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takyon writes:

Fitbit, makers of the eponymous fitness tracking wearable device, is seeing fattening revenues:

Fitbit the maker of wearable activity monitors, tripled its third quarter sales - capitalising on the popularity of wearable fitness technology. The company brought in $409.3m (£265.5m) in the third quarter compared to $152.9m in the same period the year before. Fitbit sold 4.8 million devices between July and September compared with 2.3 million in the third quarter of 2014.

Fitbit's CEO James Park has dismissed the impact of the Apple Watch:

On a conference call with investors, Park said that the rollout of other smart watches, which often come with a step-tracker similar to Fitbit's main function, did not have impact on the company's growth. When asked about Apple's new watch specifically, he said it had "no material impact". He added that Apple and Fitbit cater to "two very different segments in the market" in terms of price point and use. The price range for Fitbit devices, most often worn as a wristband, is $60 to $250. Apple Watch starts at $349 and can cost more than $1,000.

[...] Prior to the company's IPO, Park told CNBC that the company can remain competitive, despite the new players such as Apple Watch. "There's over $200bn of consumer spending on health and fitness. This is a massive market. There's room for more than one dominant player," he said. "The brand Fitbit is really synonymous with health and fitness tracking, so we feel that we have really significant competitive differentiators in the market."

Fitbit sued Jawbone, another company making fitness trackers, in September. Jawbone has filed a countersuit, claiming that Fitbit is "willfully misusing its patents as part of its efforts to protect its market power".

[We ran the story Wearable Tech Market To Treble In Next Five Years just a few days ago. -Ed.]

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takyon writes:

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has found another tale of fraud, this time involving the "world's most expensive gas station":

"DOD charged the American taxpayer $43 million for what is likely the world's most expensive gas station." That's what Special Inspector General John F. Sopko found when he looked at the construction of a natural gas station in Sheberghan, Afghanistan.

According to the report, at most that station should have cost about $500,000. But in this case, the Department of Defense's Task Force for Stability and Business Operations awarded Central Asian Engineering a contract to build the station for a little under $3 million. But somehow the spending got out of control. Here's how the inspector general explains it in the report:

The Task Force spent $42,718,739 between 2011 and 2014 to fund the construction and to supervise the initial operation of the CNG station (approximately $12.3 [million] in direct costs and $30.0 [million] in overhead costs).

To make matters worse, the inspector general found that the Department of Defense didn't even study whether a natural gas station would be used in Afghanistan. And when the IG came asking questions, the Department of Defense said that all the people who worked on the project were gone, now, so they could not provide answers as to why a project that should have cost $500,000 ended up costing nearly $43 million.

NPR's article lists previous coverage of wartime corruption and waste in Afghanistan. For example, $7.6 billion has been spent on countering opium poppy production in Afghanistan, yet production reached an all-time high in 2013.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Gina Kolata reports at The New York Times that something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling, primarily because of the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites who are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans. "It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude," say Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner.

Though not fully understood, the increased deaths are largely thought to be a result of more suicides and the misuse of drugs and alcohol, driven by easier access to powerful prescription painkillers, cheaper high quality heroin and greater financial stresses. Death rates for people with a high school education or less rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education. The rise in death rates among middle-aged white Americans means half a million more people have died in the US since 1998 than if the previous trend had continued. The death toll is comparable to the 650,000 Americans who lost their lives during the Aids epidemic from 1981 to the middle of this year, the researchers say. Anne Case and Angus Deaton warn that middle-aged Americans who are turning to drink and drugs are set to suffer more health problems than their elders unless the downwards trend can be halted. "This is not automatic. If the epidemic is brought under control, its survivors may have a healthy old age. However, addictions are hard to treat and pain is hard to control, so those currently in midlife may be a 'lost generation' whose future is less bright than those who preceded them."

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NotSanguine writes:

Jessica Jones over at The Local continues reporting on an embarrassing gaffe in promoting a vegetable celebration in a town in northwestern Spain. The town, Pontes, publicized its annual rapini festival on the town hall's website.

From the article:

A town hall in northwestern Spain was left red-faced after a Google Translate error led to it advertising its local leaf vegetable celebration as a much more X-rated affair.

