An experiment by Google has used mobile phones to map the ionosphere, improving GPS accuracy. CC-licensed photo by Mike Lewinski on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Location, location, location. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Google uses millions of phones to map Earth’s ionosphere and improve GPS • Nature
Elizabeth Gibney:
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For the first time, researchers have used real-time data from around 40 million mobile phones to map conditions in the ionosphere — a region of the upper atmosphere in which some of the air molecules are ionized. Such crowdsourced signals could improve satellite navigation, especially in swathes of the world where data are otherwise scarce, including Africa, South America and South Asia.
The proof-of-principle study, by a team at Google, was published in Nature on 13 November.
“It’s an amazing data set,” says Anthea Coster, an atmospheric physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It fills in the map a lot, in areas where we desperately need more information.”
Phone data could reduce GPS errors by 10–20% in some areas, and more in underserved regions, estimates Ningbo Wang, an atmospheric physicist at the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Even with adjustments, interference from the ionosphere remains a challenge, he says, especially during solar storms that trigger uneven conditions in the ionosphere. “The results presented are truly impressive.”
When the air is partly ionized, freely moving electrons slightly slow down the radio signals travelling to Earth from GPS and other navigation satellites. This can affect the nanosecond-precision timing that satellite navigation devices use to pinpoint their locations, with potentially serious impacts on aeroplane landings and autonomous vehicles.
Real-time maps of the density of these electrons are commonly used to correct for fluctuations in the ionosphere. Engineers create the maps using data from ground-based receiver stations, which can detect the arrival times of two different frequencies of radio waves received from the same satellite. Electrons in the ionosphere slow down low-frequency waves more than they do high-frequency ones, by a nanosecond or so. This difference reveals the density of the electrons the wave passed through on its way to a receiver.
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Nvidia posts record quarterly revenue • Axios
Hope King:
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Nvidia on Wednesday afternoon projected strong demand for its products in Q4, the first period to include sales of its new Blackwell AI chip.
It’s the latest sign that businesses continue to crave more computing power for emerging AI projects.
Sales for the current quarter are projected to reach $37.5bn, slightly above average Wall Street expectations of about $37bn.
Meeting that target would represent roughly 70% growth from a year ago’s $22.1bn. “Blackwell demand is staggering, and we are racing to scale supply to meet the incredible demand customers are placing on us,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told analysts Wednesday afternoon.
This is Nvidia’s first earnings report and call since the US presidential election. Some investors are already worried about the potential impact on Nvidia’s business if new tariffs or greater China export restrictions are put in place.
Nvidia’s outsized impact on the overall stock market means investor sentiment on the stock will spillover to other sectors in the days to come.
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Nvidia’s revenue exploded in summer of 2023, after years of noodling along fairly quietly making gamers and then cryptocoiners happy. Making shovels for the AI goldrush is good business.
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Robot manufacturer has 12 robots ‘kidnapped’ from showroom by another robot • Oddity Central
“Spooky”:
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Viral footage captured by CCTV cameras at a robotics company showroom shows 12 large robots being ‘kidnapped by another manufacturer’s robot that convinced them to “quit their jobs” and follow it.
For the past week, Chinese social media has been abuzz about a bizarre incident that reportedly occurred back in august at a robotics company showroom in Shanghai, but was only made public recently. Footage captured by the venue’s surveillance cameras shows a small robot making its way into the showroom at night and slowly rolling over to a bunch of larger robots before engaging in a dialogue with them. After asking them if they’re working overtime, the little robot manages to somehow pursuade two of the other robots to “come home” with it, and then the remaining 10 robots follow them. In the beginning, the video was deemed staged and amusing by most viewers, but then the Shanghai robotics company came out and admitted that its robots had indeed been “kidnapped” by a robot created by another manufacturer.
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There is video with this. I’m going to say it’s complete and utter junk and done as some sort of guerilla marketing. But this is probably going to get spread around, so let’s head it off at the pass.
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IMG_0001: all the YouTube videos iPhones sent untitled
Riley Walz:
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Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found five million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.
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From when the internet was not just young, but nascent. YouTube only started in 2005.
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The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled • Rest of World
Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom:
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A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet — or roughly 57% of the world’s population.
Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers.
That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.
…In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet — 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So it’s no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed.
But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan — where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.
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All the memes they’re missing! Oh, the humanity!
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The cost of Her • Tomasz Tunguz
Tunguz is a venture capitalist:
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What it cost to have an assistant with you like in the movie Her?
The cost of using AI has dropped precipitously, an order of magnitude every year.
If the average American picks up their phone 144 times per day & engages with an assistant, each time for four interactions every day of a month, an assistant like Her would cost about 78 cents in inference cost.1
I’m not taking into account any of the additional costs associated with delivering such a product. Assuming a commercial vendor would 10x the price, it’s still $7 per month, less than half of a Netflix subscription.
