The Chinese government "has embarked on an all-out drive to transform the technology from a remote concept to a newfangled reality, with applications on factory floors and in hospitals and government offices..." reports the Washington Post.

"[E]xperts say Beijing is pursuing an alternative playbook in an attempt to bridge the gap" with America: "aggressively pushing for the adoption of AI across the government and private sector." DeepSeek has been put to work over the last six months on a wide variety of government tasks. Procurement documents show military hospitals in Shaanxi and Guangxi provinces specifically requesting DeepSeek to build online consultation and health record systems. Local government websites describe state organs using DeepSeek for things like diverting calls from the public and streamlining police work. DeepSeek helps "quickly discover case clues and predict crime trends," which "greatly improves the accuracy and timeliness of crime fighting," a city government in China's Inner Mongolia region explained in a February social media post. Anti-corruption investigations — long a priority for Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are another frequent DeepSeek application, in which models are deployed to comb through dry spreadsheets to find suspicious irregularities. In April, China's main anti-graft agency even included a book called "Efficiently Using DeepSeek" on its official book recommendation list...

Alfred Wu, an expert on China's public governance at the National University of Singapore, said Beijing has disseminated a "top-down" directive to local governments to use AI. This is motivated, Wu said, by a desire to improve China's AI prowess amid a fierce rivalry with Washington by providing models access to vast stores of government data.

But not everyone is convinced that China has the winning hand, even as it attempts to push AI application nationwide. For one, China's sluggish economy will impact the AI industry's ability to grow and access funding, said Scott Singer [an expert on China's AI sector at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was attending the conference]... Others point out that local governments trumpeting their usage of DeepSeek is more about signaling than real technology uptake. Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua University's school of artificial intelligence, said DeepSeek is not being used at scale in anti-corruption work, for example, because the cases involve sensitive information and deploying new tools in these investigations requires long and complex approval processes.

Microsoft Research Asia earlier this week unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. ArsTechnica: In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds -- or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want. "It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors," reads the abstract of the accompanying research paper titled, "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." It's the work of Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo, Jiaolong Yang, Chong Li, Zhenyu Zang, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong, and Baining Guo.

The VASA framework (short for "Visual Affective Skills Animator") uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: An owl. A sharky looking bullet. The Hindu deity Ganesh. The Yin and Yang sign. All painstakingly selected and etched onto a microchip that measures about an inch square. Each microscopic silicon doodle was the handiwork of engineers at Qualcomm Incorporated, a San Diego-based company that creates wireless technology-related products and services. The engineers slipped the drawings into Qualcomm's Q1650 data decoder with care not to disturb any of the chip's functions. They were purposeless etchings, never meant to be uncovered.

These doodles, also known as silicon art, chip graffiti or chip art, and dozens others like it, are remnants of tech history -- from Silicon Valley's infancy to the early 2000s -- when innovation was rapid fire and the tech still had a very human touch. Engineers would add the sketches to their microchip designs in the techie equivalent of signing their artwork. They'd etch them on chips that may end up in your cellphone, laptop or calculator. They spent hours crafting them, even though they were frowned upon by those in the C Suite.

The existence of these doodles came to light decades ago, but social media is discovering them anew. And there is now a small but determined group of online hobbyists working to keep that history alive. They are still cataloguing the miniscule drawings -- many smaller than the width of a human hair and can't be seen without a microscope. These devotees post glossy videos of themselves shucking chips like oysters to see their iridescent insides and the itsy bitsy sketches that may be hidden on them. And they are eagerly saving them from the scrap heap.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facial recognition is a common feature for unlocking smartphones and gaming systems, among other uses. But the technology currently relies upon bulky projectors and lenses, hindering its broader application. Scientists have now developed a new facial recognition system that employs flatter, simpler optics that also require less energy, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nano Letters. The team tested their prototype system with a 3D replica of Michelangelo's famous David sculpture and found it recognized the face as well as existing smartphone facial recognition can. [...]

