Chatbots are becoming more skillful
Talking to your voice assistant, like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, Insignia Voice, isn’t much like a human conversation, more like a walkie-talkie or texting experience. However, these chatbots are amazing, recognizing different people and pets visually and by the sound of their voices.
But Microsoft is trying to make talking to its Xiaoice bot more like a conversation with a human, more like a back-and-forth listening and talking experience.
One difference is that the user doesn’t have to continually repeat the “wake” word. Another is that the bot tries to identify and respond to emotion expressed in the user’s voice. Some voice bots also are watching the user, and interpreting facial expressions or motions. Along with anticipating the person’s next words, another skill being developed is responding without waiting for the person’s speech to finish, as we humans do. They are becoming able to chitchat, remember personal details, and having a sense of humor.
Voice assistants are anticipated to be in 55% of U.S. households by 2022.
Info: shpr.fyi/2Ho0xqU
Everett Boeing Wins Jobs From Europe
American Airlines has ordered 47 U.S.-built Boeing 787 Dreamliners in a deal valued at $12 billion at list prices, while cancelling a major order for Europe-built Airbus A350s. The order for US manufacturer Boeing comes in the wake of protectionist trade measures by President Donald Trump, who champions buying from US manufacturers. Most of the 787 final assembly takes place at the Boeing Factory in Everett, Washington. Everett Boeing jobs are paying $31 to $44 per hour, and offer plenty of voluntary overtime.
Boeing Everett phone: 866-473-2016.
Manufacturing jobs strongest increase in three years
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in March, manufacturing jobs grew by the strongest numbers in three years. Manufacturing jobs grew by 22,000 jobs in March, and have grown by one million two hundred thousand jobs since U.S. manufacturing hit a bottom in 2010.
This March gain was amidst the excellent performance of the U.S. economy as a whole, which added 241,000 jobs in March, exceeding the expected number of 200,000.
Many economists believe that the entire economy is based on and depends critically on manufacturing as the “pump” that produces the money flowing up through and supporting all the rest of the primarily service economy. They worry that, in 2016, manufacturing jobs comprised only 7.9% of all U.S. jobs, down from 9.5% in 2006, and 38% in 1940, and that manufacturing jobs are predicted to fall to only 6.9% in 2026.
The possibility is that a “small” glitch causing loss of only, for example, 10% of manufacturing jobs, which is only less than one percent of all U.S. jobs, could bring the loss of the same 10% of all the manufacturing-supported jobs up through the economy.
Department of Homeland Security is building a database of journalists
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is building a database of Media Monitoring Service, of all journalists, bloggers and other who influence public opinion.
Records will include the journalist’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread.
The issue comes amid heightened interest in accuracy in media, “fake news,” and the potential for foreigners to influence popular opinion prior to elections.
Nineteen lawmakers including Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month, asking whether a well-known arab-based media news service should register as a foreign agent because it “often directly undermines” U.S. interests with favorable coverage of Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, organizations long labelled as terrorists by the U.S. Government.
Likely I, Dave Bunting, your editor, will be one of the very least among those in the database.
Be careful typing .com. Typing .cm instead may lead to big trouble
Mistyping the .com in the URL area of your browser can lead you into big trouble.
Make sure you never type .cm when you mean .com.
Domain names ending in .cm, otherwise imitating the .com address you’re seeking, have been legally registered by criminals. The site your reach will appear identical to the site you were seeking, but will be gathering all your personal and financial data to be used against you.
Also, the Cyrillic alphabet, used across eastern Europe, has 11 lower-case characters that are identical – or very similar – to Latin letters and numbers. Criminals can register a domain name identical to a real domain, like google.com, except with one of its Latin letters replaced by the identical-appearing Cyrillic letter, and if you click on that link, you will go to the criminal’s lair, a place you’ll wish you hadn’t gone.
Chinese Unfair Competition Has Almost Destroyed U.S. Solar Panel Manufacturing
China builds its solar panel factories to production level, then “bankrupts” them, then gives them free to “private” owners, who can, as a result, manufacture the panels for sale prices as low as one percent of their true price as produced by American manufacturers.
China’s solar-power production capacity expanded more than tenfold from 2007 to 2012. Now six of the top 10 world solar-panel makers are Chinese, including the top two, compared with none a decade ago.
Their competition forced many American and European solar-panel manufacturers into bankruptcy. Two dozen quit or cut back operations during President Barack Obama’s first term, damaging the heady optimism then about clean energy producing jobs.
The United States and the European Union determined that Chinese solar-panel makers were dumping panels for less than the true cost of producing them, the cost had they had to include factory construction and amortization costs in their pricing.