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Submission + - Amateur 'true crime junkies' in Florida have found 11 bodies of missing people (tampabay.com)

Submitted by Hectar
Hectar writes: A pair of half brothers in Florida who started out as weekend fishermen who'd notice stuff underwater on their fish finder, have spent the past two years searching waterways all across the state for people who've gone missing.

"In the last two years, the half-brothers who own Sunshine State Sonar have found more than 350 cars in canals, ponds and waterways across Florida.

"Weekend fishermen turned amateur underwater detectives, the true-crime junkies dive into cold cases, searching for the disappeared. Sometimes, they choose the cases themselves, following threads online. Other times, law enforcement asks for their help.

"They have discovered remains of 11 missing people inside cars, giving answers to relatives who had spent years agonizing.

"One family, who thought their mom had left them, learned that she had driven off the road. Relatives of a missing teacher suspected his girlfriend — then found out he had been submerged in a canal for three years. And the son of a young mother who thought she had been murdered was relieved when her death proved a watery accident."

Interesting story about how and why they do this work bringing closure to people who've been wondering what happened.

Submission + - A Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Startup Promised Riches and Delivered Disaster (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Parker Lewis
Parker Lewis writes: Axie is a game tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well.

There are various ways to make money from Axie. Players who own Axies can create others by choosing two they already own to act as parents and paying a cost in SLP and AXS. Once they do this and wait through an obligatory gestation period, a new character appears with some combination of its parents’ traits.

Every new Axie player needs Axies to play, pushing up their price. Alejo Lopez de Armentia, 39, started breeding last August, at a time when normal economics seemed not to apply. “You would be making 300%, 400% on your money in five days, guaranteed,” he says. “It was stupid.”

Axie’s creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the “play-to-earn” video game. “We believe in a world future where work and play become one,” it said in a mission statement on its website. “We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution.” By last October the company, founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, four years ago by a group of Asian, European, and American entrepreneurs, had raised more than $160 million from investors including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto-focused firm Paradigm, at a peak valuation of about $3 billion. That same month, Axie Infinity crossed 2 million daily users, according to Sky Mavis.

But since March, It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40, was at 1.8, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3’s utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.

Submission + - Giant Deep Ocean Turbine Trial Offers Hope of Endless Green Power (yahoo.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Power-hungry, fossil-fuel dependent Japan has successfully tested a system that could provide a constant, steady form of renewable energy, regardless of the wind or the sun. For more than a decade, Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents and converts it into a steady and reliable source of electricity. The giant machine resembles an airplane, with two counter-rotating turbine fans in place of jets, and a central ‘fuselage’ housing a buoyancy adjustment system. Called Kairyu, the 330-ton prototype is designed to be anchored to the sea floor at a depth of 30-50 meters (100-160 feet). The advantage of ocean currents is their stability. They flow with little fluctuation in speed and direction, giving them a capacity factor — a measure of how often the system is generating — of 50-70%, compared with around 29% for onshore wind and 15% for solar.

Submission + - Biden Waives Solar Panel Tariffs, Seeks To Boost Production (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China.

White House officials said Biden’s actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production — even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...]

The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration’s clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.

Submission + - NASA's space telecoms network may soon be outsourced (space.com)

Submitted by vm
vm writes: Eli Naffah, the manager of NASA's Commercial Services Project explained, "Hopefully, we can achieve some cost efficiencies in buying commercial services, get out of the business of operating networks, and really put more focus on science and exploration.â

The development is part of NASA's long-term initiative to hand over most of low-Earth orbit operations to commercial players. The space agency is already purchasing cargo and crew transportation services from Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, with Boeing due to join that list later this year.

Submission + - 'What we now know they lied': how big oil companies betrayed us all (theguardian.com)

Submitted by XXongo
XXongo writes: The Frontline series The Power of Big Oil looks at how the oil industry successfully set up a campaign to discredit climate science and targetting individual politicians to vote against measures to curb climate change. Former Republican senator Chuck Hagel reflects on his part in killing US ratification of the Kyoto climate treaty, after a vigorous campaign by big oil to mischaracterise the Kyoto protocol as a threat to jobs and the economy while falsely claiming that China and India could go on polluting to their heart’s content. The resolution effectively put a block on US ratification of any climate treaty ever since. A quarter of a century later, Hagel acknowledges that the vote was wrong, and blames the oil industry for malignly claiming the science of climate change was not proved when companies such as Exxon and Shell already knew otherwise from their own research. “What we now know about some of these large oil companies’ positions: they lied. And yes, I was misled. They had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly. I mean they, lied,” he told the documentary-makers.

