long-and-winding road to figuring out messaging is taking yet another change of direction after the company called time on Allo, its newest chat app launch, in order to double down on its vision to enable an enhanced version of SMS.

The company told The Verge that it is “pausing” work on Allo, which was only launched as recently as September 2016, in order to put its resources into the adoption RCS (Rich Communication Services), a messaging standard that has the potential to tie together SMS and other chat apps. RCS isn’t new, and Google has been pushing it for some time, but now the company is rebranding it as “Chat” and putting all its efforts into getting operators on board.

The new strategy will see almost the entire Allo team switch to Android Messages, according to The Verge.

In case you didn’t hear about it before, RCS is essentially a technology that allows basic ‘SMS’ messaging to be standardized across devices. In the same way that iMessage lets Apple device owners chat for free using data instead of paid-for SMS, RCS could allow free chats across different networks on Android or other devices. RCS can be integrated into chat apps, which is something Google has already done with Android Messages, but the tipping point is working with others, and that means operators.

Unlike Apple, RCS is designed to work with carriers who can develop their own messaging apps that work with the protocol and connect to other apps, which could include chat apps. Essentially, it gives them a chance to take part in the messaging boom, rather than be cut out as WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessage and others take over. They don’t make money from consumers, but they do get to keep their brand and they can look to get revenue from business services.

But this approach requires operators themselves to implement the technology. That’s no easy thing since carriers don’t exactly trust tech companies — WhatsApp alone has massively eaten into its SMS and call revenues — and they don’t like working with each other, too.

Google said more than 55 operators worldwide have been recruited to support Chat, but it isn’t clear exactly when they might roll it out. Microsoft is among the OEM supporters, which raises the possibility it could bring support to Windows 10, but the company was non-committal when The Verge pressed it on that possibility.

Google has tried many things on messaging, but it has largely failed because it doesn’t have a ramp to users. WhatsApp benefitted from being a first mover — all the other early leaders in Western markets are nowhere to be seen today — and Facebook Messenger is built on top of the world’s most popular social network.

Both of those services have over one billion active users, Allo never got to 50 million. Google search doesn’t have that contact, and the company’s previous efforts didn’t capture market share. (Hangouts was promising but it has pivoted into a tool for enterprises.)

That left Google with two options, take on carriers directly with an iMessage-style service that’s built into Android, or work with them.

It chose the second option. It is far messier with so many different parties involved, but it is also apparently a principled approach.

“We can’t do it without these [carrier and OEM] partners. We don’t believe in taking the approach that Apple does. We are fundamentally an open ecosystem. We believe in working with partners. We believe in working with our OEMs to be able to deliver a great experience,” Anil Sabharwal, the Google executive leading Chat, told The Verge.

Sabharwal refused to be drawn on a timeframe for operators rolling out Chat apps.

“By the end of this year, we’ll be in a really great state, and by mid-next year, we’ll be in a place where a large percentage of users [will have] this experience,” he said, explaining that uptake could be quicker in Europe or Latin America than the U.S.. “This is not a three-to-five-year play. Our goal is to get this level of quality messaging to our users on Android within the next couple of years.”

We shall see. But at least there won’t be yet more Google messaging apps launching, so there’s that.

Following time backward, for portable music we’ve had iPods, CDs, and cassette tapes which we played using small Walkmans around the size of a cigarette box. And for a brief time before that, in the 1960s and 1970s, we had 8-track tapes. These were magnetic tapes housed in cases around the size of a large slice of bread. Car dashboards housed players, and they also came in a carry-around format like the one [Todd Harrison] recently bought at a Hamfest for $5 and made more portable by machining clips for a strap and adding a headphone jack.

But before hacking it, he wanted to try it out. Luckily his sister had hung onto her old tapes and after plugging it in and sliding in a tape, it worked! Opening it up he found that the contacts for the batteries were rusted but the mechanical components and electronics inside were very clean. Though he did add glue to a crack in the plastic read-head support, cleaned out some grease, did some lubricating, and cleaned the contacts in the volume control’s potentiometer. Check out his teardown video below for those details or if you just want to see how it all works.

Then came making it portable so that he could embarrass his kids by carrying it around the mall. The shoulder strap didn’t come with it, so he machined some clips out of steel and snapped on a strap. It didn’t have a headphone jack and he didn’t want to embarrass his kids too much, so he added one.  You can see that hack in the second video below, including how his repurposed jack automatically disconnects the speaker when the headphone plug is inserted. Personally, we think he looks pretty spiffy carrying it around wearing his Hackaday T-shirt.

While you’re still feeling retro, check out [Jenny List’s] full write-up on 8-track technology and a teardown of a player for a home hi-fi system.

Have you ever spent two years pouring your heart and soul into a project that only three people will ever see? In academia, we call that your “dissertation.”

Philosophers spend a lot of time writing things and trying to get them published in journals nobody reads — not even other philosophers — because in order to get a job, you need to have these papers and journals on your C.V.

Those two years you spent every day working on that paper — all that effort reduced to a single line on a C.V., just to ever-so-slightly improve your odds of getting a good job as you compete against people who also have those lines on their C.V.

Nobody reads this stuff because most of the journals are behind paywalls so expensive that only large libraries at academic institutions can afford to access them (and even then, many university libraries are cutting some journals off for budget reasons). Even within the halls of academia, where people do have access, there are simply so many papers published every year, even within niche fields, that nobody has time to read anywhere close to all the papers/books being published, especially considering the amount of reading it takes just to teach classes, etc.

Although there is already a growing mountain of philosophical research that’s impossible to keep up with, it’s common for journal referees to reject your paper because you didn’t engage with [X] paper/book, where often [X] is either written by the referee themselves or someone they’re chummy with.

As an end-result, academic papers usually end up popularity contests, a game of who’s-who where the goal is to develop incestuous citation networks so that your impact factor will look better for hiring and/or tenure committees. Analysis of these citation networks in “top” journals reveals they mostly revolve around a small group of influential people (btw, they’re like 97% white men if you were wondering).

And speaking of men, philosophy is absolutely notorious for not being a great place in academia for women, especially grad students. Recent high profile cases of Big Shot Male Philosophers losing their jobs because of women coming forward and speaking out about sexual harassment indicate that sexism is alive and well in academia. (You can read firsthand accounts here.)

Philosophers use “rigor” to justify bad writing

Even if academic philosophy were publicly accessible, I doubt the public would be interested in reading any of it. Philosophers often go to great lengths to make their papers as boring and difficult to read as possible. This is done in order to seem “rigorous” and “technical,” but most of the time that “rigor” does nothing but make it harder for non-philosophers to understand.

But I think the ultimate sin is that academic philosophy is filled with people — mostly men — who spend a lot of time talking about things that are almost entirely abstracted from the pragmatic realities of human existence.

And not in a good way.

Contemporary academic philosophy is embarrassing

I will never forget sitting in our auditorium listening to a long talk about meta-ethics when, right outside the doors of the university, Black Lives Matter activists were marching (this was in St. Louis at the time of Ferguson).

I could hear them chanting; the stark contrast between the esoteric subtleties of meta-ethics vs. the concrete realities of what would be considered “applied ethics” — a term usually uttered with slight contempt — made me deeply uncomfortable.

How could I justify this exuberance of abstraction when there were so many real-world problems that needed the minds of intelligent people? I know, I know: the value of pure research, etc., etc., But lemme just give you a flavor of what contemporary “pure research” in philosophy looks like. I went to philpapers.org → topic: metaphysics → top trending article. The abstract of that paper reads as follows:

“I argue that if David Lewis’ modal realism is true, modal realists from different possible worlds can fall in love with each other. I offer a method for uniquely picking out possible people who are in love with us and not with our counterparts. Impossible lovers and trans-world love letters are considered. Anticipating objections, I argue that we can stand in the right kinds of relations to merely possible people to be in love with them and that ending a trans-world relationship to start a relationship with an actual person isn’t cruel to one’s otherworldly lover.”

