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HughPickens.com writes:

The news media has long been accused of turning mass shooters into celebrities. As the nation endures an ongoing stream of mass shootings, criminologists, police and even the FBI are turning to virus epidemiology and behavioral psychology to understand what sets off mass shooters and figure out whether, as with the flu, the spread can be interrupted. Now Michael S. Rosenwald writes at The Washington Post that the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence wants to wipe mass killers off the internet with a browser plug-in that replaces the names and pictures of mass shooters in news stories with the names and pictures of their victims.

"The fact is, notoriety serves as a reward for these killers and as a call-to-action for others who would seek to do similar harm in the name of infamy," says Dan Gross. Researchers says mass shooters intensely study their forbears. They often reference each other in their online ramblings and attempt to honor — or surpass — them in their own rampages. Until the news media agrees to stop naming mass shooters, their notoriety will continue to spread, particularly to disturbed people susceptible to those images. "The media also has a role to refrain from memorializing monsters by splashing the names and faces of shooters all over television, newspapers, and the Internet," says Gross.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

The Geographical Oddity of Null Island. A blog post at "Worlds Revealed: Geography & Maps at The Library Of Congress" on 2016-04-22.

It doesn't seem like much of a place to visit. Granted, I've never actually been there, but I think I can imagine it: the vastness of ocean, overcast skies, a heavy humidity in the air. No land in sight, with the only distinguishing feature being a lonely buoy, bobbing up and down in the water. It almost seems like a "non-place," but it may surprise you to learn that this site is far from anonymous. This spot is a hive of activity in the world of geographic information systems (GIS). As far as digital geospatial data is concerned, it may be one of the most visited places on Earth! This is Null Island.

Null Island is an imaginary island located at 0°N 0°E (hence "Null") in the South Atlantic Ocean. This point is where the Equator meets the Prime Meridian. The concept of the island originated in 2011 when it was drawn into Natural Earth, a public domain map dataset developed by volunteer cartographers and GIS analysts. In creating a one-square meter plot of land at 0°N 0°E in the digital dataset, Null Island was intended to help analysts flag errors in a process known as "geocoding."

Geocoding is a function performed in a GIS that involves taking data containing addresses and converting them into geographic coordinates, which can then be easily mapped. For example, a data table of buildings in Washington, DC could include the Madison Building of the Library of Congress (where I'm reporting from) as a feature and include its address: 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, DC, 20540. This address typically makes sense to the layperson, but to put the address on a map using a GIS, the computer needs a translation. A "geocoder" converts this address into its location as set of coordinates in latitude and longitude, a format that a GIS understands. In this case, the Madison Building's geographic location becomes 38° 53′ 12″N, 77° 0′ 18″W (38.886667, -77.005 in decimal degree format). Anyone who has ever typed in an address on Google Maps or looked up driving directions on Mapquest has been a beneficiary of this tool: type in an address, get a pin on a map.

Unfortunately, due to human typos, messy data, or even glitches in the geocoder itself, the geocoding process doesn't always run so smoothly. Misspelled street names, non-existent building numbers, and other quirks can create invalid addresses that can confuse a geocoder so that the output becomes "0,0". While this output indicates that an error occurred, since "0,0" is in fact a location on the Earth's surface according to the coordinate system, the feature will be mapped there, as nonsensical as the location may be. We end up with an island of misfit data.

https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2016/04/the-geographical-oddity-of-null-island/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

martyb writes:

If you have been on-line for any period of time, you've probably noticed them. They appear on e-mails, USENET posts, and social media sites (including SoylentNews, if you have setup an account). I'm talking about a .sig file, also known as a signature file.

Many are humorous, some are thoughtful, some are just placeholders. But, once in a while, I stumble upon one that makes me laugh out loud, or stops me in my tracks and makes me think. For humorists, some of my favorites are: Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, Erma Bombeck, and Ashleigh Brilliant. For the more thought-provoking, I've seen quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.

I thought it would make for an interesting weekend discussion. What are some of your favorites?

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5bn, you could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8bn, or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years at a cost of $6.5bn. "Nuclear power plants are the most complicated piece of equipment we make," says Steve Thomas. "Cost of nuclear power plants has tended to go up throughout history as accidents happen and we design measures to deal with the risk."

