U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids held a roundtable in Shawnee with local officials and stakeholders about bison herd restoration as part of her America 250 week here in town.

She said the discussion helped her appreciate the importance of both preserving the American bison and increasing the large mammal’s population.

“It actually has these broad-sweeping impacts … around the ecosystem, around the wildlife and the way that focusing on preserving and increasing the bison population is actually helping our grasslands,” Davids said. “It’s helping our pollinators. It’s helping the entire ecology.”

An issue that came up was how managing the health of grassland prairies directly affects bison herds.

“One of the things that’s really different about the prairie compared to other kinds of ecosystems is that for a tropical forest or old-growth forest, you might set aside a reserve— the idea is, ‘Let’s leave it alone and not disturb it.’ And prairies require disturbance. They require periodic fires; they require grazing. They really need management,” said Kansas State University professor emeritus John Blair, recent director of the Konza Prairie Biological Station.

Blair pointed out how indigenous people used to manage prairies with fires and knew that bison were attracted to recently-burned areas. More recently, he said, researchers tracked bison using collars and found that this still holds true.

“It creates this shifting mosaic of different habitats types that move across the landscape, and that contributes to the kind of biodiversity we’re trying to support,” Blair said.

Christopher Kennedy, secretary of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, said he appreciated a good conversation about managing bison herds, interacting with tribal nations and “how we can not just preserve bison but how do we preserve the overall ecosystem that provides for bison and a plethora of other species.”

The Nature Conservancy has two herds of bison in Kansas, said Tony Capizzo, the group’s Flint Hills Initiative director. One of them, with 85 animals, grazes on 1,500 acres of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

“Grasslands are one of the least-protected and most vulnerable ecosystems across the world, and in North America, we’ve lost 70% of our grasslands generally, and for tallgrass prairies like the Flint Hills, we’ve lost 96% of the original tallgrass prairie. … When we talk and think about bison management, it’s really in that context of how we support healthy grasses broadly,” Capizzo said.

He said that having the bison designated as the country’s national mammal in 2016 has helped the public make a connection to the grasslands.

It’s something that also helped Davids connect to the issue.

“When you think about the long history of the country, the American bison as our national mammal and something that really is a symbol particularly of the Great Plains, it prompted us to want to dig a little bit deeper on the work that Kansas specifically is doing,” she said.

Davids said that the information she learned during the conversation may help her in the future when working on bills concerning grasslands conservation, farms and USDA programs.

Fox is about to take over the TVs in more than 100 million homes worldwide. On Monday, Fox announced that it's acquiring Roku, the streaming middleman that serves as a portal for viewers to hop into services like Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, and more. The $22 billion deal may not change Roku's familiar purple interface, but it could put Fox in control of your data behind the screen.

During a call with investors, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the plan is to keep the two companies separate. Fox aims to grow its business by adding Fox Sports, news content, and local stations to Roku - one of the most popular streaming device and smart TV platfor …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Fox has announced that it's acquiring Roku outright, in a deal that values the streaming company at $22 billion. Once the deal is complete, Fox content will be promoted more heavily than before on Roku streamers and smart TVs.

The deal will see Fox's TV networks and Tubi streamer combine with Roku's network of streaming devices, smart TV software, and The Roku Channel. The companies say in a press release that by combining they'll become the third-largest player in the US TV industry by viewing share.

"This is a defining moment for Fox, and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decad …

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A copy of Super Mario Bros., still in the box and sealed with its original sticker, just sold at Heritage Auctions for $3 million. That absolutely crushes the previous record of $2 million, also for a copy of Super Mario Bros., in 2021. That sale also came hot on the heels of a controversial auction of Super Mario 64 for $1.56 million.

