Paris voted overwhelmingly Sunday to banish for-hire electric scooters from the streets of the French capital, delivering a blow to operators and a victory for road safety campaigners. From a report: The referendum means the City of Light, once a pioneer in embracing e-scooter services, is set to become the only major European capital to outlaw the widespread devices booked on apps such as Lime. The city's residents were asked to weigh in for or against them in a public consultation organised by mayor Anne Hidalgo, with nearly 90 percent of the votes cast against, official results showed. "We're happy. It's what we've been fighting for over four years," said Arnaud Kielbasa, co-founder of the Apacauvi charity, which represents victims of e-scooter accidents. "All Parisians say they are nervous on the pavements, nervous when they cross the roads. You need to look everywhere," Kielbasa, whose wife and infant daughter were hit by an e-scooter driver, told AFP. "That's why they've voted against them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: The operator of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall is being probed by New York's attorney general over the company's use of facial recognition technology to identify and exclude lawyers from events. AG Letitia James' office said the policy may violate civil rights laws. Because of the policy, lawyers who work for firms involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment Corp. can be denied entry to shows or sporting events, even when they have no direct involvement in any lawsuits against MSG. A lawyer who is subject to MSG's policy may buy a ticket to an event but be unable to get in because the MSG venues use facial recognition to identify them.

In December, attorney Kelly Conlon was denied entry into Radio City Music Hall in New York when she accompanied her daughter's Girl Scout troop to a Rockettes show. Conlon wasn't personally involved in any lawsuits against MSG but is a lawyer for a firm that "has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment," NBC New York reported. James' office sent a letter (PDF) Tuesday to MSG Entertainment, noting reports that it "used facial recognition software to forbid all lawyers in all law firms representing clients engaged in any litigation against the Company from entering the Company's venues in New York, including the use of any season tickets."

"We write to raise concerns that the Policy may violate the New York Civil Rights Law and other city, state, and federal laws prohibiting discrimination and retaliation for engaging in protected activity," Assistant AG Kyle Rapinan of the Civil Rights Bureau wrote in the letter. "Such practices certainly run counter to the spirit and purpose of such laws, and laws promoting equal access to the courts: forbidding entry to lawyers representing clients who have engaged in litigation against the Company may dissuade such lawyers from taking on legitimate cases, including sexual harassment or employment discrimination claims." The AG's office also said it is concerned that "facial recognition software may be plagued with biases and false positives against people of color and women." The letter asked MSG Entertainment to respond by February 13 "to state the justifications for the Company's Policy and identify all efforts you are undertaking to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and that the Company's use of facial recognition technology will not lead to discrimination." "To be clear, our policy does not unlawfully prohibit anyone from entering our venues and it is not our intent to dissuade attorneys from representing plaintiffs in litigation against us," said an MSG spokesperson in a statement. "We are merely excluding a small percentage of lawyers only during active litigation. Most importantly, to even suggest anyone is being excluded based on the protected classes identified in state and federal civil rights laws is ludicrous. Our policy has never applied to attorneys representing plaintiffs who allege sexual harassment or employment discrimination."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Kelly Conlon joined her daughter's Girl Scout troop for a fun outing to see the Rockettes perform their Christmas Spectacular show at Radio City Music Hall in New York, she had no idea she would end up booted from the show once she entered the building. Security stopped Conlon, NBC New York reported, because she is a New Jersey lawyer. It seems that Madison Square Garden Entertainment has begun using facial recognition technology to identify any visitor to any of its venues -- including Radio City Music Hall -- who is involved with any law firm that is actively involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment.

Conlon has never practiced law in New York nor personally been involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Instead, she is guilty by association, as an associate for Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which has spent years tangled up in litigation against a restaurant that NBC reported is "now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment." According to Conlon, she became aware of this supposed conflict of interest when security guards approached her in the Radio City Music Hall lobby just as she passed through the metal detector. Over the speakers, Conlon heard a warning about a woman in a gray scarf, then security confirmed the warning was about her, telling her, "Our recognition picked you up."

Despite Conlon assuring security that "I'm not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," she was escorted out. Ars could not immediately reach MSG for comment, but in a statement, MSG said the same thing would've happened to any attorney involved in her firm, claiming that her firm had been "notified twice" of MSG's policy. "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved," the statement provided to NBC said. "While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages. The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It's "a dream-of-a-SoC," writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a "modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and "is genuinely future-proof."

The PineTab 2 is a complete redesign, Erecinski claims. It has a metal chassis that "is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance, and repair." The tablet comes apart with snap-in tabs, and Pine64 will offer replacement parts. The insides are modular, too, with the eMMC storage, camera, daughter-board, battery, and keyboard connector all removable "in under 5 minutes." The 10.1-inch IPS display, with "modern and reasonably thin bezels," should also be replaceable, albeit with more work. On that easily opened chassis are two USB-C ports, one for USB 3.0 I/O and one for charging (or USB 2.0 if you want). There's a dedicated micro-HDMI port, and a front-facing 2-megapixel camera and rear-facing 5-megapixel (not the kind of all-in-one media production machine Apple advertises, this tablet), a microSD slot, and a headphone jack. While a PCIe system is exposed inside the PineTab, most NVMe SSDs will not fit, according to Pine64. All of this is subject to change before final production, however.

As with the original PineTab, this model comes with a detachable, backlit keyboard cover, included by default. That makes supporting a desktop OS for the device far more viable, Erecinski writes. The firmware chipset is the same as in the PineBook Pro, which should help with that. No default OS has been decided as of yet, according to Pine64. The tablet should ship with two memory/storage variants, 4GB/64GB and 8GB/128GB. It's due to ship "sometime after the Chinese New Year" (January 22 to February 5), though there's no firm date. No price was announced, but "it will be affordable regardless of which version you'll settle on." A video version of the "December Update" can be found on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a London court this week, coroner Andrew Walker had the difficult task of assessing a question that child safety advocates have been asking for years: How responsible is social media for the content algorithms feed to minors? The case before Walker involved a 14-year-old named Molly Russell, who took her life in 2017 after she viewed thousands of posts on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest promoting self-harm. At one point during the inquest, Walker described the content that Russell liked or saved in the days ahead of her death as so disturbing, the coroner said in court, that he found it "almost impossible to watch." Today, Walker concluded that Russell's death couldn't be ruled a suicide, Bloomberg reports. Instead, he described her cause of death as "an act of self-harm whilst suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content."

Bloomberg reported that Walker came to this decision based on Russell's "prolific" use of Instagram -- liking, sharing, or saving 16,300 posts in six months before her death -- and Pinterest -- 5,793 pins over the same amount of time -- combined with how the platforms catered content to contribute to Russell's depressive state. "The platforms operated in such a way using algorithms as to result, in some circumstances, of binge periods of images, video clips and text," which "romanticized acts of self-harm" and "sought to isolate and discourage discussion with those who may have been able to help," Walker said.

Following Walker's ruling, Russell's family issued a statement provided to Ars, calling it a landmark decision and saying that the court didn't even review the most disturbing content that Molly encountered. "This past fortnight has been particularly painful for our family," the Russell family's statement reads. "We're missing Molly more agonizingly than usual, but we hope that the scrutiny this case has received will help prevent similar deaths encouraged by the disturbing content that is still to this day available on social media platforms including those run by Meta." Bloomberg reports that the family's lawyer, Oliver Sanders, has requested that Walker "send instructions on how to prevent this happening again to Pinterest, Meta, the UK government, and the communications regulator." In their statement, the family pushed UK regulators to quickly pass and enforce the UK Online Safety Bill, which The New York Times reported could institute "new safeguards for younger users worldwide." Meta and Pinterest took different approaches to defend their policies. "Pinterest apologized, saying it didn't have the technology it currently has to more effectively moderate content that Molly was exposed to," reports Ars. "But Meta's head of health and well-being, Elizabeth Lagone, frustrated the family by telling the court that the content Molly viewed was considered 'safe' by Meta's standards."

"We have heard a senior Meta executive describe this deadly stream of content the platform's algorithms pushed to Molly, as 'SAFE' and not contravening the platform's policies," the Russell family wrote in their statement. "If this demented trail of life-sucking content was safe, my daughter Molly would probably still be alive." Russells' statement continued: "For the first time today, tech platforms have been formally held responsible for the death of a child. In the future, we as a family hope that any other social media companies called upon to assist an inquest follow the example of Pinterest, who have taken steps to learn lessons and have engaged sincerely and respectfully with the inquest process."

Pinterest told Ars that it is "committed to making ongoing improvements to help ensure that the platform is safe for everyone" and internally "the Coroner's report will be considered with care." Since Molly's death, Pinterest said it has taken steps to improve content moderation, including blocking more than 25,000 self-harm related search terms and, since 2019, has combined "human moderation with automated machine learning technologies to reduce policy-violating content on the platform."

Thursday Meta published a blog post by their "product management director of Messenger Trust," who emphasized that they've begun at least testing end-to-end encryption by default for Messenger chats. But Meta also announced plans "to test a new secure storage feature for backups of your end-to-end encrypted chats on Messenger...."

"As with end-to-end encrypted chats, secure storage means that we won't have access to your messages, unless you choose to report them to us."

CNBC provides some context: The announcement comes after Facebook turned over Messenger chat histories to Nebraska police as part of an investigation into an alleged illegal abortion. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the feature has been in the works for a while and is not related to the Nebraska case...

The feature is rolling out on Android and iOS devices this week, but it isn't yet available on the Messenger website. The company has been discussing full-scale deployment of end-to-end encryption since 2016, but critics have said the security measure would make it much more difficult for law enforcement to catch child predators....Meta said in the release that it is making progress toward the global rollout of default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls in 2023.
Other privacy enhancements announced Thursday by Meta:

• "We plan to bring end-to-end encrypted calls to the Calls Tab on Messenger."

• Meta announced that the deleting of messages will start syncing across your other devices "soon."

• Messenger will continue offering the option of "Disappearing" messages, in which viewed messages in an end-to-end encrypted chat automatically then disappear after a pre-specified period of time.

And there's more, according to Meta's announcement:.

"This week, we'll begin testing default end-to-end encrypted chats between some people. If you're in the test group, some of your most frequent chats may be automatically end-to-end encrypted, which means you won't have to opt in to the feature. You'll still have access to your message history, but any new messages or calls with that person will be end-to-end encrypted. You can still report messages to us if you think they violate our policies, and we'll review them and take action as necessary....

"Last year, we started a limited test of opt-in end-to-end encrypted messages and calls on Instagram, and in February we broadened the test to include adults in Ukraine and Russia. Soon, we'll expand the test even further to include people in more countries and add more features like group chats....

"We will continue to provide updates as we make progress toward the global rollout of default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls in 2023."

FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they've never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night. From a report: Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn't have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user's address book. It also requires that all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped. "I got my first facetime spam starting 4 days ago," one user reported to an Apple support forum earlier this month. "It has been non-stop, over 300 numbers blocked so far. My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on." The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they too begin making callbacks. Apple provides surprisingly few ways for users to stop the nuisance calls. As noted earlier, users can block numbers, but this requires manually blocking each individual person on the group call. That's not an effective solution for people receiving dozens of group calls, often to a different group of people in a short period of time, often in the wee hours.

"English rock band Pink Floyd has released new music for the first time in 28 years," reports UPI, "with proceeds from the track going to humanitarian relief in Ukraine amid its ongoing conflict with Russia."

"The single will be available on all streaming and download platforms..." the band said on their official web site. [Including downloads on Amazon Music and Apple Music]. "This is the first new original music that they have recorded together as a band since 1994's The Division Bell." The track sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long-time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards and features an extraordinary vocal performance by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox.... David, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren says: "We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world's major powers...."

"Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense. Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music." While writing the music for the track, David managed to speak with Andriy from his hospital bed in Kyiv where he was recovering from a mortar shrapnel injury. "I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing...."

Speaking about the track David says, "I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities and raise morale. We want to express our support for Ukraine and, in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become".

All proceeds will go towards Ukrainian humanitarian relief.
On March 11 the band had posted another update on their official site: To stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the works of Pink Floyd, from 1987 onwards, and all of David Gilmour's solo recordings are being removed from all digital music providers in Russia and Belarus....

schwit1 shares a report: About 10 years ago, when Erik Arbuthnot first started hearing about phony-kidnapping hustles, his fellow agents at the FBI scoffed at the cases. "Don't worry about those," they told Arbuthnot. "Those are fake. We handle the real ones." Now the cases have become so widespread that the bureau has a name for them: virtual kidnappings. "It's a telephone extortion scheme," says Arbuthnot, who heads up virtual-kidnapping investigations for the FBI out of Los Angeles. Because many of the crimes go unreported, the bureau doesn't have a precise number on how widespread the scam is. But over the past few years, thousands of families like the Mendelsteins have experienced the same bizarre nightmare: a phone call, a screaming child, a demand for ransom money, and a kidnapping that -- after painful minutes, hours, or even days -- is revealed to be fake. There's the pastor in Memphis who, like Mendelstein, was told his daughter had been kidnapped. The man in Miami who thought his wife and baby daughter were being held for ransom. The guy in Missouri who got conned into thinking his elderly mother had been taken. Overall, the FBI reports, internet scams nearly doubled in 2020 -- and extortion cases like virtual kidnapping have rung up the third-most victims, right behind phishing schemes and phony sales calls.

The New Yorker argues that photos on newer iPhones are "coldly crisp and vaguely inhuman, caught in the uncanny valley where creative expression meets machine learning...."

"[T]he truth is that iPhones are no longer cameras in the traditional sense. Instead, they are devices at the vanguard of 'computational photography,' a term that describes imagery formed from digital data and processing as much as from optical information. Each picture registered by the lens is altered to bring it closer to a pre-programmed ideal." In late 2020, Kimberly McCabe, an executive at a consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, upgraded from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 12 Pro... But the 12 Pro has been a disappointment, she told me recently, adding, "I feel a little duped." Every image seems to come out far too bright, with warm colors desaturated into grays and yellows. Some of the photos that McCabe takes of her daughter at gymnastics practice turn out strangely blurry. In one image that she showed me, the girl's upraised feet smear together like a messy watercolor. McCabe said that, when she uses her older digital single-lens-reflex camera (D.S.L.R.), "what I see in real life is what I see on the camera and in the picture." The new iPhone promises "next level" photography with push-button ease. But the results look odd and uncanny. "Make it less smart — I'm serious," she said. Lately she's taken to carrying a Pixel, from Google's line of smartphones, for the sole purpose of taking pictures....

Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, "I've tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing." A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device "sees the things I'm trying to photograph as a problem to solve," he added. The image processing also eliminates digital noise, smoothing it into a soft blur, which might be the reason behind the smudginess that McCabe sees in photos of her daughter's gymnastics. The "fix" ends up creating a distortion more noticeable than whatever perceived mistake was in the original.

Earlier this month, Apple's iPhone team agreed to provide me information, on background, about the camera's latest upgrades. A staff member explained that, when a user takes a photograph with the newest iPhones, the camera creates as many as nine frames with different levels of exposure. Then a "Deep Fusion" feature, which has existed in some form since 2019, merges the clearest parts of all those frames together, pixel by pixel, forming a single composite image. This process is an extreme version of high-dynamic range, or H.D.R., a technique that previously required some software savvy.... The iPhone camera also analyzes each image semantically, with the help of a graphics-processing unit, which picks out specific elements of a frame — faces, landscapes, skies — and exposes each one differently. On both the 12 Pro and 13 Pro, I've found that the image processing makes clouds and contrails stand out with more clarity than the human eye can perceive, creating skies that resemble the supersaturated horizons of an anime film or a video game. Andy Adams, a longtime photo blogger, told me, "H.D.R. is a technique that, like salt, should be applied very judiciously." Now every photo we take on our iPhones has had the salt applied generously, whether it is needed or not....

The average iPhone photo strains toward the appearance of professionalism and mimics artistry without ever getting there. We are all pro photographers now, at the tap of a finger, but that doesn't mean our photos are good.

Pi day is here — 3/14. And to celebrate, NASA released their ninth annual NASA Pi Day Challenge — "some math problems related to current and future NASA missions."

MIT Bloggers released a videogame-themed video to welcome the class of 2026.

If you Google "pi day" (or Pi), you're given an interactive doodle that (when you click the pi symbol in the upper-left) presents a Simon-like game challenging you to type in approximations of pi to an ever-increasingnumber of digits.

Guinness World Records points out that the most accurate value of pi is 62,831,853,071,796 digits, "achieved by University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland) in Chur, Switzerland, on 19 August 2021." (Note: the number of digits looks suspiciously significant....)

And USA Today published an article which shares the history of how Pi Day got started. Former physicist Larry Shaw, who connected March 14 with 3.14, celebrated the first Pi Day at the Exploratorium with fruit pies and tea in 1988. The museum said Shaw led Pi Day parades there every year until his passing in 2017.

In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution marking March 14 as National Pi Day.

The date is significant in the world of science. Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. The Exploratorium said it added a celebration of Einstein's life as part of its Pi Day activities after Shaw's daughter, Sara, realized the coincidence. March 14 also marks the death of renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who passed away in 2018.
And "For those who don't enjoy math, you get pie," the article quips, noting that numerous pizza chains and restaurants are offering appropriately-adjusted one-day sale prices on pizza (and fruit) pies.

Instacart has even released a list showing which pie flavors enjoy the highest popularity over the national average in each of America's 50 states. ("New York — Boston Cream Pie. Washington — Marionberry Pie....")

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father's death followed a "two-year battle" with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke. Engadget reports: Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film's Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick's high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull's ad hoc technique "was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do," he said during a lecture at TIFF. Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. [...] He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today's film industry.

"Until recently," writes the NY Times' Jay Caspian Kang, "my daughter and I were somehow able to avoid the king of toy videos: Ryan Kaji." There's no one way to describe what Kaji, who is now 10 years old, has done across his multiple YouTube channels, cable television shows and live appearances: In one video, he is giving you a tour of the Legoland Hotel; in another, he splashes around in his pool to introduce a science video about tsunamis. But for years, what he has mostly done is play with toys: Thomas the Tank Engine, "Paw Patrol" figures, McDonald's play kitchens. A new toy and a new video for almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content that can overwhelm your child's brain, click after click. Kaji has been playing with toys on camera since Barack Obama was in the White House.

Here are a few of the companies that are now paying him handsomely for his services: Amazon, Walmart, Nickelodeon, Skechers. Ryan also has 10 separate YouTube channels, which together make up "Ryan's World" [31.2M subscribers], a content behemoth whose branded merchandise took in more than $250 million last year. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Kaji family take exceeds $25 million annually.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article — and for summarizing one of its most startling details. "Not too surprisingly, Ryan's mother and father paused their teaching and engineering careers to focus on Ryan's empire after seeing the reaction to Ryan's breakout 2016 video, which now has 2+ billion YouTube views."

The Times' reporter quips that the videos capture glimpses from "the only world in which children do not stare at screens" — then wonders if that's even true, sharing their observation from the filming of a special toy-themed TV show with Ryan.

"I overheard a crew member say to him, 'If you finish this scene, you can play Minecraft.' "

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a mathematical model to understand why popular baby names keep on changing, and it "points to a tug-of-war between the need to stand out in the crowd and the need to fit in with the pack," reports Phys.Org. "The motives to conform and to be unique interact to produce complex dynamics when people observe each other in a social network." The research has been published in the journal Psychological Review. From the report: Mathematically speaking, the desire to fit in would drive behavior toward the mean, or average, in the group while the desire to stand out would drive behavior away from the mode, or most common occurrence, in the group. "Put them together and they still lead to equilibrium," [said Russell Golman, associate professor in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at CMU]. To break out of the equilibrium conundrum, Golman and his team added social networks to the mix. According to Golman, that means communities, neighbors, colleagues, clubs, or other social groups, not necessarily social media. "It was surprising that social networks could make such a big difference," said Golman. "We modeled the dynamics with a lot of different networks, and not converging to equilibrium is actually pretty typical."

To test their new model, CMU Ph.D. student Erin Bugbee turned to the large database of baby names managed by the Social Security Administration for the last century. If baby names settled into an equilibrium, the most popular name would always be the most popular. That is not what happened.

As the popularity of one name, say Emily, peaks, parents may decide to forgo that name and pick a similar one, like Emma. By following this strategy, they are instilling in their new daughter a name that is socially acceptable by its similarity to the popular name but will allow her to stand out in the crowd by putting a unique twist on her identity. Many parents may be thinking the same thing and the number of little girls named Emily will decline while those named Emma will increase. The study concludes that understanding social psychology and social network structure are both critical to explain the emergence of complex, unpredictable cultural trends.

Blue Origin successfully completed a 10-minute suborbital spaceflight this morning.

But with SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and the space agencies of Russia and China, Blue Origin also helped humanity achieve another milestone Saturday. The Washington Post explains how it will push us far past a record set in 1985 when America's space shuttle made nine flights into space: Saturday's launch will be the 13th human spaceflight of the year, two more than in 1985, when NASA carried out those nine shuttle flights, and the Russian Soyuz vehicle carried astronauts on two launches.

All of those flights reached orbit, while several of the flights this year barely scratched the edge of space in relatively short suborbital jaunts. Still, this year is "the busiest year in human spaceflight," Jennifer Levasseur, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview. "We're entering a new phase of activity that we've never, frankly, seen before. And it creates a lot of excitement."

Saturday's Blue Origin flight will also carry Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor; Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space; and Laura Shepard Churchley, a daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space...

China, which is building a space station in low Earth orbit, flew two crewed missions this year, and Russia has flown three, including the flight this week. The flurry of activity is reminiscent of 1985, Levasseur said, a time when NASA was optimistic that it would fly dozens of times a year, carrying all sorts of people to space.
The Post ultimately calls 2021 "one of the most remarkable years for human spaceflight."

How Natalie Grams, who once abandoned her medical education to study alternative therapies, became Germany's most prominent homeopathy skeptic. From a report: The pseudoscience of homeopathy was invented in Germany in the 18th century by a maverick physician named Samuel Hahnemann. His theory was based on the ancient principle of like cures like -- akin to the mechanism behind vaccines. The remedies Hahnemann developed, meant to help the body heal on its own, originate as substances that with excess exposure (like pollen) can make a patient ill (in this case, with hay fever) -- or kill them: Arsenic is used as a treatment for digestive problems, and the poisonous plant belladonna is meant to counteract pain and swelling. These substances are diluted -- again and again -- and shaken vigorously in a process called "potentization" or "dynamization." The resultant remedies typically contain a billionth, trillionth, orâ...âwellâ...âa zillionth (10 to the minus 60th, if you're counting) of the original substance.

Today, homeopathy is practiced worldwide, particularly in Britain, India, the U.S. -- where there's a monument to Hahnemann on a traffic circle six blocks north of the White House -- and, especially, Germany. Practitioners, however, differ greatly in their approach. Some only prescribe remedies cataloged in homeopathic reference books. Others take a more metaphoric bent, offering treatments that contain a fragment of the Berlin Wall to cure feelings of exclusion and loneliness or a powder exposed to cellphone signals as protection from radiation emitted by mobile handsets. Grams, the daughter of a chemist, first turned to homeopathy in 2002. While she was attending medical school to become a surgeon, a highway accident left her car in the ditch with the windshield shattered. Grams walked away unhurt, but she soon began to suffer from heart palpitations, panic attacks, and fainting spells that doctors couldn't explain. Her roommate suggested she visit a heilpraktiker, a type of German naturopath that offers alternative therapies ranging from acupuncture and massage to reiki and homeopathy.

Homeopaths typically spend a lot of time with patients, asking not just about symptoms but also about emotions, work, and relationships. This is all meant to find the root cause of a patient's suffering and is part of its appeal. The heilpraktiker asked Grams about her feelings and the accident, things she hadnâ(TM)t spoken about with her doctors -- or anyone -- thinking they weren't important in understanding what was wrong. The heilpraktiker prescribed her belladonna globules and recommended she visit a trauma therapist. Steadily, her symptoms fell away. She was healed. Soon after, Grams dropped the idea of becoming a surgeon, opting for a future as a general practitioner while taking night courses in alternative therapies. After completing her medical degree, she began a five-year residency to qualify as a GP. But three years in, Grams abandoned conventional medicine and began an apprenticeship with a homeopath near Heidelberg.

The chief financial officer of Chinese tech firm Huawei will be released and allowed to return to China after reaching an agreement with the U.S. government on fraud charges, prosecutors said Friday in a Brooklyn federal court. CNBC reports: A U.S. district judge accepted the deferred prosecution agreement, which will last until Dec. 1, 2022. Under the deal, the executive, Meng Wanzhou, affirmed the accuracy of a statement of facts and agreed not to commit other crimes, or risk prosecution. Meng, the daughter of Huawei's founder, was arrested in Canada in December 2018. The U.S. sought to extradite her on bank and wire fraud charges, claiming she was misled a financial institution to violate American sanctions on Iran. The U.S. said Friday it plans to withdraw its extradition request.

Meng pleaded not guilty to the charges on Friday. As part of the agreement, however, she took "responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution," acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Nicole Boeckmann said in a statement. According to Boeckmann, Meng admitted to making "multiple material misrepresentations" while CFO of Huawei about the company's business in Iran, in conversations with the senior executive of a financial institution. The government claimed she did this to continue Huawei's business relationship with the firm. Boeckmann said the admission confirms the core allegations against Meng.

LoTonah writes: Sir Clive Sinclair, the man behind the Sinclair Spectrum and the first computer to retail for under a hundred dollars (the Sinclair ZX-81, A.K.A. The Timex/Sinclair 1000), died September 15 after battling a long illness. His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness.

Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices. Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models. For a certain generation of gamer, the computer of choice was either the ZX Spectrum 48K or its rival, the Commodore 64. Belinda Sinclair, 57, told the Guardian: "He was a rather amazing person. Of course, he was so clever and he was always interested in everything. My daughter and her husband are engineers so he'd be chatting engineering with them." He left school at 17 and worked for four years as a technical journalist to raise funds to found Sinclair Radionics.

The government hopes patient testimony -- if a judge allows it -- in the closely watched criminal fraud trial will support the charge that Elizabeth Holmes touted the company's medical tests as reliable despite knowing of bad results. The former executive has pleaded not guilty. From a report: After three back-to-back miscarriages, Brittany Gould said she turned to Theranos Inc. to know if her latest pregnancy was on track. Then, one of the company's trademark finger-prick tests indicated she was losing another baby, Ms. Gould said. The Mesa, Ariz., medical assistant recalled dreading the moment when she would have to tell her 7-year-old daughter, who was waiting for a sibling. "Mommy is not having a baby," Ms. Gould said she told her.

Like those of other patients slated as potential witnesses in the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes , Ms. Gould's test was wrong. Prosecutors have accused Ms. Holmes of defrauding patients and investors by falsely claiming her invention could accurately perform lab tests on just a few drops of blood. The repeatedly delayed trial -- postponed once because Ms. Holmes was due to have a baby herself -- is expected to be one of the most widely watched corporate-fraud cases in years.

Scheduled to begin with jury selection on Aug. 31 in San Jose, Calif., the trial features a star-studded list of potential witnesses, including ex-Theranos directors Henry Kissinger and Jim Mattis ; ex-Theranos lawyer David Boies ; and high-profile investors, including Riley Bechtel, the former chairman of Bechtel Corp., and Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corp. and executive chairman of News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal. The lineup also could include a handful of previously unknown patients -- if the court allows them to take the stand. Ms. Holmes's lawyers have argued the patient witnesses should be excluded, and they have already had success in limiting the scope of their testimony. A ruling by the judge to eliminate the patients would be considered a big win for Ms. Holmes, and could significantly change the nature of the trial.

Mark Herring had a fatal heart attack after the police swarmed his house after a fake emergency call. A Tennessee man was sentenced to five years in prison in connection with the episode. From a report: Mark Herring was at home in Bethpage, Tenn., one night in April 2020 when the police swarmed his house. Someone with a British accent had called emergency services in Sumner County and reported having shot a woman in the back of the head at Mr. Herring's address. The caller had threatened to set off pipe bombs at the front and back doors if officers came, according to federal court records. When the police arrived, they drew their guns and told Mr. Herring, a 60-year-old computer programmer and grandfather of six, to come out and keep his hands visible. As he walked out, he lost his balance and fell. He was pronounced dead that same night at a nearby hospital. The cause of death was a heart attack, according to court records.

Mr. Herring had been a victim of "swatting," the act of reporting a fake crime in order to provoke a heavily armed response from the police. The caller was a minor living in the United Kingdom, according to federal prosecutors. But the caller knew Mr. Herring's address because Shane Sonderman, 20, of Lauderdale County, Tenn., had posted the information online, prosecutors said. On Wednesday, Mr. Sonderman was sentenced to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. "The defendant was part of a chain of events," federal prosecutors said in court documents. The police "arrived prepared to take on a life and death situation," prosecutors said. "Mr. Herring died of a heart attack at gunpoint." Mr. Sonderman's lawyer, Bryan R. Huffman, said he had argued for a lesser sentence but believed five years "was fair in light of Shane's culpability."

"Mr. Sonderman has expressed his remorse on multiple occasions. He has expressed his regret regarding Mr. Herring's death," Mr. Huffman said in an email on Saturday. "Mr. Sonderman's family had also expressed their remorse. There are many families affected by Shane's actions, including his own family." Mr. Herring was targeted because he refused to sell his Twitter handle, @Tennessee, according to his family and prosecutors. Smart, blunt and plain-spoken, Mr. Herring had loved computers since he was a teenager and joined Twitter in March 2007, less than a year after it started, his family said. He knew people wanted his handle, which he chose because of his love for the state, where he had been born and raised, and had rebuffed offers of $3,000 to $4,000 to sell it, his daughter Corinna Fitch, 37, said in an interview.