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unzombied writes:

Synchronizing email, texts, calendar, bookmarks, contacts, notes, git? Done.

Synchronizing what ads you heard when you had your phone in your pocket, and you tablet on the train, and you computer on your desk? Also done.

ArsTechnica (UK) has an article about synchronizing consumer and friend's device use without consumer involvement.

The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.

Cross-device tracking raises important privacy concerns, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote in recently filed comments to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has scheduled a workshop on Monday to discuss the technology. Often, people use as many as five connected devices throughout a given day—a phone, computer, tablet, wearable health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to track activity on one and tie it to another.

"As a person goes about her business, her activity on each device generates different data streams about her preferences and behavior that are siloed in these devices and services that mediate them," CDT officials wrote. "Cross-device tracking allows marketers to combine these streams by linking them to the same individual, enhancing the granularity of what they know about that person."

According to TechCrunch, Silverpush says it "isn't receiving any actual audio data" from some 18 million smartphones.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The sky is going to become a busier place if Facebook and Google get their way.

The tech firms are investing in rival efforts to beam the internet down to the ground from flying objects in the stratosphere - twice as high as aeroplanes normally fly.

Facebook aims to build a network of laser-beaming drones that will tightly circle known black-spots.

Google also has a drone project about which it's tight-lipped.

But the company is more open about an attempt to send "strings" of giant balloons circumnavigating the globe to provide persistent data links to the parts of the planet they pass.

Chatter about penis sheaths and search for penis sheath accessories is clearly worth the expense.

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Phoenix666 writes:

This is the most powerful mobile electromagnetic railgun built by a non-government. A railgun is a device that accelerates a conductive projectile using extremely high current and electromagnetism. No explosive powder required. Just batteries. This page shows many of the steps required to make one.

The gun is portable, but the power supply is not. Still, cool project.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The field of psychology has recently been embarrassed by failed attempts to repeat the results of classic textbook experiments, and a mounting realization that many papers are the result of commonly accepted statistical shenanigans rather than careful attempts to test hypotheses.

Now Ed Yong writes at The Atlantic that Anna Dreber at the Stockholm School of Economics has created a stock market for scientific publications, where psychologists bet on published studies based on how reproducible they deemed the findings. Based on Robin Hanson's classic paper "Could Gambling Save Science," that proposed a market-based alternative to peer review called "idea futures," the market would allow scientists to formally "stake their reputation", and offer clear incentives to be careful and honest while contributing to a visible, self-consistent consensus on controversial (or routine) scientific questions.

Here's how it works. Each of 92 participants received $100 for buying or selling stocks on 41 studies that were in the process of being replicated. At the start of the trading window, each stock cost $0.50. If the study replicated successfully, they would get $1. If it didn't, they'd get nothing. As time went by, the market prices for the studies rose and fell depending on how much the traders bought or sold. The participants tried to maximize their profits by betting on studies they thought would pan out, and they could see the collective decisions of their peers in real time. The final price of the stocks, at the end of two-week experiment, reflected the probability that each study would be successfully replicated, as determined by the collective actions of the traders. In the end, the markets correctly predicted the outcomes of 71 percent of the replications—a statistically significant, if not mind-blowing score.

"It blew us all away," says Dreber. "There is some wisdom of crowds; people have some intuition about which results are true and which are not," adds Dreber. "Which makes me wonder: What's going on with peer review? If people know which results are really not likely to be real, why are they allowing them to be published?"

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"gewg_" writes:

The Bern Report reports

Dr. Rick Hardy and Dr. John Hemingway have been leading Mock Presidential Elections [at Western Illinois University] since 1975. During that time, students who have participated in these mock elections have chosen the winning party with 100% accuracy and have an astonishing record in selecting presidential winners.

On the Democratic side for the Primaries Sanders won[1] by close to a 2 to 1 margin over challenger Hillary Clinton.

[...] After nominating Sanders, the student Democrats put him up against Jeb Bush, who received the Republican nomination, with Bernie winning the electoral college by nearly a 4 to 1 margin and a decisive win for the popular vote.

