California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law giving the California Energy Commission the authority to require bidirectional charging in electric vehicles (EVs) in the future -- although no timeline is set. Bidirectional charging allows EVs to not only charge from the grid but also supply electricity back to the grid, potentially enhancing grid resiliency, supporting renewable energy, and reducing peak electricity demand. Electrek reports: The idea started in 2023 when state Senator Nancy Skinner introduced a bill which would require EVs to have bidirectional charging by 2027. As this bill made its way through the legislative process, it got watered down from that ambitious timeline. So the current form of the bill, which is now called SB 59, took away that timeline and instead gave the California Energy Commission (CEC) the go-ahead to issue a requirement whenever they see it fit. The bill directs the CEC, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Public Utilities Commission to examine the use cases of bidirectional charging and give them the power to require specific weight classes of EVs to be bidirectional-capable if a compelling use case exists.

The state already estimates that integrating EVs into the grid could save $1 billion in costs annually, so there's definitely a use case there, but the question is the cost and immediacy of building those vehicles into the grid. The reason this can't be done immediately is that cars take time to design, and while adding bidirectional charging to an EV isn't the most difficult process, it also only really becomes useful with a whole ecosystem of services around the vehicle.

And that ecosystem has been a bit of a hard sell so far. It's all well and good to tell someone they can make $500/year by selling energy to the grid, but then you have to convince them to buy a more expensive charging unit and keep their car plugged in all the time, with someone else managing its energy storage. Some consumers might push back against that, so part of CEC's job is to wait to pull the trigger until it becomes apparent that people are actually interested in the end-user use case for V2G -- otherwise, no sense in requiring a feature that nobody is going to use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired, written by Guthrie Scrimgeour: It always seemed difficult for the newspaper where I used to work, The Garden Island on the rural Hawaiian island of Kauai, to hire reporters. If someone left, it could take months before we hired a replacement, if we ever did. So, last Thursday, I was happy to see that the paper appeared to have hired two new journalists -- even if they seemed a little off. In a spacious studio overlooking a tropical beach, James, a middle-aged Asian man who appears to be unable to blink, and Rose, a younger redhead who struggles to pronounce words like "Hanalei" and "TV," presented their first news broadcast, over pulsing music that reminds me of the Challengers score. There is something deeply off-putting about their performance: James' hands can't stop vibrating. Rose's mouth doesn't always line up with the words she's saying.

When James asks Rose about the implications of a strike on local hotels, Rose just lists hotels where the strike is taking place. A story on apartment fires "serves as a reminder of the importance of fire safety measures," James says, without naming any of them. James and Rose are, you may have noticed, not human reporters. They are AI avatars crafted by an Israeli company named Caledo, which hopes to bring this tech to hundreds of local newspapers in the coming year. "Just watching someone read an article is boring," says Dina Shatner, who cofounded Caledo with her husband Moti in 2023. "But watching people talking about a subject -- this is engaging."

The Caledo platform can analyze several prewritten news articles and turn them into a "live broadcast" featuring conversation between AI hosts like James and Rose, Shatner says. While other companies, like Channel 1 in Los Angeles, have begun using AI avatars to read out prewritten articles, this claims to be the first platform that lets the hosts riff with one another. The idea is that the tech can give small local newsrooms the opportunity to create live broadcasts that they otherwise couldn't. This can open up embedded advertising opportunities and draw in new customers, especially among younger people who are more likely to watch videos than read articles. Reception of the AI avatars has been poor, notes Scrimgeour. "This ain't that,â says one Instagram commenter. "Keep journalism local." Another just reads: "Nightmares."

There's also concern around the jobs these avatars will take. "Caledo claims its AI won't take news jobs because it only does work that isn't being done otherwise," notes Scrimgeour, agreeing that his newspaper company never had a video broadcast while he worked there.

"The question is, will local audiences buy into the new tech? Early returns suggest that Kauai viewers, at least, might have trouble accepting James and Rose as kama'aina (locals)..."

A professor in the University of Chicago's department of geophysical sciences "believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide," reports the New York Times.

He's not the only one promoting the idea. "Harvard University has a solar geoengineering program that has received grants from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It's being studied by the Environmental Defense Fund along with the World Climate Research Program.... But many scientists and environmentalists fear that it could result in unpredictable calamities." Because it would be used in the stratosphere and not limited to a particular area, solar geoengineering could affect the whole world, possibly scrambling natural systems, like creating rain in one arid region while drying out the monsoon season elsewhere. Opponents worry it would distract from the urgent work of transitioning away from fossil fuels. They object to intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that would eventually move from the stratosphere to ground level, where it can irritate the skin, eyes, nose and throat and can cause respiratory problems. And they fear that once begun, a solar geoengineering program would be difficult to stop...

