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An Anonymous Coward sent in an article about Tesla's "hidden workforce":

About 140 workers from Eastern Europe, mostly from Croatia and Slovenia, built a new paint shop at Tesla's Fremont plant, a project vital to the flagship Silicon Valley automaker's plans to ramp up production of its highly anticipated Model 3 sedan. Their story emerged from dozens of interviews conducted by the Bay Area News Group, and an extensive review of payroll, visa and court documents.

Yet neither the contractors involved nor Tesla itself have accepted legal responsibility for the hiring practices, long hours and low pay. While most of the imported workers interviewed for this story said they are happy with their paychecks, their American counterparts earn as much as $52 an hour for similar work.

"There's definitely something wrong with this picture," said Rob Stoker, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County, who believes local sheet metal workers lost tens of thousands of work hours and millions of dollars in wages.

Sounds like the problem is endemic to industrial construction in the US.

Update: Tesla has posted a rebuttal in its blog and The Mercury News has appended a one-paragraph "Response from Tesla" to its original article. --martyb

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A machine learning optimization process can outperform physicists when it comes to the specific task of finding new ways to create a Bose-Einstein condensate:

Australian physicists have used an online optimization process based on machine learning to produce effective Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in a fraction of the time it would normally take the researchers.

A BEC is a state of matter of a dilute gas of atoms trapped in a laser beam and cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero. BECs are extremely sensitive to external disturbances, which makes them ideal for research into quantum phenomena or for making very precise measurements such as tiny changes in the Earth's magnetic field or gravity.

The experiment, developed by physicists from ANU, University of Adelaide and UNSW ADFA, demonstrated that "machine-learning online optimization" can discover optimized condensation methods "with less experiments than a competing optimization method and provide insight into which parameters are important in achieving condensation," the physicists explain in an open-access paper in the Nature group journal Scientific Reports .

Fast machine-learning online optimization of ultra-cold-atom experiments (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep25890)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The National Academy of Sciences has released a new report that reaffirms the safety of eating genetically modified organisms. Critics attacked the report before it was released, claiming pro-industry bias:

The National Academy of Sciences — probably the country's most prestigious scientific group — has reaffirmed its judgement that GMOs are safe to eat. But the group's new report struck a different tone from previous ones, with much more space devoted to concerns about genetically modified foods, including social and economic ones.

The report marks an anniversary. Twenty years ago, farmers started growing soybeans that have been genetically modified to tolerate the popular weedkiller known as Roundup and corn that contains a protein, extracted from bacteria, that kills some insect pests. But in those years, arguments about these crops have grown so contentious that the National Academy can't be sure that people will believe whatever it has to say on the topic. Even before this report came out, an anti-GMO group called Food & Water Watch attacked it. The group accused some members of the committee that prepared the report of receiving research funding from biotech companies, or having other ties to the industry.

[...] The report found that some claims about the benefits of GMOs have been exaggerated. For instance, the productivity of crops has been increasing for a century, and that didn't change when GMOs came along. "The expectation from some of the [GMO] proponents was that we need genetic engineering to feed the world, and we're going to use genetic engineering to make that increase in yield go up faster. We saw no evidence of that," [committee chair and North Carolina State University scientist Fred] Gould says. [...] The report urges regulators to look at all new crops, no matter how they're created, if they "have novelty and the possibility of some kind of risk associated with them," Gould says.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Girls outperformed boys on a national test of technology and engineering literacy that the federal government administered for the first time in 2014, according to results made public Tuesday.

Among eighth-grade students in public and private schools, 45 percent of girls and 42 percent of boys scored proficient on the exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Overall, 43 percent of all students were proficient.

The test was designed to measure students' abilities in areas such as understanding technological principles, designing solutions and communicating and collaborating. Girls were particularly strong in the latter.

There also were large racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, mirroring results on standardized tests in other subjects. Just 25 percent of students who received free and reduced-price lunch scored proficient, compared to 59 percent of more affluent students. Eighteen percent of black students and 28 percent of Latino students scored proficient, for example, compared to 56 percent of white and Asian students.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Experts have concluded that the Iraqi government has been shutting down the entire country's Internet connectivity in order to prevent exam cheating:

The Iraqi government is repeatedly shutting down the country's entire internet to prevent students from cheating on their exams. That is the extraordinary conclusion reached by infrastructure experts delving into why the country has experienced a series of three-hour blackouts at the same time each day for three days in a row.

The same pattern was also noticed this time last year, leading to speculation that the main goal was to prevent exam cheating. But it wasn't until the same thing happened again, coinciding with exam time, that skeptical observers became certain.

