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upstart writes:

AI is changing how Americans find jobs, get promoted and succeed at work:

Whether we realize it or not, advancements in artificial intelligence are increasingly influencing the paths of our careers.

Advancements in human capital management systems [HCM], more strategic and data-driven human resource and talent management practices, and increased attention to bias are all factors that are changing how people are hired, developed, promoted and fired.

I teach and work in talent management and leadership development. I've used these programs and practices in the real world and continue to learn and research how these practices are changing. Artificial intelligence and systems are already big business, grossing over US$38 billion in 2021. Without a doubt, AI-driven software has the potential to advance quickly and change how companies make strategic decisions about their employees.

Imagine you apply for a job in the very near future. You upload your carefully written résumé through the company website, noting that the platform looks eerily similar to other platforms you've used to apply for other jobs. After your résumé is saved, you provide demographic information and complete countless fields with the same data from your résumé. You then hit "submit" and hope for a follow-up email from a person.

Your data now lives within this company's human capital management system. Even if they collect them, very few companies are looking at résumés anymore; they're looking at the info you type into those tiny boxes to help make comparisons between you, dozens or hundreds of other applicants, and the job requirements. Even if your résumé demonstrates that you are the most qualified applicant, it alone is unlikely to catch the eye of the recruiter, because the recruiter's attention is elsewhere.

Let's say you get the call, you ace the interview and the job is yours. Your information hits another stage within the company's database, or HCM: active employee. Your performance ratings and other data about your employment will now be tied to your profile, adding more data for the HCM and human resources to monitor and assess.

upstart writes:

New York City Is Sinking. It's Far From Alone:

Add up the million or so buildings in New York City, and you get something on the order of 1.7 trillion pounds of weight pressing on the earth—and that's not even counting all the other infrastructure, like roads and sidewalks. All that weight is deforming the ground, like bowling balls on a memory foam mattress, and causing a type of sinking known as subsidence, when land slowly compresses.

New research finds that, on average, subsidence rates in NYC are between 1 and 2 millimeters per year, but in some places that's up to 4 millimeters. This may not sound like a worrying figure, but compounded year after year, it's significant sinking that's effectively doubling the relative sea-level rise in the metropolis. "You have about 1 to 2 millimeters of sea level going up, while you have 1 to 2 millimeters on average going down," says United States Geological Survey geophysicist Tom Parsons, coauthor of a new paper describing the research. "It's a common issue with cities around the world. It appears there's a definite link between urbanization and subsidence."

Parts of Jakarta, Indonesia, for instance, are sinking by nearly a foot a year. The San Francisco Bay Area could lose up to 165 square miles of coastline due to a combination of rising seas and subsidence. And just last month, another team of researchers reported finding subsidence up and down the East Coast, as high as 10 millimeters a year in parts of Delaware.

The primary way to cause dramatic sinking is the over-extraction of groundwater, which is the case in Jakarta; drained aquifers collapse like empty water bottles. But in NYC, subsidence depends on the composition of the underlying soil. Long ago, glaciers scraped across the area, depositing sediments. Lakes formed too, depositing still more sediments. So the metropolis is built on a complex mix of materials like clay, silt, and artificial fill, which are more prone to subsidence, as well as sand and gravel, which tend to resist it.

upstart writes:

Windows to Finally Support 30 Year Old Archive Format:

It's been 30 years since Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal created the RAR archive format. RAR allows users to compress files so they take up less room on your hard drive. However, you needed a special program like WinRAR to open RAR files on Windows for the better part of three decades.

That's all changing soon. This week Microsoft quietly announced that Windows 11 will finally support RAR files natively. In a long-winded blog post about the future of AI, the company slipped in RAR support in the "In addition..." section. If you were just casually scrolling through, you may have missed it.

"We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows," the blog post states.

Granted, this move may not matter much to people who have never heard of a RAR file. But, those who work with archive formats know the sheer annoyance of not being able to open a somewhat common file format without special software like WinRAR—a file extraction program that people can pay for but generally don't.

