SoylentNews

c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation carries a piece of analysis/commentary on the societal ethics of advertising. I found it fascinating by the depth of arguments (true, there is a bias, but it's likely that most of us soylents share it); do take your time to read it in full, my attempts to summarize it below is bound to fail:

Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.

Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.

First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.

Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.

A classic market failure

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good — access to your attention — doesn't reflect its full social cost.

...Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.

...It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good.

soylentsandor writes:

Good news for all of us who still have to use email: spam rates are dropping! In fact, junk messages now account for just 49.7 percent of all emails.

The latest figure comes from security firm Symantec's June 2015 Intelligence Report, which notes this is the first time in over a decade that the rate has fallen below 50 percent. The last time the company recorded a similar spam rate was back in September 2003, or almost 12 years ago.

More specifically, Symantec saw 704 billion email messages sent in June, of which 353 billion were classified as spam. At one of the peaks of the spam epidemic, in June 2009, 5.7 trillion of the 6.3 trillion messages sent were spam, according to past data from Symantec.

jdavidb writes:

Thanks to New Horizons' stereo images, we can get a look at the mountains of Pluto in 3D. Now I just need to find my 3D glasses...

[Ed. Addition] Also check out this NASA.gov video Animated Flyover of Pluto's Icy Mountain and Plains:

This simulated flyover of Pluto's Norgay Montes (Norgay Mountains) and Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain) was created from New Horizons closest-approach images. Norgay Montes have been informally named for Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two humans to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Sputnik Planum is informally named for Earth's first artificial satellite. The images were acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Where do you go to find images and information on the New Horizons mission?

c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcasting Corp reports:

From 1982 to 2005, we measured the location of the North Pole as drifting slowly southwards towards Labrador around six to seven centimetres each year.

But in 2005, the North Pole suddenly, and without any warning, did two new things. First, it chucked a leftie and started heading east, parallel to the Equator. Second, the North Pole more than tripled its speed to about 24-or-so centimetres per year.

Plain and simple, rapid melting of ice on land has driven Earth's North Pole to the east. This solid ice used to be on land, but is now liquid water spread everywhere across the planet.

We've been measuring this change to the land ice with satellites beginning in the early 1990s, right up to our current CryoSat-2, which was launched in 2010. Over the decades, the satellites have taken many tens of millions of height measurements. The most recent analysis tells us that between 2011 and 2014, Greenland and Antarctica between them were losing about 500 billion tonnes of land ice per year — about three-quarters of it from Greenland. This was an increase of two-to-three times over the previous loss rate as measured between 2003 and 2009.

Original Submission

JCD writes:

We recently discussed reddit's woes and the hiring of a new CEO. However, we have seen communities come and go for many years.

Clay Shirky wrote about his experience in 1978: "Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue... And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. ... the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. ... the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom."

There are two clear trends. One is that less input and customization tends to grow bigger. Note how Geocities was replaced with Myspace which was then replaced with Facebook and Twitter. These newer systems take away personal freedom of expression and makes people follow a 'prescribed' system, albeit an easier one to use. The other trend is that communities that try to be truly free and open end up either stifled by that openness or give up. The only obvious exception is a platform that allows us to simply filter out everything we don't want to see, which becomes a series of the feared echo chamber. With the excessive amount of data and the build up of complex rules on how information is shared, where does this leave us? It seems that like the famous iron triangle allowing free (and legal) speech with the possibility of diverse opinions, a cohesive group, and growth only allows you to pick two.

It seems to me this is a wicked problem, perhaps unsolvable. But I wonder if the community thinks there are other design options? Is this even possible with human nature as it is?

Phoenix666 writes:

In an online article entitled "Screening from 100 to 24," Norbert Kraft, Chief Medical Officer of Mars One, outlines rounds three and four for candidate selection. According to Kraft, round three will take five days and concentrate on group dynamics challenges and observe the candidates as they break up into teams of 10 to 15 and learn to work together solving problems.

After the pool has been reduced to 40, they will then move onto round four where they'll be required to spend nine days in an isolation unit and their numbers will be further cut to 30. This will be followed by a four-hour Mars Settler Suitability Interview that will see the remaining candidates reduced to a pool to 24, who will be will be offered full-time employment with Mars One.
...
Announced in 2012, the Mars One project aims to land four colonists on Mars in 2025, where they would remain for the rest of their lives with additional colonists sent as Earth and Mars come back into the right launch position every 18 months or so. Living in habitats set up previously by unmanned rovers, the colonists would live off the land for their raw materials, while being the focus of a reality television show beamed back to Earth.