But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5.0bn. That includes about $730m for stone and $58m for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere 600 staff would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445m. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110bn.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Japanese overconfidence and a changing political landscape in Australia allowed a French contractor to reach a deal worth billions:

In 2014, a blossoming friendship between Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe looked to have all but sewn up a $40 billion submarine deal. Then French naval contractor DCNS hatched a bold and seemingly hopeless plan to gatecrash the party.

Almost 18 months later, France this week secured a remarkable come-from-behind victory on one of the world's most lucrative defense deals. The result: Tokyo's dream of fast-tracking a revival of its arms export industry is left in disarray.

Interviews with more than a dozen Japanese, French, Australian and German government and industry officials show how a series of missteps by a disparate Japanese group of ministry officials, corporate executives and diplomats badly undermined their bid.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man skeleton is set to be reburied after decades of research and wrangling:

Once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had control over the Columbia River property, caught wind of the bones' ancient age, the agency demanded the remains. A local tribe, the Umatilla, had claimed the Kennewick Man as an ancestor; the Native American group wanted to lay the skeleton to rest according to custom. Chatters, who had teamed up with paleoanthropologists like the Smithsonian Institute's renowned bone expert Douglas Owsley, resisted.

Thus began a debate that would last for 20 years. In one corner were the scientists, who over the years have wanted to sequence the Kennewick Man's DNA and scrape his molars to see what he ate. Burial without first letting scientists analyze the bones, paleontologist Thomas Stafford told the Denver Post in 1997, "would be like burning the great library of Alexandria."

In the other corner was a coalition of five Native American groups — the Nez Perce, Yakama, Wanapum and Colville tribes, along with the Umatilla, who refer to the Kennewick Man as the Ancient One. Their legal footing, they say, is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — legislation enacted in 1990 as a way to return cultural items kept by federal agencies and museum collections.

A genetic test on the remains found that the Kennewick Man is closely related to Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest and not the ancient Japanese Ainu tribe as some anthropologists had argued in court. The Army Corps of Engineers announced on Wednesday that it would coordinate with the coalition of Native American tribes to bury the remains.

Also at Reuters.

Previously: DNA Testing Confirms Kennewick Man's Ties to Native Americans

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Protesters have stormed the "Green Zone" and Iraqi parliament and are camping out:

Protesters stormed Iraq's parliament Saturday in a dramatic culmination of months of demonstrations, casting uncertainty over the tenure of the country's prime minister and the foundations of the political system laid in place after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Security forces declared a state of emergency in the Iraqi capital after demonstrators climbed over blast walls and broke through cordons to enter Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, also home to ministries and the U.S. embassy. Many were followers of Iraq's powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has been urging his supporters onto the streets.

Lawmakers fled the building in panic, with some berated and struck as they left. Others were trapped in the basement for hours, too afraid to face the crowds who complain that the country's political class is racked by corruption.

Also at NPR, BBC, and Reuters.

Update: PM orders arrest of parliament protesters

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that in its annual report on "global catastrophic risk," the Global Challenges Foundation estimates the risk of human extinction due to climate change—or an accidental nuclear war at 0.1 percent every year. That may sound low, but when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.

The report holds catastrophic climate change and nuclear war far above other potential causes, and for good reason citing multiple occasions when the world stood on the brink of atomic annihilation. While most of these occurred during the Cold War, another took place during the 1990s, the most peaceful decade in recent memory. The closest may have been on September 26, 1983, when a bug in the U.S.S.R. early-warning system reported that five NATO nuclear missiles had been launched and were bound for Russian targets. The officer watching the system, Stanislav Petrov, had also designed the system, and he decided that any real NATO first-strike would involve hundreds of I.C.B.M.s. Therefore, he resolved the computers must be malfunctioning. He did not fire a response.

Climate change also poses its own risks (pdf). According to Meyer, serious veterans of climate science now suggest that global warming will spawn continent-sized superstorms by the end of the century. Sebastian Farquhar says that even more conservative estimates can be alarming: UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace.

[Continues.]

DutchUncle writes:

Business news summarized a MarketWatch article thusly: "One reason growth is not faster is because technology is helping customers more than companies." As a technocrat, I thought that was the whole idea.

