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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Webologist reports on Moozvine, a startup offering crowd funding for sci-fi authors and a pay-as-you-like model for sci-fi fans. Stories either start free or require a minimum pledge to unlock; once unlocked they remain free forever.

"Many great authors are currently lost in the depths of the archaic publishing system – if they are not favoured by a publisher their work is essentially lost forever. With Moozvine authors can build up their fanbase with each new book, story or poem and this will allow them to set higher thresholds."

Four stories are already unlocked, including Soft Apocalypse, the short story that led to Hugo Award winner Will McIntosh's first novel.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket gets out of breath with this story from CBCNews Montreal:

Quebecers in need of physical activity could soon be leaving their doctors with a script for exercise rather than for a prescription drug. The province's 8,800 general practitioners are all getting new prescription pads to give patients direct instructions on how much physical activity they should be doing.

The program is an initiative of the Quebec Federation of General Practitioners and the Grand Défi Pierre Lavoie — a non-profit organization set up by Lavoie, a nine-time Kona Ironman finisher from Saguenay, to encourage Quebec youth to adopt healthy lifestyles.

The prescription pads allow doctors to instruct patients on how much exercise they should be doing, breaking their daily dose into 15 minute "exercise cubes." A similar system is already used in many Quebec schools. The type of activity can be tailored to each patient's needs and abilities: for some, it may be swimming or running. For others, it could be as simple as walking or gardening.

"Doctors are showing that they take this seriously," said Martin Juneau, director of prevention at the Montreal Heart Institute. "It's not just advice. This way, it's a medical prescription."

Quebec's health ministry and researchers plan to follow the program for three years to evaluate how well it works.

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takyon sent in links on the following:

Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor, longtime free software advocate and FSF board member, crowdfunds a million dollars to launch a bid for president.

One might suspect that this might now be SN's favorite choice for the office.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig met his self-imposed goal of crowd-funding $1 million by Labor Day, and Sunday on ABC announced he's running for the Democratic nomination for President. Lessig, an activist with a grassroots following among some progressives, says he's running on a singular platform — the Citizen Equality Act of 2017. It would expand voting access, ban gerrymandering and institute campaign finance reform.

"I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room," Lessig said Sunday on ABC. "This stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work. And we have to find a way to elevate the debate to focus on the changes that would actually get us a government that could work again, that is not captured by the tiniest fraction of the one percent who fund campaigns."

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frojack writes:

The Times of India has an article that suggests all (or at least most) of our musical instruments may become obsolete because of the invention of a new system of musical notation.

The theory is that western musical instruments are designed with our octave based system of discrete notes because of the limitations of the musical notation system available at the time. Because multiple instruments playing together had to harmonize, it was necessary to limit the actual tones that were playable to what could be written down on paper.

Without the limitations of the notation, the instruments might have been designed to play other notes than the octave system we have standardized on.

Dr Ryan has created a "new notation system for Justly Intoned music, in a format which can be inputted into a computer using an ASCII computer keyboard, to aid computer sequencing of such music. With this new method we will be able to score music in a way we could never do with the octave based notation system we've been using since the middle ages.

Such Just Intonation music, unfortunately may not be playable on many of our discretely tuned instruments such as pianos. Even the frets on a guitar lock you out of Just intonation.

A Sitar allows the playing of music written with Just Intonation, as do some synthesizers.
   

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ticho writes:

Nomophobia - or no mobile phone phobia - the onset of severe anxiety on losing access to your smartphone has been talked about for years. But in Asia, the birthplace of the selfie stick and the emoji, psychologists say smartphone addiction is fast on the rise and the addicts are getting younger.

A recent study surveyed almost 1,000 students in South Korea, where 72% of children own a smartphone by the age of 11 or 12 and spend on average 5.4 hours a day on them - as a result about 25% of children were considered addicted to smartphones. The study, to be published in 2016 found that stress was an important indicator of your likelihood to get addicted.

Asia and its 2.5bn smartphone users provides a stream of phone-related "mishap news", such as the Taiwanese tourist who had to be rescued after she walked off a pier while checking Facebook on her phone. Or the woman from China's Sichuan province rescued by fire fighters after falling into a drain while looking at her phone.

