SoylentNews

isostatic writes:

In addition to it's wall-to-wall coverage of CES, from women in showers to Drone people carriers, Auntie reveals what was supposed to be an "oh wow" press blurb from Microsoft.

In the blog entry:

The BBC then went on to point out:

and listed some claims from Microsoft.

[More after the break.]

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Center for Biological Diversity reports via Common Dreams

The Environmental Protection Agency said [January 6][1] in a "pollinator risk assessment" that imidacloprid, a popular neonicotinoid pesticide, poses a significant risk[2] to honeybees--but it failed to examine risks to nearly 4,000 [species of] North American native bees and all other pollinators, including imperiled butterflies, bats, and birds.

"You can't claim to do a 'pollinator risk assessment' and really only look at one pollinator, the honeybee", said Lori Ann Burd, Environmental Health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "That's not only cheating on the purpose of this work but also cheating the native bees, birds, butterflies, and other species threatened by this pesticide. In fact, many of these other pollinators are even more vulnerable to neonicotinoids than honeybees."

Today's analysis indicates that for some crop uses, honeybees can be exposed to imidacloprid at concentrations that negatively affect the health of the hive. But a recent Nature study found that wild bees are more sensitive to the acute toxic effects of neonicotinoids--specifically that neonicotinoid seed coatings reduce wild bee density, solitary bee nesting, and bumblebee colony growth. The EPA did acknowledge that bumblebees are affected by the pesticide at much lower levels than honeybees, but it nonetheless failed to properly assess the risk.

In addition, the EPA in this assessment improperly relied on just a single industry-provided study to assess risk to honeybee colonies, despite an abundance of published studies by independent scientists looking at this issue.

"The EPA's decision to rely on industry-funded research is absolutely unacceptable, particularly when there has been so much research by independent researchers", said Burd.

While the EPA emphasized honeybee colony risks, its risk assessment found effects on individual honeybees, not on colonies, from most crops.

"This risk assessment, while deeply flawed, does expose the substantial effects on individual honeybees from neonicotinoid treated crops", said Burd. "However, the EPA refused to make a determination on colony-level risks for specific crops when it had anything less than conclusive evidence on the risks. This flawed methodology caused the agency to dramatically understate the risks of imidacloprid. Also, the colony-level risk assessment only takes into account exposure via nectar, not pollen. So the EPA is analyzing effects on pollinators without even taking pollen into account."

[1] Content at regulations.gov (the original link in the article) is behind scripts.
[2] Better link IMO; there's a link back to regulations.gov there for those interested.

Previous Neonicotinoids stories at SoylentNews

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/cortana-cyanogen/

Microsoft's Cortana quietly snuck onto to Android in a meaningful this week in a small but telling move that you probably missed unless you own a OnePlus One..

[...] while Siri works best with Apple apps and services, the Cortana integration promises to be deeper.

"When Apple launched Apple Music at WWDC, they showed the Siri integration with Apple Music. Siri doesn't power Spotify like that so we can do these kind of things with for example, integration of Microsoft's Cortana into the OS enabling natural language to power Spotify and other services," Cyanogen CEO Kirk McMaster said in an interview with International Business Times last year.

It isn't clear when this feature will roll out to other Cyanogen-compatible devices, but already this ambitious startup is getting serious with its quest to "steal Android away from Google".

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

The Guardian reports that Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, plans to release his new novel, a historical drama set in London during the 1840s, in installments via an app in a tradition that dates back to Charles Dickens. Each of Belgravia's 11 chapters will be delivered on a weekly basis, and will come with multimedia extras including music, character portraits, family trees and an audio book version. "To marry the traditions of the Victorian novel to modern technology, allowing the reader, or listener, an involvement with the characters and the background of the story and the world in which it takes place, that would not have been possible until now, and yet to preserve within that the strongest traditions of storytelling, seems to me a marvellous goal and a real adventure," says Fellows.

While set in the 1840s, "Belgravia" opens more than two decades earlier, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, and explores the divisions between the upper echelons of society and newly wealthy families. Publisher Jamie Raab says the format appealed to her precisely because of Fellowes's television background and his ability to keep audiences engaged in a story over months and even years. "I've always been intrigued by the idea of publishing a novel in short episodic bites. He gets how to keep the story paced so that you're caught up in the current episode, then you're left with a cliffhanger."

Original Submission

Tensions Rise in Germany Over Handling of Mass Sexual Assaults in Cologne

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Guardian reports:

If you're not already feeling queasy enough be sure to read the link "Asian sex-grooming gangs in the UK" in the article. Apparently you can find similar stories from all over the UK, these sexual crimes against underage girls perpetrated by muslims are sickeningly common.

