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hubie writes:

A new study has shown the roleplaying game boosts people's confidence and enables them to feel more comfortable with social interactions:

Dungeons and Dragons is a hugely popular roleplaying game enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, both in person and online, every day.

However, new research has found it could be particularly beneficial for people with autism, giving them a safe space to engage in social interactions away from some of the challenges they face in their daily lives.

The study, published in the journal Autism, was led by researchers from the University of Plymouth's School of Psychology along with colleagues at Edge Hill University and Dalarna University in Sweden.

It saw researchers working with a group of autistic adults and aimed to explore whether finding a social situation where people felt comfortable could help them to excel.

After some initial familiarisation with Dungeons and Dragons, the participants – under the guidance of a games master – played out scenarios within small groups over the space of six weeks.

They were then interviewed individually by the researchers about the ways they felt their autism might have interacted with their experiences and, in turn, whether taking part in the game impacted their lives.

In those interviews, the participants spoke at length about their social desires and motivations, but how this came with challenges such as a lack of confidence in their communication with others, and insecurities about how other people would perceive them. This, they said, often resulted in them masking, or hiding, autistic traits.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons, they said, provided them with a friendly environment in which they very quickly felt a sense of innate kinship with others taking part.

Understanding common issues linked to activities inside and outside of the game allowed them to relax without feeling pressure to act in a certain way, and as a result they felt included in – and able to better contribute to – the group's interactions.

The participants also felt able to take some of the traits from their new character outside of the game, where it enabled them to feel differently about themselves.

[...] Another recently published study showed that those with autism enjoy board games because they took the pressure off the uncertainty around meeting and interacting with people, removing the need for small talk.

Journal Reference: Atherton et al.: A critical hit: Dungeons and Dragons as a buff for autistic people – is published in Autism, DOI: 10.1177/13623613241275260

Original Submission

upstart writes:

At least 24 EU countries struggle with teacher shortages:

Most EU member states see a large proportion of their teaching vacancies unfilled at the start of each school year, often thanks to low wages, high workload, and an ageing teacher population.

Sweden has been reported as one of the worst affected, with 153,000 qualified teachers needed by 2035.

Only Croatia and Cyprus did not report a lack of education staff, according to the European Commission's Education and Training Monitor 2023 report, while Greece's existing public data does not allow it to assess whether all needs are covered or if specific subjects might suffer shortages.

Most countries face teacher shortages specifically in STEM subjects and qualified personnel in early childhood education and care.

Germany's Education and Science Workers' Union, GEW, has warned "against lowering the standards for pedagogical qualifications to compensate for the shortage of staff."

[...] However, an EU-level solution might be difficult to implement.

"One of the reasons why it is difficult to come up with a European comparable cross-country indicator on teacher shortage is because countries have different educational institutional rules," wrote education economist Giorgio Di Pietro in a technical report for the EU's Joint Research Centre.

"For instance, formal teaching qualifications can be obtained in different ways in different countries. In some countries, one automatically becomes a teacher when they complete the teacher preparation programme, while in others there are additional steps to complete."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Darwin's fear was unjustified: Study suggests fossil record gaps not a major issue:

Fossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary history, but not all animals and plants become fossils and many fossils are destroyed before we can find them (e.g., the rocks that contain the fossils are destroyed by erosion). As a result, the fossil record has gaps and is incomplete, and we're missing data that we need to reconstruct evolutionary history.

Now, a team of sedimentologists and stratigraphers from the Netherlands and the UK have examined how this incompleteness influences the reconstruction of evolutionary history. To their surprise, they found that the incompleteness itself is actually not such a big issue.

"It's as if you are missing half of a movie. If you are missing the second half, you can't understand the story, but if you are missing every second frame, you can still follow the plot without problems.

"The regularity of the gaps, rather than the incompleteness itself, is what determines the reconstruction of evolutionary history," explains Niklas Hohmann of Utrecht University's Faculty of Geosciences, who led the study. "If a lot of data is missing, but the gaps are regular, we could still reconstruct evolutionary history without major problems, but if the gaps get too long and irregular, results are strongly biased."

