Planet Aardvark

November 27, 2021

• True Positive Weekly True Positive Weekly #45

  Hey, in this issue: how AI powers protein-folding predictions; the new paradigm to adapt pre-trained language models; an open-source differentiable computer vision library; a tutorial on transformers from scratch; an easy-to-use and performant open-source experiment tracker; and more.

  • [Nature] Artificial intelligence powers protein-folding predictions

  • Introducing TensorFlow graph neural networks

  • [Project] Prompt-learning: the latest paradigm to adapt pre-trained language models

  • Accelerating PyTorch distributed fine-tuning with Intel technologies

  • [Project] kornia: an open-source differentiable computer vision library

  • [Demo] ‘Paint Me a Picture’: NVIDIA research shows GauGAN AI art demo now responds to words

  • [Tutorial] Transformers from scratch

  • [Project] Aim: an easy-to-use and performant open-source experiment tracker

  Enjoy the newsletter? Help us make it bigger and better by sharing it with your colleagues and friends.

  Have a nice weekend! See you next week. — Andriy

• Catalogue of Organisms Shadow of the Palaeoniscoids
  

  Palaeoniscum freieslebeni, copyright James St. John.
  
  Depending how you cut it, the ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) are arguably the most diverse group of vertebrates in the modern fauna. They are the dominant vertebrates in all aquatic environments, they encompass an enormous array of species, and they have evolved a bewildering assemblage of morphologies. But despite their current pre-eminence, the early evolution of actinopterygians remains rather understudied. The earliest actinopterygians appear in the fossil record in the Late Silurian/Early Devonian but, until fairly recently, the majority of Palaeozoic ray-finned fishes have often been lumped into a catch-all holding tank, the 'Palaeonisciformes'. This was a vague assemblage of fishes united by plesiomorphic features such as ganoid scales (heavy, bony scales with an outer layer of enamel, also found in modern gars and sturgeons), a single dorsal fin and a heterocercal tail (with the upper arm of the tail fin longer than the lower). The key genus of the group, the Permian Palaeoniscum, had a fusiform (or torpedo-shaped) body; at first glance, it would not have looked dissimilar to a modern herring. However, it lacked the mobile jaw structure of modern teleost fishes, with the maxilla and preopercular bones being fixed together. As such, it would have lacked the modern fish's capacity for suction feeding (Lauder 1980). Prey capture by Palaeoniscum would have been a simple smash-and-grab affair. Palaeoniscoid fishes remained a component of both marine and freshwater faunas until the end of the Cretaceous before being entirely supplanted by modern teleost radiations such as the ostariophysans and percomorphs.
  
  

  

  Reconstruction of Acrolepis gigas, copyright DiBgd.
  
  The core concept of 'Palaeonisciformes' has united fishes with a fusiform body shape like Palaeoniscum; depending on the author, more divergent contemporary fishes such as the deep-body platysomoids might be combined in the same order or treated separately. By modern standards, former 'Palaeonisciformes' probably combine stem-actinopterygians, stem-chondrosteans, stem-holosteans and possibly even stem-teleosts. As such, the term Palaeonisciformes has tended to fall out of favour, though the less formal 'palaeoniscoid' remains a useful descriptor. Nevertheless, the exact phylogenetic position of many palaeoniscoid taxa remains unestablished. Part of this is due to a lack of observable detail: though those heavy ganoid scales preserve well, they effectively cover up internal skeletal features. Many palaeoniscoids are preserved as compression fossils, effectively not much more than intriguing silhouettes. However, part of the problem is simple neglect. Palaeoniscoids are not rare fossils; in some formations, they may be the dominant part of the fauna by a large margin. They certainly deserve a closer look.
  
  REFERENCE
  
  Lauder, G. V., Jr. 1980. Evolution of the feeding mechanism in primitive actinopterygian fishes: a functional anatomical analysis of Polypterus, Lepisosteus, and Amia. Journal of Morphology 163: 283–317.

November 26, 2021

• Krebs on Security The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire
  

  A visualization of the Internet made using network routing data. Image: Barrett Lyon, opte.org.

  Imagine being able to disconnect or redirect Internet traffic destined for some of the world’s biggest companies — just by spoofing an email. This is the nature of a threat vector recently removed by a Fortune 500 firm that operates one of the largest Internet backbones.

  Based in Monroe, La., Lumen Technologies Inc. [NYSE: LUMN] (formerly CenturyLink) is one of more than two dozen entities that operate what’s known as an Internet Routing Registry (IRR). These IRRs maintain routing databases used by network operators to register their assigned network resources — i.e., the Internet addresses that have been allocated to their organization.

  The data maintained by the IRRs help keep track of which organizations have the right to access what Internet address space in the global routing system. Collectively, the information voluntarily submitted to the IRRs forms a distributed database of Internet routing instructions that helps connect a vast array of individual networks.

  There are about 70,000 distinct networks on the Internet today, ranging from huge broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to many thousands of enterprises that connect to the edge of the Internet for access. Each of these so-called “Autonomous Systems” (ASes) make their own decisions about how and with whom they will connect to the larger Internet.

  Regardless of how they get online, each AS uses the same language to specify which Internet IP address ranges they control: It’s called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. Using BGP, an AS tells its directly connected neighbor AS(es) the addresses that it can reach. That neighbor in turn passes the information on to its neighbors, and so on, until the information has propagated everywhere [1].

  A key function of the BGP data maintained by IRRs is preventing rogue network operators from claiming another network’s addresses and hijacking their traffic. In essence, an organization can use IRRs to declare to the rest of the Internet, “These specific Internet address ranges are ours, should only originate from our network, and you should ignore any other networks trying to lay claim to these address ranges.”

  In the early days of the Internet, when organizations wanted to update their records with an IRR, the changes usually involved some amount of human interaction — often someone manually editing the new coordinates into an Internet backbone router. But over the years the various IRRs made it easier to automate this process via email.

  For a long time, any changes to an organization’s routing information with an IRR could be processed via email as long as one of the following authentication methods was successfully used:

  -CRYPT-PW: A password is added to the text of an email to the IRR containing the record they wish to add, change or delete (the IRR then compares that password to a hash of the password);

  -PGPKEY: The requestor signs the email containing the update with an encryption key the IRR recognizes;

  -MAIL-FROM: The requestor sends the record changes in an email to the IRR, and the authentication is based solely on the “From:” header of the email.

  Of these, MAIL-FROM has long been considered insecure, for the simple reason that it’s not difficult to spoof the return address of an email. And virtually all IRRs have disallowed its use since at least 2012, said Adam Korab, a network engineer and security researcher based in Houston.

  All except Level 3 Communications, a major Internet backbone provider acquired by Lumen/CenturyLink.

  “LEVEL 3 is the last IRR operator which allows the use of this method, although they have discouraged its use since at least 2012,” Korab told KrebsOnSecurity. “Other IRR operators have fully deprecated MAIL-FROM.”

  Importantly, the name and email address of each Autonomous System’s official contact for making updates with the IRRs is public information.

  Korab filed a vulnerability report with Lumen demonstrating how a simple spoofed email could be used to disrupt Internet service for banks, telecommunications firms and even government entities.

  “If such an attack were successful, it would result in customer IP address blocks being filtered and dropped, making them unreachable from some or all of the global Internet,” Korab said, noting that he found more than 2,000 Lumen customers were potentially affected. “This would effectively cut off Internet access for the impacted IP address blocks.”

  The recent outage that took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp offline for the better part of a day was caused by an erroneous BGP update submitted by Facebook. That update took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties.

  Now consider the mayhem that would ensue if someone spoofed IRR updates to remove or alter routing entries for multiple e-commerce providers, banks and telecommunications companies at the same time.

  “Depending on the scope of an attack, this could impact individual customers, geographic market areas, or potentially the [Lumen] backbone,” Korab continued. “This attack is trivial to exploit, and has a difficult recovery. Our conjecture is that any impacted Lumen or customer IP address blocks would be offline for 24-48 hours. In the worst-case scenario, this could extend much longer.”

  Lumen told KrebsOnSecurity that it continued offering MAIL-FROM: authentication because many of its customers still relied on it due to legacy systems. Nevertheless, after receiving Korab’s report the company decided the wisest course of action was to disable MAIL-FROM: authentication altogether.

  “We recently received notice of a known insecure configuration with our Route Registry,” reads a statement Lumen shared with KrebsOnSecurity. “We already had mitigating controls in place and to date we have not identified any additional issues. As part of our normal cybersecurity protocol, we carefully considered this notice and took steps to further mitigate any potential risks the vulnerability may have created for our customers or systems.”

  

  Level3, now part of Lumen, has long urged customers to avoid using “Mail From” for authentication, but until very recently they still allowed it.

  KC Claffy is the founder and director of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), and a resident research scientist of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego. Claffy said there is scant public evidence of a threat actor using the weakness now fixed by Lumen to hijack Internet routes.

  “People often don’t notice, and a malicious actor certainly works to achieve this,” Claffy said in an email to KrebsOnSecurity. “But also, if a victim does notice, they generally aren’t going to release details that they’ve been hijacked. This is why we need mandatory reporting of such breaches, as Dan Geer has been saying for years.”

  But there are plenty of examples of cybercriminals hijacking IP address blocks after a domain name associated with an email address in an IRR record has expired. In those cases, the thieves simply register the expired domain and then send email from it to an IRR specifying any route changes.

  While it’s nice that Lumen is no longer the weakest link in the IRR chain, the remaining authentication mechanisms aren’t great. Claffy said after years of debate over approaches to improving routing security, the operator community deployed an alternative known as the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI).

  “The RPKI includes cryptographic attestation of records, including expiration dates, with each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) operating as a ‘root’ of trust,” wrote Claffy and two other UC San Diego researchers in a paper that is still undergoing peer review. “Similar to the IRR, operators can use the RPKI to discard routing messages that do not pass origin validation checks.”

  However, the additional integrity RPKI brings also comes with a fair amount of added complexity and cost, the researchers found.

  “Operational and legal implications of potential malfunctions have limited registration in and use of the RPKI,” the study observed (link added). “In response, some networks have redoubled their efforts to improve the accuracy of IRR registration data. These two technologies are now operating in parallel, along with the option of doing nothing at all to validate routes.”

  [1]: I borrowed some descriptive text in the 5th and 6th paragraphs from a CAIDA/UCSD draft paper — IRR Hygiene in the RPKI Era (PDF).

  Further reading:

  Trust Zones: A Path to a More Secure Internet Infrastructure (PDF).

  Reviewing a historical Internet vulnerability: Why isn’t BGP more secure and what can we do about it? (PDF)

• WB4SON Getting close to DXCC on 160M

  After almost giving up hope on completing 160m DXCC this year (my one remaining goal for 2021), I’ve gotten VERY close.  With a LotW confirmation from Sander JW4PUA in Svalbard , I now have 98 confirmations in LotW for 160 meters.

  

  I have been holding a QSL card from Warwick E51WL in the North Cook Islands on 160m, so technically I am sitting at 99 confirmed and need one more to complete DXCC.

  Recently I’ve worked Barbados, and Argentina multiple times, with stations that have uploaded to LotW in November, so there is some hope that they may confirm a contact.  In addition I’ve worked stations in Bermuda, Bosnia, Cape Verde, Cypress, Montenegro, and Wales, so there is always a possibility that I might be able to request a card from them, or perhaps a LotW confirmation might show up eventually.

  There isn’t much time left in 2021, but there is still hope!

   

• Concreted0g Bonus content! - Hackspace Magazine Lockpicking Articles
  

  
  

  
  

  I've recently written a 2 part article in Hackspace Magazine about locksport and lockpicking, the first part (issue 48) covers the basics around lockpicking practice and essential stuff such as the golden rules, never pick a lock you don't own and never pick a lock you depend on. The second part (issue 49) looks at DIY lockpicking/locksport tools where we made some picks, tension tools and a practice board. Occasionally when I am writing this type of piece I have to edit out sections to meet the word count requirements of the article, in this instance I culled a section on how to re-pin a lock. I'm posting it here as it's a really useful skill that can mean you need fewer practice locks and can get multiple setups/pinnings per lock. 

  Re-pinning a lock is a useful skill that can enable you to create a new challenge out of an existing lock that you have got used to picking. Essentially you are removing the centre core of the lock and removing the pins and replacing them to make the lock a different challenge. A standard 5 or 6 pin tumbler lock has the core of the lock retained with a C clip in a machined groove and this can be removed with a pair of pliers. Once you have removed the clip, be careful to not pull out the lock core until you are ready as all the pins will fly out and potentially get lost. You can’t remove the core until the lock is in the unlocked state. If your lock currently has a key that fits you can insert the key and then unlock the lock, but only turn the key an eight of a turn. With the key turned rotate the whole lock assembly so that the key is now vertical such that if you removed (but don’t do this yet) the core the key pins would remain sat in the now vertical channels in the core. A plug follower is a dowel, or indeed a 3D print in our case, that matches the diameter of the lock core. These are quite commonly half an inch in diameter. The plug follower allows you to remove the lock core without releasing all the pins at once. Whilst removing the lock core hold the plug follower flush with the far end of the core and feed it in as you move the core out. If all has gone well you now have the lock core, with the key inserted, and all the key pins still in the holes and you have the lock body with the springs and driver pins still in each channel hole block by the plug follower. Cover the end of the lock or place it flush onto a table top and then slowly retract the plug follower from the other end. You should hear each driver pin and spring release and once the plug follower is out you can lift the lock body and find all the springs and driver pins safely on your work surface. Re-pinning the lock reverses this process. Note that if you swap the key pins to different locations, making a new challenge from the same lock, your key will no longer fit or operate this lock. You can, of course, pick the lock into an open position and re-pin it back to work with the key.

  
  

  To re-pin the lock place the plug follower at the back of the lock and with a pair of tweezers carefully place a spring into the hole furthest into the lock, next grab your driver pin with the tweezers and place that pin over the spring and push it until it is slightly seated into the hole. Next push the plug follower into the side of the driver pin, you should be able to trap the driver pin, binding it on the hole edge and then use your tweezers to push the pin fully down into the hole, you can then slide the plug follower over that pin to secure it and move on to repeat the process for the next pin. Finally once all the driver pins are replaced you can place the core, containing the key pins, back into position, lock the lock by rotating the core and then re attach the retaining C clip.
  

  
  

  
  

• Bruce Schneier Proposed UK Law Bans Default Passwords

  Following California’s lead, a new UK law would ban default passwords in IoT devices.

• Moon Monday Gallery: Marvelous mountains on the Moon

  The Moon is home to some amazing mountains. Unlike the millions of years it takes for most mountains on Earth to form via slowly colliding tectonic plates, most lunar mountains form near-instantly by asteroid or cometary impacts. I have previously explained how various Moon mountains form and why to explore them so in this post I just want us to appreciate how beautiful they are. Let’s see some lunar mountains.

  Note: You can click on the images to know more each feature.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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  Hope you enjoyed these curated images of some of the most amazing mountains on the Moon. As you may have noted, many of these views are captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Their outreach team has a fantastic blog where you can browse more lunar mountains and other Moon-candy, and learn about them.

  ---

  Like this post? All my articles are free, with no ads. Support me to keep me going.

  Support me ♡

• Centauri Dreams Wolf 359: Of Gravitational Lensing and Galactic Networks
  

  If self-reproducing probes have ever been turned loose in the Milky Way, they may well have spread throughout the galaxy. Our planet is 4.6 billion years old, but the galaxy’s age is 13 billion, offering plenty of time for this spread. A number of papers have explored the concept, including work by Frank Tipler, who in 1980 argued that even at the speed of current spacecraft, the galaxy could be completely explored within 300 million years. Because we had found no evidence of such probes, Tipler concluded that extraterrestrial technological civilizations did not exist.

  Robert Freitas also explored the consequences of self-reproducing probes in that same year, reaching similar conclusions about how quickly they would spread, although not buying Tipler’s ultimate conclusion. It’s interesting that Freitas went to work on looking for evidence, reasoning that halo orbits around the Lagrangian points might be one place to search. He was, to my knowledge, the first to use the term SETA — Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts — which has now come into common use, and is currently under examination by Jim Benford in his work on ‘lurkers.’

  A new paper from Michaël Gillon (University of Liège) and Artem Burdanov (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has now appeared that follows the implications of self-reproduction and technology, tying them to a more specific search regimen. Conversant with the work of Von Eshleman as well as Claudio Maccone, the authors ask whether using the gravitational lens offered by a star wouldn’t make the most reasonable method for ETI communications. The Sun’s huge magnifications, bending light from objects behind it as seen from a relay somewhere beyond its 550 AU lensing distance, could enable participation in a network that functioned on a galactic scale.

