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- [day of the dalek] Commodore 64 Crack Intros and Game Music
- [turgid] Legitimising Stupidity
- [mcgrew] Name That Device
- [quietus] Viktoria Roshchyna
- [Runaway1956] WTF is happening with FEMA?
- [lentilla] On Electric Vehicles, Their Batteries, and Solar Panels
- [acid andy] GRUB Can Be a Pain in the Butt
- [fliptop] What do you spend on your hobbies?
- [deimios] On the hunt for a low brightness laptop.
- [c0lo] The truth of Russia Today
- [janrinok] Gop Holds Show Hearing About Providing Affordable Internet
- [nostyle] Watching For Signs
- [hubie] Advancing civilization forward another step
- [canopic jug] Phrack 71 Published
- [NotSanguine] Stay Awake! The Conspiracy Clearinghouse...
Older Stuff
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September 3- IBM Promised to Back Off Facial Recognition - Then It Signed a $69.8 Million Contract to Provide It (7)
- Webb Telescope Detects Universe’s Most Distant Organic Molecules (6)
- Metaverse Could Put a Dent in Global Warming (35)
- Why Did Old Phone Numbers Start With Letters? (28)
- Nuclear Weapon Tests Have Made Boars Too Radioactive To Eat (9)
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September 2 -
September 1- Biological Clocks of People and Malaria Parasites Tick in Tune (1)
- Hacking the LG Monitor's EDID.Md (7)
- Gentle Cleansers Kill Viruses as Effectively as Harsh Soaps (9)
- FCC Says “Too Bad” to ISPs Complaining That Listing Every Fee is Too Hard (33)
- Samsung Realizes Behaving Ethically is Good for Business (8)
Quick Links
from the they'll-have-to-pry-the-PalmPilot-out-of-my-cold-dead-hands dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Apple deployments are accelerating across the global enterprise, so it’s surprising that many organizations don't properly recognize that change. Even when companies put Macs, iPhones, and iPads in the hands of their employees, they are failing to manage these deployments. It’s quite shocking.
That’s the biggest take-away from the latest Jamf research, which warns that almost half of enterprises across Europe still don’t have a formal Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy in place. That’s bad, as it means companies have no control over how employees connect and use corporate resources, creating a nice, soft attack surface for criminals and competitors alike.
[...] BYOD schemes can save company cash, but the real benefit is seen in the productivity, loyalty, and commitment benefits unlocked when employees gain this kind of autonomy. Still, in today’s security environment there are risks that must be managed rather than ignored.
[...] In a statement, Michael Covington, Jamf's vice president for portfolio strategy, said:
“While it is easy to get swept up in the positives surrounding 'anywhere work' programs that empower employees to work remotely on their own schedule, from any location and from any device, organizations need to examine the associated risks and decide how to manage them.
[...] Companies should also set standards — and devices that don’t meet those standards, in terms of security protection, should not gain access to corporate systems. This is all common sense stuff, really. We know the security environment is extremely challenging — even police forces are regularly hacked.
In that context, it makes total sense to think about how to manage the devices connected to your systems and to put in place the software, security, and user education it takes to protect your business environments. The cost of device management is relatively negligible compared to the consequences of a successful ransomware attack, after all.
With this in mind, it’s surprising so many European — and, by inference, global — businesses seem so poorly protected.
Sounds like a nightmare job to work in IT in companies like these.
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from the my-Earth's-spinning-like-a-spinning-top dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Glacial cyclicity of the Earth has often been considered on 100,000 year timescales, particularly for the Late Pleistocene (~11,700 to 129,000 years ago) swapping between periods of extensive polar and mountain glacier ice sheets, to warmer interglacial periods when ice sheets and glaciers retreated, with subsequent sea level rise. This is thought to be related to three key drivers affecting the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth from the sun.
Termed Milankovitch cycles, eccentricity considers the shape of Earth's orbit changing from circular to more elliptical over 100,000 year timescales, while obliquity refers to the varying 'tilt' of the planet's axis between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over 41,000 years (contributing to seasons) and precession, which in simple terms is the direction Earth's axis is pointed and can make the contrast between seasons more extreme in one hemisphere compared to the other.
