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A weekly financial newsletter included this link, https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/50-cognitive-biases-to-be-aware-of-so-you-can-be-the-very-best-version-of-you/. A cute graphical "flash card" version of the same list is available at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-cognitive-biases-in-the-modern-world/ Each "card" includes a short example that I found helpful in understanding the definitions.

Along with the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger Effect, the list had some eye openers for me. Here are the first ten. As a mental exercise, think about how many more you are aware of...before going to either of the links for a peek:

1. Fundamental Attribution Error: We judge others on their personality or fundamental character, but we judge ourselves on the situation.

Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot (1990)

martyb writes in with several IRC submissions:

Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot (1990):

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

[...] Voyager 1 was speeding out of the solar system — beyond Neptune and about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun — when mission managers commanded it to look back toward home for a final time. It snapped a series of 60 images that were used to create the first “family portrait” of our solar system.

The picture that would become known as the Pale Blue Dot shows Earth within a scattered ray of sunlight. Voyager 1 was so far away that — from its vantage point — Earth was just a point of light about a pixel in size.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Watch the winner of this year's 'Dance Your Ph.D.' contest:

[...] Dance Your Ph.D., hosted by Science and AAAS.[...] The contest challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through the most jargon-free medium available: interpretive dance. "Antonia Groneberg's choreography, inspired by zebrafish larvae, merged dance and science for an aesthetically stunning and intellectually profound masterwork of art," says Alexa Meade, one of the contest judges and an artist who uses mathematics and illusion in her work.

[...] Largely shot over one hot weekend at Champalimaud Research, the video incorporates colleagues, some of her dance students, children of the adult participants, and others on the Lisbon campus. (Groneberg says she went around asking, "Do you have toddlers I can borrow?")

[...] The judges—a panel of world-renowned artists and scientists—chose Groneberg's dance from 30 submissions based on both artistic and scientific merits. She takes home $1000 and a distinction shared by 11 past overall winners. "This year's Dance Your Ph.D. featured some of the best combinations of science and interpretive dance I have seen! The competition made complicated subject-matters accessible while maintaining the integrity of the material," Meade says.

This year's contest covered four broad categories: biology, chemistry, physics, and social science.

The winners were:

• Antonia Groneberg: Overall winner and social science category winner.
• Katharina Hanika: Biology category winner.
• Jackie Zorz: Chemistry category winner.
• Samuli Junttila: Physics category winner.

Which one did you like best?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/14/silly_police_infosec_parental_advice_poster/

The UK's National Crime Agency has publicly distanced itself from a poster urging parents to call police if their child has installed Kali Linux, Tor or – brace yourself – Discord.

Issued by the West Midlands Regional Organised Crime Unit (WMROCU) via local area councils, the poster in question lists a slack handful of common infosec tools – as well as some that clearly have nothing to do with computer security.

Should your child install Kali Linux, virtual machines (the image on the poster looks like Virtualbox) or internet privacy tool Tor, West Midlands Police wants to know immediately. And if – Heaven forfend – your sprog installs Metasploit to learn how to secure code, uses free chat service for gamers Discord, or gets a Wi-Fi Pineapple for research, you may as well report straight to your nearest prison and abandon your tainted offspring forever.

Here is a link to the poster in question.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

The US is charging Huawei with racketeering

Ratcheting up its pressure campaign against Huawei and its affiliates, the Department of Justice and the FBI announced today that it has brought 16 charges against Huawei in a sprawling case with major geopolitical implications (you can read the full 56-page indictment here).

Huawei is being charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute. The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei's business.

An example of this activity is provided in the indictment. Described as "Company 1," Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1's routers, which it then used in its own products.

[...] Huawei is also alleged to have engaged in more simple forms of industrial espionage. While at a trade show in Chicago, a Huawei-affiliated engineer "... was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company ... removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as 'Weihua,'

[...] Together, the indictment lists multiple examples of Huawei's alleged conspiracy to pilfer U.S. intellectual property.

It's a good thing that the United States would never do 'bad things' or act in a manner like this.

Original Submission

Modern Machine Shop ran an interesting piece recently under the title, "Why Is It Okay to Fire a Customer?" https://www.mmsonline.com/blog/post/why-is-it-okay-to-fire-a-customer. Here are a few clippings for your interest:

We work overtime to meet the demands of our customers and rightly so. Our success depends on our reputation and repeat business. So much so that going the extra mile in communication and delivery has effectively become the new baseline for good customer service for successful businesses.