See also: 28 years later, Windows finally supports RAR files submitted by owl.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Scientists making the "Air-gen" device have discovered that any material can be used to generate electricity from the air:

Scientists have invented a device that can continuously generate electricity from thin air, offering a glimpse of a possible sustainable energy source that can be made of almost any material and runs on the ambient humidity that surrounds all of us, reports a new study.

The novel "air generator," or Air-gen, is made from materials with holes that are under 100 nanometers in length, which is a scale thousand times smaller than a human hair. This design can pull electricity from water droplets in the air for much longer periods than previous concepts, the researchers report, suggesting that it could eventually provide a continuous and sustainable source of power. Researchers hope the technique could eventually help to fight climate change by serving as an alternative to fossil fuels.

[...] Now, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed an Air-gen device that yields electricity from contact with water droplets that pass through its porous material. In this way, the Air-gen technology creates "a spontaneous and sustained charging gradient for continuous electric output" that "opens a wide door for the broad exploration of sustainable electricity from ambient air," according to a study published on Wednesday in Advanced Materials.

[...] Indeed, the results revealed that practically any material could become an Air-gen device provided it was perforated with tiny holes measuring 100 nanometers or fewer. At this scale, the holes are big enough to allow water to pass through an upper chamber into a lower chamber, but are small enough that the droplets make contact with the material as they move down through the holes. As a consequence, a charge imbalance is created in the device because the water droplets increase the charge of the upper layer by soaking it as they move into the lower chamber.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

ChatGPT-maker warns it might leave EU over planned AI law:

The boss of the company behind ChatGPT has said it might consider leaving the EU if it fails to comply with a planned law on artificial intelligence (AI).

The EU's planned legislation could be the first to specifically regulate AI.

And it could require generative AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material had been used to train their systems to create text and images.

"The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating," OpenAI's Sam Altman said, Reuters reported. "But we have heard it's going to get pulled back."

Many in the creative industries accuse AI companies of using the work of artists, musicians and actors to train systems to imitate their work.

But Mr Altman is worried it would be technically impossible for OpenAI to comply with some of the AI Act's safety and transparency requirements, according to Time magazine.

At an event at University College London, Mr Altman added he was optimistic AI could create more jobs and reduce inequality.

He also met Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the heads of AI companies DeepMind and Anthropic to discuss the technology's risks - from disinformation to national security and even "existential threats" - and the voluntary actions and regulation required to manage them.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Yes, They Really Have a Favorite!:

A study conducted in 2004 aimed to determine the blood type that mosquitoes preferred when it came to feeding. The researchers released a group of Aedes albopictus mosquitoes and observed their behavior as they landed on different individuals with varying blood types. The results showed that the mosquitos were more attracted to people with Type O blood, landing on them almost twice as often compared to those who had Type A.

Although there was no significant difference between the preference for blood types B and AB, the findings strongly suggested that Type O was indeed the most favored by mosquitoes. This information is crucial in understanding how these pesky insects behave, especially since certain diseases like malaria are transmitted through mosquito bites.

If you are getting bitten more often than other people, there might be a good reason for that. Here are some of the reasons, other than Type O blood, that mosquitos may be attracted to you.

[...] Despite popular belief, mosquitoes do not actually bite us for our blood but rather for the proteins in our blood plasma. These proteins help female mosquitoes produce eggs and are essential for their survival. When a mosquito bites an individual with a particular blood type, it can detect these proteins and know if it is worth biting again in order to obtain more nutrients.

Mosquitoes aren't only attracted to a certain blood type. They are highly attracted to carbon dioxide, a gas that is naturally emitted by humans when they exhale. In fact, these pesky insects can detect carbon dioxide from almost half a football field away! This makes it easy for mosquitoes to locate potential hosts and feed on their blood.

Interestingly, some individuals naturally exhale more carbon dioxide than others. Generally speaking, larger people tend to produce more of this gas compared to smaller individuals. As a result, bigger individuals may be more attractive targets for mosquitoes.

upstart writes:

Collisions of water and ice might build electric charge in thunderclouds on both planets:

On Jupiter, lightning jerks and jolts a lot like it does on Earth.

