American Airlines has committed to making pre-delivery payments for 50 Vertical Aerospace VX4 electric VTOL aircraft. The Register reports: The commitment [PDF] comes just over a year after the aviation giant made a pre-order for 250 of the flying taxis, with an option for a further 100. Vertical Aerospace claims its VX4 will be 100x quieter than a helicopter and have a top speed of 202mph. Its range will be at least 100 miles and it can carry five people (including the pilot). Being electric, the aircraft will also have zero operating emissions, the company said.

In a recent letter to shareholders [PDF], Vertical Aerospace boasted that the prototype VX4 was nearly complete and would be kicking off its flight test program in the summer of 2022. It also talked up its pre-order book, which stands at up to 1,350 aircraft with a value of $5.4 billion, according to the company. However, it is the move by American Airlines to reserve its first 50 aircraft with a pre-delivery payment commitment that makes a fleet of eVTOL aircraft seem closer to reality than science fiction. The report notes that the VX4 still needs to be certified by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), and US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA).

Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It's nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost. This is what happened in June to a Chinese novelist writing under the alias Mitu. From a report: She had been working with WPS, a domestic version of cloud-based word processing software such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. In the Chinese literature forum Lkong on June 25, Mitu accused WPS of "spying on and locking my draft," citing the presence of illegal content.

The news blew up on social media on July 11 after a few prominent influencer accounts belatedly picked it up. It became the top trending topic on Weibo that day, with users questioning whether WPS is infringing on their privacy. Since then, The Economic Observer, a Chinese publication, has reported that several other online novelists have had their drafts locked for unclear reasons in the past. Mitu's complaint triggered a social media discussion in China about censorship and tech platform responsibility. It has also highlighted the tension between Chinese users' increasing awareness of privacy and tech companies' obligation to censor on behalf of the government. "This is a case where perhaps we are seeing that these two things indeed might collide," says Tom Nunlist, an analyst on China's cyber and data policy at the Beijing-based research group Trivium China.

On July 7th Art News explained how 95-year-old Austrian artist Herbert W. Franke "has recently become a sensation within the art world the crypto space," describing the digital pioneer as a computer artist using algorithms and computer programs to visualize math as art. Last month, the physicist and science fiction writer was behind one of the most talked about digital artworks at a booth by the blockchain company Tezos at Art Basel. Titled MONDRIAN (1979), the work paid tribute to artist Piet Mondrian's iconic geometric visuals using a program written on one of the first home computers.

Days before this, Franke, who studied physics in Vienna following World War II and started working at Siemens in 1953, where he conducted photographic experiments after office hours, launched 100 images from his famed series "Math Art" (1980-95) as NFTs on the Quantum platform. The drop was meant to commemorate his birthday on May 14 and to raise funds for his foundation. The NFTs sold out in 30 seconds, with the likes of pioneering blockchain artist Kevin Abosch purchasing a few.
In one of his last interviews, Franke told the site that blockchain "is a totally new environment, and this technology is still in its early stages, like at the beginning of computer art. But I am convinced that it has opened a new door for digital art and introduced the next generation to this new technology." It echoed something he'd said in his first book, published in 1957, which he later quoted in the interview (a full 65 years later). "Technology is usually dismissed as an element hostile to art. I want to try to prove that it is not..."

This morning, long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino wrote: The German IT news site heise reports (article in German) that digital art pioneer, SF author ("The Mind Net") and cyberspace avantgardist Herbert W. Franke has died at age 95. His wife recounted on his Twitter account: "Herbert loved to call himself the dinosaur of computer art. I am [...] devastated to announce that our beloved dinosaur has left the earth.

"He passed away knowing there is a community of artists and art enthusiasts deeply caring about his art and legacy." Among much pioneering work he founded one of the worlds first digital art festivals "Ars Electronica" in Austria in 1979.
Franke's wife is still running the Art Meets Science web site dedicated to Franke's work. Some highlights from its biography of Franke's life: Herbert W. Franke, born in Vienna on May 14, 1927, studied physics and philosophy at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1951... An Apple II was his first personal computer which he bought 1980. He developed a program as early as 1982 that used a midi interface to control moving image sequences through music....

Only in recent years has "art from the machine" begun to interest traditional museums as a branch of modern art. Franke, who from the beginning was firmly convinced of the future importance of this art movement, has also assembled a collection of computer graphics that is unique in the world, documenting 50 years of this development with works by respected international artists, supplemented by his own works....

As a physicist, Franke was predestined to bring science and technology closer to the general public in popular form due to his talent as a writer, which became apparent early on. About one-third of his nearly fifty books, as well as uncounted journal articles...

Franke's novels and stories are not about predicting future technologies, nor about forecasting our future way of life, but rather about the intellectual examination of possible models of our future and their philosophical as well as ethical interpretation. In this context, however, Franke attaches great importance to the seriousness of scientific or technological assessments of the future in the sense of a feasibility analysis. In his opinion, a serious and meaningful discussion about future developments can basically only be conducted on this basis. In this respect, Franke is not a typical representative of science fiction, but rather a visionary who, as a novelist, deals with relevant questions of social future and human destiny on a high intellectual level.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library and a massive repository of online artifacts, has been collecting mementos of the ever-expanding World Wide Web for over two decades, allowing users to revisit sites that have since been changed or deleted. But like the web, it too has evolved since its genesis, and in the aughts, it also began to offer a selection of ebooks that any internet user can check out with the creation of a free account. That latter feature has gotten the organization in some trouble. Internet Archive was sued by a suite of four corporate publishers in 2020 over copyright controversies -- with one side saying that what Internet Archive does is preservation, and the other saying that it's piracy, since it freely distributes books as image files without compensating the author. Last week, the ongoing case entered a new chapter as the nonprofit organization filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to put a stop to the lawsuit, arguing that their Controlled Digital Lending program "is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world" since "each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for." On Friday, Creative Commons issued a statement supporting Internet Archive's motion.

In 2006, Internet Archive started a program for digitizing books both under copyright and in the public domain. It works with a range of global partners, including other libraries, to scan materials onto its site (Cornell University made a handy guide on what works fall under copyright vs. the public domain). For copyrighted books, Internet Archive owns the physical books that they created the digital copies from and limits their circulation by allowing only one person to borrow a title at a time. Book publishers, namely Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley Sons, and Penguin Random House, were not keen on this practice, and they have been seeking financial damages for the 127 books (PDF) shared under copyright. Vox estimated that if the publishers win, Internet Archive would have to pay $19 million, which is about "one year of operating revenue."

In the most recent filings, the publishers accused Internet Archive of amassing "a collection of more than three million unauthorized in-copyright ebooks -- including more than 33,000 of the Publishers' commercially available titles -- without obtaining licenses to do so or paying the rightsholders a cent for exploiting their works. Anybody in the world with an internet connection can instantaneously access these stolen works via IA's interrelated archive.org and openlibrary.org websites." In its defense, Internet Archive, which is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that "libraries have been practicing CDL in one form or another for more than a decade," and that Internet Archive lends its digitized books on an "owned-to-loaned basis, backstopped by strong technical protections to enforce lending limits."

An anonymous reader writes: Posing as a scholar, a Chinese woman spent years writing alternative accounts of medieval Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, conjuring imaginary states, battles, and aristocrats in one of the largest hoaxes on the open-source platform. The scam was exposed last month by Chinese novelist Yifan, who was researching for a book when he came upon an article on the Kashin silver mine. Discovered by Russian peasants in 1344, the Wikipedia entry goes, the mine engaged more than 40,000 slaves and freedmen, providing a remarkable source of wealth for the Russian principality of Tver in the 14th and 15th centuries as well as subsequent regimes. The geological composition of the soil, the structure of the mine, and even the refining process were fleshed out in detail in the entry.

Yifan thought he'd found interesting material for a novel. Little did he know he'd stumbled upon an entire fictitious world constructed by a user known as Zhemao. It was one of 206 articles she has written on Chinese Wikipedia since 2019, weaving facts into fiction in an elaborate scheme that went uncaught for years and tested the limits of crowdsourced platforms' ability to verify information and fend off bad actors. "The content she wrote is of high quality and the entries were interconnected, creating a system that can exist on its own," veteran Chinese Wikipedian John Yip told VICE World News. "Zhemao single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia."

Yifan was tipped off when he ran the silver mine story by Russian speakers and fact-checked Zhemao's references, only to find that the pages or versions of the books she cited did not exist. People he consulted also called out her lengthy entries on ancient conflicts between Slavic states, which could not be found in Russian historical records. "They were so rich in details they put English and Russian Wikipedia to shame," Yifan wrote on Zhihu, a Chinese site similar to Quora, where he shared his discovery last month and caused a stir. The scale of the scam came to light after a group of volunteer editors and other Wikipedians, such as Yip, combed through her past contributions to nearly 300 articles. "As a punishment, Zhemao and her affiliated accounts were suspended permanently," adds VICE World News. "Most of her articles were deleted based on community consensus. Some Wikipedians even wrote to experts, seeking help to separate the wheat from the chaff." A spokesperson of the Wikimedia Foundation told VICE World News in an email that volunteers are still "continuing to review additional articles that may have been affected."

The report goes on to say that Zhemao speaks neither English nor Russian and is a housewife with only a high school degree. She came clean in an apology letter issued on her Wikipedia account last month. "The hoax started with an innocuous intention," reports VICE. "Unable to comprehend scholarly articles in their original language, she pieced sentences together with a translation tool and filled in the blanks with her own imagination. [...] Before long, they had accumulated into tens of thousands of characters, which she was reluctant to delete."

"The alternative accounts were imaginary friends she 'cosplayed' as she was bored and alone, given her husband was away most of the time and she didn't have any friends. She also apologized to actual experts on Russia, whom she had attempted to cozy up to and later impersonated."

93-year-old Peter Higgs was awarded a Nobel Prize nine years ago after the Large Hadron Collider experiments finally confirmed of the existence Higgs boson particles he'd predicted back in 1964. "This discovery was a seminal moment in human culture," says physicist Frank Close, who's written the new book Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass .

But Scientific American reports there's more to the story: For years, the significance of the prediction was lost on most scientists, including Higgs himself. But gradually it became clear that the Higgs boson was not just an exotic sideshow in the particle circus but rather the main event. The particle and its associated Higgs field turned out to be responsible for giving all other particles mass and, in turn, creating the structure of galaxies, stars and planets that define our universe and enable our species... Yet the finding, however scientifically thrilling, pushed a press-shy Peter Higgs into the public eye. When he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics the next year, Higgs left his home in Edinburgh and camped out at a pub across town on the day of the announcement so the prize committee wouldn't be able to reach him.
Physicist Close shares more details in an interview with Scientific American: Close: One of the biggest shocks I had when I was interviewing him was when he said the discovery of the boson "ruined [his] life." I thought, "How can it ruin your life when you have done some beautiful mathematics, and then it turns out you had mysteriously touched on the pulse of nature, and everything you've believed in has been shown to be correct, and you've won a Nobel Prize? How can these things amount to ruin?" He said, "My relatively peaceful existence was ending. My style is to work in isolation and occasionally have a bright idea." He is a very retiring person who was being thrust into the limelight.

That, to my mind, is why Peter Higgs the person is still elusive to me even though I've known him for 40 years...

Higgs had spent two to three years really trying to understand a particular problem. And because he had done that hard work and was still trying to deepen his understanding of this very profound concept, when a paper turned up on his desk posing a related question, Higgs happened to have the answer because of the work he'd done. He sometimes says, "I'm primarily known for three weeks of my life." I say, "Yes, Peter, but you spent two years preparing for that moment."

Q: The discovery of the Higgs boson came nearly 50 years after Higgs's prediction, and he said he never expected it to be found in his lifetime. What did it mean to him that the particle was finally detected?

He said to me that his first reaction was one of relief that it was indeed confirmed. At that moment he knew [the particle existed] after all, and he felt a profound sense of being moved that that was really the way it was in nature — and then panic that his life was going to change.

slack_justyb writes: Thunderbird 102 has been released with some new UI improvements and new features. There has been a change in the icons, the layout of the address book has been upgraded to feature a more modern UI, and a new UI feature known as the spaces toolbar to get around Thunderbird. New features include an updated import and export wizard, a UI for editing the email header settings, and Matrix client support within Thunderbird, which is a messaging system using HTTPS that is similar to Discord if you've used that.

Finally, the Thunderbird Twitter account released the first screenshot of the new UI that is being targeted for the 114 release. For those wondering what the Thunderbird team has done and is doing, you can always head over to the planning section of the developer site. The roadmap are things they're working on the current release and the backlog are the things they are working towards.

