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Freeman writes:

Last month, Volkswagen garnered plenty of bad publicity when it emerged that the company's connected car service refused to help track a stolen car—with a 2-year-old child still on board—until someone paid to reactivate the service. Now, the automaker says it's very sorry this happened, and it's making its connected vehicle emergency service free to most model-year 2020-2023 Volkswagens.
[...]
Most MY2020 or newer VWs are able to use connected services, apart from MY2020 Passats.

Some additional story details for the click-averse:

As Lake County deputies desperately tried to find a stolen Volkswagen with a toddler still inside, they reached out to Car-Net, a service that lets VW owners track their vehicles.

But the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV.

The detective pleaded, explaining the "extremely exigent circumstance," but the representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy, sheriff's office Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli said Friday.

"The detective had to work out getting a credit card number and then call the representative back to pay the $150 and at that time the representative provided the GPS location of the vehicle," Covelli said.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new study suggests that too much – or too little – office noise has a negative effect on employee well-being. The sweet spot? About 50 decibels, comparable to moderate rain or birdsong.

Choosing to work in the murmur of a busy coffee shop rather than in an office with library-level silence might be healthier, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Arizona and University of Kansas.

The study finds – perhaps unsurprisingly – that loud noises at the office have a negative impact on employee well-being. But the study also suggests that complete silence is not conducive to a healthy workplace.

[...] "Everybody knows that loud noise is stressful, and, in fact, extremely loud noise is harmful to your ear," said study co-author Esther Sternberg, director of the UArizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing & Performance. "But what was new about this is that with even low levels of sound – less than 50 decibels – the stress response is higher."

[...] Humans' tendency to get distracted, Sternberg said, is a result of the brain's stress response to potential threats. Our brains are "difference detectors" that take note of sudden changes in sounds so we can decide to fight or flee, she said.

That may explain why low, steady sounds help mask distractions in the workplace, she added.

"People are always working in coffee shops – those are not quiet spaces. But the reason you can concentrate there is because the sounds all merge to become background noise," Sternberg said. "It masks sound that might be distracting. If you hear a pin drop when it's very, very quiet, it will distract you from what you're doing."

Journal Reference:
Karthik Srinivasan, Faiz Currim, Casey M. Lindberg, et al., Discovery of associative patterns between workplace sound level and physiological wellbeing using wearable devices and empirical Bayes modeling [open], npj Digital Medicine (2023) 6:5 ; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-022-00727-1

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why Do Some Modern Computers Still Have Serial Ports?:

While the parallel port is now safely buried in the grave of obsolescence, it may seem odd that the humble, slow serial port is still around. But as it turns out, bit-by-bit, this humble communications port has become essential.

[...] Serial ports are slow with the standard speed at the high end of the range coming in at a pedestrian 115.2Kbps. At that speed, it would take you almost a day to transfer 1GB of data! That's under ideal circumstances, and things can be much, much slower than that.

If we have USB, and serial ports are so slow and comparatively bulky, why the heck do some computers still have them? There are a few reasons, but the most important ones include:

• Lots, and lots, of industrial and scientific equipment are still in service and use serial ports to interface.
• It's simple, reliable, well understood, and much cheaper to implement than other more modern port types.
• Hobbyists have uses, such as programming microcontrollers.

Do you still use the serial port, or do you depend on equipment that does? I have noticed that it is still widely used in medical equipment but are there other fields in which the serial port is the standard interface?

Original Submission

quietus writes:

Last week, Denmark has stored the first volumes of carbon dioxide in an old oil and gas field in the Danish North Sea. The carbon dioxide sequestered comes from a chemical production plant (Ineos Oxide) in the Port of Antwerp, Belgium.

Since 2010, Ineos Oxide has captured CO2 as a by-product from its ethylene oxide (plastics) production, cooled it down to a liquid, and resold the product to the food (fizzy drinks, beer) and agricultural (greenhouse cultivation) industry. Now, instead, part of this production was transported to Nini, a previously abandoned oil platform about 200 km in front of the Danish coast, and injected 1,800 meters deep.

