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Phoenix666 writes:

In meetings with clients, hedge fund representatives present flashy charts and speak equal parts oracle and mad scientist. And for technical analysts who market themselves as the most technical of analysts, the mathematical jargon—"stochastic oscillators," "Fibonacci ratios," "Elliot wave," "Golden ratio"—evinces a certain disarming beauty. "This mathematics is embedded in the structure of the universe," Cynthia Kase, who runs a firm that employs "wave analysis" to predict oil prices, told Bloomberg News in 2012. "It is the language of God."

Though much of this language is too gaudy to be embraced by sophisticated investors, there is a more subtle mathematical con that many, including editors at most of the top financial journals, overlook. The positive results that emerge from testing the performance of an investing algorithm on past market data, a process known as backtesting, can seem reliable and logical. And they sometimes are. But often, in practice, presentations of these results, though marketed as scientifically rigorous, conceal statistically insignificant methodologies.

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n1 writes:

Tom Secker at SpyCulture.com continues his reporting on the involvement of the security state in film and television:

Completing what has been a record-breaking year for FOIA releases from the Entertainment Liaison Offices of the US Department of Defense, the US Marine Corps recently sent me 1669 pages of reports covering the last 7 years of their activities in the entertainment industry. The documents reveal a number of major films that are not acknowledged in the already-released files, along with indications that the USMC are operating on a scale approaching that of the Army i.e. they are involved in dozens of productions at any given time. Unlike the Army and Air Force documents they contain details of productions that were denied assistance, adding significantly to the picture we have of the Pentagon's propaganda operations in the entertainment industry.

The USMC reports came in two batches. The 2008 to 2012 reports are relatively extensive if mundane diary-like entries very similar the those used by the US Army during the same period. The 2013 to 2015 are much shorter, are inconsistently formatted and evidently have had a lot of information removed including most of the dates, often leaving headings that tell us nothing.

[...] It is in the TV realm that the true scale of the DOD's influence becomes apparent. The ELOs of both the US Army and the Marines have the capacity to work with dozens of TV productions at any given time. The US Army's reports show that they work on an average of 40-50 TV productions at once. What the USMC reports show is that their TV work is on a similar scale, with very little crossover between the two.

[More after the break.]

Walzmyn writes:

We are in the very early stages of building a new house and I would like to incorporate "Smart Home Tech" into the house.

I've been doing a little research on the subject and it will quickly make your eyes bleed. Everyone from Amazon to Samsung and dozens more I've never heard of are getting in on the new industry. And I'm not sure I trust any of them.

The primary lessons I've learned thus far is that this stuff is expensive, "interoperability" is a foreign word said companies want nothing to do with, and security is a late afterthought at best.

My questions to the community are: does anybody have experience with smart home tech they could share with the rest of us? Is there a specific system that works better than others? Is there a good non-biased place a novice could go to properly educate themselves on the in/outs and comparisons of the competing technologies? And is any of this secure enough to actually use or should we all run away?

For the sake of the community, I would like to open the floor to pretty much anything that is "smart tech". Personally, I'm interested in lights and door locks. I'd love to be able to hit one button as I left the house and lock all the doors and kill all the lights. However, I'd be nice if all systems were linked together. Google's Nest seems to be trying to accomplish a unified control center for all things smart tech, (Kwikset makes a bluetooth door lock that links to Nest, neither of which seem like a good idea to me). But the (in)security of letting Google in my home scares the crap out of me.

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n1 reported that James Corbett (of the Corbett Report) reported:

How does the Islamic State, a ragtag band of jihadis who are supposedly at war with the combined military might of the US, Turkey, the Saudis, the Russians, the Iraqis, the Iranians and many others (including, of course, the Syrians) manage to fund and coordinate spectacular international terror attacks, including not only the Paris attack, but also (apparently) bombings in Turkey and Lebanon, and the take down of Russian airliners? How is it that governments can flag and track the "suspicious" financial transactions of anyone withdrawing or transferring over $10,000 from their own bank account, but can't seem to find a way to restrict cash flows, arms and munitions to a geographically isolated enemy who are dependent on oil sales for their financial survival?

