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Phoenix666 writes:

The pollution-cheating scandal that has engulfed auto giant Volkswagen is turning up the heat on the German government to make more determined headway in its self-declared "electromobility" goals, analysts say.

The "bitter irony" of the scam that has rocked the automobile sector around the world and plunged the once-respected carmaker into a major crisis, is that the billions of euros VW could potentially face in fines "could have been used to finance an entire electric car programme," complained Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks recently.

Over the past six years, Berlin has put up 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) for research into an electric car, the minister pointed out. And her ministry is looking into a series of measures to promote the electric car, such as tax incentives and purchase subsidies.

Her colleague at the Economy Ministry, Sigmar Gabriel, has said he was ready to support financial incentives, without specifying what form they should take.

And he is in favour of introducing quotas for electric vehicles in the car fleets of public authorities, with the aim of boosting demand.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a turning point for organized labor in the United States. It looks like the Diesel scandal is shaping up to have similarly wide-ranging repercussions for the car industry in Europe.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Apache Spark innovates a lot of[sic] in the in-memory data processing area. With this framework, you are able to upload data to a cluster memory and work with this data extremely fast in the interactive mode (interactive mode is another important Spark feature btw...). One year back (10/10/2014) Databricks announced that Apache Spark was able to sort 100 terabytes of data in 23 minutes.

Here is an interesting question – what is the limit for the amount of data you can process interactively in a cluster? What if you had 100 terabytes of memory in your cluster? Memory is so quick you would think! Intuition tells you [you] can use this memory to interactively process 100 terabytes of input data or at least half of this size. However, as usual in a distributed systems world, our intuition is wrong!

[Ed. addition.] The Databricks announcement has hard data on how they went about improving the Apache Spark code and the performance improvements they saw. That story summarizes its results as follows:

Databricks, with the help of the Spark community, has contributed many improvements to Apache Spark to improve its performance, stability, and scalability. This enabled Databricks to use Apache Spark to sort 100 TB of data on 206 machines in 23 minutes, which is 3X faster than the previous Hadoop 100TB result on 2100 machines. Similarly, Databricks sorted 1 PB of data on 190 machines in less than 4 hours, which is over 4X faster than the previous Hadoop 1PB result on 3800 machines.

Does anyone here work with data on this scale? What do you use for your database? Would you consider using Apache Spark?

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HughPickens.com writes:

Recently, MIT economists Hong Ru and Antoinette Schoar analyzed over a million credit card mailings collected by Mintel, a company that pays people to read their junk mail. The economists scanned the terms of these offers and noted the income and education levels of recipients. Now Jeff Guo writes in the Washington Post that if you want to know what credit card companies think of you, look at the junk mail you receive from credit card companies. Are you "pre-screened" for lots of mileage-reward cards? Banks think you're rich and educated. Do you mostly see offers for low-APR teaser rates? Banks think you're poor and uneducated — and, perhaps, vulnerable to financial traps.

Cards with travel rewards epitomize the kind of product aimed at the rich and educated. It's a fairly exclusive niche — only about 8 percent of credit card offers fall into this category. People in this demographic are the most likely to jet around, and therefore most likely to appreciate a card that will earn them frequent-flier miles. In contrast, the card offers sent to poorer, less-educated people were often loaded with risky features: low introductory APRs, high late fees, and penalty interest rates that kick in if you break the rules. Ru and Schoar believe that the system is tuned precisely to take advantage of those who make financial mistakes. "Backward loaded credit card features with high late fees can only be optimal [for companies] if customers do not understand their actual cost of credit," they write, using a term to describe arrangements that offer low upfront fees but higher penalty fees.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Living organisms may have existed on Earth as long as 4.1bn years ago – 300m years earlier than was previously thought, new research has shown.

If confirmed, the discovery means life emerged a remarkably short time after the Earth was formed from a primordial disc of dust and gas surrounding the sun 4.6bn years ago.

