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tt0096256 writes:

The single largest donor to any super-pacs or other outside groups so far in this political season is Robert Mercer, owner of the Big Data firm Cambridge Analytica. Besides donating cash, Mercer has donated analysis work. He paid mechanical turk workers for access to their facebook accounts and by association access to data about anyone who had unwittingly friended those mturk workers.

The goal seems to be the gathering of detailed psychological profiles to enable "micro-targeting" of campaign advertisements. In a reversal from typical claims about targeted advertising, political micro-targeting is not about showing you candidates you might like to vote for but instead figuring out how to social-engineer you into liking the candidate that paid for the advertising. They are looking to press people's buttons and hope to figure out which buttons each of us are most sensitive to and then tell each voter exactly what they want to hear and only what they want to hear, leaving out anything that might inconveniently cause them to be skeptical.

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

PsychCentral has a decent summary of a recent software-based effort from University of Michigan to discover who's lying and who's not.

By carefully observing people telling lies during high-stakes court cases, researchers at the University of Michigan are developing unique lie-detecting software based on real-world data.

Their lie-detecting model considers both the person's words and gestures, and unlike a polygraph, it doesn't need to touch the speaker in order to work.

In experiments, the prototype was up to 75 percent accurate in identifying who was telling a lie (as defined by trial outcomes), compared with humans' scores of just above 50 percent. The tool might be helpful one day for security agents, juries, and even mental health professionals.

To develop the software, the researchers used machine-learning techniques to train it on a set of 120 video clips from media coverage of actual trials. Some of the clips they used were from the website of The Innocence Project, a national organization that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

[More after the break.]

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a note on Facebook on [December 7] that made a very good point about climate change and renewable energy: It really doesn't matter what you believe.

The former California governor addressed people who think climate change is a conspiracy or a hoax, and asked them whether the deaths from pollution are acceptable, whether fossil fuels will last forever, and--to paraphrase greatly--what kind of world they want to live in. This excerpt pretty much sums up his argument to climate deniers.

There are two doors. Behind Door Number One is a completely sealed room, with a regular, gasoline-fueled car. Behind Door Number Two is an identical, completely sealed room, with an electric car. Both engines are running full blast.

I want you to pick a door to open, and enter the room and shut the door behind you. You have to stay in the room you choose for one hour. You cannot turn off the engine. You do not get a gas mask.

I'm guessing you chose the Door Number Two, with the electric car, right? Door number one is a fatal choice--who would ever want to breathe those fumes?

It's a strong point, but even more importantly, it's a bipartisan point. We are in an era where addressing climate change is largely split down party lines, especially in Congress. Moderate Republicans like Schwarzenegger, who believe a healthy environment and climate are public goods, haven't yet been able to sway people who think that clean energy is going to kill the economy.

But Schwarzenegger should know that a green economy can work. As governor of California, he worked with the Democratic-led legislature to enact the nation's first comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions reduction law and the nation's first low-carbon fuel standard. Now California is the nation's leader in both solar installations and solar jobs.

2 nitpicks: If it's electric, it's called a motor, not an engine. "Power plant" would have been more apt.
The electric car would need a way to allow the wheels to turn without the car going anywhere.
...and if the gasoline car's engine is "running full blast", you'll need a load (dynamometer).
Otherwise: Brilliant.

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

Silviu Stahie reports via Softpedia

Many of the new SoC solutions [...] have FM Radio functionalities, but Google doesn't provide any kind of API for Android devices. It's basically just something that some companies could implement if they had the time or the drive to do it properly.

[...] Most [...] things are usually difficult when [they haven't] been done before. It's true that Radio FM functions have been available on older devices, but modern devices are not doing it, so there is little to no documentation on how to proceed.

A developer from the community is now working to get this function working on Ubuntu phones, and he's already enlisted the help of the Ubuntu developers. As it turns out, this has been talked about before, but for now, it's not a high priority.

Some of the Ubuntu phones, like the two BQ devices that are now available on the market, have Mediatek hardware and they are capable for[sic] Radio FM functions--at least in theory. What's more interesting, is that they should also be able to transmit, not only to receive.

"MediaTek (Aquaris E4.5 and E5) decided to implement custom kernel drivers with a custom character device (/dev/fm) and custom ioctl commands. There seem to be userspace libraries (libfm*) including a JNI wrapper in /system/lib of the Android container on our Ubuntu phones", developer sturmflut wrote on the official mailing list.

The ideal situation would be to allow users to initialize and tune the FM radio on the Aquaris E4.5 and E5 devices and to link this functionality to the media hub. It will take a while, but it's quite possible that FM Radio will be one of the numerous features that you can only find in Ubuntu phones.

Last Summer, Jack Wallen at TechRepublic reported:

[More after the break.]

