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gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

On Thursday, major Indian solar manufacturer and developer Tata Power Solar announced plans for a new nationwide initiative that will help prospective residential solar users acquire interest-free loans for up to $4,000 for their products. Tata Power Solar, India's largest integrated solar company, is partnering with Bajaj Finance, to offer a new monthly installment payment plan to solar customers in an effort to make solar a more attractive and affordable option as well as a possibility for the approximately 400 million Indians without reliable power in the country.

The loan option, to be repaid in monthly installments, will be applicable to all Tata Power Solar products including solar lighting products, solar water heaters, and solar panels. The program will be rolled out across 20 cities first before being expanded across the entire country.

[...]

Deutsche Bank analyst Vishal Shah called the budget announcement positive for the Indian market, saying "the country has installed around 2.6GW of solar capacity as of May 2014, around two GW of which was installed in the last two years. We expect new installations to be around 1.5GW in 2014 and around 2GW in 2015."

A deficit discovered in reward-based learning, specific to food, among women with obesity highlights the behavioral aspects of the epidemic and holds potential for combating it, according to a report published in Current Biology.

"Women with obesity were impaired at learning which cues predict food and which do not, but had no trouble learning similar associations with money," Ifat Levy, PhD, of the Yale School of Medicine, told Endocrine Today.

The impairment was markedly different in women with obesity vs. those with normal weight, and not seen in men, in an appetitive reversal paradigm conducted by Zhihao Zhang, a PhD candidate at Yale University, and colleagues, including Levy.

"Although we do not know whether this impairment is a cause for obesity or its effect, this finding provides a link between reward learning and obesity, which can now be used to further probe these questions," Levy said.

The journal article is paywalled, but an abstract is available.

AnonTechie writes:

You've seen what a nuclear winter looks like, as imagined by filmmakers and novelists. Now you can take a look at what scientists have to say. In a new study, a team of four U.S. atmospheric and environmental scientists modelled what would happen after a "limited, regional nuclear war" (journal article).

To inexpert ears, the consequences sound pretty subtle - two or three degrees of global cooling, a nine percent reduction in yearly rainfall. Still, such changes could be enough to trigger crop failures and famines. After all, these would be cooler temperatures than the Earth has seen in 1,000 years.

In a separate study, published in 2013, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated 2 billion people would starve in the wake of a 100-A-bomb war.

gizmobeast writes:

Move over Siri, Google Now and Cortana! Blackberry Assistant is here . The app, together with Blackberry Passport smartphone, will be available starting this fall. The Assistant can perform various voice-activated tasks such as searching your inbox and calendar, access the web or social networks, writing and sending emails as well as creating calendar entries.

It is compatible with Bluetooth-enabled devices, making it suitable for hands-free car use. The new feature will also complete tasks using the Passport's new touch-sensitive physical keyboard, usually without leaving the app.

Clearly, an attempt to stay relevant, BlackBerry is fighting hard to catch up with iOS and Android. I'd say, it doesn't get better than this. After bouncing back with profits, now they introduce a new feature that would keep existing users and attract new followers.

cafebabe writes:

Wired reports that:

"I think that readers of comic books ― like readers of novels or watchers of films ― want to believe in the story they're reading," said John Hilgart, proprietor of the blog Comic Book Cartography. Maps, he says, make comic mythology more real. "There's a hunger to know where Gotham City is located, or what's on the 6th floor of the Fantastic Four headquarters."

The blog started as a joke with author Jonathan Lethem over email. From 2010 to 2013, he meticulously curated his childhood comic book collection, posting over 140 maps, diagrams, and charts. The archive is a tour of fantasy worlds both iconic and obscure: from Thor's Asgard to the mutated geography of Kamandi .

gewg_ writes:

With today's technology, we have the ability to 3D print in plastics, metals, ceramics, and even Nutella. Each and every day it seems as though we are introduced to a new type of material that is able to either be extruded from a 3D printer or printed via another type of laser or light processing technology. It was only a matter of time before someone would come up with the clever idea of trying to 3D print objects out of ice cream.

Three students at MIT (Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim), as part of a project for Professor John Hart's graduate class on additive manufacturing, in fact did come up with this tasty idea. Hart's class focuses on the fundamentals of additive processing of polymers, metals, and ceramics, as well as machine designs and control strategies, 3D geometry representations and metrology, material properties and digital assembly. Students broke off into groups to create new 3D printing technologies. Kyle, Kristine, and David decided to try and create a machine that could 3D print soft serve ice cream.