Keith, a professor in the University of Chicago's department of geophysical sciences, countered that the risks posed by solar geoengineering are well understood, not as severe as portrayed by critics and dwarfed by the potential benefits. If the technique slowed the warming of the planet by even just 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, over the next century, Keith said, it could help prevent millions of heat-related deaths each decade...

Opponents of solar geoengineering cite several main risks. They say it could create a "moral hazard," mistakenly giving people the impression that it is not necessary to rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions. The second main concern has to do with unintended consequences. "This is a really dangerous path to go down," said Beatrice Rindevall, the chair of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, which opposed the experiment. "It could shock the climate system, could alter hydrological cycles and could exacerbate extreme weather and climate instability." And once solar geoengineering began to cool the planet, stopping the effort abruptly could result in a sudden rise in temperatures, a phenomenon known as "termination shock." The planet could experience "potentially massive temperature rise in an unprepared world over a matter of five to 10 years, hitting the Earth's climate with something that it probably hasn't seen since the dinosaur-killing impactor," Pierrehumbert said. On top of all this, there are fears about rogue actors using solar geoengineering and concerns that the technology could be weaponized. Not to mention the fact that sulfur dioxide can harm human health.

Keith is adamant that those fears are overblown. And while there would be some additional air pollution, he claims the risk is negligible compared to the benefits.
The opposition is making it hard to even conduct tests, according to the article — like when Keith "wanted to release a few pounds of mineral dust at an altitude of roughly 20 kilometers and track how the dust behaved as it floated across the sky."

The experiment was called off after opposition from numerous groups — including Greta Thunberg and an organization representing Indigenous people who felt the experiment was disrespecting nature.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A recent meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Chicago was presented with an observational study of more than 500,000 people in the US. It found that those who ate the most UPFs (ultra-processed foods ) had a roughly 10% greater chance of dying early, even accounting for their body-mass index and overall quality of diet. In recent years, lots of other observational studies have shown a similar link - but that's not the same as proving that how food is processed causes health problems, or pinning down which aspect of those processes might be to blame.

So how could we get to the truth about ultra-processed food?

The kind of study needed to prove definitively that UPFs cause health problems would be extremely complex, suggests Dr Nerys Astbury, a senior researcher in diet and obesity at Oxford University. It would need to compare a large number of people on two diets -- one high in UPFs and one low in UPFs, but matched exactly for calorie and macronutrient content. This would be fiendishly difficult to actually do. Participants would need to be kept under lock and key so their food intake could be tightly managed. The study would also need to enrol people with similar diets as a starting point.

It would be extremely challenging logistically. And to counter the possibility that people who eat fewer UPFs might just have healthier lifestyles such as through taking more exercise or getting more sleep, the participants of the groups would need to have very similar habits. "It would be expensive research, but you could see changes from the diets relatively quickly," Dr Astbury says. Funding for this type of research could also be hard to come by. There might be accusations of conflicts of interest, since researchers motivated to run these kind of trials may have an idea of what they want the conclusions to be before they started.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way to prove it: "copyright traps" developed by a team at Imperial College London, pieces of hidden text that allow writers and publishers to subtly mark their work in order to later detect whether it has been used in AI models or not. The idea is similar to traps that have been used by copyright holders throughout history -- strategies like including fake locations on a map or fake words in a dictionary. [...] The code to generate and detect traps is currently available on GitHub, but the team also intends to build a tool that allows people to generate and insert copyright traps themselves. "There is a complete lack of transparency in terms of which content is used to train models, and we think this is preventing finding the right balance [between AI companies and content creators]," says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, an associate professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, who led the research.

The traps aren't foolproof and can be removed, but De Montjoye says that increasing the number of traps makes it significantly more challenging and resource-intensive to remove. "Whether they can remove all of them or not is an open question, and that's likely to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game," he says.

"Researchers are proposing a new way to battle the effects of climate change..." writes Science magazine: slowing the rising of sea levels with "glacial geoengineering". (That is, "building flexible barriers around them or drilling deep into them to slow their slippage into the sea.") Geoengineering proponents say it would be better to begin research now on how to staunch sea level rise at its source, rather than spending billions and billions of dollars to wall off coastal cities. "At some point you have to think, 'Well, is there anything else we can do?'" asks glaciologist John Moore of the University of Lapland, an author on the white paper, which was sponsored by the University of Chicago. One idea researched by Moore and covered in the report is to build buoyant "curtains," moored to the sea floor beyond the edge of ice shelves and glaciers, to block natural currents of warm water that erode ice sheets from below. (Especially in Antarctica, warming ocean water is a bigger threat to glaciers than warming air.)

