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Pamela J. Haney is the president of Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois. She took office on July 1.
Moraine Valley Community College enrolls more than 10,500 students, according to the most recent data reported by the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans make up 10 percent of the student body.
“It is an honor and privilege to be named as Moraine Valley’s president,” Dr. Haney said. “I’m following in the footsteps of a highly respected and committed leader from whom I’ve learned so much. As I begin my presidency, I promise to build on the college’s excellent foundation while advancing student success, innovation, community engagement, and mission-driven priorities.”
Since 2012, Dr. Haney has been serving as vice president for academic affairs at the college. Prior to coming to Moraine Valley in 2009, Dr. Haney served as program administrator and assistant professor of communication arts at Defiance College in Ohio. She also taught as an assistant professor of speech communication at Norfolk State University in Virginia.
Dr. Haney holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and a master’s degree in speech communication, both from Norfolk State University. She earned a doctorate in interpersonal communication from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Enlarge / Are we certain this famous Valve promo image wasn't generated by an AI? (credit: Valve)
Last week, we shared an anonymous report that Valve was blocking from Steam at least some games that make use of AI-generated artwork. Over the weekend, Valve confirmed that report, telling Ars in an e-mailed statement that the company is blocking games that use AI-generated content unless developers can prove those AI models were trained with data that does not "infringe on existing copyrights."
"The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show that a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music," Valve spokesperson Kaci Boyle told Ars. "In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game."
Boyle stressed in the statement that Valve's "goal is not to discourage the use of [AI-generated content] on Steam" and that the company's "priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can." Generative AI is "bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming," Valve continued.
High impact meets compact design in Division Twelve’s new Twigz café collection, created in collaboration with design duo Jones & de Leval. The furniture family’s throughline is a minimal frame with a small footprint, proving you don’t need visual heft to make a big impact. Twigz’s design details are ready to add plenty of interest to any small space, with both indoor and outdoor options available. Combine stackable chairs, benches, and tables to create a unique setup that’s all your own.
Twigz offers plenty of options to make it happen. Steel or upholstered chairs, round or rectangular table, and 20 powder coat colors are your creative playground. The one thing you won’t have deliberate is whether to play up form or function – Twigz does it all. Furthermore, the collection does so while being fully carbon neutral. Watch below to learn more about Twigz:
Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
I hope the healing is coming, too.
Written by David Thorstad , Global Priorities Institute, Junior Research Fellow, Kellogg College
This post is based on my paper “High risk, low reward: A challenge to the astronomical value of existential risk mitigation,” forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs. The full paper is available here and I have also written a blog series about this paper here.
Derek Parfit (1984) asks us to compare two scenarios. In the first, a war kills 99% of all living humans. This would be a great catastrophe – far beyond anything humanity has ever experienced. But human civilization could, and likely would, be rebuilt.
In the second scenario, a war kills 100% of all living humans. This, Parfit urges, would be a far greater catastrophe, for in this scenario the entire human civilization would cease to exist. The world would perhaps never again know science, art, mathematics or philosophy. Our projects would be forever incomplete, and our cities ground to dust. Humanity would never settle the stars. The untold multitudes of descendants we could have left behind would instead never be born.
This thought has driven many philosophers to emphasize the importance of preventing existential risks, risks of catastrophes involving “the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development” (Bostrom 2013, p. 15). For example, we might regulate weapons of mass destruction or seek to reduce what some see as a risk of extinction caused by rogue artificial intelligence.
Many philosophers think two things about existential risk. First, it is not only valuable, but astronomically valuable to do what we can to mitigate existential risk. After all, the future may hold unfathomable amounts of value, and existential risks threaten to reduce that value to naught. Call this the astronomical value thesis.
Second, increasingly many philosophers hold that humanity faces high levels of existential risk. In his bestselling book, The Precipice, Toby Ord (2020) puts the risk of existential catastrophe by 2100 at one in six: Russian roulette. Attendees at an existential risk conference at Oxford put existential risk by 2100 at nearly one in five (Sandberg and Bostrom 2008). And the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees (2003), puts the risk of civilizational collapse by 2100 at fifty-fifty: a coinflip. Let existential risk pessimism be the claim that per-century levels of existential risk are very high.
