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hubie writes:

UC Riverside psychologists' experiments explain which choice rules daily life:

Will you read this news release now or decide to read it later? "Precrastination," defined as the tendency to expend extra effort to get things done as soon as possible, could explain what you will do.

We have all probably precrastinated, that is, completed tasks right away, even if that meant putting in more work. An unresolved question about precrastination is: Do we rush to get things done because we want to simply act as quickly as possible and worry about decision making later, or do we want to get decision making over and done with, so we needn't have to worry about it subsequently?

A team of psychologists at the University of California, Riverside, may have an answer: Given a choice, we opt for the latter because we want to have our minds clear.

[...] "Precrastination is widespread," Rosenbaum said. "When you answer emails too quickly, when you submit papers before they have been polished, you are precrastinating. But why do we rush? What's the hurry? If there are scarce resources, it's wise to grab low-hanging fruit, but in other cases, rushing has another less clear basis.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Single-use plastics have saved many lives by improving sanitation in health care. However, the sheer quantity of plastic waste—which can take from tens to hundreds of years to decompose—is a global pollution scourge. But now, in a study recently published in ACS Nano, researchers from The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research (SANKEN) at Osaka University and collaborating partners have developed exceptionally versatile hydrogels and moldings that might replace conventional plastics.

The global scale of plastic waste urgently requires solutions and is being addressed from diverse perspectives. For example, in August 2022, National Geographic published a feature on recycling and repurposing plastic waste. Nevertheless, "the only long-term solution is to develop inexpensive, high-performance, plastic-like alternatives that don't persist in the environment," says Takaaki Kasuga, lead and senior author. "This is an active area of research, but the proposed alternatives to date haven't met society's needs."

Various techniques are currently available for molding nanofibers into a controlled orientation; i.e., to exhibit anisotropy. However, a simple technique that enables one to mold cellulose nanofibers from the nano- to macroscopic scale, on multiple spatial axes, has long been unavailable. To meet this need, Kasuga and coworkers used electrophoretic deposition to fabricate anisotropic cellulose-nanofiber-based hydrogels and moldings.

upstart writes:

French Government Hits Clearview With The Maximum Fine For GDPR Violations:

Clearview hasn't won many friends since its inception. Scraping the web of any relevant content to compile a few billion records for facial recognition matches is no way to run a respectable business, and Clearview has been anything but respectable.

[...] Clearview's run in the US has been slightly more successful that its endeavors outside our borders. Thanks to a lack of strong privacy laws, not much can be done about Clearview's scrape-and-sell tactics. But outside of the US, Clearview is finding it almost impossible to engage in shady business as usual.

A few countries have explicitly uninvited Clearview. The UK, after first threatening a $23 million fine for privacy law violations, finally settled on a $9.4 million fine that came with an order to delete all data pertaining to UK residents. The Italian government had the same problems with Clearview and its web scraping, ordering it to pay a $21 million fine for GDPR violations.

The same conclusion has been reached in France, adding to Clearview's European tab. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, French regulators have hit Clearview with the maximum possible fine for GDPR violations.

"Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not provide any response to this formal notice," the CNIL wrote in a press release today announcing the sanction [emphasis its].

"The chair of the CNIL therefore decided to refer the matter to the restricted committee, which is in charge for issuing sanctions. On the basis of the information brought to its attention, the restricted committee decided to impose a maximum financial penalty of 20 million euros, according to article 83 of the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation]."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On November 15, 2021, Russia launched a Nudol missile at one of its aging satellites in low-Earth orbit. As intended, the missile struck the Cosmos 1408 satellite at an altitude of 480 km, breaking it into more than 1,000 fragments.

In the immediate aftermath of this test—which Russia carried out to demonstrate to other space powers its anti-satellite capabilities—American and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station scrambled into spacecraft in case an emergency departure was needed. They remained in these shelters for about six hours before getting an all clear to return to normal activities.

Following international condemnation for this test, Russian officials claimed that Americans and other officials had overreacted. "The United States knows for certain that the emerging fragments at the time of the test and in terms of the orbit’s parameters did not and will not pose any threat to orbital stations, satellites and space activity," the Defense Ministry of Russia said at the time.