Early designs called for plastic, but natural fibers such as canvas and sisal are now being considered to avoid pollution concerns. According to the white paper, initial modeling studies show that curtain heights stretching only partway up from the sea floor off the coast of western Antarctica could reduce glacial melting by a factor of 10 in some locations. Another intervention some scientists are contemplating would slow the slippage of ice sheets by drilling holes to their bases and pumping out water or heat.

Such massive engineering efforts would surely be some of the most expensive ever undertaken by humanity. At a workshop at the University of Chicago in October 2023, researchers suggested it might cost $88 billion to build 80 kilometers of curtains around Antarctic glaciers. Interventions would also require international political support, which some glaciologists view as an even bigger hurdle than the price tag. Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, says such projects would require fleets of icebreakers, extensive shipping and supply chain needs, and significant personnel to construct, maintain, and guard the final structures — in ocean conditions she calls "eye-poppingly difficult." The projects could also incur unintended consequences, potentially disrupting ocean circulation patterns or endangering wildlife. Furthermore, it would take decades to find out whether the interventions were working.

Even if the engineering and logistics were possible, that "does not answer the question of whether it should be pursued," says Moon, who opposes even preliminary studies on the concepts.
"The report, which also stresses the importance of emissions reductions, takes pains to say it 'does not advocate for intervention; rather, it advocates for research into whether any interventions may be viable'..."

How will Apple protect user data while their requests are being processed by AI in applications like Siri?

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Apple Insider: According to sources of The Information [four different former Apple employees who worked on the project], Apple intends to process data from AI applications inside a virtual black box.

The concept, known as "Apple Chips in Data Centers" internally, would involve only Apple's hardware being used to perform AI processing in the cloud. The idea is that it will control both the hardware and software on its servers, enabling it to design more secure systems. While on-device AI processing is highly private, the initiative could make cloud processing for Apple customers to be similarly secure... By taking control over how data is processed in the cloud, it would make it easier for Apple to implement processes to make a breach much harder to actually happen.

Furthermore, the black box approach would also prevent Apple itself from being able to see the data. As a byproduct, this means it would also be difficult for Apple to hand over any personal data from government or law enforcement data requests.
Processed data from the servers would be stored in Apple's "Secure Enclave" (where the iPhone stores biometric data, encryption keys and passwords), according to the article.

"Doing so means the data can't be seen by other elements of the system, nor Apple itself."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: HP researchers have published a paper detailing a new modular monitor design they call "composable microLED monitors." Using advancing microLED tech to make smaller screens with no bezels, they imagine a Lego-like system that allows customers to buy different monitor modules and slot them together at home. In the paper, diagrams show "core units" with a direct connection to the host computer being expanded both horizontally and vertically with multiple extensions. The idea is that by choosing from flat or curved extension pieces and connecting them to the core unit, you can make a monitor in whatever size or shape you want. To keep assembly simple and effective, the design uses jigsaw-like connections alongside magnets to ensure each module automatically aligns correctly. And to prevent the number of possible configurations from getting out of hand, the design only allows extensions to attach to the sides or bottom of the square-shaped core unit. Once your strangely shaped monitor is complete, you would be able to choose how your operating system treats each part -- either as an extension of the core unit or as a separate screen. These settings would be controlled with physical switches on the modules that you could change whenever you wanted.

As for the sizes of the modules, HP proposes a range of different possibilities, some more complicated than others. In an ideal situation, customers would be able to choose from either flat or curved core units and add flat or curved extensions of varying sizes. If that proved too difficult, curved monitor elements could be taken out of the picture completely, and customers would just add flat extensions to a flat core unit. As cool as this all sounds, there is a glaring problem -- how would the seams between each module look? Thanks to the bezel-less design, there at least wouldn't be a thick black divider between each part. However, a thin line or visible distortion would be inevitable. One approach HP proposes is minimizing the gap between each panel as much as possible and just accepting the thin line it creates. Alternatives include complicated techniques to disguise the joints using hardware or software solutions that modify the display of edge pixels to minimize visual joints. HP would have to find a balance between technical viability, cost, and customer feedback to determine the best overall solution.

"As you're reading this, you're more likely than not already inside 'The Matrix'," according to a headline on the front page of CNN.com this weekend.

