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Phoenix666 writes:

Summary: I describe how the TrueSkill algorithm works using concepts you're already familiar with. TrueSkill is used on Xbox Live to rank and match players and it serves as a great way to understand how statistical machine learning is actually applied today. I've also created an open source project where I implemented TrueSkill three different times in increasing complexity and capability. In addition, I've created a detailed supplemental math paper that works out equations that I gloss over here. Feel free to jump to sections that look interesting and ignore ones that seem boring. Don't worry if this post seems a bit long, there are lots of pictures.

[...] Skill is tricky to measure. Being good at something takes deliberate practice and sometimes a bit of luck. How do you measure that in a person? You could just ask someone if they're skilled, but this would only give a rough approximation since people tend to be overconfident in their ability. Perhaps a better question is "what would the units of skill be?" For something like the 100 meter dash, you could just average the number of seconds of several recent sprints. However, for a game like chess, it's harder because all that's really important is if you win, lose, or draw.

It might make sense to just tally the total number of wins and losses, but this wouldn't be fair to people that played a lot (or a little). Slightly better is to record the percent of games that you win. However, this wouldn't be fair to people that beat up on far worse players or players who got decimated but maybe learned a thing or two. The goal of most games is to win, but if you win too much, then you're probably not challenging yourself. Ideally, if all players won about half of their games, we'd say things are balanced. In this ideal scenario, everyone would have a near 50% win ratio, making it impossible to compare using that metric.

Finding universal units of skill is too hard, so we'll just give up and not use any units. The only thing we really care about is roughly who's better than whom and by how much. One way of doing this is coming up with a scale where each person has a unit-less number expressing their rating that you could use for comparison. If a player has a skill rating much higher than someone else, we'd expect them to win if they played each other.

Older article from 2010, but still interesting.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Matt Richtel writes in The New York Times that one big reason there are only about 330,000 electric vehicles on the road is that car dealers show little enthusiasm for putting consumers into electric cars. Industry insiders say that electric vehicles do not offer dealers the same profits as gas-powered cars, they take more time to sell because of the explaining required, and electric vehicles may require less maintenance, undermining the biggest source of dealer profits — their service departments. Some electric car buyers have said they felt as if they were the ones doing the selling.

Chelsea Dell made an appointment to test-drive a used Volt but when she arrived, she said, a salesman told her that the car hadn't been washed, and that he had instead readied a less expensive, gas-powered car. "I was ready to pull the trigger, and they were trying to muscle me into a Chevy Sonic," says Dell. "The thing I was baffled at was that the Volt was a lot more expensive." Marc Deutsch, Nissan's business development manager for electric vehicles says some salespeople just can't rationalize the time it takes to sell the cars. A salesperson "can sell two gas burners in less than it takes to sell a Leaf," Deutsch says. "It's a lot of work for a little pay."

Jared Allen says that service is crucial to dealer profits and that dealers didn't want to push consumers into electric cars that might make them less inclined to return for service. Maybe that helps explains the experience of Robert Kast, who last year leased a Volkswagen e-Golf from a local dealer. He said the salesman offered him a $15-per-month maintenance package that included service for oil changes, belt repair and water pumps. "I said: 'You know it doesn't have any of those things,'" Mr. Kast recalled. He said the salesman excused himself to go confirm this with his manager. Of the whole experience, Mr. Kast, 61, said: "I knew a whole lot more about the car than anyone in the building."

"Until selling a plug-in electric car is as quick and easy as selling any other vehicle that nets the dealer the same profit, many dealers will avoid them, for very logical and understandable reasons," says John Voelker. "That means that the appropriate question should be directed to makers of electric cars: What are you doing to make selling electric cars as profitable and painless for your dealers as selling gasoline or diesel vehicles?"

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Phoenix666 writes:

The temptation is always there: include every last bit of income you earned last year on your tax return -- or not?

