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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Imagine receiving a traffic ticket in the mail because you were speeding down a Russian road in Kursk with a Ukrainian attack drone on your tail. That's the reality facing some Russians living near the front lines after Ukraine's surprise seizure of Russian territory in Kursk Oblast. And they're complaining about it on Telegram.

Rob Lee, a well-known analyst of the Ukraine/Russia war, comments on X that "traffic cameras are still operating in Kursk, and people are receiving speeding fines when trying to outrun FPVs [first-person-view attack drones]. Some have resorted to covering their license plates but the traffic police force them to remove them."

Volunteers and military volunteers who arrived in the Kursk region are asking the traffic police not to fine them for speeding when they are escaping from the drones of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Several people who are near the combat zone told Mash about this. Cameras are still recording violations in the border area, and when people try to escape from the drones, they receive letters of happiness [tickets]. One of the well-known military activists was charged 9k [rubles, apparently—about US$100] in just one day. He accelerated on a highway that is attacked almost every hour by enemy FPV drones. Some cover their license plates, but the traffic police stop them and demand that they remove the stickers.

Mash claims that the traffic police are sympathetic and that given the drone situation, "speeding can be considered as committed in a state of extreme necessity." But those who receive a speeding ticket will have to challenge it in court on these grounds.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://kevinboone.me/headphonejack.html

"It it ain't broke, replace it with something that is."

About five years ago I was suddenly, unexpectedly taken ill. Not just 'that's a bit nasty' ill, but 'prepare for the worst' ill. One thing that kept my spirits up in hospital, in the long watches of the night, was listening to comedy shows and audiobooks. I used my smartphone for this, since I had it with me, and a pair of old, wired headphones that I just had time to grab on my way to the ambulance.

I survived, of course, as evidenced by my continued ramblings on this site. But it was an unpleasant experience, made just a little better by a simple piece of technology: the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Now, of course, I do own wireless headphones and earbuds – I think almost everybody does. I also own several of those irritating USB dongles, that provide a 3.5mm port for devices that don't have one. But here's the problem: I can't use my Bluetooth earbuds while they're charging. And I can't easily charge my phone whilst it's connected to the USB dongle. In a critical-care facility, it's hard enough to find one free mains socket to connect a charger to, let alone two./blockquote.

[...] What makes the loss of the headphone jack so hard to bear is that it wasn't done for the consumer's benefit. To be sure, manufacturers made certain claims about the alleged benefits of losing the jack, but few of them stand up to much logical scrutiny.

[...] No. All of these weak excuses are simply distractions from the real reason Apple, Samsung, and Google dropped the headphone jack: they all have a substantial investment in the manufacture of wireless headphones.

Original Submission

Boeing's Starliner is Making Mysterious 'Sonar' Noises and No One Can Explain It - Plagued Spacecraf

upstart writes:

Boeing's Starliner Is Making Mysterious 'Sonar' Noises and No One Can Explain It - Plagued Spacecraft Is Scheduled To Return to Earth in a Week Without Its Crew:

The saga of the misadventures of Boeing's Starliner in space is far from over, even as the spacecraft is scheduled to return soon to Earth without its crew.

This time, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some 'strange noises' coming from a speaker inside it.

Ars Technica reported:

"'I've got a question about Starliner', Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. 'There's a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don't know what's making it'."

Butch was not sure whether there was some problem in the connection between the station and the spacecraft that was causing the noise.

He asked Houston to listen to the audio inside the spacecraft.

"Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. 'Alright Butch, that one came through', Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. 'It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping'.

'I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on', Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. 'Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out'."

The sonar-like noises most likely have a benign cause, and Butch did not seem worried.

hubie writes:

New research reveals that rudeness in the workplace is far more than just unpleasant — it can be downright dangerous:

Teams from the University of Florida, Indiana University, and other universities across the U.S. and Israel recently conducted five eye-opening studies about rudeness, uncovering that even mild instances of this behavior can significantly impair employees' performance. This could have potentially life-threatening consequences in critical fields like health care.

"Many workplaces treat rudeness as a minor interpersonal issue," said Amir Erez, Ph.D., W.A. McGriff, III Professor at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business. "Our research shows that it's a major threat to productivity and even safety. Organizations should treat it as such."

Erez and his fellow researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of Applied Psychology, evaluated teams in various settings (including a medical simulation) and found that exposure to rude behavior dramatically reduced team functioning. Surprisingly, the impact of rudeness was disproportionate to its intensity. In one study, relatively mild rude comments from an external source accounted for 44% of the variance in medical teams' performance quality.

The studies also discovered that rudeness functions as a social threat, triggering defensive responses in team members. This causes individuals to become less prosocial and more selfish, hindering the cooperation and coordination essential for effective teamwork. Specifically, teams exposed to rudeness showed reduced information sharing and workload sharing, which are two critical components of team performance. In medical settings, this translated to poorer execution of lifesaving procedures.

[...] With this in mind, the researchers recommend that organizations seek to implement solutions that help teams prepare for dealing with perceived threatening situations like rudeness. Training aimed at building team member resilience and mindfulness, for example, may better prepare employees for dealing with these situations.

"As our understanding of workplace dynamics evolves, our research underscores a critical point: in the quest for high-performing teams, sometimes the smallest courtesies can make the biggest difference," Erez said.

Journal Reference: Gale, J., Erez, A., Bamberger, P., Foulk, T., Cooper, B., Riskin, A., Schilpzand, P., & Vashdi, D. (2024). Rudeness and team performance: Adverse effects via member social value orientation and coordinative team processes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001213

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/transatlantic-flight-speed-of-sound-record-blackbird-sr-71

On 1 September 1974 two men made the fastest ever journey between New York and London. The astonishing trip – at three times the speed of sound – took less than two hours and set a record that still stands 50 years later.

Even the mighty Concorde, which set the record for the fastest commercial transatlantic flight in 1996, straggled in almost an hour behind.

The US air force Lockheed Blackbird SR-71 jet had a crew of two – pilot James Sullivan and reconnaissance systems operator Noel Widdifield – who completed the journey between the two cities in one hour, 54 minutes and 56 seconds before triumphantly landing to a fanfare welcome at the Farnborough air show in Hampshire.

[...] The aircraft had to take on fuel twice: when it took off, linking with a refuelling plane above California to fill it to capacity, and partway during the journey near to Greenland.

There was also an incident which would have looked terrifying from the outside but which the crew took in their stride. The Blackbird began to suddenly "yaw" – moving swiftly from side to side – after losing thrust.

The Blackbird took in air from the front to give thrust to the engines, and it was common for a device in the inlet to become displaced, causing one engine to lose much of its power momentarily.

All in a day's work... for some!

Original Submission

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."