Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password


Site News

Join our Folding@Home team:
Main F@H site
Our team page


Funding Goal
For 6-month period:
2022-07-01 to 2022-12-31
(All amounts are estimated)
Base Goal:
$3500.00

Currently:
$438.92

12.5%

Covers transactions:
2022-07-02 10:17:28 ..
2022-10-05 12:33:58 UTC
(SPIDs: [1838..1866])
Last Update:
2022-10-05 14:04:11 UTC --fnord666

Support us: Subscribe Here
and buy SoylentNews Swag


We always have a place for talented people, visit the Get Involved section on the wiki to see how you can make SoylentNews better.

What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:103

posted by n1 on Tuesday September 16 2014, @10:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-wont-it-go-viral? dept.

An article recently published in Nature's Scientific Reviews describes a new method to reverse-engineer network growth processes. Some examples of application include the discovery of growth processes for a small brain, social networks and a protein interactions network.

The algorithm uses a technique inspired by natural selection to evolve theories on how networks grow.

Here's also a blog post about it from one of the authors.

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

Phys.org reported on recent hoaxes where gamers seeking retaliation against an opponent make a fake emergency call to get a SWAT team sent over.

Authorities are increasingly concerned about a hoax in which video game players lash out at online opponents by making fake 911 calls that send SWAT teams to their homes.

The practice, known as "swatting," originally targeted celebrities. Experts say it's now becoming more popular with gamers seeking retaliation. It offers anonymity and a way to watch the hoax unfold live over game-streaming systems.

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @07:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the удачи-мой-друг dept.

NASA has released a media advisory today indicating that there will be a major announcement today at 16:00 EDT (20:00 UTC) about commercial crew transportation to the International Space Station. The graphic in their announcement includes the apparently new buzzphrase: "Launch America". The announcement will be made from Kennedy Space Center.

Commence wild speculation over CST-100, Dragon, etc.

[Update] The announcement: American Companies Selected to Return Astronaut Launches to American Soil

posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 16 2014, @07:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the remaining-cynical dept.

It seems self-evident that moving from a lower-income country to a higher-income country can bring about enormous increases in a person’s income (e.g., multiplying it several-fold), dwarfing the effect of any sort of direct-aid intervention. But there are worries: Does letting more workers into a wealthy country take jobs from people already working there? Or does the competition for jobs reduce wages all around? These possibilities are a particular concern as they apply to low-skill workers, who are poorer.

David Roodman was hired to review of the evidence for potential side effects of immigration for the GiveWell charity research firm, a sort of "consumers reports" for charities.

Among his findings were:

  • There is almost no evidence of anything close to one-to-one crowding out by new immigrant arrivals to the job market in industrial countries. Most studies find that 10% growth in the immigrant “stock” changes natives’ earnings by between –2% and +2%. Although serious questions can be raised about the reliability of most studies, the scarcity of evidence for great pessimism stands as a fact. The economies of destination countries largely appear flexible enough to absorb new arrivals, especially given time.
  • The group that appears most vulnerable to competitive pressure from new low-skill migrants is recent low-skill migrants. This possibility is easy to miss when talking of the impacts of “immigrants” on “natives.” Yet it stands to reason: a newly arrived Mexican with less than a high school education competes most directly with an earlier-arrived Mexican with less than a high school education.
  • One factor dampening the economic side effects of immigration is that immigrants are consumers as well as producers. They increase domestic demand for goods and services, perhaps even more quickly than they increase domestic production (@Hercowitz and Yashiv 2002@), since they must consume as soon as they arrive. They expand the economic pie even as they compete for a slice. This is not to suggest that the market mechanism is perfect—adjustment to new arrivals is not instantaneous and may be incomplete—but the mechanism does operate.
  • A second dampener is that in industrial economies, the capital supply tends to expand along with the workforce. More workers leads to more offices and more factories. Were receiving economies not flexible in this way, they would not be rich. This mechanism too may not be complete or immediate, but it is substantial in the long run: since the industrial revolution, population has doubled many times in the US and other now-wealthy nations, and the capital stock has kept pace, so that today there is more capital per worker than 200 years ago.
  • A third dampener is that while workers who are similar compete, ones who are different complement. An expansion in the diligent manual labor available to the home renovation business can spur that industry to grow, which will increase its demand for other kinds of workers, from skilled general contractors who can manage complex projects for English-speaking clients to scientists who develop new materials for home building. Symmetrically, an influx of high-skill workers can increase demand for low-skill ones. More computer programmers means more tech businesses, which means more need for janitors and security guards. Again, the effect is certain, though its speed and size are not.