Conspiracy of Silence - or Sensationalist Reporting?

frojack writes:

There are a number of marginal news sites posting stories out of Europe these days, mostly from Germany, Sweden, as well as other claims made regarding Finland and the UK. The claims all center around a huge increase in rapes by immigrants, outright take over of public train stations, and mass groping of women passing through the stations.

According to these reports, the incidents started in midsummer and continue to this day, but the local news organizations have refused to publish reports of these incidents even after arrests have been made. Often police are accused of withholding the news of any complaints or arrests for months.

The clear implication, more often implied than stated is that the national leaders who went public in their pledges to accept refugees from the middle east war zones as well as northern Africa are leaning on main stream news outlets to suppress news reports of these rapes and sexual assaults. This suppression, if it exists, also appears to extend to the US press.

The assaults aren't limited to European women, but also include women in the immigrant shelters, some as young as 16. The immigrant shelters population in Munich is 80% male. But not all the alleged perpetrators are migrants from the recent wave of mass migrations over the summer and fall. Some are earlier immigrants from North Africa who don't necessarily live in the camps.

Finally some reports are leaking into the western press in the US, such as this brief report in the New York Times about events on New Years Eve. That same event was reported by a couple of the British tabloids.

Many reports are in German, Here and Here. (Google Translate does well with these pages). Others are in English such as this one and this one.

Are any Soylentils living in the EU near refugee centers seeing these problems? Is it being reported? Is it being repressed? Or is the whole thing a made up issue by biased articles in fringe news sites?

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Phoenix666 writes:

Ideation skills are super important for effective team work. Collaborative ideation is the process where you tell me an idea, I try to identify any weakness or missing piece, augment the idea and hand it back to you. I have a good friend that I love to ideate with. We often will grab beers and just start riffing on startup ideas, technology ideas, or any crazy ideas. Single threads can pass through many topics and often aren't bound to any objective, so it is more brain gymnastics than anything else.

One time we had a third person with us that didn't have much experience collaborating this way. Instead, everytime he would suggest an idea, we would polish it one way or another and pitch it back to keep building the idea. But he started to get sooo frustrated. Finally he came out and said what he was feeling. He felt like we were "stealing" his ideas and just "repeating" back what he already said. So instead of falling into the rhythm of ideation, he setup something of an idea blockade. I kid you not, the night ended with him being escorted out of the bar. Lesson(s) learned.

Idea Averaging

There is another, less obvious, type of behavior that can at times negate the value of good ideas. It is something I call, Idea Averaging. Here is how it goes,

        1. I have an idea.
        2. I pitch my idea to the group
        3. Someone comes back and says, "Great idea, but what if you did it this way?"
        4. I decide we can just do both ideas at the same time.

What I've just done is averaged our ideas. Instead of giving the two options a throrough and objective review to select the best way forward, I've averaged them. Now, you might be thinking, "Hey, sometimes both ideas are better together". Sure, they are, but to make them work together takes that polish step of the ideation where you actually will blend and create a new, third idea.

What are the best brainstorming methods Soylentils have seen in their careers?

Original Submission

tt1515193 writes:

Cancer screening has never been shown to "save lives" as advocates claim, argue experts in The BMJ today.

This assertion rests on reductions in disease specific mortality rather than overall mortality, say Vinay Prasad, Assistant Professor at Oregon Health and Science University and colleagues.

They argue that overall mortality should be the benchmark against which screening is judged and call for higher standards of evidence for cancer screening.

There are two chief reasons why cancer screening might reduce disease specific mortality without significantly reducing overall mortality, write the authors.

Firstly, studies may be underpowered to detect a small overall mortality benefit. Secondly, disease specific mortality reductions may be offset by deaths due to the downstream effects of screening.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

I heard the claim, about five years ago, that we have caused more than a million deaths in Iraq alone - which I believed to be ludicrous. The summary presented below, is more believable, as it includes three nations which have been active fronts in the 'war on terror' for many years. I'm not quite believing it at face value, but it is within the realm of possibility.

Fourteen years ago, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the United States government initiated its "war on terror," with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, which expanded into Pakistan, and of Iraq in 2003. The conventional methodology of American politics emphasizes American financial, strategic, and human costs. Since then, the corporate media has occasionally acknowledged the 6,800 American soldiers, and the 7,000 contractors who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, corporate media and the American government have consistently ignored Iraqi and Afghani deaths, which exceed one million. Without acknowledging this modern "reign of terror," the western public has no context to understand the current attacks lead by the Islamic State in Syria and Levant (ISIL).

Civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are about ten times greater than the number the British-based Iraq Body Count (IBC) reports. IBC statistics are not reliable because they are chiefly collected from media reports written in English. Considering the majority of Iraqi media sources are written in Arabic, IBC coverage excludes a high percentage of civilian deaths. The US corporate media, including CNN and Fox News, relies on IBC numbers.