This simulation always takes place the year before the presidential election year, and three months before the actual Iowa caucuses. The genesis of this mock presidential election began at the University of Iowa in 1975 with two political science doctoral students, John Hemingway and Rick Hardy. In that year, students selected Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford--long before anyone really knew of Jimmy Carter.

In the years that followed, Rick Hardy expanded the format and engaged thousands of students at the University of Missouri-Columbia where students registered a perfect record of selecting the subsequent winning presidential party. In 2007 and 2011, Hardy and Hemingway teamed up again to conduct a massive campus-wide simulation at Western Illinois University. In 2007, Western students selected Barack Obama as president at a time when no one thought he could win! And, in 2011, students narrowly re-elected President Obama.

[1] Content is behind scripts.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Deep in the mailing list for the device-mapper project is this email exchange, after a patch to bring a request-based dm-crypt implementation was shot down by maintainers, among them Christoph Hellwig: "NAK for more request based stacking or DM drivers. They are a major pain to deal with... No, you will NOT remove the bio based path. That would break all kinds of perfectly valid setups."

The argument in favor of request-based dm-crypt was to utilize hardware encryption engines, but this was deemed too flimsy an argument to risk ruining the rest of the users of device-mapper. But then, Mark Brown reveals that Qualcomm had already implemented an "out-of-tree implementation" of this in a Board Support Package: "Android now wants to encrypt phones and tablets by default, and have been seeing substantial performance hits as a result; we can try to get people to share performance data from productionish systems, but it might be difficult."

In response to that, notable block storage kernel developer Jens Axboe replied, "Well, shame on them for developing out-of-tree, looks like they are reaping all the benefits of that."

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Vice News reports:

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Knowledge Troll writes:

A Google small neighorbood electric vehicle (aka golf cart) was recently pulled over while traveling on an extremely busy main thoroughfare in the Silicon Valley and a cute story is forming in the media about a cop who pulls over a car with no driver for no reason. What happened you ask? The car was driving slowly, 24 mph (40 kmh) in a 35 mph (55 kmh) and had a chain of other cars behind it being held up. The Google team even acts as if this is some kind of badge of honor: Driving too slowly? Bet humans don't get pulled over for that too often.

Yes, well, they do in fact get pulled over exactly for things like this. California has a law about holding up traffic on a highway. California has a law about driving at speeds so low they are dangerous because differences with other vehicles are too high. None of those laws were broken here as the Google vehicle was never actually operating outside of the law. However being inside the law isn't what we should be analyzing.

When was the last time you saw a golf cart holding up traffic on a major street in a major city? If you saw that would you think it was cute? What kind of jerk would think that was appropriate then respond that its fine because driving that slow makes things safer. The Google car and worse, the Google team. Yay?

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James Somers wanted to find out why the New York subway's F train still doesn't have countdown clocks to tell you when the next train is arriving. He never expected it to be so complicated.

The New York subway signaling system was one of the earliest attempts to automate a large, complex and chaotic mechanism. It was designed to keep the trains running while making collisions impossible - and it did a pretty good job of that, considering the technology that was available at the time. When it was built in the early part of the 20th century, it was the state of the art - the problem is, much of that system hasn't been updated since then. In the case of the F train, there are no countdown clocks at the station because literally nobody has clear knowledge of the train's position besides the people on the train. (Many other lines do have the clocks.)

Somers' lengthy article examines the nuts and bolts of the signaling system, and also tries to figure out why it's taking so long to bring it up to date - a combination of politics, bureaucracy, and a need to support legacy technology while transporting 5 million people a day.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Gay women tend to be exclusively sexually attracted to women, while straight women are more likely to be aroused by both sexes, a study says.

Researchers asked 345 women about their sexual preferences and compared these with their arousal levels when shown videos of attractive men and women.

They found 28% of straight women were mostly aroused by their preferred sex, compared with 68% of gay women.

The University of Essex study concluded that no woman is "totally straight".