Jovian lightning emits radio wave pulses that are typically separated by about one millisecond, researchers report May 23 in Nature Communications. The energetic prestissimo, the scientists say, is a sign that the gas giant's lightning propagates in pulses, at a pace comparable to that of the bolts that cavort through our own planet's thunderclouds. The similarities between the two world's electrical phenomena could have implications for the search for alien life.

Arcs of lightning on both worlds appear to move somewhat like a winded hiker going up a mountain, pausing after each step to catch their breath, says Ivana Kolmašová, an atmospheric physicist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. "One step, another step, then another step ... and so on."

Here on Earth, lightning forms as turbulent winds within thunderclouds cause many ice crystals and water droplets to rub together, become charged and then move to opposite sides of the clouds, progressively generating static electrical charges. When the charges grow big enough to overcome the air's ability to insulate them, electrons are released — the lightning takes its first step. From there, the surging electrons will repeatedly ionize the air and rush into it, lurching the bolt forward at an average of hundreds of thousands of meters per second.

Scientists have suggested that superbolts observed in Jovian clouds might also form by collisions between ice crystals and water droplets (SN: 8/5/20). But no one knew whether the alien lightning extended and branched in increments, as they do on Earth, or if they took some other form.

[...] If that universality is real, it could have implications for the search for life elsewhere. Experiments have shown that lightning strikes on Earth could have smelted some of the chemical ingredients needed to form the building blocks of life (SN: 3/16/21). If lightning is discharging in a similar way on alien worlds, Yair says, then it could be producing similar ingredients in those places too.

Journal Reference:
Kolmašová, I., Santolík, O., Imai, M. et al. Lightning at Jupiter pulsates with a similar rhythm as in-cloud lightning at Earth. Nat Commun 14, 2707 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38351-6

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Virgin Orbit to cease operations, sell assets of Richard Branson's satellite launcher:

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit is shutting down less than two months after the satellite launch start-up filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to a Tuesday company announcement.

Virgin Orbit will cease operations and sell its assets to four winning bidders, the company announced Tuesday. Those bidders include three aerospace companies—Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch and Vast Space subsidiary Launcher—with combined bids totaling almost $36 million, according to court documents.

A sale hearing for court approval is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon and transactions are expected to close soon after, the company said.

"Virgin Orbit's legacy in the space industry will forever be remembered," Virgin Orbit said in a Tuesday statement. "Its groundbreaking technologies, relentless pursuit of excellence, and unwavering commitment to advancing the frontiers of air launch have left an indelible mark on the industry."

[...] Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 by Branson, a British billionaire, in hopes of targeting the market for launching small satellites into space. Its LauncherOne rockets were launched from the air from modified Virgin passenger planes, allowing the company to operate more flexibly than using fixed launch sites.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-early-disaster-deaths-plunging.html

Weather-related disasters have surged over the past 50 years, causing swelling economic damage even as early warning systems have meant dramatically fewer deaths, the United Nations said Monday.

Extreme weather, climate and water-related events caused 11,778 reported disasters between 1970 and 2021, new figures from the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) show.

Those disasters killed just over two million people and caused $4.3 trillion in economic losses.

"The most vulnerable communities unfortunately bear the brunt of weather, climate and water-related hazards," WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

The report found that over 90 percent of reported deaths worldwide due to disasters over the 51-year-period occurred in developing countries.

But the agency also said improved early warning systems and coordinated disaster management had significantly reduced the human casualty toll.

WMO pointed out in a report issued two years ago covering disaster-linked deaths and losses between 1970 and 2019, that at the beginning of the period the world was seeing more than 50,000 such deaths each year.

By the 2010s, the disaster death toll had dropped to below 20,000 annually.

upstart writes:

Eric Schmidt wants to prevent potential abuse of AI:

Add Eric Schmidt to the list of tech luminaries concerned about the dangers of AI. The former Google chief tells guests at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit that AI represents an "existential risk" that could get many people "harmed or killed." He doesn't feel that threat is serious at the moment, but he sees a near future where AI could help find software security flaws or new biology types. It's important to ensure these systems aren't "misused by evil people," the veteran executive says.

Schmidt doesn't have a firm solution for regulating AI, but he believes there won't be an AI-specific regulator in the US. He participated in a National Security Commission on AI that reviewed the technology and published a 2021 report determining that the US wasn't ready for the tech's impact.