Hello fellow Soylentils!

We were informed by Linode (our hosting provider) that they needed to perform Xen updates on all of our servers. This forces a reboot of our virtual servers which may cause the site (and other services) to be temporarily unavailable.

Here is the two-day reboot schedule along with what runs on each server:

As we found some errors with our MySql setup during the last Xen updates, The Main Site will be down starting at 2015-12-14 at 0300 UTC while we reconfigure MySQL prior to the shutdown of the main MySQL server helium. The site should be up by 0500 UTC.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we try and get things up and running following each reboot.

takyon writes:

Journal publisher Elsevier has agreed to open up some of the research published by Dutch researchers... by 2018:

A standoff between Dutch universities and publishing giant Elsevier is finally over. After more than a year of negotiations—and a threat to boycott Elsevier's 2500 journals—a deal has been struck: For no additional charge beyond subscription fees, 30% of research published by Dutch researchers in Elsevier journals will be open access by 2018.

"It's not the 100% that I hoped for," says Gerard Meijer, the president of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the lead negotiator on the Dutch side. "But this is the future. No one can stop this anymore."

The dispute involves a mandate announced in January 2014 by Sander Dekker, the Dutch minister responsible for higher education. It requires that 60% of government-funded research papers should be free to the public by 2019, and 100% by 2024. His argument, one echoed by academics around the world, is that the public has traditionally paid twice for research: once to fund the research and then again to read the results. But for-profit publishing companies like Elsevier have argued that someone has to pay for the cost of the publication, either universities paying for subscriptions, or scientists paying article processing charges to make their papers open access. (Advocates counter that the prices for both are too high considering that most of the editing and all of the reviewing is unpaid work done by academics.)

This isn't the first time researchers have agitated against Elsevier. An unenforced boycott against Elsevier journals has been running for years in the United Kingdom, though with little impact, and some universities have tried to play hardball. The Dutch gambit was different, Meijer says. "For one thing, it helped that Elsevier is based in Amsterdam," he says. "It would be very bad for them to lose the Dutch scientific community." Meijer admits that the Netherlands is a small fish. "We only publish about 2% of academic papers. But the quality of our papers is above average and we're big enough to be taken seriously."

Previously: Elsevier Cracks Down on "Pirate" Science Search Engines

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Josh Constine writes at TechCrunch that you send Gigster your app idea and it sends you back a fully-functional app. "No coding. No hiring. No wrangling freelancers. Just a fundamental shift in how software gets built." Gigster's artificial intelligence engine converts a client's product proposal into a development plan, and helps Gigster's army of remote developers plug in pre-made code blocks to efficiently build the app. Gigster has already helped build a dating app for muslim millenials, a way for citizens of the developing world to buy electricity, and has over fifty more projects in the pipeline.

Gigster finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants. A sales engineer discusses proposals with clients, and using the AI engine, comes back with a price quote and production schedule in about 10 minutes. Then Gigster manages the entire development process through delivery of the fully-functional app. Gigster charges a flat fee, so there is no incentive for developers to work more hours and run up charges. Both developers and customers interact with a project manager, who insulates them from the potential hassles of dealing with each other. Gigsters who satisfy customers can earn karma points and qualify for higher-paying contracts, and the company uses artificial intelligence to learn from and assign every new project.

One caveat: Gigster will still own the code to the app it designs for you and "lease" it to you. The reason is that they want to be able to reuse certain components that they develop for reuse on other projects. "Software development that requires continuous recruiting and months of development time writing code from scratch is slow and costly, and not necessarily a consistent internal need of all startups or large enterprises," says CEO Roger Dickey. "Hiring talented engineers is hard – so don't. Instead, let Gigster be your engineering department."

Original Submission

edIII writes:

A squid with shiny, bioluminescent "spotlights" tipping two of its arms and what look like waxy red lips shared a close encounter with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in deep ocean waters near Hawaii.

The deepwater star of the video is estimated to measure between 3 and 7 feet (1 and 2 meters) in length. Broad, flexible fins extend from the squid's mantle; as they furl and flap, these fins steer T. danae through the water.

While the Dana octopus squid may lack a squid's trademark trailing tentacles, it makes up for them in spectacular lighting equipment, with two of its muscular arms ending in lidded light organs called "photophores." About the size of lemons, these photophores are the largest known light-producing organs in the animal kingdom, said Mike Vecchione, a zoologist at the NOAA National Systematics Laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution and a curator of cephalopods at the National Museum of Natural History, both in Washington, D.C.