I don’t mean to pick on this particular paper, or the author — who I happen to know is a very smart and nice individual — merely to give a flavor of what I mean when I say contemporary academic philosophy is almost wholly divorced from the messy world we live in.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing — I enjoy thinking about philosophical questions and find many of them interesting. But I would often feel uncomfortable listening to philosophers give talks about their research because I had this gut feeling we were all wasting our time arguing about things we would continue to argue about for decades to come (that’s what we call a “research project”).

Before anyone jumps down my throat, let me say that I think philosophy and even academic philosophy does a noble service to the world. Teaching young people how to think critically and analyze the world around them carefully and reasonably is a fantastic thing.

But there is a big difference between the hard working philosophy professors who teach logic and critical thinking and the rarified discussions and the technicalities of what academic philosophers do with their research. The dense jargon and technical details make much of contemporary philosophy exhausting for the average person, who likely does not have the patience or time to slog through a maze of technical wizardry.

Philosophers are exemplified by contrarian assholes

Academic philosophy is primarily an experience in constant rejection and criticism. Everyone is taught how to brutally attack the arguments of their peers. Have you ever hung out with someone who disagrees with everything you say? Philosophy conferences are pretty much like that. All the time. It’s a never-ending parade of people attempting to one-up each other in verbal combat, all under the pretense of being lovers of wisdom.

Along with the constant rejection comes the publish or perish mindset. If you don’t publish in “good” journals, your chances of getting a good job are slim to none. Often you’d see jobs posted with hundreds of candidates, all with similar PhD holding qualifications, most with publications in similarly ranked journals.

The task of standing out is nearly impossible. Usually it comes down to informal factors, like having an influential advisor or coming from a “top program.” My school was ranked ~25–30ish (in the world) for its philosophy PhD program, and it would be polite to say most grad students struggled on the job market. “Struggling” doesn’t begin to describe the pain and anguish of sending hundreds of job applications and not landing a single interview. That’s not uncommon.

But instead of realizing the nightmarish futility of the adjunct vs. tenure-track system, so many young PhDs buy into the academic insecurity that equates dropping out with failure.

So they continue to slog away for years in that nether-world between PhD and tenure-track, jumping from adjunct position to adjunct position, post-doc to post-doc, always moving, never stable, never secure, always on the job market, always facing rejection, never making enough money. (For reference, I make ~2.5x more delivering pizza, working fewer hours than I ever did with a “fully funded” grad stipend at a university with a 7.5 billion endowment.)

This is the future of academia. The ratio of adjunct to tenure-track jobs has been sliding towards the adjunct side for decades, and things are accelerating in that direction. Philosophy departments are being axed for being “economically useless.” The job market is getting more competitive. An increasing number of people who make their living as “philosophers” are adjuncting.

Philosophy is a silly profession

When I used to tell people I was a philosopher, a common refrain was “So what’s like, your favorite saying?” People often have no clue what it is academic philosophers do — because we are often so absurdly high in the ivory tower that any attempt to come down is seen as being “not serious.”

Those who work on contemporary and pressing issues like race, gender, and bioethics are seen as doing something “less pure” than the “real” philosophers who work in “serious” fields like metaphysics and metametaphysics. No, seriously. There are books and conferences about “metametaphysics.” The deeper into the world of abstraction, the better. The less connected to real world issues, the more pure it is.

I left academic philosophy because I couldn’t stand its essential stuffiness. But I will nevertheless contend that philosophers as a whole are a curious and intellectual bunch who, at the very least, are good conversational partners. They also drink a lot. Most good philosophy is done in the pub. I do miss it sometimes. Being surrounded by people who are equally excited about weird questions like “Do holes exist?” is a unique experience, to say the least.

But I don’t need academic philosophy to do philosophy. Blogging over the past ten years, I’ve reached a larger audience than I could have ever hoped to find through the traditional academic journal system. And that’s ultimately why I dropped out: it was holding me back.

Sometimes a single word or phrase is enough to expand your mental toolkit across almost every subject.  “Averaging argument.”  “Motte and bailey.”  “Empirically indistinguishable.”  “Overfitting.”  Yesterday I learned another such phrase: “Summer of the Shark.”

This, apparently, was the summer of 2001, when lacking more exciting news, the media gave massive coverage to every single shark attack it could find, creating the widespread impression of an epidemic—albeit, one that everyone forgot about after 9/11.  In reality, depending on what you compare it to, the rate of shark attacks was either normal or unusually low in the summer of 2001.  As far as I can tell, the situation is that the absolute number of shark attacks has been increasing over the decades, but the increase is entirely attributable to human population growth (and to way more surfers and scuba divers).  The risk per person, always minuscule (cows apparently kill five times more people), appears to have been going down.  This might or might not be related to the fact that shark populations are precipitously declining all over the world, due mostly to overfishing and finning, but also the destruction of habitat.

There’s a tendency—I notice it in myself—to say, “fine, news outlets have overhyped this trend; that’s what they do.  But still, there must be something going on, since otherwise you wouldn’t see everyone talking about it.”

The point of the phrase “Summer of the Shark” is to remind yourself that a “trend” can be, and often is, entirely a product of people energetically looking for a certain thing, even while the actual rate of the thing is unremarkable, abnormally low, or declining.  Of course this has been a favorite theme of Steven Pinker, but I don’t know if even reading his recent books, Better Angels and Enlightenment Now, fully brought home the problem’s pervasiveness for me.  If a self-sustaining hype bubble can form even over something as relatively easy to measure as the number of shark attacks, imagine how common it must be with more nebulous social phenomena.

Without passing judgment—I’m unsure about many of them myself—how many of the following have you figured, based on the news or your Facebook or Twitter feeds, are probably some sort of epidemic?

• Crime by illegal immigrants
• Fraudulent voting by non-citizens
• SJWs silencing free speech on campus
• Unemployment in heartland America
• Outrageous treatment of customers by airlines
• Mass school shootings
• Sexism in Silicon Valley
• Racism at Starbucks

Now be honest: for how many of these do you have any real idea whether the problem is anomalously frequent relative to its historical rate, or to the analogous problems in other sectors of society?  How many seem to be epidemics that require special explanations (“the dysfunctional culture of X”), but only because millions of people started worrying about these particular problems and discussing them—in many cases, thankfully so?  How many seem to be epidemics, but only because people can now record outrageous instances with their smartphones, then make them viral on social media?

Needless to say, the discovery that a problem is no worse in domain X than it is in Y, or is better, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight hard to solve it in X—especially if X happens to be our business.  Set thy own house in order.  But it does mean that, if we see X but not Y attacked for its deeply entrenched, screwed-up culture, a culture that lets these things happen over and over, then we’re seeing a mistake at best, and the workings of prejudice at worst.

I’m not saying anything the slightest bit original here.  But my personal interest is less in the “Summer of the Shark” phenomenon itself than in its psychology.  Somehow, we need to figure out a trick to move this cognitive error from the periphery of consciousness to center stage.  I mustn’t treat it as just a 10% correction: something to acknowledge intellectually, before I go on to share a rage-inducing headline on Facebook anyway, once I’ve hit on a suitable reason why my initial feelings of anger were basically justified after all.  Sometimes it’s a 100% correction.  I’ve been guilty, I’m sure, of helping to spread SotS-type narratives.  And I’ve laughed when SotS narratives were uncritically wielded by others, for example in The Onion.  I should do better.

I can’t resist sharing one of history’s most famous Jewish jokes, with apologies to those who know it.  In the shtetl, a horrible rumor spreads: a Jewish man raped and murdered a beautiful little Christian girl in the forest.  Terrified, the Jews gather in the synagogue and debate what to do.  They know that the Cossacks won’t ask: “OK, but before we do anything rash, what’s the rate of Jewish perpetration of this sort of crime?  How does it compare to the Gentile rate, after normalizing by the populations’ sizes?  Also, what about Jewish victims of Gentile crimes?  Is the presence of Jews causally related to more of our children being murdered than would otherwise be?”  Instead, a mob will simply slaughter every Jew it can find.  But then, just when it seems all is lost, the rabbi runs into the synagogue and jubilantly declares: “wonderful news, everyone!  It turns out the murdered girl was Jewish!”

