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fliptop writes:

Bosch thinks a "fascinating" user interface will develop more enthusiasm for electric vehicles. Exploratory ideas include:

...the hunch mode (hunches about things that might interest Birgit as she drives), the energy flow display, the next mile guide, and remote monitoring and control.

The ideas in Birgit's electric car are the work of the Bosch user experience team. In four project phases – and using a new approach to development – the team members gain a number of insights into the possible design of a future human-machine interface (HMI) for electric vehicles. These insights are then applied to a prototype, and members of the public are asked what they think of the concepts that have been developed.

One wonders if the engineers at Bosch are even considering that "fascinating" probably means "more complicated" and therefore more things can go wrong.

Hugh Pickens writes:

John Markoff writes in the NYT that in the aftermath of the co-pilot crashing a Germanwings plane into a mountain, aviation experts are beginning to wonder if human pilots are really necessary aboard commercial planes. Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit and government agencies are already experimenting with replacing the co-pilot, perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote operators. What the Germanwings crash “has done has elevated the question of should there or not be ways to externally control commercial aircraft,” says Mary Cummings. NASA is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft. In this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible for the ground controller to “beam” into individual planes when needed and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became incapacitated — or worse. “Could we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today’s systems?" asks Cummings. "The answer is yes.”

Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, “It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations.” The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: “A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble.” Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own,” says Amy Pritchett. “If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.”

Dr Ippy writes:

The Telegraph and Stanford News are reporting a new aluminium-ion cell which is hoped will outperform conventional lithium-ion cells.

As well as charging in 60 seconds, it is claimed, the cell will withstand 7,500 charge/discharge cycles compared with lithium-ion's 1,000 cycles.

Apart from a low 2-volt output, "our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have: inexpensive electrodes, good safety, high-speed charging, flexibility and long cycle life," states Hongjie Dai, Professor of chemistry at Stanford University.

"We have developed a rechargeable aluminium battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames."

The research is due to be published in Nature.

NotSanguine writes:

An article over at Science Daily is reporting that researchers at Duke University have developed a new method to activate genes by synthetically creating a key component of the epigenome that controls how our genes are expressed. The technique adapts CRISPR in order to deliver the enzyme acetyltransferase to promoters and enhancers rather than the well-known application of splicing DNA. Their research is detailed in a paper to be published in the April 2015 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

From the Science Daily article:

Duke researchers have developed a new method to precisely control when genes are turned on and active.

The new technology allows researchers to turn on specific gene promoters and enhancers - pieces of the genome that control gene activity - by chemically manipulating proteins that package DNA. This web of biomolecules that supports and controls gene activity is known as the epigenome.

The researchers say having the ability to steer the epigenome will help them explore the roles that particular promoters and enhancers play in cell fate or the risk for genetic disease and it could provide a new avenue for gene therapies and guiding stem cell differentiation.

What (if any) are the medical and ethical issues surrounding therapies which might come from this sort of research? Should epigenetic therapies be considered "genetic engineering?"

cosurgi writes:

If you ever wanted to learn General Relativity, now here's your chance. The caveat is that first you must learn differential geometry. But it's not difficult, really. Only lots of hard work, but not difficult. I was attending this February such a course. This course is fully documented: there are recordings of all lectures, and of tutorials with solutions (also the .pdf files with practice questions). For easier access you can also visit the The WE-Heraeus International Winter School on Gravity and Light YouTube channel.

You should know though that this material on the internet is not everything we were doing there, the biggest omission are the advanced tutorials, which were done in groups and couldn't be filmed. Also their solutions were too difficult to be "quickly" filmed like the tutorials that have videos. However there's hope that advanced tutorials will also be put online some time later this year (as promised by the organizers). In that case I'll submit a follow up story.

I must tell you that attending this course was really a great experience, and Prof. F. P. Schuller is in fact on of the best lecturers I have ever met.

takyon writes:

According to Google, YouTube users have now watched a combined 25 billion hours of VP9-encoded video. The VP9 codec, Google's alternative to MPEG LA's H.265/HEVC, can deliver video of the same quality at around half the bitrate of H.264. Google claims that VP9 has allowed users in countries such as Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, and Brazil to "upgrade" their YouTube viewing from "low definition" resolutions (144p and 240p) to "standard definition" (360p and above).

