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Sir Donald Bradman feared a second Kerry Packer breakaway venture in the 1980s and did not blame Australian cricketers for taking big money to play in apartheid South Africa. He was no fan of Paul Keating, admired Queen Elizabeth II, and took some of his greatest pleasure late in life from watching Shane Warne in action. These insights and many more are contained in a collection of more than 20 letters penned by Bradman to an English friend, the entertainer Peter Brough, and tucked away in the National Library of Australia. Sir Donald Bradman wrote letters late in life almost as prolifically as he’d made runs in his younger years. Credit: Fairfax Media Written between 1984 and 1998, the letters capture Bradman’s complicated relationship with fame and his often trenchant views on sport and politics at home and abroad. Peter Brough was an English entertainer, specialising in a ventriloquist act that was popular on radio during the 1950s in the UK. Bradman met Peter Brough through his father Arthur during tours of England in the 1930s, and the younger men struck up a friendship that continued through correspondence over many years. Peter Brough died in 1999, Bradman in 2001. The letters were donated to the NLA by Peter Brough’s family. ‘The cricket world has been in a ferment’ In the winter of 1985, Bradman held grave concerns for the future of the game amid the loss of 14 top Australian players to “rebel” tours of South Africa. There were parallel revelations that Kerry Packer was signing up players himself to protect his investment in the game in Australia. Former Australian captain Kim Hughes (left) at the Wanderers Ground in Johannesburg in 1985 while playing on a rebel tour of South Africa organised by Ali Bacher. Credit: AP There was no Packer breakaway: the terms he had agreed with Bradman in 1979 were too generous for that. And it was economic sanctions, rather than the sporting kind, that brought a swift end to apartheid in the late 1980s. Bradman was buoyed by South Africa’s readmission.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers, meet your latest lobbyists: online influencers from TikTok. The platform is once again bringing influencers to Washington, this time to lobby members of Congress to reject a fast-moving bill that would force TikTok's Beijing-based parent company to sell or be banned in the United States. On Tuesday, some influencers began a two-day advocacy event in support of TikTok, which arranged their trip ahead of a House floor vote on the legislation on Wednesday. But unlike a similar lobbying event the company put together last March when talks of a TikTok ban reached a fever pitch, this year’s effort appeared more rushed as the company scrambles to counter the legislation, which advanced rapidly on Capitol Hill. Summer Lucille, a TikTok content creator with 1.4 million followers who is visiting Washington this week, said if TikTok is banned, she “don’t know what it will do” to her business, a plus-sized boutique in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It will be devastating,” Lucille said in an interview arranged by the platform. In an unusual showing of bipartisanship, a House panel unanimously approved the measure last week. President Joe Biden has said he will sign the legislation if lawmakers pass it. But it’s unclear what will happen in the Senate, where several bills aimed at banning TikTok have stalled. The legislation faces other roadblocks. Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump, who holds sway over both House and Senate Republicans, has voiced opposition to the bill, saying it would empower Meta-owned Facebook, which he continues to lambast over his 2020 election loss. The bill also faces pushback from some progressive lawmakers in the House as well as civil liberties groups who argue it infringes on the First Amendment. TikTok could be banned if ByteDance, the parent company, doesn’t sell its stakes in the platform and other applications it owns within six months of the bill’s enactment. The fight over the platform takes place as U.S.