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looorg writes:

Followup for the previous story about facial recognition for pupils in school to get their food.

Nine schools in North Ayrshire have paused use of facial recognition technology days after introducing it, following UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) inquiries.

[...] Separately, Prof Fraser Sampson, biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner for England and Wales, told the BBC that he expected public services contemplating the use of facial recognition to think carefully before "deciding to use a measure as obviously intrusive as facial recognition".

[...] On Friday, North Ayrshire Council tweeted that it had decided to temporarily pause the facial recognition system in secondary schools, having received a number of inquiries about the technology.

I guess there was a bit of a big brother backlash after it became known and the project is now on pause. Or they won't use the entire system but just the fingerprint part, not fingerprint and face scan.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59037346

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DannyB writes:

From SpaceNews.com: Rogozin says Crew Dragon safe for Russian cosmonauts

The head of Roscosmos says he is now satisfied that SpaceX's Crew Dragon is safe enough to carry Russian cosmonauts, clearing a major obstacle for an agreement to exchange seats between Soyuz and commercial crew vehicles.

[...] Rogozin and others at Roscosmos had previously said they needed more evidence that Crew Dragon was safe enough for Russian cosmonauts

[...] NASA has sought to barter seats to create "mixed crews" of at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos cosmonaut on each mission. That would ensure both countries would have a presence on the station, and ability to maintain their separate systems, if either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles are grounded for an extended period.

The earliest a Russian cosmonaut could fly on a Crew Dragon would be the Crew-5 mission in the second half of 2022. Similarly, the next time a NASA astronaut could fly on a Soyuz would be in the fall of 2022, since NASA has decided not to acquire a seat on the Soyuz MS-21 launching in March 2022.

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upstart writes:

2 million Brits get a raise as minimum wage jumps to $13 an hour:

London (CNN Business) Up to 2 million UK workers will be getting bigger paychecks starting in April following a hike to the minimum wage.

The minimum hourly wage for people over the age of 23 will increase by 6.6% to £9.50 ($13), the government said ahead of its budget announcement on Wednesday.

The increase to the National Living Wage is more than twice the current inflation rate of 3.1%. But it has been criticized as inadequate because inflation is expected to race higher in the coming months and the government is slashing benefits for some low earners while hiking taxes on workers.

Lower income households also spend a higher proportion of their income on energy bills, and they could come under further pressure as energy prices spike.

[...] The government has recently increased the minimum wage by more than inflation, [Nye] Cominetti said. But he cautioned that the April hike "would in fact be a smaller real rise than some recent years, given that inflation is likely to be over 4% by April 2022."

Some economists are expecting prices to surge even higher. Huw Pill, the Bank of England's top economist, told the Financial Times last week that he "would not be shocked" to see inflation top 5% early next year.

Higher wages also won't fully compensate for government cuts to a benefit claimed by lower earners called Universal Credit. The benefit was hiked during the pandemic, but is now being reduced by £20 ($27.50) a week.

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DannyB writes:

Trump Given 30 Days To Have His Social Media Site Comply With Open Source License:

Plenty of people have raised concerns that Donald Trump's sketchy new social media site, Truth Social, is just a lightly reskinned Mastodon, which is violating Mastodon's fairly strict AGPLv3 license. As we had previously discussed, the aggressive (and sloppy) terms of service for the site claim that the code is proprietary, and even claims that "all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the “Content”) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the “Marks”) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us..."

Of course, part of the reason that Mastodon uses such a license is to encourage others to take the code and build on it if they abide by the terms of the license. And the nature of Mastodon's license is that if you use it, you must make the complete source code available of what you build with it.

[...] the Software Freedom Conservancy has given Trump 30 days to bring the code into compliance -- specifically by providing the source code to Truth Social to the early users who were able to sign up -- or, under the license terms, Trump's "rights in the software are permanently terminated."

For those not familiar, the AGPL license works like the GPL, but eliminates the loophole where GPL software can be used to build a web site without disclosing the GPL and all other related source code of the web site. With AGPL you can either disclose all of the code of your site as open source under AGPL, or you can take a commercial license to the AGPL code you are using.

