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takyon writes in with this story from http://www.vice.com/read/colombia-corruption-ai-819:

Eduardo was paid by the Colombian government to uncover organized crime. This was no easy task in a country with a long history of ingrained corruption, sparked in part by Pablo Escobar in the mid to late 1980s. Eduardo was faced with witnesses being murdered before he could speak to them and the daunting task of unraveling the web of corruption that allowed individual paramilitary commanders to orchestrate literally thousands of assassinations.

To help unravel that web, he created computer software that uses complex AI to map connections between legitimate authorities and organized crime groups. His technique has achieved some impressive results, and he's been labelled a rising star of crime fighting. I got in touch with him to find out how his methods could be used in Britain, and how he coped with the risks involved in investigating corruption in Colombia.

Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán: [...] Since the end of the 90s, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia [a Colombian drug trafficking and paramilitary group] supported local campaigns and even created local political parties. In 2002 they supported around 35 to 40 percent of the elected legislators at the National Congress of Colombia, as well as several mayors, governors, and municipal legislators. The legislators who were supported by them actually legislated between 2002 and 2006. You can imagine the perverse effects when laws are proposed and approved by people who were supported by a criminal group.

How has your system helped to bring serious corruption like this to light?

Some types of crime are really complex, especially cases involving hundreds or thousands of people interacting. Understanding those situations requires computational tools, because it's impossible for the human brain to make sense of thousands of names, dates, places, and facts. That's why, at Vortex Foundation, the anti-corruption organization I founded, we created protocols, tools, and processes to analyze high volumes of information and understand the structure of complex criminal networks.

http://www.scivortex.com/vortex/showcase.html

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Phoenix666 writes:

UBC researchers have created the first self-propelled particles capable of delivering coagulants against the flow of blood to treat severe bleeding, a potentially huge advancement in trauma care.

"Bleeding is the number one killer of young people, and maternal death from postpartum hemorrhage can be as high as one in 50 births in low resource settings so these are extreme problems," explains Christian Kastrup, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia.

Traditional methods of halting severe bleeding are not very effective when the blood loss originates inside the body like the uterus, sinus or abdomen.

"People have developed hundreds of agents that can clot blood but the issue is that it's hard to push these therapies against severe blood flow, especially far enough upstream to reach the leaking vessels. Here, for the first time, we've come up with an agent that can do that," Kastrup said.

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frojack writes:

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts seems to have the most accurate hurricane forecasting model of the several models currently being used. Its predictions for Hurricane Joaquin had the storm heading out to sea instead of making landfall in North America. And that is exactly what is happening. Most US models had predicted several successive landfalls, each proving wrong as the days went by.

But this isn't the first time. The European Model predicted Hurricane Sandy's left hook far in advance, unlike other models.

The problem is not limited to the lack of computer power, but also the amount of data collected and fed into the models to initiate the modeling process.

TFA found on the Tampa Bay Times

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NotSanguine writes:

Spencer Soper over at Bloomberg is reporting on Amazon's announcement that they plan to cease selling video streaming devices that it claims "aren't easily compatible with its video service."

From the article:

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling the Apple TV and Google's Chromecast since those devices don't "interact well" with Prime Video. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Prime Video doesn't run easily on its rival's hardware.

Roku Inc.'s set-top device, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation, which work with Amazon's video service, aren't affected, it said. Amazon's Fire TV stick, which plugs into an HDMI port to connect televisions with streaming services such as Netflix and Prime Video, is the company's best-selling electronic device.

Should this be considered an anti-competitive move by Amazon, or are they really trying to improve the "user experience" by favoring products that play better with their services? What streaming devices do Soylentils use, and does use of Amazon Prime Video impact your choice of streaming devices?

This story is also being covered by The New York Times, USA Today, CNET and many others.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Samsung likes to brag about its 'smart' televisions. Well, maybe they're a little too smart for their own good. Drawing an uncomfortable parallel with Volkswagen's emission rigging scheme, the European Commission is now investigating the South-Korean company to figure out whether its televisions' are designed to modify their power consumption when they detect that they are being tested for energy efficiency. This alleged fraud has been uncovered by independent labs, once again.