They may make for slapstick headlines but in Singapore too the concern is that those most vulnerable are getting younger. With its population of just 6 million, it has one of the world's highest smartphone penetration rates. It also has specialists in digital addiction, a cyber wellness clinic and a campaign to see digital addiction be formally recognised.

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fliptop writes:

In July we learned some Jeep models were vulnerable to a remote control hack that allowed the attacker to do pretty much anything, including shut down the vehicle. Fiat Chrysler has issued a recall of variants of the 2015 Renegade models that are equipped with 6.5-inch touchscreens:

Fiat Chrysler said measures have already been applied to stop this kind of cyberattack, and the remote block access controls issued "require no customer or dealer actions," commenting:

"The campaign -- which involves radios that differ from those implicated in another, similar recall - is designed to protect connected vehicles from remote manipulation. If unauthorized, such interference constitutes a criminal act.

The Company is unaware of any injuries related to software exploitation, nor is it aware of any related complaints, warranty claims or accidents - independent of the media demonstration."

There's an online utility for checking your vehicle's VIN to see if it's affected by the recall.

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ghost writes:

Eric "ESR" Raymond, perhaps best known for The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Sex Tips For Geeks and (ironically) Surprised By Wealth has set up a patreon page.

The background to this is that while I'm now getting some regular bucks for working on NTPsec, it's not a lot. Royalties from my books have been dwindling and my wife Cathy isn't making all that much from legal contract gigs that are all she can get since Obamacare costs killed her full-time law job. Add the fact that our eight-year-old car has developed problems that would cost more to fix than its book value, and the house needs a new roof, and it's looking pretty broke out.

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with a small article about the Large Hadron Collider from phys.org:

This week, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched off for its second scheduled technical stop since starting to run at the new high energy of 6.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) per beam. These regular stops allow engineers and technicians to maintain the machine and ensure that all its components are working well.

"Lots of activities were planned for this technical stop," says Marzia Bernadini of the CERN Engineering department, who is responsible for coordinating and planning the works. "As well as many maintenance and consolidation tasks, this week's work focussed on two main tasks: installing four beam-gas vertex detectors at Point 4; and replacing more than 1000 electronic circuit boards in the accelerator's quench protection system (QPS)."

The job of the QPS is to monitor the LHC's superconducting magnets for tiny changes in voltage. These magnets steer the particle beams around the accelerator's 27-kilometre ring. These magnets operate at very low temperatures – 1.9 K or -271.3°C – and even a tiny amount of energy released for any reason inside a magnet can warm its superconducting materials to above the critical superconducting temperature, causing a loss of superconductivity. This is called a quench, and just one millijoule – the energy deposited by a 1-centime euro coin falling from 5 cm – is enough to provoke one. When this happens, the current has to be safely extracted in a very short time. Magnet protection in case of quenches is a crucial part of the design of the LHC's magnetic system, and the electronic cards are in effect the eyes and ears of the quench protection system.

"We have many thousands of QPS electronic cards in the LHC," says Andrzej Siemko, who leads the Machine Protection and Electrical Integrity group in the CERN Technology department. "Some of these, used for the protection of the main dipole bus bars, are showing a higher sensitivity to radiation than expected, so they need to be replaced."

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with the story of how the Borg began from phys.org:

Punching in security codes to deactivate the alarm at his store became a thing of the past for Jowan Oesterlund when he implanted a chip into his hand about 18 months ago.

"When I walk into my studio, I just wave my hand at the alarm, and the alarm turns off," the tattoo artist said.

"Whenever someone shows up with security clearance, he will wave and the alarm is deactivated, the lights are turned on... it will start up the computer, the cash machine and so on," he added.

Oesterlund is one of the small but growing number of people around the world who has a grain-sized NFC (Near Field Communications) chip embedded in him.

In fact, so convinced is he that "this is the future" that he has two of them, one in his hand and the other in his arm.

