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upstart writes:

They even shared a clip of a child being hit by a car:

Some Tesla workers shared sensitive photos and videos captured by the cameras on owners' cars between each other for several years, according to Reuters. Former employees told the outlet that colleagues shared the images in group chats and one-on-one communications between 2019 and last year.

One such video showed a Tesla driving at high speed before hitting a child on a bike, Reuters reported. Other footage included things like a nude man walking toward a vehicle. "We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids," one of the former employees said.

[...] The company states in its customer privacy notice that it designed the camera system to protect user privacy. It says that even if owners opt in to share camera recordings with Tesla for "fleet learning" purposes, "camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle" unless it receives the footage due to a safety event, such as a crash or an airbag deployment. Even so, one employee said it was possible for Tesla data labelers to see the location of captured footage on Google Maps.

Tesla does not have a communications department that can be reached for comment.

upstart writes:

The analysis could help researchers study storms that strike in the winter:

When a strong tornado roars through a city, it often leaves behind demolished buildings, broken tree limbs and trails of debris. But a similarly powerful storm touching down over barren, unvegetated land is much harder to spot in the rearview mirror.

Now, satellite imagery has revealed a 60-kilometer-long track of moist earth in Arkansas that was invisible to human eyes. The feature was presumably excavated by a tornado when it stripped away the uppermost layer of the soil, researchers report in the March 28 Geophysical Research Letters. This method of looking for "hidden" tornado tracks is particularly valuable for better understanding storms that strike in the winter, when there's less vegetation, the researchers suggest. And recent research has shown that wintertime storms are likely to increase in intensity as the climate warms (SN: 12/16/21).

[...] Swirling winds, even relatively weak ones, can suction up several centimeters of soil. And since deeper layers of the ground tend to be wetter, a tornado ought to leave behind a telltale signature: a long swath of moister-than-usual soil. Two properties linked with soil moisture level — its texture and temperature — in turn impact how much near-infrared light the soil reflects.

Wang and his collaborators analyzed near-infrared data collected by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites and looked for changes in soil moisture consistent with a passing tornado.

upstart writes:

Drivers in Europe net big data rights win against Uber and Ola:

In a major win over opaque algorithmic management in the so-called gig economy an appeals court in the Netherlands has found largely in favor of platform workers litigating against ride-hailing giants Uber and Ola — judging the platforms violated the drivers' rights in a number of instances, including when algorithms were involved in terminating driver accounts.

The court also ruled the platforms cannot rely on trade secrets exemptions to deny drivers access to their data. Although challenges remain for regional workers to use existing laws to get enough visibility into platforms' data processing to know what information to ask for to be able to meaningfully exercise their data access rights.

The appeal court rulings can be found here, here and here (in Dutch).

The appeal was brought by the not-for-profit data trust Worker Info Exchange (WIE) in support of members of the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) in the UK and a driver based in Portugal.

One case against Uber's robo-firings involved four drivers (three based in the UK, one in Portugal); a second case against Uber over data access involved six UK-based drivers; while a data access case against Ola involved thee UK-based drivers.

In the data access cases drivers were seeking information such as passenger ratings, fraud probability scores, earning profiles, as well as data on the allocation of journeys to drivers — including Uber's batch matching and upfront pricing systems — as well as information about the existence of automated decision-making touching their work on the platforms.

Several decisions taken by the ride-hailing platforms were found to meet the relevant legal test of automated decision-making — including assigning rides; calculating prices; rating drivers; calculating 'fraud probability scores'; and deactivating drivers' accounts in response to suspicions of fraud — meaning drivers are entitled to information on the underlying logic of these decisions. (And also to a right to meaningful human review if they object to decisions.)

upstart writes:

Routing 4G cellular data to a BSD network using bridge mode on the RUT-240:

The RUT-240 from Teltonika networks is a small and fairly inexpensive 4G router which is commonly used to provide internet connectivity for remote devices that are either in locations without regular fixed-line broadband, or where high availability is required. Think smart meters, monitoring systems, and so on.

In the case of high availability, the RUT-240 is connected in line with a conventional internet router, and it's own cellular connection is only used when a lack of connectivity is detected. Both of these configurations often involve the use of a special SIM card, to which the cellular operator has provisioned a static, public IP address, thus allowing inbound connections to the connected remote devices, (as well as access to the router itself for configuration and admin purposes).

[...T]oday we're going to use our RUT-240 for a completely different purpose. No special SIM required, and we're not going to be travelling out in to the wilds either. Just a regular pre-paid SIM, and the normal office surroundings.

Instead, we'll be exploring the use of this router as a backup connection for an existing OpenBSD-based router, or even - within limits - as a replacement for fixed line broadband. This latter option might make sense on a short term basis in a new office that hasn't been fully connected yet, or in a temporary office in an awkward location where DSL or fibre isn't available. Attending a conference, but all the decent hotels are fully booked? Stuck on a boat in dry dock? Not a problem!

upstart writes:

Now We Know How a Solar Storm Took Out a Fleet of Starlinks:

On March 23rd, sky observers marvelled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called "space weather." Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon.

At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29th that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth's surface. They didn't last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet's magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun.

The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites—including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it—made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth's magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

One of the side effects of space weather that can affect satellites is warming in a region called the "thermosphere". That increased the density of the upper atmosphere over a short amount of time and caused it to swell up. A denser atmosphere causes a phenomenon called "atmospheric drag". Essentially, the thicker atmosphere slows down anything moving through. It also heats things up.

canopic jug writes:

Democracy Now has a brief interview with a representative from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on their latest attempt to meet Julian Assange inside Belmarsh high-security prison in the UK. Despite being granted approval, the RSF secretary-general and executive director Christophe Deloire and the others with him were denied entry. No other non-governmental agency has been able to meet with Assange in the last four years either.

CHRISTOPHE DELOIRE: So, what happened is that in the past years we requested to be able to visit Julian in his jail. We got an approval recently, which was confirmed on March 21st with a number, an official number, for myself and my colleague, Rebecca Vincent, and we were invited to come to the prison.

And when we just arrived, the guy at the desk, when he saw my passport, he suddenly was very stressed, and that taking a paper on his office — on his desk, and that read it, saying, "According to Article" — I do not remember the number of the article, but according to this article, "you are not allowed to visit Julian Assange. This is a decision that has been made by the governor of the Belmarsh prison, based on intelligence that we had" — I quote him — "that you are journalists."

And it doesn't make sense at all, first, because, personally, I've been a journalist since 1996, and we were vetted, so it was never a mystery that I was a journalist, never a secret. Second, my colleague wasn't a journalist herself. And we came here not as journalists, but as representatives of an international NGO with a constitutive status in many international organizations. So it was really as Reporters Without Borders representatives, not as reporters covering the case. So, it doesn't make sense for this second reason. And there is a third reason for which it doesn't make sense, is that already two journalists, at least, have been able to visit him in jail in the past four years. So —

Previously:
(2022) Biden Faces Growing Pressure to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange
(2022) Assange Lawyers Sue CIA for Spying on Them
(2022) Julian Assange's Extradition to the US Approved by UK Home Secretary
(2021) Key Witness in Assange Case Jailed in Iceland After Admitting to Lies and Ongoing Crime Spree
(2019) Top Assange Defense Account Suspended By Twitter
(2019) Wikileaks Co-Founder Julian Assange Arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London
(2015) French Justice Minister Says Snowden and Assange Could Be Offered Asylum

And many more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Inside the bitter campus privacy battle over smart building sensors:

"The initial step was to ... see how these things behave," says Herbsleb, comparing the Mites sensors to motion detectors that people might want to test out. "It's purely just, 'How well does it work as a motion detector?' And, you know, nobody's asked to consent. It's just trying out a piece of hardware."

