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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following tutorial:

First of all, the question is 'Why Use R'. One source answers that question thus:

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; it's a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Speaking of packages, there are over 2,000 cutting-edge, user-contributed packages available on CRAN (not to mention Bioconductor and Omegahat). Many packages are submitted by prominent members of their respective fields.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA on Thursday conducted the second to last splashdown test for its Orion spacecraft as the agency prepares to eventually send humans to Mars.

Scientists at NASA's Langley facility used a pendulum and explosives to vault a test capsule into a pool of water at about 25 mph. The 11-foot craft disappeared behind a bowl-shaped splash before bouncing buoyantly against safety netting.

The last time a NASA spacecraft parachuted into the ocean with astronauts on board was in the 1970s during the Apollo missions. The rules of physics haven't changed, but the technology has grown dramatically, NASA officials said.

The capsule's heat shield is no longer steel but carbon fiber and titanium, making it stronger and lighter. Instead of a couch-like seat to hold all of the astronauts, each will have his and her own custom-made chair to better protect the spine. Computer simulations have shrunk the number of actual splashdown tests from 100 to 10.

"A capsule hitting the water hasn't changed," said Mark Baldwin, an analyst with Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor behind Orion. "But what we know about it has."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a recommendation that all areas in the U.S. and its territories screen blood donations for the Zika virus, not just places currently affected by active virus transmission:

As a further safety measure against the emerging Zika virus outbreak, today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a revised guidance recommending universal testing of donated Whole Blood and blood components for Zika virus in the U.S. and its territories.

"There is still much uncertainty regarding the nature and extent of Zika virus transmission," said Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. "At this time, the recommendation for testing the entire blood supply will help ensure that safe blood is available for all individuals who might need transfusion."

The FDA first issued guidance on Feb. 16 recommending that only areas with active Zika virus transmission screen donated Whole Blood and blood components for Zika virus, use pathogen-reduction devices, or halt blood collection and obtain Whole Blood and blood components from areas of the U.S. without active virus transmission. All areas with active transmission in the U.S. are currently in compliance with this guidance. The revised guidance announced today recommends that all states and U.S. territories screen individual units of donated Whole Blood and blood components with a blood screening test authorized for use by the FDA under an investigational new drug (IND) application, or a licensed test when available. Alternatively, an FDA-approved pathogen-reduction device may be used for plasma and certain platelet products.

Reported at NPR and Reuters. Another story on NPR notes that Planned Parenthood workers are canvassing afflicted areas in Miami, Florida.

Hong Kong has reported its first case of Zika in a woman who had traveled to the Caribbean.

Finally, the CDC is reporting the first known case of asymptomatic Zika transmission:

A man who had no idea he had Zika has given the virus to his female partner during sex, the Centers for Disease Control announced today. It's the first documented case of a person with no symptoms sexually transmitting the virus to a partner who had not traveled to an area of active Zika circulation.

Original Submission

ticho writes:

Earlier this summer, the team at Inversoft published a comprehensive and sophisticated guide to user data security. The guide spans from hardening servers from provisioning, up through the IP and SSH layers, and all the way to application-level techniques for password hashing, SQL injection protection, and intrusion detection. As proof that they stood behind their advice, the Inversoft team provisioned a pair of Linode hosts, a web server and database server, and gave them the hardening treatment. Inversoft offered up a fully-loaded MacBook to anyone who could break in, taunting all comers by naming the hardened web server hackthis.inversoft.com.

Game on.

Needless to say, they found a way in.

[...] After discovering an unpatched, unfirewalled Elasticsearch instance using nmap, we gained shell access on a utility server used for various functions at Inversoft. On there, we found API keys for Linode left behind by a human operator. Those keys allowed us to detach disks from running servers and attach them to servers we controlled, stealing sensitive user data (all to win a prize).

Original Submission

ticho writes:

Securelist.com has a writeup about a new ransomware that mostly targets the Netherlands:

While ransomware is a global threat, every now and then we see a variant that targets one specific region. [...] Today we can add a new one to the list: Wildfire.

