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fork(2) writes:

Phys.org reports that a Cass [Business School -- London] team "applied automated text analysis to an archive of emails to assess the ability of word use (micro-level), message development (macro-level), and intertextual exchange cues (meta-level) to detect the severity of deception being perpetrated within a business framework."

Their findings indicate that:

        Deceitful e-mailers avoid the use of personal pronouns and superfluous descriptions such as unnecessary adjectives.
        Deceitful e-mailers over structure their arguments.
        Deceitful e-mailers minimise self-deprecation but include more flattery and pattern the linguistic style of the recipient across e-mail exchanges, because they want to make themselves appear more accommodating and likeable.

The full paper, "Untangling a Web of Lies: Exploring Automated Detection of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication," will be published in the Journal of Management Information Systems.

Original Submission

bradley13 writes:

Even as a European*, I find this of interest, because of the level of corruption it shows.

Headline: "Clinton Was 'Extremely Careless' With Email But Should Not Be Charged".

In his statement, Comey said that the FBI's investigation had found 110 emails on Clinton's servers that had contained classified information when they were sent or received, of which eight contained material at the highest classification level of "top secret." Noting that this information was being stored on "unclassified personal servers" less secure even than commercial services like Gmail and that Clinton's use of the private account was widely known, Comey said it was "possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." Said Comey: "Any reasonable person should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that kind of information."

So: The FBI knows that she mishandled classified information. When you receive your security clearance, you are informed of the rules and the penalties for breaking them. Storing Secret, much less Top Secret information on a civilian server outside the control of the government violates those rules.

Yet, she will not be prosecuted. She was just "careless", no big deal. Laws are for the little people.

*Full disclosure: I used to be American, but turned in my passport some years ago. Various reasons, not least of which are the US tax policies. But the politics (The Shrub, Obama, and now...possibly Hillary!) - it's like a banana republic, only with nukes.

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Deeo Kain writes:

Ubuntu seems to be poising itself to letting 32-bitters alone in the dark:https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html

I do use, from time to time, a (then, in 2009) top-of-the-notch 3.4GHz P-IV, for the little gaming I do and for printing. But I did notice even it is easily overwhelmed by many javascript-laden sites. How many soylentils are going to fight tooth and nails to keep their 32 pc's up and running beyond 2018, are 32 bit platforms of any relevance today aside as for IoT or CNC processes?

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The ABC reports on a paper in Science (full article paywalled) which says that, beginning last September, increased concentrations of ozone, and a decrease in the area of depleted ozone over Antarctica, have been observed. The change may be the result of restrictions on chlorofluorocarbons under the Montreal Protocol.

The ozone hole over Antarctica is finally "healing" almost 30 years after the world banned the chemicals responsible for its creation, researchers say.

According to the latest measurements, the ozone hole above the Antarctic is now smaller than it was around the year 2000, by about 4 million square kilometres.

However, renowned ozone hole expert Professor Susan Solomon, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the hole still averages about 17 million square kilometres in size.

"It isn't completely healed, but it's better than the 21 million we had around 2000," she said.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

A Tufts University press release promotes a meta-study which "found mostly small or insignificant associations of each daily serving of butter with total mortality, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes."

additional coverage:

• Telegraph
• Daily Mail
• CTV News
• U.S. News & World Report

Original Submission

"fork(2)" writes:

Rapidly changing ratios of the sexes of valerian plants could be a quick sign of climate change. Science News reports that researchers have found that in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, male and female valerian plants have responded differently to hotter, drier conditions.

Valerian (Valeriana edulis) plants range from hot, scrubby lowlands to cold alpine slopes. In each patch of plants, some are male and some are female. The exact proportion of each sex varies with elevation. High on the mountain, females are much more common than males; they can make up 80 percent of some populations.

Four decades ago, in patches of valerian growing in the middle of the plant's elevation range, 33.4 percent of the plants were males. Those patches grew in the Rockies at elevations around 3,000 meters. Today, you would have to hike considerably higher to find the same proportion of male plants. Males, now 5.5 percent more common on average, are reaching higher elevations than in the past, researchers report in the July 1 Science.

