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Phoenix666 writes:

Not all habits are bad. Some are even necessary. It's a good thing, for example, that we can find our way home on "autopilot" or wash our hands without having to ponder every step. But inability to switch from acting habitually to acting in a deliberate way can underlie addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders.
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The study provides the strongest evidence to date, Gremel said, that the brain's circuits for habitual and goal-directed action compete for control -- in the orbitofrontal cortex, a decision-making area of the brain -- and that neurochemicals called endocannabinoids allow for habit to take over, by acting as a sort of brake on the goal-directed circuit.

Endocannabinoids are a class of chemicals produced naturally by humans and other animals. Receptors for endocannabinoids are found throughout the body and brain, and the endocannabinoid system is implicated in a variety of physiological processes -- including appetite, pain sensation, mood and memory. It is also the system that mediates the psychoactive effects of cannabis.
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In the current study, since endocannabinoids are known to reduce the activity of neurons in general, the researchers hypothesized that endocannabinoids may be quieting or reducing activity in the OFC and, with it, the ability to shift to goal-directed action. They focused particularly on neurons projecting from the OFC into the dorsomedial striatum.

They trained mice to perform the same lever-pressing action for the same food reward but in two different environments that differentially bias the development of goal-directed versus habitual actions. Like humans who don't suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders, healthy mice will readily shift between performing the same action using a goal-directed versus habitual action strategy. To stick with the earlier example of getting home, we can switch the homing autopilot off and shift to goal-directed behavior when we need to get to a new or different location.

To test their hypothesis on the role played by endocannabinoids, the researchers then deleted a particular endocannabinoid receptor, called cannabinoid type 1, or CB1, in the OFC-to-striatum pathway. Mice missing these receptors did not form habits -- showing the critical role played by the neurochemicals as well as that particular pathway.

Presumably, suppressing the body's ability to form habits by blocking the body's endocannabinoid receptors would also neutralize the effects of external cannabinoids.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Microsoft is facing criticism from Chinese users about the way it is trying to persuade people to upgrade to its Windows 10 operating system.

Chinese microblog site Weibo said users had now made more than 1.2 million posts complaining about Windows 10.

The complaints in China follow criticism from IT experts who said Microsoft was using a "nasty trick" to make people upgrade.

Microsoft has not yet responded to the reports about Chinese complaints.

"The company has abused its dominant market position and broken the market order for fair play," Zhao Zhanling, a legal adviser for the Internet Society of China told the official Xinhua news agency.

He said by forcing the upgrade, Microsoft had not respected the users' right to choose what they install on their computers. This was important, he said, because eventually Microsoft might profit from the "unwanted" upgrades.

One Chinese man, Yang Shuo, who works at a Beijing-based PR firm, said the Windows 10 update interrupted him while he was working on a business plan. This meant he had to abandon the document which led to a meeting about a deal worth 3m yuan (£312,000) being cancelled.

How long can Microsoft stumble before it falls?

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takyon writes:

Forty-one Secret Service employees are being disciplined for improperly accessing data about a Congressman who was investigating the multitude of scandals involving the Secret Service:

Forty-one employees of the Secret Service have been disciplined for improperly accessing data about Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the secretary of Homeland Security said Thursday. Secretary Jeh Johnson says the employee responsible for leaking that private information to the press has already resigned from the Secret Service.

[...] Johnson now says Chaffetz's files were accessed approximately 60 times, and that most of those occasions violated privacy laws. After investigating 57 Secret Service employees, 41 people will be disciplined — with punishments ranging from a letter of reprimand (for one employee) to suspensions without pay for up to 45 days.

Also at Reuters.

Previously: US Secret Service Violated Privacy Policy to Embarrass Congressman

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butthurt writes:

Geekwire reports on a post on Microsoft's corporate blog in which plans for a transatlantic communications cable are announced. The cable will connect Bilbao in Spain to Virginia Beach, Virginia in the USA. Construction is set to begin in August. The planned capacity of 160 Tbps would, according to the blog post, exceed that of any existing transatlantic cable. The project is to be a joint venture of Microsoft with Facebook, and is to be operated by the Telxius arm of Telefónica.

