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Daily Archives: February 7, 2023

$122 Billion: The Growing, Annual Cost of the Infant-Toddler Child Care Crisis

Report – Strong Nation.org – ReadyNation – Impact on families, businesses, and taxpayers has more than doubled since 2018. $122 Billion: The Growing, Annual Costof the Infant-Toddler Child Care Crisis. “…ReadyNation’s updated study finds that the nation’s infant-toddler child care crisis now costs $122 billion in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue every year. This staggering economic toll impacts working parents, their employers, and the nation’s taxpayers. Our 2018 study found that the crisis was already severely damaging the pre-pandemic economy, exacting a cost of $57 billion annually. A combination of COVID-19 and insufficient policy action have now significantly worsened the crisis. Productivity challenges affect both employers and employees. Almost two- thirds of parents of infants and toddlers facing child care struggles reported being late for work or leaving work early, and more than half reported being distracted at work or missing full days of work. An overwhelming 85 percent of primary caregivers said problems with child care hurt their efforts or time commitment at work. These challenges had predictable impacts: more than one quarter of caregivers said they’ve been reprimanded at work, and nearly one quarter have been fired. As a result, families lose $78 billion per year in forgone earnings and job search expenses. Meanwhile, productivity problems cause employers to lose $23 billion annually due to child care challenges faced by their workforce. Taxpayers, in turn, lose $21 billion each year in lower federal and state/local tax revenue…”

AI State of the Union

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tuesday, February 7, 2023 – FiscalNote Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: NOTE) (“FiscalNote”), a leading AI-driven enterprise SaaS technology provider of global policy and market intelligence – is leveraging its proprietary AI technology to provide a live transcript of the address in real-time, paired with video coverage and non-partisan automated and human-enhanced analysis to… Continue Reading

The Law of AI for Good

Lobel, Orly, The Law of AI for Good (January 26, 2023). San Diego Legal Studies Paper No. 23-001, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4338862 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4338862  – “Legal policy and scholarship are increasingly focused on regulating technology to safeguard against risks and harms, neglecting the ways in which the law should direct the use of new technology,… Continue Reading

Americans Don’t Understand What Companies Can Do With Their Personal Data

Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania: A new survey of 2,000 Americans finds that people don’t understand what marketers are learning about them online and don’t want their data collected, but feel powerless to stop it…In a new report, “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” researchers asked a nationally representative group… Continue Reading

Google is holding an event about search and AI on February 8th

The Verge: “Google is about to share more about its work in artificial intelligence. Next week, Google will be holding an event about how it’s “using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need,”… Continue Reading

New cybersecurity data reveals persistent social engineering vulnerabilities

Tech Republic: “New research from NCC Group and Abnormal Security shows clouds and a bit of silver to line them: Ransomware attacks declined last year, but business email compromises increased — massively for smaller businesses — and a third of toxic emails got through their human gateways. According to risk management firm NCC Group, there… Continue Reading

The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video

MIT Technology Review: “Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has released an AI model that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. In a demo reel posted on its website, Runway shows how its software,… Continue Reading

The new Bing: Microsoft unveils its ChatGPT-like, AI-powered search engine

Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz – In addition to adding ChatGPT, using GPT-3.5, Bing is applying AI to improve the relevancy of its core search ranking engine: “Microsoft will launch a new, AI-powered search engine that people can chat with, ask questions, or even use to create content. We learned this today from Yusuf Mehdi,… Continue Reading