Back when scientific publications came in paper form, libraries played a key role in ensuring that knowledge didn't disappear. Copies went out to so many libraries that any failure—a publisher going bankrupt, a library getting closed—wouldn't put us at risk of losing information. But, as with anything else, scientific content has gone digital, which has changed what's involved with preservation.
[...] The work was done by Martin Eve, a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL.
But it also has a way of handling documents disappearing from their expected location, as might happen if a publisher went bankrupt. There is a set of what's called "dark archives" that the public doesn't have access to but should contain copies of anything that has had a DOI assigned. If anything goes wrong with a DOI, it should trigger the dark archives to open access and the DOI to update to point to the copy in the dark archive.
For that to work, however, copies of everything published must be in the archives. So Eve decided to check whether that's the case.
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Boeing has come in for criticism from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) over documentation detailing who was responsible for failures in the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 door plug attachment.
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy spoke before the Senate Commerce Committee on March 6. Responding to a question from ranking member Senator Ted Cruz regarding cooperation from the parties involved in the incident, Homendy said: "Boeing has not provided us with the documents and information that we have requested numerous times over the past few months. Specifically with respect to opening, closing, and removal of the door and the team that does that work at the Renton facility."
[...] Investigations have since focused on the door plug and how it was fitted. A preliminary investigation found that the door plug had not been properly bolted into place following work to deal with damaged rivets at the edge of the door frame.
"Wow," said Cruz. "Are you telling us that even two months later, you still do not know who actually opened the door plug?"
"That's correct, Senator," replied Homendy. "We don't know, and it's not for lack of trying." Homendy acknowledged that it can take a while for all the paperwork to be forthcoming. "But for this one, it's two months later."
Homendy told the committee that despite inquiries, the NTSB had not received the names of the 25-member team handling the door plugs. It had also not received all the records regarding the work to deal with the door plug and was having to use email dates and photographs to work out the timeline.
"It's absurd that we don't have that," said Homendy.
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https://newatlas.com/biology/tap-honeybee-colony/
Delivering a gentle automated tap to the outside of a hive and recording the honeybees' collective response can give an indication of the colony's health without having to look inside, new research has found.
At last check, there were an estimated 115,000 to 125,000 beekeepers in the US, most of whom were hobbyists. In particular, ownership of honeybee colonies appears to have risen in recent years, with amateur apiarists wanting to help preserve these powerful pollinators in addition to generating their own source of sweet, sticky goodness.
But caring for honeybees can be tricky. Colonies follow very specific activity patterns throughout the year; they should be very busy in warmer months and idle when it's cold. So, they need to be checked regularly for health and productivity. Beekeepers can inspect hives by opening them, but this invasive process risks harm to the colony, particularly the all-important queen.
A new study led by researchers from Nottingham Trent University in the UK suggests they have a solution: gauging health by gently tapping the hive and listening for the bees' collective response.
"It's a bit like a bear that falls asleep for the winter; sometimes, you cannot tell if the animal is alive or not," said Martin Bencsik, the study's lead and corresponding author. "A gentle tap, causing a tiny, but measurable reaction, will reveal whether the animal is in its normal state or not."
The researchers' 'gentle tap' was delivered at random times by an electromagnetic shaker attached to a hive's outer wall, driven by a computer that provided a 0.1-second pulse at 340 Hz. The honeybees' response was recorded by an accelerometer embedded in the middle of the hive's frame, which was sensitive to the insects' vibrations.
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If you're looking for a long-term relationship or to boost your social status, lower your pitch, according to researchers studying the effects of voice pitch on social perceptions. They found that lower voice pitch makes women and men sound more attractive to potential long-term partners, and lower voice pitch in males makes the individual sound more formidable and prestigious among other men.
[...] "Vocal communication is one of the most important human characteristics, and pitch is the most perceptually noticeable aspect of voice," said David Puts, study co-author and professor of anthropology at Penn State. "Understanding how voice pitch influences social perceptions can help us understand social relationships more broadly, how we attain social status, how we evaluate others on social status and how we choose mates."
[...] The researchers found that women and men preferred lower-pitched voices when asked which voice they would prefer for a long-term relationship such as marriage. They also found that a lower male voice pitch made the individual sound more formidable, especially among younger men, and more prestigious, particularly among older men. Perceptions of formidability and prestige had a larger impact in societies with more relational mobility — where group members interact more often with strangers — and more violence.
[...] The fact that study participants across cultures perceived a lower male voice pitch as conferring formidability and high social status suggests that these characteristics were likely conferred to our ancestors as well, said Puts, who is co-funded by the Social Science Research Institute at Penn State. He likened the effect to that of Darth Vader's voice in the Star Wars franchise: no matter where the character goes in the galaxy, his low pitch is perceived as formidable because larger beings tend to produce lower frequencies.
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Attackers have transformed hundreds of hacked sites running WordPress software into command-and-control servers that force visitors’ browsers to perform password-cracking attacks.
A web search for the JavaScript that performs the attack showed it was hosted on 708 sites at the time this post went live on Ars, up from 500 two days ago. Denis Sinegubko, the researcher who spotted the campaign, said at the time that he had seen thousands of visitor computers running the script, which caused them to reach out to thousands of domains in an attempt to guess the passwords of usernames with accounts on them.
