/09

NASA will pay for moon rocks excavated by private companies | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008310/nasa-pay-moon-rocks-lunar-samples-excavated-private-companies/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rp-resolve-2.jpg?resize=1200,600

Any commercial mission that can prove it has collected lunar samples stands to make up to $25,000.
by

Neel V. Patel

NASA announced today that it was seeking proposals from private companies interested in collecting samples from the moon and making them available for purchase by the agency.

The news: As part of the new initiative, one or more companies will launch a mission to the moon and collect between 50 and 500 grams of lunar regolith from the surface. If they can store the sample in a proper container and send pictures and data to NASA to prove the sample has been collected and can be brought to Earth safely, NASA will pay that company between $15,000 and $25,000.

The company would receive 10% of its payment after its bid is selected by NASA, 10% after the mission launches, and the remaining 80% upon delivering the materials to NASA. The agency has yet to determine exactly how it will retrieve the sample, but the exchange would be expected to happen “in place” on the moon itself—meaning any participating company is only obligated to figure out how to get to the moon. NASA would retain sole ownership of the material upon transfer.

NEWS: @NASA is buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It’s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources. More: ▻https://t.co/B1F5bS6pEy pic.twitter.com/oWuGHnB8ev
— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 10, 2020

The samples could be from anywhere on the surface of the moon, and could possess any rock, dust, or ice materials. The agency wants to complete these exchanges before 2024.

What’s in it for NASA: There’s an extremely high demand for lunar material among scientists. Nearly all the lunar material currently in NASA’s possession was collected during the Apollo program. While the initiative itself will only bring a small amount to Earth compared with the hundreds of kilograms gathered during Apollo, this could be the first step in establishing a new pipeline for lunar samples, in which NASA buys from the private sector instead of devoting resources to building and launching missions for that purpose.

In a blog post published today, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the new initiative is part of the agency’s larger goal with the Artemis program to bolster private-sector participation in space exploration. The agency is already working with several launch providers under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to deliver nearly two dozen scientific and technological payloads to the moon in the run-up to a crewed landing by the end of 2024. The 2024 landing itself is slated to utilize hardware built by private companies, most notably the lunar lander for taking humans to the surface.
Sign up for The Airlock - Your gateway to the future of space technology
Stay updated on MIT Technology Review initiatives and events?
Yes
No

What’s in it for the company: $25,000 is paltry compensation for such a mission, so any companies that participate won’t be in this for money. Instead, it’s an incentive to test out new technologies, including those that could be later used to extract resources like water ice from the moon. The mission outlined in today’s announcement will only involve collecting and storing material from the surface, but that’s still something no private company has done before.

Legal questions: Lastly, many of America’s larger lunar ambitions focus on establishing a moon mining industry and developing a marketplace that allows excavated resources to be bought and sold by different parties. Bridenstine alludes to these plans in his blog post, referencing President Trump’s April 2020 executive order that encourages the recovery and use of resources in outer space. That order was a follow-up to a law passed in 2015 outlining America’s position that US companies are allowed to own and sell resources they’ve extracted from extraterrestrial bodies. There’s still debate as to whether such policies conflict with the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty.

#Lune #Communs #Enclosure #Traité_espace #NASA

#Covid-19 : la terrible leçon de #Manaus – {Sciences²}
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/huet/2020/09/24/covid-19-la-terrible-lecon-de-manaus

Une grande ville d’Amazonie, Manaus, répond à la question : combien de morts si on laisse le Sars-Cov-2 se propager ?

[...]

La réponse de Manaus est-elle extrapolable à d’autres pays ? Oui, à condition de ne pas oublier son côté « optimiste », au regard d’une population similaire à celle de notre pays, où les plus de 60 ans représentent un pourcentage beaucoup plus élevé. Ainsi, un article du Massachussets Institute of Technology ▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/22/1008709/brazil-manaus-covid-coronavirus-herd-immunity-pandemic relatant l’étude sur Manaus estime que la stratégie dite d’#immunité_collective provoquerait au moins 500 000 morts aux Etats-Unis. Un chiffre minimum de chez minimum, puisque ce pays compte déjà 200 000 décès (officiels) attribués à la Covid-19 alors que le taux d’infection de la population est très loin de celui observé à Manaus. Et qu’une étude « worst case » aboutit plutôt à 1,7 million de morts aux Etats-Unis. Ce chiffre est donc similaire aux calculs de l’article de Arnaud Fontanet et Simon Cauchemez (de l’Institut Pasteur à Paris) paru dans Nature review immunology qui conclut, pour la France, à une estimation entre 100 000 et 450 000 morts dans le cas d’une stratégie d’immunité collective.

L’étude sur les donneurs de sang de Manaus apporte également une information peu encourageante : il semblerait que la réponse sérologique (donc la présence d’anticorps) diminue avec le temps passé depuis l’infection. L’#immunité serait donc assez rapidement déclinante avec le temps.

Why Facebook’s political-ad ban is taking on the wrong problem
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/06/1008192/why-facebooks-political-ad-ban-is-taking-on-the-wrong-problem

A moratorium on new political ads just before election day tackles one kind of challenge caused by social media. It’s just not the one that matters. When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would stop accepting political advertising in the week before the US presidential election, he was responding to widespread fear that social media has outsize power to change the balance of an election. Political campaigns have long believed that direct voter contact and personalized messaging are (...)

#CambridgeAnalytica/Emerdata #Facebook #algorithme #manipulation #domination #élections (...)