And now I should end this post, before it jumps the shark.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Mistake of the Week, Nerd Self-Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOMEWORK is the bane of a child’s life. It can also weigh heavily on parents, who either struggle to get their charges to finish it, or even worse, must brush up on their own rusty skills to help out. Parental involvement in education contributes to a child’s eventual success. A new report by the Varkey Foundation, an educational charity, shows how much time parents put in to their children’s education. The survey looked at 29 countries and found that parents in emerging economies spend much more time helping with homework than their counterparts in richer countries.

In India, parents spend 12 hours a week on average assisting their kids—five hours longer than the global average. Virtually none said they did not help at all. That is in stark contrast with parents in Finland and Japan, who put in around three hours on average. Indeed, only 5% of Finns say they spend at least seven hours helping their children with homework, and 31% do not spend any time at all. 

Parental concern (or guilt) about this is more in evidence in some countries than others. The survey also asked parents whether they felt that they were spending the right amount of time. A majority of those in India and Vietnam felt that the time they spent was about right. In Uganda, Peru, Malaysia and Brazil more than 40% of parents fretted that they were not doing enough, despite helping more than the global average. By contrast, the French adopt a laissez-faire attitude: only 11% spend seven or more hours helping, but only 22% feel the time they spend is too little.

The reasons for not helping are, of course, varied. The most common reason is one that nearly all parents will identify with: time. More than half say they are just too busy. Parents are also held back by their own education. Around half of those in China worry about their own lack of subject knowledge, compared with 29% globally. More encouragingly, sometimes children just do not want their help: 44% of Finnish parents cite this, the highest share of any country. And they may not need it: Finland ranks among the top ten countries in international tests. 

RF-powered computers are small devices that compute and communicate using only the power that they harvest from RF signals. While existing technologies have harvested power from ambient RF sources (e.g., TV broadcasts), they require a dedicated gateway (like an RFID reader) for Internet connectivity. We present Wi-Fi Backscatter, a novel communication system that bridges RF-powered devices with the Internet. Specifically, we show that it is possible to reuse existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to RF-powered devices. To show Wi-Fi Backscatter’s feasibility, we build a hardware prototype and demonstrate the first communication link between an RF-powered device and commodity Wi-Fi devices. We use off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices including Intel Wi-Fi cards, Linksys Routers, and our organization’s Wi-Fi infrastructure, and achieve communication rates of up to 1 kbps and ranges of up to 2.1 meters. We believe that this new capability can pave the way for the rapid deployment and adoption of RF-powered devices and achieve ubiquitous connectivity via nearby mobile devices that are Wi-Fi enabled.

Marijuana legalization is sweeping the nation, and The Green Rush is upon us. As pot sellers scramble to comply with complex regulations, one startup has built the full-stack of specialized commerce software they need. Meadow offers everything from an eye-catching digital storefront for teasing tasty plants, to automated patient records management for which you’ll go to jail if you screw up.

That’s why Meadow is emerging as the Amazon of weed. But it’s not just the website where you go to buy the best buds from a variety of top local shops. It’s the AWS powering the back end of the THC trade.

already provides:

• Online and mobile ordering
• Delivery logistics
• In-store point of sale
• Inventory management
• Returns and discounts
• Patient intake and registration
• Analytics
• Security

Today Meadow launches that final piece of its marijuana dispensary software suite: loyalty. It lets ganja buyers earn points for shopping at the same place, which they can redeem for cash back, discounts, free products and prizes. Customers can earn and apply points in-store or online, and track how many they’ve racked up at all of Meadow’s vendors. It could be especially helpful for sellers who want to get rid of pot before it goes stale or another shipment comes in, without screwing with their public pricing.

“The ability to accrue points gives the dispensary a tool to build a deeper relationship with the customer,” says Meadow co-founder David Hua. “We’ve seen a lot of dispensaries fail at managing a loyalty program. Creating one is easy, tracking it with inventory and your reporting often can be super onerous for the operator.”

Meadow co-founder, CEO and smoker David Hua

Hua is a stoner, no doubt. But Meadow’s CEO is also a shrewd businessman who won it TechCrunch’s 2015 Crunchies award for best bootstrapped startup, led it through Y Combinator and raised its $2.1 million seed round last year. Operating out of a warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District, pungent smoke often wafts in from the courtyard of Meadow HQ. Its willingness to serve as a community hub and event space has established Meadow as the commerce layer connecting players in the burgeoning legal pot business.

Meadow frequently gets compared to fellow weed software startup . While both run a virtual doctor’s office where you can get prescribed marijuana over video chat, and both offer an aggregated online storefront and delivery logistics service, that’s where the similarities end.

Eaze has aggressively raised more than $24 million for marketing in a bid to become the Uber for weed, organizing deliveries without formally employing the couriers. But Hua sees that as a more generic piece of the marijuana commerce puzzle that could get commoditized. It’s the hardcore back-end office software for navigating heavy regulation that’s harder to copy, but critical for running an upstanding pot business.

Meadow’s point of sale software lets marijuana dispensaries offer loyalty programs

Meadow’s vision is that if a dispensary relies on it for everything from scanning bar codes on jars of weed in their store to securely storing patient medical data, they’ll tack on its online storefront and delivery logistics for convenience sake.

That plot is panning out. Despite having raised just $2.1 million in April 2016, Hua says “We still have plenty of runway. We’re good on funding.” In fact, now that the 10-person startup can serve 70 percent of California counties that allow medical marijuana, Hua tells me Meadow is “getting close to profitability.”

The pot market is poised to get much more exciting as marijuana becomes legal for all adults in California at the start of 2018. “Looking at Colorado, Washington, Nevada [where weed recently became recreationally legal], those markets tripled, quadrupled, 5Xed over night. We expect to have a nice multiplier.” While only focused on California for now, Meadow has enormous growth potential as more states decriminalize.

A customer checks out using Meadow’s tablet-based point-of-sale software

Legalization brings challenges too, though, as regulations change, competition increases and more established businesses try to muscle in on the weed trade. That’s why Hua has raced to bring in best practices from outside of the pot world, watching how Square, Belly, FiveStars and other commerce platforms handle point-of-sale and loyalty.

With the end of any prohibition comes massive opportunities for new ventures. Some jumped into holding and selling weed themselves. Others like Eaze have vied to handle how it gets to your door. But Meadow has taken the unsexy path of building serious commerce software. As weed finally becomes a serious business in 2018, all that time coding could blossom into a very sticky service.

FM Backscatter: Enabling connected cities and smart fabrics Wang et al., NSDI’17

If we want to connect all the things, then we need a means of sending and/or receiving information at each thing. These transmissions require power, and no-one wants to have to plug in chargers or keep swapping batteries for endless everyday objects. So where will this power come from? One promising approach uses ambient backscattering. Ambient backscatter devices pick up existing transmissions (e.g., TV or Wi-Fi signals) and convert them to tiny amounts of electricity, this power is then used to modify and reflect the signal with encoded data.

This paper enables connectivity on everyday objects by transforming them into FM radio stations. To do this, we show for the first time that ambient FM radio signals can be used as a signal source for backscatter communication.

It turns out that, for example, all those talk show radio programmes really are a powerful medium. In the literal sense.

The prototype system built by the authors achieved data rates of up to 3.2 kbps, and ranges of 5-60 feet, while consuming as little as 11.07 μW of power.

Requirements for communicating everyday objects

The goal is to enable communication from everyday objects in outdoor scenarios (for example, from bus stop posters, street signs, smart clothing, and so on) to smart phones and cars. Wide outdoor deployment of RFID readers would be expensive, Wi-Fi backscatter is only really useful indoors, and TV signal receivers are not included in smartphones and most cars.