This is all well and good. I'm proud of our industry's efforts to elevate the standard through innovation and technology, and it's working. Even so, elevated standards mean bigger risks for customers and suppliers alike, making the century-old saying of "the customer is always right" somewhat of an overstatement. What was once sealed with a handshake is now enforced by contracts and documents written to protect all involved parties.

[...] In my 26 years of leading Pioneer Service [CNC machine shop], I've had the unfortunate but necessary task of firing exactly two customers. The common thread between them was a deal-breaking level of disrespect. They directed accusatory and demeaning language to multiple members of my team, and they were unapologetic repeat offenders. Firing them [customers] was considered only after taking every reasonable measure (and perhaps a few less reasonable ones) to make them happy.

Thankfully, this is an extreme minority of customers. I will never enjoy firing anyone, employee or customer, but I have yet to regret standing up for a member of my team.

[...] Just before firing one of the two offending customers, I approached the employee who had been that customer's favorite target. I'll call him Dave. My goal was simply to reassure Dave that he'd done nothing wrong. Dave was shocked, didn't want me to fire the customer and tried to dismiss the rude behavior. My explanation to him was the same phrase I say to all of my employees: "You've got my back; I've got your back.

Anyone work for a boss/owner like this?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Transparent human organs allow 3D maps at the cellular level:

[Ed note: the organs being discussed "were obtained post mortem from Prof. Ingo Bechmann's lab at the University of Leipzig."]

For the first time, researchers managed to make intact human organs transparent. Using microscopic imaging they could revealed underlying complex structures of the see-through organs at the cellular level. Resulting organ maps can serve as templates for 3D-bioprinting technologies. In the future, this could lead to the creation of on demand artificial organs for many patients in need.

[...] Human organs are particularly stiff due to accumulation of insoluble molecules including collagen in tissues that have grown for years or even decades. Thus, traditional detergents that are used for making mouse organs transparent do not work on human organs, particularly adult ones. "We had to change our approach completely and start from scratch to find new chemicals which can make human organs transparent," says Shan Zhao, PhD student at Helmholtz Zentrum München and first author of the study. After exhausting trials, the team discovered that a detergent called CHAPS could make small holes throughout the entire stiff human organs. CHAPS allows additional solutions to travel deep into centimeters-thick human organs and convert them into a transparent structure.

Journal Reference:
Shan Zhao, Mihail Ivilinov Todorov, et al. Cellular and Molecular Probing of Intact Human Organs. Cell, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.030

If you didn't have to be dead first, it would be neat if you could be see-through.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Meet the community still obsessing over Mass Effect 2 10 years later:

Is Mass Effect 2 the series' golden goose or its ugly duckling? As the game passes its 10th anniversary this year, the debate rages on. Many space cadets recall their time with the game through a lens of utmost fondness, while others contend its status as the most detached and defunct entry in BioWare's illustrious trilogy (Andromeda, for all its pluses and minuses, is usually not part of the same discussion).

Regardless, a decade after its release, folks from all walks of life cling to Mass Effect 2 and the events surrounding it like a vice grip, continuing to invest time, effort, and money in the maintenance of their interest long after BioWare announced its plans to discontinue the series indefinitely.

What old games are Soylentils still invested in? Starcraft? Half Life?

And for Mass Effect fans, um, Liara or Miranda?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cowardly_Anonymizer:

US DOJ Calls Bitcoin Mixing 'a Crime' in Arrest of Software Developer - CoinDesk:

Larry Harmon was arrested earlier this week for allegedly participating in a money-laundering conspiracy worth more than $300 million in cryptocurrency involving darknet marketplace AlphaBay. However, the family of the Coin Ninja CEO claims he was never involved with AlphaBay.

Harmon's case raises pressing questions about developer liability in the crypto industry.

In addition to the crypto media site Coin Ninja, Harmon created the bitcoin mixer Helix, which sends transactions out in mixed batches so individual payments are harder to trace. In its indictment, Department of Justice prosecutors refer to Helix as a "money transmitting and money laundering business."

"Helix enabled customers, for a fee, to send bitcoins to designated recipients in a manner which was designed to conceal and obfuscate the source or owner of the bitcoins," the indictment continues. "This type of service is commonly referred to as a bitcoin 'mixer' or 'tumbler.'"

