logo
Little Traverse Conservancy makes final fundraising push toward Boyne City land acquisition

Little Traverse Conservancy makes final fundraising push toward Boyne City land acquisition

Yahoo29-04-2025
BOYNE CITY — Another plot of land could be preserved in Northern Michigan if the Little Traverse Conservancy can reach its $3 million fundraising goal by May 31.
The group is looking to acquire what's locally known as "White Mountain" — 654 acres of land in Charlevoix County overlooking Boyne City and Lake Charlevoix.
According to Emily Hughes, Chief Development Officer for the Little Traverse Conservancy, the $3 million includes the purchase price of the land and the funds necessary to care for the land — both immediately and in the future.
"We need to have a certain amount of money ready to go to be able to protect this property forever," Hughes said. "We also want to have funds to care for the property as soon as we acquire it, and also 100, 200 years down the road."
A portion of the $3 million will go towards a long-term endowment that the conservancy uses for operations and long-term care for all the properties the group owns.
The conservancy already has $2.4 million raised for the project.
If the conservancy is able to acquire the land, the anonymous lead donor group asked that the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians name the property, so the final name of the land will be in both Anishinaabemowin and English.
The additional money raised will help the group in their mission of permanently protecting the 654 acres of land, preserving the wildlife habitat and forest ecosystems, and open the land for future public enjoyment.
Hughes said if the conservancy is able to acquire the land, the group will be able to spend some time getting to know the land with the stewardship team and determining the best care and management plan for the area.
She added that once the conservancy owns the property, people are able to use it. Signage and mapping won't be up immediately, but could come in time.
More: Little Traverse Conservancy plans mix of outdoor events: See what's scheduled this spring
Subscribe: Get unlimited access to our local coverage
Hughes said the community's interest and wants will lead their decisions, so a thorough trail system could be on the property in five or 10 years, or the land could be kept as a wild property if that's what the public wants more.
What they know about the property now is that there is a lot of diversity within the wooded areas of the land, and there are a lot of two-track trails already on the property.
To learn more or to donate to the cause, visit landtrust.org or call the conservancy at (231) 347-0991.
— Contact reporter Karly Graham at kgraham@petoskeynews.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KarlyGrahamJRN.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Little Traverse Conservancy works toward White Mountain property buy in Boyne City
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Vaisala's Half Year Financial Report January–June 2025 to be published on July 25, 2025
Vaisala's Half Year Financial Report January–June 2025 to be published on July 25, 2025

Business Upturn

time2 hours ago

  • Business Upturn

Vaisala's Half Year Financial Report January–June 2025 to be published on July 25, 2025

By GlobeNewswire Published on July 7, 2025, 15:00 IST Vaisala CorporationPress release July 7, 2025, at 1:00 p.m. (EEST) Vaisala's Half Year Financial Report January–June 2025 to be published on July 25, 2025 Vaisala Corporation will publish its Half Year Financial Report January–June 2025 on Friday, July 25, 2025, at about 9:00 a.m. (Finnish time). The report will be available at The President and CEO's presentation will be published by 1:00 p.m. on the same day at Audiocast and teleconference An audiocast and a conference call for analysts, investors, and media will be held in English on the same day, starting at 1:00 p.m. (Finnish time). You can participate in the live audiocast via the following link: Questions may be presented by participating in the teleconference. You can access the teleconference by registering at the link below. After registration, you will receive an email with the dial-in numbers and a conference ID. A recording will be available at later the same day. More informationNiina Ala-Luopa +358 400 728 957, [email protected] DistributionKey media Vaisala is a global leader in measurement instruments and intelligence for climate action. We equip our customers with devices and data to improve resource efficiency, drive energy transition, and care for the safety and well-being of people and societies worldwide. With almost 90 years of innovation and expertise, we employ a team of close to 2,500 experts committed to taking every measure for the planet. Vaisala series A shares are listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki stock exchange. Disclaimer: The above press release comes to you under an arrangement with GlobeNewswire. Business Upturn takes no editorial responsibility for the same. Ahmedabad Plane Crash GlobeNewswire provides press release distribution services globally, with substantial operations in North America and Europe.

