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Phoenix666 writes:

Waze, the Google-owned traffic navigation app, said Monday more than 25,000 employees at select companies in the Bay Area will be able to test a carpooling option that allows them to hitch a ride with Waze drivers.

Employees can download a free app, Waze Rider, that lets them request a ride from other Waze users who share a similar commute. Then, drivers can choose whether to approve that request in the original Waze app. The riders are matched with drivers from the app's more than 700,000 Bay Area users.

[...] Riders pay Waze drivers a suggested amount, based on the standard rate set by the IRS — 54 cents per mile. In the pilot program at least, Waze does not take a cut of the transaction. Waze tried a similar pilot program last year in Israel, where it took a 15 percent commission if riders paid drivers. (In the Israeli program, riders could request a free ride.)

Will the 'Boy Band' option be available on the Waze Rider app?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Car alarms, it turns out, do very little of what they're intended to do. For one thing, they are supposed to sniff out thieves, but plenty go off when a leaf floats down onto a windshield or a gust of wind blows. If two analyses done in the 1990s still hold, 95 to 99 percent of all car-alarm triggerings are literally false alarms. "Frankly, I think they're a waste of money," said Dr. Peter Frise, the director of AUTO21, a Canadian government-funded research group on the auto industry.

Perhaps because of that, car-security experts say, people rarely pay them any mind, rendering them even less effective. Since blaring alarms usually mean someone accidentally bumped into a vehicle, or even just happened to play loud music down the street, an alarm rarely means an actual theft is taking place. Besides, if a thief really is trying to steal a vehicle, who wants to approach a potentially dangerous criminal? "You have a car thief attacking your car. You're going to run out, and you're going to do... what?" asked Reg Phillips, a vehicle-security expert who works with the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators. "What is in that car that's worth getting hurt over?" (Of course, one could call the police instead.)

Surely it's because car alarms are useful for measuring the intensity of pressure waves from thunder claps...?

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Phoenix666 writes:

CNET reports:

It may not be as easy to make as glass, but it's less, dense, stronger, better at insulating, and more biodegradable than plastic. The material is clear wood, and it could be used for everything from solar panels to light-admitting privacy windows, according to Lars Beglund at Wallenberg Wood Science Center at KTH, Sweden.

To make the wood clear, a process detailed in the journal Biomacromolecules, it is treated in a chemical bath to strip away the lignin, the molecule that gives wood its colour. This leaves behind a colourless scaffold, but it's rather soft, so this is treated with a transparent polymer, which gives the material its strength. The team's next step is to scale up the manufacturing process.

The team's research, interestingly, was followed by a very similar research paper by researchers at the University of Maryland, published in the journal Advanced Materials [DOI: 10.1002/adma.201600427]

Windows are the achilles heel of home insulation. Better, cheaper insulating versions are sorely needed.

[Editor's note: This is also important as sand, and therefore glass, is a non-renewable resource for practical purposes. There is already resource contention over sand.]

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Phoenix666 writes:

CNN reports:

It's been billed as the most ambitious project in Kenya since it gained independence in 1963.

Now, the first section of the east African nation's $13.8 billion railway is nearly finished.

Originally planned to link Mombasa and Nairobi, the decision was made to extend the line to the market town of Naivasha in 2015, and 75% of civil works have reportedly been completed. This first Mombasa-Nairobi stretch will be completed by June 2017, consulting firm CPCS told CNN.

It is hoped that the track will shorten the journey between the two cities from 12 hours to four hours. Passenger trains will travel at 120km/h, and freight trains will be able to carry 25 million tonnes per year, according to the International Railway Journal.

Eventually, the East Africa Railway Masterplan will link Mombasa with other major east African cities such as Kampala, in Uganda, and Juba, in South Sudan.

[...] The railway is being built by the state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), 90% of the ongoing development of the Mombasa-Nairobi section is being financed by The Export-Import Bank of China.

