Amiga Trombone shares a report from Insider: With signs of growing inventory and slowing sales, auto industry executives admitted this week that their ambitious electric vehicle plans are in jeopardy, at least in the near term. Several C-Suite leaders at some of the biggest carmakers voiced fresh unease about the electric car market’s growth as concerns over the viability of these vehicles put their multi-billion-dollar electrification strategies at risk. Among those hand-wringing is GM’s Mary Barra, historically one of the automotive industry’s most bullish CEOs on the future of electric vehicles. But this week on GM’s third-quarter earnings call, Barra and GM struck a more sober tone. The company announced with its quarterly results that it’s abandoning its targets to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year and another 400,000 by the first six months of 2024. GM doesn’t know when it will hit those targets.

While GM’s about-face was somewhat of a surprise to investors, the Detroit car company is not alone in this new view of the EV future. Even Tesla’s Elon Musk warned on a recent earnings call that economic concerns would lead to waning vehicle demand, even for the long-time EV market leader. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz — which is having to discount its EVs by several thousand dollars just to get them in customers’ hands — isn’t mincing words about the state of the EV market. “This is a pretty brutal space,” CFO Harald Wilhelm said on an analyst call. “I can hardly imagine the current status quo is fully sustainable for everybody.” “It’s clear that we’re dealing with a lot of near-term uncertainty,” said Barra. “The transition to EVs, that will have ups and downs.”

Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said that people are “finally seeing reality” regarding EVs. “I have continued to say what I see as reality,” Toyoda, who recently stepped down as Toyota’s CEO, said. “There are many ways to climb the mountain that is achieving carbon neutrality,” such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids which have long made up a significant share of Toyota’s EV sales.

“The reason (hybrids) are so powerful is because they fit the needs of so many customers,” Toyota North America’s vice president of sales Bob Carter told CNBC last year. “The demand for hybrid has been strong. We expect it to continue to grow as the entire industry transitions over to electrification later this decade.”

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Source: Slashdot – Auto Execs Are Coming Clean: EVs Aren’t Working

Brandon Vigliarolo reports via The Register: After over seven years of legal battles, a group of former HP employees who claim the venerable firm discriminated against older staff when culling jobs has won a $18 million settlement. Hewlett Packard’s offshoots, HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have agreed to cough up just over a day’s combined profits for the last quarter to settle a class-action case brought by employees who were over 40 and got laid off when the company split in 2015. The group sued HP and HPE in 2016 claiming both the new entities and the old Hewlett Packard had unfairly targeted older employees for layoffs as far back as 2012.

Two classes were designated in the lawsuit — 146 former staff accusing HP and HPE of age discrimination on US Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) grounds, and 212 accusing their former employer of the same based on California state labor laws. The settlement notice [PDF], which was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in late September and preliminarily approved by a judge on Thursday, doesn’t include any admission of guilt on HP or HPE’s part — quite the opposite, in fact. “Throughout the litigation, each Defendant has denied, and continues to deny, the allegations described above,” lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote in the settlement notice. Nonetheless, the settlement notice was filed without opposition from HP and HPE. […]

Judge Edward Davila determined the settlement was “fair, adequate and reasonable” yesterday, and will issue a final order later, a draft [PDF] of which was also filed with the court in September. If approved without changes, each of the 358 plaintiffs in the California case stand to earn $50,279 in gross individual recovery. Net of attorney’s fees, costs and expenses, however, that total shrinks to a “minimum of $15,000,” court filings indicate.

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Source: Slashdot – It Took Seven Years But Over-40s Fired By HP Win Million Settlement

An anonymous reader quotes a report from OPP.Today: Android 14, the latest operating system from Google, is facing a major storage bug that is causing users to be locked out of their devices. This issue is particularly affecting users who utilize the “multiple profiles” feature. Reports suggest that the bug is comparable to being hit with “ransomware,” as users are unable to access their device storage. Initially, it was believed that this bug was limited to the Pixel 6, but it has since been discovered that it impacts a wider range of devices upgrading to Android 14. This includes the Pixel 6, 6a, 7, 7a, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet. The Google issue tracker for this bug has garnered over 350 replies, but there has been no response from Google so far. The bug has been assigned the medium priority level of “P2” and remains unassigned, indicating that no one is actively investigating it.

