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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Psychology research shows 'water cooler talk' can have big benefits: A newly described behavior shows how small talk brings balance to collaborative conversations:

Whether in the workplace or our personal lives, most people have a strong preference for balanced conversations, where each person is able to “get their two cents in.” In fact, new research published in Language and Speech shows that people take corrective action to ensure a two-way flow of conversation when situational factors, like defined roles for working together on a task, create an imbalance in how each person is able to contribute.

This corrective behavior had never before been identified or described. The researchers at UC Santa Cruz who discovered it are calling it "reciprocity in conversation." And in settings where people are working together on a task, it's actually associated with higher levels of task enjoyment. This could have fascinating implications for employee morale in work settings, but there's a catch. In order for conversation reciprocity to take place, the people collaborating on a task must make time to incorporate small talk into their work.

[...] "An average workday now is getting the team together into a virtual meeting, where there's a very clear goal and task," Guydish said. "You're not talking to coworkers at their desk or in the hall. Everything is structured, and everything is essentially a task nowadays. So this research highlights the importance of perhaps trying to institute moments throughout the day with unstructured chat time."

It's in those moments that reciprocity works its magic. Typically, when peers are working together on a task that requires one to direct the other, it creates a natural imbalance in the conversation, where the person in the leadership role ends up doing most of the talking. But if the participants also have unstructured time available, the person leading the task-based conversation can use the opportunity to pull back on their contributions, essentially yielding air time during small talk to the other participant.

That's reciprocity. It helps balance the scales of the overall interaction. And the closer participants get to achieving balance, the higher their levels of enjoyment will be related to the task at hand.

Journal Reference:
Andrew J. Guydish, J. Trevor D’Arcey, Jean E. Fox Tree. Reciprocity in Conversation [$], Language and Speech (DOI: 10.1177/0023830920972742)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Lidar startup goes public, makes founder a billionaire:

Luminar founder Austin Russell has become one of the youngest self-made billionaires after the lidar maker debuted on public markets on Thursday. Russell, 25, was just 17 when he founded Luminar in 2012. Shares of Luminar rose above $30 a share on Friday, a massive 43 percent gain for the day on top of big gains on Thursday.

Luminar has emerged as one of the leading companies in the fast-growing lidar industry.  Carmakers are expected to begin offering lidar as an advanced option for their vehicles in the next few years to enable better driver-assistance technology. Right now, lidar companies are vying to win contracts to supply these sensors.

Luminar had a major win in May when it signed a deal with Volvo to supply lidar sensors for vehicles starting in 2022. It was one of the first such deals in the industry.

More recently, Luminar struck a deal to supply lidar sensors to Mobileye, the Intel subsidiary that supplies many of the camera-based driver assistance systems in today's cars. Luminar is supplying sensors for Mobileye's self-driving prototypes, not production vehicles, so it wasn't a huge deal on its own. But if Mobileye winds up building its next-generation technology around Luminar's lidar—far from a sure thing—it could lead to a lot of Luminar lidar sales in the future.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Onion-Location
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/onion-location/

Onion-Location is an easy way to advertise an onion site to the users. You can either configure a web server to show an Onion-Location Header or add an HTML meta attribute in the website.

For the header to be valid the following conditions need to be fulfilled:

• The Onion-Location value must be a valid URL with http: or https: protocol and a .onion hostname.
• The webpage defining the Onion-Location header must be served over HTTPS.
• The webpage defining the Onion-Location header must not be an onion site.

In this page, the commands to manage the web server are based Debian-like operating systems and may differ from other systems. Check your web server and operating system documentation.

[...] The identical behaviour of Onion-Location includes the option of defining it as a HTML http-equiv attribute. This may be used by websites that prefer (or need) to define an Onion-Location by modifying the served HTML content instead of adding a new HTTP header. The Onion-Location header would be equivalent to a .onion" /> added in the HTML head element of the webpage. Replace with the onion service that you want to redirect.
More information

Read the Onion-Location spec.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

China announces expansion to weather modification program, artificial rain to cover area bigger than size of India - ABC News:

China has revealed plans over the next five years to expand its experimental weather modification program, to cover an area greater than the size of India with artificial rainfall.

[...] China's State Council says breakthroughs in research and new technologies means the country will have a "developed weather modification system" by 2025.

[...] "China will have a developed weather modification system by 2025, with breakthroughs in fundamental research [and development] in key technologies, steady improvements in modernisation and refined services, distinct enhancement in comprehensive prevention against safety risks," the statement said.

The State Council said weather modification will "intensify" in areas of mitigating drought, hail, fires and high temperatures, while also assisting agricultural production and preserving ecologically protected areas.

