June, 2023: "Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings."

November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied."

And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred...

In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found "an issue" with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused...

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. "The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth," Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. "It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it...." [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying "Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research," which the article notes "cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data."] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. "The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility."

"Do you believe that?" I asked.

"On my optimistic days, I believe it."

"Is today an optimistic day?"

"Not really."

Last year 30,000 people moved into central Florida's Polk County — more than to any other county in America. Its largest city has just 112,641 people, living a full 35 miles east of the 3.1 million residents in the metropolitan area around Tampa.

But the Associated Press says something similar is happening all over the country: "the rise of the far-flung exurbs." Outlying communities on the outer margins of metro areas — some as far away as 60 miles (97 kilometers) from a city's center — had some of the fastest-growing populations last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those communities are primarily in the South, like Anna, Texas on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; Fort Mill, South Carolina [just 18 miles from North Carolina city Charlotte]; Lebanon, Tennessee outside Nashville; and Polk County's Haines City... [C]ommuting to work can take up to an hour and a half one-way. But [Marisol] Ortega, who lives in Haines City about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from her job in Orlando, says it's worth it. "I love my job. I love what I do, but then I love coming back home, and it's more tranquil," Ortega said.

The rapid growth of far-flung exurbs is an after-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Census Bureau, as rising housing costs drove people further from cities and remote working allowed many to do their jobs from home at least part of the week... Recent hurricanes and citrus diseases in Florida also have made it more attractive for some Polk County growers to sell their citrus groves to developers who build new residences or stores...

Anna, Texas, more than 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of downtown Dallas, is seeing the same kind of migration. It was the fourth-fastest growing city in the U.S. last year and its population has increased by a third during the 2020s to 27,500 residents. Like Polk County, Anna has gotten a little older, richer and more racially diverse.
The article points out that in Anna, Texas, "close to 3 in 5 households have moved into their homes since 2020, according to the Census Bureau."

Last month C dropped from 3rd to 4th in TIOBE's ranking of programming language popularity (which tries to calculate each language's share of search engine results). Java moved up into the #3 position in September, reports TechRepublic, which notes that by comparison October "saw relatively little change" — though percentages of search results increased slightly. "At number one, Python jumped from 20.17% in September to 21.9% in October. In second place, C++ rose from 10.75% in September to 11.6%. In third, Java ascended from 9.45% to 10.51%..."

Is there a larger trend? TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen writes that the need to harvest more data increases demand for fast data manipulation languages. But they also need to be easy to learn ("because the resource pool of skilled software engineers is drying up") and secure ("because of continuous cyber threats.") King of all, Python, is easy to learn and secure, but not fast. Hence, engineers are frantically looking for fast alternatives for Python. C++ is an obvious candidate, but it is considered "not secure" because of its explicit memory management. Rust is another candidate, although not easy to learn. Rust is, thanks to its emphasis on security and speed, making its way to the TIOBE index top 10 now. [It's #13 — up from #20 a year ago]

The cry for fast, data crunching languages is also visible elsewhere in the TIOBE index. The language Mojo [a faster superset of Python designed for accelerated hardware like GPUs]... enters the top 50 for the first time. The fact that this language is only 1 year old and already showing up, makes it a very promising language.
In the last 12 months three languages also fell from the top ten:

• PHP (dropping from #8 to #15)

• SQL (dropping from #9 to #11)

• Assembly language (dropping from #10 to #16)

Global semiconductor sales recorded a 20.6% year-on-year increase in August to $53.1 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). The Register reports: The Americas led the way, with sales up 43.9 percent to $15.4 billion over last year to notch up what may be the highest on record for August, the SIA said. This comes on the back of swelling demand from sectors such as AI, cloud computing, and automotive. Over in Asia-Pacific sales grew year-on-year by 17.1 percent to $10.95 billion, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organization, which compiles these stats for the SIA. China was up 19.2 percent to $13 billion and Japan grew two percent to $4 billion.

Europe was the outlier, recording a nine percent drop to $4.7 billion. No reason was given for this decline. However, on a worldwide basis, all continents returned positive month-on-month numbers in August for the first time since October 2023, indicating that the semiconductor industry is on a path to recovery.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After 20 years, it's now possible for solo players to finish storylines in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft that previously required a group to do an intensive raid. That's thanks to "Story Mode," a new raid difficulty that was added for the final wing of the first raid of the recently released The War Within expansion. Over the years, developer Blizzard has expanded the difficulty options for raids to meet various players and communities where they are in terms of play styles. The top difficulty is Mythic, where the semi-pro hardcore guilds compete. Below that is Heroic, where serious, capital-G gamers coordinate with friends in weekly raid schedules to progress. Then there's Normal, which still requires some coordination but isn't nearly as challenging and can typically be completed within a few tries by a pick-up group. The most accessible difficulty is Raid Finder, where you're matched with random players automatically to complete a vastly easier version of a raid. Now Story Mode has been added to the mix, and it's even easier than Raid Finder.

