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Psychology professor Jonathan Kelly studies human computer interaction, spatial cognition and virtual reality. He says gender discrepancies in cybersickness may not seem that important when it's related to video games and other forms of entertainment.
"But it's still a problem, and when VR gets to the point where it's a bigger part of job training or education in a classroom, it's even more important to make sure people can access this technology. If not, a lot of people are going to get left out, and there could be a backlash," says Kelly.
Like motion sickness, cybersickness can occur when there's a mismatch between visual motion and body motion. Symptoms, including nausea, dizziness, headaches and eye fatigue, usually resolve quickly after removing the headset. But in severe cases, they sometimes last for hours.
[...] As part of a larger study on adaptation to cybersickness, the ISU researchers recruited 150 participants to play up to 20 minutes of a VR game with a headset. The participants were new to VR and could stop if they felt too sick to continue. The researchers found women ended the game early twice as often as men and reported a sickness intensity that was 40% higher.
[...] For the second paper, the researchers explored whether the distance between an individual's pupils could help explain the gender difference in cybersickness. VR headsets have an adjustable lens set-up to accommodate different users, but some people fall outside the range. The researchers found women participants on average had smaller distances between their pupils than men, but it did not predict whether they would get cybersick during the game.
What seemed to matter more was whether they had previous experience with motion sickness or screen sickness (e.g., feeling sick in movie theaters, while playing a video game.)
"Women reported experiencing more motion sickness and screen-based sickness than men, and this increased susceptibility is part of the reason that women experience more cybersickness," says Kelly.
Journal References:
J. W. Kelly, S. B. Gilbert, M. C. Dorneich and K. A. Costabile, "Gender differences in cybersickness: Clarifying confusion and identifying paths forward," 2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), Shanghai, China, 2023, pp. 283-288, doi: 10.1109/VRW58643.2023.00067
T. A. Doty, J. W. Kelly, M. C. Dorneich and S. B. Gilbert, "Does interpupillary distance (IPD) relate to immediate cybersickness?," 2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), Shanghai, China, 2023, pp. 661-662, doi: 10.1109/VRW58643.2023.00173
New Futurama episodes are hitting Hulu in July:
One of the greatest cartoons of the modern era is making a return after a 10-year layoff, and you won't have to wait long to start enjoying brand new episodes. The first new episode of season eight will premiere on Hulu on July 24, with subsequent episodes to follow on Mondays.
Hulu ordered a 20-episode run of Futurama in February of last year that will see much of the original show's voice actors and crew return, including executive producers Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and David X. Cohen (Beavis and Butt-Head). Billy West, Katey Sagal, Maurice LaMarche, Tress MacNeille, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr, and David Herman are all back, as is John DiMaggio who voices Bender.
Futurama premiered on Fox in the spring of 1999 and ran on the network for five seasons before getting canceled. The show would return in 2010 for a two season run on Comedy Central, with the final episode of that deal airing on September 4, 2013. The order with Hulu will mark the program's third platform, or fourth if you count the direct to DVD movies.
Season eight will initially consist of 10 episodes. It is unclear if the remaining 10 episodes from the original order will arrive as a second half of season eight or a new season entirely.
According to Hulu's description, new viewers will be able to pick up the series from here while Futurama diehards will be rewarded with payoffs to longstanding mysteries. Highlights are said to include developments in the relationship of Fry and Leela, the contents of Nibbler's litter box, the whereabouts of Kif and Amy's tadpoles, and the history of evil Robot Santa.
A language model trained on the fringes of the dark web... for science:
We're still early in the snowball effect unleashed by the release of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into the wild. Paired with the open-sourcing of other GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) models, the number of applications employing AI is exploding; and as we know, ChatGPT itself can be used to create highly advanced malware.
As time passes, applied LLMs will only increase, each specializing in their own area, trained on carefully curated data for a specific purpose. And one such application just dropped, one that was trained on data from the dark web itself. DarkBERT, as its South Korean creators called it, has arrived — follow that link for the release paper, which gives an overall introduction to the dark web itself.
