Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.Title of course: Art and AdvocacyWhat prompted the idea for the course? I like taking lawyers and law students to art museums. At first, I built these outings into the courses I teach on persuasion, creativity, and artificial intelligence. But the response was so positiveand the conversation so rich and interestingthat Art and Advocacy became its own class.What does the course explore? Students examine the intellectual, emotional, and professional overlap between the craft of presenting art and the craft of presenting arguments. Both activities involve storytelling. Both involve putting yourself in someone elses shoes. And both depend on properly balancing evidence and emotion, comprehensiveness and concision, provocation, and restraint.Why is this course relevant now? Advocacywhether in the courtroom, the boardroom, or in private discussions and debatesis in many ways an act of curation. It calls for highlighting themes and making connections. It requires informed selection. It places a huge premium on context, contrast, and having a bold, transformative vision.Most of all, though, advocacy, like art, involves the capacity to simultaneously connect with different audiences and push them to look at legal issues, people and ideologies in new ways. We can all learn a lot about how to develop and deploy that ability by spending time with the art collected and strategically arranged in museums.Whats a critical lesson from the course? The best advocates serve as helpful guides. They dont force their perspective on people. They dont bludgeon us with dogma or overwhelm us with irrelevant details. They instead focus, like skillful museum curators, on directing our attention in ways that ultimately empower us to make more informed, evidence-based judgments and decisions.Illumination, not coercion, is the goal.What materials does the course feature? Part of the fun of this course is the perpetually dynamic syllabus because the museums we visit continually update collections and offer new exhibits.Weve seen the Van Gogh in America exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Weve seen pieces by Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Weve even managed to include works by Monet, Rothko, and Picasso.What will the course prepare students to do? Become better visual advocates. Litigators need to be good visual advocates, especially when presenting evidence. Dealmakers need to be good visual advocates, especially when pitching projects. So does anyone who delivers presentations in person, online, or through a hybrid arrangement.If you only ever operate in sentences and paragraphs, you miss out on opportunities to communicate your messageand connect with peoplein other creative, memorable ways.Patrick Barry, is clinical assistant professor of Law and Director of Digital Academic Initiatives, University of MichiganThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Youre hunched over your desk and phone for hours. We rounded up gadgets, a DIY trick, and even some yoga advice to help you straighten up.

The social media app went dark late Saturday as a federal law went into effect requiring a sale or ban.

Ahead of an anticipated powerful new release, inventory of the current iPhone SE is dropping at retail outlets, according to a new report.The fourth-gen iPhone SE will be based on the iPhone 14, with upgraded internals.Apple is expected to launch a revamped iPhone SE sometime in the spring of 2025. The new model will offer a new look, likely based on the iPhone 14, with a larger, 6.1-inch screen.Retail inventory of the current iPhone SE is claimed to be falling fast in some locations, according to Bloomberg. AppleInsider has found that many Apple Stores in cities such as New York and Los Angeles continue to have the current iPhone SE model in stock, but it's no longer available in all stores. Rumor Score: Likely Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

TikToks US shutdown last night appears to be affecting users outside the country as well. People have taken to social media in the hours since, complaining they cant access the app despite living in non-US countries, and its not always clear why.In some cases, the problem appears to be using a VPN that routes traffic through the US. One user on Reddit says theyre based in the UK, saw the message thats supposed to be displayed only in the US overnight, and found that a quick location change in their VPN app fixed it:I got that message myself in the UK I immediately thought to check my Vpn, yep it was going through Miami once I changed that TikTok is fine.This doesnt work in all cases, though. The original creator of that thread also claims to live in the UK, but they say they werent using a VPN. Instead, they suspect the problem is that they were living in the US when they created their main account. Other people who signed up in the US also report they cant access the app, despite now living in countries like Canada, Germany, Australia, Greece, and Poland.But some users, who name their location as the UK, Canada, and Australia, say they didnt create their account in the US and in some cases that theyve never been there at all. Still others complain that the app is blocked for them in countries like Morocco or Ireland. One user, who says they are Mozambican, speculates its because they got around their countrys monetization laws by setting their account region to the US.TikTok did not immediately reply to our request for comment on what could be causing people living outside the US to lose access.