The test project, named Greensand, needs to prove that the process is possible, and safe. The modified transport vessel used, Aurora Storm, can only take 800 ton CO2 per traject; it will have to shuttle back and forth between Antwerp and Denmark about 20 times, enough for 15,000 ton, this year alone. The project will be upscaled to 1.5 million ton a year by 2025.

By 2030, 8 million ton a year is planned, or about half the carbon dioxide emitted by Antwerp's chemical cluster, the largest in Europe. This, however, requires investments in new offshore infrastructure, and larger transport ships known as CO2 carriers.

The Greensand project is racing behind another project though. That project is called Northern Lights, and aims to be able to store 1.5 million ton a year, by next year, 2024. Northern Lights is a partnership between Shell, Equinor and Total, and supported by Norway's government Langskip (Longship) CCS project.

The EU has set a target of capturing and storing a minimum 300 million ton CO2 a year by 2050.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

On March 13, we will officially begin rolling out our initiative to require all developers who contribute code on GitHub.com to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of 2023.

GitHub is central to the software supply chain, and securing the software supply chain starts with the developer. Our 2FA initiative is part of a platform-wide effort to secure software development by improving account security. Developers' accounts are frequent targets for social engineering and account takeover (ATO). Protecting developers and consumers of the open source ecosystem from these types of attacks is the first and most critical step toward securing the supply chain.

[...] If your account is selected for enrollment, you will be notified via email and see a banner on GitHub.com, asking you to enroll. You'll have 45 days to configure 2FA on your account—before that date nothing will change about using GitHub except for the reminders. We'll let you know when your enablement deadline is getting close, and once it has passed you will be required to enable 2FA the first time you access GitHub.com. You'll have the ability to snooze this notification for up to a week, but after that your ability to access your account will be limited.

So, what if you're not in an early enrollment group but you want to get started? Click here and follow a few easy steps to enroll in 2FA.

[...] You can choose between TOTP, SMS, security keys, or GitHub Mobile as your preferred 2FA method.

Recent GitHub security incidents:
GitHub says hackers cloned code-signing certificates in breached repository(1/30/2023)
Slack's private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays(1/5/2023)
Okta's source code stolen after GitHub repositories hacked(12/21/2022)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new measure can help scientists decide which estimation method to use when modeling a particular data problem:

If a scientist wanted to forecast ocean currents to understand how pollution travels after an oil spill, she could use a common approach that looks at currents traveling between 10 and 200 kilometers. Or, she could choose a newer model that also includes shorter currents. This might be more accurate, but it could also require learning new software or running new computational experiments. How to know if it will be worth the time, cost, and effort to use the new method?

A new approach developed by MIT researchers could help data scientists answer this question, whether they are looking at statistics on ocean currents, violent crime, children's reading ability, or any number of other types of datasets.

The team created a new measure, known as the "c-value," that helps users choose between techniques based on the chance that a new method is more accurate for a specific dataset. This measure answers the question "is it likely that the new method is more accurate for this data than the common approach?"

Traditionally, statisticians compare methods by averaging a method's accuracy across all possible datasets. But just because a new method is better for all datasets on average doesn't mean it will actually provide a better estimate using one particular dataset. Averages are not application-specific.

So, researchers from MIT and elsewhere created the c-value, which is a dataset-specific tool. A high c-value means it is unlikely a new method will be less accurate than the original method on a specific data problem.

upstart writes:

Monday's collision avoidance maneuver steered the International Space Station away from a presumed Earth-imaging satellite launched in 2020:

Earlier this week, the International Space Station was forced to adjust its orbit to avoid an encroaching commercial satellite. The object is likely one of many Earth-observing satellites that are falling into and aligning with the space station's orbital path, according to experts.