Of course, the system's advanced capabilities meant that Mites were not just motion detectors—and other department members saw things differently. "It's a lot to ask of people to have a sensor with a microphone that is running in their office," says Jonathan Aldrich, a computer science professor,  even if "I trust my coworkers as a general principle and I believe they deserve that trust." He adds, "Trusting someone to be a good colleague is not the same as giving them a key to your office or having them install something in your office that can record private things." Allowing someone else to control a microphone in your office, he says, is "very much like giving someone else a key."

As the debate built over the next year, it pitted students against their advisors and academic heroes as well—although many objected in private, fearing the consequences of speaking out against a well-funded, university-backed project.

In the video recording of the town hall obtained by MIT Technology Review, attendees asked how researchers planned to notify building occupants and visitors about data collection. Jessica Colnago, then a PhD student, was concerned about how the Mites' mere presence would affect studies she was conducting on privacy. "As a privacy researcher, I would feel morally obligated to tell my participant about the technology in the room," she said in the meeting. While "we are all colleagues here" and "trust each other," she added, "outside participants might not."

upstart writes:

An energy-saving coating needs no pigments, and it keeps the surface beneath it 30 degrees cooler:

Color surrounds us in nature, and we re-create it with pigments. You can think of pigments as pulverized minerals, heavy metals, or chemicals that we swish into oil and spread over a canvas or car: Cobalt becomes blue; ochre red; cadmium yellow. "But nature has a very different way of creating color than we do," Chanda says. Some of nature's most vivid looks—the kind worn by peacocks, beetles, and butterflies—do their thing without pigment.

Those colors come from topography. Submicroscopic landscapes on the outer surfaces of peacock feathers, beetle shells, and butterfly wings diffract light to produce what's known as structural color. It's longer-lasting and pigment-free. And to scientists, it's the key to creating paint that is not only better for the planet but might also help us live in a hotter world.

In a paper published this month in Science Advances, Chanda's lab demonstrated a first-of-its-kind paint based on structural color. They think it's the lightest paint in the world—and they mean that both in terms of weight and temperature. The paint consists of tiny aluminum flakes dotted with even tinier aluminum nanoparticles. A raisin's worth of the stuff could cover both the front and back of a door. It's lightweight enough to potentially cut fuel usage in planes and cars that are coated with it. It doesn't trap heat from sunlight like pigments do, and its constituents are less toxic than paints made with heavy metals like cadmium and cobalt.

upstart writes:

Even developers who want to pay for the API are having trouble:

Twitter has finally shut off its free API and, predictably, it's breaking a lot of apps and websites. The company had previously said it would cut off access in early February, but later delayed the move without providing an updated timeline.

But, after announcing its new paid API tiers last week, the company seems to have started cutting off the thousands of developers relying on its free developer tools. Over the last couple days, a number of app makers and other services have reported that the Twitter API is no longer functioning. Mashable reported the shutoff seems to have started Tuesday morning, though many developers are still trying to understand what's happening as Twitter doesn't seem to have communicated with most developers about the changes.

The ending of Twitter's free API comes after the company abruptly changed its rules to ban third-party Twitter clients as part of a larger shakeup of its developer strategy. But, as we've previously reported, third-party clients were only a small fraction of the developers, researchers, bot makers and others who relied on Twitter's APIs.

[...] All of these issues are further complicated by the fact that Twitter seems to have communicated very little with any of its developers about these changes or what they mean. Most of the employees who worked in developer relations were cut during the company's mass layoffs. And the company's developer forums are filled with posts from confused developers looking for answers. The company no longer has a communications team, and its press email auto-responds with a poop emoji.

upstart writes:

The first large-scale comparison of mutation rates gives insights into how quickly species can evolve:

Now, a massive analysis of 68 diverse vertebrate species, from lizards and penguins to humans and whales, has made the first large-scale comparison of the rates at which species mutate — a first step toward understanding how quickly they can evolve. The findings, published in the journal Nature, unearthed surprising insights into how the tempo for mutations can change and what sets that pace.

