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upstart writes:

Book Publishers Sue Maryland Over Law That Would Require Them To Offer 'Reasonable' Prices On Ebooks To Libraries:

For years now, we've been highlighting how book publishers are at war with libraries, and see ebooks and ebook pricing as a key lever in that war. With regular books, a library can just buy the book and lend it out and do what they want with it. But not ebooks. Because of a broken copyright law, publishers retain excess control over ebooks, and they lord that over libraries, arbitrarily raising prices to ridiculous levels, limiting how many times they can lend it out before they have to "repurchase" the ebook, and generally making it as difficult as possible for libraries to actually be able to offer ebooks.

This is because of a broken copyright system that gives publishers way more control over ebooks than traditional hardcopy books. And book publishers have spent the past decade abusing that power. In an ideal world, Congress would get its act together and fix copyright law and properly add first sale rights for digital goods like ebooks. But, without that, some states are trying to step in and fix things, including Maryland, which earlier this year passed a law that would require publishers to sell ebooks to libraries at "reasonable" rates.

With the law set to go into effect next year, helping more Maryland residents get access to ebooks in the midst of a still ongoing pandemic, the book publishers have continued their Grinch-like ways, and sued to block the law. The complaint says that this is an attempt by state law to route around federal copyright law, and since the 1976 Copyright Act, state copyright laws are pre-empted by federal law.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Kronos ransomware attack may cause weeks of HR solutions downtime:

Workforce management solutions provider Kronos has suffered a ransomware attack that will likely disrupt many of their cloud-based solutions for weeks.

[...] "As we previously communicated, late on Saturday, December 11, 2021, we became aware of unusual activity impacting UKG [(Ultimate Kronos Group)] solutions using Kronos Private Cloud," disclosed Bob Hughes, Executive Vice President for UKG.

"We took immediate action to investigate and mitigate the issue, and have determined that this is a ransomware incident affecting the Kronos Private Cloud—the portion of our business where UKG Workforce Central, UKG TeleStaff, Healthcare Extensions, and Banking Scheduling Solutions are deployed."

UKG solutions that are not using the Kronos Private Cloud are unaffected, including UKG Pro, UKG Ready, and UKG Dimensions.

[...] While not much else is known about the attack, this disruption of services comes at a terrible time for customers getting ready for holiday vacations, bonus payments, and a limited workforce.

An affected customer has told BleepingComputer that they will now have to go back to using spreadsheets and paper and pencil to cut checks and monitor timekeeping for the time being.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"The Google Earth of Biology" – Visually Stunning Tree of All Known Life Unveiled Online:

The OneZoom explorer – available at onezoom.org – maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species known to science. The interactive tree of life allows users to zoom in to any species and explore its relationships with others, in a seamless visualisation on a single web page. The explorer also includes images of over 85,000 species, plus, where known, their vulnerability to extinction.

OneZoom was developed by Imperial College London biodiversity researcher Dr. James Rosindell and University of Oxford evolutionary biologist Dr. Yan Wong. In a paper published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Drs Wong and Rosindell present the result of over ten years of work, gradually creating what they regard as "the Google Earth of biology."

upstart writes:

What is a NFT - Non fungible token?. And if that doesn't help try this for a less headache-inducing explanation.

'Bored Ape' NFT worth $284,495 accidentally sells for just $2,844:

A distracted trader accidentally sold a non-fungible token (NFT) for a hundredth of its market price.

NFTs are the latest cryptocurrency phenomenon to go mainstream. In the simplest terms, NFTs transform digital works of art and other collectibles into one-of-a-kind, verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 pieces of digital NFT art living on the ethereum (eth) blockchain. On Saturday, the owner of such a piece of art accidentally sold his NFT for a fraction of what it was worth.

Max, who goes by the username maxnaut, said the mistake happened after "a lapse of concentration" when he accidentally listed the NFT for 0.75 eth ($2,844) instead of 75 eth ($284,495).

