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Staff at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) received an unpleasant e-mail when they came to work Thursday morning, one that outlined some specifics of long-awaited restructuring plans. The gist of the message? You've done such a good job, we have to let you go.

CSIRO’s CEO Larry Marshall's lengthy message stated, “Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?”

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that about 110 of the 135 people in CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere division will be cut, and there will be a similar reduction in the Land and Water division. Smaller cuts are also planned for the Manufacturing and Data61 digital technology divisions. The remaining positions in Oceans and Atmosphere will be shifted away from climate science and toward mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.

T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere. (credit: T-Mobile)

A T-Mobile USA executive yesterday urged the Federal Communications Commission not to take any action against the carrier's "Binge On" program, which throttles nearly all video content and exempts certain video services from data caps.

"I think the commission has to tread lightly—and certainly more lightly than it would in the wired world—in the wireless space when there is so much experimentation happening, so much differentiation happening, and a lot of it customers responding to," T-Mobile Senior VP of Government Affairs Kathleen Ham said at an event in Washington, DC. "We do have to be transparent about it, we do have to make sure that the customer has choices, but I think it's wise to tread lightly in this environment when there's so much going on that I think customers are benefiting from."

Yesterday's event on zero-rating and net neutrality was hosted by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute (see video here). The Hill also has a report on the panel discussion.

(credit: Christopher Paul)

A new study says the obvious: suspects' brains are briefly scrambled when they are on the receiving end of a Taser stun gun and its 50,000-volt delivery. But the study, "TASER Exposure and Cognitive Impairment: Implications for Valid Miranda Waivers and the Timing of Police Custodial Interrogations," (PDF) questions whether suspects who were just shocked have the mental capacity to validly waive their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning.

"TASER-exposed participants resembled patients with mild cognitive impairment, which suggests that not only might our participants be more likely to waive their Miranda rights directly after TASER exposure, but also they would be more likely to give inaccurate information to investigators," reads the study, which appears in the journal Criminology & Public Policy. "Thus, part of our findings implicates a suspect’s ability to issue a valid waiver, whereas another part implicates the accuracy of information he or she might give investigators during a custodial interrogation (e.g., false confessions or statements)."

The paper said that police departments might want to wait to question a suspect for about an hour, the amount of time for brain functioning to return to normal after a suspect is shocked. The Drexel University and Arizona State University researchers said innocent suspects may not appear so innocent right after being shocked:

On Friday, Volkswagen Group said it would be delaying its annual earnings meeting, originally scheduled for March 10, due to "remaining open questions… relating to the diesel emissions issue.” The annual general meeting of shareholders, scheduled for April, will also be postponed.

The New York Times calls the move “highly unusual” but understandable given that the German automaker could potentially owe “tens of billions” in fines, not including the cost of fixing or buying back the nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles in the US alone that were equipped with emissions-system-cheating software. Worldwide, the number of diesel Volkswagens with so-called “defeat device” software rises to about 11 million.

According to a press release from the company, Volkswagen decided to delay the financial meetings to achieve a "transparent and reliable outcome for its shareholders and stakeholders.” It promised to release the new scheduled meeting dates as soon as possible.

iRobot

The iRobot 710 Kobra. This is the company's biggest military bot. With a gripper arm attachment like this, it can lift 330 pounds.

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iRobot is most famous for its Roomba robotic vacuum line, but the company also has a sizable "Defense and Security" division, which makes robots for the US Armed Forces and various police forces. Or at least it used to—iRobot has announced that the military division will be sold off and formed into a separate company.

The press release says that Arlington Capital Partners will buy the division for "up to $45 million in total consideration." The new company will be fully dedicated to military and police robots, and it will be led by the existing Defense and Security management team. There's no name for the new company yet—that will be saved for when the transaction closes in the next 90 days.

iRobot's military robots all followed the same basic formula. They're driven by a pair of continuous tracks with a second set of tracks attached to the front. The front tracks could be actuated, lifting up off the ground and allowing the robot to climb obstacles like stairs and rocks. The body of the robots were platforms that iRobot outfitted with various capabilities, usually robotic arms with cameras or gripper arms. That basic design came in a few different sizes, ranging from something you could throw through a window to a robot that would fit in a backpack or a heavy-duty bot weighing as much as 500 pounds.

(credit: flickr user Nick)

In places like California, researchers have been working to understand how climate change is affecting droughts. But in the UK, it’s unusually wet weather making headlines of late. Southern England and Wales got soaked over the winter that ran into January 2014, leading to near-historic flooding. This led to a natural question: did climate change have a hand in it?

Climate is basically the statistics of weather, so the way we answer this is to use climate models to look for a change in those statistics. We can’t necessarily convict climate change for any particular weather disaster, but we can learn whether we should expect to see that disaster more often than we would in the absence of climate change. A home run hitter on steroids is a common analogy—they'd clearly hit some out of the park anyway, but not with the same frequency.

Good statistics require a lot of samples, so to look at the English flooding, a climate model was used to generate over 130,000 simulations of weather in the region. To do the computational heavy lifting, the team (led by University of Oxford researcher Nathalie Schaller) relied on weather@home running on volunteers’ computers. Some of the simulations were run with greenhouse gas concentrations, Arctic sea ice extent, and sea surface temperatures to match the 2013/2014 winter. The other simulations were run under approximated pre-industrial conditions: lower greenhouse gas concentrations, cooler sea surface temperatures, and the largest sea ice extent available from the satellite era (1986/1987).

(credit: Wally Gobetz)

A man using a drone to take pictures of the Manhattan skyline accidentally crashed the device into the Empire State Building. He then went in to ask security for his drone back. Instead of helping, they called the cops.

27-year-old Sean Riddle, of Jersey City, NJ, was arrested yesterday sometime before 8:00pm, according to the New York City Police Department.

Riddle was charged with reckless endangerment, misdemeanor criminal mischief, and illegally navigating an aircraft over the city.