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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

About 23 million U.S. households depend on private wells as their primary drinking water source. These homeowners are entirely responsible for ensuring that the water from their wells is safe for human consumption.

Multiple studies show that, at best, half of private well owners are testing with any frequency, and very few households test once or more yearly, as public health officials recommend. Even in Iowa, which has some of the strongest state-level policies for protecting private well users, state funds for free private water quality testing regularly go unspent.

Is the water these households are drinking safe? There's not much systematic evidence, but the risks may be large.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still relies on a 15-year-old study showing that among 2,000 households, one in five households' well water contained at least one contaminant at levels above the thresholds that public water systems must meet. While other researchers have studied this issue, most rely on limited data or data collected over decades to draw conclusions.

I'm an economist studying energy and agriculture issues. In a recent study, I worked with colleagues at Iowa State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Cornell University to understand drinking water-related behaviors and perceptions of households that use private wells. We focused on rural Iowa, where runoff from agricultural production regularly contaminates public and private drinking water sources.

We found that few households followed public health guidance on testing their well water, but a simple intervention—sending them basic information about drinking water hazards and easy-to-use testing materials—increased testing rates. The burden of dealing with contamination, however, falls largely on individual households.

We focused on nitrate, one of the main well water pollutants in rural areas. Major sources include chemical fertilizers, animal waste and human sewage.

Drinking water that contains nitrate can harm human health. Using contaminated water to prepare infant formula can cause "blue baby syndrome," a condition in which infants' hands and lips turn bluish because nitrate interferes with oxygen transport in the babies' blood. Severe cases can cause lethargy, seizures and even death. The EPA limits nitrate levels in public water systems to 10 milligrams per liter to prevent this effect.

Studies have also found that for people of all ages, drinking water with low nitrate concentrations over long periods of time is strongly associated with chronic health diseases, including colorectal cancer and thyroid disease, as well as neural tube defects in developing fetuses.

Nitrate pollution is pervasive across the continental U.S. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to determine whether water contains unsafe nitrate concentrations. Test strips, similar to those used in swimming pools, are cheap and readily available.

upstart writes:

How a subfield of physics led to breakthroughs in AI – and from there to this year's Nobel Prize:

We covered the announcement of the Nobel Prize here. This article is to introduce the subject of Statistical Mechanics, for which you will need your thinking caps and an understanding of some serious mathematics. Follow the links for much more detail.

John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in physics on Oct. 8, 2024, for their research on machine learning algorithms and neural networks that help computers learn. Their work has been fundamental in developing neural network theories that underpin generative artificial intelligence.

A neural network is a computational model consisting of layers of interconnected neurons. Like the neurons in your brain, these neurons process and send along a piece of information. Each neural layer receives a piece of data, processes it and passes the result to the next layer. By the end of the sequence, the network has processed and refined the data into something more useful.

While it might seem surprising that Hopfield and Hinton received the physics prize for their contributions to neural networks, used in computer science, their work is deeply rooted in the principles of physics, particularly a subfield called statistical mechanics.

Statistical Mechanics is the third pillar of modern physics, next to quantum theory and relativity theory. Its aim is to account for the macroscopic behaviour of physical systems in terms of dynamical laws governing the microscopic constituents of these systems and probabilistic assumptions. Like other theories in physics, statistical mechanics raises a number of foundational and philosophical issues. But philosophical discussions in statistical mechanics face an immediate difficulty because unlike other theories, statistical mechanics has not yet found a generally accepted theoretical framework or a canonical formalism.

Journal Reference:
J J Hopfield, Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities, PNAS 79 (8) 2554-2558, (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.79.8.2554)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Charlie Stross, a science fiction writer based in Scotland, has written a post about different possible approaches to space colonization. He includes a discussion of several different models.

While the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is evidently invalid, a weaker version—that language influences thought—is much harder to argue against. When we talk about a spaceship, a portmanteau word derived from "[outer] space" and "ship", we bring along certain unstated assumptions about shipping that are at odds with the physical parameters of a human-friendly life support environment for traversing interplanetary distances. Ships, in the vernacular, have captains and a crew who obey the captain via a chain of command, they carry cargo or passengers, they travel between ports or to a well-defined destination, they may have a mission whether it be scientific research or military. And of these aspects, only the scientific research angle is remotely applicable to any actually existing interplanetary vehicle, be it a robot probe like Psyche or one of the Apollo program flights.

