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upstart writes:

Ex-Googler says she was laid off from her hospital bed shortly after giving birth:

Would you believe that Google's mass firings from January are still going on? Google's reported mishandling of its biggest round of layoffs ever has employees up in arms, and they're doing everything from walking out on the job to sending angry letters to management.

First up, European Googlers are just now being laid off due to the January announcement. Reuters reports that more than 200 workers were laid off from the Zurich, Switzerland, branch of the company this week. The employees at that office walked out for a second time in protest of the move and even offered to take pay cuts or reduce working hours to stave off the job cuts. Google's layoffs seem driven by a desire to placate the stock market, though, so it's no surprise that these offers fell on deaf ears.

[...] Making Google honor its previous leave agreements isn't just about employees getting paid when they have medical or family issues; it's also about having continual medical care when they need it most. As part of Google's (seemingly discarded) plan to offer employees every perk imaginable, the company has on-site medical facilities that many employees make use of.

While employees' severance packages might come with a few more months of health insurance, being fired means instantly losing access to Google's facilities. If that's where a laid-off Googler's primary care doctor works, that person is out of luck, and some employees told CNBC they lost access to their doctors the second the layoff email arrived. Employees on leave also have a lot to deal with. One former Googler, Kate Howells, said she was let go by Google from her hospital bed shortly after giving birth. She worked at the company for nine years.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The goal, federal prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Ms. Clinton by persuading her supporters to falsely believe they could cast presidential ballots by text message:

The misinformation campaign was carried out by a group of conspirators, prosecutors said, including a man in his 20s who called himself Ricky Vaughn. On Monday he will go on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn under his real name, Douglass Mackey, after being charged with conspiring to spread misinformation designed to deprive others of their right to vote.

"The defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution," Nicholas L. McQuaid, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said in 2021 when charges against Mr. Mackey were announced.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mackey, who went to Middlebury College in Vermont and said he lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, used hashtags and memes as part of his deception and outlined his strategies publicly on Twitter and with co-conspirators in private Twitter group chats.

[...] Mr. Mackey's trial is expected to provide a window into a small part of what the authorities have described as broad efforts to sway the 2016 election through lies and disinformation. While some of those attempts were orchestrated by Russian security services, others were said to have emanated from American internet trolls.

Just a few days ago the trial was delayed after a witness was allegedly intimidated into withdrawing his testimony.

Related:

• The Strong Case That Twitter Censorship Violates California's Civil Rights Laws
• Twitter Fights Trolls, Invites Trolls, and Trolls U.S.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA's commercial partner to visit the far side of the moon:

NASA has big plans for the moon. From sending the first crewed mission to land on its surface in 50 years to setting up a space station in orbit, the agency has multiple missions planned for exploring our planet's satellite. These include partnerships with a number of private companies as well as NASA-developed projects, such as under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program which will contract out the transportation of small payloads to the moon.

This week, NASA announced it has selected the company Firefly Aerospace to develop a commercial lander for the far side of the moon. The lander, called Blue Ghost, will be used to deliver several NASA payloads to the moon, including a radio observation mission which is placed on the far side of the moon to minimize the radio noise coming from Earth. This natural radio quiet zone will let the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) telescope detect faint radio waves from an early period of the universe known as the cosmic dark ages.

[...] As well as LuSEE-Night, Firefly will also be tasked with carrying a communications and data relay satellite called Lunar Pathfinder, which is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and which will be deployed into orbit before the lander sets down on the moon's surface. In addition, the NASA User Terminal payload will assist with communications, and there will be up to seven other payloads from private companies included as well.

[...] Firefly had a troubled start to its orbital ambitions when its first attempt to reach orbit with its Alpha rocket in September 2021 ended in an explosive failure. But a year later, its second attempt at orbital launch was successful and the rocket was able to deploy its orbital payloads.

The aim is for Firefly to launch its lunar mission, Blue Ghost Mission 1, in 2024.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Open-source tool from MIT's Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply.

Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

The detector, called Flatburn, can be made by 3D printing or by ordering inexpensive parts. The researchers have now tested and calibrated it in relation to existing state-of-the-art machines, and are publicly releasing all the information about it - how to build it, use it, and interpret the data.

The Flatburn concept at Senseable City Lab dates back to about 2017, when MIT researchers began prototyping a mobile pollution detector, originally to be deployed on garbage trucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The detectors are battery-powered and rechargable, either from power sources or a solar panel, with data stored on a card in the device that can be accessed remotely.

In both cases, the detectors were set up to measure concentrations of fine particulate matter as well as nitrogen dioxide, over an area of about 10 meters. Fine particular matter refers to tiny particles often associated with burning matter, from power plants, internal combustion engines in autos and fires, and more.

"The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions," says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Lab.

Journal Reference:
An Wang, Yuki Machida, Priyanka deSouza, Simone Mora, Tiffany Duhl, Neelakshi Hudda, John L. Durant, Fábio Duarte, Carlo Ratti, Leveraging machine learning algorithms to advance low-cost air sensor calibration in stationary and mobile settings [open], Atmospheric Environment, Volume 301, 2023, 119692, ISSN 1352-2310, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2023.119692

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why sleeper trains are being revived across Europe:

[...] Living in the Swedish capital Stockholm, the 33-year-old regularly travels by rail, not only to visit her family in Luxembourg, but also to her holiday destinations.

She favours train travel over flying mainly for environmental reasons. Yet she adds that trains are simply more enjoyable, especially sleeper services.

[...] The carbon footprint is just a fraction of a flight. Flying from Stockholm to Hamburg results in around 250kg of carbon dioxide emissions per passenger, according to calculation website EcoPassenger. By contrast, the C02 released by travelling via electric-powered train is just 26kg.

The SJ night train has nine coaches, and capacity to carry 400 passengers. Dan Olofsson, head of tendered services at SJ, says the new service was proposed by the Swedish government, "as they wanted to move more people towards climate-friendly travelling, and one of the solutions was the night train between Sweden and Germany".

The service is powered by renewable energy, and Mr Olofsson says it is typically being used by Swedes to connect them to other rail services from Hamburg.

"Hamburg isn't the main destination for most travellers, but is an important hub for people to reach more destinations in Germany and France and so on," he says.

[...] However, depending on the location, and especially if starting from the UK, travelling by train can often be more expensive than flying. Trains fares in the UK can in fact be 50% more costly than flights, according to a 2021 study by consumer choice magazine Which?.

"Like flying, you do need to book ahead to find a cheaper price," says Mark Smith, founder of train guide website Seat61. "But you need to remember airlines pay no duty on fuel.

Original Submission

Rich writes:

German company Musical Bits https://musicalbits.de/ has released the first single of their AI virtual heavy metal band "Frostbite Orckings". https://www.orckings.org/?view=article&id=37&catid=8.

Musical Bits creates software that creates music, with the support of AI. Our Maisterstück platform uses AI technology to model all layers of creativity of a human composer and implements these layers as reusable and combinable software components. Maisterstück's functionality can be accessed via a service oriented API.

The Musical Bits software can create music from real time data, from various user interfaces or from our own emotion modelling engine EME. We even create full virtual bands, albums and songs. For example, check out the Frostbite Orckings.

Their sound could be described as a keyboard-heavy version of viking metal, like a mellower spin of Amon Amarth. Along with the song comes an also AI generated video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EaJCt2GpVc of orcs playing along. At this time, it is unclear what input has gone into the AI to generate the production, and how much post processing is done.

The path seems to be set into a direction where we simply can run text-to-song AI ("AI, play me a new Motorhead song with lyrics about whiskey") in the foreseeable future and get convincing results.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AMD Allegedly Testing Hybrid Processor with Zen 4 and 4c Cores:

An unannounced AMD processor identified as Family 25 Model 120 Stepping 0 recently showed up in the MilkyWay@Home database. The CPU can process 12 threads simultaneously and the CPU expert @InstLatX64 believes that this is AMD's codenamed Phoenix 2 processor, packing two high-performance Zen 4 cores and four energy-efficient Zen 4c cores.