However, in the year since then, there have been a number of close calls resulting from near collisions with an estimated 1,500 trackable pieces of debris from the satellite's destruction. In January, for example, a piece of debris came within just 14 meters of a Chinese science satellite.

The International Space Station has also had to maneuver out of the way of potential impacts on several occasions. It had to do so again on Monday evening, NASA said. To put "an extra measure of distance" between the station and the predicted track of debris from Cosmos 1408, thrusters fired for more than five minutes.

Ironically, the thrusters were those of a Russian Progress vehicle, docked to the station in part to give the laboratory propulsive capability to maintain its orbit and just for such maneuvers.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Marine archaeologists in Sweden say they have found the sister vessel of a famed 17th century warship that sank on its maiden voyage and is now on display in a popular Stockholm museum.

The wreck of the royal warship Vasa was raised in 1961, remarkably well preserved, after more than 300 years underwater in the Stockholm harbor. Visitors can admire its intricate wooden carvings at the Vasa Museum, one of Stockholm's top tourist attractions.

Its sister warship, Applet (Apple), was built around the same time as the Vasa on the orders of Swedish King Gustav II Adolf.

Unlike the Vasa, which keeled over and sank just minutes after leaving port in 1628, the sister ship was launched without incident the following year and remained in active service for three decades. It was sunk in 1659 to become part of an underwater barrier mean to protect the Swedish capital from enemy fleets.

upstart writes:

TSMC Reportedly Halts Shipments to China's GPU Specialist, Biren:

Bloomberg reports that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has suspended shipments of products it makes for China-based Biren, which designs processors aimed at artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. TSMC's lawyers reportedly told the top contract chipmaker to suspend shipments while they are assessing the new limitations.

The U.S. has imposed pretty strict curbs and sanctions of China's supercomputer and AI industries. Specifically, new chips cannot enable machines with the performance of over 100 FP64 PetaFLOPS, or over 200 FP32 PetaFLOPS within 41,600 cubic feet (1178 cubic meters). Furthermore, the machine cannot have a throughput of more than 600 GB/s.

[...] Based on performance numbers published by Biren, its compute GPUs can barely compete with Nvidia's in HPC applications that require 64-bit precision for floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). What is more important is that Biren's software for AI and HPC is reportedly years and generations behind that of Nvidia. So whether or not Biren is a competitor to Nvidia as of today, restrictions or not, is still unclear.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A genetic variant that boosts Crohn's disease risk may have helped people survive bubonic plague :

Researchers used DNA collected from centuries-old remains to discern the fingerprints that bubonic plague during the Black Death left on Europeans' immune systems. This devastating wave of disease tended to spare those who possessed a variant of a gene known as ERAP2, causing it to become more common, researchers report October 19 in Nature. That variant is already known to scientists for slightly increasing the odds of developing Crohn's disease, in which errant inflammation harms the digestive system.

The results show "how these studies on ancient DNA can help actually understand diseases even now," says Mihai Netea, an infectious diseases specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, who was not involved with the study. "And the trade-off is also very clear."

Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, bubonic plague once killed 60 percent of those infected. [...]

By sparing individuals whose immune systems bear certain traits, pathogens such as Y. pestis have shaped the evolution of the human immune system. Studies are teasing out the ways the massive winnowing of the plague altered Europeans' immune-related genetics.

upstart writes:

Quarks inside the particles seem to move more than they should in an electric field:

The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New experiments seem to show that the quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them, physicist Nikolaos Sparveris and colleagues report October 19 in Nature. The result suggests that the strong force isn't quite as strong as theory predicts.

It's a finding at odds with the standard model of particle physics, which describes the particles and forces that combine to make up us and everything around us. The result has some physicists stumped about how to explain it — or whether to even try.

"It is certainly puzzling for the physics of the strong interaction, if this thing persists," says Sparveris, of Temple University in Philadelphia.

Such stretchiness has turned up in other labs' experiments, but wasn't as convincing, Sparveris says. The stretchiness that he and his colleagues measured was less extreme than in previous experiments, but also came with less experimental uncertainty. That increases the researchers' confidence that protons are indeed stretchier than theory says they should be.

upstart writes:

An international police organization is using the metaverse and wants to understand how crime could evolve:

The International Criminal Police Organization, aka Interpol, has launched its 'global police Metaverse' as part of an effort to train members how to police in a virtual world.

