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MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

My father, a Naval officer, was quite fond of shouting "Do something, even if it's stupid!" I expect that, in the heat of battle, indecision is worse than nothing at all.

Back in the day I worked for Dave Johnson's Working Software. We scored a big contract to port Random House Webster's Electronic Dictionary And Thesaurus College Edition - yes that was its real name - from MS-DOS to Mac OS System 7. Included in our contract was $5,000 "Timely Completion Bonus" of which I would receive $3k but only if I completed the work in the allotted time.

I found myself strangely unable to get started. Dave from time to time would politely ask me whether I had, then finally he got very assertive that I should start.

"Look: if you write anything at all, even if it crashes then you can debug it."

I remembered this recently, and it is working well for me. One must not implement too much buggy code or you will never get it debugged, but writing something bad then fixing it may well be better than not implementing anything at all.

(I got my bonus.)

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that drugs like Adderall were once only prescribed to help children with attention deficit disorders focus on their school work but then college students found those drugs could increase their ability to study. Now a growing number of workers use them to help compete. What will happen as these drugs are more widely used in the workplace? According to Anjan Chatterjee, the use of neurotechnologies to enhance healthy people’s brain function could easily become widespread. "If anything, we worship workplace productivity by any means. Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than most others in the developed world. Why not add drugs to energize, focus and limit that annoying waste of time — sleep?" Julian Savulescu says that what defines human beings is their extraordinary cognitive power and their ability to enhance that power through reading, writing, computing and now smart drugs. "Eighty-five percent of Americans use caffeine. Nicotine and sugar are also cognitive enhancers," says Savulescu.

But cognitive neurologist Martha Farah, says that regular use on the job is an invitation to dependence. "I also worry about the effect of drug-fueled productivity on people other than the users," says Farah. "It is not hard to imagine a supervisor telling employees that this is the standard they should aspire to in their work, however they manage to do it (hint, hint). The eventual result will be a ratcheting up of “normal” productivity, where everyone uses (and the early adopters’ advantage is only fleeting)."

wantkitteh writes:

A support post on SteamPowered.com shows that Valve are planning to restrict Steam account functionality of anyone who's spent less than $5 directly through Steam:

We've chosen to limit access to these features as a means of protecting our customers from those who abuse Steam for purposes such as spamming and phishing.

Limited users are prevented from accessing several features on Steam, including but not limited to: Sending friend invites; Opening group chat; Voting on Greenlight, Steam Reviews and Workshop items; Participating in the Steam Market; Posting frequently in the Steam Discussions; Gaining Steam Profile Levels (Locked to level 0) and Trading Cards; Submitting content on the Steam Workshop; Posting in an item's Steam Workshop Discussions; Accessing the Steam Web API; Using browser and mobile chat

You will need to spend at least $5.00 USD within the Steam store. Some examples of purchases that grant access to these features are: Adding the equivalent of $5 USD or more to your Steam Wallet; Purchasing game(s) that are equal to $5 USD or more from the Steam store; Adding a Steam Wallet card to your Steam account; Purchasing a Steam gift that is equal to $5 USD or more from the Steam store (Receiving a Steam gift from a friend doesn't count)

Using serial keys to activate retail purchases on Steam will not count towards your account value, neither will activating Steam keys obtained from 3rd party websites (e.g. Humble Bundle) or games gifted to you by other account holders.

sigma writes:

SBS Australia reports that a dual therapy of antiviral drug and anti-cancer drugs was 100 percent successful in eliminating the hepatitis B virus (HBV) infections in pre-clinical animal trials. The combination treatment targets the cell signalling pathways that the hepatitis B virus uses to keep host liver cells alive.

Researcher Marc Pellegrini said "We are hopeful these promising results will be as successful in human clinical trials, which are currently underway in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide,"

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/04/21/new-treatment-promising-hep-b

kaszz, "gewg_", and sigma all wrote in on this:

Under Steve Ballmer's reign, Microsoft Open Technologies was founded as a subsidiary of Microsoft. It is now being shut down and folded into Microsoft under Satya Nadella. The subsidiary, staffed with an interoperability strategy team tasked with extending Redmond's open source initiatives, will be embraced back into into the mainstream of the company.

