US Judge Halts Government Effort To Monitor Crypto Mining Energy Use

A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the U.S. government from monitoring the energy usage of cryptocurrency mining operations, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “irreparable injury” if it was made to comply. The Guardian reports: The US Department of Energy had launched an “eemergency” initiative last month aimed at surveying the energy use of mining operations, which typically use vast amounts of computing power to solve various mathematical puzzles to add new tokens to an online network known as a blockchain, allowing the mining of currency such as bitcoin. The growth of cryptocurrency, and the associated mining of it, has been blamed for a surge in electricity use as data centers have sprung up across the US, even reviving, in some cases, ailing coal plants to help power the mining. […]

“The massive energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining and its rapid growth in the United States threaten to undermine progress towards achieving climate goals, and threaten grids, communities and ratepayers,” said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney of the clean energy program at Earthjustice. Until now, a lack of publicly available information has only benefited an “industry that has thrived in the shadows,” DeRoche added.

The crypto mining industry, however, has claimed it is the victim of a “politically motivated campaign” by Joe Biden’s administration and has, for now, succeeded in averting a survey that it contends is unfairly onerous. “This is an attack against legitimate American businesses with the administration feigning an emergency to score political points,” said Lee Bratcher, president the Texas Blockchain Council, one of the groups that sued to stop the survey. “The White House has been clear that they desire to ‘to limit or eliminate’ bitcoin miners from operating in the United States. “Although bitcoin is resilient and cannot be banned, the administration is seeking to make the lives of bitcoin miners, their employees, and their communities too difficult to bear operating in the United States. This is deeply concerning.”

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Uber-Like Surge Pricing Is Coming For Fast Food

Fast food chain Wendy’s announced it’s adopting a similar approach to Uber’s Surge Pricing policy by dynamically adjusting the prices of its menu items during peak demand periods at certain locations. The controversial strategy seeks to leverage real-time data to align pricing and demand, enhancing efficiency and potentially improving customer satisfaction. From a report: During a conference call earlier this month, Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner said the fast-food chain would experiment with dynamic pricing as early as next year. “Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling,” he said. “As we continue to show the benefit of this technology in our company-operated restaurants, franchisee interest in digital menu boards should increase, further supporting sales and profit growth across the system.”

Prices seesaw all the time on the sites of online retailers like Amazon that use algorithms and artificial intelligence to monitor competitors and glean insights into individual shoppers, adjusting prices depending on interest in the product or in the brand, said Timothy Webb, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware’s hospitality and sport business management program. Coupons and other offers are also routinely dangled in mobile apps to encourage people to make purchases. “A lot of this stuff is already happening even if you don’t realize that it is happening. If you have the Starbucks app and I have the Starbucks app, we probably have different offers,” Webb said. “We might not be in the drive-through and they just increased the prices, but we are already paying different prices for the same products.”

But, he says, Wendy’s fans will likely see moderate, not massive, price swings during periods of peak demand. “It’s not like $200 or $300 on a flight. This is a hypercompetitive industry. If Wendy’s goes up $2 to $3 on a burger at dinner time, I would be shocked. People have too many options. They will just walk down the street and eat at Burger King instead,” Webb said. “There will just be little price changes here.”

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Half of College Graduates Are Working High School Level Jobs

According to a new study, almost half of America’s new college graduates are winding up in jobs they didn’t need to go to college to get. CBS News reports: If a graduate’s first job is in a low-paying field or out-of-line with a worker’s interests, it could pigeonhole them into an undesirable role or industry that’s hard to escape, according to a new study (PDF) from The Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Institute for the Future of Work. Another study from the HEA Group found that a decade after enrolling in college, attendees of 1 in 4 higher education programs are earning less than $32,000 — the median annual income for high school graduates. A college degree, in itself, is not a ticket to a higher-paying job, the study shows.

“Getting a college degree is viewed as the ticket to the American dream,” said [Burning Glass CEO Matt Sigelman], “and it turns out that it’s a bust for half of students.” The single greatest determinant of post-graduation employment prospects, according to the study, is a college student’s major, or primary focus of study. It can be even more important than the type of institution one attends. Choosing a career-oriented major like nursing, as opposed to criminal justice, gives graduates a better shot at actually using, and getting compensated for the skills they acquire. Just 23% of nursing students are underemployed, versus 68% of criminal justice majors. However, focusing on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects is not a guarantee of college-level employment and high wages, the study found. […]

Many college graduates remain underemployed even 10 years after college, the study found. That may be because employers seeking college-level skills also tend to focus on job candidates’ recent work experience, placing more emphasis on the latest jobs held by candidates who have spent years in the workforce, versus a degree that was earned a decade prior. “If you come out of school and work for a couple of years as waiter in a restaurant and apply for a college-level job, the employer will look at that work experience and not see relevance,” Sigelman said.

