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AnonTechie writes:

Liberal societies such as the UK, USA, and Australia are among the most harmful to their citizens, according to new research from the University of Birmingham.

And the austerity programmes unfolding across Europe are likely to increase the 'social harms' experienced by people in those countries.

A new book by Dr Simon Pemberton, an expert on social harm — defined as the avoidable injuries caused by the way a society is organised &mdas; looks at measures such as suicide, road traffic accidents, obesity, poverty and unemployment across 31 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The book, Harmful Societies: Understanding social harm, is published by Policy Press at the University of Bristol. ( http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847427946&dtspan=0:90&ds=Forthcoming%20Titles&m=2&dc=32 )

http://phys.org/news/2015-03-british-society-citizens.html

[Source]: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2015/03/harmful-societies-16-03-15.aspx

Phoenix666 writes:

Trove has posted a picturesque example (Javascript required) of the new perspectives drones are making accessible to the average person. Ryan Deboodt, a rock climbing instructor in Beijing, shot a panoramic of Hang Son Doong cave in Vietnam. From the article:

At three miles long, 660 feet high and 490 feet wide, [Hang Son Doong cave] is less a sightseeing stop than a unique environment. As Discover put it: “Just calling Hang Son Doong a cave almost does it a disservice. With its own river, microclimate and jungle, Hang Son Doong is more than a cave; it’s a world unto itself.”

It's not so much a unique or ground-breaking example of aerial footage as it is an exercise in the democratization of telepresence.

[Editor's addition: For other sources of information on the "Sơn Đoòng" cave see Wikipedia and coverage at Huffington Post (which has a video hosted on Vimeo). There are also National Geographic documentaries on YouTube from June 2012 and (in HD) from January 2013. -- martyb]

fleg writes:

Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called “the clacks”. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called “GNU John Dearheart” to echo his name up and down the lines. “G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is an open-source operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes Dearheart’s name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."

What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than “GNU Terry Pratchett”? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites (anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading “GNU Terry Pratchett”. “If you had to be dead,” thinks a character in Going Postal, “it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground.” And so Pratchett is, in a way.

Source The Guardian

Reddit link with suggested code mod here.

sigma writes:

Large datasets and predictive analytics software are a fertile field for innovation, but while excellent open source tools like Sci-Py, R, etc are freely available, the datasets are not. A Computerworld article notes that the scarcity of large publicly available data collections has led to a database released for a competition by Netflix half a decade ago now being constantly used in computer science research.

Australia's government does provide an easy way to find, access and reuse some public datasets, but most public and private databases are silo-ed away from experimenters. The Open Data Handbook offers some guidelines for defining openness in data, but offers little in ways to drive organisations to make their datasets available.

So do we need a GPL for data, and if so, what would it look like?

AnonTechie writes:

In 2013, the Syrian military allegedly launched sarin gas rockets into a rebel-held town, killing hundreds. After diplomats brokered a deal to eradicate the weapons, international organizations began the dangerous job of destroying them. One roadblock to chemical weapons disposal is that heat and humidity quickly break down enzymes that can disable the deadly chemicals. Now, researchers have developed a highly stable compound that can inactivate nerve agents like sarin in a matter of minutes.

To create the compound, chemists Omar Farha and Joseph Hupp of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, turned to nature for inspiration. Bacteria produce enzymes called phosphotriesterases, which deactivate certain pesticides and chemically related nerve gases at lightning speed, wiping out weapons in milliseconds. But such enzymes are fragile and easily degraded. The chemists set out to reproduce the mechanism by which phosphotriesterase breaks down these chemicals to create a human-made catalyst that would survive the most inhospitable conditions.

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4238.html

• Migration to Apache 2.2/mod_perl 2 (complete, still bug flushing)
• Removal of all MyISAM tables in the backend (complete)
• Migration to MySQL Cluster (implemented)
• SSL by default (enabled on dev)
• Nexus support
• Rewritten site search engine, replacing MySQL FULLTEXT searches with Sphinx (in progress, mostly done)
• Private Messaging
• Inline Reply and Moderation*
• IPv6 support
• Another large chunk of dead code removal

* - if user has JavaScript enabled, non-JS users will get the current behavior.

From a user perspective, the most visible changes are just more streamlined site performance. Inline reply/moderation is something that was by far the most common request the last time we asked for feedback on the subject, and I am hoping to have it implemented with this release. (Fancy URLs, the other largely requested feature will require consider effort to find and fix URLs throughout the codebase; I do not have an ETA on this feature, aside from the fact its on our roadmap).