Part of what drove the price of this particular copy so high is that, according to Heritage Auctions, instead of shrink wrap, this 19895 second run was sealed with a glossy sticker, which was discontinued shortly after. The site claims it's the earliest known sealed copy of the game in existence. It's also gr …

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The other morning I was clearing out the multiple daily emails I get from scammers who have used “AI” to praise one of my books in order to get me to use their “marketing” services and/or be on their “podcast” and/or show up for their “book club” and/or use them to become big in Hollywood, all of which is cover to grift money from me, one “Ai”-written email in particular caught my eye. This was not because it was any more authentic than the rest of them, but because the domain it came from was a specific and legit business domain, and not just Gmail or Hotmail or even (oh lord) AOL.com. In a burst of concern, I sought out the email of the company head and their management contact to let them know I suspected their domain had been hacked by scammers.

I got a reply back that, no, actually, the email, which to me had clearly been written using “AI,” was legitimate.

Folks: Don’t do this. Don’t use “AI” for your business correspondence, especially to creatives. Ever.

Let me put this in perspective: I get literally dozens of spam and scam emails every day, all of which use “AI” to fart out canned flattery about my work in an attempt to bamboozle cash out of me. I get so many of them, in fact, that I can tell at a glance not only that the text has been written with “AI,” but also, at this point, which of the “big four” LLMs was used to fart it out. Hell, I literally just now got a scam email in Spanish, and I could tell what it was going to say even before I pressed the “translate” button.

This is how predictable “AI” writing is, and how frequently it is used for fraudulent purposes. At this point, my brain immediately and directly associates “AI” text in email with “scam.” That is its only purpose.

The thing is: I’m not special. Every writer and creative person, from the most successful down to the very newest, is inundated with these scam spam emails. Lots of them, every single day. Pretty much every one of us, I assure you, now associates “AI”-generated text with attempted fraud.

When you, a legitimate business, use “AI” to communicate with me, I do not think “wow, that was a really well-composed email that makes me want to engage with the sender in a mutually co-operative way.” I makes me think “This is a fucking scam,” or, in the most charitable scenario, “This company has been hacked and a scammer is using their domain to fleece people.” Maybe you don’t know this, because you’re not the recipient of endless attempts at scammage via “AI.” But I know this, and it’s why I am telling you now: When you use “AI” in your professional communications, you do not look like a professional. You look like a fucking scammer.

There is a solution! Just don’t use “AI” to write your professional correspondence! Remember the day, like, just four years ago, when you pretty much wrote all your emails by hand? Do that again! It’s not difficult, you won’t look like a scammer, and your email has a better chance of being read and treated as if it came from an actual human, because it doesn’t look like every other awful scam email out there. It just makes good business sense.

Also, aside from the “you look like a scammer” angle: Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a “basic competence” issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me? I mean, I also have access to “AI,” so if that’s what you’re bringing to the table, what do I need you for? As the saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. If my first impression of you is that you’re letting “AI” do the talking for you, then my impression is that you’re not offering me anything at all.

So, yeah. “AI”? Don’t use it in your business emails. It does nothing positive for you, and does a lot that is negative. Just write the email yourself, or, if you’re a boss, pay someone to do it for you. It’s going to make a difference, and at the very least, your chances of being immediately and forever sorted into the spam folder will be a lot lower.

By the way, from the time I started writing this to right now, which is roughly a half of an hour later, I have received eight “AI”-written scam emails, including the one in Spanish mentioned above. This is what you’re up against when you send something to my email. If you’re using “AI” to write your business email, this is also what you’re sorting yourself into. Think about it, maybe.

— JS

The Weather Company announced an "enhanced allergy experience" now available through its The Weather Channel app designed to help allergy sufferers better understand when their symptoms might flare up and what's causing them. While the app already provides static pollen counts, its "Health & Wellness" section is being expanded to take into account other factors such as how changing weather conditions could result in you experiencing more symptoms despite the counts not actually rising.

The new features now available in the free version of The Weather Channel app include "weather aggravator insights" that analyze how conditions like high win …

Read the full story at The Verge.