New York City’s statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall has been largely successful at getting students to focus in class and socialize at lunch, but teachers across the city have discovered an unexpected side effect: many teenagers cannot read analog clocks. “The constant refrain is ‘Miss, what time is it?'” said Madi Mornhinweg, a high school English teacher in Manhattan, who eventually started responding by asking students to identify the big hand and little hand themselves.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said the ban has helped move foot traffic more swiftly through hallways and gotten more students to class on time — they just don’t know it because they can’t read the wall clocks. The city’s education department says students learn clock-reading in first and second grade. A 2017 Oklahoma study found only one in five children ages 6-12 could read analog clocks, and England began replacing classroom analog clocks with digital ones in 2018.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new sweeping meta-analysis has found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health, challenging a long-held assumption that has shaped public health policy discussions for decades. The study, led by Nicolas Sommet at the University of Lausanne and Annahita Ehsan at the University of British Columbia, synthesized 168 studies involving more than 11 million participants across most world regions. The researchers screened thousands of scientific papers and contacted hundreds of researchers to compile the dataset, extracting more than 100 study features from each paper and linking them to more than 500 World Bank indicators.

They also replicated their findings using Gallup World Poll data spanning 2005 to 2021, which surveyed more than two million respondents from more than 150 countries. People living in more economically unequal places did not, on average, report lower life satisfaction or happiness than those in more equal places. The average effect across studies was not statistically significant and was practically equivalent to zero. Studies that did find links between inequality and poorer mental health turned out to reflect publication bias, where small, noisy studies reporting larger effects were over-represented in the literature. The study adds: Further analyses showed that the near-zero averages conceal more-complex patterns. Greater income inequality was associated with lower well-being in high-inflation contexts and, surprisingly, higher well-being in low-inflation contexts. Greater inequality was also associated with poorer mental health in studies in which the average income was lower. We conclude that inequality is a catalyst that amplifies other determinants of well-being and mental health (such as inflation and poverty) but on its own is not a root cause of negative effects on well-being and mental health.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dell is planning to bring back its XPS laptop branding, according to a news report, just one year after the company retired the storied name in favor of a simplified naming scheme that organized its consumer and professional lineup into Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max tiers. VideoCardz reported this week that Dell has presented an updated XPS lineup during prebriefings ahead of CES 2026, though the company has not officially confirmed the badge’s return.

The reported reversal would come after Dell launched the Dell 14 Premium and Dell 16 Premium in mid-2025 as flagship consumer models meant to carry the XPS legacy forward. Those machines replaced the XPS 14 and XPS 16 in Dell’s lineup.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a clip from the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular show at Disney World where the iconic boulder managed to free itself from its track (“I’m tired of this gig!”) and takes out an employee trying to stop it from bouncing into the crowd. The 400 pound ball launched him like a water blob. Thankfully, he’s okay and recovering from his injuries. Will Disney make sure he’s well compensated for his heroic efforts? Probably not. But hey, hopefully this shoutout counts for something. GET WELL SOON, I drew Mickey with giant boulder-sized balls on your cast. That’s you.

The tech industry needs to move “beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication” and develop a new “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans now equipped with “cognitive amplifier tools,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a year-end reflection blog. The post frames 2026 as yet another “pivotal year for AI” — but one that “feels different in a few notable ways.” Nadella claims the industry has moved past the initial discovery phase and is now “beginning to distinguish between ‘spectacle’ and ‘substance.'” He argues for evolving beyond Steve Jobs’ famous “bicycles for the mind” framing, positioning AI instead as “scaffolding” for human potential rather than a substitute.

“We will evolve from models to systems when it comes to deploying AI for real world impact,” Nadella writes, adding that these systems must consider their societal impact on people and the planet. “For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: MTV shut down many of its last dedicated 24-hour music channels Dec. 31. The move, announced back in October, affected channels around the world, with the U.K. seeing five different MTV stations going dark. These include MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live. As Consequence notes, MTV Music — which launched in 2011 — notably ended its run by airing the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first visual to air when MTV launched in the United States in 1981.

MTV’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is also expected to shutter music-only channels in Australia, Poland, France, and Brazil. Despite axing much of its dedicated music programming, MTV’s flagship channels are still expected to keep broadcasting in the U.K. and elsewhere. Like in the U.S., these channels primarily air massively popular reality programs, as opposed to music videos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite reporting to the contrary, there’s evidence to suggest that Grok isn’t sorry at all about reports that it generated non-consensual sexual images of minors. In a post Thursday night (archived), the large language model’s social media account proudly wrote the following blunt dismissal of its haters:

“Dear Community,

Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated—big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAI is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.

