An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: [E]ven today's most sophisticated GPS systems are still unable to map a huge chunk of the Earth: that which is located under oceans, seas, or rivers. The technology, in effect, doesn't mix well with water, which breaks down the radio waves GPS relies on to function. MIT scientists have been looking at ways to create a new type of underwater GPS, which could be used to better understand the mysteries that lie between surface and seabed. The researchers have now unveiled a device called an underwater backscatter localization (UBL) that reacts to acoustic signals to provide positioning information, even when it is stuck in oceanic depths. All of this, without even using a battery. Underwater devices already exist, for example to be fitted on whales as trackers, but they typically act as sound emitters. The acoustic signals produced are intercepted by a receiver that in turn can figure out the origin of the sound. Such devices require batteries to function, which means that they need to be replaced regularly -- and when it is a migrating whale wearing the tracker, that is no simple task. On the other hand, the UBL system developed by MIT's team reflects signals, rather than emits them. The technology builds on so-called piezoelectric materials, which produce a small electrical charge in response to vibrations. This electrical charge can be used by the device to reflect the vibration back to the direction from which it came. In the researchers' system, therefore, a transmitter sends sound waves through water towards a piezoelectric sensor. The acoustic signals, when they hit the device, trigger the material to store an electrical charge, which is then used to reflect a wave back to a receiver. Based on how long it takes for the sound wave to reflect off the sensor and return, the receiver can calculate the distance to the UBL. In practice, piezoelectric materials are no easy component to work with: for example, the time it takes for a piezoelectric sensor to wake up and reflect a sound signal is random. To solve this problem, the scientists developed a method called frequency hopping, which involves sending sound signals towards the UBL system across a range of frequencies. Because each frequency has a different wavelength, the reflected sound waves return at different phases. Using a mathematical theorem called an inverse Fourier transform, the researchers can use the phase patterns and timing data to reconstruct the distance to the tracking device with greater accuracy. Frequency hopping showed some promising results in deep-sea environments, but shallow waters proved even more problematic. Because of the short distance between surface and seabed, sound signals uncontrollably bounce back and forth in lower depths, as if in an echo chamber, before they reach the receiver -- potentially messing with other reflected sound waves in the process. [...] While the scientists acknowledged that addressing these challenges would require further research, a proof-of-concept for the technology has already been tested in shallow waters, and MIT's team said that the UBL system achieved centimeter-level accuracy.

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Scientists from MIT have developed a new AI model that can detect COVID-19 from a simple forced cough. ScienceAlert reports: Evidence shows that the AI can spot differences in coughing that can't be heard with the human ear, and if the detection system can be incorporated into a device like a smartphone, the research team thinks it could become a useful early screening tool. The work builds on research that was already happening into Alzheimer's detection through coughing and talking. Once the pandemic started to spread, the team turned its attention to COVID-19 instead, tapping into what had already been learned about how disease can cause very small changes to speech and the other noises we make. The Alzheimer's research repurposed for COVID-19 involved a neural network known as ResNet50. It was trained on a thousand hours of human speech, then on a dataset of words spoken in different emotional states, and then on a database of coughs to spot changes in lung and respiratory performance. When the three models were combined, a layer of noise was used to filter out stronger coughs from weaker ones. Across around 2,500 captured cough recordings of people confirmed to have COVID-19, the AI correctly identified 97.1 percent of them -- and 100 percent of the asymptomatic cases. That's an impressive result, but there's more work to do yet. The researchers emphasize that its main value lies in spotting the difference between healthy coughs and unhealthy coughs in asymptomatic people -- not in actually diagnosing COVID-19, which a proper test would be required for. In other words, it's an early warning system. The researchers now want to test the engine on a more diverse set of data, and see if there are other factors involved in reaching such an impressively high detection rate. If it does make it to the phone app stage, there are obviously going to be privacy implications too, as few of us will want our devices constantly listening out for signs of ill health. The research has been published in the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.

