Employees at Activision Blizzard are calling on the company to issue a new statement in response to the lawsuit it’s facing from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). If you’ve been following the saga since it broke earlier in the month, you may recall the company brushed off allegations that it had fostered a “frat boy” workplace culture, claiming the lawsuit included “distorted, and in many cases false descriptions of Blizzard’s past.”
Now, in a letter obtained by Polygon, a group of more than 800 Activision Blizzard employees say the statement the company issued was “abhorrent and insulting,” and they’re demanding leadership undertake “immediate” corrective action. “Categorizing the claims that have been made as ‘distorted, and in many cases false’ creates a company atmosphere that disbelieves victims,” the letter states. “Our company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action — and the troubling official responses that followed — we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests.”
The group specifically calls out the message Frances Townsend, executive vice president of corporate affairs at the publisher, sent to employees after the news broke. In the leaked email, Townsend claims the lawsuit DFEH filed presents “a distorted and untrue picture of our company, including factually incorrect, old and out of context stories — some from more than a decade ago.” According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, the response had some workers “fuming.” The group that signed the letter is calling on Townsend to step down as executive sponsor of the ABK Employee Women’s Network.
The timing of the letter comes after Activision Blizzard reportedly held an ‘all-hands’ meeting with 500 employees. The Zoom call was supposed to include the entire studio, but a scheduling error meant not everyone could join the meeting. Activision executive Joshua Taub allegedly told those in attendance he and CEO Bobby Kotick “have never seen this,” adding that “does not mean this behavior does not happen.” Taub then reportedly said, “we don’t publicize all of these claims, we work with the employee and the person who is accused and try to work on a resolution.” The company has a second meeting planned for tomorrow, according to Uppercut.
We’ve reached out to Activision Blizzard for comment.
Tesla appears to have shrugged off the production woes it suffered last year during the COVID lockdown with the company announcing a number of "new and notable records" during its Q2 earnings call on Monday. Not only did Tesla build and ship 200,000 vehicles during the quarter, a 151 percent increase over last year, it also earned $1.1 billion in net income during the same period — a whopping tenfold increase year over year. Overall, revenue grew 98 percent from this time last year thanks in large part to Tesla's increased deliveries though the company did suffer from a "Bitcoin-related impairment" of $23 million during the past quarter.
Additionally, Tesla rolled out 85 MW worth of solar capability in Q2, a 215 percent increase from last year's 25 MW as well as added nearly 1,000 Supercharging stations to its ever expanding network.
In terms of tech, Tesla's use of radar as part of the vehicle's Full Self Driving system will soon be coming to an end. "After selling over a million vehicles equipped with radar, we have collected enough data to start removing it in some regions," the company wrote in its shareholder deck. "The removal of radar, which is enabled by our collection of a vast dataset of corner cases, allows us to focus on vision and increase the pace of improvement."
The company is also getting closer to switching over to its new 4680 battery cells, having successfully validated the battery tech's "performance and lifetime" at its California-based fabrication facility. With that testing out of the way, Tesla is focusing on "improving the 10 percent of manufacturing processes that currently bottleneck production output," though the company has not yet announced when the battery style changeover will actually take place.
Forget about "SuperFin Enhanced," the previous name for the node powering Intel's upcoming 10nm Alder Lake processors. Now, that node is just called "Intel 7," according to the company's revised roadmap. But don't go thinking that means Intel is somehow delivering a 7nm processor early — its long-delayed "Rocket Lake" 7nm chip still won't ship until 2023, and its node has been renamed to "Intel 4." Confused yet? It's almost like Intel is trying to attach a new number to these upcoming products, so we'll forget it's losing the shrinking transistor war against AMD.
But Intel's prospects are more interesting as we look ahead to 2024, when the company expects to finalize the design for its first chips with transistors smaller than 1 nanometer. Instead, they'll be measured by angstroms. The "Intel 20A" node will be powered by new "RibbonFET" transistors, the company's first new architecture since the arrival FinFET in 2011. It'll be coupled with PowerVia, a technology that can move power delivery to the rear of a chip wafer, which should make signal transmission more efficient.
