It took a while, but new midrange PC graphics cards from AMD are on the

The HBCU Transformation Project, a collaborative venture between the United Negro College Fund, Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the Partnership for Education Advancement, announced on Wednesday a $124 million investment from philanthropic group Blue Meridian Partners.

Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, tools that can create lifelike photos, video and audio are now cheap and readily available

Jakarta has been blanketed in smog that has made its air quality the worst in the world as

Vice President Kamala Harris convened a group of civil rights and labor leaders Wednesday to discuss the field

PIKETON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2023--

(Removes extra word in paragraph 4) By Nichola Groom (Reuters) -President Joe Biden’s goal to deploy 30,000 megawatts of offshore

SANTA CLARA, Calif. & MIGDAL HAEMEK, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 5, 2023--

When it’s not making disastrous decisions around the housing of migrants on barges found to contain Legionella, the Home Office is reviewing the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act and considering a proposal to require telecoms operators to notify the government of “technical changes” to their services before they are implemented – something which has been slammed as “catastrophically short-sighted”. Between 5 June and 31 July, the Home Office consulted on revising the legislation passed by Theresa May’s government, with one of the planned changes relating to “notification requirements” placed on businesses. The consultation document reads: “We propose to make changes that would support cooperation between government and industry by setting clear expectations about the circumstances in which operators might be expected to notify the Secretary of State of planned changes to their service that could have a negative impact on investigatory powers and, where necessary, mandating notification of planned changes. “This would be intended to facilitate early engagement between operators and the government so that, where necessary, appropriate steps can be taken in good time to ensure that any negative impact on investigatory powers is fully considered, and so that we can ensure continuity of lawful access to data against a background of changing technology.” However, it was a news article from Just Security on Tuesday which reignited concerns that the UK Government is about to do something “ultimately unsafe”. The piece explains: “While the proposal does not specify what technical changes would require notification, these may include changes in the architecture of software that would interfere with the UK’s current surveillance powers. “As a result, an operator of a messaging service wishing to introduce an advanced security feature would now have to first let the Home Office know in advance. “Accordingly, the Secretary of State, upon receiving such an advance notice, could now request operators to, for instance, abstain from patching security gaps to allow the government to maintain access for surveillance purposes.” If the idea of Suella Braverman being able to halt security fixes so the government can continue to spy on people doesn’t fill you with dread, we’re not sure what will. While the Home Office goes on to add in its consultation document that there is a proposed requirement for the home secretary to “consider the necessity and proportionality” of imposing such a duty on businesses, Twitter/X users remain fairly troubled by the prospect: The Investigatory Powers Act, which was dubbed “the snooper’s charter” by critics when it was first proposed, is separate to the Online Safety Bill, which the government is still trying to pass through parliament. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

BENGALURU (Reuters) -Infosys, India's No.2 IT services provider, signed a $454-million contract with Denmark's Danske Bank on Monday, at a

Male characters in role-playing video games have 50% more dialogue than females, highlighting a “stark gender imbalance” in the gaming genre, scientists have said. In role-playing games (RPGs), the gamer controls one or more characters undertaking quests or missions in an imaginary world. Researchers from the Universities of Glasgow and Cardiff analysed the dialogue of 50 RPGs from 1986 to 2020, including Final Fantasy, Skyrim and Mass Effect. This encompassed 6.2 million spoken words from 13,000 characters. The results, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggest 94% of the games studied had more male dialogue than female dialogue, including ones with multiple female protagonists such as Final Fantasy X-2 or King’s Quest VII. They also found that the proportion of female dialogue is slowly increasing in RPGs at a rate of 6.3 percentage points per decade – from a mean of about 18% in the 1980s to about 40% by 2020. While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games - just three of 50 - had more than 50% female dialogue Dr Stephanie Rennick, University of Glasgow However, the researchers said that if this rate were to continue, gender balance would not be reached until 2036. Dr Stephanie Rennick, research associate in philosophy, school of humanities at the University of Glasgow, said: “While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games – just three of 50 – had more than 50% female dialogue. “I was also surprised that the lack of female characters compared to their male counterparts persisted at every level, from main player characters through to background NPCs (non-player characters).” For the study, the researchers obtained the transcripts of dialogue used in the games and identified which character said what. Dr Sean Roberts, lecturer at the school of English, communication and philosophy at Cardiff University, said: “We categorised the gender of each character, not assuming binary gender. “This allowed us to count how many words were available for each gender in each game. “For example, we can compare the number of words spoken by female characters to the number of words spoken by male characters.” The researchers found only 35% of words were spoken by female characters and they were more likely to apologise, hesitate or be polite, compared with their male counterparts. They said the proportion of female dialogue ranged from 6% (King’s Quest VI) to 80% (King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella). They discovered one game, Monkey Island, did not pass the Bechdel test, which requires two named female characters to talk to each other about something besides a man. Around half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion. More diverse representation is being called for by players and developers Dr Sean Roberts, Cardiff University The team also found examples of stereotyped gendered behaviour. The researchers said that in Stardew Valley, characters respond differently depending on the player character’s gender. For example, they said, female players are offered a salad, wine, repeatedly described as beautiful and assumed to have little experience of video games, while male players are offered pasta, ale, described as “full of energy” and are assumed to be good video game players. Analysis also showed only 30 out of 13,000 characters belong to the non-binary gender categories, which is about half as much as in real life, the researchers said. Dr Roberts said: “Around half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion. “More diverse representation is being called for by players and developers. “So we hope that developers will consider addressing the imbalances we found in order to create more inclusive games.”

For months, Google has been under pressure to reinvent its core search business and respond to the rise