While the eccentricity cycle has been a major factor thought to drive glacial/interglacial cycles, newer research has suggested that they instead may result from a series of obliquity or precession cycles (especially as the former dominated up to 800,000 years ago). To test this theory, Bethany Hobart, a Doctoral Researcher at the University of California, and colleagues modeled the impacts of glacial termination on 23,000 and 41,000 year cycles.
[...] The research team concluded that it is actually the shortest orbital cycle, precession, that seems to have had the most effect on glacial cyclicity in geological history. For the Late Pleistocene it is the precession forcing in the northern hemisphere during summer that would have helped encourage significant melting of ice sheets and terminated the glacial period.
These findings were based upon oxygen isotopes (the same element with different atomic masses), whereby the warmer conditions cause the evaporation of lighter 16O, leaving the water enriched in heavier 18O which is then incorporated into the shells of organisms living in the ocean, such as single-celled foraminifera.
[...] Through this work, the research team identified nine glacial termination events, with the three marked by an asterisk representing partial termination, while the remainder are fully changing from glacial to interglacial conditions. The precession cycles are noticeably different between the glacial terminations, which Hobart and colleagues suggest may be explained by the competing influence of obliquity, as well as variable ice sheet size at the beginning of each cycle. Therefore, they calculate the duration between the cycles ranging from 90,400 and 115,500 years, with the more distinct changes in precession a clear indicator of the sensitivity of Late Pleistocene ice sheets.
Journal Reference:
Bethany Hobart et al, Late Pleistocene 100-kyr glacial cycles paced by precession forcing of summer insolation, Nature Geoscience (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-023-01235-x
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The National Reconnaissance Office doesn't typically talk about any of its missions, but in an unusual break with precedent, the button-down spy satellite agency is taking a different tack with its next launch Tuesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
"We’re trying to be more transparent and share more information," said Chris Scolese, director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in a roundtable with reporters Monday. As more countries and companies launch missions into space, Scolese said the space environment is becoming more congested, contested, and competitive.
"It’s also becoming easier and easier to see what’s going up there," Scolese said. "We want to let people know, to some extent, what our capabilities are."
[...] The US Space Force and the NRO have numerous satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and the mission poised for liftoff Tuesday will help track potential threats to those multibillion-dollar assets.
“Geosynchronous orbit is far away," Scolese said. "Ground-based systems have a harder time seeing what’s up there. This provides us the capability of being in this same orbit, so that we’re closer to what’s happening up there. It will not be looking at the ground, it will be looking at space.”
This new mission also has a snappy code name—Silent Barker—and an eye-catching mission patch, which isn't unusual for launches with NRO spy satellites.
[...] The Silent Barker satellites will detect and continually track other objects in geosynchronous orbit, a capability that military leaders have prioritized over the last decade. In that time, Pentagon officials say there has been an escalation in "cat and mouse" games between US satellites and those operated by China and Russia.
The US military already has its own satellites capable of approaching other objects in geosynchronous orbit. These satellites, part of the Space Force's Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP), were part of an orbital dance with two Chinese military satellites last year.
The US military dispatched one of the GSSAP satellites to get a closer look at the two Chinese spacecraft, but the Chinese satellites took off in opposite directions. Then one of the Chinese spacecraft settled into a position to get a sunlit view of the Space Force surveillance satellite that had been chasing it.
So far, there haven't been reports that any of these cat-and-mouse games have resulted in either a physical or cyber attack on a US military satellite, but that's what the Silent Barker mission is designed to guard against.
You can keep up on the status of the launch at the ULA web site.
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When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI's large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text—a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the abstract problems that Webb set for it—the kind of thing you'd find in an IQ test. "I was really shocked by its ability to solve these problems," he says. "It completely upended everything I would have predicted."
[...] Last month Webb and his colleagues published an article in Nature, in which they describe GPT-3's ability to pass a variety of tests devised to assess the use of analogy to solve problems (known as analogical reasoning). On some of those tests GPT-3 scored better than a group of undergrads. "Analogy is central to human reasoning," says Webb. "We think of it as being one of the major things that any kind of machine intelligence would need to demonstrate."
What Webb's research highlights is only the latest in a long string of remarkable tricks pulled off by large language models. [...]
And multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass tests designed to identify certain cognitive abilities in humans, from chain-of-thought reasoning (working through a problem step by step) to theory of mind (guessing what other people are thinking).
These kinds of results are feeding a hype machine predicting that these machines will soon come for white-collar jobs, replacing teachers, doctors, journalists, and lawyers. Geoffrey Hinton has called out GPT-4's apparent ability to string together thoughts as one reason he is now scared of the technology he helped create.
But there's a problem: there is little agreement on what those results really mean. Some people are dazzled by what they see as glimmers of human-like intelligence; others aren't convinced one bit.
"There are several critical issues with current evaluation techniques for large language models," says Natalie Shapira, a computer scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. "It creates the illusion that they have greater capabilities than what truly exists."
That's why a growing number of researchers—computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, linguists—want to overhaul the way they are assessed, calling for more rigorous and exhaustive evaluation. Some think that the practice of scoring machines on human tests is wrongheaded, period, and should be ditched.
"People have been giving human intelligence tests—IQ tests and so on—to machines since the very beginning of AI," says Melanie Mitchell, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. "The issue throughout has been what it means when you test a machine like this. It doesn't mean the same thing that it means for a human."
[...] "There is a long history of developing methods to test the human mind," says Laura Weidinger, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind. "With large language models producing text that seems so human-like, it is tempting to assume that human psychology tests will be useful for evaluating them. But that's not true: human psychology tests rely on many assumptions that may not hold for large language models."
Webb is aware of the issues he waded into. "I share the sense that these are difficult questions," he says. He notes that despite scoring better than undergrads on certain tests, GPT-3 produced absurd results on others. For example, it failed a version of an analogical reasoning test about physical objects that developmental psychologists sometimes give to kids.
[...] A lot of these tests—questions and answers—are online, says Webb: "Many of them are almost certainly in GPT-3's and GPT-4's training data, so I think we really can't conclude much of anything."
[...] The performance of large language models is brittle. Among people, it is safe to assume that someone who scores well on a test would also do well on a similar test. That's not the case with large language models: a small tweak to a test can drop an A grade to an F.
"In general, AI evaluation has not been done in such a way as to allow us to actually understand what capabilities these models have," says Lucy Cheke, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. "It's perfectly reasonable to test how well a system does at a particular task, but it's not useful to take that task and make claims about general abilities."
[...] "The assumption that cognitive or academic tests designed for humans serve as accurate measures of LLM capability stems from a tendency to anthropomorphize models and align their evaluation with human standards," says Shapira. "This assumption is misguided."
[...] The trouble is that nobody knows exactly how large language models work. Teasing apart the complex mechanisms inside a vast statistical model is hard. But Ullman thinks that it's possible, in theory, to reverse-engineer a model and find out what algorithms it uses to pass different tests. "I could more easily see myself being convinced if someone developed a technique for figuring out what these things have actually learned," he says.
"I think that the fundamental problem is that we keep focusing on test results rather than how you pass the tests."
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from the aren't-shooting-games-supposed-to-be-hateful? dept.
Shooter video game Call Of Duty has started using AI to listen out for hate speech during online matches.
Publisher Activision said the moderation tool, which uses machine learning technology, would be able to identify discriminatory language and harassment in real time.
Machine learning is what allows AI to learn and adapt on the fly without explicit human instruction, instead using algorithms and the data it's taught with to recognise patterns.
The tool being rolled out in Call Of Duty, called ToxMod, is made by a company called Modulate.
Activision's chief technology officer Michael Vance said it would help make the game "a fun, fair and welcoming experience for all players".
[...] Activision said its existing tools, including the ability for gamers to report others and the automatic monitoring of text chat and offensive usernames, had already seen one million accounts given communications restrictions.
Call Of Duty's code of conduct bans bullying and harassment, including insults based on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, culture, faith, and country of origin.
Mr Vance said ToxMod allows the company's moderation efforts to be scaled up significantly by categorising toxic behaviour based on its severity, before a human decides whether action should be taken.
Players will not be able to opt out of having the AI listen in, unless they completely disable in-game voice chat.