In Story Mode, you fight only the raid's final boss, which has been scaled back in stats and complexity so that it's beatable for a single player or a very small group of friends. Challenging encounter mechanics have been removed, and the whole fight has been retooled to focus exclusively on the narrative aspects. There are some rewards, but they're not the same as those on more difficult raids; the goal was to avoid cheapening the experience for those who do want to go all the way. So far, Story Mode is available exclusively for the newest raid, which is called Nerub-ar Palace. It hasn't been made available for other encounters yet, but Blizzard has hinted that this could be the long-term goal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Too often, new tech product or service launches seem like solutions in search of a problem, but not this one: ESPN is launching software that lets you figure out just where you can watch the specific game you want to see amid an overcomplicated web of streaming services, cable channels, and arcane licensing agreements. Every sports fan is all too familiar with today's convoluted streaming schedules. Launching today on ESPN.com and the various ESPN mobile and streaming device apps, the new guide offers various views, including one that lists all the sporting events in a single day and a search function, among other things. You can also flag favorite sports or teams to customize those views.

"At the core of Where to Watch is an event database created and managed by the ESPN Stats and Information Group (SIG), which aggregates ESPN and partner data feeds along with originally sourced information and programming details from more than 250 media sources, including television networks and streaming platforms," ESPN's press release says. ESPN previously offered browsable lists of games like this, but it didn't identify where you could actually watch all the games. There's no guarantee that you'll have access to the services needed to watch the games in the list, though. Those of us who cut the cable cord long ago know that some games -- especially those local to your city -- are unavailable without cable.

"Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries," warns the Atlantic. "And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it."

They start with RealPage's rental-property software (pointing out that "a series of lawsuits says it's something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy" and "The lawsuits also argue that RealPage pressures landlords to comply with its pricing suggestions.") But the most important point is that RealPage isn't the only company doing this: Its main competitor, Yardi, is involved in a similar lawsuit. One of RealPage's subsidiaries, a service called Rainmaker, faces multiple legal challenges for allegedly facilitating price-fixing in the hotel industry. (Yardi and Rainmaker deny wrongdoing.) Similar complaints have been brought against companies in industries as varied as health insurance, tire manufacturing, and meat processing. But winning these cases is proving difficult.
The article notes that "Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine." But it also notes concerns that algorithms could produce price-fixing-like behavior that's "almost impossible to prosecute under existing antitrust laws. Price-fixing, in other words, has entered the algorithmic age, but the laws designed to prevent it have not kept up." Last week, San Francisco passed a first-of-its-kind ordinance banning "both the sale and use of software which combines non-public competitor data to set, recommend or advise on rents and occupancy levels."

Whether other jurisdictions follow suit remains to be seen.

In the meantime, more and more companies are figuring out ways to use algorithms to set prices. If these really do enable de facto price-fixing, and manage to escape legal scrutiny, the result could be a kind of pricing dystopia in which competition to create better products and lower prices would be replaced by coordination to keep prices high and profits flowing. That would mean permanently higher costs for consumers — like an inflation nightmare that never ends.

Stack Overflow says over 65,000 developers took their annual survey — and "For the first time this year, we asked if developers felt AI was a threat to their job..."

Some analysis from The New Stack: Unsurprisingly, only 12% of surveyed developers believe AI is a threat to their current job. In fact, 70% are favorably inclined to use AI tools as part of their development workflow... Among those who use AI tools in their development workflow, 81% said productivity is one of its top benefits, followed by an ability to learn new skills quickly (62%). Much fewer (30%) said improved accuracy is a benefit. Professional developers' adoption of AI tools in the development process has risen rapidly, going from 44% in 2023 to 62% in 2024...

Seventy-one percent of developers with less than five years of experience reported using AI tools in their development process, as compared to just 49% of developers with 20 years of experience coding... At 82%, [ChatGPT] is twice as likely to have been used than GitHub Copilot. Among ChatGPT users, 74% want to continue using it.
But "only 43% said they trust the accuracy of AI tools," according to Stack Overflow's blog post, "and 45% believe AI tools struggle to handle complex tasks."