MS Open Tech's president Jean Paoli said "It's now time for MS Open Tech to rejoin Microsoft Corp., and help the company take its next steps in deepening its engagement with open source and open standards." Some claim that a separate subsidiary is no longer needed. Microsoft could easily be the world's biggest vendor of open source software, which is probably one reason some people don't like the term...

"gewg_" writes:

The Government of Norway announces

[April 16], the Ministry of Culture announced a national FM-switch off, to complete the transition to digital radio. Norway is making [a] historical move into a new radio era, being the first country in the world to decide upon an analogue switch-off for all major radio channels. With DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and digital radio, listeners will be provided with more radio channels and greater diversity in content.

[...]The DAB-coverage in Norway now exceeds FM-coverage. DAB provides Norway with 22 national channels, as opposed to five channels transmitting nationwide on FM.

[...]Switch-off starts in Nordland county 11th January 2017 and ends with the northernmost counties Troms and Finnmark [13th December] 2017.

Official announcement in Norwegian. Also covered at Ars Technica.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Penetration tester Marcus Murray says attackers can use malicious JPEGs to pop modern Windows servers, to gain expanded privileges over networks.

In a live hack set down for RSA San Francisco this week, the TrueSec boffin shows how he used the hack to access an unnamed US Government agency that ran a buggy photo upload portal.

A key part of the stunt is achieved by inserting active content into the attributes of a jpg image, such that the file name read image.jpg.aspx. "I'm going to try to compromise the web server, then go for back end resources, and ultimately compromise a domain controller," Murray said, adding the hack is not that difficult.
video

This is by no means a new attack vector.

Why are we still dealing with this over ten years later?

chucky writes:

VTI, a small Czech Republic company, has a device (with actual commercial installations) which can make drinking water out of any liquid dirt, like pig sludge. They claim it -unlike reverse osmosis- needs very little power, no chemicals involved, only physics.

From their website:

The core of our device is the Technology of Hybrid Asymmetric Selective Membrane Separation - THASMS, which was developed over time by our research team. The AQ3 device is suitable for use both in households and industrial units, where it eliminates problems with water quality, and with extremely low energy consumption.

Videos of the device in action purifying pig slurry (subtitled in English) are available on the references page of the website.

Are there more companies and products using this technology?

Appalbarry writes:

The always excellent Worms and Germs blog, out of the University of Guelph, has a series of articles about the recent arrival of Asian H3N2 canine flu into North America.

As described:

In a bit of a surprising twist, research performed by Cornell University, the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and the National Veterinary Services Laboratory has indicated that the large, ongoing canine flu outbreak in the Midwest US is being caused by an H3N2 influenza strain, not the expected H3N8 canine flu strain. Molecularly, the strain is closely related to H3N2 strains that are circulating in dogs in China and South Korea. H3N2 canine flu emerged in that region in the mid 2000s and is widely circulating in some areas.

It would appear that one culprit in the spread of this disease are the number of international "Rescue Societies." These groups travel to foreign countries, collect stray dogs, and bring them back to North America where they are adopted out to well-meaning families. Asia and South America are the preferred sources, although there are groups that rescue dogs in the US and haul them up to Canada.

The ultimate problem seems to be that aside from rabies there is not a lot of thought given by border agencies to managing imported pets. In fact, an awful lot of dogs are imported each year that don't even have the required rabies shots.

If over 2700 unvaccinated dogs were brought into the country, how many dogs were brought in in total? How many of the "vaccinated" dogs were really vaccinated? (Since scrutiny is limited and faking a vaccine certificate doesn’t exactly take a lot of effort.) What other pathogens might those thousands of imported dogs been carrying? Finally, why import those dogs in the first place? There’s hardly a shortage of dogs looking for homes in the US...

Here is a statement from the CDC [fixed] on the outbreak in the Chicago area.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Kate Murphy reports at the NYT that although one person’s putrid is another person’s pleasant, local governments are beginning to regulate intrusive and unpleasant smells using high tech devices. If you time-travelled back 200 years or so, you’d likely scrunch up your nose. Our forebears threw sewage out their windows, and the primary mode of transport — horses — relieved themselves all over the street. These days 'we have so reduced the level of background odor pollution, we are becoming more sensitive to anything we smell,” says Pamela Dalton, an olfactory researcher at Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit group in Philadelphia that studies smell and taste. In the past offenders were typically livestock operations and wastewater treatment plants, but more recently odor inspectors are getting calls about smells emanating from ethnic restaurants, coffee roasters and candle and bath shops. In an effort to be objective, a growing number of locales have begun using a device called a Nasal Ranger, which looks like a megaphone for the nose and measures the intensity of smells according to a so-called dilution ratio (PDF). An odor is considered intrusive if the average person can smell it when it is diluted with seven parts clean air — a decades-old threshold of stinky.