Researchers discovered the evidence in specks of graphite trapped within immensely old zircon crystals from Jack Hills, Western Australia.

Atoms in the graphite, a crystalline form of carbon, bore the hallmark of biological origin. They were enriched with 12C, a "light" carbon isotope, or atomic strain, normally associated with living things.

It suggests that a terrestrial biosphere had emerged on Earth as early as 4.1bn years ago, said the scientists writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Sad news from Variety today, the next season of Mythbusters will be the last.

"'Mythbusters' is — and will always be — an incredibly important part of Discovery's history," said Rich Ross, group president of Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and Science Channel. "Adam and Jamie are enormous talents who have brought learning and science to the forefront of this network, and their legacy will continue to live on over at Science Channel. The 'Mythbusters' library will be moving over to Discovery's sister network in 2016, where I know audiences new and old alike will be able to experience and learn with Adam and Jamie and the rest of the 'Mythbusters' family."

I guess we'll just have to try it at home now.

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[Ed: Headline updated, show was not "canceled".]

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers in the UCSD Robotics lab have developed a duct-exploring robot based on the principles of tensegrity, a structural design paradigm which combines components under pure tension and pure compression to make mass efficient, accurately controllable structures.
...
Tensegrity robots have the advantage of being light and flexible. DucTT is built from rigid aluminum tubes and space-age cables that keep its structure together. Researchers chose aluminum over 3D-printed materials to make the robot more resilient.

DucTT [has] an extensive range of motion with a small number of actuators. The batteries, electronics, motors (actuators), and strain gauges (sensors) are all embedded within the tubes of the structure to shield them from the gas or liquid that may be flowing within the duct during the inspection.

[It] moves in an inchworm-like fashion along the length of ducts or tubes in any orientation, and can accurately negotiate the intersection of two or more ducts in a controlled, deliberate fashion. Much of the volume of the bars is devoted to the batteries themselves, and thus DucTT can run for up to six hours continuously, untethered, on a single charge.

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takyon writes:

23andMe, a consumer genetic testing company, has relaunched its Personal Genome Service, which now includes a more limited selection of test results and has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:

The relaunched service will offer FDA-approved tests that show whether an individual carries genes associated with 36 different disorders, such as cystic fibrosis, that could be passed on to a child.

But Dr. Cecile Janssens, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta, said the company still is not testing for the diseases that raised the most concerns for consumers in the past. These included tests for predisposition to common diseases such as heart attack, asthma and hip fractures, for which lifestyle factors are often more important, Janssens said.

The company also does not test for high-risk genetic variants such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 for breast and ovarian cancer and APOE for Alzheimer's, and it does not include pharmacogenetic testing. 23andMe said it is still working with the FDA for approval of those additional tests.

23andMe already offers tests for inherited genetic risks and drug response in other countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Sweden.

23andMe revealed that it has received 4 requests for user data from U.S. law enforcement agencies in the past quarter:

Those stats came in the first "transparency report" from the company on Wednesday. At the same time, it launched a new "personal genome service" (PGS) test that it says will provide you with 60 different data points covering "health, ancestry, wellness, and personal."

The transparency report is frustratingly vague. We asked the company how it defined the term "user data" and it told us: "Any personal information relating to one of our customers, including but not limited to name, email address, health, and genetic information." It confirmed that this includes the results of the tests it carries out on your behalf. But we don't know exactly what was asked for, or under what justification.

Likewise, who is "law enforcement"? Does it include the FDA? The company told us: "We've received requests from both state and federal law enforcement organizations. Only two of the four requests were legally valid, one from the FBI and one from a state law enforcement agency." So on at least one occasion the FBI has asked for specific details on an individual. We don't know for a fact it was their DNA tests, but since that is 23andMe's sole function, it's a fair bet.

