Comment Re:Actual literal wolves (Score 1) 66
At least SpaceX will be putting the data centers in orbit.
Submission + - One Shared Key Lets Phones Unlock or Immobilize 2 Million Cars (youtube.com)
cortex writes: A WIRED Investigations video (YouTube) shows UC San Diego researchers discovering that dealer-installed KARR (and SWDS) aftermarket car alarms—estimated in more than 2 million U.S. vehicles, mostly from Southern California dealerships since around 2017—share a single Bluetooth authentication key. Anyone within Bluetooth range can use a simple reverse-engineered app to silently unlock doors, disable the alarm, honk the horn, flash lights, or immobilize a parked car so it won’t start, often without the owner even knowing the hidden under-dash module is present or active (it can still respond even if the paid service was declined). The vendor (Acrisure Protection Group) has released a manual firmware patch via the KARR smartphone app; owners can check for a KARR/SWDS window sticker or a blinking light under the dash. Full details in the accompanying WIRED story.
Submission + - Auto Dealerships make cars hackable (youtube.com)
cortex writes: UCSD and UW researchers show that hackers can control a vehicle by exploiting a vulnerability in an antitheft device unknowingly installed on millions of cars.
Submission + - Artists May 'Poison' AI Models Before Copyright Office Can Issue Guidance (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Artists have spent the past year fighting companies that have been training AI image generators—including popular tools like the impressively photorealistic Midjourney or the ultra-sophisticated DALL-E 3—on their original works without consent or compensation. Now, the United States has promised to finally get serious about addressing their copyright concerns raised by AI, President Joe Biden said in his much-anticipated executive order on AI, which was signed this week. The US Copyright Office had already been seeking public input on AI concerns over the past few months through a comment period ending on November 15. Biden's executive order has clarified that following this comment period, the Copyright Office will publish the results of its study. And then, within 180 days of that publication—or within 270 days of Biden's order, "whichever comes later"—the Copyright Office's director will consult with Biden to "issue recommendations to the President on potential executive actions relating to copyright and AI."
"The recommendations shall address any copyright and related issues discussed in the United States Copyright Office’s study, including the scope of protection for works produced using AI and the treatment of copyrighted works in AI training," Biden's order said. That means that potentially within the next six to nine months (or longer), artists may have answers to some of their biggest legal questions, including a clearer understanding of how to protect their works from being used to train AI models. Currently, artists do not have many options to stop AI image makers—which generate images based on user text prompts—from referencing their works. Even companies like OpenAI, which recently started allowing artists to opt out of having works included in AI training data, only allow artists to opt out of future training data. [...] According to The Atlantic, this opt-out process—which requires artists to submit requests for each artwork and could be too cumbersome for many artists to complete—leaves artists stuck with only the option of protecting new works that "they create from here on out." It seems like it's too late to protect any work "already claimed by the machines" in 2023, The Atlantic warned. And this issue clearly affects a lot of people. A spokesperson told The Atlantic that Stability AI alone has fielded “over 160 million opt-out requests in upcoming training.” Until federal regulators figure out what rights artists ought to retain as AI technologies rapidly advance, at least one artist—cartoonist and illustrator Sarah Andersen—is advancing a direct copyright infringement claim against Stability AI, maker of Stable Diffusion, another remarkable AI image synthesis tool.
Andersen, whose proposed class action could impact all artists, has about a month to amend her complaint to "plausibly plead that defendants’ AI products allow users to create new works by expressly referencing Andersen’s works by name," if she wants "the inferences" in her complaint "about how and how much of Andersen’s protected content remains in Stable Diffusion or is used by the AI end-products" to "be stronger," a judge recommended. In other words, under current copyright laws, Andersen will likely struggle to win her legal battle if she fails to show the court which specific copyrighted images were used to train AI models and demonstrate that those models used those specific images to spit out art that looks exactly like hers. Citing specific examples will matter, one legal expert told TechCrunch, because arguing that AI tools mimic styles likely won't work—since "style has proven nearly impossible to shield with copyright." Andersen's lawyers told Ars that her case is "complex," but they remain confident that she can win, possibly because, as other experts told The Atlantic, she might be able to show that "generative-AI programs can retain a startling amount of information about an image in their training data—sometimes enough to reproduce it almost perfectly." But she could fail if the court decides that using data to train AI models is fair use of artists' works, a legal question that remains unclear.