The study is published in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution.

Since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the incompleteness of the fossil record has been considered problematic for reconstructing evolutionary history from fossils. Darwin feared that the gradual change that his theory predicted would not be recognizable in the fossil record due to all the gaps.

"Our results show that this fear is unjustified. We have a good understanding of where the gaps are, how long they are and what causes them. With this geological knowledge, we can reconstruct evolution hundreds of millions of years ago at an unprecedented temporal resolution," says Hohmann.

Journal Reference:
Hohmann, Niklas, Koelewijn, Joël R., Burgess, Peter, et al. Identification of the mode of evolution in incomplete carbonate successions [open], BMC Ecology and Evolution (DOI: 10.1186/s12862-024-02287-2)

Original Submission

Ok this was pretty cool.

https://kottke.org/24/08/secret-message-in-one-million-checkboxes

(Editor's note: we usually do not post videos, but it is integral to understanding the story it well worth watching. I encourage you to watch the whole video! --MartyB)

posted 2d ago by Jason Kottke

The Secret Message Contained in One Million Checkboxes

In my XOXO post on Monday, I said that Nolen Royalty, the creator of One Million Checkboxes (a game), had told "one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I've ever heard". Well, Royalty has now put that story online, both in the form of a blog post and a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/OI4DbECnp8A

I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.

I assumed I'd been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.

I couldn't find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then — wait.

Wait!

I saw it.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A rocket team reports the first successful detection of Earth's ambipolar electric field:

Using observations from a NASA suborbital rocket, an international team of scientists has, for the first time, successfully measured a planet-wide electric field thought to be as fundamental to Earth as its gravity and magnetic fields. Known as the ambipolar electric field, scientists first hypothesized over 60 years ago that it drove how our planet's atmosphere can escape above Earth's North and South Poles. Measurements from the rocket, NASA's Endurance mission, have confirmed the existence of the ambipolar field and quantified its strength, revealing its role in driving atmospheric escape and shaping our ionosphere — a layer of the upper atmosphere — more broadly.

[...] Since the late 1960s, spacecraft flying over Earth's poles have detected a stream of particles flowing from our atmosphere into space. Theorists predicted this outflow, which they dubbed the "polar wind," spurring research to understand its causes.

Some amount of outflow from our atmosphere was expected. Intense, unfiltered sunlight should cause some particles from our air to escape into space, like steam evaporating from a pot of water. But the observed polar wind was more mysterious. Many particles within it were cold, with no signs they had been heated — yet they were traveling at supersonic speeds.

[...] The hypothesized electric field, generated at the subatomic scale, was expected to be incredibly weak, with its effects felt only over hundreds of miles. For decades, detecting it was beyond the limits of existing technology. In 2016, Collinson and his team got to work inventing a new instrument they thought was up to the task of measuring Earth's ambipolar field.

[...] Endurance's discovery has opened many new paths for exploration. The ambipolar field, as a fundamental energy field of our planet alongside gravity and magnetism, may have continuously shaped the evolution of our atmosphere in ways we can now begin to explore. Because it's created by the internal dynamics of an atmosphere, similar electric fields are expected to exist on other planets, including Venus and Mars.

Journal Reference: Collinson, G.A., Glocer, A., Pfaff, R. et al. Earth's ambipolar electrostatic field and its role in ion escape to space. Nature 632, 1021–1025 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07480-3

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft has donated the Mono Project, an open-source framework that brought its .NET platform to non-Windows systems, to the Wine community. WineHQ will be the steward of the Mono Project upstream code, while Microsoft will encourage Mono-based apps to migrate to its open source .NET framework.

[...] Mono began as a project of Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the GNOME desktop. De Icaza led Ximian (originally Helix Code), aiming to bring Microsoft's then-new .NET platform to Unix-like platforms. Ximian was acquired by Novell in 2003.

Mono was key to de Icaza's efforts to get Microsoft's Silverlight, a browser plug-in for "interactive rich media applications" (i.e., a Flash competitor), onto Linux systems. Novell pushed Mono as a way to develop iOS apps with C# and other .NET languages. Microsoft applied its "Community Promise" to its .NET standards in 2009, confirming its willingness to let Mono flourish outside its specific control.

