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Phoenix666 writes:

Android 6.0 "Marshmallow" takes translation one step further by automatically integrating it into popular apps such as LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and TripAdvisor.

Users will need to have Google's Translate app installed on their phone or tablet for the feature to work, but they won't need to switch back and forth between Translate and other apps to be able to understand text written in other languages. The translated text will appear right in the app being used.
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If you're using WhatsApp to communicate with someone in another language, the feature will help you to read his or her messages and to compose your own – just type a response in your preferred language, and Android will convert it to the language spoken by the other person. Google says the feature will allow for translation between any of 90 languages.

Let's test it out. Can any Marshmallow users check if the feature is translating this correctly? 君達の基地は、全てCATSがいただいた。 ("All your base are belong to us")

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takyon writes:

HPCWire reports that Dell is purchasing storage, security, virtualization, and cloud computing provider EMC Corporation for $67 billion:

Dell will buy the storage provider EMC (NYSE: EMC) in a deal worth about $67 billion, reports The New York Times today (Dell Announces Purchase of EMC for $67 Billion). Dell and the investment firm Silver Lake, its financial backer, are betting that a huge acquisition will help one of the best-known names in the industry keep up with the rapidly changing technology industry.

"Under the terms of the deal, Dell will pay $33.15 per EMC share, which includes cash plus tracking stock linked to part of EMC's economic interest in VMware, a publicly traded business. The Dell founder and chief executive, Michael S. Dell will lead the combined company as chairman and chief executive.

"For the last two years, since taking the company private, Mr. Dell and Silver Lake have been trying to help it adapt to a changed tech landscape. Buying EMC brings Dell one of the biggest names in computer data storage, adding to existing offerings like network servers, corporate software and mobile devices," according to the NYT report.

Addison Snell, CEO of analyst firm Intersect360 Research said, "With the number-one market share company for HPC servers purchasing the number-one market share company for HPC storage, of course this deal has ramification for HPC users. For Dell it is a chance to drive an end-to-end high-performance data strategy, which has been an area they have sought to improve. For EMC, it is a chance to consolidate separate lines into a cohesive high-performance strategy — right now, Isilon and XtremIO are isolated businesses. And with virtualization now on the rise in HPC environments, Dell will want to see if VMware can be a valuable component."

CNN characterizes it as the "biggest tech deal of all time".

Additional thoughts from El Reg are not all unicorns and sunshine.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A universal do-not-track feature has been advocated by privacy groups after being introduced by the Federal Trade Commission in 2010. But the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – composed of software companies, academics, privacy groups, and others who determine international Web-browsing standards – has long struggled to develop a unified approach for the feature.

The somewhat-arcane debate over Internet tracking has mostly simmered quietly, but now some lawmakers are arguing that a working group the consortium set up to develop the standard has become overly influenced by tech industry concerns, putting those interests ahead of protecting consumers from the possibility of privacy invasion. The group is currently chaired by representatives from Adobe and Intel.

"Unfortunately, the group's composition no longer reflects the broad range of interests and perspectives needed to develop a strong privacy standard," Sen. Edward Markey (D) of Massachusetts, Sen. Al Franken (D) of Minnesota, and Rep. Joe Barton (R) of Texas wrote in a letter on Wednesday to the consortium. "The 'Do Not Track' standard should empower consumers to stop unwanted collection and use of their personal data. At the same time, the standard should not permit certain companies to evade important consumer protections and engage in anticompetitive practices."

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mendax wrote in with some news:

El Reg has this interesting interview with legendary physicist Freeman Dyson:

The life of physicist Freeman Dyson spans advising bomber command in World War Two, working at Princeton as a contemporary of Einstein, and providing advice to the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues. He is a rare public intellectual writing prolifically for a wide audience, and also campaigned against nuclear weapons proliferation.

At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dyson was looking at the climate system before it became a hot political issue, over 25 years ago. Today he provides a robust foreword to a publication[*] by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change co-founder Indur Goklany on CO2 by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which supports his views.

Enjoy!

[*] A pdf of the report is available.

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For some examples:

The left column is all about upcoming elections and the violence attached to them--it seems that certain parts of the USA were quite passionate about politics back then.

A runaway horse trashed the carriage it was pulling.

And then there is gossip--

The attached article explains why this is the "Second Edition"--

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tt0405296 writes:

Drug companies have a problem: they are finding it ever harder to get painkillers through clinical trials. But this isn't necessarily because the drugs are getting worse. An extensive analysis of trial data has found that responses to sham treatments have become stronger over time, making it harder to prove a drug's advantage over placebo.

The change in reponse to placebo treatments for pain, discovered by researchers in Canada, holds true only for US clinical trials. Simply being in a US trial and receiving sham treatment now seems to relieve pain almost as effectively as many promising new drugs. The phenomenon is driven by 35 US trials; among trials in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, there was no significant change in placebo reponses.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Matt Richtel reports at The New York Times that the push to make California greener with electric cars is having an unintended side effect: It is making some people madder and meaner. The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. According to Richtel electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another's cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window. "Cars are getting unplugged while they are actively charging, and that's a problem," says Peter Graf. "Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'"

The problem is that installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace. German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Now there are far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, a host of thorny etiquette issues have arisen, along with some rare but notorious incidents of "charge rage." Companies are finding that they need one charging port for every two of their employees' electric vehicles. "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead," said ChargePoint CEO Pat Romano. "Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are going to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."

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Phoenix666 writes:

In the United States, a vigorous debate is under way over government-issued dietary guidance. A February 2015 report by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) recommended, for the first time, that food system sustainability be an integral part of dietary guidance in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) (1). With the final decision from the secretaries of Health and Human Services (HHS) and of Agriculture (USDA) about what parts of the DGAC recommendations to include in the 2015 DGAs expected at the end of this year, we discuss the need to incorporate sustainability into dietary guidelines and the political maneuvering under way to excise it.
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FAO [United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization] defines sustainable diets as those with "low environmental impacts which contribute to food and nutrition security and healthy life for present and future generations". By this or any other definition of sustainability, no country has achieved a sustainable diet. Current and emerging dietary patterns threaten human health in developing and developed countries and negatively affect long-term food security. It is thus not unreasonable that government-issued dietary guidelines take sustainability into account. The Netherlands, Brazil, and Sweden have already done so. Germany and the United States have active, but unresolved, discussions.

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Phoenix666 writes:

But what, exactly, is a number? A group of Chinese researchers tackled this deep philosophical question from a neurological perspective in a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They sought to verify the invariant nature of numerosity perception in an experiment that included fMRI scanning to establish the brain structures activated in number sense.

Proceeding from the obvious assumption that numerosity is invariant to specific features like size, orientation, shape and color, they designed a test that included a number of dots within an enclosed space. To test the invariant effect of connection, they used arbitrary and irregular line segments connecting dots; there were three conditions: zero, one, and two connected pairs of dots were included in the test patterns. Subjects were shown these patterns adjacent to reference patterns that contained 12 dots unconnected by line segments. They were asked to indicate solely through visual perception which pattern contained more dots.

The researchers found that connecting dots in the patterns led to a robust result of underestimation. The researchers tested another topological invariant, the inside/outside relationship, by enclosing pairs of dots within ovals and irregular oval-like shapes. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that underestimation also occurred in this condition, and that it depended directly on the number of enclosed dot pairs in the pattern.

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Four More Companies Caught Cheating Emissions Standards

cmn32480 writes:

From The Guardian :

Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi have joined the growing list of manufacturers whose diesel cars are known to emit significantly more pollution on the road than in regulatory tests, according to data obtained by the Guardian.

In more realistic on-road tests, some Honda models emitted six times the regulatory limit of NOx pollution while some unnamed 4x4 models had 20 times the NOx limit coming out of their exhaust pipes.

