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edinlinux writes:

From an article in Computerworld:

Ten U.S. senators, representing the political spectrum, are seeking a federal investigation into displacement of IT workers by H-1B-using contractors.

They are asking the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department to investigate the use of the H-1B program "to replace large numbers of American workers" at Southern California Edison (SCE) and other employers.

Rather than all of us just griping on Soylent and 'that other site' about H-1B tech workers flooding in while there are plenty of Americans looking for work, these IT workers had a union, and got the attention of 10 senators to look into this issue. Southern California Edison laid off a bunch of American IT workers to replace them with H-1B Indians, and their union (since they are a utility, they happened to have had one), came to the rescue with a huge media campaign and now investigations by US Senators.

sudo rm -rf writes:

In a recent press release Amnesty International reports:

[Editor's Note: The quoted text is reproduced here exactly as it appeared in the original. For those who may not be familiar, there are apparently three different parties involved: (1) Amnesty International, (2) Liberty, and (3) Privacy International.]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Anthony D'Ambrosio writes at USA Today that marriage seems like a pretty simple concept — fall in love and share your life together. Our great-grandparents did it, our grandparents followed suit, and for many of us, our parents did it as well. So why is marriage so difficult for the millennial generation?

"You want to know why your grandmother and grandfather just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary? Because they weren't scrolling through Instagram worrying about what John ate for dinner. They weren't on Facebook criticizing others. They weren't on vacation sending Snapchats to their friends." According to D'Ambrosio, we've developed relationships with things, not each other. "Ninety-five percent of the personal conversations you have on a daily basis occur through some type of technology. We've removed human emotion from our relationships, and we've replaced it colorful bubbles," writes D'Ambrosio. "We've forgotten how to communicate yet expect healthy marriages. How is it possible to grow and mature together if we barely speak?"

D'Ambrosio writes that another factor is that our desire for attention outweighs our desire to be loved and that social media has given everyone an opportunity to be famous. "Attention you couldn't dream of getting unless you were celebrity is now a selfie away. Post a picture, and thousands of strangers will like it. Wear less clothing, and guess what? More likes," writes D'Ambrosio.

"If you want to love someone, stop seeking attention from everyone because you'll never be satisfied with the attention from one person." Finally D'Ambrosio says the loss of privacy has contributed to the demise of marriage. "We've invited strangers into our homes and brought them on dates with us. We've shown them our wardrobe, drove with them in our cars, and we even showed them our bathing suits," writes D'Ambrosio. "The world we live in today has put roadblocks in the way of getting there and living a happy life with someone. Some things are in our control, and unfortunately, others are not."

sudo rm -rf writes:

In an article published on arXiv.org [Full article available] California-based Raytheon engineers Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson say that any interstellar spacecraft traveling at near-light speed would leave distinct light signatures in its wake.

AnonTechie writes:

A recent Wired article tells us about the progression of the Amazon product recommendation algorithm.

Amazon helped show the world how machines can learn. As far back as the late ’90s, the company’s online retail site would track every book, CD, and movie you purchased. As time went on, it would develop a pretty good sense of what you liked, serving up product recommendations its code predicted would catch your eye.

It wasn't rocket science. It was an algorithm. But it worked. And in the years since, the field of so-called machine learning has evolved in enormous ways, with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft training enormous networks of machines to identify faces in photos, recognize the spoken word, and instantly translate conversations from one language to another.

On Thursday, Amazon unveiled a similar machine learning service, pitching it as a way for any business to use the AI tech the company has spent years developing inside its own operation. Known as the Amazon Machine Learning Service, it’s designed for software developers “with no experience in machine learning,” AWS head Andy Jassy said on stage at a mini-conference in San Francisco.

anubi writes:

I guess we have all seen all those wonderful toys coming from China. Technologies unimaginable a few years ago, like quadricopters and microminiature concealed cameras. It looks like the US Military is taking notice.

Other countries (such as China) build our stuff, understand how it works, and have found out how to make it very inexpensively. A remote-controlled drone was once the exclusive domain of law enforcement... now just about anyone who wants one can buy one.

Yup, it looks like the-powers-that-be are realizing their cats are getting out of the bag...

AnonTechie writes:

From an article in Fermilab Today:

Our universe is as mysterious as it is vast. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, anything that accelerates creates gravitational waves, which are disturbances in the fabric of space and time that travel at the speed of light and continue infinitely into space. Scientists are trying to measure these possible sources all the way to the beginning of the universe.

The Holometer experiment, based at the Department of Energy's Fermilab, is sensitive to gravitational waves at frequencies in the range of a million cycles per second. Thus it addresses a spectrum not covered by experiments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which searches for lower-frequency waves to detect massive cosmic events such as colliding black holes and merging neutron stars.

The absence of a signal provides valuable information about our universe. Although this result does not prove whether the exotic objects exist, it has eliminated the region of the universe where they could be present.

AnonTechie writes:

Would somebody more knowledgeable care to explain how they managed this ?

The "unprecedented" cyber-attack on French television channel TV5Monde represents a major "step up" in the Internet warfare being waged by highly specialised jihadist hackers, experts said Thursday.

Since January's three-day Islamist attacks in Paris that killed 17 people, hackers have launched hundreds of assaults on French websites, from denial of service attacks that snarl up web traffic to full-scale hacks.

But taking over a television channel and blocking programming—as happened to TV5Monde—is another matter entirely, experts believe, an "unprecedented" attack, according to the station's boss Yves Bigot.

