It's the busiest shopping season of the year, but one item that doesn't appear to be flying off store shelves is Meta Platforms's Quest brand of virtual-reality headsets. Part of the reason is that many shoppers aren't comfortable trying one on in a store. From a report: The headsets are prone to collect dirt and grime and smear your makeup. During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, people were especially resistant to put them on in stores, even though Meta paid to have cleaners on hand to sanitize the headsets between each use, said a former Meta employee who wasn't authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified.

The health emergency is over, but many people are still weirded out by the idea of putting on a VR headset in public. Meta sells the Quest in the US through the stores of mobile carriers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. The thinking was, people are already trying out and buying other gadgets there. But picking up a phone that other people have touched feels different than strapping something to your face that other people have strapped to theirs. In-store sales of Quest headsets at mobile carriers' locations are very low, according to former employees of Reality Labs, the division that builds Meta's VR products.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new era of medical discoveries, treatments and cures is on the horizon, researchers say, following the announcement that an unprecedented trove of genetic information is to be made available to scientists. Health researchers from around the world can now apply to study the whole genomes of half a million people enrolled in UK Biobank, a biomedical research project that has compiled detailed health and lifestyle records on individuals since it began 20 years ago. The move on Thursday amounts to the largest number of whole-genome sequences ever released for medical research. The sequences will be used with UK Biobank's records and other data to delve deeply into the genetics of everything -- from people's risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions, to individuals' sleep and exercise patterns.

Researchers believe the new data will allow them to calculate people's individual risk scores for a raft of cancers and other diseases, and so work out who could benefit most from early screening. They should also gain a deeper understanding of serious genetic conditions such as Huntington's and motor neurone disease, which have often been studied in small numbers of severely affected patients. Health experts from academia, the government, industry and charities can apply for access though they have to be approved and study the genomes through a protected database stripped of identifying details such as names, addresses, birth dates, and GP information. "Until 2021 scientists could study only about 1% of the DNA of UK Biobank volunteers -- the fraction that encodes proteins," notes the report. "Since then, whole genomes have been released for 200,000 participants, but work continued to sequence all of the 500,000 volunteers."

"With that number of whole genomes in hand, researchers will be able to find much rarer genes which drive diseases, including those that behave like switches and turn other genes on and off."

Henry Kissinger, a diplomatic powerhouse whose roles as a national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents left an indelible mark on U.S. foreign policy and earned him a controversial Nobel Peace Prize, died on Wednesday at age 100. From a report: Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut, according to a statement from his geopolitical consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. No mention was made of the circumstances. It said he would be interred at a private family service, to be followed at a later date by a public memorial service in New York City. Kissinger had been active past his centenary, attending meetings in the White House, publishing a book on leadership styles, and testifying before a Senate committee about the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. In July 2023 he made a surprise visit to Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

During the 1970s in the midst of the Cold War, he had a hand in many of the epoch-changing global events of the decade while serving as national security adviser and secretary of state under Republican President Richard Nixon. The German-born Jewish refugee's efforts led to the U.S. diplomatic opening with China, landmark U.S.-Soviet arms control talks, expanded ties between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam. Kissinger's reign as the prime architect of U.S. foreign policy waned with Nixon's resignation in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal. Still, he continued to be a diplomatic force as secretary of state under Nixon's successor, President Gerald Ford, and to offer strong opinions throughout the rest of his life.

While many hailed Kissinger for his brilliance and broad experience, others branded him a war criminal for his support for anti-communist dictatorships, especially in Latin America. In his latter years, his travels were circumscribed by efforts by other nations to arrest or question him about past U.S. foreign policy. His 1973 Peace Prize - awarded jointly to North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, who would decline it - was one of the most controversial ever. Two members of the Nobel committee resigned over the selection as questions arose about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia. Further reading: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Who censored Robert De Niro? The "Killers of the Flower Moon" actor was gearing up to slam Donald Trump at Monday's Gotham Awards, but when he took the stage he discovered that the speech he planned to give had been altered at the behest of Apple, the film's producer. The company was responding to feedback from the filmmaking team that wanted the actor's remarks to be centered on the movie, according to a source.