By 2011, however, Novell, on its way to being acquired into obsolescence, was not doing much with Mono, and de Icaza started Xamarin to push Mono for Android. Novell (through its SUSE subsidiary) and Xamarin reached an agreement in which Xamarin would take over the IP and customers, using Mono inside Novell/SUSE.

What does this mean for Mono and Wine? Not much at first. Wine, a compatibility layer for Windows apps on POSIX-compliant systems, has already made use of Mono code in fixes and has its own Mono engine. By donating Mono to Wine, Microsoft has, at a minimum, erased the last bit of concern anyone might have had about the company's control of the project. It's a very different, open-source-conversant Microsoft making this move, of course, but regardless, it's a good gesture.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The European Union and China have launched an initiative aimed at addressing issues faced by European companies in the Middle Kingdom related to the transfer of non-personal data.

The effort goes by the very sexy name "Cross-Border Data Flow Communication Mechanism."

The goal is to address concerns about China's restrictive data export laws, which have left European businesses unsure about what they’re allowed to do with data collected in China – particularly in sectors like finance, pharma, automotive, and ICT.

The European Commission has specific concerns around vague language regarding China's requirements to obtain security approvals for exports of all "important data." Beijing has not offered a solid definition of that term – leaving Europeans concerned it could be applied broadly.

The initiative is intended to "focus on practical solutions."

[...] Beijing has long sought to control how its domestic businesses store their data. It is known to take action – including pulling apps and blocking IPOs – against those on its naughty list.

[...] The European Commission stated on Monday that the cross-border data transfer restrictions are "a major contributing factor to the declining confidence of European investors in China."

It likely isn't wrong. Many Western businesses have already left the nation. Yahoo! ditched its Chinese operations when the nation's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), which regulates data storage, came into effect in 2021.

[...] While China is careful not to let customer data about its citizens leave its shores, it has a reputation for being happy to slurp up the data of other countries' people.

For instance, TikTok admitted back in 2022 that some data about US-based users is transferred back to the Middle Kingdom.

Other countries have started to take notice. Earlier this month, Kakao Pay – a subsidiary of Korea's WhatsApp analog Kakao – got in trouble with regulators for sharing the data of more than 40 million users with a subsidiary of Alipay, a company under the umbrella of Chinese-owned Alibaba.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Even Earth's mightiest telescopes aren't up to the task of imaging Apollo lunar landing sites. A lack of resolution is the biggest reason why:

Back in the early 2000s, when I was butting heads seemingly every week with people who believed the Apollo moon landings were faked, such individuals would pull out an argument they thought was their ace in the hole: If NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to see the intricate details of distant galaxies, why can't it see the Apollo astronaut boot prints on our own moon?

Like most conspiratorial thinking, this argument seems persuasive on its surface but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Those taken in by it have a misunderstanding of two things: how telescopes work and just how big space is.

Many people think a telescope's purpose is to magnify images. Certainly manufacturers of inexpensive (read: cheap) telescopes love to market them as such: "150x power!" they print in huge lettering on the box (along with highly misleading photographs from much bigger telescopes). While magnification is important, a telescope's real strength is in its resolution, however. The difference is subtle but critical.

Magnification is just how much you can zoom in on an object, making it look bigger. That's important because while astronomical objects are physically big, they're very far away, so they appear small in the sky. Magnifying them makes them easier to see.

Resolution, on the other hand, is the ability to distinguish two objects that are very close together. For example, you might perceive two stars orbiting each other—a binary star—as a single star because they're too closely spaced for your eye to separate. You can't resolve them. Looking through a telescope with higher resolution, however, you might be able to discern the separation between them, revealing that they are two individual stars.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise. 

While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched—the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw. 

“It was a really terrible experience for us,” Tope says, estimating the cost of the loss at more than 50 million naira ($32,000). “We were praying for a miracle to happen. But unfortunately, it was too late.”  