On Monday, the Progress 83 resupply ship that's docked to the space station fired its engines for just over six minutes, slightly raising the orbit of the ISS in order to avoid an approaching satellite, NASA wrote in a blog post. The space agency did not identify the object, except to say that it was an "Earth observation satellite."

However, there is speculation that the satellite in question may be Argentina's Nusat-17, one of 10 commercial Earth observation satellites form the Aleph-1 constellation operated by Satellogic. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote on Twitter that the orbits of the Satellogic constellation has been gradually decaying and the satellites are now crossing the orbit of the ISS.

The latest ISS maneuver points to a larger issue of the growing number of satellites, both defunct and operational, and debris that pose a threat to orbiting spacecraft. More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris are currently being tracked by the Department of Defense's global Space Surveillance Network, with lots of smaller pieces also floating around undetected.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Time Russians Really Did Target Americans With Microwaves

A year before his arrival, State Department officials had told embassy staffers and their families that the Soviet Union had been blasting some kind of microwave beam at the embassy for up to 14 hours per day. But American higher-ups said there was little reason for concern. Issuing a "Fact Sheet," [1976] the State Department said that this microwave beam — later dubbed the "Moscow Signal" — was "no cause for concern," as "no causal relationship had been established between these microwave transmissions and any health problems."

There was, in other words, nothing to worry about. As a precaution, American officials erected aluminum "screening" around the embassy — all the better to "reduce the anxiety of employees." But that was it. And so Schumaker went about his work, day in and day out. For years, he and dozens of others operated out of the American embassy, assured that the microwave radiation was perfectly normal.

It was only years later, when Schumaker received a surprise leukemia diagnosis — and after multiple American ambassadors had already died from cancer, with the another diagnosed with a "severe blood disorder" — that Schumaker realized that microwave radiation, and the U.S.'s lackadaisical response, was far more disastrous, and even fatal, than he ever thought. And in recent months, that realization only deepened, for a pair of reasons.

First, a tranche of newly declassified documents confirmed that the Soviets saturated American embassy staffers in decades of elevated microwave radiation — and American higher-ups spent years trying to sweep the entire affair under the rug. And second, recent revelations about the so-called "Havana Syndrome" have given Schumaker and other diplomats who remember the days of Moscow Signal a sense of, as he sees it, "déjà vu all over again."

The Moon or Bust, Says NASA, After Successful Test Flight

upstart writes:

Heat shield sustained more damage than expected, but this shouldn't discourage astronauts:

NASA is ready to fly a crew of astronauts to the Moon next year after the success of the first test flight of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule.

[...] Orion fulfilled 161 test objectives and was more energy efficient than predicted, generating 20 per cent more power than predicted while consuming about 25 per cent less power than expected. All maneuvers – including flying to and from the Moon, returning to Earth, and releasing the parachute for splashdown into the Pacific Ocean – were executed without any major problems.

There are, however, a few niggling complications. Orion's latching current limiters – which act like circuit breakers to transfer and distribute power from its solar panels – switched open randomly during its flight for unknown reasons. Also, the material covering the heat shield – used to protect the capsule and prevent it and any occupants from incineration as Orion re-enters Earth's atmosphere – deteriorated more than NASA thought it would.

Little things like that.

The mobile launcher part of the SLS also sustained more damage than expected. NASA said its cryogenic fuel lines corroded, while 60 panels and cabinets broke, as did its elevators and blast shields. Officials continue to review hundreds of gigabytes worth of data gathered from the mission.

[...] "We're learning as much as we possibly can from Artemis I to ensure we fully understand every aspect of our systems and feed those lessons learned into how we plan for and fly crewed missions," said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, in a prepared statement. "Safely flying crew is our top priority for Artemis II."

