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"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Researchers are still trying to figure out what could convince the estimated 40 million smokers in the U.S. to kick the habit for good.

[...] That was the subject of an innovative study that tracked a group of [employees of the CVS drug store chain] who were recruited to participate in an incentive-based cessation program. According to the researchers, who published their results in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, offering smokers varying financial rewards and penalties in exchange for cutting out cigarettes worked better than they expected.

Participants were recruited through CVS and randomly assigned to several different groups. They could choose whether or not they wanted to join their assigned group or drop out of the study.

The control group offered standard counseling with free smoking cessation tools, like nicorette gum. The other groups were divided between "deposit" and "reward" strategies. In the "deposit program", smokers were required to fork over $150. If they successfully quit, they got their deposit back as well as a $650 bonus; if they didn't quit, they lost their $150 for good. In the "reward program", meanwhile, smokers weren't required to make an initial deposit and simply received a $800 reward for quitting.

Smokers were significantly less likely to consent to participate in the deposit program; about 14 percent of people agreed to join it, compared to 90 percent of people who agreed to try for the $800 reward. However, the people who did agree to pay out the $150 deposit upfront were much more successful at quitting.

[...] More than 80 percent of smokers in the largest rewards-based group had not given up cigarettes by the end of the study.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After many years of waiting, version 1.0 of the Rust programming language has finally been released. The Rust home page describes Rust as "a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents nearly all segfaults, and guarantees thread safety."

Thanks to the hard work of noted Rust core team members Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik, Rust is now poised to become a serious competitor to established systems programming languages like C and C++.

The announcement has brought much jubilation to the followers of Rust, who have been eagerly awaiting this milestone release for so long. With only 1,940 open issues and over 11,500 issues already closed, Rust is finally ready for users to build fantastically reliable software systems using it.

takyon writes:

Steven Aftergood at the Secrecy News blog is reporting that the U.S. is planning to adopt a new government-wide designation for information that is unclassified, yet withheld from the public, replacing "100 different markings for such information [that] existed across the executive branch":

After years of preparation, the executive branch is poised to adopt a government-wide system for designating and safeguarding unclassified information that is to be withheld from public disclosure. The new system of "controlled unclassified information" (CUI) will replace the dozens of improvised control markings used by various agencies that have created confusion and impeded information sharing inside and outside of government. A proposed rule on CUI was published for public comment on May 8 in the Federal Register. While CUI is by definition unclassified, it is nevertheless understood to require protection against public disclosure on the basis of statute, regulation, or agency policy. In many or most cases, the categories of information that qualify as CUI are non-controversial, and include sensitive information related to law enforcement, nuclear security, grand jury proceedings, and so on.

One of the striking features of the new CUI program is that it limits the prevailing autonomy of individual agencies and obliges them to conform to a consistent government-wide standard. "CUI categories and subcategories are the exclusive means of designating CUI throughout the executive branch," the proposed rule states. "Agencies may not control any unclassified information outside of the CUI Program." Nor do agencies get to decide on their own what qualifies as CUI.

"The mere fact that information is designated as CUI has no bearing on determinations pursuant to any law requiring the disclosure of information or permitting disclosure as a matter of discretion," the new proposed rule said. The possibility that CUI information could or should be publicly disclosed on an authorized basis is not precluded. More specifically, a CUI marking in itself does not constitute an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act, the rule said. However, a statutory restriction that justifies designating information as CUI would also likely make it exempt from release under FOIA.

More subtly, noted John P. Fitzpatrick, the director of the Information Security Oversight Office, there is a large mass of material that is neither CUI nor non-CUI– until someone looks at it and makes an assessment. In all such cases (other than voluntary disclosure by an agency), public access would be governed by the provisions and exemptions of the FOIA.

Public comments are due by July 7.

fliptop writes:

If you're a frequent flier and like looking for software bugs, United Airlines may have an offer you can't refuse. While most companies pay monetary rewards,

United Airlines, in keeping with the company's services, has chosen to offer air miles.

"We believe that this program will further bolster our security and allow us to continue to provide excellent service," United says. "If you think you have discovered a potential bug that affects our websites, apps and/or online portals, please let us know. If the submission meets our requirements, we'll gladly reward you for your time and effort."