From the Geekwire article:

Microsoft and Facebook will place a cutting-edge undersea cable across the Atlantic Ocean, stretching 6,600 kilometers or more than 4,100 miles from Virginia Beach, Va., to Bilbao, Spain, capable of hurtling data under the ocean at speeds of 160 Terabits per second.

The companies say the new project, called Marea, will be the highest-capacity subsea cable ever placed across the Atlantic, the first to connect the U.S. to southern Europe. Construction will begin in August 2016, with completion scheduled for October 2017, the companies say.

"We're seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure," said Microsoft's Frank Rey in a post announcing the plan.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is one of the first to show the life-changing benefits of genome-wide sequencing for children with certain kinds of intellectual disability. The work was led by researchers at BC Children's Hospital, an agency of the Provincial Health Services Authority, and the University of British Columbia.

The researchers diagnosed 68 per cent of the 41 families in the study with the precise underlying genetic condition and, based on this, were able to offer targeted treatments to more than 40 per cent of cases. They also discovered 11 new disease genes and described new physical traits and symptoms associated with a number of known diseases. ...Some people's intellectual disability is due to rare genetic conditions that interfere with the processes the body uses to break down food. Because of these metabolic dysfunctions, there is an energy deficit and build-up of toxic substances in the brain and body leading to symptoms such as developmental and cognitive delays, epilepsy, and organ dysfunction. Some of these rare diseases respond to treatments targeting the metabolic dysfunction at the cellular level and range from simple interventions like dietary modifications, vitamin supplements and medications to more invasive procedures like bone marrow transplants. Because the right treatment can improve cognitive functioning or slow or stop irreversible brain damage, early intervention can improve lifelong outcomes for affected children and their families.

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butthurt writes:

BBC News reports that a restaurant operator in the North Yorkshire county of England has been tried, found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment for the death of a customer who died after ordering chicken tikka masala with "no nuts" because he was allergic to peanuts. He died from what is believed to have been anaphylactic shock. Prior to the man's death, the restaurants had already been under investigation because another customer had a non-fatal allergic reaction after she was allegedly served peanuts contrary to her request.

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takyon writes:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/google-wins-trial-against-oracle-as-jury-finds-android-is-fair-use/

Following a two-week trial, a jury has found that Google's Android operating system does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by "fair use." The verdict was reached after three days of deliberation.

The verdict in Google's favor ends the trial, which began earlier this month. If Oracle had won, the same jury would have gone into a "damages phase" to determine how much Google should pay. Because Google won, the trial is over, although the result will surely be appealed.

Google's win somewhat softens the blow to software developers who previously thought programming language APIs were free to use. It's still the case that APIs can be protected by copyright under the law of at least one appeals court. However, the first high-profile attempt to control APIs with copyright law has now been stymied by a "fair use" defense.

It isn't clear how much Oracle would have asked for in the damages phase, but it could have been as much as $9 billion. That's how much Oracle asked for in an early expert report.

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Celestial writes:

A pair of law school researchers studied online consumers and reached the conclusion that consumers believe that they have more rights to digital media than they actually do.

Called "What We Buy When We 'Buy Now,'" the study of almost 1,300 online consumers divided its participants into four groups, presenting each of the four with a different purchase option from a fictitious Internet retail store: a "buy now" button for digital media, a "license now" button for digital media, a notice listing the various things they could and couldn't do with the digital media, and a "buy now" button for physical media. Afterward, the participants answered some questions about what rights they believed they had in the media they bought: the rights to keep, sell, gift, lend, copy, etc. said media.

The results are too complex to describe in any great detail here, but in brief, customers presented with all three digital media purchase options by and large believed they had considerably greater ownership rights in their digital media than they actually do, though the ones who got the list of rights had the lowest level of misunderstanding. Conversely, the people who bought the physical media had the best understanding of the rights they had in it, but many of them believed they had fewer rights than they did. The researchers concluded that getting online stores to move to a rights list rather than a misleading "buy now" button would work best from a standpoint of reducing those misunderstandings.