Engineers will, for example, modify the mobile launcher for the upcoming Artemis mission. They will build an emergency egress system at the launchpad in case the crew needs to make a last-minute exit from the rocket.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/wikipedia-ai-truth-duckduckgo-hopes-so-with-new-answerbot/

Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today as a wide beta test for users of DuckDuckGo's browser extensions and browsing apps. Being powered by an AI model, the company admits that DuckAssist might make stuff up but hopes it will happen rarely.

Here's how it works: If a DuckDuckGo user searches a question that can be answered by Wikipedia, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to generate a brief summary of what it finds in Wikipedia, with source links listed below. The summary appears above DuckDuckGo's regular search results in a special box.

[...] Update (March 9, 2023): We spoke with a representative of DuckDuckGo and they said they're using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Anthropic's Claude as LLMs. "We're experimenting with OpenAI's recently announced Turbo model, too," they said.

Related:
Robots Let ChatGPT Touch the Real World Thanks to Microsoft (Article has a bunch of other SoylentNews related links as well.)

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Instead of outputting in plastic, this printer builds models that you can eat:

All of the best 3D printers print from some form plastic, either from filament or from resin. But an upcoming printer, Cocoa Press, uses chocolate to create models you can eat. The brainchild of Maker and Battlebots Competitor Ellie Weinstein , who has been working on iterations of the printer since 2014, Cocoa Press will be available for pre-order, starting on April 17th via cocoapress.com (the company is also named Cocoa Press).

[...] In lieu of a roll of filament or a tank full of resin, the Cocoa Press uses 70g cartridges of special chocolate that solidifies at up to 26.67 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit), which the company will sell for $49 for a 10 pack. The cigar-shaped chocolate pieces go into a metal syringe where the entire thing is melted at the same time rather than melting as it passes through the extruder (like a typical FDM printer).

Video demonstrating how the Cocoa Press works.

Related: Why Chocolate Feels So Good? It's Down to Lubrication

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Newly spotted 50-meter asteroid tops Risk List:

Valentine's Day 2046 could be memorable for a number of reasons. Not only might you receive a card from an admirer you never knew you had, but you might also witness a large asteroid slamming into Earth and causing widespread devastation.

Hopefully the only delivery anyone will be getting that day is a card, but scientists say that a 49-meter-wide asteroid discovered last week is currently calculated to have a 1-in-625 chance of hitting our planet in a couple of decades from now.

The rock, called 2023 DW, now sits atop the European Space Agency's Risk List as the only one with a "1" rating on the Torino scale, which is used for categorizing the impact hazard of near-Earth objects.

[...] As asteroid 2023 DW was only discovered a few days ago, scientists are continuing with their analysis to determine more precisely the characteristics of the rock, which is similar in size to an Olympic swimming pool.

[...] If later analysis suggests an increased risk of 2023 DW crashing into Earth, it would be a golden opportunity for NASA to deploy its asteroid deflection system. The technology was tested last year with great success when it smashed a spacecraft into a distant asteroid, with the force of the impact altering the rock's course.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

The results of the great DB debate on The Register were announced. Although it was a close-run race, and RDBMS was well ahead at several points during the week before a late surge for graph DBs yesterday. Over 2,000 readers voted. This debate is a part of the current spotlight on databases.

Our first contributor, arguing FOR the motion, was Andy Pavlo, associate professor of databaseology at Carnegie Mellon University. Pavlo's starting point on Monday was that graph DBMSs are "fundamentally flawed and, for most applications, inferior to relational DBMSs."

Jim Webber, Neo4j's chief scientist and a professor of computer science at Newcastle University, arguing AGAINST, said in his rebuttal that he could not back the idea that "relational can do anything" and rejected the assertion that graph databases cannot properly support views and migrations.

Then, on Wednesday, Pavlo threw down the gauntlet, stating that abandoning the relational database model would be akin to "reinventing the wheel." He also doubled down on a public wager he'd previously made that graph databases won't overtake relational databases in 2030 by marketshare. He has promised that if he loses, Pavlo will replace his official CMU photo with one of him wearing a shirt that says "Graph Databases Are #1."