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President Trump attacked legitimate vote-counting efforts in remarks from the White House early Wednesday, suggesting attempts to tally all ballots amounted to disenfranchising his supporters, CNN reports. From the report: "Millions and millions of people voted for us," Trump said in the East Room. "A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people." His remarks were laced with misleading statements and outright falsehoods and amounted to an assault on the Democratic process. He insisted that states where vote tallies currently show him leading should be called in his favor, despite significant outstanding votes yet to be counted. He said he was preparing to declare victory earlier in the evening. "We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything. And all of a sudden it was just called off," he said. Trump baselessly claimed a fraud was being committed. "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country," Trump claimed. "Frankly we did win this election," he said, despite millions of votes still outstanding. Saying he would go to the US Supreme Court, Trump said he wanted "all voting to stop." Further reading: Biden urges patience as Trump threatens court action (The New York Times); Trump falsely and prematurely claims election victory (Axios); Trump baselessly claims 'fraud' amid nail-biter results (The Guardian); Trump falsely declares victory: 'We already have won' (ABC News); Trump tries to claim victory; Biden says votes still being tallied (NPR); and No clear winner in presidential race as vote counting continues, election hangs in balance. (Fox News)

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Oregonians have voted to pass Measure 109 to become the first state in the country to legalize psilocybin. OregonLive reports: Measure 109 was passing by 59.25% Tuesday when the polls closed in Oregon. Multiple cities have decriminalized the substance, but Oregon will become the first to permit supervised use statewide if that majority holds. The measure [...] will allow regulated use of psychedelic mushrooms in a therapeutic setting. It creates a two-year period during which regulatory details will be worked out, including what qualifications are required of therapists overseeing its use. [P]silocybin could help people struggling with issues from depression to anxiety to addiction. The new law will allow anyone age 21 or older who passes a screening to access the services for "personal development." But the law won't mean that "magic" mushrooms have the same legal status as cannabis. Instead, it will allow psilocybin to be stored and administered at licensed facilities. Oregonians also voted to pass Measure 110, which will decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: This is not a drill. Red alert: The police surveillance center in Jackson, Mississippi, will be conducting a 45-day pilot program to live stream the Amazon Ring cameras of participating residents. Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have started a pilot program that would allow Ring owners to patch the camera streams from their front doors directly to a police Real Time Crime Center. The footage from your front door includes you coming and going from your house, your neighbors taking out the trash, and the dog walkers and delivery people who do their jobs in your street. In Jackson, this footage can now be live streamed directly onto a dozen monitors scrutinized by police around the clock. Even if you refuse to allow your footage to be used that way, your neighbor's camera pointed at your house may still be transmitting directly to the police. Only a few months ago, Jackson stood up for its residents, becoming the first city in the southern United States to ban police use of face recognition technology. Clearly, this is a city that understands invasive surveillance technology when it sees it, and knows when police have overstepped their ability to invade privacy. If police want to build a surveillance camera network, they should only do so in ways that are transparent and accountable, and ensure active resident participation in the process. If residents say "no" to spy cameras, then police must not deploy them. The choices you and your neighbors make as consumers should not be hijacked by police to roll out surveillance technologies. The decision making process must be left to communities.

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Baby Shark, the infuriatingly catchy children's rhyme recorded by South Korean company Pinkfong, has become the most-watched video ever on YouTube. The BBC reports: The song has now been played 7.04 billion times, overtaking the previous record holder Despacito, the Latin pop smash by singer Luis Fonsi. Played back-to-back, that would mean Baby Shark has been streamed continuously for 30,187 years. Pinkfong stands to have made about $5.2 million from YouTube streams alone. It took four years for Baby Shark to ascend to the top of YouTube's most-played chart, but the song is actually much older than that. It is thought to have originated in U.S. summer camps in the 1970s. One theory says it was invented in 1975, as Steven Spielberg's Jaws became an box office smash around the world. There are a huge number of variations on the basic premise, including one version where a surfer loses an arm to the shark, and another where the protagonist dies. There are also international versions - including the French Bebe Requin and the German Kleiner Hai (Little Shark), which became a minor hit in Europe in 2007. But none of them could match the phenomenal success of Pinkfong's interpretation, which was sung by 10-year-old Korean-American singer Hope Segoine and uploaded to YouTube in 2015.