Hey, look. A page that has 8 images that are actually useful. Okay, now I'm going to grab something sweet.

gewg_ writes:

SCOTUSblog tells us:

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan refused on Thursday afternoon to block a federal appeals court ruling against continued copyright protection for fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, for any stories about him that have entered the public domain. Kagan acted without even asking for a response from an author who is preparing a new Holmes anthology, and she gave no explanation for her denial of a stay.

More background on the case and details about the filing in this detailed earlier SCOTUSblog post which notes:

[Sir Arthur Conan] Doyle has been dead for eighty-four years, but because of extensions of copyright terms, ten of his fifty-six short stories continue to be protected from copying. All of the short stories and four novels were published between 1887 and 1927, but all of the collection except ten short stories have entered into the public domain as copyrights expired.

The Doyle estate, though, is pressing a quite unusual copyright theory. It contends that, since Doyle continued to develop the characters of Holmes and Watson throughout all of the stories, the characters themselves cannot be copied even for what Doyle wrote about them in the works that are now part of the public domain and thus ordinarily would be fair game for use by others.

frojack writes:

In domesticated animals, regardless of species, certain traits eventually appear over and over again. White faces, white body spots, reduced facial skeleton, shorter snout, smaller jaws, smaller teeth, and, yes, Floppy Ears. One would almost think that humans selected animals for cuteness. In fact, people, even primitive prehistoric people, domesticated animals based on nothing more than selecting the least aggressive, or least fearful, and cross breeding those for generations. Those that bolt or bite either escaped, or got eaten, but weren't kept around for breeding.

So why do these traits appear so often in almost all domesticated animals, from horses to rabbits, and from dogs to hogs?

Scientists from Harvard, Vienna, Berlin, and South Africa have a new theory.

gewg_ writes:

Leafly.com reports:

[On Thursday] the United States' capital, Washington D.C. (not to be confused with the state of Washington, which debuted its retail stores last week), officially decriminalizes cannabis. Under the new law, police officers can no longer demand identification from people caught possessing up to one ounce of cannabis, nor can they arrest people if they simply smell cannabis on them. Instead, they will confiscate any "visible contraband" and issue a ticket with a fine of $25.

Possession of amounts greater than one ounce can still result in arrest and being charged with a crime, but this is still a small victory for D.C. residents, especially blacks, who are being penalized and face having their lives ruined over a small amount of cannabis. Now how's about you look into legalization next, Nation's Capital?

"number6" writes:

Australian *cough American* media mogul Rupert Murdoch is trying to buy Time Warner. An initial bid of $80bn has been rejected by TW executives, but it seems Murdoch is hell-bent on getting his way. The repercussions for the diversity of the US media industry look bleak; the means of mass communication and public influence is coming perilously close to a sum of one!

If you read all the reader comments left behind at this article and this article, you will get the impression that 99% of the readers do not want this outcome for the US media industry. If Murdoch succeeds, then the few other players left standing will be forced like dominoes to do the same thing. Such a state is not too far away from its ultimate conclusion... 'tyrrany'. From the article:

While Murdoch has made numerous audacious "bet the farm" moves to build his media empire over the years, the 83-year-old is determined that his last major deal is capped by a safe transition of power to his sons.

Earlier this year he laid the groundwork by bringing back eldest son Lachlan, the heir apparent who walked away from the empire almost a decade ago to set up his own investment company and move to Australia. The 42-year-old was named as non-executive co-chairman of the entertainment and publishing companies, alongside his father.

At the same time, younger brother James was also elevated to co-chief operating officer, with direct responsibility for developing Fox's pay-TV aspirations globally. The 41-year-old moved to New York to consolidate his position within the company, but also to distance himself from intense criticism of his handling of phone hacking as executive chairman of News UK.

lhsi writes:

The Open Rights Group is planning to challenge the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill in court as it ignores a European Court ruling that "blanket data retention is unlawful and violates the right to privacy".

The ORG believes that it can stop the bill coming into force, on the basis that it countermands a European court ruling that blanket data retention is unlawful and violates the right to privacy, breaching human rights.

Jim Killock, director of the ORG, said: "The government has ignored a court judgment, ridden roughshod over our parliamentary processes and denied the public the debate they deserve. But people do care about their privacy and they do care about government stitch-ups.

