SoylentNews

n1 writes:

From an article at Medium.com :

You head an Internet company. It has a billion users. Your social product alone has over 400 million users and is actually kind of hip. You bring in four billion dollars of revenue a year, a billion of that in mobile. You make a profit! You’re the third biggest search engine. You are Katie Couric’s boss.

And yet…your company is worth less than zero.

That financial version of an Escher-esque contortion is familiar turf to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. The Yahoo market cap is around $44 billion. That valuation includes its ownership of 15.4 percent of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. That’s worth about $38 billion. Yahoo also has a long standing investment in Yahoo Japan, a separate company it co-founded in 1996. It’s worth around $7 billion. Those numbers can fluctuate. But there are days when you add those up and you can reach the odd actuarial conclusion that Yahoo’s core business—which has been looking a lot better since Mayer got there—has negative value.

See also: Parmy Olsen’s story in Forbes, “Finding Alibaba: How Jerry Yang Made The Most Lucrative Bet In Silicon Valley History”

The Editors write:

Programmers should be lazy people, at least to the extent that it is better to write a piece of code to do an often-performed task, rather than manually doing so repeatedly. The various devs that visit SoylentNews are no different, especially in our IRC channels. To expedite various useful support functions, help keep the site running efficiently, and to provide amusement to citizens of IRC, "bots" are frequently used. We asked crutchy to conduct a review of the bots that are in use, so we would like to thank him for getting us a list to build this article.

Firstly, there is a table of the bots on our IRC bots wiki page and the code for many of them is available for your perusal, and perhaps tweaking for your own use.

Although most of the IRC action is in #soylent, anybody who is curious or wants to help the IRC 'botters' is encouraged to "/join #" and make your mark there.

Read on for an overview at the multitude of bots already in our arsenal:

AnonTechie writes from this story from Technology Review:

A solution to one of the key problems holding back the development of quantum computers has been demonstrated by researchers at Google and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Many more problems remain to be solved, but experts in the field say it is an important step toward a fully functional quantum computer. Such a machine could perform calculations that would take a conventional computer millions of years to complete.

The Google and UCSB researchers showed they could program groups of qubits—devices that represent information using fragile quantum physics—to detect certain kinds of error, and to prevent those errors from ruining a calculation. The new advance comes from researchers led by John Martinis, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who last year joined Google to set up a quantum computing research lab (see “Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum Computer”)

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7541/full/nature14270.html

coolgopher writes:

From http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/science-of-earths-core-takes-a-dramatic-twist-20150301-13oz5m.html we have this report:

For the first time, employing a sophisticated earthquake-deciphering technique (thus far only used to illuminate the planet's upper shells), a team of scientists from Illinois University in the US and Nanjing University in China have succeeded in exploring the inner core itself.

Their ground-breaking research supports an earlier prediction that deep within the inner core sits yet another even deeper innermost shell, containing iron crystals aligned in a different direction (north-south rather than east-west for the rest of the core).

n1 writes:

El Reg reports:

A raft of patent applications has presaged a possible legal war in the rapidly expanding domain-name industry.

This year alone, market-leading registrar GoDaddy has applied for no less than eight patents specific to the DNS world, covering everything from searching for a domain name to register, to recommending a specific domain based on user input.

At the same time, market-leading registry Verisign has applied for a wide range of patents, many covering more technical aspects of the domain name system and also covering commercially valuable ideas like enhanced privacy protections (20150058999) and abuse protection (20150047033).

[...] In the past six months, the number of internet top-level domains has more than doubled as 500 dot-words – from .london to .xyz – have been added to the roughly 300 that already existed. That number will grow by another 500 in the next six months.

The result has been a jump in competition in the registry market, and the domain-selling arena (the registrar market).

n1 writes:

Ars Technica reports:

On Wednesday, US District Judge Lucy Koh granted preliminary approval for a settlement between four top tech companies—Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel—and their former employees. The employees launched a class action suit against the companies after the Justice Department sued the top tech firms for anti-competitive labor practices in 2010.

The Justice Department had accused Apple, Google, and other top tech firms of agreeing not to approach each others’ engineers with better employment offers. The employees estimated that they collectively lost out on $3 billion in wages because competing companies would not give them better offers.

Employees of Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel pursued a larger settlement [...]. Originally, lawyers for the two sides agreed to a $324.5 million settlement for the employees. But with 64,000 former employees looking to reclaim lost wages, that amounted to a paltry $5,000 per person. Freelance programmer and representative plaintiff Michael Devine protested the agreement his side’s lawyers agreed to, and Judge Koh agreed with him, calling the settlement "below the range of reasonableness.”

n1 writes:

ScienceDaily reports:

A study from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) reveals for the first time exactly how mutations associated with the most common form of inherited Alzheimer's disease produce the disorder's devastating effects. Appearing in the March 4 issue of Neuron, the paper upends conventional thinking about the effects of Alzheimer's-associated mutations in the presenilin genes and provides an explanation for the failure of drugs designed to block presenilin activity.
[...]
"Our study provides new insights into Alzheimer's disease by showing how human mutations that cause the disease lead to neurodegeneration and dementia," says Raymond J. Kelleher III, MD, PhD, of the MGH Department of Neurology and Center for Human Genetic Research, co-senior author of the Neuron paper. "We found that mutations in the presenilin-1 gene promote the hallmark features of the disease by decreasing, rather than increasing, function of the presenilin-1 protein and the gamma-secretase enzyme. In addition to the important therapeutic implications of our findings, we have also generated the first animal model in which an Alzheimer's-disease-causing mutation produces neurodegeneration in the cerebral cortex."

chromas writes:

Blackberry appears to be expanding its services into third-party mobile devices:

A little over a year ago the company launched BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) for Android and iOS. Now the company is adding new features including support for BBM notifications on Android Wear smartwatches.