Now, Google is using VP9 as its main codec for YouTube videos. According to the company, a significant portion of those 25 billion hours of videos played in the last year couldn't have been watched in HD quality without the VP9 codec. "This new format bumps everybody one notch closer to our goal of instant, high-quality, buffer-free videos. That means that if your Internet connection used to only play up to 480p without buffering on YouTube, it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9," said Google in a blog post.

Google has previously committed to an accelerated 18-month development schedule for successors to VP9. Meanwhile, the Xiph.Org Foundation, Mozilla, and the Internet Engineering Task Force are working on a patent-unencumbered codec named NETVC (formerly Daala). The proponents are aiming to optimize NETVC beyond both VP9 and H.265.

Finally, BBC News and others are reporting on a new contender, a codec called "Perseus" from the company V-Nova. It is being marketed as enabling 4K/2160p streaming for mainstream users.

The company said Perseus is more efficient than industry-standard codecs, claiming that testing shows compression gains of two to three times compared to H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and JPEG2000 and substantially less power use compared to H.264 and H.265. The codec scales through "all bitrates," the company said, offering both lossless and lossy quality. V-Nova said SD video can be delivered to mobile devices at bitrates as low as 125 Kbps, and that HD video can be live-encoded at 500 Kbps or less, but also notes that the codec's benefits increase as resolution and frame rates increase. "Good quality" HD can be broadcast at 2 Mbps and UHD at 4 Mbps using existing hardware and infrastructure, the company said.

bookreader writes:

In the light of the heated discussions about a certain bill signed in Indiana, here is a more refreshing news about a proposed bill in Colorado. The state of Colorado is considering a bill that outlines punishments for police officers who interfere with photographers. House Bill 15-1290 is titled "Concerning Prohibiting A Peace Officer From Interfering With A Person Lawfully Recording A Peace Officer-Involved Incident".

The bill states that if a person is lawfully documenting a police officer and then has their imagery seized or destroyed without a warrant, they are entitled to $15,000 for actual damages plus attorney fees and costs. The bill also would be applied when a police officer intentionally interferes with a person's ability to capture images.

It seems the bill came up as a result of the number of news reports about police officers telling people "Give me your camera", or taking the data away.

The story is covered further in The Denver channel and PetaPixel.

NotSanguine writes:

MedicalXpress is reporting on new research [Abstract only; full article pay-walled, but available for free (PDF)] into the "Friendship Paradox", as published (online) in the journal Psychological Science by researchers at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

The MedicalXpress article says, in part:

Social scientists have long known that, statistically speaking, our friends are probably more popular than we are. It's a simple matter of math: Because extraverted people tend to have more friends, they are disproportionately represented in social networks—which means everyone's network is more extraverted than the population as a whole.

New research by researchers Daniel C. Feiler and Adam M. Kleinbaum of Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College extends this so-called "friendship paradox" beyond a purely mathematical claim, documenting the phenomenon within the emerging social networks of a new class of MBA students. Not only did the researchers show that extraversion bias exists in real-world networks, they found the effect is more pronounced in the networks of socially outgoing people. In other words, popular people are not immune from the friendship paradox—they experience it more intensely than others.

[...] "If you're more extraverted, you might really have a skewed view of how extraverted other people are in general," Feiler says. "If you're very introverted you might actually have a pretty accurate idea."

[...] The rest of us view our social world through a distorted lens—a kind of carnival mirror that makes us feel less loved than our friends, and creates the impression that others are more social than they truly are. This could have profound effects on our job performance, relationships and self-esteem.

"There's a tendency to wonder, 'am I normal?'" Feiler says. "And our research suggests that you're probably more normal than you think."

Does this mean that we, as a species, are less social than we think?

Now get off my lawn!

gewg_ writes:

Global Voices reports

Large Japanese electricity utility Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) confirmed on Thursday, March 19 that nearly all fuel in one of four damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has melted and fallen into the containment building.

With the design of the Fukushima Daiichi plants, the containment building was a very simple shell protecting the reactor from the elements, but provided no real protection in the event of a nuclear accident. Instead, the nuclear reactor was enclosed in primary and secondary containment vessels, which sat atop a thick concrete pad at the base of the containment building.

In the event of a meltdown, the thick concrete pad is the only barrier between highly radioactive molten fuel and groundwater.

While there has been suspicions that nuclear fuel did melt its way through the containment vessel and to the base of the containment building, until Thursday there was no definitive proof meltdown had occurred.

The implication of the findings is that it will be very difficult to remove the highly radioactive molten fuel from Unit 1. As well, the molten fuel must continue to be cooled with water until it is removed.

Holes and fractures in the concrete base of the reactor building also means that groundwater continues to seep in and become irradiated before draining into the Pacific Ocean, causing an ongoing nuclear disaster.

The official decommissioning plan tells us the plant should be fully shut down sometime after 2022.

"gewg_" writes:

Simon Sharwood over at El Reg reports on policy guidelines from the Indian government's technology department:

India's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY)--has laid out a new policy (PDF) commanding the nation's government to use only open source software.

The policy statement is rather blunt:

Government of India shall endeavour to adopt Open Source Software in all e-Governance systems implemented by various Government organizations, as a preferred option in comparison to Closed Source Software (CSS). The Open Source Software shall have the following characteristics:

• The source code shall be available for the community/adopter/end-user to study and modify the software and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified software.
• Source code shall be free from any royalty.

Compliance with the policy is "mandatory" and applies to all central government agencies for state agencies when they replace or upgrade "e-governance" software. There's an out if an agency needs software that isn't readily available as open source, but the policy insists on calling for only open source products in all future RFPs.

[...]There's also lots of wriggle room in the definition of "e-governance", which DEITY says is "A procedural approach in which the Government and the citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders are able to transact all or part of activities using Information and Communication Technology tools."

Between that loose definition and the get-out clause for apps that aren't easily found as FOSS, it looks like India's not blocking proprietary software entirely, but is making it plain it prefers open source whenever possible.

It's worth noting that the state of Tamil Nadu and the state of Kerala have been leaders in the move to Free and Open Source Software in India, pursuing that path for many years in government, especially in education.

NotSanguine writes:

Mary-Ann Muffoletto over at phys.org reports that researchers from Utah State and Yale Universities have developed a statistical model which puports to accurately estimate public opinion about climate change at the national, state and local levels, using documented research methods.

From the phys.org article:

Americans waste little time or ink debating global warming, but what do they really think about it in Peoria? Or Los Angeles? Or any other town, big or small, across the 50 states?

"My colleagues and I wanted to find out how people feel at the local level," says Peter Howe, assistant professor of human-environment geography in Utah State University's Department of Environment and Society and the USU Ecology Center. With Yale University researchers Matto Mildenberger, Jennifer Marlon and Anthony Leiserowitz, Howe describes a new statistical model that accurately estimates public climate change opinion in the April 6, 2015 issue of Nature Climate Change. "The idea was to develop a tool to map public opinion to get a sense of geographic variation across the country," says Howe, lead author on the paper. "Decisions about how to respond to issues such as climate change can happen at the state and local level as well as the national level, so we wanted to find out what people think about the issue at these levels."

The new model estimates opinion and support in all 50 states, 435 congressional districts and more than 3,000 counties across the nation. It's based on survey data collected from more than 12,000 people across the nation.

...

State and local surveys are costly and time-intensive, the researchers say, and most public polling is only done at the national level. The new model, for the first time, reveals the full geographic diversity of American public opinion. "A project like this has never been done at this scale before," Howe says. "It allows us to visualize the data and look for patterns." The model's results enabled the researchers to construct the interactive, online tool "Yale Climate Opinion Maps" at http://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/ , which allows users to explore public opinion in geographic detail.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports (on 27 Mar)

Software providers such as Microsoft and Oracle are aggressively targeting public sector customers with licence "audit reviews" in a bid to plug falling subscription revenue, according to research. Over one-third of the 436 councils surveyed across the UK have been subject to at least one software licence review in the last 20 months, according to a report from software licensing costs advice company Cerno. Of those, 60 per cent were found to be "under-licensed" and hit with a penalty of up to £50,000.