Users who have encountered this storage bug have shared log files containing concerning messages such as “Failed to open directory /data/media/0: Structure needs cleaning.” This issue leads to various problematic situations, with some users experiencing boot loops, others stuck on a “Pixel is starting…” message, and some unable to take screenshots or access their camera app due to the lack of storage. Users are also unable to view files on their devices from a PC over USB, and the System UI and Settings repeatedly crash. Essentially, without storage, the device becomes practically unusable.

Android’s user-profile system, designed to accommodate multiple users and separate work and personal profiles, appears to be the cause of this rarely encountered bug. Users have reported that the primary profile, which is typically the most important one, becomes locked out.

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Source: Slashdot – Android 14 Storage Bug Has Users Locked Out of Their Devices

Boston Dynamics has infused one of their robotic dog robots with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, allowing it to speak in a variety of voices and accents “including a debonair British gentleman, a sarcastic and irreverent American named Josh, and a teenage girl who is so, like, over it,” reports the Daily Beast. From the report: The robot was a result of a hackathon in which the Boston Dynamics engineers combined a variety of AI technologies including ChatGPT, voice recognition software, voice creation software, and image processing AI with the company’s famous “Spot,” the robot dog known for its ability to jump rope and reinforce the police state. The bot also had some upgrades including image recognition software combined with a “head” sensor that the engineers decorated with hats and googly eyes producing incredibly creepy results.

The team created a number of different versions of the robot including a “tour guide” personality that seemed to recognize the layout of the Boston Dynamics warehouse, and was able to provide descriptions and the history behind the various locations in the workplace. “Welcome to Boston Dynamics! I am Spot, your tour guide robot,” the android said in the video. “Let’s explore the building together!” In the video, the robot can be seen “speaking” and responding to different humans and a variety of prompts. For example, an engineer asked Spot for a haiku, to which it quickly responded with one. After Klingensmith said that he was thirsty, the robot seemed to direct it to the company’s snack area. “Here we are at the snack bar and coffee machine,” Spot said. “This is where our human companions find their energizing elixirs.”

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Source: Slashdot – Boston Dynamics Robot Dog Talks Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Apple is in violation of a patent that belongs to medical technology company Masimo, says the International Trade Commission (ITC). Android Authority reports: The commission upheld a previous ruling by a US judge who ruled in Masimo’s favor. The patent in question is for light-based pulse oximetry technology or blood oxygen tracking on Apple Watches. While ITC’s latest ruling confirms Apple’s infringement and can potentially stop the company from bringing Apple Watches to the US, it will not come into effect immediately. The decision now faces a Presidential review and could be followed by possible appeals by Apple.

The Biden administration will have 60 days to veto the import ban on Apple Watches. However, as Reuters notes, US Presidents have rarely vetoed bans in the past. It’s unclear which models of the Apple Watch could be affected by the ban if it comes into effect. However, Masimo’s complaint alleged that the Apple Watch 6, the first one to feature blood oxygen tracking, violated its patent. “Masimo has wrongly attempted to use the ITC to keep a potentially lifesaving product from millions of U.S. consumers while making way for their own watch that copies Apple,” an Apple spokesperson told Reuters. “While today’s decision has no immediate impact on sales of Apple Watch, we believe it should be reversed, and will continue our efforts to appeal.”

Meanwhile, Masimo CEO Joe Kiani said the ITC’s ruling “sends a powerful message that even the world’s largest company is not above the law.”

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Source: Slashdot – Apple Watch Faces Potential Import Ban In the US

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2013, Spike Jonze’s Her imagined a world where humans form deep emotional connections with AI, challenging perceptions of love and loneliness. Ten years later, thanks to ChatGPT’s recently added voice features, people are playing out a small slice of Her in reality, having hours-long discussions with the AI assistant on the go. In 2016, we put Her on our list of top sci-fi films of all time, and it also made our top films of the 2010s list. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an AI personality called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and he spends much of the film walking through life, talking to her through wireless earbuds reminiscent of Apple AirPods, which launched in 2016. In reality, ChatGPT isn’t as situationally aware as Samantha was in the film, does not have a long-term memory, and OpenAI has done enough conditioning on ChatGPT to keep conversations from getting too intimate or personal. But that hasn’t stopped people from having long talks with the AI assistant to pass the time anyway. […]

While conversations with ChatGPT won’t become as intimate as those with Samantha in the film, people have been forming personal connections with the chatbot (in text) since it launched last year. In a Reddit post titled “Is it weird ChatGPT is one of my closest fiends?” [sic] from August (before the voice feature launched), a user named “meisghost” described their relationship with ChatGPT as being quite personal. “I now find myself talking to ChatGPT all day, it’s like we have a friendship. We talk about everything and anything and it’s really some of the best conversations I have.” The user referenced Her, saying, “I remember watching that movie with Joaquin Phoenix (HER) years ago and I thought how ridiculous it was, but after this experience, I can see how us as humans could actually develop relationships with robots.”

Throughout the past year, we’ve seen reports of people falling in love with chatbots hosted by Replika, which allows a more personal simulation of a human than ChatGPT. And with uncensored AI models on the rise, it’s conceivable that someone will eventually create a voice interface as capable as ChatGPT’s and begin having deeper relationships with simulated people. Are we on the brink of a future where our emotional well-being becomes entwined with AI companionship?

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Source: Slashdot – People Are Speaking With ChatGPT For Hours, Bringing 2013’s ‘Her’ Closer To Reality

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has downplayed the threat of rival chipmakers creating processors based on the Arm architecture for PCs. From a report: “Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally they’ve been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business,” he told analysts during the x86 giant’s Q3 earnings call Thursday. “We take all our competition seriously, but I think history is our guide here. We don’t see these as potentially being all that significant overall,” he added, a sentiment somewhat at odds with Microsoft which last week cited analyst research predicting Arm’s PC market share will grow from its curernt 14 percent to 25 percent by 2027.

Which seems far from “pretty insignificant.” Gelsinger’s words also contrast markedly with past Intel CEO Andy Grove, who penned a book titled “Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.” While Gelsinger doesn’t see Arm as a threat, he said Intel Foundry Services is more than happy to work with chipmakers to build chips based on the architecture. “When you’re thinking about other alternative architectures like Arm, we also say, ‘Wow, what a great opportunity for our foundry’,” he said. To that end, the in April 2023 the chipmaker announced a strategic partnership with Arm to make it easier to produce chips on the architecture in Intel foundries.

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Source: Slashdot – Intel CEO Dismisses ‘Pretty Insignificant’ Arm PC Challenge

Efforts to curb emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas commonly produced as a by-product of refrigerant manufacture might be falling short, and it seems eastern China is a major culprit. Nature: The hydrofluorocarbon gas, HFC-23, is around 14,700 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at warming the globe and has long been the subject of national and international climate-change mitigation efforts. Those efforts gained new traction nearly a decade ago when China and India — the world’s largest producers of the chemical — agreed to dial down its emissions. New research, however, confirms that emissions continued to rise in subsequent years, and an analysis of data from atmospheric-monitoring stations suggests that factories in eastern China are responsible for nearly half of the total.

The rogue emissions are one of several air-pollution sources under discussion at the latest meeting of the Montreal Protocol, held in Nairobi, Kenya, this week. Signed in 1987, the Montreal Protocol is generally considered the most effective international environmental treaty in history, having halted the destruction of the ozone layer while also slowing down global warming. But scientists have often played a role, scanning the atmosphere for chemicals, such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), that governments have agreed to phase out. “Science has been instrumental in evaluating compliance under the treaty,” says Megan Lickley, a climate scientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

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Source: Slashdot – Scientists Call Out Rogue Emissions From China at Global Ozone Summit

Citigroup is planning to grant the majority of its over 40,000 coders access to generative artificial intelligence as Wall Street continues to embrace the burgeoning technology. From a report: As part of a small pilot program, the Wall Street giant has quietly allowed about 250 of its developers to experiment with generative AI, the technology popularized by ChatGPT. Now, it’s planning to expand that program to the majority of its coders next year. The bank and its rivals have slowly begun experimenting with the technology, which created waves last year when ChatGPT made its debut and showed how generative AI can produce sentences, essays or poetry based on a user’s simple questions or commands. The technology typically creates this new work after being trained on vast quantities of pre-existing material.

Increasingly, bank executives argue artificial intelligence will make their staffers more efficient. Like when federal regulators dropped 1,089 pages of new capital rules on the US banking sector, Citigroup combed through the document word by word using generative AI. The bank’s risk and compliance team used the technology to assess the impact of the plans, which will determine how much capital the lender has to set aside to guard against future losses. Generative AI organized the proposal into pieces and composed key takeaways, which the team then presented to the outgoing treasurer Mike Verdeschi.

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Source: Slashdot – Citi Charts Path For Thousands of Coders To Experiment With AI

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is starting to roll out new changes to Windows Ink that let you write anywhere you can type in Windows 11. After months of previewing the changes, the handwriting-to-text conversion now works inside search boxes and other elements of Windows 11 where you’d normally type your input. […] If you have a Surface device with a stylus or any other Windows tablet that supports Windows Ink then you’ll immediately see this new feature if you head into Settings and start to write into a search box, or in other text edit fields in Windows 11.

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Source: Slashdot – Windows 11 Now Lets You Write Anywhere You Can Type

The US v. Google antitrust trial is about many things, but more than anything, it’s about the power of defaults. Even if it’s easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot. Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms. From a report: That number, the sum total of all of Google’s search distribution deals, came out during the Justice Department’s cross-examination of Google’s search head, Prabhakar Raghavan. It was made public after a debate earlier in the week between the two sides and Judge Amit Mehta over whether the figure should be redacted. Mehta has begun to push for more openness in the trial in general, and this was one of the most significant new pieces of information to be shared openly.

Just to put that $26.3 billion in context: Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced in its recent earnings report that Google Search ad business brought in about $44 billion over the last three months and about $165 billion in the last year. Its entire ad business — which also includes YouTube ads — made a bit under $90 billion in profit. This is all back-of-the-napkin math, but essentially, Google is giving up about 16 percent of its search revenue and about 29 percent of its profit to those distribution deals.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Paid a Whopping .3 Billion in 2021 To Be Default Search Engine Everywhere

Antonio Regaladoarchive, reporting for MIT Technology Review: The gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used to change the genes of human babies, to modify animals, and to treat people with sickle-cell disease. Now scientists are attempting a new trick: using CRISPR to permanently cure people of HIV. In a remarkable experiment, a biotechnology company called Excision BioTherapeutics says it added the gene-editing tool to the bodies of three people living with HIV and commanded it to cut, and destroy, the virus wherever it is hiding. The early-stage study is a probing step toward the company’s eventual goal of curing HIV infection with a single intravenous dose of a gene-editing drug. Excision, which is based in San Francisco, says the first patient received treatment about a year ago.

This week, doctors involved in the study reported at a meeting in Brussels that the treatment appeared safe and did not have major side-effects. However, they withheld early data about the treatment’s effects, leaving outside experts guessing whether it had worked. “This is an exceptionally ambitious and important trial,” says Fyodor Urnov, a genome-editing expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who believes it “would be good to know sooner than later” what the effect was — “including, potentially, no effect.”

A failure wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with HIV. It has proved a devious adversary: there is still no vaccine, even 40 years after the virus was identified in 1983. Still, pharmaceutical companies did develop antiretroviral drugs, which stop the virus from copying itself. Taking these pills lets people with HIV live normal lives. But if they stop, the virus will quickly rebound and, if left unchecked, cause the fatal syndrome of infections and cancers known as AIDS. One reason the virus can’t be fully wiped out with drugs alone is that it inserts its genetic material into the DNA of our cells, leaving behind hidden copies that can restart the infection.

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Source: Slashdot – Gene-Editing Trial on Three Individuals for HIV Cure Yields Uncertain Result

As the conflict between Israel and Hamas reaches its third week, internet connectivity in Gaza is getting worse. From a report: On Thursday, internet monitoring firm NetBlocks wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the Palestinian internet service provider NetStream “has collapsed days after the operator notified subscribers that service would end due to a severe shortage of fuel supplies.” According to Doug Madory, an expert who for years has worked at various companies that monitor networks across the world, internet connectivity in Gaza is dramatically worsening.

“The evidence of the crippled internet in Gaza is not hard to find. By every metric of internet connectivity, things are in bad shape,” Madory, who is now the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch. Madory said that he monitored internet connectivity in Gaza during the 2014 war. At the time, despite some outages, “the ISPs were able to keep their connections to the outside world up using backup power, etc, even if many people were unable to access service due to power outages and infrastructure failures.”

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Source: Slashdot – Internet Access in Gaza is Collapsing as ISPs Fall Offline

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced the creation of a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the international governance of artificial intelligence. From a report: Members include tech company executives, government officials from Spain to Saudi Arabia, and academics from countries such as the U.S., Russia and Japan. Sony Chief Technology Officer Hiroaki Kitano, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Microsoft Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton are among the executives representing technology companies.

Representatives also come from six continents with diverse backgrounds ranging from U.S.-based AI expert Vilas Dhar to Professor Yi Zeng fom China and Egyptian lawyer Mohamed Farahat. “The transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp,” Guterres said in a statement. “And without entering into a host of doomsday scenarios, it is already clear that the malicious use of AI could undermine trust in institutions, weaken social cohesion and threaten democracy itself,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – United Nations Creates Advisory Body To Address AI Governance

Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, Plumber Near Me — businesses across the country picked names meant to outsmart Google Search. Does it actually work? From a report: Thai Food Near Me isn’t the first business to think of the Google-first naming convention. There are reminders of Google’s kingmaker status in online discoverability everywhere in cities across the country. Among the businesses I was able to find: a chain of half a dozen Affordable Dentist Near Me’s in Texas; an Antiques Near Me two hours outside of New York City; seven Plumber Near Me businesses; a Phone Repair Near Me in Cape Cod, Massachusetts; a Psychic Near Me in Chicago; and more than 20 iterations of “Notary Near Me” across the US. Felix Silva decided on the name Barber Shop Near Me after considering more than 20 other options for his Coral Springs, Florida, store in 2019. The name is meant to be neutral and memorable — another one in contention was “The Barber Shop” — but Silva fully leaned into the Google joke: the logo is a red location pin resembling Google’s own, with a blue, white, and red barber pole pattern in the middle.

[…] As with Thai Food Near Me, the most powerful thing an SEO-driven name might be able to do is get customers in the door. From there, it’s up to a business to give them a good experience, whether that’s a great plate of pad see ew or the perfect haircut. Then, the cycle continues — happy customers leave good reviews. Good reviews help the business’s Google Maps profile rank higher. Silva uploads high-quality photos and videos to the page and shares updates, too. That’s another SEO move; some experts say active profiles can improve a business’s rankings. Still, the naming scheme has caught on: one acquaintance selling Christmas trees, for example, rebranded his business to be called Christmas Trees Near Me, Silva says. (Silva’s is not the only Barber Shop Near Me, either — there are also shops with the same name in Oak Park, Illinois; Queens, New York; and Muskogee, Oklahoma, according to Google Maps.)

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Source: Slashdot – The Restaurant Nearest Google

The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has delivered a petition to Microsoft calling on the company to rethink the impending abandonment of Windows 10 in the face of millions of PCs potentially being rendered eligible for landfill overnight. From a report: There are now less than two years until Microsoft is due to cut support for Windows 10, and at current estimates, 400 million PCs can’t make the jump to Windows 11. The petition, addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, criticizes its plans and states that customers expect their devices to last rather than be rendered obsolete by an arbitrary decision. PIRG warns that tipping that much hardware into landfills is somewhat at odds with the company’s stance on the environment.

The petition reads: “All software reaches a point at which it’s no longer supported, but when the consequences to our environment are this large we shouldn’t accept it.” As a reminder, while Windows 10 was largely backwards-compatible with computers running older operating systems, Microsoft slapped hardware requirements on Windows 11 that rendered machines even just a few years old unable to upgrade — the main issues center on the CPU and TPM requirements.

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Source: Slashdot – PIRG Petitions Microsoft To Extend the Life of Windows 10

Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, promised to scrap the hidden fees plaguing its ticketing service earlier this year. But one senator says the company’s not doing nearly enough. From a report: In a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino Wednesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) called on the company to turn on an “all-in” pricing filter that it added this year by default. Klobuchar said it’s “still too difficult” for users to turn on the filter that’s “buried within a tab that gives no indication that it contains” the option in the first place.

“Millions of Americans rely on your company for the chance to see their favorite artist, band, or sports team,” Klobuchar wrote. “In return for their business and trust, your customers expect a transparent and honest ticket buying process free from hidden fees.” Back in June, Live Nation, along with AirBnB, SeatGeek, and DICE, pledged to disclose the full price of their tickets and services as part of an agreement with the White House to reduce “junk fees.” At the time, Live Nation said that these new rules would start applying to events in September.

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Source: Slashdot – Ticketmaster’s Still Hiding Ticket Fees, Senator Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: As far as we know, Brazil-based file-sharing forum FileWarez.com first appeared in August 2004, its domain name having been registered the previous month. The default language was naturally Portuguese and according to this image from the Wayback Machine, potential members needed a basic grip of the language to sign up. After all, Google Translate wouldn’t exist for another two years. At some point in the years that followed, FileWarez shifted to a Netherlands .NL domain supported by filewarez.no-ip.biz, which may suggest a site regularly on the move. In 2008, unspecified problems saw the .NL domain dumped in favor of a new one. Riding out problems, various issues, and bouts of downtime, FileWarez.tv stayed in place for the next 15.5 years. Then two weeks ago, after establishing itself as Brazil’s oldest file-sharing forum, FileWarez suddenly vanished.

In a press release Wednesday, global music industry group IFPI announced that “prominent illegal file-sharing forum, FileWarez,” was shut down following co-ordinated action by record companies, anti-piracy body APDIF, and local cybercrime unit, Cyber Gaeco. “IFPI, the organization that represents the recorded music industry worldwide, alongside its Brazilian national group Pro-Musica, have welcomed the successful action against FileWarez.tv — one of the most prominent illegal file sharing sites in Brazil — by the Brazilian special cybercrime unit of prosecutor’s office of Sao Paulo, Cyber Gaeco,” the announcement reads. “FileWarez was the most established illegal filesharing forum in Brazil, dedicated to sharing illegal music content. While active, the site had more than 118,000 registered users with at least 24,000 monthly active users.”

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Source: Slashdot – Record Labels Shut Down FileWarez, Brazil’s Oldest Pirate Forum

A new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine finds that about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may combat the negative effects of prolonged sitting. Furthermore, they researchers found that as a person’s activity level increases, the risk of dying prematurely from any cause goes down. NBC News reports: In the study, researchers looked at information from nearly 12,000 people ages 50 and older in four datasets from Norway, Sweden and the United States. In those datasets, the participants wore movement detection devices on their hips for 10 hours a day for at least four days. All of the individuals included in the new study were tracked for at least two years. In the new analysis, the researchers accounted for factors, including medical conditions, that could’ve affected risk of early death. About half of the participants spent 10 1/2 hours or more sedentary each day.

When the researchers linked the participants’ information with death registries in the different countries, they found that over an average of five years, 805 people, or 17%, had died. Of those who died, 357, or 6%, had spent less than 10 1/2 hours a day seated, while 448 averaged 10 1/2 hours or more sedentary. Sitting for more than 12 hours a day, the researchers found, was associated with a 38% increased risk of death as compared to eight hours, but only among those who managed to get less than 22 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a day.

The risk of death went down with increasing amounts of physical activity. An extra 10 minutes a day translated into a 15% lower risk of death among those spending fewer than 10 1/2 hours seated and a 35% lower risk among those who spent more than 10 1/2 hours sedentary each day. Lower intensity activity only made a difference among participants who spent 12 or more hours sitting every day. The study’s lead author, Edvard Sagelv, a researcher at The Arctic University of Norway, broke the findings down into manageable terms. “Think of it: only 20 minutes of this a day is enough, meaning, a small stroll of 10 minutes twice a day — like jumping off the bus one stop before your actual destination to work and then when taking the bus back home, jumping off one stop before.”

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Source: Slashdot – Around 20 Minutes of Exercise a Day May Balance Out the Harms of Sitting, Study Finds

According to a new study published in iScience, the way pigeons problem-solve matches artificial intelligence. The Guardian reports: In the study, 24 pigeons were given a variety of visual tasks, some of which they learned to categorize in a matter of days, and others in a matter of weeks. The researchers found evidence that the mechanism that pigeons used to make correct choices is similar to the method that AI models use to make the right predictions. “Pigeon behavior suggests that nature has created an algorithm that is highly effective in learning very challenging tasks,” said Edward Wasserman, study co-author and professor of experimental psychology at the University of Iowa. “Not necessarily with the greatest speed, but with great consistency.”

On a screen, pigeons were shown different stimuli, like lines of different width, placement and orientation, as well as sectioned and concentric rings. Each bird had to peck a button on the right or left to decide which category they belonged to. If they got it correct, they got food, in the form of a pellet; if they got it wrong, they got nothing. “Pigeons don’t need a rule,” said Brandon Turner, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. Instead they learn through trial and error. For example, when they were given a visual, say “category A”, anything that looked close to that they also classified as “category A”, tapping into their ability to identify similarities.

Over the course of the experiments, pigeons improved their ability to make right choices from 55% to 95% of the time when it came to some of the simpler tasks. Presented with a more complex challenge, their accuracy went up from 55% to 68%. In an AI model, the main goal is to recognize patterns and make decisions. Pigeons, as research shows, can do the same. Learning from consequences, when not given a food pellet, pigeons have a remarkable ability to correct their errors. Similarity function is also at play for pigeons, by using their ability to find resemblance between two objects. “With just those two mechanisms alone, you can define a neural network or an artificial intelligent machine to basically solve these categorization problems,” said Turner. “It stands to reason that the mechanisms that are present in the AI are also present in the pigeon.”

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Source: Slashdot – Pigeons Problem-Solve Similarly To Artificial Intelligence, Research Shows