Childrens art school

This week's news about the new US Postal Service truck contract, and the USPS' decision to order 90 percent of them with internal combustion engines , has been viewed by many as a missed opportunity. Thankfully, the news is better when it comes to electrifying another one of our public services—the school bus. On Thursday, Montgomery County—a wealthy Maryland suburb adjacent to Washington, DC—approved a contract to electrify its entire school bus fleet. School buses are an ideal candidate for electrification, given the frequent stops and the fact that the buses usually only run a couple of times each day. With more than 1,400 buses, the Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education, which has more than 200 schools and 160,000 students, has one of the largest fleets of school buses in the country. Over the next four years it will get 326 new ones, the largest single order of EV buses by a school district in the country. The buses in question are Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys, built … [Read more...] about Maryland school district places largest-ever order for electric buses

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO website . For the Tribeca Film Festival 's virtual reality-focused Immersive program, the show must -- and will -- go on. In a world locked down by the coronavirus , Tribeca Immersive this year will be different: smaller, free and virtual. Three weeks ago, the Tribeca Film Festival -- typically a rite of spring in New York when filmmakers, fans and immersive storytellers flock to theaters and elaborate VR showcases in downtown Manhattan -- postponed the event, about six weeks before it was set to begin, after coronavirus containment rules made the massive gathering impossible. "It was a hard pill to swallow, of having worked so hard for an entire year and spent time away from my family...and then it just exploded," said Loren Hammonds, the senior programmer of the Immersive program. But he got through that disappointment quickly, he said. "My responsibilities just kind of … [Read more...] about Tribeca, shuttered by coronavirus, revives its VR festival: Smaller, virtual, free

By Sofia Moutinho Feb. 26, 2021 , 11:30 AM One hundred years ago, a play by the Czech author Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot,” telling the story of artificial factory workers designed to serve humans. Now, in a metanarrative twist, a robot itself has written a play. And it premieres online today. “It’s a kind of futuristic Little Prince ,” says dramatist David Košťák, who oversaw the script. Like the classical French children’s book, the 60-minute production— AI: When a robot writes a play —tells the journey of a character (this time a robot), who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death. The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet. ( You can test it here .) So far, the technology has been used to … [Read more...] about Kinky and absurd: The first AI-written play isn’t Shakespeare—but it has its moments

An independent committee of vaccine experts has unanimously recommended that the Food and Drug Administration authorize the Johnson & Johnson one-shot COVID-19 vaccine for people 18 and older, taking it one step closer to use in the United States. The FDA is expected to authorize the vaccine within days. “I think it’s a relatively easy call,” said committee member Eric Rubin, an immunologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s nice to have a single-dose vaccine.” The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met today to discuss the data from clinical trials of this vaccine, which the FDA evaluated over the past three weeks . The FDA’s analysis , released earlier this week, showed that the vaccine was safe and 85 percent effective against severe cases of COVID-19 globally. No one who received the vaccine was hospitalized with or died from COVID-19. I am pleased to have been part of VRBPAC for review of the vaccine. We … [Read more...] about Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine backed by independent FDA committee