Google has lost a couple of talents due to the way it treated and the departure of its former top AI ethics researcher, Dr. Timnit Gebru. According to Reuters, engineering director David Baker left the tech giant last month after 16 years with the company. In a letter seen by the news organization, Baker said Gebru’s exit “extinguished [his] desire to continue as a Googler.” He added: “We cannot say we believe in diversity, and then ignore the conspicuous absence of many voices from within our walls.”
Software engineer Vinesh Kannan, who built infrastructure and features for organic shopping on the website, has also left the company. Kannan explained in a tweet that he made his decision because “Google’s mistreatment of @timnitGebru and @RealAbril (April Christina Curley) crossed a personal red line.”
Yesterday was my last day at Google. I left because Google’s mistreatment of @timnitGebru and @RealAbril crossed a personal red line I wrote down when I started the job. I know I gained a lot from Google, but I also gained a lot from both of their work, and they were wronged.
Timnit Gebru used to co—lead Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team until her controversial exit. Gebru said she was fired after sending an email to the company’s internal “Brain Women and Allies” list. In a report trying to get to the bottom of what happened, MIT’s Technology Review said Gebru’s departure was a result of a conflict over a paper she co-authored. The paper discussed issues with training language AI, including its environmental impact and its potential to cause a disadvantage to marginalized groups.
Google AI head Jeff Dean reportedly told colleagues in an internal email that the paper “didn’t meet [the company’s] bar for publication.” Gebru apparently pushed back on orders to pull the research and told the tech giant she would resign if her conditions weren’t met. She wrote on Twitter that Google didn’t agree to her conditions and accepted her resignation, ending her employment much earlier than the date she specified and even before she got back from vacation.
I need to be very careful what I say so let me be clear. They can come after me. No one told me that I was fired. You know legal speak, given that we’re seeing who we’re dealing with. This is the exact email I received from Megan who reports to Jeff
As for Curley, she was a diversity recruiter who said she was fired for calling Google out “on [its] racist bullshit.” Both Gebru and Curley are Black women. Google told The Verge it doesn’t agree with the “way April describes her termination, but it’s not appropriate for [the company] to provide a commentary about her claims.”
Gebru’s exit caused an uproar, prompting thousands of Googlers, as well as academic, industry and civil society supporters to sign a letter calling on Google Research “to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to unequivocally commit to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Google’s AI Principles.” The Google Ethics AI team also demanded the removal of Megan Kacholia, vice president of engineering at Google, and for Gebru’s reinstatement at a higher position. Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized for how the company handled her departure in an internal email and pledged to investigate what happened to “identify all the points where [the company] can learn.”
Universal Japan’s Super Nintendo World has soft-launched in Osaka, and with it has come a pretty extensive playlist from the Universal Parks News Today YouTube channel of videos showing off Super Nintendo World’s rides, restaurants, stores, and other secrets. There’s tons to see, even if you can’t make it to the park in person quite yet.
Through the videos from Universal Parks News Today, anyone can get a glimpse of what Super Nintendo World is like. The park itself has been gamified, with each park-goer receiving a wearable wristband that works in conjunction with a mobile app to take the experience up a notch. Using these bracelets and the app, visitors can explore the park and solve various puzzles to snag digital keys to unlock special attractions and other collectibles like virtual coins and stamps. There’s even a leaderboard for the visitors who earn the most points across the whole day or for specific rides.
With three keys in hand, attendees can take on Bowser Jr. in an AR duel at one of the attractions. To do so, players have to make their way through a recreation of Bowser’s castle, complete with Bowser family photos and various Mushroom Kingdom graffiti on the walls, to a screen where Bowser Jr. and his cronies are ready to do their worst. Players then have to use their bodies to avoid attacks, swinging their arms to bat away Bob-ombs, ducking to dodge incoming Bullet Bills, and jumping to hit Question Blocks for power-ups. Combining all these movements, it’s time to take on Bowser Jr. and his gang to reclaim the Golden Mushroom for the good guys.
If you want a closer look at what is in the park, the Universal Park News Today channel also has videos that allow viewers to experience a full POV of different rides in the park like Koopa’s Challenge, and even what it’s like to wait in line for them. Or if you want a more atmospheric look at Super Nintendo World, there’s a video that shows off the experience of simply walking around and checking out the sights.