China has been investing heavily in Africa over the last decade. Some have accused it of "neo-colonialism," of only trying to lock-in access to the continent's natural resources.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers have found a way to quintuple the number of electrons that can be harvested from light:

In traditional light-harvesting methods, energy from one photon only excites one electron or none depending on the absorber's energy gap, transferring just a small portion of light energy into electricity. The remaining energy is lost as heat. But in the paper in Science Advances , Wu, associate professor Xiaodong Xu, and colleagues describe one promising approach to coax photons into stimulating multiple electrons.
...
Xu and Wu discovered that when the graphene layer's lattice is aligned with the layers of boron-nitride, a type of "superlattice" is created with properties allowing efficient optoelectronics that researchers had sought. These properties rely on quantum mechanics, the occasionally baffling rules that govern interactions between all known particles of matter. Wu and Xu detected unique quantum regions within the superlattice known as Van Hove singularities.

"These are regions of huge electron density of states, and they were not accessed in either the graphene or boron-nitride alone," says Wu. "We only created these high electron density regions in an accessible way when both layers were aligned together."

When Xu and Wu directed energetic photons toward the superlattice, they discovered that those Van Hove singularities were sites where one energized photon could transfer its energy to multiple electrons that are subsequently collected by electrodes—not just one electron or none with the remaining energy lost as heat. By a conservative estimate, Xu and Wu report that within this superlattice one photon could "kick" as many as five electrons to flow as current.

The next step is to organize the excited electrons into current.

From the original study, "Multiple hot-carrier collection in photo-excited graphene Moiré superlattices."

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports:

Sci-Hub [is] the search engine for academic papers that includes a few tricks to access more paywalled academic papers for free, using the academic logins that have been shared with the site for the sake of retrieving more research. Academic journal publishing giant Elsevier has been waging a war with the site, first getting an injunction against its original domain back in December, only to have it quickly pop up elsewhere.

[...] Now, Sci-Hub has announced that it's available via the popular messaging app Telegram as well.

[...] From the looks of it, you can just send it a message with the title you want, and it sends you back a download link--within seconds. From a researcher's standpoint, this seems like it must be quite handy, and certainly again feels a lot like the fairly standard #icanhazpdf process used on social media by academics all the time. Just a little more automated.

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jdavidb writes:

MRI scans of children listening to their mother's voices reveal regions of the brain lighting up in response. The brain response doesn't occur at the sound of other women. The children were scanned while listening to the sound of their own mothers saying three nonsense words and the sound of other women saying three nonsense words for comparison. Nonsense words were selected to avoid the possibility of activating other regions of the brain that might be involved in other functions such as linguistic processing.

The children in the study were 7 to 12, which surprised me - I see babies delighting in the sound of their mother's voices, but I have definitely seen a lot of 7 to 12 year olds who didn't sound delighted to hear their mothers at all. I guess none of these children were engaged in any mischief - maybe that could be a new variable for a future study.

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SubiculumHammer writes:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/16/clinton-does-best-where-voting-machines-flunk-hacking-tests-hillary-clinton-vs-bernie-sanders-election-fraud-allegations/
"Of the nine places where the exit polling has missed by more than 7% (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York), two-thirds are states where all or the majority of election jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater. For these six states the average initial exit polling miss is a whopping 9.98%. From my column on exit polling misses last week, the average exit polling miss in Clinton's favor is 5.1%. For the three states (Oklahoma, New York, Maryland) for which there is polling and for which all election jurisdictions use machines less than ten years old (gray in the map), the average is just a 1.67% miss in Clinton's favor. Now take note, this 1.67% average includes New York with its huge miss in Clinton's favor."

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An IRC coward projected this article:

The embassy of Saudi Arabia in the German capital has been decorated with an ISIS flag and labeled the "Daesh Bank" in a projection stunt performed by human rights activists in an effort to draw attention to the kingdom's purported links to terrorist organizations. Artist Oliver Bienkowski and the Pixel Helper collective performed the stunt to draw public attention to Saudi Arabia's egregiously bad human rights record and country's alleged support of extremist groups. [...] Another projection that lit up the walls of the embassy stated "10 years and 1000 slashes just for blogging #FREERAIF," referring to the blogger Raif Badawi who was imprisoned for criticizing Saudi clerics and appealing for a more liberal and secular society in his blog. He has already spent four years behind the bars.

Also at DW (video).