The actor said he had not been informed of the changes, which took out any mention of the former president. De Niro, who was on hand to present "Killers of the Flower Moon" with the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute, criticized the awards show and Apple. "I don't feel like thanking them at all for what they did," he said. "How dare they do that, actually." A revised version of the speech was delivered to the teleprompter less than ten minutes before the event started, according to sources with knowledge of the show. A woman who told the teleprompter operator to upload a new speech was overheard identifying herself as an Apple employee.

Amazon has grabbed the crown of biggest delivery business in the U.S., surpassing both UPS and FedEx in parcel volumes. From a report: The Seattle e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS, after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and it is on track to widen the gap this year, according to internal Amazon data and people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Postal Service is still the biggest parcel service by volume; it handles hundreds of millions of packages for all three companies. A decade ago Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion that it could someday supplant them. Amazon's outsize growth combined with strategy shifts at FedEx and UPS have changed the balance.

Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Last year Amazon shipped 5.2 billion packages. Amazon's figures include only packages that Amazon shipped from beginning to end. UPS and FedEx include packages they hand off to the postal service for final delivery in their tallies. UPS has said that its domestic volume this year is unlikely to exceed last year's 5.3 billion, which includes packages delivered to customers through the postal service. In the first nine months this year, UPS handled around 3.4 billion parcels domestically.

There's yet another technological revolution happening, reports the Los Angeles Times. Bowling alleys across America "are ditching traditional pinsetters — the machines that sweep away and reset pins — in favor of contraptions that employ string.

"Think of the pins as marionettes with nylon cords attached to their heads. Those that fall are lifted out of the way, as if by levitation, then lowered back into place after each frame... European bowling alleys have used string pinsetters for decades because they require less energy and maintenance.

"All you need is someone at the front counter to run back when the strings tangle." String pinsetters mean big savings, maybe salvation, for an industry losing customers to video games and other newfangled entertainment. That is why the U.S. Bowling Congress recently certified them for tournaments and league play. But there is delicate science at play here. Radius of gyration, coefficient of restitution and other obscure forces cause tethered pins to fly around differently than their free-fall counterparts. They don't even make the same noise. Faced with growing pushback, the bowling congress published new research this month claiming the disparity isn't nearly as great as people think.
Using a giant mechanical arm, powered by hydraulics and air pressure, they rolled "thousands of test balls from every angle, with various speeds and spins, on string-equipped lanes," according to the article: They found a configuration that resulted in 7.1% fewer strikes and about 10 pins fewer per game as compared to bowling with traditional pinsetters... Officials subsequently enlisted 500 human bowlers for more testing and, this time, reported finding "no statistically significant difference." But hundreds of test participants commented that bowling on strings felt "off." The pins seemed less active, they said. There were occasional spares whereby one pin toppled another without making contact, simply by crossing strings.

Nothing could be done about the muted sound. It's like hearing a drum roll — the ball charging down the lane — with no crashing cymbal at the end.
Still, one Northern California bowling alley spent $1 million to install the technology, and believes it will save them money — partly by cutting their electric bill in half. "We had a full-time mechanic and were spending up to $3,000 a month on parts."

The article also remembers that once upon a time, bowling alleys reset their pins using pinboys, "actual humans — mostly teenagers... scrambling around behind the lanes, gathering and resetting by hand," before they were replaced by machines after World War II.

A bloc of 48 nations have developed the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), aimed at standardizing reporting requirements for crypto assets to address concerns related to money laundering and tax evasion. It's set to be implemented by 2027. The Register reports: Developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the CARF was developed under the 168-member Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, with the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development looking on approvingly and lending a hand. As the name implies, that Forum is all about sharing data so that each nation's tax authorities have the information they need to understand money movements and make sure they can see what they're allowed to tax. The Forum and the legislative instruments it has fostered include reporting requirements that ensure relevant information is collected by those who facilitate transactions and will be shared.