Surely the following is an obvious truth: existential risk pessimism supports the astronomical value thesis. If we know anything about risks, it is that it is more important to mitigate large risks than it is to mitigate small risks. This means that defenders of the astronomical value thesis should be pessimists, aiming to convince us that humanity’s situation is dire, and opponents should be optimists, aiming to convince us that things really are not so bad.
In my paper, I argue that every word in the previous paragraph is false. At best, existential risk pessimism has no bearing on the astronomical value thesis. Across a range of modelling assumptions, matters are worse than this: existential risk pessimism strongly reduces the value of existential risk mitigation, often strongly enough to scuttle the astronomical value thesis singlehandedly. (See end notes for examples, and see the full paper for further details).
In the full paper, I explore a range of models and argue that there is only one viable way to reconcile existential risk pessimism with the astronomical value thesis. This is the time of perils hypothesis on which levels of existential risk are high now, but will soon drop to a permanently low level if only we survive the next few perilous centuries. However, I argue, the time of perils hypothesis is unlikely to be true, so there is likely an enduring tension between existential risk pessimism and the astronomical value thesis.
This tension has important philosophical implications. First, it means that unless more is said, many parties to debates about existential risk may have been arguing on behalf of their opponents. To many, it has seemed that a good way to support the moral importance of existential risk mitigation is to make alarmist predictions about the levels of existential risk facing humanity today, and that a good way to oppose the moral importance of existential risk mitigation is to argue that existential risk is in fact much lower than alarmists claim. However, unless more is said, matters are exactly the reverse: arguing that existential risk is high strongly reduces the value of existential risk mitigation, whereas arguing that existential risk is low strongly increases the value of existential risk mitigation.
Second, there has been a wave of recent support for longtermism, the doctrine that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. When pressed to recommend concrete actions we can take to improve the long-term future of humanity, longtermists often point to existential risk mitigation. By the astronomical value thesis, longtermists hold, existential risk mitigation is very important. But this paper suggests an important qualification, since many longtermists are also pessimists about existential risk. As we have seen, existential risk pessimism may well be incompatible with the astronomical value thesis, in which case the value of existential risk mitigation may be too low to provide good support for longtermism.
The core modelling claim of the paper is that (1) at best, existential risk pessimism is irrelevant to the astronomical value thesis, and that (2) in most cases existential risk pessimism tells strongly against the astronomical value thesis. While full technical details are contained in the main paper, here are some models to illustrate claims (1) and (2).
On (1): To illustrate the best case, suppose that humanity faces a constant level of risk r per century. Suppose also that each century of existence has constant value v, if only we live to reach it. And suppose that all existential catastrophes lead to human extinction, so that no value will be realized after catastrophe. Then, it can be shown that the value of reducing in our century by some fraction f is f*v. In this model, pessimism has no bearing on the astronomical value thesis, since the starting level r of existential risk does not affect the value of existential risk mitigation. Moreover, the value of existential risk reduction is capped at v, the value of a single century of human life. Nothing to sneeze at, but hardly astronomical.
On (2): Making the model more realistic only serves to heighten the tension between pessimism and the astronomical value thesis. For example, suppose that centuries grow linearly in value over time, so that if this century has value v, the next century has value 2v, then 3v and so on. Keep the other modelling assumptions the same. Now, it can be shown that the value of reducing existential risk in our century by some fraction f is fv/r.
In this model, pessimism tells against the astronomical value thesis: if you think that existential risk is now 100 times greater than I think it is, you should be 100 times less enthusiastic about existential risk mitigation. Moreover, the value of existential risk reduction is capped at v/r. For the optimist, this quantity may be quite large, but not so for the pessimist. For example, if we estimate per-century risk r at 20%, then the value of existential risk is capped at five times the value of a single century – again, nothing to sneeze at, but not yet astronomical.
Bostrom, Nick, “Existential risk prevention as global priority,” Global Policy 4.1 (2013): 15-31.
Ord, Toby, The precipice (NY: Bloomsbury, 2020).
Parfit, Derek, Reasons and persons (Oxford: Oxford, 1984).
Rees, Martin, Our final our (NY: Basic Books, 2003).
Sandberg, Anders and Bostrom, Nick, “Global catastrophic risks survey,” Technical Report 2008-1 (2008), Future of Humanity Institute.
