Reuters reports:
India expects space debris from its anti-satellite weapons launch to burn out in less than 45 days, its top defense scientist said on Thursday, seeking to allay global concern about fragments hitting objects. The comments came a day after India said it used an indigenously developed ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space.
Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years. G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.

Space.com shared a reaction from a national security affairs professor at Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. They argued that India’s test “likely represents a feeling by other countries, specifically India in this case, that the weaponization of space is forthcoming, and India doesn’t want to be left out of the ‘have’ category if arms-control agreements are eventually reached.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Does India’s Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space?

“The security chief for Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said on Saturday that the Saudi government had access to Bezos’ phone and gained private information from it,” Reuters reports.
But in addition, the National Enquirer’s lawyer “tried to get me to say there was no hacking,” writes security specialist Gavin de Becker.
I’ve recently seen things that have surprised even me, such as National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, being in league with a foreign nation that’s been actively trying to harm American citizens and companies, including the owner of the Washington Post. You know him as Jeff Bezos; I know him as my client of 22 years… Why did AMI’s people work so hard to identify a source, and insist to the New York Times and others that he was their sole source for everything? My best answer is contained in what happened next: AMI threatened to publish embarrassing photos of Jeff Bezos unless certain conditions were met. (These were photos that, for some reason, they had held back and not published in their first story on the Bezos affair, or any subsequent story.) While a brief summary of those terms has been made public before, others that I’m sharing are new — and they reveal a great deal about what was motivating AMI.
An eight-page contract AMI sent for me and Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.” Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking — and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t…. An earlier set of their proposed terms included AMI making a statement “affirming that it undertook no electronic eavesdropping in connection with its reporting and has no knowledge of such conduct” — but now they wanted me to say that for them. The contract further held that if Bezos or I were ever in our lives to “state, suggest or allude to” anything contrary to what AMI wanted said about electronic eavesdropping and hacking, then they could publish the embarrassing photos.
I’m writing this today because it’s exactly what the Enquirer scheme was intended to prevent me from doing. Their contract also contained terms that would have inhibited both me and Bezos from initiating a report to law enforcement.
Things didn’t work out as they hoped.
De Becker instead turned over his investigation’s results to U.S. federal officials, then published today’s essay warning the National Enquirer and its chairman have “evolved into trying to strong-arm an American citizen whom that country’s leadership wanted harmed, compromised, and silenced.” He also suggests it’s in response to the “relentless” coverage by the Washington Post (which Bezos owns) of the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
“Experts with whom we consulted confirmed New York Times reports on the Saudi capability to ‘collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace — including phone calls, texts, emails.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Saudis Gained Access to Amazon CEO’s Phone, Says Bezos’ Security Chief

“Apparently we’re all fighting about how to pronounce ‘GIF’ again on Twitter,” writes technology columnist Mike Melanson:
I personally find the argument of web designer Aaron Bazinet, who managed to secure the domain howtoreallypronouncegif.com, rather convincing in its simplicity: “It’s the most natural, logical way to pronounce it. That’s why when everyone comes across the word for the first time, they use a hard G [as in “gift”].” Bazinet relates the origin of the debate as such:
“The creator of the GIF image format, Steve Wilhite of CompuServe, when deciding on the pronunciation, said he deliberately chose to echo the American peanut butter brand, Jif, and CompuServe employees would often say ‘Choosy developers choose GIF(jif)’, playing off of Jif’s television commercials. If you hear anyone pronounce GIF with a soft G, it’s because they know something of this history.”

Wilhite attempted to settled the controversy in 2013 when accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 17th annual Webby awards. Using an actual animated .gif for his five-word acceptance speech, he authoritatively announced his preferred pronounciation. However, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary argues that “A coiner effectively loses control of a word once it’s out there,” adding that “the pronunciation with a hard g is now very widespread and readily understood.”
One linguist addressed the topic on Twitter this week, noting studies that found past usage of “gi” in words has been almost evenly split between hard and soft g sounds. Their thread also answers a related question: how will I weaponize a trivial and harmless consonant difference to make other people feel bad and self-conscious about themselves?
Her response? “Maybe just….don’t do this.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – What’s The Correct Way to Pronounce ‘GIF’?

“Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content,” according to the BBC, calling for new laws governing harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.

An anonymous reader quotes their report:
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Facebook’s chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone… “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Mr Zuckerberg writes… In brief, Mr Zuckerberg calls for the following things:

– Common rules that all social media sites need to adhere to, enforced by third-party bodies, to control the spread of harmful content
– All major tech companies to release a transparency report every three months, to put it on a par with financial reporting

– Stronger laws around the world to protect the integrity of elections, with common standards for all websites to identify political actors

– Laws that not only apply to candidates and elections, but also other “divisive political issues”, and for laws to apply outside of official campaign periods

– New industry-wide standards to control how political campaigns use data to target voters online

– More countries to adopt privacy laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force last year

– A “common global framework” that means these laws are all standardised globally, rather than being substantially different from country to country
– Clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting people’s data when they move it from one service to another

Zuckerberg believes the same regulations should apply to all web sites to make it easier to stop the spread of “harmful content.” He also says Facebook will be creating “an independent body so people can appeal our decisions” when content is taken.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Mark Zuckerberg Wants The Government To Help Police Internet Content

Wednesday CMU announced the open sourcing of its adaptive-learning software platform — plus analytics and dozens of other related tools for improving college teaching — as part of a national push “in an unusual move intended to shake up how college teaching is done around the world,” writes EdSurge.

Long-time Slashdot reader jyosim shares their report:
Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars. The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start “learning engineering,” the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms. If it takes off, the effort could result in a free, open-source alternative to a growing number of commercial adaptive-learning and learning analytics tools aimed at colleges. One of the biggest concerns by college leaders about buying such tools from commercial vendors is whether colleges will have access to the underlying algorithmic logic — or whether the systems will be a “black box….”
“We need a scientific revolution in education akin to the one that we had in medicine 150 years ago,” said Michael Feldstein, coordinator of the Empirical Educator Project, in a statement. “This isn’t a silver bullet, and it isn’t charity. It’s an invitation to the educators of the world for us all to solve big problems together.”

CMU’s Nobel prize-winning economics professor Herbert Simon once argued of colleges that “we must step back and view them with Martian eyes, innocent of their history, to appreciate fully how outrageous their operation is… [W]e find no one with a professional knowledge of the laws of learning, or of the techniques of applying them.”

Kenneth R. Koedinger, a professor of human computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, now argues that “we need to change higher ed from a solo sport to a collaborative research activity.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Hoping To Fix College Teaching, CMU Open-Sources Trove of Software

“Burnout is everywhere,” reports the Washington Post.
“Caused in part by social media, the 24-hour news cycle and the pressure to check work email outside of office hours, it could hit you, too — especially if you don’t know how to nip it in the bud…”

A recent report from Harvard and Massachusetts medical organizations declared physician burnout a public health crisis. It pointed out the problem not only harms doctors but also patients. “Burnout is associated with increasing medical errors,” the paper said… Ninety-five percent of human resource leaders say burnout is sabotaging workplace retention, often because of overly heavy workloads, one [2017] survey found. Poor management contributes to the burnout epidemic. “Organizations typically reward employees who are putting in longer hours and replace workers who aren’t taking on an increased workload, which is a systematic problem that causes burnout in the first place,” says Dan Schawbel, research director of Future Workplace, the firm that conducted the survey along with Kronos

Part of the difficulty of pinpointing true burnout may be because burnout is a nonmedical term — at least in the United States. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders doesn’t list it as an illness. But other countries including France, Denmark and Sweden, do recognize burnout syndrome and consider it to be a legitimate reason to take a sick day from work…. For those who suspect they might be on the road to burnout, there are practical tools to mitigate it. Among others: physical exercise, sleep and positive social connection (the real kind, not the Facebook kind).

The Post also ran a follow-up article which suggests that to fight burnout, companies need to set reasonable work hours — and develop a culture encouraging breaks and vacations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Are We Experiencing a Burnout Epidemic?