James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Relationships are messy, whether you are an adult with lots of experience or a kid navigating tough times with a best friend, boyfriend or girlfriend. You can’t predict moods, interests or desires. For teens learning the ins and outs of relationships for the first time, disagreements, fights, and breakups can be crushing. 

But what if your teen’s best friend wasn’t actually human? It may seem far-fetched, but it’s not. A new report from Common Sense Media says that 72 percent of teens surveyed have used AI companions, and 33 percent have relationships or friendships with these chatbots.  

The language that AI companions use, the responses they make, and the empathy they exude can make a user feel as though they truly understand and sympathize. These chatbots can make someone feel liked or even loved. They are programmed to help users feel like they’ve made a real connection. And as adolescents have a naturally developing fascination with romance and sexuality, if you feel ignored by the girls in your high school, well, now, on the nearest screen is a hot girlfriend who is constantly fascinated by you and your video games, or a super cute boyfriend whom you never had to engage in small talk with to form a bond. 

This may be perplexing to some parents, but if your child is navigating the complex worlds of technology, social media, and artificial intelligence, the likelihood they will be curious about an AI companion is pretty high. Here’s what you need to know to help them.  

Chatbots have been around for a long time. In 1966, an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot, named ELIZA. Today AI and natural language processing have sprinted far past ELIZA. You probably have heard of ChatGPT. But some of the common companion AI platforms are ones you might not be familiar with: Replika, Character.AI, and My AI are just a few. In 2024, Mozilla counted more than 100 million downloads of a group of chatbot apps. Some apps set 18 as a minimum age requirement, but it’s easy for a younger teen to get around that. 

You might think your kid won’t get attached, that they will know this chatbot is an algorithm designed to give responses based on the text inputs they receive; that it’s not “real.” But a fascinating Stanford University study of students who use the app Replika found that 81 percent considered their AI companion to have “intelligence,” and 90 percent thought it “human-like.” 

On the plus side, these companions are sometimes touted for their supportiveness and promotion of mental health; the Stanford study even found that 3 percent of users felt their Replika had directly helped them avoid suicide. If you’re a teenager who is marginalized, isolated or struggling to make friends, an AI companion can provide much-needed companionship. They may offer practice when it comes to building conversational and social skills. Chatbots can offer helpful information and tips.  

But are they safe? 

A Florida mother has sued the company that owns Character.AI, alleging the chatbot formed an obsessive relationship with her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, and ultimately encouraged him to attempt suicide (which he tragically completed). Another suit filed in 2024 alleges that the same chatbot encourages self-harm in teens and violence towards parents who try to set limits on how often kids use the app.  

Then there’s privacy: Wired, drawing on Mozilla’s research, labeled AI companions a “privacy nightmare,” many crawling with data trackers that might manipulate users into thinking a chatbot is their soulmate, encouraging negative or harmful behaviors. 

Given what we know about teens, screens and mental health, online influences are sometimes powerful, largely unavoidable, and potentially life-changing for children and families. 

So what do you do?  

Remind kids that human friends offer so much that AI companions don’t. IRL friendships are challenging, and this is a good thing. Remind them that in their younger years, play is how they learned new skills; if they didn’t know how to put LEGOs together, they learned with a new friend. If they struggled with collaboration and cooperation, play taught them how to take turns, and how to adjust based on their playmates’ responses. 

Friends give children practice with the ins and outs of relationships. A friend can be tired, crabby, or overexcited. They might be lots of fun, but also easily frustrated; or maybe they’re sometimes boring, but very loyal. Growing up, a child has to learn how to take into account their friend’s personality and quirks, and they have to learn how to keep the friendship going. Maybe most poignantly, they learn how incredibly valuable friends are when things get tough. In cases of social stress, like bullying, the support of a friend who sticks by you is priceless. In my study of more than 1,000 teenagers in 2020, keeping close to a friend was by far the most helpful strategy for kids who said they were the targets of bullies. Another study of more than 1,000 teens found that IRL friends can lessen the effects of problematic social media use. 

 If they are curious about AI companions, educate them. This can increase their skepticism and awareness about these programs and why they exist (and why they’re often free). It’s important to acknowledge the pluses as well as the minuses of digital companionship. AI companions can be very supportive; they’re never fuming on the school bus because their mother made them wear

a sweater on a cold morning, they’re never jealous when you have a new girlfriend, and they never accuse you of ignoring their needs. But they won’t teach you how to handle things when they drop you for a new best friend, or when they develop an interest that you just can’t share. Discussing profit motives, personal security risks, and social or emotional risks doesn’t guarantee that a teenager won’t go online and get an AI girlfriend, but it will at least plant the seeds of a healthy doubt.  