Migrating from standard MySQL to cluster should help us considerably keep the site up for longer periods of times; we have previously experimented with other MySQL replication solutions, and found them all lacking, especially in cases of master failover. With this update to Rehash, we can take a database server offline and not have the site come crashing down, or require exceedingly large amounts of effort to replicate and reconfigure the front-end servers.

While this covers here and now, I've long liked to have plans 6 months to a year out, and post them for community feedback so everyone is in the loop on both what we're doing, and why we're doing it.

TLA writes:

Recent press coverage of the FBI's (and other agencies) use of the cellular network interception and interference tool known as "StingRay" during peaceful demonstrations has prompted a group of hackers to develop a countermeasure in the form of an Android application. Imaginatively named Android IMSI-Catcher Detector (#AIMSICD), the app passively scans network availability and monitors for unusual activity such as forced signal downgrading (ie from 3G to 2G or even GPRS), silent application install attempts, DDD propagation delays (in analogue terms, this would be like an echo on the line), active GPS pinging and tracking, and attempts to force use of broken voice ciphering algorithms over the degraded line. All the aforementioned can allow MITM attacks and signal interception on a massive scale, particularly if a larger Stingray unit such as a vehicle mounted one, is used on crowds or one of the more discrete, pocket sized models which are used on specific marks (targets).

https://secupwn.github.io/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector/ (Project home page)

The ACLU has identified through Freedom of Information requests, 48 local agencies in 20 US states that own Stingray systems, but the type used and to what extent is pretty much classified by those agencies and the manufacturer isn't saying much, either. https://www.aclu.org/maps/stingray-tracking-devices-whos-got-them What we do know is that the Federal Government through the NSA, the FBI, and several other three letter acronyms, own and operate Stingrays.

It should be noted that while the IMSI Catcher Detector runs on FCC approved hardware (Android phones), the Stingray most certainly does not carry FCC approval since it is designed from the off to interfere with lawful communications - like a landmine, it's not fussy about whose legs it blows off or what signals it intercepts.

tonyPick writes:

Nature has an article on a new method to dramatically speed up 3D printing:

A team led by Joseph DeSimone, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has now refined the liquid-resin process to make it go continuously rather than in fits and starts. They made the bottom of the container that holds the resin bath from a material that is permeable to oxygen. Because oxygen inhibits the solidification of resin, it creates a ‘dead zone’ — a layer just tens of microns thick at the bottom of the container — where the resin stays liquid even when ultraviolet rays are shining on it. The solidification reaction happens instead just above the dead zone. Because liquid is always present below the slowly forming object, the researchers can pull it up in a continuous manner, rather than waiting for new liquid resin to flow in.

More detail on the technique known as "Continuous Liquid Interface Production" (CLIP) is available at the DeSimone group news release page, and includes a link to a video of the technology in action. The claim is a 25 to 100 times speedup, and that CLIP can also produce "commercially viable objects that can have feature sizes below 20 micron".

According to the Nature article the group has formed a startup "Carbon3D" and aims to release a printer using this technology commercially within a year.

AnonTechie writes:

Flying cars have always been a vision of the future that has never quite caught up with the present. In 1989, “Back To The Future II” promised flying cars by 2015 and now that it’s 2015 AeroMobil ( http://www.aeromobil.com/ ) is hoping to produce them by 2017.

AeroMobil CEO Juraj Vaculik unveiled his plans for a flying car in October 2014 and expanded upon those plans at South by Southwest on Sunday.

The vehicle looks like a car from the front with a jet exhaust pipe in the back and wings that unfold for flight.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) in short: AMD+ARM+Qualcomm etc (all SoC interested parties except Intel and Nvidia) have teamed up on a common standard for doing efficient inter-op between specialized processors (such as GPUs and DSPs) and user space applications on CPUs.

It consists of a standard (and small) instruction set that is an easy compilation target for things like OpenCL and OpenMP (or your own custom stuff), and a processor-specific compiler that does a simple translation to machine code. It includes features like atomics to sync between CPU and GPU threads and direct job queuing from user space. The spec is finally out and we can expect hardware this year from a variety of vendors. This should allow skipping the massive sync and dispatch overhead currently in place when trying to use GPU acceleration for moderate or small jobs. This should make such acceleration practical in more cases, saving time and power (GPU compute is generally more efficient than higher clocked CPUs in addition to being massively parallel).

