Monthly Archives: November 2023

Race Cannot Be Used To Predict Heart Disease, Scientists Say

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Doctors have long relied on a few key patient characteristics to assess risk of a heart attack or stroke, using a calculus that considers blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes status, as well as demographics: age, sex and race. Now, the American Heart Association is taking race out of the equation. From a report: The overhaul of the widely used cardiac-risk algorithm is an acknowledgment that, unlike sex or age, race identification in and of itself is not a biological risk factor. The scientists who modified the algorithm decided from the start that race itself did not belong in clinical tools used to guide medical decision making, even though race might serve as a proxy for certain social circumstances, genetic predispositions or environmental exposures that raise the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The revision comes amid rising concern about health equity and racial bias within the U.S. health care system, and is part of a broader trend toward removing race from a variety of clinical algorithms. “We should not be using race to inform whether someone gets a treatment or doesn’t get a treatment,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who chaired the statement writing committee for the American Heart Association, or A.H.A. The statement was published on Friday [PDF] in the association’s journal, Circulation. An online calculator using the new algorithm, called PREVENT, is still in development.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Race Cannot Be Used To Predict Heart Disease, Scientists Say

Massive Half-Life Update Adds Steam Deck Support, Cut Content, And More

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The original Half-Life turns 25 years old on November 19. That’s a big milestone! It’s an anniversary worth celebrating. And after some behind-the-scenes shenanigans, Valve has updated its historic first game to be perfectly playable on Steam Deck and added a bunch more to the classic game. Oh, and it’s now totally…

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Source: Kotaku – Massive Half-Life Update Adds Steam Deck Support, Cut Content, And More

Half-Life's big 25th anniversary update includes four new multiplayer maps and much more

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Half-Life is one of the greatest video games of all time and just ahead of its 25th anniversary on Sunday, Valve has released a major update for the first-person shooter. For one thing, the base game now includes Half-Life Uplink. This was a demo of Half-Life, but most of its content doesn’t appear in the original game.

Uplink was initially available on CDs that came free with magazines (remember those?) and hardware like sound cards. It’s also been available on the internet for a while for those who know where to look. But now players can access it by clicking the New Game button in Half-Life itself.

On top of that, Valve has added four spanking new multiplayer maps. Some might seem familiar, such as one based on an abandoned Xen outpost and another set at an old orbital satellite launch facility. “If we could switch on the oxygen lines, power, and fuel, we might just be able to light this candle,” Valve said. The company has added three other maps that were originally available on a disc called Half-Life: Further Data.

You can now, at long last, play the original Half-Life in widescreen without having to resort to mods or the fan remake Black Mesa. Valve has added controller support along with a string of other under-the-hood updates, UI tweaks and bug fixes. Steam Networking support should make multiplayer smoother too.

Although it’s a critical part of Valve’s history, Half-Life hadn’t been Verified for Steam Deck until now. It instead bore the Playable label. “We finally put our game through our own ‘Verified’ tests, and… we failed super hard,” Valve wrote. “So we fixed it! After re-testing the game, Half-Life gets to officially wear the green checkmark.” So, that means it should run on your new Steam Deck OLED without a hitch.

Best of all, in case you somehow don’t already have it in your library, Half-Life is free on Steam until November 20. Various Half-Life and Valve bundles are on sale too, while Half-Life Alyx is 66 percent off at $20.39.

It’s worth noting that Valve now considers the anniversary edition of Half-Life “to be the definitive version, and the one we’ll continue to support going forward.” As such, Valve says Half Life: Source will be less prominent on Steam, but it will remain available so modders can continue using its assets.

“We launched Half-Life on November 19, 1998. We are very proud of what we built back then and we remain extremely grateful for the community of players who have been enjoying it ever since,” Valve said. “The game hasn’t received as much attention in recent years as many other titles in our catalog, so we thought this milestone was a great opportunity to spruce up the player experience and add some fun new ways to play the game.”

