SoylentNews

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The International Socialist Organization reports

Workers at an International Paper factory in Delaware, Ohio are on strike against the company's demand of unlimited overtime for up to 84 hours a week: 12 hours a day for all seven days.

"[The company is] telling us, 'Oh, we're not going to use it'", says Mike Schnitzler, who has worked at the factory for 21 years. "But if you're not going to use it, why ask for it? We have to fight for what we believe in--there's no family time or anything like that if you're working seven days a week, 12 hours a day."

The 130 workers, members of the Columbus-based Teamsters Local 284, had been without a contract since last summer when the company decided in April to implement its "last, best, and final offer", which included the outrageous overtime provision.

In response, Local 284 launched an unfair labor practice strike, declaring that International Paper was not negotiating in good faith.

[...] A few days into the strike, International Paper was able to get an injunction limiting the number of workers who can picket in front of the entrances to the factory and warehouse to three. As they did in the recent Verizon strike on the East Coast and countless other [strikes], police have enforced this injunction, preventing workers from confronting and slowing down scabs on their way into the factory.

After winning the injunction, company managers further harassed their striking employees by frequently calling the police on picketers, although workers reported that this tactic mainly succeeded in getting the cops annoyed at the company for continually calling them over nothing.

[...] Many people in the community agree with a point that Schnitzler made about why this strike is important, not just for members of Local 284, but for all workers:

This is a Fortune 500 company--one of the largest paper companies in the world. If they're successful in getting all of this stuff through, what's to stop other companies from doing the same thing? Nobody wants to live their life working in a factory and never getting out, never getting to spend time with their family.

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takyon writes:

from the tyrant dept.

UK Home Secretary Theresa May is favored to become the new leader of the Conservatives and the UK's next Prime Minister following a first round of voting, the elimination of Liam Fox, drop out of Stephen Crabb, and the earlier drop out of Boris Johnson:

Home Secretary Theresa May has comfortably won the first round of the contest to become the next Conservative leader and UK prime minister. Mrs May got 165 of the 329 votes cast by Tory MPs. Andrea Leadsom came second with 66 votes. Michael Gove got 48. [...] Further voting will narrow the field to two. The eventual outcome, decided by party members, is due on 9 September. Following the result, frontrunner Mrs May - who campaigned for the UK to stay in the EU - received the backing of Mr Fox, a former defence secretary and Brexit campaigner, and Mr Crabb, the work and pensions secretary, who backed Remain.

[...] Mrs May - who has said she will deliver Brexit if PM - said she was "pleased" with the result and "grateful" to colleagues for their support. She said there was a "big job" ahead to unite the party and the country following the referendum, to "negotiate the best possible deal as we leave the EU" and to "make Britain work for everyone". She added: "I am the only candidate capable of delivering these three things as prime minister, and tonight it is clear that I am also the only one capable of drawing support from the whole of the Conservative Party."

Update: The race to lead the Conservative Party and become the next Prime Minister of the UK is down to two women: Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom:

fork(2) writes:

The efforts begun by Code.org and others to bring computer science education into US schools are beginning to bear fruit. Tucson News Now reports on one:

MARANA, AZ (Tucson News Now) -- Marana Unified School District will offer Arizona's first Computer Science Immersion Schools, selected by the creators of Code To The Future.

Starting this fall both the new school Gladden Farms Elementary and Quail Run Elementary will be integrating computer science with curriculum content in English language arts, math, science, and social studies. Programming and game design will be part of the teaching methods, so students will have a well-rounded understanding of how to use technology to create.

"The Marana Unified School District is honored to lead the way in capitalizing on Computer Science's potential as a teaching tool," states Dr. Doug Wilson, superintendent of the Marana Unified School District, in a recent release. "As a District committed to inspiring students to learn today and lead tomorrow, MUSD is ensuring students are provided with the skills necessary to be successful in an ever changing world. Students at these schools will have an opportunity to develop Coding skills as part of the daily curriculum. Along with the comprehensive curriculum, students will have access to Chromebook mobile devices and new collaborative furniture, creating an engaging, interactive and fun learning environment where we will be preparing students for the high growth, high demand jobs of the future."

Another related project in Maryland. And one in Vancouver.

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fork(2) writes:

From phys.org comes an informative article about fractals.