More analysis from The New Stack: The latest edition of the global annual survey found full-time employment is holding steady, with over 80% reporting that they have full-time jobs. The percentage of unemployed developers has more than doubled since 2019 but is still at a modest 4.4% worldwide... The median annual salary of survey respondents declined significantly. For example, the average full-stack developer's median 2024 salary fell 11% compared to the previous year, to $63,333... Wage pressure may be the result of more competition from an increase in freelancing.

Eighteen percent of professional developers in the 2024 survey said they are independent contractors or self-employed, which is up from 9.5% in 2020. Part-time employment has also risen, presenting even more pressure on full-time salaries... Job losses at tech companies have contributed to a large influx of talent into the freelance market, noted Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar in an interview with The New Stack. Since COVID-19, he added, the emphasis on remote work means more people value job flexibility. In the 2024 survey, only 20% have returned to full-time in-person work, 38% are full-time remote, while the remainder are in a hybrid situation. Anticipation of future productivity growth due to AI may also be creating uncertainty about how much to pay developers.
Two stats jumped out for Visual Studio magazine: In this year's big Stack Overflow developer survey things are much the same for Microsoft-centric data points: VS Code and Visual Studio still rule the IDE roost, while .NET maintains its No. 1 position among non-web frameworks. It's been this way for years, though in 2021 it was .NET Framework at No. 1 among IDEs, while the new .NET Core/.NET 5 entry was No. 3. Among IDEs, there has been less change. "Visual Studio Code is used by more than twice as many developers than its nearest (and related) alternative, Visual Studio," said the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer survey, the 14th in the series of massive reports.
Stack Overflow shared some other interesting statistics:

• "Javascript (62%), HTML/CSS (53%), and Python (51%) top the list of most used languages for the second year in a row... [JavaScript] has been the most popular language every year since the inception of the Developer Survey in 2011."

• "Python is the most desired language this year (users that did not indicate using this year but did indicate wanting to use next year), overtaking JavaScript."

• "The language that most developers used and want to use again is Rust for the second year in a row with an 83% admiration rate. "

• "Python is most popular for those learning to code..."

• "Technical debt is a problem for 62% of developers, twice as much as the second- and third-most frustrating problems for developers: complex tech stacks for building and deployment."

The pace of China's clean energy transition "is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week," according to a report from Australia's national public broadcaster ABC (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.

It's installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight...

China accounts for about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. A recent drop in emissions (the first since relaxing COVID-19 restrictions), combined with the decarbonisation of the power grid, may mean the country's emissions have peaked. "With the power sector going green, emissions are set to plateau and then progressively fall towards 2030 and beyond," CEF China energy policy analyst Xuyang Dong said... [In China] the world's largest solar and wind farms are being built on the western edge of the country and connected to the east via the world's longest high-voltage transmission lines...

Somewhat counterintuitively, China has built dozens of coal-fired power stations alongside its renewable energy zones, to maintain the pace of its clean energy transition. China was responsible for 95 per cent of the world's new coal power construction activity last year. The new plants are partly needed to meet demand for electricity, which has gone up as more energy-hungry sectors of the economy, like transport, are electrified. The coal-fired plants are also being used, like the batteries and pumped hydro, to provide a stable supply of power down the transmission lines from renewable energy zones, balancing out the intermittent solar and wind.

Despite these new coal plants, coal's share of total electricity generation in the country is falling. The China Energy Council estimated renewables generation would overtake coal by the end of this year.
CEF director Tim Buckley tells the site that China installed just 1GW of nuclear power last year — compared to 300GW of solar and wind. "They had grand plans for nuclear to be massive but they're behind on nuclear by a decade and five years ahead of schedule on solar and wind." Last year China accounted for 16% of the world's nuclear-generated power — but also more than half the world's coal-fired power generation, according to this year's analysis from the long-running International Energy Agency. The IEA estimated that in 2023, China's electricity demand rose by 6.4%, and they're predicting that by 2026 the country will see an increase "more than half of the EU's current annual electricity consumption."

And yet in China "the rapid expansion of renewable energy sources is expected to meet all additional electricity demand..." according to the IEA analysis. "Coal-fired generation in China is currently on course to experience a slow structural decline, driven by the strong expansion of renewables and growing nuclear generation, as well as moderating economic growth."

There's also some interesting stats on the "CO2 intensity" of power generation around the world. "The EU is expected to record the highest rate of progress in reducing emissions intensity, averaging an improvement of 13% per year. This is followed by China, with annual improvements forecast at 6%, and the United States at 5%."