##CambridgeAnalytica/Emerdata ##SocialNetwork

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/SA_GettyImages-102678771_web.jpg

Eight case studies on regulating biometric technology show us a path forward
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/04/1008164/ai-biometric-face-recognition-regulation-amba-kak

A new report from the AI Now Institute reveals how different regulatory approaches work or fall short in protecting communities from surveillance. Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn’t long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to (...)

#Clearview #Facebook #biométrie #migration #[fr]Règlement_Général_sur_la_Protection_des_Données_(RGPD)[en]General_Data_Protection_Regulation_(GDPR)[nl]General_Data_Protection_Regulation_(GDPR) #consentement #données #facial #reconnaissance #iris #Aadhaar #discrimination (...)

##[fr]Règlement_Général_sur_la_Protection_des_Données__RGPD_[en]General_Data_Protection_Regulation__GDPR_[nl]General_Data_Protection_Regulation__GDPR_ ##empreintes ##pauvreté

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/image-thumb.jpg

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/03/1007716/digital-gardens-let-you-cultivate-your-own-little-bit-of-the-internet/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/digital-garden_web.jpg?resize=1200,600

Le retour des « pages personnelles »

A growing number of people are creating individualized, creative sites that eschew the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media
by

Tanya Basu
September 3, 2020
digital garden illustration of wild plants with flowers growing around screensMs Tech | Wikimedia, Pixabay

Sara Garner had a nagging feeling something wasn’t quite right.

A software engineer, she was revamping her personal site, but it just didn’t feel like her. Sure, it had the requisite links to her social media and her professional work, but it didn’t really reflect her personality. So she created a page focused on museums, which she is obsessed with. It’s still under construction, but she envisions a page that includes thoughts on her favorite museums, describes the emotions they evoked, and invites others to share their favorite museums and what they’ve learned.

“I’m going for a feeling of wonderment, a connection across time,” she says.

Welcome to the world of “digital gardens.” These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter. Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.
“Everyone does their own weird thing”

The movement might be gaining steam now, but its roots date back to 1998, when Mark Bernstein introduced the idea of the “hypertext garden,” arguing for spaces on the internet that let a person wade into the unknown. “Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. “The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.” (His digital garden includes a recent review of a Bay Area carbonara dish and reflections on his favorite essays.)

The new wave of digital gardens discuss books and movies, with introspective journal entries; others offer thoughts on philosophy and politics. Some are works of art in themselves, visual masterpieces that invite the viewer to explore; others are simpler and more utilitarian, using Google Docs or Wordpress templates to share intensely personal lists. Avid readers in particular have embraced the concept, sharing creative, beautiful digital bookshelves that illustrate their reading journey.

Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.

We have an epic collection going, check these out...

1. @tomcritchlow’s Wikifolders: ▻https://t.co/QnXw0vzbMG pic.twitter.com/9ri6g9hD93
— Maggie Appleton (@Mappletons) April 15, 2020

Beneath the umbrella term, however, digital gardens don’t follow rules. They’re not blogs, short for “weblogs,” a term that suggests a time-stamped record of thought. They’re not a social-media platform—connections are made, but often it’s through linking to other digital gardens, or gathering in forums like Reddit and Telegram to nerd out over code.

Tom Critchlow, a consultant who has been cultivating his digital garden for years, spells out the main difference between old-school blogging and digital gardening. “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”

What they have in common is that they can be edited at any time to reflect evolution and change. The idea is similar to editing a Wikipedia entry, though digital gardens are not meant to be the ultimate word on a topic. As a slower, clunkier way to explore the internet, they revel in not being the definitive source, just a source, says Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at Washington State University.

In fact, the whole point of digital gardens is that they can grow and change, and that various pages on the same topic can coexist. “It’s less about iterative learning and more about public learning,” says Maggie Appleton, a designer. Appleton’s digital garden, for example, includes thoughts on plant-based meat, book reviews, and digressions on Javascript and magical capitalism. It is “an open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I’m currently cultivating,” its introduction declares. “Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen[s].”

Appleton, who trained as an anthropologist, says she was drawn to digital gardens because of their depth. “The content is not on Twitter, and it’s never deleted,” she says. “Everyone does their own weird thing. The sky’s the limit.”

That ethos of creativity and individuality was echoed by several people I spoke to. Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional. Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements. The sense of time and space to explore is key.

Caulfield, who has researched misinformation and disinformation, wrote a blog post in 2015 on the “technopastoral,” in which he described the federated wiki structure promoted by computer programmer Ward Cunningham, who thought the internet should support a “chorus of voices” rather than the few rewarded on social media today.

“The stream has dominated our lives since the mid-2000s,” Caulfield says. But it means people are either posting content or consuming it. And, Caulfield says, the internet as it stands rewards shock value and dumbing things down. “By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” he says. “What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.” In an age of doom-scrolling and Zoom fatigue, some digital-garden enthusiasts say the internet they live in is, as Caulfield puts it, “optimistically hopeful.”

While many people are searching for more intimate communities on the internet, not everyone can spin up a digital garden: you need to be able to do at least some rudimentary coding. Making a page from scratch affords more creative freedom than social-media and web-hosting sites that let you drag and drop elements onto your page, but it can be daunting and time-consuming.

Chris Biscardi is trying to get rid of that barrier to entry with a text editor for digital gardens that’s still in its alpha stage. Called Toast, it’s “something you might experience with Wordpress,” he says.

Ultimately, whether digital gardens will be an escapist remnant of 2020’s hellscape or wither in the face of easier social media remains to be seen. “I’m interested in seeing how it plays out,” Appleton says.

“For some people it’s a reaction to social media, and for others it’s a trend,” Critchlow says. “Whether or not it will hit critical mass … that’s to be seen.”

#Internet #Culture_numérique #Pages_personnelles #Blog