  You probably remember Gillon as the man who led the team that discovered TRAPPIST-1’s planets. Back in 2014, he began his exploration of gravitational lensing and communications with the publication of a paper titled “A novel SETI strategy targeting the solar focal regions of the most nearby stars.” Accepting the idea that self-reproducing probes could spread through the galaxy in a span of hundreds of millions of years, the author opened the question of detectability. He drew on Maccone’s insight that links enabled by gravitational lensing could allow data-rich communications between two stars at extremely low power. It is in this 2014 paper that Gillon first proposes looking for leakage in traffic between star systems.

  A civilization that has spread throughout the galaxy might set up such relays around any stars useful as network nodes. This would turn conventional SETI on its head. Rather than scanning for radio or optical signals from other stellar systems, we consider intercepting ongoing traffic between another star and the relay in our own system. A fully colonized galaxy, so the thinking goes, should have a relay around at least one nearby star.

  Thus the term Focal Interstellar Communication Devices (FICDs), examples of which could be present in our own Solar System and perhaps in the focal regions of nearby stars. Several studies have already appeared on a strategy of performing intense multi-spectral monitoring of these focal regions in the hopes of snagging communication leakage from such a network. Gillon and Burdanov focus on a specific FICD. They identify Wolf 359, an M-dwarf that is the third closest stellar system to our own, as a prime candidate to receive a signal from a local FICD, and implement an optical search.

  Why Wolf 359? Ponder this:

  …detecting the FICD emission to a nearby star can only be done if the observer is within one of these narrow beams, putting a stringent geometrical constraint on the project concept. For an Earth-based observer, this means that the Earth’s minimum impact parameter has to be close to 1 as seen from the FICD, and thus also from the targeted nearby star. In other words, the Earth has to be a transiting (or nearly transiting) planet for one of the nearest stars to give this SETI concept a chance of success, so the target star has to be very close to the ecliptic plane. With its nearly circular orbit and its semi-major axis 215 times larger than the solar radius, the Earth has a mean transit probability < 0.5% for any random star of the solar neighborhood.

  

  Image: An artist’s depiction of an active red dwarf star like Wolf 359 orbited by a planet. Credit: David A. Aguilar.

  In other words, because the Earth transits the Sun as seen from Wolf 359, our planet would pass through any communication beam between the star and a local probe once per orbit. Thus a signal to Wolf 359 from an FICD in our Sun’s gravitational lensing region could in principle be detected. Gillon and Burdanov put the idea to the test using the TRAPPIST-South and SPECULOOS Southern Observatory in Chile, in a search “sensitive enough to detect constant emission with emitting power as small as 1W.”

  The result: No detections. This could indicate that no probes exist within the Solar System using these methods, or at least that such a probe did not transmit during the observations. Indeed, the list of hypotheses to explain a null result is so large that no conclusion can be drawn. No detection simply means no detection.

  But the observations lead us further to consider the spectral range of possible emissions from FICD to star. This is going to change depending on the star. Remember that using gravitational lensing to enable communications forces the receiver to face the host star, blocking its light with some kind of occulter (or perhaps a coronagraph) while enabling the signal to be received. Gillon and Burdanov note that Wolf 359 is a flare star with strong coronal activity, one with significant emission of X-ray and extreme ultraviolet light. The authors determine ‘a spectral zone of minimal emission’ that becomes interesting as a communications channel. Here let’s turn back to the paper, for this zone may be a better place to look:

  While the very low emission of late-type M-dwarfs in this spectral range could be an issue for prebiotic chemistry on habitable planets (Rimmer et al. 2018), it could represent a nice spectral ’sweet spot’ for a GL-based communication to a late M-dwarf like Wolf 359 or TRAPPIST-1. Another advantage of using this wavelength range instead of the optical range is the improved emission rate, thanks to the narrower laser beams… These considerations suggest that the spectral ranges 300-920nm and 400-950nm probed by the TRAPPIST-South and SPECULOOS South observations could not correspond to the optimal spectral range for a GL-based communication [gravitational lensing] from the solar system to Wolf 359. The 150-250 nm spectral range could represent a more optimal spectral range for such GL-based interstellar communication to a cold and active late-type M-dwarf like Wolf-359.

  

  Image: This is Figure 2 from the paper. Caption: Illustration showing the geometry of the hypothesized communication link from the solar system to the Wolf 359 system. The distances and stellar sizes are not to scale. Wolf 359 is shown at 3 different positions. Position 1 corresponds to the time of the emission of the photons that we receive from it now. Position 2 corresponds to its current position. Position 3 corresponds to the time it will receive the photons emitted now by the FICD. Credit: Gillon & Burdanov.

  Probing this spectral range would require a space-based instrument, but it would be interesting to target these frequencies in a reproduction of the Wolf 359 observations. This paper recounts the first attempt to detect optical messages emitted from the Solar System to this star, and as such seems intended primarily as a way to shake out observing methods and explore how gravitational lens-based networking could be observed.

  The paper is Gillon & Burdanov, “Search for an alien communication from the Solar System to a neighbor star,” submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (preprint). Gillon’s 2014 paper is “ “A novel SETI strategy targeting the solar focal regions of the most nearby stars,” Acta Astronautica Vol. 94, Issue 2 (February 2014), 629-633 (abstract).

  

• The Atlantic: In Focus Photos of the Week: Apple Crisp, Squirrel Tea, Floating Pumpkin (35 photos)

  A crab migration on Christmas Island, dengue fever outbreaks in Pakistan, a castle in eastern France, migrants crossing the English Channel, illegal gold miners on a Brazilian river, a candlelight vigil in Wisconsin, the opening of an ancient walkway in Egypt, and much more

  

• XKCD Siren
  
• Basic Instructions How to Troubleshoot a Concept

  

  The Disney corporation is building a high-tech resort at Walt Disney World designed to give guests the experience of actually spending a couple of days in the Star Wars universe. The building creates the illusion that it is a space liner, and costumed cast members will rove around giving guests various tasks and involving them in “galactic intrigue.”

  This does not sound recreational to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve had the experience of random Disney cast members I don’t know assigning me nonsensical tasks. It was when I worked there. The cast members giving me tasks were called Leaders.

  My favorite example of this was one day when I had parade duty. It was raining, but guests remained in their spots along the parade route hoping the weather would break. A Leader I didn’t know handed me a broom and told me to sweep the water off of the road.

  I pointed out that sweeping water away while it was still raining was useless.

  The Leader said, “Maybe, but we want the guests to see that we’re doing something.”

  I said, “Yeah, something stupid.” But, to be honest, I said it under my breath as I started sweeping the water out of the road.

  As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

November 25, 2021

• ke9v Most Viewed Posts

  Just a few of the most viewed posts so far in 2021 just in case you missed them. I hope you are enjoying a wonderful holiday weekend. Happy Thanksgiving!

  • Oris Brandt Comes Home - Seaman Oris Brandt killed at Pearl Harbor is finally laid to rest in his hometown.

  • Heathkit a Guide to the Amateur Radio Products - 3rd Edition of the ultimate book about every Heathkit product ever offered for amateur radio.

  • Ghost of DeSoto - The school library had one book, CALLING CQ, that was written by Clinton B. DeSoto and published in 1941.

  • News from Elecraft - Elecraft announced that it’s the end of the line for the KPA100, an internal amplifier for the still popular K2 transceiver.

  • Persistent rumors that ham radio played a role in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol resulted in several comments in the blog. Once the dust began to settle the FCC issued specific warnings to the amateur service and I penned the post Disturbia. That was followed by The Public Face of Amateur Radio and then More Speculation, and finally, By Any Other Name.
• Patrick Johnstone Council – Nov 22, 2021

  Our meeting this week included two relatively high-profile Public Hearings. Not because the change to the land use was large, but because the word Heritage was involved, and the properties were in Queens Park. Add those two together, and you get passionate community input. So we had four hours of discussion with the community about two projects:

  Heritage Revitalization Agreement (Bylaw No. 8262, 2021)
  Heritage Designation (Bylaw No. 8263, 2021) for 515 St. George Street
  This homeowner on the western edge of Queens Park wants to build a laneway house on the back of their property, which is one of the “lanes” that is actually a named street with other properties facing it. The laneway house would be a single-storey fully accessible 830 square foot home and meet the design guidelines for new construction in the Queens Park Heritage Conservation area.

  The Community Heritage Commission supports the HRA, and the project meets the OCP. It is actually within the laneway house accommodation that would be permitted by right in Queens Park, except for the zoning designation of this lot. The total density proposed (FSR 0.515 for the existing house and 0.185 for the LWH) is the same as any heritage house in Queens Park is entitled to (0.7), so instead of building an addition to the house and a accessory/garage, they are taking this path to build a LWH.

  We had 5 written submission and about a dozen people come to Council to speak to this project, the majority opposed. Opposition included that this was not a “real” HRA (yes it is, this is exactly what the HRA program is designed for), and that here is no “heritage win” (like every HRA in Queens Park, we need to remind folks that designation through HRA is a much higher level of protection than the HCA provides).

  Council voted to give the HRA and Designation Bylaws Third Reading.

  Heritage Revitalization Agreement Bylaw No. 8271, 2021
  Heritage Designation Bylaw No. 8272, 2021 for 208 Fifth Avenue
  This homeowner wants to subdivide their property into two lots (4,000 and 4,710 sqft), move the existing 1910 house forward on the northerly lot, and build a new house on the larger southerly lot facing Elgin Street. This project has been back and forth a few times, and the owner has made some pretty significant changes to the project over the last year. This project aligns with OCP goals and was approved by the Community Heritage Commission.

  The resultant lots will be smaller than the zoning requires, but not out of scale with the 8 lots around them (two 4,356 sqft lots to the east, a 3,300 sqft lot to the south, several 4,356 sqft lots to the north). There was a lot of concern expressed about this being “extreme density”, but the two lots would have FSRs (0.7 and 0.64) within what is currently allowable for heritage properties, and lot coverages (31% and 29%) lower than what is allowed (35%). To put that in perspective the land owner is currently entitled to build 1,154 sqft more on the existing lot than the total that is proposed for the two lots. This is not only not “extreme density”, it isn’t even building to already approved density. If that isn’t gentle, I don’t know what would be.

  We received 14 pieces of correspondence on this project, and had about 20 people come to speak to us about it; again more against than for. Opposition included that this was not a “real” HRA (yes it is, this is exactly what the HRA program is designed for), and that here is no “heritage win” (like every HRA in Queens Park, we need to remind folks that designation through HRA is a much higher level of protection than the HCA provides). There was also concern that this was “over density”, when by any measure it is under density already permitted for the site.

  Council voted to give the HRA and Designation Bylaws Third Reading.

• Oshpark Spaceflight thrilled to launch OreSat0

  OreSat0 is a fully open source CubeSat satellite system built from scratch by the Portland State Aerospace Society, an interdisciplinary student group at Portland State University. Roughly the size of a tissue box, the tiny satellite includes everything larger satellites have — including solar panels, batteries, a color camera, and an amateur radio system. It’s scheduled to fly onboard our SXRS-6 mission no earlier than January 2022 on SpaceX’s Transporter-3 launch.

  

  Slated to be Oregon’s first satellite, OreSat0 is the first of three satellites being built by the students. It’s mission is to test the modular, expandable, open source, and education-friendly OreSat CubeSat system. With this first flight under their belt, PSAS will build its next, larger satellite for the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI). This second CubeSat has a global climate science and STEM outreach mission: it will help refine global climate models  by measuring the global distribution of high altitude cirrus clouds.  

  

  Read more…

• Melissa Hafting, Dare To Bird REGISTER FOR THE CHRISTMAS BIRD COUNT FOR YOUTH JAN 2ND!

  If you are a young birder between the ages of 12-18 and want to join me on the annual Christmas Bird Count for Youth at Reifel Bird Sanctuary in Delta, please sign up HERE

  Note the event begins at 9 am on Jan 2nd and is free for all youth attending but if parents want to join they must pay Reifel's entrance fee of 5$. 

  Looking forward to seeing you all soon! The 2020 count was cancelled due to covid but you can read about the 2019 count HERE

  See you soon! Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all that celebrate!

  

  
  

  
  

November 24, 2021

• The Atlantic: In Focus A Visit to Churchill, Manitoba, During Polar-Bear Season (24 photos)

  In northern Manitoba, Canada, the town of Churchill sits along the shore of Hudson Bay, just south of the Arctic Circle. The town has become world-famous for an abundance of polar bears, especially during the months of October and November. Carlos Osorio, a photographer with Reuters, has spent the past week in Churchill, taking photos of the bears, the town, and the frigid landscape, at a time of year when daylight only lasts about seven hours.

  

• Quanta Magazine Why e, the Transcendental Math Constant, Is Just the Best

  Last month, we presented three puzzles that seemed ordinary enough but contained a numerical twist. Hidden below the surface was the mysterious transcendental number e. Most familiar as the base of natural logarithms, Euler’s number e is a universal constant with an infinite decimal expansion that begins with 2.7 1828 1828 45 90 45… (spaces added to highlight the quasi-pattern in the first...

  Source

• Centauri Dreams Deep Learning Methods Flag 301 New Planets
  

  It’s no small matter to add 301 newly validated planets to an exoplanet tally already totalling 4,569. But it’s even more interesting to learn that the new planets are drawn out of previously collected data, as analyzed by a deep neural network. The ‘classifier’ in question is called ExoMiner, describing machine learning methods that learn by examining large amounts of data. With the help of the NASA supercomputer called Pleiades, ExoMiner seems to be a wizard at separating actual planetary signatures from the false positives that plague researchers.

  ExoMiner is described in a paper slated for The Astrophysical Journal, where the results of an experimental study are presented, using data from the Kepler and K2 missions. The data give the machine learning tools plenty to work with, considering that Kepler observed 112,046 stars in its 115-degree square search field, identifying over 4000 candidates. More than 2300 of these have been confirmed. The Kepler extended mission K2 detected more than 2300 candidate worlds, with over 400 subsequently confirmed or validated. The latest 301 validated planets indicate that ExoMiner is more accurate than existing transit signal classifiers.

  How much more accurate? According to the paper, ExoMiner retrieved 93.6% of all exoplanets in its test run, as compared to a rate of 76.3% for the best existing transit classifier.

  We see many more candidate planets than can be readily confirmed or identified as false positives in all our large survey missions. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, for example, working with an area 300 times larger than Kepler’s, has detected 2241 candidates thus far, with about 130 confirmed. Obviously, pulling false positives out of the mix is difficult using our present approaches, which is why the ExoMiner methods are so welcome.

  Hamed Valizadegan is ExoMiner project lead and machine learning manager with the Universities Space Research Association at NASA Ames:

  “When ExoMiner says something is a planet, you can be sure it’s a planet. ExoMiner is highly accurate and in some ways more reliable than both existing machine classifiers and the human experts it’s meant to emulate because of the biases that come with human labeling…Now that we’ve trained ExoMiner using Kepler data, with a little fine-tuning, we can transfer that learning to other missions, including TESS, which we’re currently working on. There’s room to grow.”

  

  Image: Over 4,500 planets have been found around other stars, but scientists expect that our galaxy contains millions of planets. There are multiple methods for detecting these small, faint bodies around much larger, brighter stars. The challenge then becomes to confirm or validate these new worlds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

  The paper describes the most common approach to detecting exoplanet candidates and vetting them. Imaging data are processed to identify ‘threshold crossing events’, after which a transit model is fitted to each signal, with diagnostic tests applied to subtract non-exoplanet effects. This produces data validation reports for these crossing events, which in turn are filtered to identify likely exoplanets. The data validation reports for the most likely events are then reviewed by vetting teams and released as objects of interest for follow-up work.

  Machine learning (ML) methods speed the process. As described in the paper:

  ML methods are ideally suited for probing these massive datasets, relieving experts from the time-consuming task of sifting through the data and interpreting each DV report, or comparable diagnostic material, manually. When utilized properly, ML methods also allow us to train models that potentially reduce the inevitable biases of experts. Among many different ML techniques, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance (LeCun et al. 2015) in areas such as computer vision, speech recognition, and text analysis and, in some cases, have even exceeded human performance. DNNs are especially powerful and effective in these domains because of their ability to automatically extract features that may be previously unknown or highly unlikely for human experts in the field to grasp…

  The ExoMiner software learns by using data on exoplanets that have been confirmed in the past, and also by examining the false positives thus far generated. Given the sheer numbers of threshold crossing events Kepler and K2 have produced, automated tools to examine these massive datasets greatly facilitate the confirmation process. Remember that two goals are defined here. A ‘confirmed’ planet is one that is detected via other observational techniques, as when radial velocity methods, for example, are applied to identify the same planet.

  A planet is ‘validated’ statistically when it can be shown how likely the find is to be a planet based on the data. The 301 new exoplanets are considered machine-validated. They have been in candidate status until ExoMiner went to work on them to rule out false positives. As with the analysis we examined yesterday, refining filtering techniques at Proxima Centauri to screen out flare activity, this work will be applied to future catalogs from TESS and the ESA’s PLATO mission. According to Valizadegan, the team is already at work using ExoMiner with TESS data.

