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aristarchus writes:

More political meddling in climate science? From the Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/australia-cuts-110-climate-scientist-jobs/

But the interesting part is that this is unlike American or Harper-Canadian attempts to destroy scientific evidence for global climate change, instead it is premised on accepting AGW as established science.

The issue seems to be one of the unbusiness-like nature of pure research.

Well, at least NASA gave the US both Tang and space pens, so they didn't have to cut it so much. Until NASA started doing Earth Science. But now we know that, as far as the Aussies are concerned, Anthropogenic Global Warming is a real thing, and all that is left is to figure out how to make some wallabys off of it.

Original Submission

wirelessduck writes:

The Guardian is reporting that uninstalling the facebook app saves up to 15% of an iPhone's battery life:

Facebook is one of the most downloaded apps on iOS but it has long been cited as a cause of fast-draining iPhone batteries. Last year it was accused of using background tricks to stay active even when it wasn't being used. Facebook admitted bugs existed, and fixed them, but questions of the app's impact on battery life remained.

Similar concerns about Facebook's Android app led to the discovery that deleting the app saves up to 20% of a phone's battery. After that revelation, I set about seeing if the same was true for iPhone users. I discovered that uninstalling Facebook's iOS app and switching to Safari can save up to 15% of iPhone battery life.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

When failure to embrace what the scientific establishment currently believes in cases where it can produce no conclusive evidence results in a witch-hunt, the cause of true science is not served.

Recently, Christina Wilkinson, of St Andrew's Church of England school in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, came under fire for falling out of step with orthodoxy on the issue of the origins of life.

The Guardian reports that Wilkinson tweeted in response to London headteacher Tom Sherrington who urged teachers to stick to science when teaching young minds where life comes from: "Evolution is not a fact. That's why it's called a theory! There's more evidence that the Bible is true."

I am not here to argue for what Christina Wilkinson believes about the Bible, nor even merely to argue that she has the right to believe whatever she wants, but rather that the attacks against her – and insistence that she quieten down her Wrongthought – are born of a mentality with more in common with the excesses of the Cloth than with the advances of the Enlightenment.

[Continues.]

takyon writes:

A proposed 1,700-meter (1.056 mile) high "Sky Mile Tower" in Tokyo could house up to 55,000 people if built:

According to a report from the World Health Organization, in 2014 cities accounted for for[sic] 54 percent of the total global population, up from 34 percent in 1960, and continue to grow. This upward trend, coupled with rising sea levels from global warming, may leave some of the world's major metropolises vulnerable to overpopulation and massive flooding, among other natural concerns. In Japan, officials decided to launch an initiative called "Next Tokyo," where architects would create a futuristic mega-city that is adapted to climate change in the year 2045. Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and Leslie E. Robertson Associates joined forces to propose a vision for a new city in Tokyo Bay. Their design incorporates elements that improve the bay's preparedness for natural disasters (such as earthquakes and typhoons) as well as a mile-high residential tower and a public-transportation-friendly district. The water development's hexagonal-shaped structures, ranging from 500 to 5,000 feet in width, were imagined in layers to minimize the effects of intense waves from the bay, while also allowing ships easy access in and out of the busy harbor.

What's more, some structures would be prefilled with water, allowing access to islands that are public beach harbors and urban farming plots. Salt water from the bay would also be retained to grow algae, a source of renewable and clean fuel. One component of the plan that has drawn much attention is the mile-high skyscraper. Sky Mile Tower, as it's being called, would soar some 5,577 feet—twice the height of the Burj Khalifa, the world's current tallest building.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It also wasn't an aberration. You wouldn't see it in most classrooms, you wouldn't know it by looking at slumping national test-score averages, but a cadre of American teenagers are reaching world-class heights in math—more of them, more regularly, than ever before. The phenomenon extends well beyond the handful of hopefuls for the Math Olympiad. The students are being produced by a new pedagogical ecosystem—almost entirely extracurricular—that has developed online and in the country's rich coastal cities and tech meccas. In these places, accelerated students are learning more and learning faster than they were 10 years ago—tackling more-complex material than many people in the advanced-math community had thought possible. "The bench of American teens who can do world-class math," says Po-Shen Loh, the head coach of the U.S. team, "is significantly wider and stronger than it used to be."

[...] In the past, a small number of high-school students might have attended rigorous and highly selective national summer math camps like Hampshire College's Summer Studies in Mathematics, in Massachusetts, or the Ross Mathematics Program at Ohio State, both of which have been around for decades. But lately, dozens of new math-enrichment camps with names like MathPath, AwesomeMath, MathILy, Idea Math, sparc, Math Zoom, and Epsilon Camp have popped up, opening the gates more widely to kids who have aptitude and enthusiasm for math, but aren't necessarily prodigies. In Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, math circles—some run by tiny nonprofit organizations or a single professor, and offering small groups of middle- and high-school math buffs a chance to tackle problems under the guidance of graduate students, teachers, professors, engineers, and software designers—now have long wait lists. In New York City last fall, it was easier to get a ticket to the hit musical Hamilton than to enroll your child in certain math circles. Some circles in the 350-student program run out of New York University filled up in about five hours.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The list below appeared in my email the other day, I asked the sender if I could post his work and he said to go ahead. His inspiration for creating the list was this blog http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/03/more-microaggression-resources.html which in turn has some additional links.

Micro-aggressions are becoming more common. I thought I would attempt to clarify the terminology by defining an aggression unit as a homicide and proceeding forward from there. The results are as follows:

yotta-aggression -- God destroying the multiverse in a fit of pique
zetta-aggression -- Armageddon
exa-aggression -- Deliberate Ignition of Super Nova
peta-aggression -- Intergalactic War
tera-aggression -- Interplanetary/Interspecies War
giga-aggression -- Major Nuclear War
mega-aggression -- Genocide
kilo-aggression -- Serious Terrorist Attack
hecto-aggression -- Pogrom/Tribal Warfare
deka-aggression -- Average Mass Murder Incident
Aggression Unit -- Individual homicide
deci-aggression -- Individual Mayhem
centi-aggression -- Bar Room Fist Fight
milli-aggression -- Deliberate use of a slur
micro-aggression -- Mentioning unpleasant facts
nano-aggression -- Distinguishing individuals
pico-aggression -- Distinguishing self from other
femto-aggression -- Existing
atto-aggression -- Accidentally ceasing to exist
zepto-aggression -- Deliberately ceasing to exist
yocto-aggression -- Never having existed

The last three are aggressive because they frustrate aggrieved individuals by removing targets upon which to vent their outrage, spleen, and general dissatisfaction with the way the universe has treated them.

Personally, I thought he could have used a better title, perhaps something to do with the total perspective vortex from THHGTTG, or looking back to the famous book (later made into a movie) "Powers of Ten". Whatever the title, it helped me to put some things in perspective.

An interactive successor to "Powers of Ten" can be found at Scale of the Universe (flash required) or you can watch the YouTube video.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Well ahead of NASA's planned first manned space landing on Mars in the 2030s, VR-equipped folks will be able to "visit" the Red Planet this year, thanks to Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4.

NASA has teamed up with Fusion Media, MIT's Space Systems Laboratory, and game developers from former studio Irrational Games to develop The Mars 2030 Experience for Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and Samsung Gear VR in 2016. The free cross-platform virtual reality experience will also expand to Sony PlayStation VR and HTC Vive, thanks to Unreal Engine 4.

Justin Sonnekalb, who was a technical designer at Irrational Games, said Unreal Engine 4's visual programming for both materials and gameplay logic enabled the team to easily add new content and bring new systems online in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.

"At the end of the first day of development we had a shared project environment with players able to walk and drive around terrain based on real Martian altimetry data from the University of Arizona's HiRISE project," Sonnekalb said. "Being able to get the fundamentals down so quickly is crucial for having the time and space to really bring Mars to life and create a truly immersive experience."

Sonnekalb said Unreal provides numerous tools in its material editor and elsewhere that allowed the team to target multiple performance tiers of lighting quality and different shader models, ranging from OpenGL ES 2 on mobile to DirectX 11 on the most powerful gaming desktops, and previewing each at any time with just a couple clicks.

"The addition of the seamless Mobile Previewer in 4.8 was incredibly helpful for developers targeting a wide range of hardware profiles," Sonnekalb said. "Early development generally emphasizes the higher-end as we work to establish the visual identity of a game, but these tools make it very easy to ensure you're not boxing yourself into a corner on lower-performing hardware in the process."

NASA plans to reveal more details at this year's South by Southwest conference in March.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

David Petley blogs at the American Geophysical Union

The collapse of the Weiguan Jinlong apartment complex [in the February 6 Taiwan earthquake] should not have occurred--a building of this type should have been able to withstand the peak ground accelerations associated with an earthquake of this magnitude, even allowing for the potential for some amplification from the sediments under the foundation. The collapse is quite odd in many ways--the building has clearly toppled over. But, over the last day or so, images have emerged of the state of the key columns that supported the building and the images are shocking:

The apparent replacement of structural concrete with empty cooking oil cans may have critically weakened the building and, if these are load-bearing, may have played a role in the failure. The cans provide almost no structural strength and of course mean that the amount of rebar within the concrete is also reduced. Interestingly, there is surprisingly little rebar in the section of the column that does have concrete.

[Continues.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Last week GitHub released a new open source tool called Scientist, a Ruby-based library they've been using in-house for several years. "It's the most terrifying moment when you flip the switch," GitHub engineer Jesse Toth told one technology reporter, who notes that the tool is targeted at developers transitioning from a legacy system. "Scientist was born when GitHub engineers needed to rewrite the permissions code -- one of the most critical systems in the GitHub application." The tool measures execution duration and other metrics for both test and production code during runtime, and Toth reports that they're now also developing new versions in Node.js, C#, and .Net.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

For the last 48 hours Twitter has been... well, all of a Twitter.

An article in Buzzfeed suggesting that the social network was about to introduce what is known as an algorithmic timeline - promoting tweets deemed most relevant rather than publishing them in reverse chronological order - sparked a wave of what can only be described as furious panic.

Under the hashtag #RIPTwitter, thousands, perhaps millions, told the world that this was the end of civilisation as we know it, that a beautiful thing was being crushed, that the company, whose share price has been tumbling for months, was signing its own death warrant.

Finally, the CEO Jack Dorsey was forced to react. "Hello Twitter!" he called out. "Regarding #RIPTwitter: I want you all to know we're always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week."

Should users ignore Twitter?

Original Submission

Max Hyre writes:

The Wassenaar Arrangement attempts to limit traffic in conventional arms. The trouble is, they're trying to add security software to the list. The Register is carrying a story about the proposed rewrite of the Arrangement which specifies limitations on such trade. As with so many other tools, they can be used for good or evil, and many claim restricting good guys' access leaves everyone vulnerable to the bad guys. This is viewed with alarm in security circles.

Then, mid-2015, the US government said it had heard all the complaints against the changes, and agreed to go back to the drawing board. Now it's confirmed there will be a public consultation on the next draft update.

Speak now or forever lose your defenses. Unfortunately, TFA specifies no date or method for submissions.

Original Submission

xpda writes:

Wired.com is has announced it will block access to ad-block users, who they say make up 20 percent of their traffic. Users can access Wired without ad blockers or subscribe for $1 per week. Wired joins Forbes in blocking access to ad-block users.

Previous coverage:
Forbes Asks Readers to Turn Off Ad Blockers, Then Immediately Serves Them Pop-under Malware
Forbes.com Says "Uncle," Unblocks AdBlock Plus Users

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

¿Hablas C++? In Florida, lawmakers are debating a proposal to swap the two foreign language courses required by the state's high schools for classes in programming languages such as JavaScript and Python.

The measure, championed by a former Yahoo executive turned state senator, would let students substitute traditional foreign language studies for courses in coding, often seen as key skill in an increasingly technological era.

"This is a global language today," said Sen. Jeremy Ring (D) of Margate, the bill's sponsor, at a hearing on Wednesday. "Computers and programming have become part of our global culture."

There's growing enthusiasm about teaching coding to American students, with President Obama last weekend unveiling a $4.2 billion plan to expand computer science education, which he said had become "a basic skill, right along with the three 'R's" — reading, writing, and arithmetic.

What if they said, "they may learn math or how to read, but not both?"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Japanese firm said on Monday it will soon open what may be the most futuristic farm yet: operated by robots, with their human assistants donning lab coats instead of overalls, and vegetables growing vertically on ceiling-high metal shelves instead of horizontally over bucolic fields.

Spread, a cutting-edge food producer based in Kyoto, says its roughly one-acre indoor farm will start operating in 2017, producing 30,000 heads of pesticide-free lettuce a day initially. By using efficient lighting and watering, and shrinking the number of human employees, Spread will significantly reduce its costs, at least by half on labor.

The only job carried out by human farmers will be planting the seeds. All other tasks – from re-planting young seedlings to watering, trimming, and harvesting crops – are to be managed by machines.

"困ったな, ロボットは仕事 を 取った!" ("They took er jerbs!")

Original Submission

linuxrocks123 writes:

A number of users have reported that running "rm --no-preserve-root -rf /" not only deletes all their files (as expected), but also permanently bricks their computers (which is not). Tracing the issue revealed that the ultimate cause was that SystemD mounted the EFI pseudo-fs as read-write even when this FS was not listed in fstab, and deleting certain files in this pseudo-fs causes certain buggy, but very common, firmware not to POST anymore. A user reported this bug on SystemD's GitHub issue tracker, asking that the FS be mounted read-only instead of read-write, and said bug was immediately closed as invalid. The comment thread for the bug was locked shortly after. Discuss.

Links:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/02/01/running-a-single-delete-command-can-permanently-brick-laptops-from-inside-linux/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Days after Dutch police released a video demonstrating a trained eagle attacking a drone, other police officials and politicians have registered interest:

The Metropolitan Police have confirmed they're looking into deploying drone-busting eagles, a few days after a Scottish MP called for cops north of the border to investigate the possibility of using feathered interceptors to deal with growing flocks of wild UAVs.

According to the Times, Met Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe has tasked a chief inspector with seeing if a Dutch talon-armed anti-UAV initiative might work in the UK's capital.

[...] A Metropolitan Police spokesman said yesterday: "As would be expected in an organisation that is transforming we take an interest in all innovative new ideas and will of course be looking at the work of the Dutch police use of eagles."

Original Submission