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
[...] The U.S. government has restricted sales of Nvidia's high-performance compute GPUs to the Middle East and some other countries, the company said in a regulatory filing this week. One of the reasons why the Biden administration decided to require an export license on Nvidia's A100 and H100 products and servers on their base is to thwart China's AI development by preventing the GPUs from being resold to China, reports The Guardian.
"During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the U.S. government informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East," a statement by Nvidia reads. "We have sold alternative products in China not subject to the license requirements, such as our A800 or H800 offerings."
The affected chips, namely the H100 and A100 models, are already restricted for sale in China and Russia, which is why Nvidia has developed H800 and A800 models with reduced performance to sell in China. Although Nvidia disclosed these new limitations in a U.S. regulatory filing, the company did not reveal which countries in the Middle East are specifically impacted by these controls.
Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been strengthening their AI prowess in the recent years, which is why they are significant purchasers of Nvidia's chips. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been in talks with China to deepen their collaborations. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia even entered into a strategic alliance with China, committing to work collaboratively on artificial intelligence projects.
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"A totally unreasonable proposal":
The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don't think product repairability should be government-mandated, it has been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple's place is a new entity aiming to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.
Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc. The company, its website and letterhead say, represents the "literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology. Author Services, according to records archived via the WayBackMachine, is owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology, which describes itself as a church within Scientology.
The letter addresses Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which "makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works." The Scientology group's letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.
[...] The Scientology-tied group seeks an amendment to the exemption so that it doesn't apply to software-powered devices that can only be purchased by someone with particular qualifications or training or that use software "governed by a license agreement negotiated and executed" before purchase.
[...] As to why a Scientology-owned group would care about such a matter, 404 Media suggested that it could have to do with Scientology E-meters, or electropsychometers. The Church of Scientology describes the machines as an "electronic instrument that measures mental state and change of state in individuals and assists the precision and speed of auditing" and that only a Scientology minister or training minister should use. 404 Media noted that some people collect the devices and, oddly enough, you can find E-Meters sold on eBay.
[...] If this letter is indeed about E-meters, the only electronic device Scientology is readily connected to, then Author Services may be concerned about how the Church of Scientology's reputation could be impacted if E-Meters are dissected.
"My hunch is that the Scientologists think granting the hacking community permission to dig into their E-Meter software will expose the whole operation as snake oil. The request is like so many other anti-Right to Repair arguments: Manufacturers are afraid that access to repair materials will expose some of their other dirty secrets," Chamberlain said.
Nathan Proctor, US Public Interest Research Group's senior director, told 404 Media that Author Services' requested DMCA changes would prevent people from repairing products with end-user license agreements (EULAs). E-Meters have EULAs, 404 Media reported, that block ordinary people from getting into critical software and require an International Association of Scientologists membership number to update E-meter software.
Regardless of how an organization representing the works of the creator of Scientology ended up in the Copyright Office's mailbox, right-to-repair advocates say the amendment would harm the movement and would extend past electropsychometers if it were ever implemented.
"Obviously, very few people own E-Meters and even fewer people want to repair them. But the amendment they're proposing could undermine repair rights for many other devices," Chamberlain said.
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from the there-was-truth-and-there-was-untruth dept.
It Costs Just $400 to Build an AI Disinformation Machine:
International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses to tweets by the Russian embassy and Chinese news outlets criticizing the US.
Russian criticism of the US is far from unusual, but CounterCloud's material pushing back was: The tweets, the articles, and even the journalists and news sites were crafted entirely by artificial intelligence algorithms, according to the person behind the project, who goes by the name Nea Paw and says it is designed to highlight the danger of mass-produced AI disinformation. Paw did not post the CounterCloud tweets and articles publicly but provided them to WIRED and also produced a video outlining the project.
Paw claims to be a cybersecurity professional who prefers anonymity because some people may believe the project to be irresponsible. The CounterCloud campaign pushing back on Russian messaging was created using OpenAI's text generation technology, like that behind ChatGPT, and other easily accessible AI tools for generating photographs and illustrations, Paw says, for a total cost of about $400.
Paw says the project shows that widely available generative AI tools make it much easier to create sophisticated information campaigns pushing state-backed propaganda.