“This is how thousands of visitors across hundreds of infected websites unknowingly and simultaneously try to bruteforce thousands of other third-party WordPress sites,” Sinegubko wrote. “And since the requests come from the browsers of real visitors, you can imagine this is a challenge to filter and block such requests.”
Like the hacked websites hosting the malicious JavaScript, all the targeted domains are running the WordPress content management system. The script—just 3 kilobits in size—reaches out to an attacker-controlled getTaskURL, which in turn provides the name of a specific user on a specific WordPress site, along with 100 common passwords. When this data is fed into the browser visiting the hacked site, it attempts to log into the targeted user account using the candidate passwords. The JavaScript operates in a loop, requesting tasks from the getTaskURL reporting the results to the completeTaskURL, and then performing the steps again and again.
[...] With 418 password batches as of Tuesday, Sinegubko has concluded the attackers are trying 41,800 passwords against each targeted site.
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A group of cloud infrastructure providers in Europe has delivered an ultimatum to Microsoft: End the "unjustified feature and pricing discriminations against fair competition" or face legal action.
With 27 member organizations – including 26 headquartered in the region plus US-based AWS – Cloud Infrastructure Providers in Europe (CISPE) is a non-profit industry group based in Brussels. It filed a complaint against Microsoft with the EU's antitrust cops in November 2022.
That complaint laid out how Microsoft discounts its own software when bundled with its own Azure cloud services – meaning it is more expensive to run Redmond’s wares in rival clouds. The Windows goliath tried to settle the case out of court last May. CISPE told The Register Microsoft's offer was "paltry" and rejected it.
The parties recently resumed negotiations, and the timing of today's statement to The Register seems designed to ratchet pressure on Microsoft's lawyers to offer bigger concessions. CISPE told us it used the Azure Pricing Calculator to highlight the pricing disparity at the heart of the issue – see the table below, provided by CISPE.
It shows, if CISPE is right, that although a member of the cloud association – a rival of Azure – can offer remote desktop virtual machines at lower cost than Microsoft, the red-tape put in place by Redmond leaves the competing provider worse off for customers in comparison, causing the rival to potentially lose sales to Azure.
"According to the Azure Pricing Calculator with the multi-session capabilities allowed on Azure, a customer can run a typical virtual desktop implementation supporting 32 users using just three virtual machines," the group explained.
"The licensing restrictions on multi-session use of Microsoft software outside of Azure impose on CISPE members to provision 32 virtual machines – that is ten time more machines – to support the same number of users. Even with lower cost hardware (VM cost per hour) the cost of supporting 32 users for a CISPE member is 2.5 times higher than what Microsoft charges."
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These are some of the latest disasters listed on the AI Incident Database – a website keeping tabs on all the different ways the technology goes wrong.
Initially launched as a project under the auspices of the Partnership On AI, a group that tries to ensure AI benefits society, the AI Incident Database is now a non-profit organization funded by Underwriters Laboratories – the largest and oldest (est. 1894) independent testing laboratory in the United States. It tests all sorts of products – from furniture to computer mouses – and its website has cataloged over 600 unique automation and AI-related incidents so far.
"There's a huge information asymmetry between the makers of AI systems and public consumers – and that's not fair", argued Patrick Hall, an assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Business, who is currently serving on the AI Incident Database's Board of Directors. He told The Register: "We need more transparency, and we feel it's our job just to share that information."
The AI Incident Database is modeled on the CVE Program set up by the non-profit MITRE, or the National Highway Transport Safety Administration's website reporting publicly disclosed cyber security vulnerabilities and vehicle crashes. "Any time there's a plane crash, train crash, or a big cyber security incident, it's become common practice over decades to record what happened so we can try to understand what went wrong and then not repeat it."
[...] The organization currently collects incidents from media coverage and reviews issues reported by people on Twitter. The AI Incident Database logged 250 unique incidents before the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, and now lists over 600 unique incidents.
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https://phys.org/news/2024-03-threatened-homeland-feral-mexican-parrots.html
During a walk through the Huntington Botanical Gardens with her mother one morning, Brenda Ramirez was alarmed by the sudden squawks, warbles, and screeches of troops of parrots flying overhead at great speed in tight, precise formations.
"I asked my mom what they were," Ramirez recalled of that day 14 years ago. "She said, 'Mija, they are just like the parrots from Mexico we've seen in zoos, except for one thing: They are free flying and breed in the trees along our city streets.'"
Ramirez was entranced by this fleeting glimpse of adaptation by tropical species in one of the world's greatest asphalt jungles.
Now, at 27, she leads a team of investigators at the Free Flying Los Angeles Parrot Project based in Occidental College's Moore Laboratory of Zoology, which aims to resolve a biological puzzle: How did red-crowned and lilac-crowned parrots establish local urban breeding populations via the pet trade from Mexico, where both species are on the brink of extinction?
A potential answer is that Southern California cities have only in the last 100 years provided these sister species with a resource untapped by native birds: the fruits and flowers of exotic trees used for landscaping, according to the team's new report in the journal Diversity and Distributions.
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