Moon and star Antares morning of March 5, 2021

Let the moon show you Antares, a red supergiant star and the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion on the morning of March 5. Source: https://earthsky.org/tonight/moon-antares-morning-of-mar-5-2021…

SpaceX Mars Prototype Rocket Nails Landing For the First Time, But Explodes On Pad

A SpaceX rocket prototype, known as SN10, soared over South Texas during test flight Wednesday before swooping down to a pinpoint landing near its launch site. Approximately three minutes after landing, however, multiple independent video feeds showed the rocket exploding on its landing pad. CNN reports: SpaceX’s SN10, an early prototype of the company’s Starship Mars rocket, took off around 5:15…

How Microsoft Plans To Give Virtual Reality Apps a Big Boost

The market for virtual and augmented reality products has developed slower than expected, but Microsoft is seeking to accelerate the sector by making it much easier for people to connect from different locations and with different kinds of devices. From a report: The ultimate goal of the new effort, dubbed Microsoft Mesh, is to allow, for example, a person in an…

Exploring the Open Source That Really Goes Into a RISC-V Chip

“Maker Andreas Spiess talks about the Open Source that really goes into a RISC-V chip and the ESP32-C3,” writes
Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 — sharing a link to this article from Hackaday: It’s an exciting time in the world of microprocessors, as the long-held promise of devices with open-source RISC-V cores is coming to fruition. Finally we might be about to see open-source…

Red Hat Introduces Free RHEL for Open-Source Organizations

ZDNet brings an update about the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: When Red Hat, CentOS’s Linux parent company, announced it was “shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream,” CentOS users were not happy. Now, in an effort to mollify them and to keep its promise to open-source organizations, Red Hat is…

Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes

The summary of a study by National Bureau of Economic Research: The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare, a sector in which intensive government subsidy and market frictions could lead high-powered for-profit incentives to be misaligned with the social goal of affordable, quality care. This paper studies [PDF] the effects of PE…

Why Does the Apple TV Still Exist?

Apple commentator Jason Snell writes: Why does this product still exist, and is there anywhere for it to go next? Gruber and Thompson [two other columnists] suggest that perhaps the way forward is to lean into an identity as a low-end gaming console. Maybe amp up the processor power, bundle a controller, and try to use Apple Arcade to emphasize that…

Resilient Teaching During Times of Change with Dr. Rebecca Quintana, University of Michigan

The pandemic has accelerated the global need for online learning. In the short term, educators mitigated disruption of campus closures by moving their courses, assessments, and even graduation ceremonies online.  In many educational settings, the focus has shifted to adaptability—how can we design courses that withstand all kinds of changes, including a pandemic? It has […]
The post Resilient Teaching During Times…

Ban on Wireless Modems In Voting Machines Should be Optional, Suggests US Election Agency

The U.S. agency overseeing elections has “quietly weakened a key element of proposed security standards…” reports the Associated Press, “raising concern among voting-integrity experts that many such systems will remain vulnerable to hacking.” The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is poised to approve its first new security standards in 15 years after an arduous process involving multiple technical and elections community bodies…

Pandemic Drove Sales of 4G and 5G-Enabled PCs To New Record In 2020

Global sales of cellular-enabled mobile PCs reached more than 10 million units for the first time in 2020 as home workers sought improved connectivity in response to the closure of office facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research firm Strategy Analytics: According to the latest analysis from Strategy Analytics’ Connected Computing Devices program, global shipments increased by 70% to 10.1 million, the…