Adding to the evidence: a leaked email received by Dyn Research (internet traffic analysts) – also posted to blogs and a teaching Facebook page – from an Iraqi ISP warning that the country's internet will be down from 5am to 8am in two days' time.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The BBC reports on a small trial (12 patients) that used psilocybin to treat "moderate-to-severe, unipolar, treatment-resistant" depression:

A hallucinogenic chemical in magic mushrooms shows promise for people with untreatable depression, a short study on just 12 people hints. Eight patients were no longer depressed after the "mystical and spiritual" experience induced by the drug. The findings, in the Lancet Psychiatry [open, DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30065-7], showed five of the patients were still depression-free after three months.

Experts cautiously welcomed the findings as "promising, but not completely compelling". There have now been calls for the drug to be tested in larger trials.

From the study:

Psilocybin's acute psychedelic effects typically became detectable 30–60 min after dosing, peaked 2–3 h after dosing, and subsided to negligible levels at least 6 h after dosing. Mean self-rated intensity (on a 0–1 scale) was 0·51 (SD 0·36) for the low-dose session and 0·75 (SD 0·27) for the high-dose session. Psilocybin was well tolerated by all of the patients, and no serious or unexpected adverse events occurred. The adverse reactions we noted were transient anxiety during drug onset (all patients), transient confusion or thought disorder (nine patients), mild and transient nausea (four patients), and transient headache (four patients). Relative to baseline, depressive symptoms were markedly reduced 1 week (mean QIDS difference −11·8, 95% CI −9·15 to −14·35, p=0·002, Hedges' g=3·1) and 3 months (−9·2, 95% CI −5·69 to −12·71, p=0·003, Hedges' g=2) after high-dose treatment. Marked and sustained improvements in anxiety and anhedonia were also noted.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Firefox has gingerly pulled ahead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers for the first time across the globe.

Mozilla's Firefox grabbed 15.6 percent of worldwide desktop browser usage in April, according to the latest numbers from Web analytics outfit StatCounter.

However, neither browser threatens the market leader—Google's Chrome continues to command two thirds of the market.

StatCounter, which analysed data from three million websites, found that Firefox's worldwide desktop browser usage last month was 0.1 percent ahead of the combined share of Internet Explorer and Edge at 15.5 percent.

Although it does often seem that Firefox has pulled ahead of MS in memory usage...

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Jackie Calmes writes in the NYT that all over the country, employers say they see a disturbing downside of tighter labor markets as they try to rebuild from the worst recession since the Depression: the struggle to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test. The hurdle partly stems from the growing ubiquity of drug testing, at corporations with big human resources departments, in industries like trucking where testing is mandated by federal law for safety reasons, and increasingly at smaller companies. But data suggest employers' difficulties also reflect an increase in the use of drugs, especially marijuana — employers' main gripe — and also heroin and other opioid drugs much in the news. Data on the scope of the problem is sketchy because figures on job applicants who test positive for drugs miss the many people who simply skip tests they cannot pass. But Quest Diagnostics, which has compiled employer-testing data since 1988, documented a 10% increase in one year in the percentage of American workers who tested positive for illicit drugs — up to 4.7 percent in 2014 from 4.3 percent in 2013.

With the software industry already plagued by a shortage of skilled workers, especially female programmers, some software companies think now would be the wrong time to institute drug testing for new employees, a move that would further limit the available talent pool. "The acceptability of at least marijuana has shifted dramatically over the last 20 years," says Carl Erickson. "If the standard limits those that have used marijuana in the last week, you're surely going to be limiting your pool of applicants." Erickson's decision not to drug test stems from a low risk of workplace injury for his workers combined with an unwillingness to pry into the personal lives of his employees. "My perspective on this is if they want to share their recreational habits with me, that's their prerogative, but I'm sure as hell not going to put them in a position to have to do it."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers at the University of Bristol's Bristol Interaction Group have invented a "gauntlet of levitation" as well as a "sonic screwdriver" that can allow humans to levitate materials without touching them. Acoustic levitation is used to capture, move, transfer, and combine particles. The prototypes could lead to the development of technology intended to handle fragile and dangerous materials.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The features that make cities unique are important to understanding how cities affect weather and disperse air pollutants, researchers highlight in a new study.

Compared to their surroundings, cities can be hot – hot enough to influence the weather. Industrial, domestic, and transportation-related activities constantly release heat, and after a warm day, concrete surfaces radiate stored heat long into the night. These phenomena can be strong enough to drive thunderstorms off course. But it isn't only about the heat cities release; it's also about their spatial layout. By channeling winds and generating turbulence hundreds of meters into the atmosphere, the presence and organization of buildings also affect weather and air quality.