Cindy Campos reads the book "Stay Safe" to one of her sons in Dallas.
After more than 26 years of dedicated service to The Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose will be stepping down from his role as Executive Director to focus on The Clock of the Long Now, along with his research into the world’s longest-lived organizations. He will continue to serve on the Foundation’s Board of Directors.
For the past quarter century, Alexander Rose – known to his friends and colleagues simply as Zander – has been the engine behind so much of Long Now’s work. Under his leadership, The Long Now Foundation has gone from a fledgling nonprofit to a living, thriving organization, with a vibrant membership program, and twenty years of thought-provoking Talks. He also created The Interval, our combination cocktail bar, cafe, and gathering space in Fort Mason, San Francisco and is an active steward of The Clock of the Long Now.
Zander’s approach to guiding the Foundation has impacted every single one of us at Long Now. In order to properly commemorate his time here, we talked to the people he worked most closely with among Long Now’s staff, Board of Directors, and associates to paint a whole picture of Zander — as Long Now’s leader, but also as a friend and dedicated member of our community.
When The Long Now Foundation was still in a primordial state in the midst of the 01990s, its co-founders Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno ran the show. But as the Foundation grew and began to get to work on its core projects, it quickly became clear that Long Now needed a dedicated employee to manage The Clock and The Library. Stewart immediately sought out Zander, who he had known since Zander was just a kid in the junkyards and dockyards of Sausalito, California. Stewart served as “adult supervision” to paintball games and other adventures on the Sausalito waterfront, and to Stewart, Zander’s qualities as a “natural born leader” were clear from a young age. Kevin Kelly, another founding board member and denizen of the Sausalito waterfront, agreed, noting that even at a young age Zander was a tinkerer and skilled paintball tactician, “immediately trying to improve” the crude early paintball equipment and using it to “crush” Kevin, Stewart, and all other challengers.
When Stewart reached out to Zander more than a decade later, Zander, by then a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon who was looking for work in the field of industrial design, was at first uncertain. As recounted in Whole Earth, John Markoff’s 02022 biography of Stewart Brand, Stewart also helped Zander get job interviews with a number of companies from the contemporary crop of San Francisco Bay Area technology startups. Yet even as he pursued those interviews, Zander couldn’t help but be captivated by the promise Long Now’s Clock and Library projects offered, even in a nascent form.
In the end, his home would be The Long Now Foundation, becoming the organization’s first full time employee and a general project manager, creative leader, and jack-of-all-trades in the Foundation’s early operations. From his first meeting with Zander, Danny Hillis was impressed by his “very practical sense of building things and getting them to work.”
The two would work closely together for years on the preliminary design and prototyping of The Clock of the Long Now. Zander provided a key understanding of, in Danny’s words, the “poetry and the philosophy of the Clock” from the very start. He was able to balance The Clock’s dual nature, holding it as “a machine to be engineered but, on the other hand, a story to be told.”
One early Clock design moment where Zander’s sensibility shone through was in the design of the Clock’s face. In Danny’s recollection, he brought a rough sketch of the astronomical lines he wanted depicted on the Clock’s face to Zander, who proceeded to turn it into the iconic rete design that still serves as part of Long Now’s brand to this day.
For the last few years of the 01990s, Danny, Zander, and a small team of collaborators worked tirelessly to get the prototype ready for their “very hard deadline”: New Years Eve 01999. Without Zander, Danny told us, they wouldn’t have made it:
“I brought my whole family up there and everyone at Long Now was gathered in the Presidio, where we were sharing a space with the Internet Archive. We had finally got all the pieces put together, but when we got them together, we realized that there was a bug in the direction of rotation of one shaft and that it was going to, when it hit the millennium, go from saying, oh, 01999 to 01998 instead of 02000 — the wrong direction.”
“So, there were hours to go before New Year's Day and we had been working on it and I had been traveling and I just said, ‘oh, well this is just kind of hopeless.’ And I actually fell asleep at that point because I was thinking ‘I don't know what's gonna happen, but I am exhausted.’ So I fell asleep. But then Zander figured it out. He realized that we could do it by just remachining one part and so he drove across to Sausalito. And by the time I woke up, Zander had remachined the part. And so when I actually came to midnight it was all put together and sure enough, at midnight it ticked forward and the dial clicked to the year 02000 and the beautiful chime that Zander had chosen, this beautiful Zen bowl chime rang twice. And so the clock chimed in the year 02000 with two bongs in perfect order.”