The development of VLMs in the biomedical domain faces challenges due to the lack of large-scale, annotated, and publicly accessible multimodal datasets across diverse fields. While datasets have been constructed from biomedical literature, such as PubMed, they often focus narrowly on domains like radiology and pathology, neglecting complementary areas such as molecular biology and pharmacogenomics that are critical for holistic clinical understanding. Privacy concerns, the complexity of expert-level annotation, and logistical constraints further impede the creation of comprehensive datasets. Previous approaches, like ROCO, MEDICAT, and PMC-15M, have relied on domain-specific filtering and supervised models to extract millions of image-caption pairs. However, these strategies often fail to capture the broader diversity of biomedical knowledge required for advancing generalist biomedical VLMs.In addition to dataset limitations, the training and evaluation of biomedical VLMs present unique challenges. Contrastive learning approaches, such as PMC-CLIP and BiomedCLIP, have shown promise by leveraging literature-based datasets and vision transformer models for image-text alignment. However, their performance is constrained by smaller datasets and limited computational resources compared to general VLMs. Furthermore, current evaluation protocols, focused mainly on radiology and pathology tasks, lack standardization and broader applicability. The reliance on additional learnable parameters and narrow datasets undermines the reliability of these evaluations, highlighting the need for scalable datasets and robust evaluation frameworks that can address the diverse demands of biomedical vision-language applications.Researchers from Stanford University introduced BIOMEDICA, an open-source framework designed to extract, annotate, and organize the entire PubMed Central Open Access subset into a user-friendly dataset. This archive includes over 24 million image-text pairs from 6 million articles enriched with metadata and expert annotations. They also released BMCA-CLIP, a suite of CLIP-style models pre-trained on BIOMEDICA via streaming, eliminating the need for local storage of 27 TB of data. These models achieve state-of-the-art performance across 40 tasks, including radiology, dermatology, and molecular biology, with a 6.56% average improvement in zero-shot classification and reduced computational requirements.The BIOMEDICA data curation process involves dataset extraction, concept labeling, and serialization. Articles and media files are downloaded from the NCBI server, extracting metadata, captions, and figure references from nXML files and the Entrez API. Images are clustered using DINOv2 embeddings and labeled through a hierarchical taxonomy refined by experts. Labels are assigned via majority voting and propagated across clusters. The dataset, containing over 24 million image-caption pairs and extensive metadata, is serialized into WebDataset format for efficient streaming. With 12 global and 170 local image concepts, the taxonomy covers categories like clinical imaging, microscopy, and data visualizations, emphasizing scalability and accessibility.The evaluation of continual pretraining on the BIOMEDICA dataset utilized 39 established biomedical classification tasks and a new retrieval dataset from Flickr, spanning 40 datasets. The classification benchmark includes pathology, radiology, biology, surgery, dermatology, and ophthalmology tasks. Metrics like average accuracy for classification and retrieval recall (at 1, 10, and 100) were employed. Concept filtering, which excludes overrepresented topics, performed better than concept balancing or full dataset pretraining. Models trained on BIOMEDICA achieved state-of-the-art results, significantly outperforming previous methods, with improved performance across classification, retrieval, and microscopy tasks using less data and computation.In conclusion, BIOMEDICA is a comprehensive framework that transforms the PubMed Central Open Access (PMC-OA) subset into the largest deep-learning-ready dataset, featuring 24 million image-caption pairs enriched with 27 metadata fields. Designed to address the lack of diverse, annotated biomedical datasets, BIOMEDICA provides a scalable, open-source solution to extract and annotate multimodal data from over 6 million articles. Through continual pretraining of CLIP-style models using BIOMEDICA, the framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval across 40 biomedical tasks, requiring 10x less computing and 2.5x less data. All resources, including models, datasets, and code, are publicly available.Check out the Paper and Project Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our65k+ ML SubReddit.(Promoted) Sana Hassan+ postsSana Hassan, a consulting intern at Marktechpost and dual-degree student at IIT Madras, is passionate about applying technology and AI to address real-world challenges. With a keen interest in solving practical problems, he brings a fresh perspective to the intersection of AI and real-life solutions. Meet 'Height':The only autonomous project management tool (Sponsored)