Previously: FDA Permits Marketing of 23andMe Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Test
Color Genomics Launches a $249 Genetic Test for Breast Cancer Risk

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Phoenix666 writes:

The main pumping chamber of the heart ages differently in men and women, according to a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study published online in the journal Radiology. Researchers said the findings may support different treatment approaches for men and women with heart disease.

The mass of the left ventricle—the chamber of the heart that pumps blood throughout the body—is a predictor of cardiovascular events. The ventricle walls may thicken from having to work harder to pump blood in the presence of high blood pressure or other conditions.

Studies have shown both increases and decreases in left ventricular mass with age. Many of these studies have been cross-sectional, or focused on one point in time, and based on comparisons between the young and old, which doesn't account for different lifestyles and other historical factors. But for the new study, researchers were able to assess long-term changes in the same people by acquiring a baseline cardiac MRI and then comparing it with another taken at a later date.

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

This headline "Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men" over at Frontiers caught my eye this morning. After an admittedly quick read (look, I'm busy, do you want a non-paypal cc processor or not?), I decided it was at least worth a sub. Here's the paper's summary:

Audits of tenure-track hiring reveal faculty prefer to hire female applicants over males. However, audit data do not control for applicant quality, allowing some to argue women are hired at higher rates because they are more qualified. To test this, Williams and Ceci (2015) conducted an experiment demonstrating a preference for hiring women over identically-qualified men. While their findings are consistent with audits, they raise the specter that faculty may prefer women over even more-qualified men, a claim made recently. We evaluated this claim in the present study: 158 faculty ranked two men and one woman for a tenure-track-assistant professorship, and 94 faculty ranked two women and one man. In the former condition, the female applicant was slightly weaker than her two male competitors, although still strong; in the other condition the male applicant was slightly weaker than his two female competitors, although still strong. Faculty of both genders and in all fields preferred the more-qualified men over the slightly-less-qualified women, and they also preferred the stronger women over the slightly-less-qualified man. This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males.

You may now commence flaming without having RTFA.

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takyon writes:

A desktop computer and hard drive stolen from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights stored sensitive details of human rights violations in El Salvador and a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency:

Sometime between October 15-18, the office of Dr. Angelina Godoy, Director of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, was broken into by unknown parties. Her desktop computer was stolen, as well as a hard drive containing about 90% of the information relating to our research in El Salvador. While we have backups of this information, what worries us most is not what we have lost but what someone else may have gained: the files include sensitive details of personal testimonies and pending investigations.

This could, of course, be an act of common crime. But we are concerned because it is also possible this was an act of retaliation for our work. There are a few elements that make this an unusual incident. First, there was no sign of forcible entry; the office was searched but its contents were treated carefully and the door was locked upon exit, characteristics which do not fit the pattern of opportunistic campus theft. Prof. Godoy's office was the only one targeted, although it is located midway down a hallway of offices, all containing computers. The hard drive has no real resale value, so there seems no reason to take it unless the intention was to extract information. Lastly, the timing of this incident—in the wake of the recent publicity around our freedom of information lawsuit against the CIA regarding information on a suspected perpetrator of grave human rights violations in El Salvador—invites doubt as to potential motives.

We have contacted colleagues in El Salvador, many of whom have emphasized parallels between this incident and attacks Salvadoran human rights organizations have experienced in recent years. While we cannot rule out the possibility of this having been an incident of common crime, we are deeply concerned that this breach of information security may increase the vulnerability of Salvadoran human rights defenders with whom we work.

Reported at KPLU and KUOW.

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darkfeline writes:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/youtube-red-offers-premium-youtube-for-9-99-a-month-12-99-for-ios-users/

Google describes YouTube Red as "the ultimate YouTube experience." The $9.99 subscription will cover all of YouTube products, meaning YouTube, YouTube Gaming, YouTube Kids, and the newly announced YouTube Music. The new service will let you watch YouTube videos without ads, save videos to watch offline on a mobile device, and play videos in the background on a mobile device.