Airbnb on Tuesday announced a global ban on parties, following a temporary restriction it put in place two years ago. CNBC reports: The company is permanently banning "disruptive parties and events," which include open-invite gatherings. "Party houses," which people book to throw a large event for just one night, will stay banned as well. Airbnb placed a ban on party houses and rolled out several safety features in 2019 after five people were killed in a shooting at one of its bookings. In 2020, the company instituted a global ban on all parties as the pandemic hit.

Airbnb said that since it implemented its policy in August 2020, it has seen a 44% year-over-year drop in the rate of party reports. "The temporary ban has proved effective, and today we are officially codifying the ban as our policy," the company said in a blog post. Airbnb said guests who attempt to violate its rules will face consequences varying from account suspension to full removal from the platform. In 2021, for example, more than 6,600 guests were suspended from Airbnb for violating its party ban.

Google is warning of a sophisticated new spyware campaign that has seen malicious actors steal sensitive data from Android and iOS users in Italy and Kazakhstan. Engadget reports: On Thursday, the company's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) shared its findings on RCS Labs, a commercial spyware vendor based out of Italy. On June 16th, security researchers at Lookout linked the firm to Hermit, a spyware program believed to have been first deployed in 2019 by Italian authorities as part of an anti-corruption operation. Lookout describes RCS Labs as an NSO Group-like entity. The firm markets itself as a "lawful intercept" business and claims it only works with government agencies. However, commercial spyware vendors have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, largely thanks to governments using the Pegasus spyware to target activists and journalists.

According to Google, Hermit can infect both Android and iOS devices. In some instances, the company's researchers observed malicious actors work with their target's internet service provider to disable their data connection. They would then send the target an SMS message with a prompt to download the linked software to restore their internet connection. If that wasn't an option, the bad actors attempted to disguise the spyware as a legitimate messaging app like WhatsApp or Instagram.

What makes Hermit particularly dangerous is that it can gain additional capabilities by downloading modules from a command and control server. Some of the addons Lookout observed allowed the program to steal data from the target's calendar and address book apps, as well as take pictures with their phone's camera. One module even gave the spyware the capability to root an Android device. Google believes Hermit never made its way to the Play or App stores. However, the company found evidence that bad actors were able to distribute the spyware on iOS by enrolling in Apple's Developer Enterprise Program. Apple told The Verge that it has since blocked any accounts or certificates associated with the threat. Meanwhile, Google has notified affected users and rolled out an update to Google Play Protect.

Aiming to produce environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic food wrap and containers, a Rutgers scientist has developed a biodegradable, plant-based coating that can be sprayed on foods, guarding against pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms and transportation damage. From a report: Their article, published in the science journal Nature Food, describes the new kind of packaging technology using the polysaccharide/biopolymer-based fibers. Like the webs cast by the Marvel comic book character Spider-Man, the stringy material can be spun from a heating device that resembles a hair dryer and "shrink-wrapped" over foods of various shapes and sizes, such as an avocado or a sirloin steak. The resulting material that encases food products is sturdy enough to protect bruising and contains antimicrobial agents to fight spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms such as E. coli and listeria.

The research paper includes a description of the technology called focused rotary jet spinning, a process by which the biopolymer is produced, and quantitative assessments showing the coating extended the shelf life of avocados by 50 percent. The coating can be rinsed off with water and degrades in soil within three days, according to the study. [...] The paper describes how the new fibers encapsulating the food are laced with naturally occurring antimicrobial ingredients -- thyme oil, citric acid and nisin. Researchers in the Demokritou research team can program such smart materials to act as sensors, activating and destroying bacterial strains to ensure food will arrive untainted. This will address growing concern over food-borne illnesses as well as lower the incidence of food spoilage [...].

Social media has made us "uniquely stupid," believes Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University's School of Business. Writing in the Atlantic in April, Haidt argued that large social media platforms "unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together."

But is that true? "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media," notes Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan (quoted this month in a new article in the New Yorker).

The article describes how Haidt tried to confirm his theories in November with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and author of the book "Breaking the Social Media Prism." The two compiled a Google Doc collecting every scholarly study of social media — but many of the studies seemed to contradict each other: When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

"A lot of the stories out there are just wrong," he told me. "The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it's three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber." Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks — in the original use of the term — are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren't as widespread a problem as he'd once imagined....)

[A]t least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news — "probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn't change their opinions," Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. "In fact," he said, "echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation."