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Canada To Compel Digital Platforms To Remove Harmful Content

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Canada has proposed new rules that would compel digital platforms to remove online content that features the sexual exploitation of children or intimate images without consent of the individuals involved. From a report: The rules were years in the making, and represent the third and possibly final installment of measures aimed at regulating digital platforms. Measures introduced since 2022 aim to increase the amount of domestic, Canadian-made content on streaming services, such as Netflix, and require digital platforms to help Canadian news-media outlets finance their newsroom operations. The legislation needs to be approved by Canada’s Parliament before it takes effect.

Canada said its rules are based on concepts introduced by the European Union, the U.K. and Australia. Canadian officials say the proposed measures would apply to social-media platforms, adult-entertainment sites where users can upload content, and live-streaming services. These services, officials said, are expected to expeditiously remove two categories of content: That which sexually exploits a child or an abuse survivor, and intimate content broadcast without an individual’s consent. The latter incorporates so-called revenge porn, or the nonconsensual posting or dissemination of intimate images, often after the end of a romantic relationship. Officials said private and encrypted messaging services are excluded from the proposed regulations.

Canadian officials said platforms will have a duty to either ensure the material is not published, or take it down once notified. Canada also intends to set up a new agency, the Digital Safety Commission, to enforce the rules, order harmful content taken down, and hold digital services accountable. Platforms that violate the rules could face a maximum penalty of up to 25 million Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $18.5 million, officials said.

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Hacker Uses Raspberry Pi and AI To Block Noisy Neighbor’s Music

Maker Roni Bandini developed a Raspberry Pi project to address his neighbors’ loud reggaeton music by creating an AI-driven system that distorts audio on nearby Bluetooth speakers when reggaeton is detected. Tom’s Hardware reports: Powering this Bluetooth jamming device is a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. It’s connected to a DFRobot OLED display panel, which has a resolution of 128 x 32px. Audio is observed using a USB microphone, while a push button handles when the system will perform a check to listen for any potential reggaeton. According to Bandini, the Pi is running Raspberry Pi OS. The AI system driving the machine learning aspects of the design is Edge Impulse. With this, Bandini was able to train the Pi to listen for music and more specifically identify whether the song playing is classifiable as reggaeton or not. The official project page is available at Hackster.

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Julia v1.10 Improves Performance, and Gnuplot Gets Pie Charts

Julia 1.0 was released in 2018 — after a six-year wait.

And there’s now another update. LWN.net gets you up to speed, calling Julia “a general-purpose, open-source programming language with a focus on high-performance scientific computing.”

Some of Julia’s unusual features:
– Lisp-inspired metaprogramming
– The ability to examine compiled representations of code in the REPL or in a “reactive notebook”
– An advanced type and dispatch system
– A sophisticated, built-in package manager.

Version 1.10 brings big increases in speed and developer convenience, especially improvements in code precompilation and loading times. It also features a new parser written in Julia… [I]t is faster, it produces more useful syntax-error messages, and it provides better source-code mapping, which associates locations in compiled code to their corresponding lines in the source. That last improvement also leads to better error messages and makes it possible to write more sophisticated debuggers and linters…

Between the improvements in precompilation and loading times, and the progress in making small binaries, two major and perennial complaints, of beginners and seasoned Julia users alike, have been addressed… StaticCompiler and related WebAssembly tools will make it easier to write web applications in Julia for direct execution in the browser; it is already possible, but may become more convenient over the next few years.

Thanks for sharing the article to long-time Slashdot reader lee1 — who also wrote No Starch Press’s Practical Julia: A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds .

lee1 also reminds us that Gnuplot 6.0 was released in December:
lee1 writes: This article surveys the new features, including filled contours in 3D, adaptive plotting resolution, watchpoints, clipping of surfaces, pie charts, and new syntax for conditionals.

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Are Corporate Interests Holding Back US Electrical Grid Expansion?