While many were expecting the U.S. to shut down TikTok within its borders if parent company ByteDance didn't sell it to a Western buyer, it was a bit more of a surprise when Marvel Snap went dark as its publisher is also owned by the same company.TikTok officially went offline for those in the U.S. on Saturday, January 18, just hours before the January 19 deadline set by the U.S.' divest-or-ban law. Users who try to access TikTok in the U.S. are now greeted with a message saying they can't use the app right now. As it turns out, Marvel Snap players within the country's borders are getting a similar note."Sorry, Marvel Snap isn't available right now," the message reads when you try to open the app. "A law banning Marvel Snap has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use Marvel Snap for now. Rest assured, we're working to restore our service in the U.S. Please stay tuned!"PlayIGN's Twenty Questions - Guess the game!IGN's Twenty Questions - Guess the game!To start:...try asking a question that can be answered with a "Yes" or "No".000/250For those unaware, Marvel Snap was developed by Second Dinner and was published by ByteDance-owned publisher Nuverse, which is what led to the ban.Ben Brode, Second Dinner's Chief Development Officer and Co-Founder, took to BlueSky to discuss the ban and state that it was a surprise to them too."Unfortunately, Marvel Snap is temporarily unavailable in U.S. app stores and is unavailable to play in the U.S. This was a surprise to Second Dinner and our publisher Nuverse," Brode wrote. "Were actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will update you once we have more to share."Brode also offered a few words of advice for those who miss the Marvel-themed card game, saying VPN may be their new best friend."FWIW I am hearing that VPN software will allow you to continue playing Marvel Snap in the meantime, as long as you pretend you're from Canada or something," Brode said.For more, check out our Marvel Snap review while you wait for its hopeful return!Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.

According to Bloombergs Mark Gurman, Apples new Mail app is going to make its way to the Mac very soon, with macOS 15.4. Apple introduced the new Mail app to the iPhone back in December with iOS 18.2, but it hasnt made its way to any other platform since.Surprisingly, weve already seen what the new Mail app will look like on macOS. Back when Apple introduced the new M4 Macs in October, we got a small look at the new Mail app for macOS in one of the unveilings. This wasnt some groundbreaking leak, since the design had already been unveiled on the iPhone back at WWDC, but it was interesting, since there werent any signs of the new Mail app coming to macOS quite yet.Then, in December, iOS 18.3 and macOS 15.3 beta started rolling out. While macOS 15.3 did bring Genmoji to macOS, it didnt bring the new Mail app to the Mac, leaving many wondering when itd debut.However, according to Gurman, this will be changing very soon with the upcoming macOS 15.4 release, which will likely enter beta in the coming weeks, and debut in April:But theres another, more under-the-radar feature coming in April as well: The Mac will get the upgraded Mail app that uses AI to prioritize messages and sort content into different inboxes. Right now, iPad and iPhone users are able to tap into the feature which is terrific but Mac customershave been left behind. That changes with macOS 15.4, Im told. For those not familiar with the feature:It sorts mail into aprimary category, as well as ones for transactions, promotions, updates and all mail.Gurman states that the new Mail app is currently available for iPad users, though that isnt actually the case quite yet, neither in iPadOS 18.2 nor iPadOS 18.3. Hopefully, we see the new Mail app debut for iPad users soon, with the release of iPadOS 18.4. Only time will tell.Are you excited for the new Mail app to expand to other Apple platforms? Let us know in the comments.Some great Apple accessories on Amazon:Follow Michael:X/Twitter,Bluesky,InstagramAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsTalk about a shock to the system: zapping yourself with an electrical muscle stimulation device during resistance training can lead to greater muscle mass and strength improvements compared to weightlifting alone, according to new research.The work, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, is a meta-analysis analyzing 13 different studies for a combined total of 374 