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(credit: Apple)

Apple has just sent out invitations for a press event on March 21st, as expected. The invitation, pictured above, provides few hints about what is coming, but it does use the standard iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and MacBook finish colors (space grey, silver, gold, and rose gold). The event will take place at Apple's Cupertino campus and will get going at 10:00am PDT (5pm GMT).

The company is expected to make a handful of small announcements. One is a new 4-inch iPhone, which to date has been called the "iPhone 5SE" or simply "iPhone SE" in rumors. It's expected to include specs similar to the iPhone 6S (minus the pressure-sensitive 3D Touch screen) and to replace the iPhone 5S in the iPhone lineup. The second expected announcement is a new 9.7-inch iPad with updated internals and some features imported from the iPad Pro, including the Smart Connector and Apple Pencil support. The iPad Air 2 was introduced in October of 2014, and this is the longest Apple has gone without updating the standard iPad's hardware since the first model was introduced in 2010.

The event is also expected to usher in some more minor hardware and software updates, including some new Apple Watch band options, iOS 9.3, WatchOS 2.2, OS X 10.11.4, and tvOS 9.2. The timing is about right to introduce some new Skylake-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros, too, but we haven't heard anything specific about Mac refreshes. That doesn't mean it won't happen; it just means it's less likely to happen.

"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.