Schmidt doesn't have direct influence over AI. However, he joins a growing number of well-known moguls who have argued for a careful approach. Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai has cautioned that society needs to adapt to AI, while OpenAI leader Sam Altman has expressed concern that authoritarians might abuse these algorithms. In March, numerous industry leaders and researchers (including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak) signed an open letter calling on companies to pause AI experiments for six months while they rethought the safety and ethical implications of their work.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

With increasing demand on terrestrial launch pads, some companies are venturing out into the open sea:

With increasing demand on terrestrial launch pads, some companies are venturing out into the open sea, with this Virginia startup leading the way.

The Spaceport Company recently pulled off a series of rocket launches from a floating launch pad in the Gulf of Mexico, in its effort to create more options for rocket companies needing to reach space.

On Monday, the Virginia-based startup announced its successful demonstration, marking the first set of rocket launches from U.S. territorial waters using a prototype mobile floating spaceport.

"This demonstration provided numerous lessons which will be incorporated into our next project: building a sea-based spaceport capable of orbital operations," Tom Marotta, founder and CEO of The Spaceport Company, said in the company statement. "We are working towards offering the U.S.'s first truly commercial spaceport, which can best support the rapidly growing commercial launch industry and alleviate the burdens on government ranges."

In partnership with Evolution Space, which is providing the required propulsion systems, The Spaceport Company launched four small sounding rockets from a modified ship floating in the Gulf of Mexico. The demonstration paves the way for orbital launches hosted on offshore platforms—an effort to decrease demand on terrestrial launch sites as the cadence of rocket launches continues to increase. The launch pace and resulting traffic at Cape Canaveral, Florida, is now so intense, for example, that U.S. Space Force is looking for alternatives, as SpaceNews reported earlier this month.

owl writes:

NYT Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/opinion/cybersecurity-hacking.html

Archive Link: https://archive.is/wMAXA

In the movies, you can tell the best hackers by how they type. The faster they punch the keys, the more dangerous they are. Hacking is portrayed as a highly technical feat, a quintessentially technological phenomenon.

This impression of high-tech wizardry pervades not just our popular culture but also our real-world attempts to combat cybercrime. If cybercrime is a sophisticated high-tech feat, we assume, the solution must be too. Cybersecurity companies hype proprietary tools like "next generation" firewalls, anti-malware software and intrusion-detection systems. Policy experts like John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, urge us to invest public resources in a hugely expensive "cyber Manhattan Project" that will supercharge our digital capabilities.

But this whole concept is misguided. The principles of computer science dictate that there are hard, inherent limits to how much technology can help. Yes, it can make hacking harder, but it cannot possibly, even in theory, stop it. What's more, the history of hacking shows that the vulnerabilities hackers exploit are as often human as technical — not only the cognitive quirks discovered by behavioral economists but also old-fashioned vices like greed and sloth.

To be sure, you should enable two-factor authentication and install those software updates that you've been putting off. But many of the threats we face are rooted in the nature of human and group behavior. The solutions will need to be social too — job creation programs, software liability reform, cryptocurrency regulation and the like.

For the past four years, I have taught a cybersecurity class at Yale Law School in which I show my students how to break into computers. Having grown up with a user-friendly web, my students generally have no real idea how the internet or computers work. They are surprised to find how easily they learn to hack and how much they enjoy it. (I do, too, and I didn't hack a computer until I was 52.) By the end of the semester, they are cracking passwords, cloning websites and crashing servers.

upstart writes:

Our favorite SBC makes waves in the world of science:

The Raspberry Pi is a flexible system with use cases ranging from retro gaming platforms to industrial use cases for factories and more. Today we're sharing one research team's foray into science with the help of our favorite SBC and looking at how well it compares to modern, more expensive tools. Liam Taylor, Duncan Quincy, and Mark Smith recently deployed a set of Raspberry Pis to help monitor glacier calving in both Iceland and Peru.

According to the team, monitoring calving fronts is critical as extreme changes can result in environmental impacts for local residents. For example, things like tsunamis, floods, and the collapse of icebergs can cause serious damage, and monitoring these changes can help those living nearby respond before the problems worsen. Part of their research was to test the performance of a Raspberry Pi in monitoring these changes against more conventional tools they usually use, in this case, an unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV).

