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HughPickens.com writes:

Alex Cooke write at Fstoppers that Australian researchers believe they have found the world's "ugliest" color as judged by the reactions 1,000 study participants had to it, which included such labels as "sewage-tinted" and "death." The world's ugliest color is opaque couché, also known as Pantone 448C. The research was done for an important reason. The Australian government will now use it on packaging to help deter consumers from buying tobacco products. People find the color so repellent it will be used to discourage people from lighting up. "''We didn't want to create attractive, aspirational packaging designed to win customers," says Victoria Parr. "Instead our role was to help our client reduce demand, with the ultimate aim to minimise use of the product.''"

The new color was found to have the most ability to "minimize appeal" and "maximize perceived harm" and was implemented on plain cigarette packs with health warnings across Australia. Pantone is keen to state, however, that no color is more beautiful or ugly than the next. Naturally, the company was not thrilled at the choice of its tone for the packaging: "At the Pantone Color Institute, we consider all colours equally," explained Leatrice Eiseman, executive director. There was, she said, "no such thing as the ugliest colour". Rather, 448C was associated with "deep, rich earth tones", popular on sofas and shoes and other things that might be found in a house.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The recent uptick in heroin and opioid addiction along with new laws are making addiction treatment an attractive target for investors:

Every crisis presents an opportunity, as the saying goes. And when it comes to opioid addiction, investors and businesses are seeing a big opportunity in addiction treatment. Places like [Gosnold on Cape Cod] are being gobbled up by private equity companies and publicly-traded chains looking to do what is known in Wall Street jargon as a roll-up play. They take a fragmented industry, buy up the bits and pieces and consolidate them into big, branded companies where they hope to make a profit by streamlining and cutting costs.

One company that advises investors listed 27 transactions in which private equity firms or public companies bought or invested in addiction treatment centers and other so-called behavioral health companies in 2014 and 2015 alone. Acadia Healthcare is one national chain that has been on a shopping spree. In 2010 it had only six facilities, but today it has 587 across the country and in the United Kingdom.

What's driving the growth? The opioid addiction crisis is boosting demand for treatment and two relatively recent laws are making it easier to get insurers to pay for it. The Mental Health Parity Act of 2008 requires insurers to cover mental health care as they would cover physical health care. "Mental health parity was the beginning. We saw a big benefit. And then the Affordable Care Act was very positive for our industry," says Joey Jacobs, Acadia's CEO. He spoke at an investor conference last month.

Marketplace has an article about how data and new databases are being used to track and prevent addiction. It cites the following report from Health Affairs:

Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Are Associated With Sustained Reductions In Opioid Prescribing By Physicians (DOI: 10.1377/hlthaff.2015.1673)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Nearly 400 miles off the Massachusetts coast, a self-sailing, solar-powered, boat is bobbing along all alone. Looking like a very lonely, very miniature cargo ship, it’s at the start of a voyage that will hopefully take it more than 3,000 miles across the Atlantic and into the record books.

“Several people have tried, and they didn’t make it,” says Isaac Penny, one of the boat’s builders. “A lot of things could go wrong.”

Unlike Bertrand Piccard’s upcoming transatlantic flight on the sun-powered Solar Impulse 2 , the Solar Voyager has no human navigator. The computer in control is following pre-programmed GPS waypoints. Every 15 minutes, it reports its position online for everyone to see, along with data like speed, solar power generated, battery level, and local temperature.

At 18 feet long, Solar Voyager is roughly the size of an ocean kayak, and looks reasonably robust until you see it pictured next to another ship. The aluminum shell is just 2.5 feet across. Early prototypes built from plastic proved too fragile for the ocean conditions in the Atlantic, where waves can easily reach 30 feet high in a storm, and cause trouble even for cruise ships [autoplay warning]. “It’s pretty rough out there,” says Penny.

Almost all of the available upper surface of the wee vessel is given over to solar panels, 280 Watts worth. Below deck are 2.4-kWh batteries to run at night. A Go-Pro is set up to take pictures and short videos which will (hopefully) be retrieved when the boat next encounters a human. That may take a while. Solar Voyager’s two propellers provide a max speed under five mph, so Penny expects the crossing to take around four months, weather dependent.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A suspected Islamic terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Florida, killing 50 people and wounding another 53 before he was killed by police. While authorities continue to investigate to determine whether this man had ties to ISIS, the terror organization has not been quiet in praising the attack. This comes three days after ISIS announced they would attack somewhere in Florida. Today's attack marks the largest act of terrorism on US soil since 9/11.

takyon: The gunman reportedly called 911 emergency services to pledge allegiance to ISIS. The President will hold a briefing momentarily. Compare this article to the original submission.

Original Submission   Late submission by physicsmajor

Gaaark writes:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/09/co2-turned-into-stone-in-iceland-in-climate-change-breakthrough

The new research pumped CO₂ into the volcanic rock under Iceland and sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to form carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were amazed by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years, compared to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted.

"We need to deal with rising carbon emissions and this is the ultimate permanent storage – turn them back to stone," said Juerg Matter, at the University of Southampton in the UK, who led the research published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Matter said the only thing holding back CCS [carbon capture and storage] was the lack of action from politicians, such as putting a price on carbon emissions: "The engineering and technology of CCS is ready to be deployed. So why do we not see hundreds of these projects? There is no incentive to do it."

The Iceland project has already been increased in scale to bury 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year and the basalt rocks used are common around the world, forming the floor of all the oceans and parts of the land too. "In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there's a lot of basalt and there are many such places," said Martin Stute, at Columbia University in the US and part of the research team.

And now, I get to also sing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMmRyyU0SOo

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes in with 2 related stories about Uber's current woes:

Quebec passes law to regulate Uber

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The [Quebec] province's controversial taxi bill, which would regulate ride-hailing services such as Uber, passed after the Liberal government forced the legislation to a vote, as the last day of the National Assembly session turned into a marathon.

Initially, all sides, including the taxi industry, wanted Bill 100 passed.  The government thought it had reached consensus with all parties on an amendment that would allow Uber ninety days to come up with a pilot project before the law comes into effect. But today, Québec Solidaire retracted their consent because the party believes the amendment is too vague and would create two classes of taxi drivers.

They believe that is unfair to taxi drivers who hold permits which can cost up to $200,000.

Once Québec Solidaire retracted its consent, the Liberal government said it was forced to invoke a "closure" motion, cutting off debate and forcing the bill to a vote, which passed because the Liberals have a majority.

The opposition accused the government of using an undemocratic tactic. 

Uber and its execs hit with fines in France for illegal taxi service

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Uber has been hit with a €800,000 fine (~$900,000) for running an illegal transport service and breaking privacy laws in France, The New York Times reports.

[Continues...]

Appalbarry writes:

Found at the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies:

The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku claims to have developed a theory that might point to the existence of God. The information has created a great stir in the scientific community because Kaku is considered one of the most important scientists of our times, one of the creators and developers of the revolutionary String Theory which is highly respected throughout the world.

To to come to his conclusions, the physicist made ​​use of what he calls "primitive semi – radius tachyons". Tachyons are theoretical particles capable to "unstick " the Universe matter or vacuum space between matter particles, leaving everything free from the influences of the surrounding universe.

After conducting the tests, Kaku came to the conclusion that we live in a "Matrix". "I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence", he affirmed. "Believe me, everything that we call chance today won't make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exists in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance."

From the video, "The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Snopes reports

Claim: Search engine Google manipulated results in favor of Hillary Clinton.
UNPROVEN

On 9 June 2016, the YouTube news channel SourceFed published a video in which they accused search engine giant Google of manipulating results in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

[...] While the claims posited in the video [...] may sound like the workings of a conspiracy theorist, SourceFed didn't fudge any of its evidence. We double checked the videos findings and confirmed that Google does return different results than Bing and Yahoo for searches such as "Hillary Clinton Cri" and "Hillary Clinton Ind". For instance, Google completes the search "Hillary Clinton Cri" as "Hillary Clinton Crime Reform", while Bing and Yahoo complete the search as "Hillary Clinton Criminal Charges" and "Hillary Clinton Criminal". Google provides this result despite the fact that "Hillary Clinton Crime Reform" is a less popular term on Google Trends.

However, that does not mean that Google is manipulating search results in favor of the Democratic presidential candidate. Google's autocomplete function uses a variety of factors, including the popularity of a search term, to determine results. Furthermore, Google has also said in statements that its autocomplete does not provide offensive or disparaging results when partnered with a person's name.

[...] While it's true that Google Autocomplete will not show "Hillary Clinton Criminal" when searching for "Hillary Clinton Cri", we couldn't get Google Autocomplete to label anyone a criminal. When we searched for the names of various criminals along with the prefix "cri", we received results for "cricket", "criminology", "crisis communication", and in the case of recently convicted swimmer Brock Turner, no results.

It should be noted that Google honcho Eric Schmidt is all-in for Hillary.

Last Autumn, Quartz reported The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that's working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House

The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt--the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet--to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election.

Original Submission

mendax writes:

The New York Times Magazine published an article yesterday that asks exactly that question:

In early 2012, a neuropathologist named Daniel Perl was examining a slide of human brain tissue when he saw something odd and unfamiliar in the wormlike squiggles and folds. It looked like brown dust; a distinctive pattern of tiny scars. Perl was intrigued. At 69, he had examined 20,000 brains over a four-decade career, focusing mostly on Alzheimer's and other degenerative disorders. He had peered through his microscope at countless malformed proteins and twisted axons. He knew as much about the biology of brain disease as just about anyone on earth. But he had never seen anything like this.

The brain under Perl's microscope belonged to an American soldier who had been five feet away when a suicide bomber detonated his belt of explosives in 2009. The soldier survived the blast, thanks to his body armor, but died two years later of an apparent drug overdose after suffering symptoms that have become the hallmark of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: memory loss, cognitive problems, inability to sleep and profound, often suicidal depression. Nearly 350,000 service members have been given a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury over the past 15 years, many of them from blast exposure. The real number is likely to be much higher, because so many who have enlisted are too proud to report a wound that remains invisible.

[Continues...]

Original URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36387734

How do we stop intelligent machines from taking over the world and enslaving us all?

Give them emotions.

That's the radical suggestion of Patrick Levy Rosenthal, founder and chief executive of Emoshape, a tech firm that has developed a computer chip that can synthesise 12 human emotions.

"It's logical to conclude that autonomous machines made of electricity and metal will eventually see us as their main competitors for those resources, and try to take control," he says.

This is the dystopian vision of artificial intelligence (AI) run amok that luminaries such as physicist Prof Stephen Hawking, and tech entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Elon Musk, worry about.

But Mr Rosenthal believes this nightmare scenario will be avoided if we create machines that can empathise.

"We can teach them to feel happiness when they perform well, solve problems and receive positive feedback from humans," he says. "This will reduce the threat, because they will always work to achieve human happiness."

Machines that can understand human emotion - and express their own emotions - will also be more effective colleagues and helpers, he believes.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Roman tablets discovered during an excavation in London include the oldest hand-written document ever found in Britain, archaeologists have revealed.

The Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) said it had deciphered a document, from 8 January AD 57, found at the dig at Bloomberg's new headquarters.

The first ever reference to London, financial documents and evidence of schooling have also been translated.

[...] According to MOLA, the tablets reveal the first years of the capital "in the words of the people who lived, worked, traded with and administered the new city".

Director Sophie Jackson said the findings had "far exceeded all expectations" and would allow archaeologists "to get closer to the first Roman Britons".

[...] The documents were written on wooden tablets which would have been covered in blackened beeswax.

Although the wax has not survived, the words were etched into the wood below using styluses.

The area is around the buried Walbrook River and objects were trapped in soaking mud which helped to preserve the wood.

Once excavated, the tablets were kept in water, then cleaned and freeze-dried.

Dr Roger Tomlin, who translated the documents said it had been "a privilege to eavesdrop" on the people of Roman London.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Original URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36478641

A faulty data broadcast is causing problems for Lexus car owners in the US.

The buggy update - which was delivered via a wireless transmission - is causing affected vehicles' infotainments systems to stop working.

This prevents drivers from getting navigation directions, climate controls and digital radio.

The Toyota division has acknowledged the problem and said owners needed to bring their cars in.

"Errant data broadcast by our traffic and weather data service provider was not handled as expected by the microcomputer in the vehicle navigation head unit (centre display) of 2014-16 Model Year Lexus vehicles and 2016 Model Year Toyota Land Cruiser," a spokeswoman explained.

"In some situations, this issue can cause the head unit to restart repeatedly, affecting operation of the navigation system (if equipped), audio and climate control features. The data suspected to be the source of the error was corrected last night."

The firm said "many" vehicles had been affected.

It confirmed the problem only affected US-based drivers who subscribed to Enform, a data-transmitting service not available in Europe.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Recode (Vox Media) reports

Gawker and owner Nick Denton are making the Chapter 11 filing today, in order to avoid paying Thiel and Hulk Hogan the $140 million judgment they won in Hogan's privacy trial earlier this year.

Update: In a memo to employees, Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah says his company has an "asset purchase agreement" to buy seven Gawker titles, and says there is a "tremendous fit between the two organizations".

Previous: Hulk Hogan's Sex Tape and a Tech Billionaire's Revenge on Gawker
Gawker Becomes First Online Media Outlet to Unionize

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department's professional staff.

The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to "protect the name" of the Secretary, "stall" the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

[...] The newly released emails reveal that after ABC News started asking questions in August 2011, a State Department official who worked with the advisory board couldn't immediately come up with a justification for Fernando serving on the panel. His and other emails make repeated references to "S"; ABC News has been told this is a common way to refer to the Secretary of State.

"The true answer is simply that S staff (Cheryl Mills) added him," wrote Wade Boese, who was Chief of Staff for the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, in an email to Mannina, the press aide. "Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence."

Source: ABC News

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Original URL: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3081326/security/this-company-uses-ai-to-stop-cyberattacks-before-they-start.html

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saying goes, and that's just as true in cybersecurity as it is in health. So believes Cylance, a startup that uses AI to detect and prevent cyberattacks.

[...] Cylance extracts millions of unique characteristics from the code and analyzes them against trained statistical models to determine their intention. Rather than relying on hash comparison or post-run behavior heuristics to determine what to do, Cylance evaluates objects in less than 100 milliseconds, early in the run time process. That way, if the object is determined to be malicious, execution can be stopped.

The software protects against system- and memory-based attacks, spear phishing, zero-day malware, privilege escalations, scripts and malicious programs, Cylance says, and eliminates the need for antivirus and intrusion detection and prevention systems. No Internet connection or daily software updates are required.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission