thanks for joining us for abc7 news at three. here's a look at some of our top stories this

afternoon. a surge in covid cases across the bay area has another county joining the call to bring back voluntary masking. the college application industry is changing because of artificial intelligence. we'll talk to an expert about how the technology is helping or hurting students navigate the process. and an historic first for california 16 and 17 year olds in parts of alameda county will be able to vote in school board elections. but let's begin with the latest in the race for the white house. vice president kamala harris and her new running mate are essentially holding dueling rallies today, with former president trump's vice presidential nominee, ohio senator jd vance. both campaigns stopping in the swing states of wisconsin and michigan. abc's jay o'brien has more. >> the battle for the midwest is on. vice president kamala harris and her new running mate, minnesota governor tim walz, on the campaign trail today in wisconsin. >> listen, let me tell you, i am

clear. the path to the white house runs right through this state. and with your help, we will win in november. we are going to win. >> walz, a popular midwestern governor, a former teacher and football coach trying to extend that appeal to voters in must win rust belt states. >> i couldn't be prouder to be on this ticket to help make kamala harris the next president of the united states, and quickly embracing his role as the campaign's pitbull, going on offense against former president donald trump and his running mate, senator jd vance. >> this guy weakens our country to strengthen his own hands. vance campaigning just miles away in the same wisconsin town. >> first, i want to say how great it is to be here in eau claire, wisconsin. >> raised in rural ohio with deep family roots in appalachia, the senator hoping his personal story of rising from poverty will resonate with rust belt voters at an event in michigan, another crucial midwestern state. vance, responding to waltz, who said his ivy league

education and connections to silicon valley distance him from the heartland. >> i grew up in a poor family. the fact that tim walz wants to turn it into a bad thing, that i actually worked myself through college, through law school, and made something myself to me, that's the american dream. >> meantime, in an interview with fox news, former president trump seemed to say he would debate vice president harris, but also appeared to waver on participating in a debate that he initially committed to have with president biden, hosted by abc news in september. jay o'brien, abc news, washington. >> the democratic ticket is bringing up the bay area during this campaign. last night, governor walz referenced vp harris's early days spent in the bay area. he didn't hold back about his love for california, specifically san francisco. in a recent new york times podcast, mayor london breed shared her reaction to what governor walz said about the city. >> last week was my first time in san francisco and stayed down there. i was doing some

meetings, woke up, did my five mile run through the presidio to the golden gate, went back to my hotel, was downtown and then up leaving. and i'm like, that is the most beautiful city i've ever been in. >> i think it's really exciting that someone like him would talk about his own personal experience in that way, and really bring attention to the realities of san francisco. >> now, according to campaign, her campaign website. harris will be in san francisco on sunday for a campaign fundraiser. most tickets have sold out only the quarter million and half million dollar tickets remain, the harris campaign reports, raising $36 million since walz was announced as her running mate yesterday. you can find the latest on harris and trump's campaigns and all of our election coverage heading into november. it's available now at abc7 news .com and wherever you stream abc7. now to that historic first for teen voters in alameda county for the first time this november, 16 and 17 year olds in berkeley and oakland will be

able to vote in school board elections for their own districts. the youth vote initiative stems from a ballot measure berkeley voters passed in 2016, and oakland voters passed in 2020. logistical questions held up the implementation, but now the final hurdles have been cleared. the alameda county registrar of voters is allowing registration through the existing pre-registration process for 16 and 17 year olds. abc seven news reporter ryan curry will have more on this story coming up on abc seven news at four. now to an interview you'll see only on seven. the family of an oakland man is completely shaken by a devastating shooting. 33 year old huang quan was sleeping at home in east oakland when a bullet went through his wall, hitting him in the head on august 1st. quan remains in critical condition at a local hospital. a family friend tells abc seven the family is afraid to be at their home. they're trying to move out of oakland as soon as they can. meantime, she's calling on local leaders

to step up. >> please do something to stop crimes. this is totally unacceptable. they got to do something. the government, the mayor, the police, just it's just ridiculous. >> with quan in the hospital, his sister says she worries about the financial impact on his wife and their young children. they've set up a gofundme and are asking for the community's help. we're learning more today about a deadly crash in the south bay. san jose police say a driver did have a green light when he hit and killed a 12 year old boy on a scooter yesterday afternoon in the cambrian park neighborhood. police say the boy was in a marked crosswalk when he was hi. >> it was terrible for everybody involved, including just the individuals, the driver, the family of the deceased, but also for our officers to have to witness and have to deal with that. >> police say the driver stayed at the scene and is cooperating with the investigation. the boy was the 30th person to be killed in a traffic crash in san jose this year. an east bay county is