AMD Eng Sample processor marked 100-000000931-21_N [Family 25 Model 120 Stepping 0] features 12 logical cores (i.e., six physical cores with simultaneous multithreading) and reports about 1MB of cache, which indicates that the MilkyWay@Home client cannot correctly determine the amount of cache featured by the chip. The listing itself does not prove that we are dealing with AMD's hybrid Phoenix 2 processor with Big.Little-like core configuration, but six physical/12 logical cores featured by an unknown CPU gives us a hint that this may match the rumors.

AMD's Phoenix 2 processor (which does not have a lot in common with the company's Phoenix APU) is rumored to feature two 'big' Zen 4 cores with 2MB L2 and 4MB L3 cache as well as four 'small' Zen 4c cores equipped with 4MB L2 and 4MB L3 cache, which is a rather surprising cache configuration. The APU is also said to pack an RDNA 3-based integrated GPU with 512 stream processors and has a DDR5/LPDDR5X-supporting memory subsystem, according to 3DCenter. @InstLatX64 claims that AMD's Phoenix 2 APU has an A70F8x CPUID, whereas CoelacanthDream asserts that the CPUID of the processor is 0x00a70f80.

hubie writes:

Although seasonality in animal sleep is well known, we've assumed humans are different:

Whether we're night owls or morning larks, our body clocks are set by the sun. Theoretically, changing day length and light exposure over the course of the year could affect the duration and quality of our sleep. But figuring out how this applies in practice is difficult. Although studies where people assess their own sleep have suggested an increase in sleep duration during winter, objective measures are needed to determine how exactly the seasons affect sleep. Scientists studying sleep difficulties have now published data in Frontiers in Neuroscience that shows that, even in an urban population experiencing disrupted sleep, humans experience longer REM sleep in winter than summer and less deep sleep in autumn.

"Possibly one of the most precious achievements in human evolution is an almost invisibility of seasonality on the behavioral level," said Dr Dieter Kunz, corresponding author of the study, based at the Clinic of Sleep & Chronomedicine at the St Hedwig Hospital, Berlin. "In our study we show that human sleep architecture varies substantially across seasons in an adult population living in an urban environment."

[...] Even though the patients were based in an urban environment with low natural light exposure and high light pollution, which should affect any seasonality regulated by light, the scientists found subtle but striking changes across the seasons. Although total sleep time appeared to be about an hour longer in the winter than the summer, this result was not statistically significant. However, REM sleep was 30 minutes longer in the winter than in summer. REM sleep is known to be directly linked to the circadian clock, which is affected by changing light. Although the team acknowledged that these results would need to be validated in a population which experiences no sleep difficulties, the seasonal changes may be even greater in a healthy population.

[...] "Seasonality is ubiquitous in any living being on this planet," said Kunz. "Even though we still perform unchanged, over the winter human physiology is down-regulated, with a sensation of 'running-on-empty' in February or March. In general, societies need to adjust sleep habits including length and timing to season, or adjust school and working schedules to seasonal sleep needs."

Journal Reference:
Aileen Seidler, Katy Sarah Weihrich, Frederik Bes, et al., Seasonality of human sleep: Polysomnographic data of a neuropsychiatric sleep clinic, Front. Neurosci., 17, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1105233

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Remote and hybrid work has altered our understanding of where and how we do our jobs:

A new survey released Thursday from the University of Washington's Mobility Innovation Center and Commute Seattle reveals travel trends that have taken root three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data, collected last fall, is further evidence of the shift in habits that is impacting Seattle's downtown core.

Among the findings:

• Seattle workers are more likely to physically commute to their workplace on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. In the Center City, 39% of people telework on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday and Friday, they are much more likely to telework with 57% of people teleworking on Friday.
• Center City commuters used public transit 46% of the time in 2019. The number dropped to 18% in 2021 and was up to 22% in 2022.
• Drive-alone commute trips to the Center City declined since 2019, from a rate of 26% during that year, to 25% in 2021, and 21% in 2022.

