Go, the ancient board game that China, Japan and South Korea all claim as part of their cultural heritage, is struggling to expand its global footprint because the three nations that dominate it cannot agree on something as basic as a common rulebook.

When Go was registered with the International Mind Sports Association alongside chess and bridge, organizers had to adopt the American Go Association's rules because the East Asian trio failed to reach consensus. In 2025, China's Ke Jie withdrew from a title match at a Seoul tournament after receiving repeated penalties for violating a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament. China's Go association responded by barring foreign players, most of them South Korean, from its domestic competitions.

It also doesn't help that the game's commercial appeal is fading. Japan's Nihon Ki-in, the country's main Go association, has started exploring a potential sale of its Tokyo headquarters. Young people across the region are gravitating toward chess, shogi, and video games instead.

DesScorp writes: CNBC reports that new data from the National Student Clearinghouse indicates that enrollment growth in four year degree programs is slowing down, while growth in two year and certification programs is accelerating:

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience."

Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. [...] Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft's roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft's subscription list.

American buses in cities like New York and San Francisco crawl along at about eight miles per hour -- barely faster than a brisk walk -- and one surprisingly simple fix could make them faster without requiring new infrastructure or controversial policy changes. The issue, according to a Works in Progress analysis, is that US bus stops sit far too close together.

Mean spacing in American cities is roughly 313 meters, about five stops per mile, while older cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco pack stops even tighter at 214, 223 and 248 meters respectively. European cities typically space stops at 300 to 450 meters.

Each stop costs time: passengers boarding and exiting, acceleration and deceleration, buses kneeling for wheelchairs, missed traffic light cycles. Buses spend about 20% of their operating time just stopping and starting, and since labor accounts for the majority of transit operating costs, slower buses translate directly to higher expenses.

Cities that have tried spacing stops further apart have seen results. San Francisco recorded a 4.4 to 14% increase in travel speeds by reducing from six stops per mile to two and a half. Vancouver's pilot removed a quarter of stops and cut average trip times by five minutes while saving about $500,000 annually on a single route. A McGill study found that even substantial stop consolidation reduced overall system coverage by just 1%.

Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms.

Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors.

The UK government has awarded guaranteed electricity prices to offshore wind projects totaling 8.4 GW in a bid to revive wind development, attract nearly $30 billion in private investment, and stabilize energy costs. The New York Times reports: On Wednesday, the British government said that it would provide guaranteed electricity prices for a group of wind farms off England, Scotland and Wales that would, once built, provide power for 12 million homes. The 8.4 gigawatts, a power capacity measure, that won support is the largest amount that has been achieved in an auction in Britain. The government said that these wind farms could lead to 22 billion pounds, or almost $30 billion, in private investment.

The government holds regular auctions, roughly on an annual basis. Results have been improving after a failed auction in 2023 that produced no bids from developers. The government almost doubled its original budget for the recent auction to about 1.8 billion pounds per year. To encourage renewable energy sources like offshore wind, Britain offers a price floor to provide certainty for investors. The average floor, or strike price, from the auction on Wednesday was about 91 pounds, or $122 per megawatt-hour, in 2024 prices, up about 11 percent from the last auction.

Over the past year the wholesale price for electricity in Britain was on average about 79 pounds, according to Drax Electric Insights, a market analysis website. The bulk of the planned wind farms that won price supports will be off eastern England. Support will also go to wind farms off Scotland and Wales. The British government wants at least 95 percent of the country's electricity generation to come from clean sources by 2030. Political consensus for ambitious climate goals is eroding in Britain, but the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer believes that an enormous bet on clean energy, especially offshore wind, is necessary to protect consumers from volatile fossil fuel prices.