SoylentNews

"exec" writes:

Here's a discovery that could make secular parents say hallelujah: Children who grow up in non-religious homes are more generous and altruistic than children from observant families. ...

A series of experiments involving 1,170 kids from a variety of religious backgrounds found that the non-believers were more likely to share stickers with their classmates and less likely to endorse harsh punishments for people who pushed or bumped into others.

The results "contradict the common-sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind toward others," according to a study published this week in the journal Current Biology.

Worldwide, about 5.8 billion people consider themselves religious, and religion is a primary way for cultures to express their ideas about proper moral behavior — especially behavior that involves self-sacrifice for the sake of others.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

onEarth reports

President Obama officially rejected the Keystone XL pipeline [November 6], just days after TransCanada begged for a stay of execution.

[...] Obama ought to keep his veto pen handy, just in case. Congressional Republicans have so far been quiet today about their reaction to the president's decision, but they may yet use some legislative trickery to try to approve KXL against his wishes.

[...] TransCanada bought hundreds of miles of property easements from U.S. landowners to clear a path for the pipeline. If it decides to abandon the project, it could sell those rights to other companies, even if the easements were purchased from unwilling landowners through eminent domain. (Permissive eminent domain laws in many states allow companies to do almost whatever they want with the property once they have it.) Expect fights between property owners and TransCanada to continue.

[...] Existing tar sands mines will continue to produce crude. KXL's demise, however, is a major threat to expansion. Tar sands mines are expensive to start up. Even when oil was selling for more than $90 per barrel, several companies canceled their planned tar sands projects. The price per barrel is now in the mid-$40s, making tar sands crude uneconomic--even if there were a pipeline to transport it cheaply to refineries.

Without KXL, fewer companies will want to take a chance on tar sands. Just as important, the pipeline's rejection sends a signal to investors that politicians and the public are concerned about the impacts of tar sands on the climate.

TransCanada was once so confident that Keystone XL would win approval that the company contracted the manufacture of 661,670 tons of pipe--most of what was required for KXL. The company has not said exactly how much pipe it already has on hand, but a 2011 report[PDF] from Cornell University identified 70,000 tons that had been received in U.S. ports.

[...] The company needed federal approval for KXL only because it crossed national borders. It can likely repurpose much or all of the pipe for its many other pipelines [paywall] that have been approved in the United States and Canada. If that doesn't work, sale is always an option.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Make has an article on an impressively low cost desktop CNC router built by Norbert Heinz, largely from scrap parts.

Using dirt-cheap chipboard, an Arduino, motor breakout board, angled aluminum, and a few gears and servos pulled from a tray-style computer CD drive, Norbert Heinz has created an unbelievably inexpensive CNC router — the total cost for Heinz was around €150 (or about $160 in US dollars).
...
During testing, the machine was able to engrave wood, glass, plastic, aluminum, and Depron foam with ease and surprising precision

The project page has complete instructions and source code, and there is a detailed Youtube video showing the construction and operation of the machine.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

The BBC reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will "review" the appointment of his new communications director, Ran Baratz, over comments Baratz made on Facebook accusing President Obama of anti-Semitism and describing US Secretary of State John Kerry as having a "mental age" of no more than 12. Netanyahu has described the comments as totally unacceptable while US state department spokesman John Kirby said Mr Baratz's Facebook posts were "troubling and offensive". "Insults, certainly, aimed at individuals doesn't do anything to help advance and deepen the relationship. ... We learn in kindergarten about name-calling, and it's simply not a polite thing to do, ' Kirby said.

The Facebook posts emerged shortly after Netanyahu announced the appointment of philosophy lecturer Mr Baratz as his chief spokesman. In March, Baratz described President Obama's criticism of Netanyahu's opposition to the Iran nuclear deal as "the modern face of anti-Semitism in Western and liberal countries".

