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lhsi writes:

Abstract: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10336-014-1098-9

By re-examining a fossil of Scansoriopteryx (which means "climbing wing"), a sparrow-size creature from the Jurassic era, researchers believe that the commonly held belief that birds evolved from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs that gained the ability to fly is false. The birdlike fossil is actually not a dinosaur, as previously thought, but much rather the remains of a tiny tree-climbing animal that could glide.

Through their investigations, the researchers found a combination of plesiomorphic or ancestral non-dinosaurian traits along with highly derived features. It has numerous unambiguous birdlike features such as elongated forelimbs, wing and hind limb feathers, wing membranes in front of its elbow, half-moon shaped wrist-like bones, bird-like perching feet, a tail with short anterior vertebrae, and claws that make tree climbing possible. The researchers specifically note the primitive elongated feathers on the forelimbs and hind limbs. This suggests that Scansoriopteryx is a basal or ancestral form of early birds that had mastered the basic aerodynamic manoeuvres of parachuting or gliding from trees.

Their findings validate predictions first made in the early 1900's that the ancestors of birds were small, tree-dwelling archosaurs which enhanced their incipient ability to fly with feathers that enabled them to at least glide. This "trees down" view is in contrast with the "ground up" view embraced by many palaeontologists in recent decades that birds derived from terrestrial theropod dinosaurs.

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica brings us another report on Climate change.

Given what we know about the sensitivity of the climate to added greenhouse gases, it's possible to calculate how much more carbon dioxide we can admit while still having a reasonable chance of staying within the two degree Celsius envelope. What's striking about these calculations is how many large changes we'll have to make in order to get there. According to Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute, the per-capita emissions would have to drop from five tons annually (where they are now) to 1.6 tons by 2050.

To accomplish this, Sachs says that all nations will have to undergo a process he calls "deep decarbonization," which is part of the title of a report he's helped organize and deliver to the UN today. Pathways to Deep Decarbonization, prepared by researchers in 15 different countries, looks into what's needed to achieve sufficient cuts in our carbon emissions. The report finds that current government pledges aren't sufficient, and the technology we need to succeed may exist, but most of it hasn't been proven to scale sufficiently.

Achieving this, the report's authors argue, will have to come with a normal pace of economic growth: "There is no prospect of winning the fight against climate change if countries fail on poverty eradication or if countries do not succeed in raising the living standards of their people." Although this may add to the challenge of lowering carbon emissions, the report concludes that "Robust economic growth and rising prosperity are consistent with the objective of deep decarbonization."

The report identifies what Sachs called "three pillars" of emissions reductions: low-carbon electricity, massive efficiency gains, and a greater electrification of transit and infrastructure. (Sachs also added that land use changes could also have a major impact.)

Ok, folks you can't just put your head in the sand and pass this off as Science fiction. Do you honestly believe that the governments around the world will actually do something about this, or shall we just hope for a nice asteroid so we don't have to deal with long term planning?

c0lo writes:

Wall Street Journal runs a story on Japanese electronics factories "diversifying" into running greenhouses.

Struggling to compete with rivals in South Korea or China in businesses like televisions and smartphones, a range of Japanese electronics giants are converting idled factories to agriculture.

Last month, as Fujitsu began selling lettuce from the Aizu-Wakamatsu plant, Toshiba Corp said it would begin growing vegetables inside a floppy disk factory near Tokyo that hasn't been used for two decades. Later this year, Panasonic Corp will start selling computer-program controlled greenhouses to grow spinach and other vegetables. And Sharp Corp last year began laboratory tests to grow strawberries at an indoor site in Dubai using its lighting and air-purifying technologies.

Because the lettuce is grown in a bacteria-free space, it keeps much longer than ordinary produce - up to two months if refrigerated, the company says. "Because it stays fresh for so long, this will give us a competitive edge when we ship it for export," says Akihiko Sato, a manager at the plant, showing that an economic model honed during the days of the transistor radio, when overseas sales fuelled growth, retains its appeal. But high-tech lettuce comes at a price. At a supermarket near Tokyo, a small bag of Fujitsu lettuce was selling for $3, about $1 more than a whole head of ordinary lettuce.

Fujitsu is starting modestly, with production of 3,500 heads of lettuce a day, but says that if all goes well, it intends to produce about $4 million worth by the 2016 fiscal year, up from a goal of $1.5 million this year.

AnonTechie writes:

A suit, filed below by Seungjin Kim in Washington, DC, claims 10 billion dollars in damages from Google, Inc after the search giant allegedly closed several of Kim's Google accounts for reasons unspecified. Of course there's a very slim chance this case goes anywhere (although with their current market cap of 397.21 billion dollars, Google could throw Kim a couple of bills without breaking a sweat).

