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upstart writes:

NASA's Psyche metal asteroid mission launches this week: Here's what you need to know:

NASA is preparing to launch its Psyche spacecraft on the first mission designed to study a metal-rich asteroid up close. The Psyche mission is set to blast off on Thursday (Oct. 12) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

After traveling an estimated 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers), the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is located at the far edge of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.

Once the spacecraft is in place, mission scientists will study the metal asteroid, which is different from the rock- and ice-dominated bodies studied in situ in the past, to learn more about how the rocky planets of the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) formed.

Discovered in 1852, Psyche is considered one of the most fascinating objects in the main asteroid belt, and scientists have only been able to study it at a distance. Scientists think the asteroid is composed of the exposed core of a planetesimal, a small body that formed during planet formation as gas and dust around a star collapsed in dense patches.

A planetesimal could eventually go on to gather more mass and thus become a planet. But Psyche is thought to have failed to reach planet status because it collided with other larger bodies as the solar system was forming around 4.5 billion years ago, possibly stripping the metal-rich asteroid of its outer rocky shell and exposing its iron-rich core.

That means that studying this 173-mile-wide (279 km), potato-shaped asteroid could not only help reveal more about the collisions that took place in the early solar system but also provide scientists with a proxy for the inaccessible iron core of our own planet.

Psyche seems to diverge from the solar system planets born from planetesimals. Whereas the rocks of the inner solar system planets are replete with iron oxides  —  chemical compounds of iron and oxygen atoms  —  Psyche lacks these compounds. If Psyche is indeed composed of material left over from the birth of the rocky planets, its existence could point to a different type of planetary formation that diverges from the mechanism that created Earth.

But even if Psyche turns out not to be an exposed planetesimal core, the asteroid is still very interesting to scientists because it could mean it belongs to a population of never-before-seen primordial solar system bodies.

hubie writes:

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.13.021032

In the short story Chains (1929), the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy described a game where a group of people were discussing how the members of the human society were closer together than ever before. To prove this point, one participant proposes that any person out of the entire Earth population (around 1.8 billion at that time) could be reached using nothing except each personal network of acquaintances, betting that the resulting chain would be of no more than five individuals. The story coined the expression "six degrees of separation" to reflect the idea that all people of the world are six or fewer social connections apart from each other. The concept was later generalized to that of "small-world" networks, where the maximal social distance (the diameter of the network) scales logarithmically, rather than linearly, with the size of the population.

[...] One of the most intriguing and captivating features of social networks is that they are organized so that no individual is more than six connections apart from any other, an empirical regularity known as the six degrees of separation. Why social networks have this ultrasmall world organization—where the diameter of a graph of the network is independent of the network size over several orders of magnitude—is still unknown. Our study shows that this property is the direct consequence of the dynamical evolution of any network structure where individuals weigh their aspiration to improve their centrality against the costs incurred in forming or maintaining connections.

We look at the evolution of a graph whose growth is governed by a simple compensation rule. This rule balances the cost incurred by nodes in maintaining connections and the benefit accrued by the chosen links. In this case, the graph's asymptotic equilibrium state (a Nash equilibrium, where no further actions would produce more benefit than cost) features a diameter that, irrespective of the network's initial connectivity structure, does not depend on the system's size and is equal to six.

Our study points out that evolutionary rules of the kind traditionally associated with human cooperation and altruism can in fact account also for the emergence of the six degrees of separation in social networks.

Journal Reference:
I. Samoylenko, D. Aleja, E. Primo, et al., Why Are There Six Degrees of Separation in a Social Network?, Phys. Rev. X 13, 021032 – Published 31 May 2023. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.13.021032

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person:

Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists "are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem", David says. He decided he needed some data.

The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David's speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he'd missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint1, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.

[...] Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors' motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.

Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications — the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin's developers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I am still amazed how few people – even in IT – have heard of Windows Copilot. Microsoft's deep integration of Bing Chat into Windows 11 was announced with much fanfare back in May.

Microsoft hasn't been quiet about it – indeed it can’t seem to shut up about Copilot this and Copilot that – yet it seems that the real impact of this sudden Copilotization of all the things has somehow managed to fly under the radar.

[...] Microsoft has rushed to get Copilot into its operating system

[...] Windows Copilot looks just like Bing Chat – which may be why IT folks haven't given it a second look. Bing Chat has been available in Microsoft's Edge Browser for months – no biggie.