I tried 3 AI-powered scam detectors to help keep me safe online — and there's a clear winner
I tried 3 AI-powered scam detectors to help keep me safe online — and there's a clear winner

Tom's Guide

time5 hours ago

  • Tom's Guide

I tried 3 AI-powered scam detectors to help keep me safe online — and there's a clear winner

Regardless of whether it's some fine Russian women dying to meet me or a rogue document for me to read from a mysterious online bank, it seems that every day I'm inundated with scam emails, texts and phone calls. The bad news is that by using the fruits of artificial intelligence, the scams are getting increasingly sophisticated and believable with accurate design elements (rather than fuzzy images), realistic sounding English (not grammatically incorrect wording) and an overall look that is at a glance, credible. Gone are the easy to see-through Nigerian Prince scams, fake lottery winnings and offers to cash a six figure check, replaced by calls purporting to be from the IRS, texts about unpaid tolls as well as no shortage of tech support and crypto currency come-ons. Scammers are becoming a little too convincing and people worldwide are falling for them – hook, line and online sinker – according to the Netherlands-based Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA). The organization's latest 'Global State of Scams Report,' revealed that 2 billion scam victims worldwide lost over $1 trillion dollars to an ever-increasing variety of scams – a little less than 1 percent of the World Bank's global $106 trillion economic output. One of the biggest online growth industries, only those living in a cave without Internet are immune to modern day scammers, regardless of whether it's a scam farm in Myanmar, a Romanian job that doesn't exist or a Chinese pig butchering operation. Call it wishful thinking or online self-delusion, but two-thirds of the nearly 60,000 people GASA surveyed in 2024 thought they could recognize scams. Still, 74% concluded that they were the victim of an online crime; the average loss was $3,520. No surprise, bank, electronic money transfers and e-wallet transactions top the list of successful scams, because – as bank robber Willie Sutton said – 'that's where the money is.' With AI's help, scams today can feel like they're coming from all angles, including realistic looking but fake sites for banks, online payment companies and major web firms, like Amazon and PayPal. In fact, scams today seem limited only by criminal creativity, but the best defense is a good offence by using the fruits of artificial intelligence to stop them. The scam detectors I looked at come from the makers of the best antivirus software and use close to a million scams to train their models to analyze suspect imagery, text, video and overall design. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I tried them out with three typical scams, including emails purporting to be from the FBI and PayPal as well as a rogue text about unpaid tolls. They show the range of efforts to get me to go to a malicious site, open a dangerous link or supply my login credentials. The good news in the AI arms race is that these detectors use scammers' favorite tool to defeat them and create a virtuous circle. Based on machine learning techniques, the detectors use verified scams they pick up to further train, refine and speed up the detection model that looks for patterns of fraud, deception and rip-offs. In other words, the more scams found, the better the detection can become. They can't perform magic. Although the AI scam detectors I used were generally effective at separating the online wheat from the chaff, some were frustratingly slow. The best part is that with greater input data, the AI models can be made more effective. And it looks like there'll be no shortage of scams to feed into the AI detection machine. Bitdefender has a two barreled approach that starts with its free Scamio detection site and mini apps for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Discord. Just drop a dodgy image, email or text string into Scamio, and a moment later it pronounces the item safe or dangerous. Its chatbot provides the rationale in a chat window that can be interrogated. However, this leaves the onus on you to be skeptical and paranoid about your online life. Bitdefender's Scam Copilot (no relation to Microsoft Copilot) automates scam detection by incorporating an AI chatbot that's similar to Scamio and leverages the latest advances in Large Language Models (LLM). It proactively looks for hidden scams in the background of the company's Ultimate Security Plus and Premium Security plans. Scam Copilot spots rip offs that are endemic in your area as well as those hiding in Gmail, Outlook and text messages, calendar invites in iOS and chat apps, like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Discord. To work, some of these apps require specific permission, such as access to notifications or the ability to read messages. To train its AI app, Bitdefender went through hundreds of thousands of online frauds and swindles using several machine learning techniques. The resulting layered model can identify malicious patterns, such as unauthorized remote access as well as