  Usefully, ExoMiner offers what the authors call “a simple explainability framework” that provides feedback on the classifications it makes. It isn’t a ‘black box,’ according to exoplanet scientist Jon Jenkins (NASA Ames), who goes on to say: “We can easily explain which features in the data lead ExoMiner to reject or confirm a planet.”

  Looking forward, the authors explain the keys to ExoMiner’s performance. The reference to Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) below refers to a subset defined within the paper:

  [S]ince the general concept behind vetting transit signals is the same for both Kepler and TESS data, and ExoMiner utilizes the same diagnostic metrics as expert vetters do, we expect an adapted version of this model to perform well on TESS data. Our preliminary results on TESS data verify this hypothesis. Using ExoMiner, we also demonstrate that there are hundreds of new exoplanets hidden in the 1922 KOIs that require further follow-up analysis. Out of these, 301 new exoplanets are validated with confidence using ExoMiner.

  The paper is Valizadegan et al., “ExoMiner: A Highly Accurate and Explainable Deep Learning Classifier to Mine Exoplanets,” accepted at The Astrophysical Journal (preprint).

  

• Bruce Schneier Apple Sues NSO Group

  Piling more on NSO Group’s legal troubles, Apple is suing it:

  The complaint provides new information on how NSO Group infected victims’ devices with its Pegasus spyware. To prevent further abuse and harm to its users, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services, or devices.

  NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware is favored by totalitarian governments around the world, who use it to hack Apple phones and computers.

  More news:

  Apple’s legal complaint provides new information on NSO Group’s FORCEDENTRY, an exploit for a now-patched vulnerability previously used to break into a victim’s Apple device and install the latest version of NSO Group’s spyware product, Pegasus. The exploit was originally identified by the Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto.

  The spyware was used to attack a small number of Apple users worldwide with dangerous malware and spyware. Apple’s lawsuit seeks to ban NSO Group from further harming individuals by using Apple’s products and services. The lawsuit also seeks redress for NSO Group’s flagrant violations of US federal and state law, arising out of its efforts to target and attack Apple and its users.

  NSO Group and its clients devote the immense resources and capabilities of nation-states to conduct highly targeted cyberattacks, allowing them to access the microphone, camera, and other sensitive data on Apple and Android devices. To deliver FORCEDENTRY to Apple devices, attackers created Apple IDs to send malicious data to a victim’s device — allowing NSO Group or its clients to deliver and install Pegasus spyware without a victim’s knowledge. Though misused to deliver FORCEDENTRY, Apple servers were not hacked or compromised in the attacks.

  This follows in the footsteps of Facebook, which is also suing NSO Group and demanding a similar prohibition. And while the idea of the intermediary suing the attacker, and not the victim, is somewhat novel, I think it makes a lot of sense. I have a law journal article about to be published with Jon Penney on the Facebook case.

• Quanta Magazine Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code

  Suppose you are trying to transmit a message. Convert each character into bits, and each bit into a signal. Then send it, over copper or fiber or air. Try as you might to be as careful as possible, what is received on the other side will not be the same as what you began with. Noise never fails to corrupt. In the 1940s, computer scientists first confronted the unavoidable problem of noise.

  Source

• Moon Monday NASA DART mission and planetary defense resources

  The Planetary Society has put up truly comprehensive and excellent resources on NASA's DART mission to smash an asteroid, and planetary defense at large. https://www.planetary.org/articles/dart-mission-resources

  

• ke9v Thinking Local

  I ordered a turkey online and paid a considerable extra fee to make certain it would arrive before Thanksgiving.

  Guarantees and confirmations flowed via email from the company over the last week assuring me that a UPS man would be delivering the package prior to the holiday. You can probably guess what happened next. The phone rang yesterday morning with some out of state number and the lady on the other end said that although the turkey had been shipped on time, they had just been alerted by UPS that it wasn’t going to make it to my door until Friday.

  After the initial panic subsided, and after kicking myself multiple times for ordering online, I suddenly remembered that I do live in Central Indiana and if I drive just outside the city limits I can throw a rock and hit a half-dozen farms. It took all of an hour to locate a fresh turkey and for considerably less money than I had paid online.

  I’ll not make that stupid mistake again…

  That all got me thinking about how much “stuff” we order online and while most of it isn’t as time-sensitive as the main course for Thanksgiving dinner, now I’m on a mission, no, let’s call it a crusade, to buy local. I’m sure the UPS delay of my turkey was related to Covid and the “supply chain” and all the other usual suspects blamed for such things these days, but I think the root cause is that we have built an unsustainable system of commerce.

  Fortunately, we have everything needed for the big feast tomorrow and I’m incredibly thankful for living in flyover country where we have abundant sources of good water and endless storehouses of food thanks to thousands of hard working farmers, many of them my neighbors, who work tirelessly to feed a nation.

  Happy Thanksgiving!

• Planet Labs Blog Planet Expands Sales Leadership Team as It Prepares to Go Public

  We are thrilled to announce the latest expansion of our sales leadership team with the addition of Michael Goldberg, the Vice President of Sales Operations, Vice President of Sales Operations, Debbie Queen, Simon Alford, the Vice President of Global Pre-Sales, and Leslie Mertz, the Global Director of Sales Development! Planet drove over $110 million in revenue in FY2021A, and as we prepare to go public, among the uses for capital raised will be further growing our sales and marketing function. 

  As Planet scales its business and readies itself for the public market, these experienced sales leaders join a global, world-class team that is focussed on accelerating the company’s growth. Planet drove over $110 million in revenue in FY2021A. As Planet prepares to go public, among the uses for capital raised will be further expanding the sales and marketing function.  

  “We are at a pivotal moment in Planet’s journey. Nothing is more important than bringing in top sales talent to drive new customer-centric programs and build a robust sales pipeline. With the exceptional combined leadership experience of Michael, Leslie, Debbie, and Simon, we feel confident that Planet is now set-up for even greater success,” said Planet’s President Kevin Weil.

  As the Vice President of Sales Operations, Michael Goldberg brings over 25 years of experience in the technology industry to Planet. He predominantly worked in sales operations and financial planning and analysis, most recently serving as the Head of Global Business Operations for OneLogin and the Senior Director of Sales Operations and Enablement at Skuid. Michael is skilled in streamlining sales tools and processes, improving integrations, and optimizing cross-functional and customer-facing initiatives in support of business objectives. This expertise stems from his long history of leadership roles in companies, including Salesforce, Seagate, Autodesk, and Nextel Communications.

  As the Vice President of Sales, Americas at Planet, Debbie Queen brings over 18 years of business to business sales experience and leadership expertise in acquisitions and account management. Before moving to Planet, Debbie was the Sr. Manager – Design & Manufacturing, North America Territory Sales at Autodesk. She has a proven track record in strategic vision implementation for solution sales and has worked extensively in developing sales team structures. Prior to Autodesk, Debbie worked as the Director of Sales at ReadyTalk, a cloud communications provider, where she was responsible for the performance and success of Account Executive and Inside Sales teams. She also served as an Account Manager at Aerotek, supporting new business acquisitions and account growth.

  Joining Planet as the Vice President of Global Pre-Sales, Simon Alford brings a wealth of knowledge and experience leading global Pre-Sales and Products teams. Prior to joining Planet, he served as the Director of Global Pre-Sales – Digital Manufacturing Group at Autodesk, and their Director of Automotive Products. Simon has a proven track record scaling innovation and operations excellence, helping create the conditions for high performance. Prior to Autodesk, he was Head of Pre-Sales & Services at an Autodesk Manufacturing Partner, led Pre-Sales teams and user experience programs at Siemens Digital Industries Software, and spent his early career as a design engineer in the Automotive industry.

  Leslie Mertz joined Planet as the new Global Director of Sales Development. Leslie brings over 20 years of experience in sales development and marketing in life sciences, sustainability and technology. Prior to joining Planet, she was the Business Development Manager at Aurora Solar, a technology company that builds software solutions for distributed solar projects. There, she scaled the sales development team, oversaw pipeline development for Mid Market, Enterprise, and Strategic Accounts, and supported exceptional levels of company growth with the generation of new logos and expansion revenue. Prior to Aurora Solar, Leslie worked closely with revenue teams to support sales development at ProspectCloud, Insperity, and Escalent.

  As Planet joins the public market, the company will become a public benefit corporation (PBC), in which its mission will be encoded into its corporate DNA, obligating Planet’s directors to stay true to their mission as part of their fiduciary duty to their stockholders. Planet’s public benefit purpose is: “To accelerate humanity to a more sustainable, secure and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change.”

• XKCD Fiction vs Nonfiction
  
• Basic Instructions How to Get Feedback on Your Ideas

  

  I defy you to tell me how any of these actual Hallmark Christmas Ornaments have any relation at all to Christmas.

  

  Yes, these are all from my personal collection. That’s beside the point.

  As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

November 23, 2021

• Roger Rivester - Astronomy sketches and notes NGC 16; Galaxy in Pegasus: December 2021 Observer’s Challenge Report #155

  Work-File: Used only for organization and editing. When all entries are received, a .pdf report will be issued by the 10th of January. And the link will be posted on this page.

  James Dire: Observer from Illinois

  Supporting notes and information to follow later…

  

  

  Pencil sketch by Roger Ivester: 10-inch reflector @114x

  Supporting notes and information to follow later…

  

  

  Mario Motta: Observer from Massachusetts

  See attached images for December observer’s challenge object. Small NGC 16 galaxy is centered, but I wanted to get the general field which was too large for my 32-inch reflector field-of-view, so I combined two sets of images into a mosaic, and labeled them.

  To the right (west) is NGC 1 and NGC 2, then moving east is NGC 16 (the December object) and finally toward the left (East) and on the the extreme edge is NGC 22.  Taken with my 32- inch telescope in two sets, then combined. It was not the best night, but being November 3, and having had to be away the past few weeks, I thought it best to use and send in.

  

  Uwe Glahn: Observer from Germany

  NGC 1 and NGC 2: 27-inch reflector @ 293x

  

  Glenn Chaple: Observer from Massachusetts

  NGC 16 – Lenticular Galaxy in Pegasus  (Magnitude 12.0, Size 1.8’ by 1.0’)

  Our December Observer’s Challenge takes us to the northeast corner of Pegasus and a lenticular galaxy some 123 million light years away (SIMBAD data). Discovered by William Herschel on September 8, 1784. its appearance (“A faint star with small chevelure [hazy luminescence] and 2 burs”) led Sir William to enter it into his Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars as a Class IV (Planetary Nebulae) object.

  With a visual magnitude of 12.0, NGC 16 will challenge medium aperture scopes, especially if observed from an area beset by slight to moderate light pollution. I looked for it with a 10-inch f/5 reflecting telescope on an evening when the magnitude limit was around 5. At 140X, I was able to make out little more than a faint star (the galaxy’s nucleus). Visual observers in dark-sky locations or working with larger instruments may be able to make out a surrounding oval haze.

  The 2000.0 celestial coordinates for NGC 16 are: RA 00^h 09^m 04.3^s, DEC +27° 43’ 45”, a little over a degree south of the 2^nd magnitude star Alpheratx (alpha [α] Andromedae). The accompanying finder chart should enable star-hoppers to find their way from Alpheratz to NGC 16.

  Larry McHenry: Observer from Pittsburgh, PA.

  December:  NGC 16 – Galaxy – Pegasus; Mag. V = 12.0;  sfc. br. 12.5;  Size 1.8′ x 1.0′

  RA:  00h  09m   Dec.  +27º  44′  

  NGC 16 (galaxy): Located in the fall constellation of Pegasus, ‘The Winged Horse’, is the small oval-shaped +12th mag lenticular (S0) galaxy NGC 16. The little galaxy displays a bright, bar-shaped central core embedded in the center of an inclined oval, which itself is surrounded by a light haze of unresolved starlight. Using the camera’s maximum FOV, I could also pull in the nearby faint spirals NGC 1 and 2, along with PGC619. NGC 16 was first observed on September 8^th 1784 by William Herschel and is about 146 Mly distant and around 81,00 Ly in diameter.

  Video-Capture/EAA:  

  11/05/2021: from Calhoun Cty Park, WV. Using an 8-inch SCT optical tube @ f6.3 on a GEM mount with a CMOS color camera and broadband filter @ 60-second guided exposure, livestacked for 15 minutes. 

  

  

• DragonflyBSD Blog Synproxy/pf note to save

  Linked here cause maybe it’ll help someone else with synproxy and pf in DragonFly: synproxy state doesn’t work in Packet Filter.

• Loren Grush NASA wants to defend Earth from asteroids — so it’s slamming a spacecraft into one

  

  Takeoff of DART is scheduled for 1:21AM ET on November 24th

  Continue reading…

• Patrick Johnstone Resilience

  I never remember feeling like this before. The bad stuff is piling up. People and governments are being tested in ways I don’t think anyone anticipated, though it was easily predicted. What’s on my mind is not the bad news happening (there has always been bad news), but in the shift in mindset about the bad news. Maybe it was Trump, maybe it was COVID, maybe it is the algorithms in our news feed or there was truth to the theory that David Bowie was holding the good in the Universe together. I don’t know the cause, but I have been thinking about how a shift in language I noticed might give insight into a change in out collective mindset, and what it means to be in a leadership role at this time.

  I am involved in a few organizations that bring Local Governments together. I’m on the Executive of the Lower Mainland Local Government Association. We bring local government leaders together to network, share resources and knowledge, and advocate for the things we need (money and/or regulatory change) to make our communities work better. I am also the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Community Energy Association. We are a not-for profit with a growing professional staff that empower local and regional governments to achieve energy and emissions reductions targets, through planning support, coaching, and actual implementation of programs that move the dial on Climate Action.

  In both of those organizations, we spend a lot of time strategizing the best way to serve our communities. We are both receivers and dealers in Buzz Words. In that part of the work, there has been a shift that was so subtle, I didn’t even notice at the time, and was swept up in the change such that I even changed my own language and thinking without noticing. Only with hindsight, and only recently, have I started to think about what we may have lost.

  The shift is how we stopped talking about (and building towards) sustainable communities, and are now talking about (and hoping for) resilient communities. Perhaps this is not a revelation. Google “resilience is the new sustainability” and you get an awful lot of hits, most of them of the eco-marketing genre. Resilience is the new buzz, sustainability is passé.

  This has been in my mind of late because [gestures to everything happening around us] and how wordshift / mindshift is not limited to those organizations above, but in communications being used by the government in face of overlapping catastrophe. The increased reliance on “resilience” as a planning idea, a community goal, a vision, means something different when you recognize just don’t talk about sustainability any more, it turns to dark thoughts.

  Sustainability, use as a buzzword aside, has a clear definition that can be traced back to the Brundtland Report and can be simplified to “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. There is a hope in sustainability. A vision that we can do better right now in ways that will make things better in the future. It’s planning for a prosperous future, like planting a tree under whose shade you may never personally sit. It tells the next generation that we care, that we are cognizant we are passing to them a legacy of our decisions, and we are taking responsibility for that legacy.

  Resilience is something different. So shockingly different that it is amazing we have so easily slotted it in to replace sustainability. Though definitions may vary based on context, the one we are talking about in community planning and governance is something akin to “an ability to recover from, or adjust easily to, misfortune or disruption”. This is a different vision, one that sees a lot of bad shit coming down the pike, and we can do nothing to stop it, so hold on tight, and we’ll try to get you some pillows to soften the blow. It is different than hope, and if it isn’t exactly despair, it is at least stripped of optimism.

  These days, our emergencies feel like Matryoshka dolls. Last week’s emergencies are sitting within last month’s emergencies, sitting within the emergency that has been going on for two years, surrounded by a decades-long building emergency that is, ultimately, the cause of last week’s emergency. And will be the cause of next week’s.

  How did we get here? After decades of talking about, instead of applying, a sustainability lens to addressing that big emergency, we are left with trying to build resiliency to the inevitable emergencies that we know are coming. It is an admission of failure at providing the basic stability of yesterday to those living tomorrow.  If we weren’t successful at the sustainability, why would we believe we are going to be successful at resilience? How did we let this shift happen without us noticing it? Without even comment?

  These questions are rhetorical, but the answers are there for us. There is the generational failure where hoarding was seen as the best path to assuring the next generation’s prosperity. There is the neo-liberal outsourcing of solutions for pressing problems to a market that was wholly unequipped to think long-term because we had to be creating something to hoard. There is an intentional erosion of trust in institutions from science to education to governance to journalism that has disarmed the warning systems that should have shown us this future. There is a paucity of leadership, replaced with caffeine hits of populism.