“Building on Intel’s unquestioned leadership in advanced packaging, we are accelerating our innovation roadmap to ensure we are on a clear path to process performance leadership by 2025,” Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger said during the "Intel Accelerated" livestream today. “We are leveraging our unparalleled pipeline of innovation to deliver technology advances from the transistor up to the system level. Until the periodic table is exhausted, we will be relentless in our pursuit of Moore’s Law and our path to innovate with the magic of silicon.”
Before it reaches the angstrom era of chips, though, the company also plans to release a processor with an "Intel 3" node in 2023. You can think of it as a super-powered version of its 7nm architecture, with around an 18 percent performance power watt improvement over Intel 4. It'll likely fill the timing gap between Rocket Lake chips in 2023 and the Intel 20A products in 2024.
If Detective Pikachu had you hankering for more real-world(ish) Pokémon action, Netflix appears to be working on something that might catch your interest. The streaming giant has a live-action Pokémon series in early development, according to Variety.
Lucifer co-showrunner Joe Henderson is reportedly involved with the show as a writer and executive producer. Netflix picked up Lucifer after Fox canceled the show. Henderson has another project in the works at Netflix, an adaptation of his Shadecraft comic.
A live-action Pokémon series has the potential to be a massive hit for Netflix. Given the company's bigger push into video games, perhaps Netflix will work with The Pokémon Company on a game that ties into the show too.
Exactly one week after the release of iOS 14.7, Apple has pushed out a new update to iPhone and iPad owners. Coming in at approximately 900MB, iOS 14.7.1 doesn't include new features but does address a bug that made its way into 14.7. The glitch broke Apple's Unlock with iPhone integration, preventing Touch ID-equipped phones from unlocking Apple Watch devices. So if you use an older iPhone with your Apple wearable, you'll want to download the update as soon as possible.
Apple says iOS 14.7.1 also addresses a security vulnerability that someone may have exploited. In a support document spotted by 9to5Mac, the company notes the oversight had allowed an application to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Apple's latest macOS software, which you can also download today, addresses that same issue with the release of Big Sur 11.5.1. As usual, the company says the updates are "recommended for all users."
If you don't see a prompt to download iOS 14.7.1 on your iPhone or iPad, you can manually check for the software by opening the Settings app on your device, tapping "General" and then "Software Update." On macOS, meanwhile, open the System Preferences menu and then click on "Software Update."
Scientists have discovered the first evidence of water vapor on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. They used new and archival datasets from the Hubble Space Telescope to find the vapor, which forms when ice on the surface sublimates and turns from solid to gas.
A team led by Lorenz Roth of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden examined data captured by Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in 2018 and images the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph obtained between 1998 and 2010. Ultraviolet images captured by the STIS in 1998 showed “colorful ribbons of electrified gas called auroral bands,” according to NASA (which launched Hubble as a joint project with the European Space Agency).
Researchers previously believed that atomic oxygen may have caused discrepancies between UV images that were captured over time. However, using data from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, Roth's team found that there was barely any atomic oxygen in the moon's atmosphere. As such, there had to be another reason for the discrepancies.
The temperature at Ganymede's equator may become warm enough for surface ice to release some water molecules. When they re-examined the relative distribution of the aurora in the UV images, Roth's team found that differences between them match up with where water would be expected in the moon's atmosphere.
Previous research indicated that Ganymede may hold more water than in all of our oceans. The moon's ocean is believed to be around 100 miles below the surface, so the vapor isn't from there. Water on the surface is frozen due to the moon’s temperatures.
The finding arrived ahead of the ESA's wonderfully named upcoming mission, JUICE, or JUpiter ICy moons Explorer. The mission should launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter in 2029. It will then spend at least three years examining the planet and three of its largest moons. JUICE will pay special attention to Ganymede, both as a planetary body and possible habitat.
"Our results can provide the JUICE instrument teams with valuable information that may be used to refine their observation plans to optimize the use of the spacecraft," Roth said in a statement.
NASA's Juno mission has also been studying Ganymede and Jupiter's environment (aka the Jovian system) since 2016. The agency says examining the Jovian system and understanding its history "will provide us with a better understanding of how gas giant planets and their satellites form and evolve. In addition, new insights will hopefully be found on the habitability of Jupiter-like exoplanetary systems."
