Month: June 2018

Enlarge / The mirror of the James Webb, with its individual segments unfolded into place. (credit: NASA)

Today, NASA announced that it had accepted the findings and recommendations of an independent review of progress toward the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, intended to be NASA's next great observatory. As a result of some changed procedures and reigning in some unjustified schedule optimism, the changes will mean that Webb won't be launched until March of 2021, a delay that will tack on $800 million to the telescope's $8 billion price tag.

Complexity and errors

The James Webb Space Telescope would be the most complex imaging hardware that NASA has attempted to put into space. It features a large mirror that will be formed by multiple individual segments moving into place and protected by a sunscreen that would also unfold after launch. Webb's instruments would be sensitive to a region of the infrared that should allow it to image everything from the Universe's first galaxies to the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets.

But so far, that complexity has driven extensive delays. Early this year, the Government Accountability Office released a report that suggested that further delays were inevitable. And shortly after its release, NASA disclosed that testing of the spacecraft's unfolding resulted in damage to some of the systems. That set the stage for an independent review board to give the entire project a new look.

Enlarge / The McLaren Senna, the cover car for "Forza Horizon 4," is unveiled at the Mixer booth at E3 2018 on Tuesday, June 12, 2018 in Los Angeles. (credit: Casey Rodgers/Invision for Microsoft/AP Images)

LOS ANGELES—Microsoft's presence at this month's E3 had its share of Xbox surprises, but a new annual Forza racing installment wasn't one of them. Forza Horizon 4, with its off-road London setting, had already leaked ahead of the official mid-June announcement, and we didn't learn many more surprises during a behind-closed-doors meeting with the game's developers at Playground Games.

One exception, however, got lost during the E3 hubbub: a blink-and-you'll-miss-it confirmation of a first in the booming world of game streaming. It's a subtle thing, which we're dubbing "stream-to-win," and it sees Microsoft take its boldest step in battling the behemoth service Twitch.

New Microsoft rewards

When describing upcoming features in this October's Forza Horizon 4, Playground Games art director Benjamin Penrose reminded us that Forza games have typically included ways to "progress" outside of standard races. Horizon 4's in-game currency can be used to unlock new cars and features in the game, and Penrose said that players can "progress in the game just by painting, or tuning, or streaming your gameplay on Mixer."

Enlarge / The front view of Tesla's new Model 3 car on display is seen on Friday, January 26, 2018, at the Tesla store in Washington, D.C. (credit: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

In an ongoing high-stakes lawsuit, Tesla has now asked a judge for emergency permission to serve subpoenas on numerous tech firms, including Facebook and Dropbox. Tesla believes these companies hold data connected to a recently-fired technician that the auto company says stole its trade secrets.

US Magistrate Judge Valerie P. Cooke in Nevada had already granted Tesla permission on Monday to serve Microsoft, Google, and Apple with similar subpoenas in the case filed against Martin Tripp, whom CEO Elon Musk has suggested is a saboteur.

Tripp previously worked at the Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, which manufactures Tesla’s batteries. The former employee insists that he is a whistleblower. He has previously told Ars that he witnessed large quantities of waste and that "punctured" cells as part of batteries were allowed to ship.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Department of Justice has approved the Walt Disney Company's proposed purchase of 21st Century Fox properties on the condition that the company divests Fox-owned regional sports networks (RSNs).

That's bad news for Comcast, which has been trying to outbid Disney for the Fox properties. Fox is reluctant to sell to Comcast because of concerns about obtaining regulatory approval of such a deal. The DOJ's approval of the Disney/Fox deal gives Fox another reason to reject any further bids from Comcast.

Technically, the DOJ filed a court complaint to block the Disney/Fox merger today. But the agency also filed a proposed final judgment that would let the merger proceed if Disney agrees to the DOJ's conditions. That's standard procedure for when the DOJ wants to impose conditions on a merger but doesn't intend to block it entirely.

Enlarge / Not a turbine-powered optical isolator (but James Murphy may like the term to use for a side project). (credit: Noam Galai / Getty Images)

Today I would like to present the turbine-powered optical isolator, a steampunk-sounding bit of hardware that only allows light to pass in one direction. That, I must admit, is a sentence I never imagined writing. 

It turns out that having components that only allow light to flow one way is really important. I’ve personally managed to destroy more than one laser because some of the light it emitted ended up returning to the hardware and wreaking havoc. Even if you don’t destroy anything, back reflections can still mess experiments up. So optical isolators, as they are called, are really important.

They are also big and expensive. To reduce the cost and size, researchers have demonstrated an optical oscillator that only requires an operating turbine to function. Despite being the least practical isolator ever, I still want one, maybe even two. In fact, give me three since I happen to be here anyway. 

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has improved its facial recognition system to make it much better at recognizing people who aren't white and aren't male. The company says that the changes it has made have reduced error rates for those with darker skin by up to 20 times and for women of all skin colors by nine times. As a result, the company says that accuracy differences between the various demographics are significantly reduced.

Microsoft's face service can look at photographs of people and make inferences about their age, gender, emotion, and various other features; it can also be used to find people who look similar to a given face or identify a new photograph against a known list of people. It was found that the system was better at recognizing the gender of white faces, and more generally, it was best at recognizing features of white men and worst with dark-skinned women. This isn't unique to Microsoft's system, either; in 2015, Google's Photos app classified black people as gorillas.

Machine-learning systems are trained by feeding a load of pre-classified data into a neural network of some kind. This data has known properties—this is a white man, this is a black woman, and so on—and the network learns how to identify those properties. Once trained, the neural net can then be used to classify images it has never previously seen.