Good question. Just don't ask the US State Department spokesman those questions, because he doesn't have the answers. When asked earlier this week by RT's Gayane Chichakyan "whether the US has sanctioned any banks suspected of carrying out transactions for ISIL," department spokesman Mark Toner responded with a resounding: "I'd have to look into that. I don't have the answer in front of me."

Apparently the question of how ISIS is financing its operations is of so little interest to the State Department that they haven't bothered to look into it. So in the interest of helping them out with their homework, let's connect a few dots, shall we?

[More after the break.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s," reads the official NASA web site. But National Geographic points out that "the details haven't been announced, in large part because such a massive, long-term spending project would require the unlikely support of several successive U.S. presidents." And yet on November 4th, NASA put out a call for astronaut applications "in anticipation of returning human spaceflight launches to American soil, and in preparation for the agency's journey to Mars," and they're currently experimenting with growing food in space. And this week they not only ordered the first commercial mission to the International Space Station, but also quietly announced that they've now partnered with 22 private space companies.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Entertainment Weekly reports that George Lucas has compared his retirement from Star Wars to a break-up – a mutual one, maybe, but one that nonetheless comes with hard feelings. Although Lucas came up with story treatments for a new trilogy, those materials, to put it bluntly, were discarded. "They decided they didn't want to use those stories, they decided they were gonna go do their own thing," says Lucas. "They weren't that keen to have me involved anyway. But at the same time, I said if I get in there I'm just going to cause trouble. Because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore. All I would do is muck everything up. So I said, 'Okay, I will go my way, and I'll let them go their way.'"

Lucas says he was going to tell a story about the grandchildren of figures from the original trilogy. "The issue was, ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans,'" says Lucas. "So, I said, all I want to do is tell a story of what happened – it started here and went there. It's all about generations, and issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers. It's a family soap opera."

Although the team behind The Force Awakens acknowledges they're taking the story in a different direction from what Lucas intended, they maintain affection for his original creations and the man himself. "Before I showed up, it was already something that Disney had decided they wanted to go a different way with," says J. J. Abrams. "But the spirit of what he wrote, both in those pages and prior, is everything that this movie is built upon."

Some fans question why there was no "Based on" credit for Lucas in the poster for The Force Awakens. "I don't know why it isn't on the poster, but it's a valid point. I'm sure that that will be a credit in the film," says Abrams. "We are standing on the shoulders of Episodes I through VI."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

"Detoxing" and kombucha are yesterday's news. Now the latest health fad, cryotherapy, is facing regulation in Nevada after a recent death:

After the death of a spa employee, Nevada has created health guidelines for cryotherapy, a treatment that experts say has been growing in popularity but is largely unregulated and whose benefits are not proven.

The guidelines from the state health department recommend that the machines, which subject users to subzero temperatures, not be used by those younger than 18, under five feet tall or with certain health conditions, said Dr. Tracey Green, the state's chief medical officer. The health conditions include a history of stroke, high blood pressure, seizures and infections, as well as pregnancy, a pacemaker or claustrophobia. Users should have only one session per day for no more than three minutes and have their blood pressure taken before and after.

[...] Chelsea Ake-Salvacion, 24, accidentally died of asphyxia caused by low oxygen levels while in a cryotherapy machine at the Rejuvenice spa in Henderson, where she worked, the Clark County coroner's office said. She was found dead on Oct. 20 after apparently using the treatment on herself the night before. Her death drew scrutiny to the treatment that has been used worldwide but is not quite mainstream.