Last week, Interpol unveiled what it says is the "the first ever Metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide." It says the "Interpol Metaverse" gives officers around the world the tools for cross-border knowledge sharing via avatars, and to take immersive training in forensic investigation and other policing activities.

[...] "As the number of Metaverse users grows and the technology further develops, the list of possible crimes will only expand to potentially include crimes against children, data theft, money laundering, financial fraud, counterfeiting, ransomware, phishing, and sexual assault and harassment," it said.

"For law enforcement, some of these threats are likely to present significant challenges, because not all acts that are criminalized in the physical world are considered crimes when committed in the virtual world," it warned.

[...] "The Metaverse has the potential to transform every aspect of our daily lives with enormous implications for law enforcement," said Madan Oberoi, Interpol executive director of technology and innovation.

"But in order for police to understand the Metaverse, we need to experience it."

[...] "For many, the Metaverse seems to herald an abstract future, but the issues it raises are those that have always motivated Interpol – supporting our member countries to fight crime and making the world, virtual or not, safer for those who inhabit it," said Interpol secretary, General Jürgen Stock.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

While the world is marveling over the first images and data now coming from NASA's Perseverance rover mission seeking signs of ancient microscopic life on Mars, a team of UNLV scientists is already hard at work on the next step: What if we could one day send humans to the Red Planet?

There's a lot to consider when sending people, though. Human explorers, unlike their rover counterparts, require oxygen and food, for starters. It also takes about six to nine months—both ways—just in travel time. And then there's the air itself. Martian air is roughly 98% carbon dioxide (Earth's is a fraction of 1% for comparison) and the air temperature averages an extremely frigid -81 degrees.

It's these challenges that UNLV geochemist and NASA Mars 2020 team scientist Libby Hausrath and postdoctoral researcher Leena Cycil, a microbial ecologist, are exploring. And a big part of the answer? Algae.

[...] Hausrath and Cycil are among a handful of scientists looking at growing algae under the low-pressure, low-light conditions seen on Mars, and are pursuing different species than previous studies.

upstart writes:

Take off the training wheels once in a while:

Turn-by-turn navigation on phones and dedicated GPS devices has made it much easier to travel. However, the reliance on GPS navigation comes at a cost—you never actually learn how to get anywhere. That's a problem.

My world changed when my HTC Eris received an update to enable turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps. I have always been comically bad at navigating. Even places I've been to dozens of times can escape my memory. So having a GPS device in my pocket gave me a lot of confidence to travel.

[...] Recently, I've made a concerted effort to rely less on GPS navigation. Sometimes I will literally just start driving and see what happens. Other times I'll look up my destination in Google Maps first to create a mental map in my head. If I get lost, I can pull out my phone to find my way. I've noticed an improvement in my navigation skills, but why is that?

[...] While some people are naturally better at navigating, it's like a lot of things in life—you just need practice. GPS is like training wheels on a bike. They certainly make it easier to ride the bike, but you don't have to practice balancing. When the training wheels come off, you go down.

If you never navigate without the help of GPS, you're building up a reliance on it. The more you use it, the more you need it. That's why it's important to ditch the GPS from time to time and navigate on your own terms. Maybe you get lost more often, but even that is a great learning experience.

Related journal article:
L. Dahmani, V.D. Bohbot. Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation [open]. Sci Rep 10, 6310 (2020). https://doi.org/10.11598-020-62877-0

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Apple Granted Patent for Deepfakes Based on Reference Images:

Remember how entire governments have been pressing tech companies to tackle the deepfakes permeating their online platforms? Well, they have even more work cut out for themselves now. On Tuesday the US Patent Office granted Apple a patent for "face image generation with pose and expression control"—AKA deepfakes—based on reference images.

According to patent documents first spotted by Patently Apple, Apple's technology uses machine learning to create synthetic images of human faces based on a reference image provided by the user. Once the tech has generated a synthetic face, it can manipulate that face to create changes in expression. Given a reference image or "target shape" depicting a whole person (not just a face), the image generator can also create synthetic images in which the reference person is posed differently.