His findings indicate that more low-skill immigration would stimulate employment in the kind of high-skilled professions that suffer from the wage-depression effects of the H1B program.

posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 16 2014, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-late-than-never dept.

Has Redmond finally stopped fighting its users' wishes? Indications are that, in Windows 9, it will include multiple workspaces (which unix and unix-like OSes have offered for years).

SiliconANGLE reports

Leaked photos of the Windows Technical Preview are shedding light on what the next version of Windows will look like.

[...]

The Metro style Start screen has been replaced with a traditional Windows desktop, complete with the taskbar at the bottom with frequently used app shortcuts. One new element that wasn't in prior leaked screenshots is the search icon. It appears on the taskbar, next to the Start button.

On the right side of the search icon is, at long last, the Virtual Desktop icon. Virtual desktops, a feature that allows users to create, save, and easily switch between multiple desktop configurations, has been available in competing operating systems, like Ubuntu, for some time.

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @03:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-information dept.

WikiLeaks has released previously unseen copies of weaponised German surveillance malware used by intelligence agencies around the world to spy on journalists, political dissidents and others.

https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles4/index.html

FinFisher (formerly part of the UK based Gamma Group International until late 2013) is a German company that produces and sells computer intrusion systems, software exploits and remote monitoring systems that are capable of intercepting communications and data from OS X, Windows and Linux computers as well as Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. FinFisher first came to public attention in December 2011 when WikiLeaks published documents detailing their products and business in the first SpyFiles release.

Since the first SpyFiles release, researchers published reports that identified the presence of FinFisher products in countries aroud the world and documented its use against journalists, activists and political dissidents.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Editor in Chief said:

FinFisher continues to operate brazenly from Germany selling weaponised surveillance malware to some of the most abusive regimes in the world. The Merkel government pretends to be concerned about privacy, but its actions speak otherwise. Why does the Merkel government continue to protect FinFisher? This full data release will help the technical community build tools to protect people from FinFisher including by tracking down its command and control centers.

FinFisher Relay and FinSpy Proxy are the components of the FinFisher suite responsible for collecting the data acquired from the infected victims and delivering it to their controllers. It is commonly deployed by FinFisher's customers in strategic points around the world to route the collected data through an anonymizing chain, in order to disguise the identity of its operators and the real location of the final storage, which is instead operated by the FinSpy Master.

Archives:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140915073153/https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles4/index.html
https://archive.today/XRT0p

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @02:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the push-media dept.

Apple's latest press event was punctuated by a live appearance by U2 as well as an official announcement that Apple was giving away the band's latest album to over 500 million iTunes users. Apple called the mass giveaway "part of music history."

And it was, but maybe not in the way they intended. Apple's heavy-handed approach forced the album to download on every device of users who enable their purchases to download, whether they wanted it or not. And there was no easy way to NOT have the album on your device - many users found that even if they deleted the album, it would simply show back up again, unless they disabled all automatic syncing (even for albums they chose and purchased). Apple users were not impressed.

To the point where Apple has apparently admitted defeat, and offered an official tool to allow users to remove the unwanted album permanently from their iTunes library.

In other words, Apple mishandled a free giveaway of an album so badly that they actually had to create a special tool to allow people to decline to receive something they gave away for free (after Apple paid the band for the album). They could have generated more goodwill and generated less anger by making the album temporarily free in the iTunes store. But hey, how often can you make "music history?"