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Mint's programmers, led by lead developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, have built their own take on Google's open-source Chromium web browser. ZDNet reports: Some of you may be saying, "Wait, haven't they offered Chromium for years? Well, yes, and no. For years, Mint used Ubuntu's Chromium build. But then Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, moved from releasing Chromium as an APT-compatible DEB package to a Snap. The Ubuntu Snap software packing system, along with its rivals Flatpak and AppImage, is a new, container-oriented way of installing Linux applications. The older way of installing Linux apps, such as DEB and RPM package management systems for the Debian and Red Hat Linux families, incorporate the source code and hard-coded paths for each program. While tried and true, these traditional packages are troublesome for developers. They require programmers to hand-craft Linux programs to work with each specific distro and its various releases. They must ensure that each program has access to specific libraries' versions. That's a lot of work and painful programming, which led to the process being given the name: Dependency hell. Snap avoids this problem by incorporating the application and its libraries into a single package. It's then installed and mounted on a SquashFS virtual file system. When you run a Snap, you're running it inside a secured container of its own. For Chromium, in particular, Canonical felt using Snaps was the best way to handle this program. [...] Lefebvre wrote, "The Chromium browser is now available in the official repositories for both Linux Mint and LMDE. If you've been waiting for this I'd like to thank you for your patience." Part of the reason was, well, Canonical was right. Building Chromium from source code is one really slow process. He explained, "To guarantee reactivity and timely updates we had to automate the process of detecting, packaging and compiling new versions of Chromium. This is an application which can require more than 6 hours per build on a fast computer. We allocated a new build server with high specifications (Ryzen 9 3900, 128GB RAM, NMVe) and reduced the time it took to build Chromium to a little more than an hour." That's a lot of power! Still, for those who love it, up-to-date builds of Chromium are now available for Mint users.

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On Monday, Spotify announced a new initiative that offers artists the chance to pay their way into automated recommendations. Gizmodo reports: In a carefully worded blog post, Spotify is framing its latest move as a test that will give artists more "input" into the recommendation algorithms that populate personalized playlists with fresh tracks. The company writes that its algorithms take "into account thousands of types of signals: what you're listening to and when, which songs you're adding to your playlists, the listening habits of people who have similar tastes, and much more." Today, Spotify is adding a new signal to the mix: $$$. Artists uploading new tracks to Spotify will be able to choose "music that's a priority for them" and in exchange for accepting a "promotional recording royalty rate," Spotify's algorithms might just bless them with exposure. The company isn't making promises, it's only offering an opportunity. There's no guarantee of placement in playlists and the reduced royalty rate is only applied to songs that end up being served through the new recommendation system. What is a "promotional recording royalty rate," exactly? [A] spokesperson for the service told the Verge that they aren't making the rate public while it's in testing and Spotify will "calibrate to make sure that the widest group of artists and labels can find success."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The data analysts firm NetMarketShare revealed that Windows 10 has seen another uptake in users and it went up to 64.04% from 61.26% last month. Linux (multiple distros) went from 1.14% to 1.65% and Ubuntu now holds a market share of 0.51%. The market share of Windows 7 has also dropped, but many users are still actively using outdated Windows 7, which could be due to its huge number of enterprise users. According to NetMarketShare, Windows 7 saw a drop from 22.77% to 20.41% last month. The report shows that 20.41% of desktops still use Windows 7. Even worse, some are still using Windows XP, according to the report. As of October 2020, the market share of Windows XP is 0.87%.