  Worse than a lack of vision, there is a fear of vision. A suspicion of vision. We are at the same time clamoring for change and terrified of change. Ideas like “maybe we can fix homelessness by building homes” are seen as radical, fanciful, and ultimately unaffordable. So the change we are getting is the one we could not avoid. At the heart of it all is the feeling that we, one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the globe, can’t afford change. We need to keep digging the hole, because hole-digging is what’s going to pay our way out of this hole. Yes, I’m looking at you, TMX.

  If there is hope in this, it is that there are people who see past this. There are leaders in our community, in our province, in our country who are talking about what we can do, not what we can’t. Because shit has to change, and this dread you are feeling doesn’t need to be there. We can’t settle for resilience. Sustainability is not a pipe dream we should let die, it is the survival of all we value, and it is the promise we should be making to the next generation, and to ourselves. It’s the path away from this dread.

  It’s the work we have to do, now more than ever.

• Centauri Dreams Proxima Centauri: Transits Amidst the Flares?
  

  Discovered in 1915, Proxima Centauri has been a subject of considerable interest ever since, as you would expect of the star nearest to our own. But I had no idea research into planets around Proxima went all the way back to the 1930s. Nonetheless, a new paper from Emily Gilbert (University of Chicago) and colleagues mentions a 1938 attempt by Swedish astronomer Erik Holmberg to use astrometric methods to search for one or more Proxima planets. The abstract of the Holmberg paper (citation below) reads in part:

  Many parallax stars show periodic displacements. These effects probably are to be explained as perturbations caused by invisible companions. Since the amplitudes of the orbital motion are very small, the masses of the companions will generally be very small, too. Thus Proxima Centauri probably has a companion, the mass of which is only some few times larger than the mass of Jupiter. A preliminary investigation gives the result that 25% of the total number of parallax stars may have invisible companions.

  Holmberg (1908-2000) seems to be best known for his work on galaxy interactions, but the movement of nearby stars was clearly a lively interest. I think we can assume that the Proxima ‘detection’ was due to systematic factors; i.e., noise in the data. But because I was fascinated by this early flurry of exoplanet hunting, I dug around a bit in Michael Perryman’s The Exoplanet Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 2011) to learn that Holmberg came back in 1943 to use long-term time-series photographic plates in another astrometric hunt, this one at 70 Ophiuchi (he thought he detected a gas giant), while in the same year, the Danish astronomer Kaj Aage Gunnar Strand (1907-2000) found evidence for a 16-Jupiter mass planet around 61 Cygni. Neither of these worlds turned out to be any more real than Holmberg’s putative planet at Proxima Centauri.

  So exoplanet hunting is replete with false positives. We’ve talked at some length in these pages about the work of Peter van de Kamp (1901-1995), a Dutch astronomer living in the US, on possible planets at Barnard’s Star. His detections were ultimately shown to have resulted from systematic errors in his equipment (though unless I am mistaken, he never accepted this conclusion). Van de Kamp’s work in the 1960s and later made the point that a small number of astronomers have been actively searching for exoplanets long before the detection of 51 Pegasi b, but the Holmberg paper, taking us back prior to World War II, came as a surprise I wanted to share.

  Searching for Transits

  On to today’s work on Proxima Centauri, which as we know has no gas giant of the sort Holmberg deduced, but does host at least two planets, among which is the fascinating Proxima Centauri b, the latter in the habitable zone of the star. Habitability, however, is problematic. Proxima is a flare star, so active that the atmosphere of a habitable zone planet may be threatened by the intense radiation, with obvious implications for surface life.

  

  Proxima’s flares can dominate observation, as this passage from today’s paper makes clear:

  We see 2-3+ large flares every day in the 2-minute cadence TESS light curve (Vida et al., 2019), and even with TESS 2-minute cadence, optical photometry, it can be hard to fully resolve flare morphology in order to search for transits. Davenport et al. (2016) even suggest that the visible-light light curve of Proxima Centauri may be so dominated by flares that the time series can be thought of as primarily a superposition of many flares.

  Image: Proxima Centauri is a “flare star,” meaning that convection processes within the star’s body make it prone to random and dramatic changes in brightness. The convection processes not only trigger brilliant bursts of starlight but, combined with other factors, mean that Proxima Centauri is in for a very long life. Astronomers predict that this star will remain middle-aged — or a “main sequence” star in astronomical terms — for another four trillion years, some 300 times the age of the current Universe. These observations were taken using Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Its two companions, Alpha Centauri A and B, lie out of frame. Credit: NASA/ESA.

  Indeed, Proxima’s flares appear nearly continuous, occurring at a range of wavelengths. Flares can induce shifts in radial velocity measurements, making observations noisy and burying a potential planetary signal in a sea of misleading data. The same problem occurs for transit detection, where flare-induced variations in the lightcurve may mask an actual planetary signature. All this makes clear what fine work Guillem Anglada-Escudé and team performed at unpacking the radial velocity data that first revealed the existence of Proxima b in 2016.

  Because flare activity may be masking transits at Proxima Centauri, Gilbert and team modeled the stellar activity in their planet search algorithm, refining the result. Previous flare detection algorithms have tried to identify the flares and remove them, revealing the more stable stellar signal beneath. The authors take a different approach, using their own algorithm to first identify flares, then modeling them using a template, subtracting them from the data and running a transit search on the result. The unique flare modeling they apply to Proxima, painstakingly presented in the paper’s section on methods, involves a multi-step process of filtering and fitting the flare data. The scientists injected transits into the light curves before modeling as a way of determining how sensitive their method was, with results that boosted the planet signal.

  

  Image: This is Figure 3 from the paper. Caption: By subtracting a flare model from the light curve of Proxima Centauri, we are able to significantly increase the probability of recovering small planets. We are able to reliably recover planets down to around the radius of Mars across the period range searched, effectively ruling out any transit of Proxima Centauri b. Credit: Gilbert et al.

  A transit at Proxima Centauri would be a huge boon to astronomers, allowing a precise radius and accurate determination of the composition of Proxima Centauri b (the same is true, of course, of Proxima c). Moreover, Proxima b’s short orbital period would mean frequent transits, and thus would elevate its status as a place to look for biosignatures in the atmosphere.

  Alas, we have no transits. Gilbert’s team used TESS observations of Proxima Centauri to make this determination. The conclusion seems tight. From the paper:

  We find no evidence for Proxima Centauri b in TESS data. This is not surprising because previous efforts using different telescopes have been similarly fruitless.

  Using the known minimum mass of Proxima Centauri b (Msini = 1.27 M_⊕), we used the relationship from Chen and Kipping (2017) to derive an expected planet radius to be R = 1.08 ± .14 R_⊕. A 100% Iron planet would have an expected radius of 0.88 R_⊕ (Zeng et al., 2019). Therefore, given our injection and recovery tests show that no planets larger than 0.4 R_⊕ transit Proxima Centauri at periods between 10–12 days, we are confident that we would recover the signal from Proxima Centauri b if it were to transit.

  The team’s flare modeling is a big part of the story here, improving the sensitivity to transiting planets from 0.6 Earth radii to 0.4, and allowing the team to put rigorous limits on the probability of transits. According to the authors, this kind of flare modeling is a technique that should be applicable to all active stars. This is good news for the continuing work of TESS and the future work of Plato (ESA’s PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars mission). Our sensitivity to small planets transiting low-mass, nearby active stars receives a boost from these methods, even though the search for transits at Proxima Centauri comes up empty.

  The paper is Gilbert et al., “No Transits of Proxima Centauri Planets in High-Cadence TESS Data,” accepted at Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (preprint). The Holmberg paper is Holmberg, E., “Invisible Companions of parallax stars revealed by means of modern trigonometric parallax observations,” Meddelanden fran Lunds Astronomiska Observatorium, Series II 92, 5–25.

  

• Quanta Magazine At the Dawn of Life, Heat May Have Driven Cell Division

  An elegant ballet of proteins enables modern cells to replicate themselves. During cell division, structural proteins and enzymes coordinate the duplication of DNA, the division of a cell’s cytoplasmic contents, and the cinching of the membrane that cleaves the cell. Getting these processes right is crucial because errors can lead to daughter cells that are abnormal or unviable.

  Source

• ke9v Fish in a Barrel

  I ordered the AX2 portable 20M whip antenna from Elecraft yesterday.

  I already have the multi-band AX1 with the 40M adapter and all the associated bits and bobs including a separate tripod mount that makes picnic table activation a snap. I’ve had good results with this short, low-power radiator that easily fits in a lunch bag and though it only covers a single band, the AX2 is even smaller so I wanted to take it for a spin.

  Being this late in the season I’m less inclined to take it for a test drive deep in the field, but my favorite operating location remains the backyard where the first test-run will take place. It will be paired with the KX3 and I’ll set some target, like using only the AX2 for the next 50 contacts - or something like that.

  It should go without saying that this is not a great antenna. If you have a place to toss a wire then do that, it will outperform these whip antennas. Small antennas like these aren’t magic and certainly are not the solution to antenna restrictions, etc.

  The attraction for me is two-fold. First, I like that a picnic table can become an operating position in one minute. Plus, I appreciate the challenge that comes from using low-power and less than ideal antennas in unique situations.

  Anything more than that and it’s just shooting fish in a barrel.

• Planet Labs Blog Planet Builds Business in State and Local Government Sector

  Every year, Planet data is utilized by state and local governments to track environmental change, support regional enforcement efforts, and make informed decisions. We were thrilled to see new partnerships with local governmental entities begin in 2021, including the State of Alaska and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. 

  Through their 7-month pilot program, Planet and the State of Alaska explored solutions for department managers that have historically been challenged by Alaska’s unique geography, marked by severe winter storms and remote landscapes. Notably, 82% of Alaskan communities are inaccessible by roads, and it is time consuming and costly to get boots on the ground for evaluations. Previously, employees would take small aircraft to monitor approximately 50 weather stations across 90 million acres of land to determine when a station became snow-free. With daily PlanetScope images, their team was able to look back at satellite imagery day-by-day to determine the exact moment the station became snow-free, saving substantial time, costs, and energy, and increasing the accuracy of the data collected. By decreasing the number of aircraft trips needed to these remote regions, Planet’s data also significantly increased employee safety. 

  

  Alaska weather stations marked to indicate if the station is snow-covered or clear in Planet Explorer. Image provided by the State of Alaska.

  

  Usibelli coal mine located in Lignite, Alaska © 2021, Planet Labs Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Using our SkySats, the State of Alaska was also able to support inspectors for mining operations. With more frequent visibility, managers tracked mining activity on a month-to-month basis to plan inspections and support regulatory enforcement. They further utilized PlanetScope and SkySat data to provide environmental situational awareness for wildfires and reveal final fire perimeters. Additionally, the state leveraged Planet imagery of forestland to determine enforcement policies prior to on-site evaluations.  Using Planet’s datasets under a multi-department license, the State of Alaska ensures this data is shared through the State’s Imagery portal so that the imagery data can be used by various agencies. For example, the satellite data collected for mining inspection analysis by the Department of Mining Land and Water is also open and accessible to the State Department of Conservation, Fish and Game. By sharing this data across agencies, there is increased project transparency to support economic development and sustainability efforts. 

  At the other end of the continental U.S., our satellite data also supports the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (DMR). The Mississippi gulf coast is home to some of the nation’s most productive fin fish and shellfish waters. To ensure the sustainable use of these wetland ecosystems, the DMR works to regulate and restore these habitats yearly. Using PlanetScope imagery, the DMR was able to conduct necessary due diligence to protect wetlands and enforce accurate permitting programs. 

  Wetland habitats are home to a variety of submerged aquatic vegetation, including seagrasses that are vital to the ecosystem. As part of their role, the DMR provides permits to allow clients to mitigate and transport sections of vegetation for coastal development. In one instance, a client reported that in their designated zone, the aquatic vegetation was no longer present and requested a permit modification. It was critical that the DMR was able to ensure that the movement of this growing vegetation was a natural phenomenon and not due to human interference, such as mechanical removal or obstruction of light from a barge.  Using PlanetScope’s high-cadence imagery, the DMR team was able to go back day-by-day through the previous year to ensure that there was no man-made structure, barge, or interference to the vegetation on the site. They concluded that the species movement was indeed a natural phenomenon, and thanks to Planet’s high temporal resolution imagery, they were able to support the changing permit status with confidence. This case highlighted how daily transparency allowed the DMR to increase local enforcement and conduct their due diligence to keep the wetlands safe. 

  As a new customer, the Mississippi DMR was able to see immediate results from Planet’s product; and they are now exploring further uses for the data. These explorations will dive into identifying point sources of wetlands sedimentation, monitoring seagrass movement, and evaluating tidal marsh health and water quality. By working with our high-cadence imagery, the DMR will be able to better gauge secondary and cumulative impacts when projects are implemented.

  Each year, more and more state and local governments are using Planet’s data to support their regional planning processes, manage their local industries, and protect their ecosystems. Our additional customers include the New Mexico State Land Office, the Port of Long Beach, Humboldt County, California, City and County of San Francisco, Autoridad Nacional de Licencias Ambientales in Colombia, the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission and the County of San Luis Obispo in California.

  Working with state and local governments aligns with our goals to support communities and protect the environment. Earlier this year, Planet entered into a definitive merger agreement with dMY Technology Group, Inc. IV (NYSE:DMYQ), a special purpose acquisition company, to become a publicly-traded company. As we join the public market, Planet will become a public benefit corporation (PBC), in which our mission will be encoded into our corporate DNA, obligating our directors to stay true to our mission as part of their fiduciary duty to their stockholders. Planet’s public benefit purpose is: “To accelerate humanity to a more sustainable, secure and prosperous world by illuminating environmental and social change.”

• Melissa Hafting, Dare To Bird Help Young Birder Adam Dhalla save a vital urban forest in Coquitlam!

  Young Birder Adam Dhalla who has made 2 conservation-based games Find The Birds  (which now has the BC Game out!) and Find the Bats has been working hard to save an urban forest in his hometown of Coquitlam. I could not be more proud of him!

  You can watch the documentary below that he made about the birds and bats that live there and would be impacted if the forest was to be destroyed.

  You can read more about the importance of preserving this urban forest at the website he made HERE.

  He has also created a petition that has over 15,000 signatures. Please sign it HERE

• DragonflyBSD Blog CBSD support for qemu/nvmm in DragonFly

  ifconfig(8) in DragonFly is gaining a description field, to ease porting of CBSD.

November 22, 2021

• Krebs on Security Arrest in ‘Ransom Your Employer’ Email Scheme

  In August, KrebsOnSecurity warned that scammers were contacting people and asking them to unleash ransomware inside their employer’s network, in exchange for a percentage of any ransom amount paid by the victim company. This week, authorities in Nigeria arrested a suspect in connection with the scheme — a young man who said he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network.

  

  Image: Abnormal Security.

  The brazen approach targeting disgruntled employees was first spotted by threat intelligence firm Abnormal Security, which described what happened after they adopted a fake persona and responded to the proposal in the screenshot above.

  “According to this actor, he had originally intended to send his targets—all senior-level executives—phishing emails to compromise their accounts, but after that was unsuccessful, he pivoted to this ransomware pretext,” Abnormal’s Crane Hassold wrote.

  Abnormal Security documented how it tied the email back to a Nigerian man who acknowledged he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network he is building called Sociogram. In June 2021, the Nigerian government officially placed an indefinite ban on Twitter, restricting it from operating in Nigeria after the social media platform deleted tweets by the Nigerian president.

  Reached via LinkedIn, Sociogram founder Oluwaseun Medayedupin asked to have his startup’s name removed from the story, although he did not respond to questions about whether there were any inaccuracies in Hassold’s report.

  “Please don’t harm Sociogram’s reputation,” Medayedupin pleaded. “I beg you as a promising young man.”

  After he deleted his LinkedIn profile, I received the following message through the “contact this domain holder” link at KrebsOnSecurity’s domain registrar [curiously, the date of that missive reads “Dec. 31, 1969.”]. Apparently, Mr. Krebson is a clout-chasing monger.

  

  A love letter from the founder of the ill-fated Sociogram.

  Mr. Krebson also heard from an investigator representing the Nigeria Finance CERT on behalf of the Central Bank Of Nigeria. While the Sociogram founder’s approach might seem amateurish to some, the financial community in Nigeria did not consider it a laughing matter.

  On Friday, Nigerian police arrested Medayedupin. The investigator says formal charges will be levied against the defendant sometime this week.

  

  KrebsOnSecurity spoke with a fraud investigator who is performing the forensic analysis of the devices seized from Medayedupin’s home. The investigator spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his physical safety.

  The investigator — we’ll call him “George” — said the 23-year-old Medayedupin lives with his extended family in an extremely impoverished home, and that the young man told investigators he’d just graduated from college but turned to cybercrime at first with ambitions of merely scamming the scammers.