Today, non-mathematicians who happen to be familiar with fractals are more likely aware of their beauty. A fiddlehead fern, a gecko's footpads, a flashy bolt of lightning -- these are all reminiscent of fractal images. And while nature seems to provide an array of these beauties, humanity has added more to the mix through kaleidoscopes, architecture and, yes, even those wiggly math problems.

As the start of the 2016 International Math Olympiad draws near, three NSF program directors from the Division of Mathematical Science -- Lora Billings, Edward Taylor and Frederi Viens -- provide some facts on fractals.

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Snipers in Dallas: [5] Cops Dead; [6] More Cops Wounded

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Atlantic reports:

Two gunmen shot eleven police officers in Dallas, Texas [at 8:58 PM July 7], killing at least four of them.

[...] At a Thursday night press conference, Dallas Police Department Chief David Brown said [...] officers had one of the suspects "cornered", but did not offer further details.

"Tonight, it appears that two snipers shot ten police officers from elevated positions during the protest/rally", Brown said in an initial statement. "Three officers are deceased, two are in surgery, and three are in critical condition. An intensive search for suspect is currently underway." The police department later said an eleventh officer had also been injured and a fourth officer had been killed.

[...] The shootings occurred during a protest against police killings earlier this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. Hundreds rallied in downtown Dallas, near the corner of Main Street and Lamar Street. Local news footage captured what sounds like several gunshots being fired, and the crowd scattering.

[...] No motive has yet been established and it's unclear whether the shooting was related to the protest.

fork(2) writes:

Science News describes more evidence and clues about where to search for a possible ninth planet lurking in the fringes of our solar system.

From the article:

Evidence for the existence of Planet Nine is scant, based on apparent alignments among the orbits of the six most distant denizens of the Kuiper belt (SN: 2/20/16, p. 6). Their oval orbits all point in roughly the same direction and lie in about the same plane, suggesting that a hidden planet, about five to 20 times as massive as Earth, has herded them onto similar trajectories.

Planetary scientists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, both at Caltech, announced this evidence in January. Now they've used it to refine Planet Nine's properties and narrow in on where it might be hiding. Their results appear in the June 20 [issue of] Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Planet Nine's average distance from the sun is most likely between 500 and 600 times as far as Earth's, Brown and Batygin report. Its orbit is highly stretched and tipped by about 30 degrees relative to the rest of the solar system, taking it well above and below the orbits of the eight known worlds. And right now, it's probably near its farthest point from the sun -- possibly as far as 250 billion kilometers away -- in a large patch of sky around the constellation Orion.

But the evidence depends on orbital oddities among just six frozen worlds. "The argument that a planet is there is not ironclad," cautions Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "I think it's worth studying. There's enough there to not ignore this evidence," she adds. "We just shouldn't get depressed if the planet's not there."

Malhotra and colleagues have been looking for independent evidence for a ninth planet. And they think they've found another clue: The orbital periods of those six bodies are roughly synced to one another, her team reports in the same journal.

[...] A planet at least 10 times as massive as Earth and orbiting the sun once every 17,117 years would be in sync with four of these bodies, Malhotra and colleagues find. That puts Planet Nine, on average, about 100 billion kilometers from the sun, or roughly 665 times the distance between the sun and Earth.

[...] "The real problem is knowing where to look," [Jonathan Fortney, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz] says.

Brown and Batygin think they've narrowed it down to roughly 2,000 square degrees of sky near Orion. "That's not as horrific as you might imagine," Batygin says. The Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which is large enough to detect Planet Nine, could cover that swath in about 20 nights, he says.

(Remember when Pluto was the ninth planet? Not anymore, man!)

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butthurt writes:

Actor George Takei spoke to The Hollywood Reporter concerning the upcoming film Star Trek Beyond. Takei played the character Hikaru Sulu in the 1960s Star Trek television series and in several films in the franchise. Takei, who is gay, commented on the news that the Sulu character in the upcoming movie—to be played by John Cho—will be portrayed as gay. Referring to the series' creator Gene Roddenberry, he said:

I'm delighted that there's a gay character. Unfortunately, it's a twisting of Gene's creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it's really unfortunate.

