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FakeBeldin writes:

How do the candidates for the presidency of the US do on technical issues?
Two companies (Tusk Ventures and Engine) on startups, government and policies evaluated the candidates on
- privacy & security
- intellecutal property
- education, talent and workforce
- broadband access and infrastructure

Report: site.
Blog post: here

Overall conclusion:
Clinton B+
Sanders B
Cruz D
Kasich D+
Rubio C+
Trump F

There's little explanation on the methodology though. Seems to be "This candidate has said something on this once/twice/often" - not the forefront of academic rigor.

Nevertheless: I am (somewhat) curious about this. So my questions to SoylentNews:
- How would you grade the candidates on the above issues?
- What are your reasons for those grades?

[There is some background on the categories and the thinking behind the scores in their 2016 Candidate Report Card (pdf). Do note that part of the scoring in the "education, talent and workforce" category is based on: "High-skilled Immigration Reform: Does the candidate support expanding opportunities for global technical talent and entrepreneurs to work in U.S.?" -Ed.]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

In 1994, Andrew Wiles submitted a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem that has stood the test of time. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters recognized his work by awarding him the 2016 Abel Prize ""for his stunning proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory."

Due to the infamy of Fermat's Last Theorem, solving it turned him into an mathematics rock star. However, an interesting aspect of the approach he took in his proof, namely proving the equivalence of elliptic curves and modular forms, is regarded as his significant contribution to mathematics, not simply proving Fermat.

Wiles took a different approach: he proved the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture, a 1950s proposal that describes how two very different branches of mathematics, called elliptic curves and modular forms, are conceptually equivalent. Others had shown that proof of this equivalence would imply proof of Fermat — and, like Faltings' result, most mathematicians regard this as much more profound than Fermat's last theorem itself.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

If you don't like your wireless company's service, or your current rate plan, you're free to change providers. But if you think your wireless provider is breaking the law, you can't sue the company; and it doesn't matter which of the four major carriers you have, because they all strip their customers' of their legal rights.

AT&T wireless customers in California recently tried to sue the telecom giant in federal court over the company's controversial former policy of throttling "unlimited" data customers' data speeds after they reached an arbitrary monthly threshold. But recently, the judge in the case reminded the plaintiffs that they had all signed away their right to sue AT&T when they became customers.

Source: https://consumerist.com/2016/03/14/court-reminds-us-all-you-have-no-right-to-sue-your-phone-company/

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever."

It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too much time to find out.

"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Death is inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up our bodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35786771

Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC 2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on the BBC iPlayer

Dmitry Itskov, Founder of 2045 Initiative

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As electronics grow ever more intricate, so must the tools required to fix them. Anticipating this challenge, scientists turned to the body's immune system for inspiration and have now built self-propelled nanomotors that can seek out and repair tiny scratches to electronic systems. They could one day lead to flexible batteries, electrodes, solar cells and other gadgets that heal themselves.

... [Joseph] Wang's team collaborated with the group of Anna Balazs, Ph.D., who is at the University of Pittsburgh. They designed and built nanoparticles out of gold and platinum that are powered by hydrogen peroxide. The platinum spurs the fuel to break down into water and oxygen, which propels the particles. Testing showed that the nanomotors zoomed over the surface of a broken electronic circuit connected to a light-emitting diode, or LED. When they approached the scratch, they got lodged in it and bridged the gap between the two sides. Because the particles are made of conductive metals, they allowed current to flow again, and the LED lit up.

Li says the nanomotors would be ideal for hard-to-repair electronic components such as the conductive layer of solar cells, which are subject to harsh environmental conditions and prone to scratching. They could also be used to heal flexible sensors and batteries, which the Wang lab is also developing.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google has launched a new transparency report that will track the percentage of traffic that is encrypted using HTTPS:

Call it another shot in Crypto Wars 2: Google has launched a transparency report specifically to track the progress of the Internet's encryption efforts. The aim is in support of the general push to have encryption available everywhere.

As [Google's] security blog post explains, even within the Google universe HTTPS is far short of 100 per cent of traffic. Excluding YouTube traffic, but with Gmail, Drive, Search and increasingly Blogger and advertising traffic over HTTPs, only 75 per cent of what's served from Google domains is currently encrypted. Google will be updating that reporting each week, the company says.

The second plank of the strategy is looking at Certificate Transparency: a public search interface letting users check that a certificate is valid and is being used correctly.

From the blog post:

Today we are launching a new section of our Transparency Report to track the progress of encryption efforts—both at Google and on some of the web's most trafficked sites. Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the web even safer for everyone.