"One year ago it was 'that's just stupid', or 'wow that's just awesome'. But now multinational companies are looking into it," he said, pointing to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky as an example.

The renowned cybersecurity company had brought in Oesterlund to carry out a live demonstration of chip implantation at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin which opens to the public Friday.

The nervous volunteer is Rainer Bock, who works at Kaspersky. After Oesterlund used a needle to put a chip under Bock's skin, the new member of the "cyborg" club said: "It didn't hurt."

With a memory of just 880 bytes, the chips are far from the science fiction equivalent of data powerhouses carrying billions of encrypted secret documents.

Rather, they tend to have specific functions, such as unlocking a door or hooking up to an app on a smartphone.

Despite the limited uses, human chip implant manufacturer Dangerous Things told AFP that there are now around 10,000 "cyborgs"—or humans with digital chips in them—across the globe.

Is this the future? No more car keys. No more remembering passwords or pin numbers. Just have a chip or two implanted into your hand and hope that nobody ever finds a way to read them with a small handheld device from a few feet away.

Now where did I put my tinfoil gloves?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Grsecurity® is an extensive security enhancement to the Linux kernel that defends against a wide range of security threats through intelligent access control, memory corruption-based exploit prevention, and a host of other system hardening that generally require no configuration. It has been actively developed and maintained for the past 14 years. Commercial support for grsecurity is available through Open Source Security, Inc.

In a big red block at the top of their home page is the following warning:

Important Notice Regarding Public Availability of Stable Patches
Due to continued violations by several companies in the embedded industry of grsecurity®'s trademark and registered copyrights, effective September 9th 2015 stable patches of grsecurity will be permanently unavailable to the general public. For more information, read the full announcement.

And I thought GRSecurity was based on the GPL'd work called "Linux". Guess I was wrong.

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"gewg_" writes:

Common Dreams reports

The Seattle Times reports that

The ruling--believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country--overturns the law [I-1240] voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.

Teacher and author Mercedes Schneider offers more on the Act:

As is true of charter schools nationwide, the charters in Washington State (up to the current ruling) were eligible for public funding diverted from traditional public schools. Charter schools were approved via a November 2012 ballot initiative (I-1240, the Charter Schools Act) in which charters were declared to be "common schools" despite their not being subject to local control and local accountability. And also like America's charters in general, Washington's charters are not under the authority of elected school boards.

Thus, Washington voters had approved to give public money to private entities--a one-way street that provided no means for such funds to overseen by the public.

[...] The new ruling (pdf)[1] states that charters, "devoid of local control from their inception to their daily operation", cannot be classified as "common schools," nor have "access to restricted common school funding."

[...] "The Supreme Court has affirmed what we've said all along--charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer funding," said Kim Mead, president of the [Washington Education Association], in a statement.

"Instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to unaccountable charter schools, it's time for the Legislature to fully fund K-12 public schools so that all of Washington's children get the quality education the Constitution guarantees them," Mead continued.

The Associated Press reports that the state had one charter school last year, and eight more have opened in the past few weeks.

I pity Ms. Schneider's students if she routinely starts sentences with conjunctions--especially consecutive, redundant conjunctions.

[1] I had trouble with the connection.

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in from afar with a story from phys.org:

Astronomers from the University of Cambridge have developed a new, highly accurate method of measuring the distances between stars, which could be used to measure the size of the galaxy, enabling greater understanding of how it evolved.

Using a technique which searches out stellar 'twins', the researchers have been able to measure distances between stars with far greater precision than is possible using typical model-dependent methods. The technique could be a valuable complement to the Gaia satellite - which is creating a three-dimensional map of the sky over five years - and could aid in the understanding of fundamental astrophysical processes at work in the furthest reaches of our galaxy. Details of the new technique are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Determining distances is a key problem in astronomy, because unless we know how far away a star or group of stars is, it is impossible to know the size of the galaxy or understand how it formed and evolved," said Dr Paula Jofre Pfeil of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the paper's lead author. "Every time we make an accurate distance measurement, we take another step on the cosmic distance ladder."