Zander’s work at Long Now, even in those early days, was not limited to The Clock. The Foundation’s core project has always involved building a cultural institution to deepen our understanding of long-term thinking in parallel to the Clock, and Zander dove into that cause with full commitment.
Along with a dedicated core of early colleagues, Zander helped develop a diverse set of projects that, in their ways, would help foster long-term thinking in the world. These projects included the Rosetta Project, a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers that aims to preserve the world’s languages using long-term archival devices like microscopically etched disks, and Long Bets, our initiative for long-term predictions and wagers for charity.
Zander didn’t just help get these projects started; he has kept them running for decades as well. Andrew Warner, who has worked as a project manager in Long Now’s programs team for the last decade, says that Zander has “basically done every job at Long Now at some point,” from Clock designer to project manager to maintenance man. Earlier this year, Zander repaired a damaged hot water heater at the Long Now offices the same day he departed on a multi-week research trip on long-lived institutions in India. Throughout all those roles, Zander has maintained his unique sensibility and perspective on leadership. Former Long Now Director of Strategy Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes this perspective as a certain “pragmatism” that “does not suffer needless philosophizing.” Long-time Long Now Director of Programs Danielle Engelman cites Zander’s “clear decision-making process after weighing key options & opportunities” as having “kept Long Now's projects and programs moving forward at a pace that belied the small team working on them in the beginning.”
Over the years, Zander has also taken a lead role in one of Long Now's longest-running projects: our speaker series. Since 02020, Zander has acted as the host and co-curator for Long Now's main talk series, bringing together perspectives on long-term thinking from everyone from science fiction authors and artists to scientists, sociologists, and political leaders.
These projects, along with The Clock, helped build a mythos around the Foundation over the years. With this cultivated mythos came interest from the broader culture, with many around the world expressing interest in becoming more involved with Long Now’s work. In response, Zander worked to establish Long Now’s membership program in 02007. According to Danny Hillis, “he really led the idea of the membership program and supported Long Now members. And I think that the original board didn’t really see the potential of that the way that Zander did, but we trusted his intuition on that.”
As Long Now entered its adolescence as an organization, Zander began to research the world’s longest-lasting institutions — groups that had lasted for more than a millennium from businesses to religious orders. This project would later become Long Now's Organizational Continuity Project.
As he studied the records of these organizations, he began to notice a particular, unexpected commonality: across continents and cultural contexts, many of the longest-lived institutions were those that served and produced alcohol, from German breweries to Japanese Sake Houses.
For Zander, the obvious corollary to this finding was to open up a cocktail bar. At first, Long Now’s Board of Directors was skeptical. Running a bar is complicated, and a task far from the core competencies of Long Now at the time. As Andrew Warner put it, “Opening a successful bar is really hard and people didn't really ‘get it’ until it was done.”
But Long Now collectively put their trust in Zander, and he delivered. The Interval, which opened in 02013 after an extensive crowdfunding campaign was “pure Alexander,” per Stewart, with Zander’s fingerprint on everything: its “invention, funding, and peerless delivery.” Danny noted that Zander was especially adept at “getting all the permissions for getting things to happen at Fort Mason,” requiring Zander to use his “political finesse” to navigate the bureaucratic structures of working on federal property.
The Interval, which took the former space of Long Now’s museum and offices and turned it into a world-class cocktail bar, café, and gathering place, was thoroughly shaped by Zander’s influence. As Andrew recounted to us, he even “took the first doorman shift” for the bar’s opening day. Yet perhaps nothing about The Interval’s design speaks to Zander’s unique perspective more than the bar’s Gin Robot. As Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes it, “the gin robot at The Interval is the one thing I associate with Zander alone. It’s quintessentially his. It makes billions of gins. It lights up. The lights change color. The only ways it could be more Zandery would involve pyrotechnics.”
Over the past decade, The Interval has become more than just a place to get expertly-crafted cocktails and view the collection of Long Now’s Manual for Civilization. Under Zander’s supervision, the bar has become a place to tell — and to continue — Long Now’s story, a headquarters with a mythos all its own.
