Christopher Groskopf

There may be no group of voters who have been more alienated by Donald Trump than Hispanics. He’s described them as rapists, said they are unfit to serve as judges, kicked them out of his press conferences, and promised to deport them. Those remarks may be coming back to haunt him. Polling suggests 79% of Hispanics will vote for Hillary Clinton and early voting data indicates they are turning out in record numbers.

When the dust settles from the US election, haggard voters may be surprised to learn that other important things have been happening in the world. On October 4th, the historic Paris Agreement on climate change came into force—years sooner than expected. The international scramble to ratify the agreement quickly reflected a widespread desire to have it done before Americans could vote in a new president.

With only a few days left before Americans go to the polls, anxiety seems to be spiking. The S&P 500 experienced its ninth consecutive day of losses—something that hasn’t happened since 1980, much less immediately before an election.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re an Apple fan. You’ve got a Mac, an iPhone, an Apple TV, and at least one Airport router. You even bought that overhyped watch. If you own those five devices, and use the software that Apple provides for each, then you’ve agreed at least 30 contracts, totaling more than 100,000 words of legal documentation. That’s longer than either The Hobbit or the first Harry Potter book.

Donald Trump has made no secret that he wants to live in a less globalized world. He has spoken at length about sealing borders, coercing long-lost jobs back to the US, and punishing foreign countries for perceived economic slights. In order to pry America free from its global obligations Trump wants to throw out decades of free trade deals, and kill those under negotiation.

Apple’s product launches are notoriously secretive, but the Cupertino, California tech giant is sure to do one thing ahead of a big reveal: file trademark paperwork in Jamaica.

On the internet, everyone is within shouting distance. When you WhatsApp, Slack, or email your friends or colleagues, you probably don’t think much about the path your message follows as it wends its way from your phone to theirs.

Despite decades of growth, demand for more and faster internet connections continues to skyrocket. According to Cisco, total internet traffic for 2016 will exceed a zettabyte. (A one with 21 zeroes behind it.) That’s enough capacity to stream approximately 143 billion hours of Netflix video at Ultra HD quality.

We’re used to thinking of the internet as a place that exists apart from our physical presence in a particular country. I can send an email to someone who lives in New Zealand as easily as I can to someone next door. When I do, thousands of independent computer networks whisk my message around the globe without regard for the walls, mountains, oceans, or border fences that stand in the way. There are no import tariffs, national taxes, or customs agents to deal with. There are, it seems, no national borders on the internet.

Sluggish wage growth in the US has been been a subject of much hand-wringing in recent years. Economists have suggested all manner of reasons for this slowdown, with the post-recession focus being on slack in the labor market—specifically an excess of part-time employees and gig workers. However, new analysis from the New York Fed suggests one more fundamental explanation: Americans are getting old, exiting the labor market, and dragging wage growth measures down for everyone.

When you purchase a book from a bookstore your rights to that particular stack of paper are pretty intuitive. It becomes your personal property, not much different from a t-shirt, a diamond ring, or anything else you might carry around. You can sell your book, lend it to a friend, or toss it in the fireplace. In short, unless you’re making a copy, you can do whatever you want without asking for permission from the book’s creator.

Machine learning algorithms, such as those that power Google’s search or Apple’s Siri, learn by extracting information from large amounts of text, images, or other data. Unfortunately, research has shown that these algorithms not only learn to understand language, they also learn to replicate human biases, including implicit biases that humans aren’t even aware of.

Bored with your work? Think you’re worth more? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of July there were fewer unemployed people per job opening than at any time in the past decade. That’s bad news for employers struggling to capitalize on a rebounding economy, but could be great news for anyone out of work—or thinking about a career change.

Implicit biases are a well-documented and pernicious feature of human languages. These associations, which we’re often not even aware of, can be relatively harmless: We associate flowers with positive words and insects with negative ones, for example. But they can also encode human prejudices, such as when we associate positive words with European American names and negative words with African American ones.

Having a lazy Sunday? Love music? A group of friends spent the last few year’s worth of Sundays creating the perfect weekend-activity for you. BlokDust is a visual music-making map that runs in your browser and let’s you build your own synthesizer out of tiny musical blocks.

The Olympics may have ended, but that doesn’t mean your appetite for intense, global competition has been satisfied! Fortunately, today (Aug. 28) and tomorrow (Aug. 29) are the final days of the World Youth Scrabble Championships. Even better, they are being streamed live, on Twitch.

Germany’s economy minister Sigmar Gabriel has described negotiations between the US and the EU over the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as “failed,” the Associated Press is reporting.

As the global climate gets hotter both people and animals will have to adapt to changes in their local environments. However, while people can shed clothes or turn up the A/C, animals have fewer options to maintain the conditions they need to survive. If their home habitats change too much, they’ll be forced to migrate in search of new territory. “Migration” sounds like a simple fix, and in some cases it might be, if not for one big problem: There are, literally, a lot of things in the way.

For the first time ever, the US government has a policy requiring the release of source code for federally-funded websites, apps, and other software projects. The new rules, called the Federal Source Code policy, were announced by the White House earlier this week. They include a mandate for federal agencies to open source at least 20% of the code they develop over the next three years. The changes promise to overhaul how the government interacts with vendors on technology projects.

The global refugee crisis is getting worse. A new blog post from the Pew Research Center puts the problem in stark terms: 0.8% of the world’s population—nearly 1 out of every 100 people—are now displaced from their homes. This number includes people who have fled abroad, as well as those who are displaced within their home country. For comparison, if 0.8% of US residents were displaced, that would be roughly the population of Iowa.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is warning that the US presidential election could be rigged. His statements come on the heels of hacks into Democratic Party institutions that are believed to have been perpetrated by Russia. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier has suggested that those hackers might try to throw the election in November by hacking voting machines. While it’s not clear if Trump is intentionally conflating those two things, he certainly seems to be capitalizing on a sense that US elections are insecure.

Like many other political realignments, the UK’s vote to leave the European Union has split along generational lines. Polling before the vote showed younger voters were much more likely to support staying in the EU:

Today the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted to make Investor’s Exchange (IEX) the 13th public stock exchange in the US. You might think this decision will lead to more creative new exchanges starting up—but in fact it may signal just the opposite.

Beginning in late August, US brokers will have a new, and quite different, choice for making their trades. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today voted to allow Investor’s Exchange (IEX) to operate as a public stock exchange. It will be the first public exchange to employ techniques specifically designed to thwart manipulative strategies used by high-frequency traders.