Netanyahu quickly distanced himself from the comments but indicated the appointment remained valid. "I have just read Dr Ran Baratz's posts on the internet, including those relating to the president of the state of Israel, the president of the United States and other public figures in Israel and the United States," Netanyahu said in a statement. "Those posts are totally unacceptable and in no way reflect my positions or the policies of the government of Israel. Dr Baratz has apologized and has asked to meet me to clarify the matter following my return to Israel."

Baratz, in a Facebook post Thursday night, apologized for "the hurtful remarks" and for not informing the prime minister of them. Baratz said the posts "were written frivolously and sometimes humorously, in a tone suited to the social networks and a private individual." Baratz added, "It is very clear to me that in an official post one has to behave and express oneself differently."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The transition to fully driverless cars is still several years away, but vehicle automation has already started to change the way we are thinking about transportation, and it is set to disrupt business models throughout the automotive industry.

Driverless cars are also likely to create new business opportunities and have a broad reach, touching companies and industries beyond the automotive industry and giving rise to a wide range of products and services.

We currently have Uber developing a driverless vehicle, and Google advancing its driverless car and investigating a ridesharing model.

Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly gearing up to challenge Telsa in electric cars and Silicon Valley is extending its reach into the auto industry.

These developments signal the creation of an entirely new shared economy businesses that will tap into a new market that could see smart mobility seamlessly integrated in our lives.

Consider, for example, the opportunity to provide mobility as a service using shared on-demand driverless vehicle fleets. Research by Deloitte shows that car ownership is increasingly making less sense to many people, especially in urban areas.

Individuals are finding it difficult to justify tying up capital in an under-utilised asset that stays idle for 20 to 22 hours every day. Driverless on-demand shared vehicles provide a sensible option as a second car for many people and as the trend becomes more widespread, it may also begin to challenge the first car.

Results from a recent study by the International Transport Forum that modelled the impacts of shared driverless vehicle fleets for the city of Lisbon in Portugal demonstrates the impacts. It showed that the city's mobility needs can be delivered with only 35% of vehicles during peak hours, when using shared driverless vehicles complementing high capacity rail. Over 24 hours, the city would need only 10% of the existing cars to meet its transportation needs.

The Lisbon study also found that while the overall volume of car travel would likely increase (because the vehicles will need to re-position after they drop off passengers), the driverless vehicles could still be turned into a major positive in the fight against air pollution if they were all-electric.

It also found that a shared self-driving fleet that replaces cars and buses is also likely to remove the need for all on-street parking, freeing an area equivalent to 210 soccer fields, or almost 20% of the total kerb-to-kerb street space.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Given the choice between safer and cheaper construction, many housing design companies in earthquake-prone developing countries see themselves forced to save on expensive construction materials and opt for the latter. EPFL structural engineers have gathered new data on how these structures respond to earthquakes, and in which circumstances they may fail.

Earthquakes almost never kill people by themselves. Instead, the high toll they take can be explained by a lack of resilient buildings and infrastructure. In Chile in 2010, many thin-walled reinforced concrete buildings were damaged in one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. Yet today, more and more structures with even thinner walls are being built in some Latin American countries. Recently, engineers from EPFL evaluated the stability of thin reinforced concrete walls to understand how they fail. Their findings are published in the journal Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering.

To find out how very thin-walled structures behave in an earthquake, João Almeida and Angelica Rosso, two of the study's authors, tested two 80-millimeter-thick, 2-by-2.7-meter wall segments, similar to those used in low-income housing projects in some South American countries. By clamping the wall segments to the floor of the laboratory and loading them with five actuators strong enough to slowly bend the walls back and forth in different directions, they simulated the impact of an earthquake on the structure. By slowing down the process the researchers had time to watch the damage spread and to find out how cracks propagate across the wall, ultimately destabilizing it.

"The data we gathered in our experiment is unique," says Katrin Beyer, the principal investigator of the study. "It is the first to contain detailed measurements of a so-called out-of-plane wall failure, which means that the wall structure was irreversibly deformed perpendicularly to its surface." According to Beyer, it was also the first time that displacements greater than the wall thickness itself had been observed under these conditions. By the end of the test, the wall's reinforcement bars had bent, with the concrete crumbling in one corner of the structure. Thanks to an array of sensors, cameras, and strain gauges, the researchers were able to capture and analyze every motion leading up to the collapse of the wall.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

The folks over at CNBC have dug up some experts to explore the question should you have sex with robots:

Should we be having sex with robots?