DarkBERT is based on the RoBERTa architecture, an AI approach developed back in 2019. It has seen a renaissance of sorts, with researchers discovering it actually had more performance to give than could be extracted from it in 2019. It seems the model was severely undertrained when released, far below its maximum efficiency.
Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
Related: People are Already Trying to Get ChatGPT to Write Malware
Study finds 90% of Australian teachers can't afford to live where they teach:
The teaching profession is already struggling with shortages and a lack of new candidates in a situation widely regarded as a crisis. Now, research warns that teachers are being priced out of housing near their schools, with many areas even too expensive for educators at the top of the pay scale.
The study, published recently in The Australian Educational Researcher analyzed quarterly house sales and rental reports in New South Wales (NSW) and found more than 90% of teaching positions across the state—around 50,000 full-time roles—are located in Local Government Areas (LGAs) where housing is unaffordable on a teacher's salary.
The situation is particularly dire for new teachers. There are 675 schools—nearly 23,000 full-time teaching positions—where the median rent for a one-bedroom place is unaffordable on a graduate teacher's salary.
Housing is considered unaffordable if a person spends more than 30% of their income on housing costs—sometimes called being in housing stress. Those in housing stress may not have enough money remaining to cover the cost of food, clothing, and other essentials.
But affordability isn't just an issue for early career teachers. For experienced educators at the top of the pay scale, 70 schools—about 2,000 full-time roles—are in an LGA where a single-bedroom dwelling is also unaffordable.
"The study shows the last time a first-year teacher salary could comfortably afford the rent for a one-bedroom dwelling was around a decade ago," says Professor Scott Eacott, the author of the study and Deputy Director of the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture.
"Fundamentally, there's been an increasing gap between salary and the costs of housing that the standard pay rise isn't covering, and it's pushing teachers further away from their workplaces or out of the profession entirely.
"The issue is not just limited to teachers, but all essential workers who are increasingly finding it difficult to find affordable places to live within a reasonable distance of their
"The school system is struggling to find enough teachers as it is," Prof. Eacott says. "If teachers can't afford to live near or within reasonable commuting distance of their schools, we can only expect those shortfalls to continue to grow."
[...] Prof. Eacott says part of the challenge is that no single government department or the private sector is ultimately responsible for housing essential workers. While more investment from superannuation funds in essential worker housing developments is welcome, it won't be enough to address the issue at scale.
"The simple answer is we do need to be paying teachers more. But that may not necessarily solve supply problems," Prof. Eacott says. "For example, it is just incredibly difficult right now for teachers to find a place to rent given record low vacancy rates.
"It's also important that we're not confining teachers to just teacher apartments, but creating pathways to home ownership."
[...] "We rely so much on our teachers, so it's only fair we take steps towards providing them and other essential workers with affordable and secure housing options," Prof. Eacott says.
Journal Reference:
Eacott, Scott. The systemic implications of housing affordability for the teacher shortage: the case of New South Wales, Australia [open], The Australian Educational Researcher (DOI: 10.1007/s13384-023-00621-z)
Deep sea researchers have used two submersibles to make the first full, 3-dimensional scan of the wreck of the sunken passenger ship, The Titanic, including much of the 3-mile long debris field. This is a major step forward in evidence-based analysis of the wreck from over a hundred years ago.
The new scan was "devoid of that," he said, adding, "It is completely based on data and not human interpretation and that is why we are now seeing it in its larger context for the first time ever."
Atlantic Productions said "one major area of deterioration" had already been observed in the officers' quarters. "This included the room of Captain Edward John Smith and discovered that the iconic captain's bathtub has now disappeared from view," it added.
"Now we're getting objective, so we can get really serious with the science of understanding the wreck," Stephenson said.
He added that he was "absolutely convinced," that the photogrammetry model would now be used "not just for Titanic, but for all underwater exploration," because it "ushers in a new phase of exploration and analysis."
Much of the wreck lies in two main pieces, far apart from each other, at a depth of about 4,000 meters. Around 700k images where taken and stitched together to created the model.