[...] Virtual art has been created, and talked about, for years. But now, thanks to endorsement from celebrities as diverse as Elon Musk, Lindsay Lohan and Steve Aoki, online buzz in art and cryptocurrency circles, and, perhaps most importantly, blockchain technology, it has not only entered the mainstream -- it is generating huge sums of money for digital artists and online collectors.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Personality Traits Predict Performance Differently Across Different Jobs:

"Although past studies made statements about the effects of personality traits on job performance in general, the specifics of these relationships really depend on the job," said Michael Wilmot, assistant professor of management in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. "More interesting findings exist when we take a deeper look at performance within the different jobs."

Wilmot and Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, combined multiple meta-analyses of the five big personality traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and neuroticism — and examined their effect on job performance. Meta-analysis is a process used to systematically merge multiple independent findings using statistical methods to calculate an overall effect.

The researchers indexed these personality trait relationships across nine major occupational groups — clerical, customer service, healthcare, law enforcement, management, military, professional, sales, and skilled/semiskilled. They accounted for job complexity and what occupational experts rate as the relevance of these personality traits to job requirements.

Overall, Wilmot and Ones found that relationships between personality traits and performance varied greatly across the nine major occupational groups. The main source of these differences pertained to occupational complexity.

upstart writes:

When the brain switches from hearing to listening:

It is intuitively clear to us that there is a difference between passive hearing and active listening. [...] Neuroscientists Professor Tania Rinaldi Barkat and Dr. Gioia De Franceschi from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel have provided an accurate account of what happens in this process in the journal Cell Reports.

For their study, the researchers examined the activity of neurons in four different areas in the brains of mice known to be involved in increasingly complex sound processing. During the experiment, the animals were either passively hearing the sounds played to them, or actively listening to them to receive a reward for detecting the sounds.

[...] It was shown that the majority of neurons changed their activity when switching between hearing and listening. "But this doesn't mean that all neurons behaved the same way," explains De Franceschi. "We actually found ten distinct and specific types of activity change."

While most of the neurons showed a change that was probably related to varying levels of attention, some of them also showed patterns of activity that were related to the arousal level of the mice, their movement, the availability of a reward, or a combination of these factors.

[...] "At the beginning of our study, we suspected that these were the areas particularly affected by attention to sounds," said Barkat. "Surprisingly, however, this wasn't the case." Attention also alters activity in brain areas previously thought to perform only basic forms of sound processing.

Journal Reference:
Gioia De Franceschi, Tania Rinaldi Barkat. Task-induced modulations of neuronal activity along the auditory pathway. Cell Reports, 2021; 37 (11): 110115 (DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.110115)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Debilitating human parasite transmitted via dogs eating fish:

Guinea worm disease is usually caught by drinking water containing water fleas that carry the parasite larvae.

The worms mate and grow inside the body, and after 10-14 months the one-metre-long [~40 inch] adult worm emerges, usually from the arms or legs, to shed its larvae back into water.

[...] Eradication programmes have cut human cases of Guinea worm from millions a year in the 1980s to just 27 in 2020.

[...] Targeted surveillance showed that in 2020, 93% of Guinea worms detected worldwide were in dogs in Chad, in central Africa.

Research by the University of Exeter, published today in Current Biology, has revealed a new pathway for transmission – by dogs eating fish that carry the parasite larvae. This means dogs maintain the parasite's life-cycle and humans can still catch the disease.

[The researchers] tracked hundreds of dogs with satellite tags to analyse movements, and revealed dog diets throughout the year using forensic stable isotope analysis of dog whiskers.

Much of the fish eaten by the dogs – usually guts or smaller fish – was discarded by humans fishing on the river and its lagoons.

Professor Robbie McDonald, of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute, who led the study said: "Dogs are now the key impediment to eradicating this dreadful human disease.

Journal Reference:
Cecily E.D. Goodwin, Monique Léchenne, Jared K. Wilson-Aggarwal, et al. Seasonal fishery facilitates a novel transmission pathway in an emerging animal reservoir of Guinea worm. Current Biology, 2021; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.11.050

Original Submission

Trade magazine AVI and other sources are running this press release from Mercedes: Mercedes meets legal requirements for L3 driving on German roads:

Mercedes-Benz has become the first automotive company in the world to meet the legal requirements of UN-R157 for a Level 3 autonomous driving system. The German Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) has granted system approval to Mercedes based on UN-R157, thus paving the way for international rollout of the system, provided that national legislation allows it.

