Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong? An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before. On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress? It's surprisingly difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways. Part of the trouble is that it's hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is.

[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.

For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]

Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.

Scientists have changed the way the kilogram is defined. Currently, it is defined by the weight of a platinum-based ingot called "Le Grand K" which is locked away in a safe in Paris. On Friday, researchers meeting in Versailles voted to get rid of it in favour of defining a kilogram in terms of an electric current. From a report: The decision was made at the General Conference on Weights and Measures. But some scientists, such as Perdi Williams at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, have expressed mixed feelings about the change. "I haven't been on this project for too long but I feel a weird attachment to the kilogram," she said. "I think it is such an exciting thing and this is a really big moment. So I'm a little bit sad about [the change]. But it is an important step forward and so the new system is going to work a lot better. It is also a really exciting time, and I can't wait for it to happen."

Le Grand K has been at the forefront of the international system of measuring weights since 1889. Several close replicas were made and distributed around the globe. But the master kilogram and its copies were seen to change -- ever so slightly -- as they deteriorated. In a world where accurate measurement is now critical in many areas, such as in drug development, nanotechnology and precision engineering -- those responsible for maintaining the international system had no option but to move beyond Le Grand K to a more robust definition.

schwit1 writes: PlayStation users in Chicago on Wednesday began paying a 9 percent tax on streaming content as the gaming company starts complying with a city levy. The Sony-owned company joins other streaming services including Spotify, Netflix and Hulu in complying with the charge, which took effect three years ago. The city's amusement tax, which used to apply mostly to concert and sporting event tickets, was extended to include streaming services in 2015. That includes charges paid for playing games, according to Chicago's Finance Department. Some tech companies have fought the additional 9 percent charge. Apple filed a lawsuit against the city in August alleging the tax on its music streaming services was illegal and discriminatory. That suit is pending in Cook County Circuit Court. Meanwhile, Apple is not collecting the tax. In 2015, a group of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, XBox Live and Hulu users sued Chicago in Cook County, alleging the tax violates federal law. The judge ruled in the city's favor in May, and the streaming service users appealed the decision. The case is pending in state Appellate Court.

Days before Amazon announced the cities it had picked for its HQ2, CEO Jeff Bezos had to address a separate but related concern among employees: Where is all this headed? At an all-hands meeting last Thursday in Seattle, an employee asked Bezos about Amazon's future. Specifically, the questioner wanted to know what lessons Bezos has learned from the recent bankruptcies of Sears and other big retailers. From a report: "Amazon is not too big to fail," Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting that CNBC has heard. "In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years." The key to prolonging that demise, Bezos continued, is for the company to "obsess over customers" and to avoid looking inward, worrying about itself. "If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end," he said. "We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible." Bezos' comments come at a time of unprecedented success at Amazon, with its core retail business continuing to grow while the company is winning the massive cloud-computing market and gaining rapid adoption of its Alexa voice assistant in the home.

Justin Kosslyn, who leads product management at Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet that builds technology to address global security challenges, writes: The Internet's lack of friction made it great, but now our devotion to minimizing friction is perhaps the internet's weakest link for security. Friction -- delays and hurdles to speed and growth -- can be a win-win-win for users, companies, and security. It is time to abandon our groupthink bias against friction as a design principle. Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions -- rules that limit how fast you can drive a vehicle or access a controlled substance -- yet digital information moves limitlessly. The same design philosophy that accelerated the flow of correspondence, news, and commerce also accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware, and disinformation.

In the old days, it took time and work to steal secrets, blackmail people, and meddle across borders. Then came the internet. From the beginning, it was designed as a frictionless communication platform across countries, companies, and computers. Reducing friction is generally considered a good thing: it saves time and effort, and in many genuine ways makes our world smaller. There are also often financial incentives: more engagement, more ads, more dollars. But the internet's lack of friction has been a boon to the dark side, too. Now, in a matter of hours a "bad actor" can steal corporate secrets or use ransomware to blackmail thousands of people. Governments can influence foreign populations remotely and at relatively low cost. Whether the threat is malware, phishing, or disinformation, they all exploit high-velocity networks of computers and people.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) paved the way for improved GPS and location accuracy today, approving an order that will allow U.S. phones to access a European satellite system. The order allows non-federal consumer devices to access the European Union's version of GPS, which is also known as Galileo. The system is available globally, and it officially went live in 2016. By opening up access, devices that can retrieve a signal from both Galileo and the U.S. GPS system will see improved timing estimates and location reliability. The iPhone 8 was the first Apple product to support it. Other phone models from Huawei and Samsung support the system, too. "Since the debut of the first consumer handheld GPS device in 1989, consumers and industry in the United States have relied on the U.S. GPS to support satellite-based positioning, navigation, and timing services that are integral to everyday applications ranging from driving directions to precision farming," the FCC said in a release. Now, the U.S. system will be able to commingle with the European one, making the way for better reliability, range, and accuracy.

Tulsa, Oklahoma is offering full-time remote workers in the U.S. free office space, a subsidized furnished apartment, and $10,000 cash if you move there and stay for at least one year. The city wants to attract so-called "digital nomads," who would, presumably, start paying taxes, launch businesses, and otherwise contribute to the economy of wherever they're drawn to. Nextgov reports: Tulsa Remote is one of several revitalization projects in the region funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The Tulsa-based philanthropic organization was started by George B. Kaiser, an oil and banking billionaire who has signed on to Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates' "Giving Pledge," whose wealthy signees promise to give away at least half their fortunes to charity.

The organization has budgeted for 20 new remote workers in the program's first year, says Ken Levit, GKFF's executive director. Applicants must be at least 18, eligible to work in the U.S., already working full-time for an employer based outside the boundaries of Tulsa County, and prepared to move to Tulsa within six months. Applications opened Tuesday at the website TulsaRemote.com; the city hopes to settle the first new residents within the next three months, Levit said.

Google's parent company Alphabet is closing down Schaft, its secretive unit that develops bipedal robots aimed at helping out in disaster efforts. The news was first reported by Nikkei, but Alphabet confirmed to TechCrunch that the business will be shuttered. It said it is helping staff find new roles, most of which will likely be outside of Google and its Alphabet parent. TechCrunch reports: The company was scheduled to be sold to SoftBank alongside Boston Dynamics -- another of Alphabet's robotics ventures -- through a deal that was announced last year. Boston Dynamics made the transition but Schaft didn't. Softbank never shouted that omission from the rooftops, but a source with knowledge of the deal told us that certain conditions agreed for the deal were not fulfilled, hence Schaft remained with Alphabet. Our source explained that Alphabet's robotics focused shifted away from Schaft and instead to non-humanoid robots and industry-led solutions such as robotic arms.

The departure of Andy Rubin, the controversial robotics evangelist who reportedly got a $90 million payout to leave amid sexual misconduct allegations, seemed to speed up its demise inside the organization. Alphabet shopped the Schaft business fairly widely -- since 2016 and after the SoftBank deal collapsed -- but to no avail, we understand. That left closing it down as the last remaining option.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A spinning turbine that can capture wind traveling in any direction and could transform how consumers generate electricity in cities has won its inventors a prestigious international award and ~$38,000 prize. Nicolas Orellana, 36, and Yaseen Noorani, 24, MSc students at Lancaster University, scooped the James Dyson award for their O-Wind Turbine, which -- in a technological first -- takes advantage of both horizontal and vertical winds without requiring steering.

O-Wind Turbine is a 25cm sphere with geometric vents that sits on a fixed axis and spins when wind hits it from any direction. When wind energy turns the device, gears drive a generator that converts the power of the wind into electricity. The students believe the device, which could take at least five years to be put into commercial production, could be installed on large structures such as the side of a building or balcony, where wind speeds are highest. Dyson, who chose the winners, hailed it as "an ingenious concept." He continued: "Designing something that solves a problem is an intentionally broad brief. It invites talented, young inventors to do more than just identify real problems. It empowers them to use their ingenuity to develop inventive solutions. O-Wind Turbine does exactly that. It takes the enormous challenge of producing renewable energy and using geometry it can harness energy in places where we've scarcely been looking -- cities."

Jason Koebler writes: "SleepyHead" is a free, open-source, and definitely not FDA-approved piece of software for sleep apnea patients that is the product of thousands of hours of hacking and development by a lone Australian developer named Mark Watkins, who has helped thousands of sleep apnea patients take back control of their treatment from overburdened and underinvested doctors. The software gives patients access to the sleep data that is already being generated by their CPAP machines but generally remains inaccessible, hidden by DRM and proprietary data formats that can only be read by authorized users (doctors) on proprietary pieces of software that patients often can't buy or download. SleepyHead and community-run forums like CPAPtalk.com and ApneaBoard.com have allowed patients to circumvent medical device manufacturers, who would prefer that the software not exist at all. Medical device manufacturers fought in 2015 to prevent an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to legalize hacking by patients who wanted to access their own data, but an exemption was granted, legalizing SleepyHead and software like it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "the Justice Department is preparing to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) and is increasingly optimistic it will be able to get him into a U.S. courtroom." From the report: Over the past year, U.S. prosecutors have discussed several types of charges they could potentially bring against Mr. Assange, the people said. Mr. Assange has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since receiving political asylum from the South American country in 2012. The people familiar with the case wouldn't describe whether discussions were under way with the U.K. or Ecuador about Mr. Assange, but said they were encouraged by recent developments.

Prosecutors have considered publicly indicting Mr. Assange to try to trigger his removal from the embassy, the people said, because a detailed explanation of the evidence against Mr. Assange could give Ecuadorean authorities a reason to turn him over. The exact charges Justice Department might pursue remain unclear, but they may involve the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the disclosure of national defense-related information.

Earlier today, Facebook issued a response to a New York Times report on the social media company's handling of the many scandals it faced last year, including Russian interference and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. "There are a number of inaccuracies in the story," Facebook said in a point-by-point blog post, including that the company was aware of Russian meddling on the social platform months before taking any action. Variety reports: Facebook said it has "acknowledged publicly on many occasions" that "we were too slow to spot Russian interference on Facebook, as well as other misuse." But Facebook denied the allegation in the Times report that the company knew about Russian activity as early as the spring of 2016 and had failed to actively investigate it. The company cited CEO Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony from April 2018, in which he said Facebook detected threats related to Russia only in the weeks leading up to the U.S. election in November 2016. When it identified fake accounts that were used to furnish stolen information to journalists, "we shut these accounts down for violating our policies," Zuckerberg testified.

Meanwhile, Facebook in October 2017 enlisted Washington, D.C.-area PR firm Definers Public Affairs, founded by Republican political strategists, as part of its crisis response to dealing with the Russia fallout. Among other activities, Definers launched a campaign linking Facebook critics to liberal billionaire George Soros, a common tactic used by anti-Semitic alt-right groups. At the same time, Facebook lobbied the Anti-Defamation League to portray other critics of the company as anti-Semitic, per the Times report. On Thursday, Facebook said it terminated its contract with Definers on Nov. 14 after the Times story was published. Facebook acknowledged that Definers "did encourage members of the press to look into the funding"of Freedom From Facebook, an anti-Facebook organization that has called for the company's breakup. "The intention [of the Definers' efforts] was to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company. To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue," Facebook said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: At a recent air show in the city of Zhuhai, state-owned Chinese defense giant China Electronics Technology Group Corporation displayed what it claims to be a quantum radar that's able to detect even the stealthiest of stealth aircraft. The company claims to have been working on the technology for years, and to have tested it for the first time in 2015. In principle, a quantum radar functions like a regular radar -- only that instead of sending out a single beam of electromagnetic energy, it uses two split streams of entangled photons. Only one of these beams is sent out, but due to a quirk of quantum physics both streams will display the same changes, despite being potentially miles apart. As a result, by looking at the stream which remains back home it's possible to work out what has happened to the other beam. According to a brochure from the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, the new quantum radar could "solve the traditional bottleneck [of] detection of low observable target detection, survival under electronic warfare conditions, [and] platform load limitations."

SpaceX has successfully sent up a communications satellite for the country of Qatar, marking the aerospace company's 18th mission in 2018, which ties the company's record in 2017 for the most launches done in a year. Since the company has several more missions planned for this year, it's very likely that the company will set a new all-time high soon. The Verge reports: For this mission, SpaceX is employing another one of its used rockets, a Falcon 9 booster that launched the Telstar 19 VANTAGE satellite in July. After that mission, the rocket landed on one of SpaceX's autonomous drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean, and the company hopes to pull off the same feat following today's launch. If successful, this particular Falcon 9 booster could be capable of flying a third time in the near future.

The payload is the Es'hail-2 satellite, which is meant to provide communications services to the Middle East and North Africa. It's primarily meant to be used for government and commercial purposes, however, amateur radio operators can also use this satellite. Es'hail-2 has two transponders on board that can connect to amateur radios from South America to Asia. It's not the only satellite with this capability, but Es'hail-2 is going to a particularly high orbit 22,000 miles up. That will make it the first satellite at this altitude to link amateur radios from Brazil to India. SpaceX managed to successfully deploy the Es'hail-2 satellite into orbit "32 minutes after takeoff," The Verge reports in an update. "The company also landed its Falcon 9 rocket on one of its drone ships following liftoff, bringing its total number of successful booster landings to 31." You can watch the full launch here.

At the 2018 Uber Open Summit, Uber announced it was joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member, making a firm commitment to using and contributing to open source tools. TechCrunch reports: Uber CTO Thuan Pham sees the Linux Foundation as a place for companies like his to nurture and develop open source projects. "Open source technology is the backbone of many of Uber's core services and as we continue to mature, these solutions will become ever more important," he said in a blog post announcing the partnership. "Uber has made significant investments in shared software development and community collaboration through open source over the years, including contributing the popular open source project Jaeger, a distributed tracing system, to the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2017," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. As the report mentions, it took the ride-hailing service a long time for them to join the Linux Foundation. "Uber has been long known for making use of open source in its core tools working on over 320 open source projects and repositories from 1500 contributors involving over 70,000 commits, according to data provided by the company," reports TechCrunch.