Zander’s time at Long Now did not, of course, keep him confined to our offices in Fort Mason in San Francisco. In Long Now’s early days, he traveled extensively with Danny, Stewart, and other board members to explore sites in the American southwest and beyond to find an eventual home for The Clock of The Long Now. As part of that process, Zander became an accomplished rock climber and cave explorer, venturing hundreds of feet into the depths of caves in Texas or mountains in Arizona.
Eventually, Long Now landed on a site at Mount Washington, on the border between Nevada and Utah in the Great Basin, as a likely choice for The Clock. Zander served as a de facto leader for the Long Now team as they explored the many crags and crevices of the mountain. As Danny recounted, “in dangerous situations it's always good to have somebody in charge who's making the decisions and Zander was the one to do that.”
After years of exploration of Mount Washington, Zander and the rest of the team thought they had found nearly all of the useful approaches and pathways within. Yet one particular entrance still eluded them. Inspired by the Siq, a narrow, shaft-like gorge that serves as the grand main entrance to the classical Nabatean city of Petra, Danny and Stewart had imagined a similar pathway as the main approach to The Clock. For years, they searched for it to no avail, until June 21, 02003.
On that day, Zander found a certain opening in what first seemed to Stewart and Danny, his travel companions, to be a “sheer cliff” face on the west side of the mountain. Zander found his way through that passage, a Class 4 crevice, ascending 600 feet alone. “Henceforth,” Stewart told Long Now, “it is known as Zander’s Siq.”
Once the potential sites for The Clock were identified, Zander’s travels did not stop. Instead, he took on a role as a kind of international ambassador for Long Now and for long-term thinking broadly. Those travels have taken him everywhere from the Svalbard seed bank and the far reaches of Siberia to the Hoover Dam, the 1400-year-old Ise Shrine in Japan, and the ancient stepwells of India.
Danny, who accompanied Zander on an early trip to Japan for the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, which has occurred every 20 years since 00692 CE, recounted that the two of them had been two of the few westerners invited to the rededication ceremony, and the “amazingly moving” feeling of being there with Zander. Afterwards, the Long Now traveling party went to one of the area’s “bottle keep” bars, where patrons can leave part of a liquor bottle reserved for future use for an indefinite period of time. Zander explained to the bartender that Long Now would be returning to the bar in twenty years — in time for the next rebuilding of the shrine. While the bartender was at first skeptical, Zander managed to convince him that they’d actually be back — spreading the word about Long Now along the way. That encounter also ended up inspiring Zander to create The Interval’s own bottle keep system, which can, of course, be used more frequently than once every two decades.
While 02023 marks the end of Zander’s time as Long Now’s Executive Director, his work with us is far from over. He will continue his work on The Clock of the Long Now as its installation continues. He will also continue to work on the Organizational Continuity Project, discovering the lessons behind the world’s long-lived institutions and pulling these lessons into a first of its kind book. He will also continue to be a dedicated member of Long Now’s community, a vital part of the culture that he has fostered over the last quarter century as we go into our next quarter century. Thank you, Zander.
Just a few years ago, the case for buying a smartwatch was unclear. The market wasn't as saturated as it is today, and features were more limited. Today, the wearable world is filled with various high-quality options, and a few key players, like the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch and Fitbit Versa, have muscled their way to the front of the pack with their smart features. Chances are, if you’re reading this guide, you’ve probably already decided that it’s time to upgrade whatever's on your wrist - be it a standard timepiece or an aging smartwatch. Regardless of which category you fall into, the list of factors you’ll want to consider before deciding which is the best smartwatch for you to buy is a long one, and we'll help you make sense of it.
Apple Watches only work with iPhones, while Wear OS devices play nice with both iOS and Android phones. Smartwatches made by Samsung, Garmin, Fitbit and others are also compatible with Android and iOS, but you’ll need to install a companion app.
The smartwatch OS will also dictate the type and number of third-party apps you’ll have access to. Many of these aren’t useful, though, making this factor a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things.
The best smartwatches generally cost between $300 and $400. Compared to budget smartwatches, which cost between $100 and $250, these pricier devices have advanced communications, music and fitness features. They also often include perks like onboard GPS tracking, music storage and NFC, which budget devices generally don’t.