In Roman times people were fed to lions for entertainment. In the 21st century, it's this.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I tried to return an item to a nearby carrier-owned store, but they couldn't find my information. They never gave me a printed receipt and couldn't look it up with my phone number or name.

Now here's where it gets fishy: the clerk wanted to log into my e-mail account with the store's computer! When I told him I didn't have a web mail like GMail, etc, he asked another guy, who also said I should just log into it from there and find it.

I'm pretty sure I was giving deer-in-headlights looks while I was there. Flabbergasted is probably the word. Considering their "POS" system is based on Windows and has regular problems, this just seems tailor-made for keylogging, social engineering, or worse. I probably won't use my credit card there again.

So my question: how do I report this? Just calling customer care obviously won't cut it. I have a very hard time believing this is SOP, and that this is probably just this store--and where there's one, there are probably more.

Phoenix666 writes:

After nearly a decade in the wilderness of celestial classification, Pluto is on the rise again. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to adopt a new definition of what makes a body a planet, and to specifically demote Pluto to the status of dwarf planet. Now, with new data and images streaming in from New Horizons showing that Pluto is not only a little larger than previously thought, but also home to some remarkable geological features (including what may be some of the solar system's youngest mountain peaks, reaching to 11,000 ft/3,353 m high), many are saying it's time to restore the ninth planet to its previous station.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the most prominent advocates for Pluto are scientists working on the New Horizons mission, which reached the closest point of its long-awaited Pluto fly-by on July 14.

"We are free to call it a planet right now," Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist on the New Horizons mission, told DW.com. "Science is not decided by votes ... the planetary science community has never stopped calling bodies like Pluto 'planets'."

Really, isn't it time to re-classify Pluto as a dog?

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers who are developing miniature models of human organs on plastic chips have touted the nascent technology as a way to replace animal models. Although that goal is still far off, it is starting to come into focus as large pharmaceutical companies begin using these in vitro systems in drug development.

"We are pretty excited about the interest we get from pharma," says Paul Vulto, co-founder of the biotechnology company Mimetas in Leiden, the Netherlands. "It's much quicker than I'd expected." His company is currently working with a consortium of three large pharmaceutical companies that are testing drugs on Mimetas's kidney-on-a-chip. At the Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, last week, Mimetas was one among many drug and biotechnology firms and academic researchers showing off the latest advances in miniature model organs that respond to drugs and diseases in the same way that human organs such as heart and liver do.

Is this a better approach than mini 3D-printed organs that use a patient's stem cells?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TechTimes has a new interview with Bill James, a pioneer in the field of sports analytics (specifically applied to baseball); James started publishing his annual newsletters ("Bill James Baseball Abstract") in the late 1970's, coining the term 'sabermetrics' along the way, which arguably launched the trend of sports-related "stat geek" publications that continue to this day. He and likeminded peers came up with several new metrics which they felt provided answers to certain useful questions with more precision than one could obtain with the traditional ones used by baseball insiders and fans to evaluate players from time immemorial (batting averages, hits and home run totals, runs batted in, pitchers' earned run averages). But, don't call James a statistician or a 'numbers guy':

To James, the value of sabermetrics is more qualitative than quantitative. He gives a couple examples of how sabermetrics are being used by nearly every major league team today: batter-specific defensive shifts, particularly of infielders, based on location analysis of each batter's hit balls; and pitch framing (the catcher's art of selling a pitch thrown outside the strike zone as a strike to the plate umpire, using body language and glove position).

Since 2003, James has been employed by the Boston Red Sox to assist in player evaluation; however, James still maintains an active role in the sabermetrics community. A particularly good interview by Stephen Dubner was published on Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics blog in 2008, which goes into considerable baseball detail.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes suggesting the following ComputerWorld story:

BitTorrent has long billed its Sync file-sharing service as a peer-to-peer alternative to cloud storage, but on Wednesday the company announced it's working with Onehub on a new, combined offering for large businesses.

Onehub Sync integrates BitTorrent Sync into Onehub's online file-storage service through what the two companies call a hybrid, peer-to-peer+one approach. The result is said to combine the benefits of syncing directly between peers with using Onehub as a "persistent peer" that's always available in the cloud.

BitTorrent's Sync service requires at least two peer computers to be connected for file sharing to occur. With Onehub Sync, the cloud part of the equation means that users' Onehub Sync clients will always have a peer to connect with, ensuring that their content can stay current.

"Sync is ideal for organizations with hundreds of people, or individual workgroups," said Erik Pounds, vice president of product management for BitTorrent Sync, in a blog post announcing the news. Onehub is well-suited to companies of all sizes and delivers key features for enterprises, he said.