But BBM might just be the start of BlackBerry’s cross-platform offerings. This week the company unveiled something called the BlackBerry Experience Suite which could bring more apps and services to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices in the future.

The Experience Suite has three components: the Productivity Suite, Communication and Collaboration Suite, and Security Suite. BlackBerry says users will be able to purchase all three of those packs together or buy just the individual suites they want.

n1 writes:

Ars Technica reports:

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced another contest to design a system to "identify unwanted robocalls received on landlines or mobile phones, and block and forward those calls to a honeypot." The agency will select "up to five contestants" as part of what it’s calling "Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back."

The first qualifying phase launches Wednesday and runs through June 15, 2015 at 10:00pm Eastern Time, while the final phase concludes at DEF CON 23 on August 9, 2015.

Here's the FTC contest page. There's another similar contest (with no cash prize) being held "as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking." It appears they have done something similar in previous years as well.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted at Make is a link to scale models and dioramas of Tokyo-based artist Satoshi Araki.

There's a link to Araki's (japanese) blog which contains more impressive artwork.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Navanshu Agarwal writes that Italian scientists have developed an artificial LED sunlight system that looks just like real daylight streaming through a skylight. The LED skylight uses a thin coating of nanoparticles to recreate the effect that makes the sky blue, known as Rayleigh Scattering that doesn’t just light up a room but produces the texture and feel of sunlight. Paolo Di Trapani, one of the scientists who worked on the device believes that the skylight will allow developers of the future to not just build up, but also far down below the ground- without any of the "dinginess" that currently keeps us above ground.

CoeLux hopes to treat seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. Each year, some 10 million Americans, mostly women, find themselves sinking into a heavy malaise during the wintertime. CoeLux hopes its LED bulbs, which create the illusion of infinitely tall, bright blue skies, will help trick the brains of people with SAD, ridding them of their blues.

takyon writes:

The BBC is reporting on new metamaterials being discussed at the American Physical Society's March Meeting. Metamaterials are simply "artificial materials engineered to have properties that have not yet been found in nature". The most well-known metamaterials have a "negative refractive index" and have been compared by the press to the invisibility cloak from Harry Potter.

The conference, running from March 2 - 6 in San Antonio, Texas, has seen metamaterials that do far more than bend electromagnetic waves. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have shown off "unfeelability cloaks" that can deflect pressure around an object. Related work could lead to the deflection of earthquake waves around structures. A programmable spongelike metamaterial can be made to exhibit "negative stiffness", ie. softer when under pressure. This property could be useful in car bumpers (normally stiff, but soft on impact) or shoe soles. Also discussed are materials with a negative "Poisson ratio", which could lead to longer lasting engine parts, and highly compressible ceramics with shape memory.

AnonTechie writes:

IQ is rising in many parts of the world. What's behind the change and does it really mean people are cleverer than their grandparents?

It is not unusual for parents to comment that their children are brainier than they are. In doing so, they hide a boastful remark about their offspring behind a self-deprecating one about themselves. But a new study, published in the journal Intelligence, provides fresh evidence that in many cases this may actually be true.

The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an IQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested IQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31556802

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In December, 1903, at Kitty Hawk NC, the Wright brothers won the race to create the world's first powered flying machine capable of controlled human flight. But in the years that followed, Europeans took the lead as airplanes were made practical for commercial and military use. In response, the US Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) a hundred years ago this week (March 3, 1915), to undertake and coordinate aeronautical research.

The agency has been credited for a number of engineering breakthroughs during the 43 years of its existence, particularly in airfoil and wind tunnel designs, and in the development of the Bell X-1 (jointly with the US Air Force) in which 24-year old Chuck Yeagar broke the sound barrier for the first (verified) time.

In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik artificial satellite around earth, a triumph that took America and the rest of the world by surprise. It became clear that outer space was the new frontier, so NACA's mission had come to an end. On July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed a bill creating NASA as the successor to NACA.

NASA's tribute to NACA here.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Catherine Saint Louis reports at the NYT that according to a survey of 534 primary care physicians, a wide majority of pediatricians and family physicians acquiesce to parents who wish to delay vaccinating their children, even though the doctors feel these decisions put children at risk for measles, whooping cough and other ailments. One-third of doctors said they acquiesced “often” or “always”; another third gave in only “sometimes.” According to Dr. Paul A. Offit, such deference is in keeping with today’s doctoring style, which values patients as partners. “At some level, you’re ceding your expertise, and you want the patient to participate and make the decision,” says Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases. “It is sad that we are willing to let children walk out of our offices vulnerable to potentially fatal infections. There’s a fatigue here, and there’s a kind of learned helplessness.”

Part of the problem is the lack of a proven strategy to guide physicians in counselling parents. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a solid evidence base in terms of how to communicate to patients about vaccines,” says Saad Omer adding that although he does not sanction the use of alternative vaccine schedules, he understands why primary care physicians keep treating these patients — just as doctors do not kick smokers out of their practices when they fail to quit. Dr. Allison Kempe, the study’s lead author and a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, thinks the time has come to acknowledge that the idea that “vaccine education can be handled in a brief wellness visit is untenable” and says that we may need pro-vaccine parents and perhaps even celebrities to star in marketing campaigns to help “reinforce vaccination as a social norm.” "Whether the topic is autism or presidential politics," says Frank Bruni, "celebrity trumps authority and obviates erudition."