[...] The mid-week in-person trend is backed up by what small business owners are seeing and feeling around parts of downtown Seattle and South Lake Union, where Amazon, Google, Facebook and other large tech companies have offices.

[...] Amazon's call to require corporate and tech workers back in the office at least three days a week was welcome news to restaurant owners, food truck operators and others who have been impacted by the lack of foot traffic since remote work took hold in 2020.

During DSA's annual "State of Downtown" event this week, the organization's president, Jon Scholes, said, "There's a lot at stake," in getting workers back to the office in the urban core. "We built a physical economy, not a virtual one. And it has fed this tax base that has been so important to the quality of life that we've created in this city."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Farmers need a right to repair:

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has called upon farm equipment maker John Deere to comply with its obligations under the General Public License (GPL), which requires users of such software to share source code.

In a blog post published on Thursday, SFC director of compliance Denver Gingerich argues that farmers' ability to repair their tools is now in jeopardy because the makers of those tools have used GPL-covered software and have failed to live up to licensing commitments.

"Sadly, farm equipment manufacturers, who benefit immensely from the readily-available software that they can provide as part of the farming tools (tractors, combines, etc.) they sell to farmers, are not complying with the right to repair licenses of the software they have chosen to use in these farming tools," said Gingerich.

"As a result, farmers are cut off from their livelihood if the farm equipment manufacturer does not wish to repair their farming tools when they inevitably fail, even when the farmer could easily perform the repairs on their own, or with the help of someone else they know."

Gingerich singled out Moline, Illinois-based John Deere as a particularly egregious offender. He said that for years the SFC has attempted to work with John Deere to resolve the company's non-compliance, but the agricultural equipment maker has failed to cooperate.

"When Deere does reply (we have heard from others that their legitimate requests for source code have been met with silence), they have always failed to include the 'scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable,' per GPLv2," Gingerich told The Register.

upstart writes:

How much fuel is left in this 20-year-old Mars orbiter?:

Designing, building, and launching a spacecraft is hugely expensive. That's why NASA missions to Mars are designed with the hope that they'll last as long as possible — like the famous Opportunity rover which was supposed to last for 90 days and managed to keep going for 15 years. The longer a mission can keep running, the more data it can collect, and the more we can learn from it.

That's true for the orbiters which travel around Mars as well as the rovers which explore its surface, like the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which was launched in 2001 and has been in orbit around Mars for more than 20 years. But the orbiter can't keep going forever as it will eventually run out of fuel, so figuring out exactly how much fuel is left is important — but it also turned out to be more complicated than the NASA engineers were expecting.

Odyssey started out with nearly 500 pounds of hydrazine fuel, though last year it looked as if the spacecraft was running much lower on fuel than had been predicted.

mhajicek writes:

I just bought my second Haas CNC mill. I use them primarily to make parts for implantable medical devices, but they could just as easily make parts for small arms, guided missiles, or aircraft. Most big names in CNC machine tools are Eastern; Japanese, Taiwanese, or Chinese, with a few European. Haas, the biggest and most well known Western manufacturer of CNC machine tools, stands accused of continuing to supply Russian companies involved in military manufacturing, long after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/f1/news-haas-automation-face-legal-action-accused-violating-russian-sanctions

Documents filed with the U.S. Treasury and Department of Commerce indicate that RATEP is one of many Russian enterprises that Haas Automation has serviced with direct shipments of goods in that period.

Per the aforementioned PBS Newshour report, the American company allegedly approved as many as 18 shipments to Russia between March and October of 2022 to the tune of $2.8 million.

Video here:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-company-accused-of-violating-sanctions-doing-business-with-russian-arms-industry

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Swear words across different languages may tend to lack certain sounds such as l, r, and w:

Swear words across different languages may tend to lack certain sounds such as l, r, and w, suggests research published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. This common pattern in profanity indicates that these sounds, called approximants, may appear less offensive to listeners.

Swear words are thought to have sounds that help facilitate the expression of emotion and attitude, but no study to date has investigated if there is a universal pattern in the sound of swearing across different languages.

