An anonymous reader writes: Billy Mitchell is the intense videogamer made famous in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong. Last month he threatened to sue both the Guinness Book of World Records and the videogame record-keepers at Twin Galaxies for defamation after they revoked an entire lifetime's worth of videogame high scores. An online discussion had argued that videotapes of three of Mitchell's performances suggested they'd been achieved using a MAME emulator -- but the organization revoked all of Mitchell's high scores (including his uncontested perfect game of Pac-Man in 1999).

Last week Twin Galaxies finally posted their response to Mitchell's lawsuit. "It is not necessary to hire lawyers and threaten Twin Galaxies out of the blue to get it to review and consider relevant new evidence -- all anyone has to do is simply reach out and directly request an opportunity to present the information...

"There will be no retraction or reinstatement. It should be noted that Twin Galaxies is under no obligation to maintain Mr. Mitchell's scores in its database. He has no divine right to be part of the Twin Galaxies community either. Twin Galaxies has unlimited authority to maintain the integrity of its score database." They also write that any lawsuit will be considered a strategic lawsuit against public participation and countered accordingly, followed by a second suit over malicious prosecution. "Please advise Mr. Mitchell to tread lightly, and choose wisely."

Last week a massive new 16,000-word profile of Mitchell pointed out that after his records were revoked, Mitchell had actually webcast himself playing Donkey Kong on Twitch, "obtaining scores equal to those that had been disputed, broadcast live from public venues.... Mitchell had proven he could earn those scores now. But he hadn't outlined a clear defense to prove he'd achieved them at the time of the original submissions."

CNBC reports that a popular Twitch poker star has been accused of cheating: Stones Gambling Hall in Sacramento, California says it will not livestream poker games pending an investigation into cheating allegations made against one of the game's players, Mike Postle... The original accusations were made by Veronica Brill, another poker player who has played with Postle on "Stones Live." Since then, others have come forward with similar complaints. Brill has no specific accusation of what Postle is doing and even admits that she can't be sure he is cheating. So why does she think he is cheating? His results are too good, according to Brill. She said (and several professional pokers players who talked to CNBC, agreed) no one could do as well as he has, for as long as he has, on these livestreamed games...

It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."

Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.

Dave Knott writes: A Montreal legal firm has requested authorization to launch a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games, makers of the widely-popular video game Fortnite. The legal notice, filed on behalf of two minors, likens the effect of the game to cocaine, saying it releases the chemical dopamine to the brain of vulnerable young people who can become dependent on playing. Much of the suit is based on a 2015 Quebec Superior Court ruling that determined tobacco companies didn't warn their customers about the dangers of smoking. Jean-Philippe Caron, a lawyer at Calex, said the firm was contacted by several parents whose kids had become addicted to the game.

Last year, the World Health Organization classified addiction to video games as a disease. It defined the disorder as "a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences." According to Caron, Fortnite was designed by psychologists to make it more addictive. "They knew that their game was very attractive, yet they did not divulge the risks to the population. It's a little like tobacco."

Disney is banning advertising from Netflix across its entertainment TV networks, according the The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. It's "a sign that the marketing wars over streaming-video are escalating as media giants battle each other for subscribers," the report says. From the report: Disney, Comcast and AT&T are set to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising over the next year to attract consumers to their new streaming-video services as they look to compete with industry juggernaut Netflix. Netflix spent $1.8 billion on advertising last year and will be playing defense against Hollywood's new entrants. Disney, whose properties include ABC and Freeform, earlier this year put out an edict to staffers that it wouldn't accept ads from any rival streaming services, but later reversed course and found a compromise with nearly every company, the people familiar with the situation said. The exception was Netflix.