CARF brings similar reporting requirements to crypto assets. Note the term "crypto assets." That's important, because cryptocurrency is not the only blockchain-based instrument that worries authorities. Some, like non-fungible tokens, rely on the same "greater fool" theory that pumped up cryptocurrency prices, and can attract - ahem - interesting investors. But others are far less contentious or speculative, and instead aim to speed transaction processing. Stablecoins, for example, are often suggested as a means for faster and cheaper cross-border transactions than is possible with dominant transaction processing services. Tokenized assets can also be more easily integrated into applications to ease automated money movements.

That speed and flexibility is increasingly appreciated. But unless transactions made with those instruments can be observed, the potential for their use to evade tax authorities is high. CARF's use of the term "crypto assets" therefore signals an effort to cover the weird world of cryptocurrencies and the emerging classes of classier tokenized assets. The Framework was signed off in March 2023, and in the time since OECD members and other interested nations have been dotting the Is and crossing the Ts to prepare for its implementation. The Framework can be found here.

An anonymous reader writes: Videos collected by 404 Media over months give a peek into the world of spoofing numbers, automated call scripts, and a specific seller of the phones. From the report: "Alright lads," a man sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car says in a heavy British accent. In his left hand he holds a special phone he is showing off to his clients, while with the other he films his demonstration which was later uploaded to Telegram. "I'm only going to say it once, yeah. You swipe, and it's gone," he continues, demonstrating one app installed that can instantly destroy data stored on the device. The phone in question is one from "Russiancoms," an underground outfit that sells the devices for just under $2,000 each. For that price, customers get a laundry list of features: the ability to spoof phone numbers, play hold music, and have a computerized voice read pre-determined scripts. While Russiancoms does not acknowledge in its Telegram channel what the phones might really be for, those are features well suited to committing fraud.

The Russiancoms Telegram channel periodically deletes its videos and other messages, but 404 Media has been archiving many of them for months. They provide insight into a little known industry of fraud phones, ones that make it easy for anyone to enter the world of robocalling or other scams. While much of the underground phone industry has been focused on providing secure communications to criminals -- companies like Phantom Secure, Encrochat, and Sky for example -- Russiancoms and similar companies appear to cater to a different use case: enabling people to make calls that fraudulently appear to come from someone else. A common tool in the underground is also so-called Russian SIMs, which can spoof numbers in some cases. Russiancoms' phones, however, are more fully featured.

Greek economist/politician Yanis Varoufakis "was briefly Greek finance minister in 2015," remembers the Conversation. Now his new book asks the question, "What killed capitalism," with the title's first word providing an answer.

"Techno-feudalism." Varoufakis argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society... "Today, capitalist relations remain intact, but techno-feudalist relations have begun to overtake them," writes Varoufakis. Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become "vassal capitalists". They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of "lords" — the Big Tech companies — who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved — what Varoufakis calls "cloud capital" — and it has displaced "capitalism's two pillars: markets and profits".

Markets have been "replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets". The moment you enter amazon.com "you exit capitalism" and enter something that resembles a "feudal fief": a digital world belonging to one man and his algorithm, which determines what products you will see and what products you won't see. If you are a seller, the platform will determine how you can sell and which customers you can approach. The terms in which you interact, share information and trade are dictated by an "algo" that "works for [Jeff Bezos'] bottom line"...

Access to the "digital fief" comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% "on all their revenues", while Amazon charges its sellers "35% of revenues". This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs' produce because he owns the estate and everything within it.