Samsung strongly denies that its TVs' "motion lighting" feature is designed to fool official energy efficiency tests or that it constitutes a defeat device. The company says it reduces screen brightness in response to numerous types of real-world content including fast-moving action movies and sports and slower moving footage such as weather reports - not just during test conditions.

"There is no comparison [between motion lighting and VW defeat devices]," a Samsung spokesman said. "This is not a setting that only activates during compliance testing. On the contrary, it is an 'out of the box' setting, which reduces power whenever video motion is detected. Not only that, the content used for testing energy consumption has been designed by the international electrotechnical commission to best model actual average picture level internationally."

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tt0103855 wrote in to tell us:

The Secret Service thought we all needed a reminder that databases of personal information will be exploited for political gain. The chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, was leading the investigation into one of the recent cases of Secret Service misconduct. Agents within the service accessed records concerning Chaffetz' application to the Secret Service (which was not acted upon) and then disseminated that information within the agency and talked to the press about it.

The full Inspector General's report (pdf) is available.

Will Chaffetz learn from his experience and strengthen privacy laws for regular citizens?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Many tropical Pacific island nations are struggling to adapt to gradual sea level rise stemming from warming oceans and melting ice caps. Now they may also see much more frequent extreme interannual sea level swings. The culprit is a projected behavioral change of the El Niño phenomenon and its characteristic Pacific wind response, according to recent computer modeling experiments and tide-gauge analysis by scientists Matthew Widlansky and Axel Timmermann at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and their colleague Wenju Cai at CSIRO in Australia.

During El Niño, warm water and high sea levels shift eastward, leaving in their wake low sea levels in the western Pacific. Scientists have already shown that this east-west seesaw is often followed six months to a year later by a similar north-south sea level seesaw with water levels dropping by up to one foot (30 cm) in the Southern Hemisphere. Such sea level drops expose shallow marine ecosystems in South Pacific Islands, causing massive coral die-offs with a foul smelling tide called taimasa (pronounced [kai' ma'sa]) by Samoans.

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frojack writes:

Just four types of gut bacteria in the stools seem to make all the difference, predicting which babies will get Asthma later in life, and which children won't, researchers say. The finding could help identify children at high risk of asthma, and it could also lead to the development of probiotic mixtures that prevent the disease.

For years there have been hints that the microbiome—the collection of bacteria and viruses that live in the human body at an early age, may be involved in the eventual development of Asthma. There are no tests to prove it, and no causal mechanism has been found, but years of epidemiological data hinted that this might be the case.

That was half of the study. The other half was to determine if seeding the missing bacteria into the gut could prevent Asthma.

So even if the mechanism isn't understood, the presence of certain gut bacteria seems to prevent Asthma. Unfortunately the researchers can't go around seeding stool samples into the guts of babies, and significant work will be necessary to come up with a safe treatment to naturally grow the needed bacteria,

The story appeared on ScienceMag's website.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Roberto Ferdman writes in The Washington Post that researchers at Texas A&M University, looking for patterns in food consumption among elementary school children, found an interesting quirk about when and why kids choose to eat their vegetables. After analyzing plate waste data from nearly 8,500 students, it seems there's at least one variable that tends to affect whether kids eat their broccoli, spinach or green beans more than anything: what else is on the plate.

Kids are much more likely to eat their vegetable portion when it's paired with a food that isn't so delicious that it gets all the attention. For example, when chicken nuggets and burgers, the most popular items among schoolchildren, are on the menu, vegetable waste tends to rise significantly. When other less-beloved foods, like deli sliders or baked potatoes, are served, the opposite seems to happen."Our research team looked at whether there is a relationship between consumption of certain entrees and vegetables that would lead to plate waste," says Dr. Oral Capps Jr. "We found that popular entrees such as burgers and chicken nuggets, contributed to greater waste of less popular vegetables."

Traci Man, who has been studying eating habits, self-control, and dieting for more than 20 years, believes that food pairings are crucial in getting kids to eat vegetables. "Normally, vegetables will lose the competition that they're in — the competition with all the other delicious food on your plate. Vegetables might not lose that battle for everyone, but they do for most of us. This strategy puts vegetables in a competition they can win, by pitting vegetables against no food at all. To do that, you just eat your vegetable first, before any of the other food is there," says Mann. "We tested it with kids in school cafeterias, where it more than quadrupled the amount of vegetables eaten. It's just about making it a little harder to make the wrong choices, and a little easier to make the right ones."