"I don't think there is a silver bullet for this, much in the same way there is no silver bullet for phishing attacks, spam, or social engineering," Paw says in an email. Mitigations are possible, such as educating users to be watchful for manipulative AI-generated content, making generative AI systems try to block misuse, or equipping browsers with AI-detection tools. "But I think none of these things are really elegant or cheap or particularly effective," Paw says.
[...] Legitimate political campaigns have also turned to using AI ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. In April, the Republican National Committee produced a video attacking Joe Biden that included fake, AI-generated images. And in June, a social media account associated with Ron Desantis included AI-generated images in a video meant to discredit Donald Trump. The Federal Election Commission has said it may limit the use of deepfakes in political ads.
[...] When OpenAI first made its text generation technology available via an API, it banned any political usage. However, this March, the company updated its policy to prohibit usage aimed at mass-producing messaging for particular demographics. A recent Washington Post article suggests that GPT does not itself block the generation of such material.
Kim Malfacini, head of product policy at OpenAI, says the company is exploring how its text-generation technology is being used for political ends. People are not yet used to assuming that content they see may be AI-generated, she says. "It's likely that the use of AI tools across any number of industries will only grow, and society will update to that," Malfacini says. "But at the moment I think folks are still in the process of updating."
Since a host of similar AI tools are now widely available, including open source models that can be built on with few restrictions, voters should get wise to the use of AI in politics sooner rather than later.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66643241
In a world first, scientists say an 8cm (3in) worm has been found alive in the brain of an Australian woman.
The "string-like structure" was pulled from the patient's damaged frontal lobe during surgery in Canberra last year.
"It was definitely not what we were expecting. Everyone was shocked," said operating surgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi.
The woman, 64, had for months suffered symptoms like stomach pain, a cough and night sweats, which evolved into forgetfulness and depression.
[...] Her case is believed to be the first instance of a larvae invasion and development in the human brain, researchers said in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal which reported the case.
'I pulled it out... and it was happily moving'[...] "Even if you take away the yuck factor, this is a new infection never documented before in a human being."
Researchers warn the case highlights the increased danger of diseases and infections being passed from animals to people.
The Ophidascaris robertsi roundworm is common in carpet pythons - non-venomous snakes found across much of Australia.
Scientists say the woman most likely caught the roundworm after collecting a type of native grass, Warrigal greens, beside a lake near where she lived. The area is also inhabited by carpet pythons.
Writing in the journal, Australian parasitology expert Mehrab Hossain said she suspected the woman became an "accidental host" after using the foraged plants - contaminated by python faeces and parasite eggs - for cooking.
[...] Dr Senanayake - who is also an associate professor of medicine at the Australian National University (ANU) - told the BBC the case is a warning.
The ANU team reports that 30 new types of infections have appeared in the last 30 years. Three-quarters are zoonotic - infectious diseases that have jumped from animals to humans.
"It just shows as a human population burgeons, we move closer and encroach on animal habitats. This is an issue we see again and again, whether it's Nipah virus that's gone from wild bats to domestic pigs and then into people, whether it's a coronavirus like Sars or Mers that has jumped from bats into possibly a secondary animal and then into humans."
"Even though Covid is now slowly petering away, it is really important for epidemiologists... and governments to make sure they've got good infectious diseases surveillance around."
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from the you've-got-nothing-to-fear-if-you've-nothing-to-hide dept.
The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.
The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. "The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security," the appeal for an increase says.
"When we're talking about rapid expansion like this, it's getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database."
[...] The FBI began building a DNA database as early as 1990. By 1998, it helped create a national database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, that spanned all 50 states. Each state maintained its own database, with police or other authorities submitting samples based on their states' rules, and CODIS allowed all the states to search across the entire country. At first, the collection of data was limited to DNA from people convicted of crimes, from crime scenes, and from unidentified remains.
[...] "If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders," Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. "The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that's indeed what we've seen."
Today, police have the authority to take DNA samples from anyone sentenced for a felony charge. In 28 states, police can take DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies but who have not been convicted of any crime. In some cases, police offer plea deals to reduce felony charges to misdemeanor offenses in exchange for DNA samples. Police are even acquiring DNA samples from unwitting people, as The Intercept recently reported.