(Pedant's footnote: while the Apollo crews had a nominal commander, actual direction came from Mission Control back on Earth and the astronauts operated as a team, along lines very similar to those later formalized as Crew Resource Management in commercial aviation.)

Anyway, a point I've already chewed over on this blog is that a spaceship is not like a sea-going vessel, can't be operated like a sea-going vessel, and the word "ship" in its name feeds into various cognitive biases that may be actively harmful to understanding what it is.

Which leads me to the similar term "space colony": the word colony drags in all sorts of historical baggage, and indeed invokes several models of how an off-Earth outpost might operate, all of which invoke very dangerous cognitive biases!

There are few more models which he missed.

Previously:
(2022) Moon Life 2030
(2022) Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization "Will Inevitably Fail"
(2020) Elon Musk Will Run Into Trouble Setting Up a Martian Government, Lawyers Say
(2018) Who Owns The Moon? A Space Lawyer Answers
(2017) Stephen Hawking Urges Nations to Pursue Lunar Base and Mars Landing
(2015) NASA Working on 3D Printers to Print Objects Using Martian Regolith

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new paper from Apple's artificial intelligence scientists has found that engines based on large language models, such as those from Meta and OpenAI, still lack basic reasoning skills.

The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models.

The group investigated the "fragility" of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn't happen.

"Specifically, the performance of all models declines [even] when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark," the group wrote in their report. "Furthermore, the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models [demonstrates] that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases."

The study found that adding even a single sentence that appears to offer relevant information to a given math question can reduce the accuracy of the final answer by up to 65 percent. "There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer," the study concluded.

[...] "We found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models," the new study concluded. The behavior of LLMS "is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching" which the study found to be "so fragile, in fact, that [simply] changing names can alter results."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Internet Archive is back online in a read-only state after a cyberattack brought down the digital library and Wayback Machine last week. A data breach and DDoS attack kicked the site offline on October 9th, with a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records also stolen in recent weeks.

The Internet Archive is now back online in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to founder Brewster Kahle. “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.”

While you can access the Wayback Machine to search 916 billion web pages that have been archived over time, you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive. Kahle and team have gradually been restoring Archive.org services in recent days, including bringing back the team’s email accounts and its crawlers for National Libraries. Services have been offline so that Internet Archive staff can examine and strengthen them against future attacks.

[...] The Internet Archive outage came just weeks after Google started adding links to archived websites in the Wayback Machine. Google removed its own cached pages links earlier this year, so having the Wayback Machine linked in Google search results is a useful way to access older versions of websites or archived pages.

Previously: Archive.org, a Repository Storing the Entire History of the Internet, Has a Data Breach

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Should I be more or less scared of the doctor?

The products include a service that helps healthcare organizations build their own AI agents:

Microsoft revealed a slew of new artificial intelligence capabilities for healthcare organizations Thursday, including a product to help companies to build their own AI agents.

The technology giant also announced foundation models for medical imaging and a healthcare data analysis platform, as well as details about its plans to build an AI documentation product geared toward nurses.

Healthcare organizations have shown increased interest in adopting AI tools, even as some experts and lawmakers raise questions about its safe and equitable use. Tech companies say the products have potential to help providers manage their workloads and alleviate burnout.

"We're at an inflection point. AI breakthroughs are changing, augmenting how we work and live," Kees Hertogh, vice president for healthcare and life sciences product marketing, said during a press briefing. "The integration of AI into healthcare has significantly enhanced patient care and is rekindling the joy of practicing medicine for clinicians."

Microsoft's agent service would allow companies to create AI tools with pre-built templates and data sources that could be used for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching and patient triage, Hertogh said.

The service is currently in public preview, which allows wider access to the tools and lets organizations give feedback on the product, according to a spokesperson.

In one example, a doctor could ask an AI agent to find clinical trials for a 55-year-old patient with diabetes and interstitial lung disease.

[...] The product allows organizations to build agents with healthcare-specific features using intelligence from credible sources, which aims to improve safety, said Hadas Bitran, partner general manager of health AI at Microsoft Health and Life Sciences.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs are experiencing unprecedented demand, with the company reporting that it has sold out of these next-gen processors. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the news during an investors meeting hosted by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley Analyst Joe Moore notes that Nvidia executives disclosed that their Blackwell GPU products have a 12-month backlog, echoing a similar situation with Hopper GPUs several quarters ago.

The overwhelming demand for Blackwell GPUs comes from Nvidia's traditional customers, including major tech giants like AWS, CoreWeave, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle. These companies have purchased every Blackwell GPU Nvidia and its manufacturing partner TSMC can produce for the next four quarters. The extreme demand indicates that Nvidia's already considerable footprint in the AI processor market should continue to grow next year, even as competition from rivals such as AMD, Intel, and various cloud service providers grab their share.

"Our view continues to be that Nvidia is likely to gain share of AI processors in 2025, as the biggest users of custom silicon are seeing very steep ramps with Nvidia solutions next year," Moore said in a client note.

Nvidia unveiled the Blackwell GPU platform in March. It includes the B200 GPU and GB200 Grace "super chip." These processors can handle the demanding workloads of large language model (LLM) inference while significantly reducing energy consumption, a growing concern in the industry.

[...] In August, Nvidia acknowledged that its Blackwell-based products were experiencing low yields, necessitating a re-spin of some layers of the B200 processor to improve production efficiency. Despite these challenges, Nvidia remains confident in its ability to ramp up Blackwell production in Q4 2024. It expects to ship several billion dollars worth of Blackwell GPUs in the last quarter of this year.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Software developer and former computer science student Amit Patel has written a post about generating curved text for maps and other purposes.

Over the last few posts I wrote about things I did to improve font quality, such as antialiasing and combining distance fields to merge outlines and halos. But I want to "pop up the stack" a bit and talk about one of the bigger goals for this project. I want to render text in styles that I've seen in maps, both online and offline, both fantasy and real. In particular, I want to apply spacing, rotation, and curvature to the labels.

[...] These are common in cartography, not only in fantasy maps like Tolkein's but also in real-world maps. Eduard Imhof's classic 1975 paper, Positioning Names on Maps^[1] has a ton of great advice on how to position labels, and not only recommends curving text, but also sketches out examples:

In some ways, that desktop computing has moved beyond monospace type comes down to the long term impact of a course in calligraphy and typography which took place decades ago. Now even your GUIs on GNU/Linux or the BSDs provide a variety of typefaces — in straight lines. Text along curved paths is another step forward.

Previously:
(2020) Fonts for Programmers and Developers

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The new text is timed to a new California law against false advertising:

There comes a point in most experienced Steam shoppers' lives where they wonder what would happen if their account was cancelled or stolen, or perhaps they just stopped breathing. It's scary to think about how many games in your backlog will never get played; scarier, still, to think about how you don't, in most real senses of the word, own any of them.

Now Valve, seemingly working to comply with a new California law targeting "false advertising" of "digital goods," has added language to its checkout page to confirm that thinking. "A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam," the Steam cart now tells its customers, with a link to the Steam Subscriber Agreement further below.

California's AB2426 law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Sept. 26, excludes subscription-only services, free games, and digital goods that offer "permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet." Otherwise, sellers of digital goods cannot use the terms "buy, purchase," or related terms that would "confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good." And they must explain, conspicuously, in plain language, that "the digital good is a license" and link to terms and conditions.

[...] Online-only content licenses have always existed in a precarious state, but recent corporate maneuvers have seen them teetering especially hard. Ubisoft deleted The Crew,its online-only racing game, from its servers on April 1, and thereby cut off access for those who bought it. Warner Bros. Discovery spent months in early 2024 moving toward a wipe-out of all Adult Swim Games titles listed on Steam and elsewhere, only to do something far more sensible at the last moment. Sony tried in late 2023 to delete more than 1,000 Discovery video titles from PlayStation owners' libraries, then walked that back. And then a couple months later, it jumped back into the online ire mix by nixing a wealth of Funimation anime offerings that had once been promised to be available "forever."

So long as Steam lasts forever, however, this new language should not be that alarming.

Original Submission

Ward Christensen, inventer of XMODEM and co-inventer of the BBS, has died

Snotnose writes:

Not much I can say, .Story here"

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

RIP, man who's code I used a lot back in the day.