Some companies make specialized fitness watches: Those can easily run north of $500, and we’d only recommend them to serious athletes. Luxury smartwatches from brands like TAG Heuer and Hublot can also reach sky-high prices, but we wouldn’t endorse any of them. These devices can cost more than $1,000, and you’re usually paying for little more than a brand name and some needlessly exotic selection of build materials.
Battery life remains one of our biggest complaints about smartwatches, but there’s hope as of late. You can expect two full days from Apple Watches and most Wear OS devices. Watches using the Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor support extended battery modes that promise up to five days of battery life on a charge — if you’re willing to shut off most features aside from, you know, displaying the time. Snapdragon’s next-gen Wear 4100 and 4100+ processors were announced in 2020, but only a handful of devices – some of which aren’t even available yet – are using them so far. Other models can last five to seven days, but they usually have fewer features and lower-quality displays. Meanwhile, some fitness watches can last weeks on a single charge.
A few smartwatches now support faster charging, too. For example, Apple promises the Series 7 can go from zero to 80 percent power in only 45 minutes, and get to full charge in 75 minutes. The OnePlus Watch is even speedier, powering up from zero to 43 percent in just 10 minutes. (Mind you that turned out to be one of the only good things about that device.)
Any smartwatch worth considering delivers call, text and app notifications to your wrist. Call and text alerts are self explanatory, but if those mean a lot to you, consider a watch with LTE. They’re more expensive than their WiFi-only counterparts, but data connectivity allows the smartwatch to take and receive phone calls, and do the same with text messages, without your device nearby. As far as app alerts go, getting them delivered to your wrist will let you glance down to the watch face and see if you absolutely need to check your phone right now.
Activity tracking is a big reason why people turn to smartwatches. An all-purpose timepiece should function as a fitness tracker, logging your steps, calories and workouts, and most of today’s wearables have a heart rate monitor as well.
Many smartwatches' fitness features include a built-in GPS, which is useful for tracking distance for runs and bike rides. Swimmers will want something water resistant, and thankfully most all-purpose devices now can withstand at least a dunk in the pool. Some smartwatches from companies like Garmin are more fitness focused than others and tend to offer more advanced features like heart-rate-variance tracking, recovery time estimation, onboard maps and more.
Health tracking on smartwatches has also seen advances over the years. Both Apple and Fitbit devices can estimate blood oxygen levels and measure ECGs. But the more affordable the smartwatch, the less likely it is that it has these kinds of in-depth health tracking features; if collecting that type of data is important to you, you’ll have to pay for the privilege.
Your watch can not only track your morning runs but also play music while you’re exercising. Many smartwatches let you save your music locally, so you can connect wireless earbuds and listen to tunes without bringing your phone. Those that don’t have onboard storage for music usually have on-watch music controls, so you can control playback without whipping out your phone. And if your watch has LTE, local saving isn’t required — you’ll be able to stream music directly from the watch to your paired earbuds.
Most flagship smartwatches today have some an always-on display - some have it on by default while others let you enable it via tweaked settings. This smart feature allows you to glance down at your watch to check the time and any other information you’ve set it to show on its watchface without lifting your wrist. This will no doubt affect your device’s battery life, but thankfully most always-on modes dim the display’s brightness so it’s not running at its peak unnecessarily. Cheaper devices won’t have this feature; instead, their screens will automatically turn off to conserve battery life and you’ll have to intentionally check your watch to turn on the display again.
Many smartwatches have NFC, letting you pay for things without your wallet. After saving your credit or debit card information, you can hold your smartwatch up to an NFC reader to pay for a cup of coffee on your way home from a run. Keep in mind that different watches use different payment systems: Apple Watches use Apple Pay, Wear OS devices use Google Pay, Samsung devices use Samsung Pay and so forth.
Apple Pay is one of the most popular NFC payment systems, with support for multiple banks and credit cards in 72 different countries, while Samsung and Google Pay work in fewer regions. It’s also important to note that both NFC payment support varies by device as well for both Samsung and Google’s systems.
The Apple Watch has evolved into one of the best wearables on the market since its debut in 2015. It’s the best smartwatch for iPhone users, and we wouldn’t judge you for switching to an iPhone just to be able to use an Apple Watch. The latest model, Apple Watch Series 8, has solid fitness-tracking features that will satisfy the needs of beginners and serious athletes alike. It also detects if you’ve been in a car crash, can carry out electrocardiogram (ECG) tests and measures blood oxygen levels. Plus, this Apple smartwatch offers NFC, onboard music storage and many useful apps as well as a variety of ways to respond to messages.