There is "no disinterested invisible hand of the market" here. The Big Tech platforms are exempted from free-market competition.
And in the meantime, users are unknowingly training their algorithms for them — so "In this interaction, we are all high-tech 'cloud serfs'... [T]he 'cloud capital' we are generating for them all the time increases their capacity to generate yet more wealth, and thus increases their power — something we have only begun to realise." Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech's workers, in contrast, collect "less than 1% of their firms' revenues"... For Varoufakis, we are not just living through a tech revolution, but a tech-driven economic revolution. He challenges us to come to terms with just what has happened to our economies — and our societies — in the era of Big Tech and Big Finance.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Earlier this year, Mozilla acquired Fakespot, a startup that leverages AI and machine learning to identify fake and deceptive product reviews. Now, Mozilla is launching its first LLM (large language model) with the arrival of Fakespot Chat, an AI agent that will help consumers as they shop online by answering questions about the product or even suggesting questions that could be useful in your product research. [...] Fakespot has been using AI, including generative AI technologies, to make the online shopping process more trustworthy, not less. For instance, it launched a generative AI feature called Pros and Cons last year, that could replace the need for reading reviews by writing up its own summaries of a product's positives and negatives. The feature was trained on billions of data points, with the model itself using five different models under its hood, the company said.

This week, Fakespot Chat launched into testing, allowing shoppers to ask an AI chatbot about a product they're considering, similar to how you could ask a salesperson for help if you were shopping in a physical store in the real world. The technology uses AI and machine learning to sort through the product reviews, sorting real from fake, to answer the user's questions. The information from your chat session is saved to improve the experience for others, Mozilla notes, but users don't have to create an account or divulge personal information for the experience to work. The feature is available via the Fakespot Analyzer or it can be used on an Amazon.com product from Fakespot's browser extension. For the former, you'd copy and paste the URL of the product into the analyzer to ask your questions, but if using the browser add-on, the analysis starts automatically. When the analysis is complete, Fakespot Chat appears on the right-hand side of the analysis page alongside other features, like Pros and Cons, as well as Fakespot's Review Grades and Highlights. You can then interrogate the AI agent about the product as you weigh your purchase decisions.

Humane, the startup founded by former Apple design and engineering team Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, has officially launched its long-awaited Ai Pin -- making a splashy foray into the nascent field of artificial intelligence hardware. From a report: The device can magnetically clip onto clothing and will cost $699 with a $24-a-month subscription -- which will come with unlimited data and phone calls. The company also said it would partner with T-Mobile for phone service and Microsoft and OpenAI for AI technology. The device will be available to order starting Nov. 16.

Tech and AI enthusiasts have watched Humane closely after Chaudhri and Bongiorno, husband-and-wife co-founders, started the company in 2018. It has kept most of its work under wraps, with some notable exceptions. In April, Chaudhri gave a demo of the device at a TED Talk. In September, the pin adorned models including Naomi Campbell at Paris Fashion Week. The Humane Ai Pin is meant to eventually be a smartphone replacement. The subscription plan comes with its own phone number, and it doesn't need to be paired with a phone. The device is screenless, and people will interact with it via voice, touchpad, gesture or by holding up objects. It also features a laser projector that can emit text onto the user's hand.

In September, a "bespoke AI nutrition" store opened in beleaguered downtown San Francisco to much fanfare, promising smoothie concoctions generated by AI and a much-needed boost to the area. Less than two months later, it has seemingly closed without explanation. From a report: BetterBlends advertised "Your Smoothie, powered by AI" and received positive press upon its opening, ginning up excitement for a new business and a novel use of artificial intelligence. Its AI model would take customer orders and preferences to generate a smoothie recipe that would then be blended by hand by co-founders Michael Parlato and Clayton Reynolds, who worked in the shop. But now the storefront sits empty. On Friday 20 October, the locked doors to BetterBlends featured a sign that read "temporarily closed," stating the shop would reopen in one hour -- but sources in the neighborhood said the storefront had been closed for more than three weeks.