It linked to an opinion piece by Rizwan Virk, founder of MIT's startup incubator/accelerator program. He's now a doctoral researcher at Arizona State University, where his profile identifies him as an "entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist, computer scientist and bestselling author." Virk's 2019 book was titled "The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game." In the decades since [The Matrix was released], this idea, now called the simulation hypothesis, has come to be taken more seriously by technologists, scientists and philosophers. The main reason for this shift is the stunning improvements in computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) and AI. Taking into account three developments just this year from Apple, Neuralink and OpenAI, I can now confidently state that as you are reading this article, you are more likely than not already inside a computer simulation. This is because the closer our technology gets to being able to build a fully interactive simulation like the Matrix, the more likely it is that someone has already built such a world, and we are simply inside their video game world...

In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom imagined a "technologically mature" civilization could easily create a simulated world. The logic, then, is that if any civilization ever reaches this point, it would create not just one but a very large number of simulations (perhaps billions), each with billions of AI characters, simply by firing up more servers. With simulated worlds far outnumbering the "real" world, the likelihood that we are in a simulation would be significantly higher than not. It was this logic that prompted Elon Musk to state, a few years ago, that the chances that we are not in a simulation (i.e. that we are in base reality) was "one in billions." It's a theory that is difficult to prove — but difficult to disprove as well. Remember, the simulations would be so good that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a physical and a simulated world. Either the signals are being beamed directly into your brain, or we are simply AI characters inside the simulation...

Recent developments in Silicon Valley show that we could get to the simulation point very soon. Just this year, Apple released its Vision Pro headset — a mixed-reality (including augmented and virtual reality) device that, if you believe initial reviews (ranging from mildly positive to ecstatic), heralds the beginning of a new era of spatial computing — or the merging of digital and physical worlds... we can see a direct line to being able to render a realistic fictional world around us... Just last month, OpenAI released Sora AI, which can now generate highly realistic videos that are pretty damn difficult to distinguish from real human videos. The fact that AI can so easily fool humans visually as well as through text (and according to some, has already passed the well-known Turing Test) shows that we are not far from fully immersive worlds populated with simulated AI characters that seem (and perhaps even think they are) conscious. Already, millions of humans are chatting with AI characters, and millions of dollars are pouring into making AI characters more realistic. Some of us may be players of the game, who have forgotten that we allowed the signal to be beamed into our brain, while others, like Neo or Morpheus or Trinity in "The Matrix," may have been plugged in at birth...

The fact that we are approaching the simulation point so soon in our future means that the likelihood that we are already inside someone else's advanced simulation goes up exponentially. Like Neo, we would be unable to tell the difference between a simulated and a physical world. Perhaps the most appropriate response to that is another of Reeves' most famous lines from that now-classic sci-fi film: Woah.
The author notes that the idea of being trapped inside a video game already "had been articulated by one of the Wachowskis' heroes, science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who stated, all the way back in 1977, 'We are living in a computer programmed reality.'" A few years ago, I interviewed Dick's wife Tessa and asked her what he would have thought of "The Matrix." She said his first reaction would have been that he loved it; however, his second reaction would most likely have been to call his agent to see if he could sue the filmmakers for stealing his ideas.

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

Devin Coldeway reports via TechCrunch: Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits "emergent" qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see the kind of leap in ability that we observed once language models got past a certain size. For reasons unknown to us, once LLMs grow past a certain point, they start being way more robust and versatile, able to perform tasks they weren't trained to. That is not to say they are gaining sentience or anything, just that past a certain point their performance on certain conversational AI tasks hockey sticks. The team at Amazon AGI -- no secret what they're aiming at -- thought the same might happen as text-to-speech models grew as well, and their research suggests this is in fact the case.

The new model is called Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities, which they have contorted into the abbreviation BASE TTS. The largest version of the model uses 100,000 hours of public domain speech, 90% of which is in English, the remainder in German, Dutch and Spanish. At 980 million parameters, BASE-large appears to be the biggest model in this category. They also trained 400M- and 150M-parameter models based on 10,000 and 1,000 hours of audio respectively, for comparison -- the idea being, if one of these models shows emergent behaviors but another doesn't, you have a range for where those behaviors begin to emerge. As it turns out, the medium-sized model showed the jump in capability the team was looking for, not necessarily in ordinary speech quality (it is reviewed better but only by a couple points) but in the set of emergent abilities they observed and measured. Here are examples of tricky text mentioned in the paper:

- Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage.
- Emotions: "Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That's unbelievable!" Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee.
- Foreign words: "Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a piece de resistance.
- Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): "Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn't wake your baby brother," Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery.
- Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: 'Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried... #familymatters.'
- Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time?
-Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews. You can read more examples of these difficult texts being spoken naturally here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report released Tuesday (Jan. 16th) by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco: The U.S. labor market experienced a massive increase in remote and hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic. At its peak, more than 60% of paid workdays were done remotely -- compared with only 5% before the pandemic. As of December 2023, about 30% of paid workdays are still done remotely (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis 2021). Some reports have suggested that teleworking might either boost or harm overall productivity in the economy. And certainly, overall productivity statistics have been volatile. In 2020, U.S. productivity growth surged. This led to optimistic views in the media about the gains from forced digital innovation and the productivity benefits of remote work. However, the surge ended, and productivity growth has retreated to roughly its pre-pandemic trend. Fernald and Li (2022) find from aggregate data that this pattern was largely explained by a predictable cyclical effect from the economy's downturn and recovery. In aggregate data, it thus appears difficult to see a large cumulative effect -- either positive or negative -- from the pandemic so far. But it is possible that aggregate data obscure the effects of teleworking. For example, factors beyond telework could have affected the overall pace of productivity growth. Surveys of businesses have found mixed effects from the pandemic, with many businesses reporting substantial productivity disruptions.

In this Economic Letter, we ask whether we can detect the effects of remote work in the productivity performance of different industries. There are large differences across sectors in how easy it is to work off-site. Thus, if remote work boosts productivity in a substantial way, then it should improve productivity performance, especially in those industries where teleworking is easy to arrange and widely adopted, such as professional services, compared with those where tasks need to be performed in person, such as restaurants. After controlling for pre-pandemic trends in industry productivity growth rates, we find little statistical relationship between telework and pandemic productivity performance. We conclude that the shift to remote work, on its own, is unlikely to be a major factor explaining differences across sectors in productivity performance. By extension, despite the important social and cultural effects of increased telework, the shift is unlikely to be a major factor explaining changes in aggregate productivity. [...]

The shift to remote and hybrid work has reshaped society in important ways, and these effects are likely to continue to evolve. For example, with less time spent commuting, some people have moved out of cities, and the lines between work and home life have blurred. Despite these noteworthy effects, in this Letter we find little evidence in industry data that the shift to remote and hybrid work has either substantially held back or boosted the rate of productivity growth. Our findings do not rule out possible future changes in productivity growth from the spread of remote work. The economic environment has changed in many ways during and since the pandemic, which could have masked the longer-run effects of teleworking. Continuous innovation is the key to sustained productivity growth. Working remotely could foster innovation through a reduction in communication costs and improved talent allocation across geographic areas. However, working off-site could also hamper innovation by reducing in-person office interactions that foster idea generation and diffusion. The future of work is likely to be a hybrid format that balances the benefits and limitations of remote work.

Japanese startup EX-Fusion plans to eliminate small pieces of space junk with laser beams fired from the ground. Nikkei Asia reports: EX-Fusion stands apart in that it is taking the ground-based approach, with the startup tapping its arsenal of laser technology originally developed in pursuit of fusion power. In October, EX-Fusion signed a memorandum of understanding with EOS Space Systems, an Australian contractor that possesses technology used to detect space debris. EX-Fusion plans to place a high-powered laser inside an observatory operated by EOS Space outside of Canberra. The first phase will be to set up laser technology to track debris measuring less than 10 cm. Pieces of this size have typically been difficult to target from the ground using lasers.

For the second phase, EX-Fusion and EOS Space will attempt to remove the space debris by boosting the power of the laser beams fired from the surface. The idea is to fire the laser intermittently against the debris from the opposing direction of its travel in order to slow it down. With a decreased orbiting speed, the debris will enter the Earth's atmosphere to burn up. High-powered lasers are often associated with weapons that blast objects into smithereens. Indeed, the EOS Space group supplies laser weapon systems used to destroy drones. But lasers designed to remove space debris are completely different from weapon-grade lasers, EOS Space's executive vice president James Bennett said during a visit to Japan in November.

Current laser weaponry often uses fiber lasers, which are capable of cutting and welding metal and can destroy targets like drones through heat created from continuous firing. Capturing and removing space junk instead involves diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers, which are pulsed to apply force to fast moving debris, stopping it like a brake. EX-Fusion's signature laser fusion process also involves DPSS lasers, which strike the surface of a hydrogen fuel pellet just millimeters in diameter, compressing it to trigger a fusion reaction. This makes space debris removal a useful test along the path to commercializing the fusion technology.