  George’s team confirmed that Medayedupin had around USD $2,000 to his name, which he’d recently stolen from a group of Nigerian fraudsters who were scamming people for gift cards. Apparently, he admitted to creating a phishing website that tricked a member of this group into providing access to the money they’d made from their scams.

  Medayedupin reportedly told investigators that for almost a week after he started emailing his ransom-your-employer scheme, nobody took him up on the offer. But after his name appeared in the news media, he received thousands of inquiries from people interested in his idea.

  George described Medayedupin as smart, a quick learner, and fairly dedicated to his work.

  “He seems like he could be a fantastic [employee] for a company,” George said. “But there is no employment here, so he chose to do this.”

  What’s interesting about this case — and indeed likely why anyone thought this guy worthy of arrest — is that the Nigerian authorities were fairly swift to take action when a domestic cybercriminal raised the specter of causing financial losses for its own banks.

  After all, the majority of the cybercrime that originates from Africa — think romance scams, Business Email Compromise (BEC) fraud, and unemployment/pandemic loan fraud — does not target Nigerian citizens, nor does it harm African banks. On the contrary: This activity pumps a great deal of Western money into Nigeria.

  How much money are we talking about? The financial losses from these scams dwarf other fraud categories — such as identity theft or credit card fraud. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), consumers and businesses reported more than $4.2 billion in losses tied to cybercrime in 2020, and BEC fraud and romance scams alone accounted for nearly 60 percent of those losses.

  

  Source: FBI/IC3 2020 Internet Crime Report.

  If the influx of a few billion US dollars into the Nigerian economy each year from cybercrime seems somehow insignificant, consider that (according to George) the average police officer in the country makes the equivalent of less than USD $100 a month.

  Ronnie Tokazowski is a threat researcher at Agari, a security firm that has closely tracked many of the groups behind BEC scams. Tokazowski maintains he has been one of the more vocal proponents of the idea that trying to fight these problems by arresting those involved is something of a Sisyphean task, and that it makes way more sense to focus on changing the economic realities in places like Nigeria.

  Nigeria has the world’s second-highest unemployment rate — rising from 27.1 percent in 2019 to 33 percent in 2020, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The nation also is among the world’s most corrupt, according to 2020 findings from Transparency International.

  “Education is definitely one piece, as raising awareness is hands down the best way to get ahead of this,” Tokazowski said, in a June 2021 interview. “But we also need to think about ways to create more business opportunities there so that people who are doing this to put food on the table have more legitimate opportunities. Unfortunately, thanks to the level of corruption of government officials, there are a lot of cultural reasons that fighting this type of crime at the source is going to be difficult.”

• Bruce Schneier “Crypto” Means “Cryptography,” not “Cryptocurrency”

  I have long been annoyed that the word “crypto” has been co-opted by the blockchain people, and no longer refers to “cryptography.” I’m not the only one.

• Oshpark Cast-Away RP2040: ultra-compact feature-rich Pico alternative

  
  Gareth Halfacree writes on Hackster:

  

  Oak Development Technologies has unveiled another board built around Raspberry Pi’s incredibly popular RP2040 microcontroller: the compact, castellated, surface-mountable Cast-Away RP2040.

  “Cast your project fears away with the Cast-Away RP2040, a small and easy to use RP2040 dev board designed to take your project to the beach,” writes Oak’s Seth Kerr of his latest board design. “This board uses the popular Raspberry Pi RP2040, a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller.”

  Read more…

  Perfect purple prototypes from @oshpark with beautiful silk detail. pic.twitter.com/KbX10Eiq2D

  — Oak Dev Tech (@oakdevtech) November 20, 2021

• The Atlantic: In Focus Buried in Volcanic Ash, Scenes from the Canary Islands (18 photos)

  The Cumbre Vieja volcano has now been erupting for more than two months, continuing to generate lava flows and earthquakes on the Spanish island of La Palma. It has also been spewing millions of cubic meters of volcanic ash into the air, and as the ash falls, it blankets the nearby landscape. The ash can fall like hail or drift like dust, and it piles up and drifts in the wind, covering houses, farms, and forests. Some removal work has taken place, to clear roads and ease the strain on sagging rooftops, but more ash continues to fall. The following photographs from La Palma show what some of the volcano’s neighbors have been coping with over the past few weeks.

  

• ke9v Return to Real

  It seems the Dayton Hamvention will happen in 2022.

  Having been canceled these last two years due to the global pandemic I’m a little skeptical, but making plans to attend. With the event still six months away who knows what the virus situation will be then? Still, the tickets are printed and the area hotels are booked solid so a lot of folks see this as a done-deal and I hope they’re right.

  After avoiding large crowds for nearly two years I guess I will need to work up a little courage to get up close and personal with more than 30,000 others coming from points unknown with perhaps half of them vaccinated.

  Many details are still in the works, but we know the Contest activities have moved from the Crowne Plaza in downtown Dayton out to the Hope Hotel near Wright-Patterson, a definite step-up in the accommodations and surroundings. It’s also a lot closer to Xenia.

  Assuming I go, I’ll slip over to the fairgrounds on Friday, weather permitting, just to put an eyeball on whatever might be new and exciting in the world of ham radio. I don’t generally buy anything that requires hauling out of there these days. Ordering online with direct delivery is just too convenient to pass on.

  Unless of course Unobtanium is discovered in the flea market…

  It will be nice to catch-up with old friends and maybe shake the hands of a few of those adventurers destined for Bouvet, Crozet, and other exotic ports of call over the coming year.

  These are real things, important aspects that have been lacking from the virtual hamfests that have tried to replace them with bits on a screen.

  Ham radio is a real thing and I like to think the return to Dayton and other real hamfests, conferences, and meetings will mark the beginning of the end of the short-lived love affair many have had with these virtual hamfests during the days of Covid.

• Deep Learning Weekly Deep Learning Weekly: Issue #225

  Hey folks,

  This week in deep learning, we bring you GPT-3's availability, a model that can diagnose glaucoma in 10 seconds, TensorFlow Graph Neural Networks library, and a paper on permutation-invariant neural networks for RL.

  You may also enjoy on-device training (with reference Colab) using TensorFlow Lite, a primer on ML interpretability, a tutorial for fine-tuning XLSR for automatic speech recognition, a paper on accelerating recurrent neural networks for gravitational wave experiments, and more!

  As always, happy reading and hacking. If you have something you think should be in next week's issue, find us on Twitter: @dl_weekly.

  Until next week!

  ---

  Industry

  Comet Raises $50 Million Series B to Accelerate ML Development for the Enterprise

  With the round, Comet plans to continue building out its enterprise ML platform that combines both experiment tracking and model production monitoring tools.

  OpenAI's API Now Available with No Waitlist

  Developers in supported countries can now sign up and start experimenting with GPT-3.

  New AI Test Diagnoses Glaucoma in Just 10 Seconds

  A team of engineers and ophthalmologists in Australia has developed a novel approach using AI to diagnose glaucoma that can yield results in just 10 seconds.

  AWS makes AI and machine learning tangible with first major art debut at Smithsonian

  Amazon Web Services Inc. has commissioned its first-ever major art piece, a site-specific sculpture powered by artificial intelligence and designed by artist and architect Suchi Reddy that will be the centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s “Futures” exhibit.

  Google partners with startup Cohere to run AI models on Cloud TPU chips

  Google LLC’s cloud business will help Cohere Inc., an early-stage artificial intelligence startup, run natural language processing models in the cloud as part of a multiyear partnership.

  MLPerf HPC Benchmarks Show the Power of HPC+AI

  NVIDIA-powered systems won four of five tests in MLPerf HPC 1.0, an industry benchmark for AI performance on scientific applications in high performance computing.

  In Pursuit of Smart City Vision, Startup Two-i Keeps an AI on Worker Safety

  Two-i uses computer vision to help prevent deadly accidents in the oil and gas industry, one of the world’s most dangerous sectors.

  Mobile & Edge

  On-device training in TensorFlow Lite

  TensorFlow Lite now supports training your models on-device, in addition to running inference. The article includes a reference Colab and a short tutorial.

  Using Arm Streamline for profiling ML workloads

  This tutorial demonstrates how to use Arm Streamline Performance Analyzer to profile an ML-based Android application.

  This tinyML system helps soothe your dog's separation anxiety with sounds of your voice

  A tinyML project that can automatically detect a dog’s barking sounds and subsequently play some familiar voices to calm it down.

  AI Recycling Machine using oneM2M

  A quick guide on how to make a MobileNet-based garbage sorting device using a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.

  Learning

  Introducing TensorFlow Graph Neural Networks

  An announcement of and tutorial for TensorFlow Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a library designed to make it easy to work with graph structured data using TensorFlow. 

  A Primer on ML Interpretability & Explainability

  A comprehensive and theoretical article on the definition, motivating need, landscape, limitations, and the future of ML/DNN interpretability.

  How to Train State-Of-The-Art Models Using TorchVision’s Latest Primitives

  A comprehensive walkthrough on how to train SOTA models using TorchVision’s latest ResNet primitives.

  Fine-Tune XLSR-Wav2Vec2 for low-resource ASR with 🤗 Transformers

  A technical tutorial and in-detail explanation of how XLS-R (a multilingual version of Wav2Vec2) can be fine-tuned for automatic speech recognition.

  Libraries & Code

  IntelLabs/control-flag: A system to flag anomalous source code expressions by learning typical expressions from training data

  A self-supervised idiosyncratic pattern detection system that learns typical patterns that occur in the control structures of high-level programming languages, such as C/C++, by mining these patterns from open-source repositories.

  OpenPrompt

  An open-source framework for prompt-learning that supports loading PLMs directly from Hugging Face transformers.

  jaxdf - JAX-based Discretization Framework

  A JAX-based package defining a coding framework for writing differentiable numerical simulators with arbitrary discretizations.

  Papers & Publications

  The Sensory Neuron as a Transformer: Permutation-Invariant Neural Networks for Reinforcement Learning

  Abstract:

  In complex systems, we often observe complex global behavior emerge from a collection of agents interacting with each other in their environment, with each individual agent acting only on locally available information, without knowing the full picture. Such systems have inspired development of artificial intelligence algorithms in areas such as swarm optimization and cellular automata. Motivated by the emergence of collective behavior from complex cellular systems, we build systems that feed each sensory input from the environment into distinct, but identical neural networks, each with no fixed relationship with one another. We show that these sensory networks can be trained to integrate information received locally, and through communication via an attention mechanism, can collectively produce a globally coherent policy. Moreover, the system can still perform its task even if the ordering of its inputs is randomly permuted several times during an episode. These permutation invariant systems also display useful robustness and generalization properties that are broadly applicable.

  Accelerating Recurrent Neural Networks for Gravitational Wave Experiments

  Abstract:

  This paper presents novel reconfigurable architectures for reducing the latency of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are used for detecting gravitational waves. Gravitational interferometers such as the LIGO detectors capture cosmic events such as black hole mergers which happen at unknown times and of varying durations, producing time-series data. We have developed a new architecture capable of accelerating RNN inference for analyzing time-series data from LIGO detectors. This architecture is based on optimizing the initiation intervals (II) in a multi-layer LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) network, by identifying appropriate reuse factors for each layer. A customizable template for this architecture has been designed, which enables the generation of low-latency FPGA designs with efficient resource utilization using high-level synthesis tools. The proposed approach has been evaluated based on two LSTM models, targeting a ZYNQ 7045 FPGA and a U250 FPGA. Experimental results show that with balanced II, the number of DSPs can be reduced up to 42% while achieving the same IIs. When compared to other FPGA-based LSTM designs, our design can achieve about 4.92 to 12.4 times lower latency.

  CLIP2TV: An Empirical Study on Transformer-based Methods for Video-Text Retrieval

  Abstract:

  Modern video-text retrieval frameworks basically consist of three parts: video encoder, text encoder and the similarity head. With the success on both visual and textual representation learning, transformer based encoders and fusion methods have also been adopted in the field of video-text retrieval. In this report, we present CLIP2TV, aiming at exploring where the critical elements lie in transformer based methods. To achieve this, We first revisit some recent works on multi-modal learning, then introduce some techniques into video-text retrieval, finally evaluate them through extensive experiments in different configurations. Notably, CLIP2TV achieves 52.9@R1 on MSR-VTT dataset, outperforming the previous SOTA result by 4.1%.

• Quanta Magazine The Algorithm That Lets Particle Physicists Count Higher Than Two

  Thomas Gehrmann remembers the deluge of mathematical expressions that came cascading down his computer screen one day 20 years ago. He was trying to calculate the odds that three jets of elementary particles would erupt from two particles smashing together. It was the type of bread-and-butter calculation physicists often do to check whether their theories match the results of experiments.

  Source

• Moon Monday Moon Monday Issue #54

  Highlight & Science

  NASA has selected Intuitive Machines as the commercial lander provider to deliver 92 kilograms of science and technology payloads to the swirl of Reiner Gamma on the Moon as part of the agency’s CLPS program. For a bargain price of $77.5 million, Intuitive Machines will land and jointly operate five rovers and a bunch of science instruments in 2024.

  

  The swirl of Reiner Gamma has a weak local magnetic field, possibly a remnant from the time the Moon had a global magnetic field. The mission’s primary payload suite Lunar Vertex is a collection of spectrometers and magnetometers on the lander and a rover. The rover, which Lunar Outpost will provide, will drive up to two kilometers over 13 Earth days, exploring at least one bright and dark section of the lunar swirl. Lunar Vertex will study the swirl’s composition, and map the strength and direction of magnetic fields at its surface, complementing observations from past orbiters. This will be the world’s first mission to a swirl, and will provide us insights into how they form and evolve, better understand effects of the solar wind and bombarding micrometeorites on planetary bodies across the solar system, and shape our understanding of the Moon’s magnetic evolution.

  

  The other four rovers Intuitive Machines will land in Reiner Gamma are part of NASA’s Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project. The shoebox-sized rovers will autonomously navigate the landed region and collectively better map it than a single rover can. Onboard the lander will also be a South Korean instrument to monitor high-energy particles as the Moon passes in and out of Earth’s magnetic tail, and an ESA-provided MoonLIGHT retroreflector, which will reflect laser beams from Earth to make precise distance measurements and infer properties of the Moon’s core, the Moon drift rate away from Earth, and test General Relativity.

  This science-packed mission represents a new phase for NASA’s CLPS program to send instruments on commercial lunar landers, enhanced thanks to the recent PRISM initiative. The second mission in this enhanced science phase will visit the Schrödinger crater in 2024, for which NASA will announce the winning commercial landing bidder next.

  The Reiner Gamma landing is Intuitive Machines’ third such NASA contract and also their third Moon mission, following the first two missions in 2022. All three missions will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with each lander carrying at least 100 kilograms of payloads to the lunar surface. The third lander will also carry a thousand kilograms worth of spacecraft on an attached dispenser ring to deploy them on a lunar transfer orbit, one of which will be the company’s own communications satellite called Khonstellation. This satellite will place itself in an orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point, like the previous Khonstellation similarly deployed by the company’s second lander, to relay communications between Earth and hardware on the lunar farside or poles.

  Exploration

  NASA’s Office of Inspector General has released another critical report on the agency’s Artemis program to land and sustain humans on the Moon. It summarizes the report as follows:

  NASA lacks a comprehensive and accurate cost estimate that accounts for all Artemis program costs. For FYs 2021 through 2025, the Agency uses a rough estimate for the first three missions that excludes $25 billion for key activities related to planned missions beyond Artemis III. When aggregating all relevant costs across mission directorates, NASA is projected to spend $93 billion on the Artemis effort up to FY 2025., We also project the current production and operations cost of a single SLS/Orion system at $4.1 billion per launch for Artemis I through IV, although the Agency's ongoing initiatives aimed at increasing affordability seek to reduce that cost. Multiple factors contribute to the high cost of ESD programs, including the use of sole-source, cost-plus contracts; the inability to definitize key contract terms in a timely manner; and the fact that except for the Orion capsule, its subsystems, and the supporting launch facilities, all components are expendable and "single use" unlike emerging commercial space flight systems. Without capturing, accurately reporting, and reducing the cost of future SLS/Orion missions, the Agency will face significant challenges to sustaining its Artemis program in its current configuration.

  

  While members of NASA leadership concurred with many of the report findings, they didn’t agree on how the costs should be tracked, essentially saying that Artemis is a “campaign” of lunar exploration efforts and not a defined program. For the per-mission cost, they argue the agency “does not account, track, or report costs on a per-mission basis, precisely because doing so would reduce contractual transparency to key stakeholders.” On a non-critical note, the report complimented NASA for using a commercial model to land Artemis astronauts on the Moon, and noted that “SpaceX has contributed much more than half of the required funding to date for the HLS system and plans to continue this level of contribution.”

