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Submission + - Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat (insidehighered.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.

Submission + - Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That's finally changing. (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.

Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.

This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.

“I actually thought I would basically disprove that [claim], and on my first try, I got to $67 per kilogram after nine use cycles,” Jones told Ars. “It’s based upon some significant assumptions in the paper, but it’s not something that’s completely crazy. It certainly wouldn’t be something they’d reach on the first few times, on their first model; but over time, and with a learning curve, why not? I think it’s possible.

“These [Wall Street] analyst dweebs just have no clue what daily orbital access at under $100/kg means.”
— veteran aerospace engineer Will Collier

Submission + - Nobel-winning materials scientist Omar Yaghi joins China's Tsinghua University (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Yaghi hopes to lead team using AI to create materials to tackle global challenges such as carbon neutrality and water shortages

Omar Yaghi, the winner of last year's Nobel Prize for chemistry, has left the United States to lead a new AI-driven research centre at China's Tsinghua University.

The 61-year-old materials scientist will head a team working on ways artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the design and synthesis of new materials and shorten their development cycle "by orders of magnitude", Tsinghua said on Friday.

Speaking at his appointment ceremony, Yaghi said he hoped to develop materials to tackle major environmental challenges such as water shortages, carbon neutrality and sustainable development.

Submission + - Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search (adweek.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.

Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.

Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.

The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators

Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.

“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.

In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.

Submission + - Tianwen-2 Visits Kamo'oalewa July 4, Hayabusa-2 Flies Past Torifume July 5

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: China's Tianwen-2 spacecraft went into pseudo-orbit around Earth's quasi-moon Kamo’oalewa on July 4. It will spend the next several months mapping the small, rapidly-spinning object while getting progressively closer, then in April is scheduled to sample the surface using at least one of three methods that it is equipped for (touching, hovering and anchoring) and then return the samples to Earth while continuing to its next target, the comet 311P where it may attempt to land.
https://www.planetary.org/arti...

Previously thought to have been a fragment of the Moon's surface new data from Earth and Tianwen-2 indicate that instead it is a captured asteroid.
https://www.techtimes.com/arti...

The next day the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 did a fast flyby of the larger asteroid Torifume in a mission extension after its sample-return from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020, returning photos which show it to be an agglomeration of two smaller asteroids.
https://www.planetary.org/arti...

Submission + - 'Knockoff' Browser Extension Hides Sketchy Brands on Amazon (404media.co) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items.

In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed product listings for screwdrivers made by âoeSUNHZMCKP,â spoons made by âoeSACATR,â and a lamp made by âoeROTTOGOON.â In a tweet announcing the extension, developer Josh Pigford wrote âoeSorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY, and LUENX.â The extension can also hide all sponsored product listings. The extension quickly went viral as a much-needed filter for people who still use Amazon and, for those who donâ(TM)t use Amazon because of its horrendous labor practices and other concerns, it is evidence of what an incredible wasteland the platform has become.

Submission + - Mysterious Spheres Found In Australia Are Likely Space Debris (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Australian beach community was confused — and later delighted — by the discovery of six metallic-looking spheres that washed ashore last week. The mystery, and the ensuing attention, prompted a bunch of alien jokes from local residents and businesses. But Australia’s space agency put the speculation to rest on Monday, saying that the spheres appeared to be rocket debris that had recently re-entered the atmosphere from orbit.

The objects were found on Forrest Beach in the northeastern state of Queensland over the weekend, the state’s fire department said. Residents described them as being about twice the size of a basketball. “The recovered objects appear to be pressure vessels from a space launch vehicle,” the Australian Space Agency said in a statement, adding that they were “consistent with debris from a foreign rocket body.” The agency said that it had identified the likely source of the objects, without providing further details, and was working with international authorities to confirm the vehicle from which the debris originated.

Comment Re:Surely (Score 1) 153

by david-bo (#66226284) Attached to: Fines Doubled As Teens Outsmart Australia's Social Media Ban

SMS "pinged" in the middle of the night even before smart phones. iPhone was launched 2007 - children born then are legally adults now.

You force children to grow up non-free - that is the main problem. Just because you wanted meaning and purpose in YOUR life. Ignoring that you forced yourself upon children, without their consent.

Submission + - Nordstjernen Web Browser 1.0.18 released (nordstjernen.org)

Submitted by Andreas(R)
Andreas(R) writes: Today marks the release of Nordstjernen Web Browser version 1.0.18. Developed entirely from scratch in C, Nordstjernen is a lightweight browser focused strictly on conforming to modern HTML and CSS standards. Built in Norway, the project currently supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, with an active Android port currently underway.

Version 1.0.18 is a maintenance release that builds upon the stability of the 1.0.17 branch. In an era dominated by Chromium forks and Gecko-based engines, it's refreshing to see an independent, compiled-from-scratch layout engine entering the ecosystem. For those interested in minimal overhead or native C development, the full release details and binaries are available on their official site.

Submission + - What is a quantum computer good for? Absolutely nothing — yet (theverge.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: The Verge has an article about the "absolute nothing" of quantum computers. We have yet to see a quantum computer conclusively perform a single useful task. Existing machines are simply too small and error-ridden to solve commercially relevant problems.
Companies drive the hype, too. In June, Microsoft announced a new quantum computing chip named Majorana 2. It claimed the chip was a hardware advancement that accelerates its timeline to a “scalable, practical quantum computer” by 2029. But independent experts swiftly criticized the announcement. “This is complete codswallop,” Henry Legg, a physicist from the University of St. Andrews and a longtime Microsoft critic, tells The Verge.
Legg just published a paper in Nature on June 24th criticizing Microsoft’s quantum claims from a year ago — peer review takes a long time — and pointing to what he sees as major discrepancies between Microsoft’s papers and press releases. Nature included Microsoft’s rebuttal.
Researchers have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it’s just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public’s imagination. Proponents predict that the technology will lead to discoveries in medicine, as well as advances in materials science and machine learning. Meanwhile, many national security experts frame its development as a new Cold War competition between the US and China.
Some have imagined the quantum computer as a cyberattack tool. In 1994, computer scientist Peter Shor developed a quantum computing algorithm for factoring prime numbers that should be able to break RSA encryption, a ubiquitous family of algorithms used to secure banking and email communications. So "RSA is dead" is the repeated mantra of the quantum computing hype.
Current quantum computers like Google’s Willow are individual chips too primitive to break RSA encryption or implement drug molecule simulations. But the vision is to build scaled-up machines that can.
Similar cycles have played out several times since the technology’s beginnings. Companies announce a breakthrough; independent researchers cry hype, all while investors continue to inject money into the industry. Then investors cash out and then call it a "scam" on the public.
Henry Legg is more skeptical and thinks some have underestimated the fundamental challenges of scaling. “There’s no evidence of the scalability of any platform to the level that you would need to do useful quantum computations within a decade, or probably a couple of decades,” he says.
While researchers have made progress toward building a useful quantum computer, it’s not clear what that use should be. “It’s such a nascent technology,” says Islam. “If you ask, what is a quantum computer good for, I do not know of an application which is a sure shot.”
The Trump administration wants a useful quantum computer in two years. Are we having fun yet?

Submission + - Microsoft fake Windows error ended in a $280 million secret settlement (makeuseof.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Facing real competition from Digital Research's DR DOS, Microsoft secretly embedded a sabotaging mechanism known as "AARD code" into beta versions of Windows 3.1 to prevent it from running on Digital Research's competing DR DOS operating system.
This code triggered fake, alarming error messages to convince developers that DR DOS was unstable, effectively eliminating a significant market threat through fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Although the company disabled the feature in the final retail release, the California-based firm Caldera, Inc., which had acquired DR DOS assets, sued Microsoft for anti-competitive practices.
Microsoft settled the lawsuit out of court in 2000 for $280 million, a figure that remained sealed until it was unsealed in 2009. Nothing says taking ownership and responsibility than keeping it a sealed secret for a decade. Microsoft paid for being clumsy enough to write the intent down in an email. The lesson the industry took away wasn't "don't do it." It was "don't put it in writing." Something Bill Gates forgot with Epstein.

Comment Re: Bygone days. (Score 1) 64

by david-bo (#66213378) Attached to: Trump Administration Asks OpenAI To Stagger Release of New Model

Fascism is left. Mussolini started as socialist. The S in NSDAP literally stands for "socialism". Neither Germany or Italy in the 30s and 40s were "free market"-economies "laissez-faire"-style. Do you think libertarians agree with Trump's most important policy - tariffs? You need to lookup "political compass", you are uneducated.

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