If a researcher discovers bugs in the system which affect the "confidentiality, integrity and/or availability of customer or company information," through customer-facing websites and third-party programs used by United, they may be eligible for reward. Low-severity rated vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and third-party problems which affect United are worth 50,000 air miles.

Medium- and high-severity attacks will net 250,000 and 1 million miles, respectively. You probably don't want to conduct any research while in flight, though:

The airline says brute-force attacks, code injection on live systems, DDoS attacks, testing on MileagePlus accounts that are not your own and testing on in-flight systems will result in disqualification and possible criminal investigation.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted at Laughing Squid is an link to the Jet Powered Go-Kart developed by Colin Furze.

From the linked YouTube video summary:

So it's finished and it's brilliant, it's stable it starts easy and the fuel system after a slight redesign (see website) works perfectly. Top speed so far is 60mph but i run out of airstrip so might be more in it.

More details are available at Colin's project site. Colin is also known for previously developing this Jet powered bicycle.

takyon writes:

Google's Transparency Report reveals that since the Court of Justice of the European Union's ruling on May 13, 2014 that established "the right to be forgotten" for Europeans, Google has received 255,143 requests to remove a total of 925,586 URLs. Google removed 323,482 of those URLs (41.3%).

However, that effort isn't enough for some:

Google is receiving a telling off from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office and may face legal action after failing to adequately respond to several so-called "right to be forgotten" requests. The ICO told The Register that "since the details of the ruling were first announced, we have handled over 183 complaints from those unhappy with Google's response to their takedown request". The ICO estimates that Google has mismanaged individuals' requests to remove their information in a quarter of cases.

The independent UK body set up to uphold information rights also says it will now be looking to resolve the 48 remaining cases "through discussion and negotiation with Google, though we have enforcement powers available to us if required".

In addition, 80 legal experts have written an open letter to Google demanding more data about how Google responds to removal requests:

What We Seek

Aggregate data about how Google is responding to the >250,000 requests to delist links thought to contravene data protection from name search results. We should know if the anecdotal evidence of Google's process is representative: What sort of information typically gets delisted (e.g., personal health) and what sort typically does not (e.g., about a public figure), in what proportions and in what countries?

Why It's Important

Google and other search engines have been enlisted to make decisions about the proper balance between personal privacy and access to information. The vast majority of these decisions face no public scrutiny, though they shape public discourse. What's more, the values at work in this process will/should inform information policy around the world. A fact-free debate about the RTBF is in no one's interest.

takyon writes:

A YouTube user has had enough with the service's flawed ContentID system for removing copyright-infringing material. Benjamin Ligeri has filed a lawsuit in Rhode Island against Google, Viacom, Lionsgate and another YouTube user:

Ligeri says that he has uploaded content to YouTube under the name BetterStream for purposes including "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and/or research," but never in breach of copyright. Nevertheless, he claims to have fallen foul of YouTube's automated anti-piracy systems.

One complaint details a video uploaded by Ligeri which he says was a parody of the film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It was present on YouTube for a year before a complaint was filed against it by a YouTube user called Egeda Pirateria. "Defendant Pirateria is not the rightful owner of the rights to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, nor did the Plaintiff's critique of it amount to copying or distribution of the movie," Ligeri writes. However, much to his disappointment, YouTube issued a copyright "strike" against Ligeri's account and refused to remove the warning, even on appeal. "YouTube, although Defendants Pirateria or Lion's Gate lacked any legal claim to any copyright to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, denied the Plaintiff's appeal pertaining to his account's copyright strike," the complaint reads. Ligeri says Viacom also got in on the action, filing a complaint against his "critique" of the 2014 remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

"Content ID is an opaque and proprietary system where the accuser can serve as the judge, jury and executioner," Ligeri continues. "Content ID allows individuals, including Defendants other than Google, to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don't own deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to fair use videos getting blocked, muted or monetized."

Noting that YouTube exercises absolute power through its take-it-or-leave-it user agreement, Ligeri says the agreement and Content ID combined result in non-compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Ligeri says that rather than acting as a neutral party, YouTube favors larger copyright holders using Content ID over smaller creators who do not. "This software and YouTube's terms of use circumvent DMCA by creating a private arbitration mechanism. Further, a party claiming copyright infringement has no burden of proof under this private arbitration mechanism," he notes.

Is this a pie-in-the-sky attempt to win over $1 million in damages while standing up for the rights of disgruntled YouTube uploaders, or a publicity stunt to promote channels with less than a thousand subscribers and a million views? This is not Ligeri's first legal action against YouTube.

frojack writes:

The problems of developing new antibiotics is that it is a never ending technology race.

New drugs are targeted at those areas where there are a sufficient number of patients to (eventually) pay for the cost of development. Only when existing drugs no longer are effective (due to resistant strains of infectious agents), will doctors prescribe newer more expensive drugs. Some antibiotics and antivirals will end up being niche drugs, for those with special needs.

These situations can lead to an inability to recover developmental costs before the patent expires

This means, the developers are tempted to keep the prices very high. Unfortunately, this discourages use and doctors refuse to prescribe the drug. Some drug companies launch a massive advertising campaign to pump up sales before the patents can expire. This encourages over use, which detracts from the useful life of the drugs.

Too many drug companies therefore, have started shying away from expensive development on a drug that will never make money for them.

ScienceMag features a story on a UK Government proposal for a global government administered program that would guarantee drug developers a profit, rather than extending patent length.

The new report full text pdf here estimates that the world needs 15 new antibiotics per decade, at least four of which should have new mechanisms of action to target the most harmful pathogens.

Toward that end the UK plan would create a $2 billion "global innovation fund," bankrolled by pharmaceutical companies to kick-start development of promising drug studies.

• They propose a system by which a global organisation has the authority and resources to commit lump-sum payments to successful drug developers, irrespective of current sales.
• Secondly, they would also jump-start a new innovation cycle in antibiotics by getting more money into early stage research by boosting funding for blue-sky research into drugs and diagnostics.
• Finally they propose to further reduce barriers to drug development by lowering costs, improving the efficiency of research, and lowering global regulatory barriers wherever possible without compromising patients' safety.

They suggest that a comprehensive package of interventions could cost as little 16 billion USD and no more than 37 billion USD over the course of 10 years and would be sufficient to radically overhaul the antibiotics pipeline.

Presumably such a program would come with some requirement to keep prices low, or require them to license others to manufacture the drugs at reasonable royalty rates well before the patents expire.

Hugh Pickens writes:

BBC reports that results of a study of the spectrum of light emitted by 23,000 red, passive galaxies and 4,000 blue, star-forming ones shows that when galaxies stop making stars, their death is usually a slow process that chokes them of the necessary cool gases over about four billion years. Astronomers surveyed thousands of galaxies, living and dead, to assess whether the transition is rapid or slow. In the dead galaxies they detected high levels of metals, which build up during star formation and point to a slow strangulation process. "Metals are a powerful tracer of the history of star formation: the more stars that are formed by a galaxy, the more metal content you'll see," says Dr Yingjie Peng. "So looking at levels of metals in dead galaxies should be able to tell us how they died."

Astronomer Andrea Cattaneo from the Observatoire de Paris compares this tell-tale evidence to the high levels of carbon dioxide seen in a strangled human body. "During [strangulation], the victim uses up oxygen in the lungs but keeps producing carbon dioxide, which remains trapped in the body," wrote Dr Cattaneo. "Instead of building up CO2, the strangled galaxies accumulate metals - elements heavier than helium - produced by massive stars." On average, living, star-forming galaxies were four billion years younger than the dead ones. This matches the amount of time that the astronomers calculate would be needed for the galaxies to burn up their remaining gas supply during the strangulation. "This is the first conclusive evidence that galaxies are being strangled to death," says Peng. "What's next though, is figuring out what's causing it. In essence, we know the cause of death, but we don't yet know who the murderer is, although there are a few suspects."

Phoenix666 writes:

The bees keep dying:

Beekeepers across the United States lost more than 40 percent of their honey bee colonies during the year spanning April 2014 to April 2015, according to the latest results of an annual nationwide survey. While winter loss rates improved slightly compared to last year, summer losses--and consequently, total annual losses--were more severe. Commercial beekeepers were hit particularly hard by the high rate of summer losses, which outstripped winter losses for the first time in five years, stoking concerns over the long-term trend of poor health in honey bee colonies.

The survey, which asks both commercial and small-scale beekeepers to track the health and survival rates of their honey bee colonies, is conducted each year by the Bee Informed Partnership in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America, with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A summary of the 2014-2015 results is available upon request prior to May 13, 2015; thereafter the results will be added to previous years' results publicly available on the Bee Informed website.

Of course, thanks to the good Doctor we know bees are actually disappearing in anticipation of the Earth being stolen from space by Davros.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Adam Taylor writes in the Washington Post that Australia's threat to kill Boo and Pistol, two dogs that belong to the American movie star Johnny Depp unless they leave the country by Saturday has made headlines around the world. But the logic behind the threat is typical for Australia, which has some of the strictest animal quarantine laws in the world.

According to the Australian Department of Agriculture, dogs can be imported to Australia but are required to spend at least 10 days in quarantine in the country. There are also a whole variety of other restrictions on the dogs – they can only come from an approved country, they cannot be pregnant, and they must not be a banned breed. The dogs are then required to undergo a variety of tests and be fully vaccinated and microchipped. It's a time-consuming, expensive and complicated process that serves one purpose. Australia is one of a relatively small number of countries around the world that are considered rabies-free. "The reason you can walk through a park in Brisbane and not have in the back of your mind, 'What happens if a rabid dog comes out and bites me or bites my kid,' is because we've kept that disease out," says Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.

[More after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

Wired has a gushing review of the Mad Max reboot:

Lightning rarely strikes twice, so going into Mad Max: Fury Road it's hard not to dwell on the words of Max Rockatansky himself: "You know hope is a mistake. If you can't fix what's broken, you'll go insane." The thing is, Max is wrong. Fury Road is everything fans could have hoped for.

It's also a very necessary movie right now. Fury Road is not only a reminder of what big, beautiful action movies can and should look like, it's a reminder that they can have a point. That spectacle can have substance. That, in a cinematic landscape where we're still fighting over the roles women get in movies, a new Ripley might just be waiting in the next trailer you see. (In Fury Road's case, that's Charlize Theron in a heart-stoppingly badass performance as Imperator Furiosa.)

Cars, guns, desert, and 1980's style post-apocalyptic fashion.

Dr Spin writes:

Inspired by octopus arms, a robotic arm that can bend, stretch and squeeze through cluttered environments has been created by researchers in Italy.

Soft robotics is a promising technology in the medical field, particularly for surgical applications. This arm was designed for surgical operations which need to access remote, confined regions of the body and, once there, manipulate soft organs without damaging them, and relies on coffee grounds as a control mechanism!

More details available from Sclog

fliptop writes:

Touting the technology as a replacement for IDs, part of your laptop's login, or able to let cops know if the person they just pulled over is dangerous, the first effective long-range iris scanner has been developed by Marios Savvides, a Carnegie Mellon engineering professor:

"Fingerprints, they require you to touch something. Iris, we can capture it at a distance, so we're making the whole user experience much less intrusive, much more comfortable," Savvides [said]. Unlike other scanners, which required someone to step up to a machine, his scanner can capture someone's iris and face as they walk by.

"There's no X-marks-the-spot. There's no place you have to stand. Anywhere between six and 12 meters, it will find you, it will zoom in and capture both irises and full face," he said.

Iris scanning currently works only at close range, so it requires a level of cooperation of the person being scanned:

"It requires a level of cooperation that makes it very overt—a person knows that you're taking a picture for this purpose,"...If it succeeds, long-distance scanning will change all that. Savvides says his team has secured a patent for his invention and will continue to work to make it easier and cheaper. He continues, too, to look for positive implementations of it.

Spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Phoenix666 writes:

IBM has demonstrated a chip that can take advantage of photonics' higher bandwidth and lower energy consumption:

Engineers have long known that fibre-optic links are more desirable than copper wires for shuttling data around—the available bandwidth is higher, the distances that signals can be squirted over are longer, and energy consumption is lower. On the other hand, when it comes to actually doing stuff with that data, electronics are where it's at. This dichotomy has resulted in a very pronounced split between optical and electrical technologies: optics are used for networking between computers, but inside the chassis it's electronics all the way.

This approach has worked well so far, but as bandwidth and energy requirements continue to soar, research labs around the world have been looking at ways of bringing the optics ever closer to the electronics. The first step is to bring optical channels onto the motherboard, then onto the chip package, and ultimately onto the die so that electrical and optical pathways run side-by-side at a nanometer scale.

Quantum computing has also made a lot of gains recently. Perhaps in 5 years we'll be looking at a higher order of magnitude in processing power. What would you do with it?