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Phoenix666 writes:

The employee records from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not included in the data cache from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack, according to government officials. However, that doesn't mean the CIA has been unaffected by the breach. The Washington Post reports that according to unnamed current and former US officials, the CIA pulled "a number of officers" from the US Embassy in Beijing as a precautionary measure following the breach—precisely because their names would not appear in State Department personnel files believed to have been obtained by Chinese intelligence operatives.

The question of how to respond to the OPM breach was raised yet again during testimony by intelligence and defense officials on September 29 before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The hearing on "United States Cybersecurity policy and threats" delved into the distinction being made by the Obama administration between electronic economic espionage and the hacking of government agencies and why the breach at the OPM was not considered an attack warranting a proportionate response from the US. No US official has gone on the record to attribute the OPM breach to China.

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"gewg_" writes:

Quartz reports

Last year, [...] Ronald Dillon, a longtime New York City Health Department worker [...] was suspended for 20 days without pay from his job at the agency's IT help desk--for talking in a "deliberately robotic fashion" when he answered phone calls. According to Health Department officials, Dillon had used a robotic voice on "at least five occasions" between February and April 2013.

Dillon offered a perfectly reasonable explanation for his robot-voice: His natural Brooklyn accent was often difficult for callers to understand. "They objected to the tone of my voice so I made it atonal", he told DNAInfo.

But the city judge who threw down the suspension said Dillon was likely bitter over being reassigned to the tech support job from his previous role as a project manager and supervisor. Dillon has an MBA.

So, that's where the story ends, right? Wrong. Dillon now faces another suspension--this one for 30 days--after he was caught still answering the phone like a robot.

"You. Have. Reached. The. Help-desk. This. Is. Mr. Dill-on. How. May. I. Help. You?" Dillon beeped and booped, in a recorded call obtained by DNAInfo (robot emphasis ours).

After introducing himself, Dillon reverts to his normal speaking voice. While seemingly harmless, Dillon's failure to follow his directives was apparently enough to earn him another suspension, pending health department approval. The robot voice was reportedly so realistic that it made at least one caller hang up because she wanted to speak to a real person, not an automated messaging system.

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Techwolf writes:

Shine https://www.getshine.com/ is being install by some mobile network operators to combat the freeloaders they see as advertisers that chew up there resources.

Digicel Group [DCEL.N] is to deploy ad-blocking software on mobile networks in its Caribbean and Asia Pacific markets, it said on Wednesday, making it one of the first mobile operators to join the battle between internet users and advertisers.

Israeli ad-blocking software maker Shine Technologies and Digicel said in a joint statement that the Kingston, Jamaica-based operator was going to install its software on its networks, starting with Jamaica itself and then rolling it out to its many other national markets across the Caribbean and in the Asia Pacific region.

The use of ad-blocking software has been growing rapidly on desktop computers but until now has been rare on mobiles.

Some 200 million people used ad blockers last year, up 40 percent from a year earlier, resulting in $22 billion in lost advertising revenue, according to a study by Adobe and PageFair, an anti ad-blocking technology company.

Although only about 5 percent of internet users globally use the tools, they are especially popular in Europe. In Germany and Poland, for instance, the figure is above 30 percent.

Broad adoption of ad-blocking would bring a new set of problems for online publishers, many of whom are already struggling with plummeting ad prices.

Others covering this story:

• http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/30/us-digicel-adblocking-idUSKCN0RU2BY20150930
• http://recode.net/2015/09/30/caribbean-carrier-digicel-first-to-offer-shines-ad-blocking-technology/
• http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/google-facebook-others-face-fees-advertise-digicels-mobile-users/2015-10-01
• https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=d4vs6vaeJ9nmJNMVlTPVUK6DdTW7M&q=shine&lr=English&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8QqgIwAGoVChMI-Jz_iouiyAIVzJiACh3GGAEg

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takyon writes:

IBM has made progress towards the creation of usable carbon nanotube transistors:

IBM Research reported in a paper in Science today a technique for making carbon nanotube transistors with tiny (~9nm) contacts that exhibit low, size-independent resistance. This overcomes a huge hurdle in shrinking transistor size beyond current limits. "I think this is the first carbon nanotube transistor demonstration with such a small, low resistance contact," said Shu-Jen Han, manager of the Nanoscale Science & Technology Group at IBM Research and an author on the paper (End-bonded contacts for carbon nanotube transistors with low, size-independent resistance).

[...] Earlier this summer, IBM unveiled the first 7 nanometer node silicon test chip, pushing the limits of silicon technologies and ensuring further innovations for IBM Systems and the IT industry. By advancing research of carbon nanotubes to replace traditional silicon, IBM is hoping to pave the way for a post-silicon future and delivering on its $3 billion chip R&D investment announced in July 2014.

[...] "This is an important advance but there are many other challenges to be solved such as how to purify the nanotubes, how to place them properly, and we also made good progress there but when we are talking about new technology so many things have to be right. People tend to divide the technology into two parts, materials and the device. Solving the contact size is probably top challenge on the device side. There are still a bunch of issues on the materials side," said Han.

Indeed the paper points out, "We have only demonstrated p-channel SWNT transistors using p-type end contacts. It will be difficult to form end-bonded n-type contacts to SWNTs in which electrons are directly injected into the conduction band of SWNTs with this carbide formation approach as metals with low enough work function tend to oxidize first rather than react with C. However, it is still possible to realize n-channel SWNT device operation even with end-bonded contacts to high work function metals through electrostatic doping in the vicinity of the source electrode."

Also reported at The Register, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and The New York Times.

Previously: IBM and Partners Develop 7nm Process Chips

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eof writes:

At the NPR site is the article What You'll Actually Pay At 1,550 Colleges which provides some idea of what current students pay to attend their college. The data were taken from the information gathered by the Department of Education for the College Scorecard. The data reflect students who received federal aid; the net price appears to be after taking into account non-loan aid.

The data show:

There are significant differences between what students from low income and high income families pay, particularly at elite private universities. The school where that difference is the greatest is Amherst College. The cost of attendance (including tuition, fees, books, etc.) for students in the lowest income tier (with a family income of less than $30,000) is only $2,000, but for students in the highest tier (over $110,000), the cost is $40,000. Amherst is among the top 50 schools that emphasize upward mobility, and this pricing structure reflects that.

The cost curve for public universities is flatter. Public colleges don't offer steep discounts for low-income families. What this means is that public colleges can actually be the more expensive option, particularly if a student's family is low-income. But overall, the typical public school is still cheaper than the typical private school.

At private universities, almost no one pays full price. Even at the high end of the income spectrum, the net price is significantly less than the sticker price. It's the opposite at public schools. In public schools, net price often meets sticker price at the high end.

Of course the numbers are just a guide. One caveat is mentioned: the numbers are for people who have enrolled. Some of these students may have been targeted by the schools and offered more generous financial aid packages.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hawaii's attorney general on Wednesday said the state has recovered more than $53.1 million in general excise tax, penalties and interest from nine online travel companies, following a final judgement by the state Tax Appeal Court.

The online travel companies include Travelocity.com, Expedia, Orbitz and Priceline.com, according to Attorney General Doug Chin. The tax litigation began in 2011 after the state tax department issued GE tax and TAT assessments against the online travel companies for back taxes starting from 2000 in 2010. The online travel companies refused to pay, arguing their revenue generating activities did not occur in the state of Hawaii.

"Online travel companies derive substantial profits from the sale of hotel rooms, rental cars and other services in Hawaii. The importance of the Hawaii Supreme Court ruling is the precedent it establishes. People or companies who provide goods and services through the Internet that are used or consumed in Hawaii are subject to Hawaii taxation, despite being domiciled in other states," said Chin.

http://westhawaiitoday.com/news/state-wire/hawaii-recovers-531m-general-excise-taxes-online-travel-companies

What kind of precedent does this set for taxation of other internet purchases? It is already the case where if a company has a brick and mortar location in a state, purchases on the internet are taxed. Does this now allow for a more general taxation of goods and services that are consumed in a given state, even if sold through a company based somewhere with different tax laws?

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