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Hugh Pickens writes:

Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was “This got hit by the ugly stick.” But Karjaluoto says that Apple’s decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.

Microsoft’s approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations—as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." Bu Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn’t later look upon as the right choice.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

This is old news, but still pretty neat for USA sports fans. It's an example of maps illuminating collections of data. Facebook published a fan map showing which NFL team "rules" each county across the USA, based on counts of "likes" by its user base. Evidently the Dallas Cowboys can make a case of being "America's Team" (the nickname they came up for themselves back in their glory years), despite having won exactly one playoff game over the past sixteen years (they're doing surprisingly well this year, though).

I thought of this map when I saw yesterday's tweet from Edward Tufte, statistician and author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information":

Earlier this year, Facebook published a similar county-by-county fan map for Major League Baseball.

gewg_ writes:

The American Statesman reports:

Google will launch its ultra-fast Google Fiber Internet service in South and Southeast Austin in December, Google officials said Wednesday.

Google announced in April 2013 that Austin would be the second U.S. city - after Kansas City - to get its Google Fiber 1-gigabit service. Google has since added the ultra-fast service in Provo, Utah.

Google initially said the service would be available in Austin by mid-year 2014, but that deadline came and went without the service being ready to launch.

Signups will begin in December for new users in South and Southeast Austin, said Mark Strama, head of Google Fiber’s Austin operations.

KXAN TV has some more details on construction as well as a map.

gewg_ writes:

Slate[1] reports:

When you pay to go to a comedy club, there's an expectation that the show will be ... funny. Right? Except that expectation is really more of a hope--standup is pretty hit or miss. Unless you're seeing someone really exceptional, you're probably in for an uneven ride. And a Spanish comedy club only wants you to pay for the parts that get you laughing.

At the Teatreneu club in Barcelona, tablets on the back of every seat run facial recognition software to track how often audience members crack up. According to BBC News , at the end of the show each person gets charged about 38 cents per laugh, for a total of no more than about $30. That means the club thinks people are going to laugh about 80 times per show. Ambitious.

Teatreneu is working with The Cyranos McCann, an advertising agency, to see if it can use the novel initiative to bring audience numbers back up. In Spain, taxes on tickets for entertainment like comedy have reduced crowds in recent months.

Teatreneu told BBC News that ticket prices are up about $7.50 since the club started using software to track laughs, and it has also added a mobile payment app to make checkout quicker.

It seems like a great idea for those awkward sets where a comedian bombs and the audience is feeling kind of ripped off, but it could cause problems if people try not to laugh on purpose so they won't have to pay as much. Check disputes could become a matter of arguing about whether a facial expression was mirth or pity. Plus it could be embarrassing to compare ticket costs with friends and find out that you paid $25 and they paid only $3.

[1] Sorry. Couldn't find a site covering this that has pages that don't suck.

Hugh Pickens writes:

After rising rapidly for decades, the number of people behind bars peaked at 1.62 Million in 2009, has been mostly falling ever since down, and many justice experts believe the incarceration rate will continue on a downward trajectory for many years. New York, for example, saw an 8.8% decline in federal and state inmates, and California, saw a 20.6% drop. Now the WSJ reports on an awkward byproduct of the declining U.S. inmate population: empty or under-utilized prisons and jails that must be cared for but can’t be easily sold or repurposed. New York state has closed 17 prisons and juvenile-justice facilities since 2011, following the rollback of the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws, which mandated lengthy sentences for low-level offenders. So far, the state has found buyers for 10 of them, at prices that range from less than $250,000 to about $8 million for a facility in Staten Island, often a fraction of what they cost to build. “There’s a prisoner shortage,” says Mike Arismendez, city manager for Littlefield, Texas, home of an empty five-building complex that sleeps 383 inmates and comes with a gym, maintenence shed, armory, and parking lot . “Everybody finds it hard to believe.”

The incarceration rate is declining largely because crime has fallen significantly in the past generation. In addition, many states have relaxed harsh sentencing laws passed during the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, and have backed rehabilitation programs, resulting in fewer low-level offenders being locked up. States from Michigan to New Jersey have changed parole processes, leading more prisoners to leave earlier. On a federal level, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Before 2010, the U.S. prison population increased every year for 30 years, from 307,276 in 1978 to a high of 1,615,487 in 2009. “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration,” says Natasha Frost. "People don’t care so much about crime, and it’s less of a political focus."

frojack writes:

Remember Yucca mountain?