By the following Monday, the sign had been removed, and the inside of the shop was largely cleared of blenders, fruit, vegetables and other supplies -- anything you might need to make a smoothie, with or without AI. Only a trashcan and a few plants remained. The store's Google Maps listing speaks to both problems in the physical world and its roots in AI. A Google Maps review posted two weeks ago accompanied by a picture of the sign read: "I was hopeful for this business. The owners however did not understand the discipline to run a restaurant. It was often open late and closed early. They changed their hours after a week of being open. And then 1 day they put up a sign, 'Temporarily closed, be back in an hour.' They have not been back in over two weeks."

Other reviews were positive, awarding BetterBlends four or five stars. The shop owners themselves uploaded pictures of their smoothies to the Google Maps page as well as an image of happy customers that bears the hallmarks of generative AI. The light on their smiling faces is soft and glossy like a photoshoot. The fruits in the store window are, on closer inspection, unrecognizable blobs of fruit-colored things. The clear plastic cups are branded with gibberish characters that don't spell anything and filled with lumpy smoothie-ish mixtures. They are cartoonishly large in the customers' hands, one of which has only three too-long fingers. AI image generators have a documented history of failing to produce text within images or realistic human hands.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PFAS stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging -- all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company's PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company's PFAS "Annihilator" in a white shipping container.

The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research. There's good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they're also in us. Humans can't break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they're in my blood and yours -- the majority of Americans,' in fact -- and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that's only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Over at Computers Are Bad, J.B. Crawford [a senior professional services engineer at GitLab] offers a pretty epic takedown of the startup "Cooler Screens", which has replaced the formerly transparent cooler doors at Walgreens and other stores with six-foot, heat-generating 4K resolution digital screen doors that block the view of the merchandise that's behind them to enable IoT "contextual advertising".

"I find myself looking at a Walgreens cooler that just two years ago was covered in clear glass admitting direct inspection of which tall-boy teas were in stock," Crawford writes of his experience. "Today, it's an impenetrable black void. Some Walgreens employee has printed a sheet of paper, 'TEA' in 96-point Cambria, and taped it to the wall above the door...."

While Cooler Screens was first tested by Walgreens in 2018 and backed by Microsoft VC money, Cooler Screens is now suing Walgreens, claiming the pharmacy chain obstructed a nationwide rollout of the technology and demanded its removal from stores. Walgreens said in court documents that technical issues plagued the technology, making it difficult for customers to see what was available inside the coolers, the report said. According to Walgreens, the screens froze or went dark, showed incorrect products or prices, and even sparked and caught fire in some instances. Cooler Screens, on the other hand, blamed what it called Walgreens' aging and poorly maintained electrical and refrigeration infrastructure for the technical difficulties.

Still, Crawford notes that Kroger has announced it's adding Cooler Screens to 500 more of their stores, the result of a three-year pilot that apparently went better than Walgreens. But he isn't buying claims that "90%+ of consumers no longer prefer traditional glass cooler doors," and closes with a final observation, "I am nodding and appropriately chuckling when a stranger says 'remember when you could see through these?' as they fight against retail innovation to purchase one of the products these things were supposed to promote. You cannot say they aren't engaged, in a sense."
Earlier on Slashdot: Shoppers React as Grocers Replace Freezer Doors with Screens Playing Ads.

Amiga Trombone shares a report from Insider: With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term. Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market's growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk. Among those hand-wringing is GM's Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry's most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles. But this week on GM's third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it's abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024. GM doesn't know when it will hit those targets.

While GM's about-face was somewhat of a surprise to investors, the Detroit car company is not alone in this new view of the EV future. Even Tesla's Elon Musk warned on a recent earnings call that economic concerns would lead to waning vehicle demand, even for the long-time EV market leader. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz -- which is having to discount its EVs by several thousand dollars just to get them in customers' hands -- isn't mincing words about the state of the EV market. "This is a pretty brutal space," CFO Harald Wilhelm said on an analyst call. "I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody." "It's clear that we're dealing with a lot of near-term uncertainty," said Barra. "The transition to EVs, that will have ups and downs."
Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said that people are "finally seeing reality" regarding EVs. "I have continued to say what I see as reality," Toyoda, who recently stepped down as Toyota's CEO, said. "There are many ways to climb the mountain that is achieving carbon neutrality," such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids which have long made up a significant share of Toyota's EV sales.

