SoylentNews

From Hackernews: Project Jacquard

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.google.com/atap/project-jacquard/

A Google project about using conductive yarn in standard industrial looms. Sounds really interesting, I don't know if this is state of the art or what, but bring on the reactive-video t-shirts, mu-mus and hoodies!

Google and Levi's are Weaving Computers into your Clothes

AnonTechie writes:

Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group is one of the most exciting divisions of any major technology company: It’s where Project Ara, Google's modular phone experiment, and Project Tango, Google's 3D-mapping tool, were born and are continuing to be incubated. Now, Google is shooting for the moon with another big idea—Project Jacquard.

Project Jacquard is an effort to invisibly incorporate computers into objects, materials, and clothing. Everyday items such as sweaters, jackets, and furniture will be turned into interactive surfaces that can be used as trackpads, buttons and more. The objects will receive information directly from the surface of the material used to build them, eliminating the need for bulky plastic or metal parts. The objects will then transmit information to a nearby smartphone or computer using low-powered Wi-Fi.

http://www.popsci.com/googles-levi%27s-computers-clothing-project-jacquard

An Anonymous Coward writes:

At the start of Google I/O on May 28, NVIDIA released the shield console. Available on Amazon.com and Nvidia.com for $199 and reviewed here:

http://anandtech.com/show/9289/the-nvidia-shield-android-tv-review

It supports 4K Netflix streaming out of the box, and is the only device to do so. Now subscribers to Netflix 4K can finally use it. It costs extra, the base Netflix subscription price ($7.99) doesn't include the 4K streaming package.

Is this the start of Google taking over the living room? Games, movies, music, infotainment, all streamed from the cloud.

Fastest Android SoC out there at the moment:

-Quadcore A57
-Maxwell 2 SMM GPU
-3 GB LP4 DRAM
-4K display (OK not included :-P )

It also includes a game controller. The games streaming service might be cheaper than buying a GTX, and could potentially be used as a home server for movie streaming or basic FTP /disk streaming tasks. Should be interesting to see what apps get released for it. It's faster than most embedded systems used such as routers, scanners, and HTPCs. With Kodi + portable HDD, I could keep my desktop PC turned off most of the time now.

takyon writes:

Biotechnology firm Calysta has developed fish feed made from Methylococcus capsulatus and other bacteria:

Dr Shaw proposes to take advantage of the rock-bottom price of methane, a consequence of the spread of natural-gas fracking, to breed Methylococci en masse as a substitute for the fish-meal such farmers now feed to their charges.

The idea of using methanotrophs as fish food was invented by Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company. Calysta bought the technology in 2014, and has been refining it since then. Crucially, from a business point of view, the EU and Norway have already approved the use of Methylococcus-based fish food. Though America has yet to follow suit, this means there is a large available market for the stuff.

[...] The internal geometry of the reactors in which they live is designed to keep them in constant contact with enough methane to grow, enough air to respire and enough ammonia to provide the nitrogen which, along with the carbon and hydrogen in the methane, is a fundamental building block of the amino acids from which proteins are made. Nor are the Methylococci alone. The reactors actually contain a mini ecosystem that includes other species of bacteria, known as heterotrophs, which mop up metabolic products that would otherwise slow Methylococcus's growth. These products are mostly the result of Methylococcus consuming things other than methane (ethane, propane and so on) that are minor components of raw natural gas. Adding heterotrophs to the mix means Calysta can be less fussy about exactly which sources of natural gas it uses to feed its bugs.

At the moment, the world produces about 5m tonnes of fish-meal a year, a number that has been constant for four decades and is limited by the size of the Earth's fisheries. Demand, however, is growing at 6-8% a year, putting pressure on prices. This has led some fish farmers to adopt soya-based substitutes. These, though, can inflame the fishes' guts. That, Dr Shaw says, is not a problem with Calysta's product.