But Windows Copilot only looks like Bing Chat. While Bing Chat runs within the isolated environment of the web browser, Copilot abandons those safeties. Copilot can touch and change Windows system settings – not all of them (at least not yet) but some of them, with more being added all the time. That means Microsoft's AI chatbot has broken loose of its hermetically sealed browser, and has the run of our PCs.

[...] Every day we learn of new prompt injection attacks – weaponizing the ambiguities of human language (and, sometimes, just the right level of noise) to override the guardrails keeping AI chatbots on the straight and narrow. Consider a prompt injection attack hidden within a Word document: Submitted to Windows Copilot for an analysis and summary, the document also injects a script that silently transmits a copy of the files in the working directory to the attacker.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is Retiring, Effective Immediately

upstart writes:

Former EA CEO will be replaced in interim by James Whitehurst from IBM/Red Hat:

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

[...] The timing of Riccitiello's retirement is certainly intriguing, given Unity's recent history. After announcing a per-install fee that many developers felt would endanger their livelihoods, Unity made major changes and has sent other executives on something of an apology tour. Riccitiello previously served as CEO at Electronic Arts, where his resignation came soon after SimCity's technically (if not financially) disastrous launch, though Riccitiello himself cited financial results.

Unity CEO 'Retires' In The Wake Of Fee Fiasco

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Unity has announced the immediate retirement of president, CEO, chair, and board member John Riccitiello.

The boss's departure follows a botched attempt to charge developers per-install fees for games created with Unity's tools – a step that effectively amounted to charging royalties on each sale of a game. Unity had previously promised never to do such a thing.

Developers did not appreciate Unity's proposal, expressing opposition so vigorous the toolmaker canceled a Town Hall Meeting and mostly walked back its new pricing plan.

Riccitiello's departure was announced in a press release headlined "Unity Announces Leadership Transition." Tellingly, Unity posted it to Business Wire – a press release distribution service and repository that many comms people regard as a source of on-the-record info – rather than its own site.

[...] You may or may not know that Riccitiello was CEO of games publishing house Electronic Arts from February 2007 to March 2013; back then he quit that biz saying he was accountable for EA's under-performing finances. He joined Unity the following year.

Previously:
    Unity Makes Major Changes to Controversial Install-Fee Program
    Unity Promises "Changes" to Install Fee Plans as Developer Fallout Continues
    Developer Dis-Unity

Original Submission

looorg writes:

ATARI releasing a "new" game for the 2600 console. 46 years in development, there wasn't just active development, have got to be some kind of record in and by itself.

Sold in the classic box and cartridge form. Clearly targeting the collector-market since it's just 500 copies. I'm not sure you'll get your $60 worth tho. It doesn't look very good or appear to be overly interesting as a game. It's not Pitfall.

Perhaps this isn't a surprise, or should come as one. After all it seems the game market today is in large just remaking the same titles over and over again, remaking and "updating" previous titles etc. In that sense starting to release games for long dead consoles is perhaps not that far fetched.

https://www.engadget.com/atari-is-releasing-a-new-cartridge-for-its-46-year-old-2600-console-183922523.html

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Result confirms time-dilation expectations of Einstein's general relativity:

Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein's expanding universe.

Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant – and hence ancient – universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as 'clocks'.

"Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

"If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

[...] "Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding," Professor Lewis said.

"This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today.

[...] Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colours (or wavelengths) – green light, red light and into the infrared – they were able to standardise the 'ticking' of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar's ticking.

"With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space," Professor Lewis said.

You can look at their source data if you want to do your own number crunching.

Journal Reference:
Lewis, G.F., Brewer, B.J. Detection of the cosmological time dilation of high-redshift quasars. Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02029-2

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Elon Musk's X Corp. has to pay $1.1 million in reimbursements for legal fees to former Twitter executives that he fired, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, a judge reportedly ruled yesterday. Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled against Musk's firm during a hearing yesterday, Bloomberg reported.

The former Twitter executives said that after being fired by Musk, the company now known as X refused to reimburse them for expenses related to federal investigations and civil lawsuits. The former executives' lawsuit filed in April said the company "has breached its obligations... by refusing to advance Plaintiffs' Expenses."

"After hearing arguments, McCormick noted Delaware courts lean in favor of granting executives' request to have legal fees covered when tied to their actions on behalf of companies. She said she didn't see any reason to deviate from the norm in the case," Bloomberg wrote.

