SoylentNews

martyb writes:

Scotland's claim to fame as birthplace of the F-word revealed:

[...] Experts say the origins of the profanity can be traced all the way back to the 16th century equivalent of a rap battle.

An account of a "flyting" duel between two poets, held in the collection of the National Library of Scotland, is said to be its first recorded use anywhere in the world.

The hour-long BBC Scotland programme, which airs on Tuesday[1], sees actress, singer and theatre-maker Cora Bissett[2] trace the nation's long love affair with swearing and insults, despite the long-standing efforts of religious leaders to condemn it as a sin.

[...] [The documentary] In Scotland – Contains Strong Language, [explores] the Bannatyne Manuscript, one of the most important collections of medieval Scottish literature, which was compiled by the Edinburgh merchant George Bannatyne in 1568 when a plague struck the city and he was forced to stay at home.

The collection contains The Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedy, an account by the poet William Dunbar of a duel with Walter Kennedy, said to have been conducted in Edinburgh before the court of King James IV of Scotland in around 1500.

[...] A spokeswoman for the National Library said: "The Bannatyne Manuscript[3] is a collection of some 400 poems compiled by the young Edinburgh merchant George Bannatyne in the last months of 1568, when an outbreak of plague in Edinburgh compelled him to stay indoors. It is one of the most important surviving sources of Older Scots poetry.

"The manuscript remained in his descendants' possession until they gifted it to the National Library's predecessor – in 1772.

[...] "It has long been known that the manuscript contains some strong swearwords that are now common in everyday language, although at the time, they were very much used in good-natured jest.

[1] Scotland—Contains Strong Language
[2] Cora Bissett
[3] Bannatyne Manuscript

takyon writes:

With day 1 digital distribution of films becoming more prevalent, and movie theater chains going out of business, Hollywood and the MPAA are going to do everything they possibly can to kill or cobble illicit streaming. This could include increasing potential criminal penalties for individuals who operate "streaming piracy" services:

Movie Company Boss Urges US Senators to Make Streaming Piracy a Felony

In the United States, criminal copyright infringers can be sentenced to five years in prison. However, this is not the case for streaming piracy, which is seen as a misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum jail sentence of one year. Millennium Films boss Jonathan Yunger is callling on senators to change this, so the Department of Justice can effectively shut down and prosecute streaming piracy operations.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property is actively looking for options through which the US can better address online piracy. During a hearing last month, various experts voiced their opinions. They specifically addressed measures taken by other countries and whether these could work in the US, or not. Pirate site blocking and upload filtering emerged as the main topics during this hearing. While pros and cons were discussed, movie industry insiders including Millennium Media co-president Jonathan Yunger framed these measures as attainable and effective.

After the hearing, senators asked various follow-up questions on paper. Last week we reported how former MEP Julia Reda answered these by stressing the importance of affordable legal options. Yunger, however, takes another approach.

In his answers, which were published before the weekend, he reiterates the power of website blocking. In addition, Yunger also brings a second, previously unmentioned issue to the forefront: criminal penalties for streaming piracy. "The second thing that we could easily do in the United States is close the legal loophole that currently allows streaming – which accounts for the vast majority of piracy today – to be treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony," Yunger writes.

See also: Movie & TV Giants Sue 'Pirate' Nitro IPTV For 'Massive' Copyright Infringement

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Quibi Picked the Worst Time to Launch a Streaming Service for Short Attention Spans - Or maybe the best? (archive)

For months, Quibi, the phone-based streaming service that launched Monday, has been getting roasted by the small group of people whose professions require them to know about the existence of Quibi. The gist of the jokes has been that Quibi sounds like a 30 Rock fiction come to life. The brainchild of billionaire boomers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, it's predicated on the idea that no one can pay attention any more, so if anything is going to lure the scattered, cellphone-obsessed youth away from the free and varied YouTube content with which they seem generally satisfied, it's high production values that you can't really see on a cellphone and the imprimatur of celebrities grandparents have heard of. Quibi has gone on a buying spree for every famous person in Hollywood's leftover ideas, which have been turned into "quick bites" of six to 10 minutes apiece. The company has already raised $1.75 billion dollars, on the strength of that idea and a slate that includes a reality show called Murder House Flip.

