DoNotPay, which describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” has been accused of practicing law without a license.
It’s facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm Edelson on March 3 and published Thursday on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco.
The complaint argues: “Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm. DoNotPay does not have a law degree, is not barred in any jurisdiction, and is not supervised by any lawyer.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Jonathan Faridian, who said he’d used DoNotPay to draft various legal documents including demand letters, a small claims court filing, and a job discrimination complaint.
[…]
Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay, said on Twitter that the claims had “no merit” and pledged to fight the lawsuit.
He said DoNotPay was “not going to be bullied by America’s richest class action lawyer” in a reference to Edelson founder Jay Edelson.
Browder said he’d been inspired to set up DoNotPay in 2015 to take on lawyers such as Edelson.
“Time and time again the only people that win are the lawyers. So I wanted to do something about it, building the DoNotPay robot lawyer to empower consumers to take on corporations on their own,” he said.
[…]
DoNotPay grabbed attention earlier this year after Browder said it planned to use its artificial intelligence chatbot to advise a defendant facing traffic court. This plan was postponed after Browder said said he’d received “threats from State Bar prosecutors” and feared a jail sentence.
Chronic pain patients were implanted with “dummy” pieces of plastic and told it would ease their pain, according to an indictment charging the former CEO of the firm that made the fake devices with fraud.
Laura Perryman, the former CEO of Stimwave LLC, was arrested in Florida on Thursday. According to an FBI press release, Perryman was indicted “in connection with a scheme to create and sell a non-functioning dummy medical device for implantation into patients suffering from chronic pain, resulting in millions of dollars in losses to federal healthcare programs.” According to the indictment, patients underwent unnecessary implanting procedures as a result of the fraud.
Perryman was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and health care fraud, and one count of healthcare fraud. Stimwave received FDA approval in 2014, according to Engadget, and was positioned as an alternative to opioids for pain relief.
[…]
The Stimwave “Pink Stylet” system consisted of an implantable electrode array for stimulating the target nerve, a battery worn externally that powered it, and a separate, 9-inch long implantable receiver. When doctors told Stimwave that the long receiver was difficult to place in some patients, Perryman allegedly created the “White Stylet,” a receiver that doctors could cut to be smaller and easier to implant—but was actually just a piece of plastic that did nothing.
“To perpetuate the lie that the White Stylet was functional, Perryman oversaw training that suggested to doctors that the White Stylet was a ‘receiver,’ when, in fact, it was made entirely of plastic, contained no copper, and therefore had no conductivity,” the FBI stated. “In addition, Perryman directed other Stimwave employees to vouch for the efficacy of the White Stylet, when she knew that the White Stylet was actually non-functional.”
Stimwave charged doctors and medical providers approximately $16,000 for the device, which medical insurance providers, including Medicare, would reimburse the doctors’ offices for.
[…]
“As a result of her illegal actions, not only did patients undergo unnecessary implanting procedures, but Medicare was defrauded of millions of dollars,” FBI Assistant Director Michael J. Driscoll said.
Cerebral has revealed it shared the private health information, including mental health assessments, of more than 3.1 million patients in the United States with advertisers and social media giants like Facebook, Google and TikTok.
The telehealth startup, which exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic after rolling lockdowns and a surge in online-only virtual health services, disclosed the security lapse [This is no security lapse! This is blatant greed served by peddling people’s personal information!] in a filing with the federal government that it shared patients’ personal and health information who used the app to search for therapy or other mental health care services.
Cerebral said that it collected and shared names, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, IP addresses and other demographics, as well as data collected from Cerebral’s online mental health self-assessment, which may have also included the services that the patient selected, assessment responses and other associated health information.
If an individual created a Cerebral account, the information disclosed may have included name, phone number, email address, date of birth, IP address, Cerebral client ID number, and other demographic or information. If, in addition to creating a Cerebral account, an individual also completed any portion of Cerebral’s online mental health self-assessment, the information disclosed may also have included the service the individual selected, assessment responses, and certain associated health information.
If, in addition to creating a Cerebral account and completing Cerebral’s online mental health self-assessment, an individual also purchased a subscription plan from Cerebral, the information disclosed may also have included subscription plan type, appointment dates and other booking information, treatment, and other clinical information, health insurance/pharmacy benefit information (for example, plan name and group/member numbers), and insurance co-pay amount.