The Washington Post reports: A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's charitable arm. As research director of Harvard Kennedy School projects delving into mis- and disinformation on social media platforms, Donovan had raised millions in grants, testified before Congress and been a frequent commentator on television, often faulting internet companies for profiting from the spread of divisive falsehoods. Last year, the school's dean told her that he was winding down her main project and that she should stop fundraising for it. This year, the school eliminated her position.
As one of the first researchers with access to "the Facebook papers" leaked by Frances Haugen, Donovan was asked to speak at a meeting of the Dean's Council, a group of the university's high-profile donors, remembers The Columbia Journalism Review : Elliot Schrage, then the vice president of communications and global policy for Meta, was also at the meeting. Donovan says that, after she brought up the Haugen leaks, Schrage became agitated and visibly angry, "rocking in his chair and waving his arms and trying to interrupt." During a Q&A session after her talk, Donovan says, Schrage reiterated a number of common Meta talking points, including the fact that disinformation is a fluid concept with no agreed-upon definition and that the company didn't want to be an "arbiter of truth."

According to Donovan, Nancy Gibbs, Donovan's faculty advisor, was supportive after the incident. She says that they discussed how Schrage would likely try to pressure Douglas Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government (where the Shorenstein Center hosting Donovan's project is based) about the idea of creating a public archive of the documents... After Elmendorf called her in for a status meeting, Donovan claims that he told her she was not to raise any more money for her project; that she was forbidden to spend the money that she had raised (a total of twelve million dollars, she says); and that she couldn't hire any new staff. According to Donovan, Elmendorf told her that he wasn't going to allow any expenditure that increased her public profile, and used a number of Meta talking points in his assessment of her work...

Donovan says she tried to move her work to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, but that the head of that center told her that they didn't have the "political capital" to bring on someone whom Elmendorf had "targeted"... Donovan told me that she believes the pressure to shut down her project is part of a broader pattern of influence in which Meta and other tech platforms have tried to make research into disinformation as difficult as possible... Donovan said she hopes that by blowing the whistle on Harvard, her case will be the "tip of the spear."
Another interesting detail from the article: [Donovan] alleges that Meta pressured Elmendorf to act, noting that he is friends with Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer. (Elmendorf was Sandberg's advisor when she studied at Harvard in the early nineties; he attended Sandberg's wedding in 2022, four days before moving to shut down Donovan's project.)

Scientists have proposed a framework that they say could unify quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of general relatively. "Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are mathematically incompatible with each other, so it's important to understand how this contradiction is resolved," said Prof Jonathan Oppenheim, a physicist at University College London, who is behind the theory. The Guardian reports: Until now, the prevailing assumption has been that Einstein's theory of gravity must be modified, or "quantized," in order to fit within quantum theory. This is the approach of string theory, which advances the view that spacetime comprises 10, 11 or possibly 26 dimensions. Another leading candidate, advanced by Rovelli and others, is loop quantum gravity, in which spacetime is composed of finite loops woven into an extremely fine fabric. Oppenheim's theory, published in the journal Physical Review X, challenges the consensus by suggesting that spacetime may be classical and not governed by quantum theory at all. This means spacetime, however closely you zoomed in on it, would be smooth and continuous rather than "quantized" into discrete units. However, Oppenheim introduces the idea that spacetime is also inherently wobbly, subject to random fluctuations that create an intrinsic breakdown in predictability.

"The rate at which time flows is changing randomly and fluctuating in time," said Oppenheim, although he clarifies that time would never actually go into reverse. "It's quite mathematical," he added. "Picturing it in your head is quite difficult." This proposed "wobbliness" would result in a breakdown of predictability, which, Oppenheim says, "many physicists don't like." [...]

Ultimately, whether the theory is correct is not an aesthetic preference, but a question of whether it is a faithful representation of reality. A second paper, published simultaneously in Nature Communications and led by Dr Zach Weller-Davies, formerly of UCL and now at Canada's Perimeter Institute, proposes an experiment designed to uncover "wobbles" in spacetime through tiny fluctuations in the weight of an object. For example, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France routinely weigh a 1kg mass, which used to be the 1kg standard. If the fluctuations in measurements of this 1kg mass are smaller than a certain threshold, the theory can be ruled out. "We have shown that if spacetime doesn't have a quantum nature, then there must be random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which have a particular signature that can be verified experimentally," said Weller-Davies.

This week the Microsoft Security Response Center celebrated the 20th anniversary of Patch Tuesday updates.