  ---

  Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims denied Blue Origin’s lawsuit against NASA for the agency selecting SpaceX Starship as the sole spacecraft provider to land the first Artemis astronauts on the Moon. The court has now released the 47-page redacted report detailing its decision, which essentially says Blue Origin couldn’t prove that NASA’s conduct was “arbitrary and capricious or otherwise contrary to law.” It adds that their price was simply too high for the available budget to NASA and that their bid was noncompliant anyway. It further adds that even if Blue Origin was given the opportunity to alter their bid, they didn’t seem to have a demonstrably different bid.

  While Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has decided to stop pursuing their protests, the drama may not be fully over yet. NASA is still under pressure from the U.S. Senate to include a competitor for the mission. If the senate’s recent draft of appropriation bills for fiscal year 2022 is passed, it would direct NASA to select a second company regardless of funding availability. Either way, NASA has formally begun planning its Lunar Exploration Transportation Services (LETS) program to regularly ferry astronauts to and fro the Moon after the first few Artemis missions. To that end, NASA funded five commercial companies two months ago—including Blue Origin and SpaceX—to advance their crewed and large-cargo lunar lander concepts in specific ways that makes them cost-effective and sustainable.

  ---

  In September, NASA asked the U.S. industry for feedback on how it could go about procuring an extremely capable, commercial Lunar Terrain Vehicle rover for its Artemis astronauts to explore the Moon. While NASA prepares to solicit said proposals by next year, the bidders are coming out. We already knew Lockheed Martin and General Motors will pitch their co-designed autonomous rover that can handle rugged terrain at the Moon’s poles, and survive and “even operate” in the frigid lunar night. Now Northrop Grumman has come forth with its intent to bid an autonomous rover too, in crew and cargo variants, that can last for 10 years as required by NASA.

  

  Northrop will partner with Lunar Outpost—the company sending its small, autonomous, rugged and robotic MAPP rover on two prior Moon missions—to build the rover, for which AVL will provide the drive, steering and suspension mechanisms and Michelin will design the tires. Since NASA wants the rover to be delivered on a commercial landing mission, Northrop has partnered with Intuitive Machines to use their upcoming 500-kilogram capacity Nova-D spacecraft to land the rover on the Moon. In addition to leading the bid and rover integration, Northrop is also engaging Apollo astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Charles Duke to leverage their experience to optimize the rover for the needs of researchers and astronauts.

  ---

  NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy are asking U.S. companies to propose designs for autonomous, compact and lightweight fission surface power systems that could launch to the Moon within a decade and provide at least 40 kilowatts of electrical power—enough to continuously power 30 households for ten years. Fission systems can operate continuously in the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions as well as during the long and frigid lunar night, and thus be able to provide crucial and ample power to enable sustained robotic and human presence on the Moon.

  Update: In last week’s coverage, I missed the second company selected for the Canadian rover study. Below is an updated paragraph.

  After requesting proposals from Canadian companies earlier this year to build a lunar rover, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has awarded MDA and Canadensys detailed design study contracts for a mission at the Moon’s south pole to potentially explore water ice and other resources in permanently shadowed regions. An interesting and challenging requirement is for the rugged rover to survive an entire lunar night. CSA intends to select one of the two companies to build the rover for the actual mission, which will launch in 2025 onboard an as-yet unspecified NASA-funded U.S. commercial landing mission.

  More Science

  An object 40 to 100 meters across which quasi-orbits Earth—meaning it actually orbits the Sun but lies very close to Earth, and from our reference looks like its circling us—may actually be a piece of the Moon ejected by a past asteroid impact.

  The Washington State University team won NASA’s 2021 BIG Idea Challenge to develop an effective lunar dust mitigation technique for future crewed and robotic missions to the Moon. They demonstrated a proof-of-concept with a spray-bar which used cryogenic liquid droplets to lift and transport over 90% of hazardous lunar dust from spacesuit materials. The technique’s core operating principle is the Leidenfrost effect, wherein if a liquid is close to a surface significantly hotter than its boiling point, an insulating vapor layer forms that keeps the liquid from boiling rapidly. This makes the droplet hover, much like how water drops sprinkled on an already hot pan skitter. Check out the team’s poster and technical paper, as well as the other novel lunar dust removal ideas from the rest of the finalists.

  More Moon

  If you thought Earth orbit is getting crowded, the Moon maybe next in line. On October 18, ISRO commanded its Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to change its orbit slightly to avoid an uncomfortably close approach (about 3 kilometers) to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter near the Moon’s north pole. Both spacecraft orbit the Moon in a nearly polar orbit, which is why they can come close to each other over the poles.

  

  ---

  Thank you Andrew Cantino, Hunter Danque, Open Lunar Foundation and SWISSAPOLLO for supporting me and powering this edition of Moon Monday.

  Everyone, this one-of-a-kind Moon exploration newsletter is free, with no ads. And it will stay that way. If you like my comprehensive lunar exploration and science coverage, your support will keep it going.

  Support Moon Monday 🌗

• Freedom to Tinker “Signal Loss” and advertising privacy on Facebook

  The 2021 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, a major award administered by a Japanese foundation, goes to Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Chinese computer scientist who earned PhDs from Harvard and the University of Illinois before being a professor at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and then becoming Dean of an important theoretical computer science education program at Tsinghua University.  Professor Yao is a theorist, his many major important results are in “computational complexity theory,” so how did he win an international award in “Advanced Technology?”    Well, one of his major results led to the invention of Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC), by which two or more people can pool their data to compute a result without actually disclosing their data to each other.  And in this article I’ll explain how one present day company seems to be applying MPC to try to comply with privacy rules issued by regulators.

  Facebook tracks your web browsing in order to make money delivering ads to you.  Facebook has been under pressure from the European Union and from Apple to be less invasive of your privacy.  For example, in 2017 the EU put out a new Privacy Directive, and in 2019 Apple’s Safari browser stopped attaching cookies to third-party image requests.  In this article I’ll discuss some indications that Facebook is beginning to adjust its advertising-tracking model so they can make money without invading your privacy quite as much.  They are experimenting with secure multiparty computation, a “privacy enhancing technology” developed in academia, to measure which ad “impressions” convert to purchases on the average–but without knowing which individuals saw an ad and then made a purchase.

  When you browse from one web site to another, many sites snoop on your browsing history, by tracking mechanisms such as cookies and single-pixel images (whose purpose is to track your http image-load requests).  Much of this tracking is for the purpose of making money by targeting ads to you.  Merchants (for example Nike) pay web sites (such as Facebook) to deliver ad views (“impressions”), and Nike pays more for impressions that “convert”, that is, lead to a purchase.  So, Facebook and (independently) Nike would like to (1) deliver ads that are likely to convert, and (2) measure which impressions are converting.  Facebook wants to make more money by delivering to you the ads most likely to convert, and Nike wants to make sure it’s getting its money’s worth from its ad budget.

  One way to do this is: when you make a purchase at the Nike online store, the browser sends Facebook a copy of your nike.com shopping cart and your Facebook user ID.  Then Facebook looks up what Nike ads they displayed recently to that user ID; those ads converted to shoe sales, and Nike is happy to pay more for such ads.

  That tracking can be a terrible invasion of privacy.  So for years now, regulators (in California and the European Union) and browser makers (like Firefox) have been adjusting restrictions on cookies (and other kinds of tracking) to try to improve privacy.  Facebook’s internal euphemism for privacy enforcement is “signal loss.”  Here’s an analysis of the problem, from an advertiser’s point of view (warning: much marketing-speak!).  The “signal” is the data that Facebook needs to manage its core revenue stream, advertising.  

  (When the browser maker (Google, or Apple) is also a major advertising platform, there’s an inherent conflict of interest:  Apple’s Safari restricts Facebook and Google’s ad tracking more than it restricts Apple’s own ad tracking, and Google-the-browser-maker delayed tightening Chrome’s cookie-rules for two years because Google-the-ad-platform needed those cookies.)

  So for years now, advertising platforms (like Facebook) have been adapting the way they intrusively track you, so they can still make money delivering relevant ads.   For example, aside from using cookies and tracking pixels inside the browser, Nike and Facebook share things they know about you outside, like your e-mail address, phone number, and home address.  Facebook’s system for that is their “Conversions API”, a software interface for merchants, to measure which advertisements “convert”, using server-to-server communications in the back end.

  In any case, there’s pressure on Facebook (and Google and other advertising platforms) to be more respectful of privacy.  When it was just the U.S. Congress asking Zuck to testify at hearings, Facebook could perhaps laugh it off, but when entities with real enforcement power (Apple and California and the EU) start to insist on their users’ and citizens’ privacy, then Facebook might ask themselves, “How can we make money without so much privacy invasion?”

  Google is trying one method, called “Federated Learning of Cohorts” (FLoC), but privacy advocates have severely criticized it, for good reason: instead of sharing your entire history, FLoC labels you with a summary of your history.  That’s still a significant privacy invasion, and it may even make it easier for bad guys to track large numbers of people in harmful ways.

  Is there a better way?  Academic research on secure multiparty computation (MPC) has shown how to measure a global property (how many Nike ads converted into sales) without identifying specific users’ histories.  In particular, with the right multiparty protocol, Nike (or Facebook) can’t tell which specific purchases at nike.com resulted from ads, and they can’t tell which specific ad-impressions resulted in sales, but they can measure the average.  And that’s good enough:  good enough for Facebook to target you with ads that are more likely to convert; good enough for Nike to know that they’re getting their money’s worth from Facebook.

  The way this kind of MPC would work is,  the ad platform (such as Facebook) knows what ads it shows to each user.  The merchant (such as Nike) knows which shoes it sold to each purchaser.  They want to jointly compute the effectiveness of the ad campaign, but without Facebook revealing to Nike anything about individual users, and without Nike revealing to Facebook anything about individual purchasers.  (but see note 1 below) So Nike would encrypt its collection of shopping carts, and Facebook would encrypt its collection of ad-impression data, and they use homomorphic encryption to compute the “join” of these relations without either one seeing the other’s unencrypted data.

  And indeed,  Facebook claims to be adopting this method (though this explainer is very short on technical details).  But Facebook has a public github repo for their new API for advertisers, based on MPC.  And this press release says they’re already testing their “Private Lift Measurement” with some advertisers.  

  Will Facebook adopt this for all advertisers?  If they do, then I think it really will be a privacy improvement.  It’s more private than Google’s solution of publicly labeling each user with a summary of their history.  Of course, Facebook still knows where on Facebook you’ve been, in every detail; and Nike still knows what you browsed in their on-line store; but nobody will know both at once.

  Although MPC can measure ad conversions–whether Facebook is delivering ads that will increase shoe sales–it probably cannot target ads quite as precisely.  That is, Facebook’s machine-learning criteria to decide which ads to show you might work better if they do their super-privacy-intrusive tracking of everything you do on and off Facebook.  By limiting their tracking to on-Facebook-only, they may find that ad impressions have a slightly lower conversion rate, so Facebook makes slightly less money.  Time will tell whether they’re willing to take that hit.

  And SMP won’t solve other societal problems that aren’t related to privacy:  The duopoly of Google/Youtube and Facebook/Instagram in online advertising, Youtube and Facebook’s recommender systems pushing users towards extreme views, Youtube and Facebook trying to maximize the amount of time you waste on-line, Instagram harmful to teenage girls–none of these are about privacy, and secure multiparty computation doesn’t address those problems.

  Note 1. Sarah Scheffler, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), writes, MPC’s “private” nature in these descriptions depends not only on using MPC, but also on using MPC to compute a privacy-preserving function.  MPC could be used in the way you describe to privately compute average ad conversions, but could also be used to say, “privately” compute the list of users who are shared between Nike and Facebook or something (and I’ve heard suggestions of it being used for exactly that purpose).  In the latter case, it’s still technically more private than Facebook and Nike comparing lists in the clear, but I don’t think it’s what most people want from “private computing”. 

  So Sarah and I took a look at Facebook’s open-source MPC repo, where we see strong evidence that they are computing appropriately private functions (such as “total value of an ad campaign”).

• The Early Days of a Better Nation Book launch for BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY
  Details here.
  
  

  
• XKCD Bayes' Theorem
  
• Basic Instructions How to Accept Assistance

  

  Someday, somebody is going to make a Tiger King-style documentary about Gallagher (the famous comedian and enemy of all watermelons) and his brother Ron Gallagher, otherwise known as Gallagher II, or Gallagher Too.

  The broad strokes of the story are:

  Leo Gallagher, who I will from here on out refer to as Gallagher, became a famous comedian, playing large theaters and small arenas all over the country.

  Gallagher had a brother named Ron, who looked a lot like him.

  Ron asked if he could put together an act made up of a bunch of Gallagher’s older material, including the Sledge-O-Matic, and play smaller venues where they couldn’t afford Gallagher. Gallagher agreed to this, as long as the advertising made it clear that the show featured Ron Gallagher, not Gallagher.

  Allegedly, after a few years of this arrangement, Ron’s advertisements became less obvious about which Gallagher people could expect. I myself remember seeing a newspaper advertisement when he performed at a comedy club in Seattle that left me confused as to which Gallagher was going to show up. I seem to remember the wording being something like, “Here’s your chance to see Gallagher Too!”

  Allegedly, Gallagher withdrew his permission for Ron to use his intellectual property.

  Allegedly, Ron continued using it anyway.

  I also heard a story through the comedy grapevine that Ron Gallagher (again, allegedly) started offering himself to some of the smaller venues Gallagher played at a lower price than his brother, but I’ve found no evidence of this on the web.

  The records show that Gallagher sued Ron Gallagher and won.

  Allegedly, most of their family sided with Ron.

  I once saw Gallagher (the real Gallagher) perform: back in the very early ’90s, my younger brother and I saw him at the Capitol Theater in Yakima, Washington. The show started over an hour late, after Gallagher personally escorted security up into the balcony where he shrieked insults at two guys who had offended his girlfriend. (The guys probably had it coming.) Then, once the show did finally start, he took some time out to complain that the restaurant down the street had the temerity to charge him full price for his dinner.

   What I’m saying is that I’m not surprised that there’s some emotional volatility in his family.

  As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).
• Weekly Robotics Weekly Robotics #170

  

  Last week I announced on LinkedIn that I’m opening up the newsletter for advertising. If you know anyone that could be interested in advertising here please feel free to reach out. The ads will be in text format only,...

• Dan Luu Major errors on this blog (and their corrections)

  Here's a list of errors on this blog that I think were fairly serious. While what I think of as serious is, of course, subjective, I don't think there's any reasonable way to avoid that because, e.g., I make a huge number of typos, so many that the majority of acknowledgements on many posts are for people who e-mailed or DM'ed me typo fixes.

  A list that included everything, including typos would both be uninteresting for other people to read as well as high overhead for me, which is why I've drawn the line somewhere. An example of an error I don't think of as serious is, in this post on how I learned to program, I originally had the dates wrong on when the competition programmers from my high school made money (it was a couple years after I thought it was). In that case, and many others, I don't think that the date being wrong changes anything significant about the post.

  Although I'm publishing the original version of this in 2021, I expect this list to grow over time. I hope that I've become more careful and that the list will grow more slowly in the future than it has in the past, but that remains to be seen. I view it as a good sign that a large fraction of the list is from my first three months of blogging, in 2013, but that's no reason to get complacent!

  I've added a classification below that's how I think of the errors, but that classification is also arbitrary and the categories aren't even mutually exclusive. If I ever collect enough of these that it's difficult to hold them all in my head at once, I might create a tag system and use that to classify them instead, but I hope to not accumulate so many major errors that I feel like I need a tag system for readers to easily peruse them.