[...] Cloud seeding — specifically, glaciogenic cloud seeding — is where tiny drops of super-cooled water that are not growing efficiently enough to become raindrops are converted into ice by adding silver iodide.

This then helps the super-cooled water grow into snowflakes or raindrops ready to fall from the sky. The process only works if conditions are just right.

[...] The $19 million Tianhe Project — which translates into Sky River — is the world's largest artificial rain experiment, which aims to divert excess water vapour above the Yangtze river basin towards drier parts of the country, according to local media.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers discover life in deep ocean sediments at or above water's boiling point:

"Water boils on the (Earth's) surface at 100 degrees Celsius, and we found organisms living in sediments at 120 degrees Celsius," said URI Professor of Oceanography Arthur Spivack, who led the geochemistry efforts of the 2016 expedition organized by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Germany's MARUM–Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. The study was carried out as part of the work of Expedition 370 of the International Ocean Discovery Program.

[...] While this is exciting news on its own, Spivack said the research could point to the possibility of life in harsh environments on other planets.

According to the study, sediments that lie deep below the ocean floor are harsh habitats. Temperature and pressure steadily increase with depth, while the energy supply becomes increasingly scarce. It has only been known for about 30 years that, in spite of these conditions, microorganisms do inhabit the seabed at depths of several kilometers. The deep biosphere is still not well understood, and this brings up fundamental questions: Where are the limits of life, and what factors determine them?

[...] Like the search for life in outer space, determining the limits of life on the Earth is fraught with great technological challenges, the research study says.

"Surprisingly, the microbial population density collapsed at a temperature of only about 45 degrees," says co-chief scientist Fumio Inagaki of JAMSTEC. "It is fascinating – in the high-temperature ocean floor, there are broad depth intervals that are almost lifeless. But then we were able to detect cells and microbial activity again in deeper, even hotter zones – up to a temperature of 120 degrees."

Journal Reference:
Verena B. Heuer, Fumio Inagaki, Yuki Morono, et al. Temperature limits to deep subseafloor life in the Nankai Trough subduction zone [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abd7934)

Original Submission

Tokolosh writes:

Blogger Daniel Lange takes a look at the Linux Foundation's 2020 annual report, and concludes that it was produced with Adobe, which is not available on Linux. Further sleuthing by a commentator reveals that the original was created on Microsoft Word. Stock images used for illustration mostly show Apple MacBooks. This is what you get for a $148 million annual budget.

No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The same vision for all primates: The world's smallest primate reveals the incredible preservation of our visual system through millions of years of evolution:

For more than a century, the visual system of primates has been intensely studied. These studies uncovered that unlike other mammals such as rodents, visual information is processed by small dedicated computing units located in the visual cortex. "As the different primate species cover a wide range of sizes, we were led to wonder whether this basic computing unit scales with body or brain size. Is it simplified or miniaturized, for example, in the world's smallest primate, the gray mouse lemur," asks Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Fundamental Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine?

[...] To answer this question, the visual system of the mouse lemur was studied using an optical brain imaging technique. Geometrical shapes representing lines of various orientations were presented to the lemurs and the activity of the neurons responding to the visual stimuli was imaged. The repetition of such measurements gradually allowed them to determine the size of the minimal units processing form information. "We expected to see a unit of tiny size, proportional to the small size of the lemur, but our data revealed that they measure more than half a millimeter in diameter," says Daniel Huber.

In collaboration with the Max Planck Researchers, Huber compared hundreds of these units imaged in the tiny mouse lemur brain with the data obtained for the visual circuits of other, much larger primate species. The team made a surprising discovery: not only was the basic processing unit almost identical in size in the 60-gram mouse lemur, as in larger monkeys such as macaques weighing about seven kilograms, or even larger primates such as us humans.

They also found that the way the units are arranged across the brain was totally indistinguishable, following the same rules with mathematical precision. The researchers also found that the number of nerve cells per visual unit was almost identical in all primates studied so far.

Journal Reference:
Chun Lum Andy Ho, Robert Zimmermann. et. al.,Orientation Preference Maps in Microcebus murinus Reveal Size-Invariant Design Principles in Primate Visual Cortex, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.11.027)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Chinese Robotaxi Firm AutoX Starts Operation In Shenzen With No Human Driver:

Most self-driving car companies move to test vehicles put putting them into taxi service, to learn what it's like to carry passengers, but they always start by having a human safety driver on board who, ideally, never touches the wheel, though at first they need to intervene from time to time.