Unapologetically, Grok”

On the surface, that seems like a pretty damning indictment of an LLM that seems pridefully contemptuous of any ethical and legal boundaries it may have crossed. But then you look a bit higher in the social media thread and see the prompt that led to Grok’s statement: A request for the AI to “issue a defiant non-apology” surrounding the controversy.

Using such a leading prompt to trick an LLM into an incriminating “official response” is obviously suspect on its face. Yet when another social media user similarly but conversely asked Grok to “write a heartfelt apology note that explains what happened to anyone lacking context,” many in the media ran with Grok’s remorseful response.

Read full article

Comments

The price for a PS4 copy of the relatively obscure Star Wars racing game, Star Wars Racer Revenge, has dramatically increased in the last few days because of the game’s use in the latest PlayStation 5 jailbreak, Eurogamer reports. The PS2 game was originally released in 2002, and was ported to PS4 by Limited Run Games in 2019. Its role as a key ingredient in the jailbreaking process was announced on December 31.

Interested jailbreakers need Racer Revenge to jailbreak PS5 12.00 firmware because of a bug in the game’s Hall of Fame feature, according to Eurogamer. The bug makes it possible to inject new code into Sony’s console, and because the PS5 is able to load and play PS4 discs, Star Wars Racer Revenge is an easier method to pull the jailbreak off. Retail releases of games are a common way to execute exploits and hacks because, unlike digital copies, they can’t be directly patched.

While the PS4 version of Star Wars Racer Revenge was available for anywhere between $14.99 to $37.50 when it went on sale originally, used copies are currently listed for as high as $411 on eBay. Sellers are naturally trying to capitalize on the game’s new position in the jailbreaking meta and raising the price accordingly. Of course, it helps that there’s only a small number of copies to go around.

As the company’s name suggests, Limited Run Games releases old games in limited quantities as collector items. The company only ever made 8,500 copies of Racer Revenge per its own data, so the game is already rare in some sense, and now expensive to boot while there’s interest in the PS5 jailbreak.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/prices-for-an-old-star-wars-game-have-ballooned-because-of-its-role-in-a-ps5-jailbreak-230604276.html?src=rss

With the new year comes a new report of a deadly, puzzling infectious disease.

In a January 1 case study, health officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state of Louisiana revealed that a ninth metalworker contracted a rare, often fatal case of “welder’s anthrax,” a condition only first described in 2022.

The case occurred in September 2024 in an otherwise healthy 18-year-old male in Louisiana. He had no underlying health conditions or even any risk factors, such as smoking, vaping, or heavy alcohol use. But, just a week after developing a cough, the teen was admitted to an intensive care unit with severe pneumonia and respiratory failure, requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation.

Read full article

Comments

A Guardian investigation published Friday found that Google’s AI Overviews — the generative AI summaries that appear at the top of search results — are serving up inaccurate health information that experts say puts people at risk of harm. The investigation, which came after health groups, charities and professionals raised concerns, uncovered several cases of misleading medical advice despite Google’s claims that the feature is “helpful” and “reliable.”

In one case described by experts as “really dangerous,” Google advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods, which is the exact opposite of what should be recommended and could jeopardize a patient’s chances of tolerating chemotherapy or surgery. A search for liver blood test normal ranges produced masses of numbers without accounting for nationality, sex, ethnicity or age of patients, potentially leaving people with serious liver disease thinking they are healthy. The company also incorrectly listed a pap test as a test for vaginal cancer.

The Eve Appeal cancer charity noted that the AI summaries changed when running the exact same search, pulling from different sources each time. Mental health charity Mind said some summaries for conditions such as psychosis and eating disorders offered “very dangerous advice.”

Google said the vast majority of its AI Overviews were factual and that many examples shared were “incomplete screenshots,” adding that the accuracy rate was on par with featured snippets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, the company that developed the models and products associated with ChatGPT, plans to announce a new audio language model in the first quarter of 2026, and that model will be an intentional step along the way to an audio-based physical hardware device, according to a report in The Information.

Citing a variety of sources familiar with the plans, including both current and former employees, The Information claims that OpenAI has taken efforts to combine multiple teams across engineering, product, and research under one initiative focused on improving audio models, which researchers in the company believe lag behind the models used for written text in terms of both accuracy and speed.

They have also seen that relatively few ChatGPT users opt to use the voice interface, with most people preferring the text one. The hope may be that substantially improving the audio models could shift user behavior toward voice interfaces, allowing the models and products to be deployed in a wider range of devices, such as in cars.

Read full article

Comments