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-french-tv-hack-cyberjihadism.html

SlimmPickens writes:

Researchers at Penn State University have developed a technique using retroviral expression of DNA transcription factor NEUROD1 to transform astrocytes into glutamatergic neurons and NG2 cells into GABAergic neurons. Astrocytes and NG2 are glial cells, a kind of support cell for neurons performing a wide variety of functions. Glutramate is an excitatory neurotransmitter and a precursur to GABA, GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. According to this page "The majority of excitatory neurons in the CNS are glutamatergic and over half of all brain synapses release glutamate."

This procedure only involves converting dysfunctional reactive glial cells associated with nerve injury and neurodegenerative disorders.

A crowd funding appeal was recently launched to speed up research in order to begin human trials more quickly.

The abstract of the paper:

There's a youtube of Gong Chen, the team director talking about the discovery.

tonyPick writes:

According to IEEE Spectrum a proposed robot lawnmower from iRobot (developers of the Roomba) has astronomers concerned about the proposed design.

In order to provide the robot lawnmower with information about position iRobot are proposing to use wireless beacons in the 6240-6740 MHz range, which covers a region of the radio spectrum the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) uses for observations, and iRobot would like the FCC to allow them to operate in this protected spectrum by issuing a waiver:

As you might expect, the NRAO got a little bit upset that iRobot wanted to set up its beacons to broadcast on a protected frequency, because they're worried that people's lawn mower beacons would start to mess with their radio astronomy data. So, they’ve filed a comment to that effect on iRobot's FCC waiver application, to which iRobot responded, and then NRAO responded to that.

We’ve read through these documents (including iRobot’s waiver application, NRAO’s comments, iRobot’s response, and NRAO’s reply), and they’re full of amusingly passive-aggressive commentary from both sides as they argue back and forth in front of the FCC.

mendax writes:

If you've ever wondered why Dutch people are so tall, this story from The New York Times may have the answer:

Today, the Dutch are on average the tallest people on the planet. Just 150 years ago, they were relatively short. In 1860, the average Dutch soldier in the Netherlands was just 5 feet 5 inches. American men were 2.7 inches taller.

Since 1860, average heights have increased in many parts of the world, but no people have shot up like the Dutch. The average Dutchman now stands over six feet tall. And while the growth spurt in the United States has stopped in recent years, the Dutch continue to get taller.

For years, scientists have sought to understand why average height has increased, and why the Dutch in particular have grown so quickly. Among other factors, the Dutch have a better diet than in the past, and they also have better medical care. But now Dr. Stulp and his colleagues have found evidence suggesting that evolution itself is also helping to make them taller.

It seems that taller men in the Netherlands are more likely to father more children:

Dr. Stulp and his colleagues analyzed data on 42,612 men and women over age 45, looking at the height of their subjects and how many children they had. Dutch men who were taller than average had more children than those of average or lower than average height, the researchers found.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted at Extreme Tech is a report on the variation between processor speeds on Intel Core-M devices between OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers):

...users have generally been able to expect that a CPU in a Dell laptop will perform identically to that same CPU in an HP laptop. These assumptions aren’t trivial — they’re actually critical to reviewing hardware and to buying it.

The Core M offered OEMs more flexibility in building laptops than ever before, including the ability to detect the skin temperature of the SoC (System on Chip) and adjust performance accordingly. But those tradeoffs have created distinctly different performance profiles for devices that should be nearly identical to one another

The article references the detailed analysis done by Anandtech. Originally spotted at Hackernews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Got some time to burn away? Interested in reading? If you find yourself agreeing with those two propositions, you might be a good candidate for Distributed Proofreaders which turns public domain books into versatile and compact ebooks. The OCR'd* pages of the books are first proofread because the machine still makes some mistakes and then formatted to all kind of layouts. If you're willing to give the process a try, here's a live demo. (no registration required) Distributed Proofreaders has preserved more than 29,000 books!

I think this is a wonderful way to spend some time and find interesting books while at the same time doing something useful. Also, no technical skills are required.

* Optical Character Recognition, a process of turning a scanned image of text into actual text

frojack writes in with a story from The Scientist reporting on the results [Abstract] of a clinical trial Last December.

Scientists at Juno Therapeutics reported that their chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy put 24 of 27 adults with refractive acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) into remission, with six patients remaining disease free for more than a year. This response rate is unprecedented for patients who had stopped responding to all other treatments.

In persons with ALL, lymphoblasts are overproduced in the bone marrow and continuously multiply, causing damage and death by inhibiting the production of normal cells.

This disease is extremely hard to treat and progresses rapidly when it becomes refractory (resistant); most patients die within a few months.

CAR T-cell therapies are cell therapy, gene therapy, and immuno-therapy all at the same time.

From The Scientist:

[More after the break.]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Reuters reports that in the first ever suit of its kind from Amazon, the online retailer has sued four websites to stop them from selling fake, positive product reviews. The suit accuses Jay Gentile of California and websites that operate as buyamazonreviews.com and buyazonreviews.com, among others, of trademark infringement, false advertising and violations of the Anticyber­squatting Consumer Protection Act and the Washington Consumer Protection Act. Amazon says the defendants are misleading customers, and through their activity generating improper profit for themselves and a "handful" of dishonest sellers and manufacturers. Amazon says the defendants have caused reviews to be posted on its website intermittently, through a "slow drip" designed to evade its detection systems, at a typical cost of $19 to $22 per review. "While small in number, these reviews threaten to undermine the trust that customers, and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers, place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon’s brand."

Mark Collins, the owner of buyamazonreviews.com, denies Amazon’s claims and says the site simply offers to help Amazon’s third-party sellers get reviews. Collins defended his business, writing that his website operates as a “middleman,” connecting sellers with buyers willing to write reviews. The sellers provide reviewers with discounted items. But he said there are no restriction on the type of review they can post. “We are not selling fake reviews. however we do provide Unbiased and Honest reviews on all the products,” Collins wrote. “And this is not illegal at all.”