SoylentNews

aristarchus writes:

Premature announcement? Article at Wired says Microsoft is retracting Quantum computing claim.

A Microsoft-led team of physicists has retracted a high-profile 2018 paper that the company touted as a key breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer, a device that promises vast new computing power by tapping quantum mechanics.

The retracted paper came from a lab headed by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles, long-theorized but never conclusively detected. The elusive entities are at the heart of Microsoft's approach to quantum computing hardware, which lags behind that of others such as IBM and Google.

WIRED reported last month that other physicists had questioned the discovery after receiving fuller data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov, from the University of Pittsburgh, and Vincent Mourik, at University of New South Wales, in Australia, said it appeared that data that cast doubt on the Majorana claim was withheld.

Cherrypicking through the windows? Say it ain't so, Bill!

Monday, the original authors published a retraction note in the prestigious journal Nature, which published the earlier paper, admitting the whistleblowers were right. Data was "unnecessarily corrected," it says. The note also says that repeating the experiment revealed a miscalibration error that skewed all the original data, making the Majorana sighting a mirage. "We apologize to the community for insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript," the researchers wrote.

Also at Retraction Watch

Journal Reference:
Hao Zhang, Chun-Xiao Liu, Sasa Gazibegovic, et al. RETRACTED ARTICLE: Quantized Majorana conductance, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature26142)

Foreseen here: Microsoft’s Big Win in Quantum Computing Was an ‘Error’ After All

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Software Workers at Glitch Get a Historic Union Contract:

Glitch, the software company behind Trello and Stack Overflow, now has a collective bargaining agreement with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The news is extraordinary, not just because they claim to be the first software workers to have secured a collective bargaining agreement, but because the lead-up to ratification has been so quiet: no leaked memos of smear campaigns, no evidence of union-busting firms. Wonderful, and eerie.

The contract is the outcome of an overwhelming majority vote to unionize under the CWA in March 2020, just before Glitch laid off about a third of its staff, citing the economic downturn. In a joint press release, Glitch workers and the CWA describe Glitch as an unusually willing partner in the negotiations. "Glitch's management, which voluntarily recognized the union after it was announced, is an exception and should serve as a model for executives at other tech companies," it reads.

[...] Over the past few years, unions have gone from taboo to a conceivable future for tech. Along with a wave of media outlets, workers at the podcasting company Gimlet (under Spotify) voted to unionize in 2019. Recently, Medium workers (primarily engineers) lost a unionization effort by one vote but plan to keep moving forward. Meanwhile, a union tide has also swept online media outlets.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

FedEx plans for an all-electric delivery fleet by 2040:

FedEx will replace its current delivery trucks with electric models until its entire fleet is made up of zero—emission vehicles by 2040. The company is making the transition as a way to help it achieve its goal to reach carbon neutral status in the same year. In its announcement, FedEx says its will slowly phase out its existing parcel delivery trucks and that 50 percent of its global vehicle purchases will be electric by 2025. All its vehicle purchases will be EVs by 2030, and it's aiming to retire its gas-powered trucks completely 10 years after that.

[...] FedEx also plans to work with customers to make their supply chains sustainable with carbon–neutral shipping offerings and sustainable packaging solutions. In addition, it will invest money into making its facilities worldwide more efficient and to give them the capability to run on renewable energy.

Related:
UPS Buying Thousands of Electric Vans; Teaming Up with Waymo to Accelerate the Future of Delivery
USPS Picks Oshkosh Defense for Greener Mail Trucks

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say:

Four US senators called on the Biden administration Thursday to establish a "21st century definition of high-speed broadband" of 100Mbps both upstream and downstream. This would be a big upgrade over the Federal Communications Commission broadband standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, which was established in 2015 and never updated by former President Trump's FCC chair, Ajit Pai.