One of the highlights of the year in the town of As Pontes in Galicia, northwestern Spain, is its annual rapini festival, when townsfolk celebrate the town's speciality, the leafy green vegetable similar to spinach.

[...] But when residents clicked onto the Castillian Spanish version of the town's website - provided by Google Translate - to check the dates for next year's fest they were shocked at the new turn the festival had apparently taken.

"The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine," read the description of the festival on the Castillian Spanish version of the town hall's website, whose original version is written in Galician.

"Google translate recognized our Galician word grelo as Portuguese and translated into the Spanish clítoris," town hall spokeswoman Monserrat García, explained to The Local.

Google Translate changed Feira do grelo (Rapini Festival) into Feria Clítoris (Clitoris Festival) leading to some embarrassment when staff at the town hall discovered their error on Thursday.

While this is embarrassing for the folks in Pontes, it raises some interesting questions as to how useful automated translation software (such as Google Translate) can be.

Have any Soylentils run into issues like this while using automated translation software? Did anyone see the mistranslation and make travel plans based on the it?

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Celestial writes:

Microsoft announced yesterday that they plan to downgrade their various OneDrive storage offerings.

Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers are now limited to 1 TB of OneDrive storage instead of unlimited storage. The 100GB and 200GB OneDrive plans are discontinued. They will be replaced by a 50GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016. Free storage will be reduced from 15GB to 5GB for all free users. The camera roll bonus of 15GB will be discontinued.

Microsoft's reasoning for the OneDrive storage offering downgrades: "A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."

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fliptop writes:

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have built smart glasses that translate video into sound:

The device, called vOICe (OIC stands for "Oh! I See"), is a pair of dark glasses with an attached camera, connected to a computer. It's based on an algorithm of the same name developed in 1992 by Dutch engineer Peter Meijer. The system converts pixels in the camera's video feed into sound, mapping brightness and vertical location to an associated pitch and volume.

A cluster of dark pixels at the bottom of the frame sounds quiet and has a low pitch, while a bright patch at the top would sound loud and high-pitched. The way a sound changes over time is governed by how the image looks when scanned left to right across the frame. Headphones sends the processed sound into the wearer's ear.

[...] Tested on the device, blind people with no experience of using it were able to match the shapes to the sounds as often as those who had been trained – both groups performed 33 per cent better than by chance. But when the encoding was reversed, so that a high part of the image became a low pitch and a bright part of the image became a quiet sound, volunteers found it harder to match image to sound.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The R Consortium and the Linux Foundation are investing in a new code-hosting platform that will help streamline the development and distribution of software packages for R, the popular statistical programming language.

Titled R-Hub, the platform will offer development, building, testing and validation services for R packages. R developers proposed the creation of R-Hub in July 2015 to serve as "the everything-builder the R community needs."

A description of the R programming language can be found on Wikipedia.

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Three stories all looking at how deliveries might be made in the near future:

Google Drone Deliveries by 2017, While Skype Founders' Bots Keep Down to Earth

takyon writes:

Google has put a tentative date on deliveries by drone:

Search giant Google has announced a date for the launch of its drone delivery service. Called Project Wing, the initiative aims to be delivering goods to consumers using the robot aircraft sometime in 2017. The announcement came from David Vos, the project leader for the delivery service. Online retailers such as Amazon, Alibaba and others are also experimenting with drone delivery. "Our goal is to have commercial business up and running in 2017," said Mr Vos during a speech at an air traffic control convention being held in Washington.

Meanwhile, Skype's co-founders are working on a more grounded approach:

Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis are poised to unleash a fleet of trundling robodelivery vehicles, promising to get up to two bags of groceries to your door within 30 minutes.

Starship Technologies' bots, which are capable of delivering up to 5km from a central hub at a leisurely 6km/h, have all the bells and whistles you'd expect from the ultra modern alternative to the delivery boy's bicycle – low carbon footprint, autonomous operation, obstacle avoidance capability, mobile app tracking, and so forth.

The blurb explains:

Starship's robots can drive intelligently on the sidewalks at pedestrian speeds. They know their location and can navigate their way through an area with perfect precision all whilst seamlessly merging with pedestrian traffic. The robots can detect obstacles, adjust speed or stop and safely cross the streets.