The paper roughly "doubles the amount of mutation-rate estimates we have," said Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the study. Now we have a "better idea of the amount of variation within vertebrates."

With this extensive data, biologists can begin to answer questions about which traits most influence mutation rates and the pace of evolution. "There are things that affect the rate of evolution, [but] we don't know all of them," said Patricia Foster, a professor emerita of biology at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. "This is the start."

[...] If they found a mutation in around 50% of an offspring's DNA, they concluded that it was likely a germline mutation — one inherited through either the mother's egg or the father's sperm. Natural selection can act directly on such a mutation. Less frequent mutations were deemed to have happened spontaneously in tissues outside the germline; they were less relevant to evolution because they wouldn't get passed on.

(Surprisingly often, mismatches in the family trios told the researchers that the fathers listed by the zoos were unrelated to the babies. Zoo representatives would often shrug at this news and say there might have been two males in the cage. "Yeah, well, the other one is the winner," Bergeron would joke.)

In the end, the researchers had 151 usable trios, representing species as physically, metabolically and behaviorally diverse as massive killer whales, tiny Siamese fighting fish, Texas banded geckos and humans. They then compared the species' mutation rates with what we know about the behaviors and characteristics called their life history. They also considered a statistical measure for each species called the effective population size, which roughly corresponds to how many individuals are needed to represent the genetic diversity. (For example, although the human population today is 8 billion, scientists usually estimate our effective population size to be around 10,000 or fewer.) Bergeron and her colleagues looked for patterns of associations in the numbers.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/meta-introduces-ai-model-that-can-isolate-and-mask-objects-within-images/

On Wednesday, Meta announced an AI model called the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that can identify individual objects in images and videos, even those not encountered during training, reports Reuters.

According to a blog post from Meta, SAM is an image segmentation model that can respond to text prompts or user clicks to isolate specific objects within an image. Image segmentation is a process in computer vision that involves dividing an image into multiple segments or regions, each representing a specific object or area of interest.

The purpose of image segmentation is to make an image easier to analyze or process. Meta also sees the technology as being useful for understanding webpage content, augmented reality applications, image editing, and aiding scientific study by automatically localizing animals or objects to track on video.

Related:
MIT's Computer Vision (CV) Algorithm Identifies Images Down to the Pixel (20220424)
NVIDIA Research's GauGAN AI Art Demo Responds to Words (20211130)
Ask Soylent: Beginning in Artificial Intelligence Methods (20150629)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Palantir's Plan to Decipher the Mysteries of Long Covid:

65 million people are still suffering from long Covid, the mysterious cocktail of symptoms that persist in some patients more than 12 weeks after an initial infection. Researchers are still working to understand this illness, but it's been slow progress so far.

This is because long Covid is not just a medical problem—it's also a data problem, says Indra Joshi, director of health, research, and artificial intelligence at Palantir, which specializes in analyzing big data.

Before the pandemic, US hospitals kept their data to themselves, Joshi told WIRED Health this March, making it difficult for policymakers and researchers to identify patterns of disease occurring across the country. That's why Palantir worked with the US medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, to create what Joshi describes as one of the largest collections of Covid-19 health records in the world.

The National COVID Cohort Collaborative, aka N3C, is essentially a giant, collaborative database, enabling clinicians and researchers to study the deidentified data of people suffering from Covid-19 or related conditions. "If you're diagnosed with Covid now, your data goes into this enclave," says Joshi, explaining that N3C now includes 2.1 billion clinical observations. The data enclave also encourages clinicians to enter data in a standardized format, making it easy for their insights to be compared with data collected from other US hospitals.