As progress is made, an important milestone is to have the confidence (and legal permission) to operate for actual passengers without the safety driver. On Dec 2, AutoX, a Chinese robocar developer, announced that their vehicles are now providing taxi rides in Shenzen to a group of staff and VIP guests.

Google DriveVideo - AutoX Puts Fully Driverless RoboTaxis on the Roads in China.mp4

The start of such operations presumes that the existing tests have shown an excellent safety record, good enough that the company is willing to take the necessary risk and liability of no-driver operation. Previously, Waymo was the only pioneer to do this, having begun in 2018. Since then it has expanded operations and temporarily is making all rides passenger-only due to Covid-19. AutoX is deploying its entire fleet of 25 cars passenger-only, and did not disclose what set of roads the vehicles operate on. (Waymo operates in the fairly easy region around Chandler, Arizona.)

[...] While AutoX indicated the vehicles do not have remote monitors or operators, the vehicles will come to a stop if they come to a confusing situation, and a remote operator can then give high level guidance on how to proceed.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Does Tor provide more benefit or harm? New paper says it depends:

Researchers on Monday unveiled new estimates that attempt to measure the potential harms and benefits of Tor. They found that, worldwide, almost 7 percent of Tor users connect to hidden services, which the researchers contend are disproportionately more likely to offer illicit services or content compared with normal Internet sites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries rated as more politically "free" relative to those that are "partially free" or "not free."

Specifically, the fraction of Tor users globally accessing hidden sites is 6.7, a relatively small proportion. Those users, however, aren't evenly distributed geographically. In countries with regimes rated "not free" by this scoring from an organization called Freedom House, access to hidden services was just 4.8 percent. In "free" countries, the proportion jumped to 7.8 percent.

[...] The researchers—from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia; Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Cyber Espion in Portsmouth, United Kingdom—acknowledged that the estimates aren't perfect, In part, that's because the estimates are based on the unprovable assumption that the overwhelming majority of Dark Web sites provide illicit content or services.

The paper, however, argues that the findings can be useful for policymakers who are trying to gauge the benefits of Tor relative to the harms it creates. The researchers view the results through the lenses of the 2015 paper titled The Dark Web Dilemma: Tor, Anonymity and Online Policing and On Liberty, the essay published by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859.

The Tor Project points out in an email, presumably to ArsTrchnica, that the findings are flawed because they assume every .onion address is used for illicit purposes. Many sites offer a .onion address as an alternative way of reaching their content, including SoylentNews.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo_:

Divers discover Nazi WW2 enigma machine in Baltic Sea:

BERLIN (Reuters) - German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine.

Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find.

"I've made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years. But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines," said Huber.

[...] The find, made by divers working on behalf of WWF aiming to find abandoned fishing nets that endanger marine life, will be given to the archaeology museum in Schleswig.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Black holes may not exist, but fuzzballs might, wild theory suggests:

[...] In string theory, black holes are neither black nor holes. Instead, the best metaphor to explain what a fuzzball is to look at another compact-and-weird object in the universe: neutron stars.

Neutron stars are what happens when an object doesn't quite have enough gravity to compress into what we call a black hole. Inside a neutron star, matter is compressed into its highest density state possible. Neutrons are one of the fundamental constituents of atoms, but they usually play along with other particles such as protons and electrons. But in a neutron star, that kind of atomic camaraderie breaks down and dissolves, leaving behind just neutrons crammed together as tightly as possible.

With fuzzballs, the fundamental strings stop working together and simply crowd together, becoming a large, well, ball of strings. A fuzzball.

Fuzzballs aren't fully fleshed out, even in theory, because as cool as string theory sounds, nobody has ever been able to come up with a complete mathematical solution for it — and so fuzzballs aren't just fuzzy in physical reality, but also fuzzy in mathematical possibility.

Still, we might be able to find fuzzballs with upcoming surveys, as described in a review article published Oct. 27 in the preprint journal arXiv. We are just now beginning to move past proving the existence of black holes and toward probing the details of how they behave, and our best way to do it is through gravitational waves.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

What makes the world's biggest surfable waves?:

On Feb. 11, 2020, Brazilian Maya Gabeira surfed a wave off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, that was 73.5 feet tall. Not only was this the biggest wave ever surfed by a woman, but it also turned out to be the biggest wave surfed by anyone in the 2019-2020 winter surfing season—the first time a woman has ridden the biggest wave of the year.

As a female surfer myself—though of dubious abilities—this news made me really excited. I love it when female athletes accomplish things that typically garner headlines for men. But I am also a physical oceanographer and climate scientist at Brandeis University. Gabeira's feat got me thinking about the waves themselves in addition to the surfers who ride them.