Previously:
(2022) Researchers Discover Wreck of Ship that Tried to Warn the Titanic
(2022) OceanGate Ramps Up the Research for its Second Deep-sea Expedition to the Titanic
(2020) An Aurora that Lit Up the Sky Over the Titanic Might Explain Why It Sank
(2020) US Court Grants Permission to Recover Marconi Telegraph from Titanic's Wreckage [Updated]
(2018) Finding the Titanic with ROVs and Navy Funding
Personality is usually summarized in five traits - the so-called "big five": Emotional stability (neuroticism), extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Our personality then shapes our decision-making style. In a research study from Lund University, Swedish obstetricians' and gynecologists' personality profiles and clinical experience are linked for the first time to their decision-making styles in acute childbirth situations.
"Obstetricians and gynecologists have a personality profile that differs significantly from the population at large. On average, 85 percent of Sweden's population has significantly lower emotional stability, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than the obstetricians in our study. It's hard not to be surprised when the differences are so clear", says Petri Kajonius, associate professor of personality psychology and behavioral measurement at Lund University.
It is our personality that defines what we will enjoy in our professional life, and the consequence is likely a self-selection of people who seek a certain profession. Swedish obstetric-focused physicians' personalities make them comfortable in an environment where a childbirth situation can quickly shift to something acute and potentially escalate into a crisis. Here, traits such as emotional stability and conscientiousness are prominent.
Journal Reference:
Raoust, G., Kajonius, P. & Hansson, S. Personality traits and decision-making styles among obstetricians and gynecologists managing childbirth emergencies [open]. Sci Rep 13, 5607 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32658-6
How do you assess your own personal emotional stability. Are you excitable, or calm and methodical, or does it change frequently depending upon the current situation that you find yourself?
Intel Shows New Stacked CFET Transistor Design At ITF World:
At ITF World 2023, Ann Kelleher, Intel's Technology Development GM, presented an outline of Intel's latest developments in several key areas, and one of the most interesting revelations was that Intel would embrace stacked CFET transistors in the future. This marks the first time that Intel has shown this new type of transistor in its presentations, but Kelleher didn't provide a date or firm timeline for production.
[In the image] we can see a zoomed-in version of the slide with a ring added around the new type of transistor. The first two transistor types at the bottom of the slide are older variants, while the '2024' entry represents Intel's new RibbonFET transistors that we've covered extensively in the past. Intel's first-gen design with the 'Intel 20A' process node features four stacked nanosheets, each surrounded entirely by a gate. Kelleher says this design remains on track to debut in 2024. RibbonFET uses a gate-all-around (GAA) design, which confers both transistor density and performance improvements like faster transistor switching while using the same drive current as multiple fins, but in a smaller area.
Kelleher's slide also shows the next generation of Intel's GAA design – the stacked CFET. The Complementary FET (CFET) transistor design has been on imec's roadmaps for some time, but we haven't yet seen it on an Intel slide or heard the company state that it plans to adopt this design. As a reminder, the imec research institute studies future technologies and collaborates with the industry to bring them to fruition.
Naturally, there is some variation between Intel's stylized render and the imec CFET render we've included in the first image of the album above, but Intel's image conveys the point well – this design allows the company to stack eight nanosheets, a doubling of the four used with RibbonFET, thus increasing transistor density. We also have images of the three other types of Intel transistors in the album above — Planar FET, FinFET, and RibbonFET.
CFET transistors, which you can read more about here, stack n- and pMOS devices atop each other to enable higher density. Two types of CFETs are currently being researched — monolithic and sequential. The four devices on the right side of the above image detail various proposed CFET designs. For now, it is unclear which type of design Intel would adopt, or if it will devise another type of implementation. Given that imec doesn't have CFETs on its roadmap until around when chips shrink to 5 angstroms in the 2032 timeframe, it could be some time before we find out.
That said, it isn't guaranteed that Intel would target CFET in that timeframe: Interestingly, Intel's slide shows its next-gen GAA nanosheet transistor (RibbonFET) and then jumps directly to CFET, omitting the GAA forksheet transistors that most think will be the step between nanosheet and CFET. You can also see that type of transistor in the above slide — it is the second from the left.
