レアジョブ英会話 Daily News Article Podcast

On a drizzly Saturday morning in May, the basement of the New Paltz United Methodist Church filled with old lamps, blunt knives, malfunctioning sound mixers, and balky zippers.

About a dozen volunteers welcomed the broken goods and their owners to a worldwide movement that’s evangelizing new relationships between people and their things.

Repair Cafés—free events where volunteers with technical know-how help neighbors fix myriad household items—are part of a new brand of anti-consumerism that’s trying to offer an alternative to the mass-produced disposable goods that have dominated the global economy for the last half-century. Helping fuel that move to repairing, not buying, are U.S. consumer prices, which climbed sharply again last month as the war with Iran delivered higher gasoline prices and more pain for Americans.

After starting in the Netherlands with a single event in 2009, Repair Café has grown into a global nonprofit with more than 59,000 members, some 4,000 cafés, and close to 850,000 items fixed a year.

“We need to change our mindset. We need to change the economy,” Repair Café founder Martine Postma said. “Even if Repair Cafés can’t solve the problem alone, then still they are a very clear sign that change is needed on a much higher level.”

In New Paltz, a Hudson Valley college town about two hours from New York, 50 people brought about 85 items to the Repair Café: an antique fan that required rewiring, shirts, pants, jackets, stuffed animals. There were old family photos that needed restoring and jewelry awaiting work, like restringing beads or replacing clasps.

Repair experts waited behind long cafeteria tables to teach alternatives, giving people chances to learn that flawed goods aren’t automatically junk. “Maybe their initial reason for coming is monetary or sentimental,” organizer Holly Shader said. More than that, she added, it gives people a chance to work together and extend the life of something. People form relationships.”

The experts on hand fixed 71 of the items, found that four needed more work, and deemed 10 beyond repair. They said they volunteer for the low-pressure joy of fixing things, with networking as a side benefit.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Betting that people will soon grow more comfortable having artificial intelligence agents shop for groceries, plane tickets, or diapers on their behalf, payments giant Visa said that it has embedded its payment network inside ChatGPT, empowering the chatbot to independently shop and complete transactions.

It means AI agents cannot only recommend products but also complete the purchase on the user's behalf at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa. The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants.

It is not OpenAI's first attempt at e-commerce. Late last year, the company announced Instant Checkout, which allowed ChatGPT to scour the internet for a specific item like a digital personal shopper. But the process was prone to errors and was not widely adopted by merchants due to the fee that OpenAI was charging merchants. The company retired Instant Checkout in March.

Visa's collaboration is different from OpenAI's previous attempts, as it will allow users to link their Visa cards to ChatGPT to shop and make it easier for merchants to accept transactions initiated by agents.

OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make decisions, and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world's largest payment network outside of China, will provide the payment authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale.

As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure, and seamless, said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa.

Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the collaboration and did not give details on the fees merchants or customers would have to pay.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Steam-powered vehicles, Victorian costumes, and remote-controlled teapots have taken over the New Zealand town of Ōamaru for its annual Steampunk Festival. The festival ran from 29 May to 1 June. The four-day event, now in its 17th year, draws thousands of visitors to one of the world's best-known celebrations of the Victorian-inspired science fiction genre.

The town’s annual Steampunk Festival is built around a simple idea: what if steam technology had continued into the modern age? Steampunk imagines an alternative world in which the technology of the Victorian age never faded away, evolving instead into the modern era through steam-powered inventions, brass machinery, and elaborate mechanical design.

This year’s theme is “Frontiers of Steam.” Graeme Clark, vice chair of the Ōamaru Whitestone Civic Trust, says, “The theme this year, Frontiers of Steam, is very appropriate considering the looming fuel shortage. Steam power will be the way to travel in the future. As we all know, SPVs, steam-powered vehicles, will be the ‘trump card’ and will dominate world travel and industry.”