It appears Kim had a developer account he was using to create religious apps with and feels Google is violating his freedom of religion by closing his accounts.

Read the whole complaint here.

dublet writes:

The BBC is reporting the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled an EU directive (One that requires phone and internet companies to retain communications data of when and who their customers called, texted, and emailed, but not what was said for a 12-month period) as unlawful. In a reaction to this the UK government is set to railroad new legislation within a week that keeps the existing pervasive snooping laws legal.

The unheard speed of passing this legislation is almost guaranteed by support of the three main political parties in the UK parliament.

Without a new law being passed in the UK to retain the powers, the British Prime Minister claims that that information could be destroyed within weeks by companies fearing legal challenges, meaning police and the security services would not be able to access it.

There would also be new moves to "increase transparency and oversight", including:

• A senior diplomat will be appointed to lead discussions with the US government and internet firms to establish a new international agreement for sharing data between legal jurisdictions
• The creation of a new Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to "examine" the impact of the law on privacy and civil liberties
• A "review" of the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)
• Annual government "transparency reports" on how these powers are used
• A "restriction" on the number of public bodies able to ask for communications data
• The so-called sunset clause ensuring these powers end in 2016 to ensure a longer and wider "debate" about what more draconian laws will replace them

Randolph Carter writes:

"It started as a headache, but soon became much stranger. Simon Baker entered the bathroom to see if a warm shower could ease his pain. "I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air", he says. "They came into hard focus rapidly, over the course of a few seconds". Where you'd normally perceive the streams as more of a blur of movement, he could see each one hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. "It was like a high-speed film, slowed down."

source http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze

also see Slow time perception can be learned

Appalbarry writes:

I'm running a fresh install of Mint 17 Cinnamon, and have been using Transmission for torrent downloads. I suspect that my ISP is throttling Bittorrent traffic, as things seem rather slow. Right now I'm downloading a file with dozens of seeds, and hundreds of peers, and it's topping out at 300k DL, and is usually struggling to stay above 100k.

I've been Googling this, but most advice seems to be at least two or three years old an eternity on the Internet, so I'm looking for current advice.

1) What are the recommended Bittorrent clients these days? And why is your choice better?

2) Can anyone point me to current specific advice on how to handle downloads without my ISP slowing everything to a halt?

Please note, when I say "current", it's because I've wasted way too much time the past chasing down leads which turned out to be out of date or which no longer were usable. And FWIW, almost everything that I download is actually legal Linux ISOs etc.

lhsi writes:

A London-based start-up, The Place, has configured Google Glass to be controlled from a users brainwaves by combining the glass hardware with an electroencephalography (EEG) headset. They have released the initial code on GitHub.

An EEG headset can be used to measure when certain parts of the brain show a greater level of activity.

In this case, the MindRDR software monitors when the wearer engages in high levels of concentration.

Within Google Glass's "screen" a small window that appears in the corner of the wearer's right eye a white horizontal line is shown.

As a user concentrates, the white line rises up the screen. Once it reaches the top, a picture is taken using Glass's inbuilt camera.

Repeating this process will then post it to a pre-configured social media profile.

At present, Google Glass is controlled by either voice command "OK Glass, take a picture" or by tapping and swiping on the side of the device.

"We wanted to realise the true potential of Glass by allowing users to control it with their minds," said Dusan Hamlin, chief executive of This Place.

"Currently, users either have to touch it or use voice commands, which are restrictive for some social situations and for users with disabilities."

gizmobeast writes:

Apple's Siri may no longer be available in China as the U.S. company lost the lawsuit against Shanghai based Zhizhen Network Technology. The decision came after China's State Intellectual Property authority ruled that Zhizhen's patent of voice-controlled service, called Xiao i Robot is valid.

In its court filing, Zhizhen claimed that it has started with the speech recognition technology as early as 2003 and had applied for a patent in 2004 and had been granted in 2006. However, Apple countered that Siri used a different process in its voice-recognition tech. It can be noted that Siri software has become available on the iPhone 4S model only in 2011, which was developed by Siri Inc.in 2011.

A spokesman from Apple was quoted as saying, "Apple believes deeply in protecting innovation, and we take intellectual property rights very seriously. Apple created Siri to provide customers with their own personal assistant by using their voice. Unfortunately, we were not aware of Zhizhen's patent before we introduced Siri, and we do not believe we are using this patent. While a separate court considers this question, we remain open to reasonable discussions with Zhizhen."

Apple further said it would make an appeal with Beijing Higher People's court. However, if the iPhone maker's history with patent infringement is any indication, it will most likely end into a financial settlement. As the song goes, "It's all about the money." So, no need to worry that Apple will pull out its products.

Read more http://www.gizmobeast.com/apple/goodbye-siri-in-china.html

dbot writes:

A new ECC curve has been introduced in a recent paper by Daniel J. Bernstein and Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup and Tanja Lange.