Cryotherapy supporters claim it can ease pain and inflammation, aid blood flow and weight loss, improve skin and even ward off aging and depression. The treatment has been popularized by celebrities and sports stars who use it in lieu of a traditional ice bath. It can involve two- to four-minute exposures in a chamber the size of a telephone booth to temperatures ranging from minus 166 to minus 319 degrees F.

Cryotherapy has been used by athletes for muscle soreness and exercise recovery, although there is insufficient evidence to support its efficacy. It is not the same thing as cryonics or medically induced hypothermia.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Citing possible links between terror-related websites and online communications and [the recent] attacks on Paris, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested Tuesday Congress give the agency more authority to use 'big data' to monitor and act on potential threats.

Appearing at a hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Federal Communications Commission chairman told lawmakers that updating a 1994 law could give the agency more power to assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the surveillance of terror suspects online.

"We just had this terrible attack in Paris, and hundreds of people were killed," Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton said during the hearing. "We need to do something about it. ISIS and the terrorist networks can't beat us militarily, but they are really trying to use the Internet and all of the social media to try to intimidate and beat us psychologically."

Total surveillance failed, so more unconstitutional measures are required.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HPCwire reports on an analysis of the November 2015 TOP500 Supercomputer list by co-creator Dr. Erich Strohmaier showing "nothing wrong with Moore's Law". Strohmaier examined China's jump in installed systems and performance growth trends.

China's surge is mainly attributed to "surprise company" Sugon, which submitted smaller sytems. It achieved 3rd place in vendor market share, but just 7th in terms of installed performance, with 21 petaflops. Strohmaier says that Sugon was new to supercomputing and took the time and energy to run the LINPACK benchmark across all systems, "regardless of how well or badly they run and gave us the number". Lenovo became a Chinese company, and some "artifact" systems were labelled Lenovo/IBM or IBM/Lenovo. Strohmaier also pointed to Inspur with 15 systems.

Strohmaier identifies two inflection points in TOP500 performance development. The growth trajectory dips in 2008 and 2014, showing the effects of financial and technology changes. Turnover has decreased since 2008, with 1.27 year old systems before 2008 and roughly 3 year old systems today. However, by filtering out systems with NVIDIA and Xeon Phi coprocessors, Strohmaier identified an Rmax/socket trend that continues to follow Moore's Law and is the product of the average number of cores per socket and the performance per core. Since the performance per socket continues to increase at an exponential rate, it is the lack of growth in total number of sockets that explains TOP500 stagnation. "So it's clearly a technological reason, but it's not a reason on a chip, it's actually a reason on the facility and system level that is most likely related to either power or money or both."

[More after the break.]

takyon writes:

Google Glass came back from the dead to assist cardiologists completing a difficult surgery:

Cardiologists from the Institute of Cardiology, Warsaw, Poland have used Google Glass in a challenging surgical procedure, successfully clearing a blockage in the right coronary artery of a 49-year-old male patient and restoring blood flow, reports the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Chronic total occlusion, a complete blockage of the coronary artery, sometimes referred to as the "final frontier in interventional cardiology," represents a major challenge for catheter-based percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), according to the cardiologists.

[...] Coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) is increasingly used to provide physicians with guidance when performing PCI for this procedure. The 3-D CTA data can be projected on monitors, but this technique is expensive and technically difficult, the cardiologists say.

So a team of physicists from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling of the University of Warsaw developed a way to use Google Glass to clearly visualize the distal coronary vessel and verify the direction of the guide-wire advancement relative to the course of the blocked vessel segment.

The procedure was completed successfully, including implantation of two drug-eluting stents.