When the next planting season rolled around, Tope’s team weighed different ways to avoid another cycle of heavy losses. They decided to work with EOS Data Analytics, a California-based provider of satellite imagery and data for precision farming. The company uses wavelengths of light including the near-infrared, which penetrates plant canopies and can be used to measure a range of variables, including moisture level and chlorophyll content. 

EOS’s models and algorithms deliver insights on crops’ health weekly through an online platform that farmers can use to make informed decisions about issues such as when to plant, how much herbicide to use, and how to schedule fertilizer use, weeding, or irrigation. 

AI is expanding across the continent and new policies are taking shape. But poor digital infrastructure and regulatory bottlenecks could slow adoption.

When EOS first launched in 2015, it relied largely on imagery from a combination of satellites, especially the European Union’s Sentinel-2. But Sentinel-2 has a maximum resolution of 10 meters, making it of limited use for spotting issues on smaller farms, says Yevhenii Marchenko, the company’s sales team lead.  

So last year the company launched EOS SAT-1, a satellite designed and operated solely for agriculture. Fees to use the crop-monitoring platform now start at $1.90 per hectare per year for small areas and drop as the farm gets larger. (Farmers who can afford to have adopted drones and other related technologies, but drones are significantly more expensive to maintain and scale, says Marchenko.)

In many developing countries, farming is impaired by lack of data. For centuries, farmers relied on native intelligence rooted in experience and hope, says Daramola John, a professor of agriculture and agricultural technology at Bells University of Technology in southwest Nigeria. “Africa is way behind in the race for modernizing farming,” he says. “And a lot of farmers suffer huge losses because of it.”

upstart writes:

Ford becomes the latest company to scale back its diversity and inclusion policies:

Ford is changing some of its diversity and inclusion policies, joining a growing list of companies altering their approaches amid a changing legal and political environment and online pressure from the right.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said in an email to employees Wednesday that the company has changed some of its policies in the past year. It has shifted its employee resource groups' focus and ended participation in external culture surveys by the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group. In 2017, Ford boasted about its recognition from the organization as one of the best places to work for LGBTQ equality.

Right-wing activist Robby Starbuck posted a copy of the email on X and took credit, saying he had told the automaker he was looking into their policies. (Ford confirmed the accuracy of the email to CNN.)

"We are mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs," Farley wrote in the email. "The external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve."

Farley said that Ford remains committed to creating an "inclusive workspace and building a team that leverages diverse perspectives, backgrounds and thinking styles."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Malicious hackers are exploiting a critical vulnerability in a widely used security camera to spread Mirai, a family of malware that wrangles infected Internet of Things devices into large networks for use in attacks that take down websites and other Internet-connected devices.

The attacks target the AVM1203, a surveillance device from Taiwan-based manufacturer AVTECH, network security provider Akamai said Wednesday. Unknown attackers have been exploiting a 5-year-old vulnerability since March. The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-7029, is easy to exploit and allows attackers to execute malicious code. The AVM1203 is no longer sold or supported, so no update is available to fix the critical zero-day.

Kyle Lefton, a security researcher with Akamai’s Security Intelligence and Response Team, said in an email that it has observed the threat actor behind the attacks perform DDoS attacks against “various organizations,” which he didn’t name or describe further. So far, the team hasn’t seen any indication the threat actors are monitoring video feeds or using the infected cameras for other purposes.

Akamai detected the activity using a “honeypot” of devices that mimic the cameras on the open Internet to observe any attacks that target them. The technique doesn’t allow the researchers to measure the botnet's size. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned of the vulnerability earlier this month.

The technique, however, has allowed Akamai to capture the code used to compromise the devices. It targets a vulnerability that has been known since at least 2019 when exploit code became public. The zero-day resides in the “brightness argument in the ‘action=’ parameter” and allows for command injection, researchers wrote. The zero-day, discovered by Akamai researcher Aline Eliovich, wasn’t formally recognized until this month, with the publishing of CVE-2024-7029.

upstart writes:

Top Brazilian judge orders suspension of X platform in nation:

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk's social media giant X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, according to a copy of the decision seen by The Associated Press

The move further escalates the months long feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative, and established a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn't had a representative in the country since earlier this month.