Last but not least, Valve has released a new documentary to mark the 25th anniversary. The 65-minute film features developers and Valve co-founders discussing the company’s early days and their memories of working on Half-Life. Happy birthday, Mr. Freeman.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/half-lifes-big-25th-anniversary-update-includes-four-new-multiplayer-maps-and-much-more-193932590.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Half-Life’s big 25th anniversary update includes four new multiplayer maps and much more

Why Superconductor Research is in a 'Golden Age' – Despite Controversy

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Davide Castelvecchi, writing for Nature: A Nature retraction last week has put to rest the latest claim of room-temperature superconductivity — in which researchers said they had made a material that could conduct electricity without producing waste heat and without refrigeration. The retraction follows the downfall of an even more brazen claim about a supposed superconductor called LK-99, which went viral on social media earlier this year. Despite these high-profile setbacks, superconductivity researchers say the field is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. “It’s not a dying field — on the contrary,” says Lilia Boeri, a physicist who specializes in computational predictions at the Sapienza University of Rome. The progress is fuelled in part by the new capabilities of computer simulations to predict the existence and properties of undiscovered materials.

Much of the excitement is focused on ‘super-hydrides — hydrogen-rich materials that have shown superconductivity at ever-higher temperatures, as long as they are kept at high pressure. The subject of the retracted Nature paper was purported to be such a material, made of hydrogen, lutetium and nitrogen. But work in the past few years has unearthed several families of materials that could have revolutionary properties. “It really does look like we’re on the hairy edge of being able to find a lot of new superconductors,” says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and Ames National Laboratory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Why Superconductor Research is in a ‘Golden Age’ – Despite Controversy

Amazon is laying off several hundred employees working on Alexa

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Amazon is sacking employees in its Alexa division even as it prepares to upgrade Alexa to be as smart as modern AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. The move will impact several hundred employees in the US, Canada, and India, according to an internal email sent on Friday.

“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI,” wrote Daniel Bausch, Amazon’s vice president of Alexa and Fire TV in the email, first obtained by GeekWire. “These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated.”

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that the company was, indeed, laying off “several hundred” people in the division and said that Amazon was trying to find roles for those impacted wherever possible. “While this was a hard decision to make, we remain very optimistic about the future of Alexa,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “As we move forward, Alexa remains an incredibly important part of our business, and we will continue to invest and innovate to deliver on our vision.” The spokesperson did not say which initiatives were being discontinued.

Amazon released Alexa in 2014. But nearly ten years later, most people don’t use the digital assistant for anything beyond playing music, asking for the weather, or setting timers. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was powered by generative AI, was widely perceived to be smarter than Alexa and Siri, which sometimes struggle with basic requests. A few months ago, OpenAI added voice capabilities to ChatGPT, letting people have conversations with it in natural language.

In September, Amazon announced that it would upgrade Alexa with capabilities that would bring it closer in line with ChatGPT. Alexa will soon be powered by a large language model, the same foundational technology that is the basis of modern chatbots like ChatGPT. “Our latest model has been specifically optimized for voice,” David Limp, Amazon’s SVP of Devices & Services, told the audience at the company’s event that month, “and the things we know our customers love — like having access to real-time information, efficiently controlling their smart home, and getting the most out of their home entertainment.” Earlier this year, Limp announced he would leave Amazon after more than 13 years later this year and is now the CEO of Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin.

The new upgrades to Alexa will mean that you won’t have to say “Alexa” each time you want something done. You’ll also be able to give complex requests, like asking the assistant to prepare the house for bedtime every weeknight at 9 PM, dim the lights, lock the doors, and set the temperature all at one go. Alexa will also be able to hold longer conversations and maintain the context of the discussion.

Amazon has so far laid off more than 27,000 employees across the company after it began mass-scale cutbacks a year ago for the first time in its history. Last week, the company cut 180 jobs from its gaming division, including the entire staff of Crown, a company-backed Twitch channel. Earlier this month, Amazon also laid off an unspecified number of employees in its music streaming unit and has previously cut more than 100 employees from its gaming divisions.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-laying-off-several-hundred-employees-working-on-alexa-190339189.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Amazon is laying off several hundred employees working on Alexa

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: The Kotaku Review

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Let’s get it out of the way: This is not a spoiler-free review of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Netflix’s anime take on Brian Lee O’Malley’s video game reference-ridden romantic comedy graphic novels and their subsequent live-action movie adaptation is impossible to talk about while tiptoeing around specifics. I’m not…