What about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)? In broadcast mode, BLE can send short packets every 100ms, and therefore won’t work for streaming audio. In addition, the bluetooth antenna in cars is positioned inside to interact with mobile phones and other devices. The car body itself would shield such an antenna from any outside signals.

What we really want is a solution that:

• Uses ambient signals that are already ubiquitous in outdoor environments
• Can be easily received by cars and smartphones using existing hardware
• Is legal to backscatter in the desired frequencies without a license (which rules out cellular transmissions)
• Enables decoding of the raw incoming signal without any additional hardware.

The suitability of FM radio

Enter FM radio!

• Broadcast FM radio infrastructure exists in cities around the world
• FM radio towers transmit at high power (several hundred kilowatts), providing an ambient signal source suitable for backscattering
• FM radio receivers are included in the LTE and Wi-Fi chipsets of almost every smartphone (and of course, are in cars)
• In the US, low-power transmitters can operate on FM bans without requiring a license
• FM radios provide access to the raw audio decoded by the receiver, which can be used to extract the backscattered data

_c_ in one of these FM bands, and information at each time instant is encoded by a deviation from _f_c_.

### Backscattering FM radio

The authors describe three mechanisms for backscattering FM radio transmissions: overlay backscatter, stereo backscatter, and cooperative backscatter.

Backscattering is a multiplicative operation in the frequency domain. Say a signal source is transmitting a tone signal at a centre frequency . For a backscatter signal with baseband , we need to generate the signal .

If we pick such that it is centred at and uses audio signal then an FM radio tuned to the frequency will output the audio signal .

Thus, by picking the appropriate backscatter signal we can use the multiplicative nature of backscatter in the RF domain to produce an additive operation in the received audio signals. We call this overlay backscatter because the backscattered information is overlaid on top of existing signals and has the same structure as the underlying data.
is chosen so that lies at the centre of an unoccupied FM channel. There are plenty such channels available, as the following indicates:

To send audio (e.g., a music sample for a band advertised on a poster) the desired audio can be overlaid directly. To send data, audio signals are generated using modulation techniques. The desired cosine signals are approximated with a square wave alternating between +1 and -1.

These two discrete values can be created on the backscatter device by modulating the radar cross-section of an antenna to either reflect or absorb the ambient signal at the backscatter device. By changing the frequency of the resulting square wave, we can approximate a cosine signal with the desired time-varying frequencies.

If an FM radio station is broadcasting in mono, then audio or data can be backscattered in the stereo stream without interference from the audio signals in the ambient FM transmissions. To tell the receiver to pick up the stereo stream, the backscattering device also needs to generate the 19 kHz pilot signal. This is the stereo backscatter approach. There’s a variation that works well for talk shows too:

While many FM stations transmit in the stereo mode, i.e. with the 19 kHz pilot tone, in the case of news and talk radio stations, the energy in the stereo stream is often low. This is because the same human speech signal is played on both the left and right speakers… based on this observation, we can backscatter data/audio in the stereo stream with significantly less interference from the underlying FM signals.

Cooperative backscattering can give much lower error rates, but requires the cooperation of two receiving devices to create a MIMO system. One device is tuned to the original band of the FM signal ($f_c$) and the other is tuned to . The joint information can be used to cancel the ambient FM signal and decode the backscattered signal. See section 3.3 in the paper for further details.

Data encoding

Data is encoded using frequency-shift keying (FSK). Two schemes are described, a low rate scheme (100 bps) for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments, and a higher rate (1.6 or 3.2 kbps) scheme for high SNR environments.

For the 100 bps transmission, a binary FSK scheme (2-FSK) is used where zero and one bits are represented by the frequencies 8 and 12 kHz respectively. For high bit rates, a combination of 4-FSK and frequency division multiplexing is used: sixteen frequencies between 800 Hz and 12.8 kHz are grouped into four consecutive sets, within each set 4-FSK is used to transmit two bits. Experiments showed that the bit-error rate (BER) performance degraded significantly above 3.2 kbps, so this is the maximum achievable rate for the target applications.

Implementation and evaluation

The FM backscatter design is implemented in an integrated circuit with a TSMC 65 nm LP CMOS process (see section 4 of the paper for detail). A Moto G1 smartphone with Sennheiser MM30i headphones as its antenna is used for smartphone receiving, and a 2010 Honda CRV is used for car testing.

For the smartphone, the following plot shows how SNR changes as a function of the distance between the backscatter device and the FM receiver at five different power levels. At a -50 dBm power level, the power in the backscattered signal is still reasonably high at close distances.

At 100 bps, the BER is nearly zero at distances up to 6 feet across all power levels, and for power levels greater than -60 dBm range increases to over 12 feet. At 1.6 and 3.2 kbps range is reduced, but BERs are still low up to 3 and 6 feet away at -60 and -50 dBm respectively.

For the car receiver, the system can work well up to about 60 ft.

We leverage the low power backscatter techniques described in this paper to show that posters can broadcast information directly to cars and smartphones in outdoor environments. To evaluate this, we design two poster form factor antennas…

The results showed that data could be decoded at 100 bps at distances of up to ten feet with a smartphone. An overlaid snipped of music from the band advertised on the poster could be decoded at a distance of up to 4ft. The car could detect the same signal at 10 ft.

The team also designed a smart shirt by machine sowing an antenna into it:

We perform this experiment in an outdoor environment in which the prototype antenna receives ambient radio signals at a level of -35 dBm to -40 dbm. Fig. 17b (above) compares the bit error rate when the user is standing still, running (2.2 m/s) or walking (1 m/s). The plot shows that at a bit rate of 1.6 kbps while using MRC, the BER was roughly 0.02 while standing and increases with motion. However at a lower bit rate of 100 bps, the BER was less than 0.005 even when the user was running. This demonstrates that FM radio backscatter can be used for smart fabric applications

We’re on a quest for an extraordinary software engineer who will join us to build and maintain clean, modern applications.

You are a self-starter with a bias for action, and you can take projects from start to finish. You want to work as part of a small, tightly-knit team that moves quickly and pushes changes to production many times a day. You always admired your friends in science, but your knack for computers led you to programming.

Why Quartzy

Quartzy is the world’s #1 lab management platform. Every day, hundreds of thousands of scientists from all over the world improve the efficiency of their research by using Quartzy. Our team is passionate about accelerating scientific research through well-designed, meaningful tools for labs and companies alike. We value openness, transparency, and good communication, because, after all, we are in this together.

What you'll do

• Design and implement new functionality from the ground up
• Work closely with your team to design and develop a robust REST API
• Measure and improve site performance and scalability
• Write well-tested code that is resilient to heavy iteration

What we're looking for

• Demonstrable experience writing clean, thoughtfully crafted PHP that scales
• You have experience with other parts of our technology stack: MySQL, Redis, Beanstalkd, RabbitMQ, nginx, Git.
• You have the ability and desire to own projects that directly impact Quartzy's bottom line.
• An entrepreneurial attitude that gets high-quality projects done quickly
• You are a strong communicator. You write well and can easily explain complex technical concepts to non-technical people.

What we'd love

• Background working with mission-critical financial systems
• Experience with the integration of external financial or ERP systems
• Familiarity with asynchronous worker queues
• Experience working in a dynamic startup environment
• Occasionally, you end the day with more lines of code removed than added; and that feels great

Does that sound like you? We'd love to hear from you.

AMD has unleashed its Ryzen 2nd Generation processors to much acclaim, and overclockers have already been pushing the new flagship model, with the 6GHz barrier now having been broken (following a 5.884GHz overclock earlier this week).

Expert overclockers Der8auer and Neo took the Ryzen 7 2700X, which has a base clock of 3.7GHz, and ramped it up to a blistering 6.0GHz over all eight of the processor’s cores using a voltage of 1.85v.

