Crop Circles – and Why People Believed in Them

The New York Times tells the story of crop circles, “the mysterious patterns that regularly intrigued people around the world in the 1980s and ’90s, prompting speculation about alien visitors, ancient spiritual forces, weather anomalies, secret weapons tests and other theories.”

They call the phenomenon “a reminder that even before the era of social media and the internet, hoaxes were able to spread virally around the world and true believers could cling stubbornly to conspiracy theories despite a lack of evidence — or even the existence of evidence to the contrary.”

In the case of crop circles, the most important contradictory evidence emerged on Sept. 9, 1991, when the British newspaper Today ran a front-page story under the headline “Men who conned the world,” revealing that two mischievous friends from Southampton had secretly made more than 200 of the patterns over the previous decade.

Doug Bower, then 67, and his friend Dave Chorley, 62, admitted to a reporter, Graham Brough, that in the late 1970s they had begun using planks of wood with ropes attached to each end to stamp circles in crops by holding the ropes in their hands and pressing the planks underfoot. They had then watched with amusement as their anonymous antics eventually attracted media attention and began being copied by imitators around the world… The real-life pranksters phoned the newspaper to come clean, according to Mr. Brough, now 62, who says he verified their claims by checking an archive of more than 200 crop circle designs stored in a shed behind Mr. Bower’s home. The designs were clearly aged and matched the patterns they had made over the years, Mr. Brough said.

“I spent a week getting them to show me how they had done it all, and I have never laughed as much in my life,” he recalled. “The prevailing wisdom at the time was that aliens were about to land any day, but it had all been kicked off by these two blokes who’d have a couple of pints at their favorite pub and then head out into the night to have a bit of fun….”

“The people who wanted to keep believing in aliens and everything else just ignored the evidence, no matter how obvious it was,” said Rob Irving, who had begun emulating the two pranksters’ work in 1989 and befriended them after they went public…. “The power of the art came from the mystery, and Doug forever regretted coming forward because the mystery was lost.”

A professor of psychology at the University of Bristol in Britain explains to the Times the thought process of believers (which he says predated the internet). “instead of admitting that we live in a world we can’t control, they take comfort from believing that there is agency involved and someone who can be blamed.” The Times finds an example in a crop circle proponent who now believes, to this day, that even if crop circles are all man-made, the people making them have unwittingly “been prompted by an independent nonhuman mind.”

Although after a new crop circle appeared, the Times obtained an alternative perspective — from a neighboring farmer. “It is just so irresponsible to be trespassing and destroying food in the middle of a global wheat shortage.”

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Low-cost Astra Rocket Suffers Upper Stage Failure. Two NASA Satellites Lost

“All appeared to be going smoothly,” reports CBS News, “when, about a minute before the second stage engine was expected to shut down, an onboard ‘rocketcam’ showed a flash in the engine’s exhaust plume.

“The camera view them showed what appeared to be a tumble before video from the rocket cut off….”

California-based Astra on Sunday launched two shoebox-size NASA satellites from Cape Canaveral in a modest mission to improve hurricane forecasts, but the second stage of the company’s low-cost booster malfunctioned before reaching orbit and the payloads were lost.

“The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit,” Astra tweeted. “We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data analysis.”

It was the seventh launch of Astra’s small “Venture-class” rocket and the company’s fifth failure. Sunday’s launch was the first of three planned for NASA to launch six small CubeSats, two at a time, into three orbital planes. Given the somewhat risky nature of relying on tiny shoebox-size CubeSats and a rocket with a very short track record, the $40 million project requires just four satellites and two successful launches to meet mission objectives. The NASA contract calls for the final two flights by the end of July. Whether Astra can meet that schedule given Sunday’s failure is not yet known.

“Although today’s launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities,” tweeted NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen….
After Sunday’s failure, he tweeted: “Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead.”

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Two Tech CEOs Wanted Every Worker to Have a Permanent, Publicly-Available Job Performance File

“Two CEOs on a podcast casually proposed a shareable database of worker performance that would follow them between companies, forever, and encouraged listeners to create one,” writes Slashdot reader merauder128 , summarizing a recent article on Vice.