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Google Chrome is ditching third-party cookies for good. If all goes according to plan, then future updates to the world’s most popular web browser will rewrite the rules of online advertising and make it far harder to track the web activity of billions of people. But it’s not that simple. What seems like a big win for privacy may, ultimately, only serve to tighten Google’s grip on the advertising industry and web as a whole.
Critics and regulators say the move risks putting smaller advertising firms out of business and could harm websites that rely on ads to make money. For most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google is planning to put Chrome in control of some of the advertising process. To do this it plans to use browser-based machine learning to log your browsing history and lump people into groups alongside others with similar interests.
“They’re going to get rid of the infrastructure that allows individualized tracking and profiling on the web,” says Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’re going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising—just doing it a different way.”
Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from its Privacy Sandbox, a set of proposals for improving online ads without obliterating the ad industry. Aside from getting rid of third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox also deals with issues such as advertising fraud, reducing the number of captchas people see, and introducing new ways for companies to measure the performance of their ads. Many Google critics say parts of the proposals are an improvement on the existing setup and good for the web.
Change is necessary. The online advertising industry is, to put it mildly, unwieldy. It comprises billions of data points about all of our lives that are automatically traded every second of every day. Such a substantial change to this system will impact a raft of businesses, from brands advertising products and services online to the ad tech networks and news organizations that propel those ads to every corner of the web.
The Privacy Sandbox proposals are complicated and technical. Google is already testing some, while others remain firmly at the development stage. Privacy Sandbox is documented online, and Google has altered its plans based on feedback and counterproposals from rivals. But, ultimately, when it comes to Chrome, everything is controlled by Google.
The removal of third-party cookies from Chrome, first announced in January 2020, has been a long time coming. “Third-party cookies were awful,” Cyphers says. “They were the most privacy-invasive technology in the world for a while.” When Google does remove them in 2022, it won’t be first—but its huge market share does mean it will have the biggest impact. Apple’s Safari, the second-biggest browser behind Chrome, limited cookie tracking in 2017. Mozilla’s Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so vast that the browser is currently blocking 10 billion trackers per day.
If you’re using Chrome at the moment, then the websites you visit, with a few exceptions, will add a third-party cookie to your device. These cookies—small snippets of code—are able to track your browsing history and display ads based on this. Third-party cookies send all the data they collect back to a different domain than the one you’re currently on. First-party cookies, by comparison, beam data back to the owners of the domain you’re visiting at the time.
Third-party cookies are the main reason why the shoes you looked at two weeks ago are still stalking you around the web. All the data gathered by third-party cookies is used to build user profiles, which can include your interests, the things you buy, and your behavior online, and this can be fed back to murky data brokers. “The intention really was to initiate a certain set of proposals about how older technologies like third-party cookies, as well as others, can be replaced by privacy-preserving API alternatives,” says Chetna Bindra, a product lead on Google’s ads business.
Those caterpillar treads fold back up into the boat for speedy travel when it’s in the water. (Iguana Yachts/)
A French amphibious boat that employs caterpillar treads instead of wheels has seduced the U.S. Navy. In late 2020 it bought two of them, called Iguana Interceptors, for shallow-water surveillance missions.
Amphibious boats are certainly not a new concept. In the 20th century, notably during World War II, the United States, Great Britain and Germany all developed versions, but they were land vehicles that could be used on water. In the 21st century a very small number of companies, including New Zealand company Sealegs, have turned that idea on its head; they have been developing fast boats that can be used on land. But, like their 20th-century ancestors, they all have wheels, generally one in the front and two in the rear.
The Iguana is the only fast boat in the world with caterpillar tracks. It was designed by a company, Iguana Yachts, founded in 2008 by Antoine Brugidou in Normandy, on France’s Atlantic coast. The coastline there sees some of the world’s biggest tidal ranges, and that was a problem for Brugidou, a boating enthusiast. If he wanted to take his pleasure boat out at low tide and come back at high tide, he couldn’t haul his boat down to the shoreline and then leave the vehicle and trailer on the beach—they’d be underwater by the time he came home.
The answer was to give the boat retractable caterpillar treads so it can rumble down the beach and into the water without needing to be towed. This solution not only does away with the need to have a dock, as the boat can be kept on dry land, but it also keeps the hull sleek. It’s like an iguana, a reptile that stays streamlined in the water by tucking its front legs under its belly when it swims.