In a blog post they call the updates "an initiative that has become a cornerstone of the IT world's approach to cybersecurity." Originating from the Trustworthy Computing memo by Bill Gates in 2002, our unwavering commitment to protecting customers continues to this day and is reflected in Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative announced this month. Each month, we deliver security updates on the second Tuesday, underscoring our pledge to cyber defense. As we commemorate this milestone, it's worth exploring the inception of Patch Tuesday and its evolution through the years, demonstrating our adaptability to new technology and emerging cyber threats...

Before this unified approach, our security updates were sporadic, posing significant challenges for IT professionals and organizations in deploying critical patches in a timely manner. Senior leaders of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) at the time spearheaded the idea of a predictable schedule for patch releases, shifting from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence...

This led to a shift from a "ship when ready" model to a regular weekly, and eventually, monthly cadence. In addition to consolidating patch releases into a monthly schedule, we also organized the security update release notes into a consolidated location. Prior to this change, customers had to navigate through various Knowledge Base articles, making it difficult to find the information they needed to secure themselves. Recognizing the need for clarity and convenience, we provided a comprehensive overview of monthly releases. This change was pivotal at a time when not all updates were delivered through Windows Update, and customers needed a reliable source to find essential updates for various products.

Patch Tuesday has also influenced other vendors in the software and hardware spaces, leading to a broader industry-wide practice of synchronized security updates. This collaborative approach, especially with hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel, aims to provide a united front against vulnerabilities, enhancing the overall security posture of our ecosystems. While the volume and complexity of updates have increased, so has the collaboration with the security community. Patch Tuesday has fostered better relationships with security researchers, leading to more responsible vulnerability disclosures and quicker responses to emerging threats...

As the landscape of security threats evolves, so does our strategy, but our core mission of safeguarding our customers remains unchanged.

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle reports via The Register: The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) may open source the proprietary encryption algorithms used to secure emergency radio communications after a public backlash over security flaws found this summer. "The ETSI Technical Committee in charge of TETRA algorithms is discussing whether to make them public," Claire Boyer, a spokesperson for the European standards body, told The Register. The committee will discuss the issue at its next meeting on October 26, she said, adding: "If the consensus is not reached, it will go to a vote."

TETRA is the Terrestrial Trunked Radio protocol, which is used in Europe, the UK, and other countries to secure radio communications used by government agencies, law enforcement, military and emergency services organizations. In July, a Netherlands security biz uncovered five vulnerabilities in TETRA, two deemed critical, that could allow criminals to decrypt communications, including in real-time, to inject messages, deanonymize users, or set the session key to zero for uplink interception. At the time ETSI downplayed the flaws, which it said had been fixed last October, and noted that "it's not aware of any active exploitation of operational networks."

At the time ETSI downplayed the flaws, which it said had been fixed last October, and noted that "it's not aware of any active exploitation of operational networks." It did, however, face criticism from the security community over its response to the vulnerabilities -- and the proprietary nature of the encryption algorithms, which makes it more difficult for proper pentesting of the emergency network system. "This whole idea of secret encryption algorithms is crazy, old-fashioned stuff," said security author Kim Zetter who first reported the story. "It's very 1960s and 1970s and quaint. If you're not publishing [intentionally] weak algorithms, I don't know why you would keep the algorithms secret."

An anonymous reader writes: Toyota, the world's largest automaker, has a problem. Although the company is famous for pioneering lean methods of manufacturing and being an early pioneer of hybrid electric powertrains, the switch to battery electric vehicles caught it somewhat unprepared. As rivals locked up contracts for critical minerals and formed joint ventures with battery makers (or built their own), Toyota has appeared to fall behind. Now, it has released a new roadmap showing how it will regain competitiveness and sell 3.5 million EVs by 2030. After some early experiments with electric-converted RAV4s (including a partnership with Tesla), Toyota has finally released a modern BEV, the bZ4x. The car had a difficult launch -- a recall for wheels falling off will lead to that -- but a week's test of a bZ4x exceeded our low expectations. A look at the car's specs makes clear Toyota's problem, though: There are different battery packs for the single-motor and dual-motor versions, made by Panasonic and CATL, respectively. [...] "We will need various options for batteries, just like we have different variations of engines. It is important to offer battery solutions compatible with a variety of models and customer needs," said Takero Kato, president of BEV Factory. To that end, Toyota is working on four different solutions. Three of these will use liquid electrolytes and are meant for different applications.