Also noted was how bright these photophores are, showing up on video with the already bright lights of the ROV.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A company is starting to sell customized buckyballs (endohedral fullerenes) on the order of micrograms:

Designer Carbon Materials, an Oxford-based scientific startup, has recently sold its first 200 micrograms of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerenes for £22,000 ($33,400)—or about £110 million ($167 million) per gram. This valuation likely makes the material the second most valuable on Earth, preceded only by antimatter, which is estimated by NASA to cost some £41 trillion per gram.

The material, which essentially is a cage of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom inside, could be used for very small and very accurate atomic clocks, which are currently of the size of a room. "Imagine a minaturised atomic clock that you could carry around in your smartphone," the company's founder Dr. Kyriakos Porfyrakis told The Telegraph. "This is the next revolution for mobile."

[...] These caged molecules have greatly enhanced physical and electronic properties compared to "normal" ones. In case of N@C60 (i.e. nitrogen atom-based endofullerenes), the "super power" is a long electron spin lifetime.

The research of one of the most expensive materials on Earth hasn't been cheap, either. In 2013, Oxford University together with two partners received a £1.5 million research grant to develop manufacturing methods "for increasing the production of endohedral fullerenes to the gram scale."

[...] At the moment, Designer Carbon Materials can produce "up to half a gram a day" of cheaper and lower-purity material, which means that there will be more empty carbon cages than those with a nitrogen atom inside. "As for the higher-purity material, we can make 50 milligrams of it, and that would take us weeks to purify," said Porfyrakis.

Original Submission

195 Nations Approve Historic Climate Accord

CoolHand writes:

195 Nations Approve Historic Climate Accord

Following late-night negotiations and years of anticipation, delegates from 195 countries have agreed to curb the worst effects of climate change by limiting warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius. The agreement, the result of an international climate summit outside Paris and approved December 12, aims to be the world's roadmap to kicking the fossil fuel habit, with a possibility of an even more ambitious 1.5-degree goal in the future.

Even with the agreement in hand, political obstacles and technological challenges remain to reining in global warming. Individual countries will have to swap greenhouse gas‒emitting energy sources like coal, oil and natural gas for low-emission sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power. Along with yet-to-be-realized technologies that pull greenhouse gases from the air, these changes are meant to reduce net carbon emissions to zero in the second half of the century. By 2020, countries will release their long-term plans to cut emissions. Every five years, countries will reassess their progress and tweak their carbon-cutting goals.

COP21 has been signed

fritsd writes:

After a last-minute weakening of the text, COP21 has been accepted in Paris by almost 200 countries (that's our world, basically) and the French minister of Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabius, hammered it off before proceeding with the group hug of world leaders.

The draft text [PDF] is currently available, but a crucial change in article 4 point 4 on page 21 is no longer there after the last-minute "oh sorry we were tired and made a typo".

Read about it on The Guardian.

Let me say in conclusion: Thank you Paris! Politics is the art of what is achievable.
Polar bears - Terrorists : 1 - 0 [Caution: to view this link you MUST accept the site cookie popup] (violent cartoon, possibly NSFW)

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Ars Technica reports that black boxes at sea may not always be so opaque:

Sometimes, that data can be awfully inconvenient. While the data in the VDR is the property of the ship owner, it can be taken by an investigator in the event of an accident or other incident—and that may not always be in the ship owner's (or crew's) interest. The VDRs aboard the cruise ship Costa Concordia were used as evidence in the manslaughter trial of the ship's captain and other crewmembers. Likewise, that data could be valuable to others—especially if it can be tapped into live.

It turns out that some VDRs may not be very good witnesses. As a report recently published by the security firm IOActive points out, VDRs can be hacked, and their data can be stolen or destroyed.

The US Coast Guard is developing policies to help defend against "transportation security incidents" caused by cyber-attacks against shipping, including issuing guidance to vessel operators on how to secure their systems and reviewing the design of required marine systems—including VDRs. That's promising to be a tall order, especially taking the breadth of systems installed on the over 80,000 cargo and passenger vessels in the world. And given the types of criminal activity recently highlighted by the New York Times' "Outlaw Ocean" reports, there's plenty of reason for some ship operators to not want VDRs to be secure—including covering up environmental issues, incidents at sea with other vessels, and sometimes even murder.

HughPickens.com writes:

CBS reports that hot on the heels of its campaign against ISIS, the shadowy hackers' collective known as Anonymous is going after a new target: Donald Trump. The latest Anonymous operation -- #OpTrump -- was announced in a YouTube video featuring a masked activist claiming to speak for the group. In a computer-generated voice, he takes aim at Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States, claiming "This is what ISIS wants." He goes on to say that "the more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims," the more ISIS will be able to recruit sympathizers. The video concludes with Anonymous' now-familiar threat: "You have been warned, Mr. Donald Trump. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. Expect us."

