Health and Media

According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 8.3 million households lack access to high-speed broadband. Providing universal access to communications service—initially voice service and now broadband—has always been a challenge in the United States. Although connecting urban, populated areas is relatively easy, serving sparsely populated rural areas is difficult due to differences in terrain and population density.

Fallout continues from the Wall Street Journal’s investigative journalism exposé that showed telecommunications companies in the US have left behind a massive network of copper cables covered in toxic lead. AT&T CEO John Stankey said “there is no public health crisis” to worry about, citing the release of lead test results by AT&T, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the state of New York.

In early 2020, as the coronavirus spread, schools around the world abruptly halted in-person education. To many governments and parents, moving classes online seemed the obvious stopgap solution. In the United States, school districts scrambled to secure digital devices for students. Almost overnight, videoconferencing software like Zoom became the main platform teachers used to deliver real-time instruction to students at home.

Large language model (LLM)–-based artificial intelligence chatbots direct the power of large training data sets toward successive, related tasks as opposed to single-ask tasks, for which artificial intelligence already achieves impressive performance. The capacity of LLMs to assist in the full scope of iterative clinical reasoning via successive prompting, in effect acting as artificial physicians, has not yet been evaluated. The objective of the study was to evaluate ChatGPT’s capacity for ongoing clinical decision support via its performance on standardized clinical vignettes.

As airlines upgrade their in-flight Wi-Fi systems, they often tout the passenger experience benefits, like faster internet browsing or bett

The Good Things Foundation is the UK’s largest digital inclusion charity, seeking to help a million people to get across a tech divide that has deepened during the cost of living crisis.

Who still has landline telephones? The Washington Post's Andrew Van Dam found the answer in the National Health Interview Survey that is conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics. Over the years, the survey has shown a correlation between having a landline and overall health. According to the survey, people who cut the cord and only use cell phones are more likely to engage in risky behavior.

The Universal Service Fund Working Group seeks public comment on the future of the Universal Service Fund (USF). The goal of this working group is to create a bipartisan forum to guide education, awareness, and policy-making on the USF. The working group invited comments on ten questions related to money collected from telecommunications companies that is dedicated to fulfilling the goals of universal service.