-China relations have shifted to that of strategic rivalry, especially in areas such as advanced technologies and data security, seen as essential to each country’s economic prowess and national security. The shift, which started during the Trump years and has continued under Biden, has placed restrictions on export of advanced technologies and outflow of U.S. monies to China, as well as access to the U.S. market by certain Chinese businesses. The Biden administration also has cited human rights concerns in blacklisting a number of Chinese companies accused of assisting the state surveillance campaign against ethnic minorities. TikTok isn’t short on lobbyists. Its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance has a strong lobbying apparatus in Washington that includes dozens of lobbyists from well-known consulting and legal firms as well as influential insiders, such as former members of Congress and ex-aides to powerful lawmakers, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will also be in Washington this week and plans to meet with lawmakers, according to a company spokesperson who said Chew’s visit was previously scheduled. But influencers, who have big followings on social media and can share personal stories of how the platform boosted their businesses — or simply gave them a voice — are still perhaps one of the most powerful tools the company has in its arsenal. A TikTok spokesperson said dozens of influencers will attend the two-day event, including some who came last year. The spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about how many new people would be attending this year’s lobbying blitz. The company is briefing them ahead of meetings with their representatives and media interviews. Lucille, who runs the boutique in North Carolina, says has seen a substantial surge in revenue because of her TikTok page. The 34-year-old began making TikTok content focusing on plus-sized fashion in March 2022, more than a decade after she started her business. She quickly amassed thousands of followers after posting a nine-second video about her boutique. Because of her popularity on the platform, her business has more online exposure and customers, some of whom have visited from as far as Europe. She says she also routinely hears from followers who are finding support through her content about fashion and confidence. JT Laybourne, an influencer who also came to Washington, said he joined TikTok in early 2019 after getting some negative comments on videos he posted on Instagram while singing in the car with his children. Laybourne, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, said he was attracted to the short-form video platform because it was easy to create videos that contained music. Like Lucille, he quickly gained traction on the app. He says he also received more support from TikTok users, who reacted positively to content he produced on love and positivity. Laybourne says the community he built on the platform rallied around his family when he had to undergo heart surgery in 2020. Following the surgery, he said he used the platform to help raise $1 million for the American Heart Association in less than two years. His family now run an apparel company that gets most of its traffic from TikTok. “I will fight tooth-and-nail for this app,” he said. But whether the opposition the company is mounting through lobbyists or influencers will be enough to derail the bill is yet to be seen. On Tuesday, House lawmakers received a briefing on national security concerns regarding TikTok from the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence officials. AP Journalist Didi Tang contributed to this report. This story was originally published on March 12, 2024. It was updated on December 23, 2024 to clarify a quote by TikTok content creator Summer Lucille.ANDOVER, Mass. , Dec. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- TransMedics Group, Inc. ("TransMedics") (Nasdaq: TMDX ), a medical technology company that is transforming organ transplant therapy for patients with end-stage lung, heart, and liver failure, today announced that members of the management team will present at the upcoming 43 rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. The presentation will take place on Monday, January 13, 2025 , at 2:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time / 5:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time . Event: 43 rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference Date: Monday, January 13, 2025 Time: 2:15 p.m. PST A live and archived webcast of the presentation will be available on the "Investors" section of the TransMedics website at https://investors.transmedics.com/ . The Company's standard investor presentation is also available through this link. About TransMedics Group, Inc. TransMedics is the world's leader in portable extracorporeal warm perfusion and assessment of donor organs for transplantation. Headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts , the company was founded to address the unmet need for more and better organs for transplantation and has developed technologies to preserve organ quality, assess organ viability prior to transplant, and potentially increase the utilization of donor organs for the treatment of end-stage heart, lung, and liver failure. Investor Contact: Brian Johnston Laine Morgan 332-895-3222 [email protected] SOURCE TransMedics Group, Inc.