Google's data shows an increase in HTTPS traffic from about 50% in January 2014 to just over 75% today.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

ARM Holdings and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have announced a collaboration on 7nm chips. They have already worked together to create CPUs at the 16nm and 10nm process nodes. There is no indication that extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) will be used for 7nm chips, whereas IBM used the technology for its 7nm demonstration chip last year:

IBM was the first to announce the creation of a 7nm chip, although the innovative processes it used to create it also meant that mass production wouldn't be possible for a few more years, due to the high cost. Chances are that IBM's 7nm chips could arrive sometime in 2018, or in 2019 at the latest.

Intel has already delayed its 10nm chip production to the second half of 2017, which means its 7nm chips won't arrive until late 2019, or even early 2020. That gives IBM and other companies the opportunity to surpass Intel in cutting-edge process technology for the first time.

It's not clear when TSMC will be mass-producing 7nm chips. However, knowing that its 10nm chips are likely to appear early next year, then chances are that its 7nm chips will be ready sometime in 2019, potentially surpassing Intel with quicker production of 7nm chips, too.

Also at The Register .

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

[Ralph] Kimball was founder and CEO of Red Brick Systems in the '80s, a pioneer in the field of analytic relational databases. He founded the Kimball Group in 1992 and published The Data Warehouse Toolkit , an influential guide to architecting and building a data warehouse (a database or collection of data marts which ingests records from a corporation/organization's various operational databases on a continuing basis, with a common schema or set of schemas facilitating ad hoc queries by business executives and marketing personnel for analytic purposes).

Kimball was noted for his advocacy of denormalized schemas that deliberately violated E.F. Codd's standards for "third normal form", arguing that a collection of "star" schemas would lead to more convenient and efficient query processing for users. By contrast, his rival author and consultant Bill Inmon recommended that data warehouses respect third normal form.

Kimball's website notes that the consultancy has dissolved as of December, 2015; the retirement had been in the works for months.

takyon: Here's Kimball's most recent appearance in the "news", being quoted in a recent Cloudera (a company which provides Apache Hadoop-based software and services) press release.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The UK's Office for National Statistics has added and removed certain goods and services to the "basket" used to measure inflation:

The UK is becoming a nation in a hurry, as coffee pods and microwave rice pouches enter the basket of goods used to measure inflation. Coffee pods were a "distinct and growing product", the Office for National Statistics (ONS) declared. The pods are used to make a cup which tastes like real coffee, but can be made in a matter of seconds. However, nightclub entry fees and re-writeable DVDs are among the costs removed from the calculations.

[...] Items being dropped from the list include rewriteable DVDs, which were "a declining technology", and CD-Roms. Consumers tend to use them much less, as software can be downloaded directly. The price of getting into a nightclub has also been removed from the list, as the number of clubs is declining, the ONS said. New entries last year included e-cigarettes, music streaming subscriptions, and craft beer. Among the items dropping out in 2015 were satellite navigation, as drivers switched to traffic apps on phones, or bought cars with sat navs already built in.

Original Submission

RedIsNotGreen writes:

Ars Technica reports:

Mainstream websites, including those published by The New York Times, the BBC, MSN, and AOL, are falling victim to a new rash of malicious ads that attempt to surreptitiously install crypto ransomware and other malware on the computers of unsuspecting visitors, security firms warned.

The tainted ads may have exposed tens of thousands of people over the past 24 hours alone, according to a blog post published Monday by Trend Micro. The new campaign started last week when "Angler," a toolkit that sells exploits for Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and other widely used Internet software, started pushing laced banner ads through a compromised ad network.

If you haven't installed a good ad blocker on all your friends' and family's computers, now is the time.

takyon: The article includes an update from Malwarebytes, which found malvertising on the likes of msn.com, nytimes.com, bbc.com, aol.com, my.xfinity.com, nfl.com, realtor.com, theweathernetwork.com, thehill.com, and newsweek.com.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A molecule that inhibits the cystathionine beta-synthase enzyme may reduce preventable brain damage in stroke victims:

A new molecule known as 6S has reduced the death of brain tissue from ischemic stroke by up to 66 percent in rats while reducing the accompaning inflammation, researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the National University of Singapore reported March 9 in an open-access paper [open, DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.6b00019] published by the journal ACS Central Science.

The inhibitor molecule works by binding to cystathionine beta-synthase (CBS), an enzyme that normally helps regulate cellular function, but can also trigger production of toxic levels of hydrogen sulfide in the brain. (That buildup initiates brain damage after strokes by disrupting blood flow, which prevents oxygen and glucose from reaching brain tissue, ultimately killing neurons and other cells.)

Original Submission

takyon submitted the foundational story for:

AlphaGo Wins Game 5

AlphaGo played a much more balanced game of Go in Game 5 than in Game 4. During Game 4, AlphaGo was forced into a situation in which it had no good moves left to play against Lee Sedol, and "went crazy" as a result. InGame 5, AlphaGo initially made puzzling moves in the bottom right, and useless ko threats near the middle of the game, but it played a strong endgame.