dangerous online transactions, and blocks them before they show up on your screen. It runs on a balance between cloud and local processing. Its interface is similar to the rest of Bitdefender's products with a Scam Copilot box up front in the dashboard that replaces the Quick Scan option. It includes details about scams it encountered via email, links and messaging, along with a way to go right to an on-demand chat window with provisions for analyzing text, images and links. Overall, it did well catching all three scams I assembled. However, the Scam Copilot was slow at nearly 30 seconds to recognize each. In other words, it's thorough but can be time-consuming. Like Bitdefender's Scamio, Norton's Genie started as a stand-alone product for getting a thumbs up or down verdict on suspicious items. Using the latest AI techniques, Genie has expanded its usefulness as an automated scam detector that's a fully-fledged part of Norton's phalanx of protective services. Available with AntiVirus Plus, Norton Mobile Security, and Norton 360 plans, Genie Scam Protection combines traditional defenses like URL detection and behavioral analysis with natural language processing that can root out the telltale signs of potential scams from emails and texts and images. The Genie Scam Protection's model is the result of processing hundreds of thousands of real-world scams fed through its machine learning infrastructure. The resulting detection model runs on cloud processing to react to quick changes in criminal techniques. It starts with the Safe SMS feature's ability to stop text-based scams. Norton adds the SafeWeb protection to steer you away from those sites with a bad reputation for malware distribution and scamming visitors. It looks deeply into shopping sites to verify that they are genuine, don't have dangerous links or embedded malware. The company's Genie Scam Protection Pro takes this to a new level and is included with the top Norton 360 plans and LifeLock ID protection services, which adds $10,000 of insurance per event should something dangerous slip through. The Pro version has an extra focus on tech support scams and includes Safe Call to block scam calls that seem to outnumber legitimate calls these days. Meanwhile, Safe Email proactively scans existing emails looking for extra patterns that might indicate dangers. Regardless of which version you get, the scam protection fits into Norton's security dashboard and operates in the background – day and night. It shows the number of questionable files scanned and the latest information on current scams. There's also the Ask Genie box that provides direct access to try out presumed scams in the chat window. The Genie Scam Protection passed my three-part scam test and offers to provide details as to its decision. On the other hand, the FBI warning scam took 29.8 seconds to process, while others took half as long. Still, that's too long for many impatient web hounds. The newest of the three, McAfee Scam Detector, is not something the company will charge extra for or only include with its high-end security suites. Call it the democratization of scam protection, McAfee's scam protection will be part of all of the company's security products because it's considered fundamental protection. As an opening blow in the AI cold war, McAfee's technological emphasis was on stopping phishing scams that are after your login credentials or personal data. Today, Scam Detector goes a lot further by fighting fire with fire with AI techniques to recognize and stop a wide variety of computer-generated criminal scams. McAfee machine learning experts used thousands of known online scams to train its AI model and develop its detection algorithms to counter more personal and directed scams with a flexible technique that's able to spot all kinds of scams and frauds in a crowd. Fully automatic, the predictive model runs 24/7 in the background looking for the telltale signs of AI scams. It doesn't need a chat window for instant (or nearly so) analysis of suspect items and the good news for the impatient among us, including me, is that it all works quickly because the AI processing is done locally and not online. This works especially well on one of the best AI laptops with an NPU. The responses are generally completed in near real time but analyzing a video for AI scams might take as much as four seconds, not half a minute as is the case with some of the others. Whether it's text, an email or video, whenever something enters the computer with a recognizable scam component or pattern, the security software detects it, flags it and blocks its execution before it can unleash its dangers. McAfee's Scam Detector was still being finished back when I ran my scam tests with the others but after seeing it in action myself, I was very impressed with how quick and thorough it was. The bottom line for scams today is that they are the inevitable result of a free, open and inherently uncontrollable online world. There's no avoiding them, but you can fight back and turn the tables by aiming AI right back at them. The best scam detectors can put up a fight against all sorts of online rip offs, although for the time being you might have to be a little patient for a verdict.