After returning from the edge of space, Jeff Bezos has personally waded into Blue Origin's dispute with NASA over its decision to award a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX. In an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Bezos said his company is willing to waive up to $2 billion in payments from NASA in the current and next two federal fiscal years in return for a fixed-price lander contract. Bezos said Blue Origin is also willing to fund its own pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit. "This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments," Bezos said in the letter. "This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up."
While Bezos spends a significant part of his letter talking about Blue Origin's commitment to "advance America's future in space," his offer isn't altruistic. At the heart of it is the belief that NASA unfairly excluded his company from a lucrative and prestigious contract. When it comes to its most important projects, NASA has historically handed out agreements to multiple contractors to promote competition and ensure it can get a mission off the ground on time if one company falls behind schedule. In its latest procurement, NASA didn't do that, and Blue Origin filed a protest with the federal government shortly after that.
At the time, a Blue Origin spokesperson told Engadget NASA "executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute." That's something Bezos reiterates in his letter. "Instead of investing in two competing lunar landers as originally intended, the Agency chose to confer a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar head start to SpaceX," the former Amazon CEO said. "That decision broke the mold of NASA's successful commercial space programs by putting an end to meaningful competition for years to come."
It's hard to say how NASA will respond to the open letter. The Human Landing System project can't move forward while the US Government Accountability Office reviews the protest from Blue Origin. Notably, this isn't the first time a Bezos-affiliated company has got itself into a contract dispute with the US government. In 2019, Amazon challenged the Department of Defense's decision to award Microsoft its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. After a nearly two-year-long legal battle, the Pentagon canceled that project at the start of July in favor of a new multi-vendor project that will hand out work to both Amazon and Microsoft.
SiriusXM has revealed a new $35/month plan that allows you to listen to the service’s 300-plus channels from two cars and log in to the SXM streaming app on two devices simultaneously. Subscribers will have other perks through the Platinum VIP plan, including the chance to check out some exclusive events with artists and celebrities.
The plan includes access to more than 5,000 soundboard-quality concert recordings. You’ll also be able to check out 250 video recordings of shows selected from live concert streaming service nugs.net’s library. The lineup includes gigs from Bruce Springsteen, Phish and Pearl Jam (all of whom have SiriusXM channels), as well as the likes of Wilco and Metallica.
Platinum VIP seems like SiriusXM’s take on a family plan, with live concert recordings and other perks to sweeten the deal. For subscribers who have more than one car, the plan could be a better option than perhaps having two $22/month Platinum plans.
Even though every media-centric company is battling for customers' time and dollars, SiriusXM targets a slightly different type of user to the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. It has some high-profile exclusive stations, including ones from Howard Stern, as well as features like Pandora stations and play-by-play for several major sports. However, Spotify has significantly expanded its non-music offerings over the last few years, with investments into the likes of podcasts and Clubhouse-style audio chat rooms.
As promised, Respawn Entertainment has shared a gameplay trailer showing off some of the more significant changes coming to Apex Legends as part of its upcoming Emergence season, which is slated to get underway on August 3rd. Right off the bat, we’re treated to a look at the new version of World’s Edge. Respawn has tweaked the battleground to add a molten lava fissure that runs through the center of the map.
The studio says it did this in part to make combat encounters that take part in and around the Sorting Facility, one of the main points of interest in World’s Edge, more dynamic, with a greater emphasis on close-quarters action. Another major element of the redesign is the addition of gondolas at two of the new points of interest. According to Respawn, the idea here was to replicate some of the “dynamic gameplay” that trains offered in the original version of the map.
Outside of the redesigned World’s Edge, we also get to see the game’s new Rampage LMG in action, which will allow players to knock down doors from a distance. Towards the end of the clip, Seer, Apex’s latest playable character, makes his entrance. His kit allows you to narrow in on your opponents by tracking their heartbeats while aiming down the sights of your weapon. If you find an enemy, you can send a swarm of microdrones to hunt them down. Players can avoid detection by Seer by moving slowly. During EA’s Play Live event last week, Apex Legends game director Chad Grenier said he believes the character will help vary the pace of matches, forcing players to move more methodically when Seer is on the other team.
Apex Legends is available to play for free on PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Nintendo Switch.
First developed more than 100,000 years ago, clothing is one of humanity’s earliest — and most culturally significant — inventions, providing wearers not just protection from the environment and elements but also signifying social status, membership in a community and their role within that group. As robots increasingly move out of labs, off of factory floors and into our everyday lives, a similar garment revolution could soon be upon us once again, according to a new research study out of New York’s Cornell University.