In an EPFL-led study published in the Journal of Boundary Layer Meteorology, researchers have shown that the way cities are represented in today's weather and air quality models fails to capture the true magnitude of some important features, such as the transfer of energy and heat in the lower atmosphere. What's more, they found that processes that atmospheric sensors are unable to sense are essential to more accurately represent cities in weather models.

Termites shape their mounds to control their local climate, so why shouldn't humans do the same?

Spatial Characteristics of Roughness Sublayer Mean Flow and Turbulence Over a Realistic Urban Surface (open, DOI: 10.1007/s10546-016-0157-6)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

US cable carriers are crying foul against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over what they say are overbearing and heavy-handed regulations being placed on their market.

Speaking at an event in Boston, Michael Powell - CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and former FCC chairman - said that the Commission was putting undue pressure on cable providers by overstepping its bounds on regulation.

"The policy blows we are weathering are not modest regulatory corrections," Powell said

"They have been thundering, tectonic shifts that have crumbled decades of settled law and policy."

The industry lobbyist said that while the FCC should seek to promote competition in the cable market, it should do so by easing regulations and encouraging new competitors, though Powell himself acknowledged the US cable market has been consolidating significantly as of late.

The Invisible Hand squeezes out competition, doesn't it?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The BBC has announced that a number of websites, including BBC Food and Newsbeat, are to close as part of plans to save £15m. The online News Magazine will also close but "long-form journalism" will continue under a current affairs banner.

Local news indexes for more than 40 geographical areas around the country will close. The BBC's Travel website will also be axed.

Separately, plans are being considered to merge the News Channel with the BBC's international 24-hour television news service.

The proposals were announced on Tuesday by head of BBC news and current affairs James Harding.

Removing the 11,000 recipes for English cuisine will save 15 million pounds.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

How did the giraffe get its long neck?

Since early evolution theory, and likely well before, scientists have puzzled over how the spotted creature came to have a neck that stretches more than 6 feet long. The answer, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications [open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11519], may have to do with a small number of genes that have evolved in the past 11 million to 12 million years, as today's tallest land mammals split off from their closest relatives.

...
The giraffe and the okapi's common ancestor had an intermediate neck length, implying that when they split off about 11.5 millions years ago, the okapi evolved to have shorter necks, Dr. Cavener tells the Monitor. As they evolved separately, the giraffe's key regulatory proteins genes underwent several modifications, promoting extended growth in the cervical vertebrae and the cardiovascular system, allowing the giraffe's heart to pump blood all the way up to its head.

Making that six-and-a-half foot journey upward has "evolved a turbocharged heart" and a vascular system adapted to handle twice the blood pressure as in other animals, the researchers write.

The real story is here.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Another data point in the conversion of our transportation fleet from Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles to Electric Vehicles (EVs):

Electric vehicles are making up an ever-increasing percentage of BMW's sales, both here in the US and worldwide, according to a statement released by the company on Friday. In April in the US, the BMW i3, i8, and X5 xDrive 40e accounted for just under 15 percent of all BMW passenger vehicle sales—a combined 2,572 cars out of a total of 17,786 cars sold last month.

More than half of BMW's EVs have been sold here in the US, which, along with Scandinavia and the UK, is the company's best market for hybrids and EVs. BMW's electrification strategy is a two-fold affair. There's the i sub-brand, which currently features the i3 city car and i8 sports car (two of our favorites here at Ars), and it's believed that a third i model is in the works, a crossover called the i6.

The company is also building hybrid versions of some of its regular vehicles, including the 330e, X5 xDrive40e, and now a 740e as well.

In recent news BMW also announced a joint fast-charger network with Nissan.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Waze, the Google-owned traffic navigation app, said Monday more than 25,000 employees at select companies in the Bay Area will be able to test a carpooling option that allows them to hitch a ride with Waze drivers.

Employees can download a free app, Waze Rider, that lets them request a ride from other Waze users who share a similar commute. Then, drivers can choose whether to approve that request in the original Waze app. The riders are matched with drivers from the app's more than 700,000 Bay Area users.

[...] Riders pay Waze drivers a suggested amount, based on the standard rate set by the IRS — 54 cents per mile. In the pilot program at least, Waze does not take a cut of the transaction. Waze tried a similar pilot program last year in Israel, where it took a 15 percent commission if riders paid drivers. (In the Israeli program, riders could request a free ride.)

Will the 'Boy Band' option be available on the Waze Rider app?

Original Submission