New research has found that we're more likely to do the right thing in situations of moral conflict when it requires little to no effort. If income information is automatically entered into our tax return, we may be less likely to alter it to something that is incorrect once it's there.

However, the passive response can promote cheating, too. When faced with a blank return, we may conveniently "forget" to fill in those bothersome boxes for things like extra money made on investments, which might push our taxes higher.

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Phoenix666 writes (with a hat tip to wonkey_monkey for the summarization):

It's an ancient article, but still relevant to, and perhaps of interest for, Soylentils stuck in holiday traffic...

When driving on the motorway, have you ever wondered about (and cursed) the fact that cars in the other lane seem to be getting ahead faster than you? You might be inclined to account for this by invoking Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will", discovered by Edward A. Murphy, Jr, in 1949). However, a recent paper in Nature by Redelmeier and Tibshirani seeks a deeper explanation.

According to the authors, drivers suffer from systematic illusions causing them to mistakenly think they would have been better off in the next lane. In this Plus article, we show that their argument fails to take into account an important observation selection effect - namely that cars in the next lane actually do go faster!

In their paper, Redelmeier and Tibshirani present some evidence that drivers on Canadian roadways think that the next lane is typically faster. (You can read their paper for more about this). They seek to explain the drivers' perceptions by appealing to a variety of psychological factors. For example:

• "A driver is more likely to glance at the next lane for comparison when he is relatively idle while moving slowly";
• "Differential surveillance can occur because drivers look forwards rather than backwards, so vehicles that are overtaken become invisible very quickly, whereas vehicles that overtake the index driver remain conspicuous for much longer"; and
• "Human psychology may make being overtaken (losing) seem more salient than the corresponding gains."

In short, cars in the other lane "really do go faster", because that's usually the lane with fewer cars in it, so any car picked at random is more likely to be found in the slow lane.

[Updated to change title and add explanatory summary. -Ed.]

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Wachau, a picture-postcard river valley in Austria, makes a lot of wine. Soon it could be producing its own electricity too, and in a way that will not spoil the stunning views.

"Wind turbines are out of the question and solar panels are strictly regulated," says Andreas Nunzer, mayor of picturesque Spitz on the left bank of the Danube river.

"But we have found a way to contribute to the fight against global warming without harming our quality of life." It is called river current power.

The idea is to place in the river what looks on the surface like the top of a submarine but is in fact a six-tonne buoy producing enough electricity for 250 people.

New York City has turbines in the East River (which is technically a tidal inlet, not a river) that produce power, too. After some initial hiccups, it seems to be performing as designed.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Brad Tuttle writes at Money Magazine that while the terms "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" are more ubiquitous than ever, the importance of the can't-miss shopping days is undeniably fading. "I think what you're seeing now is the start or middle of a trend where Black Friday decreases in importance," says analyst Yory Wurmser. "It's probably still going to be a significant shopping day, but at the same time it's probably going to lose its singular significance in the season."

Retailers seem to want it both ways: They want shoppers to spend money long before these key shopping events, and yet they also want shoppers to turn out in full force to make purchases over the epic Black Friday weekend. When they use the "Cheap Stuff!" card day after day and week after week, the deals on any single day stop seeming special. The bottom line is that shifting spending patterns means that holiday sales are now dispersed over a longer period. "You can try to get the consumer to spend earlier," says Marshal Cohen. "But that doesn't mean there's more money in their pockets."

The true story behind Black Friday is not as sunny as retailers might have you believe. Back in the 1950s, police in the city of Philadelphia used the term to describe the chaos that ensued on the day after Thanksgiving, when hordes of suburban shoppers and tourists flooded into the city in advance of the big Army-Navy football game held on that Saturday every year. Not only would Philly cops not be able to take the day off, but they would have to work extra-long shifts dealing with the additional crowds and traffic. Shoplifters would also take advantage of the bedlam in stores to make off with merchandise, adding to the law enforcement headache.

Sometime in the late 1980s, however, retailers found a way to reinvent Black Friday and turn it into something that reflected positively, rather than negatively, on them and their customers. The result was the "red to black" concept of the holiday, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America's stores finally turned a profit.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A district judge last week denied two activist groups the chance to file a supporting motion in a copyright case. In a stinging and derisive rejoinder, he compared their complaints to those of a spoilt boy.
...
It's part of a court case that stateside ISPs and rights-holders are watching with keen interest.

Cox Communications is the only major US ISP not to participate to the "Six Strikes" Copyright Alert System, where an ISP acts on "red flag" knowledge of a persistent infringer by kicking them off their network. Cox preferred to implement its own "10+" graduated response program. Two music publishers, BMG and Round Hill, weren't impressed, and a year ago they sued Cox, arguing that they never kicked even the most hardcore freetard off their networks. As evidence, they picked the IP addresses of the 250 most persistent freetards on Cox's network over the preceding six months.

"Cox directly profits from repeat infringers," they argued in their lawsuit. "Cox collects significant fees from its subscribers and subscribers that frequently upload media content often pay higher monthly premiums for higher bandwidth. Plaintiffs' agent has identified – and notified Cox of – over 200,000 repeat infringers on the Cox network. On information and belief, the number of actual repeat infringers on the Cox network not known to Plaintiffs or their agent is substantially higher."
...
Enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, two slacktivist groups who howled (predictably) that the internet would break if Cox did what it promised and kicked off the most high volume torrenters. Both groups applied to file amicus, or 'Friend of the Court', briefs. But Judge O'Grady rejected the applications, saying they were irrelevant.

Interestingly, he went even further, apparently mocking the applications, and arguing that the two "digital rights" groups were fundamentally compromised.

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Hairyfeet writes:

Today a number of AMD GPUs entered end of life, including the * series (8400 and below), 7 series (7600 and below) and all of the 6000 and 5000 series.

As a last gift to these card owners AMD has also released a beta of the new Crimson software that supports these cards and of course the previous release will continue to work for these cards now that they have been moved to legacy status.

We covered Radeon Software Crimson just a short while ago.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Murtaza Hussain writes at The Intercept that although it remains in use at sensitive security areas throughout the world, the ADE 651 is a complete fraud and the ADE-651's manufacturer sold it with the full knowledge that it was useless at detecting explosives. There are no batteries in the unit and it consists of a swivelling aerial mounted to a hinge on a hand-grip. The device contains nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores and critics have likened it to a glorified dowsing rod.

The story of how the ADE 651 came into use involves the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the height of the conflict, as the new Iraqi government battled a wave of deadly car bombings, it purchased more than 7,000 ADE 651 units worth tens of millions of dollars in a desperate effort to stop the attacks. Not only did the units not help, the device actually heightened the bloodshed by creating "a false sense of security" that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi civilians. A BBC investigation led to a subsequent export ban on the devices.

The device is once again back in the news as it was reportedly used for security screening at hotels in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh where a Russian airliner that took off from that city's airport was recently destroyed in a likely bombing attack by the militant Islamic State group. Speaking to The Independent about the hotel screening, the U.K. Foreign Office stated it would "continue to raise concerns" over the use of the ADE 651. James McCormick, the man responsible for the manufacture and sale of the ADE 651, received a 10-year prison sentence for his part in manufacture of the devices, sold to Iraq for $40,000 each. An employee of McCormick who later became a whistleblower said that after becoming concerned and questioning McCormick about the device, McCormick told him the ADE 651 "does exactly what it's designed to. It makes money."

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hubie writes:

Glastonbury Abbey in England is known for a rich and colorful history from its origins as being built by Joseph of Arimathea and the boy Jesus, to being the resting place for King Arthur and Guinevere. However, a four year study shows that those feet in ancient time did not walk upon England's mountains green, and that the Arthurian legend stories were made up by the 12th century monks to raise money to rebuild their beleaguered monestary.