Long-time Slashdot reader BishopBerkeley writes: Though it does not come as much of a surprise, a new study highlighted in IEEE Spectrum delves into how corporate profit motives are preventing the upgrading and the expansion of the U.S. electrical grid. The full report can be downloaded here from the source [the nonprofit economic research group NBER].

Besides opening up the market to competition, utilities don’t want to lose control over regional infrastructure, writes IEEE Spectrum. “[I]nterregional lines threaten utility companies’ dominance over the nation’s power supply. In the power industry, asset ownership provides control over rules that govern energy markets and transmission service and expansion. When upstart entities build power plants and transmission lines, they may be able to dilute utility companies’ control over power-industry rules and prevent utilities from dictating decisions about transmission expansion.”

The article begins by noting that “The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable-energy deployment. ”

Utilities can stall transmission expansion because out-of-date laws sanction these companies’ sweeping control over transmission development…
One of the main values of connecting regional networks is that it enablesâ”and is in fact critical forâ”incorporating renewable energy… Plus, adding interregional transmission for renewables can significantly reduce costs for consumers. Such connections allow excess wind and solar power to flow to neighboring regions when weather conditions are favorable and allow the import of energy from elsewhere when renewables are less productive.

Even without renewables, better integrated networks generally lower costs for consumers because they reduce the amount of generation capacity needed overall and decrease energy market prices. Interregional transmission also enhances reliability,particularly during extreme weather…

Addressing the transmission shortage is on the agenda in Washington, but utility companies are lobbying against reforms.

The article points out that now investors and entrepreneurs “are developing long-distance direct-current lines, which are more efficient at moving large amounts of energy over long distances, compared with AC,” and also “sidestep the utility-dominated transmission-expansion planning processes.”

They’re already in use in China, and are also becoming Europe’s preferred choice…

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$500 Drone Calculates Its GPS Coordinates Offline from Downloaded Google Maps and a Camera

From a report:

A team of drone enthusiasts have built a sub-$500 drone that uses a camera and Google Maps to provide itself with GPS co-ordinates, removing the need for a GPS satellite signal. And all of this was done in 24 hours during the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon. The drone the trio opted for is a custom designed and 3D printed fixed wing featuring a large single motor towards the rear and a downward facing camera used for geo-referencing…

Doesn’t Google Maps still require internet, you may ask? Google Maps allows users to download segments of maps ahead of time, usually for use when you are travelling or camping out in remote areas. In this instance, the team used this feature to their advantage, allowing the drone to continue operating…

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Scientists Pursue Cancer Vaccines Tailored to the Genetic Makeup of an Individual’s Tumor

“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of ‘decisive contributions’ to cancer research,” reports CNN.

Their profile of the oncologist from Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu’s research “has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual’s tumor.”

It’s a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer…

The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body’s immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system… These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don’t work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body’s immune system against cancer…

Wu’s research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what’s called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system’s T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used “tour de force lab work” to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. “If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it’s pretty pointless,” Lendahl added…

By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient’s unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells… Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system’s cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided “proof of principle” that a vaccine can be targeted to a person’s specific tumor, Lendahl said.

A follow-up by Wu’s team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control… Since then, Wu’s team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma.

“All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks,” adds CNN.

“To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed.”

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Boeing Removes Head of Its 737 Max Program After January’s ‘Door Bolts’ Incident

On Wednesday Boeing “removed executive Ed Clark, the head of its 737 Max passenger jet program,” reports CNN, “after a dramatic — and terrifying — midair blowout in January underscored ongoing problems with the jet.”

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the four bolts that should have held the door plug in place were missing when the plane left Boeing’s factory. The NTSB report did not assess blame for the missing bolts and the accident but in a statement to investors before the findings were released, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun assumed responsibility for the incident. “We caused the problem, and we understand that,” he told investors during a call after reporting the latest quarterly loss at the company. “Whatever conclusions are reached, Boeing is accountable for what happened.”

Clark, who had been at Boeing for 18 years, had only been in charge of the Max program since March of 2021, assuming that title after the jets had been returned to service following the crashes. But he had previously held roles related to the 737 Max, including as chief engineer and chief 737 mechanic.

With the news of Clark’s departure, Boeing also announced a shuffling of a number of executives in its Boeing Commercial Airplanes unit. It created a new executive position, Senior Vice President for BCA Quality, and named Elizabeth Lund to that position.

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