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AnonTechie writes:

Gene M. Amdahl, chief architect of IBM's System/360 mainframe and later the creator of the IBM plug-compatible mainframe vendor that bore his name, has died aged 92.

Amdahl was born in South Dakota, earning a bachelor's degree in engineering physics at the state university in 1948.

In 1950, as a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he and Charles H. Davidson designed a digital computer. In 1952, the year Amdahl received his doctorate in theoretical physics, the university began building the computer, the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC).

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3004884/high-performance-computing/gene-amdahl-ibm-mainframe-architect-then-a-rival-has-died.html

[Also Covered By]:
Bloomberg Business

New York Times

[Wikipedia Bio]: Gene Amdahl and Amdahl's law

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Matt Becker over at peekand.io informs us of what everyone should have already known:

When the results were broken down, it emerged that PC players had been rated the highest by their partners, with 54 per cent of PC gamers being described as 'good' or above and 22 per cent being regarded as 'excellent'.

Xbox players also fared relatively well, with 47 per cent of them being described as 'good' or above.

In contrast, Playstation gamers performed badly in the bedroom study, as only three per cent were described as being 'excellent' and eight per cent as very good.

At the very least we don't need help aiming like you console noobs.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Chinese scientists have found a new chemical compound in the venom of a centipede native to China that can act as a painkiller with no negative side effects like those associated with morphine.

The discovery could potentially help a country's military reduce its reliance on morphine for battleground injuries, or even create an army of soldiers with the ability to fight on after sustaining wounds in combat, pundits say.

"It is completely different from morphine," said Professor Lai Ren, the lead scientist of the study.

"Morphine is only intended for emergency use. It has many side effects and can lead to addiction over the longer-term," added Lai, who works with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Zoology in southern Yunnan province.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Spin-off company Dispelix Oy will commercialise a new display – developed by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland – which brings visual information directly into the user's field of vision, as a high-definition image on an eyeglass lens. This will enable smartglasses to replace even smartphones or tablets, while still allowing users to see the world around them. Also integrable with current smartglasses, this product should be available to consumers within a year.

[...] The forthcoming displays will have unlimited applications for consumer and professional use. The first applications will be found in the worlds of exercise, work and motor sports. Thanks to the new display, a sportsperson will no longer need to check his or her pulse-rate from a watch – pulse-rate, navigation and activity data will be directly displayed on sport glasses.

[...] The technology is based on lightguide optics, which enables the manufacture of displays on either glass or plastic in the form of light and thin elements with a thickness of just one millimetre. In addition to thinness, the benefits of the technology include a large, high-quality virtual image and excellent transparency. The display element can also be freely shaped.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

France has declared a national state of emergency and has closed its borders after at least 40 people were killed in multiple shootings in Paris.

At least 15 people were killed near the Bataclan arts centre, where up to 60 people are being held hostage. Explosions and gunfire are reported.

Three people were killed in an attack near the Stade de France, with some reports suggesting a suicide blast.

Paris authorities have urged people to stay indoors.

Military personnel are being deployed across Paris.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/13/455943961/violence-reported-in-paris
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/world/paris-shooting/index.html

Update #1 [BBC updates]:

Scores of people have been killed in multiple gun and bomb attacks in Paris

At least 100 people are reported to have died inside the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris

Others died in attacks near the Stade de France, where France were playing Germany, and at restaurants

France has declared a national state of emergency and has closed its borders

Paris residents have been asked to stay indoors and military personnel are being deployed across the city

[...] Reuters. quoting an un-named official at Paris City Hall, says the current death toll in Paris is around 140.

Update #2:

According to the Paris prosecutor, of the four assailants who died during the sidge at the Bataclan, three committed suicide by detonating explosive vests. The prosecutor has warned that some of their accomplices may "still be on the loose".

[...] Here is what French president François Hollande told reporters outside the Bataclan concert hall just now: "To all those who have seen these awful things, I want to say we are going to lead a war which will be pitiless. Because when terrorists are capable of committing such atrocities they must be certain that they are facing a determined France, a united France, a France that is together and does not let itself be moved, even if today we express infinite sorrow."

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