Cooling was provided by liquid nitrogen, as is usually the case with these sort of big boosts. These aren’t the sort of results you can get on a normal PC with conventional cooling, of course, and neither was the CPU stable enough to run things at this level.

It’s just impressive that the speed could be physically reached when the right processor was found (the overclockers had a number of samples to hand, and of course all CPUs – even those of the same model – vary somewhat in their tolerance for being juiced up).

Steaming past Skylake-X

Wccftech.com reports that benchmarks were successfully run at a stable 5.7GHz, with the 2700X setting some new world records for eight-core processors, and indeed besting Intel’s Core i9-7980XE (Skylake-X) processor which was cranked to a higher 6.1GHz.

So that’s an impressive result all round for AMD, with the new Ryzen 7 2700X certainly making a big splash. In our Ryzen 7 2700X review, we gave it full marks, and called it the “best consumer processor on the market right now”, no less, beating out its Core i7-8700K rival on the Intel side.

In other words, you don’t need liquid-nitrogen and mad overclocking chops to be able to feel the benefit of the new 2700X.

(Russia)

0

2016

’17

’18

Number of hacks from 4Q 2015 to 1Q 2018

39

Sofacy

36

Lazarus Group

19

Carbanak

18

Turla Group

17

OilRig

40

10

20

30

0

To assess North Korea’s cyber program, the Journal interviewed dozens of North Korean defectors, foreign cybersecurity researchers, South Korean government advisers and military experts. The researchers emphasize that catching hackers is difficult, and that they can’t be 100% certain that every attack attributed to North Korea was orchestrated by its cyberwarriors.

These experts point to numerous signs that the hackers have become better. North Koreans are acting on security glitches in widely used software only days after the vulnerabilities first appear, and crafting malicious code so advanced it isn’t detected by antivirus programs, they say. When software or security firms plug holes, the hackers are adapting within days or weeks, fine-tuning their malware much as Apple Inc. would release an update to the iPhone’s operating system.

Many North Korean hackers are using perfect English or embedding other languages into coding to make it appear hacks came from other countries, the researchers have concluded. And they are earning a reputation as innovators at breaking into smartphones, hiding malware in Bible apps or using Facebook Inc. to help infect targets.

“The whole world needs to take notice,” says John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc., who now ranks North Korea among the world’s mature hacking operations.

North Korea has denied involvement in hacking attacks, including last year’s WannaCry ransomware, which locked digital files and demanded bitcoin payment for their release, or the 2016 cybertheft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank. Calls for comment to the North Korean consulate in Hong Kong weren’t answered.

Researchers say telltale signs are buried deep inside the malware and coding: Korean words only used in the North, the use of data servers commonly associated with Pyongyang hacks and files created by usernames linked with the country’s hackers.

The U.S. and other governments have publicly blamed North Korea for an array of infiltrations in recent months, including WannaCry, citing patterns in coding and techniques they say lead to Pyongyang. South Korean officials estimate their country is now targeted by an estimated 1.5 million North Korean hacking attempts daily, or 17 every second.

Late last year, North Korean hackers were the first to unearth a vulnerability in the popular Adobe Flash multimedia player that allowed an unchallenged attack to go undetected for months, according to cybersecurity researchers. After Adobe released a security patch in February, the suspected Pyongyang cyberwarriors modified the malware to target European financial institutions, giving them the ability to steal sensitive information about their networks, according to cybersecurity firm McAfee LLC.

North Korea’s cyber advances parallel its breakthroughs in missile technology since Kim Jong Un assumed power in 2011.

Many suspected North Korean attacks occur without a clear objective. Some researchers have described it as akin to an organized-crime ring seeking any weaknesses to learn about enemies or generate cash. Researchers generally agree the program is becoming more focused on obtaining military intelligence or earning income as sanctions tighten and negotiations with the U.S. approach.

“Hacking abilities give them a much stronger hand at the negotiating table,” says Ross Rustici, a director at cybersecurity firm Cybereason Inc. and a former Defense Department analyst.

In October, South Korean lawmakers said North Koreans had stolen 235 gigabytes of data and military secrets, including a joint U.S.-South Korean plan to eliminate Pyongyang leadership in the event of war. North Korean hackers are believed to have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars, ranging from stealing credit-card information from ATMs to a $530 million raid of a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange in January.

Cryptocurrencies appear to be a particular interest. Last year, suspected North Korean hackers began creating fictitious Facebook profiles, posing as attractive young women interested in bitcoin or working in the industry, according to people familiar with a South Korean investigation into the matter. They sought friendships with men at cryptocurrency exchanges and banks.

The Facebook accounts listed links with an “NYU Research Center” and other institutions to make them appear believable. Then the hackers lured men into opening app downloads or word documents, disguised as greeting cards or invites, that flooded their systems with malware, say the people familiar with the investigation.

It isn’t clear what the scheme netted. Facebook shut down fake accounts used by hackers linked to North Korea that “pretended to be other people in order to do things like learning about others and building relationships with potential targets,” the company said in December.

North Korea also has been using a targeting “watering hole” attack, in which a person’s computer becomes infected by accessing a certain website, according to cybersecurity researchers. Research firms say Pyongyang used watering holes to target banks in Mexico, Poland and Asia in 2016, leading to security improvements by those institutions and antivirus software firms.

North Korea re-emerged last June with a watering hole variant that uses different encryptions and commands, according to cybersecurity firm Proofpoint Inc., which named the malware PowerRatankba.

The adaptation “shows that North Korea can recover when a researcher finds their tooling, publishes on it and lets the world know how to stop it,” says Ryan Kalember, a Proofpoint senior vice president. “They are developing their own tools with a software-development life cycle, making products and improving them over time.”

North Korea’s hacking program dates at least to the mid-1990s, when then-leader Kim Jong Il said that “all wars in future years will be computer wars.”

Its hacking made headlines in 2014 by knocking Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer systems offline, erasing company data and pilfering troves of emails that eventually became public. The attack itself, cyber researchers now say, deployed an uncomplicated, widely available “wiper” tool.

Defectors and South Korea cyber experts say hacker trainees recruited by North Korea’s government get roomy Pyongyang apartments and exemptions from mandatory military service.

The North Korean defector familiar with the country’s cyber training says he received such training, and describes intense preparation for annual “hackathon” competitions in Pyongyang, in which teams of students holed up learning to solve puzzles and hacking problems under severe time pressure.

“For six months, day and night, we prepared only for this contest,” he says. He recalls going home for a meal after an all-night prep session only to wake up with his head resting in his bowl of soup. “It was everyone’s dream to be a part of it.”

Top performers, he says, get jobs foraging for money via websites of overseas banks or targeting computer networks for intelligence in countries such as the U.S.

“To maintain the nuclear program and build more weapons and maintain the North Korean regime, a lot of hard currency is needed, so naturally attacking banks is of first importance,” he says.

Some trainees are sent overseas to master foreign languages or to participate in international hackathons in places such as India or China, where they compete against coders from around the world. At a 2015 global competition called CodeChef, run by an Indian software company, North Korean teams ranked first, second and third out of more than 7,600 world-wide. Three of the top 15 coders in CodeChef’s network of about 100,000 participants are North Korean.

The defectors and South Korean researchers say North Korea’s cyber army has about 7,000 hackers and support staffers, loosely divided into three teams. The A team, often called “Lazarus” by foreign researchers, attacks foreign entities and is associated with North Korea’s most headline-grabbing campaigns, such as the WannaCry and Sony attacks.

The B team traditionally focused on South Korea and swept for military or infrastructure secrets, though it has begun mining for intelligence elsewhere recently, the cyber researchers say. The C team does lower-skilled work, such as targeted email attacks called spear phishing.