  • Insufficient thought
    • 2013: Using random algorithms to decrease the probability that good stories get "unlucky" on HN: this idea was tried and didn't work well as well as putting humans in the loop who decide which stories should be rescued from oblivion.
      • Since this was a proposal and not a claim, this technically wasn't an error since I didn't claim that this would definitely work, but my feeling is that I should've also considered solutions that put humans in the loop. I didn't because Digg famously got a lot of backlash for having humans influence their front page but, in retrospect, we can see that it's possible to do so in a way that doesn't generate backlash that effective kills the site and I think this could've been predicted with enough thought
  • Naivete
    • 2013: The institution knowledge and culture that create excellence can take a long time to build up: At this time, I hadn't worked in software and that thought that this wasn't as difficult for software because so many software companies are successful with new/young teams. But, in retrospect, the difference isn't that those companies don't produce bad (unreliable, buggy, slow, etc.) software, it's that product/market fit and network effects are important enough that it frequently doesn't matter that software is bad
    • 2015: In this post on how people don't read citations, I found it mysterious that type system advocates would cite non-existent strong evidence, which seems unlike the other examples, where people pass on a clever, contrarian, result without ever having read it. The thing I thought was mysterious was that, unlike the other examples, there isn't an incorrect piece of evidence being passed around; the assertion that there is evidence is disconnected from any evidence, even misinterpreted evidence. In retrospect, I was being naive in thinking that there was a link to evidence that people wouldn't just fabricate the idea that there is evidence supporting their belief and then pass that around.
  • Insufficient verification of information
    • 2016: Building a search engine isn't trivial: although I think the overall point is true, one of the pieces of evidence I relied on came out of using numbers that someone who worked on a search engine told me about. But when I measured actual numbers, I found that the numbers I was told were off by multiple orders of magnitude
  • Blunder
    • 2015: Checking out Butler Lampson's review of what worked in CS, 16 years later: it was wrong to say that capabilities were a "no" in 2015 given their effectiveness on mobile and that seems so obviously wrong at the time that I would call this a blunder rather than something where I gave it a decent amount of thought but should've thought through it more deeply
  • Pointlessly difficult to understand explanation
    • 2013: How data alignment impacts memory latency: the main plots in this post use a ratio of latencies, which adds a level of indirection that many people found confusing
    • 2017: It is easy to achieve 95%-ile performance: the most common objection people had to this post was something like "False. You need to be very talented and/or it is hard to [play in the NBA / become a chess GM / achieve a 2200 chess rating]". James Clear made an even weaker claim on Twitter and also got similar responses. There isn't really space to do this on Twitter, but in my blog post, I should've included more concrete examples of what various levels of performance look like for people who have a difficult time estimating what performance looks like at various percentiles. To pick one of the less outlandish claims, here's a claim that a 2200 rating is 95%-ile for someone who's ever played chess online, which appears to be off by perhaps four orders of magnitude, plus or minus one.
  • Errors in retrospect
    • 2015: Blog monetization: I grossly underestimated how much I could make on Patreon by looking at how much Casey Muratori, Eric Raymond, and eevee were making on Patreon at the time. I thought that all three of them would out-earn me based for a variety of reasons and that was incorrect. A major reason that was incorrect was that boring, long-form, writing monetizes much better than I exepected, which means that I monetarily undervalued that compared to what other tech folks are doing.
      • A couple weeks ago, I added a link to Patreon at the top of posts (instead of just having one hidding at the bottom) and mentioned having a Patreon on Twitter. Since then, my earnings have increased by about as much as Eric Raymond makes in total and the amount seems to be increasing at a decent rate, which is a result I wouldn't have expected before the rise of substack. But anyone who realized how well individual writers can monetize their writing could've created substack and no one did until Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi created substack, so I'd say that this one was somewhat non-obvious

  Thanks to Anja Boskovic and Ville Sundberg for comments/corrections/discussion.

November 21, 2021

• VE7SAR (Surrey Amateur Radio Club) SARC-SEPAR November 10 Presentation on DMR

   Here is a guide to getting started on DMR

  DMR stands for Digital Mobile Radio and is a European-developed international standard of digital radio. This new and versatile technology covers voice and data transmissions, along with conformance testing. It is an affordable digital solution to analog radio.

  The only drawback is programming, which is more complex than standard amateur radio. DMR requires a 'codeplug' which is a file containing program information. With most analog ham radios you can convert a DMR code plug from one radio brand to another, using CHiRP for example. As mentioned during the presentation, every manufacturer seems to roll their own software, thus ensuring different nomenclature, and organization of their dialog boxes.

  Its not for the faint of heart or for the beginner, so its best to consult someone in your area who may have a codeplug ready to go. For us that resource is Doug Pattengale VE7CQT, who gave an excellent PowerPoint presentation on the subject to a combined Zoom audience of SARC and SEPAR members. 

  According to Doug, some of the worst radios don't include the ability to fully export or import the code plug elements so that tools like spread sheets can be used for bulk editing. There are tools 'out there' that facilitate this conversion from one proprietary software to another. For free! Have a look at this tool as it handles the TYT MD UV380 or 390 model in question. 

  Doug has used it to convert an AnyTone code plug in the past, and he reports that its amazingly powerful and convenient. Once you get to know how it works, it can do in a few minutes what would take hours of work to manipulate in a spread sheet. An added benefit is that it compensates for missing functionality like sorting, re-ordering and cut / paste that the native CPS software lacks.

  http://n0gsg.com/contact-manager/

  - this is a stand alone .exe file. You just drop it into a folder and run it. No hidden files, overhead, install or uninstall. Just delete it, and its gone.

   

  

  
  
  

  Here is a link to Doug's presentation:

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d4qRTKzhX46fFVagdHUq1UAy2SLNrc55/view?usp=sharing

  And here is a complete guide to getting started in digital radio, courtesy of the Galway Radio Club:  Digital-Radio-Operating-Manual-v2.pdf (galwayradio.com)

  ~

  
  

• Prof. Werner Antweiler Where in the United States is driving an electric vehicle environmentally beneficial?
  Categories: US Environment Transportation
• ke9v Lazy Sunday

  We spent much of Friday and Saturday working on the Great Leaf Gathering. Our home is surrounded by big trees that seem to shed endless leaves and we usually spend several days (about now) every year in the clean-up process. It requires at least three BIG efforts to get them all blown, bagged, and hauled away.

  It was important to get that work done yesterday as a cold rain rolled into the area overnight. Our timing was good and today I’m able to enjoy the lazy rain from the warm, dry side of the window.

  Listened

  I managed to catch-up on SolderSmoke (the podcast) last week thanks to the commute time caused by a rare out-of-town trip for work. It was episode 234 and N6QW mentioned one of his latest projects, the PSSST-20, a scratch built minimalist SSB transceiver (Pete’s Simple Seven SSB Transceiver):

  Our goal is to create a fully functioning “Minimalist” SSB transceiver using something different than the currently popular bilateral (Bitx) topology and in doing so use the minimum number of transistor devices. The ensuing webpages describe a fully functional and operational 20M SSB transceiver that uses a total of 7 transistors, Five of those transistors are 2N2222A, the 6th is a 2N2219A and the 7th is now a RD006HHF1. With some shopping all seven can be purchased for under $10 total. The output power is 4 Watts with the RD006HHF1. If you stick with the IRF510 the cost is under $5.

  Watched

  I caught Wayne, N6KR of Elecraft on the Coffee and Ham Radios video podcast. Burdick described the Elecraft design philosophy and more. It’s detailed (and long) at about 100 minutes, but fans of the company will find it time well-spent.

• DragonflyBSD Blog Lazy Reading for 2021/11/21

  This is a good mix this week.

  • Can Data Die?  Tracking the Lenna Image.  I’ve linked to other stories about this image before.  (lost the source link, sorry)
  • A Close Look at a Spinlock.
  • The Monstrosity Email Has Become.  (via)
  • FURBY MODULE – A Synthesizer Module That Houses A Furby.  The synth itself is worth a look.  (via)
  • The inside story of the outside investigation of SoftRAM 95.
  • Oh, great, there’s a year 2028 problem too.  (via)
  • The history of writing in 1.5 hours.
  • Upstairs, Downstairs: d20 Power Relations.
  • Faces of Open Source.  Doug McIlroy looks like Otto Mentalis from Psychonauts 2.  Coincidence?  (via)
  • Fermentabot 1.0 and a data-collecting version.
  • New Brothers Quay film on the way.  (via)
  • Tindie, a maker market site.  Interesting niche products.  Found via this story.
• mlops.community What is the secret formula for MLOps success?

  This article is written by Hristo Krastev ( The original post can be found here ).

  Clearly, no mastermind holds the key. A better place to search might be in the sleepless nights and the overtime hours spent on operationalizing machine learning models.

  This search for the pieces of the formula is what I had to do when I started working a few months ago on the product side of TeachableHub’s machine learning deployment platform. As a novice in the field, it threw me in the deep end and it was overwhelming, to say the least. Thankfully by my side, I had my team and the people forming the awesome MLOps.community and DataTalks.Club communities.

  Putting one foot before the other on the way to uncover the secret I spoke with more than 100 ML professionals to learn about their MLOps journeys. My expedition is far from over but I saw three ‘signposts’ along the way that helped me better understand what the formula for MLOps success looks like. I hope you find them helpful on your journey too.

  “Don’t Innovate for Innovation’s Sake“

  

  “Focus more on solving a problem, rather than using a particular tool…”

  Luigi Patruno shared in his second talk with Demetrios Brinkmann about productionization.

  Carving out new paths requires a lot more energy and resources, which is especially true for machine learning. Before searching for any secret formula for successful ML model operationalization, we need to take a really good look first at the problem and then at the tools we are planning to use for it. That is the foundation for an impactful and beneficial MLOps introduction later on, not only for the Machine Learning and Data Science teams but also for the company as a whole.

  “There’s a shocking number of what people classify as DS/ML work that can be solved in SQL (Quintile bucketing, windowing ops, building linear equations, etc.) It might execute in seconds vs. the ML approach — 1 hour to train, 10 mins to validate, and the code you need to maintain. We’re here to solve problems, not to get fancy.”

  From Benjamin Wilson’s talk with Alexey Grigorev on how to run away from complexity.

  Hyped about the latest cutting-edge technology and FOMO

  “AI FOMO leads to teams throwing ML at the wrong problems and then getting disappointed when the models perform poorly or never make it to production”

  Chris Sears, Field CTO of Hypergiant

  Fear of missing out makes some companies grab on to machine learning and start looking for a problem it can solve, instead of looking for it as a solution to an already established issue.

  We have met people from various sizes of organizations and they shared common observations on how decisions on the executive level are affected by the:

  • Lack of understanding of the technology,
  • Poor communication with the data science and engineering teams,
  • An unhealthy innovative spirit at times.

  All these are oftentimes leading to selecting a fancy-sounding problem and fixating on innovating with machine learning. In the end, resulting in a mismatch and a failure of the whole initiative.

  ML as a one-off project or as a continuously developing product?

  The above-mentioned observations are a contributing factor to companies treating ML as a one-off project, rather than as a product. Speaking with the lead ML engineer of a major fintech company building a fraud detection system, she shared a similar observation:

  “Companies that are starting with the problem first, improving on a defined metric and reach ML as a solution naturally are the ones that will treat their models as a continuously developing product”

  In her experience, the distinguishing feature between the two types of companies and approaches is having a defined key metric that is directly tied to the core of the problem. Having that in place allows ML/DS teams to show clear results to the company’s executives, gain their trust and get a “green light” for further development. It also makes the work more impactful and enjoyable as well as benefiting the business as a whole.

  The ML Jackpot!

  To conclude this point I’d like to quote two experts from the MLOps.community sharing practical experience about not innovating just for innovation’s sake but rather for the problem’s sake. The first is Oguzhan Gencoglu from his discussion with Demetrios Brinkmann on the Law of Diminishing Returns for Running AI Proofs-of-Concept.

  “If you gather 3 or 4 people with tech and business backgrounds and put them in a room for some time to think of all the possible problems in the organization that can be solved with ML you can create a backlog of problems. From which you can select the one that will be the best match with the highest ROI. This incredibly increases the chances of hitting the ML Jackpot!”

  Supporting and expanding on this quote Simon Shaienks Product Marketing expert at Snitch AI added:

  “We have a similar approach. ROI and impact are great, but feasibility and complexity are equally as important. We gather the best use case but don’t necessarily go for the highest ROI first if it’s too complex. We tend to focus on quick wins more than big bets.“

  You can find more on his thoughts about the complexity vs. impact balance here.

  The Focus

  And the second is a continuation from Luigi Patruno’s talk with Demetrios Brinkmann about productionization:

  “If you have strong leadership on the executive table to direct your attention to the really important problems can translate to huge wins for the company as a whole. Focus on THE problem that is going to be the most important for the business”

  They both touch on the topic from slightly different angles, but their points feel equally eye-opening and important to me.

  “Start with the end in mind”

  Now, getting more into the field of productionized models Oguzhan Gencoglu made another great point in the same talk explaining from his experience why a lot of successful PoCs don’t make it to production.

  While all the reasons he shared are valid, the thing that struck me the most is that ML teams are missing the holistic view from the beginning:

  “If you don’t plan during the Proofs-of-Concept, it will never make it to production so, in the beginning, you should be aware of the holistic view of the constraints. Your models are made for production”.

  A smarter way of building PoCs is to think of them as products that will need to get into a real business environment. Of course, that doesn’t mean data scientists shouldn’t experiment and test ideas. But considering the requirements and resources needed to get a particular model working in production from the beginning brings them closer to success.

  “Getting into new areas with many unknowns, we, of course, use the scientific methodology, but still maintaining an iterative way of working and keeping in mind the business problem”

  Shared Georgi Kostadinov Co-founder & CTO at Kelvin Health and also Head of AI at Imagga

  

  The positive exceptions

  A lot of teams have had to undergo several iterations in defining and establishing their machine learning capabilities. Of which two separate fairly small teams we’ve met each consisting of 2–3 Data Scientists and just a single ML engineer. One was at the beginning of improving their recommendation system for e-commerce in production and the other was in its second year of having live models for optimizing freight distribution channels. They both followed Elena Samuylova’s pieces of advice on how to avoid failing at productionizing ML models, which she shared in her talk with Alexey Grigorev:

  “Educate non-technical stakeholders and learn from them

  Tight collaboration and cross-functional teams

  Be highly iterative — iterate on the problem statement, data, and model

  Scoping — don’t rush into modeling or settle for convenience

  Start small deploy fast — measure time to results, not results

  Clear metrics — don’t lose sight of business success criteria

  Start with a suitable MVP/prototype”

  Both teams on the one hand thought in terms of infrastructure, load balancing, redundancy, availability, performance, scaling, data security, compatibility, reproducibility, etc, and on the other — they were considering the team’s capacity and know-how. And while making all those considerations, they always made sure the core metric and requirements for the problem are communicated with the business. That way, they created a holistic view of their roles and responsibilities in putting models to production, which helped them execute much faster than the rest of the teams we’ve spoken to.

  But Unfortunately…

  Unfortunately, from our observation, these two cases are more of an exception as the majority of teams think about these things as they go. No wonder Ale Solano first message got pinned right on top of the introductions around the MLOps community:

  “I was a happy data scientist until we decided it was time for deploying our models.”

  It is common among many DS/ML teams that when the time for productionizing the model comes, they are caught off guard due to poor planning.

  

  Unsiloing the Data Science teams

  As Chris Sears best puts it:

  “I think the challenge is getting DS teams embedded or collaborating with the folks that have the deep domain knowledge to identify and frame the ML problem correctly. Small teams do that better than large corporate orgs where there’s a DS team silo’d off in their own world. I used to be at AWS and working backwards from a customer outcome or experience was one of our key principles.”

  To that challenge, Soumanta Das shared with us how they are addressing currently the issue at Yugen:

  “For the past few months at Yugen, we’ve been pairing Data Scientists and ML Engineers to work together on a new model release or to roll out an A/B test, to foster a positive culture of collaboration. We’ve noticed the following encouraging trends:

  • Increased appreciation of system design and architecture. All our Data Scientists now spend more time designing flows before they write the first line of code.

  • Using system design documents as a tool to onboard new team members. We’re saving a lot of time that would have been earlier spent in knowledge transition meetings.

  • Higher influx of ideas. ML Engineers feel more confident suggesting ideas to drive key KPIs”

  “Aim for the low hanging fruits”

  Reaching the end of any endeavor requires strategy, the same applies for succeeding with MLOps. One such strategy is to take on a less challenging problem or part of it in the beginning and find the easiest way it can be solved. “Simple bets with quick wins” can be a good foundation and preparation for the more complex problems.

  The Strategy

  So when it comes to introducing MLOps to your organization, do you go for the lowest hanging fruits first or the highest priority problems?

  

  In one of the MLOps community’s Coffee Sessions, Nick Masca was sharing War Stories from Productionising ML and he answered:

  “Early on I focused on delivering value, gaining trust through making some early wins, but also having a 3-year plan and thinking about the bigger picture around automating at scale. It gave me both the technical (path to production) and non-tech (customer behavior, measurement issues, business impact) learnings much faster. So start small, think big.”

  Strategically picking the problems in the grand scheme of things from the very beginning can allow for quick learning moving forward and showing results. And later on, prepare the team for the more challenging ones. Georgi Kostadinov also shared the experience they have with picking the problems to focus on:

  “Throughout the years we’ve noticed that the time spent on hyper optimizing algorithms yields less overall improvement as compared to focusing on improving the data set or switching the perspective on solving a particular problem. The Pareto effect applies with full force 20% of the effort brings 80% of the model accuracy”

  The IKEA effect

  Taking a certain approach often depends on the company’s culture. Benjamin Wilson later in his talk with Alexey Grigorev touches heavily on that point:

  “I have seen that effect with certain companies that I’ve interacted with, where they’ve built that “10,000 piece desk”. They love it. But they also hate it, because they can’t build any more desks, can’t build the chair that goes along because they’re too busy fixing the desk over and over again. The whole DS team spends 90% of their time just fixing and gluing back on little pieces that keep falling off.”