Given that Intel's image isn't very detailed, it is possible that the company also plans to use forksheet transistors before it moves to CFET, but it hasn't chosen to share the details yet. We're following up with Intel to see if we can learn any more details.
Reddit will allow users to upload NSFW images from desktop:
Reddit announced Thursday that it will now allow users to upload NSFW images from desktops in adult communities. The feature was already available on the social network's mobile app.
[...] "This now gives us feature parity with our mobile apps, which (as you know) already has this functionality. You must set your community to 18+ if your community's content will primarily be not safe for work (NSFW)," the company said.
Reddit's announcement comes days after Imgur said that the image hosting platform was banning explicit photos from May 15. At that time, the company said that explicit content formed a risk to Imgur's "community and its business". Banning this type of content would "protect the future of the Imgur community."
Many of Reddit's communities rely on Imgur's hosting services. However, the social network allowing native NSFW uploads through desktop might be the most logical solution going forward.
Image hosting is not the only hurdle for NSFW communities. Last month, when Reddit announced that it will start charging for its API, the company also said that it will limit access to mature content available through its API. This would directly impact the experience on third-party Reddit apps. In yesterday's announcement about desktop upload for NSFW images, a Reddit staff members said that the company is discussing how to navigate this situation.
Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race:
Video Visit Asia's emerging megacities and you'll quickly notice that scooters and motorbikes vastly outnumber cars. Before long these fleets of two-wheelers will become battery-powered, always-connected, semi-autonomous machines that offer an even more potent alternative to their four-wheeled rivals.
The reasons powered two-wheelers dominate nations such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam – with a combined population over 1.75 billion – are simple: cars are unaffordable on local wages, few urban homes have space to store them, and warm climates make two-wheelers viable year-round. Plus, many of them sell for less than the equivalent of $1,000 apiece.
The industry has decided many will soon be electric and it looks like drivers will buy them.
"Electrification of micromobility can be adopted at a faster pace than cars, mainly because the motor and batteries are much smaller," Fook Fah Yap, a director at Singapore's Nanyang Technical University's Transport Research Centre told The Register.
Evidence of the shift is not hard to find. Earlier this year Honda announced it will start to sell 10 battery-powered bikes in 2025. Yamaha expects 90 percent of its sales will be electrified by 2050 and Toyota is expected to announce an electric two-wheeler this year.
[...] Two—wheelers, by contrast, are all about getting from A to B, quickly and at low cost. Digital technology's role in a two-wheeler is therefore all about information related to navigation.
First discovered 60 years ago, quasars can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our Solar System. In the decades since they were first observed, it has remained a mystery what could trigger such powerful activity. New work led by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire has now revealed that it is a consequence of galaxies crashing together.
The collisions were discovered when researchers, using deep imaging observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, observed the presence of distorted structures in the outer regions of the galaxies that are home to quasars.
Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres. They also contain substantial amounts of gas – but most of the time this gas is orbiting at large distances from the galaxy centres, out of reach of the black holes. Collisions between galaxies drive the gas towards the black hole at the galaxy centre; just before the gas is consumed by the black hole, it releases extraordinary amounts of energy in the form of radiation, resulting in the characteristic quasar brilliance.
[...] This is the first time that a sample of quasars of this size has been imaged with this level of sensitivity. By comparing observations of 48 quasars and their host galaxies with images of over 100 non-quasar galaxies, researchers concluded that galaxies hosting quasars are approximately three times as likely to be interacting or colliding with other galaxies.
The study has provided a significant step forward in our understanding of how these powerful objects are triggered and fuelled.
Journal Reference:
C S Pierce et al., Galaxy interactions are the dominant trigger for local type 2 quasars [open], Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 522, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1736–1751, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad455
Malware turns home routers into proxies for Chinese state-sponsored hackers
Researchers have uncovered malicious firmware that can turn residential and small office routers into proxies for Chinese state-sponsored hackers. The firmware implant, discovered by Check Point Research, includes a full-featured backdoor that allows attackers to establish communication, issue commands, and perform file transfers with infected devices. The implant was found in TP-Link routers but could be modified to work on other router models.