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takyon writes:

The Obama administration is loosening restrictions on buprenorphine/Suboxone prescriptions in order to fight the "heroin epidemic", while calling on Congress to act on a request for $1.1 billion in additional funding for opioid treatment programs across the U.S.:

The Obama administration is making it easier for people addicted to opioids to get treatment. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced new rules Wednesday to loosen restrictions on doctors who treat people addicted to heroin and opioid painkillers with the medication buprenorphine. Doctors who are licensed to prescribe the drug, which is sold mostly under the brand name Suboxone, will be allowed to treat as many as 275 patients a year. That's almost triple the current limit of 100, and HHS estimated that as many as 70,000 more people may have access to the drug as a result.

"There are a number of ways we are trying to increase access to medication-assisted treatment," said Michael Botticelli, the director of national drug control policy, on a conference call with reporters. "This rule itself expands access and gets more physicians to reach more patients."

Suboxone is itself an opioid. It eases withdrawal symptoms and cravings, but doesn't make people high. [...] Botticelli said an average 129 people a day die from opioid overdoses.

Here is some basic information about the differences between buprenorphine (Suboxone) and Naloxone (Narcan).

Previously:
White House Announces Heroin Response Strategy for the US Northeast
Alarming Rise in Death Rates for Middle-Aged White Americans
Kroger Supermarkets to Carry Naloxone Without a Prescription
4/20: Half-Baked Headline

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takyon writes:

Another team of engineers seeks to enslave insects with cyborg technology to do the bidding of humans:

A team of engineers from Washington University in St. Louis is looking to capitalize on the sense of smell in locusts to create new biorobotic sensing systems that could be used in homeland security applications.

Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to use the highly sensitive locust olfactory system as the basis to develop a bio-hybrid nose. Joining Raman in the research are engineering colleagues Srikanth Singamaneni, associate professor of materials science, and Shantanu Chakrabartty, professor of computer science & engineering.

[...] For several years and with prior funding from the ONR, Raman has been studying how sensory signals are received and processed in relatively simple brains of locusts. He and his team have found that odors prompt dynamic neural activity in the brain that allow the locust to correctly identify a particular odor, even with other odors present. In other research, his team also has found that locusts trained to recognize certain odors can do so even when the trained odor was presented in complex situations, such as overlapping with other scents or in different background conditions.

"Why reinvent the wheel? Why not take advantage of the biological solution?" Raman said. "That is the philosophy here. Even the state-of-the-art miniaturized chemical sensing devices have a handful of sensors. On the other hand, if you look at the insect antenna, where their chemical sensors are located, there are several hundreds of thousands of sensors and of a variety of types." The team intends to monitor neural activity from the insect brain while they are freely moving and exploring and decode the odorants present in their environment.

Related: Insect–Computer Hybrid Legged Robot with User-Adjustable Speed, Step Length and Walking Gait

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fork(2) writes:

Space.com reports:

Three new crewmembers launched toward the International Space Station in an upgraded Russian Soyuz spacecraft today (July 6), beginning a two-day journey to the orbiting lab.

At 9:36 p.m. EDT (0136 on July 7 GMT), the trio -- NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi -- successfully lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Russian Soyuz rocket.

The three spaceflyers will spend their two-day trip testing the Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft's modified systems before docking with the station early Saturday morning (July 9). [Russia's Manned Soyuz Space Capsule Explained (Infographic)]

[...] Rubins is a molecular biologist and former "virus hunter"; she worked with West and Central African viruses before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. Onishi, who is a trained pilot, was selected as an astronaut candidate in 2009 as well (by JAXA), and he was a part of NEEMO 15, a 2011 NASA research mission in which six "aquanauts" lived in an underwater lab testing new technologies for exploring an asteroid.

Ivanishin flew in the Russian Air Force before his selection by the Russian space agency, known as Roscosmos, in 2003, and he served as flight engineer on the long-duration Expedition 29/30 space station missions in 2011. (His last launch from Baikonur was on a snow-filled winter day).

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Under terms of a contract that has been seen by Recode, whoever acquires Yahoo might have to pay Mozilla annual payments of $375 million through 2019 if it does not think the buyer is one it wants to work with and walks away.

That's according to a clause in the Silicon Valley giant's official agreement with the browser maker that CEO Marissa Mayer struck in late 2014 to become the default search engine on the well-known Firefox browser in the U.S.

Mozilla switched to Yahoo from Google after Mayer offered a much more lucrative deal that included what potential buyers of Yahoo say is an unprecedented term to protect Mozilla in a change-of-control scenario.

Additional coverage at Ars Technica .

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fork(2) writes:

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hitomi X-ray space observatory (SN, March 28) "managed to make one crucial astronomical observation before the accident, capturing gas motions in a galaxy cluster in the constellation Perseus. The instrument that made the observation, a high-resolution spectrometer, had been in the works for three decades. Two earlier versions of it were lost in previous spacecraft failures." [Nature] Today Alexandra Witze reveals in Nature that observation reveals a galaxy cluster surprise.

From the last gasp of a failed satellite comes a brief glimpse of galaxies far, far away. Before it broke in March, one month after launch, Japan's Hitomi X-ray satellite managed to gaze at the Perseus galaxy cluster -- one of the Universe's most massive objects, 250 million light-years from Earth. And researchers discovered that superheated gas at the cluster's heart flows much more placidly than expected.

Understanding how turbulence roils this gas allows astronomers to explore how galaxies form and evolve. "Clusters are one of our most important probes of cosmology," says Craig Sarazin, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville who was not involved with the work. "Most of the gas in the Universe lies between galaxies," adds Andrew Fabian, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a member of the international team that reported its findings on 6 July in Nature. So Hitomi's peek into these areas could affect how scientists see most of the Universe's matter.

[...]

The new Hitomi measurements aren't quite as precise as they could have been, because the team had not gone through all its calibrations before losing the satellite, notes Elizabeth Blanton, an astronomer at Boston University in Massachusetts. But the Perseus work is likely to stand as Hitomi's primary scientific legacy.

The next big X-ray telescope won't launch until at least 2028 when the ESA's ATHENA observatory is planned.

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butthurt writes:

Gizmag reports that Samsung is expected to be the first company to offer for sale a new type of memory card, Universal Flash Storage. The new cards, which follow a JEDEC standard, have the same size and shape as microSD cards but are electrically incompatible with them.

Samsung claims a "sequential read speed of 530 megabytes per second (MB/s)" and, for the 256 GB card (the largest capacity), a "170 MB/s sequential write speed" and "35,000 random IOPS." Gizmag likened the speeds to those obtainable with SSDs. Cards with capacities as small as 32 GB will be offered.

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takyon writes:

Geologists have been left disappointed after a certain misaligned curb was ordered to be fixed by Hayward, California city management:

To the average pedestrian, it was just a curb. To an observant one, perhaps, it was an oddly misaligned curb. To geologists, it was a snapshot of the earth's shifting tectonic plates — an accidental experiment, a field trip destination for decades. But to the town of Hayward, Calif., it was just a bit of subpar infrastructure.

The Los Angeles Times sums up what happened next: "Then, one early June day, a city crew decided to fix the faulty curb — pun intended. By doing what cities are supposed to do – fixing streets – the city's action stunned scientists, who said a wonderful curbside laboratory for studying earthquakes was destroyed."

Geologist David Schwartz of the U.S. Geologic Survey spoke with NPR on Wednesday. He has been visiting the curb for 30 years. He says the fault that broke the curb — the Hayward fault — is "one of the major and most important faults in the San Francisco Bay Area." "In probably the late 1950s, your standard sidewalk curb was built across the fault — and the fault is creeping," Schwartz explained. "That means it moves a little bit every year, maybe about four millimeters. It broke through the curb and started pushing it out. And over the years it has moved it eight inches." A website for geology-themed field trips has photos of the curb dating back to the early '70s. They show the separating halves of the curb at first disjointed but overlapping, then growing farther apart.

Now the curb is gone — making way for a wheelchair-accessible ramp, the LA Times reports.

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ticho wrote in with news from infoq:

Apple has open-sourced its new lossless compression algorithm, LZFSE, introduced last year with iOS 9 and OS X 10.10. According to Apple, LZFE provides the same compression gain as ZLib level 5 while being 2x–3x faster and with higher energy efficiency.

LZFSE is based on Lempel-Ziv and uses Finite State Entropy coding, based on Jarek Duda's work on Asymmetric Numeral Systems (ANS) for entropy coding. Shortly, ANS aims to "end the trade-off between speed and rate" and can be used both for precise coding and very fast encoding, with support for data encryption. LZFSE is one of a growing number of compression libraries that use ANS in place of the more traditional Huffman and arithmetic coding.

Admittedly, LZFSE does not aim to be the best or fastest algorithm out there. [...] LZFSE is Apple's suggested option when compression and speed are more or less equally important and you want reduce energy consumption.

See GitHub for a reference implementation and a copy of the license.

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