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takyon writes:

Signs of first planet found outside our galaxy

Astronomers have found hints of what could be the first planet ever to be discovered outside our galaxy. Nearly 5,000 "exoplanets" - worlds orbiting stars beyond our Sun - have been found so far, but all of these have been located within the Milky Way galaxy.

The possible planet signal discovered by Nasa's Chandra X-Ray Telescope is in the Messier 51 galaxy. This is located some 28 million light-years away from the Milky Way.

[...] Dr Rosanne Di Stefano and colleagues searched for dips in the brightness of X-rays received from a type of object known as an X-ray bright binary. These objects typically contain a neutron star or black hole pulling in gas from a closely orbiting companion star. The material near the neutron star or black hole becomes superheated and glows at X-ray wavelengths. Because the region producing bright X-rays is small, a planet passing in front of it could block most or all of the X-rays, making the transit easier to spot.

The team members used this technique to detect the exoplanet candidate in a binary system called M51-ULS-1.

[...] The transit lasted about three hours, during which the X-ray emission decreased to zero. Based on this and other information, the astronomers estimate that the candidate planet would be around the size of Saturn, and orbit the neutron star or black hole at about twice the distance Saturn lies from the Sun.

Also at NASA.

A possible planet candidate in an external galaxy detected through X-ray transit

Previously: Detection of Extragalactic Exoplanets and Large Organic Molecules

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takyon writes:

Pimax Announces $2399 Standalone Headset With 5.7K Per Eye & 200° Field Of View

Pimax just announced Reality 12K QLED, a future $2399 standalone VR headset with 5.7K per eye resolution and an astonishing 200 degree horizontal field of view.

Reality will use dual 5620×2720 200Hz HDR LCD panels with Mini LED backlighting and a quantum dot layer. While traditional small LCD panels use a single backlight behind the entire display, Mini LED instead uses thousands of tiny LED elements, delivering contrast levels close to OLED – though with the tradeoff of some blooming. The quantum dot layer should deliver an extremely wide color range, which Pimax claims surpasses even OLED.

Pimax says Reality will use a compound lens design combining a fresnel and aspheric element to get the advantages of both. The company claims the geometric distortion seen in the peripheral view on its current products will no longer be present in Reality. The field of view is listed as 200 degrees horizontal and 135 degrees vertical – covering the majority of human vision.

Four cameras on the front edges of Reality are used for inside-out tracking of the headset and its Oculus Touch-like controllers – or your hands freely. Through a partnership with Tobii it will have integrated eye tracking cameras, powering automatic lens separation adjustment and dynamic foveated rendering.

That covers pretty much every feature a VR headset should have.

It also has additional cameras for body tracking and facial expression tracking.

Also at Tom's Hardware and VRFocus.

Previously: Pimax Launches Kickstarter for "8K" Virtual Reality Headset

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upstart writes:

Young Australians lodge human rights complaints with UN over alleged government inaction on climate:

Five young Australians, including members of First Nations and disability communities, have lodged three human rights complaints with the United Nations over what they claim is the Morrison government’s inaction on climate.

The complainants – aged between 14 and 24 years old – argue that the Australian government’s 2030 emissions reduction target fails to uphold the rights of every young person in Australia.

They claim the target is putting young First Nations people and people with disabilities at risk of acute harm from climate change.

They filed the complaint just days before the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, where key allies, like the US and UK, will expect to see improvements to Australia’s emissions reduction targets.

[...] Australia currently has a 2030 target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% of 2005 levels. The target has been widely criticised as inconsistent with scientific advice and inadequate to slow global warming.

The group, represented by lawyers from Environmental Justice Australia, have filed complaints with the UN special rapporteurs for human rights and the environment, the rights of Indigenous people, and the rights of persons with disabilities.

Senior climate specialist lawyer at Environmental Justice Australia, Hollie Kerwin, says this is significant because special rapporteurs have the power to investigate a breach of human rights, and report these breaches to the Australian representative to the United Nations, and the UN Human Rights Council.