Cerebral was sharing patients’ data with tech giants in real-time by way of trackers and other data-collecting code that the startup embedded within its apps. Tech companies and advertisers, like Google, Facebook and TikTok, allow developers to include snippets of their custom-built code, which allows the developers to share information about their app users’ activity with the tech giants, often under the guise of analytics but also for advertising.
But users often have no idea that they are opting-in to this tracking simply by accepting the app’s terms of use and privacy policies, which many people don’t read.
Cerebral said in its notice to customers — buried at the bottom of its website — that the data collection and sharing has been going on since October 2019 when the startup was founded. The startup said it has removed the tracking code from its apps. While not mentioned, the tech giants are under no obligations to delete the data that Cerebral shared with them.
Because of how Cerebral handles confidential patient data, it’s covered under the U.S. health privacy law known as HIPAA. According to a list of health-related security lapses under investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees and enforces HIPAA, Cerebral’s data lapse is the second-largest breach of health data in 2023.
Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air.
The research team, led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ph.D. student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analyzed a hydrogen-consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium.
[…]
In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”
The researchers used several cutting-edge methods to reveal the molecular blueprint of atmospheric hydrogen oxidation. They used advanced microscopy (cryo-EM) to determine its atomic structure and electrical pathways, pushing boundaries to produce the most resolved enzyme structure reported by this method to date. They also used a technique called electrochemistry to demonstrate the purified enzyme creates electricity at minute hydrogen concentrations.
Laboratory work performed by Kropp shows that it is possible to store purified Huc for long periods. “It is astonishingly stable. It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 degrees celsius, and it retains its power to generate energy,” Kropp said. “This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments. ”
Huc is a “natural battery” that produces a sustained electrical current from air or added hydrogen. While this research is at an early stage, the discovery of Huc has considerable potential to develop small air-powered devices, for example as an alternative to solar-powered devices.
The bacteria that produce enzymes like Huc are common and can be grown in large quantities, meaning we have access to a sustainable source of the enzyme. Dr. Grinter says that a key objective for future work is to scale up Huc production. “Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy.”
[…] Starting next week, the company will begin rolling out a public experiment that will augment Clyde, the built-in bot Discord employs to notify users of errors and respond to their slash commands, with conversational capabilities. Judging from the demo it showed off, Discord envisions people turning to Clyde for information they would have obtained from Google in the past. For instance, you might ask the chatbot for the local time in the place where someone on your server lives to decide if it would be appropriate to message them. You can invoke Clyde at any time, including in private conversations among your friends, by typing @Clyde.
Discord
Discord is quick to note Clyde is programmed not to bother you and your friends. Admins can also disable the chatbot if they don’t want to use the feature on their server. The first time you activate Clyde, Discord will display an opt-in prompt. For users worried about privacy, Anjney Midha, Discord’s head of platform ecosystem, told Engadget the company is not sharing user data with OpenAI to assist the startup in training its machine learning models.
Separate from Clyde, Discord is using OpenAI’s technology to enhance AutoMod, the automated content moderation tool the company introduced last June. As a refresher, server admins and moderators can configure AutoMod to automatically detect and block inappropriate messages before they’re posted by creating a list of words and phrases they don’t want to see. In the nine months since it began rolling out AutoMod, Discord says the feature has blocked more than 45 million unwanted messages.
Moving forward, the tool will use large language models to interpret and apply server rules. In practice, this should make AutoMod capable of spotting and taking action against people who attempt to go against a community’s norms and expectations. In one demo, Discord showed AutoMod taking action against someone who tried to skirt a server rule against self-promotion by writing their message in a different language. In that instance, AutoMod wasn’t preprogrammed to watch for a specific word or phrase, but it was able to use context to infer that there was a potential infraction.
[…]
Discord is also using OpenAI tech to power a feature that everyone should find useful: Conversation Summaries. If you’ve ever joined a large server only to immediately feel like you can’t keep up with some of its more active members, this feature promises to solve one of Discord’s longstanding pain points. When it arrives in a limited number of servers next week, the feature will begin creating bundles designed to provide you with an overview of chats you may have missed while away from the app. Each bundle will include a title, a summary of what was said and any images that were shared, as well as a log of who took part. You won’t need to endlessly scroll to try and piece together something you missed.
It can feel like Discord is just another tech firm up in the generative AI craze, but Midha wants users to know machine learning has been part of the Discord identity for a while. Every month, more than 30 million people use AI applications through the platform, and almost 3 million servers include at least one AI experience. On GitHub, many machine learning projects feature links to Discord servers, a fact Midha attributes to Discord being a natural place for those conversations to start.