The malware's main purpose is to relay traffic between infected targets and command-and-control servers, obscuring the origins and destinations of the communication. The control infrastructure was traced back to hackers associated with the Chinese government. By using a chain of infected devices, the attackers can hide the final command and control and make it difficult for defenders to detect and respond to the attack.
This technique of using routers and other IoT devices as proxies is a common tactic among threat actors. The researchers are unsure how the implant is installed on devices but suspect it could be through exploiting vulnerabilities or weak administrative credentials.
While the firmware image discovered so far only affects TP-Link devices, the modular design allows the threat actors to create images for a wider range of hardware. The article concludes with recommendations for users to check for potential infections and apply proactive mitigations such as patching routers and using strong passwords.
How is "junk food" defined for food policies like taxes? A combination of food category, processing, and nutrients can determine which foods should be subject to health-related policies, according to a new analysis examining three decades of U.S. food policies by researchers at the NYU School of Global Public Health and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.
[...] "There is a growing recognition that an unhealthy diet stems from overconsumption of what we colloquially refer to as 'junk food,' " said Jennifer Pomeranz, assistant professor of public health policy and management at NYU School of Global Public Health and the first author of the study, published in the journal Milbank Quarterly. "However, public health efforts to address junk food are hindered by a lack of a uniform method to define junk food for policy purposes."
One policy example where a definition for junk food is needed is a junk food tax, which raises the price of such products to reduce consumption and generate revenue for other programs to improve the nutrition and health of communities in need. Previous research by NYU and Tufts shows that taxes on junk food are administratively and legally feasible.
[...] They identified and analyzed 47 laws and bills from 1991 through 2021, including one active junk food tax law implemented by the Navajo Nation, three state snack food sales taxes that were later repealed, and numerous junk food tax bills that have not been enacted. (Their analysis did not include policies that solely focused on beverages such as soda taxes.)
[...] The researchers were surprised that no state tax laws or bills directed the state's public health department to define the foods subject to the tax, a practice regularly used at the federal level and a mechanism that states could use to have experts define the foods to be taxed.
The researchers further concluded that their analysis supports the use of junk food taxes implemented as excise taxes paid by manufacturers or distributors, rather than sales taxes that need to be administered by retailers and paid directly by consumers. Revenue from excise taxes can be earmarked for particular uses, including improving access to healthy food in low-resource communities.
"An advantage of excise taxes is that food companies may be motivated to reformulate their products to be healthier to avoid taxation," said study co-author Sean Cash of the Friedman School at Tufts. "Defining foods to be taxed is not a static exercise, as existing products are reformulated and thousands of new packaged foods are introduced each year—so how we tax foods is not just a tool for steering consumers away from the least healthy options, but also for encouraging healthy innovations in what ends up on the supermarket shelves."
Researchers are debating how the new domains will affect web security and users' habits:
In Google's own words, new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) can help self-expression, creativity and business. The previously approved list of "hundreds" of gTLDs entries now provides some troublesome additions such as "zip" and "mov," which can (and will) be abused to target users with sophisticated phishing attacks.
Google Registry has recently introduced 8 new top-level domains for "dads, grads, and techies," adding .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .nexus, .zip, and .mov to its growing list of some of the "most popular" gTLDs which also include .app and .dev. The .zip and .mov domains, however, have sparked a debate among experts about their potential consequences on internet and web overall security.
The zip and mov gTLDs were available in IANA's DNS records since 2014, but they have now become generally available thanks to Google's involvement. Now, anyone can purchase a ".zip" or ".mov" domain like "techspot.zip," even though the two suffixes have long been used to identify compressed file archives in Zip format and video clip files.
The overlap between two, extremely popular file formats – the Zip standard was created by Pkware in 1989, 34 years ago – and the recently registered web domains will bring new security threats to the internet ecosystem, some researchers said. Users could be deceived by malicious URLs shared on social networks or by mail, giving cyber-criminals new, "creative" tools to push malware installations, phishing campaigns or other nefarious activities.