Long-time Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a related article from Electrek ...

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: According to a new report from the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow to an estimated peak of 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an increase over the current global population of 8.2 billion people.

The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago.

However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with "many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.

"64% of Americans live within 2 miles of a public charging station," Pew Research reported this week, citing a survey paired with an analysis of U.S. Energy Department data that found over 61,000 publicly accessible charging stations.

And those who live closest to public chargers "view EVs more positively." The vast majority of EV charging occurs at home, but access to public infrastructure is tightly linked with Americans' opinions of electric vehicles themselves. Our analysis finds that Americans who live close to public chargers view EVs more positively than those who are farther away. Even when accounting for factors like partisan identification and community type, Americans who live close to EV chargers are more likely to say they:

- Already own an electric or hybrid vehicle
- Would consider buying an EV for their next vehicle
- Favor phasing out production of new gasoline cars and trucks by 2035
- Are confident that the U.S. will build the necessary infrastructure to support large numbers of EVs on the roads

The number of EV charging stations has more than doubled since 2020. In December 2020, the Department of Energy reported that there were nearly 29,000 public charging stations nationwide. By February 2024, that number had increased to more than 61,000 stations. Over 95% of the American public now lives in a county that has at least one public EV charging station.

EV charging stations are most accessible to residents of urban areas: 60% of urban residents live less than a mile from the nearest public EV charger, compared with 41% of those in the suburbs and just 17% of rural Americans.
California is home to about 25% of all of America's charging stations, according to the report. But this means EV-owning Californians "might also have a harder time than residents of many states when it comes to the actual experience of finding and using a charger." Despite having the most charging stations of any state, California's 43,780 individual public charging ports must provide service for the more than 1.2 million electric vehicles registered to its residents. That works out to one public port for every 29 EVs, a ratio that ranks California 49th across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

At the other end of the spectrum, Wyoming (one-to-six), North Dakota (one-to-six) and West Virginia (one-to-eight) have the most ports relative to the much smaller number of EVs registered in their respective states.
Another interesting finding? "Attitudes toward EVs don't differ that much based on how often people take long car trips.

"In fact, those who regularly drive more than 100 miles are slightly more likely to say they currently own an electric vehicle or hybrid — and also to say they'd consider purchasing an EV in the future — when compared with those who make these trips less often."

Just as Google, Samsung and Microsoft continue to push their efforts with generative AI on PCs and mobile devices, Apple is moving to join the party with OpenELM, a new family of open source large language models (LLMs) that can run entirely on a single device rather than having to connect to cloud servers. From a report: Released a few hours ago on AI code community Hugging Face, OpenELM consists of small models designed to perform efficiently at text generation tasks. There are eight OpenELM models in total -- four pre-trained and four instruction-tuned -- covering different parameter sizes between 270 million and 3 billion parameters (referring to the connections between artificial neurons in an LLM, and more parameters typically denote greater performance and more capabilities, though not always).

[...] Apple is offering the weights of its OpenELM models under what it deems a "sample code license," along with different checkpoints from training, stats on how the models perform as well as instructions for pre-training, evaluation, instruction tuning and parameter-efficient fine tuning. The sample code license does not prohibit commercial usage or modification, only mandating that "if you redistribute the Apple Software in its entirety and without modifications, you must retain this notice and the following text and disclaimers in all such redistributions of the Apple Software." The company further notes that the models "are made available without any safety guarantees. Consequently, there exists the possibility of these models producing outputs that are inaccurate, harmful, biased, or objectionable in response to user prompts."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Qualcomm is cheating on the Snapdragon X Plus/Elite benchmarks given to OEMs and the press. SemiAccurate doesn't use these words lightly but there is no denying what multiple sources are telling us. [...] Then there were the actual 'briefings' for the X Pro SoC. To call them pathetic is giving them more than their due. The deck was 11 slides, three of which were empty/fluff, five 'benchmark' slides with woefully inadequate disclosure, and two infographic summary slides. The last was the slide below with the 'deep technical' stats [screenshots in the linked article], much of which we told you about last week. And more.