[...] The authors asked 215 participants (from across six different languages) to rate pairs of pseudo-words (imaginary words created by the authors), one of which included an approximant. For example, in Albanian, the authors took the word "zog", meaning "bird", and changed this to "yog" to include an approximant and "tsog" without an approximant. The authors found that participants were significantly less likely to judge that words with approximants were swear words and selected words without approximants as swear words 63% of the time.

In a following study, the authors also looked at minced oaths – which are variations of swear words deemed less offensive, for example "darn" instead of "damn". The authors found that approximants were significantly more frequent in minced oaths than swear words. The authors propose that this introduction of approximants is part of what makes minced oaths less offensive than swear words.

The authors conclude that their work suggests a potential universal pattern to swear words across different languages, with the lack of approximants a common feature when perceiving swear words.

Journal Reference:
Lev-Ari, S., McKay, R. The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity? Psychon Bull Rev (2022). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://hackaday.com/2023/03/14/pcie-for-hackers-the-diffpair-prelude/

PCIe, also known as PCI-Express, is a highly powerful interface. So let's see what it takes to hack on something that powerful. PCIe is be a bit intimidating at first, however it is reasonably simple to start building PCIe stuff, and the interface is quite resilient for hobbyist-level technology. There will come a time when we want to use a PCIe chip in our designs, or perhaps, make use of the PCIe connection available on a certain Compute Module, and it's good to make sure that we're ready for that.

PCIe is everywhere now. Every modern computer has a bunch of PCIe devices performing crucial functions, and even iPhones use PCIe internally to connect the CPU with the flash and WiFi chips. You can get all kinds of PCIe devices: Ethernet controllers, high-throughput WiFi cards, graphics, and all the cheap NVMe drives that gladly provide you with heaps of storage when connected over PCIe. If you're hacking on a laptop or a single-board computer and you'd like to add a PCIe device, you can get some PCIe from one of the PCIe-carrying sockets, or just tap into an existing PCIe link if there's no socket to connect to. It's been two decades since we've started getting PCIe devices – now, PCIe is on its 5.0 revision, and it's clear that it's here to stay.

PCIe is a point-to-point bus that connect two devices together – as opposed to PCI, an older bus, that could connect a chain of devices on your mainboard. One side of a PCIe link is a device, and another is a host. For instance, in a laptop, your CPU will have multiple PCIe ports – some used to connect the GPU, some used to connect a WiFi card, some used for Ethernet, and some used for a NVMe drive.

Each PCIe link consists of at least three differential pairs – one is a 100 MHz clock, REFCLK, that is (almost) always required for a link, and two pairs that form a PCIe lane – one for transmit and another for receive. This is an x link – you can also have 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x links, with four, eight sixteen and thirty-two differential pairs respectively, plus, again, REFCLK. The wider the link, the higher its throughput!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Organizations must educate themselves and their users on how to detect, disrupt, and defend against the increasing volume of online disinformation:

More and more, nation-states are leveraging sophisticated cyber influence campaigns and digital propaganda to sway public opinion. Their goal? To decrease trust, increase polarization, and undermine democracies around the world.

In particular, synthetic media is becoming more commonplace thanks to an increase in tools that easily create and disseminate realistic artificial images, videos, and audio. This technology is advancing so quickly that soon anyone will be able to create a synthetic video of anyone saying or doing anything the creator wants. According to Sentinel, there was a 900% year-over-year increase in the proliferation of deepfakes in 2020.

It's up to organizations to protect against these cyber influence operations. But strategies are available for organizations to detect, disrupt, deter, and defend against online propaganda. Read on to learn more.

[...] As technology advances, tools that have traditionally been used in cyberattacks are now being applied to cyber influence operations. Nation-states have also begun collaborating to amplify each other's fake content.

These trends point to a need for greater consumer education on how to accurately identify foreign influence operations and avoid engaging with them. We believe the best way to promote this education is to increase collaboration between the federal government, the private sector, and end users in business and personal contexts.