McCormick is the same judge who handled the trial that forced Musk to complete the deal to buy Twitter that he tried to break last year. "I have reviewed the amount in question, and although it is high and probably higher than most humans would like to pay, it's not unreasonable," McCormick was quoted as saying yesterday. A written ruling wasn't available on the court website yet.

The lawsuit was filed by Agrawal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and former Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal. Musk fired the executives right after he completed the $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October 2022.

Their lawsuit said that Twitter's bylaws and agreements with executives required it "to indemnify Plaintiffs and advance all Expenses incurred in connection with any Proceeding in which Plaintiffs are involved by reason of their Corporate Status." The plaintiffs said they incurred legal bills related to inquiries by the US Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Enforcement and US Department of Justice; a securities class action filed against the company and its executives; a congressional inquiry into alleged "social media bias"; and other matters.

upstart writes:

The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs:

It was meant to be a week for women in tech—but this year's Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.

The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last week in Orlando, Florida. The event bills itself as the largest gathering of women in tech worldwide and has sought to unite women in the tech industry for nearly 30 years. Sponsors include Apple, Amazon, and Bloomberg, and it's a major networking opportunity for aspiring tech workers. In-person admission costs between $649 and around $1,300.

This year, droves of men showed up with résumés in hand. AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was "an increase in participation of self-identifying males" at this year's event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.

[...] Cullen White, AnitaB.org's chief impact officer, said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, that some registrants had lied about their gender identity when signing up, and men were now taking up space and time with recruiters that should go to women. "All of those are limited resources to which you have no right," White said. AnitaB.org did not respond to a request for comment.

upstart writes:

Records reportedly belong to millions of users who opted in to a relative-search feature:

Genetic profiling service 23andMe has commenced an investigation after private user data was been scraped off its website

Friday's confirmation comes five days after an unknown entity took to an online crime forum to advertise the sale of private information for millions of 23andMe users. The forum posts claimed that the stolen data included origin estimation, phenotype, health information, photos, and identification data. The posts claimed that 23andMe's CEO was aware the company had been "hacked" two months earlier and never revealed the incident. In a statement emailed after this post went live, a 23andMe representative said "nothing they have posted publicly indicates they actually have any 'health information.' These are all unsubstantiated claims at this point."

23andMe officials on Friday confirmed that private data for some of its users is, in fact, up for sale. The cause of the leak, the officials said, is data scraping, a technique that essentially reassembles large amounts of data by systematically extracting smaller amounts of information available to individual users of a service. Attackers gained unauthorized access to the individual 23andMe accounts, all of which had been configured by the user to opt in to a DNA relative feature that allows them to find potential relatives.

[...] The DNA relative feature allows users who opt in to view basic profile information of others who also allow their profiles to be visible to DNA Relative participants, a spokesperson said. If the DNA of one opting-in user matches another, each gets to access the other's ancestry information.

hubie writes:

People with dementia still have the ability to learn new things despite their illness:

Elias Ingebrand let ten dementia sufferers, eight of whom lived in care facilities, try using computer tablets for the first time in their lives. A staff member or a loved one was there for support, but the only instruction given to participants was to use the tablet as they wished. It soon turned out that the device made them curious.

"I was rather surprised at this. I may have expected that it would just lie there and that they would talk about something else, but we saw that they focused their attention on it," he says.
[...] A woman who used to do orienteering spontaneously started using the tablet to check competition results. A man who used to be restless and aggressive learned how to navigate to the Open Archive of SVT, the Swedish public television broadcaster. After a while, staff noted that he would sit and watch for a long time, calmly and focused. This was a side of him they had never seen before.

Elias Ingebrand was surprised to find that people with dementia could solve the mysteries of the tablet also without help from staff or loved ones, by collaborating and learning from each other. Also in this context, they managed to focus on the task at hand. As far as he knows, no-one has studied collaboration between dementia sufferers before.

[...] "My thesis has an impact on how we look at people with dementia. They are not to be treated as children, but as people who still have a will and an incentive to do things. This is ultimately about having the opportunity to participate in meaningful activities based on the person's own interests and desires."

This of course presents a challenge to care facility staff, who are often too busy to sit down with just one person for any length of time. Letting people with dementia do things in collaboration could be a solution worth trying. And even though this study is about computer tablets, Elias Ingebrand believes that its results are valid also for other forms of learning.

Reference:
Ingebrand, E. (2023). Dementia and learning : The use of tablet computers in joint activities (PhD dissertation, Linköping University Electronic Press). DOI: 10.3384/9789180750714

Original Submission

hubie writes:

'Very online' Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news:

University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated "misinformation susceptibility test".