A study authored by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, along with the Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Physicians for Global Survival, "conservatively, estimates that at least 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan from direct and indirect consequences of the U.S. 'war on terrorism'," wrote Al Jazeera's Lauren Carasik. Moreover, over one million lives were lost in Iraq alone, about 5 percent of the country's population. The report also describes the three million "internally displaced" Iraqis and approximately 2.5 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan.

Source: ProjectCensored.org

There is a short list of references on the page which are worth looking at. Especially, see the MIT reference, which helps to explain why such studies are difficult and/or unreliable. http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Scott Gilbertson at El Reg reports:

Despite its relatively obscure version number, GIMP 2.9.2, released recently, represents a major leap forward for the popular image editing suite.

Like all odd-numbered GIMP releases, 2.9.2 is considered a technical preview, but the features here will form the base of the stable release GIMP 2.10.

[...] This release has a lot of under-the-hood changes--in particular this largely completes the move to the Generic Graphics Library, better [known] as GEGL. GEGL is GIMP's "new" image processing engine and the project has been slowly incorporating GEGL code for quite a few releases. In fact, while the GEGL in GIMP still gets referred to as "new," the project itself began life in 2000 and GIMP has been slowly porting over to GEGL since 2007.

That means GIMP 2.9.2 has support for high bit depth image (16/32bit per colour channel processing). There's even an option for 64bit-per-channel images, though that appears to be a feature planned for the future. The GEGL support also means GIMP now has basic support for the OpenEXR high dynamic range imaging image file format. In addition to OpenEXR, GIMP 2.10 has been upgraded to read and write 16/32bit per colour channel data from PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS files.

The other big news is the new on-canvas preview for image filters. In past versions of GIMP most filters only offered a very small preview window within the filter dialog box. It works, but it often means you have to stop interacting with the filter to zoom and pan around your image to see what the effect is doing. With 2.10, many filters will be able to apply their effect to your image in the background in real time.

[...] 57 plugins have been ported to become GEGL operations, with another 27 in progress. Another 37 plugins still need to be ported. Unfortunately, some photographer favourites like Unsharp Mask, Gaussian blur, and Red Eye Removal--all of which become much more usable with real-time previews--are still works in progress (if you use the bleeding-edge PPA for Ubuntu, you'll find that Gaussian and Unsharp Mask have been updated to GEGL). Still, strictly by the numbers, the majority of GIMP's filters now offer live previews.

[...] Completing the move to GEGL also puts some exciting new features on the GIMP roadmap, including the holy grail of image editing--non-destructive editing. You'll have to wait for GIMP 3.2 before non-destructive editing lands, but in the mean time the high bit depth support and filter previews feature already make all the work (and users waiting) for GEGL feel well worth it.

[...] Though, I've found this one to be rock solid in my testing, [...] don't try to do production work in this [technical preview]. [...] [One hopes] an official release of 2.10 won't be too far in the future.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The idea of a thinking machine is an amazing one. It would be like humans creating artificial life, only more impressive because we would be creating consciousness. Or would we ? It's tempting to think that a machine that could think would think like us. But a bit of reflection shows that's not an inevitable conclusion.

To begin with, we'd better be clear about what we mean by "think". A comparison with human thinking might be intuitive, but what about animal thinking? Does a chimpanzee think? Does a crow? Does an octopus ?

The philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there was "something that it is like" to have conscious experiences. There's something that it is like to see the colour red, or to go water skiing. We are more than just our brain states.

Could there ever be "something that it's like" to be a thinking machine? In an imagined conversation with the first intelligent machine, a human might ask "Are you conscious?", to which it might reply, "How would I know?".

http://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-think-and-could-a-machine-ever-do-it-51316

[Related Video]: They're Made Out of Meat

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Remember Napster or Grokster? Both services allowed users to share computer files – usually digital music – that infringed the copyrights for those songs.

Now imagine that, instead of music, you could download a physical object. Sounds like something from a sci-fi movie – push a button and there's the item! But that scenario is already becoming a reality. With a 3D printer, someone can download a computer file, called a computer-aided design (CAD) file, that instructs the printer to make a physical, three-dimensional object.

Because CAD files are digital, they can be shared across the internet on file-sharing services, just like movies and music. Just as digital media challenged the copyright system with rampant copyright infringement, the patent system likely will encounter widespread infringement of patented inventions through 3D printing. The problem is, however, that the patent system is even more ill-equipped to deal with this situation than copyright law was, posing a challenge to a key component of our innovation system.

If 3-D printing at home happened fast enough it would cut China off at the knees.