once again recommending face masks in crowded indoor settings as covid cases surge across the bay area. the recommendation from the contra costa county health department comes ahead of a new school year. health officials are encouraging students and staff who are at risk of serious infection to mask up inside the classroom. just last month, the san francisco department of public health also recommended wearing masks indoors. new at three a kaiser study shows soda taxes are improving the health of bay area kids. four cities currently have a soda tax san francisco, oakland, berkeley and albany. kaiser researchers found kids in those cities have a lower body mass index than kids in comparable cities that don't have soda taxes. bmi is, of course, one gauge of healthy weight. a new study finds a free text message program is helping some teens quit vaping. the program, titled this is quitting, was developed by truth initiative, a nonprofit focused on ending tobacco use. the texts

are designed to build confidence and skills for quitting, including coping strategies. truth initiative reports more than 780,000 young people have used the program since it launched in 2019. research shows 35% of them quit vaping after about seven months. still to come, a new look for sfo, which is rolling out a new logo. what inspired the design and ai is changing the game for college applicants. how the technology is giving them a leg up and the things you have to be aware of and cute video of mountain lion cub as we make it through wednesday. stay with us abc se

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using chatgpt to write essays, some colleges, like duke university, are no longer considering quality of writing as a factor in deciding who gets in. and that's not all the season. more students are also turning to ai for other parts of the application process, potentially blowing up the $3 billion college application industry. joining us live now to offer some helpful insight to students and parents. samantha schreiber, a veteran college counselor in southern california who has studied and presented on the use of ai in college applications. samantha. so nice to have you on the show. >> thanks so much for having me. >> all right, so what are ai college counseling platforms and what do they do? >> so these are relatively new, so much so that i actually haven't gotten my hands on any of them quite yet. >> but every year there are always companies that say we have the new secret. we have the

new way to help you get into college. and so harnessing the power of ai, you know, helping students from starting to build lists, researching colleges, planning trips all the way to writing essays on and proofreading those essays to submitting. so this is really new and is probably changing every day as companies adapt, but i think they look to really help supplement and aid students in the college application process. >> okay. and are these tools really more like, counselors or consultants? i think we have to take it back a step and kind of explain to our viewers the difference. because when i think of college counselors like you, i think of the nice lady in the office i can go to who has all the insight, can suggest colleges that might be a good match for me, handle my transcripts, this and that, and consultants i think have i mean, i'm not trying to imply they're all bad, not by any means, but it's kind of like varsity blue. that scandal kind of brought it

to the forefront that there are people you can pay to help. you kind of tailor your story. your applications kind of handhold you through the process. so kind of explain what this is. >> yeah. so like you said, i work at a high school, so i serve the students at that high school and i work with them, throughout their time on the campus. there's also independent college consultants who don't represent a specific high school and are working with students kind of for hire, and there are wonderful ones out there. i think, like you said, anything that purports to have the secret or guarantee you any sort of result or touts the kinds of schools they get their students into, you know, is looking more at consultant and really looking at outcomes versus a counselor who is trying to help a student reflect, find their best fit and remain authentic through that process. >> got it. so i know there are a few players in this ai space, collegio i think is one of them. reach best is another one. they're pretty new, but explain which role they're trying to fill, i guess. and how they do it. like how does it work? walk

us through how a student might use this platform through the process. >> so i you know, i poked around a little bit on there and it looks like it's trying to help a student all the way through the process. and from the screenshots i see the strengths are in managing the workload and looking at timelines and looking at, deadlines and helping to spread out what can be a really overwhelming process, but, you know, you're taking away the personal aspect of it. and so the same way a computer can't know a person, this platform might be able to suggest places and give feedback on the tone of essays or grammar. and punctuation, but it's not going to know the student. and really replace the counselor, you know, i think it can help students who don't have access to a counselor in the same way students at private schools do or can't hire independent consultants, it can really help them wrap their head around the work that they have ahead of them, and outline all of the different pieces of the