As someone who has not been above a Quibi joke herself, I am disappointed to report that Quibi is neither a glorious embarrassment nor a surprising triumph. It is, instead, expensively competent. The dozens of star-studded series it debuts with are, in general, solid and professional, and tend toward uplifting but brief documentaries I could totally imagine spacing out to in a waiting room. (The fact that almost no one on the planet Earth is spacing out in a waiting room right now is another Quibi punchline.) The implicit assumption of Quibi is that no one has any time anymore, even, say, for a 22-minute sitcom. And yet it is arriving at a moment when a majority of Americans have more time than they had weeks ago—if also, perhaps, even more shredded attention spans.

Quibi review – shortform sub-Netflix shows aren't long for this world

AnonTechie writes:

Older Entrepreneurs as Successful as Their Younger Counterparts, Study Reveals:

From Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of prosperous, young innovators drive the American economic narrative. However, the truth is that older business entrepreneurs may be just as well suited to success. And older women are far more successful at launching a business than their younger counterparts.

Those are among the findings reached by Hao Zhao, an associate professor of management at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in research recently published online in the Journal of Business Venturing.

Zhao and his co-authors conducted a meta-analysis based on 102 independent samples and determined that the rate of success for people who launch a business in their 20s is the same as for those who become entrepreneurs in their 50s. According to Zhao, this suggests that, while younger entrepreneurs are generally more adapt at inventing new technology and making bold moves, their older counterparts have more wisdom, financial capital, and business connections.

Zhao found that older entrepreneurs have slightly higher satisfaction levels and greater financial success than younger entrepreneurs. Their only disadvantage is slightly lower growth rates, an artefact of their companies tending to be larger in size.

Journal Reference:
Hao Zhao, Gina O'Connor, Jihong Wu, G.T. Lumpkin. Age and entrepreneurial career success: A review and a meta-analysis, Journal of Business Venturing (DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2020.106007)

I agree with their conclusion, do you ??

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

FDA Requests Removal of All Ranitidine Products (Zantac) from the Market:

Español

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced it is requesting manufacturers withdraw all prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) ranitidine drugs from the market immediately. This is the latest step in an ongoing investigation of a contaminant known as N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) in ranitidine medications (commonly known by the brand name Zantac). The agency has determined that the impurity in some ranitidine products increases over time and when stored at higher than room temperatures and may result in consumer exposure to unacceptable levels of this impurity. As a result of this immediate market withdrawal request, ranitidine products will not be available for new or existing prescriptions or OTC use in the U.S.

[...] NDMA is a probable human carcinogen (a substance that could cause cancer). In the summer of 2019, the FDA became aware of independent laboratory testing that found NDMA in ranitidine. Low levels of NDMA are commonly ingested in the diet, for example NDMA is present in foods and in water. These low levels would not be expected to lead to an increase in the risk of cancer. However, sustained higher levels of exposure may increase the risk of cancer in humans. The FDA conducted thorough laboratory tests and found NDMA in ranitidine at low levels. At the time, the agency did not have enough scientific evidence to recommend whether individuals should continue or stop taking ranitidine medicines, and continued its investigation and warned the public in September 2019 of the potential risks and to consider alternative OTC and prescription treatments.

takyon writes:

Exclusive: Apple likely buyer of NextVR, a live event streaming AR/VR company being sold for ~$100M

It's no secret that Apple has ambitious plans for augmented reality and a future AR-focused headset. Apple is practically building the platform for its future headset out in the open with ARKit. What's new is that Apple is believed to be in the process of acquiring a California-based virtual reality company called NextVR, 9to5Mac has learned.

NextVR, which is located in Orange County, California, has a decade of experience marrying virtual reality with sports and entertainment. The company currently provides VR experiences for viewing live events with headsets from PlayStation, Oculus, HTC, Microsoft, Lenovo headsets.

The icing on the cake may not be expertise in virtual reality, however, as NextVR also has holds patented technology that upscales video streams. NextVR uses this technology to support high quality video streams of music and sporting events to VR headsets. NextVR holds over 40 technology patents in total.

Apple is reportedly in the process of snapping up NextVR, its third acquisition in the past week

Apple appears to have embarked on a buying spree over the past week, as startup valuations come down amid the coronavirus pandemic.