"The recommendations shall address any copyright and related issues discussed in the United States Copyright Office’s study, including the scope of protection for works produced using AI and the treatment of copyrighted works in AI training," Biden's order said. That means that potentially within the next six to nine months (or longer), artists may have answers to some of their biggest legal questions, including a clearer understanding of how to protect their works from being used to train AI models. Currently, artists do not have many options to stop AI image makers—which generate images based on user text prompts—from referencing their works. Even companies like OpenAI, which recently started allowing artists to opt out of having works included in AI training data, only allow artists to opt out of future training data. [...] According to The Atlantic, this opt-out process—which requires artists to submit requests for each artwork and could be too cumbersome for many artists to complete—leaves artists stuck with only the option of protecting new works that "they create from here on out." It seems like it's too late to protect any work "already claimed by the machines" in 2023, The Atlantic warned. And this issue clearly affects a lot of people. A spokesperson told The Atlantic that Stability AI alone has fielded “over 160 million opt-out requests in upcoming training.” Until federal regulators figure out what rights artists ought to retain as AI technologies rapidly advance, at least one artist—cartoonist and illustrator Sarah Andersen—is advancing a direct copyright infringement claim against Stability AI, maker of Stable Diffusion, another remarkable AI image synthesis tool.
Andersen, whose proposed class action could impact all artists, has about a month to amend her complaint to "plausibly plead that defendants’ AI products allow users to create new works by expressly referencing Andersen’s works by name," if she wants "the inferences" in her complaint "about how and how much of Andersen’s protected content remains in Stable Diffusion or is used by the AI end-products" to "be stronger," a judge recommended. In other words, under current copyright laws, Andersen will likely struggle to win her legal battle if she fails to show the court which specific copyrighted images were used to train AI models and demonstrate that those models used those specific images to spit out art that looks exactly like hers. Citing specific examples will matter, one legal expert told TechCrunch, because arguing that AI tools mimic styles likely won't work—since "style has proven nearly impossible to shield with copyright." Andersen's lawyers told Ars that her case is "complex," but they remain confident that she can win, possibly because, as other experts told The Atlantic, she might be able to show that "generative-AI programs can retain a startling amount of information about an image in their training data—sometimes enough to reproduce it almost perfectly." But she could fail if the court decides that using data to train AI models is fair use of artists' works, a legal question that remains unclear.
Submission + - DoorDash warns no tipping will mean slower service (cnn.com)
quonset writes: “Orders with no tip might take longer to get delivered — are you sure you want to continue?”
That is the message DoorDash is trying out on customers though users do have the option of continuing without leaving a tip.
The message is just a test, DoorDash spokesperson Jenn Rosenberg told CNN in an email. “This reminder screen is something that we’re currently testing to help create the best possible experience for all members of our community,” she said. “As with anything we pilot, we look forward to closely analyzing the results and feedback.”
Rosenberg noted that Dashers, the people who deliver orders, are “independent contractors” who “have full freedom to accept or reject offers based on what they view as valuable and rewarding.” Tips go directly to Dashers, according to the company. So if an order comes in without a tip, they’re more likely to let it linger.
That is the message DoorDash is trying out on customers though users do have the option of continuing without leaving a tip.
The message is just a test, DoorDash spokesperson Jenn Rosenberg told CNN in an email. “This reminder screen is something that we’re currently testing to help create the best possible experience for all members of our community,” she said. “As with anything we pilot, we look forward to closely analyzing the results and feedback.”
Rosenberg noted that Dashers, the people who deliver orders, are “independent contractors” who “have full freedom to accept or reject offers based on what they view as valuable and rewarding.” Tips go directly to Dashers, according to the company. So if an order comes in without a tip, they’re more likely to let it linger.
Submission + - Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Confirmed: California Team Achieved Ignition (newsweek.com)
hesdeadjim99 writes: A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers now. LLNL's paper.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers now. LLNL's paper.