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upstart writes:

EU scientists reveal long-term brain damage caused by Covid:

A European study has found that Covid-19 can affect blood vessels in the human brain in a study that has raised more questions about the long-term consequences of the disease.

Research by French, Spanish and German scientists published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience reveals that, in addition to attacking the lungs, the virus can also can kill certain brain cells.

They're known as endothelial cells and are located around the brain, protecting the cerebellum and facilitating blood flow.

The brains of #COVID-19 patients have damaged blood vessels (more so-called string vessels representing remnants of lost capillaries); SARS-CoV-2 infects brain endothelial cells and leads to microvascular pathology via RIPK signalinghttps://t.co/vR0mgZ9EbS

— Nature Neuroscience (@NatureNeuro) October 21, 2021

[...] Scientists discovered that the virus had destroyed endothelial cells by observing patients who died of Covid.

"Blood enters regions of the brain that should not normally see molecules leaving the bloodstream," said report co author Vincent Prévot, from the Inserm research centre in Lille.

upstart writes:

Machine Learning Can Be Fair and Accurate:

Carnegie Mellon University researchers are challenging a long-held assumption that there is a trade-off between accuracy and fairness when using machine learning to make public policy decisions.

As the use of machine learning has increased in areas such as criminal justice, hiring, health care delivery and social service interventions, concerns have grown over whether such applications introduce new or amplify existing inequities, especially among racial minorities and people with economic disadvantages. To guard against this bias, adjustments are made to the data, labels, model training, scoring systems and other aspects of the machine learning system. The underlying theoretical assumption is that these adjustments make the system less accurate.

A CMU team aims to dispel that assumption in a new study, recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

[...] the researchers found that models optimized for accuracy — standard practice for machine learning — could effectively predict the outcomes of interest but exhibited considerable disparities in recommendations for interventions. However, when the researchers applied adjustments to the outputs of the models that targeted improving their fairness, they discovered that disparities based on race, age or income — depending on the situation — could be removed without a loss of accuracy.

Journal Reference:
Kit T. Rodolfa, Hemank Lamba, Rayid Ghani. Empirical observation of negligible fairness–accuracy trade-offs in machine learning for public policy, Nature Machine Intelligence (DOI: 10.1038/s42256-021-00396-x)

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upstart brings us this story:

International Team of Astronomers Reports on Largest-ever Observed Set of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts:

An international team of astronomers recently observed more than 1,650 fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected from one source in deep space, which amounts to the largest set – by far – of the mysterious phenomena ever recorded.

More than a decade after the discovery of FRBs, astronomers are still baffled by the origins of the millisecond-long, cosmic explosions that each produce the energy equivalent to the sun’s annual output.

In a study published in the Oct. 13 issue of the journal Nature, scientists – including UNLV astrophysicist Bing Zhang – report on the discovery of a total of 1,652 independent FRBs from one source over the course of 47 days in 2019. The source, dubbed FRB 121102, was observed using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China, and represents more FRBs in one event than all previous reported occurrences combined.

[...] According to Zhang, there are two active models for where FRBs come from. One could be that they come from magnetospheres, or within a magnetar’s strong magnetic field. Another theory is that FRBs form from relativistic shocks outside the magnetosphere traveling at the speed of light.

“These results pose great challenges to the latter model,” says Zhang. “The bursts are too frequent and - given that this episode alone amounts to 3.8% of the energy available from a magnetar - it adds up to too much energy for the second model to work.”

Journal Reference:
D. Li, P. Wang, W. W. Zhu, et al. A bimodal burst energy distribution of a repeating fast radio burst source, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03878-5)

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upstart writes:

Facebook sues programmer who allegedly scraped data for 178 million users:

Facebook has filed a lawsuit on Friday against a Ukrainian national for allegedly scraping its website and selling the personal data of more than 178 million users on an underground cybercrime forum.

According to court documents filed today, the man was identified as Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko, a resident of Kirovograd, Ukraine.

Facebook alleges that Solonchenko abused a feature part of the Facebook Messenger service called Contact Importer.

The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had a Facebook account in order to allow users to reach out to their friends via Facebook Messenger.

