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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Thursday Google announced they'd be including OpenShift Dedicated -- Red Hat's platform for container applications -- in Google's own cloud computing platform. "This service is underpinned by Red Hat Enterprise Linux," says Google's Martin Buhr, "and marries Red Hat's enterprise-grade container application platform with Google's 10 years of operational expertise around containers." Google argues it's part of their commitment to being "the Open Cloud," along with investments in open source tools like Kuernetes, and this is also beneficial to Red Hat. "Until now Red Hat PaaS required the use of Amazon Web Services, the only public cloud large enough to support it," notes one technology reporter. "Now, it can be deployed on Google as well."

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hubie writes:

Armchair neuroscientists rejoice! McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and Hospital in Canada will begin the transition this year to conform to the "open science" movement: all results and data will be made freely available at the time of publication and the institute will not pursue patents on any of its discoveries. They will include freely providing all results, data, software, and algorithms and requiring collaborators from other institutions to also follow the open principles.

"It's an experiment; no one has ever done this before," he says. The intent is that neuroscience research will become more efficient if duplication is reduced and data are shared more widely and earlier. Opening access to the tissue samples in MNI's biobank and to its extensive databank of brain scans and other data will have a major impact, Rouleau hopes. "We think that it is a way to accelerate discovery and the application of neuroscience."

This was an institutional decision supported by the 70 principal investigators and 600 other scientific faculty and staff. Over the next six months the individual research groups will determine how they will implement the policy.

"While the scale of 'open' that can be pursued right now may vary across research areas and will certainly depend on the resources that can be brought to bear, the practical challenges seem worth contending with," she says. Participation is voluntary, and researchers can pursue patents on their own, but MNI will not pay the fees or help with the paperwork.

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"exec" writes:

Apple’s Steve Zadesky, who has been overseeing the company’s electric car project for the last two years, has said he is leaving the company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

A person familiar with the matter said Zadesky's departure was for personal reasons and wasn't related to his performance.

Zadesky ... worked as an engineer at Ford prior to joining Apple in 1999] ... the pending departure marks a setback for one of the most talked-about projects in the technology field. Apple has become the most valuable company in the world making consumer electronics products, but moving into the automotive sector poses big new challenges.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/22/the-head-of-apples-electric-car-project-is-reportedly-leaving-the-company/

-- submitted from IRC

Article at The Wall Street Journal is paywalled. An excerpt is available at: MarketWatch.

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takyon writes:

The BBC reports that one of a group of four men arrested in 2014 and accused of plotting terror attacks is said to have downloaded "Mujahedeen Secrets," an Al Qaeda-linked encryption software package for Microsoft Windows:

One of the four men accused of plotting "drive-by" shootings downloaded software to allow jihadists to exchange secret messages, a court has heard. Suhaib Majeed, 21, had "Mujahideen Secrets" on his laptop, the jury heard. Mr Majeed, along with Nathan Cuffy, 26, Nyall Hamlett, 25, and Tarik Hassane, 22, from west London, deny conspiracy to murder and preparing terrorist acts. It is alleged they were inspired by the Islamic State group and plotted to kill a police officer, soldier or civilian.

The Old Bailey[*] heard that Mr Majeed liaised via Skype, the internet-based communication software, with someone overseas who helped him download the software, which the prosecution said was designed for Islamist terrorists to exchange encrypted messages. The contact abroad told Mr Majeed to "stay sharp" but unknown to either of them he was already under surveillance by counter-terrorism officers, the court was told.

The prosecution says Mr Majeed and fellow defendant Mr Hassane were in frequent contact about how to cover their tracks using false names and addresses and a variety of SIM cards. The jury also saw evidence they had set up a code to share new phone numbers but Mr Majeed did not fully understand it, leading to a string of abusive messages from Mr Hassane.

They also used Google Street View to identify targets, so put that next on the list of things to be banned.