Most people thought the nuclear waste storage project has been put to death back in 2010 when the when the Department of Energy withdrew the project for political reasons.

The Yucca site was designated in 1987 legislation as a repository and has faced political opposition in Nevada ever since. In 2008, DOE submitted a license application to open the repository, but withdrew it 2 years later.

In response, the states of Washington and South Carolina—both large producers of nuclear waste—and others filed suit. These states had been promised that federal nuclear waste sites like Hanford, would be cleaned up, and locally stored spent fuel would moved from nuclear power plants.

Last year, a court ordered NRC to move forward with its review and licensing process.

Last Thursday, (16th), key safety evaluation was published by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) which gives Yucca Mountain a thumbs up.

This report, Volume 3, isn't the final approval. The staff expects to publish volumes 2 (Repository Safety Before permanent Closure), 4 (Administrative and Programmatic Requirements) and 5 (License Specifications) by January 2015

Of course Nevada is not happy.

AnonTechie writes:

Today, the White House announced a pause in a specific type of research on viruses. Rather than being a response to the recent Ebola infections, this dates back to events that began in 2011 ( http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/02/study-of-deadly-flu-sparks-debate-amidst-fears-of-new-pandemic/ ). Back then, researchers who were studying the bird flu put it through a series of lab procedures that ended with a flu virus that could readily infect mammals. Some members of the scientific community considered this work irresponsible, as the resulting virus could, again, potentially infect humans.

Similar research and a debate over its value and threat have continued. Now, however, the Obama administration decided to put it on hold. Prompted by several recent biosafety lapses (including the discovery of old smallpox samples at the National Institutes of Health), the government will temporarily stop funding for these projects. During the pause, the government will organize a "deliberative process" ( http://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf ) that will consider the value of the research and the appropriate safety precautions that will need to be followed if it's done. The review will be run by a combination of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the National Academies of Science.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/10/us-announces-pause-in-funding-for-changing-the-species-a-virus-targets/

[Announcement]; http://m.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-diligence-assess-risks-and-benefits-life-sciences-gain-function-research

AnonTechie writes:

President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Friday to have secure chip-and-PIN technology embedded into government-issued credit and debit cards as part of a broader move aimed at stemming payment data breaches.

Under the order, government-issued cards that transmit federal benefits, such as Social Security, will have microchips embedded instead of the usual magnetic strips, as well as associated PINs like those typically used for consumer debit cards. A replacement program for the cards is set to begin on Jan. 1 of next year, with the goal to have more than 1 million such cards issued by the end of the year, Obama said at the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a press release.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2835226/obama-orders-chip-and-pin-for-government-credit-cards.html

[Related]: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/10/17/fact-sheet-safeguarding-consumers-financial-security

[Additional Coverage]:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/17/us-obama-credit-security-idUSKCN0I61OP20141017
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/17/obama-calls-for-greater-credit-card-security-in-light-of-data-breaches/

tonyPick writes:

Reports in The Guardian and Scientific American about the possible detection of dark matter, via observations of X-Rays from the Sun.

(The XMM Newton is an X-Ray Observatory in earth orbit, summarised at Wikipedia)

Obviously this is fairly speculative at this point

The paper can be Downloaded from arXiv

tonyPick writes:

Balloon based satellite launcher Zero2Infinity is covered over at Universe Today, following an announcement this week on launch plans for small satellites to LEO and beyond.

Zero2Infinity is a Barcelona-based company which has been operating high altitude balloon systems since 2009, operating payloads and prototypes at over 30km.

They're looking at a launch system which uses a balloon launch to the 20km, and then a rocket stage to achieve orbit, where the high launch altitude results in lower drag and more flexibility in the rocket design.

This idea, known as a Rockoon is not new, but Zero2Infinity appear to be eyeing the emerging cubesat and associated small payload opportunities as a practical driver to make the launch payloads they can support (quoted as 75kg) viable.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jim Edwards writes at Business Insider that Google is so large and has such a massive need for talent that if you have the right skills, Google is really enthusiastic to hear from you - especially if you know how to use MatLab, a fourth-generation programming language that allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages, including C, C++, Java, Fortran and Python. The key is that data is produced visually or graphically, rather than in a spreadsheet.