Submission + - Germans ready to lean back into nuclear power (spiegel.de)
atcclears writes: German voters can see the toll of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine and the cost of Berlin’s failed 20-year green-energy transition, and they are opening to reality. The country’s economic prospects, and Europe’s, depend on whether their leaders will follow that example. Some 78% of respondents support running the three remaining nuclear power plants at least until summer 2023
Submission + - SPAM: IBM's AI Can Predict How Parkinson's Disease May Progress In Individuals
An anonymous reader writes: [R]esearchers from IBM and Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) say they’ve developed a program that can predict how the symptoms of a Parkinson’s disease patient will progress in terms of both timing and severity. In The Lancet Digital Health journal, they claim the software could transform how doctors help patients manage their symptoms by allowing them to better predict how the disease will progress. The breakthrough wouldn’t have been possible without the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative, a study the Michael J. Fox Foundation sponsored. IBM describes the dataset, which includes information on more than 1,400 individuals, as the “largest and most robust volume of longitudinal Parkinson’s patient data to date” and says it allowed its AI model to map out complex symptom and progression patterns.
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - China Sets New Records for Nuclear Fusion (globaltimes.cn)
AltMachine writes: China broke the controlled nuclear fusion record by keeping the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST,) located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, by maintaining plasma temperature at 120 million Celsius for 101 seconds and 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor, beating a previous record of maintaining the plasma temperature at 100 million C for 100 seconds set by South Korean scientists which in turn beat the earlier EAST record at 100 million degrees for shorter time. "The breakthrough is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time," Li Miao, director of the physics department of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, told the Global Times, adding that the next milestone might be to maintain the stability for a week or more.
Comment Not Surprising: supported by controlled experiment (Score 4, Interesting) 87
Greenough showed the effects of enriched and deprived environments on cortical connectivity and thickness in a series of studies. This is one of his early studies:
Science. 1972 Jun 30;176(4042):1445-7. Rearing complexity affects branching of dendrites in the visual cortex of the rat. Volkmar FR, Greenough WT.
"Higher-order dendritic branching is considerably greater in Golgistained neurons from the occipital cortex of rats reared in groups in a complex environment than in similar neurons of littermates reared individually in laboratory cages have intermediate amounts of branching, while lower-order branching did not appear to be affected by any rearing environment."
Submission + - Look at What I'm Saying (plosone.org)
cortex writes: University of Utah bioengineers discovered our understanding of language may depend more heavily on vision than previously thought: under the right conditions, what you see can override what you hear. In an article published in PLOS One "Seeing Is Believing: Neural Representations of Visual Stimuli in Human Auditory Cortex Correlate with Illusory Auditory Perceptions" the authors showed that visual stimuli can influence neural signals in the auditory processing part of the brain and change what a person hears. In this study patients were shown videos of an auditory illusion called the McGurk Effect while electrical recordings where made from the surface of the cerebral cortex.
Comment Don't wait for Google (Score 1) 80
Lobby your local city and county officials to support the installation of fiber infrastructure. Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. Local cities used bonds to support setting up the infrastructure, and home owners pay for the connection from the street to their house. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business. I have a symmetric 100 MB connection for about about 1/3 less than Comcast was charging me for a 15 MB connection, and I get MUCH better service.
Comment Fiber as a Utility Model (Score 1) 327
Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business - Keeping costs down. It was a great day when I had my symmetric 100 MB connection installed and was able to say goodbye to Comcast.
Comment Biomedical Engineering has fastest job growth (Score 1, Insightful) 226
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Biomedical Engineering is one of the fastest growing occupations and has a median income of over $80,000. I think that this NIH study, which was run mainly by people in academia, doesn't fully account for the jobs in industry.
Comment Effect on Promotion and Tenure (Score 3, Interesting) 146
Most researchers will think about this for about 2 seconds and then publish in the journal with the most prestige and highest impact factor that they can. Publishing in high impact journals is a major factor in promotion and tenure for professors, so until universities adapt their policies on promotion and tenure, professors will continue to published in prestigious and expensive closed access journals. When reviewing someone for promotion or tenure, high-level administrators don't have time to read all the journal articles a professor has published, so they really heavily on g-indices and/or h-indices that are based upon journal impact factor scores.