Julien Poirier, the company’s chief operating officer, says that the initial prototype came out of the Iguana shipyard in 2011, and the first boat was sold two years later. The caterpillar track system, or “mobility system” as the company calls it, “has proved its robustness and efficiency” since then, as the company website says.
When aluminum arms lower the kevlar and rubber caterpillar tracks to the ground, the 30-foot-long, 10.5-foot-wide, 4.4-ton vessel lifts about three feet off the ground. A retractable ladder at the back allows access on and off the boat. The craft may appear to be unstable, but Poirier said 11 people, each weighing some 176 pounds, can stand in it while it was on its caterpillar tracks and it remains “extremely stable.” Once the boat has trundled down into a minimum of 1.8 feet of water, the tracks fold flush back into the hull without compromising its hydrodynamic properties—you’d never guess there was anything unusual about it.
The company’s website stresses the solution was “developed specifically to be both efficient and extremely resistant.”
It quickly became apparent that the boat had obvious defense, homeland security, coast guard, and life-saving applications. The company developed a militarized version, the IG Pro 31 Interceptor, both as a rigid hull and a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) with an all-around inflatable tube making it “safe and more comfortable” according to the vessel brochure.
The Interceptor’s tracks deploy and retract in just 8 seconds and can be used to travel at a top speed of about 4.5 mph along shores that are muddy, sandy, or rocky and even up inclines with a 40-percent grade. In the water, the boat is powered by two 450 horsepower engines, taking it to a top speed of 52 knots (60 mph). It can be used in winds up to Beaufort 8: that’s a gale with winds of up to 46 mph and waves up to 25 feet high. It can carry up to 2,645 pounds, so that’s 11 people plus 709 pounds of gear. But there are only five seats on the rigid Interceptor (six on the RIB) so that leaves plenty of wiggle room to carry all sorts of other equipment, including a light machine-gun mounted on the front.
At sea, the boat can hit speeds of 60 mph. (Iguana Yachts/)
Iguana specifies that the whole boat can be customized based on the existing carbon fiber and glass-reinforced plastic (or GRP) hull and mobility system. For example, it could be equipped with shock-mitigating seats, a hard top, a crash engine rail, lights, cameras, and so on. And to mitigate the boat’s carbon footprint it can also be equipped with electrically powered engines.
To date two Interceptors have been bought by the U.S. Navy for shallow-water surveillance missions. Poirier says advanced discussions are ongoing with defense ministries in a number of other countries. As for the French armed forces, they are only just beginning to realize that an interesting product has been developed at home.
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
Apple’s new M1 processors have shaken up the entire CPU landscape. Apple has used Intel for more than a decade, but these new in-house chips, based on their designs for iPad and iPhone processors, are powerful enough to run a laptop.
Well, that’s an understatement, they are in fact some of the fastest laptop processors we’ve ever seen, and they deliver this performance with incredibly low power consumption. The M1 chip is so impressive, it’s been referred to as “black magic”. But it’s not magic, it’s physics, architecture and electricity. There has to be a reason a chip is fast, and for this episode of our explainer show Upscaled, we set out to learn what it is.
One feature of the M1 is that it’s a RISC-based chip, designed using ARM’s instruction set. This means it has more in common with the chips commonly found in smartphones and tablets than those typically used in desktops or laptops. This already makes the M1 unusual, but it’s not unique. Microsoft’s Surface Pro X also uses a custom ARM chip, co-designed with Qualcomm, called the SQ2. On the face, these processors are similar: both the SQ2 and M1 use a 4+4 core design with a mix of high and low-powered cores, they both have 16GB RAM, and they’re designed as an SoC or “system-on-a-chip” meaning all the components you’d typically find on a computer are build together into one chip.
There the similarities end. Not only is the M1 much faster than the SQ2, Apple has pulled off a pretty amazing feat when it comes to emulation. Their Rosetta 2 emulator allows you to run pretty much any software that works on an Intel mac, for a slight loss of performance. Windows also has an emulator, but in our experience it’s slow, buggy, and restricted to 32-bit apps (for now).
Traditionally, there have been actual hardware reasons why running Intel or AMD software on an ARM chip is slow, which makes Apple’s achievement all the more impressive. In this episode we test the M1 versus the SQ2 and an Intel Macbook Pro, and dig into just how Apple achieved such good emulator performance. In the next episode, we’ll get into the architecture itself to break down how the M1 is just so dang fast.