Rather than recreating the Victorian era exactly as it was, steampunk sets out to try and reimagine it. Participants use its fashions and technologies as a foundation for imagining how the world might look if steam power had continued into the modern age, with plenty of room for invention along the way.

Many attendees spend months creating elaborate costumes and props, drawing on skills such as sewing, metalworking, and model-making. The festival attracts people from a wide range of professions, including engineers, artists, farmers, and bricklayers, who use steampunk as a chance to create fictional identities and showcase their work in public.

Juliet Thorn, one of those attending the festival, says, “The first time you dress up and go out in public is really scary. And then people get such a buzz out of it. They love it, and they come up, and they go, ‘You look amazing.’ It’s so cool that you take on a different personality.” Steampunk enthusiasts pride themselves on building much of the world themselves.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The Obama Presidential Center opened to the general public on June 19 after a celebratory dedication in Chicago with dignitaries. But tens of thousands of people–friends and family of museum staff, students, and journalists–have already been offered a sneak peek as crews finish final art installations and landscaping.

The roughly $850 million project covers both the political and personal realms of the nation’s first Black president. Campaign memorabilia and presidential artifacts are displayed in the admission-based museum tower, while public spaces of the sprawling campus feature other things important to Obama: a new library, basketball court, and picnic area with grills.

“This is a safe space for people to come and, yes, reflect on the historic moments of this presidency and the campaigns, but also to come together as a community to think about what change you can bring to your own neighborhood,” Josh Harris, the Obama Foundation’s vice president of public engagement, said during a tour with The Associated Press.

Unlike other presidential museums, Obama’s doesn’t contain reams of official papers. It’s the first fully digitized presidential museum where unclassified documents can be viewed through a website they are calling a “digital reading room.”

Visitors to the museum will get to walk into a life-sized replica of the Oval Office.

On a recent day, a stream of visitors, including school children, walked through the circular room, stopping to sit behind the desk and pose for pictures. One drawer holds a copy of a handwritten letter from predecessor former President George W. Bush and Obama’s beloved BlackBerry phone.

“We want to make sure that people from all walks of life have the opportunity to sit behind the Resolute Desk,” said Harris. “You think about the possibilities that if a young organizer from the South Side of Chicago can be president, you can be president too.”

Several of the ballgowns Michelle Obama wore as first lady are displayed on mannequins behind glass, including a black and red dress designed by Narciso Rodriguez that the former first lady wore on Election Night in Chicago.

Visitors will also get a chance to touch swatches of the fabrics, including the rose gold chain-mail Atelier Versace evening gown she wore at her final state dinner in 2016.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Just a few years ago, America's public schools were rushing to get every child a laptop. Los Angeles middle school teacher Anna Soffer remembers it well: The idea was that technology is the future, so we need to put tech in every child's hands.

Now, the conversation has flipped. After pouring billions of dollars into laptops, tablets, and learning apps, many schools are facing a digital reckoning. Classrooms have become saturated with screens, and a growing number of parents, teachers, and school districts are saying it is time to scale back.

The Chromebook is just a world of distraction, says Soffer, who teaches sixth-grade English and history. She favors pen-and-paper assignments but is required to use laptops and online apps for certain activities. Every day, I'm battling, 'Who would you rather listen to, Ms. Soffer or Minecraft?'

The Los Angeles Unified School District, where Soffer teaches, recently became the first major school district to say it will stop giving devices to its youngest students. It is part of a new screen time policy taking effect in the fall across the country's second-largest school system.

A sweeping resolution passed last April by the Los Angeles school board requires the district to eliminate devices until second grade; set daily and weekly screen limits for all higher grades; block YouTube on school devices; and ban the use of devices at lunch and recess in elementary and middle school. The district will also audit its education technology contracts, which the teachers' union says amount to $1.6 billion.

The Los Angeles crackdown is adding momentum to calls for reform emerging around the country. In many cases, parents lobbied a few years ago for school cellphone bans, which have now become the norm. Realizing phones weren't the only classroom distraction, they pivoted to a new target: school-issued devices.