Another part of the report looked at how much consumers value these ownership rights, and whether they would be willing to pay extra for them. It concluded that many consumers do value ownership rights enough to pay extra for them, and would use streaming services or even illegal peer-to-peer to obtain media instead of "buying" it if such rights were not provided. This doesn't surprise me—though the article didn't discuss the particular illegality of breaking DRM, I know many people already do that in the name of exercising greater "ownership" rights over their digital media. But even digital media that are provided free of DRM by the seller often have license terms that say purchasers are not permitted to transfer them, even if the lack of DRM isn't stopping them.

An abstract of the sixty page summary can be found here.

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takyon writes:

Eugen Archy, the Swedish operator of a site that hosted "fansubs" but no copyrighted audio or video, is facing prosecution and possibly prison:

The operator of a site that hosted fan-made translated movie subtitles has been prosecuted in Sweden. Undertexter.se was raided by police in the summer of 2013, despite many feeling that the site had done nothing wrong. That is disputed by the prosecutor who says that the crimes committed are worthy of imprisonment. [...] For ten years Undertexter ('subtitles' in Swedish) provided a somewhat useful service. Faced with what they perceived as a dearth of subtitling in local language, members of the site made their own translated subtitles for movies and TV shows. These were made available to all via the site. However, in the summer of 2013 everything came crashing down. Under pressure from powerful Hollywood-based movie companies, police raided the site and seized its servers.

[...] Soon it will be up to the court to decide whether distributing fan-created subtitles is a crime in Sweden. Experts have already weighed in on the case with Sanna Wolk, an associate professor of civil law at Uppsala University, noting that the devil could be in the [details]. "The core issue is whether the lyrics count as independent works or pure translations. If they follow the script, it's a copyright violation to distribute them without permission, but if they're self-published, it is not," Wolk noted earlier. "It is difficult to say where the exact line is. Subtitles need to be considered on their own merits to make an assessment."

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b0ru writes:

Earlier this month, a team of astronomers from the University of Liège, Belgium, and NASA, using the TRAPPIST instrument at the ESO site in La Silla, Chile, discovered three exoplanets with temperatures similar to those of the Earth and Venus orbiting an ultra-cool M class dwarf star. M dwarves makes up approximately 75 percent of the stars in our galaxy, and this discovery greatly improves the potential for habitable exoplanets.

A recent study from the Imperial College of London, however, suggests that, whilst these planets orbit cooler and less luminous stars, they may still be too hot to be habitable for life as we know it. Dr James Owen, Hubble Fellow and lead author of the study states:

The atmospheres of these exoplanets are estimated to make up rougly one percent of their planetary mass. By comparison, the mass of our atmosphere is roughly one millionth of the mass of our planet. This suggests an especially thick atmosphere which, given the resultant greenhouse effect, may render these exoplanets uninhabitable. Naturally, this problem is inherent of planets of Earth-like mass, or heavier; smaller planets, e.g. of Mars-like mass, may lose some of this atmospheric mass through evaporation, as we have observed in our own solar system. Further cataloging of the orbital systems of M class dwarf stars will identify these low mass exoplanets as candidates for the ongoing search for extra-solar life.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For the first time in more than 20 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled a new required nutritional information label for packaged foods.

Experts believe the new label will make it easier for consumers to make informed decisions about their health and the foods they eat.

The updated panel will take effect in two years—and for the first time requires the inclusion of how much sugar has been added during processing or preparation. The label will also suggest a daily value of sugar a person should be eating, similar to what has been included for carbohydrates, fats, and sodium.

New US dietary guidelines suggest limiting consumption of added sugars to less than 10 percent of calories per day. On average, Americans currently receive 13 percent (roughly 270 calories) of their total caloric intake from added sugars—with beverages like soft drinks as the major source.