In making its decision, Disney evaluated whether it had a mutual business or advertising relationship with the companies, one of the people said. Netflix doesn't show ads in its programs. In a statement, Disney said the subscription streaming-video business has evolved, "with many more entrants looking to advertise in traditional television, and across our portfolio of networks." The company said it re-evaluated its initial blanket ban on streaming ads "to reflect the comprehensive business relationships we have with many of these companies."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers with likely ties to Egypt's government used Google's official Play Store to distribute spyware in a campaign that targeted journalists, lawyers, and opposition politicians in that country, researchers from Check Point Technologies have found. The app, called IndexY, posed as a means for looking up details about phone numbers. It claimed to tap into a database of more than 160 million Arabic numbers. One of the permissions it required was access to a user's call history and contacts. Despite the sensitivity of that data, those permissions were understandable, given the the app's focus on phone numbers. It had about 5,000 installations before Google removed it from Play in August. Check Point doesn't know when IndexY first became available in Play.

Behind the scenes, IndexY logged whether each call was incoming, outgoing, or missed as well as its date and duration. Publicly accessible files left on indexy[.]org, a domain hardcoded into the app, showed not only that the data was collected but that the developers actively analyzed and inspected that information. Analysis included the number of users per country, call-log details, and lists of calls made from one country to another. IndexY was one piece of a broad and far-ranging surveillance campaign that was first documented in March by Amnesty International. It targeted people who played adversarial roles to Egypt's government and prompted warnings from Google to some of those targeted that "government-backed attackers are trying to steal your password." Check Point found that, at the same time, Google was playing a key supporting role in the campaign. According to Lotem Finkelshtein, Check Point's threat intelligence group manager, one of the ways the attackers evaded Google vetting of the app was that the analysis and inspection of the data happened on the attacker-designated server and not on an infected phone itself. "Google couldn't see the info that was collected," he said.

IndexY was one of at least three pieces of Android malware that Check Point tied to the campaign. "A different app purported to increase the volume of devices, even though it had no such capability," reports Ars Technica. "Called iLoud 200%, it collected location data as soon as it was started. In the event it stopped running, iLoud was able to restart itself. Finkelshtein said that that app was distributed on third-party sites and was installed an unknown number of times." v1.apk was another app that communicated with the domain drivebackup[.]co and appeared to be in an early testing phase.

A powerful disaster-inducing geomagnetic storm is an inevitability in the near future, likely causing blackouts, satellite failures, and more. From a report: Unlike other threats to our planet, such as supervolcanoes or asteroids, the time frame for a cataclysmic geomagnetic storm -- caused by eruptions from our sun playing havoc with Earth's magnetic field -- is comparatively short. It could happen in the next decade -- or in the next century. All we know is, based on previous events, our planet will almost definitely be hit relatively soon, probably within 100 years. Geomagnetic storms are caused by sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, resulting in calamities to which our modern technological society is becoming ever more susceptible.

Most experts regard the Carrington Event, a so-called superstorm that occurred in September 1859, as the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. But new data suggest that a later storm in May 1921 may have equaled or even eclipsed the Carrington Event in intensity, causing at least three major fires in the U.S., Canada and Sweden -- and highlighting the damaging effects these storms can have on Earth today. In a paper published in the journal Space Weather, Jeffrey Love of the U.S. Geological Survey and his colleagues reexamined the intensity of the 1921 event, known as the New York Railroad Storm, in greater detail than ever before.

Although different measures of intensity exist, geomagnetic storms are often rated on an index called disturbance storm time (Dst) -- a way of gauging global magnetic activity by averaging out values for the strength of Earth's magnetic field measured at multiple locations. Our planet's baseline Dst level is about -20 nanoteslas (nT), with a "superstorm" condition defined as occurring when levels fall below -250 nT. Studies of the very limited magnetic data from the Carrington Event peg its intensity at anywhere from -850 to -1,050 nT. According to Love's study, the 1921 storm, however, came in at about -907 nT. "The 1921 storm could have been more intense than the 1859 storm," Love says. "Prior to our paper, [the 1921 storm] was understood to be intense, but how intense wasn't really clear."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In a move that puts California on a collision course with the NCAA, Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill effectively allowing college athletes in the state to earn compensation for the use of their likeness, sign endorsement deals and hire agents to represent them. The governor signed the measure in a segment released Monday by Uninterrupted, a sports programming company co-founded by LeBron James. Newsom proclaimed the move as "the beginning of a national movement -- one that transcends geographic and partisan lines."

