Month: February 2021

Climate Fiction – Climate Cultures

“Jeder steht aufs Neue vor dem großen Feuer und muss sich überlegen, wie er das große Feuer bekämpft.”

"Jeder steht aufs Neue vor dem großen Feuer und muss sich überlegen, wie er das große Feuer bekämpft."

As important as the Beetle? Two days with Volkswagen’s electric ID.4

It’s a competent but not flashy crossover with a real-world range of 250 miles.

  • Volkswagen says the ID.4 is as important to its future as the Beetle was to its past. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

The Volkswagen ID.4 is a big deal for its manufacturer. After getting busted six years ago for fibbing about diesel emissions, VW underwent a corporate transformation, throwing all its chips into electrification. As a big believer in modular architectures that it can use to build a wide range of vehicles from a common set of parts, it got to work on a new architecture just for battery electric vehicles, called MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit).

Since then, we've seen a dizzying array of MEB-based concepts, including that electric bus that everyone wants, and even a bright green buggy. But the ID.4 is no mere concept. It's the first production MEB vehicle to go on sale here in the US, designed with the crossover-crazy US market firmly in mind. Last September we got our first good look at the ID.4 in under studio lights in Brooklyn, and a month later, Ars got to spend 45 minutes on the road with a pre-production ID.4. But now we've had two full days in a model year 2021 ID.4 1st Edition, getting to know it on local turf.

Volumetrically, it's about the same size as a Toyota RAV4 or VW Tiguan: 181 inches (4,585mm) long, 73 inches wide (1,852mm), and 64 inches tall (1,637mm), with a 109-inch (2,766mm) wheelbase. Depending on the angle it can be quite a handsome shape. That's helped by the way the 1st Edition's aerodynamic 20-inch alloy wheels fill their arches helps convince the brain that the car is smaller than it actually is, as well as the designer's trick of making bits disappear by cladding them in glossy black panels.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Exploitive Business Model of Academic Publishers Fuels Piracy

For many researchers, a publication in a high-impact academic journal is the holy grail. However, this goal comes at a price. Authors often have to sign over their copyrights to major publishers, who put the research behind a paywall. This model is detrimental to science, according to Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who remains determined to break the stranglehold.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

A few years ago I reached out to an academic researcher, asking for a copy of a paper that was just published in a prominent journal.

We regularly report on piracy-related research and many of these papers are hidden behind paywalls. Researchers are often willing to share a review copy, but not always.

Giving Up Copyrights

In this case, the author was very reluctant to share the article. While he would like to see the work covered by a news site, he feared repercussions from the publisher. Why? Because like most researchers, the author had to give up his copyrights in order to be published.

To outsiders, this may sound bizarre. Why would the person who came up with the idea, did the research, and wrote up the results, have to give up the copyrights? Welcome to the world of academic publishing.

While there may be some exceptions, the majority of the “high impact” academic journals are owned by for-profit publishers. These earn billions of dollars, in part by charging academic institutions for access. Yes, the same institutions that pay the researchers.

Paywall Barriers

To make matters worse, the paywalls prevent less fortunate academics from accessing the work of their colleagues. In some cases, researchers even find their own articles behind a paywall.

These billion-dollar companies essentially have a stranglehold on science. While copyright is supposed to “promote the progress of science,” the major publishers restrict access to millions of people, mostly in developing countries.

This system has led to a situation where academic researchers actively use ‘pirate’ sites to access research literature. For many academics, Sci-Hub has become the go-to site for unrestricted access to scientific papers.

The Sci-Hub ‘Threat’

Needless to say, the publishers are not happy. Companies such as Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature are taking countermeasures. US Courts have ordered Sci-Hub to pay millions of dollars in damages and publishers are actively trying to have the site blocked by ISPs.

The most recent blocking attempt is currently taking place in India. Despite the mounting pressure, Elkabyan refuses to give up what she stands for and continues to push back.

Sci-Hub Founder Highlights Publisher Problems

In a recent interview with the Indian news site The Wire, Elbakyan neatly summarizes the “exploitive” business model of the publishers.

“The careers of researchers depend on journal publications. To receive funding or secure positions at the university, a scientist must have publications in ‘high-impact’ academic journals,” she notes.

In other words, the research only ‘counts’ if it’s published in high-profile journals, which are often controlled by large corporations. Putting exactly the same paper on a university site is pointless.

The publishers essentially have a monopoly on science. A pretty healthy one as well, because all the hard work is done by people they don’t have to pay.

Publishers are Organizers, Not Creators

“Researchers do the actual work: they invent the hypothesis, do the experiments and write the articles describing the results of these experiments. Then they publish this article in an academic journal,” says Sci-Hub’s founder.