[...] Apple frequently buys smaller startups without disclosing the details, Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC last May. But an uptick in acquisitions — three in a week — is particularly significant as startups tackle the economic pressures brought by the coronavirus pandemic.

Last week, Apple acquired the acclaimed weather app DarkSky, in a move predicted to add to a growing list of services division. DarkSky's founder Adam Grossman announced the news in a blog post, but didn't disclose any of the deal's details.

Then it acquired the Dublin-based AI startup Voysis, whose technology could help bolster Siri's language skills, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The terms of the deal were also left undisclosed.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Large-diameter ground-based optical telescopes now routinely use laser-beam generated artificial guide stars, created in the higher levels of the atmosphere. These artificial stars allow users to correct atmospheric aberrations of light passing to and from space, using adaptive optics. They are crucial for high fidelity transmission of data for applications in both optical free-space and ground to earth communications, in space debris imaging and tracking, and for astronomy.

The principle involves using a precisely tuned laser to energize atoms in the sodium layer that occurs naturally in the mesosphere, at an altitude of around 90 km. These atoms re-emit the laser light, temporarily creating a glowing artificial star. There have been a number of technologies developed to do this, but generating that specific wavelength has been a notorious challenge that has so far needed impractical approaches.

Now researchers from the MQ Photonics Research Centre at Macquarie University have shown that diamond Raman lasers are a highly efficient way to generate the precise output needed. They have for the first time demonstrated a continuous-wave 589 nm diamond laser for guidestar applications. Described in Optics Letters, the laser delivered higher power and efficiency than previous guide star laser systems of its type.

[...] The diamond laser is in the class of lasers called Raman lasers, and works by stimulated scattering rather than stimulated emission. The researchers have found that this core difference enables the laser to operate more stably on a pure single frequency.

The authors believe we will soon see diamond lasers on telescopes and at higher levels. "We believe that the diamond approach will provide an interesting system for greatly expanding the brightness and quality of future guide stars. The light-atom interaction in the sodium layer happens to be extremely complex, but this brings forth interesting opportunities to adapt lasers to boost the performance of earth-to-space adaptive optical systems." says Professor Rich Mildren, the research leader for this work.

More information: Xuezong Yang et al. Diamond sodium guide star laser, Optics Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1364/OL.387879

Journal information: Optics Letters

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a paper published in Nature Communications, a group of cell biologists led by Meng Chen, a professor of botany and plant sciences at the University of California, Riverside, reveal the phytochrome B molecule has unexpected dynamics activated by temperature, and behaves differently depending on the temperature and type of light.

As climate change warms the world, crop growth patterns and flowering times will change. A better understanding of how phytochromes regulate the seasonal rhythms of plant growth will help scientists develop crops for optimal growth under the Earth's new climate and might even shed light on cancer in animals.

Phytochromes switch between active and inactive forms like a binary switch controlled by light and temperature. In direct sunlight, such as in open fields, phytochromes switch "on," absorbing far-red light. This active form inhibits stem elongation, which limits how tall plants in direct sunlight can grow.

In shade phytochromes are less active, absorbing red. This "off" form releases the inhibition of stem growth, so plants grow taller in shade to compete with other plants for more sunlight.

Within the cell, light causes "on" phytochromes to coalesce into units called photobodies inside the cell nucleus. When phytochrome B is off, it resides outside the cell nucleus. It moves inside the nucleus when "on" and changes the expression of genes and growth patterns.

Changes in light alter the size and number of all foci. Chen's group has now shown temperature alters individual foci.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Used properly, bug bounty platforms connect security researchers with organizations wanting extra scrutiny. In exchange for reporting a security flaw, the researcher receives payment (a bounty) as a thank you for doing the right thing. However, CSO's investigation shows that the bug bounty platforms have turned bug reporting and disclosure on its head, what multiple expert sources, including HackerOne's former chief policy officer, Katie Moussouris, call a "perversion."

Silence is the commodity the market appears to be demanding, and the bug bounty platforms have pivoted to sell what willing buyers want to pay for.

"Bug bounties are best when transparent and open. The more you try to close them down and place NDAs on them, the less effective they are, the more they become about marketing rather than security," Robert Graham of Errata Security tells CSO.