participants providing, in theory, more comprehensive results.As the authors note, neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) devices are affordable, widely available, and easy to use so the findings could offer a practical way to boost gains for meatheads everywhere.On paper, the idea makes sense. Resistance training is the way to build muscle, while NMES is typically used in muscle therapy and rehab to prevent the loss of strength and mobility. Both are proven to increase strength and mass on their own. So why not combine them, the researchers' thinking went, and get the best of both worlds?That's what the meta-analysis set out to find. Until now, whether there was an additive effect of using NMES with resistance training remained unknown, the authors wrote."Under normal conditions, the brain activates muscles by sending signals through the nervous system," study coauthor Sudip Bajpeyi, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at The University of Texas at El Paso, explained in a statement about the work. "NMES mimics this process by delivering external electrical currents to the nerves, causing the muscles to contract, without input from the brain.""Think of it as though your muscles are contracting involuntarily," he added.The constituent studies were chosen for combining neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) with resistance training; 13 of them were randomized control trials with the majority of the studies favoring athletic participants (though sedentary folks, i.e. most of us, were still fairly represented.) Subjects' strength and muscle mass were evaluated at the beginning and end of each study, which had training periods between two to 16 weeks in length.It may not be the largest meta-analysis, but the findings showed a statistically significant boost in strength and muscle mass gains by combining weight training with electrical stimulation. In particular, it seems like the NMES electrical signals can be used to activate parts of your muscles that you aren't fully contracting. That's part of the struggle of resistance training: you can pick up a dumbbell and still not effectively use the muscle it's supposed to be targeting. It's why mind muscle connection is such a big deal in the world of weightlifting, which can take a lot of focus and discipline to develop.There's at least one major caveat, however. As , none of the analyzed studies controlled the participants' diet a pretty big oversight, because eating enough calories and protein are essential to building muscle, as any gym rat will tell you.But if you're an experienced lifter, it could be worth a shot once the science is more established, at least. After all, it can't be any more off-putting of a concept than cutting off your bloodflow for bigger arms. Newbie lifters, though, are probably better off focusing on getting their lifts down and eating enough food.More on fitness: Scientists Discover Easy Hack to Live Way LongerShare This Article

Time zones: EST (UTC -5), CST (UTC -6), MST (UTC -7), PST (UTC -8), AKST (UTC -9), HST (UTC -10)Purity Coffees mission is to improve the worlds health by producing the healthiest and most sustainable coffee backed by scientific research and testing. We promote the wellness benefits of coffee, and are guided by our values of Health, Science, Integrity, Responsibility and Growth. Our thousands of loyal customers rave about the quality of our coffee and the health benefits theyve experienced by drinking it. If youre interested in joining a dynamic, rapidly growing company, were looking for respectful and honest team players who are committed to continuous improvement and health.This is a remote position, with the option of on-site work if the candidate is located in Greenville, SC.Schedule: 9 am - 5 pm EST Monday through Friday, occasional weekend shift possible.This job position is open exclusively to U.S. residents.Benefits listed below job summary.Job SummaryPurity Coffee Customer Support Representatives are key to the companys success and the satisfaction of its customers. They are responsible for multi-channel customer support tickets, emails, live chats, with a particular emphasis on phone support. This is a high call volume position, requiring excellent communication skills and the ability to handle a fast-paced environment. They will participate in weekly team member 1:1 meetings, a weekly department meeting, as well as quarterly team member reviews and departmental strategic planning meetings. Each team member is expected to manage an average of 150-250 support tickets weekly via email, call, or live chat. They will also be responsible for setting and managing quarterly objectives and key results related to their growth and the performance of their department.Puritys helpdesk and telephony systems will be utilized and