[…] In the latest advance in nano- and micro-architected materials, engineers at Caltech have developed a new material made from numerous interconnected microscale knots.
The knots make the material far tougher than identically structured but unknotted materials: they absorb more energy and are able to deform more while still being able to return to their original shape undamaged. These new knotted materials may find applications in biomedicine as well as in aerospace applications due to their durability, possible biocompatibility, and extreme deformability.
[…]
Each knot is around 70 micrometers in height and width, and each fiber has a radius of around 1.7 micrometers (around one-hundredth the radius of a human hair). While these are not the smallest knots ever made—in 2017 chemists tied a knot made from an individual strand of atoms—this does represent the first time that a material composed of numerous knots at this scale has ever been created. Further, it demonstrates the potential value of including these nanoscale knots in a material—for example, for suturing or tethering in biomedicine.
The knotted materials, which were created out of polymers, exhibit a tensile toughness that far surpasses materials that are unknotted but otherwise structurally identical, including ones where individual strands are interwoven instead of knotted. When compared to their unknotted counterparts, the knotted materials absorb 92 percent more energy and require more than twice the amount of strain to snap when pulled.
The knots were not tied but rather manufactured in a knotted state by using advanced high-resolution 3D lithography capable of producing structures in the nanoscale. The samples detailed in the Science Advancespaper contain simple knots—an overhand knot with an extra twist that provides additional friction to absorb additional energy while the material is stretched. In the future, the team plans to explore materials constructed from more complex knots.
[…]
More information: Widianto P. Moestopo et al, Knots are not for naught: Design, properties, and topology of hierarchical intertwined microarchitected materials, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ade6725
[…] An interdisciplinary team of scientists have released a complete reconstruction and analysis of a larval fruit fly’s brain, published Thursday in the journal Science. The resulting map, or connectome, as its called in neuroscience, includes each one of the 3,016 neurons and 548,000 of the synapses running between neurons that make up the baby fly’s entire central nervous system. The connectome includes both of the larva’s brain lobes, as well as the nerve cord.
[…]
It is the most complete insect brain map ever constructed and the most intricate entire connectome of any animal ever published. In short: it’s a game changer.
For some, it represents a paradigm shift in the field of neuroscience. Fruit flies are model organisms, and many neural structures and pathways are thought to be conserved across evolution. What’s true for maggots might well be true for other insects, mice, or even humans.
[…]
this new connectome is like going from a blurry satellite view to a crisp city street map. On the block-by-block array of an insect’s cortex, “now we know where every 7-11 and every, you know, Target [store] is,” Mosca said.
To complete the connectome, a group of Cambridge University scientists spent 12 years focusing in on the brain of a single, 6-hour-old female fruit fly larva. The organ, approximately 170 by 160 by 70 micrometers in size, is truly teeny—within an order of magnitude of things too small to see with a naked eye. Yet, the researchers were able to use electron microscopy to visually cut it into thousands of slices, only nanometers thick. Imaging just one of the neurons took a day, on average. From there, once the physical map of the neurons, or “brain volume,” was complete, the analysis began.
Along with computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University, the Cambridge neuroscientists assessed and categorized the neurons and synapses they’d found. The JHU researchers fine-tuned a computer program for this exact application in order to determine cell and synapse types, patterns within the brain connections, and to chart some function onto the larva connectome—based on previous neuroscience studies of behavior and sensory systems.
They found many surprises. For one, the larval fly connectome showed numerous neural pathways that zigzagged between hemispheres, demonstrating just how integrated both sides of the brain are and how nuanced signal processing can be, said Michael Winding, one of the study’s lead researchers and a Cambridge University neuroscientist, in a video call. “I never thought anything would look like that,” Winding said.
[…]
Fascinatingly, these recurrent structures mapped from an actual brain appear to closely match the architecture of some artificial intelligence models (called residual neural networks), with nested pathways allowing for different levels of complexity, Zlatic noted.
[…]
Not only was the revealed neural structure layered, but the neurons themselves appear to be multi-faceted. Sensory cells connected across modalities—visual, smell, and other inputs crossed and interacted en route to output cells, explained Zlatic. “This brain does a huge amount of multi-sensory integration…which is computationally a very powerful thing,” she added.