A performance-focused liquid electrolyte lithium-ion battery is slated to be the first to appear in 2026. Toyota says it's targeting a 20-minute fast-charging time and wants these cells to be 20 percent cheaper than the cells used in the bZ4x. The company plans to use this in a BEV that can travel almost 500 miles (800 km) on a single charge. For lower-cost vehicles, Toyota is looking at lithium iron phosphate cells, a chemistry that's already extremely popular in China and is being used by Tesla. Toyota plans to construct these as bipolar batteries, where the active materials for the anode and cathode are on either side of a common electrode carrier rather than having separate electrodes for each. (Toyota already uses this approach for the nickel metal hydride batteries it uses in many of its hybrid models.) LFP cells are targeting a 40 percent cost reduction compared to the bZ4x battery and 20 percent more range. LFP cells don't charge as fast, but Toyota wants a 10-80 percent DC fast-charging time of 30 minutes. If it pans out, the company expects these cells in 2026 or 2027.

There's also a high-performance lithium-ion chemistry in development, though it may not be ready until 2028. Toyota wants to combine its bipolar electrode structure with a high percentage of nickel in the cathode to create a pack with extremely long range -- up to 621 miles (1,000 km). But it's also targeting a 10 percent cost reduction compared to the performance-focused pack mentioned earlier. The fourth battery technology is one that Toyota has talked about a lot in the past -- solid state. Both electrodes and electrolytes in a solid state battery are solid, which means the battery can be smaller and lighter than a cell with liquid electrodes. The technology is tantalizing, but it's troubled by the formation of dendrites -- spikes of lithium crystals that can grow and puncture the cathode. Toyota says it has made a breakthrough in durability for lithium-ion solid state cells -- it's being coy as to exactly what -- that has allowed it to switch to putting these batteries into mass production, with commercial use scheduled for 2027 or 2028. Interestingly, Toyota was originally planning to use solid state cells in its hybrids only, but it appears to have revised that idea and will put them in BEVs, with a target range of more than 600 miles and a fast-charging time of just 10 minutes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more companies are phasing out "feedback" bosses give to workers — and replacing it with "feedforward."

"The idea is that 'feedforward' gives people less anxiety," the Journal's reporter said in a video interview. "It's a little bit gentler. When people hear 'feedback', they think immediately, 'What have I done wrong? What are the bad things my boss is going to tell me to fix?'" And another reason that we're hearing "feedforward" at these companies over and over is employees are younger. Younger employees make up a larger percentage of the workforce today, and a number of experts with whom we spoke said that younger employees are more comfortable with gentler terms like "feedforward"...

Q: So they're trying to appeal to the younger employees who are sensitive to harsher reviews, feedback or criticism. But do the employees need to learn how to better receive this type of constructive criticism, regardless of what you call it?

A: Some experts say that younger employees do need to be prepared for negative feedback. And just the rebranding or replacing of a word could have a negative effect, and perhaps managers won't be as comfortable providing negative feedback if they're just thinking about this as a way to tell an employee what they've done well...

Certain companies are really revamping their entire review process, trying to make it so that employees and managers are more communicative and really addressing any issues or concerns, so that they can work more productively. In some cases if companies are just rebranding "feedback" with "feedforward" or other terms, people with whom I spoke were concerned that this is just a hollow effort.

And there is a possibility that younger generations won't learn about what they're doing wrong and how to improve... [W]e did speak with an expert who said that baby boomers learned to suck it up and perform. And this trend really is generational.
From the Journal's article: At Microsoft, managers are encouraged to use the word "perspectives" instead of traditional feedback, according to current and former employees. Reviews, meanwhile, have been branded as "connect" conversations. The company also recently stopped including anonymous comments from peers in employee reviews, instead showing the names of the colleagues in question... Jennifer Solomon-Baum, a former Microsoft marketing director who left early this year, says she understands why the company chose to rethink its approach to feedback, which she feels may have made employees more open to giving feedback. On the other hand, she says Microsoft's recent decision to put an end to anonymous peer feedback in reviews completely backfired. In the wake of the change, "we didn't get the richness of constructive criticism," says Solomon-Baum, who is now consulting and leading marketing for a new ballet company in Los Angeles. "It became a praise festival...."

The divide on the issue is partially generational, several HR specialists say... Many younger employees entered the workforce while managers had loosened expectations on productivity and performance, and may have had less stringent grading in college amid remote classes, making the postpandemic adjustment more difficult. "It's the first time that they have not just gotten professional feedback, but it might be the first time in quite a while that somebody said, 'You know, this isn't good enough,'" says Megan Gerhardt, a management professor at Miami University and the author of a book on leading intergenerational workforces.
"I refuse to believe this is true," writes Apple blogger John Gruber, "and if it is true, my feedback is that any company that encounters an employee who bristles at the word feedback should fire them on the spot."