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @12:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the mod-me-up! dept.

An article posted by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2014/09/15/downvoting-considered-harmful.html has interesting insight into moderation:

A study http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf [PDF] published in a journal of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence found that sites that have a "downvote" button to punish bad comments lock the downvoted users into spirals of ever-more-prolific, ever-lower-quality posting due to a perception of having been martyred by the downvoters.

Cory continues: What's more, positive attention for writing good posts acts as less of an incentive to write more good stuff than the incentive to write bad stuff that's produced by negative attention.

How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf [Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec]

Why Reddit sucks: some scientific evidence http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/09/09/why-reddit-sucks-some-scientific-evidence/ [Henry Farrell/Washington Post]

So... do you downvote? if so, why? Does this article make you reconsider your down-modding?

[Editor's note: I offer for your consideration and commentary our very own SoylentNews Moderation FAQ.]

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @11:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the preparing-for-talk-like-a-pirate-day? dept.

In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind Professor of Law James Boyle writes about the history of copyright, patent and trademark laws, and their application. What is the public domain? What are orphan works? Why should somebody own an idea? Boyle makes the case for result-based evaluation of how well the current laws serve us and (re)introduces his idea of information environmentalism.

I think the book makes fascinating reading and since all our contemporary culture and technology is governed by these rules, we should know them and understand how they came to be.

The book is available for download under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

“In this beautifully written and subtly argued book, Boyle has succeeded in resetting that framework, and beginning the work in the next stage of this field. The Public Domain is absolutely crucial to understanding where the debate has been, and where it will go. And Boyle’s work continues to be at the center of that debate.” — Lawrence Lessig.

What say you Soylents? Do you think copyright protection lasts too long? Do you have a problem with patents? Download this book and weigh in for an informed discussion.

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @09:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the do-they-still-make-that-neeeeeyung-sound? dept.

The FIA's new motor racing championship, built around electric cars and city street racing, Formula E held its first race on Saturday the 13th in Beijing, and Lucas di Grassi won after a spectacular crash at the last corner.

Although I'm not a big fan of most motor sports, there is a lot of fascinating technology behind the cars. All the teams are currently in the €350,000 Spark-Renault SRT_01E model car from Spark Racing Technology which is capable of a top speed of about 140 mph (225kph) and 0-60 mph in 3s.

There's an official Youtube channel with quite a bit of background and highlights clips as well as a video from di Grassi with a drivers-eye view of the technical aspects of the power management and regeneration system

The early reception seems to be generally positive although some aspects have been criticised, particularly the "Fanboost", where an online vote awards three drivers an extra 5 second power boost during the race.

So is Formula-E racing a gimmick, is it Formula 1 greenwashing, or is there some future for this sport and will the trickle-down-technology theory of motorsport proponents mean innovations here will end up in consumer cars?

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 16 2014, @07:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the throw-away-your-makeup-and-forget-that-diet dept.

Darren Pauli at El Reg reports

Chinese researchers have developed a facial recognition system that can pick faces from a crowd with 99.8 percent accuracy from 91 angles. The platform can distinguish between identical twins, unravel layers of makeup and still identify an individual if they've packed on or shed kilos.

Researcher Zhou Xi of the Chinese Academy of Science told local reporters [Google translation] the system would be built into a [mobile] app next year.

"The facial recognition system is not only accurate but also quick to recognise," Xi said.

The platform which is limited use (sic) in China topped Carnegie Mellon University's global standards beating the previous accuracy record of 97.6 percent.

It was trained against a database sporting 50 million Chinese faces compiled with help from the University of Illinois and the National University of Singapore.

The biometrics system comes as Australia's Immigration Minister Scott Morrison announced facial recognition Smart Gates would be installed at departure areas within the nation's airports.