If you’ve been searching for a PS5 these past months—convinced that the solution to the ennui of lockdown life lies in next-gen gaming—it’s likely that you’ve also made a new, hated enemy: retail bots.
For many, attempts to buy the console have followed the same sad pattern. A store, like Argos, Currys PC World, or GAME, announces it has new stock. Customers descend on the site—more than 160,000 at once, in the case of Currys—crashing it. When the virtual dust settles, the consoles are gone. Almost instantly, hundreds begin to appear on eBay for double the price. The culprits? Scalpers and their weapon of choice: retail bots. And the pandemic has created an ideal hunting ground.
There are three kinds of bots at work, explains Thomas Platt, head of ecommerce at Netacea, a cybersecurity company. The first, and most notorious, is called an AIO bot, or all-in-one bot. These move at an inhuman rate, scanning hundreds of websites every second to check if the PS5 is in stock. The instant an item drops, the bot will buy it and check out, faster than a human could ever type their details. These bots, explains Platt, will have multiple accounts loaded with multiple credit cards, so they can pick up large quantities of PS5s.
The two other common types of bot are similar. One will check to see if an item becomes available, then send the bot’s owner a text or notification; the other lets you pay a fee to get a checkout slot. “Or they’re pausing and holding that stock in rotation until they sell it,” says Platt. “That’s something we saw a lot in the ticket industry a while ago, and we see a lot in the airline industry, where you might hold the item, put it up for retail on another site, and as soon as you get a bid on it, you automatically purchase it.”
Scalping bots aren’t new. Online ticket scalping was outlawed in the UK in 2018, and “sneakerbots” drive a secondary retail market for rare trainers worth $2 billion. It’s been typical to see bots target big shopping events like Black Friday. Before the pandemic, they were growing in popularity as a result of the retail industry’s increasing reliance on hype and limited stocks. “We are seeing more and more hard sales recently, with limited stock,” says Benjamin Fabre, CTO of DataDome, a cybersecurity company.
But the pandemic has kicked these bots into overdrive, and it’s not just the result of more aggressive sales events and shopping being pushed online (you can’t, obviously, have a retail bot camp out in front of your local GAME store). Damaged supply chains have limited the stock of usually plentiful items, creating scarcity, and scarcity is what scalpers prey on. “We used to see niche groups of people targeting niche groups of things,” says Platt. “And now what we realize is they can target things that aren’t so niche, and they can make a lot of money. And that’s the real switch for us.”
From gym equipment to hot tubs to Magic the Gathering trading cards, the net has widened for these groups, which have grown into huge communities. “It’s spreading across the board,” says Jason Kent at Cequence Security, a cybersecurity software company. “The guys that worked on buying the most desirable shoes have realized that they can spread their knowledge, ability, and concepts to whatever.”
Data provided by Netacea showed that a botnet which used 300 compromised machines made 1 million attempts to buy PS5s over six hours, and that “cook communities” of would-be scalpers can reach up to 20,000 people. When Google searches for PS5 spike, so do those for scalper bots.
Gareth Dorrian, Post Doctoral Research Fellow in Space Science, University of Birmingham
Ian Whittaker, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University
No-one has visited the moon since 1972. But with the advent of commercial human spaceflight, the urge to return is resurgent and generating a new space race. Nasa has selected the private company SpaceX to be part of its commercial spaceflight operations, but the firm is also pursuing its own space exploration agenda.
To enable flights to the moon and beyond, both NASA and SpaceX are developing new heavy lift rockets: SpaceX’s Starship and Nasa’s Space Launch System.
But how do they differ and which one is more powerful?
Discover the story of how and why NASA was created, its greatest triumphs, darkest days, and of the times it exceeded all possible hopes. A tale of adventure, heroism and resourcefulness, learn of the space agency’s greatest achievements and how — over six decades — the organization has consistently and tirelessly devoted itself to its founding principle: that “activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humankind”. View Deal
Starship
Rockets go through multiple stages to get into orbit. By discarding spent fuel tanks while in flight, the rocket becomes lighter and therefore easier to accelerate. Once in operation, SpaceX’s launch system will be comprised of two stages: the launch vehicle known as Super Heavy and the Starship.
Super Heavy is powered by the Raptor rocket engine, burning a combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The basic principle of a liquid fuel rocket engine is that two propellants – a fuel such as kerosene and an oxidiser such as liquid oxygen – are brought together in a combustion chamber and ignited. The flame produces hot gas under high pressure which is expelled at high speed through the engine nozzle to produce thrust.
