ReHacked vol. 215: Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common, Morris Tanenbaum, Inventor of the Silicon Microchip, Dies at 94, Hobson's choice and more
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10 Things I Want to Communicate to the Human Species Before I Die #selfdevelopment
- Your shopping cart doesn’t need to go wherever you go.
- Societies are better when liberals and conservatives keep each other in check.
- Exercise is the magic bullet.
- Humans want everything to be someone’s fault.
- Three meals a day is probably excessive for many people.
- The “lived” in “short-lived” rhymes with “dived.”
- Restricting speech only helps the people in power.
- Religion is not “ancient superstition.”
- We take morality very seriously but make moral judgments very flippantly.
- You can‘t ruminate and listen at the same time.
Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common | Science | AAAS #science #copyrights
When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.
Climate Prediction Center: ENSO Diagnostic Discussion #nature
A transition from ENSO-neutral is expected in the next couple of months, with a greater than 90% chance of El Niño persisting into the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Morris Tanenbaum, Inventor of the Silicon Microchip, Dies at 94 - IEEE Spectrum #promemoria
Tanenbaum’s research in the mid-1950s proved that silicon was a better semiconductor material for transistors than germanium, which was commonly used at the time. His discovery paved the way for more efficient transistors critical in technologies that ushered in the Information Age.
He began his career in 1952 at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, N.J., as a researcher in its chemical physics department. Two years later, under the direction of physicist and inventor William Shockley, who at the time worked at Bell Labs, Tanenbaum began investigating whether silicon crystals could be used for transistors.
Toyota: Car location data of 2 million customers exposed for ten years #security #privacy
Toyota Motor Corporation disclosed a data breach on its cloud environment that exposed the car-location information of 2,150,000 customers for ten years, between November 6, 2013, and April 17, 2023.
According to a security notice published in the company's Japanese newsroom, the data breach resulted from a database misconfiguration that allowed anyone to access its contents without a password.
"It was discovered that part of the data that Toyota Motor Corporation entrusted to Toyota Connected Corporation to manage had been made public due to misconfiguration of the cloud environment," reads the notice (machine translated).
Hobson's choice - Wikipedia #history #language
A Hobson's choice is a free choice in which only one thing is actually offered. The term is often used to describe an illusion that multiple choices are available. The most well known Hobson's choice is "I'll give you a choice: take it or leave it", wherein "leaving it" is strongly undesirable.
The phrase is said to have originated with Thomas Hobson (1544–1631), a livery stable owner in Cambridge, England, who offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in his stall nearest to the door or taking none at all.
Synthstrom Deluge Goes Open Source – Synthtopia #software
Synthstrom Audible has announced that – as of June 5th, 2023 – the Deluge firmware will be open source.
The Deluge is a grid-based instrument that’s a portable sequencer, synthesizer and sampler. It features 128 RGB pads, arranged in a 16 x 8 grid; a built-in synthesizer; up to 12 minutes of sample playback from SD card; and sequencing of up to thousands of notes.
YouTube tests blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers #internet #copyrights
YouTube is running an experiment asking some users to disable their ad blockers or pay for a premium subscription, or they will not be allowed to watch videos.
As first spotted by a Reddit user this week, YouTube will display a pop-up warning some users that "ad blockers are not allowed."
"It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide," the message adds.
András Gáspár (University of Arizona) and his team present in Nature Astronomy images of the Fomalhaut system taken by the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The images reach a resolution and sensitivity far beyond the capability of earlier instruments. The team also analyzed new images taken by Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, in which the star’s light is blocked using a coronagraph.
Previously, Hubble, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and other telescopes have shown a far-out debris ring surrounding Fomalhaut that’s akin to the Kuiper Belt in our solar system. Analysis of the system’s brightness at different wavelengths had also suggested the presence of a dusty inner disk. Now, the new JWST images reveal unprecedented detail, including a new belt inside the first, an extended inner disk, and a gap between the two. They also show what might be a dust cloud in the outer, previously detected ring.
European Processor Designed for Use in Space Taped Out #hardware
The European Space Agency is investigating many ways to boost computing capabilities in space, and one of the processors it is backing is close to release.
The space agency is part of a group developing an open-source processor called Occamy, which is based on RISC-V. The chip was closer to completion and is now being assembled after being taped out late last year, researchers said during a presentation at last month’s Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference.
The 432-core chip is an interesting combination of old and new tech, and has been designed using the relatively new chiplet approach. The chiplet design allows the mixing and matching of old and new technologies – such as analog or digital processors – inside a chip package.
Science Fiction Movie Lettering #design
The lettering in science fiction cinema can sometimes be more memorable than the movies themselves. Just about anyone in America would recognize the Star Wars logo, even if they haven't seen all nine films. As is the case with most of my logo posts, it's been fun to pick up on the trends. There's the trick where they remove the segments from the top half of the letters like Blade Runner, or the embossed brushed metal of Robocop. Glowing letters were a big trend that started in the late 80s, most likely set off by the Alien franchise. And I can never get enough of the 3D type in early films.
But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part:
There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.
In the aftermath of this, Sheeran has said that he’s now filming all of his recent songwriting sessions, just in case he needs to provide evidence that he and his songwriting partners came up with a song on their own, which is depressing in its own right.
In the latest case, which just concluded last week, Sheeran said that if he lost he’d probably quit music altogether, as it’s just not worth it.
Facebook is overrun by Vietnamese military trolls - Rest of World #internet #socialnetworks
The military-backed group manipulates Facebook's moderation tools to silence dissenting speech.
Focused on posts written in Vietnamese, the mass-reporting campaigns reach far beyond Vietnam's borders.
Facebook says "our platforms would be blocked in their entirety” if they attempted to ban the group.
1-bit Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave” – Hypertalking #art #fun
Chile plans to nationalize its vast lithium industry | Reuters #economy #politics
Chile's President Gabriel Boric said on Thursday he would nationalize the country's lithium industry, the world's second largest producer of the metal essential in electric vehicle batteries, to boost its economy and protect its environment.
The shock move in the country with the world's largest lithium reserves would in time transfer control of Chile's vast lithium operations from industry giants SQM (SQMA.SN) and Albemarle (ALB.N) to a separate state-owned company.
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