“We believe that robot clothes present an underutilized opportunity for the field of designing interactive systems,” the team argues in What Robots Need From Clothing, which was submitted to the In Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021. “Clothes can help robots become better robots — by helping them be useful in a new, wider array of contexts, or better adapt and function in the contexts they are already in.”
“I started by looking at how different materials would move on robots and thinking about the readability of that motion — like, what is the robot's intention based on the way materials move on the robot,” Natalie Friedman, a PhD student at Cornell Tech and lead author on the paper, explained to Engadget. “From there, I started thinking about all the different social functions that clothes have for people and how that could influence how the robot is viewed.”
While tomorrow’s robots may wear white button down dress shirts and black bow ties while serving hors d'oeuvres to party guests or wear candy stripes while working as nurses, it’s not simply a matter of tossing human clothing onto a robotic chassis. “What robot clothes are is integrally tied to what robots need from clothing. Robot clothing should analogously fulfill needs robots have, rather than just being human clothes on a robot,” the researchers wrote.
Robo-clothes could take any number of forms, depending on their wearer’s specific function. Robotic firefighters, such as the Thermite from Howe and Howe, might theoretically be issued heat-resistant overcoats akin to what humans wear but embedded with thermochromic ink to provide the robot’s operator an easy visual reference to the area’s ambient temperature or indicate that the robot is in danger of overheating. Conversely, search-and-rescue bots could wear waterproof garments when conducting oceanic operations and then strap on extra-grippy boots when searching for lost hikers in mountainous terrain or survivors of a building collapse.
"I think this work is important to helping engineers and technologists understand the functional importance of aesthetics and signaling in design,” Cornell Tech professor and co-author Wendy Ju, said in a recent blog. “It's not ‘just fashion’ - what the robot wears helps people understand how to interact with it in ways that are critical to safety and task execution."
Overall, the use of swappable attire could lead to more generalized robot designs as the specific capabilities the clothing provides don't have to be baked into the robot’s construction. “It is more difficult to build a new robot than to build new clothes,” Friedman said. “I think that clothes are going to influence robot design and robot designs are going to influence clothes. Maybe it'll start in one direction — clothes made to fit robots — but, in the future, I think that robots might be built to better fit in clothes.” She notes that Pepper, though recently discontinued by SoftBank, offers an online merch store with a wide variety of costumes and outfits for the robot to wear including outfits designating cultural, national, professional and religious affiliations.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
But clothing on robots isn’t just for their own benefit, it also serves to demystify and humanize these cutting-edge machines in the eyes of the people they’re working with. For example, clothing could help protect a robot’s sense of shame — or rather that of its user.
“The need for wire modesty — to cover up nudity — stems from anthropomorphic priggishness, since robots do not get embarrassed about wires poking out of them,” the researchers wrote. “However, both humanoid and non-humanoid robots have pragmatic reasons to maintain a clean and covered aesthetic, because exposed wires present a real risk to function. Any wire that is pulled out or cut will remove power or signal to a subsystem, and that can be risky to the robot and any people or objects in the environment.”
“I definitely see a future where [when robots] aren't wearing clothes, it might look a little funny,” Friedman added. “I mean we are just mapping our ideas onto robots, right? Robots don’t have consciousness, so they don't feel shame.”
However, putting clothes on robots could also prove problematic especially if the apparel style has been culturally appropriated. You can bet your bottom dollar that the first cannabis dispensary to dress an automated budtender in rastafarian garb is going to make headlines — and not the kind that are good for business — same as if you outfitted a Roomba with a Native American headdress. “Hawaiian shirts, for example, used to be a marker of ‘casual Friday’ office attire, but more recently are affiliated with the extremist ‘Boogaloo Boys,’” the researchers wrote.
Despite the potential drawbacks to putting pants on robots, doing so could help make the entire field of research more attractive to a new generation of roboticists. “I like to think about girls in robotics,” Friedman said. “When they're young, I think robotics seems like a really intimidating thing but I see clothes as kind of a way to welcome, you know, the stereotypically feminine... skills that women have. I see clothes as a way to welcome girls into [robotics].”