"The reason (hybrids) are so powerful is because they fit the needs of so many customers," Toyota North America's vice president of sales Bob Carter told CNBC last year. "The demand for hybrid has been strong. We expect it to continue to grow as the entire industry transitions over to electrification later this decade."

Apple has introduced a completely new way to interact with the Apple Watch without ever needing to use the touchscreen. It's called Double Tap and it arrives today via the watchOS 10.1 update. The Verge reports: With a quick pinching motion, you can use it to scroll through the new smart stack of widgets in watchOS 10, pause or end timers, skip music tracks, and answer phone calls. It's the sort of feature that you might read about and scoff at -- until you're unloading groceries from your car, hands full, and an important call comes through on your watch. [...] Double tap technically isn't a new gesture so much. In 2021, Apple introduced Assistive Touch, an accessibility feature designed for people with limb differences or mobility issues. The idea was to give these folks a way to navigate through menus and control the Apple Watch without needing a second hand.

On the surface, it can seem like double tap is a rebadged version of Assistive Touch. That's led to understandable confusion as to how the two features differ -- and why double tap isn't available on older Apple Watches that support Assistive Touch (Series 4 or later, including the first-gen SE and Ultra). The short answer is that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 have a more powerful chip. Specifically, the new S9 features four neural engines for machine learning, which is what powers double tap. On older watches, Assistive Touch was run on the main CPU.

But practically speaking, it's easier to see how Assistive Touch and double tap differ once you try using both. [...] Double tap isn't designed to help you navigate anything. The best way I can describe it is Assistive Touch is like the mouse to your computer. It scrolls, it selects, and it's highly programmable. Double tap is more like the double-click portion of using a mouse. You use it solely to perform the main action of an app. And to do that, Apple had to spend a lot of time researching what people wanted or expected a single double tap to do. [...] And, when double tap performs as intended, it does feel a bit like the watch can read my mind. It's genuinely cool to see double tap work with not just my index finger but the rest of them as well. To my surprise, it feels less gimmicky than I expected. But despite Apple's efforts, it doesn't take long to run into double tap's limitations...

At Lenovo Tech World '23 in Austin, Texas, yesterday, Motorola demoed a bendable, bracelet-like smartphone that can wrap around your wrist. Ars Technica reports: On stage at the event, Lexi Valasek, 312 Labs innovation strategy and product research Lead for Motorola Mobility, proudly held a prototype. The smartphone looked ordinary to start: a slab of OLED with a chassis that's a bold orange on the backside. But Valasek quickly bent the phone into an arch shape, where it stood on her hand before she wrapped it around her wrist like a cuff. The phone seemed to adapt to its new positioning rapidly, quickly showing a large clock, making the device feel like a smartwatch.

Interestingly, Valasek placed the phone around a silver band already wrapped around her wrist. Lenovo hasn't confirmed why, but The Verge suspects this could be critical to the phone being wearable by featuring a magnet for a secure hold. Videos Motorola shared with its press release today also show the user wearing some sort of metal-looking band on their wrist that the smartphone wraps around. And images of the device show a metal-looking strip that might be for connecting to the additional band in question.