Dr Shaw seems confident Calysta's system, which should turn out more than 8,000 tonnes of bacterial fish food a year per reactor, can do so at a cost well below the $2,000 a tonne at which fish-meal now sells—and that it will be available commercially by 2018. If this comes to pass, not only will it help fish farmers, but it may also relieve pressure on wild fish stocks in the world's oceans.

takyon writes:

Prof. Kim Heung-Kwang has told BBC Click that North Korea has trained 6,000 military hackers capable of attacks that could destroy critical infrastructure or even kill people:

For 20 years Prof Kim taught computer science at Hamheung Computer Technology University, before escaping the country in 2004. While Prof Kim did not teach hacking techniques, his former students have gone on to form North Korea's notorious hacking unit Bureau 121. The bureau, which is widely believed to operate out of China, has been credited for numerous hacks. Many of the attacks are said to have been aimed specifically at South Korean infrastructure, such as power plants and banks.

Speaking at a location just outside the South Korean capital, Prof Kim told the BBC he has regular contact with key figures within the country who have intimate knowledge of the military's cyber operation. "The size of the cyber-attack agency has increased significantly, and now has approximately 6,000 people," he said. He estimated that between 10% to 20% of the regime's military budget is being spent on online operations. "The reason North Korea has been harassing other countries is to demonstrate that North Korea has cyber war capacity," he added. "Their cyber-attacks could have similar impacts as military attacks, killing people and destroying cities."

Speaking more specifically, Prof Kim said North Korea was building its own malware based on Stuxnet - a hack attack, widely attributed to the US and Israel, which struck Iranian nuclear centrifuges before being discovered in 2010. "[A Stuxnet-style attack] designed to destroy a city has been prepared by North Korea and is a feasible threat," Prof Kim said. Earlier this year, the South Korean government blamed North Korea for a hack on the country's Hydro and Nuclear Power Plant. "Although the nuclear plant was not compromised by the attack, if the computer system controlling the nuclear reactor was compromised, the consequences could be unimaginably severe and cause extensive casualties," Prof Kim said.

tt1870479 writes:

Ad-blocking technology is finally taking off in the general population. In the US 15% of internet users have installed an ad-blocker, but among people born after 1980 the number is closer to 30%.

One American journalism startup thinks they have a business model that doesn't depend on advertising -- Low volume, high-quality, hyper-local investigative reporting intended to appeal to passionate citizens that are especially engaged in their community. Will it work? They claim to be close to achieving their budget targets after just a month of operation.

The startup is in Tulsa, about as far away as you can get from the stereotypical centers of innovation and journalism like Silicon Valley and New York City. Is the mainstream of internet development so addicted to advertising and Big Data profiling that they are unable to see opportunities that exist outside of their filter bubble?

AnonTechie writes:

As the number and variety of smartphones and other connected devices keeps growing, the need for radio spectrum grows with it. Cognitive radio technology developed under the EU-funded QOSMOS project could help meet these needs while controlling telecom costs, improving service and driving the development of new markets.

In the near future, the telecom industry will be faced with three challenges: a need for more radio spectrum, an ever-increasing demand for data, and consumers' increasing unwillingness to pay for it. Spectrum, however, is a finite resource.

The QOSMOS project addressed the twin problems of scarcity and cost by developing cognitive radio technology that dynamically optimises the use of radio spectrum, by accessing under-utilised portions of the spectrum and sharing spectrum across devices.

'The idea is to break down silos,' says Michael Fitch of British Telecom, who coordinated the QOSMOS project. 'Every new service and technology needs a new spectrum, and silos are formed when there are umpteen different devices that use umpteen different parts of the spectrum.'

This diversity does not make for efficient spectrum management. The project partners therefore developed three technologies: a central manager that controls the spectrum 'portfolio' in real-time for a region or country; a resource manager that allocates the spectrum to individual systems and senses the environment; and a cognitive radio terminal.

The project also developed a prototype transceiver to generate FBMC (Filter Bank Multicarrier transmission) waveforms. FBMC is expected to replace the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) technology that is more commonly in use today. With FBMC transmission, spectrum is carved out in rectangular blocks so that it is tightly packed for more efficient spectrum use.