"Two roads diverged," Robert Frost wrote in what is perhaps the most popular poem of all time, "The Road Not Taken." Frost's opening words keep playing in my head every time an economic indicator is released, a global macro forecast is revised, or financial markets take a tumble. In all cases, the bulls and the bears find enough ammunition to support their diametrically opposed views on the U.S. economy.

Rarely have two roads diverged so dramatically for so long. It took six years for mainstream economists to come around to the notion that no, this is not your grandfather's economy; and no, real economic growth isn't going to accelerate to 3% next year, the perennial forecast. Trend economic growth of 3% or 4% is a thing of the past, constrained as it is right now by anemic productivity and labor-force growth.

Even the 2.1% average growth [in] real gross domestic product since the Great Recession ended in June 2009 is a source of controversy. The economic bulls maintain that the price of information technology is being overstated, which means real GDP and productivity growth are being understated. For this group, the low level of both jobless claims and the unemployment rate is telling the true story of a robust economy that isn't being captured by the statisticians.

http://on.mktw.net/23NzdKB

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Astronomers have discovered a tailless comet, C/2014 S3, that resembles inner solar system asteroids:

Astronomers have found a first-of-its-kind tailless comet whose composition may offer clues into long-standing questions about the solar system's formation and evolution, according to research published on Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The so-called "Manx" comet, named after a breed of cats without tails, was made of rocky materials that are normally found near Earth. Most comets are made of ice and other frozen compounds and were formed in solar system's frigid far reaches.

Researchers believe the newly found comet was formed in the same region as Earth, then booted to the solar system's backyard like a gravitational slingshot as planets jostled for position.

Also at Space.com.

Inner solar system material discovered in the Oort cloud (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600038)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have found specific parts of the brain that correspond to different aspects of language:

What if a map of the brain could help us decode people's inner thoughts? UC Berkeley scientists have taken a step in that direction by building a "semantic atlas" that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature, are based on a brain imaging study that recorded neural activity while study volunteers listened to stories from the "Moth Radio Hour." They show that at least one-third of the brain's cerebral cortex, including areas dedicated to high-level cognition, is involved in language processing.

Notably, the study found that different people share similar language maps: "The similarity in semantic topography across different subjects is really surprising," said study lead author Alex Huth, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Click here for Huth's online brain viewer.

Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex (DOI: 10.1038/nature17637)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward submitted this story about efforts to build an encrypted meshnet in Toronto:

Meshnet networks, or meshnets, are a form of intranet that doesn't require a central router point. Instead of emitting from a single point, they're distributed across an entire system of nodes. Accessing one is free—and doesn't require the services of a telecom.

Lau had spent the previous summer chatting with other meshnet enthusiasts in Europe, trying to figure out the best way to set up routers across the city. He suggested it was time to give it a try in Toronto. What grew out of Lau and Iantorno's meeting, four months ago now, was a plan to build a meshnet in this city—one where users wouldn't need to worry about eavesdroppers, because it would be encrypted.

When it's finished, Toronto's first free-to-use meshnet should provide an accessible and secure internet community, maintained by locals keen on becoming digitally self-sufficient. Those early adopters could reshape our relationship to internet providers, and cut monthly rates out of the picture.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel has exited the smartphone System-on-a-Chip business, at least temporarily, with the cancellation of Broxton and SoFIA products:

Given the significance of this news we immediately reached out to Intel to get direct confirmation of the cancelation, and we can now confirm that Intel is indeed canceling both Broxton (smartphone and tablet) and SoFIA as part of their new strategy. This is arguably the biggest change in Intel's mobile strategy since they first formed it last decade, representing a significant scaling back in their mobile SoC efforts. Intel's struggles are well-published here, so this isn't entirely unsurprising, but at the same time this comes relatively shortly before Broxton was set to launch. Otherwise as it relates to Atom itself, Intel's efforts with smaller die size and lower power cores have not ended, but there's clearly going to be a need to reevaluate where Atom fits into Intel's plans in the long run if it's not going to be in phones.