There aren't a ton of differences between the Series 8 and the Series 7 that came before it. The design is largely unchanged, and while the Apple Watch Series 8 runs on a newer S8 SiP, it didn't feel dramatically faster in our testing. It lasted a little bit longer, and we were impressed by the new low-power mode, which kept the watch going for an additional two hours after already being down to 20 percent battery life.
There are two other options now at the opposite ends of the spectrum. The new Apple Watch Ultra is probably overkill for most people, but it has a ton of extra features like extra waterproofing to track diving, an even more accurate GPS and the biggest battery of any Apple Watch to date. Apple designed it for the most outdoorsy among us, but for your average person, it likely has more features than they'd ever need.
The $250 Apple Watch SE, on the other hand, is less feature-rich than the Series 8, but it will probably suffice for most people. We actually regard the Watch SE as the best smartwatch option for first-time buyers, or people on stricter budgets. You’ll get all the core Apple Watch features as well as things like fall and crash detection, noise monitoring and emergency SOS, but you’ll have to do without more advanced hardware perks like an always-on display, a blood oxygen sensor, an ECG monitor and a skin temperature sensor.
Buy Apple Watch Ultra at Amazon - $799Buy Apple Watch SE at Amazon - $249Dropping $400 on a smartwatch isn’t feasible for everyone, which is why we recommend the Fitbit Versa 2 as the best sub-$200 option. It’s our favorite budget watch because it offers a bunch of features at a great price. You get all of these essentials: Fitbit’s solid exercise-tracking abilities (including auto-workout detection), sleep tracking, water resistance, connected GPS, blood oxygen (SpO2) tracking and a six-day battery life. It also supports Fitbit Pay using NFC and it has built-in Amazon Alexa for voice commands. While the Versa 2 typically costs $150, we’ve seen it for as low as $100.
Samsung may not have brought many upgrades to the latest version of its popular Galaxy Watch, but that doesn't mean the Watch 5 isn't still the best smartwatch for Android users. Improvements like a more durable screen and refined curvature don't sound exciting, but they make the Watch 5 more resilient and reliable. Plus, the Galaxy Watch offers the most comprehensive fitness and health tracking, including body composition analysis, on Wear OS, and the company added a sleep coaching feature this year that is meant to help guide you towards better rest.
If you don't mind oversized watches, consider the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. It's more expensive at $450, but comes with a larger 45mm titanium case, a more durable screen and a larger battery. Though Samsung markets this Android smartwatch as an outdoor-oriented device, you're better off thinking of it as a big timepiece that lasts longer than the standard model. It has all the same smartwatch features as the 40mm and 44mm versions, except it supports the GPX route format for workouts so you can get turn-by-turn directions while you hike and bike.
All three watches are also water-resistant so they can track swims or survive a sudden storm, and last more than a day (without the Always On Display enabled). They also run Wear OS 3.5, which is so similar to Samsung's previous Tizen OS that longtime wearers won't need to worry about adjusting to a new system. Ultimately, the Galaxy Watch 5 series is a capable, well-rounded set of smartwatches that will serve most Android users well.
Yes, there are still companies out there trying to make “fashionable” smartwatches. Back when wearables were novel and generally ugly, brands like Fossil, Michael Kors and Skagen found their niche in stylish smartwatches that took cues from analog timepieces. You also have the option to pick up a “hybrid” smartwatch from companies like Withings and Garmin – these devices look like standard wrist watches but incorporate some limited functionality like activity tracking and heart rate monitoring. They remain good options if you prefer that look, but thankfully, wearables made by Apple, Samsung, Fitbit and others have gotten much more attractive over the past few years.
Ultimately, the only thing you can’t change after you buy a smartwatch is its case design. If you’re not into the Apple Watch’s squared-off corners, all of Samsung’s smartwatches have round cases that look a little more like a traditional watch. Most wearables are offered in a choice of colors and you can pay extra for premium materials like stainless steel. Once you decide on a case, your band options are endless – there are dozens of first- and third-party watch straps available for most major smartwatches, allowing you to change up your look whenever you please.
