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Submission + - Open Documentation Academy offers on-ramp to OSS

Submitted by tykev
tykev writes: Documentation authors at Canonical have launched the Open Documentation Academy to offer an easy way to get started contributing to open-source projects:

Open and inclusive collaboration, and the sharing of ideas, remains the best way to develop software (and to do many other things!), but we also recognise that this “getting involved” step can be difficult. Where do you start? Who do you ask? What needs to be done?

We all very much want to help people become open source contributors by building an on-ramp process. It may take some time, and we will need to adapt, but this is exactly why we’ve started our Open Documentation Academy.

Submission + - Can you picture things in your mind? (theguardian.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on aphantasia, which is the inability to picture objects in your mind. People with this condition tend to go into STEM fields and remember different aspects of objects and people. Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images.

Try the red apple test.

Submission + - Alexei Navalny has died in prison. Vladimir Putin is suspect. (archive.is)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Alexei Navalny has died in a Siberian prison. A great many in the international community have blamed Vladimir Putin for Alexei Navalny's death, including US President Joe Biden. Only a day earlier in a videotaped court proceeding, Navalny appeared in good health and spirits. Former president Trump has yet to comment on his Truth Social account or elsewhere.

Submission + - Big name cancer institute is correcting dozens of papers and retracting others (nbcnews.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has requested the retraction of six studies and corrections in another 31 papers after a scathing critique drew attention to alleged errors a blogger and biologist said range from sloppiness to “really serious concerns.”

The allegations — against top scientists at the prestigious Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School — put the institute at the center of a roiling debate about research misconduct, how to police scientific integrity and whether the organizational structure of academic science incentivizes shortcuts or cheating.

The criticism also spotlights how artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in catching sloppy or dubious science.

Comment Re:Not worth it (Score 1) 90

by hjf (#64236606) Attached to: Amazon Prime Video Drops Dolby Vision, Atmos Unless You Pay Extra

Remember when DVDs had trailers and ADVERTISEMENTS, and players respected the PUA (Prohibited User Actions) that disabled fast forwarding?

Expect new generations of audio devices to respect Amazon's wishes of disabling certain buttons on your remote unless you pay extra.

And in a few years we'll get to the point of smart TVs with subject recognition and eye tracking cameras that will detect if you aren't looking at the screen when the ad is playing. You WILL look at the ad AND listen to it, or else you won't get your freemium content. They will give you the TV for free, though.

Submission + - Precision Agriculture Has Its Cassandra. His Name Is Kevin. (substack.com) 1

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Farming in the United States is in the midst of a major transformation — the biggest since the arrival of mechanized agriculture more than a century ago.The transformative technology back then was the internal combustion engine, which allowed farmers to power a wide range of new machines and mechanize previously manual implements from tractors and reapers to combine harvesters.The transformative technology now? Precision agriculture, a catch-all term that describes a constellation of technologies that includes Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, “big data” analytics and cloud computing.

Once it is broadly adopted, precision agriculture technology promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms even more than the combustion engine did. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) But the risks it poses to small farms and farming communities are much bigger than that. First, as the USDA notes on its website (https://www.nifa.usda.gov/grants/programs/precision-geospatial-sensor-technologies-programs/adoption-precision-agriculture): the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage access to- and maintenance of vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms. That includes the risk of disruption due to cyber attacks on precision farming hardware, software and services — an issue that agricultural equipment makers are scrambling to address (https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulfroberts/2021/06/20/under-scrutiny-big-ag-scrambles-to-address-cyber-risk/), but reluctant to discuss.

The biggest risk, however, comes from the reams of valuable and proprietary operational data that precision agriculture equipment generates and collects about the operation of a farm — from soil quality to the application of fertilizers and other agents, to crop yields. For centuries, such information resided in farmers’ heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology wrests it from the farmer’s control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data. Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.

That’s a dark view of the future — and one that its hard to hear over the “rah rah rah!” of precision agriculture’s (corporate funded) boosters. But its not like nobody sees the writing on the wall, or is sounding the alarm bell. The blog Fight to Repair News (http://fighttorepair.news) recently interviewed Kevin Kenney an Alternative Fuel Systems Engineer at Grassroots Energy in Nebraska and one of the loudest voices warning about the dangers posed by precision agriculture technologies, including the wholesale theft and monetization of proprietary farmer data.

Comment Top-level Boeing managers quit. (Score 5, Interesting) 99

A Slashdot comment I posted, copied below: Top-level Boeing managers quit.

The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course

"A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance."

Boeing must change leadership: Former employee

Quoting that story:

Boeing executives "need to get out of their corporate headquarters and they need to spend time with their troops on the factory floor and they need to understand what they're dealing with," Pierson, a former Boeing Senior Manager and a whistleblower on similar issues in 2019, adding: "If it was up to me, I would absolutely advocate the change of leadership."

Comment Management requires 3 kinds of capabilities (Score 5, Insightful) 99

Management of high-technology companies requires 3 kinds of capabilities:
1) Thorough interest in many areas of the technology.
2) Strong, careful, caring interest in people.
3) Concern for the complicated issues of finances.

News stories have indicated that Boeing management focuses on finances.

Submission + - Fusion research facility's final tritium experiments yield new energy record (phys.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world’s largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output.

These notable accomplishments represent a significant milestone in the field of fusion science and engineering.

In JET’s final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

Submission + - Ring video doorbell customers angry at 43% price hike (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: Users of Ring video doorbells have reacted angrily to a huge price hike being introduced in March.

After buying the devices, customers can pay a subscription to store footage on the cloud, download clips and get discounted products.
That subscription is going up 43%, from £34.99 to £49.99 per device, per year, for basic plan customers.

The firm, which is owned by Amazon, insisted it still provided "some of the best value in the industry."
Its customers appear not to to agree.

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