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-cognitive-radio-technology-optimises-scarce.html

[Source]: http://www.ict-qosmos.eu

takyon writes:

Call it competitive gaming, eSports, or just big business. "The big events are already bigger than the biggest events in sports," says Twitch COO Kevin Lin:

The industry is anchored by what is referred to as multiplayer online battle arena games, like the League of Legends, where one or several players face off in a digital arena. Watching people play professionally has been popular in Asia for years, but is now also gaining steam in the U.S.

In fact, those powering the industry say it's well on its way to becoming the next major professional sport alongside football and baseball. The biggest tournaments are already filling entire arenas, including New York City's Madison Square Garden.

The average Twitch user spends two hours a day engaging with the site. Lin said it's not unusual for some users to stretch to the five-hour mark for some of the more popular players and events. In total, Twitch logs more than 100 million unique viewers a month, with those viewers racking up a collective 20 billion minutes of viewing time of the more than 11 million videos that are broadcast. The Twitch app has been downloaded more than 23 million times since its launch in 2011.

In 2014, Riot Games' League of Legends world championship had roughly 27 million streaming views, more than the average viewership of the individual games of the World Series and roughly the same as the amount of people that tuned in for this year's NCAA final.

Last month, ESPN 2 made history by airing the finals of Blizzard Entertainment's collegiate "Heroes of the Dorm" competition on TV for the first time.

iWantToKeepAnon writes:

Boyan Slat, 20-year old founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, today announced that the world's first system to passively clean up plastic pollution from the world's oceans is to be deployed in 2016. He made the announcement at Asia's largest technology conference, Seoul Digital Forum, in South-Korea.

The array is projected to be deployed in Q2 2016. The feasibility of deployment, off the coast of Tsushima, an island located in the waters between Japan and South-Korea is currently being researched.

The scale of the plastic pollution problem, whereby in the case of Tsushima island, approximately one cubic meter of pollution per person is washed up each year, has led the Japanese [and] the local government to seek innovative solutions to the problem.

An Anonymous Coward suggests the following story:

Chris Ball, about whom I know very little, gave a talk to the Data Terra Nemo conference on 23/24 May in Berlin. From the conference site, I gathered the following: "Data Terra Nemo is a technical conference for discussing the ideas behind systems and protocols without centralized ownership and how they impact the landscape of the Internet".

Chris gave a presentation regarding a decentralized git repository which he has dubbed 'GitTorrent'. His notes, which he describes as an 'aspirational transcript' of the talk, take the story up:

Why a decentralized GitHub?

First, the practical reasons: GitHub might become untrustworthy, get hacked — or get DDOS'd by China, as happened while I was working on this project! I know GitHub seems to be doing many things right at the moment, but there often comes a point at which companies that have raised $100M in Venture Capital funding start making decisions that their users would strongly prefer them not to.

There are philosophical reasons, too: GitHub is closed source, so we can't make it better ourselves. Mako Hill has an essay called Free Software Needs Free Tools, which describes the problems with depending on proprietary software to produce free software, and I think he's right. To look at it another way: the experience of our collaboration around open source projects is currently being defined by the unmodifiable tools that GitHub has decided that we should use.

So that's the practical and philosophical, and I guess I'll call the third reason the "ironical". It is a massive irony to move from many servers running the CVS and Subversion protocols, to a single centralized server speaking the decentralized Git protocol. Google Code announced its shutdown a few months ago, and their rationale was explicitly along the lines of "everyone's using GitHub anyway, so we don't need to exist anymore". We're quickly heading towards a single central service for all of the world's source code.

So, especially at this conference, I expect you'll agree with me that this level of centralization is unwise.

The talk continues in the first link at the start of this summary.

takyon writes:

James J. H. Rucker, a psychiatrist and honorary lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, has argued in a British Medical Journal (BMJ) article that psychedelics should be reclassified as schedule 2 compounds:

He explains that many trials of psychedelics published before prohibition, in the 1950s and 1960s, suggested "beneficial change in many psychiatric disorders".

However, research ended after 1967. In the UK psychedelic drugs were legally classified as schedule 1 class A drugs - that is, as having "no accepted medical use and the greatest potential for harm, despite the research evidence to the contrary," he writes.