Germany has taken a pioneering role in legislating for autonomous driving, following its establishment of the Road Traffic Act (StVG) for Level 3 systems in 2017. Thanks to this, customers will be able to buy an S-Class saloon equipped with Mercedes Drive Pilot in the first half of 2022, enabling them to drive in conditionally automated mode at speeds of up to 60km/h in heavy traffic or congested situations on suitable stretches of motorway in Germany.

"For many years, we have been working to realize our vision of automated driving. With this lidar-based system, we have developed an innovative technology for our vehicles that offers customers a unique, luxurious driving experience and gives them what matters most: time. With the approval of the authorities, we have now achieved a breakthrough: We are the first manufacturer to put conditionally automated driving into series production in Germany," said Markus Schäfer, member of the board of management of Daimler and Mercedes-Benz, chief technology officer responsible for development and purchasing.

Despite ongoing claims of "full self driving" by Elon Musk, the Tesla system is still SAE Level 2, which requires operator supervision (although there are many documented cases where this was not done). There are some differences between the SAE Levels and the UN-R157 spec.

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mini-jet found near Milky Way's supermassive black hole:

Our Milky Way's central black hole has a leak. This supermassive black hole looks like it still has the vestiges of a blowtorch-like jet dating back several thousand years. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope hasn't photographed the phantom jet but has helped find circumstantial evidence that it is still pushing feebly into a huge hydrogen cloud and then splattering, like the narrow stream from a hose aimed into a pile of sand.

This is further evidence that the black hole, with a mass of 4.1 million Suns, is not a sleeping monster but periodically hiccups as stars and gas clouds fall into it. Black holes draw some material into a swirling, orbiting accretion disk where some of the infalling material is swept up into outflowing jets that are collimated by the black hole's powerful magnetic fields. The narrow "searchlight beams" are accompanied by a flood of deadly ionizing radiation.

"The central black hole is dynamically variable and is currently powered down," said Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Cecil pieced together, like a jigsaw puzzle, multiwavelength observations from a variety of telescopes that suggest the black hole burps out mini-jets every time it swallows something hefty, like a gas cloud. His multinational team's research has just been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

In 2013 evidence for a stubby southern jet near the black hole came from X-rays detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio waves detected by the Jansky Very Large Array telescope in Socorro, New Mexico. This jet too appears to be plowing into gas near the black hole.

upstart writes:

Breakthrough AI Technique Enables Real-Time Rendering of Scenes in 3D From 2D Images:

Humans are pretty good at looking at a single two-dimensional image and understanding the full three-dimensional scene that it captures. Artificial intelligence agents are not.

Yet a machine that needs to interact with objects in the world — like a robot designed to harvest crops or assist with surgery — must be able to infer properties about a 3D scene from observations of the 2D images it's trained on.

While scientists have had success using neural networks to infer representations of 3D scenes from images, these machine learning methods aren't fast enough to make them feasible for many real-world applications.

A new technique demonstrated by researchers at MIT and elsewhere is able to represent 3D scenes from images about 15,000 times faster than some existing models.

The method represents a scene as a 360-degree light field, which is a function that describes all the light rays in a 3D space, flowing through every point and in every direction. The light field is encoded into a neural network, which enables faster rendering of the underlying 3D scene from an image.

driverless writes:

Looks like Germany is about to force ISPs to actually deliver the speeds they promise in their advertising:

A new regulation coming in the form of an amendment in the Telecommunications Act of Germany could radically change the relationship between consumers and internet service providers. According to the draft, users will be able to test their internet speeds and, if there's a too large deviation between their real-world results and what their ISPs promised, they will be eligible for a bill discount. The discount amount will be comparable to the deviation between the contractually agreed Internet speeds and the actual ones.

[...] According to the German consumer protection authorities, deviations from contractual agreements affect over 50% of internet users in the country. As such, the new law will provide a balancing dynamic and an incentive for ISPs to meet their marketing promises and offer more consistent service quality.