Webber then countered this in his Thursday argument, noting that the pending standard for graphs, GQL, is overseen by the same ISO committee that delivered SQL. If SQL extensions were enough to solve the graph problem, the committee wouldn't have bothered itself, he seemed to be saying. Instead, it decided graphs were different enough to warrant a full query language.

Webber also mentioned: In late 2010, I visited former colleagues at the University of Sydney, Australia. I gave a talk on graph databases and ended it by lightheartedly saying something like, "This technology category is going to catch on. You're going to ignore it for now, but in about a decade you will become interested and start telling us that we've done it all wrong."

Several papers from CIDR 2023 were cited in the discussion.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Results come from a lab that had an earlier superconductivity paper retracted:

On Wednesday, a paper was released by Nature that describes a mixture of elements that can superconduct at room temperature. The work follows a general trend of finding new ways of stuffing hydrogen into a mixture of other atoms by using extreme pressure. This trend produced a variety of high-temperature superconductors in previous research, though characterizing them was difficult because of the pressures involved. This new chemical, however, superconducts at much lower pressures than previous versions, which should make it easier for others to replicate the work.

The lab that produced the chemical, however, had one of its earlier papers on high-temperature superconductivity retracted due to a lack of details regarding one of its key measurements. So, it's a fair bet that many other researchers will try to replicate it.

The form of superconductivity involved here requires that electrons partner up with each other, forming what are called Cooper pairs. One of the things that encourages Cooper pair formation is a high-frequency vibration (called a phonon) among the atomic nuclei that these electrons are associated with. That's easier to arrange with light nuclei, and hydrogen is the lightest around. So finding ways to stuff more hydrogen into a chemical is thought to be a viable route toward producing higher-temperature superconductors.

The surest way of doing that, however, involves extreme pressures. These pressures can induce hydrogen to enter the crystal structure of metals or to form hydrogen-rich chemicals that are unstable at lower pressures. Both of these approaches have resulted in chemicals with very high critical temperatures, the highest point at which they'll support superconductivity. While these have approached room temperature, however, the pressures required were multiple Gigapascals—with each Gigapascal being nearly 10,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level.

In essence, this involves trading off impractical temperatures for impractical pressures.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/musk-apologizes-for-mocking-and-firing-twitter-exec-with-muscular-dystrophy/

After a tweet exchange where Twitter CEO Elon Musk questioned a fired former Twitter executive's disabilities and work performance, Musk has issued a rare apology and offered to rehire former Senior Director of Product Design Haraldur "Halli" Thorleifsson.

Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021, saying on the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that he decided to let his successful design agency Ueno get acquired by Twitter because he really believed that, much like Musk, Twitter had "never lived up to its potential." Until his exit from Twitter, Thorleifsson led an innovation team at Twitter, but Musk apparently was not familiar with the meaningful contributions Thorleifsson made to the company until after he let Thorleifsson go. Now Musk apparently regrets dismissing Thorleifsson.

[...] Before Thorleifsson got the official notification that he'd been fired from Twitter, he told the BBC that he had a theory explaining why it took Twitter nine days to respond to his inquiries about layoffs.

"My theory is they made a mistake and are now looking for anything they can find to make this a 'for cause' firing to avoid having to fulfill their contractual obligations," Thorleifsson told the BBC.

According to The New York Times, the cost of firing Thorleifsson may be greater to Twitter than the cost of keeping him on, which could be another factor motivating Musk's decision to try to rehire the former design executive. Twitter users have speculated that his severance package could be worth $100 million, and Thorleifsson seems willing to take the money and leave. He tweeted that he's OK with his exit from Twitter and asked Musk to confirm he'll receive his full severance.

Related:
Open Source Teams at Google Hit Hard by Layoffs: Was It the Algorithm?

Original Submission