A veteran JPMorgan Chase banker fumed over the financial giant’s policy requiring certain staffers to give six months’ notice before being allowed to leave for another job.
The Wall Street worker, who claims to earn around $400,000 annually in total compensation after accumulating 15 years of experience, griped that the lengthy notice period likely means a lucrative job offer from another company will be rescinded.
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“When I looked into the resignation process, I see that my notice period is 6 bloody months!!”
“I was in disbelief, I checked my offer letter and ‘Whoops there it is,’” the post continued.
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A spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase told The Post: “In line with other e-trading organizations, some of our algo trading technology employees have an extended notice period. This affects a very small portion – less than 100 – of our 57,000 technologists.”
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Workers at its India corporate offices said last year that the Wall Street giant was raising its notice period from 30 days for vice president and below to 60 days, according to eFinancialCareer.com.
Meanwhile, bankers at the executive director level saw their notice period bumped up to 90 days.
Mere weeks after achieving experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Universal Hydrogen has successfully taken its 40-passenger regional hydrogen electric plane to the skies. The aircraft took off from Washington state this morning and ascended to an altitude of 3,500 mean sea level (MSL) before safely landing, as you can see in the video below.
Universal Hydrogen Co. is a Southern California-based aviation company founded in 2020 by engineers with the mission of bringing zero-emission hydrogen electric-powered aviation to fruition.
In early February, we covered new milestones achieved using its Dash-300 flying test bed. The aircraft has the capability to eventually transport over 40 passengers using hydrogen fuel cells and electric powertrains and is promised to eventually become the largest of its kind to ever take to the skies.
The runway to today’s latest milestone began with the FAA experimental certification of the Dash-300, giving Universal Hydrogen permission to take off.
The Dash-300 flying test bed / Credit: Universal Hydrogen
Check out the largest hydrogen electric plane to ever fly
Universal Hydrogen is celebrating today following the first successful flight of the hydrogen electric plane this morning, which took off in Grant County, Washington, at 8:41 a.m. PST and flew for 15 minutes.
For this initial flight, one of the airplane’s engines was replaced with Universal Hydrogen’s fuel cell-electric powertrain. The other standard engine remained to ensure the safety of the plane and its pilot, former US Air Force test pilot Alex Kroll. Kroll spoke to the confidence achieved during flight:
During the second circuit over the airport, we were comfortable with the performance of the hydrogen powertrain, so we were able to throttle back the fossil fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power. The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A guy embezzled nearly $9 million by convincing investors he was turning cow poop into green energy—and then not building any of the machines at all.
On Monday, 66-year-old Raymond Brewer of Porterville, California pled guilty to charges that he’d defrauded investors. Court records show that Brewer stole $8,750,000 from investors between 2014 and 2019 with promises to build anaerobic digesters, or machines that can convert cow manure to methane gas that can then be sold as energy, on dairies in various counties in California and Idaho. But instead of actually building any of those digesters, Brewer spent it on stuff like a new house and new Dodge Ram pickup trucks.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of California, Brewer was a prolific scammer. He took potential investors on tours of dairies where he said he was going to build the digesters and sent faked documents where he’d signed agreements with those dairies. When investors asked how things were going or for updates on the construction of the digesters or how the digesters were running, Brewer sent over “fake construction schedules, fake invoices for project-related costs, fake power generation reports, fake RECs, and fake pictures,” as well as forged contracts with banks and fake international investors. He must have been great at Photoshop!
Part of the appeal of the scam was in what’s known as Renewable Energy Credits (REC), which are credits issued by the federal government signifying that renewable energy has been produced on a site; those credits can then be sold to companies looking to offset their fossil fuel emissions. Brewer told his investors that he’d get them 66% of all the profits from those credits.
Five years is a hell of a long time to promise folks money and not deliver—which is why the U.S. Attorney’s office has described Brewer’s setup as a “Ponzi” scheme, because he began repaying old investors with money he was scamming off of new ones. When investors began to get suspicious, the U.S. Attorneys’ office said, Brewer moved to Montana and assumed a new identity. He was finally arrested in 2020.
Some profiles for Brewer’s company, CH4 Energy, are still active on business directories like PitchBook and food waste resource site ReFED. The company was even the subject of a profile on its “work” in local paper Visalia Times-Delta in 2016 and was part of a story in the LA Times in 2013 on dairy farmers and renewable energy.
In the LA Times story, Brewer is quoted as talking about the reluctance of dairy farmers to install the digesters.
“Brewer said he tested his system in other states, such as Wisconsin and Idaho, before shopping it around with California dairy farmers, whom he said were very skeptical,” the LA Times wrote. “He eventually signed his first contract with [a farmer]—‘Talk about apprehensive,’ Brewer recalled. ‘That was a little bit of an understatement.’”