Now if only more consumer services were regulated that way.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New IBM and Samsung transistors could be key to super-efficient chips (updated)

IBM and Samsung claim they've made a breakthrough in semiconductor design. On day one of the IEDM [(International Electron Devices Meeting)] conference in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled a new design for stacking transistors vertically on a chip. With current processors and SoCs, transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side-to-side. By contrast, Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) sit perpendicular to one another and current flows vertically.

According to IBM and Samsung, this design has two advantages. First, it will allow them to bypass many performance limitations to extend Moore's Law beyond IBM's current nanosheet technology. More importantly, the design leads to less wasted energy thanks to greater current flow. They estimate VTFET will lead to processors that are either twice as fast or use 85 percent less power than chips designed with FinFET transistors. IBM and Samsung claim the process may one day allow for phones that go a full week on a single charge. They say it could also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including cryptomining, more power-efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment.

IBM blog post. Also at Notebookcheck.

See also: Samsung Begins Sampling 24 Gbps GDDR6 Memory Chips For Next-Gen GPUs

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

With further delays to BE-4 rocket engine, Vulcan may not make 2022 debut

Blue Origin is unlikely to deliver two flight-ready versions of the BE-4 rocket engine to United Launch Alliance (ULA) before at least the second quarter of 2022, two sources say. This increases the possibility that the debut flight of ULA's much-anticipated new rocket, Vulcan, could slip into 2023.

Vulcan's first stage is powered by two BE-4 engines, which burn methane and are more powerful than the space shuttle's main engines. The sources said there recently was a "relatively small" production issue with fabrication of the flight engines at Blue Origin's factory in Kent, Washington.

As a result of this, the engines will not be completed and shipped to the company's test stands in West Texas until next year. Once there, each engine must be unpacked, tested, and then re-configured to be moved to ULA's rocket assembly facility in northern Alabama. A reasonable "no-earlier-than" date for the engines' arrival at the rocket manufacturer is now April 2022, and this assumes a smooth final production and testing phase.

owl writes:

Toyota owners have to pay $8/mo to keep using their key fob for remote start

Automakers keep trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet subscription income. Now, it's Toyota's turn.

Nearly every car company offers some sort of subscription package, and Toyota has one called Remote Connect. The service offers the usual fare, letting owners use an app to remotely lock their doors, for example, or if they own a plug-in vehicle, to precondition the interior. But as some complimentary subscriptions for Remote Connect come to an end, Toyota owners are getting an unexpected surprise—they can no longer use their key fob to remote-start their vehicles.

In terms of technology, this remote-start feature is no different from using the fob to unlock the car. The fobs use a short-range radio transmitter to send the car a signal that is encrypted with rolling codes. The car then decrypts the signal and performs the requested action, whether it's to lock or unlock the doors, beep the horn, or start the engine. RF key fobs have been around since the 1980s, and GM added a factory-installed remote-start option in 2004 (no subscription needed).

Key fob remote start has nothing to do with an app, nor does the car or the fob communicate with any servers managed by Toyota.

upstart writes:

New copper surface eliminates bacteria in just two minutes, scientists report:

A new copper surface that kills bacteria more than 100 times faster and more effectively than standard copper could help combat the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

The new copper product is the result of a collaborative research project with RMIT University[*] and Australia's national science agency, CSIRO[**], with findings just published in Biomaterials.

Copper has long been used to fight different strains of bacteria, including the commonly found golden staph, because the ions released from the metal's surface are toxic to bacterial cells.

But this process is slow when standard copper is used, as RMIT University's Distinguished Professor Ma Qian explained, and significant efforts are underway by researchers worldwide to speed it up.

"A standard copper surface will kill about 97% of golden staph within four hours," Qian said.

"Incredibly, when we placed golden staph bacteria on our specially-designed copper surface, it destroyed more than 99.99% of the cells in just two minutes."

"So not only is it more effective, it's 120 times faster."

[*] RMIT: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
[**] CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Journal Reference:
J.L. Smith, N. Tran, T. Song, D. Liang, M. Qian. Robust bulk micro-nano hierarchical copper structures possessing exceptional bactericidal efficacy. Biomaterials, 2022; 280: 121271 DOI: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2021.121271

Original Submission