"We think climate is acting almost like a filter on males and females," says Will Petry of ETH Zurich, who led the study while at the University of California, Irvine. "The settings on this filter are controlling the sex ratio." Those settings are sweeping up the mountainside like a rising tide at a rate of 175 meters per decade, Petry and colleagues found.

[...] Those moving sex ratios have kept pace with climate change since the late 1970s. Today, winter snows are melting earlier and summers are hotter, with less rain. As a result, the same amount of precipitation that would have fallen at one elevation in 1978 now falls at higher elevations instead; it has moved upslope by 133 meters per decade. Soil moisture has moved up the mountain, too, by 195 meters per decade.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

On SpacePolicyOnline.com last week, Marcia S. Smith reported that:

The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on Tuesday that praised NASA for some aspects of its management of the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with SpaceX, but reiterated earlier concerns about the independence of mishap investigations into these "commercial cargo" launch services. NASA concurred with most, but not all, of the OIG's recommendations.

Referring specifically to the June 28, 2015 SpaceX CRS-7 (SpX-7) Falcon 9 rocket failure that was intended to send a Dragon spacecraft full of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), the OIG criticized NASA for not having "an official, coordinated, and consistent mishap investigation policy for commercial resupply launches, which could affect its ability to determine root cause of a launch failure and corrective action."

The article continues, describing the various levels and branches of oversight authority. It also outlines another area of OIG concern. The entire OIG report can be found here: Final Report IG-16-025.

A related article on Quartz, "How SpaceX kept its number one client happy after its rocket exploded" outlines how SpaceX retained the confidence of its government bosses. In addition to pricing and fee structuring, no-cost extras (such as it ramped up the electrical power onboard its Dragon spacecraft so that it can take three times more cargo) keep the agreement attractive.

Moreover,

[In] response to NASA's concerns, the company has reorganized its quality control teams and how it assigns work to its technicians and tracks their progress, as well and now tests each individual component of the rocket for reliability.

The Falcon 9 rocket has flown seven times without incident since the 2015 accident.

Original Submission

isj writes:

Disclaimer: I work on a search engine (findx). I try not to put competitors in a bad light.

Question: Should a web crawler always reveal its true name?

Background: While crawling the web I've found some situations where using a fake user-agent might help. First example is a web site that checks the user-agent in the http-request and returns a "your browser is not supported" - even for robots.txt. Another example is a site that had an explicit whitelist in robots.txt. Strangely, 'curl' was whitelisted but 'wget' was not. I hesitate in using a fake user-agent, e.g. googlebot because it isn't clear what the clueless webmasters' intentions are. It appears that some websites are misconfigured or so google-optimized that other/new search engines may have to resort to faking user-agent.

I'm also puzzled by Qwant because they claim to have their own search index but my personal website (which is clearly indexed when I search in qwant) has never been crawled by a user-agent resembling anything that could lead to qwant. Apparently they don't reveal what their user-agent is: https://blog.qwant.com/qwant-fr/. And there has been some discussion about it: https://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4743502.htm

This is different from search engines that don't have their own index (eg. DuckDuckGo uses results from Yahoo! and yandex. Startpage uses Google, etc.)

So what do you Soylentils say, is faking the user-agent in webcrawls necessary? Acceptable? A necessary evil?

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

ScienceDaily reports on research from Pennsylvania State University that demonstrates a new way to "pack a lot more quantum computing power into a much smaller space and with much greater control than ever before."

From the article:

The research advance, using a 3-dimensional array of atoms in quantum states called quantum bits -- or qubits -- was made by David S. Weiss, professor of physics at Penn State University, and three students on his lab team. He said "Our result is one of the many important developments that still are needed on the way to achieving quantum computers that will be useful for doing computations that are impossible to do today, with applications in cryptography for electronic data security and other computing-intensive fields."

The new technique uses both laser light and microwaves to precisely control the switching of selected individual qubits from one quantum state to another without altering the states of the other atoms in the cubic array. The new technique demonstrates the potential use of atoms as the building blocks of circuits in future quantum computers.