The campaign for change is becoming a public policy issue. At least 14 states have proposed laws to limit screen time in schools, according to Ballotpedia. The federal government issued an advisory warning that excessive screen use among youth is becoming a growing public health concern.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Google must allow news sites to opt out of having their online content scraped to feed AI overviews and other artificial intelligence services and features for British users, regulators said in June.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was ordering Google to give online publishers the option, in what it called a “world first.”

The watchdog is seeking to loosen the U.S. tech giant’s stranglehold on the U.K.’s online search market by using new digital powers to force changes to the company’s business practices.

Under the decision, Google will have to give publishers “effective tools” to prevent their content from being used to power the company's generative artificial intelligence services and its AI search features like AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Google will also have to properly cite publisher content in AI-generated search results by using clear links. In addition, it will have to let publishers opt out of having their content used to fine-tune AI models.

The watchdog said the decision will give publishers a stronger hand when negotiating content deals with Google. Publishers are defined as anyone who puts content on the web that's available to people in Britain.

The CMA's ruling was expected because it had released draft proposals at the start of the year after using its new digital powers to label Google a “strategic” player in online search advertising.

The CMA previously found that news publishers had suffered a drop in traffic since Google rolled out its AI Overviews—summaries that appear at the top of some search queries—because fewer users are clicking through to the original articles.

The watchdog said its requirements will also apply to big changes that Google unveiled in May, which further embed AI in the company's search services.

Google is “engaging with regulators like the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority to ensure website owners have the right tools as user preferences evolve,” the company's general manager of search ecosystem, Mrinalini Loew, said in a blog post.

“Today, we’re beginning to test a new control that lets website owners manage how their links and content appear in generative AI search features.”

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

The environmental footprint of data centers already rivals some of the world's largest countries, according to a United Nations University report, which also predicts their water use, energy use, and pollution will double in just four years as the use of artificial intelligence grows.

Last year, global data centers used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries in the world, said the report recently issued. That electricity use produced about 208 million tons (189 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide, about the same amount as Argentina, and producing that much energy consumed about 1.2 trillion gallons (4.5 trillion liters) of water, according to the report on the environmental consequences of AI's energy use.

By 2030, data centers will account for nearly 3% of the world's projected electricity use, with 935 trillion watt-hours. If data centers were a country, the country would be projected to rank sixth-highest in power use in 2030. That would produce nearly 440 million tons (399 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide, the report said. The study focused on energy use and didn’t examine the massive amount of water used to cool data centers.

“If you look at these numbers, we're seeing scales comparable to nations,” said study co-author Kaveh Madani, a water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada. “The demand is enormous.”

Much of the growth of data centers is being driven by AI. About 20% of data centers’ energy is currently due to AI, but that should grow to 40% by 2030, the report said.

The report is significant because of the credibility and authority of the U.N., not just because of any one set of eye-popping numbers, said Fengqi You, a Cornell University energy engineering professor who directs the college’s AI sustainability issues.

“Its value is that a U.N. institution is putting carbon, water, land, life-cycle impacts, and environmental justice into one frame” for an issue that is often shrouded in secrecy and partial disclosures, said You, who was not part of the report.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Life tasks like paying bills, canceling subscriptions, and answering overdue emails are becoming a reason to socialize for friends, couples, roommates, and other people who get together for what's known as “admin dates.”

The low-pressure gatherings taking place in coffee shops, accommodating bars, and private homes are intended to turn tedious and procrastination-inducing adult responsibilities into productive time with a twist. Tackling a personal to-do list alongside others is a double-duty activity that combines the satisfaction of tending to necessary chores with the no less vital work of nurturing relationships.

“You can have both—getting things done and connecting with people,” Thema Bryant, a Pepperdine University psychology professor and past president of the American Psychological Association, said. “At the gym, if I'm taking a group exercise class, I'm less likely to stop in the middle of other people. ... In the same way, admin dates can help with accountability, motivation, and connection.