Leitschuh, the Zoom bug finder, agrees. "This is part of the problem with the bug bounty platforms as they are right now. They aren't holding companies to a 90-day disclosure deadline," he says. "A lot of these programs are structured on this idea of non-disclosure. What I end up feeling like is that they are trying to buy researcher silence."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

TracFone Wireless is facing a potential $6 million fine for allegedly defrauding a government program that provides discount telecom service to poor people.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed the fine against TracFone yesterday, saying the prepaid wireless provider obtained FCC Lifeline funding by "enroll[ing] fictitious subscriber accounts." TracFone improperly sought and received more than $1 million from Lifeline, the FCC said.

The FCC press release said:

TracFone's sales agents—who were apparently compensated via commissions for new enrollments—apparently manipulated the eligibility information of existing subscribers to create and enroll fictitious subscriber accounts. For example, TracFone claimed support for seven customers in Florida at different addresses using the same name, all seven of whom had birth dates in July 1978 and shared the same last four Social Security Number digits. The Enforcement Bureau's investigation also found that, in 2018, TracFone apparently sought reimbursement for thousands of ineligible subscribers in Texas.

Today's proposed fine is based on the 5,738 apparently improper claims for funding that TracFone made in June 2018 and includes an upward adjustment in light of the company's egregious conduct in Florida.

The FCC's Lifeline program, which is paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills, provides monthly subsidies of up to $9.25 per household for phone and broadband service provided to eligible low-income subscribers.

[...] TracFone said it would respond "at the appropriate time" and that "we take seriously our stewardship of public dollars and will continue to focus on connecting millions of low-income customers to school, jobs, healthcare, and essential social services," according to Reuters.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

'Scared to Death' by Arbitration: Companies Drowning in Their Own System

Lawyers and a Silicon Valley start-up have found ways to flood the system with claims, so companies are looking to thwart a process they created.

Teel Lidow couldn't quite believe the numbers. Over the past few years, the nation's largest telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T, have had a combined 330 million customers. Yet annually an average of just 30 people took the companies to arbitration, the forum where millions of Americans are forced to hash out legal disputes with corporations.

Mr. Lidow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a law degree, figured there had to be more people upset with their cable companies. He was right. Within a few months, Mr. Lidow found more than 1,000 people interested in filing arbitration claims against the industry.

About the same time last year, Travis Lenkner and his law partners at the firm Keller Lenkner had a similar realization. Arbitration clauses bar employees at many companies from joining together to mount class-action lawsuits. But what would happen, the lawyers wondered, if those workers started filing tens of thousands of arbitration claims all at once? Many companies, it turns out, can't handle the caseload.

Hit with about 2,250 claims in one day last summer, for example, the delivery company DoorDash was "scared to death" by the onslaught, according to internal documents unsealed in February in federal court in California.

[ . . . . ] But a federal judge in San Francisco wasn't willing to go along with it. The judge, William Alsup, ordered DoorDash in February to proceed with the American Arbitration Association cases and pay the fees.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for DoorDash said the company "believes that arbitration is an efficient and fair way to resolve disputes."

But in a hearing, Judge Alsup questioned whether the company and its lawyers really believed that.

"Your law firm and all the defense law firms have tried for 30 years to keep plaintiffs out of court," the judge told lawyers for Gibson Dunn late last year. "And so finally someone says, 'OK, we'll take you to arbitration,' and suddenly it's not in your interest anymore. Now you're wiggling around, trying to find some way to squirm out of your agreement."

"There is a lot of poetic justice here," the judge added.

Ah! Gotta love judge Alsup. Back in SCO vs Novell, and in Oracle vs Google. Now this.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

How much CEOs matter to firm performance:

"Do CEOs matter?" has been a perennial question in management discourse. But "the CEO effect" has been notoriously difficult to isolate -- a moving target caught in the slipstream of dynamic forces that shape firm performance.

So Morten Bennedsen, INSEAD Professor of Economics and the André and Rosalie Hoffmann Chaired Professor of Family Enterprise, along with colleagues Francisco Perez-Gonzalez (ITAM and NBER) and Daniel Wolfenzon (Columbia University and NBER) decided to find out how much CEOs matter by measuring the impact on firm performance when a CEO is absent, specifically, hospitalised.