It's a question that has sparked fierce debate among moralists and the robotics industry. And it turns out, they're all split on what role machines should play in future relationships.

During a discussion at the Web Summit technology conference in Dublin on Wednesday, experts warned about the dangers of getting intimate with robots.

"It's something we should be very concerned about...because if people feel they can have an intimate relationship with a machine, that is saying something serious about how we're experiencing empathy with each other," Kathleen Richardson, senior research fellow in the ethics of robotics at the U.K.'s De Montfort University, said during the panel.

The academic, who launched the "campaign against sex robots" earlier this year, added that "we are losing our sense of humanity."

How, exactly, do you get to be an expert on banging robots? Just saying...

Original Submission

Zinho writes:

The Atlantic is running an article on the friction between the computing world and Professional Engineer societies. This discussion has been going on for a long time, and is meaningful to me personally - I quit a 10-year career as server administrator with 'engineer' in my job title when I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree, and have since earned my Professional Engineer license. In a world where most software comes with a disclaimer of liability due to defects, where would an ethical, civic-minded programmer even practice Professional Engineering? Angry Birds probably doesn't have any responsibility to the public safety, so there's little need there; on the other hand, Google's self-driving car program is a good candidate.

I'd love to welcome the programming profession into the circle of licensed Engineers, provided that the industry manages to agree on standards of quality and accountability. I don't see the methods (such as Agile) used by programmers as a significant obstacle, either; the programming motto of "move fast and break things" (which the article wrongly decries) is echoed in the motto "fail early, fail often" that is held by many Mech Eng R&D shops. I just fear that the halting problem will be solved before any such standards become widely accepted and implemented in the industry.

Original Submission

Only a few days back we had a story telling how the FBI recommends that people who are suffering from some malware that encrypts their data should simply pay the ransom if they hope to get their data back. Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A secure-email firm, based in Switzerland, has paid a ransom of more than £3,600 after web attacks crippled its website. The hi-tech criminals behind the web attacks said the payment would stop the deluge of data hitting the site. But despite paying up, the web attacks continued, leaving Protonmail struggling to operate. It has now launched a fund-raising drive to raise cash to tackle any future attacks.

Protonmail did not respond to the message and, soon afterwards, was hit by what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This tries to knock a server offline by bombarding it with more data than it can handle. Protonmail is a free, web-based, encrypted email service that needs its site up and running to serve customers. The first attack knocked out Protonmail for about 15 minutes and then stopped. A second attack the next day was much bigger and overwhelmed efforts by the email firm and its ISP to stop it.

"This co-ordinated assault on key infrastructure eventually managed to bring down both the datacenter and the ISP, which impacted hundreds of other companies, not just Protonmail," it said on the blog. In a bid to halt the attack, Protonmail said it "grudgingly" paid the 15 bitcoin ransom.

[...]

Post-attack analysis suggests Protonmail was targeted in two phases, the company said. The first aided the ransom demand but the second was "not afraid of causing massive collateral damage in order to get at us".

Switzerland's national Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert), which helped Protonmail cope, said the attack was carried out by a cybercrime group known as the Armada Collective. This group has also targeted many other Swiss web companies over the last few weeks, the team said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the first time a powerful laser has been used to further our understanding of some of the most mysterious celestial objects just beyond the solar system - brown dwarfs.

Despite being discovered 20 years ago, very little is known about brown dwarfs – notably why they fail to grow into stars. Scientists say part of the answer probably lies in the physics of how dense plasmas merge inside them. Now researchers, led by the York Plasma Institute at the University of York and the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Central Laser Facility, have created "lumps" of plasma to recreate the conditions similar to those found deep inside brown dwarfs.