“HR professionals say it’s a terrible idea.”

Vice points out the podcast both the host and guest were CEOs of “data harvesters that package and resell data to other parties.”
Through one lens, it was a mundane musing between two CEOs of data companies talking about how awesome it would be to have more data on something. But in the context of experiments occurring in the tech industry around hiring practices, it was two influential CEOs encouraging other entrepreneurs to create a business that would be an absolute nightmare for workers, a type of credit score for workers that could be a permanent HR file that follows workers from one job to the next, and where a worker who struggles at one job may have trouble getting another….

It is also in line with a growing trend among tech companies that, spurred by work-from-home and hybrid work, are increasingly interested in quantifying employee performance. The most prominent example is Coinbase introducing an app so employees can constantly rate each other’s performances, a scenario even the normally cheery TechCrunch said “sounds rough.”
Over the last several years, there has been a boom in employee management software solutions such as Workday, Lattice, CultureAmp that are used across thousands of companies for performance reviews and other sensitive HR tasks. Technologically speaking, what Youakim and Hoffman are talking about is opening those confidential resources — or some condensed version of them that can be easily digested and analyzed — up to everyone.

None of these HR software companies have indicated that they have any intention of doing this.
The article warns that experts who have studied hiring extensively believe a permanent database database “would allow this complete, random mess to follow workers their entire careers, affecting their job prospects, earning potential, and their broader lives.” And the article summarizes a reaction to the idea from John Hausknecht, a professor of human resources at Cornell University. “It assumes people don’t change, that jobs require similar attributes, that a person’s experience at one company is relevant to another where they will be in a different environment with a different manager and different company culture….

“Or, to put it a different way, ‘Just because we can track it, collect it, and ask about it,’ Hausknecht said, ‘doesn’t necessarily mean we should.'”

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New CRISPR-based Map Ties Every Human Gene To Its Function

In 2003, the Human Genome Project finished sequencing every bit of human DNA, remembers MIT News.

“Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells.”
The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.

The data are available for other scientists to use. “It’s a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research,” says Weissman, who is also a member of the Whitehead Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute….

“I think this dataset is going to enable all sorts of analyses that we haven’t even thought up yet by people who come from other parts of biology, and suddenly they just have this available to draw on,” says former Weissman Lab postdoc Tom Norman, a co-senior author of the paper.

The announcement credits the single-sequencing tool Perturb-seq and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing which introduced genetic changes into cells and then captured information about which RNAs expressed (uses single-cell RNA sequencing).

The researchers scaled the method to the entire genome using human blood cancer cell lines and noncancerous cells derived from the retina, ultimately using Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the news.

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‘A Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Startup Promised Riches and Delivered Disaster’

“Even many Axie regulars say it’s not much fun, but that hasn’t stopped people from dedicating hours to researching strategies, haunting Axie-themed Discord channels and Reddit forums, and paying for specialized software that helps them build stronger teams…”

Bloomberg pays a visit to the NFT-based game Axie Infinity with a 39-year-old player who’s spent $40,000 there since last August — back when you could actually triple your money in a week. (“I was actually hoping that it could become my full-time job,” he says.)

The reason this is possible — or at least it seemed possible for a few weird months last year — is that Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well….

Axie’s creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the “play-to-earn” video game. “We believe in a world future where work and play become one,” it said in a mission statement on its website. “We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution.” By last October the company, founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, four years ago by a group of Asian, European, and American entrepreneurs, had raised more than $160 million from investors including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto-focused firm Paradigm, at a peak valuation of about $3 billion. That same month, Axie Infinity crossed 2 million daily users, according to Sky Mavis.