There is a big catch about that $9.99 price: $9.99 will cover Android, desktop, and the mobile Web, but if you purchase a subscription via Apple's in-app purchasing on iOS, the price goes up to $12.99/month. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue on its platform, and Google is passing that cost directly onto the consumer. (Most likely, customers will be able to bypass the higher price by paying $9.99 directly to Google and using the service across all platforms, including iOS, simply by signing into the app.)

YouTube won't talk about revenue sharing with content creators, but the company says it will pass on the "majority" of the revenue. In lieu of ad revenue, subscription revenue will be split up among creators by view time from Red subscribers. The subscription service changes things for YouTube creators, and anyone that doesn't agree to the new subscription terms will have their content set to "private" on YouTube.

darkfeline suggests the following specific points and topics for discussion:

1. iOS support costs extra, YouTube is passing the cost of Apple's cut directly to the consumer.
2. Up-to-date ad blockers and youtube-dl bypasses all YouTube ads to the best of my knowledge.
3. youtube-dl allows you to download videos for offline play.
4. How do you feel about exclusive paid content?
5. Who the heck is Pewdiepie and why does he make so much money? (How do you feel about YouTube "celebrities"?)

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HughPickens.com writes:

American history is filled with war stories that subsequently unraveled. Consider the Bush administration's false claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction or the imagined attack on a U.S. vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. Now Johnathan Mahler writes in the NY Times about the inconsistencies in the official US story about bin Laden's death. "Almost immediately, the administration had to correct some of the most significant details of the raid," writes Mahler. Bin Laden had not been ''engaged in a firefight,'' as the deputy national-security adviser, John Brennan, initially told reporters; he'd been unarmed. Nor had he used one of his wives as a human shield. The president and his senior advisers hadn't been watching a ''live feed'' of the raid in the Situation Room; the operation had not been captured on helmet-cams.

But according to Mahler there is the sheer improbability of the story itself, which asked us to believe that Obama sent 23 SEALs on a seemingly suicidal mission, invading Pakistani air space without air or ground cover, fast-roping into a compound that, if it even contained bin Laden, by all rights should have been heavily guarded. How likely was that? Abbottabad is basically a garrison town; the conspicuously large bin Laden compound — three stories, encircled by an 18-foot-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire — was less than two miles from Pakistan's equivalent of West Point. ''The story stunk from Day 1,'' says Seymour Hersh whose most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was found in the first place. According to Hersh, it was not years of painstaking intelligence-gathering, he wrote, that led the United States to the courier and, ultimately, to bin Laden. Instead, the location was revealed by a ''walk-in'' — a retired Pakistani intelligence officer who was after the $25 million reward that the United States had promised anyone who helped locate him. And according to Hersh, the daring raid wasn't especially daring. The Pakistanis allowed the U.S. helicopters into their airspace and cleared out the guards at the compound before the SEALs arrived. The most blatant lie was that Pakistan's two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission.

"It's not that the truth about bin Laden's death is unknowable," concludes Mahler. "it's that we don't know it. And we can't necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.'s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don't know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011."

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martyb writes:

Researchers have recently observed what happens when a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) — the star is shredded with some of the material spiraling into the SMBH and some of it being cast out to space. By examining the X-rays that emanate from this encounter, they have found that the brightest ones come from the material that is closest to the SMBH's event horizon:

When a star comes too close to a black hole, the intense gravity of the black hole results in tidal forces that can rip the star apart. In these events, called tidal disruptions, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for years.

A team of astronomers, including several from the University of Maryland, has observed a tidal disruption event in a galaxy that lies about 290 million light years from Earth. The event is the closest tidal disruption discovered in about a decade, and is described in a paper published in the October 22, 2015 issue of the journal Nature.

[...] The optical light All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) originally discovered the tidal disruption, known as ASASSN-14li, in November 2014. The event occurred near a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy PGC 043234.