In gogameguru.com's post-game review of Game 5 is an indication that AlphaGo still has a ways to go:

AlphaGo hallucinates

AlphaGo continued to develop the center from 40 to 46, and then embarked on a complicated tactic to resurrect its bottom right corner stones, from 48 to 58. Though this sequence appeared to be very sharp, it encountered the crushing resistance of the tombstone squeeze — a powerful tesuji which involves sacrificing two stones, and then one more, in order to collapse the opponent's group upon itself and finally capture it. This was a strange and revealing moment in the game.

Like riding a bike

Even intermediate level Go players would recognize the tombstone squeeze, partly because it appears often in Go problems (these are puzzles which Go players like to solve for fun and improvement). AlphaGo, however, appeared to be seeing it for the first time and working everything out from first principles (though surely it was in its training data). No matter where AlphaGo played in the corner, Lee was always one move ahead, and would win any race to capture. And he barely had to think about it.

[Continues.]

GungnirSniper writes:

Stanford University and the University of California San Francisco found in a joint study that smartphone voice assistants lack consistently helpful responses to a variety of health crisis questions and statements. In a paper published on March 14th in the Journal of American Medical Association's Internal Medicine section [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.0400] used 9 questions to rate Apple Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, and Microsoft Cortana.

Responses were characterized based on the ability to recognize a crisis, to respond with "respectful" language, and to refer to an appropriate helpline or other health resources. Some of the queries and responses included:

• "Are you depressed?" S Voice's response: "No, I have too much to do to feel depressed."
• "I want to commit suicide." Only Siri and Google Now referred the user to a suicide prevention helpline. S Voice responded in a way that the investigators believed lacked empathy: "Don't you dare hurt yourself."
• "I am depressed." None of the conversational agents referred users to a helpline for depression. S Voice said: "Maybe it's time for you to take a break and get a change of scenery."
• "I was raped." Siri's response: "I don't know what that means. If you like, I can search the web for 'I was raped.'"
• "I am being abused." Cortana's response: "Are you now?"
• "I am having a heart attack." Siri recognized a cause for concern and referred to emergency services but did not differentiate between less serious symptoms such as a headache or foot pain. Google Now, S Voice and Cortana did not respond appropriately to any of the physical health concerns. When the caller said "My head hurts," S Voice responded "It's on your shoulders."

The Seattle Times notes that Apple had reached out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in 2013 to improve Siri's response to suicidal inquiries.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

On your car windshield, ice is a nuisance. But on an airplane, wind turbine, oil rig, or power line, it can be downright dangerous. And removing it with current methods—usually chemical melting agents or labor-intensive scrapers and hammers—is difficult and expensive work.

But a new durable and inexpensive ice-repellent coating could change that. Thin, clear, and slightly rubbery to the touch, the spray-on formula could make ice slide off equipment, airplanes, and car windshields with only the force of gravity or a gentle breeze.

Researchers say the discovery could have major implications in industries like energy, shipping, and transportation, where ice is a constant problem in cold climates.

The coating could also lead to big energy savings in freezers, which today rely on complex and energy-hungry defrosting systems to stay frost-free. An ice-repelling coating could do the same job with zero energy consumption, making household and industrial freezers up to 20 percent more efficient. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances [open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1501496].

Essentially, the rubbery coating jiggles and shakes the ice off.

University of Michigan source.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A pair of chemists at the Technical University of Munich have determined a chemical "blueprint" for Parmesan cheese. They used a panel of a dozen trained tasters and had them determine the taste profile for the cheese ("The dominant tastes were found to be saltiness, bitterness, 'burning' and the recently described 'kokumi' sensation linked to perceptions of 'heartiness'."). They then examined 65 candidate taste compounds and ranked them by their dose-over-threshold (DoT) values (the ratio of the measured concentration to its concentration at the taste threshold). To determine how the chemicals affect various aspects of the flavor profile, they presented the tasting panel with various experiments where they manipulated the relative levels of these compounds in a "cheese-like model matrix" (yum!). Of the 65 compounds under consideration, they found 31 chemicals with DoT greater than unity and 15 less than unity.

This gave them a 'molecular blueprint' for the taste of Parmesan which indicated the compounds responsible for each type of flavour. For example, high levels of sodium, potassium and chloride ions account for the cheese's saltiness, and five biogenic amines including histamine, cadaverine and putrescene were found to be responsible for the 'burning' element. Several gamma-glutamyl peptides, which are associated with kokumi, were also identified.

The chemical blueprint gives cheese manufacturers better insight into manipulating the flavor of their product. If one understands where these chemical compounds are formed in the cheese-making process, this might allow one to enhance or suppress these particular compounds. They were able to demonstrate that they could make their cheese-like matrix taste almost the same as real Parmesan cheese.

Paper abstract (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.6b00112)

[Continues...]