The Daily Populous

Billionaire Bill Gates announces a $1.7 billion investment in U.S. schools

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced Thursday that his foundation will invest more than $1.7 billion in public education, money that will go to support schools interested in developing and testing new approaches to teaching.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent at least $3.4 billion on public education in the United States, most notably to develop the Common Core State Standards and to persuade state education leaders to implement them.

His money also went to support charter schools, teacher preparation programs and an array of other improvement initiatives, including one to break up large high schools into smaller ones.

[How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution].

The initiative to break up large high schools was not one that could be easily replicated elsewhere, he acknowledged.

Hess noted that a dozen years ago, the billionaire declared U.S. high schools to be “obsolete.”

Another 15 percent of the money will go to help charter schools better support the needs of students with disabilities. »

George Carlin Utters “Seven Words” and Is Arrested for Public Obscenity

Authored by markwalston.com

“There are 400,000 words in the English language,” Carlin told the audience, “and there are seven you can’t say on television.

In 1977, he filmed the first of fourteen stand-up comedy specials for HBO, which had begun transmission in 1972.

His final HBO special, It’s Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death in 2008. »

Nestlé is extracting water from Canadian towns on expired permits

Authored by news.vice.com

Switzerland-based Nestlé, for its part, says it donates tens of thousands of dollars to community groups in Canadian towns where it operates wells and bottling facilities and that its permits expired because of complicated changes to water management rules imposed by the Ontario government earlier this year.

Nestlé is currently extracting about five million litres per day from the sites where its permits have expired, according to Emma Lui, water campaigner for the Council of Canadians advocacy group.

The Ontario government has imposed a moratorium on new permits for extracting water for bottling until January 2019. »

How Elon Musk's A.I. Destroyed The World's Best Gamers in "DoTA 2'

Authored by inverse.com

Elon Musk-backed Artificial Intelligence company “OpenAI” used a bot to wallop the best DOTA2 players in the world.

OpenAI began its training in March of 2017 and by July it was already taking semipro players to the woodshed.

OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, who is trying to discover and enact the path to safe artificial general intelligence. »

CDC: Suicide Rates Increase in US Rural Areas

Authored by mdmag.com

The United States Center for Disease Control (CDC), in a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), published a "Surveillance Summary" revealing surprising data that suicide rates are higher in rural areas compared to urban areas.According to the study, suicide is 1 of the top 10 leading causes of death in the US resulting in 44,193 deaths in 2015 alone. »