Rucker points out that psychedelics remain more legally restricted than heroin and cocaine. "But no evidence indicates that psychedelic drugs are habit forming; little evidence indicates that they are harmful in controlled settings; and much historical evidence shows that they could have use in common psychiatric disorders."

In fact, recent studies indicate that psychedelics have "clinical efficacy in anxiety associated with advanced cancer, obsessive compulsive disorder, tobacco and alcohol addiction, and cluster headaches," he writes.

And he explains that, at present, larger clinical studies on psychedelics are made "almost impossible by the practical, financial and bureaucratic obstacles" imposed by their schedule 1 classification. Currently, only one manufacturer in the world produces psilocybin for trial purposes, he says, at a "prohibitive" cost of £100,000 for 1 g (50 doses).

[...] He concludes that psychedelics are neither harmful nor addictive compared with other controlled substances, and he calls on the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs, "to recommend that psychedelics be reclassified as schedule 2 compounds to enable a comprehensive, evidence based assessment of their therapeutic potential."

[See also: Research into Psychedelics, Shut Down for Decades, is Now Yielding Exciting Results - Ed.]

AnonTechie writes:

There's a mysterious threshold that's predicted to exist beyond the limits of what we can see. It's called the quantum-classical transition.

If scientists were to find it, they'd be able to solve one of the most baffling questions in physics: why is it that a soccer ball or a ballet dancer both obey the Newtonian laws while the subatomic particles they're made of behave according to quantum rules? Finding the bridge between the two could usher in a new era in physics.

We don't yet know how the transition from the quantum world to the classical one occurs, but a new experiment, detailed in Physical Review Letters , might give us the opportunity to learn more.

The experiment involves cooling a cloud of rubidium atoms to the point that they become virtually motionless. Theoretically, if a cloud of atoms becomes cold enough, the wave-like (quantum) nature of the individual atoms will start to expand and overlap with one another. It's sort of like circular ripples in a pond that, as they get bigger, merge to form one large ring. This phenomenon is more commonly known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in which subatomic particles are chilled to near absolute zero (0 Kelvin or −273.15° C) and coalesce into a single quantum object. That quantum object is so big (compared to the individual atoms) that it's almost macroscopic—in other words, it's encroaching on the classical world.

[Also Covered By]: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/05/atomic-telescope-brings-atoms-to-standstill/

takyon writes:

Google announced "Android M" at the Google I/O developer conference. It follows "Android L," or Lollipop, which only represents about 10% of the install base.

Google outlined six major areas of improvement in Android M. Permissions controls will be more granular, with apps asking for permission when some features are used (e.g. "Allow WhatsApp to access your microphone?"). You can install apps without allowing them all of the permissions they ask for, and manage permissions after the fact at any time. However, only apps targeting Android M with the latest Android SDK will allow these changes; existing apps won't automatically gain this functionality unless they update.

A feature called Chrome Custom Tabs will allow apps to have a customized instance of the Chrome browser run atop the application when a user clicks on a hyperlink. This allows customization of the user interface, increases performance vs. launching the full browser, and means that "all of a user's autofill data, passwords, and cache are available when they open links within that application." Custom Tabs are an alternative to using a WebView. Apps will also be able to communicate with their own web servers to verify that links to their own websites should be redirected to the app. Previously, clicking a link may bring up a menu asking if you want to complete the action using a browser or an app.

Users will be able to use their fingerprint to authorize Android Pay transactions. Other apps will also be able to use the fingerprint authentication API.

Finally, Android M will introduce a new feature called Doze, which will use motion detection to decide whether the device should shut down background activity to reduce idle power usage, such as when it is sitting unused on a desk. Google is claiming two times longer idle battery life on the Nexus 9 using Doze.

AnonTechie writes:

The workplace is where people go to work. But much of the day is increasingly padded out with less productive activities, writes Peter Fleming. A few years ago a disturbing story appeared in the media that seemed to perfectly capture the contemporary experience of work and its ever increasing grip over our lives: "Man Dies at Office Desk - Nobody Notices for Five Days".