While its earlier attacks used well-known tools and familiar coding, Pyongyang tried to learn from better hackers abroad, says Simon Choi, a cybersecurity consultant to South Korea’s government who tracks online behavior. North Korean-linked accounts on Facebook and Twitter began following famous Chinese hackers and marked “like” on pages of how-to books outlining how to make malicious code for mobile devices, he says. Some North Koreans registered for online courses offered in South Korea teaching people how to hack smartphones, he says.

North Korea has planted programmers abroad where they can more easily connect online with the global financial system, security firms say. Recorded Future Inc., an intelligence firm, says it has tracked cyber activities with North Korean fingerprints to places such as China, India, New Zealand and Mozambique.

McAfee said it took suspected North Korean cyberwarriors just seven days in December to discover and use Invoke-PSImage, a new open-source hacking tool, to target groups involved in the Winter Olympics. McAfee said hackers used the tool to custom-build a malware download that was invisible to most antivirus software and hid malicious files in an image attached to a Microsoft Word document.

Researchers say they were particularly impressed with the recent attack that capitalized on previously unknown vulnerabilities with Adobe Flash. According to South Korean and U.S. cyber researchers, the malware popped up in November targeting South Koreans, attaching itself to Microsoft Office files distributed by email. Victims infected their computers by viewing embedded Adobe Flash content in Word documents or spreadsheets. Hackers were then able to gain remote access to those PCs and steal files.

Adobe put out a security advisory on Feb. 1 and released a software patch five days later. FireEye said it suspected the malware came from North Korean hackers.

Within weeks, suspected Pyongyang hackers had adapted the original malware, which then appeared in attacks on financial institutions in Turkey in early March, according to McAfee. Although no money was taken, the attacks likely obtained intelligence, possibly including details of how the banks’ internal systems work, McAfee said.

“This malware was not written by some average Joe,” says Christiaan Beek, McAfee’s senior principal engineer.

Mr. Choi, the South Korean cyber consultant, digitally pursued the author of the malware, piecing together details from the attack to gather biographical details. He eventually found what he believes is the male hacker’s Facebook page. The listed hometown and current city was Pyongyang.

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article incorrectly included the name of a defector familiar with North Korea’s cyber training, whose identity was included in violation of the agreement with the source. (April 19, 2018)

—Jonathan Cheng contributed to this article.

Write to Timothy W. Martin at timothy.martin@wsj.com

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The nation’s fingerprints have appeared recently in surprisingly sophisticated attacks; ‘The whole world needs to take notice’

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TEGs make electricity through the Seebeck effect, where different conductive materials in contact develop a potential difference across the contact point.

Pyroelectric materials, in contrast, develop a potential across a crystal of one material due to electrons shifting as a consequence of heat-induced crystal lattice changes – the effect was first seen in the mineral tourmaline in the 18th century.

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a thin-film pyroelectric device from the ferro-electric 0.68Pb(Mg_1/3Nb_2/3)O3 – 0.32PbTiO₃– a relaxor ferroelectric with strong field- and temperature-induced polarisation susceptibilities, according to ‘Pyroelectric energy conversion with large energy and power density in relaxor ferroelectric thin films‘, a paper published in Nature Materials.

“We know we need new energy sources, but we also need to do better at utilising the energy we already have,” said researcher Lane Martin. “These thin films can help us squeeze more energy than we do today out of every source of energy.”

The energy converter was fabricated from films 50-100nm thick.

“By creating a thin-film device, we can get the heat into and out of this system quickly, allowing us to access pyroelectric power at unprecedented levels for heat sources that fluctuate over time,” said Martin. “All we’re doing is sourcing heat and applying electric fields to this system, and we can extract energy.”

The team is claiming record pyroelectric energy conversion: 1.06J/cm³, 526Watt/cm³ and 19% Carnot efficiency “equivalent to the performance of a thermoelectric with an effective Zt ≈ 1.16 for a temperature change of 10K”, according to the paper. “Our findings suggest that pyroelectric devices may be competitive with thermoelectric devices for low-grade thermal harvesting.”

“Part of what we’re trying to do is create a protocol that allows us to push the extremes of pyroelectric materials so that you can give me a waste-heat stream and I can get you a material optimized to address your problems,” said Martin.

For Indian teenagers, the pressure to excel in a country of 1.3 billion people is immense. And at no other time do these pressures metastasise more than in the month of April: exam season.

This is when the nation’s brightest minds sit the examinations that will determine whether they secure entrance to one of India’s prestigious Institutes of Technology (IITs), medical institutes, or business schools. They dream of becoming engineers, dentists, or doctors. But with only 23 IITs in one of the most densely populated nations on Earth, and vastly over-subscribed dental and medical colleges, competition is intense.

To prepare, students from across India travel to the historic northern city of Kota, spending months or even years away from their family and home. Whether the children of manual labourers or business tycoons, all have travelled to Kota for one reason: academic glory.

Kota is the epicentre of India’s private coaching industry. Here, students enrol at one of the many for-profit residential institutes that prepare teenagers for their university entrance exams. For months, even years, teens who’ve barely left their parental homes before live alone, in austere hostel rooms, cramming morning, noon, and night in the hope of a secure, financially lucrative future. They leave their hostel rooms early in the morning to avoid the midday heat and walk down cracked pavements to stuffy classrooms, where they crouch over desks. At lunchtime they wolf chutney-filled dosas before returning to their desks to cram some more. The most studious return to their hostel rooms and study alone, well into the night.

But most of the teenagers who come to Kota, this effort proves futile. And for some, the threat of failure can prove psychologically overwhelming – and even fatal. In recent years, Kota has earned a more unfortunate reputation for a spate of suicides.

From the start of 2014 to November 2017, 45 Kota students committed suicide. So far, at least three people have taken their lives in 2018. Many of these deaths were the result of hanging by ceiling fan. Like 17-year-old Amandeep Singh, from the Raigarh district in Maharashtra, who committed suicide in 2017. Or 18-year-old Niharika Devangan, who died in January this year after three years in Kota, preparing for medical entrance exams. But this particular suicide method isn’t limited to Kota alone. According to 2015 figures from the National Crime Record Bureau, hanging accounts for 45.6 percent of all suicides in India.

There is no easy solution. But engineer Sharad Ashani believes that he might have one answer to India’s teen suicide problem — and it’s a simple bit of kit. But as with many deceptively simple offerings to complicated social problems, not everything is as easy as it might appear.

His offering? The world’s first anti-suicide fan (or as Ashani’s latterly rebranded it, the Smart Fan – as the manufacturers thought that the old name wasn’t auspicious.) Ashani was inspired to create the Smart Fan after the death of Indian model Nafisa Joseph in 2004. “It struck me that people used fans in this way,” Ashani says. “So I invented an anti-suicide fan pipe.” The inner pipe consists of a joint with a mechanism. When a weight greater than 20 kilograms is attached to the fan, the spring unlatches, lowering the individual to the ground safely. (Ashani, an exuberant presence, is fond of demoing the ceiling fan by attempting to hang himself on Indian TV.)

Ashani is candid about his struggles to get his Smart Fan into wider circulation. “I was expecting a huge demand for the product, but so far it’s not coming through,” he explains. “Unfortunately, safety in India is always everyone’s last priority.” Whilst Ashani has succeeded in getting the Kota Hostel Association, which consists of 2,000 hostels across the city, to pledge to install the devices, not everyone is on board: he provides a list of hostels that have refused to instal the fan.

“I’ve been producing the fan for eight months, and I was expecting the production would shoot like anything, but I’ve sold only about 1,000 fans so far,” Ashani says, blaming institutional apathy for the Smart Fan’s limited success. “Hangings happen, and people think, ‘Oh, we must see what we can do’. Then people forget, and another hanging happens,” he says. “People make inquiries but when it comes to collecting the orders, they back out.” Right now, Ashani is looking for an NGO to help sponsor a wider roll-out. Despite his enthusiasm, there is little evidence to suggest that novel inventions such as Ashani’s have any impact.

Institutional apathy aside, suicide prevention technologies are a novel (and media-friendly) approach to a complex social issue, albeit one with limited effectiveness. Often targeting specific suicide hotspots can be useful as a short-term solution. At Niagara Falls, authorities have set up a suicide hotline to deter would-be jumpers, whilst in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, dedicated volunteers prowl the woodland in the hope of preventing people from taking their lives.

The evidence is that these measures can help. Crisis hotlines in particular do work: Distress and Crisis Ontario, which administers suicide prevention services around Niagara Falls, reports that in 2017 92 per cent of callers ringing their hotline were de-escalated from suicidal behavior without involving emergency services. And a 2017 evidence review of suicide prevention apps concluded that “apps are an essential tool that can help us to prevent suicide”.

Fans aren’t the only technology being used in an attempt to save lives. Largely in response to widespread media scrutiny of Kota’s teen suicides, authorities and regulators have been struggling for a response. Biometric scanners have been installed in many hostels, and a helpline for anxious teens to call has been set up. “Around 500 to 600 hostels have installed biometric attendance machines,” says Manish Jain of the Kota Hostel Association. “When students enter and leave their hostels, a message is sent to their parents telling them whether they’re arrived or left. It’s much better for students and parents. Parents are less stressed.” But suicide prevention expert Vikram Patel of Harvard University’s department of global health and social medicine isn’t convinced by biometric scanners. “I don’t think we have sufficient evidence to suggest the utility of biometric technologies at this time,” he says.

Whether fans, biometric scanners, or hotlines, these stop-gap solutions are, just that: they stop immediate loss of life, but don’t address the underlying issue. Unless emergency initiatives are complemented by a full suite of mental health interventions and large-scale government initiatives, they have limited effectiveness.

And the vast majority of students who visit Kota have no need for biometric technologies or special ceiling fans. “The atmosphere is good here, honestly,” says Rudra Nadalia, an 18-year-old student resident of the Being Home hostel. He thinks that Kota’s suicide problem is overplayed by the media, and hasn’t encountered any suicidal students during his eight-month stay in the city. That said, he’s not immune to the pressures of exam season. With his IIT JEE a month away, Nadalia’s putting in 15-hour daily study stints, but even that may not be enough. “It’s gruesome!” he says, before reeling off statistics: only 10,000 applicants out of a pool of over a million students will score highly enough for entrance to an IIT. “The competition is fierce.”

Nadalia is remarkably well-adjusted given the pressures he is under. But, as he explains, his parents are affluent and thus able to afford the not-inconsiderable cost of months of residential private tuition in the city. Not everyone is as fortunate. “There are some students here whose parents are labourers,” he explains, “and the amount they spend over here means a lot for them. Suicides are probably because of that – because of the financial pressures and competition they’re under.”

But Kota’s suicide problem is likely a simulacrum of India’s growing mental health crisis. The nation as a whole has one of the world’s highest youth suicide rates. According to a 2012 Lancet report, suicide is the second-leading cause of death amongst young Indians aged 15-29. Despite these figures, India only spends 0.06 per cent of its health budget on mental healthcare, compared to the four per cent or more typically spent by developed nations.

“We need to promote an open conversation about mental health,” says Patel. He argues that policy makers should respond to India’s suicide epidemic not with gimmicks like fans or fingerprint scanners, but with evidence based policy approaches. “We need a significant financial commitment to ensure the actual implementation of progressive ideas and values in national mental health policy, and the government must commit to an evidence-based approach to mental health care.”

For now, ceiling fans — whilst a well-intentioned response to a real problem — will only have limited impact on India’s suicide crisis. The real solution? Sustained investment in mental health initiatives from an early age, and cultural change.

Nadalia sits his exam in days: he’s sanguine about his prospects. “If I don’t get in, it’s okay,” he shrugs. “Life will go on.” Meanwhile, Ashani will continue trying to sell his fans, one at a time if necessary. “My mission is to save lives,” he says.

Need help? Contact the Samaritans anytime on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland. For a list of international numbers, click here.

A vast majority of people who have made profits with cryptocurrency trading have not reported the wins to the tax authorities in the previous years. With the Bitcoin boom of late 2017 it is expected that Finns gained over ten times as much than in the previous year.

During 2017 the value of Bitcoin went from less than a thousand euros to around 15,000 euros. Since that the price has halved, but many finns managed to turn a profit from training Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrencies.

Capital gains made with cryptocurrency trading are taxed on the year they are traded for traditional currency like Euros or Dollars or real world goods. Profits are taxed as capital income, and the tax office in Finland has improved it's tracking of payments. The authorities are able to match money transfers and payments from anonymous Bitcoin-wallets.

All of the transaction data for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are stored in a public ledger known as Blockchains. The tax office has been admitted generous access to bank transfers and other data, which enables identifying people. By matching the transfers it is evident that in the past most citizens have not reported profits made with virtual currencies.

For tax year 2017 over 3,300 identified as obliged to file

Talking to Kauppalehti, a Finnish financial daily, inspector general Timo Puiro from the Finnish tax office states that they have identified over 3,300 finns that should pay tax for cryptocurrency trading. Taxes for 2017 should be filed latest by 15th of May, but for some the last date was set in April. Puiro says it is too early to calculate how much taxes were not paid.

The estimated gains by residents of Finland amounts to a hundred Million euros for 2017. Roughly 30 Million of this should be paid to the state in the form of capital tax. These numbers are ten times higher than they were in 2016.

Puiro hopes that citizens will report the taxes voluntarily. Those avoiding the taxes will need to pay them as back taxes, with possible raises. In addition if the sums are considerably high, unpaid cryptocurrency trading gains could be subject to criminal prosecution.

The Finnish tax authorities are in a leading position when it comes to cryptocurrency analytics worldwide. The Finnish tax authorities have provided consulting for organizations responsible for taxation in many countries. The old truth seems to stand: You can't avoid death or taxes.

Source: Verottaja odottaa jättipottia bitcoin-voitoista - yli 3300 suomalaista tunnistettu

Written by Janita on Friday April 20, 2018
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Many of today’s discussions around blockchain technology remind me of the classic Shimmer Floor Wax skit. According to Dan Aykroyd, Shimmer is a dessert topping. Gilda Radner claims that it is a floor wax, and Chevy Chase settles the debate and reveals that it actually is both! Some of the people that I talk to see blockchains as the foundation of a new monetary system and a way to facilitate international payments. Others see blockchains as a distributed ledger and immutable data source that can be applied to logistics, supply chain, land registration, crowdfunding, and other use cases. Either way, it is clear that there are a lot of intriguing possibilities and we are working to help our customers use this technology more effectively.

We are launching AWS Blockchain Templates today. These templates will let you launch an Ethereum (either public or private) or Hyperledger Fabric (private) network in a matter of minutes and with just a few clicks. The templates create and configure all of the AWS resources needed to get you going in a robust and scalable fashion.

Launching a Private Ethereum Network
The Ethereum template offers two launch options. The ecs option creates an Amazon ECS cluster within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and launches a set of Docker images in the cluster. The docker-local option also runs within a VPC, and launches the Docker images on EC2 instances. The template supports Ethereum mining, the EthStats and EthExplorer status pages, and a set of nodes that implement and respond to the Ethereum RPC protocol. Both options create and make use of a DynamoDB table for service discovery, along with Application Load Balancers for the status pages.

