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The founder of a Harlem-born network of nonprofit charter schools once lauded for his “compelling new vision” for public education is headed to prison – for stealing from the very schools he helped launch.Seth Andrew, 43, once honored as a “Hometown Hero” in education by the Daily News, was sentenced Thursday in a federal courtroom in Manhattan to 366 days in prison, plus three years of supervised release. He pleaded guilty in January to charges he defrauded the well-regarded Democracy Prep Public Schools (DPPS) network of more than $218,000.The sentencing marked the messy end of a public service career that won Andrew accolades as the leader of taxpayer-backed schools known for achieving high marks in high-poverty neighborhoods, starting with the “flagship” middle school in Harlem in 2006, and later reaching some 7,100 students in communities from Texas to New Jersey. He left DPPS in 2017.“Seth Andrew was sentenced today for stealing from those who once trusted him,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, of the Southern District of New York,  » Read More

News Bloomberg New monthly job postings across all industries with “metaverse” in the title declined 81% between April and June, according to workplace researcher Revelio Labs, after surging in the months following Facebook’s rebranding last fall. Bloomberg News | Jul 30, 2022 (Bloomberg) -- Meta Platforms Inc., grappling with its first-ever quarterly sales slump, now has another problem: Jobs in the metaverse are disappearing.  New monthly job postings across all industries with “metaverse” in the title declined 81% between April and June, according to workplace researcher Revelio Labs, after surging in the months following Facebook’s rebranding last fall. The dropoff coincides with a broader slowdown across the tech sector, which has prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, leaving workers from the Bay Area to Bangalore increasingly rattled. Job postings in tech hubs like San Francisco and Austin, Texas, dropped 8.4% in the past four weeks, according to job site Indeed. Bloomberg Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s big bet on virtual reality and other nascent,  » Read More

The Blue Frontier founding team testing a prototype at Oak Ridge National Labs. From left to right: Matt Graham (VP of Engineering), Daniel Betts (CEO) and Matt Tilghman (CTO).Air conditioning has the potential to keep people cool as climate change keeps making the planet hotter. At the same time, conventional air conditioning technology uses a lot of energy, meaning it's contributing to climate change — and will have a bigger effect as more people need air conditioners to stay comfortable or even survive.Currently, air conditioning is responsible for nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to an analysis by scientists from the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center released in March. Those emissions are expected to get worse as more people install air conditioners, especially in India, China, and Indonesia, according to a joint statement from the NREL and Xerox PARC."It's a good and a bad thing," Jason Woods, an NREL senior research engineer and co-author of the new study,  » Read More

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Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove. It is the third such test of Facebook's ability to detect hateful language - either via artificial intelligence or human moderators - that the groups have run, and that the company has failed. The ads, which the groups submitted both in English and in Swahili, spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed. They compared people to donkeys and goats. Some also included profanity and grammatical errors. The Swahili language ads easily made it through Facebook's detection systems and were approved for publication. As for the English ads, some were rejected at first, but only because they contained profanities and mistakes in addition to hate speech. Once the profanities were removed and grammar errors fixed, however, the ads - still calling for killings and containing obvious hate speech - went through without a hitch.  » Read More

After a decade of registering consistent growth and gravity-defying ad sales, all while fighting increasing regulatory scrutiny, Facebook parent Meta has posted its first-ever decline in quarterly revenue since it went public in 2012. The company’s profit also fell for the third straight quarter and its forecast for its advertisement business remained gloomy for the foreseeable future. What is the reason behind the decline in revenue? Meta’s total revenue, which primarily includes digital ad sales, fell 1% to $28.8 billion for the quarter that ended in June compared to the same time last year when it had posted a revenue of $29.1 billion. Similarly, the company’s profit was $6.69 billion, down 36% from a year earlier. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the current economic downturn has had an impact on digital ad sales, Meta’s core business. “We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call. “The situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago.” In her final earnings call,  » Read More

Facebook has a message for employees, one delivered relentlessly by executives in recent weeks: It’s time to shape up.In a memo earlier this month, the company’s top human resources officer advised team leaders to return to the “rigorous performance management” practices that Facebook used before the coronavirus pandemic, including giving critical feedback to struggling employees.“If someone is still unable to meet expectations with that additional support, transitioning them out of Meta is the right thing to do,” wrote Lori Goler in a memo viewed by The Washington Post.The missive, one of multiple recent such messages to the workforce at the social media giant, is part of a broader crackdown following years of laxer management practices, according to current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters and internal message posts obtained by The Washington Post.Facebook executives have issued a dizzying number of directives, outlining a new era of higher performance expectations and slowed hiring as the company emerges from the pandemic with a growing list of economic challenges.  » Read More

As markets react to inflation and high interest rates, technology stocks are having their worst start to a year on record. WSJ’s Hardika Singh explains why the sector — from tech giants to small startups — is getting hit so hard. Illustration: Jacob ReynoldsUpdated July 27, 2022 1:17 pm ETFacebook parent Meta Platforms is expected to post its biggest drop in daily users and its first decline in revenue as the company struggles to adjust to macroeconomic forces and growing competition from TikTok.The company is expected to report quarterly revenue of $28.9 billion, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet. That figure would be down 0.6% from a year prior and would represent the first time that the company has posted a quarterly drop in revenue from the year earlier.  » Read More

Facebook is turning to its “supreme court” to decide whether to end restrictions on Covid misinformation, more than two years after the company first started to take special action on posts promoting falsehoods about the disease.The social network is considering changing the way it deals with such misinformation by, for example, labelling it as false or demoting it in algorithmic ranking, rather than simply removing it from the site. It wants to make the change now, according to head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, “as many, though not all, countries around the world seek to return to more normal life”.But in order to avoid making the wrong choice when “resolving the inherent tensions between free expression and safety”, Facebook will turn to its oversight board, the arms-length self-regulator set up in May 2020, to decide on what the future moderation policy should be.“We are requesting an advisory opinion from the oversight board on whether Meta’s current measures to address Covid-19 misinformation under our harmful health misinformation policy continue to be appropriate,” Clegg said,  » Read More

Madhu Balaji | Chennai, July 26 | Updated on: Jul 26, 2022 Music revenue sharing on Facebook does not extend to Reels at this timeMeta has introduced ‘music revenue sharing’ for creators on Facebook to monetise videos that use licensed music. According to the company, the ability to monetise such videos aids both creators and music rights holders make money. Nevertheless, Facebook Reels are not eligible for monetisation at this time. Creators must be eligible for in-stream ads and will have to meet Meta’s monetisation eligibility standards to access the music revenue sharing ability, Meta said in a blog post. Video creators will receive a 20 per cent revenue share on eligible videos that are 60 seconds or longer, with a separate share to music rights holders and Meta. “To start, eligible videos will monetise from in-stream ads in the US, and will then expand to the rest of the world where music is available on Facebook in the coming months,” Meta said. The video must have a visual component,  » Read More