By harmonizing all this data, the N3C acts as a collective pool of information that researchers can dip into to try to find consensus on the ongoing mysteries of long Covid: What exactly are the symptoms? What treatments are people receiving? And how are they responding to those treatments? Already the N3C data has helped better define the symptoms that make up long Covid. It has also revealed that Black and Hispanic Americans, in comparison to white patients, appear to experience more symptoms and health problems related to long Covid, but are less likely to be diagnosed.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2020/06/die-shrink-how-intel-scaled-down-8086.html

The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die.1 I came across two 8086 dies with different sizes, which reveal details of how a die shrink works. The concept of a die shrink is that as technology improved, a manufacturer could shrink the silicon die, reducing costs and improving performance. But there's more to it than simply scaling down the whole die. Although the internal circuitry can be directly scaled down,2 external-facing features can't shrink as easily. For instance, the bonding pads need a minimum size so wires can be attached, and the power-distribution traces must be large enough for the current. The result is that Intel scaled the interior of the 8086 without change, but the circuitry and pads around the edge of the chip were redesigned.

[...] The photo above shows the two 8086 dies at the same scale. The two chips have identical layout in the interior,7 although they may look different at first. The chip on the right has many dark lines in the middle that don't appear on the left, but this is an artifact. These lines are the polysilicon layer, underneath the metal; the die on the left has the same wiring, but it is very faint. I think the newer chip has a thinner metal layer, making the polysilicon more visible.

The magnified photo below shows the same circuitry on the two dies. There is an exact correspondence between components in the two images, showing the circuitry was reduced in size, not redesigned. (These photos show the metal layer on top of the chip; some polysilicon is visible in the right photo.)

upstart writes:

NASA's TEMPO Mission Could Bring You Hyper-Local Pollution Alerts:

An advanced tool for monitoring air pollution from space is set to launch on Friday morning, and it'll be hosted on a commercial satellite.

A soon-to-launch NASA mission is set to offer more data on North America's air quality than researchers and public health programs have ever had available before. A new monitoring instrument hosted on a commercial satellite will offer continent-wide, hourly updates on air pollution, at about a four square mile resolution, according to the space agency and partner groups behind the project.

The Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will keep tabs on the air quality in a region stretching from the oil sands in Canada to south of Mexico City, and from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts, according to a NASA news statement.

The device will use advanced imaging to collect detailed light scattering data (i.e. hyperspectral data) on sunlight reflected off of Earth's atmosphere at varying levels. Using this information, scientists back on the ground will be able to translate those wavelengths of light into local concentrations of different pollutants in the air, explained Dennis Nicks, director of payload engineering at Ball Aerospace–the company that NASA contracted to design and build the TEMPO instrument, during a Wednesday press briefing.

upstart writes:

Regulators have to figure out how to get them on the market:

Ella Balasa was 26 when she realized the routine medical treatments that sustained her were no longer working. The slender lab assistant had lived since childhood with the side effects of cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that turns mucus in the lungs and other organs into a thick, sticky goo that gives pathogens a place to grow. To keep infections under control, she followed a regimen of swallowing and inhaling antibiotics—but by the beginning of 2019, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium lodged in her lungs was making her sicker than she had ever been.

Balasa's lung function was down to 18 percent. She was feverish and too feeble to lift her arms over her head. Even weeks of intravenous colistin, a brutal last-resort antibiotic, made no dent. With nothing to lose, she asked a lab at Yale University whether she could volunteer to receive the organisms they were researching: viruses that attack bacteria, known as bacteriophages.

[...] And it worked. The viruses penetrated the goo, attacked the bacteria, and killed a portion of them; the rest of the bacteria weakened enough that antibiotics could knock them out. Balasa's body cleared the life-threatening infection faster than ever before.

[...] There's an asterisk to her success: Phages are unapproved drugs, not just in the United States, but in the United Kingdom and Western Europe, too. No company makes them for commercial sale in those countries, and hospitals and pharmacies don't stock them. To administer them, physicians must seek a compassionate-use authorization from a government regulator—in Balasa's case, the US Food and Drug Administration—showing their patients have no other options.