The combined offering provides numerous benefits for large enterprises, including speed, scalability, reliability and security, Pounds said.

Phoenix666 writes:

The asteroid-mining industry has taken a step closer to becoming an actual thing, with the successful deployment of Planetary Resources' Arkyd 3 Reflight (A3R) spacecraft from the International Space Station Wednesday night. The A3R's three-month mission will be used to test and validate some basic technologies that the company hopes to incorporate in future spacecraft that will prospect near-Earth asteroids for potentially valuable resources.

"Our philosophy is to test often, and if possible, to test in space," says Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki. "The A3R is the most sophisticated, yet cost-effective, test demonstration spacecraft ever built."

The small craft was sent to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 resupply mission in April. On Wednesday (July 15), it was sent out the Kibo airlock to begin checking out its avionics, control systems and software, among other systems. It will be followed up by the Arkyd-6 (A6), another demonstrator set to launch later this year. The larger A6 will check out next-generation attitude control, power and communication systems, as well as the sensors that will be used to detect resources with good potential for mining.

When I was a kid I found a science fiction novel on the shelves in a cabin in Glacier National Park entitled, "Assignment in Space with Rip Foster," in which the heroes try to steer an asteroid of pure thorium back to Earth orbit. The cover of the book was hokey, but the story was one of the better "science" science fiction stories I've read, in the sense that there were no magical technologies to make everything easy to accomplish; there was just plain old rocketry and physics. But as interesting as the concept of asteroid mining is, wouldn't the fabulous costs and potential to crash commodities markets once you brought something back to Earth defeat the profit motive?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following from PhysOrg:

When a flash of light beamed from the arid New Mexico desert early on July 16, 1945, residents of the historic Hispanic village of Tularosa felt windows shake and heard dishes fall. Some in the largely Catholic town fell to their knees and prayed.

The end of the world is here, they thought.

What villagers didn't know was that just before 5:30 a.m., scientists from the then-secret city of Los Alamos successfully exploded the first atomic bomb at the nearby Trinity Site. Left in its place was a crater that stretched a half-mile wide and several feet deep.

Thursday mark[ed] the 70th anniversary of the Trinity Test in southern New Mexico. It comes as Tularosa residents say they were permanently affected by the test and want acknowledgement and compensation from the U.S. government.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders, said the aftermath caused rare forms of cancer for many of the 30,000 residents in the area surrounding Trinity. She said residents weren't told about the site's dangers and often picnicked there and took artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as "trinitite."

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute are studying past and present cancer cases in New Mexico that might be related to the Trinity Test.

"It's a moral and ethical issue. It's about consent," said Cordova, a former Tularosa resident and cancer survivor. "We were never given the opportunity to do anything to protect ourselves, before or after."

Vera Burnett-Powell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program, did not immediately return a phone message and email from The Associated Press.

Additional resources follow.

Phoenix666 writes:

The challenge was to design "the next generation of 3D-printed cars," and qualifying entries had to demonstrate that the design could result in the world's first road-ready 3D printed car, which Local Motors really does plan to put into production in 2016.

The idea is to roll out a low-speed version at the beginning of the year, and follow it up with a "fully homologated highway-ready" model before 2017 (homologated is fancyspeak for a vehicle approved for a particular use).

The winning entry was announced last week, and it's a twofer that demonstrates the high degree of customization enabled by 3D printing. Kevin Lo, a long-time Local Motors collaborator known as Reload, won for a duo of designs called Reload Swim and Reload Sport.

Custom-printed cars sound fun, but who bears the cost of safety certification?

Arthur T Knackerbracket suggests the following from PhysOrg:

A simple, lower-cost new method for DNA profiling of human hairs developed by the University of Adelaide should improve opportunities to link criminals to serious crimes.

The researchers have modified existing laboratory methods and been able to produce accurate DNA profiles from trace amounts at a much higher success rate.

"Technological advancements over the last 10 years have allowed police and forensic scientists to profile crime-scene DNA from ever smaller and more challenging samples collected from fingerprints, skin cells, saliva and hairs," says Associate Professor Jeremy Austin, Deputy Director with the University's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.

"DNA profiling of human hairs is critical to solving many serious crimes but most hairs found at crime scenes contain very little DNA because it has been severely dehydrated as part of the hair growth process. This makes DNA testing of hairs a real challenge."

[...] Lead-author Assistant Professor Dennis McNevin, from the University of Canberra, says: "Our simple modifications will allow this trace DNA to be analysed in a standard forensic laboratory with improved success rates of DNA profiling and without increased error rates.

"This is very important in forensic science as false positive results can lead to incorrect identifications and poor outcomes in the judicial system."