Then there were the types and relative quantities of cell-to-cell connections. In neuroscience, the classic “canonical” type of synapse runs from an axon to a dendrite. Yet, within the mapped larval fly brain, that only accounted for about two-thirds of the connections, Winding and Zlatic said. Axons linked to axons, dendrites to dendrites, and dendrites to axons. Scientists have known these sorts of connections exist in animal nervous systems, but the scope went far beyond what they expected. “Given the breadth of these connections, they must be important for brain computation,” Winding noted. We just don’t know exactly how.
Health data and other personal information of members of Congress and staff were stolen during a breach of servers run by DC Health Care Link and are now up for sale on the dark web.
The FBI is investigating the intrusion, which came to light Wednesday after Catherine Szpindor, the House of Representatives’ chief administrative officer, sent a letter to House members telling them of the incident. Szpindor wrote that she was alerted to the hack by the FBI and US Capitol Police.
DC Health Link is the online marketplace for the Affordable Care Act that administers the healthcare plans for members of Congress as well as their family and staff.
Szpindor called the incident “a significant data breach” that exposed the personal identifiable information (PII) of thousands of DC Health Link employees and warned the Representatives that their data may have been compromised.
“Currently, I do not know the size and scope of the breach,” she wrote, adding the FBI informed her that account information and PII of “hundreds” of House and staff members were stolen. Once Szpindor has a list of the data taken, she will directly contact those people affected.
[…]
Thousands of House Members and employees from across the United States have enrolled in health insurance through DC Health Link for themselves and their families since 2014,” McCarthy and Jeffries wrote. “The size and scope of impacted House customers could be extraordinary.”
Szpindor in her letter recommended House members consider freezing their credit at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion until the breadth of the breach is known, particularly which representatives and staff members had their data compromised.
According to CNBC, the Senate may also have been impacted by the breach, with an email sent to offices in that side of Congress saying the Senate at Arms was told of the breach from law enforcement and the “data included the full names, date of enrollment, relationship (self, spouse, child), and email address, but no other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).”
The FBI in a terse statement to the media said it was “aware of this incident and is assisting. This is an ongoing investigation.” Capitol Police said they were working with the FBI.
[…]
At least some of the PII taken during the breach found its way onto a dark web marketplace. In their letter, McCarthy and Jeffries noted the FBI was able to buy the PII and other enrollee information that was breached. The information included names of spouses and dependent children, Social Security numbers, and home addresses.
CNBC said a post on a dark web site put up for sale the data of 170,000 Health Link members and posted data from 11 users as a sample.
[…]
Organizations in the healthcare field have come under increasing attacks in recent years, which is unsurprising given the vast amounts of PII and health data – from medical records to Social Security numbers – they hold on doctors, staff, and patients.
Cybersecurity firm Check Point in a report said the number of cyberattacks around the world jumped 38 percent year-over-year in 2022 and that healthcare, education and research, and government were the top three targeted sectors
Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction.
The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalising prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future.
“This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes from male cells,” said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm.
[…]
The technique could also be applied to treat severe forms of infertility, including women with Turner’s syndrome, in whom one copy of the X chromosome is missing or partly missing, and Hayashi said this application was the primary motivation for the research.
[…]
The study, which has been submitted for publication in a leading journal, relied on a sequence of intricate steps to transform a skin cell, carrying the male XY chromosome combination, into an egg, with the female XX version.
Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes.
“The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome,” said Hayashi. “We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome.”
Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilised with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups. The efficiency of about 1% was lower than the efficiency achieved with normal female-derived eggs, where about 5% of embryos went on to produce a live birth.
The baby mice appeared healthy, had a normal lifespan, and went on to have offspring as adults. “They look OK, they look to be growing normally, they become fathers,” said Hayashi.
He and colleagues are now attempting to replicate the creation of lab-grown eggs using human cells.
Back in September 2021 Techdirt covered an outrageous legal attack by Sony Music on Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform. Quad9 is part of the Internet’s plumbing: it converts domain names to numerical IP addresses. It is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit organization. Sony Music says that Quad9 is implicated in alleged copyright infringement on the sites it resolves. That’s clearly ridiculous, but unfortunately the Regional Court of Hamburg agreed with Sony Music’s argument, and issued an interim injunction against Quad9. The German Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. or “GFF”) summarizes the court’s thinking:
In its interim injunction the Regional Court of Hamburg asserts a claim against Quad9 based on the principles of the German legal concept of “Stoererhaftung” (interferer liability), on the grounds that Quad9 makes a contribution to a copyright infringement that gives rise to liability, in that Quad9 resolves the domain name of website A into the associated IP address. The German interferer liability has been criticized for years because of its excessive application to Internet cases. German lawmakers explicitly abolished interferer liability for access providers with the 2017 amendment to the German Telemedia Act (TMG), primarily to protect WIFI operators from being held liable for costs as interferers.