The rocket will provide 15 million pounds of thrust at launch, which is approximately twice as much as the rockets of the Apollo era. Atop the launcher sits the Starship, itself powered by another six Raptor engines and equipped with a large mission bay for accommodating satellites, compartments for up to 100 crew and even extra fuel tanks for refuelling in space, which is critical to long duration interplanetary human spaceflight.
Super Heavy separating from Starship. (Image credit: SpaceX)
The Starship is designed to operate both in the vacuum of space and within the atmospheres of Earth and Mars, using small moveable wings to glide to a desired landing zone.
Once over the landing area, the Starship flips into a vertical position and uses its on-board Raptor engines to make a powered descent and landing. It will have sufficient thrust to lift itself off the surface of Mars or the moon, overcoming the weaker gravity of these worlds, and return to Earth – again making a powered soft landing. The Starship and Super Heavy are both fully reusable and the entire system is designed to lift more than 100 tons of payload to the surface of the Moon or Mars.
The spacecraft is maturing rapidly. A recent test flight of the Starship prototype, the SN8, successfully demonstrated a number of the manoeuvres required to make this work. Unfortunately, there was a malfunction in one of the Raptor engines and the SN8 crashed on landing. Another test flight is expected in the coming days.
NASA’s Space Launch System
The Space Launch System (SLS) from Nasa will be taking the crown from the discontinued Saturn V as the most powerful rocket the agency has ever used. The current incarnation (SLS block 1) stands at almost 100 metres tall.
The SLS core stage, containing more than 3.3 million litres of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (equivalent to one-and-a-half Olympic size swimming pools), is powered by four RS-25 engines, three of which were used on the previous Space Shuttle. Their main difference from the Raptors is that they burn liquid hydrogen instead of methane.
Stages of the SLS. (Image credit: NASA)
The core stage of the rocket is augmented by two solid rocket boosters, attached to its sides, providing a total combined thrust of 8.2 million pounds at launch – about 5% more than the Saturn V at launch. This will lift the spacecraft to low Earth orbit. The upper stage is intended to lift the attached payload – the astronaut capsule – out of Earth’s orbit and is a smaller liquid fuel stage powered by a single RL-10 engine (already in use by ATLAS and DELTA rockets) which is smaller and lighter than the RS-25.
The Space Launch System will send the Orion crew capsule, which can support up to six crew for 21 days, to the Moon as part of the Artemis-1 mission – a task that current Nasa rockets are currently not capable of performing.
It is intended to have large acrylic windows so astronauts can watch the journey. It will also have its own engine and fuel supply, as well as secondary propulsion systems for returning to the Earth. Future space stations, such as the Lunar Gateway, will serve as a logistical hub, which may include refuelling.
The core stage and booster rockets are unlikely to be reusable (instead of landing they will drop in the ocean), so there is a higher cost with the SLS system, both in materials and environmentally. It is designed to evolve to larger stages capable of carrying crew or cargo weighing up to 120 tonnes, which is potentially more than Starship.
NASA’s SLS and SpaceX’s Starship, on the right, could both get us to the Moon and beyond. (Image credit: Ian Whittaker/NASA/SpaceX, Author provided)
A lot of the technology being used in SLS is so-called “legacy equipment” in that it is adapted from previous missions, cutting down the research and development time. However, earlier this month, a test fire of the SLS core stage was stopped a minute into the eight-minute test due to a suspected component failure. No significant damage occurred, and the SLS program manager, John Honeycutt, stated: “I don’t think we’re looking at a significant design change.”
And the winner is…
So which spacecraft likely to reach carry a crew to the moon first? Artemis 2 is planned as the first crewed mission using SLS to perform a flyby of the moon and is expected to launch in August 2023. Whereas SpaceX has no specific date planned for crewed launch, they are running #dearMoon – a project involving lunar space tourism planned for 2023. Musk has also stated that a crewed Martian mission could take place as early as 2024, also using Starship.
Ultimately it is a competition between an agency that has had years of testing and experience but is limited by a fluctuating taxpayer budget and administration policy changes, and a company relatively new to the game but which has already launched 109 Falcon 9 rockets with a 98% success rate and has a dedicated long-term cash flow.
Whoever reaches the moon first will inaugurate a new era of exploration of a world which still has much scientific value.
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