[...] Thus Intel's big wins in the smartphone space have been rather limited: they haven't had a win in any particularly premium devices, and long term partners have been deploying mid-range platforms in geo-focused regions. Perhaps the biggest recipient has been ASUS, with the ever popular ZenFone 2 creating headlines when it was announced at $200 with a quad-core Intel Atom, LTE, 4GB of DRAM and a 5.5-inch 1080p display. Though not quite a premium product, the ZenFone 2 was very aggressively priced and earned a lot of attention for both ASUS and Intel over just how many higher-end features were packed into a relatively cheap phone.

Meanwhile, just under two years ago, in order to address the lower-end of the market and to more directly compete with aggressive and low-margin ARM SoC vendors, Intel announced the SoFIA program. SoFIA would see Intel partner with the Chinese SoC vendors Rockchip and Spreadtrum, working with them to design cost-competitive SoCs using Atom CPU cores and Intel modems, and then fab those SoCs at third party fabs. SoFIA was a very aggressive and unusual move for Intel that acknowledged that the company could not compete in the low-end SoC space in a traditional, high-margin Intel manner, and that as a result the company needed to try something different. The first phones based on the resulting Atom x3 SoCs launched earlier this year, so while SoFIA has made it to the market it looks like that presence will be short-lived.

Here is a previous story about the SoFIA program.

Related:
Intel Skylake & Broxton Graphics Processors To Start Mandating Binary Blobs (only Broxton story on the site)
Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As this year's National Football League (USA) draft kicked off Thursday night, Univ. of Mississippi offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil was projected to be a top pick; he was said to be coveted by several teams drafting early in the first round, including the San Diego Chargers at #3 and the Baltimore Ravens at #6. Soon after the draft began, however, a video clip was posted on Tunsil's Twitter account, showing Tunsil doing bong hits while wearing a gas mask (Tunsil later acknowledged being in the video, but says it happened two years ago). Shortly thereafter, Tunsil's Instagram account was hacked, with an upload of an email in which Tunsil asks a university official for money to help with his mother's bills (one might sympathize with Tunsil on this, but it would be an NCAA violation if the request were granted).

Tunsil was eventually picked at #13 by the Miami Dolphins; this chart shows what the incident might have cost him. The SI article linked above, written by a legal analyst, suggests that he likely has grounds to sue, if the perpetrator can be identified.

College kids do some stupid things, and the guys on the football team probably get into more than their share of campus scrapes and brushes with the law. NFL general managers, coaches, and scouts who draft players (mostly from American college football teams) spend considerable time vetting candidates, not just for their abilities the field, but for intelligence, personalities, behavioral traits, and potential character issues. Football talent is much more important to these gentlemen than good citizenship, but character "red flags" can push a candidate down on, or even off, a team's draft board (a priority queue of candidates that gets pruned as other teams make their selections in a multiple-round, round-robin fashion).

Twenty-one years ago, the stock of a top defensive lineman named Warren Sapp went into freefall right before the draft over rumors of heavy cocaine and marijuana use. Sapp fell from projected #2 overall to #12, where he was picked by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Sapp went on to have a Hall of Fame career with Tampa Bay, where he played 13 seasons and was selected to the Pro Bowl 7 times.

Original Submission

Whoever writes:

Rovi Corporation (formerly known as Macrovision Corporation) has agreed to buy TiVo in an $1.1B stock and cash deal.
The combined company company will be called TiVo, and the CEO will be the current CEO of Rovi: Tom Carson.

The deal provides that Rovi will pay about $10.70 per share of TiVo stock, broken down into $2.75/share in cash and Rovi stock worth $7.95/share. The amounts may change before the deal finalizes, depending on the movement of TiVo and Rovi stock. However, Rovi will not pay more than $3.90 per share in cash.

Shareholders of both companies must agree to the sale and it may be scrutinized by antitrust regulators.

[Ed. Addition.] Also covered at Ars Technica which notes:

The deal seems to be centered on patents. According to The New York Times , Rovi's interactive TV program guides account for less than half of its $526 million revenue last year, while the rest is made up of its licensed intellectual property. TiVo made a name for itself with its DVR technology, but the patents that make its DVR hardware and software work are proving to be more valuable. Together, Rovi and TiVo have over 6,000 patents issued and pending in the digital entertainment space.

Original Submission