SoylentNews

upstart writes:

The Overture Maps Foundation took info from Microsoft, Meta, and more to help more developers create a new wave of map apps:

If you're not Google (or, to a much lesser extent, Apple), map apps are damned hard to make. Last year, several major heavy hitters in tech, including the likes of Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and Amazon, decided to lay down their arms and meet under a flag of parlay held aloft by the Linux Foundation to make mapping just a little easier, cheaper, and less dominated by two companies. Alone, none could establish a big enough data pool to rival the likes of Google Maps, but with their individual hoards of business location data, satellite mapping tech, and more support from smaller tech firms, they could perhaps gather enough data together to help create a whole new series of up-to-date map apps.

On Wednesday, this pooled initiative, called the Overture Maps Foundation, shared its first alpha release for its mapping data. It contains millions of examples for buildings, roads, and geographic boundaries. It's only the first large release for the planned massive dataset, but the hope is there will be much more to come as companies sign on.

[...] "The hardest thing in mapping is knowing what's changed in the world," Prioleau told Gizmodo in a video chat. Essentially, map apps are some of the hardest to design simply because of the massive amount of data required to build the systems. Not only do they need to be accurate, but they need to be constantly updated when businesses close and new ones open.

The first Overture release contains about 59 million points of interest that the group claims has not yet been released as open data before. A POI could be anything—a public landmark, a specific building, or a local business. Otherwise, the data contains about 750 million building footprints alongside road data that's mostly collated from the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap project.

The date, time, and place for the upcoming SoylentNews PBC meeting mentioned in a previous meta post from Tuesday, July 25th were announced today:

• Date and Time: Monday, July 31 at 1:30pm PDT (4:30pm EDT / 8:30pm UTC)
• Place: #meeting on irc.soylentnews.org (SoylentNews IRC)

More details:

The upcoming meeting will be to nominate one or more qualified candidates to serve on the Board. The PBC exists to define what and how SoylentNews will be and to enforce that vision. Ultimately the Board is responsible for the high-level oversight that ensures the bylaws are fulfilled. The purpose of the expansion is to include more voices from the community so they will be directly represented in the decision making [affecting] the community. The next meeting will be held over IRC and will be answering and addressing your questions and concerns from any of the comments posted in this article.

For further information, see the previous meta post.

Community participation is essential, so I hope we'll see as many of you there as possible.

upstart writes:

NASA briefly lost contact with International Space Station after power outage:

A brief power outage at NASA's Mission Control in Houston meant that the space agency lost contact with the International Space Station on Tuesday. During the outage, flight controllers were able to talk to the crew through Russian Space Agency Roscosmos's channels.

"A power issue in Mission Control Houston resulted in the loss of command, telemetry, and voice from the ground to the International Space Station," said the American space agency in a blog post. The outage was short-lived as the mission control team transitioned to back-up hardware for telemetry, commanding and audio.

NASA power outage temporarily halts contact with space station:

Space station program manager Joel Montalbano said neither the astronauts nor station were ever in any danger and that backup control systems took over within 90 minutes. The crew was notified of the problem through Russian communication systems, within 20 minutes of the outage.

It's the first time NASA has had to fire up these backup systems to take control, according to Montalbano.

[...] NASA maintains a backup control center miles from Houston in the event a hurricane or other disaster requiring evacuations. But in Tuesday's case, the flight controllers stayed at Mission Control since the lights and air-conditioning still worked.

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upstart writes:

Teen Wins Scholarship for His Glaucoma-Detection Device:

After one of teenager Rohan Kalia's family members was diagnosed with glaucoma, he began researching an affordable technology that could be used for early detection. Kalia is a sophomore at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Ga. He built a portable, inexpensive device that can accurately diagnose the condition.

Kalia's EyePal was showcased at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) held in May in Dallas.

Eyepal, described as a novel multimodal diagnosis and prevention system to enable accessible and individualized glaucoma detection, won this year's IEEE Presidents' Scholarship of US $10,000. The IEEE Foundation established the award to acknowledge a deserving student whose project demonstrates an understanding of electrical or electronics engineering, computer science, or other IEEE field of interest.

[...] EyePal also came in third place in the ISEF's systems software category, earning Kalia a $1,000 award.

[...] The EyePal uses a quality camera, a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, machine-learning technology, and a mobile app. The camera takes photos of the fundus and sends them to a mobile device that can be examined by a specialist. EyePal showed a 95 percent accuracy when tested on sets of fundus images, Kalia says.

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mendax writes:

Ars recently published a story that goes in-depth into the alleged dinosaurs of the computing world, the lowly IBM mainframe computer:

Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they're dinosaurs, they're T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot. It's estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They're used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM. In this explainer, we'll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it's still going strong after over 50 years.

Original Submission

sonamchauhan writes:

A paper uploaded to the Arxiv preprint repository claims South Korean scientists have created the world's first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. The superconducting material, dubbed 'LK-99', is synthesized in a fairly simple manner from lead-apatite. As yet, there seems to be no independent verification of the claims of their paper.

