls Ford’s automated driving tech much better than Tesla’s
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-25 | by ( Peter Valdes-Dapena | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

And in a recent ranking by Consumer Reports, which tested ADAS from 12 different carmakers, Tesla’s ranked seventh. GM’s Super Cruise, which ranked second, is the only other system tested by Consumer Reports that works this way. Ford’s driver monitoring technology is one of the major reasons that BlueCruise ranked so highly in Consumer Reports’ testing. Kia and Genesis did not immediately respond to requests from CNN Business for comments on Consumer Reports’ assessments. For the most part, vehicle owner’s manuals were of little use in learning how to use the systems, Consumer Reports said.

☆ Family of 6-year-old Virginia boy who shot first-grade teacher says firearm accessed by their son 'was secured'
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-19 | by ( Antonio Planas | Antonio Planas Is A Breaking News Reporter For Nbc News Digital. | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +4 min

The family of a 6-year-old boy who shot a first-grade teacher in her classroom earlier this month said the gun retrieved from their home was secured, according to a statement from their attorney. “Our family has always been committed to responsible gun ownership and keeping firearms out of the reach of children. The firearm our son accessed was secured,” according to the Thursday statement provided to NBC News by attorney James Ellenson. She has worked diligently and compassionately to support our family as we sought the best education and learning environment for our son. During a raucous school board meeting Tuesday night, parents, teachers and students told the superintendent and board members teachers teachers were not able to properly discipline problematic students.

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