According to Motorola's press release, the concept device has "FHD+" resolution across the display, which has a 6.9-inch diagonal size when flat. Also when flat, the device runs the "full Android experience, just like any smartphone," according to Motorola. The concept shown this week differs slightly from the concept demoed at Lenovo Tech World '16 in that it can be arched or bent into an upright position. [...] But beyond that, Motorola doesn't seem any closer to releasing the design.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the "worst connected city in the U.S." thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn't really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don't have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else. Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment "redlining," but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

Last week I spent some time talking to Cleveland city leaders and local activists about their plan to do something about it. On one hand, they've doled out $20 million in COVID relief broadband funding to local non-profit DigitalC to deliver fixed wireless broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps for as little as $18. On the other hand, they've convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs. [...]

Local activists like DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds tell me they hope the project teaches U.S. towns and cities that there are alternatives to being feckless supplicants to regional telecom mono/duopolies: "This is a major victory, and I hope that people don't look at it as just a major victory for Cleveland. Every city where there's a prevalent digital divide, where there's political will and ability to execute, people should be paying close attention to what happens in Cleveland, paying close attention to how DigitalC was able to fight and navigate with our coalition of stakeholders."

A Harvard professor on the history of science looks at our response to the pandemic, criticizing "a report that gave the false impression that masking didn't help." From Scientific American: The group's report was published by Cochrane, an organization that collects databases and periodically issues "systematic" reviews of scientific evidence relevant to health care. This year it published a paper addressing the efficacy of physical interventions to slow the spread of respiratory illness such as COVID... The review of studies of masking concluded that the "results were inconclusive..." [and] it was "uncertain whether wearing [surgical] masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses." Still, the authors were also uncertain about that uncertainty, stating that their confidence in their conclusion was "low to moderate." You can see why the average person could be confused... The Cochrane finding was not that masking didn't work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked...

Cochrane has made this mistake before. In 2016 a flurry of media reports declared that flossing your teeth was a waste of time... The answer demonstrates a third issue with the Cochrane approach: how it defines evidence. The organization states that its reviews "identify, appraise and synthesize all the empirical evidence that meets pre-specified eligibility criteria." The problem is what those eligibility criteria are. Cochrane Reviews base their findings on randomized controlled trials (RCTs), often called the "gold standard" of scientific evidence. But many questions can't be answered well with RCTs, and some can't be answered at all...

In fact, there is strong evidence that masks do work to prevent the spread of respiratory illness. It just doesn't come from RCTs. It comes from Kansas. In July 2020 the governor of Kansas issued an executive order requiring masks in public places. Just a few weeks earlier, however, the legislature had passed a bill authorizing counties to opt out of any statewide provision. In the months that followed, COVID rates decreased in all 24 counties with mask mandates and continued to increase in 81 other counties that opted out of them... Cochrane ignored this epidemiological evidence because it didn't meet its rigid standard.

I have called this approach "methodological fetishism," when scientists fixate on a preferred methodology and dismiss studies that don't follow it. Sadly, it's not unique to Cochrane. By dogmatically insisting on a particular definition of rigor, scientists in the past have landed on wrong answers more than once.
Vox also points out that while Cochrane's review included 78 studies, "only six were actually conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic... Instead, most of them looked at flu transmission in normal conditions, and many of them were about other interventions like hand-washing.

"Only two of the studies are about Covid and masking in particular. Furthermore, neither of those studies looked directly at whether people wear masks, but instead at whether people were encouraged or told to wear masks by researchers."

Nvidia Research announced today that it has developed a new AI agent, called Eureka, that is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 and can autonomously teach robots complex skills. From a report: In a blog post, the company said Eureka, which autonomously writes reward algorithms, has, for the first time, trained a robotic hand to perform rapid pen-spinning tricks as well as a human can. Eureka has also taught robots to open drawers and cabinets, toss and catch balls, and manipulate scissors, among nearly 30 tasks.

"Reinforcement learning has enabled impressive wins over the last decade, yet many challenges still exist, such as reward design, which remains a trial-and-error process," Anima Anandkumar, senior director of AI research at Nvidia and an author of the Eureka paper, said in the blog post. "Eureka is a first step toward developing new algorithms that integrate generative and reinforcement learning methods to solve hard tasks."