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Apple delivered the new iPhone on Sept. 7 to a raucous crowd in a packed auditorium in San Francisco. Every September, Apple has a big event designed to whip up interest in its purportedly latest and greatest products ahead of the holiday season. But for anyone whoâs been paying attention, this yearâs event was underwhelming.
The company unveiled the iPhone 7 and the next version of the Apple Watch, both of which look [pretty much exactly like] the versions that preceded them. The new iPhone is more powerful, for sure, but it wonât look or act markedly different from the previous two models. Except for the fact that it has no headphone jack, but donât worry, Apple has a solution for that: $159 wireless earbuds that youâll probably [lose in a week], or wired headphones that force you [to choose between] charging your phone and listening to music.
For the last [few years], Apple has been living off the goodwill and the failures of its competitors. But sales of iPhonesâwhich make up the bulk of Appleâs revenueâ[are falling] for the first time in a decade. The Apple Watch, the companyâs first entirely new product released under CEO Tim Cook, [hasnât generated]the kind of numbers the iPhone has. And the new versionâthe same size, with the same battery life and screen resolution as its predecessorâprobably wonât help Apple overtake FitBit as the [leading producer] of wearables. It is [waterproof now], though.
Many predict next Septemberâs event will be a real blowout, with completely redesigned Apple products across the board. Then again, with stagnating sales and so many underwhelming product launches, how many people will wait with bated breath in 2017 to hear [what magic] Apple wants to sell them then?âMike Murphy
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Five things on Quartz we especially liked
Teachers need to try harder when calling the roll. For many minority and immigrant students, names hold ancestral and historical significance. So when white teachers mispronounce those namesâor, worse, give up and force students to adopt an Americanized versionâit can make children feel as though their families and cultures lack value. And that, [Claire McLaughlin argues], undermines minority studentsâ ability to learn.
Dying in pursuit of the Silicon Valley ideal. [Aimee Groth tells the gripping story] of Dan Fredinburg, co-founder of Google Adventures. The mission: capture imagery of the highest mountains on each of the worldâs seven continents for Google Street View. Then tragedy struck in April 2015, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook Nepal and sent a deadly avalanche down Mt. Everest.
Weâre overpumped on protein. For the past decade, sales of protein drinks, shakes, and bars have been skyrocketing. In the supermarket, you are bound to see protein-enhanced versions of pretty much everything. As [Katherine Ellen Foley points out], most of us already get more protein than we need. So whoâs profiting from this marketing coup?
The center of gravity of experimental physics is shifting. Indian-born scientists have played integral roles in many of the most important experimental physics projects of the last 50 years. But theyâve always had to do their work on foreign soil. [Sonali Prasad talked] to some of Indiaâs top physicists to learn about their ambitious plan to build an advanced gravitational wave observatory in their home country.
The risk of a child being abducted by a stranger is 0.00007%. And yet parents today live in constant fear of leaving their children alone in the park, even for a few minutes. [Jenny Anderson reports] reports that this might because they feel like other parents are judging their parenting skillsâand not due to any real concern for danger. The biggest losers here are the kids growing up without the freedom to dream and play.
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Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Corporate Americaâs relationship with Washington is broken. Big business used to be a âmoderating influenceâ in Washington. Now, political gridlock and partisanship, toxic relationships with both the Republican and Democratic parties, and the waning influence of the âbusiness statesman,â means companies no longer have a say on broad issues impacting the economy, [writes Steven Pearlstein] for The Washington Post. Worse, theyâre beginning not to care.
Teaching machines to think helps us understand how humans learn. To give robots true artificial intelligence, we need to program them to see the world as subtly as we doâand thatâs not through a mass of quantitative data. Instead, as [Alan S. Brown writes] for Nautilus, we need to work on approximating the complex relationship between teacher and student. The better we understand the âteacher-student code,â the smarter our machines will be. In the process, we might get smarter ourselves.
Offices are designed to control us. The âluxury minimalismâ of the contemporary office aims to strips employees of their identifying quirks and clutter, the better to transform them into indistinguishable worker bees. But as The New Republicâs [Miya Tokumitsu and Joeri Mol write], work is inherently messyâespecially the creative, political kind.
Itâs last call for Chomsky-ites. Noam Chomskyâs theories on the universality of language have dominated linguisticsâand influenced fields ranging from evolutionary psychology to computer science. New research on how children learn to understand and speak native tongues appears to be undermining Chomskyâs âuniversal grammarâ theory. Writing in Scientific American, [Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello investigate] this sea change in the social sciences.
New voices are moving fashion forward. As a student, the New York City-based fashion designer Shayne Oliver styled himself in clothes âbutch enough for Bed-Stuy, smart enough for school, glam enough for the club,â writes the The New Yorkerâs Christopher Glazer. [Glazer chronicles] how Oliverâs cutting-edge fashion collective, Hood by Air, remixes influences from hip-hop and queer cultureâand revises traditional identities in the process.
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