The rest of the 'disclosure' for Snapdragon X Pro was a list of features that all fall under the guise of exactly what you would expect. The rest was filled with deep 'details' like the GPU capabilities of 3.8TFLOPS. That's it. No specs, no capabilities, no nothing. It was truly pathetic. But wait there is more, or less really, with statements like it having AV1 encode and decode. Trivialities like frame rates and resolutions were seemingly not needed for such technical briefs. See what we mean by pathetic? Those 10 cores are arranged how again? That 42MB of cache is what level? Shall I go on about the bare minimum basics or do you get the point now? SemiAccurate was planning to ask Qualcomm about their cheating on benchmarks at the promised briefing but, well, they lied to us and cut us out of the pathetic bits they did brief on. We honestly would have liked to know why they were cheating but we kind of think they will do their usual response to bad news and pretend it never happened like last time. If they actually do explain things we will of course update this article as we always do.

Data scientist Antoine Mayerowitz, PhD, applied Vilfredo Pareto's (the early 20th-century Italian economist) theories to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to determine the best racer combinations. "When you break down the build options (including driver stats and various vehicle details) in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, there are over 700,000 possible combinations," notes Engadget. "But once you eliminate duplicates that differ only in appearance, you can narrow it down to 'only' 25,704 possibilities." From the report: Pareto's theories, most notably the Pareto front, help us navigate the complexities of choice. They can pinpoint the solutions with the most balanced strengths and the fewest trade-offs. Pareto's work is about efficiency and effectiveness. [...] Mayerowitz's Pareto front analysis lets you narrow your possibilities down to the 14 most efficient. And it turns out the game's top players were onto something: One of the combinations with the most ideal balance of speed, acceleration and mini-turbo is Cat Peach driving the Teddy Buggy, roller tires and cloud glider -- one already favored among Mario Kart 8 competitors.

Of course, if that combination isn't your cup of tea, there are others that allow you to stay within the Pareto front's optimal range. As Eurogamer points out, Donkey Kong, Wario (my old standby, mostly because he makes me laugh) and Princess Peach are often highlighted as drivers, and you can use Mayerowitz's data fields to find the best matching vehicles. Keep in mind that others have identical stats, so racers like Villager (female), Inkling Girl and Diddy Kong are separated only by appearances.

To find your ideal racer, you can head over to Mayerowitz's website. There, you can enter your most prized stats and view the combos that give you the best balance (those highlighted in yellow), according to Pareto's theories.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard's online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students' headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash -- and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world's dominant social-media empire -- was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win. That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports -- soccer, football, basketball -- and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating. [...]

Elo ratings don't inherently have anything to do with chess. They're based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition -- which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams -- a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver's 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system's shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game. Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game. Arpad Emmerich Elo, creator of the Elo rating system, understood the limitations of his invention. "It is a measuring tool, not a device of reward or punishment," he once remarked. "It is a means to compare performances, assess relative strength, not a carrot waved before a rabbit, or a piece of candy given to a child for good behavior."

The PHP programming language has sunk to its lowest position ever on the long-running TIOBE index of programming language popularity. It now ranks #17 — lower than Assembly Language, Ruby, Swift, Scratch, and MATLAB. InfoWorld reports: When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. PHP even reached the top 3 spot in the index, ranking third several times between 2006 and 2010. But as competing web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and React arrived in other languages, PHP's popularity waned.

"The major driving languages behind these new frameworks were Ruby, Python, and most notably JavaScript," Jansen noted in his statement accompanying the index. "On top of this competition, some security issues were found in PHP. As a result, PHP had to reinvent itself." Nowadays, PHP still has a strong presence in small and medium websites and is the language leveraged in the WordPress web content management system. "PHP is certainly not gone, but its glory days seem to be over," Jansen said.
A note on the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index argues that the TIOBE Index "is a lagging indicator. It counts the number of web pages with the language name." So while "Objective-C" ranks #30 on TIOBE's index (one rank above Classic Visual Basic), "who is reading those Objective-C web pages? Hardly anyone, according to Google Trends data." On TIOBE's index, Fortran now ranks #10.

Meanwhile, PHP ranks #7 on Pypl (based on the frequency of searches for language tutorials).

TIOBE's top ten?

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Go
8. Visual Basic
9. SQL
10. Fortran

The next two languages, ranked #11 and #12, are Delphi/Object Pascal and Assembly Language.

"After taking a look at Floorp Browser, I was left wondering whether there was a Chromium-based web browser that was as good, or even better than Chrome," writes a "First Look" reviewer at It's Foss News.

"That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'." [Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were:

Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5

So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system).

Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more.
Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article.

"Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."

The Guardian reports that this week "Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill to establish a four-day US working week." "Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea," Sanders said on Thursday. "Today, American workers are over 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago. "That has got to change. The financial gains from the major advancements in artificial intelligence, automation and new technology must benefit the working class, not just corporate chief executives and wealthy stockholders on Wall Street.