The best way to directly measure a star's distance is by an effect known as parallax, which is the apparent displacement of an object when viewed along two different lines of sight - for example, if you hold out your hand in front of you and look at it with your left eye closed and then with your right eye closed, your hand will appear to move against the background. The same effect can be used to calculate the distance to stars, by measuring the apparent motion of a nearby star compared to more distant background stars. By measuring the angle of inclination between the two observations, astronomers can use the parallax to determine the distance to a particular star.

However, the parallax method can only be applied for stars which are reasonably close to us, since beyond distances of 1600 light years, the angles of inclination are too small to be measured by the Hipparcos satellite, a precursor to Gaia. Consequently, of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, we have accurate measurements for just 100,000.

Gaia will be able to measure the angles of inclination with far greater precision than ever before, for stars up to 30,000 light years away. Scientists will soon have precise distance measurements for the one billion stars that Gaia is mapping - but that's still only one percent of the stars in the Milky Way.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"Richard Hartmann, Peter Palfrader, and Jonathan McDowell have set up the first official onion service mirrors of the Debian operating system's software package infrastructure. This means that it is now possible to update your Debian system without the update information or downloaded packages leaving the Tor network at all, preventing a network adversary from discovering information about your system. A follow-up post by Richard includes guidance on using apt-transport-tor with the new mirrors.

These services are only the first in what should hopefully become a fully Tor-enabled system mirroring "the complete package lifecycle, package information, and the website". "This service is not redundant, it uses a key which is stored on the local drive, the .onion will change, and things are expected to break", wrote Richard, but if you are interested in trying out the new infrastructure, see the write-ups for further information."

This was orignially found at Blog.TorProject.org

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes with an article from Phys.org:

Bring on the night, say National Park visitors in new study

Natural wonders like tumbling waterfalls, jutting rock faces and banks of wildflowers have long drawn visitors to America's national parks and inspired efforts to protect their beauty.

According to a study published Sept. 4 in Park Science, visitors also value and seek to protect a different kind of threatened natural resource in the parks: dark nighttime skies.

Almost 90 percent of visitors to Maine's Acadia National Park interviewed for the study agreed or strongly agreed with the statements, "Viewing the night sky is important to me" and "The National Park Service should work to protect the ability of visitors to see the night sky."

Acadia National Park will hold its annual Night Skies Festival Sept. 10 through 14 this year.

According to the study, led by Robert Manning of the University of Vermont, 99 percent of the world's skies suffer from light pollution and two-thirds of Americans can't see the Milky Way from their homes.

Most light threatening the National Parks comes from development, the study says. Light from cities or towns can reach parks from as far away as 250 miles.

"It's a typical story," Manning says. "We begin to value things as they disappear. Fortunately, darkness in a renewable resource and we can we can do things to restore it in the parks."

In addition to gauging the value to park visitors of a dark nighttime sky, the study also provides data to park managers at Acadia - and by extension, other parks - enabling them to develop visitor-driven plans for setting light pollution targets.

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AnonTechie writes:

It sounds like something out of a Terminator movie. Chemical engineers at the University of Michigan have developed a plastic that instantly heals itself when it’s cracked by a bullet or other projectile.

Zavada and his lab mates had been working on self-healing materials for medical uses—surgical adhesives that could be used instead of stitches, for instance. But when they heard that a team at NASA's Langley Research Center was working on similar technology to try to quickly heal holes in space suits and outer space habitats, they switched gears. The University of Michigan engineers joined forces with NASA to create a material that solidifies once it is exposed to the atmosphere. “Once we started working with NASA, we decided we might be able to use the action of oxygen leaking to drive that reaction,” Zavada says.

Their goal was to create a material that could heal itself almost instantaneously, because, in space, a rip in a space suit or breach of a space station wall can be deadly.

Zavada and his advisor, Tim Scott, came up with a solution. They sandwiched tributylborane, a chemical that quickly hardens when it’s exposed to oxygen, between two layers of plastic. When one or both of the plastic sheets was punctured, the tributylborane immediately started hardening, covering the hole.

[Video]: https://youtu.be/JVWFvKxrcLg

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