Out of 132 universities, one quarter have been subject to at least one software licence audit in the last 20 months, it said. "This survey confirms considerable activity in licence reviews by the major software vendors - principally Oracle and Microsoft - and, critically, the high incidence of penalty demands following the review," said Robin Fry, co-founder of Cerno.

gewg_ notes that the solution adopted last century by Dave Richards of the City of Largo, Florida and by Ernie Ball, Inc. keep looking better and better. (It cost the California company $100,000 before they saw the light.)

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that thousands of visitors converged Saturday on the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb was detonated nearly 70 years ago. Many posed for pictures near an obelisk marking the exact location where the bomb went off and were also able to see a steel shell that was created as a backup plan to keep plutonium from spreading during the explosion. "It brought a quick end to World War II, and it ushered in the atomic age," Erin Dorrance said. "So out here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico changed the world 70 years ago." Pete Rosada, a Marine Corps veteran, drove with another military veteran from San Diego to make the tour. Rosada said he previously visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese targets of atomic bombs during World War II after the test at the Trinity Site. "This completes the loop," said Rosado.

Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb. Henry Herrera was 11 years old when he got up to help his father with the car on that fateful July morning in 1945 and says the dust from the blast scattered all over Tularosa, remembering how his mother had to wash clothes twice that day due to the fallout dusting the family's clothes line. "I stop to think I'm one lucky, fortunate guy because I'm here and so many are dead," says Herrera. "Gobs of people from around here died and nobody knew what they died of, they just went to bed and never woke up." Albuquerque resident Gene Glasgow, 69, visited the Trinity Site for the first time with relatives from Arizona. Born and raised in New Mexico, he said he'd grown curious through talking to people who witnessed the explosion, including one man who was laying trap line in the mountains at the time. "He thought the end of the world had come."

"gewg_" writes:

Boing Boing reports

The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to "disclose information about the existence or non-existence" of a warrant to spy on journalists.

Despite that move away from retaining communications metadata by the EU and continuing concerns in the US about the National Security Agency's bulk phone metadata spying program, the Australian government was able to push through the amendments implementing data retention thanks to the support of the main opposition party. Labor agreed to vote in favor of the Bill once a requirement to use special "journalist information warrants" was introduced for access to journalists' metadata, with a view to shielding their sources. No warrant is required for obtaining the metadata of other classes of users, not even privileged communications between lawyers and their clients. Even for journalists, the extra protection is weak, and the definition of what constitutes a journalist is rather narrow--bloggers and occasional writers are probably not covered.

Warrant canaries can't be used in this context either. Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

During the relatively quick passage of the amendments, the Australian government made the usual argument that metadata needs to be retained for long periods in order to fight terrorism and serious crime--even though the German experience is that, in practice, data retention does not help. Toward the end of the debate, when concerns about journalist sources were raised, one senior member of the Australian government adopted a more unusual approach to calming people's fears.

"gewg_" writes:

The Register reports

In a paper published at [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] (abstract), the researchers claim capacitance of more than 1,100 Farads per cubic centimetre--or around 1,145 Farads per gram, which is about as much as they reckon you could get out of the manganese dioxide (MnO₂) in the cap.

Using a combination of graphene and MnO₂, the researchers say the energy density they can achieve can be as high as 42 Watt-hours per litre, which is getting close to that of a lead acid battery.

It's not much yet: the demonstrator pictured below from the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute is one-fifth the thickness of paper, however it can hold charge long enough to power the demo LED overnight.

That, the university claims, beats a thin-film lithium battery on a pound-for-pound (or rather gram-for-gram) basis.

Manganese dioxide is cheap and plentiful, and is good at storing charge--which is why it's popular in dry-cell batteries and alkaline batteries.

The combination of the MnO₂ and laser-etched graphene--the secret sauce in all of this--can be produced without dry rooms or extreme temperatures.