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"Hello, tech support?" (credit: Dan Stijovich @ Flickr)

In an episode of CBS' techno-procedural series CSI:Cyber that aired in January, pilots were forced to power off and power back on an airliner's flight computer to regain control from a hacker. As preposterous as that cold-boot of avionics sounds, it's something that test pilots have had to do with the F-35A "Lightning II" Joint Strike Fighter's radar system—not because of a hack but because of a software problem that causes the radar to degrade or stop working entirely.

IHS Jane's reports that an issue arose in late 2015 with the F-35's AN/APG-81 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar system, built by Northrop Grumman for the Lockheed Martin-led F-35 program. The software planned to be used in the F-35A when the Air Force declares its "initial operational capability" (IOC) with the fighter later this year—revision 3i—has a major flaw. As Air Force F-35 Integration Office Director Major General Jeffrey Harrigian told Jane's, that flaw affects "radar stability—the radar's ability to stay up and running. What would happen is they'd get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail—something that would force us to restart the radar."

Harrigan said that Lockheed Martin has discovered the cause of the problem and has diverted developers who were working on the next increment of the F-35's code to fix it. A patch is expected by the end of March. But if the fix is delayed, it could push back the Air Force's IOC declaration, which is currently expected some time after August of this year.

(credit: YES Network)

New York Yankees fans opening the newspaper this week may see an unusual full-page advertisement urging them to "Drop Comcast today and find another TV provider." The ad points fans to a website that suggests DirecTV, Frontier, and Verizon as alternatives.

It's the latest punch thrown in a fight between Comcast and the YES Network, which broadcasts about 130 Yankees games per season and is owned by Fox and Yankee Global Enterprises. When negotiations for a new carriage deal broke down in November, Comcast dropped the regional sports network, affecting about 900,000 homes in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, the New York Post reported at the time.

Since there's still no deal and regular season baseball starts in less than a month, the YES Network took out the full-page ads in The New York Times and other newspapers and is also urging fans to drop Comcast with "radio and TV spots, outdoor placements, and an aggressive social media strategy," Variety reported this week.

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."