Hustle culture may be the norm at tech companies in the AI era, but the work will stop tomorrow at publishing platform Medium. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine is giving the company's employees permission to take the day off to participate in tomorrow's nationwide general strike protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Activists behind the general strike are calling for 'no work, no school, and no shopping' amid a push to defund ICE, which has escalated raids in U.S. cities, killing several people, including two U.S. citizens earlier this month in Minneapolis. 'Whether or not you want to fully take the day away from work, or do a partial work day, or orient your work towards something that feels aligned to the goals of the strike, that is up to you,' he wrote in a general announcements channel. Of course, the publishing platform has an important role in helping people share news, opinions, insights, and analysis around politics, culture, and other topics. So that it can allow its employees to take the day off to protest, Stubblebine said Medium will coordinate with the necessary teams to ensure there's a plan for 'business continuity' on Friday....

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz worries that the violence in his state could produce a national rupture. 'I mean, is this a Fort Sumter'' he mused today in an interview in his office at the state capitol. The island fortification near Charleston, South Carolina, is where Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War in 1861. Now it's federal forces that are risking a breach. 'It's a physical assault,' Walz told me. 'It's an armed force that's assaulting, that's killing my constituents, my citizens.' Walz bowed out of his reelection race earlier this month. The 2024 vice-presidential candidate said that he didn't want politics to interfere with his work amid an intensifying federal probe into welfare fraud in his state. Two days later, his phone rang, and it was Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. Renee Good had been shot and killed by an ICE officer, one of thousands of federal agents deployed to Minnesota as part of what the Trump administration declared the largest immigration-enforcement operation in history. 'Get yourself prepared,' was the mayor's message, Walz recalled to me. He had understood instantly that the kind of unrest not seen since the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, could be returning to Minneapolis....

A tool that has helped to transform modern social-science research is under threat thanks to artificial intelligence. Researchers are warning that a wave of chatbots impersonating people could corrupt or invalidate the online surveys that power thousands of studies every year. They are urging the companies that run the surveys to do more to address the problem. Since the early 2000s, online surveys that allow people to participate in research studies from the comfort of their own desktops have been used in fields such as ecology, psychology, economics and politics. They have become 'essential infrastructure' of the social sciences, says Felix Chopra, a behavioural economist at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany, who uses such surveys in his research. People get paid to participate in online surveys ' anywhere from pennies to US$100 or more per hour. And an industry was created to administer the surveys and manage vast pools of potential respondents. Between 2015 and 2024, the use of online surveys in published studies increased four-fold, and with that explosion came people trying to game the system, from simply giving fake answers to deploying bots that impersonate individuals; the industry has had to build in checks and tools to root out fraud....

Washington Harbour Partners led the financing, which was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from Alpine Space Ventures, Founders Fund, Balerion Space Ventures, Fulcrum, 137 Ventures and others. The latest round is the Torrance, California-based startup's second in just over nine months, after it raised a $30 million Series A last April. It has now raised a total of over $136 million since its 2023 inception. Its funding comes amid red-hot investor interest in space tech. Global venture funding to the sector last year totaled $14.2 billion ' more than double the annual totals in 2023 and 2024 ' per Crunchbase data. Funding recipients reliably include a mix of defense tech, satellite and rocket developers, and startups finding innovative use cases for geospatial data. The company said the latest round follows 'millions in signed contracts,' including a $49.8 million contract with the Space Force to support the Satellite Control Network. The SCN, according to Northwood, is 'the critical infrastructure used for launches and early satellite operations, to track and control satellites, and to provide emergency support to tumbling and lost satellites.'...