Romantic or business partners looking to get on the same page, and club members or volunteers collaborating on a big project, may also find admin dates helpful. Experts generally advise against meeting up in this way with regular work colleagues, especially supervisors, because it might add unnecessary pressure or create self-consciousness that's counterproductive to confronting inbox gremlins.

Dealing with too many uncompleted tasks can feel overwhelming to some people, but whittling away at them in the company of trusted friends or even strangers engrossed in their own screens can clear some of the mental fog and foster a sense of community, said Bryant, the author of a book titled Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself and Those You Love.

One reason admin dates can help with productivity is because of modeling, a theory from behavioral psychology about learning by observing and imitating others, she said. Seeing other people check off items on their agendas can motivate us to do the same, Bryant said.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

European Union leaders, worried about the continent relying too heavily on American companies for AI and cloud computing services and Asia for microchips, are pushing back.

The 27-nation bloc unveiled a tech sovereignty package with measures to promote homegrown European alternatives to Big Tech services and hardware.

The efforts by Brussels have gained urgency as leaders worry about dependence on technologies from foreign providers, which they say could be weaponized against Europeans. Those fears crystallized after the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor was sanctioned by the Trump administration, which led to Microsoft canceling his email account, sparking fears of a kill switch hidden in U.S. tech services.

Europe wants to be in the position to make its own choices, avoiding risky dependencies on single dominant suppliers, one company or one third country, European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, who oversees tech sovereignty, told reporters in Brussels.

Because we live in a world where geopolitics and technology go hand in hand. Those who champion technological innovation will shape the future, and we must ensure that Europe plays a leading role in this.

A cornerstone of the package is a sequel to the EU's 2023 Chips Act to further boost local production of semiconductors by cutting red tape for chip fabs and fostering a European chipmaking ecosystem.

Europe's vulnerability to the global chip supply chain centered in East Asia was highlighted last year in a power struggle at the Chinese-owned, Netherlands-based chipmaker Nexperia.

Another key part of the package is supporting local cloud and AI development, with plans to triple Europe's data center capacity over the next five to seven years. The EU is pushing to expand data centers to keep up with the AI boom, which is driving demand for cloud computing services.

The proposals from the EU's executive arm still need to be debated by the EU's two other main institutions, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Imagine taking part in a job interview not conducted by a human, but by an AI avatar. What might seem dystopian in concept is an increasing reality for some applicants.

As employers face surging application numbers and a flood of AI-written CVs, companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to screen candidates. And as workers flood into offices across the capital, the process of getting a job is increasingly being handed over to artificial intelligence.

Bracing for the changes AI is driving in the job market, schools are incorporating it into their teaching. At London Enterprise Academy in East London, students are being taught about the opportunities and risks linked to AI tools as they prepare applications for sixth form (the two final years of secondary school in Britain) places and work experience opportunities.

Teacher Mohammed Islam asks students whether they would trust a robot interviewer. Some students say AI can help candidates improve applications but still believe human interaction remains essential.

“It does help people to get jobs, and it does help companies to hire people, but we also need humans to interview other people as well because robots don’t have actual feelings, and sometimes, they might not understand what they have to do, and it’s not as reliable as humans,” student Zara says.

For growing numbers of applicants for jobs, the first interview may no longer be with a person. Instead, candidates are increasingly facing artificial intelligence-powered hiring systems designed to screen applications, verify identities, and assess answers before any human recruiter becomes involved.

In a demonstration showing technology developed by Amsterdam-based hiring platform TestGorilla, an AI-generated avatar interviews an Associated Press reporter through a laptop screen.

The system asks spoken questions, records verbal responses, and combines them with timed assessments, behavioral prompts, and identity verification checks. Candidates are asked to complete multiple-choice questions, answer spoken interview prompts, and verify their identity through facial biometric checks comparing their face against identification documents.

TestGorilla says its AI interview systems are designed to replace some traditional screening calls, which recruiters say can consume large amounts of time when employers receive hundreds or thousands of applications for a single role.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.