As zip and mov are now two generally approved TLDs, internet services and mobile apps will be essentially forced to treat text snippets such as "test.zip" or "test.mov" like proper URLs to open in a web browser. Cyber-criminals have already started to exploit the new gTLDs, with a now-defunct phishing page at "microsoft-office.zip" designed to try and steal Microsoft Account credentials.
New exploit tactics conceived by security researchers include the ability to use Unicode characters and the "@" symbol for user identification as a creative way to share malicious URLs that looks like legitimate internet addresses. The "creative" internet conceived by Google as a new form of expression and business is more insecure than ever, it seems.
The debate among security experts is still ongoing, though, as some developers don't share the same "doom and gloom" sentiment about the new gTLDs. Microsoft Edge programmer Eric Lawrence said on Twitter that the level of fear-mongering about .zip and .mov domains is "just comical." Google highlighted how the risk of confusion between domains and file names is not a new one, and that Google Registry provides the tools needed to suspend or remove malicious domains across all of the TLDs the company controls.
Some of the biggest names in tech have inked a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into a barbecue sauce ingredient and then pump the stuff underground to try to fight climate change.
That sounds wild, so let's break it down from the start. Alphabet, Meta, Stripe, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability launched a new climate initiative called Frontier about a year ago. The goal is to boost new technologies capable of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by convincing other companies to buy into them.
Today, a San Francisco-based climate tech startup called Charm Industrial announced that Frontier's founding members and a smattering of other companies have agreed to pay Charm a total of $53 million to capture and store 112,000 tons of carbon dioxide between 2024 and 2030.
Some of the biggest names in tech have inked a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into a barbecue sauce ingredient
Charm has an unconventional way of getting that done. First, it collects agricultural and forestry waste — i.e., discarded corn stalks or branches leftover from logging. Wherever it finds that stuff, it sends its fleet of flatbed semi trucks hauling reactors that heat up the waste to 500 degrees Celsius without burning it. That turns the waste into bio-oil, a tarry-looking carbon-rich liquid.
The watery part of the bio-oil is essentially the same thing as liquid smoke, an ingredient used to give barbecue sauce and other foods a smokey flavor, according to Charm CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt.
Bio-oil also holds the carbon dioxide that the plants or trees its made from absorbed for photosynthesis. Had those corn stalks or tree branches been disposed of by burning or simply left to rot, that CO2 would have escaped again — heating the planet along with all the other emissions that come from burning fossil fuels.
Trapped in the bio-oil, Charm Industrial thinks it can store the CO2 underground for thousands to millions of years to keep it from making climate change worse. That's how the startup can now sell carbon removal credits, representing tons of captured CO2, to companies that want to use its service to try to cancel out some of its own carbon dioxide pollution.
So far, Charm has successfully stored more than 6,100 metric tons of CO2 in the form of bio-oil. (A previous purchase from Microsoft, at 2,000 metric tons of CO2, is a big chunk of that.) So the deal announced today is a major escalation and a vote of confidence from Big Tech companies that have been early backers of the nascent carbon removal industry.
The advantage Charm says it has is that its plan is decentralized. Other companies are building big plants to suck carbon dioxide out of the air or sea. They need land (or offshore real estate) for their facilities, to start. And then they face lengthy permitting processes for pipelines transporting CO2 to specialized storage wells.
http://www.righto.com/2023/05/8086-processor-group-decode-rom.html
A key component of any processor is instruction decoding: analyzing a numeric opcode and figuring out what actions need to be taken. The Intel 8086 processor (1978) has a complex instruction set, making instruction decoding a challenge. The first step in decoding an 8086 instruction is something called the Group Decode ROM, which categorizes instructions into about 35 types that control how the instruction is decoded and executed. For instance, the Group Decode ROM determines if an instruction is executed in hardware or in microcode. It also indicates how the instruction is structured: if the instruction has a bit specifying a byte or word operation, if the instruction has a byte that specifies the addressing mode, and so forth.