"Blanket data retention is unlawful and we will fight against this legislation. Our message to Theresa May is: see you in court," he said.

The ORG believes that DRIP breaches the European convention on human rights, the European charter of fundamental rights and the UK's human rights Act.

gewg_ writes:

I think this is a first for S/N: An audio presentation as a story.

The other day I heard Pierre Sprey, the primary designer of the F-16 and A-10, talking to journalist Ian Masters about the F-35 attack jet. This guy is a fascinating speaker.

Topics: Politics and military procurement;

• Graft; bribery.
• How, after an aircraft becomes a multi-role multi-service platform, it is not a "common" airframe any longer.
• Vertical takeoff and landing to support ground troops is nonsense. (It churns up too much crap on anything except when using a giant concrete slab.)
• Trying to put VTOL and supersonic capability into the same aircraft is just stupid.
• When plastic aircraft burn, they produce toxic smoke.

It's about 20 minutes in length, but if your media player has a speed control, you can listen to it in less time than that.
The high bitrate version at Ian's site is 19MB. Mr.Sprey is the 3rd of 3 guests.
The low bitrate webcast at KPFK's archive is 14MB for all 3 guests.
KPFK also has a stream.
The 3rd segment is from 36:30 to 55:00.
KPFK's stuff will be available until mid-October.

AnonTechie writes:

Huge electricity provider Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) has announced [PDF] that it plans to lay superconducting cables alongside existing copper cables in parts of downtown Chicago to prevent outages in and around the Loop. The effort is receiving partial financial support from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Superconducting cables are those that are able to carry more electricity than standard power cables—in this case, ten times as much. The plan is to lay such cables next to existing copper cables that exist between substations and customers—thus new trenches or underground work won't be needed. Superconducting cables, the thinking goes, would allow for sending more power from substations that aren't impacted during an outage—taking over for those that are—the result would be a portion of the city protected against major power outages. The cables are to be supplied by American Superconductor, which has announced that the company is also in talks with other large metro area suppliers to provide cable for them as well.

Companies such as American Superconductor create so-named superconducting cables by using special metal alloys for the wire inside—in this case it's an alloy the company calls Amperium—a brass laminated wire. It allows for conducting up to 200 times more electricity than copper wire. They cover the wire with special materials to help prevent loss of power during transmission.

AnonTechie writes:

"Containment control" model looks at how groups of influencers can manipulate people. The same math that researchers use to control swarms of drones can be used, in theory, to control you on social media.

Facebook isn't the only organization conducting research into how attitudes are affected by social media. The Department of Defense has invested millions of dollars over the past few years investigating social media, social networks, and how information spreads across them. While Facebook and Cornell University researchers manipulated what individuals saw in their social media streams, military-funded research-including projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program-has looked primarily into how messages from influential members of social networks propagate.

One study, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), has gone a step further. "A less investigated problem is once you've identified the network, how do you manipulate it toward an end," said Warren Dixon, a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Florida's Nonlinear Controls and Robotics research group. Dixon was the principal investigator on an Air Force Research Laboratory-funded project, which published its findings in February in a paper entitled "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity." [PDF]

Magic Oddball writes:

Jason Scott, who has been working on the Internet Archive's Console Living Room, recently posted what he calls a "desperate" plea for help fixing serious sound problems with JSMESS and Web Audio API. He asks that people share the request 'far and wide' in hope that someone capable of fixing the problem sees it.

The situation: Internet Explorer gets no audio, Safari is unpredictable, and for Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Chrome the audio ranges from "very nice" to "horrible, grating." (For comparison, see the Web Audio API compatibility chart he linked to.) The Archive has two test cases people can try (click on "toggle MESS performance indicator" to see how your system fares):

Here is the Wizard Test. It's an emulator playing the Psygnosis game "Wiz n' Liz" on an emulated Sega Genesis. This is extremely tough on the browser almost nothing can play it at 100% speed.

Here is the Criminal Test. It is an emulator playing Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal as rendered on a Colecovision. It is not tough on the browser at all. Almost everything should be able to do it at 100% or basically 100%.

He says that he's "happy to entertain all ideas, discuss all possibilities" and will "spend all the time you need to ramp up, or try any suggestion." If anyone might be able to help, he says to go to #jsmess on EFNet if you use IRC, or email him at audio@textfiles.com.