They find, in a forthcoming paper, "Do CEOs Matter? Evidence from Hospitalization Events", soon to be published in the Journal of Finance, that the financial ramifications of CEO hospitalisation are significant.

Based on data of nearly 13,000 Danish SMEs between 1996 and 2012, Bennedsen and his co-authors find that five-to-seven day hospitalisations sent firm profitability tumbling by 7% in the year of illness. Longer hospital stays of 10 days or more wreaked even deeper damage, lowering operating return on assets (OROA) by a full percentage point.

Journal Reference
Morten Bennedsen, Francisco Pérez-Gonzalez, Daniel Wolfenzon. Do CEOs Matter? Evidence from Hospitalization Events, The Journal of Finance[^$] (DOI: 10.1111/jofi.12897)

See also: Phys.org

[Source]: INSEAD research

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The governor of New Jersey has asked COBOL-capable coders to volunteer their skills as the State’s mainframe computers have struggled to cope with a surge of requests for benefits to help citizens through the coronavirus crisis.

COBOL - common business-oriented language - was first introduced in the early 1960s and achieved the then-important trick of offering programmers a language that could work across multiple manufacturers' proprietary computers.

[...] In his daily press briefing on April 4th, governor Phil Murphy said: “In our list of volunteers not only do we need health care workers but given the legacy systems we should add a page for cobalt [sic] computer skills, because that's what we're dealing with in these legacies.”

[...] It appears that New Jersey needs COBOL coders because its benefits system has choked on a surge of requests for unemployment payments.

[...] [C]ommissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Robert Asaro-Angelo explained that his agency has experienced a 1600 percent increase in its usual volume of requests for assistance.

[...] At Governor Murphy’s April 2nd briefing he said: “This morning the Department of Labor reported that over the past week more than 206,000 new claims for unemployment were filed, meaning that in just the past two weeks alone more than 362,000 residents have filed for unemployment. “

Does anybody know where he could find someone looking for work?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1650 GDDR6 Released: GDDR6 Reaching Price Parity With GDDR5

Tucked inside NVIDIA's announcement of their spring refresh of their mobile GPU lineup, the company included a new low-end mobile part, the GeForce GTX 1650 GDDR6. Exactly as it says on the tin, this was a version of the company's GTX 1650 accelerator, except with newer GDDR6 instead of the GDDR5 it launched with. Now, in one of NVIDIA's more poorly kept secrets, their desktop product stack is getting a version of the card as well.

[...] The entry-level card is the cheapest (and the slowest) of the Turing family, offering as much performance as NVIDIA can pack into a 75 Watt TDP.

[...] Overall, this low-key release should mark a more important turning point in the state of GDDR memory. If NVIDIA and its partners are now willing to release GDDR6 versions of low-end cards, then this is a strong indicator that GDDR6 has finally lost most of its new technology price premium, and that memory prices have fallen by enough to be competitive with 8Gbps GDDR5. GDDR6 prices were a sticking point for the profit-sensitive NVIDIA during the original Turing product stack launch, so while it has taken an extra year, the company is finally offering a top-to-bottom GDDR6-based product stack.

Let's see more GPUs and APUs with HBM already.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Mysteries of Uranus' oddities explained by Japanese astronomers:

The ice giant Uranus' unusual attributes have long puzzled scientists. All of the planets in our Solar System revolve around the Sun in the same direction and in the same plane, which astronomers believe is a vestige of how our Solar System formed from a spinning disc of gas and dust. Most of the planets in our Solar System also rotate in the same direction, with their poles orientated perpendicular to the plane the planets revolve in. However, uniquely among all the planets, Uranus' is tilted over about 98 degrees.

[...] How Uranus' unusual set of properties came to be has now been explained by a research team led by Professor Shigeru Ida from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Their study suggests that early in the history of our Solar System, Uranus was struck by a small icy planet - roughly 1-3 times the mass of the Earth - which tipped the young planet over, and left behind its idiosyncratic moon and ring system as a 'smoking gun'.

The team came to this conclusion while they were constructing a novel computer simulation of moon formation around icy planets. [...] There is strong evidence Earth's own single moon formed when a rocky Mars-sized body hit the early Earth almost 4.5 billion years ago. This idea explains a great deal about the Earth and its Moon's composition, and the way the Moon orbits Earth.