See also:
https://thequantuminsider.com/2023/07/26/researchers-claim-they-developed-a-room-temperature-superconductor/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624

Original Submission

liar and Isia wrote in with the same story:

Companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.

[...] Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders.
Go meta.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ubisoft will delete your account, along with your game library, if it's inactive for too long:

Has it been a while since you signed into your Ubisoft account? It might be prudent to log in as soon as possible; otherwise, there's a risk of it being deleted and your purchased games along with it.

Twitter user @PC_enjoyer, a piracy and anti-DRM advocate, tweeted a very phishing-like email from Ubisoft informing them that they have not been using their Ubisoft account. As such, the company has temporarily suspended the inactive account and said it would be closed in 30 days in accordance with the Terms of Use.

UBISOFT closes your account if you haven't logged in for some time.

You will lose all your games purchased forever. pic.twitter.com/exC78bUt93

– AntiDRM (@PC_enjoyer) July 19, 2023

The message includes a Cancel button for the user to keep their Ubisoft account open. Again, this all looks pretty suspicious, but the company's support staff later confirmed it's not a scam.

Hey there. We just wanted to chime in that you can avoid the account closure by logging into your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email. We certainly do not want you to lose access to...

– Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) July 20, 2023

hubie writes:

Although the two types of training produce similar metabolic stress, muscle activation is different:

Which kind of resistance training promotes more muscle growth: low load with many repetitions or high load with fewer repetitions? According to a study conducted at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo state, Brazil, it makes no difference.

The study lasted eight weeks and involved 18 volunteers in two different training protocols. One group performed high-load (HL) exercises with fewer repetitions, while the other did low-load (LL) exercises with more repetitions. Muscle mass was measured in the first and last exercise sessions. A comparison of the two groups did not show any difference in muscle growth or metabolic stress, measured in an analysis of substances released into the bloodstream by the exercises.

In the HL group, each individual lifted up to 80% of their own weight. In the LL group, the limit was 30%, but they repeated the exercises until their muscles could no longer lift the loads.

[...] "Resistance training is known to promote muscle growth, but it's still not completely clear whether the key to muscle hypertrophy is the load or the number of repetitions. Our study supports the theory that both types have the same effect. We also showed that muscle activation occurs in a different manner in each type, although metabolic stress is the same and the effect on hypertrophy is therefore also the same," said Renato Barroso, a professor at UNICAMP's School of Physical Education.

[...] Although the researchers found no differences in the overall metabolic response, they observed that some metabolites correlated with muscle hypertrophy in both groups. Some of these correlations, they concluded, may be associated with the characteristics of the muscle fibers activated by exercise (type 1 or type 2) as well as the metabolic demands of the training protocols used in the study.

upstart writes:

Thousands of Chromebooks Are 'Expiring,' Forcing Schools to Toss Them Out:

As thin, light, and inexpensive as Chromebooks can be, they come with a major caveat: short life expectancies. Chromebooks aren't just a little flimsier than the average laptop—they're shipped with software "death dates" that render them useless three to six years after release. And because schools are some of Chromebooks' biggest customers, they're now swamped with bricked hardware.

The Chromebook crisis is apparent at northern California's Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), where thousands of laptops have reportedly stopped working. Sam Berg, the district's computer science coordinator, told Silicon Valley's Mercury News that while Oakland students can gain tech repair experience through an OUSD internship, the expired Chromebooks simply aren't fixable. "They're designed to be disposable," Berg said.

The district was forced to replace 3,851 laptops last year after the Chromebooks reached their built-in death dates. Over the next five years, that number will skyrocket to 40,000 as more than 60 Chromebook models expire. The district's tech internship for teenagers will attempt to salvage as much hardware as possible, but most will need to be recycled.

Google told OUSD the baked-in death dates are necessary for security and compatibility purposes. As Google continues to iterate on its Chromebook software, older devices supposedly can't handle the updates. But this illustrates a particularly contentious issue in modern technology: planned obsolescence. From smartphones and computers to printers and even kitchen appliances, consumers have learned to purchase things with the knowledge that they'll need to be replaced in just a few years. Not only is this expensive, but it produces a shocking amount of e-waste, less than a quarter of which is recycled.

Also submitted as: Built-in software 'death dates' are sending thousands of schools' Chromebooks to the recycling bin

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Scientists are trying to give AI human brains, quite literally:

AI researchers and neurologists are working together the world over to give humans the power of AI, and to give AI the capacity of the human brain. The ultimate idea, is to give AI enough processing or "thought" power using a non-silicon based processor.

A group of researchers has secured a $600,000 grant from Australia's Office of National Intelligence to explore the integration of human brain cells with artificial intelligence (AI).