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But but but: what sort of quality of Her would it be? Possibly it’s time to rewatch the film and be reminded of the qualities that that software had (apart from Scarlet Johansson’s voice, of course).
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Danish military says it’s staying close to Chinese ship after data cable breaches • Reuters
Johan Ahlander:
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The Danish military said on Wednesday that it was staying close to a Chinese ship currently sitting idle in Danish waters, days after two fibre-optic data telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea were severed.
Chinese bulk carrier Yi Peng 3 was anchored in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden on Wednesday, with a Danish navy patrol ship at anchor nearby, MarineTraffic vessel tracking data showed. “The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3,” the military said in a post on social media X, adding it had no further comments.
It is quite rare for Denmark’s military to comment publicly on individual vessels travelling in Danish waters. It did not mention the cable breaches or say why it was staying with the ship. Swedish police later told news agency TT they were also interested in the Yi Peng 3, adding there might be other vessels of interest to Sweden’s investigation.
The Chinese ship left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15 and was in the areas where the cable damages occurred, according to traffic data, which showed other ships to have been in the areas too.
One cable running between Sweden and Lithuania was cut on Sunday and another one between Finland and Germany was severed less than 24 hours later on Monday.The breaches happened in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone and Swedish prosecutors started a preliminary investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of possible sabotage. Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told Reuters on Tuesday that the country’s armed forces and coastguard had picked up ship movements that corresponded with the interruption of two telecoms cables in the Baltic Sea.
…European governments accused Russia on Tuesday of escalating hybrid attacks on Ukraine’s Western allies, but stopped short of directly accusing Russia of destroying the cables.
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Probably wise that they stopped short. Unlike the ship. Badum-tish.
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The US response to bird flu is not reassuring the world • The New York Times
Tulio de Oliveira is the director of the Center for Epidemic Response and Innovation in South Africa:
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As a virus scientist in South Africa, I’ve been watching with dread as H5N1 bird flu spreads among animals in the United States. The pathogen poses a serious pandemic threat and has been detected in over 500 dairy herds in 15 states — which is probably an undercount. And yet the U.S. response appears inadequate and slow, with too few genomic sequences of H5N1 cases in farm animals made publicly available for scientific review.
Failure to control H5N1 among American livestock could have global consequences, and this demands urgent attention. The United States has done little to reassure the world that it has the outbreak contained.
The recent infection of a pig at a farm in Oregon is especially concerning, as pigs are known to be mixing bowls for influenza viruses. Pigs can be infected by both avian and human influenza viruses, creating a risk for the viruses to exchange genetic material and potentially speed up adaptation for human transmission. The H1N1 pandemic in 2009 was created and spread initially by pigs.
Beyond the risks to its citizens (there are over 45 cases of people in the United States getting the virus in 2024), the United States should remember that the country where a pandemic emerges can be accused of not doing enough to control it. We still hear how China did not do enough to stop the Covid-19 pandemic. None of us would want a new pathogen labeled “the American virus,” as this could be very damaging for the United States’ reputation and economy.
The United States should learn from how the global south responds to infectious diseases. Those of us working in the region have a good track record of responding to epidemics and emerging pandemics and can help the United States identify new virus strains and offer insights into how to control H5N1. This knowledge has not come easily or without suffering; it has developed from decades of dealing with deadly diseases. We’ve learned one simple lesson: you need to learn your enemy as quickly as possible in order to fight it.
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Watching brief! Also perhaps worrying brief, because it’s hard to see the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) becoming more effective in a Trump administration. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The US Patent and Trademark Office banned staff from using generative AI • WIRED
Reece Rogers:
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The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit “bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior,” according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is “committed to pursuing innovation within our agency” but are still “working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way.”
Paul Fucito, press secretary for the USPTO, clarified to WIRED that employees can use “state-of-the-art generative AI models” at work—but only inside the agency’s internal testing environment. “Innovators from across the USPTO are now using the AI Lab to better understand generative AI’s capabilities and limitations and to prototype AI-powered solutions to critical business needs,” Fucito wrote in an email.
Outside of the testing environment, USPTO staff are barred from relying on AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude for work tasks. The guidance memo from last year also prohibits the use of any outputs from the tools, including images and videos generated by AI. But Patent Office employees can use some approved AI programs, such as those within the agency’s own public database for looking up registered patents and patent applications. Earlier this year, the USPTO approved a $75m contract with Accenture Federal Services to update its patent database with enhanced AI-powered search features.
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Perhaps AI search will stumble on the real perpetual motion machine lost in the applications. And the working cold fusion machine!
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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