Today's letter was sent to FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and other federal officials by two Democrats, one independent who caucuses with Democrats, and one Republican. Noting that "the pandemic has reinforced the importance of high-speed broadband and underscored the cost of the persistent digital divide in our country," they wrote:

Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality, including low latency, high reliability, and low network jitter, for modern and emerging uses, like two-way videoconferencing, telehealth, remote learning, health IoT, and smart grid applications. Our goal for new deployment should be symmetrical speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), allowing for limited variation when dictated by geography, topography, or unreasonable cost.

"We should also insist that new networks supported with federal funds meet this higher standard, with limited exceptions for truly hard-to-reach locations," the senators wrote later in the letter. "For years, we have seen billions in taxpayer dollars subsidize network deployments that are outdated as soon as they are complete, lacking in capacity and failing to replace inadequate broadband infrastructure."

[Note: all footnotes refer to the original journal article in Nature.--Ed]

DannyB writes:

Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images:

Abstract
Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals' political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries.

[...] Introduction
There is a growing concern that the widespread use of facial recognition will lead to the dramatic decline of privacy and civil liberties^[1]

Pervasive surveillance is not the only risk brought about by facial recognition. Apart from identifying individuals, the algorithms can identify individuals' personal attributes, as some of them are linked with facial appearance. Like humans, facial recognition algorithms can accurately infer gender, age, ethnicity, or emotional state.^[2],^[3] Unfortunately, the list of personal attributes that can be inferred from the face extends well beyond those few obvious examples.

A growing number of studies claim to demonstrate that people can make face-based judgments of honesty^[4], personality^[5], intelligence^[6], sexual orientation^[7], political orientation^[8],^[9],^[10],^[11],^[12], and violent tendencies^[13].

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"User Engagement" Is Code for "Addiction"

There is something about social media that human beings are not psychologically prepared for. It is a perverse and unnatural abstraction of human social community to which our brain does not react well. As a facsimile of genuine humanity, it plunges into something resembling The Uncanny Valley for social interactions. It might be, for all we know, that the primary reason someone posts on social media is anger. If a proper study was done, I bet it would show exactly that.

Quarantines and lock downs forced people indoors and onto social media. That means that everyone's own emotions became the most important thing in their world. Suddenly, everyone is in the daily habit of an unhealthy and irrational solipsism. Not because we wanted to be, or would be under other circumstances, but because we are all being conditioned to be introverted and consumption-obsessed egomaniacs.

[...] As a UI developer by trade, I can pinpoint precisely the Dark Triad of Web UI Design Choices that addict people to social media and drive us all slowly crazy (by design!):

1. Relative timestamps ("3 hours ago" instead of "6:56 PM"). This creates IMMEDIACY.
2. Infinite scrolling with no "more" button or link. This creates PERPETUATION.
3. Fake internet points (clickable, often animated icons with incrementing numbers. Likes, reactions, upvotes, retweets, etc.). This creates ADDICTION.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Wait, What? MIPS Becomes RISC-V
Classic CPU Company Exits Bankruptcy, Throws in the Towel

What a long, strange trip it's been. MIPS Technologies no longer designs MIPS processors. Instead, it's joined the RISC-V camp, abandoning its eponymous architecture for one that has strong historical and technical ties. The move apparently heralds the end of the road for MIPS as a CPU family, and a further (slight) diminution in the variety of processors available. It's the final arc of an architecture.

[...] Development of the MIPS processor architecture has now stopped, and MIPS (the company) will start making chips based on RISC-V. This is a complete change of business model, not just CPU. The old MIPS was in the business of licensing IP, just like ARM or Ceva or Rambus. It didn't make anything tangible. Companies like the old Wave Computing were its customers, and processors like ARM and RISC-V were its competitors. Now that equation is inverted.

The company didn't have far to go to find a new CPU. RISC-V is the brainchild of Dave Patterson and his team at UC Berkeley, and he's co-author of the seminal textbook on CPU design along with John Hennessy at Stanford. Hennessy's MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages) preceded RISC-V by about two decades, but the two are remarkably similar in underlying concept and philosophy.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up:

On Jan. 27, 1986, Allan McDonald stood on the cusp of history.

McDonald directed the booster rocket project at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol. He was responsible for the two massive rockets, filled with explosive fuel, which lifted space shuttles skyward. He was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the launch of the Challenger "...to approve or disapprove a launch if something came up," he told me in 2016, 30 years after Challenger exploded.

His job was to sign and submit an official form. Sign the form, he believed, and he'd risk the lives of the seven astronautsset to board the spacecraft the next morning. Refuse to sign, and he'd risk his job, his career, and the good life he'd built for his wife and four children.

"And I made the smartest decision I ever made in my lifetime," McDonald told me. "I refused to sign it. I just thought we were taking risks we shouldn't be taking."

[...] McDonald persistently cited three reasons for a delay: freezing overnight temperatures that could compromise the booster rocket joints; ice forming on the launch pad and spacecraft that could damage the orbiter heat tiles at launch; and forecast rough seas at the booster rocket recovery site.

He also told NASA officials, "If anything happens to this launch, I wouldn't want to be the person that has to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why we launched... ."

Now, 35 years after Challenger, McDonald's family reports that he died Saturday in Ogden, Utah, after suffering a fall and brain damage. He was 83 years old.

"There are two ways in which [McDonald's] actions were heroic," recalls Mark Maier, who directs a leadership program at Chapman University and produced a documentary about the Challenger launch decision.

canopic jug writes:

Developer Gavin L Rebeiro has posted[*see note below] a five-part article series at Techrights on how to deal with the ongoing Raspberry Pi fiasco by salvaging existing hardware with a replacement operating system.

• Part I: Acknowledgements
• Part II: Introduction
• Part III: Fundamentals
• Part IV: Doing The Task
• Part V: All The Rest

He covers the background, the technical principles, some methods for mitigation, proposes using NetBSD in place of the GNU/Linux, Raspberry Pi OS. Finally, he walks through installation of NetBSD.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Saudi Arabia takes steps to lead the $700B global hydrogen market:

As governments and industries seek less-polluting alternatives to hydrocarbons, the world's biggest crude exporter doesn't want to cede the burgeoning hydrogen business to China, Europe or Australia and lose a potentially massive source of income. So it's building a $5 billion plant powered entirely by sun and wind that will be among the world's biggest green hydrogen makers when it opens in the planned megacity of Neom in 2025.

[...] Hydrogen is morphing from a niche power source — used in zeppelins, rockets and nuclear weapons — into big business, with the European Union alone committing $500 billion to scale up its infrastructure. Huge obstacles remain to the gas becoming a major part of the energy transition, and skeptics point to Saudi Arabia's weak track record so far capitalizing on what should be a competitive edge in the renewables business, especially solar, where there are many plans but few operational projects.

[...] Saudi Arabia is setting its sights on becoming the world's largest supplier of hydrogen — a market that BloombergNEF estimates could be worth as much as $700 billion by 2050.

takyon writes:

SK Hynix Commences Mass Production of 18GB LPDDR5 RAM Chips for Smartphones With 6,400Mbps Speeds

Android phone makers will continue to push the limits of hardware specifications, and from the looks of it, SK Hynix will lend out more than just a helping hand. The memory manufacturer today announced that it has started mass production of 18GB LPDDR5 RAM chips for flagship smartphones, meaning that premium handsets touting more memory than notebooks will become a commonplace.

SK Hynix claims that its 18GB LPDDR5 RAM for smartphones can operate up to 6,400Mbps, making it around 20 percent faster than the previous-generation LPDDR5 RAM, which could run up to 5,500Mbps. The manufacturer also mentions that it has supplied ASUS with these DRAM chips for the upcoming ROG Phone 5 flagship. Keep in mind that during a specifications leak, the ROG Phone 5 was spotted with the aforementioned RAM count.