[...] The researchers are confident in their work and have ambitious goals for the technology. Adeel Razi, the team lead and associate professor at Monarch University, stated that this new technology may eventually surpass the performance of traditional silicon-based hardware.

"This new technology capability in the future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware," said Adeel Razi, team lead and associate profess at Monarch University, in a statement.

The potential applications of this research span multiple fields, including planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-computer interfaces, and drug discovery, granting Australia a significant strategic advantage.

[...] This ambitious project will undoubtedly require considerable time and effort to complete. With the grant, they aim to develop AI machines that can replicate the learning capacity of biological neural networks. Ultimately, they hope to scale up the hardware and methods to a level where these systems can viably replace traditional in silicon computing.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

We use technology in work more than ever before, but it isn't making us more productive:

We are often told that we are in the midst of a technological revolution.

That business and the world of work continue to be transformed and improved by computers, the internet, the increased speed of communication, data processing, robotics, and now - artificial intelligence.

There is only one small problem with all this - none of it seems to show up in the economic data. If all this technology really is making us all work faster and better, there is precious little evidence.

Between 1974 and 2008 the UK's productivity - the amount of output you get per worker - grew at an annual rate of 2.3%. But between 2008 and 2020 the rate of productivity growth collapsed to around 0.5% per annum.

[...] It feels like we are continuing to go through a huge period of innovation and technological advancement, but at the same time, productivity has slowed to a crawl. How can you explain this apparent paradox?

[...] Productivity is something economists look at very closely. And while it is a complicated issue, with the 2008 financial crisis and current high inflation having a negative impact, there are said to be two main explanations for why technology is not boosting productivity.

The first is that we are just not measuring the impact of technology properly. The second is that economic revolutions tend to be rather slow-burning affairs. And therefore, technological change is happening, but it just might be decades before we see the full benefits.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/ready-for-your-eye-scan-worldcoin-launches-but-not-quite-worldwide/

Sam Altman's cryptocurrency project, the Worldcoin Foundation, is rolling out its services globally even as the company cofounded by the OpenAI chief faces regulatory pushback in the US.

The Berlin and San Francisco-based start-up announced on Monday that its technology, including its Worldcoin token—a cryptocurrency traceable on the blockchain that requires users to first prove their identity—will be available in 35 cities across 20 countries.

Central to the effort is an eye-scanning physical "orb," which Worldcoin's founders say is necessary for a future in which distinguishing between humans and robots becomes increasingly challenging due to a surge in artificial intelligence technology. Once users have proven they are not robots, they can be issued one of the company's tokens.

[...] Altman admitted that eye-scanning technology has "a clear ick factor," but he is confident that with proper explanation the company can attract users.

"On crypto, there have been a lot of bad actors and that's a real shame... we have to earn people's trust, which is why we're explaining so much about how the technology works and the road map for decentralizing the company," he said.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

A federal judge ruled on Friday that Arizona’s law limiting how close people can get to recording law enforcement is unconstitutional:

In his three-page ruling, [U.S. District Judge] John J. Tuchi said the law violated the First Amendment and “there is a clearly established right to record law enforcement officers engaged in the exercise of their official duties in public places.” He also said the law was too vague.

The judge cited infringement against a clear right for citizens to film police while doing their jobs in his ruling:

“The law prohibits or chills a substantial amount of First Amendment protected activity and is unnecessary to prevent interference with police officers given other Arizona laws in effect,” Tuchi wrote.

Tuchi suspended the implementation of the law last year. Now, his ruling permanently blocks enforcement.

Previously:

• Federal Judge Blocks Arizona Law Limiting Filming of Police
• Arizona Makes It Illegal for Bystanders to Record Cops at Close Range

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers have created an edible power resource that could boost healthcare and help preserve the environment:

Most examinations of the gastrointestinal region involve sending a thin tube with a camera affixed to the tip either down your throat to the small intestine or through the rectum to the colon, neither of which are pleasant experiences.

However, an innovative, and increasingly attractive -- albeit less common -- method is to dispatch a camera housed in a small, vitamin pill-shaped capsule along with silver oxide batteries on its maiden voyage down into your gut.

[...] While this process sounds great so far, there's a problem. Ingestible devices, as amazing as they are, require medical oversight while they're administered and they sometimes get lodged into the mountainous crevices of your innards.

Out of nowhere, you've gone from a routine, affordable cancer test to surgery and a humongous medical bill.

But what if the pill camera was made of substances that were not harmful and somehow quietly melded away into nothingness once it served its tour of duty?

Italian researchers from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) have engineered a battery that could power devices, such as the pill camera, using ingredients you may find in any food lover's pantry.

[...] This carefully crafted work of ingenuity is able to operate at 0.65 Volts, low enough to not affect humans when they swallow it, but with enough juice to power a tiny LED for a short while.

Journal Reference:
Ivan K. Ilic, Valerio Galli, et. al. An Edible Rechargeable Battery, Advanced Materials (DOI: 10.1002/adma.202211400)

Original Submission