puzzle. but i don't know that it will necessarily replace, the one on one relationship that that students have with their counselors at many places. >> right, right. i was just wondering, you know, to what extent students can trust the information that's relayed back to them, right? because, i mean, if these platforms are trained on whatever's out there on the internet, wouldn't whatever they tell you be kind of cookie cutter and generic? and isn't that the opposite of the way you want to go for these applications? >> exactly. >> and my question would be, you know, what is it being trained on, anybody can go on the internet and say anything, and so i can post an essay and say, this is the essay that got me into harvard. well, you don't know that. and also, i don't know why i got into college. and so it assumes there is one answer or formula and that it, through training itself on thousands and thousands of students, alleged applications, it's found the answer when there is no answer and we don't have insight into why students certain certain students are admitted and certain are denied.

and so, you know, the gut check for a student is, am i going through this process authentically, or am i going to do something that this computer tells me to do? so it could be pulling from outdated information. it could be pulling from websites from places that aren't fact checking. you don't know where it's being trained on, you don't know what it's pulling from. and so it's always good to have a healthy amount of skepticism and double check things and not rely blindly on, this technology. right? >> right. i mean, sometimes when i use those platforms, they tell me something that's blatantly false, right? so you just have to be circumspect and be careful. and but i wonder if this does anything that chatgpt or other platforms, can't currently do already, because some of these you have to pay kind of a subscription. right, and i'm just wondering, aren't there tools for free that kind of do the same thing? if you tell them the right things and give them the right prompts? >> yeah, i think that if someone who is savvy with ai and is a

good internet user, they can probably get these results from chatgpt or any other sort of, large, large language model, >> you know, i think you can ask it to say, well, where are colleges? you know, within 100 miles of this college i'm going to visit, and that can help you plan a college visit so you can see places. you can search for, well, i really want to be an astrophysics major. not physics, what are schools that have the astrophysics major? but at the same time, that's not going to replace you doing research on the school itself to see if it's a somewhere that you could be happy. so i don't necessarily know. what these platforms are claiming to have that you couldn't get from your average ai. but i would be skeptical of, well, where are they getting that information and are what they're promising to deliver? is that actually something that's deliverable or not. >> >> all right. so sounds like to me that it's not going to, you know, take away the need or

replace a trusty experienced college counselor anytime soon. so still go to the nice lady or nice gentleman in your school office. but i want to bring it back to close to what i said off the top that because of chatgpt, there are schools such as duke which are now saying, you know what, we're not going to judge the quality of this essay in our deciding who to accept here. are there california colleges that are starting to do that? and i guess, you know, what's your advice to students as they write their essays? >> yeah, absolutely. so the ucs actually don't take into consideration grammar, punctuation, if you misspell something, something like that. and that's a move they made out of equity. because not every student has had the same k through 12 education. and so it's much more important what you're saying and how you're saying it, having the voice of a 17 year old. and that's another potential pitfall of all of these, large language models is do they write like a 17 year old? do they have the perspective that a 17 year old would have? you don't want to sound like me. an adult with

years of experience, under their belt. you want to sound like yourself. and so, i think it's really important to remember that you're not being judged based on how well you write. you're being evaluated based on how well you can reflect and articulate what's important to you, what you're looking for, and just give insight into who you are and what kind of person you're going to be on these college campuses. >> great advice. samantha schreiber, thank you so much for joining us. >> thanks so much for having me. >> up next, a mountain lion cub is rescued and settling into its new home in oakland. we'll introduce you

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special themes, you see. the move comes after oakland renamed its airport to san francisco bay. oakland international. now we want to get a check on the weather. it's another warm day away from the coast, but cooler temperatures will move in by the end of the week. there you have it. i just told you, but spencer says it better. >> you did it all, kristen. you did it all. i'm literally updating as we as we talk uh- some new readings have come in, new temperature readings and whatnot. so let me go right up to the top and give you a view of what's going on. we still have our heat advisory in effect for the bay area until 9:00 tonight. so if you're over exposure to the heat under these circumstances, can produce heat related illnesses. but right n we're looking at a cool down as we go to the satellite radar composite image. the marine layer is coming back. it will be rebuilt rebuilding tonight. so we'll get some cooling overnight and cooler weather tomorrow as well. it's breezy out there right now, with gusts up to 32mph at oakland and at sfo. so let's move along and take a look