Why does a smartphone need 18 GB of memory instead of the previous 16 GB? From the press release:

"This product will improve the processing speed and image quality by expanding the data temporary storage space, as the capacity increases compared to the previous 16GB product," an official from the company said.

So we will see smartphones with 18 GB of RAM, or perhaps smartphones or laptops with 16/32 GB of error correction code (ECC) LPDDR5 memory.

Also at ZDNet and Guru3D.

Previously: Samsung Begins Mass Producing 12 GB DRAM Packages for Smartphones
Samsung Mass Producing LPDDR5 DRAM (12 Gb x 8 for 12 GB Packages)
Get Ready for Smartphones with 16 GB of RAM
Samsung Announces Mass Production of 16 GB LPDDR5 DRAM Packages

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Some misconceptions in this article, but it does explain "alewives", so there is that. From The Conversation.

What do witches have to do with your favorite beer?

When I pose this question to students in my American literature and culture classes, I receive stunned silence or nervous laughs. The Sanderson sisters didn't chug down bottles of Sam Adams in "Hocus Pocus." But the history of beer points to a not-so-magical legacy of transatlantic slander and gender roles.

Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women's work – that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches. Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, emerged from their connection to female brewers.

A routine household task

Humans have been drinking beer for almost 7,000 years, and the original brewers were women. From the Vikings to the Egyptians, women brewed beer both for religious ceremonies and to make a practical, calorie-rich beverage for the home.

True, dat.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A quantum computer just solved a decades-old problem three million times faster than a classical computer:

Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods.

Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU.

The calculation that D-Wave and Google's teams tackled is a real-world problem; in fact, it has already been resolved by the 2016 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless, who studied the behavior of so-called "exotic magnetism", which occurs in quantum magnetic systems.

[...] In contrast, D-Wave's latest experiment resolved a meaningful problem that scientists are interested in independent of quantum computing. The findings have already attracted the attention of scientists around the world.

Journal Reference:
Andrew D. King, Jack Raymond, Trevor Lanting, et al. Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-20901-5)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

China's Tianwen-1 zooms in on Mars surface on cusp of new tech era:

China's Mars orbiter has beamed back high-resolution images, revealing geographic features of the red planet in detail.

The photos taken by Tianwen-1 come a week after the United States released a panorama of the Martian surface snapped by the rover Perseverance.

They also come as China prepares to unveil a new five-year plan centred on science and hi-tech innovation, with aerospace technology expected to be a priority programme.

Chinese mission spokesman Liu Tongjie told state television that two of the orbiter's images were snapped at an altitude of about 330km (205 miles) and had a resolution down to 70cm (27 inches), revealing fine details of the Martian landscape.

"These two pictures clearly show craters, mountain ridges and dunes," said Liu, from the China National Space Administration.

"One image shows a crater with a diameter of about 620 metres and clearly displays the lines at the bottom of the crater."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Exclusive: Flaws in Zoom's Keybase App Kept Chat Images From Being Deleted:

A serious flaw in Zoom's Keybase secure chat application left copies of images contained in secure communications on Keybase users' computers after they were supposedly deleted.

The flaw in the encrypted messaging application (CVE-2021-23827) does not expose Keybase users to remote compromise. However, it could put their security, privacy and safety at risk, especially for users living under authoritarian regimes in which apps like Keybase and Signal are increasingly relied on as a way to conduct conversations out of earshot of law enforcement or security services.

The flaw was discovered by researchers from the group Sakura Samurai as part of a bug bounty program offered by Zoom, which acquired Keybase in May, 2020. Zoom said it has fixed the flaw in the latest versions of its software for Windows, macOS and Linux.

[...] In a statement, a Zoom spokesman said that the company appreciates the work of the researchers and takes privacy and security "very seriously."

"We addressed the issue identified by the Sakura Samurai researchers on our Keybase platform in version 5.6.0 for Windows and macOS and version 5.6.1 for Linux. Users can help keep themselves secure by applying current updates or downloading the latest Keybase software with all current security updates," the spokesman said.

Original Submission