[...] Just as light waves and sound waves will bend when they hit something or change speed—a process called refraction—so do ocean waves. When shallow bathymetry slows down a part of a wave, this causes the waves to refract. Similar to the way a magnifying glass can bend light to focus it into one bright spot, reefs, sand banks and canyons can focus wave energy toward a single point of the coast.

This is what happens at Nazaré to create giant waves. Extending out to sea from the shore is an underwater canyon that was etched out by an ancient river when past sea level was much lower than it is today. As waves propagate toward shore over this canyon, it acts like a magnifying glass and refracts the waves toward the center of the canyon. This focusing of waves by the Nazaré Canyon helps make the largest surfable waves on the planet.

YouTube video of Maya's record.

Journal References:
1.) Babanin, Alexander V., Rogers, W. Erick, de Camargo, Ricardo, et al. Waves and Swells in High Wind and Extreme Fetches, Measurements in the Southern Ocean, Frontiers in Marine Science (DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2019.00361)
2.) N. F. Barber and F. Ursell, The generation and propagation of ocean waves and swell. I. Wave periods and velocities, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences (DOI: 10.1098/rsta.1948.0005)
3.) L.S.Griffiths, R.Porter, Focusing of surface waves by variable bathymetry, Applied Ocean Research (DOI: 10.1016/j.apor.2011.08.004)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Justice Department accuses Facebook of discriminating against U.S. workers:

The Justice Department said that Facebook had "refused" to recruit, consider or hire qualified U.S. workers for more than 2,600 jobs that in many cases paid an average salary of $156,000 a year.

Instead, it opted to fill the positions using temporary visa holders, such as those with H-1B visas, the department added.

"Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs," the Justice Department said. The social media company instead sought to channel such jobs to temporary visa holders it wanted to sponsor for green cards or permanent residency, it added.

Company spokesman Daniel Roberts said: "Facebook has been cooperating with the DOJ in its review of this issue and while we dispute the allegations in the complaint, we cannot comment further on pending litigation."

H-1B visas are often used by the technology sector to bring highly skilled foreign guest workers to the United States. But critics say the laws governing these visas are lax, and make it too easy to replace U.S. workers with cheaper, foreign labor.

Also at:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/03/facebook-h1b-visa-jobs-trump-department-of-justice
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/facebook-doj-immigration-lawsuit/
https://www.engadget.com/justice-department-sues-facebook-h1b-visas-205126525.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-doj-suing-facebook-hiring-foreign-workers-h1b-2020-12
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/doj-sues-facebook-discriminating-against-us-workers-reserving-jobs-h1-b-workers
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/12/3/trump-administration-accuses-facebook-of-exploiting-h1-b-visas
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-lawsuit-against-facebook-discriminating-against-us-workers

Original Submission

takyon writes:

US ends era of emotional support animals on planes

US airlines will no longer be required to transport emotional support animals after passengers insisted on bringing on board their horses, pigs, peacocks and turkeys for psychological reasons.

Wednesday's rule change by the US Department of Transportation now says only dogs qualify as service animals.

The agency said unusual animals on flights had "eroded the public trust in legitimate service animals".

Airlines say the old policy had been abused and was dangerous.

The new rule defines service dogs as "individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability", and says other animals should be treated by airlines as pets that can be placed in the cargo hold for a fee.

Previously: The Confusion About Pets (archive)
"Emotional Support Animals" Riding With Owners Aboard Commercial Airlines Flights

Original Submission

hubie wrote in with a story which became:

SOHO's Pioneering 25 years in Orbit:

The ESA-NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is celebrating its twenty-fifth launch anniversary.

Two and a half decades of scientific discovery is a major milestone for any space mission. But when the spacecraft at the heart of the celebration was only designed to last for two years, and operates from an area outside the Earth's protective magnetosphere, it's an unalloyed triumph in the history of space exploration.

SOHO launched on 2 December 1995. It is stationed 1.5 million kilometers closer to the Sun than the Earth, from where it enjoys uninterrupted views of our star. The mission was launched with three scientific objectives in mind. The first was to study the dynamics and structure of the solar interior. The second was to study why the Sun's outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is so much hotter than its surface, and the third was to study where and how the solar wind of particles is accelerated. Almost 6000 papers have now appeared in refereed journals based on SOHO data, many of them representing significant progress in our understanding of the original objectives. In addition to investigating how the Sun works, SOHO is the most prolific discoverer of comets in astronomical history, having spotted more than 4000 of these icy mini-worlds during the sunward leg of their journeys.

[*] SOHO.

In celebration, NASA posted a really cool video from the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) instrument showing a movie of its observations of the Sun over the whole mission.

Original Submission