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Phoenix666 writes:

I worked for Atari and then one of its successor companies (Atari Games) for 13 years, designing hardware for coin-operated video games.

When I arrived in 1979, software for the games was cross-assembled on two DEC PDP-11/20 systems in batch mode. We had two computer operators who would take your marked-up listing, do the edits, and run the program. If it actually ran without any fatal errors, it would produce a listing and a paper tape.

Paper tape? (Well, at least it wasn't punched cards.)

On a good day the process would take less than an hour. On a bad day, when someone else's project had been designated as "hot" because it was about to go out on Field Test or be Released, you might get only two runs that day.

You then took the Paper Tape to your emulator which had a Paper Tape reader.

The emulators were home-made and were in a plywood cabinet painted black which is why they were called "Black Boxes." Programmers could load the program from paper tape, run it, set breakpoints, and examine memory as well as write to it. It was all done in Hex code, so people became adept at hand assembling small fragments of code. There was no way of saving the hand-patched program, so power interruptions were usually followed by much wailing, yelling, and gnashing of teeth. (To be fair, the few commercially available emulators weren't any better.)

Because the Black Box did not contain a built-in logic analyzer we had a few HP Logic Analyzers on carts that people dragged around from project to project.

It was common for a Programmer returning from lunch discovering that his analyzer had been hijacked. (The Programmers were all guys then.) The result was more wailing, yelling, and gnashing of teeth, "Who took my HP?"

Click through to the article to read the rest plus the email logs. If you ever wondered what is was like to work for one of the earliest successful console companies, here's your chance.

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Submitted via IRC for crutchy:

From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky. Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge.

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.

[...]You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking. It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals. These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs. In 2009 China produced 95% of the world's supply of these elements, and it's estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north of Baotou contain 70% of the world's reserves. But, as we would discover, at what cost?

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

[Editor's note: this story is a few months old, but I think it is environmentally thought provoking; also, it was not "big news" so most here probably missed it.]

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chromas writes:

Many sites are reporting on the release of AMD's Crimson driver, which replaces Catalyst, features a redesigned interface and gives DirectX 9 applications access to variable framerates:

AMD’s first tease of Crimson was a run-through of the slick new Radeon Settings hub designed to replace Catalyst Control Center. (R.I.P.) At the time, AMD revealed some of the overt new features in Radeon Settings, such as per-game OverDrive overclocking settings and one-click Eyefinity multi-monitor configuration. On Tuesday, AMD’s unwrapping the deeper-level goodies in Radeon Software Crimson—with handy features for new and old graphics cards alike—and pushing the drivers live so you can try them out for yourself.

Crimson officially supports Windows 7—10. Linux users can expect a new, partially-open-source driver (AMDGPU) sometime in the future, but only for the latest, shiniest of graphics cards. The current driver's performance has been improved somewhat.

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An Anonymous Coward submitted the news that a Court ruled Church of Scientology Moscow branch should be 'dissolved':

A Russian court has ruled that the Moscow branch of the Church of Scientology should be dissolved.

The Moscow city court accepted the arguments of Russia's justice ministry that as the term "Scientology" is a registered US trademark, the Church cannot be considered a religious organisation.

The organisation plans to appeal, reports said.

The controversial church is based in Los Angeles, California and was found in 1954 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Biofilms frequently coat the surfaces of catheters, and of various medical implants and prostheses, where they can cause life-threatening infections. New research at the Sahlgrenska Academy show that coating implants with a certain "activator" can prevent Staphylococcus aureus, the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections, from forming biofilms.

Biofilms are mats of bacteria similar to the plaque that grows on teeth. Biofilms frequently coat the surfaces of catheters, and of various medical implants and prostheses, where they can threaten lives or lead to failure of the implants.

Antibiotics are impotent against biofilms. Now Gothenburg researchers Jakub Kwiecinski, Tao Jin and collaborators show that coating implants with "tissue plasminogen activator" can prevent Staphylococcus aureus, the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections, from forming biofilms.

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