Harris Dickinson was nervous to approach Nicole Kidman . This would not necessarily be notable under normal circumstances, but the English actor had already been cast to star opposite her in the erotic drama “Babygirl,” as the intern who initiates an affair with Kidman's buttoned-up CEO . They’d had a zoom with the writer-director Halina Reijn, who was excited by their playful banter and sure that Dickinson would hold his own. And yet when he found himself at the same event as Kidman, shyness took over. He admitted as much to Margaret Qualley , who took things into her own hands and introduced them. “She helped me break the ice a bit,” Dickinson said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. On set would be an entirely different story. Dickinson might not be nearly as “puckishly audacious” as his character Samuel but in the making of “Babygirl,” he, Kidman and Reijn had no choice but to dive fearlessly into this exploration of sexual power dynamics, going to intimate, awkward, exhilarating and meme-able places. It’s made the film, in theaters Christmas Day, one of the year’s must-sees. “There was an unspoken thing that we adhered to,” Dickinson said. “We weren’t getting to know each other’s personal lives. When we were working and we were the characters, we didn’t veer away from the material. I never tried to attach all of the history of Nicole Kidman. Otherwise it probably would have been a bit of a mess.” His is a performance that reconfirms what many in the film world have suspected since his debut seven years ago as a Brooklyn tough questioning his sexuality in Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats”: Dickinson is one of the most exciting young talents around. Dickinson, 28, grew up in Leytonstone, in East London — the same neck of the woods as Alfred Hitchcock. Cinema was in his life, whether it was Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films at the local multiplex or venturing into town to see the more social realist films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. “Working class cinema interested me,” he said. “People around me that represented my world.” Appropriately, his entry into making art started behind the camera, with a comedy web series he made as a kid, which he now describes as “really bad spoofs” of films and shows of the time. But things started to really click when he began acting in the local theater. “I remember feeling invigorated by it and accepted,” he said. “I felt myself for the first time and felt able to express myself in a way where I didn’t feel vulnerable and I felt alive and ignited by something.” At around 17, someone suggested that he should give acting a try professionally. He hadn’t even fully understood that it was a career possibility, but he started auditioning. At 20, he was cast in “Beach Rats” and, he said, just “kept going.” Since then, he’s gotten a wide range of opportunities in films both big, including “The King’s Man,” and small. He’s captivated as a male model in Ruben Östlund’s Cannes-winning “Triangle of Sadness,” an estranged father to a 12-year-old in Charlotte Regan’s “Scrapper,” an actor bringing an ex-boyfriend to life in Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir Part II,” the charismatic, tragic wrestler David Von Erich in Sean Durkin’s “The Iron Claw” and a soldier in Steve McQueen’s “Blitz.” But “Babygirl” would present new challenges and opportunities with a character who’s almost impossible to define. “He was confusing in a really interesting way. There wasn’t loads of specificity to it, which I enjoyed because it was a bit of a challenge to sort of pinpoint exactly what it was that drove him and made him tick,” Dickinson said. “There was a directness that unlocked a lot for me, like a fearlessness with the way he spoke, or a social unawareness in a way — like not fully realizing what he’s saying is affecting someone in a certain way. But I didn’t make too many rules for him.” Part of the allure of the film is the ever-shifting power dynamics between the two characters, which could change over the course of a scene. As Reijn said, “It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you suppress your own desires.” She was especially in awe of Dickinson's ability to make everything feel improvised and the fact that he could look like a 12-year-old boy in one shot and a confident 45-year-old man in the next. Since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, the film has led to some surprisingly direct conversations with audiences spanning generations. But that, Dickinson understood, was what Reijn wanted. “She really wanted to show the ugliness and the awkwardness of these things, of these relationships and sex,” he said. “That sort of fumbly version and the performative version of it is way more interesting, to me at least, than the kind of fantasized, romanticized, sexy thing that we’ve seen a lot.” Dickinson recently stepped behind the camera again, directing his first feature film under the banner of his newly formed production company. Set against the backdrop of homelessness in London, “Dream Space” is about a drifter trying to assimilate and understand his cyclical behavior. The film, which wrapped earlier this year, has given him a heightened appreciation for just how many people are indispensable in the making of a film. He’s also started to understand that “acting is just being able to relax.” “When you’re relaxed, you can do stuff that is truthful,” he said. “That only happens if you’ve got good people around you: The director that creates the good environment. The intimacy coordinator facilitating a safe space. A coworker in Nicole encouraging that kind of bravery and performance with what she’s doing.” Dickinson did eventually get to the point where he managed to ask Kidman questions about working with Stanley Kubrick and Lars Von Trier. But he also kept one shattering possibility between himself and his director. “There is a world in which Samuel doesn’t even exist. He’s just a sort of a device or a figment for her own story. And I like that because it kind of means you can take the character into a very unrealistic realm at times and be almost like a deity in the story,” Dickinson said. “We didn’t talk about it with Nicole.”