The New Rules of Writing: Why Every Writer Needs Digital Support Tools
The New Rules of Writing: Why Every Writer Needs Digital Support Tools

Time Business News

time5 hours ago

  • Time Business News

The New Rules of Writing: Why Every Writer Needs Digital Support Tools

Whether you are writing an academic thesis, a product description, a social media caption, or a business interactions, every word counts. They represent your brand, ideas, and reputation. In today's fully digital world, writing anything is no longer enough; it needs to be accurate, original, and reliable. In order to meet these increasing standards, producers increasingly utilize three essential tools: a grammar checker, a plagiarism detector, and a free AI content detector. Such tools are becoming a necessary part of modern writing workflows, not only for error correction but also for assuring ethical, effective, and transparent communication. Let us look into why. These tools are available under several flexible plans that cover a range of user needs: Essential Plan: It is free to use and provides basic privacy protection, four proofread files, one plagiarism score, and writing help for 5,000 words each month. Full access to writing tools, ten proofread files per month, two plagiarism scores, extensive data privacy, and extension access are all included in the $6.67/month (yearly) Premium Plan. Plan Premium Plus: This package, which costs $10.41 per month (paid yearly), includes 3,000 AI-assisted writing requests every month, 600 citation formatting credits annually, and 120 pages of plagiarism or AI content detection reports. Sensitive Data Plan: This $41.67/month (yearly) plan gives customers complete control—no data storage, no AI training, and all premium features—for those who value data protection. A lot of people think that grammar checkers are used to correct misspellings and comma positions. But the grammar tools of today are actually much more sophisticated. They serve as in-the-moment editors, offering feedback on word choice, tone, clarity, and sentence structure. Consider someone writing a formal email. A statement that is overly complicated or has a modifier in the wrong place could cause confusion. Such errors are quickly caught by a grammar checker, which makes the writer sound confident and straightforward. These tools help marketers and bloggers make sure their material is fluid and simple to read, which is crucial for keeping online readers happy. Non-native English speakers gain greatly from grammar checkers. Even for people who are competent in the language, writing in English can be difficult. In addition to fixing errors, a grammar checker slowly encourages increased language, acting as a silent coach. Long-term, this results in stronger, more organic writing abilities. To put it briefly, a grammar checker is now a tool for anyone who loves precision and professionalism in their writing, not just students or novices. Plagiarism, or the use of the work of someone else without giving due credit, is one of the most serious writing violations that exists today. Plagiarism, whether deliberate or unintentional, can result in academic sanctions, legal action, or harm to one's reputation professionally or personally. The plagiarism checker may assist with that. To make sure your writing is truly unique, a plagiarism checker compares it to vast databases of published work, which include books, journals, websites, and student papers. It lets you edit passages that closely resemble content that was previously published before submitting or publishing them. In academic settings, where originality is absolutely required, this tool is very crucial. But it is also becoming more and more essential in internet marketing, journalism, and business. Audiences demand transparency, and search engines penalize websites that contain duplicate content. A plagiarism detector guarantees that your work is distinct, supported by your own thoughts and voice. It is important to bear in mind that using a plagiarism checker is about taking ownership of your work and earning your readers' trust, not just about staying out of jail. A growing number of people are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist with writing as AI continues to transform the content landscape. AI is unquestionably beneficial, from chatbots who create blog entries to helpers that condense articles. However, it also poses major queries: Who is the author of this content? Is it real? Is it reliable? The free AI content detector can help with that. This tool examines writing to figure out if it was produced by a person or by artificial intelligence. Although this might not appear significant at first, it is rapidly becoming necessary in professional, publishing, and educational settings. For instance, teachers must make sure that pupils are doing their own assignments. Editors are interested in confirming the submission's place of origin. Additionally, readers must be able to tell if the content they are reading is machine-generated or human-authored. Writing with AI is not always bad; in fact, it can be very helpful. However, it is crucial to be open about the process of creating content. In a time when AI is making it harder to distinguish between human labor and machine output, a free AI content detector supports integrity. Grammar checkers, plagiarism checkers, and AI detectors each have different uses. When put together, they provide a comprehensive strategy for content integrity and quality. Grammar checkers aid in the precise and concise expression of your thoughts. Plagiarism detectors ensure that those concepts are original to you. The authenticity of the writing process is verified using AI detectors. Writers can produce content that is not only flawless and free of errors, but also unique and reliable by regularly utilizing these tools. This is about boosting human creativity with smart computer support, not about replacing it. What one considers to be a writer is changing. Writing words on a page is no longer enough. The writer of today also serves as an ethical communicator, an editor, and a researcher. Using digital tools has grown to be a show of professionalism and care as expectations rise and technology develops. Including a grammar checker, plagiarism detector, and free AI content detector in your writing routine will significantly improve the caliber of your work and the audience's faith in it, regardless of whether you are writing a thesis, managing a team, maintaining a blog, or studying for an exam. Conclusion Although writing well has always been vital, remaining writing in the digital age is characterized by accuracy, uniqueness, and transparency. Every writer may now achieve these criteria thanks to modern instruments like AI content detectors, grammar checkers, and plagiarism checkers. Make good use of them. Allow them to lead you. Additionally, write with assurance, recognizing that the tools you are utilizing are meant to enhance, not to replace, your voice. TIME BUSINESS NEWS

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store