The case was unnerving for one reason mainly. People die all the time, but usually we notice. Are things so bad in the modern workplace that we can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead? Of course, the story turned out to be a hoax. An urban myth.

As it happens, each country has its own variation that still fools people when they periodically appear. In the US the dead person is a publisher. In other countries, a management consultant.

Apart from getting the actual task done, which is typically completed in short bursts, there is also a good deal of messing about, chatting, paying the bills, surfing the net, daydreaming and waiting for the day to finish. Most importantly, much of our day is spent busy being busy rather than doing things that are socially useful.

A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually "faked" an 80-hour work week. For various reasons these individuals pretended to sacrifice themselves on the altar of work and still got everything done.

In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world. For those economists trying to figure out the present "productivity puzzle" in the UK, best start looking here.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232

[Source]: http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/may/why-do-people-waste-so-much-time-at-the-office

takyon writes:

The Intercept reporter Lee Fang obtained emails through an Idaho public records request exposing dairy lobbyist involvement in crafting "Ag-gag" legislation. "Ag-gag" describes a class of agricultural industry anti-whistleblower legislation that now exists in several states, usually prohibiting photography and audio/visual recording:

State Sen. Jim Patrick, R-Twin Falls, said he sponsored the bill in response to an activist-filmed undercover video that showed cows at an Idaho plant being beaten by workers, dragged by the neck with chains, and forced to live in pens covered in fæces, which activists said made the cows slip, fall and injure themselves. The facility, Bettencourt Dairies, is a major supplier for Burger King and Kraft. The workers who were filmed were fired.

Introducing the bill, Patrick compared the activists behind the Bettencourt video to marauding invaders who burned crops to starve their enemies. "This is clear back in the sixth century B.C.," Patrick said, according to Al Jazeera America. "This is the way you combat your enemies." Patrick's bill was introduced on February 10, 2014, sailed through committee within days, and was signed by Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter on February 28. The legislation calls for a year in jail and fines up to $5,000 for covertly recording abuses on farms or for those who lie on employment applications about ties to animal rights groups or news organizations.

But the groundwork was laid by Dan Steenson, a registered lobbyist (pdf) for the Idaho Dairymen's Association, a trade group for the industry. Steenson testified in support of the ag-gag bill, clearly disclosing his relationship with the trade group. Emails, however, show that he also helped draft the bill. On January 30, before Sen. Patrick's bill was formally introduced, Steenson emailed Bob Naerebout, another Dairymen lobbyist, and Brian Kane, the Assistant Chief Deputy of the state attorney general's office, with a copy of the legislation. "The attached draft incorporates the suggestions you gave us this morning," Steenson wrote, thanking Kane for his help in reviewing the bill. Kane responded with "one minor addition" to the legislation, which he described to Steenson as "your draft." The draft text of the legislation emailed by Steenson closely mirrors the bill (pdf) signed into law.

AnonTechie writes:

Boffins [Scientists] that want to see Internet protocols extend to outer space – the so-called “Interplanetary Internet” – need to prove they're offering something useful, according to one of the father-figures of the Earth-bound Internet.

Vint Cerf, who has taken an interest in beyond-Earth applications for the Internet protocol stack since the 1990s, told last week's InterPlanetary Networking SIG (IPNSIG) meeting that to get beyond a mere curiosity, the SIG needs to be useful.

“Our challenge, to the extent that we're interested in serious expansion of communications capability for space exploration, is to demonstrate its utility,” Cerf told the gathering.

“It's not that anyone thinks that you should just build this interplanetary thing and hope that somebody uses it,” he added.

One possibility, for example, is that spacecraft that support these kinds of protocols could, having fulfilled their primary mission, have a longer economically-useful life if they can then become nodes in the interplanetary backbone.

And there's no doubt that there'll be a lot more data being flung around in space: last year, for example, the success of NASA's LADEE broadband experiment showed that free space optics could cook along at hundreds of megabits a second without an atmosphere to get in the way.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/27/interplanetary_network_sig/

IPNSIG presentations and videos: http://ipnsig.org/2015/05/26/speaker-presentation-materials-2015/