Cherlynn Low contributed to this guide.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-smartwatches-153013118.html?src=rss
Apple Watch Series 8
The Apple Watch Series 8 on a person's wrist, showing a paused workout tracking screen.
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Chicago mayoral candidates Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas. The race will end with a fiercely contested runoff election on April 4.
I want to get this out of my head and on to the blog because I had this idea while in conversation with Reclaim’s Pilot Irwin and Occidental College’s Jacob Alden Sargent yesterday, and after sitting on it for more than 12 hours I think it could be interesting. The idea is pretty simple: channel my best Terry Greene and talk to folks about their edtech pandemic stories, and the subsequent fallout. This is a topic that came up again and again while traveling with Brian in February, and it’s no secret the sector was hit particularly hard, and seems many are still shell-shocked professionally (not to mention the broader personal toll). This was already one of the themes I planned on writing about from the road trip given there was a tentative sense of trying to move on.
And yesterday while talking with Pilot and Jacob, the impact COVID had on Jacob’s edtech group came up once again and the stories are powerful and important. Sounds very much to me like folks are still trying to make sense of what happened. So, in that spirit, I would be interested in just talking to people about the the impact of COVID on their edtech affiliated group(s). How did it play out? What was the aftermath?
In other words, “Jim Groom, what happened?” said in my best Dr. Oblivion voice. I understand folks may want to avoid this topic like the plague (pun intended). I also understand this may be a terrible idea. What’s more, someone may already be doing it, or want to do it, and in that case go for it. But if not, and folks are interested, I would love to have some conversations with any interested parties about their edtech group’s institutional story during COVID, as well as get a sense of where they are now. Maybe I’ll have a couple of folks interested from OER23, and I would love to put together a bit of an archive to capture these stories before they get lost in oblivion.
If you're on the market for a new e-reader, Amazon's latest discounts on Kindles may have exactly what you've been looking for at a lower-than-expected price. Key among the sale items is the Kindle Paperwhite, which is down to $100. That's only $5 more than its record-low price, and it's the same price as the standard Kindle, which doesn't have as many extra features as the Paperwhite.
While we did not review the Paperwhite, we did test the Paperwhite Signature Edition, which is only different thanks to its auto-adjusting front light, higher storage capacity and its wireless charging capabilities. You should get a very similar experience going with the regular Paperwhite, and it should be a great one. The latest version of Amazon's ubiquitous e-reader has a 6.8-inch, 300 ppi glare-free screen with 17 front LEDs, including a new adjustable warm light that will make it easier to read in dark environments (and after a full day of staring at a computer screen).
The design of the Paperwhite hasn't changed drastically over the years, but Amazon has refined it. This model's screen is flush with its bezels, giving it a cleaner look, and it's also IPX8-rated, so it won't be in danger if it takes an accidental dunk in the pool or bathtub. This Paperwhite also has Audible support, so if you have audiobooks through the Amazon-owned outlet, you can listen to them directly from your Kindle as long as you have a pair of Bluetooth headphones to do so.
It's worth mentioning that the Kids version of the Paperwhite is also on sale for $110, and we sometimes recommend this model even for adults. You're getting the same hardware as the non-kids model, along with a longer warranty and a protective case. The Kids version is also touted to have no ads, but that's only if you stick to the kid-friendly UI that's preinstalled on the e-reader.
Also included in this sale is the new Kindle Scribe, which is down to a new all-time-low price of $290. The Scribe is Amazon's first jump into the e-ink tablet space, and the model on sale includes 16GB of storage and a basic pen. As a tablet, the Scribe is a basic but fairly well-executed device: there's little to no latency when writing on the display, there are a decent number of brush options to choose from and you can organize multiple notebooks pretty easily. As an e-reader, it's a little on the large size with its 10.3-inch display, but the screen is crisp and responsive and we like the wider side bezel that makes the device easier to grip.
You can't actually take notes in the margins of Kindle books on the Scribe, but you can add sticky notes to your books and jot down ideas that way. And if you like the idea of keeping your notes on the same device that holds most of your reading material, the Scribe will be a good option for you. That goes for those who have big Kindle e-book libraries, but also those who have PDFs and ePUBs they want to mark up, too, as the Scribe supports a number of different file types.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-sale-knocks-the-kindle-paperwhite-down-to-100-150513073.html?src=rss
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite
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