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Source: Kotaku – Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: The Kotaku Review

Valve Updates Half-Life For 25th Anniversary – Adds Official Steam Deck Support

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This weekend marks 25 years already since Valve originally released Half-Life! In celebration of this milestone, Valve released today the Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update that now includes official Steam Deck support, Steam networking and controller support, updated graphics settings, and more…

Source: Phoronix – Valve Updates Half-Life For 25th Anniversary – Adds Official Steam Deck Support

Intel Lands Vulkan Sparse Binding Support For ANV+i915 With Mesa 24.0

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The most significant limitation of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with the existing open-source driver stack has been the lack of sparse resources support that is needed for many newer games to work via Steam Play on Linux. Intel has a proper solution in place with their yet-to-be-merged Xe kernel driver while now for Mesa 24.0 their ANV Vulkan driver has landed an implementation that works with the existing i915 kernel driver…

Source: Phoronix – Intel Lands Vulkan Sparse Binding Support For ANV+i915 With Mesa 24.0

Almost No One Pays a 6% Real-Estate Commission – Except Americans

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The way we buy and sell homes in the U.S. isn’t normal — at least not compared with the rest of the world. From a report: The commission on a home sale here is typically around 5% to 6%, usually split between the seller’s and buyer’s agents. In most countries, the commissions are substantially smaller. The U.S. is home to as many as three million agents. By most estimates, no other country is even a close second.

Though it is unclear how much a court decision on commissions last month will upend American real estate, if at all, the ruling opens up the possibility of forever changing how agents are paid for their work. And looking at home sales around the world offers a window into what could be in store. One reason commissions here remain high is the use of buyer agents, said Ryan Tomasello, managing director at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Home sellers pay the commission — typically between 5% and 6% of a home’s selling price — which is usually split between the seller’s and buyer’s agent. Buyer agents aren’t nearly as common in other parts of the world, said Tomasello.

[…] In the pre-internet days, a buyer agent’s main job was to screen and filter listings for hopeful home buyers. Today, much of that early house hunting can be done online. So the role of the buyer agent has shifted more to providing advice and support, as well as recommendations for home inspectors, lenders and lawyers. A good buyer agent will know how to make a strong offer and may push to lower the home price. In most countries, buyer agents are much less of a factor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Almost No One Pays a 6% Real-Estate Commission – Except Americans

BBC quiz show with Gestapo-inspired design offers study on stress responses

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generic shot of TV set with background blurred

Enlarge (credit: University of Arizona)

The hugely popular British quiz show Mastermind has been a fixture on BBC television since its debut in 1972, spawning multiple international versions as well as a video game and countless parodies. Now it has inspired researchers at the University of Arizona, Tucson, to use several recent seasons as a “real-world” lab to study physiological responses to stress, according to a new paper published in the journal Psychophysiology. The findings reaffirmed some prior conclusions of lab-based studies and contradicted others. The Arizona team also found that random variations in the time the host takes to ask different questions means that Mastermind is not perfectly “fair” when it comes to determining the winner.

Why a game show? According to the authors, it’s because lab-based experiments in psychology have inherent limitations, in that it is simply too difficult to accurately reproduce complex human cognition in such a controlled setting—particularly when studying things like stress and cognition. “The stakes are too low, the tasks too simple, participants are often bored, and the equipment, such as MRI scanners, too cumbersome, making lab-based experiments a poor reflection of real-world cognition,” the authors wrote.

A seminal 1927 study by Eric Ponder and W.P. Kennedy on whether blinking increases when people are under stress is an illustrative case. Ponder and Kennedy initially tried to prove this connection in a lab-based setting with participants hooked up to clunky, uncomfortable devices to measure blink frequency. But they only succeeded in generating the appropriate degree of stress in the test subjects once, when a frustrated participant became genuinely angry. They turned instead to surreptitiously measuring the blink frequency of witnesses under hostile cross-examination in a courtroom. That did the trick, confirming Ponder and Kennedy’s hypothesis that blinking does indeed increase in stressful situations.