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the "proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization," by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels — a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification — or encountered via links from external sites. It's easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. "These are the three stories — echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms — but, when you look at the literature, they've all been overstated." He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, "Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm" — or, presumably, the reverse — "and it's just not going to happen."
Nyhan also tells the New Yorker that "The most credible research is way out of line with the takes," adding, for example, that while studies may find polarization on social media, "That might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!" He hastened to add, "Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area." He told me, "It's hard to weigh in on the side of 'We don't know, the evidence is weak,' because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain...."

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism... He added, "There's some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds" — streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation — "people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it's another case where a very simple notion of 'algorithms are bad' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't mean they're good, it's just that we don't know."

"A Google software engineer was suspended after going public with his claims of encountering 'sentient' artificial intelligence on the company's servers," writes Bloomberg, "spurring a debate about how and whether AI can achieve consciousness."

"Researchers say it's an unfortunate distraction from more pressing issues in the industry." Google put him on leave for sharing confidential information and said his concerns had no basis in fact — a view widely held in the AI community. What's more important, researchers say, is addressing issues like whether AI can engender real-world harm and prejudice, whether actual humans are exploited in the training of AI, and how the major technology companies act as gatekeepers of the development of the tech.

Lemoine's stance may also make it easier for tech companies to abdicate responsibility for AI-driven decisions, said Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. "Lots of effort has been put into this sideshow," she said. "The problem is, the more this technology gets sold as artificial intelligence — let alone something sentient — the more people are willing to go along with AI systems" that can cause real-world harm. Bender pointed to examples in job hiring and grading students, which can carry embedded prejudice depending on what data sets were used to train the AI. If the focus is on the system's apparent sentience, Bender said, it creates a distance from the AI creators' direct responsibility for any flaws or biases in the programs....

"Instead of discussing the harms of these companies," such as sexism, racism and centralization of power created by these AI systems, everyone "spent the whole weekend discussing sentience," Timnit Gebru, formerly co-lead of Google's ethical AI group, said on Twitter. "Derailing mission accomplished."
The Washington Post seems to share their concern. First they report more skepticism about a Google engineer's claim that the company's LaMDA chatbot-building system had achieved sentience. "Both Google and outside experts on AI say that the program does not, and could not possibly, possess anything like the inner life he imagines. We don't need to worry about LaMDA turning into Skynet, the malevolent machine mind from the Terminator movies, anytime soon.

But the Post adds that "there is cause for a different set of worries, now that we live in the world Turing predicted: one in which computer programs are advanced enough that they can seem to people to possess agency of their own, even if they actually don't...." While Google has distanced itself from Lemoine's claims, it and other industry leaders have at other times celebrated their systems' ability to trick people, as Jeremy Kahn pointed out this week in his Fortune newsletter, "Eye on A.I." At a public event in 2018, for instance, the company proudly played recordings of a voice assistant called Duplex, complete with verbal tics like "umm" and "mm-hm," that fooled receptionists into thinking it was a human when it called to book appointments. (After a backlash, Google promised the system would identify itself as automated.)

"The Turing Test's most troubling legacy is an ethical one: The test is fundamentally about deception," Kahn wrote. "And here the test's impact on the field has been very real and disturbing." Kahn reiterated a call, often voiced by AI critics and commentators, to retire the Turing test and move on. Of course, the industry already has, in the sense that it has replaced the Imitation Game with more scientific benchmarks.

But the Lemoine story suggests that perhaps the Turing test could serve a different purpose in an era when machines are increasingly adept at sounding human. Rather than being an aspirational standard, the Turing test should serve as an ethical red flag: Any system capable of passing it carries the danger of deceiving people.

Disneyland's Galaxy's Edge, aka "Star Wars Land," lets its visitors "immersively" experience the planet Batuu during the period between Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi and Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker. But there's some big changes coming, reports SFGate.com: Disney recently announced — at the "From a Galaxy Far, Far Away to Disney Park Near You" panel at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim 2022 event — that main characters from the immensely popular Disney Plus series "The Book of Boba Fett" and "The Mandalorian" would begin appearing at Disneyland.

Yes, including the universally adored, merchandise and meme-dominating Grogu, aka "Baby Yoda."

However, there is one sarlacc-sized snag: Those stories are set about five years after Return of the Jedi, and about 25 years before The Force Awakens, which raises a galaxy of questions about how this will impact Galaxy's Edge. The introduction of new characters into the attraction will either break the timeline of Star Wars land or, perhaps, unburden it from self-imposed shackles. This could be a good thing, the article suggests, since "Currently there is frankly not a lot of character interaction on Batuu." Kylo Ren pops in on occasion to interrogate guests, and some stormtroopers march around. Rey and Chewie pose for pics, R2-D2 wheels around, and Vi randomly shows up. But that's about it. There is no BB-8 or C-3PO, no Poe or Finn walking around, no Captain Phasma (who died in "The Last Jedi"). The cast members do their part to speak the local lingo of "bright suns" and "till the spire," but Black Spire Outpost feels somewhat unpopulated. It looks and feels like a Star Wars town, but lacks true full immersion. Oga's Cantina does feel lived in, and always crowded, but the closest immersive experience is Savi's Workshop, where building a lightsaber is a damn near religious experience, complete with the Force ghost voice of Yoda.

So how would new characters impact this? If Mando appears at Galaxy's Edge, are guests to assume he (and Grogu) are still bouncing about by the time of the sequel series...? The town of Black Spire Outpost might come to resemble Fantasyland, for instance, where multiple characters occupy their own zones and don't intersect...

Regardless, this change further populates Galaxy's Edge, which is good for the guest who wants to take a lot of character photos. It also allows Disney to roll out their most popular modern characters, and potentially open the door for them to showcase original trilogy and prequel trilogy characters (which are having a moment right now).

But it does create major story hiccups.

Music streaming giant Spotify has revealed that it's intending to make a big splash in the audiobooks business. Trusted Reviews reports: At the company's Investor Day 2022, CEO Daniel Ek revealed that the company would be branching out into audiobooks following its successful music and podcast offerings. Several months ago, Spotify announced its agreement to acquire audiobook distribution platform Findaway, which was a surefire indicator that it was thinking big in this area. Whie that deal has yet to close, Ek has confirmed that he sees audiobooks as "a massive opportunity."

The overall book market today is worth $140 billion, yet audiobooks only represent 6 to 7% of that. In the most developed audiobook markets that figure is closer to 50%, so Spotify as seeing this as a potential $70 billion market that it's going to compete with Amazon and its Audible platform for. Spotify revealed that it's planning to relaunch the audiobook arm of its streaming service later this year. As this suggests, you can already access audiobooks through Spotify, but it's not a particularly well fleshed out offering, and it's not easily accessible. No specifics were mentioned on the pricing of this audiobook offering.

Thane Gustafson is a longtime specialist on Russian energy — and even before Russia invaded Ukraine, he'd pulled together some startling predictions for his new book. The New York Review of Books looks at Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change: About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round. As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break. Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds. Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods. The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.... As burning, dying, clear-cut forests become carbon producers rather than carbon sinks, they make the problem of climate change even worse. The same is true of melting permafrost, which releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion....

[T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts...

As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate.

Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse.
"Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website.

"Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."

Amazon will shut its Chinese ebook store next year, pulling a small but prominent business from a market where it's failed to make major inroads against local rivals. From a report: The e-commerce giant will discontinue the Kindle eBook store on June 30, 2023, a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. It promised to continue supporting Kindle readers or refund any device purchases made after January this year.

In early 2020, the distant supergiant star, 700 light-years away known as Betelgeuse experienced an odd uneven dimming, leaving the astronomy community scrambling to explain what happened. In a new study recently published in the journal Nature, a trio of astronomers managed to confirm some of the earlier explanations thanks to a Japanese weather satellite, Himawari-8, which had Betelgeuse lurking in the background of its images. CNET reports: Himawari-8 is, as the name suggests, the eighth version of the Himawari satellite operated by Japan's Meteorological Agency. It operates in geostationary orbit, at a distance of 22,236 miles above the equator. This is more than 90 times further away than the International Space Station. From that position, the satellite snaps optical and infrared images of the whole Earth once every 10 minutes, predominantly to help forecast the weather across Asia and the Western Pacific. For instance, it snapped a ton of images of the Tongan volcano eruption that occurred on Jan. 15. However, looking through images stretching back to 2017, the trio of Japanese researchers went looking for a pinprick of light that would be Betelgeuse, lurking in space behind our brilliant blue and green marble. They found it.