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

FTFA:

[...] Advanced systems for tamper protection currently rely on fiber-optic cables threaded through and around stores of materials to be safeguarded. These cables carry secret optical signals, which traverse the path and return to a detector at a secure site. Efforts to tamper with the materials, by disturbing the cables, would alter the returning signal and reveal the intrusion.

But such systems remain open to a conceptually simple attack. A sophisticated intruder, upon breaking the fiber, could hide his or her presence by reproducing, or "spoofing," the original signal. They need only detect the arriving signal and send along an exact copy. Such an "intercept-resend" attack would produce precisely the signal expected, and so avoid detection.

This problem can be overcome by using optical signals that are far harder to spoof...

[...] Their idea was to create a stream of entangled photon pairs. For each pair, one would be sent directly to a nearby detector in a secure place, while the other would instead travel down a fiber and through the protected zone, before joining its partner at the detector. In the absence of any disturbance along the way, the second photon, upon reaching the detector, would still show a perfect entanglement with the first. For example, the two photons might have been created in a state with opposite polarizations: if one is vertical, the other must be horizontal. In contrast, any disturbance to the fiber would alter properties of that second photon, destroying the entanglement, so that some pairs might have the same rather than opposite polarizations.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Patients requiring reconstruction of a body part may soon have lab-grown 3D-printed cartilage implanted:

Patients needing surgery to reconstruct body parts such as noses and ears could soon have treatment using cartilage which has been grown in a lab. The process involves growing someone's cells in an incubator and then mixing them with a liquid which is 3D printed into the jelly-like shape needed. It is then put back in an incubator to grow again until it is ready.

Researchers in Swansea hope to be among the first in the world to start using it on humans within three years.

"In simple terms, we're trying to grow new tissue using human cells," said Prof Iain Whitaker, consultant plastic surgeon at the Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery at Morriston Hospital.

[...] How the process works

• Cells are taken from a tiny sample of cartilage during the initial operation and grown in an incubator over several weeks
• The shape of the missing body part is scanned and fed into a computer
• It is then 3D printed using a special liquid formula combined with the live cells to form the jelly-like structure
• Reagents are added to strengthen the structure
• It is put into an incubator with a flow of nutrients to supply the cells with food so they can grow and produce their own cartilage
• The structure will then be tested to see if it is strong enough to be eventually implanted into patients

Original Submission

joekiser writes:

Libreboot, the project which aims to replace a computer's BIOS (or UEFI) with free software, has gained support for its first Micro-ATX motherboard. The Socket 775 Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L was first produced in 2009, and supports up to 8GB of RAM and the Core 2 range of processors. Libreboot, soon to be part of the GNU project, is derived from the Coreboot project, with the caveat that all binary firmware is removed. Libreboot allows security features such as the disabling of the Intel Management Engine, an encrypted /boot/ partition, and GPG signature checking of the kernel. With Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L support, it is now possible to build a completely free Micro-ATX system.

Note that it has been previously possible to use Libreboot on laptops such as the Libiquity Taurinus X200 (a re-branded Lenovo X200), and the Minifree Libreboot T400 (re-branded Lenovo T400), as well as the ASUS KGPE-D16 server board.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Nanotechnologists at the University of Twente research institute MESA+ have discovered a new fundamental property of electrical currents in very small metal circuits. They show how electrons can spread out over the circuit like waves and cause interference effects at places where no electrical current is driven. The geometry of the circuit plays a key role in this so called nonlocal effect. The interference is a direct consequence of the quantum mechanical wave character of electrons and the specific geometry of the circuit. For designers of quantum computers it is an effect to take account of. The results are published in the British journal Scientific Reports.

Interference is a common phenomenon in nature and occurs when one or more propagating waves interact coherently. Interference of sound, light or water waves is well known, but also the carriers of electrical current – electrons – can interfere. It shows that electrons need to be considered as waves as well, at least in nanoscale circuits at extremely low temperatures: a canonical example of the quantum mechanical wave-particle duality.

[...] The researchers from the University of Twente have demonstrated electron interference in a gold ring with a diameter of only 500 nanometers (a nanometer is a million times smaller than a millimeter). One side of the ring was connected to a miniature wire through which an electrical current can be driven. On the other side, the ring was connected to a wire with a voltmeter attached to it. When a current was applied, and a varying magnetic field was sent through the ring, the researchers detected electron interference at the other side of the ring, even though no net current flowed through the ring.

This shows that the electron waves can "leak" into the ring, and change the electrical properties elsewhere in the circuit, even when classically one does not expect anything to happen. Although the gold ring is diffusive (meaning that the electron mean free path is much smaller than the ring), the effect was surprisingly pronounced.

The full article is available (DOI: 10.1038/srep18827).

Original Submission