First-in-Man Computed Tomography-Guided Percutaneous Revascularization of Coronary Chronic Total Occlusion Using a Wearable Computer: Proof of Concept [abstract]

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Nerdfest writes:

A group of students at Germany's Hasso-Plattner Institute have developed the Protopiper, a hand-held device that takes packing tape and "extrudes" it into rigid tubes (presumably with the sticky surface on the insides). It's meant to allow the user to quickly bang out 3D wireframes of large objects. While the resultant extrusions obviously lack load-bearing capacities, I'd imagine this would be useful for exhibit designers or furniture designers trying to rough out scale. And the real brilliance of the Protopiper is how "lean" it is.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Netflix announced Friday that they'd be remaking the old `60s show, Lost in Space

Space's first family is flying back. Netflix is remaking the cult '60s series Lost in Space, executive producer Kevin Burns confirmed to EW. Legendary TV's remake, which has yet to garner a straight-to-series order, is being written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (Dracula Untold) and produced by Game of Thrones vet Neil Marshall, who's in line to direct.

"Am I thrilled? Yes," Burns tells EW. "We've obviously been developing Lost in Space for a long time, and we've had a couple of false starts. Just speaking for myself, we really felt that we had learned a lot from not only what we did, but what other people did and did wrong."

The original series, which lasted three seasons and 83 episodes, is set in a futuristic 1997 and follows the Robinson family's space exploration. After the villainous Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris) sabotages the navigation system, they become helpless and, yes, lost. (The robot tasked with protecting the youngest child, the precocious Will, utters "Danger, Will Robinson!" — a phrase that still tortures this reporter.)

I was never really that big of a fan but I did dig me some Dr. Smith.

n1 writes:

Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Washington Post reports:

The average annual retail cost of specialty drugs used to treat complex diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis now exceeds the median U.S. household income, according to a report to be published Friday.

The study of 115 specialty drugs found that a year's worth of prescriptions for a single drug retailed at $53,384 per year, on average, in 2013 -- more than the median U.S. household income, double the median income of Medicare beneficiaries, and more than three times as much as the average Social Security benefit in the same year. The report was prepared by the AARP Public Policy Institute to highlight the impact of drug prices on seniors.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The largest diamond ever discovered is the 3,106-carat Cullinan diamond. It was found in January of 1905 and was the only diamond over 1,000 carats. Until now.

Cnet reports that a diamond weighing in at 1,111 carats (222 grams; 5.7 oz) has been found at the Karowe Mine in Botswana. By comparison, the Hope Diamond weighed 45.5 carats (9.1 grams) and the Taylor–Burton Diamond weighed 68 carats (13.6 grams).

Lucara Diamond Corp — the owners of the mine — reports It is the second largest gem-quality diamond ever found.

According to a report in The Guardian :

William Lamb, the company's chief executive, said Lucara had already been inundated with inquiries from potential buyers, but said it was impossible to price the diamond at this stage. The stone, the second largest ever recovered, was too large to fit inside the company's own scanner, so it was be[sic] transported to Antwerp for closer inspection.

The company has yet to decide how to sell the stone, but it is likely to be auctioned once it has been prepared for sale. "People are still reeling from the fact that it's over 1,000 carats," Lamb said on Thursday.

[...] The Lucara company had used an x-ray processing facility to reduce damage while recovering large diamonds. Had the Karowe mine – which is about 300 miles north of Botswana's capital, Gaborone – used older equipment, the diamond might have been smashed to pieces along with the rubble removed from the pit. "It would have gone to the pebble crusher and it would have been destroyed," said Lamb." (emphasis added)

As if that were not enough, Lucara then reported this week that it found TWO MORE massive diamonds which weighed in at 813 carats (162.6 grams; 4.2 oz) and 374 carats (74.5 grams; 1.9 oz), respectively!

I deal with diamonds on a regular basis and see many 'nice' stones: near colorless with slight inclusions visible to the naked eye. On rare occasions I come upon a colorless and/or very slightly included stone — the difference in brilliance and fire is striking. To find such a large stone of such good quality (Type IIa) boggles my mind!

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Turns out all of you who thought millennials were fascist little turds were 40% correct.

American Millennials are far more likely than older generations to say the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data on free speech and media across the globe.

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK.

And this is why you should not be allowed to vote until you're mature enough to consider the consequences of your actions.

Original Submission