Official announcement: http://www.hsafoundation.com/hsa-foundation-launches-new-era-of-pervasive-energy-efficient-computing-with-hsa-1-0-specification-release/
An article about it: http://semiaccurate.com/2015/03/16/hsa-foundation-releases-v1-0-namesake-spec/
Actual docs: http://www.hsafoundation.com/html/HSA_Library.htm

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Some interesting studyage from good ole pew.

Politics can be a sensitive subject and a number of SNS users have decided to block, unfriend, or hide someone because of their politics or posting activities. In all, 18% of social networking site users have taken one of those steps by doing at least one of the following:

• 10% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because that person posted too frequently about political subjects
• 9% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they posted something about politics or issues that they disagreed with or found offensive
• 8% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they argued about political issues on the site with the user or someone the user knows
• 5% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they posted something about politics that the user worried would offend other friends
• 4% of SNS users have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on the site because they disagreed with something the user posted about politics

Of course, that means that 82% of SNS users have not taken any steps to ignore or disconnect from someone whose views are different – or have not encountered any views that would prompt such a move.

Liberals are the most likely to have taken each of these steps to block, unfriend, or hide. In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates.

Personally, I almost never ignore anyone for ideological reasons. You can't argue with someone you can't read responses from.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

In late February, NASA shut down the robotic limb after a short circuit led to errors. By March 7th, the space agency expressed optimism that the arm would come good.

And last week, it did: NASA reports that last Wednesday the nuclear-powered laser-equipped space tank once again showed Mars that humanity means business by using its arm "to sieve and deliver a rock-powder sample to an onboard instrument."

The sample in question was the one that gave the arm problems back in February.

NASA now thinks those problems needn't slow the rover's progress, as in tests over ten days the short-circuit recurred only once and "...lasted less than one one-hundredth of a second and did not stop the motor."

AnonTechie writes:

Why install them if they don't plan to use them ? Doesn't pass the smell test.

Fusion site passes on the news that Hertz is putting cameras inside its rental cars as part of its "NeverLost" navigational system:

Hertz has offered the NeverLost navigational device for years, but it only added the built-in camera feature (which includes audio and video) to its latest version of the device -- NeverLost 6 -- in mid-2014. "Approximately a quarter of our vehicles across the country have a NeverLost unit and slightly more than half of those vehicles have the NeverLost 6 model installed,” Hertz spokesperson Evelin Imperatrice said by email. In other words, one in 8 Hertz cars has a camera inside -- but Imperatrice says that, for now, they are inactive. "We do not have adequate bandwidth capabilities to the car to support streaming video at this time," she said.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150316/08270530325/hertz-puts-video-cameras-inside-its-rental-cars-has-no-current-plans-to-use-them.shtml

Phoenix666 writes:

TeleGeography releases Vintage-style Maps and Charts to reflect the current state of the submarine cables that carry the world's internet traffic.

The latest edition depicts 299 cable systems that are currently active, under construction, or expected to be fully-funded by the end of 2015.

This year’s map pays tribute to the pioneering mapmakers of the Age of Discovery, incorporating elements of medieval and renaissance cartography. In addition to serving as navigational aids, maps from this era were highly sought-after works of art, often adorned with fanciful illustrations of real and imagined dangers at sea. Such embellishments largely disappeared in the early 1600s, pushing modern map design into a purely functional direction.

The Interactive Map also contains inserts for latency, lift capacity, and dangers to cables.

Phoenix666 writes:

NY Post reports:

February was another heartbreaker for the $65 billion television ad business.

Commercial ratings — the viewing “currency” that determines what advertisers pay for TV time — cratered across broadcast and cable networks, marking the fifth straight month of double-digit declines for the industry.

[...] Americans are increasingly watching TV shows on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon streaming and other services. Some 40 percent of households now have subscription video service, Nielsen reported earlier this week.

There has been a lot of tumult in the cable industry this last year, with 1/3 of American households streaming content via Netflix, and HBO and CBS launching their own streaming services. The big Internet providers probably won't miss a beat, especially if Time-Warner & Comcast and AT&T & DirecTV merge, but it could still send seismic shocks through media markets whose business models have been static for 70 years.

What does Soylent say, meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss, or is there something else waiting in the distribution wings that will really shake things up?