Some studies report that calorie labelling on fast food hasn't made a difference in calorie consumption, so will this change fare better?

takyon: Evaporated Cane Juice? Puh-leeze. Just Call It Sugar, FDA Says

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Phoenix666 writes:

Henry Ford is reputed to have said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." He didn't, but that doesn't change the truth of the aphorism: People don't want something when they don't know what it can do and how it will change their lives. It's one reason that a lot of people are dubious about self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs), as noted in a J.D. Power study we covered recently, and now in a report from the The University of Michigan Sustainable Worldwide Transportation gang, Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak.

Their latest study, Motorists' Preferences for Different Levels of Vehicle Automation:2016 finds that people really don't want completely self-driving cars. A whopping 95.2 percent of respondents wanted a self-driving car, even if it was totally capable, to still have have a steering wheel plus gas and brake pedals (or some other controls) to enable a driver to take control if desired, even though that is what some (like Google) have determined to be the worst of all possible worlds.

Everything hinges on branding. Call it a "Foreign Driver-free Taxi" and those reservations will melt away.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Turns out we know a whole lot less about Neanderthals than we thought, because our cave-painting, tool-wielding, fire-conquering cousins were sophisticated enough to build complex subterranean structures as far back as 176,500 years ago, according to new archaeological evidence.

Deep inside a dark, underground cave 50 km from the city of Toulouse, France, researchers have uncovered the remains of six ancient structures crafted from stalagmites. The find forces us to rethink our assumptions about these archaic humans, because what they appear to have built is far beyond anything we thought they were capable of.

"Neanderthals were inventive, creative, subtle and complex," one of the team, Jacques Jaubert from France's Bordeaux University, told AFP. "They were not mere brutes focused on chipping away at flint tools or killing bison for food."

The ring-shaped structures were found 300 metres deep inside Bruniquel Cave in southwest France, and one is thought to have stood almost 7 metres wide. The twisted corridors of this cave are pitch black this far from the entrance, so the Neanderthals would have had to construct everything by firelight.

There have also been recent reports that Neanderthal flint-knapping was much more sophisticated than previously thought.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The number of U.S. jobs in solar energy overtook those in oil and natural gas extraction for the first time last year, helping drive a global surge in employment in the clean-energy business as fossil-fuel companies faltered.

Employment in the U.S. solar business grew 12 times faster than overall job creation, the International Renewable Energy Agency said in a report on Wednesday. About 8.1 million people worldwide had jobs in the clean energy in 2015, up from 7.7 million in 2014, according to the industry group based in Abu Dhabi. ...The group projects the workforce in clean energy will grow to 24 million by 2030 if United Nations targets are met on climate change and development.

The 58 percent slide in oil prices since June 2014, triggered by Saudi Arabia's grab for market share, has prompted reductions in employment in the fossil-fuels industry. Many higher-cost producers in the U.S. shale industry, Canada's oil sands and Brazil's deepwater-drilling projects have become unprofitable. The transition to clean energy spurred by a landmark deal in Paris involving almost 200 nations is reflected in the global labor market for renewables.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The University of Iowa suspects at least 30 Chinese students of having used ringers to take their exams. The case offers a look inside a thriving underground economy of cheating services aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Chinese kids applying to and attending foreign colleges. ...The advertisements were tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the English language and an unfamiliar culture.

Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at U.S. colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.

For dozens of Chinese nationals at the University of Iowa, the offers proved irresistible. ...Reuters has identified companies in China that help students contrive their entire college application – embellishing or ghostwriting application essays, doctoring letters of recommendation from high school teachers, and even advising kids to obtain fake high school transcripts. Other providers continue the illicit assistance after admission, such as those that performed coursework for hire in Iowa City.

... The cheating services extend far beyond Iowa. At the University of Washington, the University of Alabama and Penn State University, for example, students received Chinese-language advertisements by email this semester from unnamed firms. The pitch: Students could raise their grade point averages and graduate early if they hired the outfits to take classes and do assignments for them. The ads, reviewed by Reuters, offered a money-back guarantee. Students who didn't get As would get refunds.

The article continues with a detailed analysis of one student's dealings with University of California, Davis.

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