Flexport Is Hiring in North America, Europe, and Asia
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Kim Jong-un: fragile and under pressure but he won’t give up
The Observer The North Korean leader’s surprise freeze of his nuclear programme is less a genuine move than a diplomatic manoeuvre,...
Friday, 31 July 2020
What to Stream: Alan and Susan Raymond’s Prescient Documentaries of Police, Prison, and Schools
Richard Brody reviews “Toe Tag Parole” and “Hard Times at Douglass High,” by the documentary filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/what-to-stream-alan-and-susan-raymonds-prescient-documentaries-of-police-prison-and-schools
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/what-to-stream-alan-and-susan-raymonds-prescient-documentaries-of-police-prison-and-schools
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How to clean your sex toys, according to three experts
Whether you've just purchased your first vibrator or are a seasoned dildo user, it's important to learn how to properly care for it. One major safety precaution you need to take — before both solo and partner play — is to clean your sex toy.
While it may not sound sexy, cleaning your toys is essential. "Pleasure products can help you embrace confidence, help navigate intimate desires and boundaries and boost self-love," said Kristin Fretz, co-founder and CMO of Emojibator. "But having an experience like getting a UTI from a vibrator is not just uncomfortable and can be extremely painful if left untreated, but it perpetuates the shame around masturbation and can create individual resistance to self-pleasure." Read more...
More about Sex Toys, Sex And Relationships, Dildos, Vibrators, and Sex Educationfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/how-to-clean-sex-toys/
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Thursday, 30 July 2020
Become a better writer with lifetime access to this online course
TL;DR: The Writing With Impact course is on sale for £7.69 as of July 31, saving you 95% on list price.
Prolific writers make writing look easy, but it's really not the case.
Between finding a unique, zippy opener to decoding a jumble of thoughts and emotions into clean, concise prose, the whole process can be grueling. Yes, even for professional writers. And when it comes to writing persuasively? Forget about it.
As a writing tutor at Cambridge University, Clare Lynch knows a thing or two about good writing and has developed an online course dedicated to making you a better writer. The Writing With Impact course features 5.5 hours of on-demand videos and 30 articles, and will teach you the nuts and bolts of persuasive writing. Read more...
More about Writing, Mashable Shopping, Online Courses, Shopping Uk, and Uk Dealsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/uk/shopping/july-31-writing-that-persuades-online-course-deal/
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Master digital marketing with this stacked set of classes
TL;DR: The Digital Marketing 22-Course Masterclass is on sale for £11.55 as of July 31, saving you 92% on list price.
It’s never been easier to start your own business. On the flip side, it’s also never been harder to start your own business. Everyone and their mother is doing it and there are so many different digital ways to reach customers that it can seriously make your head spin.
Fortunately, you can learn how to master the digital marketing world with the Digital Marketing 22-Course Masterclass.
This massive educational bundle contains 22 individual courses that will teach you how to become a digital marketing rock star. You’ll get lifetime access to 298 lectures and some 28 hours of content covering everything from social media and content marketing to email marketing and paid marketing. Whether you’re looking to grow your own business, land a marketing job, or help a client increase their business, this masterclass will get you where you need to go and take your skills to the next level. Read more...
More about Digital Marketing, Online Classes, Mashable Shopping, Shopping Uk, and Uk Dealsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/uk/shopping/july-31-digital-marketing-course-masterclass/
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New top story on Hacker News: Reverse Engineering the PLA Chip in the Commodore 128
Reverse Engineering the PLA Chip in the Commodore 128
18 by segfaultbuserr | 1 comments on Hacker News.
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18 by segfaultbuserr | 1 comments on Hacker News.
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Twitter reveals exactly how bitcoin scammers hacked Elon Musk's, Kim Kardashian's accounts
Twitter just released an update on the massive hack that prompted the Great Blue Tick Silence of 2020, letting us know exactly how many accounts were actually impacted.
On July 15, hackers posted tweets from several prominent, verified Twitter users' accounts, falsely claiming that any bitcoin sent to a certain address would be paid back in double. The scam netted the hackers 400 payments with a total value of $121,000 — a tidy sum for a handful of tweets.
Now, Twitter has revealed what it's learned about how this hack took place, stating that it "relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to [Twitter's] internal systems." Read more...
More about Twitter, Bitcoin, Hack, Tech, and Big Tech Companiesfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/twitter-bitcoin-hack-spear-phishing-attack/
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Facebook boasts that ad boycott won't make a dent
Boycott, schmoycott.
Despite over 1,000 major advertisers participating in a July advertising boycott over the way Facebook handles hateful content, the company said in its Q2 2020 earnings report that its advertising business is doing fine and dandy.
Last quarter, Facebook made $18.3 billion in advertising revenue, which blew past investor expectations. While the company didn't give numbers for July (when the boycott began), it said its ad revenue growth rate for the first three weeks of July tracked with the rest of its 2020 year-over-year ad revenue growth rate of 10%. Meaning, despite companies from Ben & Jerry's to Unilever pulling their advertising dollars, things are basically the same for Facebook's bottom line, and Facebook expects it to stay that way. Read more...
More about Facebook, Advertising, Tech, Social Media Companies, and Mark Zuckerbergfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/facebook-q2-2020-earnings-advertising-boycott/
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Trump Is the Election Crisis He Is Warning About
Susan Glasser writes about Donald Trump’s insistence that the Presidential election, in November, should be delayed, and about the contrast between the President and John Lewis, the congressman and civil-rights icon who died earlier this month.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-is-the-election-crisis-he-is-warning-about
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-is-the-election-crisis-he-is-warning-about
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Trump’s Dangerously Distorted View of How to Keep America Safe
Amy Davidson Sorkin writes about President Donald Trump’s continued touting of hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for the coronavirus, despite a lack of supporting medical evidence, and his suggestion that the 2020 election should be postponed until the pandemic is brought under control.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-dangerously-distorted-view-of-how-to-keep-america-safe
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumps-dangerously-distorted-view-of-how-to-keep-america-safe
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The pandemic has been very good business for Apple
Apple has pandemic work-from-home orders and stimulus checks to thank for setting new all-time sales records across a number of its product categories.
Starting with the iPhone, which saw a decrease in sales last quarter, Apple revealed revenue for that product category grew by two percent during the third quarter.
"In April, we expected year-over-year performance to worsen, but we saw better than expected demand in May and June," said CEO Tim Cook during the company's earnings call. "We attribute this increase in demand to several interactive causes, including a strong iPhone SE launch, continued economic stimulus, and potentially some benefit from shelter-in-place restrictions lifting around the world," he explained. Read more...
More about Apple, Iphone Se, Tech, and Consumer Techfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/apple-pandemic-sales-boom-third-quarter-2020/
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On Mars, an autonomous rover and helicopter will roam free
The Perseverance rover is the size of a small car and more technologically sophisticated than anything you’ve ever seen. | NASA / JPL
Some powerful self-driving tech is on its way to the Red Planet.
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NASA’s Perseverance rover launched at 7:50 am ET on July 30, the first day of a flight that will take the fifth NASA rover to Mars. During its mission, the boxy, car-sized vehicle and its extendable arm will be charged with looking for signs of ancient life and gathering data about Mars’s geology and climate. It will even lay the groundwork for eventual human exploration of the planet.
To make all that possible, the rover carries a stunning display of technology designed especially for Perseverance’s historic mission, from pieces of a new spacesuit to an autonomous helicopter, the first aircraft ever sent to another planet. Those tools will help the rover gather data about the planet’s atmosphere, which it can then send back to NASA. There’s also an excavation system that can collect high-quality samples of Martian soil to be stashed and later analyzed by a future mission to Mars.
In the years the new rover is expected to operate, these machines will battle challenges that terrestrial technology never has to deal with, including the Red Planet’s super-thin atmosphere, limited resources, incredibly cold temperatures, and delayed communication with human overlords on Earth.
To give you an idea of how all this will happen, we’ve outlined some of the coolest features that will be on display when Perseverance finally arrives on Mars in February.
Perseverance is armed with advanced self-driving tech
Key to its mission’s success is the ability for Perseverance to self-drive. The vehicle has a computer devoted to its autonomous capabilities, and as Wired explains, it was designed and built specifically for this mission. The autonomous driving feature is essential because Mars is simply too far away for humans to give the vehicle constant, real-time instructions. So the rover needs to fend for itself.
“One of the fundamental constraints of any kind of space exploration — whether you’re going to Mars or Europa or the moon — is that you have limited bandwidth, which means a limit on the amount of information you can send back and forth,” David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, told Recode. “During the periods of time when the robot can’t communicate, autonomy is important for it to enable it to keep doing tasks, to explore on its own, to make progress, rather than just sitting there waiting for the next time it hears from us.”
But building an autonomous vehicle for Mars is not necessarily as easy as building a self-driving car here on Earth (and that’s not easy, either). For one thing, the vehicle needs to be primarily concerned with safety, not with speed or the comfort of its passengers. After receiving basic instructions from humans about where it needs to go, Perseverance has to figure out the least-dangerous route on its own. If it crashes, the rover might render itself useless.
“Mars is not a fixed, flat, nice, paved road. Mars is really challenging terrain. There is dirt, rocks, sand, slopes, cliffs — all these things that the rover is going to have to avoid,” explained Philip Twu, robotics system engineer at NASA. “In addition to cameras, the rover is also going to need computers, algorithms, and software to be able to process all that imagery data into essentially a 3D picture that it’s then going to go ahead and use to plan.”
Fortunately for Perseverance, Mars is not a place where a self-driving rover needs to worry about crashing into another car or hitting a pedestrian.
“On Mars, there’s nothing moving around,” said Wettergreen. “They’re moving slowly, so they can take the time to build a detailed model, do a lot of analysis on that model, and then decide what to do next.”
A robotic arm will take samples of Mars that will be studied back on Earth
The vehicle is also armed with a 7-foot-long arm equipped with a drill that’s designed to collect rock and soil samples from beneath Mars’s surface. Those samples will then be stored in as many as 43 containers that the rover carries around on the planet. Once those samples are collected, they’ll be left in tubes that will sit on Mars’s surface for a future mission to pick up.
The arm alone isn’t all that impressive as a piece of space technology. Instead, its virtue is all the stuff that it comes, well, armed with.
“It’s like a Swiss Army knife of scientific instruments,” said Wettergreen. “What’s so amazing about it is all of these different functionalities and capabilities that they’ve been able to pack into such a small package.”
For instance, on the arm is a robotic claw equipped with a laser and other tools, including a camera called Watson that NASA compares to “a geologist’s hand-lens, magnifying and recording textures of rock and soil targets,” which is part of a tool — fittingly named Sherloc — that comes with special spectrometers and a laser. There’s also a tool called PIXL that can analyze incredibly tiny chemical elements and, in NASA’s words, take “super close-up pictures of rock and soil textures” to help scientists figure out whether Mars could have been home to microbial life in the past.
High-tech cameras and microphones will give the rover “senses”
Integrated into the rover are a slew of extremely high-quality cameras — 23 in total — that will help the vehicle survey the planet. The cameras won’t just help Perseverance get around Mars, but they’ll also take images of samples collected on the planet and record the vehicle’s arrival on the surface in full color. Meanwhile, NASA says that so-called “engineering” cameras will take on tasks like helping the vehicle avoid potentially treacherous areas, like sand dunes and trenches, while others will help the system navigate without human intervention.
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NASA
At the same time, the rover will pick up sound data through its two microphones. Those devices will listen to the rover as it arrives and travels on the planet. There’s a special microphone that works in conjunction with a laser to study the chemistry of the planet’s geology by zapping it and recording the sound of the zapping. As NASA explains, the microphone hears the intensity of the “pop” made by the laser turning the rock into plasma, which “reveals the relative hardness of the rocks, which can tell us more about their geological context.”
A self-driving helicopter will fly on another planet. That’s a first.
Also aboard the rover is Ingenuity, which will — if all goes as planned — be the first helicopter to fly on Mars as well as the “first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet,” according to NASA. That makes Ingenuity an experiment on its own, one that has undergone extensive testing on Earth. Its mission is to demonstrate that flight on Mars, where it will conduct up to five test flights, is possible, and that flights can be conducted autonomously on the planet.
While the device is essentially a drone, it’s specially crafted for Mars, which has less gravity than Earth. This makes ascent easier, but due to the planet’s comparatively thin atmosphere, flight itself is more challenging. As The Verge reports, the blades of the helicopter can make more than 2,000 revolutions a minute, several times the speed of helicopter blades whipping around in Earth’s atmosphere. Ingenuity is incredibly light, weighing in at around 4 pounds.
But the tiny vehicle’s autonomy is not just designed to help with navigation; it’s also build to keep Ingenuity alive.
“Mars is very, very cold. It gets to about negative 130 degrees Fahrenheit at night. That’s pretty cold,” explained Twu. “So the autonomy onboard the helicopter is also involved with finding a way to keep the helicopter warm enough to survive all the Martian nights.”
If the helicopter is ultimately successful, it will help NASA make decisions about where flight could lend assistance during future missions to the planet. Similar drones could serve as scouts that survey the terrain of Mars — especially places that rovers can’t easily get to — or, as NASA says, become “full standalone science craft carrying instrument payloads.”
Will we be seeing any of this tech on Earth one day? It’s hard to say right now, but Twu notes that NASA is famous for its spinoffs.
“Time and time again, we’ve seen that technology developed for NASA missions — a lot of them for space missions — end up having terrestrial applications here on Earth,” he said. “All technology development can cross-pollinate and advances in one area inevitably result in advances in other areas.”
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from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/30/21348560/mars-rover-nasa-perseverance-autonomous-helicopter-drone
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