.

Malte Mueller/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Last week, Senate Republicans narrowly confirmed Emil Bove to a lifetime seat on a federal appeals court over the objections of pretty much everyone who cares about preserving an impartial judiciary. Bove has performed a series of cartoonishly corrupt misdeeds on President Donald Trump’s behalf from his perch in the Department of Justice, manufacturing the crooked bargain to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and firing prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. Multiple whistleblowers have alleged that Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, instructed his staff to defy the courts if necessary to deport immigrants without due process and lied to Congress at his hearing. This egregious misconduct was not a deal-breaker for Senate Republicans, who rushed through his confirmation to avoid even more damning revelations from coming out before the vote.

But Bove will step into a judiciary that has not yet been entirely degraded by Trump’s influence. There are still plenty of courageous judges in the lower courts, and many of them have spent the past six months fighting vigorously against the president’s abuses of office. A trio of our finest district court judges, and their unflinching battle for equal justice, is the subject of Reynolds Holding’s new book Better Judgment: How Three Judges Are Bringing Justice Back to the Courts. Holding is a journalist, lawyer, and research scholar at Columbia Law School. On this week’s episode of Amicus, he spoke with Mark Joseph Stern about what we can learn from these three judges—Carlton Reeves, Martha Vázquez, and Jed Rakoff—in the shadow of Trump’s attempted transformation of the courts. An excerpt of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mark Joseph Stern: Emil Bove is one of Trump’s most corrupt hatchet men. More than 900 former Justice Department officials urged the Senate to vote him down, saying his confirmation would be “intolerable to anyone committed to maintaining our ordered system of justice.” And yet he has now been confirmed as a judge. We just talked about three judges who are the polar opposite of Bove, but now they’re serving in the same judiciary with him. What are we supposed to make of the courts as a whole when these two incredibly different kinds of judges are serving side by side in the system? 

.

Emil Bove. Jack Gruber/USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

However, Donalds recalled, Trump himself was unenthused about his medical head accessory when the pair met shortly after his convention speech. “I see the bandage, and the second thing [Trump says] is ‘what do you think of the bandage?’” Donalds said.

“I said, ‘I don’t like it. Take it off.’ That’s what I said. ‘I don’t like it. Take it off.’ I said, ‘let everybody see the ear.’”

“He was like, ‘you know, it’s not too bad. It’s not too bad’…”Doc Ronny [Jackson] says, I gotta wear the bandage.”

“I’m like, ‘so what? You’re the president, just take the thing off,” Donalds added.

The president’s bandage became the inspiration for many at the RNC, with one Arizona delegate, Joe Neglia, describing it at the time as “the newest fashion trend.”

“Everybody in the world is going to be wearing these pretty soon,” Neglia told CBS, while sporting a piece of white tape over his own ear. “When he came in [to the convention], and there was that eruption of love in the room, I thought, ‘what can I do to honor the truth? What can I possibly do?

“And then I saw the bandage, and I thought, I can do that. So, I put it on simply to honor Trump and to express sympathy with him and unity with him.”

At a rally shortly after the convention, Trump appeared to have downgraded his ear bandage, instead sporting a skin-colored band-aid covering the top part of his right ear.

.

Donald Trump, with a bandage on his ear from an assassination attempt foiled at his rally on Saturday, speaks at the RNC after accepting the 2024 Republican nomination for president. (Getty Images)

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Every four years, soccer fans eagerly await the sport’s biggest event: the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup. But before each dramatic kickoff, artists and researchers spend years designing, testing, and revising the official match ball. Recently, images of the planned ball for the 2026 competition were leaked, and its design incorporates math, physics, and style in some surprising ways.

Called the Trionda (Spanish for “triwave”), the new ball celebrates the three host nations—the U.S., Mexico, and Canada—for the first multinational-hosted World Cup. The ball is stitched together from just four panels, the smallest number yet for a FIFA World Cup ball. And it represents a significant reduction from the 20-paneled Al Rhila ball that was used in 2022.

The design of any soccer ball hinges on an age-old question: How can one make rounded shapes out of flat material? Every FIFA World Cup ball so far has borrowed inspiration from some of math’s simplest three-dimensional shapes: the platonic solids. These five shapes are the only convex polyhedrons built from copies of a single regular polygon where the same number of faces meet at each corner.

