Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann giving a presentation on records of past climate. (credit: American Association of University Professors)

Climate scientists take a lot of abuse. The political opposition to climate science in some countries breeds nasty attacks on the scientists themselves. Penn State's Michael E. Mann, for example, became a favorite target after his work on tree-ring records of past climate produced a "hockey stick" graph showing that a gradual cooling trend flipped into sharp, human-caused warming.

In 2012, Mann decided he'd had enough and did something few other scientists have—he filed a defamation lawsuit. After years bouncing around in court, with the defendants appealing decisions that would let the case proceed, the suit's last obstacle was cleared Monday as the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. A 2016 decision by a District of Columbia court will stand, and the case will now have to be heard.

The original suit was prompted by articles written by Conservative columnist and radio show host Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg of the Conservative Enterprise Institute. The articles claimed that Mann's research was fraudulent—that he had intentionally manipulated data. And Simberg added a regrettable analogy that Steyn quoted in his piece: "Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data."

Enlarge / Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019. (credit: Lyu Liang | VCG | Getty Images)

Tensions between Google parent company Alphabet and its workers are again on the rise, as four employees at the forefront of an organization movement within Google have been fired.

The firings came Monday in the wake of an employee rally at Google's San Francisco office that took place last Friday. The rally was in support of employees Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, both of whom had been placed on administrative leave in the wake of their previous protests against the company.

Bloomberg obtained a memo sent to all Google employees on Monday about the firings, which described the dismissal as due to "clear and repeated violations" of the company's data security policies.

Enlarge / The Porsche Taycan can feature up to four touchscreens, three of which are seen here. That might be overkill. (credit: Porsche)

The primary controls for operating a car are the same today as they were a hundred years ago. We push one foot pedal to speed up, another to slow down, and turn a hand-operated wheel to steer our direction. Over the years, people have suggested joysticks or other radical replacements for controls, but none has proven superior to wheels and pedals. However, when it comes to our other interactions with automobiles, the past decade or so has seen quite the change within our car interiors. The high-definition, multicolored glitz of the consumer electronics world has proliferated throughout the industry, replacing dials and buttons with touchscreens. Whether that's an entirely good thing is up for debate.

It might all be infotainment's fault. In the old days, there were just car stereos. You turned a knob or pushed a button to listen to the radio, inserted some kind of physical media, and if you were really fancy, maybe there were some sliders to change the EQ settings. Soon, small digital screens were appearing in our cars' center consoles, built-in alternatives to the suction-cupped GPS units that all of a sudden rendered the road atlas a thing of the past. Those screens grew and became more capable, so there was more need to interact with them. Dedicated physical buttons have given way to jogwheels, scroll- and touchpads, and then the touchscreen.

One problem with all of these additions is that they can be a distraction from driving. Taking your eyes off the road is bad, and touchscreen interfaces are generally not conducive to developing "eyes-off" muscle memory, particularly if they lack haptic feedback. It's not that touch interfaces are inherently bad, but they do let designers get away with shipping poor user interfaces.

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  Google Assistant's Ambient Mode. Look at all the info! [credit: Google ]

Google has quietly released a new Android feature called the "Google Assistant Ambient Mode," a new screen Google is calling a "proactive experience" your phone can kick over to while it's charging.

Ambient mode is built into the Google Search app and takes over the lock screen any time you charge the phone. The new ambient mode shows a quick greeting message at the top, followed by your calendar, weather, upcoming flights, and notifications. Below that is a quick settings section that shows things like a do-not-disturb toggle and smart home controls for lights and thermostats. There's also a photo frame mode. It looks like a handy screen that could pop up when you're just charging your phone before bed.

There's no blog post on this new feature, only a single YouTube video. In the video, Google Assistant Product Manager Arvind Chandrababu says the new screen is about "moving from an app-based way of doing things to an intent based way of doing things. Right now users can do most things with their smartphone, but it requires quite a bit of mental bandwidth to figure out 'Hey, I need to accomplish this task, so let me backtrack and figure out what are all the steps I need to do.'"

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Scott Olson)

Several supposed brain-enhancing supplements sold in the US contain a questionable drug that has been rejected by the Food and Drug Administration, according to a new analysis published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Researchers led by Harvard’s Pieter Cohen identified four dietary supplement makers illegally selling the drug, piracetam, in their products. The researchers were clued in to the presence of the unapproved drug by simply reading the products’ labels. Two of the supplement makers brazenly called their brain pills “piracetam” outright.

In a twist, researchers found that a fifth supplement maker named its product after the unapproved drug but didn’t actually include any piracetam in the product.

Enlarge / Microsoft's own Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets aren't set for support on the Xbox side, according to Spencer.

Microsoft Head of Xbox Phil Spencer told Australian gaming site Stevivor that virtual reality support is "not where our focus is" for next year's planned release of an Xbox One successor known as Project Scarlett.

"I have some issues with VR," Spencer told the site. "It’s isolating and I think of games as a communal, kind of together experience. We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and... nobody’s asking for VR."

That closely mirrors comments Spencer made to Ars Technica in 2017, when he said, "We haven't had people climbing over us saying, 'Hey, when can you deliver a family room VR experience.' I think a little of the setup with TV and dragging cables across the room is a little difficult." Apparently Microsoft's view of its customers' VR demand hasn't changed much in the intervening years.

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  We used an EVGA Dark board for testing the i9-10980XE. Most boards this far on the high end look like they escaped from Las Vegas—this one goes for a quiet, clean aesthetic instead. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Intel's new i9-10980XE, debuting on the same day as AMD's new Threadripper line, occupies a strange market segment: the "budget high-end desktop." Its 18 cores and 36 threads sound pretty exciting compared to Intel's top-end gaming CPU, the i9-9900KS—but they pale in comparison to Threadripper 3970x's 32 cores and 64 threads. Making things worse, despite having more than double the cores, i9-10980XE has trouble differentiating itself even from the much less expensive i9-9900KS in many benchmarks.

This leaves the new part falling back on what it does have going for it—cost, both initial and operational. If you can't use the full performance output of a Threadripper, the i9-10980XE will give you roughly half the performance for roughly half of the cost, and it extends that savings into ongoing electrical costs as well.

Power

Our i9-10980XE system desktop idled at 69W and drew 257W at the wall under full CPU load. (credit: Jim Salter)

Our i9-10980XE test rig was a lot easier to share an office with than the competing Threadripper 3970x rig. Its EVGA X399 Dark motherboard didn't make it look like a scene from Poltergeist was playing out in the office, and it drew a lot less power and threw off a lot less palpable heat.