Additionally, Starship's robots are monitored by human operators who can, at any time, take control over the device and view the world through the robot's eyes, communicating with people around it if necessary.

Australia Post Could Soon be Delivering Packages with Drones

"exec" writes:

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/australia-post-could-soon-be-delivering-packages-with-drones-2015-10

Australia Post is trialling the use of drones for package deliveries as early as next year. The drones, which will cost $10,000 each, will allow packages up to 2kg to be delivered over 25km with the possibility of transporting 10kg on the discussion table.

“It meets all of the flying requirements, has backup engines, gps co-ordinates, so we can put it right on their patio,” Chief executive Ahmed Fahour told the AFR.

“It’s the thin edge of trying to demonstrate that when you think of Australia Post – they’re innovative. We’re hopefully trying to show with the lockers [for parcel pick up], the app, that we are innovative.”

The drone trials will be a new 21st century addition to the national postal service who has in recent years, faced logistical issues such as delayed services despite installing $500 million worth of "state-of-the-art" parcel sorting machines in Sydney and Melbourne last year.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Linus Torvalds has just announced that the new Linux kernel 4.3 has been released and is now available for download. This marks the end of a new development cycle, for 4.3, and the beginning of the next one, 4.4.

The new Linux kernel 4.3 has finally arrived, and it looks like no major problems have troubled the developers. As usual, the new Linux kernel packs an assortment of changes and improvements, and we'll likely see it integrated very soon in a host of operating systems. This is not a long term release, so there won't be a lot of updates down the line, but any kernel upgrade is usually a good one.

In fact, developers announced just a short while ago that Linux kernel 4.4 would be the next LTS release, which is something that hasn't been done before. Usually, kernels were declared LTS (long term support) after their release, but now we know ahead of time. This will make some fascinating research, as the number of people willing to upgrade to version 4.3 will be smaller since they know that 4.4 LTS is on its way.

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AnonTechie writes:

Australia is looking at trialling passport-less travel in a move Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop predicts will go global. The idea of cloud passports is the result of a hipster-style-hackathon held at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), which culminated in an X-Factor style audition before the secretary Peter Varghese, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, Assistant Minister Steve Ciobo and Chris Vein from the World Bank.

Under a cloud passport, a traveller's identity and biometrics data would be stored in a cloud, so passengers would no longer need to carry their passports and risk having them lost or stolen. DFAT says 38,718 passports were registered as lost or stolen in 2014-15, consistent with the 38,689 reported missing the previous year.

Australia and New Zealand are now in discussions about trialling cloud passports. Ms Bishop acknowledged there were security requirements that would have to be met in order to store biometrics in the cloud, but told Fairfax Media: "We think it will go global."

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australia-to-trial-cloud-passports-in-worldfirst-move-20151028-gkkkr3.html

[Also Covered By]: Australia Is Testing Virtual Passports

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The UK government will tomorrow publish draft legislation to regulate the use of encryption and require ISPs to log which websites their customers visit for a year. The government has previously expressed irritation at the idea of some communications being out of government reach. There is an (inevitably toothless) petition.

The silver lining is perhaps that the government still cannot comprehend that not all secure communications involve a communications provider. The government appears to be using the door in the face technique, making the bill as over the top as possible so they can appear to compromise later.

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takyon writes:

After years of slowly killing off its traditional bookstore competition, Amazon has opened its first physical bookstore at 4601 26th Ave NE, Seattle, WA:

Amazon is opening a bookshop in Seattle in a move it described as a "physical extension" of its business. It will stock the most popular books from Amazon.com, and the prices will be the same as those offered on the website. Customers will also be able to try out Amazon's devices, including the Kindle and its Fire TV. One expert questioned how much impact such a shop would have.

Amazon Books vice-president Jennifer Cast announced the online giant would open its "real, wooden doors" at the Seattle University Village on 3 November. "Amazon Books is a physical extension of Amazon.com. We've applied 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping," she said. The shop will stock 5,000 books in the 5,500-sq-ft (510-sq-m) space, with the majority chosen on the basis of customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on reader recommendation site Goodreads, and the shop's curators' assessments.