"The issue is a systemic one" across the industry, said Nick Molden, whose company Emissions Analytics tested the cars. The Guardian revealed last week that diesel cars from Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and Jeep all pumped out significantly more NOx in more realistic driving conditions. NOx pollution is at illegal levels in many parts of the UK and is believed to have caused many thousands of premature deaths and billions of pounds in health costs.

The article goes on to state that the toxic emissions levels are anywhere from 1.5 to 6 times higher in road use than in the lab tests. Of the 200 cars tested only five had emissions levels that matched their test results. This is a rather distressing fact. It seems that we the public have been lied to (again) for many years now. The "clean diesel" might just be a myth.

Given that these manufacturers come from all over the world, how is it possible that this is an accident? Is there so much incest in the automobile industry that the code from one manufacturer has permeated the industry and the rest of the manufacturers are just waiting to get caught?

VW Says Rogue Engineers, Not Executives, Responsible for Emissions Scandal

Phoenix666 writes:

Volkswagen's US CEO testified Thursday that the decision to use emissions cheating software was not made at the corporate level. Instead, it was "software engineers who put this in for whatever reason," Michael Horn told a congressional panel that is investigating the scandal.

What's more, Horn told US lawmakers that the German automaker was withdrawing its application to sell 2016 autos with 2.0-liter diesel engines because they don't comply with US emissions standards. Horn testified that the 2016 vehicles were equipped with the same type of software that allowed millions of VW diesel vehicles to cheat pollution tests. "As a result, we have withdrawn the application for certification of our model year 2016 vehicles. We are working with the agencies to continue the certification process," Horn told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

The timing is perfect to throw the engineers under the bus.

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mendax writes:

The New York Times is reporting:

The Obama administration has backed down in its bitter dispute with Silicon Valley over the encryption of data on iPhones and other digital devices, concluding that it is not possible to give American law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to that information without also creating an opening that China, Russia, cybercriminals and terrorists could exploit.

Not surprisingly:

With its decision, which angered the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, the administration essentially agreed with Apple, Google, Microsoft and a group of the nation's top cryptographers and computer scientists that millions of Americans would be vulnerable to hacking if technology firms and smartphone manufacturers were required to provide the government with "back doors," or access to their source code and encryption keys.

What's important about this decision is this:

While the administration said it would continue to try to persuade companies like Apple and Google to assist in criminal and national security investigations, it determined that the government should not force them to breach the security of their products. In essence, investigators will have to hope they find other ways to get what they need, from data stored in the cloud in unencrypted form or transmitted over phone lines, which are covered by a law that affects telecommunications providers but not the technology giants.

One wonders at the intelligence of law enforcement officials regarding their anger because of this decision. Do they not realize that backdoors let the good guys (law enforcement pursuing an active and legitimate case), the bad guys (the criminals), and the other bad guys (corrupt law enforcement and the 3- and 4-letter intelligence agencies) into people's secret and confidential information? Do they not realize that we the people no longer trust them and we do not want them knowing any more about us than we are willing to give them?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The most noticeable change in this release – the only visual change, really – involve the scrollbars. Yes, scrollbars. Canonical's homegrown versions have been ditched in favor of the GNOME scrollbars in GTK 3 applications (which accounts for the majority of Ubuntu apps).

The GNOME scrollbars have been themed a little to look like Ubuntu's old version, but the strange, handle-like thing is gone. The move seems primarily a result of the fact GNOME's scrollbars more or less now behave just like Unity's did. In other words, there's no need to duplicate scrollbar efforts.

The annoying thing is that while the behaviour of the scrollbars has changed, all the bad UI decisions remain – which is to say that even when there's scrollable content, Unity will still not show a scrollbar until either you hover the scrollbar or otherwise put the mouse in motion. How do you know there's scrollable content? Well, your guess is as good as mine. At least now Canonical engineers can move on to something more exciting than maintaining homegrown scrollbars, though.