Millions of people now have access to artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. After Apple Intelligence integrated ChatGPT into its platform, anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Mac can now ask complex questions without going to a separate app or website. This long-awaited integration may spark questions like, how does ChatGPT work? What are chatbots? ChatGPT, operated by OpenAI, is an artificial intelligence chatbot like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, or Meta AI. These chatbots use a type of AI called a “large language model.” They understand text and generate words to sound human. “It’s almost boring now to say this,” said Daniel Dugas, an AI and robotics scientist based in Switzerland. He wrote a visualized explanation of earlier AI GPT models. “The fact that I can talk to my computer and have a semi-coherent conversation is — it’s just unbelievable,” “As an engineer, I immediately was pushed to the direction of, OK, how do we make something like intelligence?” Dugas said. While large language models may seem intelligent, they essentially just predict the next word — much like a phone’s text suggestions. But it’s far more complex. How ChatGPT works Large language models are trained on vast amounts of data, ranging from books to social media to much of the internet. An LLM maps out word relationships similar to the way the human brain does. Take the sentence, “Don’t put all your eggs in one.” Once you enter it into an LLM and hit send, a lot of things happen in repetition — in a fraction of a second. Step One: Tokenization and Encoding Imagine the process like an assembly line. The first step on the assembly line is to turn the sentence into something computers can definitely understand: numbers. RELATED STORY | How deepfake technology works The sentence, “Don’t put all your eggs in one” is broken down into what’s called “token IDs” that vary depending on the AI model. The sentence now becomes [91418, 3006, 722, 634, 27226, 306, 1001] You can test out tokenization using OpenAI’s tool . Step Two: Embedding Next, the resulting vector of numbers is expanded based on context. For example, the word “egg” has a lot of different meanings and connotations. If you had to map out the word mathematically, one way is to plot it onto a graph between “chicken” and “young.” On a two-dimensional graph, that’s simple. But “egg” has so many different meanings. “Egg” can be a part of an idiom, a breakfast ingredient, something associated with Easter, or a shape. Graphing this out would require multiple dimensions in a never-ending vector. We can’t imagine this, but a computer can compute it. With the sentence “Don’t put all your eggs in one” the word egg might be [27226]. With the sentence “I ate an egg for breakfast” the word egg might be [16102]. It all depends on context. These contextual adjustments are based on all the training and the neural network of word relationships, and the changes are embedded into the vector. Step Three: Transformer Architecture The vector moves down the assembly line into a “transformer architecture.” It is a series of layers that make even more adjustments to the vector of numbers. Based on the previous training, the AI has learned and decided what words carry more weight. For example, in the sentence “Don’t put all your eggs in one” the word “eggs” matters more than “one.” Adjustments to the vector of numbers occur repeatedly to make sure context and meaning are close to everything it was trained on. Step Four: Output Finally, the result goes in reverse on the assembly line to turn a vector of numbers back into a word: basket. "Don’t put all your eggs in one ... basket." Is this advanced word prediction? Is this intelligence? Are there limits? “You have papers saying, the model will never be able to create music or a model will never be able to answer a mathematical question,” Dugas said. “And they basically are crushed in the last five years.” As large language models continue to advance, it’s important to keep up with what they can do and to know how we can work with them, not for them. Even a basic understanding will help people utilize, navigate, and legislate a technology some might consider revolutionary.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Philadelphia Phillies and right-handed pitcher Joe Ross finalized a one-year contract on Monday. The 31-year-old Ross made 10 starts and 25 total appearances for the Milwaukee Brewers last season. He went 3-6 with a 3.77 ERA. Selected by the San Diego Padres in the first round of the 2011 amateur draft, the 6-foot-4 Ross has pitched in 123 career games across seven seasons with the Washington Nationals and Brewers. In his career, he has combined for a 4.19 ERA with 469 strikeouts to 170 walks. He's 29-34 with a 4.19 career ERA. Ross is the latest in an offseason of minor moves for the NL East champs. The Phillies acquired left-hander Jesús Luzardo from the Miami Marlins and signed free-agent outfielder Max Kepler to a $10 million, one-year deal. AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLBThe internet is rife with fake reviews. Will AI make it worse?Heron Therapeutics Announces Corporate Headquarters Relocation to Cary, North Carolina