Month: March 2016

Jeff Bezos, not a member of the Hair Club for Men, in Blue Origin's rocket factory. (credit: Eric Berger)

The thickly coiffed Sy Sperling gained a measure of fame as the founder of the Hair Club for Men in the 1980s and 1990s with commercials that reminded viewers he wasn’t just the president of the company, he was “also a client.” For Jeff Bezos, it’s much the same. No, the close-shaven, balding-pate Bezos decidedly isn’t a member of the hair club. Rather, he’s not just the founder of Blue Origin, he also intends to fly into space aboard its New Shepard spacecraft.

And is he ever excited about this. Oh yes. This week, while pointing out the large windows in the New Shepard on the floor of his rocket factory, Bezos talked expansively about what it would be like to ride into space aboard the vehicle for the first time. The seats recline, he explained, with each of the six inside the spacecraft facing its own window.

But the spacecraft won’t just offer a room with a view. Passengers will feel the effect of rocketing into space. During ascent, passengers will experience 3 to 4Gs, and up to 5Gs during descent, although the maximum g-forces will last only for about 10 seconds.

(credit: wingedwolf)

Social science, including behavioral economics, has recently come under fire as failing to generate studies with reproducible results. The Reproducibility Project made waves in August of 2015 when it announced that reproducing social science experiments is very difficult—not because the original studies were difficult, but because published findings often aren’t as strongly backed by the data as the original authors claimed.

A recent issue of Science contains three articles that alternately contest and defend the reproducibility of social sciences. Critics argue that the true reproducibility rate of articles in these fields is much higher than was initially reported; defenders, including some researchers from the Reproducibility Project, say that the reproduciblity rate is truly less than half.

Though the authors don’t all agree with one another, for the most part they do agree on two things. One is that there were at least some issues with the initial report from the Reproducibility Project, which made a big splash in the media at the time. The second is that we'd probably still like to see higher rates of reproducibility.

(credit: Swatch)

We're learning more about how the legacy watch company Swatch plans to make its products smarter for the wearable age. At a news conference in Biel, Switzerland, Swatch Group AG said it plans to focus smartwatch technology on its more affordable plastic watch brand before attempting to put the technology in high-end devices.

According to The Wall Street Journal, this strategy is in response to devices like the Apple Watch which live in the under $1,000 price range (at least, the base models of the Apple Watch do). Since most other Swiss watchmakers focus on the luxury market, Swatch is the company most threatened by sub-$1,000 smart devices taking over its industry. According to IDC, smartwatches will be the most popular type of wearable device going forward, and it's expected that 34.3 million units will be shipped in 2016, which would be up from 2015's expected 21.3 million units.

However, even if Swatch plans to produce smart devices in the same price range as the Apple Watch, Swatch CEO Nick Hayek claims the company doesn't want to compete as a consumer technology company. "We are not talking about competing with Apple,” Hayek is quoted as saying in the WSJ. "They are consumer-electronics people and we don’t want to get into that sector. We are also competing with jewelry; it’s two different worlds."

(credit: Tim Ellis)

Cothority, a new software project designed to make secret backdoored software updates nearly impossible, is offering to help Apple ensure that any secret court orders to backdoor its software cannot escape public scrutiny.

Currently, when Apple or any software maker issues a software update, they sign the update with their encryption keys. But those keys can be stolen, and a government could coerce the company to sign a backdoored software update for a targeted subset of end users—and do so in secret.

Cothority decentralises the signing process, and scales to thousands of cosigners. For instance, in order to authenticate a software update, Apple might require 51 percent of 8,000 cosigners distributed around the world.

AMD has introduced XConnect, a form of driver-level support for external graphics cards, as part of its latest Radeon 16.3 driver. XConnect allows users to add and remove a Thunderbolt 3 external graphics device (eGFX) such as the Razer Core, without needing to restart the PC, as well as switch between discrete and integrated graphics on-the-fly.

The XConnect driver can also detect what applications are running on the external GPU, giving users the option to close them individually, or shut them all down at once from a pop-up menu in the system tray. Even if users forget to close down applications before removing the external GPU, AMD claims that the system will remain functional after a "surprise removal."

The first device to use XConnect will be the Razer Blade Stealth and Razer Core. AMD promises that its XConnect driver will be compatible with other systems and external GPU devices, provided they meet a few criteria. Devices must be running Windows 10 build 10586 or later and Thunderbolt firmware v.16 or higher; feature a Thunderbolt 3 port and 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 cable; and pass Thunderbolt certification. Most importantly, the systems must have BIOS ACPI extensions for Thunderbolt eGFX.

A collection of foam-tipped weapons used for LARPing.

Two rivals in the unusual business of selling foam arrows have failed to settle their dispute over patents and trademarks, and the lawsuit between them is moving forward rapidly.

Defendant Jordan Gwyther has said that the litigation could threaten the future of his favorite hobby: live action role-playing, or "LARPing." Gwyther and his fellow LARPers recreate medieval battles, wearing armor and using foam weapons to stage fights in local fields and parks.

Gwyther runs a community website for LARPers called Larping.org and has a side business selling foam-tipped arrows that are popular with LARPers. He got sued in October by a company called Global Archery, which claims that Gwyther's arrows business violates two patents it owns and also illegally uses its trademark. Last month, Gwyther, strapped for cash, went public with the dispute. He made a video asking for support on GoFundMe.