The systems already in place at arrival points work by matching Aussie or Kiwi passports against a stored photo and dramatically cut down on Customs wait times, much to this correspondent's delight.

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @05:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the manual-desk dept.

3D design tools company Autodesk, probably best known for the Autocad and Maya product lines, appears to have acquired Stockholm-based game engine supplier Bitsquid.

From the Autodesk announcement:

We are significantly expanding our portfolio of game making tools, complementing our middleware and 3D animation tools

This could indicate Autodesk plans to compete with engine makers like Unity, Epic, Id and others.

Bitssquid's homepage showcases several of the game engine clients, and the company blog has several articles on the game engine design.

(Originally spotted over at BlenderArtists)

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @03:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the Tuesday-night-music-club dept.

The Washington Post is reporting on research (summary of paywalled Elsevier journal article) that shows that creativity is increased at the elite level by living in the same city as other elite level performers, but the effect decreases when too many elite level performers are located in the same city. From the Post article:

"Karol Jan Borowiecki, an economist at the University of Southern Denmark, makes a point about how creative clusters grow using an unusual data set: the lives and times of classical music composers from hundreds of years ago." ....

"Borowiecki found that living in one of the three music capitals led composers to produce one additional great work every three years. (He focused on major composers and major works that had been noted in a music encyclopedia.) That’s a huge increase, because these composers produced only three works every four years on average. While composers lived in one of these superstar cities, “around one third of composers’ output was a result of the positive externalities associated with a cluster,” Borowiecki writes in his paper."

In a separate article (link to abstract; non-paywalled Wiley journal article available for download) Borowiecki noted a "crowding effect" that decreased productivity for all composers after a certain point.

From The Washington Post:
"Borowiecki notes that after about eight major composers were living in the same city, every additional composer made the productivity boost shrink for everybody. This is the cost of crowding. So even though Paris was one of the biggest classical-music clusters, the benefit it offered to a composer’s productivity was about the same as the benefit offered by the much smaller communities in London and Vienna."

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 16 2014, @01:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the green-skinned-dancing-metaphors dept.

Alva Noë has an interesting piece on NPR about how some scientists, and cultural defenders of science, like to think of themselves as free of prejudice and superstition, as moved by reason alone and a clear-eyed commitment to fact and the scientific method. "I'm pro-science, but I'm against what I'll call "Spock-ism," after the character from the TV show Star Trek," writes Noë. "I reject the idea that science is logical, purely rational, that it is detached and value-free, and that it is, for all these reasons, morally superior."

According to Noë, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Spockians give science a bad name because if you think of science as being in the business of figuring out how atoms spinning noiselessly in the void give rise to the illusion that there are such things as love, humor, sunsets and knuckleballs, then it isn't surprising that people might come to think that the inner life of a scientist would be barren. "The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value. What we need, then, is a Kirkian understanding of science and its place in our lives. The world, for Captain Kirk and his ontological followers, is a field of play, and science is a form of action."

posted by janrinok on Monday September 15 2014, @11:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the series-of-tubes dept.

https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/moving-electrons-on-graphene-0911
From the press release,

When moving through a conductive material in an electric field, electrons tend to follow the path of least resistance — which runs in the direction of that field.

But now physicists at MIT and the University of Manchester have found an unexpectedly different behavior under very specialized conditions — one that might lead to new types of transistors and electronic circuits that could prove highly energy-efficient.

They’ve found that when a sheet of graphene — a two-dimensional array of pure carbon — is placed atop another two-dimensional material, electrons instead move sideways, perpendicular to the electric field. This happens even without the influence of a magnetic field — the only other known way of inducing such a sideways flow.

and,

The MIT and Manchester researchers have demonstrated a simple transistor based on the new material, Levitov says.

[...]

In their experiments, Levitov, Geim, and their colleagues overlaid the graphene on a layer of boron nitride — a two-dimensional material that forms a hexagonal lattice structure, as graphene does. Together, the two materials form a superlattice that behaves as a semiconductor.