The BBC article shows an online customer review displayed alongside one of the books, along with a shelf featuring books rated "4.8 stars or higher".

From The Seattle Times:

Amazon is betting that the troves of data it generates from shopping patterns on its website will give it advantages in its retail location that other bookstores can't match. It will use data to pick titles that will most appeal to Seattle shoppers.

And that could also solve the business problem that has long plagued other bookstores: unsold books that gather dust on shelves and get sent back to publishers. More than most book retailers, Amazon has deep insight into customer buying habits and can stock its store with titles most likely to move.

The company will stock best-sellers, of course. But it will also include books that get the highest ratings from its customers, including little-known titles. The store will also include such categories as "Most Wished-For Cookbooks." Another section features "Award Winners, 4.5 Stars & Above, Age 6-12."

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Months before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared bacon a carcinogen, American boffins may have found a solution: algae that tastes just like bacon, but without the bad bits the Doctors at WHO say could cause your untimely demise.

The eukaryote[1] in question is called Dulse (Palmaria sp.) and, as explained Oregon State University, is already in demand as a tasty addition to various recipes. Boffins at the University had been experimenting with a new strain of the plant designed to boost growth of abalone, a delicious and expensive shellfish. Results were good: abalone grew faster on a diet of modified Dulse than they did on other foodstuffs.

And then one of those things happened that is supposed to happen at Universities: folks from the business school met folks from Marine Science Center and asked if they were working on anything that might be a good project for students.

Thus did Dulse attain the status of a "specialty crop" at Oregon's Food Innovation Center. From that collaboration some of the algae, which apparently resembles "translucent red lettuce", found its way into a frying pan wielded by Chris Langdon, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU.

"When you fry it, which I have done, it tastes like bacon, not seaweed. And it's a pretty strong bacon flavor", Langdon says.

Those among you who, on WHO's advice, have stopped eating bacon can't start planning a hangover in anticipation of a virtuously restorative fry-up because Dulce production isn't exactly happening in bulk. It's not hard to imagine that will change after WHO's bacon-killer: OSU announced its find in July and now has a potential market it could only dream of at the time.

[1] A eukaryote is any organism whose cells contain a nucleus and other organelles enclosed within membranes.

Previous: Bacon, Burgers, and Sausages Are a Cancer Risk, Say World Health Chiefs

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AnonTechie and Phoenix666 wrote in minutes apart with this story:

Biogas from human waste, safely obtained under controlled circumstances using innovative technologies, is a potential fuel source great enough in theory to generate electricity for up to 138 million households - the number of households in Indonesia, Brazil, and Ethiopia combined.

A report today from UN University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health estimates that biogas potentially available from human waste worldwide would have a value of up to US$ 9.5 billion in natural gas equivalent. And the residue, dried and charred, could produce 2 million tonnes of charcoal-equivalent fuel, curbing the destruction of trees.

Finally, experts say, the large energy value would prove small relative to that of the global health and environmental benefits that would accrue from the safe treatment of human waste in low-resource settings.

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-vast-energy-human-university.html

[Video]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807RtubRyF0

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takyon writes:

MarketWatch/WSJ reports:

Activision Blizzard Inc. late Monday said it is acquiring King Digital Entertainment PLC for $3.4 billion in cash plus debt, combining two giants in the videogame industry.

The deal gives Activision a powerhouse in console videogames with hit franchises such as "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft," a beachhead in the fast-growing business of mobile games.

King shot to fame in 2012 with its hit "Candy Crush Saga," helping to position casual and inexpensive smartphone apps as a viable alternative to pricier games played on TVs and personal computers. While many of King's other mobile games haven't reached the same level of success, "Candy Crush" and its sequel are still among the top-grossing apps on Apple Inc.'s App Store.

Activision can't pay for the full value of Candy Crush out of pocket:

Activision said it is paying $18 a share, a 20% premium to King's 4 p.m. ET price of $14.96 on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 30. On Monday, King shares rose 3.9% to $15.54. Activision is using $3.4 billion in cash, plus a $2.3 billion loan, to pay for the deal.

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