California is the first state to pass such a law, which is to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. That marks a significant shift from the current policies enforced by the NCAA, collegiate sports' national governing body, which generally renders student-athletes ineligible to accept compensation for "the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind." And the NCAA Board of Governors pushed back hard against the bill at the time of its passage in the Legislature, saying that it would leave the playing field for universities of different sizes radically uneven. "Collegiate student athletes put everything on the line -- their physical health, future career prospects and years of their lives to compete. Colleges reap billions from these student athletes' sacrifices and success but, in the same breath, block them from earning a single dollar," Newsom said in a statement. "That's a bankrupt model -- one that puts institutions ahead of the students they are supposed to serve. It needs to be disrupted."

In response, a 22-member panel composed mostly of university presidents and athletic directors said in a letter: "Right now, nearly half a million student-athletes in all 50 states compete under the same rules. This bill would remove that essential element of fairness and equal treatment that forms the bedrock of college sports."

Wired reports on both Sidewalk, Amazon's new low-bandwidth long-range wireless networking protocol, and Apple's new position- and distance-measuring U1 chip (mentioned in a recent keynote). Apple's U1 chip -- which allows precise, indoor positional tracking via the latest iPhones and will power, at the very least, directional AirDrop file-sharing -- popped up on screen but was never even mentioned. The interest-piquing phrase "GPS at the scale of your living room" was saved for the online iPhone product pages rather than the bombast of the Steve Jobs Theater... Both Amazon and Apple have the hardware scale to build up the base of access points needed to create a useful network before reaching out to, most likely, iOS developers in Apple's case, and hardware makers already on board with Alexa in Amazon's case. For Amazon, in fact, that work has already begun as Sidewalk originally came out of the Ring team's ambition to extend its connected security devices out into gardens. "Ring lighting was the first time we ran into it as a company, because we wanted to extend out onto the sidewalk," says Daniel Rausch, VP of smart home at Amazon (which owns Ring).

The smart outoor Ring lights are already out. Products like the Smart Floodlight and Pathlight list a "wireless connection to the Ring Bridge" in the tech specs but eagle-eyed Ring owners had already started to figure out what band Amazon was playing with for this connection, before the Sidewalk announcement. "They've been using an internal version of the protocol on the freely available and unlicensed 900MHz part of the spectrum already," explains Rausch. "What we realised was 'woah, we can actually do something special'. We can make a version of this protocol which is secure and have this unbelievably ubiquitous coverage if we bring it all together, neighbours and neighbours and neighbours...." An innocent smart dog tracker like Ring Fetch fits perfectly into this model of Amazon-networked communities sharing video, alerts and location tracking.

Apple is reportedly talking to movie theater chains to try and get its Apple TV Plus movies shown in theaters a few weeks before they hit the streaming service. CNET reports: Apple's apparently hoping to attract established directors and producers to the $5-a-month service, and avoid creating industry tension like Netflix -- Martin Scorcese's The Irishman won't be playing in several theater chains because Netflix wouldn't agree to the usual three-month delay between the movie's theatrical debut and its arrival on streaming. The strategy Apple reportedly is taking mirrors that of Amazon, which gave the Oscar-winning Manchester by the Sea a three-month theatrical run in 2016, the Wall Street Journal noted.

Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks, which stars Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, is one of Apple's first major theatrical releases. It could premiere at the Cannes Film Festival prior to its mid-2020 release, according to the Journal. The Cupertino, California, company also reportedly talked about giving The Elephant Queen, a Chiwetel Ejiofor-narrated documentary about an elephant mother leading her herd across Africa, a theatrical release so it's eligible for awards consideration. It's due to be available on Apple TV Plus at launch on Nov. 1.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to video games and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media. Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing video games while only 11% of girls said they do. Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving -- a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing video games, those parts of the men's brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women's brains. Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

But girls and women aren't free from problems when it comes to digital media. Data from Pew shows that, in general, women use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest far more than men. Many girls and women are drawn to those photo-sharing sites because they like to form bonds and find similarities, says Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Even if women only use those sites more than men because that is where their friends are, many experts and parents say they have found that girls appear to have a greater fear of missing out, which compels them to keep up with what their friends are posting. Some recent studies show that girls feel the ill effects of too much social media use, such as depression and anxiety, more than boys do.

Both Sony and Microsoft on Monday committed to making their future video game consoles better for the planet. The two console makers laid out their plans alongside the UN Climate Summit as part of the Playing for the Planet Alliance. From a report: Microsoft will start a pilot program to create 825,000 carbon neutral Xbox consoles, the company said in a press release Sunday. It said these will be the first video game consoles to achieve that goal. Sony will focus on the upcoming PlayStation 5's energy consumption. The Japanese company will improve the next console's low-power suspend mode to make it more efficient than the PlayStation 4. Sony said if 1 million users make use of the PS5's energy-saving feature, it'll save the equivalent of the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes. Sony will also reassess its carbon footprint in its gaming service and data centers. The Playing for the Planet Alliance is a joint effort among the console manufacturers, publishers, developers and Twitch through various eco-friendly initiatives, spreading awareness, and reducing carbon emissions and power consumption.

SpaceX "built its experimental spaceport in and around Boca Chica Village, a decades-old community of about 20 elderly residents," reports Business Insider.

But now "SpaceX is trying to buy as much of Boca Chica Village as it can and move people out...following an accidental brush fire, public-safety notices warning of the possibility for explosions, and a push to have the Federal Aviation Administration approve orbital-class launches with larger rockets." "When SpaceX first identified Cameron County as a potential spaceport location, we did not anticipate that local residents would experience significant disruption from our presence," the letter said. "However, it has become clear that expansion of spaceflight activities as well as compliance with Federal Aviation Administration and other public safety regulations will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption to residents of the Village... SpaceX is offering you three times the independently appraised fair market value of your property," the letter said. "The offer is good through two weeks from the date of this letter...."

For those who commit to a sale, SpaceX said it would cover closing and other real-estate costs. It also comes packaged with an additional perk. "SpaceX recognizes that your close proximity to its operations has offered a unique opportunity to experience at close-hand the development of what will be the world's most advanced rocket. In appreciation of your support, we will offer all residents of the Village who accept the purchase offer the opportunity to continue their connection with the development of Starship by extending an invitation to attend future private VIP launch viewing events that are unavailable to the public."
Homeowner Cheryl Stevens complained to CBS News that the company has encroached on their neighborhood. "They're behaving as if this is Cape Canaveral. And it's not. It's not a military base. It's just a regular neighborhood, and a public beach, and a state highway. And suddenly, because they're here, stop the presses. Everything has to change for SpaceX."

SpaceX issued the following statement to CBS News: "We are entering a new and exciting era in space exploration and Texas is playing an increasingly important role in our efforts to help make humanity multi-planetary.

"As we develop Starship -- the world's most advanced launch system ever -- we are listening and responding to our neighbors' concerns and are striving to minimize disruptions as much as possible. We are working closely with Cameron County to facilitate public safety and provide regular road and beach closure updates to the public through a telephone hotline and on Cameron County's website."

As noted by Zatz Not Funny, TiVo is testing pre-roll video ads that start playing when customers view one of their recordings. The Verge reports: The ad spots are noticeably low-res and worse quality than the DVR'd content that starts playing afterward, according to one TiVo owner who has been served spots for Amazon, Keurig, and Toyota. It sounds like the users can fast-forward through the ads, but doing so is "not that seamless."

There are several potential reasons for TiVo ramping up advertising. Maybe the company plans to offer an ad-supported subscription with lower (or no) monthly fees compared to what regular customers are paying (similar to Amazon's Kindle devices with ads). No one who has paid for a lifetime subscription or even a monthly plan will be pleased to see pre-roll ads. TiVo also handles DVR functionality for many midsized and international cable providers. Squeezing in ads wherever possible could be something that those companies are pushing for as more of their customers spend increased time streaming shows and movies elsewhere.

In the early days of life on Earth, biological organisms were exceedingly simple. They were microscopic unicellular creatures with little to no ability to coordinate. Yet billions of years of evolution through competition and natural selection led to the complex life forms we have today -- as well as complex human intelligence. Researchers at OpenAI, the San-Francisco-based for-profit AI research lab, are now testing a hypothesis: if you could mimic that kind of competition in a virtual world, would it also give rise to much more sophisticated artificial intelligence? From a report: The experiment builds on two existing ideas in the field: multi-agent learning, the idea of placing multiple algorithms in competition or coordination to provoke emergent behaviors, and reinforcement learning, the specific machine-learning technique that learns to achieve a goal through trial and error. In a new paper released today, OpenAI has now revealed its initial results. Through playing a simple game of hide and seek hundreds of millions of times, two opposing teams of AI agents developed complex hiding and seeking strategies that involved tool use and collaboration. The research also offers insight into OpenAI's dominant research strategy: to dramatically scale existing AI techniques to see what properties emerge.

FastCompany magazine editor and Slashdot reader harrymcc writes: On the night of October 26, 1960, CBS aired a special -- coproduced with MIT -- about an emerging field of technology called 'artificial intelligence.' It featured demos -- like a checkers-playing computer and one that wrote scripts for TV westerns -- along with sound bits from leading scientists on the question of whether machines would ever think. It was well reviewed at the time and then mostly forgotten. But it's available on YouTube, and surprisingly relevant to today's AI challenges, 59 years later.

A reporter for SFGate describes what happened when he tried out for the quidditch team at the University of California at Berkeley: The person throwing me what's called a "quaffle" (actually a slightly deflated volleyball) looked at me to make sure I'm ready. I gave them a head nod and grip my "broom" (a PVC pipe), ready to run. "GO!" I run 20 feet and turn back to catch the ball. Success!

But as I take my next step, I get decked by team captain Dara Gaeuman, fall to the ground, drop the quaffle, re-grab the quaffle, get back up, run over to the hoop and score. It's a triumphant moment for my post-healthy, 33-year-old self, regardless of the fact that this a drill. On the first day of practice. Of a sport I'm playing for the first time. With people who likely weren't born when the first Harry Potter book came out....

[I]n 2005, a pair of students at Middlebury College -- Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe -- translated quidditch into a non-flying sport. The game used to be played on wooden brooms until a few years ago when the game got too rough. There are still chasers (offensive players), beaters (defenders), seekers, keepers (like a goalie in hockey or soccer) and quaffles (again the balls, stay with me here) and bludgers (slightly deflated dodgeballs). But here the snitch is actually a person with sock-like pouch attached to their lower back that has to be snatched by the seekers, while the snitch tries to evade them... Almost 15 years after its inception, real-world quidditch has grown into a global phenomenon, with an International Quidditch Association (IQA) that has a World Cup every two years, a couple of semi-pro leagues, several regional and national leagues and more than 150 colleges and universities with club teams.

During practice, Chanun Ong, a sophomore returning for his second year on the team, tells a freshman, "I wasn't a big Harry Potter fan, but this sport is pretty legit."
There's a short video of the quidditch practice, and the the article's author remembers some crucial advice he received from one of the players. "Scrunch your body down if someone is about to throw a bludger at you, so you're a harder target to hit."

Although he also acknowledges that most of the people watching the two-hour practice "were passersby trying to figure out what the hell is going on."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: With less than two weeks until the global climate strikes, 930 tech and corporate Amazon employees have pledged to walk out of the company's offices on September 20, demanding zero emissions by 2030. The climate action, which follows strikes at Amazon warehouses, most recently on Amazon Prime Day, marks the first time white collar Amazon employees have staged a walkout.

Workers with the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice are demanding that the company adopt a resolution to eliminate its massive carbon footprint by 2030. Compared to other tech giants, Amazon, which ships billions of packages each year and controls a huge portion of the cloud computing market, has come under particular scrutiny for its carbon emissions. On September 20, the biggest day of the weeklong climate strike taking place in 117 countries, Amazon employees in Seattle will walk out of their offices at 11:30 a.m., gather at the giant glass spheres at the center of Amazon's corporate campus, then march to city hall to rally with youth climate activists. An internal call for action that began circulating among employees on September 4 received around 930 pledges as of September 8, Read said. "Playing a significant role in helping to reduce the sources of human-induced climate change is an important commitment for Amazon," an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard in response to news of the walkout. "We have dedicated sustainability teams who have been working for years on initiatives to reduce our environmental impact. Earlier this year, we announced Shipment Zero - Amazon's vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon, with 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030."

"Over the past decade through our sustainable packaging programs, we've eliminated more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials and avoided 500 million shipping boxes," the Amazon spokesperson continued. "To track our progress on this journey and as part of an overall commitment to sharing our sustainability goals, we plan to share Amazon's company-wide carbon footprint, along with related goals and programs, later this year. This follows an extensive project over the past few years to develop an advanced scientific model to carefully map our carbon footprint to provide our business teams with detailed information helping them identify ways to reduce carbon use in their businesses."

Microsoft workers in Seattle will also participate in the walkout. Google workers could join too.

An IKEA hide-and-seek game with 3,000 people was scheduled to take place in Glasglow, Scotland on Saturday, August 31, but police managed to put a stop to it before it even got started. From a report: The one-stop shop for everything home-related and also the ideal place for a 3,000-person hide-and-seek game. After all, the average store is about 300,000 square feet, while the world's largest IKEA is 700,000 square feet, and honestly, it's easy to imagine endless hiding spots. But unfortunately for one Facebook group, their planned trip to an IKEA in Glasgow, Scotland was cancelled after word got out about their Saturday event. Five police officers were called to the Braehead branch and remained at the store until the evening.

"People are stopping everyone who 'looks like they are here for a game of hide and seek,'" one person wrote on Facebook after stopping by the store, The Scotsman reported. The IKEA itself also had its own security personnel, and no incidents were reported. The report says that IKEA management initially allowed hide-and-seek events -- a trend that began in Belgium in 2014 -- but were eventually forced to ban the events after they began getting out of hand.

"The safety of our customers and co-workers is always our highest priority," said Rob Cooper, IKEA Glasgow Store Manager in a statement. "We were aware of an unofficial Hide and Seek Facebook event being organized to take place at our store today and have been working with the local police for support. While we appreciate playing games in one of our stores may be appealing to some, we do not allow this kind of activity to take place to ensure we are offering a safe environment and relaxed shopping experience for our customers."

According to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE, the "chatter" from multiple bird species can be a useful cue to squirrels and other animals that there is no imminent threat in the area. Phys.Org reports: To test this hypothesis, the researchers observed the behavior of 54 wild Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in public parks and residential areas in Ohio in response to threat, which they simulated by playing back a recording of the call of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), a common predator of both squirrels and small birds. They followed the predator's call with a playback of either multi-species songbird bird chatter or ambient sounds lacking bird calls and monitored the behavior of each squirrel for 3 minutes.

The researchers found that all squirrels showed an increase in predator vigilance behaviors, such as freezing, looking up, or fleeing, after they heard the hawk's call. However, squirrels that were played bird chatter afterwards performed fewer vigilance behaviors and returned to normal levels of watchfulness more quickly than squirrels that did not hear bird calls after the hawk's call. This suggests that the squirrels are able to tap into the casual chatter of many bird species as an indicator of safety, allowing them to quickly return to getting on with normal behaviors like foraging rather than remaining on high alert after a threat has passed. "We knew that squirrels eavesdropped on the alarm calls of some bird species, but we were excited to find that they also eavesdrop on non-alarm sounds that indicate the birds feel relatively safe," the authors said. "Perhaps in some circumstances, cues of safety could be as important as cues of danger."

"As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce," reports The Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader shares excerpts from the report: Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones. Whether it's terrestrial delivery robots, flying delivery drones, office-patrolling security robots, inventory-checking robots in grocery stores or remotely piloted cars and trucks, the machines that were supposed to revolutionize everything by operating autonomously turn out to require, at the very least, humans minding them from afar. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation comes into effect -- and frankly, there's no guarantee that will ever happen -- there will be plenty of jobs for humans, just not ones their parents would recognize. Whether the humans in charge are in the same city or thousands of miles away, the proliferation of not-yet-autonomous technologies is driving a tiny but rapidly growing workforce.

Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.

"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."