If you think the entire internet should be rebuilt around the blockchain — the vision now referred to as web3 — Axie provided a useful example of what this looked like in practice. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and an Axie investor, predicted that 90% of the gaming market would be play-to-earn within five years. Gabby Dizon, head of crypto gaming startup Yield Guild Games, describes Axie as a way to create an “investor mindset” among new populations, who would go on to participate in the crypto economy in other ways. In a livestreamed discussion about play-to-earn gaming and crypto on March 2, former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang called web3 “an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition” and “the biggest weapon against poverty that we have.”

By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3’s utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.

The article does credit the company for building its own blockchain (Ronin) to provide cheaper and faster NFT transactions. “Purists might have taken issue with the decision to abandon the core blockchain precept of decentralization, but on the other hand, the game actually worked.”

But the article also chronicles a fast succession of highs and lows:

“In Axie’s biggest market, the Philippines, the average daily earnings from May to October 2021 for all but the lowest-ranked players were above minimum wage, according to the gaming research and consulting firm Naavik.”

Axie raised $150 million to reimburse victims of the breach and repair its infrastructure. “But nearly two months later the systems compromised during the hack still weren’t up and running, and the executives were vague about when everything would be repaired. (A company spokesperson said on June 3 that this could happen by midmonth, pending the results of an external audit….): Days after the breach it launched Axie: Origin, a new alternate version with better graphics/gameplay — and without a cryptocurrency element. About 75% of the 39-year-old gamer’s co-players have “largely” stopped playing the game. “But at least one was sufficiently seduced by Axie’s potential to take a significant loan to buy AXS tokens, which he saw as a way to hedge against inflation of the Argentine peso. The local currency has indeed lost value since he took out the loan, but not nearly as much as AXS.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Parker Lewis for sharing the article

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Museum Restores 21 Rare Videos from Legendary 1976 Computing Conference

At Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, the senior curator just announced the results of a multi-year recovery and restoration process: making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of a legendary 1976 conference:

For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing’s top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb.

Among the speakers:

– A young Donald Knuth on the early history of programming languages

– FORTRAN designer John Backus on programming in America in the 1950s — some personal perspectives

– Harvard’s Richard Milton Bloch (who worked with Grace Hopper in 1944)

– Mathematician/nuclear physicist StanisÅaw M. Ulam on the interaction of mathematics and computing
– Edsger W. Dijkstra on “a programmer’s early memories.”

The Computer History Museum teases some highlights:

Typical of computers of this generation, the 1946 ENIAC, the earliest American large-scale electronic computer, had to be left powered up 24 hours a day to keep its 18,000 vacuum tubes healthy. Turning them on and off, like a light bulb, shortened their life dramatically. ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly discusses this serious issue….
The Los Alamos peak moment was the brilliant lecture on the British WW II Colossus computing engines by computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell. Colossus machines were special-purpose computers used to decipher messages of the German High Command in WW II. Based in southern England at Bletchley Park, these giant codebreaking machines regularly provided life-saving intelligence to the allies. Their existence was a closely-held secret during the war and for decades after. Randell’s lecture was — excuse me — a bombshell, one which prompted an immediate re-assessment of the entire history of computing. Observes conference attendee (and inventor of ASCII) IBM’s Bob Bemer, “On stage came Prof. Brian Randell, asking if anyone had ever wondered what Alan Turing had done during World War II? From there he went on to tell the story of Colossus — that day at Los Alamos was close to the first time the British Official Secrets Act had permitted any disclosures. I have heard the expression many times about jaws dropping, but I had really never seen it happen before.”

Publishing these original primary sources for the first time is part of CHM’s mission to not only preserve computing history but to make it come alive. We hope you will enjoy seeing and hearing from these early pioneers of computing.

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Short-Sightedness Was Rare. In Asia, It Is Becoming Ubiquitous

Researchers have found that being outside drastically reduces the risk of developing short-sightedness. From a report: In the early 1980s Taiwan’s army realised it had a problem. More and more of its conscripts seemed to be short-sighted, meaning they needed glasses to focus on distant objects. “They were worried that if the worst happened [ie, an attack by China] their troops would be fighting at a disadvantage,” says Ian Morgan, who studies myopia at Australian National University, in Canberra. An island-wide study in 1983 confirmed that around 70% of Taiwanese school leavers needed glasses or contact lenses to see properly. These days, that number is above 80%. But happily for Taiwan’s generals, the military disparity has disappeared. Over the past few decades myopia rates have soared across East Asia (see chart 1 in the linked story). In the 1960s around 20-30% of Chinese school-leavers were short-sighted. These days they are just as myopic as their cousins across the straits, with rates in some parts of China running at over 80%.