optimized by the Customer Support Representatives. They will work with other team members in Customer Support and I.T. to improve the customer and employee experience as users of these technologies.Customer Support Representatives will regularly report on support workload and capacity, customer satisfaction, and issue resolution times. They will apply root cause analysis to inform other key functions of the company of opportunities to solve a customer issue or optimize the customer experience. They will report directly to the Customer Support Manager and be a key resource for departmental planning and execution.Job ResponsibilitiesDepartmental Management:Meet key performance metrics, including ticket resolution time and volume, with weekly monitoring and quarterly performance evaluations to ensure consistent quality and efficiencyParticipate in weekly Customer Support meetings to identify, discuss and solve key issuesContribute to a Customer Support scorecard with departmental KPIs and analysisParticipate in quarterly strategic planning sessions to set objectives and key results for Customer Support department and team members that align with company objectivesContribute to weekly Customer Support updates and reporting, highlighting Voice of the Customer and root cause analysisSystems Management:Use systems including Gorgias, Okendo, Skio, Refersion, Smile, Shopify, and ShipstationHelps with Gorgias helpdesk system functionality and managementHelps assign unassigned cases while helping improve the automatic assignment of tickets when possible.Assist with data segmentation so that tagging and intentions provide accurate and useful dataAssist with the auditing, editing, and optimization of macrosHelps with Okendo review system functionality and managementResponsible for review management, including the publishing, response, and reporting on site and product reviewsKnowledgeable on processes for customer support in Skio, Refersion, and SmileAfter Sales Support:Provide support to multi-channel customer inquiries including Amazon, wholesale, affiliate, subscriber, and direct consumersProvide solutions for customer questions, complaints, or needs in a timely manner from multiple channels including website, live chat, Amazon, wholesale and affiliatesOrder entry, cancellation or changesProvide information about Purity Coffee and its productsAdvise on questions about the purchasing, storing, grinding, and brewing of coffeeRoute unassigned tickets to the appropriate team membersUse help desk software to monitor and manage customer issuesProvide knowledgeable responses to customer questions regarding products and servicesAnalyze customer issues to determine opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and communicate that to the appropriate team mates to influence changesJob RequirementsExperience with Customer Support, Customer Experience, or Customer ServiceExcellent communication and problem-solving skillsGood interpersonal skills and ability to work in a team environmentPatience with customers and the ability to de-escalate situationsExperience with help desk software and remote working tools is a plusFamiliarity with coffee, health, wellness, and/or coffee industriesMust have a quiet and distraction-free environment to take customer phone callsPhysical RequirementsWorking on a computer for the majority of the workdayLifting and carrying boxes (depending on remote / on-site)Packaging small shipments (depending on remote / on-site)Benefits (Some Waiting Periods Required)Paid Time Off / Flexible Time OffMedical, Dental, and Vision Insurance401KLife InsurancePersonal Development BenefitPaid Job Training and DevelopmentPurity Coffee is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage and celebrate the uniqueness of each individual and believe that our differences make us stronger as a team.Our commitment to diversity extends beyond race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and veteran status to create an environment where all employees feel valued and inspired. We strive to create a culture that embraces diversity and inclusion as a fundamental part of how we operate, empowering each employee to contribute their best work.We actively seek to attract, develop, and retain individuals from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and we prioritize creating a space where everyone feels supported, heard, and included. Our dedication to DEI is woven into our hiring process, employee development programs, and overall company culture.We believe that by fostering an inclusive environment, we not only ensure the well-being and growth of our employees but also drive innovation, creativity, and success as a company. Join us in our journey to build a workplace that reflects the diverse world we live in. Related Jobs See more Customer Support jobs