The icosahedron, which has 20 triangle faces and a relatively ball-like appearance, seems promising, but it’s still a bit too pointy to roll around. If we cut off (or truncate) the points of an icosahedron, each of the triangles becomes a hexagon, and each of the points becomes a pentagon.

This is the shape of the classic soccer ball, originally called the Telstar ball and used in the official FIFA World Cup match in 1970. The stark black-and-white color scheme was meant to increase visibility on black-and-white TVs, which were still prevalent at the time.

The Trionda ball is also based on a platonic solid—the tetrahedron—which at first seems the least ball-like of all the famous shapes. A tetrahedron is made of four triangles, three of which meet at every point. The trick in the Trionda design is in the shape of the panels. Though they have three points like a typical triangle, the panels’ edges are curves that fit together to give the ball a more rounded exterior.

This method of making a pointy platonic solid rounder by curving the edges of the faces may be familiar to soccer fans; in fact, the design of the Trionda ball strongly evokes the Brazuca⁠, a six-paneled ball based on a cube that starred in the 2014 World Cup.

Basing the Trionda ball on a tetrahedron might be a risky choice; the last match ball based on that shape was highly controversial. The Jabulani ball, whose name means “rejoice” in Zulu, might have been a bit too joyful. Players complained it was unpredictable in the air and didn’t react the way they expected it to. The design of the Jabulani combined both methods of turning a platonic solid into a sphere: cutting off the corners to make eight faces and turning the edges of the faces into curves. It also had a unique feature, shared with none of the official match balls before or since: three-dimensional, spherically molded panels.

The Jabulani may have been the roundest ball yet. So why didn’t it work as intended? The answer has to do with “drag”⁠—the force of air particles pushing back on the ball as it flies through space. Typically, the faster a ball moves, the more drag it experiences, which can slow it down and change its trajectory. But each ball also has a “critical speed” past which the drag on the ball decreases significantly. The smoother a ball is, the higher the critical speed barrier becomes. This is why the surfaces of golf balls have dimples: they lower the critical speed and help the balls move faster through the air. These effects mean that rounder and smoother isn’t always better—and may explain the Jabulani’s unpredictable behavior.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Some Republican senators have expressed concern about President Donald Trump’s decision Friday to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics hours after the release of the July jobs report.

Several Republicans told NBC News that they would take issue with the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the BLS, if it is the result of Trump disliking the jobs report numbers, which showed the U.S. job market in the past months has been considerably weaker than previously thought.

Trump defended his decision Friday, saying without evidence that the report’s numbers were “phony” and accused McEntarfer of releasing favorable jobs numbers before the election to give former Vice President Kamala Harris an edge.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., said if the data is untrustworthy, the public should find out, but firing the commissioner before knowing whether the numbers are inaccurate is “kind of impetuous.”

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” Lummis said. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., blasted Trump’s decision to fire McEntarfer as well.

“If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up,” Tillis said.

Tillis announced in June that he does not intend to run for re-election, a day after opposing Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and subsequently drawing the president’s ire, including a threat to back a primary challenge against the senator.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who found out about the commissioner’s firing from NBC News’ question to him about it, said he did not know much about the topic but proceeded to question whether the move would be effective in improving the numbers.

“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized,” Paul said.

“I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” he added.

Paul also opposed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” in June. The senator said in June that due to his vocal opposition, he was uninvited from an annual White House picnic in the weeks leading up to the vote on the sweeping domestic policy package. However, Trump later said Paul and his family were invited.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she cannot trust the job numbers — and “that’s the problem.”

“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.

Democratic senators have spoken out against McEntarfer’s firing, too, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accusing Trump of acting like “someone who imitates authoritarian leaders” during remarks on the Senate floor Friday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called the move “the sign of an authoritarian type” and added, “what that means is, I think the American people are going to find it hard to believe the information that comes out of the government, because Trump will always want it to be great news, and when that happens, it’s hard for us to deal with the problems, because we don’t know what is going on.”

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, went a step further, calling McEntarfer’s dismissal “the stuff of fascist dictatorships.”

Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, whom Trump appointed to the position and was confirmed by the Senate in 2019, made a post on X calling McEntarfer’s firing “totally groundless,” “a dangerous precedent,” and undermining “the statistical mission of the Bureau.”

A statement by “The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” co-signed by Beach, affirmed the accuracy of the bureau’s work and of McEntarfer specifically.

“The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information,” the statement read.

“BLS operates as a federal statistical agency and is afforded autonomy to ensure the data it releases are as accurate as possible,” it added

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________