“Publishers send articles they have received to other scientists for peer-review. Reviewers give their opinion on whether the work should be accepted in a journal or not, or if some additional work must be done. Based on these reviews, the article is published or rejected.

“Both reviewers and scientists work for free. They do not earn any compensation from the academic publisher. Here, academic publishers work as organizers of the academic community, but not as creators. The work of the academic publisher is organizational and not creative.”

Progress of Science

That last comment hits the nail on the head. While there are probably many nuances, most people would agree that the researchers are the real creators here. They are the definition of the “progress of science.” Paywalls certainly aren’t.

That brings us back to the author I requested a paper from a few years ago. After repeated requests, also to the publisher, I never managed to get a copy. The paywall worked, but does that help science?

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Creator or Creature? A Nightmare Wakes dramatizes the birth of Frankenstein

Ars chats with director Nora Unkel about the origins, themes of her first feature film.

Alix Wilton Regan stars as Mary Shelley in the throes of creating her timeless literary masterpiece in A Nightmare Wakes.

It's one of the most famous origin stories in literary history. One summer night in 1816 in Geneva, Lord Byron hosted a gathering of his fellow Romantics, including Percy Shelley and his lover (soon-to-be wife), Mary Godwin. The incessant rain confined the party indoors for days at a time, and one night, over dinner at the Villa Diodati, Byron propose that everyone write a ghost story to amuse themselves. The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the classic Gothic horror tale of a mad scientist who creates a monster—arguably the first science fiction novel.

That fateful summer is the subject of A Nightmare Wakes, the first feature film from writer/director Nora Unkel. It's been portrayed before, most recently in a 2020 episode of Doctor Who, but Unkel's film delves particularly into Mary Shelley's inner state of mind and the process of creation, as the world of her imagination begins to bleed into her reality. Per the official premise: "While composing her famous novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (Alix Wilton Regan) descends into an opium-fueled fever dream while carrying on a torrid love affair with Percy Shelley (Giullian Yao Gioiello). As she writes, the characters of her novel come to life and begin to plague her relationship with Percy. Before long, she must choose between true love and her literary masterpiece."

(Mild spoilers below)

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Now you can buy smartphone with /e/ OS in the US and Canada (Android phones stripped of Google services)

The /e/ Foundation has been developing a custom version of Android that doesn’t include Google’s propriety apps and services for a few years, and in 2019 the team began selling refurbished phones with the de-Googled software pre-installed….

The /e/ Foundation has been developing a custom version of Android that doesn’t include Google’s propriety apps and services for a few years, and in 2019 the team began selling refurbished phones with the de-Googled software pre-installed. At the time the phones were only available for purchase for customers in Europe. But now customers in […]

The post Now you can buy smartphone with /e/ OS in the US and Canada (Android phones stripped of Google services) appeared first on Liliputing.

Sony adds color E Ink display to its new 10.3 inch DPT-CP1 Digital Paper tablet

Sony has been selling a line of Digital Paper tablets with large E Ink displays for much of the past decade. Now the company is jumping on the latest trend in E Ink devices: color. According to a report from Good e-Reader, the new Sony DPT-CP1 v2 is a…

Sony has been selling a line of Digital Paper tablets with large E Ink displays for much of the past decade. Now the company is jumping on the latest trend in E Ink devices: color. According to a report from Good e-Reader, the new Sony DPT-CP1 v2 is an upgraded version of a 10.3 inch grayscale device Sony […]

The post Sony adds color E Ink display to its new 10.3 inch DPT-CP1 Digital Paper tablet appeared first on Liliputing.

Atlantic currents seem to have started fading last century

Another predicted impact of climate change may be here.

Image of a white, meandering band separating purple areas from grey ones.

Enlarge / The Gulf Stream, as imaged from space. (credit: NASA images courtesy Norman Kuring, MODIS Ocean Team.)

The major currents in the Atlantic Ocean help control the climate by moving warm surface waters north and south from the equator, with colder deep water pushing back toward the equator from the poles. The presence of that warm surface water plays a key role in moderating the climate in the North Atlantic, giving places like the UK a far more moderate climate than its location—the equivalent of northern Ontario—would otherwise dictate.

But the temperature differences that drive that flow are expected to fade as our climate continues to warm. A bit over a decade ago, measurements of the currents seemed to be indicating that temperatures were dropping, suggesting that we might be seeing these predictions come to pass. But a few years later, it became clear that there was just too much year-to-year variation for us to tell.

Over time, however, researchers have figured out ways of getting indirect measures of the currents, using material that is influenced by the strengths of the water's flow. These measures have now let us look back on the current's behavior over the past several centuries. And the results confirm that the strength of the currents has dropped dramatically over the last century.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments