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hubie writes:

A tsunami is a wave, or series of waves, associated with a single event disturbance; something pushes on the water in a specific location causing a wave to propagate outward. The most infamous tsunamis were caused by large seismic events, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, or underwater landslides.

There is a lesser-known class of tsunami, outside of coastal regions at least, that is caused by meteorological conditions and is called a meteotsunami. This is caused by an atmospheric disturbance, typically associated with a combination of a rapid atmospheric pressure change and strong winds, such as one would get with a strong convective storm front. Not every storm generates them because the conditions need to be optimized, such as having the speed of the atmospheric disturbance match the local shallow wave speed in the water. Meteotsunamis are very common in oceans around the world and have generated surges as high as 6 meters, though these large destructive events are very rare.

Meteotsunamis also occur in lakes, but they largely go unrecognized because they are mostly very small events, or they get confused with seiches, which is when water sloshes back-and-forth in an enclosed region much like water in a bathtub. A pair of University of Wisconsin researchers looked back at 20 years of historical tide and atmospheric weather data and they determined that the Great Lakes are subject to frequent meteotsunamis, and that they, not seiches, are the most likely cause of some of the worst beach disasters seen on the lakes. Their paper presents meteotsunami statistics and their associated causative storms to develop a predictive tool in the hopes of developing a warning system for the Great Lakes.

Original Submission

A summary of the Inspector General report from FactCheck.org:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that her decision to use a private email account and server for government business while secretary of state was "allowed" by the State Department. She has said "my predecessors did the same thing," and insisted she "fully complied with every rule" in preserving her work emails.

We have taken issue with those claims, and now so does the State Department Office of Inspector General, which issued a report on May 26 that contradicts several of Clinton's claims about her emails:

• The IG report cited department policies dating to 2005 that require "normal day-to-day operations" to be conducted on government servers, contrary to Clinton's claim that her server was allowed. It also said she "had an obligation" to discuss her email system with cybersecurity officials, but there's "no evidence" that she sought or received their approval.
• The IG report said Clinton should have turned over her emails before she left office — not 21 months after she left. "[S]he did not comply with the Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act," the report said.
• Clinton has said her emails "were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department" because she emailed department officials at their government accounts. The IG report said that is "not an appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a Federal record."

The IG report also said the only other secretary of state to use personal email "exclusively" for government business was Colin Powell, contrary to Clinton's claim that her "predecessors" — plural — "did the same thing." The IG also said that, like Clinton, Powell did not comply with policies on preserving work-related emails.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TFA mentions this new finding raises the possibility of using Wnt modulators as a treatment, but I'd wait until this is confirmed in mammals before entertaining the idea.

It may be interesting to look into the side effects of anti-Wnt chemotherapy and see if any mimic autistic traits.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/neuroscientists-illuminate-role-of-autism-linked-gene-0524

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

There is a summary in the New York Times about how Governments Turn to Commercial Spyware to Intimidate Dissidents. The actual report is entitled Keep Calm and (Don't) Enable Macros: A New Threat Actor Targets UAE Dissidents published by the University of Toronto in Canada. The report details the companies and methods used to target journalists, activists, and dissidents so they can be removed and silenced. The bag of tricks includes fake web sites, documents with embedded macros, javascript, and even impersonation.

In the last five years, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, has been jailed and fired from his job, along with having his passport confiscated, his car stolen, his email hacked, his location tracked and his bank account robbed of $140,000. He has also been beaten, twice, in the same week.

Mr. Mansoor's experience has become a cautionary tale for dissidents, journalists and human rights activists. It used to be that only a handful of countries had access to sophisticated hacking and spying tools. But these days, nearly all kinds of countries, be they small, oil-rich nations like the Emirates, or poor but populous countries like Ethiopia, are buying commercial spyware or hiring and training programmers to develop their own hacking and surveillance tools.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TFA reminds me that I still need to fill out an advance medical directive.
Any of you figure out when/if the plug should be pulled for you and will your wishes be acted upon if the situation arises?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/will-you-wake-vegetative-state-new-test-could-tell

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

You may remember Myriad's involvement in the SCOTUS case on patenting human genes.

http://www.nature.com/news/myriad-genetics-embroiled-in-breast-cancer-data-fight-again-1.19953

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The show must go on:

The World Health Organization is trying to ease concerns about spreading Zika as a result of this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janiero.

"Based on current assessment, cancelling or changing the location of the 2016 Olympics will not significantly alter the international spread of Zika virus," a statement released Saturday reads.

This comes a day after more than 150 scientists released an open letter to the head of WHO calling for the games to be moved or postponed, citing new research. "We make this call despite the widespread fatalism that the Rio 2016 Games are inevitable or 'too big to fail,'" the letter says.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The spreading of systemd continues, now actively pushed by themselves unto other projects, like tmux:

"With systemd 230 we switched to a default in which user processes started as part of a login session are terminated when the session exists (KillUserProcesses=yes).

[...] Unfortunately this means starting tmux in the usual way is not effective, because it will be killed upon logout."

It seems methods already in use (daemon, nohup) are not good for them, so handling of processes after logout has to change at their request and as how they say. They don't even engange into a discussion about the general issue, but just pop up with the "solution". And what's the "reason" all this started rolling? dbus & GNOME coders can't do a clean logout so it must be handled for them.

Just a "concidence" systemd came to the rescue and every other project like screen or wget will require changes too, or new shims like a nohup will need to be coded just in case you want to use with a non changed program. Users can probably burn all the now obsolete UNIX books. The systemd configuration becomes more like a fake option, as if you don't use it you run into the poorly programmed apps for the time being, and if they ever get fixed, the new policy has been forced into more targets.

Seen at lobsters 1 & 2 where some BSD people look pissed at best. Red Hat, please, just fork and do you own thing, leaving the rest of us in peace. Debian et al, wake up before RH signed RPMs become a hard dependency.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Virtual reality just became even more "convenient" with this "backpack PC" prototype:

"We're learning a lot about how customers use and perceive VR," says Nash. "There are two consistent pieces of feedback we've gotten. The first is that the demo is incredibly cool, and the second is that the cord is incredibly annoying. But despite all of the demos, nobody has tripped over the cord. We wondered why this was and basically people are aware of the cord the whole time so they don't trip over it. In some sense it's kind of limiting the overall VR experience. It feels a little less real."

The company worked on a few different solutions. Wireless transfer standards couldn't accommodate the throughput without a notable latency and simply shoving a compatible laptop into a backpack wasn't an ideal solution. HP eventually hit upon the Omen X concept, a wearable PC.

It's a similar solution to the one recently shown off by MSI, though HP insists that the timing had less to do with that announcement than its own desire to offer up a working prototype before the unveil. But rather than waiting until the company has a shippable product before announcing, HP opted to show off a prototype in hopes of enlisting developers to help shape the creation of the device.

[...] The current prototype weighs in at less than 10 pounds and features a battery that offers an hour of life per charge. And while HP believes this will be enough to offer a reasonable immersive VR experience, the company has also added a belt with hot swappable batteries, letting users switch them in without losing their place in the game and other important data. The system also features two high-output batteries, assuring that the CPU and GPU aren't throttled — despite the fact that the backpack is intended to operate on battery power alone.

MSI has their own similar "backpack PC" concept. Road to VR helpfully notes (emphasis mine):

HP and MSI are working on concept 'PC on your back' projects (often known as backtops)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Watch homebrew code run Steam games on the PS4

OsirisX recently demonstrated Steam running on a PS4 thanks to a combination of a jailbreak, Arch Linux and some software libraries from Fail0verflow. And yes, it plays games. The demo shows the action-RPG Bastion running at a decent pace, and OsirisX notes that most other titles run well enough at medium to low graphics settings.

Previously: PlayStation 4 Hacked to Run Linux

Full Linux-on-PS4 Hits Github

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Fossbytes reports

Starting with the primary schools in 2020, computer programming will be made a compulsory subject in the Japanese primary schools. It will be followed by the implementation in middle schools in 2021 and high schools in 2022.

Japan aims to make computer programming a common subject like science and integrated studies [in order] to make children ready for the bigger challenges.

In Japanese cities like Takeo [and] Koha [as well as] Ibaraki Prefecture, programming classes are already mushrooming to assist the schools. The Japan News reports that volunteers and businesses are contributing effectively to this mission.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

The BBC reports:

A historic machine used to swap top secret messages between Hitler and his generals has been found languishing in a shed in Essex.

Volunteers from The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park used eBay to track down the keyboard of the Lorenz machine. It was advertised as a telegram machine and was for sale for £9.50.

The museum, in Buckinghamshire, is now asking people to search for the motor, another key piece of the equipment.

"My colleague was scanning eBay and he saw a photograph of what seemed to be the teleprinter," said John Wetter, a volunteer at the museum. He then went to Southend to investigate further where he found the keyboard being kept, in its original case, on the floor of a shed "with rubbish all over it". "We said 'Thank you very much, how much was it again?' She said '£9.50', so we said 'Here's a £10 note - keep the change!'"

The teleprinter, which resembles a typewriter, would have been used to enter plain messages in German. These were then encrypted by a linked cipher machine, using 12 individual wheels with multiple settings on each, to make up the code.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The European Union's interoperability page reports

Sweden should bolster its competence on the use of open source and open standards in public administrations, a study for the country's Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation recommends. Public administrations must also be required to consider switching to free and open source alternatives, when procuring [Information and communications technology (ICT)] solutions, and justify why they continue to use proprietary software.

These are three of the seven recommendations listed in the report by Ramboll Management Consulting, submitted to the ministry in late April. The other four are:

• Require an assessment of the total costs of ownership for larger ICT procurements;
• Select national open standards (such as the Open Document Format ODF);
• Disseminate best practices of the use of open source software;
• Rid schools and universities of IT vendor lock-in, by requiring the use of open source alternatives.

[...] The use of open source by Sweden's public administrations is widespread and increasing, the report summarises. Open source is implemented pragmatically--whenever it is the best solution. In general, open source is common in data centre environments, where it is used for web and application servers. Open source is more prevalent in central government organisations than in local administrations.

[...] [Besides the typical use of existing FOSS apps,] there are a handful of projects where local and regional public administrations are working together [to build their own] open source solutions.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Softpedia reports

Linux Steam Integration (or LSI for short) [is] a small and straightforward utility that promises to solve the issue of the Steam runtime not working correctly on various Linux kernel-based operating systems, such as Solus, because of the old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS libraries [which] Steam for Linux client requires.

Running Steam on some distributions that have nothing to do with Debian packaging has always been a pain in the neck, but now, thanks to this little open-source project, which any OS vendor can integrate into its GNU/Linux operating system, things should run more smoothly for gamers.

This is from Ikey Doherty and the Solus Project, whose announcement says

Linux Steam Integration, or LSI, is a configurable shim I've developed to solve the issue of the Steam runtime. With this shim, one may force Steam to run in 32-bit mode, to combat issues such as seen with the latest CS:GO 64-bit update, as well as to enable or disable the Steam runtime at will.

The shim binary is extremely lightweight and completely leak-free, and is designed to be used in place of the existing /usr/bin/steam, meaning adopters must move the existing Steam binary elsewhere.

This will be expanded in [the] future to address further limitations in the Steam client, in order to bring per-game runtime configuration settings, as well as steadily removing Steam's requirement for [its] own SDL libraries.

The repo is on GitHub, and in the next few hours I'll cut a 0.1 release. It's designed to be distro-agnostic, and to finally address the headaches we've put up with for so long now, such as setting the LD_PRELOAD or LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

With this new shim, we can even run Steam with its own runtime without doing any hacks, and letting LSI take care of it for us.

Original Submission

GungnirSniper writes:

A recent study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine and expanded upon by The Washington Post finds that providing sliced apples, rather than whole ones, increases the odds students will eat them and reduces waste.

A pilot study conducted at eight schools found that fruit consumption jumped by more than 60 percent when apples were served sliced. And a follow-up study, conducted at six other schools, not only confirmed the finding, but further strengthened it: Both overall apple consumption and the percentage of students who ate more than half of the apple that was served to them were more than 70 percent higher at schools that served sliced apples.

This mirrors McDonald's experience with Happy Meals.

In 2004, before any other fast food company was offering apple slices, McDonald's was adding them to its menu. At the time, the company was looking to introduce healthier options that would be attractive to children, and pre-sliced apples seemed like a good place to start.

"Sliced apples are often easier for children, especially young children, to eat," said Christina Tyler, a company spokesperson. "We simply wanted to make enjoying fruit easier and more fun for our youngest customers."

For years, the apples were offered as an optional side. But in 2012, the company began automatically serving them as part of Happy Meals. And the impact has been enormous.

While McDonald's wouldn't disclose how many apples it sold in the early years, it confirmed that it has served more than 2 billion packages since they were first offered. In 2015 alone, the company served almost 250 million packages of sliced apples, which amounts to just over 60 million apples, or more than 10 percent of all fresh sliced apples sold in the United States.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2013.02.003

Original Submission