Enlarge / A jackdaw tries to remember what color it was thinking of. (credit: Frans Buiter / 500px)

This is far from the first time that bird species such as corvids and parrots have shown that they can think like us in certain ways. Jackdaws are clever corvids that belong to the same family as crows and ravens. After putting a pair of them to the test, an international team of researchers saw that the birds’ working memory operates the same way as that of humans and higher primates. All of these species use what’s termed “attractor dynamics,” where they organize information into specific categories.

Unfortunately for them, that means they also make the same mistakes we do. “Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) have similar behavioral biases as humans; memories are less precise and more biased as memory demands increase,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Communications Biology.

Enlarge / Given only this sign, and a glimpse of some pieces, a constant stream of playtesters stopped by to check out what was then called Corporate Vampire. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

It’s mid-afternoon in early December in downtown Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center, and I’m in the Unpub room at PAX Unplugged. Michael Schofield and Tim Broadwater of Design Thinking Games have booked one of the dozens of long card tables to show their game Corporate Vampire to anybody who wants to try it. Broadwater is running the game and explaining the big concepts while Schofield takes notes. Their hope is that after six revisions and 12 smaller iterations, their game is past the point where someone can break it. But they have to test that disheartening possibility in public.

I didn’t expect to spend so much of my first PAX Unplugged hanging around indie game makers. But with the tabletop industry expanding after some massive boom years, some Stranger Things and Critical Role infusions, and, of course, new COVID-borne habits, it felt like a field that was both more open to outsiders than before and also very crowded. I wanted to see what this thing, so big it barely fit inside a massive conference center, felt like at the smaller tables, to those still navigating their way into the industry.

Enlarge / The Matter standard’s illustration of how the standard should align a home and all its smart devices. (credit: CSA)

Matter, as a smart home standard, would make everything about owning a smart home better. Devices could be set up with any phone, for either remote or local control, put onto any major platform (like Alexa, Google, or HomeKit) or combinations of them, and avoid being orphaned if their device maker goes out of business. Less fragmentation, more security, fewer junked devices: win, win, win.

Matter, as it exists in late 2023, more than a year after its 1.0 specification was published and just under a year after the first devices came online, is more like the xkcd scenario that lots of people might have expected. It’s another home automation standard at the moment, and one that isn’t particularly better than the others, at least how it works today. I wish it was not so.

Setting up a Matter device isn’t easy, nor is making it work across home systems. Lots of devices with Matter support still require you to download their maker’s specific app to get full functionality. Even if you were an early adopting, Matter-T-shirt-wearing enthusiast, you’re still buying devices that don’t work quite as well, and still generally require a major tech company’s gear to act as your bridge or router.

Enlarge / They know… (credit: Aurich / Getty)

US president Joe Biden’s plan for containing the dangers of artificial intelligencealready risks being derailed by congressional bean counters.

A White House executive order on AI announced in October calls on the US to develop new standards for stress-testing AI systems to uncover their biases, hidden threats, and rogue tendencies. But the agency tasked with setting these standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), lacks the budget needed to complete that work independently by the July 26, 2024, deadline, according to several people with knowledge of the work.

Enlarge / The invitation might be nice, but you can feel free to say no. (credit: Maryna Terletska)

The holidays can be a time of parties, events, dinners, outings, get-togethers, impromptu meetups—and stress. Is it really an obligation to say yes to every single invite? Is not showing up to Aunt Tillie’s annual ugly sweater party this once going to mean a permanent ban? Turning down some of those invitations waiting impatiently for an RSVP can feel like a risk.

But wait! Turning down an invite won’t necessarily have the harsh consequences that are often feared (especially this time of year). A group of researchers led by psychologist and assistant professor Julian Givi of West Virginia University put test subjects through a series of experiments to see if a host’s reaction to an invitation being declined would really be as awful as the invitee feared. In the experiments, those who declined invitations were not guilted or blacklisted by the inviters. Turns out that hosts were not so upset as invitees thought they would be when someone couldn’t make it.

“Invitees have exaggerated concerns about how much the decline will anger the inviter, signal that the invitee does not care about the inviter, make the inviter unlikely to offer another invitation in the future, and so forth,” the researchers said in a study published by the American Psychological Association.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images (Bloomberg/Antonio Masiello))

While celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Matt Damon last year faced public backlash after shilling for cryptocurrency, this year’s top headlines traced the downfalls of two of the most successful and influential crypto bros of all time: FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried (often referred to as SBF) and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (commonly known as CZ).

At 28 years old, Bankman-Fried made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2021, but within two short years, his recently updated Forbes profile notes that the man who was once “one of the richest people in crypto” in “a stunning fall from grace” now has a real-time net worth of $0.

Enlarge (credit: d3sign)

So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there’s a lot of fossil fuels.”

Enlarge / Electron returned to flight successfully this week. (credit: Rocket Lab)

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Ranking the top 10 US launch companies of 2023. Oops, we did it again and published a list of the most accomplished US commercial launch companies. It’s no surprise that SpaceX is atop the list, but what comes after is more intriguing, including a new company in second position. I hope the list sparks debate, discussion, and appreciation for the challenge of operating a successful rocket company.

Enlarge / Media firms are looking for allies to help them take the coveted media throne. (credit: Warner Bros. Discovery)

The CEOs of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Paramount Global discussed a potential merger on Tuesday, according to a report from Axios citing “multiple” anonymous sources. No formal talks are underway yet, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the discussions look like the start of consolidation discussions for the media industry during a tumultuous time of forced evolution.

On Wednesday, Axios reported that WBD head David Zaslav and Paramount head Bob Bakish met in Paramount’s New York City headquarters for “several hours.”

Zaslav and Shari Redstone, owner of Paramount’s parent company National Amusements Inc (NAI), have also spoken, Axios claimed.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google is wrapping its head around the idea of being a generative AI company. The “code red” called in response to ChatGPT has had Googlers scrambling to come up with AI features and ideas. Once all the dust settles on that work, Google might turn inward and try to “optimize” the company with some of its new AI capabilities. With artificial intelligence being the hot new thing, how much of Google’s, uh, natural intelligence needs to be there?

A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people’s jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to “consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers.” According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google’s new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.

Google announced a “new era of AI-powered ads” in May, featuring a “natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jump-start campaign creation and simplify Search ads.” Google said its new AI could scan your website and “generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets,” making the Google Ads chatbot one part designer and one part sales expert.

Enlarge / X-ray emissions (purple) superimposed on a visible light image of a galaxy shows the galaxy winds being launched.

CREDIT: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Ohio StateH-alpha and Optical: NSF/NOIRLab/AURA/KPNO/CTIO; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Spitzer/ Optical: ESO/La Silla Observatory.

According to the study’s lead author, Yucheng Guo, of the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, galactic winds are an important part of the galaxy evolution models.

Enlarge / Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a National Space Council meeting Wednesday in Washington. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Earlier this year, NASA named a Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, to the Artemis II crew training to fly around the far side of the Moon, a mission that will likely launch sometime in 2025. This flight won’t land on the Moon, but NASA plans a series of lunar landing missions beginning with Artemis III later this decade.

On Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced an international astronaut will land on the Moon during one of NASA’s Artemis missions.

Enlarge (credit: JGI/Jamie Grill | Tetra images)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently seeking comments on new rules that would further restrict platforms’ efforts to monetize children’s data.

Through the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the FTC initially sought to give parents more control over what kinds of information that various websites and apps can collect from their kids. Now, the FTC wants to update COPPA and “shift the burden from parents to providers to ensure that digital services are safe and secure for children,” the FTC’s press release said.

“By requiring firms to better safeguard kids’ data, our proposal places affirmative obligations on service providers and prohibits them from outsourcing their responsibilities to parents,” FTC chair Lina Khan said.

Enlarge / NREL has taken some of the hassle out of getting permits for projects like these. (credit: owngarden)

“We estimate that automatic SolarAPP+ permitting saved around 9,900 hours of… staff time in 2022,” NREL staff wrote in the report, “SolarAPP+ Performance Review (2022 Data). “Based on median timelines, a typical SolarAPP+ project is permitted and inspected 13 business days sooner than traditional projects… SolarAPP+ has eliminated over 134,000 days in permitting-related delays.”

SolarAPP+ automates over 100 compliance checks in the permitting process that are usually the responsibility of city, county, or town employees, according to Jeff Cook, SolarAPP+ program lead at NREL and first author of the report. It can be more accurate, thorough, and efficient than a time-pressured local government employee would be.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

I like the idea of drawing the year to a close with some good news for a change, and I think maybe the US Environmental Protection Agency does as well. On Wednesday, the EPA published its Automotive Trends Report, which now included data for model-year 2022 vehicles.

And the data is good: record-low carbon emissions and record-high fuel economy, and the biggest improvement year on year for almost a decade.

For MY2022, the EPA says that the average real-world CO₂ emissions for all new vehicles fell by 10 g/mile to 337 g/mile, the lowest average it has ever measured. Similarly, real-world fuel economy increased by 0.6 mpg for MY2022, to 26 mpg—this, too, is a record high and the single-largest year-on-year improvement for both CO₂ and mpg for nine years.

Enlarge / The iPhone 15 Pro. (credit: Apple)

The paper, entitled “LLM in a Flash,” offers a “solution to a current computational bottleneck,” its researchers write.

Its approach “paves the way for effective inference of LLMs on devices with limited memory,” they said. Inference refers to how large language models, the large data repositories that power apps like ChatGPT, respond to users’ queries. Chatbots and LLMs normally run in vast data centers with much greater computing power than an iPhone.

Enlarge / Look at this very good boy taking a test to determine the origin of his spatial bias for a study on how dogs think. (credit: Eniko Kubinyi)

Research has shown that if you point at an object, a dog will interpret the gesture as a directional cue, unlike a human toddler, who will more likely focus on the object itself. It’s called spatial bias, and a recent paper published in the journal Ethology offers potential explanations for why dogs interpret the gesture the way that they do. According to researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, the phenomenon arises from a combination of how dogs see (visual acuity) and how they think, with “smarter” dog breeds prioritizing an object’s appearance as much as its location. This suggests the smarter dogs’ information processing is more similar to humans.

The authors wanted to investigate whether spatial bias in dogs is sensory or cognitive, or a combination of the two. “Very early on, children interpret the gesture as pointing to the object, while dogs take the pointing as a directional cue,” said co-author Ivaylo Iotchev. “In other words, regardless of the intention of the person giving the cue, the meaning for children and dogs is different. This phenomenon has previously been observed in dogs using a variety of behavioral tests, ranging from simple associative learning to imitation, but it had never been studied per se.”

Their experimental sample consisted of dogs used in a previous 2018 study plus dogs participating specifically in the new study, for a total of 82 dogs. The dominant breeds were border collies (19), vizslas (17), and whippets (6). Each animal was brought into a small empty room with their owner and one of the experimenters present. The experimenter stood 3 meters away from the dog and owner. There was a training period using different plastic plates to teach the dogs to associate either the presence or absence of an object, or its spatial location, with the presence or absence of food. Then they tested the dogs on a series of tasks.

Enlarge / The Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees, right on the French and Spanish border. (credit: bulbs_01_frizzle)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Enlarge / Great British Bake Off judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith (top) and presenters Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding. (credit: Mark Bourdillon/Love Productions/Channel 4)

The Great British Bake Off (TGBBO)—aka The Great British Baking Show in the US and Canada—features amateur bakers competing each week in a series of baking challenges, culminating in a single winner. The recipes include all manner of deliciously decadent concoctions, including the occasional Christmas dessert. But many of the show’s Christmas recipes might not be as bad for your health as one might think, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal, traditionally devoted to more light-hearted scientific papers.

TGBBO made its broadcast debut in 2010 on the BBC, and its popularity grew quickly and spread across the Atlantic. The show was inspired by the traditional baking competitions at English village fetes (see any British cozy murder mystery for reference). Now entering its 15th season, the current judges are Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, with Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond serving as hosts/presenters, providing (occasionally off-color) commentary. Each week features a theme and three challenges: a signature bake, a technical challenge, and a show-stopper bake.

The four co-authors of the new BMJ study—Joshua Wallach of Emory University and Yale University’s Anant Gautam, Reshma Ramachandran, and Joseph Ross—are avid fans of TGBBO, which they declare to be “the greatest television baking competition of all time.” They are also fans of desserts in general, noting that in medieval England, the Catholic Church once issued a decree requiring Christmas pudding four weeks before Christmas. Those puddings were more stew-like, containing things like prunes, raisins, carrots, nuts, spices, grains, eggs, beef, and mutton. Hence, those puddings were arguably more “healthy” than the modern take on desserts, which contain a lot more butter and sugar in particular.