Ward Christensen, BBS Inventor and Architect of Our Online Age, Dies at Age 78

upstart writes:

Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at age 78:

On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking work. Despite creating one of the foundational technologies of the digital age, Christensen maintained a low profile throughout his life, content with his long-standing career at IBM and showing no bitterness or sense of missed opportunity as the Internet age dawned.

"Ward was the quietest, pleasantest, gentlest dude," said BBS: The Documentary creator Jason Scott in a conversation with Ars Technica. Scott documented Christensen's work extensively in a 2002 interview for that project. "He was exactly like he looks in his pictures," he said, "like a groundskeeper who quietly tends the yard."

Tech veteran Lauren Weinstein initially announced news of Christensen's passing on Sunday, and a close friend of Christensen's confirmed to Ars that Christensen died peacefully in his home. The cause of death has not yet been announced.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

UK government has kicked off a consultation on whether the country should have a common standard for charging electrical devices, and if this needs to be the same as the USB-C connector the EU adopted.

In a call for evidence this month, the Office for Product Safety and Standards within the Department for Business and Trade said it wants to hear from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations.

The EU has already outlined USB-C as its standard for charging personal devices across all of its 27 member states, as has India – the world's second-largest smartphone market. The standard is also being mooted for possible adoption by the US as well. Even Apple has reluctantly accepted USB-C.

In The Register's estimation, the chances are pretty small that device makers will be prepared to build special versions of their products to cater specifically to the UK consumer, should the government elect to go its own way.

The call for evidence points out that recent developments in wired charging technologies and evolving international standards provide an opportunity to reduce electronic waste and benefit consumers by specifying a standardized charger for smartphones and similar gadgets.

"We consider that it would potentially help businesses and deliver consumer and environmental benefits if we were to introduce standardized requirements for chargers for certain portable electrical/electronic devices across the whole UK," the Office for Product Safety and Standards stated. "We are seeking views from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations as to whether it would be helpful to do so and, if so, whether this should be based on USB-C – as adopted by the EU."

The aim of the exercise is to help the office understand the potential impact of introducing the measures. It wants feedback of the potential issues and practicalities of having a common charger based on USB-C.

However, the agency notes that having USB-C as a common charging port should mean that one charger will work for multiple devices. It may also allow manufacturers to "unbundle" the sale of a charger, meaning that consumers have the option to purchase new devices without a charger.

The Office for Product Safety and Standards conceded that "manufacturers are likely to adopt a similar approach to the EU Common Charger Directive for the whole of the UK on a voluntary basis in order to avoid supply chain complexity," and concluded: "As a result, the USB-C charging port is likely to become the industry default."

[...] The call for evidence runs for eight weeks, from October 9 to midnight on December 4. Anyone interested in responding should do so via this survey page

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Boeing Slashes 10% Of Workforce, CEO Warns "Hard To Overstate The Challenges We Face":

In what some have called a panic/desperation negotiating tactic, Boeing has announced (late on a Friday afternoon) that it will slash its workforce by 10% as the pummeled planemaker struggles with a cash-crunch amid a drawn-out strike and ongoing quality control (to put it nicely) issues.

"Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together."

Boeing ended 2023 with 171,000 employees.

The company said it expects to report third quarter revenue of $17.8 billion, and a loss per share of $9.97, according to preliminary figures.

The company unveiled the measures and the earnings figures as it seeks to get its negotiations with labor unions back on track.

Boeing has made two offers for higher wages, both of which were turned down by workers.

About 33,000 employees at its main Seattle-area facilities have been on strike for a month now, devastating production and draining Boeing's reserves.

The latest talks collapsed earlier this week, with no clear path when and how they might resume.

Boeing shares tumbled after hours, erasing the day's gains...

Ortberg also said the company has notified customers that the first deliveries of the 777X are now expected in 2026, citing the ongoing work stoppage and flight test pause.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: Time.com

If uncontrolled artificial general intelligence—or "God-like" AI—is looming on the horizon, we are now about halfway there. Every day, the clock ticks closer to a potential doomsday scenario.

That's why I introduced the AI Safety Clock last month. My goal is simple: I want to make clear that the dangers of uncontrolled AGI are real and present. The Clock's current reading—29 minutes to midnight—is a measure of just how close we are to the critical tipping point where uncontrolled AGI could bring about existential risks. While no catastrophic harm has happened yet, the breakneck speed of AI development and the complexities of regulation mean that all stakeholders must stay alert and engaged.