In a statement Thursday, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski made the department's views on bitcoin mixers clear. "This indictment underscores that seeking to obscure virtual currency transactions in this way is a crime," he said.

Harmon's brother and Coin Ninja coworker, Gary Harmon, said Helix did not directly partner with AlphaBay and that the darknet market recommended the mixer without Larry's permission or input. (Helix shut down in 2017; AlphaBay was seized by the FBI in July 2017.)

[...] Many bitcoin experts are concerned this could establish a precedent where simply creating a bitcoin mixer is seen, in itself, as a money-laundering conspiracy.

Bitcoin Core contributor Matt Corallo tweeted that if this accusation was upheld by the federal court in Washington, D.C., it would be "the beginning of the end."

CORRECTION (Feb. 14, 04:00 UTC): This article has been updated to clarify the difference between bitcoin mixers that custody digital assets and ones where users retain custody.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica:

Following its successful rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was sent on toward a smaller object out in the Kuiper Belt. As it shot past, the spacecraft captured images of a small world [Arrokoth] consisting of two very distinct lobes, with properties that scientists found a bit confusing. But details would have to wait, as the combination of distance and power budget meant that transmitting much of New Horizons' data back to Earth was a slow process.

[...]the object is likely to be composed of material that is largely unchanged since the formation of the Solar System. And, by all indications, it is true. Evaluations of the crater density on the surface of Arrokoth is consistent with an age of four billion years, that of the Solar System itself. And the surface has the red color typical of other objects from this region of the Kuiper belt, suggesting that its surface hasn't seen significant chemical modification.

The red color seems to come from a complicated mix of longer-chain hydrocarbons collectively called tholins. These are built by chemical reactions among shorter molecules driven by radiation exposure. In Arrokoth's case, those shorter molecules appear to include methanol, a single-carbon alcohol and the only individual chemical clearly identified in the New Horizons data. Methanol could have formed by chemical reactions between methane and water, but there's only weak indications of the presence of water on Arrokoth and no clear signature of methane.

The object is of particular interest because of its age and lobed structure.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

New research finds Earth's oldest-known asteroid strike linked to 'big thaw' - News and Events:

Curtin University scientists have discovered Earth's oldest[-known] asteroid strike occurred at Yarrabubba, in outback Western Australia, and coincided with the end of a global deep freeze known as a Snowball Earth.

[...] Lead author Dr Timmons Erickson, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and NASA's Johnson Space Center, together with a team including Professor Chris Kirkland, Associate Professor Nicholas Timms and Senior Research Fellow Dr Aaron Cavosie, all from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, analysed the minerals zircon and monazite that were 'shock recrystallized' by the asteroid strike, at the base of the eroded crater to determine the exact age of Yarrabubba.

The team inferred that the impact may have occurred into an ice-covered landscape, vaporised a large volume of ice into the atmosphere, and produced a 70km diameter crater in the rocks beneath.

Professor Kirkland said the timing raised the possibility that the Earth's oldest asteroid impact may have helped lift the planet out of a deep freeze.

[...] "The age of the Yarrabubba impact matches the demise of a series of ancient glaciations. After the impact, glacial deposits are absent in the rock record for 400 million years. This twist of fate suggests that the large meteorite impact may have influenced global climate," Associate Professor Timms said.

"Numerical modelling further supports the connection between the effects of large impacts into ice and global climate change. Calculations indicated that an impact into an ice-covered continent could have sent half a trillion tons of water vapour – an important greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. This finding raises the question whether this impact may have tipped the scales enough to end glacial conditions."

The full research paper, 'Precise radiometric age establishes Yarrabubba, Western Australia, as Earth's oldest recognized meteorite impact structure,' can be found online here.

Journal Reference:
Timmons M. Erickson, Christopher L. Kirkland, Nicholas E. Timms, Aaron J. Cavosie, Thomas M. Davison. Precise radiometric age establishes Yarrabubba, Western Australia, as Earth's oldest recognised meteorite impact structure. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13985-7

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Apple must pay store employees for bag-search time, court rules

Apple must pay its retail store employees for the time they spend waiting for mandatory bag searches at the end of their shifts, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday. The decision is retroactive, but it wasn't immediately clear how much Apple would have to pay.

The decision stems from a class-action lawsuit filed in 2013 by two former workers from Apple stores in New York and Los Angeles that claimed employees at physical locations were required to stand in lines up to 30 minutes long every day for store managers to check their bags to ensure they weren't smuggling home stolen goods. Failure to comply can lead to the employee's termination.