Submission + - The University of Washington's Fuzzy CS Diversity Success Math

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The University of Washington's Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Access (DEIA) relies on "a set of objective measurements that will enable us to assess our progress." So, what might those look like? Well, for Goal O.3 — Have effective pipelines for students to enter the Allen School as Ph.D. students with a focus on increasing diversity — the UW's 5-Year Strategic Plan for DEIA specifies these 'Objective Measurements': 1) Measure the percentage of women at the Ph.D. level and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 40%. 2) Measure the percentage of domestic Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native, Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Ph.D students and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 12% (the UW-Seattle average for Ph.D. students). 3) Measure the percentage of Ph.D. students with disabilities (measured based on DRS use) and, by year 5, evaluate whether the percentage is at least 8% (the UW-Seattle average).

But with an Allen School Incoming Ph.D. Class of only 54 students — of which 63% are International — that suggests race/ethnicity success for an incoming PhD class could be just one Black student and one Hispanic student, if my UW DEIA math is correct.

Even if it falls short, at least UW attempted to publicly quantify what their overall DEI race/ethnicity goals are, which is more than what Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have done. That the UW felt compelled to break out U.S. and International students separately in an effort to facilitate more meaningful comparisons also suggests another way that the tech giants' self-reported race/ethnicity percentages and EEO-1 raw numbers for their U.S.-based tech workforce (which presumably includes International students and other visa workers) may be misleading, as well as a possible explanation for tech's puzzling diversity trends.

Submission + - Signal app experiencing worldwide outage (ndtv.com) 2

Submitted by JoeyRox
JoeyRox writes: The Signal app network is down worldwide. Users are able to log in but can't send or receive messages. When contacted about the outage, Signal's COO Aruna Harder said "We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters, and we are working hard to restore service for them as quickly as possible." Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days, a 62-fold rise from the prior week. Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp before selling it to Facebook and then co-founding the Signal Foundation, said that the expansion in recent days had been "vertical".

Submission + - U. of Florida Asks Students to Use App to Report Profs Who Don't Teach In Person (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: Professors at U of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 profs there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Profs feel the app is akin to a "police state."

Submission + - SPAM: Harvard CS50 Team: We 'Feel More Comfortable' About Harshly Punishing Cheaters

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In Teaching Academic Honesty in CS50, a new paper scheduled to be presented at SIGCSE 2020, educators behind Harvard's fabled CS50 introductory computer science course report on an unexpected benefit of the introduction of a 'regret clause' that gives students who cheat 72 hours to self-report their misdeeds in return for a lesser punishment: It's made the CS50 team lose less sleep over referring 'unregretful' cheaters for harsh punishment. From the SIGCSE paper: "Invocations of that [regret] clause have led to heart-to-heart talks, referrals for mental health, and, ultimately, teachable moments for an otherwise not-previously-reached demographic. But that same clause has also contributed to an uptick in the number of cases referred to the university’s honor council for disciplinary action [which may result in required withdrawal from the university], in part because we now feel more comfortable referring cases after students have had an opportunity to take ownership themselves but have chosen not to do so." Bet you didn't see that one coming, kids!

Submission + - DNA from "chewing gum" provides clues to life 5,700 years ago

Submitted by RG-man
RG-man writes: DNA obtained from birch pitch used as a type of ancient chewing gum has revealed significant insights into the life of a young girl who lived 5700 years ago.

...she chewed on birch pitch, a material that functioned a bit like an ancient chewing gum. A study of that birch pitch has uncovered the girl's entire genome and oral microbiome, marking the first time human genetic material has successfully been extracted from something besides human bones. The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
...By extracting DNA from the birch pitch, the researchers learned that it had been chewed by a female genetically closely related to hunter-gatherers from the European mainland, rather than those in central Scandinavia. Specific genes told them about her hair, skin and eye color, similar to that of other European hunter-gatherers.
..."What is more, we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains."
...Plant and animal DNA trapped in the pitch also revealed that she had eaten hazelnuts and duck, likely staples of her diet.

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