As that indicates, this is a case of a law that is a poor fit for modern technology. Just as the liability no longer applies to WIFI operators, who are simply providing Internet access, so the German law should also not catch DNS resolvers like Quad9. The GFF post notes that Quad9 has appealed to the Hamburg Higher Regional Court against the lower court’s decision. Unfortunately, another regional court has just handed down a similar ruling against the company, reported here by Heise Online (translation by DeepL):
the Leipzig Regional Court has sentenced the Zurich-based DNS service Quad9. On pain of an administrative fine of up to 250,000 euros or up to 2 years’ imprisonment, the small resolver operator was prohibited from translating two related domains into the corresponding IP addresses. Via these domains, users can find the tracks of a Sony music album offered via Shareplace.org.
The GFF has already announced that it will be appealing along with Quad9 to the Dresden Higher Regional Court against this new ruling. It says that the Leipzig Regional Court has made “a glaring error of judgment”, and explains:
Let’s hope so. If it isn’t, we can expect companies providing the Internet’s basic infrastructure in the EU to be bombarded with demands from the copyright industry and others for domains to be excluded from DNS resolution. The likely result is that perfectly legal sites and their holdings will be ghosted by DNS companies, which will prefer to err on the side of caution rather than risk becoming the next Quad9.
Google’s finally rolling back its unpopular decree against any kinds of profanity in videos, making it harder for any creators used to offering colorful sailor’s speech in videos from monetizing content on behalf of its beloved ad partners. The only thing is, Google still seems to think the “f-word” is excessively harsh language, so sorry Samuel L. Jackson, those motha-[redacted] snakes are still liable for less ad dollars on this motha-[redacted] plane.
On Tuesday, Google updated its support page to offer up an olive branch to crass creators upset that their potty mouths were resulting in their videos being demonetized. Now, the company clarified that use of “moderate” profanity at any time in a video is now eligible for ad revenue.
However, the company seemed to be antagonistic to “stronger profanity” like “the f-word,” AKA “fuck.” You can’t say “fuck” in the first seven seconds or repeatedly throughout a video or else you will receive “limited ads.” Putting words like “fuck” into a title or thumbnail will result in no ad content.
What is allowed are words like “hell” or “damn” in a title or thumbnail. Words like “bitch,” “douchebag,” “asshole,” and “shit” are considered “moderate profanity, so that’s fine to use frequently in a video. But “fuck,” dear god, will hurt advertiser’s poor virgin ears. YouTube has been extremely sensitive to what its advertisers are saying. For instance the platform came close to pulling big money-making ads over creepy pasta content during the “Elsagate” scandal.
The changes also impacted videos which used music tracks in the background. YouTube is now saying any use of “moderate” or “strong” profanity in background music is eligible for full ad revenue.
Back in November, YouTube changed its creator monetization policy, calling it guidelines for “advertiser-friendly content.” The company decreed that any video with a thumbnail or title containing obscene language or “adult material” wouldn’t receive any ad revenue. YouTube also said it would demonetize violent content such as dead bodies without context, or virtual violence directed at a “real, named person.” Fair enough, but then YouTube said it would demonetize any video which used profanity “in the first eight seconds of the video.”
Reach, the owner of the UK’s Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues.
Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city.
Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they’re published online.
“We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial,” he said, according to The Guardian. “It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor.”
“There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content,” Mullen admitted. “The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written.”
Mullen’s comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.
Reach’s latest financial results, released on Tuesday, show total revenues for 2022 were £601.4 million ($711.6 million) – a decrease of 2.3 percent compared to the year before. Operating profit plunged 27.4 percent to £106.1 million ($125 million). In a bid to make up for losses, the publicly traded company is focused on cutting operating costs by up to six percent this year.
“The current trading environment remains challenging and we expect this to continue in 2023, with sustained inflation and suppressed market demand for digital advertising. Although input costs remain elevated, we are confident that our cost action plan will enable us to deliver a 5–6 percent like for like reduction in our operating cost base for FY23,” Reach’s full-year report read [PDF].