While not claimed to be as fast as Curve25519, Curve41417 should provide a much higher security margin, and be fast enough for most applications.

Erogenous Coward writes:

Google, once boastful that it was the leading defender of a free and open Internet, has gone into the shadows.

FCC records show that since the Federal Communications Commission proposed in May to let cable and telephone companies offer special Internet fast lanes for companies willing to pay extra, lobbyists for Google have not visited the agency to intervene. Facebook has also been absent.

"Net neutrality got them where they are," said Timothy Wu, a Columbia University law professor in New York who supports open-Internet rules. "There's a danger that they, having climbed the ladder, might pull it up after them."

AnonTechie writes:

Do you agree with this assessment from Rana Jawad via The Conversation?

The rapid rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) to global notoriety has taken observers of Middle East politics by surprise. All of a sudden, a new Islamist political movement has stunningly upstaged former global public enemy number one al-Qaeda and establishes an Islamic state, a caliphate encompassing lands in both Iraq and Syria.

ISIS sees itself and its newly declared caliphate as revoking the historic deals that were struck between European imperial powers after World War I, which gave us most of the Middle Eastern borders we know today.

Nothing symbolizes the sorry state of Arab politics more than the march of ISIS. The Arab world at large appears to be fast descending into a political quagmire, only a few years after the euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring. The unraveling of old dictatorships in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria has opened up a pandora's box of sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions, old fault-lines that have persisted under the heavy hand of police states for the last century.

And the more chaotic the region becomes, the more desperate and frustrated the search for a meaningful explanation. From the perspective of many western governments and much of the western media, many Arab countries have never been able to govern themselves effectively. They lack structures for effective democratic governance and rule of law; they are bedeviled by corruption and are too influenced by Arab or Islamic traditions which favour paternalistic or patronage systems of rule.

The Conversation has also published an opposing viewpoint, found here.

lhsi writes:

A study into the genetic basis of cognitive traits has found that about half of the genes that influence how well a child can read also play a role in their mathematics ability.

Dissecting how genetic and environmental influences impact on learning is helpful for maximizing numeracy and literacy. Here we show, using twin and genome-wide analysis, that there is a substantial genetic component to children's ability in reading and mathematics, and estimate that around one half of the observed correlation in these traits is due to shared genetic effects (so-called Generalist Genes). Thus, our results highlight the potential role of the learning environment in contributing to differences in a child's cognitive abilities at age twelve.

Importantly, our analyses show that a substantial proportion of the observed correlation in reading and mathematics abilities is due to genetics. If a large proportion of the genetic factors that affect these traits are pleiotropic, then the factors that lead to differences in an individual's abilities (or disabilities) are relatively more likely to be environmental. Understanding the aetiology of these patterns increases our chances of developing effective learning environments that will help individuals attain the highest level of literacy and numeracy, increasingly important skills in the modern world.

cafebabe writes:

The BBC reports that doctors and dentists fail at basic statistics and are unable to answer patients' questions accurately. This leads to unnecessary tests and operations and their associated side-effects. It also stresses patients unnecessarily.

In 2006 and 2007 Gigerenzer gave a series of statistics workshops to more than 1,000 practising gynaecologists, and kicked off every session with the same question:

A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer?

• nine in 10
• eight in 10
• one in 10
• one in 100

Gigerenzer then supplied the assembled doctors with some data about Western women of this age to help them answer his question. (His figures were based on US studies from the 1990s, rounded up or down for simplicity - current stats from Britain's National Health Service are slightly different).

1. The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% ("prevalence")
2. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% ("sensitivity")
3. If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% ("false alarm rate")

In one session, almost half the group of 160 gynaecologists responded that the woman's chance of having cancer was nine in 10. Only 21% said that the figure was one in 10 - which is the correct answer. That's a worse result than if the doctors had been answering at random.

lhsi writes:

A new device has been created that attaches to a finger and will read out the text that is being pointed at (for example, menus, newspapers).

The so-called FingerReader, a prototype produced by a 3-D printer, fits like a ring on the user's finger, equipped with a small camera that scans text. A synthesized voice reads words aloud, quickly translating books, restaurant menus and other needed materials for daily living, especially away from home or office.

Reading is as easy as pointing the finger at text. Special software tracks the finger movement, identifies words and processes the information. The device has vibration motors that alert readers when they stray from the script, said Roy Shilkrot, who is developing the device at the MIT Media Lab.

For Jerry Berrier, 62, who was born blind, the promise of the FingerReader is its portability and offer of real-time functionality at school, a doctor's office and restaurants. "When I go to the doctor's office, there may be forms that I [want to] read before I sign them," Berrier said. He said there are other optical character recognition devices on the market for those with vision impairments, but none that he knows of that will read in real time.