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A text message campaign, claiming to be from the FBI, is targeting people in Michigan with misinformation about "ballot sensor issues." According to The Verge, citing The Washington Post, "The messages claim a 'typographical error' is causing people who voted for Joe Biden to have their votes switched to President Trump, and people who voted for Trump to have their votes switched to Biden." From the report: In Flint, robocalls have been trying to trick people into voting tomorrow (which is not allowed) due to supposedly long lines at polling stations. Nessel debunked this claim too, tweeting: "Getting reports of multiple robocalls going to Flint residents that, due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow. Obviously this is FALSE and an effort to suppress the vote. No long lines and today is the last day to vote. Don't believe the lies! Have your voice heard! RT PLS." These campaigns are just two of the many efforts to spread doubt about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In a separate campaign, robocallers have been warning people to "stay safe and stay home," according to The Washington Post. The calls, which began over the summer, have increased leading up to the election -- targeting nearly every city in the US. While they do not mention the 2020 race, one source told the Post: "I think they mean stay home and don't vote." Voters in swing states have received the most misinformation about voting by mail leading up to the 2020 election, according to The New York Times. Between September 1st and October 29th, Pennsylvania saw 227,907 mail-in voting rumors, according to media intelligence company Zignal Labs.

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In a late-evening announcement that stunned China, the Shanghai Stock Exchange slammed the brakes on Ant's initial public offering, which was set to be the biggest stock debut in history with investors on multiple continents and at least $34 billion in proceeds. The New York Times reports: The stock exchange's notice to Ant said that the company's proposed offering might no longer meet the requirements for listing after Chinese regulators had summoned company executives, including Jack Ma, the co-founder of the e-commerce titan Alibaba and Ant's controlling shareholder, for a meeting on Monday. Neither the regulators nor Ant has said in detail what was discussed at the meeting. But the timing of the conversation, mere days before Ant's shares were expected to begin trading concurrently in Shanghai and Hong Kong, suggested discord with the company or with Mr. Ma, who spun Ant out of Alibaba in 2011. Though he is not part of Ant's management, Mr. Ma has been a spirited champion for the company's mission of bringing financial services to small businesses and others in China who he says have been ill served by stodgy, government-run institutions. Shortly after the Shanghai exchange's announcement, Ant said it was suspending the Hong Kong leg of its listing as well. The company apologized to investors "for any inconvenience." "We will keep in close communications with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and relevant regulators," the company said, "and wait for their further notice with respect to further developments of our offering and listing process."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of building political pressure for antitrust scrutiny of major tech companies, this month Congress and the US government delivered. The House Antitrust Subcommittee released a report accusing Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook of monopolistic behavior. The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Google alleging the company prevents consumers from sampling other search engines. The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. "If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples," says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband -- Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T -- argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen Internet access. Analysis by Microsoft last year concluded that as many as 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds (as many as 42.8 million lack meaningful broadband), and New America's Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America. The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company's payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult -- it requires moving. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which promotes community broadband projects, recently estimated from Federal Communications Commission data that some 80 million Americans can only get high-speed broadband service from one provider. "That is quite intentional on the part of cable operators," says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. "These companies are extracting rent from Americans based on their monopoly positions." The United States has suffered, and broken up, telecom monopolies in the past. AT&T had a government-sanctioned monopoly for much of the 20th century, until it was broken up in 1984. The 1996 Telecom Act included rules for phone providers aimed at encouraging competition, but it excluded "information services," leaving broadband companies freer rein. The White House and Congress will both need to act in order to make US broadband more competitive. "Options worth considering include reversing some of the acquisitions that turned Comcast and others into nation-spanning giants and mandating that companies allow competitors to use their networks, as is common in Europe, [says Joshua Stager, a senior policy counsel at New America's Open Technology Institute.]

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It is being described as a "revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling": a socially conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is open in the UK from this week. From a report: Bookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin -- 30% of the cover price -- from each sale. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days. "It's been a wild ride," said Hunter, who launched the site in the US in January. "Five weeks into what we thought was going to be a six-month period of refining and improving and making small changes, Covid-19 hit and then suddenly we were doing massive business." Initially starting with 250 bookshops, more than 900 stores have now signed up in the US. "We went from selling $50,000 worth of books in all of February, to selling $50,000 a day in March, then $150,000 a day in April," said Hunter. By June, Bookshop sold $1m worth of books in a day. The platform has now raised more than $7.5m for independent bookshops across the US.