The Register has asked London-based Reach for further comment. (A few of us vultures once worked for what is now Reach, previously known as Trinity Mirror, an empire built from absorbing hundreds of titles around Britain.)
Reach isn’t the only publisher rolling out AI-generated articles while reducing its count of human reporters. CNET owner Red Ventures laid off scribes last week and has promised to double down on machine-written content despite complaints that those articles contained errors and plagiarism.
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed has produced quizzes with the help of ChatGPT, and Arena Group published botched health-related articles for Men’s Health. Both publishers have also axed employees – in December 2022 and February 2023, respectively.
Recently I went on a liveaboard with some extremely experienced divers, most of which had 400 or more dives logged. One of my problems with diving is that I am an extremely slow equalizer, which means that I have to descend extremely slowly, especially at around 5m and again at 10m depth. Another problem I have is that my ears tend to fill up with water after the dive and it takes some time to get rid of the water.
Getting rid of water
To get rid of the water, most sites will tell you to use ear drops (an alcohol / vinegar mix), pull on your earlobe, use a warm compress, inhale steam to open the sinusses, use a hot air dryer at least 10cm from your ears.
Methods to equalize
Most sites will tell you about the valsalva maneuver – which many people tend to do wrong because they blow too hard – or to swallow in order to clear your ears and equalize. For more and better ways to equalise, read this DAN article with 6 methods to equalize. Divebuddies4life has this article as well:
VOLUNTARY TUBAL OPENING | Tense Your Throat and Push Your Jaw Forward
Tense the muscles of the soft palate and the throat while pushing the jaw forward and down as if starting to yawn. These muscles pull the Eustachian tubes open. This requires a lot of practice, but some divers can learn to control those muscles and hold their tubes open for continuous equalization.
TOYNBEE MANEUVER | Pinch Your Nose and Swallow
With your nostrils pinched or blocked against your mask skirt, swallow. Swallowing pulls open your Eustachian tubes while the movement of your tongue, with your nose closed, compresses air against them.
FRENZEL MANEUVER | Pinch Your Nose and Make the Sound of the Letter “K”
Close your nostrils, and close the back of your throat as if straining to lift a weight. Then make the sound of the letter “K.” This forces the back of your tongue upward, compressing air against the openings of your Eustachian tubes.
LOWRY TECHNIQUE | Pinch Your Nose, Blow and Swallow
A combination of Valsalva and Toynbee: while closing your nostrils, blow and swallow at the same time.
EDMONDS TECHNIQUE | Pinch Your Nose and Blow and Push Your Jaw Forward
While tensing the soft palate (the soft tissue at the back of the roof of your mouth) and throat muscles and pushing the jaw forward and down, do a Valsalva maneuver.
Methods without names
An extra way to equalize is to close one nostril by pressing your finger on the side of the nose and then blowing out through the other one. Do this to the other nostril and after this equalising through any of the outlined techniques becomes much easier.
Before the dive itself there is a freediving method to empty your sinusses: pretend there is a mosquito on the tip of your nose and try to blow it off by blowing through your nose (softly!) for a minute. After a minute, pause for a minute. Repeat so that you have blown out three times. Keep some toilet paper handy, you may be surprised how much snot comes out! After having done this my descent times inproved incredibly rapidly.
Prevention
This is the best form of action and this collection of divers had extremely good tips to help.
Headgear
First is headgear – wear a (2mm if warm water, 7mm if cold water) hoodie or even just a buff scarf: cover your ears. This means a lot less water enters your ears and make equalising much easier. Or you can get an IST Sports dive mask with over ear protection – also saving you from ear infections! The IST Sports Pro Ear Mask ME80 is surprisingly affordable.
Surfears also has Diving ear plugs which are connected by a cable so you can pull them out – don’t just put earplugs in when diving as the pressure will put them into your head and when you ascend you won’t be able to pull them out!
Medication / Drugs
Second is Sudofed. This comes in tablets (Sudafed Sinus Max Strength capsules with paracetamol, caffeine and phenylephrine) and a nose spray (blocked nose, Xylometazoline and hydrochloride). Take the tablets daily and spray 2 shots of nose spray into each nostril before the dive (yes, this is a lot more than the daily recommended intake if you dive four times on a day, but it’s over a short period of time and prevention here is worth it).
Third also helps is to suck on a few SMINTS – this exercises the jaw muscles and prepares your jaw for equalzing during the dive. It also helps against dry mouth and improves the taste due to the rubber of the regulator. Exercising the jaw muscles by chewing, sucking and moving your jaw around before the dive helps to equalise.
Wax buildup in your ears
To get rid of wax buildup in your ear, which may hinder equalization, take a syringe, fill it with slightly warm water and spray it directly into your ear at full force. You will very probably have to repeat this several (many!) times. Do it over a sink, as wax will come out first in tiny bits and then potentially as a clump. It’s messy. It sounds scary, but it works wonders. NB should a large piece come out, then it’s probably a good idea to wait a good while before diving as the tubes will need to settle back into their original position first.
Start your first equalization just before you get into the water.
Finally, you need to equalize much more often than you think you need to – don’t wait until you feel pressure on your eardrums, but continuously equalize as you are going down.
Hopefully you will enjoy diving a lot more with these tips!
Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to ask permission to re-publish or re-use it in some way.
It turns out that there is another serious issue, related to that of orphan works. It has been revealed by the New York Public Library, drawing on work carried out as a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the US Copyright Office. According to a report on the Vice Web site:
the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.
The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
Since most people today will naturally assume that a book published between 1923 and 1964 is still in copyright, it is unlikely anyone has ever tried to re-publish or re-use material from this period. But this new research shows that the majority of these works are, in fact, already in the public domain, and therefore freely available for anyone to use as they wish.
That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result, huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds, infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda.
The other important lesson to be drawn from this work by the NYPL is that given the choice, the majority of authors didn’t bother renewing their copyrights, presumably because they didn’t feel they needed to. That makes today’s automatic imposition of exaggeratedly-long copyright terms not just unnecessary but also harmful in terms of the potential new works, based on public domain materials, that have been lost as a result of this continuing over-protection.
Last week, Texas introduced a bill that would make it illegal for internet service providers to let users access information about how to get abortion pills. The bill, called the Women and Child Safety Act, would also criminalize creating, editing, or hosting a website that helps people seek abortions.
If the bill passes, internet service providers (ISPs) will be forced to block websites “operated by or on behalf of an abortion provider or abortion fund.” ISPs would also have to filter any website that helps people who “provide or aid or abet elective abortions” in almost any way, including raising money.
[…]
Five years ago, a bill like this would violate federal law. Remember Net Neutrality? Net Neutrality forced ISPs to act like phone companies, treating all traffic the same with almost no ability to limit or filter the content traveling on their networks. But Net Neutrality was repealed in 2018, essentially reclassifying internet service as a luxury with little regulator oversight, and upending consumers’ right to free access of the web.
A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican.
If enacted, the proposed law would likely be challenged in court on grounds that it violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. Defending his bill, Brodeur said, “Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn’t paid bloggers?” according to the Florida Politics news website.
The bill text defines bloggers as people who write for websites or webpages that are “frequently updated with opinion, commentary, or business content.” Websites run by newspapers or “similar publications” are excluded from the definition.
The proposed registration requirements apply to bloggers who receive payment in exchange for writing about elected state officers, including “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature.” Bloggers who write about a member of the legislature would have to register with the state Office of Legislative Services, while bloggers who write about the governor or other members of the executive branch would have to register with the Commission on Ethics.
“If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register with the appropriate office… within 5 days after the first post by the blogger which mentions an elected state officer,” the bill said. “Upon registering with the appropriate office, a blogger must file monthly reports on the 10th day following the end of each calendar month from the time a blog post is added to the blog.”
[…]
The Florida Legislature is separately considering proposals that would make it easier for people to sue media organizations for defamation; these proposals have also been criticized for harming freedom of speech. Brodeur filed one of the defamation proposals on Monday.
The defamation proposals were spurred by DeSantis, who last month held a roundtable discussion on media defamation and called on the legislature “to protect Floridians from the life-altering ramifications that defamation from the media can cause for a person who does not have the means or the platform to defend himself.”
“We’ve seen over the last generation legacy media outlets increasingly divorce themselves from the truth and instead try to elevate preferred narratives and partisan activism over reporting the facts,” DeSantis said. “When the media attacks me, I have a platform to fight back. When they attack everyday citizens, these individuals don’t have the adequate recourses to fight back. In Florida, we want to stand up for the little guy against these massive media conglomerates.”
If you read the headline in the source it sounds dreadful, but it turns out this makes absolute sense – if you’re being paid and are influencing public opinion then yep, register with ethics.
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.
[…]
“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.
[…]
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.”
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