"It changed massively," Lewis said of the rules and regulations around government DNA collection. "You only have to be a person of interest to end up in these databases."
The database is likely to continue proliferating as DNA technology becomes more sophisticated, Lewis explained, pointing to the advent of environmental DNA, which allows for DNA to be collected from ambient settings like wastewater or air.
"Just by breathing, you're discarding DNA in a way that can be traced back to you," Lewis said.
While this might sound like science fiction, the federal government has already embraced the technology. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered a contract for laboratory services to assist with "autonomously collected eDNA testing": environmental DNA testing based on samples that are no longer even manually collected.
[...] "A universal database really just would subvert our ideas of autonomy and freedom and the presumption of innocence. It would be saying that it makes sense for the government to track us at any time based on our private information," Eidelman told The Intercept, adding that DNA collection presents specific risks to privacy. "Our DNA is personal and sensitive: It can expose our propensity for serious health conditions, family members, and ancestry."
[...] DHS initially sought to collect DNA from detainees in 2009, but the Obama administration exempted the department from collection requirements for non-U.S. detainees. The task would have been too expensive, since Congress had not allocated funding for DNA collection, then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano explained.
In 2019, President Donald Trump's administration ended the exemptions, and DHS announced that it would collect DNA samples from people arrested or detained by border authorities. At the time, Trump's policy was widely condemned, including on the grounds that it could lead to widespread civil liberties violations.
President Joe Biden has not reversed the decision, causing the government's DNA database to balloon in size.
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New research from the University of Chicago found that very heavy drinkers display the same impairment as light drinkers when consuming their usual excessive amount.
The study suggests that the concept of "holding your liquor" is more nuanced than commonly believed. They found heavy drinkers could tolerate some alcohol better than light drinkers, but that disappeared when the heavy drinkers drank their typical amounts.
"There's a lot of thinking that when experienced drinkers (those with alcohol use disorder) consume alcohol, they are tolerant to its impairing effects," said Andrea King, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at UChicago and senior author of the study. "We supported that a bit, but with a lot of nuances. When they drank alcohol in our study at a dose similar to their usual drinking pattern, we saw significant impairments on both the fine motor and cognitive tests that was even more impairment than a light drinker gets at the intoxicating dose."
[...] For this study, they worked with three groups of adults in their 20s with different drinking patterns.
The groups were: light drinkers who do not binge-drink; heavy social drinkers who binge-drink several times a month (defined as consuming five or more drinks for a man or four or more for a woman); and drinkers who meet the criteria for alcohol use disorder and binge-drink 11 or more days in a typical month.
They had each group consume a set amount of alcohol and tested their performance on both a fine motor task and a paper-and-pencil cognitive skill test.
When given a standard intoxicating dose, which produce breathalyzer readings of 0.08%, the light drinkers were more impaired than the heavier drinkers.
Yet when those drinkers with alcohol use disorder consumed a higher amount, akin to their usual drinking habits, they showed significant impairment on those same tasks—more than double their impairment at the standard intoxicating dose. They did not return to baseline performance for at least three hours after drinking.
Their level of impairment even exceeded that of the light drinkers who consumed the standard dose, suggesting that the physical effects of the alcohol add up the more someone drinks, experienced or not.
"I was surprised at how much impairment that group had to that larger dose, because while it's 50% more than the first dose, we're seeing more than double the impairment," King said.
[...] "It's costly to our society for so many reasons, that's why this study is just so important to understand more," she said. "I'm hoping we can educate people who are experienced high-intensity drinkers who think that they're holding their liquor or that they're tolerant and won't experience accidents or injury from drinking. Their experience with alcohol only goes so far, and excessive drinkers account for most of the burden of alcohol-related accidents and injury in society. This is preventable with education and treatment."
Journal Reference:
Didier et al, Holding your liquor: Comparison of alcohol-induced psychomotor impairment in drinkers with and without alcohol use disorder. Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, June 18, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.15080
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from the of-course-we-trust-you-with-that dept.
dept.