[...] Gas often falls toward a black hole by spiraling inward and forming a disk. But the process that creates these disk structures, known as accretion disks, has remained a mystery. By observing ASASSN-14li, the team of astronomers was able to witness the formation of an accretion disk as it happened, by looking at the X-ray light at different wavelengths and tracking how those emissions changed over time.

[...] The X-ray data also suggest the presence of a wind moving away from the black hole, carrying stellar gas outward. However, this wind does not quite move fast enough to escape the black hole's gravitational grasp. A possible explanation for the low speed of this wind is that gas from the disrupted star follows an elliptical orbit around the black hole, and travels slowest when it reaches the greatest distance from the black hole at the far ends of this elliptical orbit.

I am now trying to imagine the scenario in this story: Kepler K2 Mission Spots a Vaporizing Exoplanet Orbiting a White Dwarf as that white dwarf is in turn being shredded by a SMBH. Shredded turtles all the way down?

Abstract: Flows of X-ray gas reveal the disruption of a star by a massive black hole

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Phoenix666 writes:

A low-cost, high-speed method for printing graphene inks using a conventional roll-to-roll printing process, like that used to print newspapers and crisp packets, could open up a wide range of practical applications, including inexpensive printed electronics, intelligent packaging and disposable sensors.

Developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Cambridge-based technology company Novalia, the method allows graphene and other electrically conducting materials to be added to conventional water-based inks and printed using typical commercial equipment, the first time that graphene has been used for printing on a large-scale commercial printing press at high speed.

Graphene is a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms, just one atom thick. Its flexibility, optical transparency and electrical conductivity make it suitable for a wide range of applications, including printed electronics. Although numerous laboratory prototypes have been demonstrated around the world, widespread commercial use of graphene is yet to be realised.

"We are pleased to be the first to bring graphene inks close to real-world manufacturing. There are lots of companies that have produced graphene inks, but none of them has done it on a scale close to this," said Dr Tawfique Hasan of the Cambridge Graphene Centre (CGC), who developed the method. "Being able to produce conductive inks that could effortlessly be used for printing at a commercial scale at a very high speed will open up all kinds of different applications for graphene and other similar materials."

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takyon writes:

NASA's Kepler space telescope has found a small exoplanet being torn apart by a white dwarf star:

The devastated planetesimal, or cosmic object formed from dust, rock, and other materials, is estimated to be the size of a large asteroid, and is the first planetary object to be confirmed transiting a white dwarf. It orbits its white dwarf, WD 1145+017, once every 4.5 hours. This orbital period places it extremely close to the white dwarf and its searing heat and shearing gravitational force.

During its first observing campaign from May 30, 2014 to Aug. 21, 2014, K2 trained its gaze on a patch of sky in the constellation Virgo, measuring the minuscule change in brightness of the distant white dwarf. When an object transits or passes in front of a star from the vantage point of the space telescope, a dip in starlight is recorded. The periodic dimming of starlight indicates the presence of an object in orbit about the star.

A research team led by Vanderburg found an unusual, but vaguely familiar pattern in the data. While there was a prominent dip in brightness occurring every 4.5 hours, blocking up to 40 percent of the white dwarf's light, the transit signal of the tiny planet did not exhibit the typical symmetric U-shaped pattern. It showed an asymmetric elongated slope pattern that would indicate the presence of a comet-like tail. Together these features indicated a ring of dusty debris circling the white dwarf, and what could be the signature of a small planet being vaporized.

[...] In addition to the strangely shaped transits, Vanderburg and his team found signs of heavier elements polluting the atmosphere of WD 1145+017, as predicted by theory. Due to intense gravity, white dwarfs are expected to have chemically pure surfaces, covered only with light elements of helium and hydrogen. For years, researchers have found evidence that some white dwarf atmospheres are polluted with traces of heavier elements such as calcium, silicon, magnesium and iron. Scientists have long suspected that the source of this pollution was an asteroid or a small planet being torn apart by the white dwarf's intense gravity.

A disintegrating minor planet transiting a white dwarf [abstract]

Original Submission