To test the Pi against the UAV monitoring system, the team traveled to Fjallsjökull, Iceland. Here they could survey glaciers both from the shore and from a boat. The area also had a great variety of calving margin heights that made it easier to test the accuracy of the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pis were tested using both a Camera Module V2 and an HQ Camera Module using a 16mm telephoto lens. The Camera Module V2 proved too inadequate for their measurements, so the team opted to stick with the HQ Camera Module. The UAV chosen to compare against the Pi was a DJI Mavic 2 Pro UAV. The Raspberry Pis were then attached to a tripod with critical components like batteries stored inside a weatherproofed box.

The team mounted some of the Pis to a boat as they passed by while the UAV moved overhead. Recording the glaciers simultaneously allowed the team to get an accurate comparison of the charting ability of both devices. Using the pictures taken by the Pi, the team created a 3D render of the glaciers using photogrammetry.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Weed killers of the future could soon be based on failed antibiotics:

A molecule that was initially developed to treat tuberculosis but failed to progress out of the lab as an antibiotic is now showing promise as a powerful foe for weeds that invade our gardens and cost farmers billions of dollars each year.

While the failed antibiotic wasn't fit for its original purpose, scientists at the University of Adelaide discovered that by tweaking its structure, the molecule became effective at killing two of the most problematic weeds in Australia, annual ryegrass and wild radish, without harming bacterial and human cells. This research has been published in the journal Communications Biology.

"This discovery is a potential game changer for the agricultural industry. Many weeds are now resistant to the existing herbicides on the market, costing farmers billions of dollars each year," said lead researcher Dr. Tatiana Soares da Costa from the University of Adelaide's Waite Research Institute.

"Using failed antibiotics as herbicides provides a short-cut for faster development of new, more effective weed killers that target damaging and invasive weeds that farmers find hard to control."

Researchers at the University's Herbicide and Antibiotic Innovation Lab discovered there were similarities between bacterial superbugs and weeds at a molecular level.

They exploited these similarities, and by chemically modifying the structure of a failed antibiotic, they were able to block the production of amino acid lysine, which is essential for weed growth.

"There are no commercially available herbicides on the market that work in this way. In fact, in the past 40 years, there have been hardly any new herbicides with new mechanisms of action that have entered the market," said Dr. Andrew Barrow, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Soares da Costa's team at the University of Adelaide's Waite Research Institute.

[...] It's not just farmers who could reap the benefits of this discovery. Researchers say it could also lead to the development of new weed killers to target pesky weeds growing in our backyards and driveways.

"Our re-purposing approach has the potential to discover herbicides with broad applications that can kill a variety of weeds," said Dr. Barrow.

Journal Reference:
Mackie, Emily R. R., Barrow, Andrew S., Giel, Marie-Claire, et al. Repurposed inhibitor of bacterial dihydrodipicolinate reductase exhibits effective herbicidal activity [open], Communications Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-04895-y)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Memristors Were Going to Replace RAM and SSDs. What Happened?:

Memristors promised to revolutionize how we store and access data. However, despite hype surrounding memristors, they haven't quite replaced traditional storage technologies like RAM and SSDs. In this article, we'll explore the journey of memristors and where they stand today.

Memristors, or memory resistors, are a type of electrical component that can change their resistance based on the flow of electrical current. This unique property allows them to store information in a fast and energy-efficient way. Memristors were first theorized by Professor Leon Chua in 1971, but it wasn't until 2008 that researchers at HP Labs created a working prototype.

The primary advantage of memristors over traditional storage like RAM and SSDs is their non-volatile nature. This means memristors can retain data even when the power is turned off. In contrast, RAM (Random Access Memory) is volatile, which means it loses all data when the system is powered down. SSDs (Solid State Drives) are non-volatile but have limited read/write cycles, which can lead to wear and eventual failure. On the other hand, memristors have been touted to offer virtually unlimited read/write cycles, leading to a longer lifespan.

In other words, memristors promise to be the perfect combination of RAM and SSD storage if we can get them to work commercially.