After a video message was posted, the website of Trump Tower in New York City went down for at least an hour. However the campaign didn't appear to have much success. Despite the group's apparent distributed-denial-of-service attack, which aimed to take down a web server by flooding it with fake traffic, the Trump Tower website was up and running by 11 a.m. and the alleged damage might not have been apparent, to visitors to the page, because a cached version of Trump's site was programmed to hold the fort in the event of an attack or maintenance issues. Gabriella Coleman, who studies hackers and online activism as the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University, in Montreal, told CBS News it's no surprise that Anonymous would find Trump a juicy target. "He's the biggest bully and the only other bully that's bigger is possibly trolls and Anonymous," says Coleman. "Anonymous isn't necessarily going to take down his campaign, per se, but they could embarrass him."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Elon Musk, a businessman who has described artificial intelligence development as "summoning the demon", is among the backers of the newly launched non-profit OpenAI:

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other technology entrepreneurs are betting that talented researchers, provided enough freedom and money, can develop artificial intelligence systems as advanced as those being built by the sprawling teams at Google, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Along the way, they'd like to save humanity from oblivion.

The pair are among the backers of OpenAI, a nonprofit company introduced Friday that will research novel artificial intelligence systems and share its findings. Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Motors Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Sam Altman, president of the Y Combinator, will serve as co-chairman. The nonprofit has received financial backing from Musk, Thiel, co-founder of PayPal Holdings Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc., Reid Hoffman and others as well as companies including Amazon Web Services and Infosys.

The group's backers have committed "significant" amounts of money to funding the project, Musk said in an interview. "Think of it as at least a billion."

Also at BBC, NYT, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and Hacker News (note the involvement of Sam Altman).

Runaway1956 writes:

Something strange was hiding in the Horsehead. The nebula, named for its stallionlike silhouette, is a towering cloud of dust and gas 1,500 light-years from Earth where new stars are continually born. It is one of the most recognizable celestial objects, and scientists have studied it intensely. But in 2011 astronomers from the Institute of Millimeter Radioastronomy (IRAM) and elsewhere probed it again. With IRAM's 30-meter telescope in the Spanish Sierra Nevada, they homed in on two portions of the horse's mane in radio light. They weren't interested in taking more pictures of the Horsehead; instead, they were after spectra—readings of the light broken down into their constituent wavelengths, which reveal the chemical makeup of the nebula. Displayed on screen, the data looked like blips on a heart monitor; each wiggle indicated that some molecule in the nebula had emitted light of a particular wavelength.

Every molecule in the universe makes its own characteristic wiggles based on the orientation of the protons, neutrons and electrons within it. Most of the wiggles in the Horsehead data were easily attributable to common chemicals such as carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and neutral carbon. But there was also a small, unidentified line at 89.957 gigahertz. This was a mystery—a molecule completely unknown to science.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hunt-for-alien-molecules/

It has always amazed me that people can only imagine life, and matter, as it exists on earth. Given molecules that can't exist on earth, it is easy to imagine life forms that we might not even recognize as "alive". While some general laws of physics probably apply throughout the universe, we need to keep in mind that there may be exceptions to those laws, and that local conditions might twist the laws far outside our understanding. C3H+ ?? Who would have guessed!

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

The kingdom launched a new Farsi website this week, but how will an Iranian audience react?

Saudi Arabia is taking a "soft power" jab at its regional rival Iran this week — a news website in Farsi, the language of Iran. It launches Thursday and the Saudi government expects to eventually start a Farsi-language TV channel as well. The step into soft power is new for the wealthy Kingdom, more known for opening its checkbook to gain influence.

"Yes, indeed, to give correct information," explains Adel al-Toraifi in an interview with NPR. He is the recently-named minister of culture and information, one of the young technocrats appointed by King Salman in the government's generational shift. As for soft power, he says, "This is what we are lacking," and it is time to "catch up with the world."

In September, the Saudis launched a short-term Farsi TV and radio broadcast during the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage of Muslim faithful to Mecca. The programming was strictly religious commentary and the broadcast ended when the Hajj was over. Al-Toraifi says this is part of a larger effort by the Saudis planned to include a web site in Russian, Chinese and Farsi — and coming up next — TV channels in English, Farsi and Urdu, the language of Pakistan. He says the immediate goal is to "actually explain Saudi society" to Iranians in their own language.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are regional rivals, fighting local proxy wars. Now a media proxy war may be heating up, with Tehran already out in front. In 2003, Iran began a 24-hour news service in Arabic that broadcast into Iraq after Iraqi state television collapsed during the U.S. invasion. Many Iranian-backed Arabic TV channels and web sites have been launched since then, which al-Toraifi described as "very negative." For the first time, the Saudis aim to challenge Iran's media blitz, says al-Toraifi. "It's better if Iranians know how we live, it's kind of a dialogue between people."

Original Submission