Here are the AWS Blockchain Templates for Ethereum:

I start by opening the CloudFormation Console in the desired region and clicking Create Stack:

I select Specify an Amazon S3 template URL, enter the URL of the template for the region, and click Next:

I give my stack a name:

Next, I enter the first set of parameters, including the network ID for the genesis block. I’ll stick with the default values for now:

I will also use the default values for the remaining network parameters:

Moving right along, I choose the container orchestration platform (ecs or docker-local, as I explained earlier) and the EC2 instance type for the container nodes:

Next, I choose my VPC and the subnets for the Ethereum network and the Application Load Balancer:

I configure my keypair, EC2 security group, IAM role, and instance profile ARN (full information on the required permissions can be found in the documentation):

The Instance Profile ARN can be found on the summary page for the role:

I confirm that I want to deploy EthStats and EthExplorer, choose the tag and version for the nested CloudFormation templates that are used by this one, and click Next to proceed:

On the next page I specify a tag for the resources that the stack will create, leave the other options as-is, and click Next:

I review all of the parameters and options, acknowledge that the stack might create IAM resources, and click Create to build my network:

The template makes use of three nested templates:

After all of the stacks have been created (mine took about 5 minutes), I can select JeffNet and click the Outputs tab to discover the links to EthStats and EthExplorer:

Here’s my EthStats:

And my EthExplorer:

If I am writing apps that make use of my private network to store and process smart contracts, I would use the EthJsonRpcUrl.

Stay Tuned
My colleagues are eager to get your feedback on these new templates and plan to add new versions of the frameworks as they become available.

— Jeff;

In Israel’s Negev Desert, a side road leads to a valley ringed by red, purple and brown cliffs. Now part of Timna National Park, this valley is famous for its jagged landscape carved by wind and water over many millennia. Tourists and geologists alike come here to admire rock formations shaped like giant mushrooms, elegant pillars and delicate arches.

It was mid-morning when I set off on a short hike, and the sun was already blazing hot. From a trailhead near the park’s famous coral-coloured rock formation known as the Arches, I ascended a small hill and within 10 minutes stood atop a plateau. From up here I could see the valley’s rugged terrain, with cliffs above and canyons below.

As amazing as the scenery was, the full story of this place – and the reason why people flocked to this harsh landscape in prehistoric times – can only be experienced by heading underground.

You may also be interested in:
• Buenos Aires’ mysterious secret tunnels
• An ancient world concealed underground
• The sinful city swallowed by the Earth

Timna National Park was once one of the centres of metal production in the ancient world; here, thousands of mining shafts and tunnels were painstakingly bored to harvest the copper embedded in the stone.

Specks of green and blue copper ore dotted the gravel-covered trail as I approached the park’s oldest mines, dug as early as 4500BC. Metal handrails help visitors navigate a few metres down a steep slope to enter the mine, a narrow passageway with ceilings so low I had to crawl on my hands and knees to avoid hitting my head. Beams of light shone into the tunnel from openings that have emerged over the years from erosion, exposing the vertical scores on the walls left by the stone tools used to carve the cavity into the Earth.

You can touch things left at Timna 3,000 and 4,000 years ago

“[Miners] worked in very harsh conditions in the desert, a place without water and really without anything,” said Dr Erez Ben-Yosef, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and director of the Central Timna Valley Project, an interdisciplinary research project about the region’s history of copper production.

This mine, and the others in the area, follow the horizontal turquoise veins of copper that snake through the ground south of the Dead Sea in both Israel and Jordan. Thousands of years ago, miners chiselled out this copper ore, carried it out of the mines, then heated it to extract a shiny metal that was used to make beads, pendants and other decorative items. It was among the earliest examples of people deriving metal from stone, Dr Ben-Yosef said, and thanks to the dry climate, Timna’s are among the world’s best-preserved ancient mines.

“You can see everything. You can touch things left at Timna 3,000 and 4,000 years ago,” he added.

Aside from mines like this, some flint tools and heaps of rock left from the smelting process, these early miners didn’t leave much behind. “We know very little about these first miners,” Dr Ben-Yosef said. “We don’t have names for them. We just know that they were local people working with very simple stone tools.”

The caverns and shafts throughout Timna National Park reveal thousands of years of mining history. Evidence has been found linking these mines to Ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom, which existed from the 16th through the early 11th Centuries BC. Copper from here enriched the series of Ramses pharaohs who used it for everything from weapons to jewellery. However, further evidence shows that mining here reached its peak several hundred years later. High-resolution radiocarbon dating of seeds and other organic matter left in the miners’ work camps indicates the mines were active between the 11th and 9th Centuries BC, lending credence to theories that Timna was the source of copper for the biblical King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.

And until recently, experts assumed the gruelling manual labour had been done by slaves. But archaeological findings over the last few years, including high-quality dyed fabrics preserved by the dry climate, indicate that the metalworkers were employed rather than enslaved. Remains of sheep and goat bones as well as date and olive pits also suggest that the workers ate a rich diet of foods not usually found in the desert.

By this time, people had learned how to shape the copper found in Timna’s mines into tools and weapons, and how to mix it with tin to create bronze, a much stronger material. Evidence of this early metalworking is on display in museums around the world. Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum has the largest collection of artefacts from Timna, including copper chisels used for mining and a bronze serpent found in a local temple.

“When you see the things they made, then you understand why all this work in the mines was worth it,” Dr Ben Yosef said.

The mines can be accessed during the park’s opening hours without a guide or any previous arrangements. While the cavern offered a cool respite from the heat, I was a relieved to reach the end. Climbing the ladder back to the desert’s scorched surface, it felt good to stand up straight again.

I continued on the trail to peer down a nearly 3,000-year-old precipice-like mine shaft, catching a glimpse of the niches scored by miners as they climbed in and out. A little way further along a dry desert streambed, entrances to dozens of mines looked like turquoise-striped pockmarks along the rocky walls. All around me, colourful ridges rose several storeys as if reaching for the fiery desert sun. The landscape was breathtaking, to say the least, but not nearly as fascinating as what some of the world’s earliest miners had left behind.

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A population of Indonesian ‘fish people’ have evolved extra large spleens that enable them to free dive to depths of more than 200 feet, scientists have discovered.

The genetic change discovered in the Bajau tribe is the first known example of a human adaptation to deep diving.

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For more than 1,000 years, the Bajau – known as ‘Sea Nomads’ – have wandered the seas of southern Asia in houseboats, catching fish by free diving with spears.

Now settled around the islands of Indonesia, they are famous for their extraordinary breath-holding ability.

Members of the tribe can dive up to 70 metres (230ft) aided by nothing more than a set of weights and a pair of wooden goggles.

The spleen plays a key role in the ‘human dive response’ that puts the body in survival mode when it is submerged under cold water for even brief amounts of time.

As the dive response kicks in, heart rate slows, blood is directed to the vital organs, and the spleen contracts to inject oxygenated red blood cells into the circulation.

Spleen contraction can boost oxygen levels in the body by 9%.

The new study found that the spleens of the Bajau people are 50% larger than those of their land-dwelling neighbours, the Saluan.

Lead scientist Melissa Ilardo, from Cambridge University, who embarked on the research as a PhD candidate, said: ‘There’s not a lot of information out there about human spleens in terms of physiology and genetics, but we know that deep diving seals, like the Weddell seal, have disproportionately large spleens.

‘I thought that if selection acted on the seals to give them larger spleens, it could potentially do the same in humans.’

Ms Ilardo spent several months in Jaya Bakti, Indonesia, taking genetic samples and conducting ultrasound scans of people from the Bajau and Saluan tribes.

The evidence showed that Bajau spleens were permanently enlarged, and did not get bigger simply as a response to diving.

DNA analysis showed that the Bajau have a gene called PDE10A that is lacking in the Saluan. The gene is thought to alter spleen size by adjusting thyroid hormone levels.

Ilado said: ‘We believe that in the Bajau they have an adaptation that increases thyroid hormone levels and therefore increases their spleen size.

‘It’s been shown in mice that thyroid hormones and spleen size are connected. If you genetically alter mice to have an absence of the thyroid hormone T4, their spleen size is drastically reduced, but this effect is actually reversible with an injection of T4.’

Because the Bajau do not dive competitively it is uncertain precisely how long they can remain under water. One of the tribe told Ms Ilardo that he had once dived for 13 minutes.

The study, published in the journal Cell, may help scientists to understand acute hypoxia, a condition in which body tissues experience a rapid loss of oxygen. Acute hypoxia is a leading cause of complications in emergency care.