Elsewhere on the continent things are even worse. One study of male high-school leavers in Seoul found 97% were short-sighted. Hong Kong and Singapore are not far behind. And although the problem is worst in East Asia, it is not unique to it. Reliable numbers for America and Europe are harder to come by. But one review article, published in 2015, claimed a European rate of between 20% and 40% — an order of magnitude higher than that which people working in the field think is the “natural,” background rate. For most of those affected, myopia is a lifelong, expensive nuisance. But severe myopia can lead to untreatable vision loss, says Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London. A paper published in 2019 concluded that each one-dioptre worsening in myopia was associated with a 67% increase in prevalence of myopic maculopathy, an untreatable condition that causes blindness. (A dioptre is a measure of a lens’s focusing power.) In some parts of East Asia, 20% of young people have severe myopia, defined as -6 dioptres or worse (see chart 2 in linked story). “This is storing up a big problem for the coming decades,” says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.

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UK Regulator Plans To Launch Probe Into Google’s and Apple’s Mobile Duopoly

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that Google and Apple “hold all the cards” when it comes to mobile phones a year after taking a closer look at their “duopoly.” It’s now consulting on the launch of a market investigation into the tech giants’ market power in mobile browsers, as well as into Apple’s cloud gaming restrictions. From a report: In addition, the CMA has launched a separate investigation into Google’s Play Store rules — the one that requires certain app developers to use the tech giant’s payment system for in-app purchases, in particular. The CMA has concluded after its year-long study that the tech giants do indeed exhibit an “effective duopoly” on mobile ecosystems. A total of 97 percent of all mobile web browsing in the UK is powered by Apple’s and Google’s browser engines. iPhones and Android devices typically come with Safari and Chrome pre-installed, which means their browsers have the advantage from the start. Further, Apple requires developers to make sure their iOS and iPadOS apps are using its WebKit engine to browse the web. That limits the incentives Apple may have to invest in Safari, the CMA said.

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Jack Dorsey’s TBD Announces Web3 Competitor: Web5

Jack Dorsey’s beef with Web3 has never been a secret. In his view, Web 3 — blockchain boosters’ dream of a censorship resistant, privacy-focused internet of the future — has become just as problematic as the Web2 which preceded it. Now, he’s out with an alternative. From a report: At CoinDesk’s Consensus Festival here in Austin, TBD — the bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Dorsey’s Block (SQ) — announced its new vision for a decentralized internet layer on Friday. Its name? Web5. TBD explained its pitch for Web5 in a statement shared with CoinDesk: “Identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to individual’s applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals.”

While the new project from TBD was announced Friday, it is still under open-source development and does not have an official release date. A play on the Web3 moniker embraced in other corners of the blockchain space, Web5 is built on the idea that incumbent “decentralized internet” contenders are going about things the wrong way. Appearing at a Consensus panel clad in a black and bitcoin-yellow track suit emblazoned with the numeral 5, TBD lead Mike Brock explained that Web5 — in addition to being “two better than Web3” — would beat out incumbent models by abandoning their blockchain-centric approaches to a censorship free, identity-focused web experience. “This is really a conversation about what technologies are built to purpose, and I don’t think that renting block space, in all cases, is a really good idea for decentralized applications,” Brock said. He continued: “I think what we’re pushing forward with Web5 — and I admit it’s a provocative challenge to a lot of the assumptions about what it means to decentralize the internet — really actually is back to basics. We already have technologies that effectively decentralize. I mean, bittorrent exists, Tor exists, [etc].” The full presentation is here.

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