New York City received more than 10,000 odor complaints last year, many from residents upset about cooking smells wafting into their apartments from restaurants and coffee houses — smells that might be pleasing when patronizing those same establishments. “A lot of it has to do with tolerance level in neighborhoods that are getting gentrified,” says Ben Siller. “People at lower socio-economic levels may tolerate something much better than someone who moves into the same area and buys a house, sinks a fortune into remodeling and then goes out in the backyard and smells a pot grower, charbroiler, pet food manufacturer or something stinky like that.”

Phoenix666 writes:

Yes, it's finally arriving--remote control people:

“Actually, it’s a really basic technology,” says creator Max Pfeiffer, who studies human-computer interactions at Leibniz University of Hanover in Germany.

Indeed. As cool as it sounds, the underlying tech is pretty straightforward. To dictate walkers’ routes, Pfeiffer simply attached electrodes (pilfered from a massage tool purchased on Amazon) to the thighs of 18 volunteers. When activated by a signal from a smartphone, the electrodes stimulated the sartorious, the long, thin muscle that connects the outer pelvis to the inner knee and controls the rotation of the leg. As long as the volunteer is providing forward locomotion, the sensation makes them turn.

Using a smartphone, Pfeiffer trailed his subjects as they walked through the streets with a smart phone connected to the electrodes. A push of the button on his phone caused them to veer right or left. The compulsion to turn wasn’t overwhelming. “One comment from the participants was they always had the feeling that they can just take back control and override the signal,” says Pfeiffer.

Remote control people...paging Philip K. Dick?

Jaruzel writes:

According to Wired.co.uk, the source of the Earth's 'humming' noise may have been found:

A strange bell-like ring emitted by the Earth has left oceanographers confused for decades, but a new study may have found an explanation.

The low-frequency sound, which is inaudible to human ears but can be detected by seismic instruments, has frustrated scientists since the 90s. Theories suggested everything from electromagnetic radiation to earthquakes and secret military operations might be to blame. Although the sound is almost certainly too faint for humans to hear, some people claim to be plagued by a "tinnitus"-like noise -- including many residents of Bristol in the 70s, who said the sound caused headaches and even nosebleeds.

Link to research paper.[abstract only]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NYT that machines can now process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. Machines can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor. Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out that most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being de-constructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."

According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills but Tufekci says that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."

Phoenix666 writes:

We've been reading headlines about Tesla, Nissan Leaf, and several other recent arrivals in the EV market the past few years, but the growth curves are starting to look very interesting:

We already wrote about the recent ZSW report that found that the world electric car market was up to 740,000 at the end of 2014. Other cool stats noted there included:

• China saw 54,000 electric cars registered in 2014, a growth of 120%.
• The US grew 69% to hit 290,000 total electric cars, about 39% of all electric cars on the road.
• Japan grew 45% to hit 110,000 total electric cars.
• The overall global electric car market saw a growth of 76%.

However, we missed sharing a big one, but thanks to reve putting it in a headline and a hat tip from Bob Wallace, we’re getting it now. Actually, you just saw it in the title: ~43% of the world’s electric cars were bought in 2014.

Coupled with the ongoing steep drop in the price of solar panels, we are quickly approaching an epochal tipping point in transportation, energy, and many other realms. My family is ready to switch to an EV as soon as a mass market car is available where we are. How about other Soylentils, do you plan to jump to an EV too, or hang on to your ICE?

Bill Dimm writes:

A Chemistry World article summarizes a study by Cornell University psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci finding that faculty members asked to evaluate hypothetical male and female applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology gave preference to female applicants. Quoting the study:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers.

The article concludes:

To be hired, women must first apply and the authors question whether ‘omniprescent and discouraging’ messages about sexism in academic appointments makes them reluctant to do so.