The generator's neural network is trained to constrain generation enough that the synthetic image can convincingly look like the reference person, not an entirely new—or simply "inspired—creation. These constraints are incorporated using a generative adversarial network (GAN) in which multiple synthetic images are generated, after which a discriminator attempts to determine which images are real or synthetic. The discriminator's findings are then used to further train both the generator and the discriminator.

[...] Others think Apple could be working towards an app or feature that puts a "fun" or "convenient" twist on deepfakes. If that ends up happening, at which point does the [...] proposed AI Bill of Rights get involved?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux Kernel May Drop i486 Support as Torvalds Backs Pentium Plan:

The 486 CPU is somewhat of a relic these days, but its legacy in the Linux kernel has lived on. The i486 has been the de facto minimum for decades. Even Linux, that long-term supporter of outdated architectures, is considering giving up on the chip and removing support for the 486 processors, just like it did for the 386 back in 2012.

The news comes via a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (opens in new tab) from Linus Torvalds himself. Recently keen on adding things like the Rust programming language (opens in new tab)and support for Intel Arc GPUs and Loongson CPUs (opens in new tab) to the Linux kernel, Torvalds is now considering removing the venerable 486, writing: "We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022?"

The idea, which seems so obvious in these days of Raptor Lake and Ryzen 7000, received a certain amount of pushback, with the claim from some users that new hardware based on the superannuated silicon was still being shipped. When the same plan was raised a year ago, one user said they were still using a 486, and wanted to continue doing so.

The 486, which dates back to 1989, is currently the minimum possible spec for running Linux, and works best with lightweight distros such as Tiny Core Linux.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Diverse Digital Interventions Remediate Cognitive Aging in Healthy Older Adults:

After a decade of work, scientists at UC San Francisco's Neuroscape Center have developed a suite of video game interventions that improve key aspects of cognition in aging adults.

The games, which co-creator Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, says can be adapted to clinical populations as a new form of "experiential medicine," showed benefits on an array of important cognitive processes, including short-term memory, attention and long-term memory.

Each employs adaptive closed-loop algorithms that Gazzaley's lab pioneered in the widely cited 2013 Neuroracer study published in Nature, which first demonstrated it was possible to restore diminished mental faculties in older people with just four weeks of training on a specially designed video game.

These algorithms achieve better results than commercial games by automatically increasing or decreasing in difficulty, depending on how well someone is playing the game. That keeps less skilled players from becoming overwhelmed, while still challenging those with greater ability. The games using these algorithms recreate common activities, such as driving, exercising and playing a drum, and use the skills each can engender to retrain cognitive processes that become deficient with age.

[...] The lab's most recent invention is a musical rhythm game, developed in consultation with drummer Mickey Hart, that not only taught the 60 to 79-year-old participants how to drum, but also improved their ability to remember faces. [...]

upstart writes:

IT Leaders Aren't Getting Listened to, and Now They're Ready to Walk Away:

It's not just software developers that companies risk losing: a survey of more than 500 US IT leaders suggests that 58% are actively looking for a new role because they aren't being listened to in company decision-making.

[...] For instance, the report found that non-IT departments have the final say when it comes to decisions around purchasing apps and IT software for the company (54%), facilitating IT audits (52%), purchasing devices (45%) and hiring tech talent (48%).

Tech decision-makers also feel unappreciated by senior company leadership in the transition to remote and hybrid working models: 81% of IT decision-makers felt that they should have had more support from their employer over the last two years. Likewise, more than half (56%) of IT leaders said they felt less loyalty to their employer than they did two years ago.

Vijay Sundaram, chief strategy officer of Zoho Corporation, said even though IT teams have been "indispensable to business innovation and continuity" in recent years, senior management continue to overlook their input in larger business decisions.

This is despite the fact that 88% of respondents believe IT is more responsible for business innovation than ever before, while 85% agree IT could drive even greater innovation in the business if they had a stronger leadership position.

Sundaram noted that the role of IT within organizations would become increasingly important as hybrid working and decentralized teams became mainstream. Indeed, 99% of survey respondents said their organization had already moved to a hybrid model. "This will require the expertise and involvement of ITDMs to identify appropriate technologies and meet corporate guidelines in areas like compliance, privacy and security," he added.

Original Submission