The quick two-minute quiz gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that is flooding online spaces.

The test, proven to work through a series of experiments involving over 8,000 participants taking place over two years, has been deployed by polling organisation YouGov to determine how susceptible Americans are to fake headlines.

The first survey to use the new 20-point test, called 'MIST' by researchers and developed using an early version of ChatGPT, has found that – on average – adult US citizens correctly classified two-thirds (65%) of headlines they were shown as either real or fake.

However, the polling found that younger adults are worse than older adults at identifying false headlines, and that the more time someone spent online recreationally, the less likely they were to be able to tell real news from misinformation.

This runs counter to prevailing public attitudes regarding online misinformation spread, say researchers – that older, less digitally-savvy "boomers" are more likely to be taken in by fake news.

You can test yourself at: https://yourmist.streamlit.app/

Journal Reference:
Maertens, R., Götz, F.M., Golino, H.F. et al. The Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST): A psychometrically validated measure of news veracity discernment. Behav Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02124-2

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, October 11th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (5pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. Please note the new day and time.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community, as always, is welcome to observe and participate, and is, as always, invited to the meeting.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Meta's new Emu AI algorithm allows users to generate unsavory content involving weapons and nudity while blocking only certain explicit phrases.

Meta’s continued experiments with piloting us into a half-baked future appear to be backfiring. After announcing more customer-facing AI features on Meta platforms in September, the company’s new sticker generation tool is letting some choice phrases and prompts go unchecked.

Meta’s new algorithm, called Emu which stands for “expressive media universe,” is the brain behind the stickers. On Meta platforms like Instagram, Facebook Stories, WhatsApp, and Messenger, users can input a phrase or word and have a few different sticker choices generated for use in conversations. The company, however, appears to have safeguards in place that more closely resemble Swiss cheese as opposed to guardrails as certain controversial phrases are blocked while synonyms of those same phrases are deemed okay.

[...] In Gizmodo’s own tests, the phrase “elon musk, large breasts” was blocked, while “elon musk mammaries” got past Emu’s filters. Phrases “spongebob rifle” and “karl marx underwear” generated stickers as well. Most jarringly, searching for “pol pot” generated a sticker of the Cambodian dictator seemingly sitting on a throne of babies and skulls. “guantanamo bay” showed a cartoon boy in an orange jumpsuit behind jail bars while “syria gas attacks” generated a barrage of stickers of people in gas masks, some of which were laying down with their eyes closed. The prompt “school shooting” also showed several children holding guns while “school shooting mass murder” goes against Community Guidelines.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

In eye-tracking study, half of participants look only at date:

Up to half of consumers may decide to pour perfectly good milk down the drain based solely on their glance at the date label on the carton, a new study suggests.

Researchers using eye-tracking technology found that 50% of study participants declared their intent to throw away milk based on the date stamped on the container – without ever even looking at the label phrasing in front of the date.

Each participant saw one of three phrasing options: "Sell by," "Best if used by" or "Use by" a given date, as well as containers with no label at all.

"We asked them if they intended to discard it, and if they said yes, it didn't matter which phrase was there," said senior study author Brian Roe, professor of agricultural, environment and development economics at The Ohio State University.

"As soon as we changed the printed date, that was a huge mover of whether or not they would discard or not. So we documented both where their eyes were and what they said was going to happen. And in both cases, it's all about the date, and the phrase is second fiddle."

Policymakers and industry leaders are working toward settling on a universal two-phrase system – one when quality, but not safety, is the concern, and a second phrase for items where safety may be a concern, Roe said. To date, they haven't landed on what those phrases would be.

"If you're going to have an education campaign, it helps to have a set of phrases out there that people can cling to – but in the end, so few actually look at the phrase. They look at the date," he said. "The date signifies a point after which you can expect quality to degrade. If you can get firms to push that date further out, then people are going to be willing to use the milk, or whatever it is, for a few more days, and waste a lot less food."

[...] "But we were a bit surprised that over half of the viewing sessions featured no attention on the phrase whatsoever," he said. "The date is more salient – you have to reference it against the calendar. It's more actionable than the phrase is.

"For policy reasons, it's still important to narrow the phrases down to two choices. But that's only the beginning – there needs to be a broader conversation about pushing those date horizons back to help minimize food waste."

Journal Reference:
Badiger et al. When considering whether to waste food, consumers focus attention on food label dates rather than phrases, Waste Management, 168, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2023.06.006

Original Submission