at the 24 hour temperature change. you can see it's cooler in almost all areas than at this time yesterday. just a couple of places are warmer. looking out over san francisco right now we see that it's currently 69 degrees here in the city, 75 in oakland. we've got 87 at hayward, 91 at san jose, 85 redwood city. there's the fog at the golden gate. so you can see that the marine layer is rebuilding, and it'll have a cooling influence that will last a while. more than just overnight. 90 right now in santa rosa, petaluma, 8478 napa. and we have mid to upper 90s at concord, fairfield and livermore. so still sizzling in some of our inland areas. these are the forecast headlines. heat advisory expires at 9:00 this evening. tomorrow through saturday. the heat eases. it'll still be quite warm in our inland areas for the next few days, but then relief arrives sunday with breezy and much cooler weather. so overnight we'll see some high clouds. and then overnight during the early morning hours, we'll see the marine layer redeveloping, along with pockets of drizzle near the coast and some of it even onshore. overnight, low temperatures, mainly in the mid to upper 50s. some of the warmer

spots will bottom out at about 6062 degrees, and then tomorrow look for 61 at half moon bay, 67 here in san francisco, mid 70s, low to mid 70s around the bay shoreline. still some low to mid 90s inland. and as we skip ahead here you see friday still pretty toasty. saturday pretty toasty. but the real cooldown begins on sunday and that cooldown is going to continue into next week. well into next week. as you see on the accuweather seven day forecast, we'll be looking at highs inland only in the 80s where we have recently had upper 90s to about 100, so that looks pretty good to me. i think i call that welcome relief, wouldn't you? kristen >> yes, lovely. we'll take that relief. thank you. spencer. the oakland zoo conservation society has rescued its 27th mountain lion. he's one of the zoo's youngest mountain lion rescues at roughly 4 to 5 months old. abc7 news reporter gloria rodriguez introduces us to brye. >> he's doing great. very playful, very engaged. bryer is getting used to his new home at

the oakland zoo, the small male mountain lion was found alone in el dorado county on thursday and brought to the zoo on monday. they looked for his mom all weekend, so they held him so he wouldn't get hurt, but they cdfw put out camera traps all weekend long to see if mom would come back to retrieve him. she did not. bryer will stay at the oakland zoo until he's healthy enough and a forever home found for him, likely in another facility since he's so young and lacks survival skills. the zoo says he can't return to the wild. he's too young to be on his own. normally, they stay with the mom until they're about a year and a half or two years old, so you can imagine at 4 to 5 weeks, not even 4 pounds, he would have no ability to survive at all. bryer is the 27th mountain lion rescued through the zoo's bay area cougar action team. i think these guys are our iconic alpha predator here in the state of california. they're kind of our tiger, so i think recognizing all the hard work

that we need to do so that we can live our human lives in our homes, driving cars around the state. but how do we coexist with them so that their population doesn't plunge and they don't become endangered? >> right now, bryer is being cared for here, and the oakland zoo will be posting updates on bryer on their social media pages. if you want to follow him at the oakland zoo. gloria rodriguez, abc seven news. >> here, from three time world series champion and former giant jeremy affeldt about a charity concert happening this weekend, who it helps and

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>> 17 years ago today, one of the most iconic moments in giants and baseball history happened here in san francisco. barry bonds broke the all time home run record with his 756th career long ball. he would retire after the season with 762, a mark that still stands today. the giants retired his number in 2018. this weekend, san francisco giants fans get to relive some of the good times when the team won the world series ten years ago, before saturday's game at oracle park. there will be a team reunion this ceremony starts at noon. some of your favorite players from that magical 2014 team will be there. that includes relief pitcher jeremy affeldt, who joined our midday show to invite fans to an. after party. a benefit show hosted by former pitcher jake peavy. >> it's going to be a fun time.

a lot of the players, most of us are probably going to show up. we're going to have a good time with it. some of us are going to get on stage and, hang out with jake and do some interview type conversations. so it should be a great night, and it'll be a great way to top off the weekend for all of us. and hopefully the fans. >> peavy and affeldt will be joined by tim flannery, jackie green and other special guests. money raised will go to the giants community fund, the event is saturday at eight at august hall in san francisco. you go to august hall sf.com to buy your tickets. thank you for joining us. world news tonight with david muir starts now. and i'll see you back here at four. tonight, taylor swift cancels three major concerts after police say they uncovered an isis-inspired terror threat. the race for the white house kicks into high gear. harris and walz hit the campaign trail, while trump and vance