Wen-Chen Hsu, of National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and the Hon Hai Research Institute in Taiwan, and colleagues turned to ultrathin optical components known as metasurfaces for a potential solution. These metasurfaces can replace bulkier components for modulating light and have proven popular for depth sensors, endoscopes, tomography. and augmented reality systems, among other emerging applications. Hsu et al. built their own depth-sensing facial recognition system incorporating a metasurface hologram in place of the diffractive optical element. They replaced the standard vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) with a photonic crystal surface-emitting laser (PCSEL). (The structure of photonic crystals is the mechanism behind the bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings or beetle shells.) The PCSEL can generate its own highly collimated light beam, so there was no need for the bulky light guide or collimation lenses used in VCSEL-based dot projector systems.

The team tested their new system on a replica bust of David, and it worked as well as existing smartphone facial recognition, based on comparing the infrared dot patterns to online photos of the statue. They found that their system generated nearly one and a half times more infrared dots (some 45,700) than the standard commercial technology from a device that is 233 times smaller in terms of surface area than the standard dot projector. "It is a compact and cost-effective system, that can be integrated into a single chip using the flip-chip process of PCSEL," the authors wrote. Additionally, "The metasurface enables the generation of customizable and versatile light patterns, expanding the system's applicability." It's more energy-efficient to boot.

IEEE Spectrum reports that "Standard electric-vehicle batteries can recharge much of their range in just 10 minutes with the addition of a thin sheet of nickel inside them, a new study finds." This could provide a welcome and economically attractive alternative to expensive EVs that carry massive and massively expensive battery packs. If faster-charging options were available, enabling the EV's sticker price to drop substantially, some researchers suspect consumers' EV phobia and industry dogma against "range anxiety" could be overcome....

In the new study, researchers experimented with a lithium-ion battery with a roughly 560-kilometer range when fully charged. (The battery's energy density was 265 watt-hours-per-kilogram.) By adding an ultrathin nickel foil to its interior [to heat the battery quickly], they could recharge it to 70 percent in 11 minutes for a roughly 400-km range, and 75 percent in 12 minutes for a roughly 440-km range.

"Our technology enables smaller, faster-charging batteries to be deployed for mass adoption of affordable electric cars," says study senior author Chao-Yang Wang, a battery engineer at Pennsylvania State University....

The scientists detailed their findings online in the journal Nature.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader gunner2028 for sharing the story.

The president emeritus of the Great Lakes College Association writes that "nearly all colleges have re-adopted in-person education this fall, in spite of delta variant risks...

"As it turns out, student enthusiasm for remote learning is mixed at best, and in some cases students have sued their colleges for refunds. But it is not simply student opinion that has driven this reversion to face-to-face education." Indeed, students are far better off with in-person learning than with online approaches. Recent research indicates that the effects of remote learning have been negative. As the Brookings Institution Stephanie Riegg reports, "bachelor's degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures — including math, reading, writing, and English — relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs...."

[R]esearch on human learning consistently finds that the social context of learning is critical, and the emotions involved in effective human relations play an essential role in learning. Think of a teacher who had a great impact on you — the one who made you excited, interested, intrigued, and motivated to learn. Was this teacher a calm and cool transmitter of facts, or a person who was passionate about the subject and excited to talk about it...? Research tells us the most effective teachers — those who are most successful in having their students learn — are those who establish an emotional relationship with their students in an environment of care and trust. As former teacher and now neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang tells us, emotion is necessary for learning to occur: "Emotion is where learning begins, or, as is often the case, where it ends. Put simply, it is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don't care about.... Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts...."

Today we have the benefit of extensive research documenting the short-term and long-term importance of these social-educational practices. Research based on the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) consistently finds that having meaningful outside-of-class relationships with faculty and advisors increases not only learning but graduation from college and employment after graduation. It is also worth noting that Gallup-Purdue University public opinion research affirms the idea that people believe these personal relationships in college matter. A study of 30,000 graduates reports that they believe "what students are doing in college and how they are experiencing it... has a profound relationship to life and career." Specifically, "if graduates had a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their dreams, their odds of being engaged at work more than doubled, as did their odds of thriving in their well-being."

Since empirical research documents the powerful impact of meaningful human relationships on learning while in college as well as on graduate's adult lives, and people believe it matters, do we dare replace it with technology?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Virtual contact during the pandemic made many over-60s feel lonelier and more depressed than no contact at all, new research has found. Many older people stayed in touch with family and friends during lockdown using the phone, video calls, and other forms of virtual contact. Zoom choirs, online book clubs and virtual bedtime stories with grandchildren helped many stave off isolation. But the study, among the first to comparatively assess social interactions across households and mental wellbeing during the pandemic, found many older people experienced a greater increase in loneliness and long-term mental health disorders as a result of the switch to online socializing than those who spent the pandemic on their own.

The problem [said Dr Yang Hu of Lancaster University, who co-wrote the report, published on Monday in Frontiers in Sociology] was that older people unfamiliar with technology found it stressful to learn how to use it. But even those who were familiar with technology often found the extensive use of the medium over lockdown so stressful that it was more damaging to their mental health than simply coping with isolation and loneliness. "Extensive exposure to digital means of communication can also cause burnout. The results are very consistent," said Hu, who collected data from 5,148 people aged 60 or over in the UK and 1,391 in the US -- both before and during the pandemic. "It's not only loneliness that was made worse by virtual contact, but general mental health: these people were more depressed, more isolated and felt more unhappy as a direct result of their use of virtual contact," he said. "We need to have disaster preparedness," he said. "We need to equip older people with the digital capacity to be able to use technology for the next time a disaster like this comes around." Hu added: "Policymakers and practitioners need to take measures to pre-empt and mitigate the potential unintended implications of household-centerd pandemic responses for mental wellbeing."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Aljazeera: Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a former presidential contender, officially declared his run for New York City mayor. In a campaign video released late Wednesday on Twitter, Yang put forth an agenda that included a guaranteed minimum income, bringing universal high-speed Internet, starting a "people's bank" and reopening New York City "intelligently" from the pandemic. "I moved to New York City 25 years ago," he said in the video. "I came of age, fell in love, and became a father here. Seeing our city in so much pain breaks my heart." His agenda includes a focus on New York City's nightlife. On his campaign website, Yang pledges to make permanent outdoor dining, "to-go cocktails" and other temporary measures put in place during the pandemic. He also says he wants to attract so-called TikTok hype houses, where social-media influencers live together in big mansions and shoot videos together.

Yang's basic income program would start by providing $2,000 a year to half a million New Yorkers in extreme poverty. Participants would receive the cash through monthly transfers to a bank account opened in their name at a newly-created "People's Bank." His most detailed policy focuses on reviving the city's small businesses. He pledged to open 15,000 small businesses by 2022 and also offered a bevy of unconventional ideas, including buying heaters in bulk and then selling them to restaurants that are serving customers in the frigid outdoors as indoor dining remains shut. He also suggested the city make an investment in Cinch Market, a Brooklyn startup that brings together small businesses on one online platform, whose tagline is "Shop Brooklyn Not Bezo$." Yang, 46, whose two kids attend public school in the city, also said he wanted to subsidize broadband for schools, expand the city's universal preschool program, and reform the school system's admissions process. "There will be no recovery without schools being open and teaching children safely every day," he said.

Andrew Yang wants people to get paid for the data they create on big tech platforms like Facebook and Google, and with a new project launching on Monday, he believes he can make it happen. From a report: Yang's Data Dividend Project is a new program tasked with establishing data-as-property rights under privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) all across the country. The program hopes to mobilize over 1 million people by the end of the year, focusing primarily on Californians, and "pave the way for a future in which all Americans can claim their data as a property right and receive payment" if they choose to share their data with platforms. At the beginning of the year, the CCPA went into effect, granting consumers new control over their data online like the right to delete and opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's nothing in the law about tech companies paying for data (or, more specifically, paying them not to opt out), but Yang's new project is looking to show that the idea is popular with voters. The Data Dividend Project is betting on collective action as a means of changing the law and extending data property rights to users across the country. If this idea becomes law, Yang's team says it will work on behalf of users to help them get paid.

Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate who supports Universal Basic Income and has attracted a devoted online following, is planning to use a 3D hologram on the campaign trail. "On Wednesday he gave the #YangGang, which is what his supporters call themselves, their first look at it," reports New York Magazine. From the report: The hologram's debut came on TMZ Live, which showed a video of Yang's hologram performing a duet alongside a hologram of his "hero," Tupac. "I was doing a demo of what a hologram would consist of in order to send the hologram of me to campaign in Iowa or other battleground states," he said.

Last month, Yang spoke about his hologram plans with Iowa newspaper, The Carroll Daily Times Herald. "We are exploring rolling a truck out that would enable someone to see a hologram of me that is three-dimensional give my stump speech," Yang told the paper. "And, also, if I were in a studio, which we could set up very easily, I could beam in and take questions live." Yang also told the paper that he plans to use hologram technology to remind voters that "it is 2019, and soon it will be 2020, and things are changing."

The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture." From a report: Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," the country's national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long. "The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will "guide and lead the public and society."

A number of readers sent word of the hearing by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in which committee members raked two Yahoo execs over the coals. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," the committee chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from Jerry Yang and Michael Callahan about Yahoo's actions that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese dissident. In 2004 Yahoo turned over information about journalist Shi Tao's online activities requested by Chinese authorities. In Feb. 2006, Yahoo's General Counsel Callahan testified that he had not known the nature of the investigation the authorities were conducting. He later learned that several employees of Yahoo China were aware at the time that the investigation involved "state secrets," but Callahan did not go back to Congress to amend his testimony. Committee members were withering in their disdain for Yahoo's refusal to help Shi Tao's family after his arrest.

Mz6 writes "One faction within Microsoft is promoting a bold strategy in the company's battle with Google: Join forces with Yahoo. That would be a major departure for Microsoft, the software maker that is legendary for toiling on its own until it captures a new market. However, people familiar with the situation say that Microsoft has considered the idea of acquiring a stake in Yahoo, and that the two companies have discussed possible options over the course of the past year. Currently, talks of an equity stake in Yahoo don't appear to be active, given that Microsoft is focusing on a reorganization that it hopes will re-energize its effort to compete with Google. Two wild cards remain: Steve Ballmer, who has historically shunned large acquisitions, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, whose support would be key to bringing the necessary Yahoo shareholders on board for a deal. Mr. Yang and others in Yahoo would be hard-pressed to sell to Microsoft, people close to the company say. However, people familiar with Microsoft say its top management remains open to a deal with Yahoo as pressure grows to perform better against Google. The increasing pressure on Microsoft -- not just from Google, but also from its own shareholders, as well as from advertisers that want an alternative to Google -- could help to justify the acquisition or some kind of business collaboration, these people say."

JPThorne writes "BBC Online is reporting that China will launch a manned space mission sometime between Wednesday and Sunday of this week. Two as yet unnamed Chinese Astronauts will undertake the mission." From the article: "The launch comes almost exactly two years after China's first manned space flight, which made astronaut Yang Liwei a national hero. Unlike the last mission, Xinhua said a live broadcast of the launch would be provided to foreign media. Analysts say the fact the authorities are being more open about this launch may indicate that they are more confident of its success. "

Duke Machesne writes "In the year 2000, Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney hired programmer Clint Curtis, while he was working for NASA contractor Yang Enterprises, to write an undetectable vote flipping program which could 'control' the votes of electronic voting machines, according to Wayne Madsen's latest article for the Online Journal."

Ex-Amazon.com wage slave Mike Daisey asks in one fantasy e-mail to his then-boss Jeff Bezos: "Would it have been so hard to build a cool and quirky bookstore instead of a soulless virtual megamall? You were afraid: afraid to define the company, afraid the stock would drop, afraid not to feed the monster. What you sacrifice reveals what you value, and you're a fool if you think the world will forgive you in the end." Prescient stuff. 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com , Daisey's hilarious, heartbreaking and surprisingly powerful recounting of life inside what may be the world's strangest, most ephemeral company -- a symbol of all that was exciting, misguided, and ultimately misunderstood about business online during the mad years. It's also one of the best books ever written about the Net, an unsparing, even brutal indictment not only of hubris, but of media and, of course, the corporate-spawned hype that shapes so much of American life.

We've linked to plenty of "secondhand" media pieces about the recent DoS attacks on major commercial Web sites. Fine. Now here's real, hard-core hard-tech info on the subject - in answer to your excellent questions - from somebody who actually knows what's going on, namely Dave Dittrich from the University of Washington. He's been interviewed up the yin-yang this last week by mainstream reporters who probably wouldn't understand half the answers he gives here. But this is Slashdot, so he didn't have to hold back or dumb anything down. Click below and enjoy!