"It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life. It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay."
The proposed bill "has received the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, United Auto Workers, the Service Employees International Union, the Association of Flight Attendants" — as well as several other labor unions, reports USA Today: More than half of adults employed full time reported working more than 40 hours per week, according to a 2019 Gallup poll... More than 70 British companies started to test a four-day workweek last year, and most respondents reported there has been no loss in productivity.
A statement from Senator Sanders: Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, predicted last year that advancements in technology would lead to a three or three-and-a-half-day workweek in the coming years. Despite these predictions, Americans now work more hours than the people of most other wealthy nations, but are earning less per week than they did 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
"Sanders also pointed to other countries that have reduced their workweeks, such as France, Norway and Denmark," adds NBC News.

USA Today notes that "While Sanders' role as chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee places a greater focus on shortening the workweek, it is unlikely the bill will garner enough support from Republicans to become federal law and pass in both chambers."

And political analysts who spoke to ABC News "cast doubt on the measure's chances of passage in a divided Congress where opposition from Republicans is all but certain," reports ABC News, "and even the extent of support among Democrats remains unclear."

Rust's official survey team released results from their 8th annual survey "focused on gathering insights and feedback from Rust users". In terms of operating systems used by Rustaceans, the situation is very similar to the results from 2022, with Linux being the most popular choice of Rust users [69.7%], followed by macOS [33.5%] and Windows [31.9%], which have a very similar share of usage. Rust programmers target a diverse set of platforms with their Rust programs, even though the most popular target by far is still a Linux machine [85.4%]. We can see a slight uptick in users targeting WebAssembly [27.1%], embedded and mobile platforms, which speaks to the versatility of Rust.

We cannot of course forget the favourite topic of many programmers: which IDE (developer environment) do they use. Visual Studio Code still seems to be the most popular option [61.7%], with RustRover (which was released last year) also gaining some traction [16.4%].
The site ITPro spoke to James Governor, co-founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk, who said Rust's usage is "steadily increasing", pointing to its adoption among hyperscalers and cloud companies and in new infrastructure projects. "Rust is not crossing over yet as a general-purpose programming language, as Python did when it overtook Java, but it's seeing steady growth in adoption, which we expect to continue. It seems like a sustainable success story at this point."

But InfoWorld writes that "while the use of Rust language by professional programmers continues to grow, Rust users expressed concerns about the language becoming too complex and the low level of Rust usage in the tech industry." Among the 9,374 respondents who shared their main worries for the future of Rust, 43% were most concerned about Rust becoming too complex, a five percentage point increase from 2022; 42% were most concerned about low usage of Rust in the tech industry; and 32% were most concerned about Rust developers and maintainers not being properly supported, a six percentage point increase from 2022. Further, the percentage of respondents who were not at all concerned about the future of Rust fell, from 30% in 2022 to 18% in 2023.

The Guardian reports: The Covid death toll in the U.S. is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally, according to a new study, and researchers believe the cause of the undercounting goes beyond overloaded health systems to a lack of awareness of Covid and low levels of testing.

The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found.

More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time. There were 1.2 million excess deaths from natural causes — excluding deaths from accidents, firearms, suicide and overdoses — between March 2020 and August 2022, the researchers estimated, and about 163,000 of those deaths were not attributed to Covid in any way — but most of them should have been, the researchers say... "The mortality that's not considered Covid starts a little bit before the Covid surges officially start and crests a little bit sooner," said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate professor in the department of sociology and the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota and one of the study's authors. That indicates some people didn't realize their illness was Covid, due to a lack of awareness about its prevalence and low levels of testing. There was also a rise in out-of-hospital deaths — in homes and nursing homes, for instance — which makes ascertaining the cause of death more difficult...

"[W]e find over the first 30 months of the pandemic that serious gaps remained in surveillance," said Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health and sociology at Boston University and one of the study's authors. "Even though we got a lot better at testing for Covid, we were still missing a lot of official Covid deaths" in the U.S., said Jennifer Dowd, professor of demography and population health at University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research. The phenomenon "underscores how badly the U.S. fared as the pandemic continued," Wrigley-Field said. "It does profoundly reflect failures in the public health system."
One of the study's authors told the Guardian that the hardest-hit areas were non-metropolitan counties, especially in the west and the south, with fewer resources for investigating deaths (and lower testing levels) — as well as different methodologies for assembling the official numbers.