X (née Twitter) wants to collect your biometric data and employment history:
X, the social network that you can access at twitter.com, is planning to collect users' biometric information, employment history, and educational history, according to an updated privacy policy. "Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes," the new policy says.
X posted the new version of its privacy policy yesterday, saying it will go into effect on September 29. The current privacy policy that doesn't include collecting biometric data and employment history will remain in effect until September 29.
The new policy says that X "may collect and use your personal information (such as your employment history, educational history, employment preferences, skills and abilities, job search activity and engagement, and so on) to recommend potential jobs for you, to share with potential employers when you apply for a job, to enable employers to find potential candidates, and to show you more relevant advertising."
The biometric data and employment history disclosures are listed in the section, "information you provide us." The policy does not say what kind of biometric data X would collect. We contacted X about the changes and will update this article if we get a response.
The privacy policy changes are being made as X plans to offer video and audio calls. "Video & audio calls coming to X," owner Elon Musk wrote today. The call feature will work on iOS, Android, Mac, and PCs and will not require a phone number, according to Musk.
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An article in The Age reports on a find that could up-end much of what we believe on the origin of humans.
Africa has always been considered the cradle of mankind, where humans evolved from apes on the continent before spreading to the rest of the world.
An intriguing find is challenging the long-standing assumption.
The partial skull of a new ancient ape has been discovered in Turkey, and it appears to predate African apes, suggesting that human origins may actually lie in Europe.
The fossil of Anadoluvius turkae was discovered in Cankiri, a city about 138 kilometres north-east of Ankara, and is thought to date from about 8.7 million years ago.
In contrast, early hominins – the group that includes chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, humans, and their fossil ancestors – were not seen in Africa until about 7 million years ago.
It suggests that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before migrating south between 9 million and 7 million years ago.
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from the who-knew-unbundling-MS-products-could-be-so-easy? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Microsoft will start unbundling Teams from its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 productivity suites in EU markets in October. The move is designed to avoid further antitrust scrutiny, after the European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s bundling of its Teams software with the Office productivity suite last month.
“Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it,” says Nanna-Louise Linde, VP of Microsoft european government affairs. “These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland.”
[...] Alongside the Teams unbundling, Microsoft is also planning to improve its documentation on interoperability with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 for rivals like Zoom and Slack to integrate into Exchange, Outlook, and Teams. Microsoft will also allow rivals to host Office web applications within their competing apps, just like how Microsoft does in Teams.
Microsoft will now have to wait on EU regulators to decide whether its unbundling of Teams from Office suites in EU markets is enough. “We believe these changes balance the interests of our competitors with those of European business customers, providing them with access to the best possible solutions at competitive prices,” says Linde. “We also recognize that we are still in the early stages of the European Commission’s formal investigation. We will continue to engage with the Commission, listen to concerns in the marketplace, and remain open to exploring pragmatic solutions that benefit both customers and developers in Europe.”
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Chandrayaan-3 rover is the first to leave its track marks on the Moon’s south pole, and the six-wheeled explorer has made a breakthrough discovery that could have major implications for establishing a future lunar habitat.
Using the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) instrument onboard the Pragyan rover, the Chandrayaan-3 mission found traces of sulfur on the lunar surface near the Moon’s south pole, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced Tuesday on X (formerly Twitter).
[...] The rover also found aluminum, calcium, chromium, iron, manganese, oxygen, titanium and silicon, according to ISRO. The presence of sulfur, however, was the most surprising.
Sulfur is a chemical element that’s found in soil, water, and plants on Earth. Its existence on the Moon suggests that it could be trapped in water ice in the lunar south pole; the detection of sulphur infers the presence of water ice. Accordingly, the presence of sulphur and other elements on the Moon’s south pole also suggests that this region is not as inhospitable as previously believed.
The south pole is of great interest to space agencies racing to get to the lunar surface, with plans to build a permanent lunar habitat and establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon. Previous evidence suggests that the lunar south pole has reservoirs of ice water in its permanently shadowed regions, which could be used for drinking water or fuel.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission successfully landed on the Moon on August 23, making India the fourth country to achieve such feat after the Soviet Union, the U.S., and China. The mission is set to last for 14 days, the equivalent of one full lunar day when the sunlight reaches the Moon’s surface.
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