[*] The Old Bailey.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Take a look back at a popular TV programs from the mid-1960s, say "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and what do you see? Like today, middle-class Americans typically had washing machines and air-conditioning, telephones and cars. The Internet and video games were not yet invented but life, over all, did not look that different. Now flash back 50 years earlier to 1910 and less than half the population lived in cities, Model T's were just starting to roll off the assembly line, most homes weren't wired for electricity, and average life expectancy was only 53. Now Eduardo Porter writes in the NYT that although Americans like to think they live in an era of rapid and unprecedented change, the truth is that the most momentous changes of the 20th century arose between 1920 and 1970 and according to Robert J. Gordon, author of "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," despite the burst of progress of the Internet era, total factor productivity has risen in the last fifty years at only about one-third the pace of the previous five decades. "This book," Gordon writes in the introduction, "ends by doubting that the standard of living of today's youths will double that of their parents, unlike the standard of living of each previous generation of Americans back to the late 19th century."

But that's not the worst part of the story. According to Gordon, the labor force will continue to decline, as aging baby boomers leave the work force and women's labor supply plateaus and gains in education, an important driver of productivity that expanded sharply in the 20th century, will contribute little. Moreover, the growing concentration of income means that whatever the growth rate, most of the population will barely share in its fruits. Altogether, Professor Gordon argues, the disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the population, which has expanded about 2 percent per year since the late 19th century, will expand over the next few decades at a rate little above zero. Gordon says that the explosion of innovation and prosperity from 1920 through 1970 was a one-time phenomenon.

From now on, progress will continue at the more gradual pace of both the last 40 years and the period before 1920. "If you think about the productivity effects of the computer revolution, they started way back in the 1960s, with the first computer-produced telephone bills and bank statements and went on in the 1970s with airline reservation systems. In the early 80s there was the invention of the personal computer, the ATM cash machine and barcode scanning which greatly increased productivity in retail. And so much of the impact of computers in replacing human labor had already occurred at the time the internet was introduced in the late 1990s. And actually, depending on which part of the internet you are looking at, it was introduced before then. Most of us were doing email by the early 90s. Amazon was founded in 1994, so we're 20 years now into the age of e-commerce," says Gordon. "There is plenty of room in my forecast for evolutionary change. What is lacking is sharp, discrete change."

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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813558/google-apple-1-billion-default-ios-search

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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=34781

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ticho writes in with the news that:

The Rust Core Team has announced release of new Rust version, 1.6.

Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

[...] The largest new feature in 1.6 is that libcore is now stable! Rust's standard library is two-tiered: there's a small core library, libcore, and the full standard library, libstd, that builds on top of it. libcore is completely platform agnostic, and requires only a handful of external symbols to be defined.

[...] libcore being stabilized is a major step towards being able to write the lowest levels of software using stable Rust. There's still future work to be done, however. This will allow for a library ecosystem to develop around libcore, but applications are not fully supported yet.

[...] You can read the full release announcement here.

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AndyTheAbsurd writes in with this story:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160122145457.htm

I wonder if they controlled for type of fiber intake? It does specify, further down in the story, that the study did not control for activity levels, which seems strange.

There is a pdf of the full report available.

[*] NHANES: National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"The fuss made over contested decimal points in highly adjusted datasets of irrelevant factors only shows how unscientific the public debate is. It probably wasn't the hottest year in the last 150, and even it was, who cares – that doesn't tell us anything about the cause. (Remember when cause and effect used to matter to a scientist?) Natural forces like the Sun and clouds can cause hot years too. Even if it was "the hottest" in a short noisy segment, the world has been hotter before (and life on Earth thrived) and the climate models are still hopelessly wrong. If CO2 was a big driver of the climate, 2015 should have been a lot hotter."

The article then provides comparisons with satellite data, ice core samples. Then sums up the current state of sea level rise and other hot issues.

My favourite being the last 100,000 years comparing now to the Medieval and Roman warming periods as **temperature measurements** and not anomaly graphs: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png

Article: http://joannenova.com.au/2016/01/hottest-shattering-year-since-the-last-one-five-reasons-it-was-not-hot-and-not-relevant/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The aerial view of the concept of data sharing is beautiful. What could be better than having high-quality information carefully reexamined for the possibility that new nuggets of useful data are lying there, previously unseen? The potential for leveraging existing results for even more benefit pays appropriate increased tribute to the patients who put themselves at risk to generate the data. The moral imperative to honor their collective sacrifice is the trump card that takes this trick.