  In the same line of thought, one Full-stack Data Scientist who was tasked to introduce MLOps in the start-up company he works in shared with us:

  “I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. If there is an MLOps platform that can manage the infrastructure in an optimized way and has some of the best practices built in the workflow, I’ll take it.”

  They are a small team consisting of 3 Data Scientists including him and their focus is to be able to deliver faster and continuously improve their models. Building things in-house is something he wanted to avoid as that would add unnecessary complexity to his work and this was in alignment with the company’s culture. They were actively looking to outsource this part of the process and exploring our and other solutions was a possible low-hanging fruit for them.

  Avoiding unnecessary complexity

  Another example of successfully applying this strategy came from Utkarsh Agrawal Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Trell. Their main focus at the time was to improve their personalization system for a video-sharing platform. They have taken this approach to a smaller scale with the way they have constructed their production pipeline:

  “With each model, we focus on putting a stripped-down version, quickly deploy in production and then in the span of a few weeks to continuously add complexity”.

  Continuously improving their models was possible because they have well-established performance metrics. Taking one problem at a time and focusing on it was their way to nail the engagement rate they were trying to improve as a core metric. This strategy allowed them to build up the complexity required for accurate personalization models and to fully address the problem over time.

  Making a full circle on the MLOps journey isn’t easy and it’s not something that happens for a day. So starting small, but thinking big is making mine, and as it seems others’ work, less overwhelming and a lot more exciting. I hope it can do the same for you.

  Fin

  The amazing collaborative spirit in the communities is a major driving force in the progress of the MLOps space.

  Thanks to it, a search for any kind of success formula is possible. Step by step in my team, we put together insights from all the shared knowledge and experience to paint the detailed picture. If you want to see it yourself sign up to demo test the TeachableHub’s platform.

  The journey continues, and these were some of the “signposts’’ that helped me build up an understanding of successful MLOps. Hopefully, they will save you time and give you some sense of direction. I’m interested to hear how are you navigating in the space and to build a more comprehensive guide together. Contact me on LinkedIn and stay tuned for part II.

  The post What is the secret formula for MLOps success? appeared first on MLOps Community.

• Jetson Hacks NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin

  At the latest GTC, NVIDIA announced that they will begin shipping the Jetson AGX Orin in early 2022.

  

  Introduction

  The Jetson AGX Orin is the next generation AGX form factor Jetson. The AGX Orin module has the same footprint as the Jetson AGX Xavier, using the same 699 pin connector. Here’s some quick specs for the AGX Orin Developer Kit:

  OrinDevKitDownload

  Tech Specs

  We can see from the specs some of the reasons that NVIDIA claims a 6-7X performance improvement over the earlier AGX Xavier. The Orin uses the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture with 2048 CUDA cores and 64 Tensor Cores. The AGX Xavier has 512 Volta Architecture CUDA cores with the same number of Tensor Cores.

  By comparison the Orin CPU complex consists of 12 ARM Cortex A78AE v8.2 64 bit CPUs, grouped in fours. The Xavier has 8 ARM Cortex A72s. For the Orin, the memory is faster with 32GB of 256-bit LPDDR5 main memory versus the older LPDDR4 of the Xavier.

  The Orin has 15W, 30W and 50W power modes.

  How Do We Keep Getting Even More Computing Power?

  The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, famously stated that “Moore’s law is dead”. Kinda, sorta. If you look at the past history of the Jetson, we know that the Tegra X1 chips (currently in the Jetson Nano) have ~2 billion transistors. The Xavier Tegra chips have ~7 billion. The new Orin Tegra chips have ~17 billion! With just about every generation of Jetson you get 2x the number of transistors of its predecessor.

  How does that happen? The key is the manufacturing process. the Tegra X1 uses a 20 nanometer (nm) process, the Xavier a 12nm process and the Orin a 8nm process. The process is the main factor on how many transistors you can fit in a given space on the chip die. The smaller the process, the smaller the transistor. Thus more transistors in a given amount of space.

  That explains how you get more transistors, but you can imagine that there’s a physical limit. 5nm is now becoming available. However, as you keep getting smaller you will eventually reach the point where the electrons won’t be able to be contained. After all, they can only put up with so much. They want to be free!

  

  Another interesting aspect of having more transistors is how to take advantage of them in the compute stream. Modern computer hardware architecture is a really interesting area. If you haven’t studied it or haven’t visited the area in a while, it’s well worth taking some time and listen to some talks and read up on the subject.

  Sofware

  The big news on the software front for the Jetson AGX Orin is that a new version of JetPack 5.0 will install Ubuntu 20.04 on Xavier and Orin platforms. This, along with support of the rest of the major NVIDIA Jetson software packages (CUDA, DeepStream, ISAAC support and so on) promises to make the new Jetson quite formidable in the AI on the Edge and robotics communities.

  JetPack 5.0 will include kernel 5.10, a reference file system based on Ubuntu 20.04, UEFI as boot loader, OP-TEE as the trusted execution environment, and also the latest compute stack. JetPack 5.0 Developer Preview release is targeted for Q1 2022 and the production release is targeted for 2H-2022. 

  Pricing?

  NVIDIA is keeping this a secret for now. As we get closer to the release data, I’m sure they’ll let us know.

  How This Rollout is Different

  In the past, the Jetson announcements have been pretty much around the product launch date. For the Orin, that changes somewhat. This time, the Orin is announced a few months ahead of ship dates. In addition, NVIDIA provides several different documents to help with migration from the AGX Xavier to the AGX Orin, along with a good amount of technical specifications, pinmux sheets, and design considerations.

  Resources for Jetson AGX Orin

  Here are some of the documents:

  • The Jetson AGX Orin Product Page
    Jetson AGX Orin for Next-Gen Robotics | NVIDIA 38
  • The Jetson AGX Orin technical brief: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/gtcf21/jetson-orin/nvidia-jetson-agx-orin-technical-brief.pdf 26
  • Jetson AGX Orin collateral available at the Jetson Download Center 22, including data sheet, design guide, pinmux, and Jetson AGX Xavier to Jetson AGX Orin migration app note.

  Read through the technical brief first, it gives a good overview of the architecture of the system. There are many different compute complexes on the Tegra System on a Chip (SoC), it takes some study to understand what all of them do.

  Once we get our hands on one of these, we’ll be able to see what the new goodness is all about.

  The post NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin appeared first on JetsonHacks.

• True Positive Weekly True Positive Weekly #44

  Hey, in this issue: model ensembles are faster than you think; how ML is helping us understand animal communication; a multilingual model has outperformed the best bilingual models for the first time; PyTorch implementations of 37 GAN papers; attention mechanisms in computer vision; and more.

  • [Google] Model ensembles are faster than you think

  • [Facebook] For the first time, a single multilingual model has outperformed the best bilingual models (paper, code)

  • [Project] PyTorch implementations of 37 GAN papers

  • [Video] How ML is helping us understand animal communication

  • [ArXiv] Attention mechanisms in computer vision: a survey (github) plus a Survey of visual transformers

  • [Google] MetNet-2: deep learning for 12-hour precipitation forecasting (ArXiv)

  • [Project] doubtlab: doubt your data, find bad labels

  • Unis are using AI to keep students from cheating and it’s a bit creepy

  Enjoy the newsletter? Help me make it bigger and better by sharing it with your colleagues and friends.

  Have a nice weekend! See you next week. — Andriy

November 20, 2021

• WB4SON 1500 Medallion on my DXCC Challenge Plaque

  The ARRL delivered my 1500 band-point medallion yesterday, and it is now mounted on my DXCC Challenge Plaque.  I had acquired the 1000 band-point plaque after about 3 years of DXing.  It took almost 7 years to work the next 500 band-points during the bottom on Solar Cycle 24, and the beginning of 25.

  

   

• ke9v Future of Amateur Radio

  The IARU Region 1 Workshop on the Future of Amateur Radio yielded BIG goals seen as essential for future growth. I’m certain radio amateurs of all regions would embrace these as they are consistent with the messaging of other organizations interested in the future of the hobby. Almost as though these were taken from a coordinated global playbook and it’s a very good book!

  There is a lot to digest here, go read the full document for yourself.

  The focus is clear; we will use our radio spectrum as a playground for fun, education, and innovation. The intended results are compelling and summed up well by the stated vision for results in the coming decade:

  “By 2031, amateur radio will be booming throughout Region 1. It will have evolved into one of the leading expert communities for science and technology enthusiasts. It will be justly respected and admired, both for the opportunities for self-development it offers and for the value it brings to society as a whole ”.

  I intend to wear that phrase (“evolved into one of the leading expert communities for science and technology enthusiasts”) out over the coming months and years at KE9V.net.

  If we can’t achieve that, we need to find a new hobby!

  Key values ​considered ​guiding principles and that should not be compromised:

  FUN, ENJOYMENT, PASSION, HOBBY

  Experiencing the magic of radio / electronics / wireless communications, as an adventure of a lifetime (for all ages), for personal interest only, not for commercial purposes. Amateur radio is not just fun: We are passionate about using electromagnetic communications and technology to achieve and improve ourselves. We enjoy personal interaction with like-minded people and we want to serve our society.

  GLOBAL COMMUNITY OF RADIO HOBBIES

  The global ham radio community is an inclusive environment without borders. The “HAM spirit” is used within the community and is a multicultural, apolitical, open-minded and tolerant concept where friendship is built around the world. In this community common interests are shared and developed.

  PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTATION (TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION)

  The freedom to experiment. Curiosity-driven experimentation with communication technology and techniques, reusing existing techniques and improving them, understanding and exploring the physics of electromagnetic propagation.

  INNOVATION

  A focus on creativity and innovation around cutting edge technology and an intense curiosity about what might be possible. Development of new techniques.

  LEARNING AND EDUCATION (TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATIONS)

  One of the foundations of amateur radio is continuous self-training and education within technologies and communications. Curiosity and the desire to break existing technical boundaries are strong drivers, as well as sharing knowledge within the community to educate and help others.

  VALUE FOR SOCIETY

  Promote interest in scientific and technological issues throughout society. Amateur radio also provides trained radio operators and radio engineers to companies. They provide logistical support and radio communication expertise in emergency situations and public events.

• DragonflyBSD Blog In Other BSDs for 2021/11/20

  Some history, some games.

  • tmpfs-13, an experimental hellosystem build.
  • Latest iortcw [Return to Castle: Wolfenstein] on OpenBSD.
  • What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD Part 3: That packet filter.  (via)
  • FreeBSD Quarterly Report, 2021Q3.
  • Installing and Operating 4.3BSD-tahoe UNIX on the VAX (1988).  (via)
  • FreeBSD/Ubuntu Dual-boot testbed using Desktop Hardware.  (via)
  • GhostBSD online meetup, December 11.
  • Call For Testing: Removing and hardening sensitive files.
  • Valuable News – 2021/11/15.
  • Demystifying OpenZFS 2.0.  BSD-oriented.
  • OpenBSD and Linux comparison: data transfer benchmark.  Interesting results…  Excessive ACKing?

November 19, 2021

• Krebs on Security The ‘Zelle Fraud’ Scam: How it Works, How to Fight Back

  One of the more common ways cybercriminals cash out access to bank accounts involves draining the victim’s funds via Zelle, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) payment service used by many financial institutions that allows customers to quickly send cash to friends and family. Naturally, a great deal of phishing schemes that precede these bank account takeovers begin with a spoofed text message from the target’s bank warning about a suspicious Zelle transfer. What follows is a deep dive into how this increasingly clever Zelle fraud scam typically works, and what victims can do about it.

  Last week’s story warned that scammers are blasting out text messages about suspicious bank transfers as a pretext for immediately calling and scamming anyone who responds via text. Here’s what one of those scam messages looks like:

  

  Anyone who responds “yes,” “no” or at all will very soon after receive a phone call from a scammer pretending to be from the financial institution’s fraud department. The caller’s number will be spoofed so that it appears to be coming from the victim’s bank.

  To “verify the identity” of the customer, the fraudster asks for their online banking username, and then tells the customer to read back a passcode sent via text or email. In reality, the fraudster initiates a transaction — such as the “forgot password” feature on the financial institution’s site — which is what generates the authentication passcode delivered to the member.

  Ken Otsuka is a senior risk consultant at CUNA Mutual Group, an insurance company that provides financial services to credit unions. Otsuka said a phone fraudster typically will say something like, “Before I get into the details, I need to verify that I’m speaking to the right person. What’s your username?”

  “In the background, they’re using the username with the forgot password feature, and that’s going to generate one of these two-factor authentication passcodes,” Otsuka said. “Then the fraudster will say, ‘I’m going to send you the password and you’re going to read it back to me over the phone.'”

  The fraudster then uses the code to complete the password reset process, and then changes the victim’s online banking password. The fraudster then uses Zelle to transfer the victim’s funds to others.

  An important aspect of this scam is that the fraudsters never even need to know or phish the victim’s password. By sharing their username and reading back the one-time code sent to them via email, the victim is allowing the fraudster to reset their online banking password.

  Otsuka said in far too many account takeover cases, the victim has never even heard of Zelle, nor did they realize they could move money that way.

  “The thing is, many credit unions offer it by default as part of online banking,” Otsuka said. “Members don’t have to request to use Zelle. It’s just there, and with a lot of members targeted in these scams, although they’d legitimately enrolled in online banking, they’d never used Zelle before.” [Curious if your financial institution uses Zelle? Check out their partner list here].

  Otsuka said credit unions offering other peer-to-peer banking products have also been targeted, but that fraudsters prefer to target Zelle due to the speed of the payments.

  “The fraud losses can escalate quickly due to the sheer number of members that can be targeted on a single day over the course of consecutive days,” Otsuka said.

  To combat this scam Zelle introduced out-of-band authentication with transaction details. This involves sending the member a text containing the details of a Zelle transfer – payee and dollar amount – that is initiated by the member. The member must authorize the transfer by replying to the text.

  Unfortunately, Otsuka said, the scammers are defeating this layered security control as well.

  “The fraudsters follow the same tactics except they may keep the members on the phone after getting their username and 2-step authentication passcode to login to the accounts,” he said. “The fraudster tells the member they will receive a text containing details of a Zelle transfer and the member must authorize the transaction under the guise that it is for reversing the fraudulent debit card transaction(s).”

  In this scenario, the fraudster actually enters a Zelle transfer that triggers the following text to the member, which the member is asked to authorize: For example:

  “Send $200 Zelle payment to Boris Badenov? Reply YES to send, NO to cancel. ABC Credit Union . STOP to end all messages.”

  “My team has consulted with several credit unions that rolled Zelle out or our planning to introduce Zelle,” Otsuka said. “We found that several credit unions were hit with the scam the same month they rolled it out.”

  The upshot of all this is that many financial institutions will claim they’re not required to reimburse the customer for financial losses related to these voice phishing schemes. Bob Sullivan, a veteran journalist who writes about fraud and consumer issues, says in many cases banks are giving customers incorrect and self-serving opinions after the thefts.

  “Consumers — many who never ever realized they had a Zelle account – then call their banks, expecting they’ll be covered by credit-card-like protections, only to face disappointment and in some cases, financial ruin,” Sullivan wrote in a recent Substack post. “Consumers who suffer unauthorized transactions are entitled to Regulation E protection, and banks are required to refund the stolen money. This isn’t a controversial opinion, and it was recently affirmed by the CFPB here. If you are reading this story and fighting with your bank, start by providing that link to the financial institution.”

  “If a criminal initiates a Zelle transfer — even if the criminal manipulates a victim into sharing login credentials — that fraud is covered by Regulation E, and banks should restore the stolen funds,” Sullivan said. “If a consumer initiates the transfer under false pretenses, the case for redress is more weak.”

  Sullivan notes that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently announced it was conducting a probe into companies operating payments systems in the United States, with a special focus on platforms that offer fast, person-to-person payments.

  “Consumers expect certain assurances when dealing with companies that move their money,” the CFPB said in its Oct. 21 notice. “They expect to be protected from fraud and payments made in error, for their data and privacy to be protected and not shared without their consent, to have responsive customer service, and to be treated equally under relevant law. The orders seek to understand the robustness with which payment platforms prioritize consumer protection under law.”

  Anyone interested in letting the CFPB know about a fraud scam that abused a P2P payment platform like Zelle, Cashapp, or Venmo, for example, should send an email describing the incident to BigTechPaymentsInquiry@cfpb.gov. Be sure to include Docket No. CFPB-2021-0017 in the subject line of the message.

  In the meantime, remember the mantra: Hang up, Look Up, and Call Back. If you receive a call from someone warning about fraud, hang up. If you believe the call might be legitimate, look up the number of the organization supposedly calling you, and call them back.