"Under the circumstances of this case and the realities of ordinary, 21st century life, we find farfetched and untenable Apple's claim that its bag-search policy can be justified as providing a benefit to its employees," Supreme Court Judge Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote in the decision (PDF).

[...] "Given that Apple requires its employees to wear Apple-branded apparel while working but directs them to remove or cover up such attire while outside the Apple store, it is reasonable to assume that some employees will carry their work uniform or a change of clothes in a bag in order to comply with Apple's compulsory dress code policy," she wrote.

[...] "Apple may tailor its bag-search policy as narrowly or broadly as it desires and may minimize the time required for exit searches," Cantil-Sakauye wrote. "But it must compensate those employees to whom the policy applies for the time spent waiting for and undergoing these searches."

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission

Coward, Anonymous writes:

Our solar system is thought to have begun billions of years ago as a protoplanetary disk. Over time, gravity caused this matter to clump together and eventually form planets. There is debate over the process and its duration, with previous studies suggesting several ten million years until the initially dry Earth was formed. Water was delivered at the end of this period.

A new article in Science Advances (open) describes Iron isotope evidence for very rapid accretion and differentiation of the proto-Earth.

Moreover, new planet formation models based on the rapid accretion of pebbles onto asteroidal seeds suggest that Earth's main accretion phase may have been completed within the ~5–million year lifetime of the protoplanetary disk.

The authors find that the ratio of iron isotopes ⁵⁴Fe to ⁵⁶Fe in most meteorites differs from the Earth, and deduce that the planet formed rapidly with little material from the outer solar system, where those meteorites originated. The terrestrial iron isotope ratio does match that of a rare class of meteorites known as CI chondrites.

The only epoch in the history of the solar system when the CI-like material is readily available within the terrestrial planet–forming region is during the lifetime of the protoplanetary disk. This period represents the time when the in-falling envelope material of CI composition is channeled through the disk to fuel the growth of the proto-Sun and is estimated to have lasted approximately 4.8 ± 0.3 million years (Ma).

This conclusion has implications for where the Earth's water and oxygen came from:

An initially more reduced proto-Earth relaxes these constraints and only requires that Earth oxidized (i.e., acquired most of its mantle iron budget) by the accretion of CI-like dust. Water is the key ingredient for oxidation, and as such, our results are consistent with the accretion of a component of Earth's water and other volatile elements during the protoplanetary disk's lifetime. This may be achieved via the direct accretion of water adsorbed to dust or reflects the fact that the snowline will be inside of Earth's orbit toward the end of the protoplanetary disk's lifetime, allowing direct accretion of ice during this stage.

Regarding the Moon:

Critically, the rapid timescales proposed here can be reconciled with Earth's mantle ¹⁸²W isotope composition if the Moon-forming impact occurred at least 40 Ma after the main accretion and differentiation of the proto-Earth.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Debian developer Jonathan Carter was recently given a MIPS64-based motherboard which he ran through its paces. The board has a Loongson processor which is intended for both general purpose and embedded processing.

The reason why I wanted this board is that I don't have access to any MIPS64 hardware whatsoever, and it can be really useful for getting Calamares to run properly on MIPS64 on Debian. Calamares itself builds fine on this platform, but calamares-settings-debian will only work on amd64 and i386 right now (where it will either install grub-efi or grub-pc depending in which mode you booted, otherwise it will crash during installation). I already have lots of plans for the Bullseye release cycle (and even for Calamares specifically), so I'm not sure if I'll get there but I'd like to get support for mips64 and arm64 into calamares-settings-debian for the bullseye release. I think it's mostly just a case of detecting the platforms properly and installing/configuring the right bootloaders. Hopefully it's that simple.

In the meantime, I decided to get to know this machine a bit better. I'm curious how it could be useful to me otherwise. All its expansion ports definitely seems interesting. First I plugged it into my power meter to check what power consumption looks like. According to this, it typically uses between 7.5W and 9W and about 8.5W on average.

The Loongson processors are developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in China in conjunction with the BLX IC Design Corporation, also in China.

Earlier on SN:
Is Low-Priced Computing Stuck With an ARM/x86 Duopoly? (2019)
MIPS CPU Architecture to Become Open Source Hardware in 2019 (2018)
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched (2016)

Original Submission