This is not alarmism; it's based on hard data. The AI Safety Clock tracks three essential factors: the growing sophistication of AI technologies, their increasing autonomy, and their integration with physical systems.

We are seeing remarkable strides across these three factors. The biggest are happening in machine learning and neural networks, with AI now outperforming humans in specific areas like image and speech recognition, mastering complex games like Go, and even passing tests such as business school exams and Amazon coding interviews.

... There's no denying the risks are real. We are on the brink of sharing our planet with machines that could match or even surpass human intelligence—whether that happens in one year or ten. But we are not helpless. The opportunity to guide AI development in the right direction is still very much within our grasp. We can secure a future where AI is a force for good.

But the clock is ticking.

This is similar to Doomsday Clock, what effect do you think this AI Safety Clock will have ? Will this serve as a warning to those involved ?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Darpa Thinks Walls of Oysters Could Protect Shores Against Hurricanes:

2018, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf of Mexico—a pillar of American air superiority—found itself under aerial attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the Florida coast, unexpectedly hulked up to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour whipped into the base, flinging power poles, flipping F-22s, and totaling more than 200 buildings. The sole saving grace: Despite sitting on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael's 9-to-14-foot storm surge swamped other parts of Florida. Tyndall's main defense was luck.

That $5 billion disaster at Tyndall was just one of a mounting number of extreme-weather events that convinced the US Department of Defense that it needed new ideas to protect the 1,700 coastal bases it's responsible for globally. As hurricanes Helene and Milton have just shown, beachfront residents face compounding threats from climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. Rising oceans are chewing away the shore. Stronger storms are more capable of flooding land.

In response, Tyndall will later this month test a new way to protect shorelines from intensified waves and storm surges: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by Rutgers University scientists. The 50-meter-wide array, made up of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing about 46,000 pounds, can take 70 percent of the oomph out of waves, according to tests. But this isn't your grandaddy's seawall. It's specifically designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature's most effective wave-killers.

If researchers can optimize these creatures to work in tandem with new artificial structures placed at sea, they believe the resulting barriers can take 90 percent of the energy out of waves. David Bushek, who directs the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory at Rutgers, swears he's not hoping for a megastorm to come and show what his team's unit is made of. But he's not not hoping for one. "Models are always imperfect. They're always a replica of something," he says. "They're not the real thing."

The project is one of three being developed under a $67.6 million program launched by the US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Cheekily called Reefense, the initiative is the Pentagon's effort to test if "hybrid" reefs, combining manmade structures with oysters or corals, can perform as well as a good ol' seawall. Darpa chose three research teams, all led by US universities, in 2022. After two years of intensive research and development, their prototypes are starting to go into the water, with Rutgers' first up.

[...] Oysters are effective wave-killers because of how they grow. The bivalves pile onto each other in large, sturdy mounds. The resulting structure, unlike a smooth seawall, is replete with nooks, crannies, and convolutions. When a wave strikes, its energy gets diffused into these gaps, and further spent on the jagged, complex surfaces of the oysters. Also unlike a seawall, an oyster wall can grow. Oysters have been shown to be capable of building vertically at a rate that matches sea-level rise—which suggests they'll retain some protective value against higher tides and stronger storms.

canopic jug writes:

Computer consultant J B Crawford, author of the Computers Are Bad newsletter, has posted an overview of commercial HF radio with a bit of background into the technology and some of its advantages and disadvantages:

According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio technology means that modern communications standards like 5G are pushing major applications into the EHF or "extremely high frequency" band. The frontiers of basic radio technology now lie in the terahertz range, where the demarcation between radio waves and light is blurred and the known techniques for both only partially apply. HF, by contrast, is ancient technology. HF emissions can be generated by simple, brute-force means. Ironically, this makes HF a bit difficult: the incredible miniaturization and energy efficiency of modern electronics makes HF radio hard to receive and transmit in a reasonable footprint, one of several reasons that HF radio sees little consumer use.

HF still has a variety of interesting uses, including some new, surprising ones. The signals go beyond the horizon and around the curvature of the Earth due to their interaction with parts of the atmosphere.

Previously:
(2021) The $50 Ham: a Cheap Antenna for the HF Bands
(2020) ARRL Requests Expanded HF Privileges for Technician Licensees

Original Submission