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Source: Ars Technica – BBC quiz show with Gestapo-inspired design offers study on stress responses

AMD Ryzen 9 8940HS Hawk Point APU May Have Just Made A Benchmark Cameo

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AMD Ryzen 9 8940HS Hawk Point APU May Have Just Made A Benchmark Cameo
An AMD engineering sample that appeared on the Geekbench browser appears to be one of AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 8000 mobile CPUs, code-named Hawk Point. The CPU model is specifically believed to be one of AMD’s top-of-the-line variants, the Ryzen 9 8940HS. If true, that would make this one of the first Geekbench 6 results featuring the new chip.

Source: Hot Hardware – AMD Ryzen 9 8940HS Hawk Point APU May Have Just Made A Benchmark Cameo

Cadillac's midrange Optiq electric SUV takes cues from the high-end Lyriq

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Cadillac has unveiled a new entry-level compact electric SUV. The Optiq will sit below the Lyriq in Cadillac’s lineup, and images the automaker shared suggest it will also borrow from the more expensive SUV’s stylings. However, you may have to wait a while before buying one, as Cadillac says we won’t hear more about the Optiq (including its full specs) until 2024.

The Optiq will continue Cadillac’s naming convention of ending its EVs’ names with some form of “IQ.” In addition to the Lyriq, other examples include the Escalade IQ and Celestiq.

Although Cadillac hasn’t explicitly stated so, the Optiq will likely use GM’s Ultium battery platform. Road and Driver speculates that since Cadillac’s SUV is similar in size to the Chevy Equinox EV, it could have similar specs. The Equinox has a 210-horsepower electric motor for the front wheels and an optional 290-horsepower dual-motor all-wheel-drive setup with a range likely capping out at around 300 miles for maxed-out configurations.

Marketing photo of the Cadillac Optiq, sitting under a modern building at nighttime. The vehicle is a reddish-orange.
Cadillac

Autoblog notes details we already know about the version of the Optiq made for China, thanks to photos and information shared through the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) pre-market vehicle approval process. That model is allegedly 189.8 inches long, 75.3 inches wide and 64.6 inches tall. That would make it around 2.5 inches narrower and seven inches shorter (in length) than the Lyriq. The China model is listed as weighing 4.850 lbs with a top speed of 112 mph. It has two front-wheel-drive configurations, including a 201-horsepower motor and a 241-hp one.

Cadillac’s full press release was short and to the point. “Today, Cadillac has confirmed the fourth vehicle to join its expanding global electric vehicle portfolio — OPTIQ,” the announcement reads. “OPTIQ will act as the entry point for Cadillac’s EV lineup in North America, slotting in below LYRIQ, a luxury compact SUV. OPTIQ’s spirited driving dynamics are designed to appeal to global luxury customers.  Additional details, as well as available features and pricing, will be unveiled next year.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cadillacs-midrange-optiq-electric-suv-takes-cues-from-the-high-end-lyriq-183414934.html?src=rss

Source: Engadget – Cadillac’s midrange Optiq electric SUV takes cues from the high-end Lyriq

OnePlus ships Android 14 to the OnePlus 11

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The OnePlus 11.

Enlarge / The OnePlus 11. (credit: OnePlus)

The release of Android 14 to the rest of the Android ecosystem is slowly happening. Today, OnePlus is joining the party, with the flagship OnePlus 11 getting the update. The company posted the news on its forum.

The update is first launching in India, OnePlus’ biggest market, but there’s no reason for other markets to not get the update quickly. Phone manufacturers like to roll out these new Android updates slowly, and for now, the “stable” release is opt-in via the beta program.

What will you be getting with your exciting new Android 14 update? Honestly, there’s not a lot to care about here. OnePlus’ OS is now so heavy that it paves over many of the Android 14 changes. A customizable lock screen was one of the few user-facing changes in Android 14, but OnePlus, which has its own lock screen, isn’t offering that. You should still get the included performance improvements, a block for often-malicious old app updates, and one or two permission changes. The small update size is probably why companies are getting the new Android release out the door in record time this year. The OS was released 44 days ago, and Xiaomi, Samsung, and OnePlus have all started rolling it out.

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Source: Ars Technica – OnePlus ships Android 14 to the OnePlus 11