DrunkEngineer

The grieving parents of a 7-year-old child who died hours after being hit by a car were charged with involuntary manslaughter after allowing him and his brother, 10, to walk home unaccompanied by an adult from a nearby grocery store.

The artificial intelligence, internally dubbed CDRH-GPT, is intended to help staffers at the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, a division responsible for ensuring the safety of devices implanted in the body, as well as essential tools like X-rays and CT scanners.

The division was among those affected by the sweeping mass layoffs at the Department for Health and Human Services earlier this year. While many of the device reviewers were spared, the agency eliminated much of the backend support that enables them to issue approval decisions on time.

The work of reviewers includes sifting through large amounts of data from animal studies and clinical trials. Depending on the applicant, it can take months or even over a year — which an AI tool could feasibly help shorten. 

Experts, however, are concerned that the FDA’s push toward AI could outpace what the technology is actually ready for. 

Since taking over the agency on April 1, Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has pushed to integrate artificial intelligence across the FDA’s divisions. How this move into AI could affect the safety and effectiveness of drugs or medical devices hasn’t been determined.

"It has been dubbed Britain's 'most woke' roundabout because drivers must give priority to pedestrians, then cyclists, and then other cars and lorries before continuing on themselves. Locals have pointed out the priority for cyclists and pedestrians is unnecessary as only cars and lorries regularly use the Boundary Way route."

According to prosecutors, Harris killed Whitley in retaliation for a fight the men had two months earlier. At the time, Harris was working as an activist and life coach at a community center in Hunters Point.

That case was already working its way through the legal system, with delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, court records show. Now, Harris has been charged with three additional counts of murder.

The Cuomo violation — which would result in a traffic ticket if it had been seen by a police officer, but in a criminal summons if he had been on a bike — followed the endorsement announcement.

It is unclear why Cuomo would drive into the most-congested part of the city, which, conveniently, is the part of the city with the best transit. The endorsement meeting was steps from Penn Station, as well as the A/C/E and 1/2/3 trains.

The vote came after its sponsor Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Bay Ridge) showed up to lobby his colleagues on its behalf. He made his standard pitch: The bill, which requires a speed-limiting device to be installed in the cars of motorists with six or more camera-issued speeding tickets in 12 months, is better than license suspension because everyone knows that drivers in a car-dependent state like ours will still drive even if their license is suspended.

It’s official. As my colleague David Dayen and I both predicted, enough Democratic senators have voted for a crypto “regulation” bill (called the GENIUS Act), basically written by the industry and Donald Trump’s minions, that it passed easily on Monday. If anything, it was even worse than I expected—just nine Democrats were needed to get to the necessary 60 votes, but 16 voted for it. (Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jerry Moran of Kansas, voted against it.)

This vote was technically for cloture, meaning the bill couldn’t be halted by a filibuster, but it’s the only vote that mattered. The official vote, now scheduled for Thursday, is only a formality, and I expect several of these senators to vote against it so they can pretend they aren’t monumentally corrupt.

The Crypto Sixteen are the following: Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who co-sponsored the bill, Adam Schiff (D-CA), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Mark Warner (D-VA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), John Fetterman (D-PA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE). Every one of them ought to be primaried in their next election.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has more experience in financial regulation than anyone in Congress, outlined the problems in a speech on the Senate floor. First, the bill gives a clear green light to Trump’s world-historical corruption. “Passing this bill means that we can expect more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments to use the president’s stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account shielded from government oversight and as a way to pay off the president personally. For crooks, it’s a two-for-one,” she said.

The AI-powered system uses 279 variables to score families for risk, based on cases from 2013 and 2014 that ended in a child being severely harmed. Some factors might be expected, like past involvement with ACS. Other factors used by the algorithm are largely out of a caretaker’s control, and align closely with socioeconomic status. The neighborhood that a family lives in contributes to their score, and so does the mother’s age. The algorithm also factors in how many siblings a child under investigation has, as well as their ages. A caretaker’s physical and mental health contributes to the score, too.

While the tool is new, both the data it’s built on and the factors it considers raise the concern that artificial intelligence will re-inforce or even amplify how racial discrimination taints child protection investigations in New York City and beyond, civil rights groups and advocates for families argue.

Joyce McMillan, executive director of Just Making A Change for Families and a prominent critic of ACS, said the algorithm “generalizes people.”

“My neighborhood alone makes me more likely to be abusive or neglectful?” she said. “That’s because we look at poverty as neglect and the neighborhoods they identify have very low resources.”

More than 100 Harvard researchers received termination notices for federally funded research projects on Thursday, as sweeping cuts to the majority of Harvard’s federal grants begin taking effect across the University’s labs.

The notices, delivered via email from Harvard’s Grants Management Application Suite, informed recipients that their projects had been terminated “per notice from the federal funding agency” and contained a list of terminated grants.

“You are receiving this e-mail because one (or more) of your projects have been terminated,” the emails read.

Harvard Assistant Vice President for Sponsored Programs Kelly Morrison and Chief Research Compliance Officer Ara Tahmassian had warned the researchers in a separate Wednesday email that the majority of Harvard’s awards from federal agencies were terminated.

“The University has received letters from most federal agencies indicating that the majority of our active, direct federal grants have been terminated,” they wrote to recipients.

Some of the terminated grants exceeded $1 million, funding entire research operations, including salaries for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and lab technicians.

Tesla blocked shareholders who own less than 3% of its shares from suing its directors or officers on behalf of the electric vehicle maker for breach of duties, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

Three percent of Tesla's shares amounts to about 97 million shares worth about $34 billion as of Friday's close.

That is far higher than the nine shares owned by Richard Tornetta when he sued Tesla's CEO Elon Musk and several of its directors over his $56 billion pay package in 2018. Tesla was at the time incorporated in Delaware, where such a threshold does not exist.

Florida became the second state in the country after Utah to ban local governments from adding fluoride to their public water systems.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill at Simpson Lakes in Dade City -- about 38 miles northeast of Tampa -- on Thursday. The law is set to go into effect on July 1.

"We certainly now, in our society in 2025, we have the ability to deliver fluoride through toothpaste and all these other things," DeSantis said at an event for the signing of the bill. "You don't gotta force it and take away people's choices. But the whole crux of the issue is you should be able to make decisions on the basis of informed consent."

"Forcing this in the water supply is trying to take that away from people who may want to make a different decision rather than to have this in water," DeSantis added.