Studying that pinprick of light, the researchers came to the same conclusion as their predecessors: Betelgeuse dimmed because of both dust and some natural variability in its light. That's not all that exciting, but it's good confirmation we're all on the right track, and it's exactly what the process of science is all about. What is intriguing is the fact a weather satellite was able to provide this data in the first place. It could be a big deal for astronomers. Building and launching new space telescopes isn't a cheap or easy endeavor and you have to book yourself a rocket. But... there are already satellites orbiting the Earth that might be able to do a similar job.

Some resort owners think they have found a way to avoid getting stuck with excess inventory when guests cancel at the last minute. It involves converting room nights for sale into nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, that can be bought or sold by hotel guests, similar to the StubHub market for concert and sporting event tickets. From a report: Owners say this ensures they get paid for the rooms because guests would sell their reservation in the market if they decide not to go, and appeal to the crypto-enthusiastic traveler. "We can reach another consumer that maybe isn't booking through traditional means," said Jason Kycek, senior vice president with Casa de Campo Resort & Villas, a Dominican Republic resort, who is planning to soon begin booking rooms with NFTs.

Casa de Campo has signed with the startup Pinktada, which recently launched a booking system that includes hotels in the Caribbean, Mexico, San Francisco and Hawaii. Hotel guests can reserve rooms at those properties by buying NFTs through Pinktada. By using this system, guests can book a room at a discount to what the hotel would charge for a refundable reservation. The sale is final from the point of view of hotel owners, so their revenue is guaranteed whether or not the room is used. If travelers change plans, they can use the tokens for other Pinktada hotels or sell them to another traveler in the Pinktada network. Pinktada (the name is a reference to a type of pearl oyster) promises to be the buyer-of-last resort if another traveler doesn't buy it.

"We do not need to plunge headlong into a nuclear future," argues Serhii Plokhy, author of the book Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima.

He notes Belgium's adding a 10-year extension to the life of two of its nuclear reactors, France's program to build 14 new reactors, and Boris Johnson's pledge to create supply 25% of the UKs power needs with nuclear energy by 2050. On the surface, the switch to nuclear makes sense. It would not only enable European countries to meet their ambitious net zero targets, since it produces no CO2. It would also make them less vulnerable to Russian threats, and allow them to stop financing the Russian war machine....

What the Russian takeover of [Ukraine] nuclear facilities exposed is a hazard inherent in all nuclear power. In order for this method of producing electricity to be safe, everything else in society has to be functioning perfectly. Warfare, economic collapse, climate change itself — all of these increasingly real risks make nuclear sites potentially perilous places. Even without them, the dangers of atomic fission remain, and we must ask ourselves: are they really worth the cost...?

Technological developments, growing international cooperation and rising safety standards did indeed do a great deal to ensure that no major nuclear accident occurred for 25 years after Chernobyl. But the Fukushima explosions demonstrated that such improvements have not eradicated the dangers surrounding nuclear power plants.... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates's TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors "accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics" must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack.

There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations.

This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Fuel from nuclear power plants will present a threat to human life and the environment for generations to come, with the half-life of some radioactive particles measured in tens of thousands of years.... Nuclear power plants generally have no alternative to storing their high-level radioactive waste on site....If what we bury today in the New Mexico desert — the waste created by our nuclear ambitions — is so repulsive to us, why do we pass it on to others to deal with?
The author's counter-proposal: expanding the use of renewable energy: New research should be encouraged, grid infrastructure should be built up, and storage capacity increased. Billions that would otherwise go to new nuclear infrastructure, with all the attendant costs of cleanup that continue for decades and beyond, should be pumped instead into clean energy.

In the meantime, we obviously have an existing nuclear industry, and the solution is not to run away in panic, but to take good care of the facilities that already dot our countryside. We must not abandon the industry to its current state of economic hardship, as that would only mean inviting the next accident sooner rather than later.

Offering a sneak preview of the Pixel 7 wasn't enough, so Google's really leaning in. Today at I/O, the company announced that it's returning to the tablet business with a new device set for, get this, a 2023 launch. From a report: "Normally we wouldn't tease a new product before it's ready," said Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh, "but there's so much amazing energy around tablets in the developer community that we wanted to bring you all into the loop." The Pixel Tablet is going to be something of a spiritual successor to 2018's Pixel Slate, which the company quietly discontinued last year. Like the Pixel Book, the hardware was nice, but in a world full of super cheap Chromebooks, Google never really nailed the "why."