According to Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's former senior vice president for product management, being a master of statistics is probably your best way into Google right now and if you want to work at Google, make sure you can use MatLab. Big data — how to create it, manipulate it, and put it to good use — is one of those areas in which Google is really enthusiastic about. The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Rosenberg says that "My quote about statistics that I didn't use [last night] but often do is, 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it [are] the samurai.'"

mendax writes:

The New York Times published a story about a close encounter Mars will have with comet Siding Spring—and the equipment on the surface of and in orbit of the red planet:

The comet was well beyond Jupiter when [it was first sighted], but ... so-called comet modelers were nonetheless able to predict its 125,000-mile-per-hour path into the inner solar system. To their surprise and consternation, it appeared to be heading straight for Mars, and some of their most precious equipment.

Comet trajectories are notoriously changeable, and more recent projections suggest the comet, named Siding Spring, is highly unlikely to strike the planet or to do much damage to the two NASA rovers on its surface or the five research satellites orbiting it.

Still, on Oct. 19, the comet is expected to pass within 82,000 miles of Mars, a stone’s throw in astronomical terms — one-third the distance between Earth and the moon, and much closer to Mars than any comet has come to Earth in recorded history.

The dust, water vapor and other gases spewed by a comet can spread for tens of thousands of miles, so the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere are expected to be showered by Siding Spring — perhaps briefly, perhaps more extensively. Shock waves may rock the atmosphere.

The sweet thing about this cometary encounter is this:

The satellites and rovers — along with ground and space observatories such as the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes — will offer a front-row seat to the event, which may provide important images and science for days.

We may be in for some very interesting pictures in the next few days and weeks, folks!

kaszz writes:

The battery uses a radioactive isotope Strontium-90 to produce energetic particles that boost electrochemcial energy in a water based solution with a nanostructured titanium dioxide (TiO2) electrode with a platinum coating that collect and effectively directly convert the energy into electrons. The ionic solution is not easily frozen at very low temperatures. Beta particles produce electron-hole pairs in semiconductors via their loss of kinetic energy which contributes electrical energy.

The problem so far with solid beta decay battery design has been the serious radiation damage to the semiconductor lattice structures. The major benefit of utilizing a liquid-phase material is it's well known ability to efficiently absorb the kinetic energy of beta particles. The fluid absorbs the energy and passes much of it to the semiconductor. The radiation generated free radicals produced can be converted into electricity by using a plasmon-assisted, wide band gap oxide semiconducting material. Strontium 90 has a half life of 28.79 years and the maximum energy conversion efficiency of the battery is approximately estimated to be 53.88%.

There's also a publication in Nature called "Plasmon-assisted radiolytic energy conversion in aqueous solutions".

gewg_ writes:

TechDirt reports:

Nintendo: It protects what it believes it owns with great vigor. The company has rarely missed an opportunity to make sure that other people are not allowed to alter or mess with the stuff Nintendo insists is Nintendo's. In an apparent effort to maximize the irony combo-meter, Nintendo also has been known to make sure that customers don't mess with or alter the properties those customers actually own, such as online support for games that Nintendo decided to alter long after purchase... just because.

But the cold grip of Nintendo's control over its customers' property is apparently no longer limited to games. Nintendo recently released an update for the Wii U that forces you to "agree" to a new end-user license agreement, or else it simply [locks up] the console altogether.

This is how Nintendo's update to its end-user license agreement (EULA) for the Wii U works, as described by YouTube user "AMurder0fCrows" in this video. He didn't like the terms of Nintendo's updated EULA and refused to agree. He may have expected that, like users of the original Wii and other gaming consoles, he would have the option to refuse software or EULA updates and continue to use his device as he always had before. He might have to give up online access, or some new functionality, but that would be his choice. That's a natural consumer expectation in the gaming context--but it didn't apply this time. Instead, according to his video, the Wii U provides no option to decline the update, and blocks any attempt to access games or saved information by redirecting the user to the new EULA. The only way to regain the use of the device is to click "Agree."

gewg_ objects to the use of "brick" to describe something that can be set right with a software tweak and does not require soldering equipment to correct the condition.

AnonTechie writes:

Silicon Valley just won a major victory in the war over patents.

On Thursday, the White House announced that it has nominated former Google patent lawyer Michelle Lee as the next director of the USPTO. Lee, who holds a master’s degree from MIT in electrical engineering and computer science and a JD from Stanford Law School, has served as acting director of the office since she was appointed deputy director last year. If approved by the Senate, Lee will be the first woman to officially hold the USPTO’s top position, according to The Hill.

The nomination could signal the end of a nearly two year political struggle between the technology and pharmaceutical sectors over the directorship of the USPTO. The technology industry, plagued by “patent trolls”—companies that acquire patents for the sole purpose of suing others—has been fighting to reform the patent system for years. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, has generally sought to preserve the status quo.