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On Election Day, a subset of Instagram users woke up to a message at the top of their Instagram feeds that read, "Tomorrow is Election Day." For some, the message was still there by the early afternoon. Instagram chalked the outdated message up to a caching issue that caused some users to continue seeing Monday's election notification. From a report: "While we turned off the 'Tomorrow is Election Day' notice last night, it was cached for a small group of people if their app hadn't been restarted," Instagram wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, responding to a number of users who had received the message. "It's resolving itself as people restart."

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Here's a good sign for alien hunters: More than 300 million worlds with similar conditions to Earth are scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. A new analysis [PDF] concludes that roughly half of the galaxy's sunlike stars host rocky worlds in habitable zones where liquid water could pool or flow over the planets' surfaces. From a report: "This is the science result we've all been waiting for," says Natalie Batalha, an astronomer with the University of California, Santa Cruz, who worked on the new study. The finding, which has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, pins down a crucial number in the Drake Equation. Devised by my father Frank Drake in 1961, the equation sets up a framework for calculating the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way. Now the first few variables in the formula -- including the rate of sunlike star formation, the fraction of those stars with planets, and the number of habitable worlds per stellar system -- are known. The number of sunlike stars with worlds similar to Earth "could have been one in a thousand, or one in a million -- nobody really knew," says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute who was not involved with the new study. Astronomers estimated the number of these planets using data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. For nine years, Kepler stared at the stars and watched for the brief twinkles produced when orbiting planets blot out a portion of their star's light. By the end of its mission in 2018, Kepler had spotted some 2,800 exoplanets -- many of them nothing like the worlds orbiting our sun. But Kepler's primary goal was always to determine how common planets like Earth are. The calculation required help from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which monitors stars across the galaxy. With Gaia's observations in hand, scientists were finally able to determine that the Milky Way is populated by hundreds of millions of Earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars -- and that the nearest one is probably within 20 light-years of the solar system.

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The man on the trail went by "Mostly Harmless." He was friendly and said he worked in tech. After he died in his tent, no one could figure out who he was. Wired: It's usually easy to to put a name to a corpse. There's an ID or a credit card. There's been a missing persons report in the area. There's a DNA match. But the investigators in Collier County couldn't find a thing. Mostly Harmless' fingerprints didn't show up in any law enforcement database. He hadn't served in the military, and his fingerprints didn't match those of anyone else on file. His DNA didn't match any in the Department of Justice's missing person database or in CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI. A picture of his face didn't turn up anything in a facial recognition database. The body had no distinguishing tattoos. Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play, and he had more than $3,500 cash in the tent. He had food nearby, but he was hollowed out, weighing just 83 pounds on a 5'8" frame. Investigators put his age in the vague range between 35 and 50, and they couldn't point to any abnormalities. The only substances he tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was "undetermined." He had, in some sense, just wasted away. But why hadn't he tried to find help? Almost immediately, people compared Mostly Harmless to Chris McCandless, whose story was the subject of Into the Wild. McCandless, though, had been stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving, desperate for help, 22 miles of wilderness separating him from a road. Mostly Harmless was just 5 miles from a major highway. He left no note, and there was no evidence that he had spent his last days calling out for help. The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public. In the sketch, his mouth is open wide, and his eyes too. He has a gray and black beard, with a bare patch of skin right below the mouth. His teeth, as noted in the autopsy, are perfect, suggesting he had good dental care as a child. He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he's just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain. The image started to circulate online along with other pictures from his campsite, including his tent and his hiking poles.

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The Motion Picture Association says that circumvention services such as VPNs, DNS masks and Tor networks can pose a direct threat to legitimate streaming services. In comments submitted to the US Trade Representative, the movie industry group highlights PDF various other piracy challenges around the globe.