Between January 2018 and September 2019, Facebook said that Solonchenko used an automated tool to pose as Android devices in order to feed Facebook servers with millions of random phone numbers.

As Facebook servers returned information for which phone numbers had an account on the site, Solonchenko collected the data, which he later collected and offered for sale on December 1, 2020, in a post on RaidForums, a notorious cybercrime forum and marketplace for stolen data.

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hubie writes:

From a very recent Scientific Reports paper, described very well by its abstract:

Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that represent objects like art, collectible, and in-game items. They are traded online, often with cryptocurrency, and are generally encoded within smart contracts on a blockchain. Public attention towards NFTs has exploded in 2021, when their market has experienced record sales, but little is known about the overall structure and evolution of its market. Here, we analyse data concerning 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs between June 23, 2017 and April 27, 2021, obtained primarily from Ethereum and WAX blockchains. First, we characterize statistical properties of the market. Second, we build the network of interactions, show that traders typically specialize on NFTs associated with similar objects and form tight clusters with other traders that exchange the same kind of objects. Third, we cluster objects associated to NFTs according to their visual features and show that collections contain visually homogeneous objects. Finally, we investigate the predictability of NFT sales using simple machine learning algorithms and find that sale history and, secondarily, visual features are good predictors for price. We anticipate that these findings will stimulate further research on NFT production, adoption, and trading in different contexts.

Journal Reference:
Nadini, Matthieu, Alessandretti, Laura, Di Giacinto, Flavio, et al. Mapping the NFT revolution: market trends, trade networks, and visual features [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-00053-8)

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upstart writes:

Tesla switches all standard-range vehicles to LiFePo chemistry:

The thing about modern lithium nickel-cobalt-aluminum-oxide battery chemistries as fitted to modern, long-range electric vehicles is that they're expensive. They're expensive because their increased energy density necessitates the use of more rare-earth minerals in their construction. There are other chemistries, though, and one of the more popular ones is called lithium-iron-phosphate or LFP.

In a move to offer reduced-cost Model 3s to the Chinese market, Tesla started offering its base Model 3 with an LFP battery pack. Since LFP chemistry makes for a less energy-dense cell, it provides a lower range but at significantly lower production costs. That move worked so well for Tesla that now, according to its 2021 Q3 shareholder deck (PDF), released Wednesday, it's moving to LFP chemistry for all of its standard-range vehicles around the world.

upstart writes:

Stretchy, bendy, flexible LEDs: They're also cheaper, faster and fabricated with an inkjet printer:

Organic LEDs, made with organic small molecules or polymer materials, are cheap and flexible. "You can bend or stretch them -- but they have relatively low performance and short lifetime," [Chuan] Wang said. "Inorganic LEDs such as microLEDs are high performing, super bright and very reliable, but not flexible and very expensive."

"What we have made is an organic-inorganic compound," he said. "It has the best of both worlds."

They used a particular type of crystalline material called an organometal halide perovskite -- though with a novel twist. The traditional way to create a thin layer of perovskite, which is in liquid form, is to drip it onto a flat, spinning substrate, like a spin art toy, in a process known as spin coating. As the substrate spins, the liquid spreads out, eventually covering it in a thin layer.

From there, it can be recovered and made into perovskite LEDs, or PeLEDs.

Like spin art, however, a lot of material is wasted in that process -- as the substrate spins at several thousand RPM, some of the dripping perovskite splatters and flies away, not sticking to the substrate.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In the early 1980s cassette tapes were the standard storage medium for home computer users; readers of a certain age will remember fiddling with audio jacks, tape counters and signal levels, then waiting for several minutes while a program (hopefully) loaded correctly. While most people happily upgraded to much more reliable floppy disks, [Zack Nelson] decided to go back in time and add a suitably classic storage medium to a retrocomputing project, in the form of a cassette interface. The cassette player he had available was a Pearlcorder L400, which uses the smaller microcassette instead of the familiar audio tapes used in your Walkman or boombox.

https://zeninstruments.blogspot.com/2021/10/manchester-decoder-and-cassette.html

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