Previously: Anti-NSA Message Projected on US Embassy in Berlin

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martyb writes:

Ars Technica is running a story about a patient monitor going blank for five minutes during a cardiac catheterization — because it was performing its hourly AV (anti virus) scan. The patient was under sedation at the time and though there was a pause in the procedure, the patient apparently experienced no untoward effects.

It appears the system was misconfigured — it should not have been performing a scan of medical images — but it still strikes me as odd that there were no fail safes to ensure correct operation of the system while it was in use. Further, I cannot fathom how one could rationally design a system such that the built-in AV scan was running at such a priority level that it was even possible for it to interfere with the monitor's operation.

Have we learned nothing since the Therac-25?

takyon: At the FDA.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

After a denial-of-service attack disrupted 444 school websites hosted by the Osaka Board of Education last November, police have now brought charges against a 16-year-old boy who admitted carrying out the attack.

Punishment for this first-of-a-kind cyber attack against a local government in Japan could include a maximum three-year prison sentence or 500,000 yen fine.

takyon: Also at SC Magazine.

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takyon writes:

The Food and Drug Administration is fast tracking an experimental treatment for brain cancer that uses a modified form of the polio virus:

Tests at Duke University have been so successful that the FDA will make the treatment available to hundreds of patients while it's still being evaluated for final approval. The treatment uses the polio virus to attack an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. Duke neuro-oncologist Dr. Henry Friedman told "60 Minutes" the polio treatment is "the most promising therapy I've seen in my career, period."

The polio virus seeks out and attaches to a receptor on the surface of the cells that commonly make up solid tumors. The team at Duke re-engineered the virus so that it cannot reproduce in normal cells and cause paralysis or death, as the normal polio virus does. The immune system, which typically is unable to attack cancer cells, recognizes the polio virus and can begin to attack brain tumors on its own.

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Runaway1956 sent in an article about the changes sweeping the television and advertising industries:

When you started using all the new technology to watch shows on your own terms, and to stop viewing commercials, you threw into question the modus operandi of a roughly $70 billion industry that has been remarkably stable for decades. The billions give television the room to maintain business as usual in the middle of this change-tsunami in a way that, say, newspapers can't. But some sort of reckoning seems inevitable.

In the not-too-long run, network television could come to look nothing like it does today. Maybe you will be surfing apps instead of channels, as the Apple chief executive Tim Cook predicts, skipping between shows that don't have commercial breaks or hard-and-fast 30- and 60-minute time limits. That would have big consequences for those who have stuff to sell and who still view television ads as the best way to do it — and equally big consequences for traditional television's gatekeepers.

In the short term, as in this coming week of television brinkmanship, bets on where it will all end up, and how much of a reckoning is already upon us, will drive the negotiations for what could be more than $9 billion in advance advertising purchases for the coming fall season.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The chief advisor for the European Court of Justice has declared that dynamic IP addresses are tantamount to personal data and should be protected under Europe's privacy laws, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) reports.

The [German-language] opinion, issued by Advocate General Manuel Campos Sánchez-Bordona, is online but has yet to be translated into English. The advocate general's opinions are non-binding but they typically dictate how the European Court of Justice will rule.

Sánchez-Bordona's opinion concerns the lawsuit that Patrick Breyer, a privacy activist and German pirate party politician, filed against the German government for logging visits to government websites. "Banning governments and Internet giants from identifiably recording our browsing habits is the only way to effectively shield our private life and interests," Breyer has said.

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"exec" writes:

Google (GOOGL.O) faces a record antitrust fine of around 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) from the European Commission in the coming weeks, British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-eu-idUSKCN0Y60J4

The European Union has accused Google of promoting its shopping service in Internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has dragged on since late 2010.

Several people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month they believed that after three failed attempts at a compromise in the past six years Google now had no plans to try to settle the allegations unless the EU watchdog changed its stance.

The Telegraph cited sources close to the situation as saying officials planned to announce the fine as early as next month, but that the bill had not yet been finalised.

Google will also be banned from continuing to manipulate search results to favour itself and harm rivals, the newspaper said.

The Commission can fine firms up to 10 percent of their annual sales, which in Google's case would be a maximum possible sanction of more than 6 billion euros.

-- submitted from IRC

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