In his decision, de Moraes gave internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, and said the platform will remain blocked until it complies with his orders. He also said people or companies who use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X will be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais ($8,900).

"Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country," de Moraes wrote.

Brazil is an important market for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the former Twitter in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month.

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, "simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents."

"When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts," the company wrote. "Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes' colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him."

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Identifying deteriorating infrastructure can be as challenging as fixing it. However, researchers at Tohoku University have made this process easier with the development of an innovative new material.

The material responds to mechanical stimuli by recording stress history through a luminescent effect called an afterglow. This information is stored for a long time, and by applying the material to the surfaces of structures, researchers can observe changes in the afterglow to determine the amount of stress the material has experienced.

“What makes our material truly innovative is that it operates without a power supply, complex equipment, or on-site observation and is easily combined with IoT technology,” points out Tohoku University professor and corresponding author of the study, Chao-Nan Xu.

In Japan, aging infrastructure has become a significant problem, leading to an increased demand for new diagnostic technologies that prevent accidents and/or extend the life of structures.

Mechanoluminescent materials exhibit luminescence when mechanically stimulated, and technologies such as crack detection and stress visualization have been developed by applying this material to the surface of structures. But the luminescence can only be observed at the moment of mechanical stimulation, and information about past mechanical stimuli cannot be retrieved.

Researchers have explored various materials capable of recording past mechanical loading histories. These materials typically combine stress-luminescent materials with photosensitive materials, creating a system where the material emits light in response to mechanical stress, and this light can be preserved and later analyzed to reconstruct the stress history. However, these materials face several challenges: complex layering structures, dark reactions, and long-term recording performance. Additionally, while certain fluorophores reveal past loading history when subjected to heat, the application has been limited to materials capable of withstanding high temperatures.

Xu and her colleagues discovered a simple and environmentally friendly method to record stress using Pr-doped Li_0.12 Na_0.88 NbO₃ (LNNO). This LNNO had a mechanical recording functionality, meaning it could retrieve even past stress events.

upstart writes:

End of the Road: An AnandTech Farewell:

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I've ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech's final day of publication.

For better or worse, we've reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It's fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we've spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term "GPU" – and we've been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We've gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we'd charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.

The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers.

Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.

[...] And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won't be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we've created over the years remains accessible and citable. Even without new articles to add to the collection, I expect that many of the things we've written over the past couple of decades will remain relevant for years to come – and remain accessible just as long.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The salty, arsenic- and cyanide-laced waters of the Eastern Sierra Nevada’s Mono Lake is an extremely hostile environment. Aside from the abundant brine shrimp and black clouds of alkali flies, very few organisms live there.

Now, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have discovered a new creature lurking in the lake’s briny shallows — one that could tell scientists about the origin of animals more than 650 million years ago.

The organism is a choanoflagellate, a microscopic, single-celled form of life that can divide and develop into multicellular colonies in a way that’s similar to how animal embryos form. It’s not a type of animal, however, but a member of a sister group to all animals. As animals’ closest living relative, the choanoflagellate is a crucial model for the leap from one-celled to multicellular life.

Surprisingly, it harbors its own microbiome, making it the first choanoflagellate known to establish a stable physical relationship with bacteria, instead of solely eating them. As such, it’s one of the simplest organisms known to have a microbiome.

“Very little is known about choanoflagellates, and there are interesting biological phenomena that we can only gain insight into if we understand their ecology,” said Nicole King, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator who studies choanoflagellates as a model for what early life was like in ancient oceans.

Typically visible only through a microscope, choanoflagellates are often ignored by aquatic biologists, who instead focus on macroscopic animals, photosynthetic algae, or bacteria. But their biology and lifestyle can give insight into creatures that existed in the oceans before animals evolved and that eventually gave rise to animals. This species in particular could shed light on the origin of interactions between animals and bacteria that led to the human microbiome.

“Animals evolved in oceans that were filled with bacteria,” King said. “If you think about the tree of life, all organisms that are alive now are related to each other through evolutionary time. So if we study organisms that are alive today, then we can reconstruct what happened in the past.”