Our buddy Ray wasn’t totally bullshitting—pardon the pun—in peddling his ideas. Anaerobic digesters are real machines that do convert animal waste into energy, and millions of dollars in federal and state money have been spent on the technology. However, questions remain around just how “green” this energy is and whether it’s worth the investment.
Brewer will be sentenced in June and faces up to 20 years in prison.
obuaki Kobayashi, the trustee for the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, has announced that the deadline for repayment selection and registration of payee information for its creditors has been moved from Jan. 10 to Mar. 10.
According to Kobayashi, the change was made due to “various circumstances such as the progress by rehabilitation creditors in respect of the Selection and Registration.”
Mt. Gox was one of the leading Bitcoin exchanges in the early days of crypto but was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2014 after a supposed hack that led to the theft of 850,000 Bitcoin. Roughly 200,000 BTC has been recovered since the hack, and the repayment of Mt. Gox creditors has been a slow-motion development since the Civil Rehabilitation Plan was accepted by 99% of them on Oct. 20, 2021. As of July 6, 2022, the Mt. Gox trustee held close to 142,000 Bitcoins.
This latest announcement from Kobayashi means that the repayment to creditors will take even more time as the trustee looks to ensure that everyone who is owed funds can properly submit their claims.
Those who have yet to complete the necessary registration were encouraged to do so as soon as possible as rehabilitation creditors who do not complete their selection and registration by the new deadline will not be able to receive their repayment, the announcement said.
Some creditors may be required to bring the required documents to the head office of MtGox or a location designated by the Rehabilitation Trustee to receive repayment in Japanese yen.
According to the announcement, “The Rehabilitation Trustee will begin confirming the contents of your Selection and Registration, etc., after this point in time in order to make repayment as promptly as possible after March 10, 2023 (Japan time).”Creditors have the choice of receiving an early lump sum repayment, repayment for a portion of cryptocurrency rehabilitation claims in cryptocurrency, repayment by bank remittance, or repayment by remittance through a fund transfer service provider.
The new deadline is meant for those who have yet to complete the process while those that have already done so do not need to do anything further at this time. The update also requested that those who already completed the process abstain from making any revisions to their registration unless absolutely necessary to help make the confirmation process go as smoothly as possible.
The change in registration date also means that the repayment dates have been moved from their originally scheduled deadline of July 31 to Sept. 30 of this year. The release of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin remains a primary concern for many crypto traders, as some fear the release of a large number of tokens into the market will lead to a collapse in the price of Bitcoin.
“Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race,” reports the British newspaper the Times. Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle. Dahl’s biographer Matthew Dennison last night accused the publisher of “strong-arming readers into accepting a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.”
Meanwhile…
A New York Times opinion writer adds that “the changes to Dahl’s texts first began to appear more than a year ago without attracting any significant attention until now.”
Children’s book author Frank Cottrell-Boyce admits in the Guardian that “as a child I disliked Dahl intensely. I felt that his snobbery was directed at people like me and that his addiction to revenge was not good. But that was fine — I just moved along.”
But Cottrell-Boyce’s larger point is “The key to reading for pleasure is having a choice about what you read” — and that childhood readers faces greater threats. “The outgoing children’s laureate Cressida Cowell has spent the last few years fighting for her Life-changing Libraries campaign. It’s making a huge difference but it would have a been a lot easier if our media showed a fraction of the interest they showed in Roald Dahl’s vocabulary in our children.”
BlackLotus, a UEFI bootkit that’s sold on hacking forums for about $5,000, can now bypass Secure Boot, making it the first known malware to run on Windows systems even with the firmware security feature enabled.
Secure Boot is supposed to prevent devices from running unauthorized software on Microsoft machines. But by targeting UEFI the BlackLotus malware loads before anything else in the booting process, including the operating system and any security tools that could stop it.
Kaspersky’s lead security researcher Sergey Lozhkin first saw BlackLotus being sold on cybercrime marketplaces back in October 2022 and security specialists have been taking apart piece by piece ever since.
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BlackLotus exploits a more than one-year-old vulnerability, CVE-2022-21894, to bypass the secure boot process and establish persistence. Microsoft fixed this CVE in January 2022, but miscreants can still exploit it because the affected signed binaries have not been added to the UEFI revocation list, Smolár noted.
“BlackLotus takes advantage of this, bringing its own copies of legitimate – but vulnerable – binaries to the system in order to exploit the vulnerability,” he wrote.
Plus, a proof-of-concept exploit for this vulnerability has been publicly available since August 2022, so expect to see more cybercriminals using this issue for illicit purposes soon.
Making it even more difficult to detect: BlackLotus can disable several OS security tools including BitLocker, Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity (HVCI) and Windows Defender, and bypass User Account Control (UAC), according to the security shop.
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Once BlackLotus exploits CVE-2022-21894 and turns off the system’s security tools, it deploys a kernel driver and an HTTP downloader. The kernel driver, among other things, protects the bootkit files from removal, while the HTTP downloader communicates with the command-and-control server and executes payloads.
The bootkit research follows UEFI vulnerabilities in Lenovo laptops that ESET discovered last spring, which, among other things, allow attackers to disable secure boot.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, announced several significant changes today. First, it’s launching developer APIs for ChatGPT and the Whisper speech-transcription model. It also changed its terms of service to let developers opt out of using their data for improvements while adding a 30-day data retention policy.
The new ChatGPT API will use the same AI model (“gpt-3.5-turbo”) as the popular chatbot, allowing developers to add either unchanged or flavored versions of ChatGPT to their apps. Snap’s My AI is an early example, along with a new virtual tutor feature for the online study tool Quizlet and an upcoming Ask Instacart tool in the popular local-shopping app. However, the API won’t be limited to brand-specific bots mimicking ChatGPT; it can also power “non-chat” software experiences that could benefit from AI brains.
The ChatGPT API is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (about 750 words). Additionally, it’s offering a dedicated-capacity option for deep-pocketed developers who expect to use more tokens than the standard API allows. The new developer options join the consumer-facing ChatGPT Plus, a $20-per-month service launched in February.
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Whisper API is a hosted version of the open-source Whisper speech-to-text model it launched in September. “We released a model, but that actually was not enough to cause the whole developer ecosystem to build around it,” OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman toldTechCrunch on Tuesday. “The Whisper API is the same large model that you can get open source, but we’ve optimized to the extreme. It’s much, much faster and extremely convenient.” The transcription API will cost developers $0.006 per minute, enabling “robust” transcription in multiple languages and providing translation to English.
Finally, OpenAI revealed changes to its developer terms based on customer feedback about privacy and security concerns. Unless a developer opts in, the company will no longer use data submitted through the API for “service improvements” to train its AI models. Additionally, it’s adding a 30-day data retention policy while providing stricter retention options “depending on user needs” (likely meaning high-usage companies with budgets to match). Finally, it’s simplifying its terms surrounding data ownership, clarifying that users own the models’ input and output.
The company will also replace its pre-launch review process for developers with a mostly automated system. OpenAI justified the change by pointing out that “the overwhelming majority of apps were approved during the vetting process,” claiming its monitoring has “significantly improved.” “One of our biggest focuses has been figuring out, how do we become super friendly to developers?” Brockman said to TechCrunch. “Our mission is to really build a platform that others are able to build businesses on top of.”
Many cars claim to be a beast although just a few have a resume to back it up. This 1972 Rolls-Royce-ish plants its flag as “The Beast” so hard it’s right there on the name. This beige-on-beige-on-beige masterpiece is heading to auction to find a new home, and hopefully, one with a very long garage to contain its very long snout.
The Beast was the creation of John Dodd, who died last December at 90 years old. The automotive engineer and transmission maker constructed the car using a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine plucked from a military application [Note: from a Spitfire airplane] to power his Beast, all 27 liters and 12 cylinders of glory. The result was an “estimated” 750 horsepower, although the Beast hasn’t ever set foot on a dyno. What you see here isn’t the first Beast, either. Dodd bought the first Beast after he helped to craft a transmission for it, which burned on the way home from a trip in Sweden. The rebodied version is what you see here, and it’s longer than its predecessor if that’s at all possible.
This Beast once famously and litigiously wore a Rolls-Royce snout, which you can see has been removed and replaced with John Dodd’s initials after courts ruled against him. (It still says “Rolls-Royce” on the registration, so checkmate.) The interior is no less resplendent than Rollers of the time, although it’s far smaller than a car with a football-field-sized footprint should have. There are two doors, two seats—in beige no less—with a long cargo area. (So, technically a shooting brake?) There’s a sculpted dash that looks like 1971 vacuformed. It’d be hard to imagine airbags anywhere in the car—they may not be needed if the hood is technically one county ahead of the passengers—but it appears there’s some padding on the dash and a bank of switches with no clear indication of what any of them do.
The internals are absurd, albeit interesting. Behind the vainglorious Meteor V12 is a GM three-speed automatic that shifts through a heavy-duty Currie rear axle. A staggered wheel setup covers four-wheel disc brakes, which is good because the Beast managed 183 mph in a top-speed run in 1977. Just an observation: The five-lug wheels don’t inspire a lot of confidence for the power and speed, but I’m no expert.
But I can confidently spot a winner when I see one, and the Beast is one such winner. It was certifiably the most powerful car on the planet in 1977 and it can also be yours.
Drop a flat piece of paper and it will flutter and tumble through the air as it falls, but a well-fashioned paper airplane will glide smoothly. Although these structures look simple, their aerodynamics are surprisingly complex. Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences conducted a series of experiments involving paper airplanes to explore this transition and develop a mathematical model to predict flight stability, according to a March paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
“The study started with simple curiosity about what makes a good paper airplane and specifically what is needed for smooth gliding,” said co-author Leif Ristroph. “Answering such basic questions ended up being far from child’s play. We discovered that the aerodynamics of how paper airplanes keep level flight is really very different from the stability of conventional airplanes.”
Nobody knows who invented the first paper airplane, but China began making paper on a large scale around 500 BCE, with the emergence of origami and paper-folding as a popular art form between 460 and 390 BCE. Paper airplanes have long been studied as a means of learning more about the aerodynamics of flight. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci famously built a model plane out of parchment while dreaming up flying machines and used paper models to test his design for an ornithopter. In the 19th century, British engineer and inventor Sir George Cayley—sometimes called the “father of aviation”—studied the gliding performance of paper airplanes to design a glider capable of carrying a human.
An amusing “scientist playing with paper planes” anecdote comes from physicist Theodore von Kármán. In his 1967 memoir The Wind and Beyond, he recalled a formal 1924 banquet in Delft, The Netherlands, where fellow physicist Ludwig Prandtl constructed a paper airplane out of a menu to demonstrate the mechanics of flight to von Kármán’s sister, who was seated next to him. When he threw the paper plane, “It landed on the shirtfront of the French minister of education, much to the embarrassment of my sister and others at the banquet,” von Kármán wrote.
Enlarge/ Flight motions of paper airplanes with different center of mass locations.
NYU Applied Mathematics Laboratory
While scientists have clearly made great strides in aerodynamics—particularly about aircraft—Ristroph et al. noted that there was not a good mathematical model for predicting the simpler, subtler gliding flight of paper airplanes. It was already well-known that displacing the center of mass results in various flight trajectories, some more stable than others. “The key criterion of a successful glider is that the center of mass must be in the ‘just right’ place,” said Ristroph. “Good paper airplanes achieve this with the front edge folded over several times or by an added paper clip, which requires a little trial and error.”
He and his team verified this by test-flying various rectangular sheets of paper, changing the front weight by adding thin metallic tape to one edge. They found that an unweighted sheet tumbled end over end while descending left to right under the force of gravity. Adding a small weight to shift the center of mass slightly forward also produced a tumbling trajectory. Overall, they found that flyers with greater front-loading produced erratic trajectories full of swoops, climbs, flips, and dives.
The next step was to conduct more controlled and systematic experiments. Ristroph et al. decided to work with thin plastic plates “flying” through a large glass tank of water. The plates were laser-cut from an acrylic plastic sheet, along with two smaller “fins” embedded with lead weights to displace the center of mass, and they also serve as aerodynamic stabilizers. There were 17 plastic plates, each with a different center of mass. Each was released into the tank by sliding it down a short ramp, and the team recorded its free-flight motion through the water.
Enlarge/ Trajectories of plates falling through water, where the different colors represent different degrees of front weighting. Only the “just right” weight distribution leads to the smooth gliding shown in blue.
NYU Applied Mathematics Laboratory
They found the same dynamics played out. If the weight was centered, or nearly so, at the center of the wing, the plate would flutter and tumble erratically. Displace the center of mass too far toward one edge, and the plate would rapidly nosedive and crash. The proverbial “sweet spot” was placing the weight between those extremes. In that case, the aerodynamic force on the plane’s wing will push the wing back down if it moves upward, and push the wing back up if it moves downward. In other words, the center of pressure will vary with the angle of flight, thereby ensuring stability.
This differs substantially from conventional aircraft, which rely on airfoils—structures designed to generate lift. “The effect we found in paper airplanes does not happen for the traditional airfoils used as aircraft wings, whose center of pressure stays fixed in place across the angles that occur in flight,” said Ristroph. “The shifting of the center of pressure thus seems to be a unique property of thin, flat wings, and this ends up being the secret to the stable flight of paper airplanes. This is why airplanes need a separate tail wing as a stabilizer while a paper plane can get away with just a main wing that gives both lift and stability.”
The team also developed a mathematical model as a “flight simulator” to reproduce those motions. Ristroph et al. think their findings will prove useful in small-scale flight applications like drones or flying robots, which often require a more minimal design with no need for many extra flight surfaces, sensors, and controllers. The authors also note that the same strategy might be at work in winged plant seeds, some of which also exhibit stable gliding, with the seed serving as the payload to displace the center of mass. In fact, a 1987 study of the flying seeds of the gourd Alsomitra macrocarpa showed a center of mass and glide ratios consistent with the Ristroph group’s optimal gliding requirements.