They were able to do this using one of the world's most powerful lasers, STFC's Vulcan Petawatt that is based at their Oxfordshire laser laboratory, to create the first test of resistivity and viscosity found in brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs bridge the gap between very low mass stars and planets and share characteristics with both. Despite being numerous across the immensity of space, these little "starlets" are hard to spot because they are small and cool in temperature so tend to be faint and difficult to record.

But by measuring the x-rays emitted from these objects, the researchers were able to build up a profile of how dense plasmas form inside brown dwarfs.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The TPP E-Commerce chapter has a provision banning requirements to transfer or provide access to software source code. This applies to "mass market software."

Article 14.17: Source Code
1. No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.
2. For the purposes of this Article, software subject to paragraph 1 is limited to mass-market software or products containing such software and does not include software used for critical infrastructure.
3. Nothing in this Article shall preclude:
(a) the inclusion or implementation of terms and conditions related to the provision of source code in commercially negotiated contracts; or
(b) a Party from requiring the modification of source code of software necessary for that software to comply with laws or regulations which are not inconsistent with this Agreement.
4. This Article shall not be construed to affect requirements that relate to patent applications or granted patents, including any orders made by a judicial authority in relation to patent disputes, subject to safeguards against unauthorised disclosure under the law or practice of a Party.

I'm wondering how the GPL fares here, and how much money Microsoft spent lobbying to get this included in the TPP, or if the NSA has a role in this. One aspect of this provision is that governments cannot insist on source code transparency, for mass market software, even to address concerns over security or interoperability.

Original Submission

zugedneb writes:

In 2011 AMD released the Bulldozer architecture, with a somewhat untraditional implementation of the "multicore" technology. Now, 4 years later, they are sued for false advertising, fraud and other "criminal activities". From TFA:

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

More than 40 states have banned the sale of electronic cigarettes to minors, but Michael Greenwood reports at the Yale School of Medicine that a study indicates that these measures have an unintended and dangerous consequence: increasing adolescents' use of conventional cigarettes. "Conventional cigarette use has been falling somewhat steadily among this age group since the start of the 21st century. This paper shows that bans on e-cigarette sales to minors appear to have slowed this decline by about 70 percent in the states that implemented them," says Abigail Friedman. "In other words, as a result of these bans, more teenagers are using conventional cigarettes than otherwise would have done so." Guided by her findings and the fact that habitual use of conventional cigarettes first spikes at age 16, Friedman suggests that bans on e-cigarette sales may be more effective in reducing teenage smoking if they were limited to those under 16, rather than those under 18.

This middle ground solution may provide a way to reduce teen smoking while the long-term effects of vaping, still largely unknown, are being determined. "Policy makers have been assuming that banning e-cigarette sales to minors will improve public health. This paper's finding, that these bans increase conventional cigarette smoking among teens, suggests that we may need to rethink this conclusion."

Original Submission

Erwin Proell, the governor of Lower Austria (the largest of Austria's 9 states, with a population of 1.6 million) announced on Thursday that his state now gets 100% of its electricity from renewable sources (63% hydroelectric, 26% wind, 9% biomass and 2% solar).

"Since 2002 we have invested 2.8 billion euros ($3bn) in eco-electricity, from solar parks to renewing (hydroelectric) stations on the Danube," Proell told a news conference.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Exxon Mobil is facing an investigation by New York's attorney general:

New York's attorney general would like to know: Did Exxon Mobil lie to you about the risks of climate change and to investors about how those risks might reduce profits?

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman's office confirms that a New York Times story is correct in reporting that an investigation has been launched into Exxon Mobil. That story said Schneiderman issued a subpoena on Wednesday, seeking financial records, emails and other documents.

The goal is to examine whether back in the 1970s, Exxon Mobil funded groups to undermine scientific studies involving climate change. Also, the attorney general is investigating whether the oil giant properly informed its investors of the profit risks that might arise as countries cut back on fossil fuels.

In a statement, Exxon Mobil confirms it is under investigation and says its executives "unequivocally reject allegations that ExxonMobil suppressed climate change research."

[More after the break.]