However, many of us who have actually conducted clinical research, managed clinical studies and data collection and analysis, and curated data sets have concerns about the details. The first concern is that someone not involved in the generation and collection of the data may not understand the choices made in defining the parameters. Special problems arise if data are to be combined from independent studies and considered comparable. How heterogeneous were the study populations? Were the eligibility criteria the same? Can it be assumed that the differences in study populations, data collection and analysis, and treatments, both protocol-specified and unspecified, can be ignored?

A second concern held by some is that a new class of research person will emerge — people who had nothing to do with the design and execution of the study but use another group's data for their own ends, possibly stealing from the research productivity planned by the data gatherers, or even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited. There is concern among some front-line researchers that the system will be taken over by what some researchers have characterized as "research parasites."

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1516564

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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/545806/microsoft-bets-that-bitcoin-style-blockchains-will-be-big-business/

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HughPickens.com writes:

Elizabeth Olsen writes at the NYT that a growing number of older Americans are driving for Uber or its competitor Lyft to augment their retirement income. Older drivers are prized because they usually own their own cars, have adequate auto insurance and, according to insurance statistics, have fewer crashes. For most senior drivers, the biggest advantage is the extra income. Many of those who continue working after 65 do so because they would be too poor otherwise, according to a new report from the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute that found the current retirement system inadequate. But driving for a ride-booking service, some retirees said, also can offer more than money. For George Cameron, a 65-year-old former marine in Mechanicsville, Virginia, retirement was not all it cracked up to be. Chiefly, it was dull. "Although I've got a few community things I'm involved in," says Cameron, "I sit at home and listen to the news. And my wife says I'm getting too close to the dog."

Some drivers say it is a great chance to be independent and earn extra cash on their own schedule. Retirees are insulated from many of the shortcomings of the gig economy. But critics say Uber vastly exaggerates the amount of money a driver can make driving full-time. Its workers are contractors, and don't receive benefits. As with most gig economy work, there's no such thing as a career path. But many seniors don't need (second) careers. Not all of them need full-time work. Forty million of them already have health insurance through Medicare. Some say it is exploitation of older people who work as independent contractors, without any benefits, because their age means they have a harder time finding full-time employment. "You have to work close to 50 hours a week to survive," says Musse Bahta who says he has to spend more time on the road since Uber lowered the per-mile fare to $1.35.

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"exec" writes:

Nearly 300,000 recreational drone owners have registered their unmanned aircraft in a new federal database intended to help address a surge of rogue drone flights near airports and public venues, U.S. regulators said on Friday.

[...] The registration applies to drones that weigh between 0.55 pound (250 grams) and 55 pounds (25 kgs).

Experts have said 700,000 to 1 million unmanned aircraft were expected to be given as gifts in the United States last Christmas alone. People who operated their small unmanned aircraft before Dec. 21 must register by Feb. 19.

[...] The current system is available only to owners who intend to use drones exclusively for recreational or hobby purposes. The FAA is also working to make the system available for non-model aircraft users including commercial operators by March 21.

Officials say the agency is also working with the private sector to streamline registration including through the use of new smart phone apps that could allow a manufacturer or retailer to register a drone automatically by scanning an identification code on the aircraft.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drones-registration-idUSKCN0V02FI

-- submitted from IRC

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xpda writes:

Two major undersea communications cables were down Thursday, bringing down the internet for most African countries for 2 hours and 40 minutes. A Seacom cable was cut by civil construction workers at the same time that its backup route, a West Africa Cable System cable, was down.

Seacom had been in the news earlier in the week for its new partnership with network provider Ciena – a deal which promises to deliver improved reach and increased capacity for local providers.

Both companies will offer new solutions with a 100Gbps upgrade to African service providers, linking to main points of presence in Europe via undersea routes.

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