The scientists invented an innovative way to arrange and precisely control the qubits, which are necessary for doing calculations in a quantum computer. "Our paper demonstrates that this novel approach is a precise, accurate, and efficient way to control large ensembles of qubits for quantum computing," Weiss said.

The paper by Weiss, et al, appeared in the June 24 issue of Science (possibly paywalled).

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found that stimulating the visual cortex of the brain for 20 minutes with a mild electrical current can improve vision for about two hours, and those with worse vision see the most improvement, according to a paper published this week in Current Biology and summarized here in ScienceDaily.

"It's actually a very simple idea," said co-author Geoff Woodman, associate professor of psychology. "This kind of stimulation can improve cognitive processing in other brain areas, so if we stimulate the visual system, could we improve processing? Could we make someone's vision better -- not at the level of the eye, like Lasik or glasses, but directly at the level of the brain?"

Twenty young, healthy subjects with normal or near-normal vision were asked to evaluate the relative position of two identical vertical lines and judged whether they were perfectly aligned or offset. The test is more sensitive than a standard eye chart, and gave the researchers are[sic] very precise measurement of each subjects' visual acuity.

The researchers then passed a very mild electric current through the area at the back of the brain that processes visual information. After 20 minutes, the subjects were asked to perform the test again, and about 75 percent showed measurable improvement following the brain stimulation.

[...] They also measured how the stimulus changed the speed with which the brain processed visual information and whether the stimulation also improved the subjects' contrast sensitivity -- their ability to differentiate between multiple shades of gray.

The contrast experiment was notable because they found that the stimulation only improved contrast sensitivity at frequencies also associated with visual acuity, indicating that it was just the subjects' visual acuity that was being affected, not the contrast sensitivity.

Robert Reinhart, one of the authors of the paper, said, "Now we have a new tool that could be valuable for researchers investigating fundamental questions about how the visual system works."

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

The 4th of July in the US is noisy! Yahoo Finance says that the American Pyrotechnic Association estimates that over $800 million will be spent on fireworks this year (up from $775M last year).

With that much gunpowder on the loose, safety (for humans, pets, and property) is a concern. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, 230 people go to the emergency room every day with firework-related injuries in the month surrounding the Fourth of July. While safety issues are the main concern, there are also environmental implications that people have to look out for.

Science World reports:

[...] Fireworks can add a lot of pollution in the air. According to The Guardian, firework smoke is rich in metal particles - making it very different than the average urban air pollution. These metal particles used to make firework colors different include strontium or lithium (red), copper (blue) and barium compounds (bright green or white). With more colors also come more chemicals - Rubidium (purple), and cadmium (various colors).

Cadmium is a known human carcinogen that damages lungs and can fluster the stomach if consumed. If this chemical gets back on the ground, plants, animals, and even fish can eat or absorb them, and make their way up the food chain,

To blow these fireworks up, charcoal and sulfur fuel, as well as potassium nitrate are mixed together in a form of gunpowder, which helps the fireworks and other pyrotechnics blow up in the air. Modern gunpowder uses perchlorates, which use chemicals with chlorine and oxygen as oxidizers. High levels of Percholates limit the ability of thyroid glands to take iodine from the bloodstream resulting in hypothyroidism.

Mother Nature News pointed out that although the use of fireworks are fleeting and infrequent, they spray a toxic concoction that end up on lakes, river, and bays, and many of them have chemical that don't break down, making them dangerous to the animals in the water.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Microsoft just released yet another Win10 upgrade nag system, disguised as a "Recommended" patch for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 systems. According to the KB 3173040 article, if you have Windows set to automatically install updates, and have the Windows Update "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" box checked, your machine will suddenly sprout a full-screen purple message that says:

Sorry to interrupt, but this is important.

Windows 10 free upgrade offer ends July 29.

Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 10 -- the most secure Windows ever built. The upgrade is free and you can easily roll-back to your current operating system within 31 days if you decide Windows 10 is not right for you. We'll check for compatibility before starting the upgrade. Over 300 million people have upgraded. Upgrade your PC before the offer ends!

Notably, there is no "X" in the upper right corner. There's also no indication if any other combination of keys, clicks or swipes might simply tell the full-screen ad to buzz off.

For all two of you who didn't know that Microsoft wants you to upgrade to Windows 10, this should serve as a welcome reminder.

The KB article says the full-page ad won't appear if you have a "recent version" of the Get Windows 10 app installed, if your machine is known to be incompatible with Win10, or if you have previously rolled back from Win10 to your earlier operating system. Also, we're promised that those of you who have run GWX Control Panel, Never10, or manually set the appropriate registry keys won't see the ad.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3090508/microsoft-windows/win7-and-81-patch-kb-3173040-throws-full-screen-win10-upgrade-warning.html

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Soylent News has carried articles about Juno, the NASA spacecraft headed for a rendezvous with Jupiter on July 4. Here, here, here, and here. Among all the cool stuff about this, "as Juno nears Jupiter tonight, the giant planet's powerful gravity will accelerate the spacecraft to an estimated top speed of about 165,000 mph (265,000 km/h) relative to Earth, mission team members said."

From Space.com,

"I don't think we've had any human[-made] object that's moved that fast, that's left the Earth," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said during a news conference last week. [Juno's Plunge Into Jupiter Orbit Fraught With Danger (Video)]

The all-time speed record is currently held by NASA's Helios 1 and Helios 2 spacecraft, which launched in the mid-1970s to study the sun. Both probes reached top speeds of about 157,000 mph (253,000 km/h) at their points of closest approach to Earth's star.

For perspective: Bullets cut through the air at about 1,700 mph (2,735 km/h), and the International Space Station zooms around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h).

Indeed, Juno will be moving a bit too fast for its own good tonight. To slow down enough to be captured into Jupiter orbit, the probe must slam on the brakes, which it will do by firing its main engine for 35 minutes, beginning at 11:18 p.m. EDT (0318 GMT) tonight.

Bolton said he's nervous about this make-or-break maneuver, which Juno will perform on autopilot.

"If that doesn't all go just right, we fly past Jupiter," Bolton said. "Everything's riding on it."

[...] If all goes according to plan tonight, Juno will enter into a 53.5-day orbit around Jupiter. The probe's handlers will then commission the probe's instruments and use them to study the giant planet over the next few months.

Another way to look at this is a trip from Earth to the Moon at that speed would take only about 90 minutes. Reports are that NASA will live stream this on nasa.gov and Youtube.

[Continues...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

More than 100 Nobel laureates have a message for Greenpeace: Quit the G.M.O.-bashing.

Genetically modified organisms and foods are a safe way to meet the demands of a ballooning global population, the 109 laureates wrote in a letter posted online and officially unveiled at a news conference on Thursday in Washington, D.C.

Opponents, they say, are standing in the way of getting nutritious food to those who need it.

[...] Proponents of genetically modified foods such as Golden Rice, which contains genes from corn and a bacterium, argue that they are efficient vehicles for needed nutrients. Opponents fear that foods whose genes are manipulated in ways that do not naturally occur might contaminate existing crops. And, they say, the debate distracts from the only guaranteed solution to malnutrition: promoting diverse, healthy diets.

[...] In 2014, the Pew Research Center found an enormous gap between the public and scientists on the issue. Just 37 percent of adults in the United States said genetically modified foods were safe to eat, while 88 percent of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science said the same.

Source: The New York Times

Related: GeneticLiteracyProject.org

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Facebook is training its top leaders and employees on how to manage their political bias, according to the social network's COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The revelation comes less than two months after Facebook's trending topics controversy, which saw the company fending off accusations of human bias affecting its news algorithm.

In a discussion with Arthur Brooks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Wednesday, Sandberg stated: "We have a managing bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create. And we focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we're going to add in a scenario now on political bias."

"So that, as part of [how] we think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view, we're dealing with political bias as well going forward."

Source: Fox News

Original Submission