The full release notes for Wily Werewolf are available from Ubuntu.org.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Jeff Guo reports at The Washington Post that development of qinghaosu — or artemisinin — is one of modern China's proudest accomplishments winning a Noble Prize in Medicine this year for Tu Youyou, but it's also a story about Communism, Chairman Mao, and China's return to the world economy. On May 23, 1967, Chinese scientists commenced Project 523, a secret effort that enlisted hundreds of researchers to discover a new malaria drug during the Vietnam War. Although in a better warfare position, the People's Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army) and its allies in the South, Viet Cong, suffered increasing mortality because of malaria epidemics. The project began at the height of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, a brutal time during which academics and intellectuals were murdered, imprisoned, or sent to "reeducation camps" in mass purges.

For doctors and chemists. Project 523 was a lifeline, according to Professor Zhou Yiqing. "By the time Project 523 had got under way, the Cultural Revolution had started and the research provided shelter for scientists facing political persecution." Tu's husband had been banished to the countryside when she was asked to get involved in Project 523. Tu's research project sought to find modern logic in ancient ways, much as the French researchers identified quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree. According to Tu, she and her team screened over 2,000 different Chinese herbs described in old texts, of which about 200 were good enough to test in mice. That's when they hit upon a plant called Artemisia annua: annual wormwood, or qinghao in Chinese. At the time, all of this work remained a Chinese military secret; some of the results were published in Chinese-language journals, but it would be well after the death of Mao Zedong until China would reveal that it had discovered a surprisingly potent new weapon against malaria.

According to Guo the lion's share of the credit rightly goes to Tu and the countless other Chinese scientists who worked on Project 523. But Oxford anthropologist Elisabeth Hsu suggests that the political climate at the time also deserves recognition. Qinghaosu might never have been discovered had it not been for Maoist China's nationalist infatuation with Chinese folk medicine. "It was thus a feature specific to institutions of the People's Republic of China that scientists, who themselves had learnt ways of appreciating traditional knowledge, worked side by side with historians of traditional medicine, who had textual learning," Hsu argues. "This was crucial for the 'discovery' of qinghao."

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Phoenix666 writes:

The latest research results expands upon last year's work that demonstrated that light could be transmitted along a silver nanowire as a plasmon, which are rapid oscillations in electron density. The plasmons are re-emitted at the other end of the nanowire, which is covered with the MoS₂.

When the light was re-emitted, its wavelength corresponded with the band gap of the MoS₂ as well as the wavelength of the laser source. This demonstrated to the researchers that the plasmons were able to push the electrons in the MoS₂ into a different energy state.
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To accomplish this, the team again took their nanowires with one end coated in MoS₂ and put it on a silicon substrate. Next, they put metal contacts on the end with the MoS₂ using electron beam lithography. They then set it up so they could measure the current running through it.

They discovered that the current running through the wires was sensitive to the polarization of the incoming light. The current was the strongest when the light was polarized parallel to the wire.

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Phoenix666 writes:

From an ethical perspective, there is little reason to consider human stem cell–derived tissue constructs as more problematic than human tissue explants—brain slices, for instance—maintained in vitro. But the situation is somewhat different for provocative new studies exploring the ability of pluripotent stem cells to organize into structures that have features of the early embryo, however poor the resemblance at present.

Two papers published in the past year—one focused on the mouse and the other on humans—report that embryonic stem cells differentiated under certain conditions can give rise to structures in which the three embryonic germ layers are reproducibly patterned (van den Brink et al., 2014; Warmflash et al., 2014). Furthermore, in the study on the human system, the biological pathways involved are proposed to be similar to those functioning in vivo. Though more characterization is needed, patterned human cell colonies with embryo-like germ layers may therefore be potential models for research on early human development; such work is otherwise difficult or entirely unfeasible to carry out and could be hugely informative about human developmental disorders. Research both to understand patterned embryo-like structures and to improve them as models for human biology should therefore continue.

But should we be concerned from an ethical or regulatory perspective about growing embryo-like structures from pluripotent stem cells in a dish? Could such structures be seen, now or in the future, as violating current regulations on human embryo culture? Conversely, should such regulations be revisited when considering structures that are derived not from the union of gametes but rather from cells in a dish?

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