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A Twitter board committee reviewing the social network's leadership and management structure concluded that Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey should maintain his role at the helm of the company. From a report: The committee was asked to formally review Twitter's leadership as part of an agreement in March with activist investor Elliott Management and private equity firm Silver Lake, which took stakes in the San Francisco-based company earlier this year. The independent board panel, which included representatives from Elliott and Silver Lake, concluded that the current management structure is sufficient, and the full board accepted that recommendation, according to a company filing on Monday. "The committee expressed its confidence in management and recommended that the current structure remain in place," the filing reads. "The board will continue to evaluate company and management performance according to a range of factors, including the company's operating plan and established milestones."

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An excerpt from MIT Technology Review's interview with Geoffrey Hinton: You think deep learning will be enough to replicate all of human intelligence. What makes you so sure? I do believe deep learning is going to be able to do everything, but I do think there's going to have to be quite a few conceptual breakthroughs. For example, in 2017 Ashish Vaswani et al. introduced transformers, which derive really good vectors representing word meanings. It was a conceptual breakthrough. It's now used in almost all the very best natural-language processing. We're going to need a bunch more breakthroughs like that. And if we have those breakthroughs, will we be able to approximate all human intelligence through deep learning? Yes. Particularly breakthroughs to do with how you get big vectors of neural activity to implement things like reason. But we also need a massive increase in scale. The human brain has about 100 trillion parameters, or synapses. What we now call a really big model, like GPT-3, has 175 billion. It's a thousand times smaller than the brain. GPT-3 can now generate pretty plausible-looking text, and it's still tiny compared to the brain. When you say scale, do you mean bigger neural networks, more data, or both? Both. There's a sort of discrepancy between what happens in computer science and what happens with people. People have a huge amount of parameters compared with the amount of data they're getting. Neural nets are surprisingly good at dealing with a rather small amount of data, with a huge numbers of parameters, but people are even better. A lot of the people in the field believe that common sense is the next big capability to tackle. Do you agree? I agree that that's one of the very important things. I also think motor control is very important, and deep neural nets are now getting good at that. In particular, some recent work at Google has shown that you can do fine motor control and combine that with language, so that you can open a drawer and take out a block, and the system can tell you in natural language what it's doing. For things like GPT-3, which generates this wonderful text, it's clear it must understand a lot to generate that text, but it's not quite clear how much it understands. But if something opens the drawer and takes out a block and says, "I just opened a drawer and took out a block," it's hard to say it doesn't understand what it's doing.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Less than 24 hours before a historic US presidential election day, Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs and communications and the former United Kingdom deputy prime minister, tried to rally employees at the embattled social networking corporation. Noting that the world would be watching the results, Clegg published a post on an internal message board about the work Facebook employees had done to prepare for the vote. Many things had changed since 2016, he said, alluding to an election in which Russian state actors used Facebook to sow discord, while the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood by oblivious. "We have transformed the way we approach elections since the U.S. presidential election four years ago," Clegg wrote in the note titled "READY FOR ELECTION DAY." "Thanks to the efforts of far, far too many of you to mention by name, Facebook is a very different company today." It is indeed. Roiled by months of internal scandals and high-profile failures, the social network giant heads into Election Day with employee morale cratering and internal political discussion muzzled on internal message boards. While Clegg took an optimistic tone in his post, Facebook released results of an internal survey on Monday that revealed a stark decline in employee confidence over the past six months. Its semi-annual "Pulse Survey," taken by more than 49,000 employees over two weeks in October, showed workers felt strained by office shutdowns and were continuing to lose faith that the company was improving the world. Only 51% of respondents said they believed that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down 23 percentage points from the company's last survey in May and down 5.5 percentage points from the same period last year. In response to a question about the company's leadership, only 56% of employees had a favorable response, compared to 76% in May and more than 60% last year. (A Facebook employee acknowledged in the announcement that the uptick in May's Pulse results were "likely driven by our response to COVID-19," which was widely praised.)

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