Wildfire spreads through well-crafted spam e-mails. [...] Three things stand out here. First, the attackers registered a Dutch domain name, something we do not see very often. Second, the e-mail is written in flawless Dutch. And thirdly, they actually put the address of the targeted company in the e-mail. This is something we do not see very often and makes it for the average user difficult to see that this is not a benign e-mail.

Even though Wildfire is a local threat, it still shows that ransomware is effective and evolving. In less than a month we observed more than 5700 infections and 236 users paid a total amount of almost 70.000 euro. This is also due to the fact that the spam e-mails are getting better and better.

When you are infected with Wildfire, the malware calls home to the C2 server where information such as the IP, username, rid and country are stored. The botnetpanel then checks whether the country is one of the blacklisted countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova). It also checks whether the "rid" exists within a statically defined array (we therefore expect the rid to be an affiliate ID).

If the rid is not found, or you live in one of the blacklisted countries, the malware terminates and you won't get infected.

Each time the malware calls home, a new key is generated and added to the existing list of keys. The same victim can thus have multiple keys. Finally the botnetpanel returns the bitcoin address to which the victim should pay, and the cryptographic key with which the files on the victim's computer are encrypted.

Original Submission

Sir Finkus writes:

It has only been six short months since SoylentNews' Folding@Home team was founded, and we've made a major milestone: our team is now one of the top 500 teams in the world! We've already surpassed some heavy hitters like /. and several universities, including MIT. (But now is not the time to rest on our laurels. A certain Redmond-based software producer currently occupies #442.)

In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's and thereby help to find a cure. To that end, SoylentNews' team has completed nearly 16,000 work units.

If you'd like to contribute to our team by donating some spare CPU/GPU cycles, you can get started here. There are clients available for Linux, Windows, and OSX. Once you have installed the software, enter the TeamID 230319 to join us.

Feel free to join #folding on our IRC channel if you need any help, or just want to chat.

Thank you to all that have participated, and a special thanks to our top 10 folders:

1. cmn32480
2. Runaway1956
3. Beldin65
4. tibman
5. LTKKane
6. EricAlbers_ericalbers_com
7. Kymation
8. meisterister
9. kurenai.tsubasa
10. NotSanguine

Related Links:
http://folding.stanford.edu
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319

Original Submission

takyon writes:

President Obama is increasing the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument by over 316%, to encompass an area more than twice the size of Texas:

On Friday, President Obama will expand the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii, creating the world's largest marine protected area. Building on the United States' global leadership in marine conservation, today's designation will more than quadruple the size of the existing marine monument, permanently protecting pristine coral reefs, deep sea marine habitats, and important ecological resources in the waters of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

Following this historic conservation action, the President will travel to Hawaii next week. On Wednesday evening, he will address leaders from the Pacific Island Conference of Leaders and the IUCN World Conservation Congress, which is being hosted in the United States for the first time. On Thursday, he will travel to Midway Atoll, located within the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, to mark the significance of this monument designation and highlight first-hand how the threat of climate change makes protecting our public lands and waters more important than ever.

The monument was originally created in 2006 by President George W. Bush and designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. Since that time, new scientific exploration and research has revealed new species and deep sea habitats as well as important ecological connections between the existing monument and the adjacent waters. Today's designation will expand the existing Marine National Monument by 442,781 square miles, bringing the total protected area of the expanded monument to 582,578 square miles.

The move follows a similar expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in 2014.

DOI press release, and more resources at NOAA.

Reported at NPR, National Geographic, NBC, and WBUR.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The back-and-forth over which carrier has the best network continues, with Verizon Wireless taking the latest win.

The nation's largest carrier also proved to be the best, according to the results taken from the first half of the year from testing firm RootMetrics. Along with the best overall performance, Verizon took the top spot in reliability, speed, data, calling and text message. AT&T finished second in every category except for calls, where Sprint edged out its rival.

The results, which didn't differ much from RootMetrics' second-half 2015 test, give Verizon further ammunition as it touts the superiority of its network. These tests are critical to carriers as they sell you on the strength of their service. That's particularly the case for Verizon, which needs to justify the premium it charges its customers.

But RootMetrics isn't the only game in town, and the results differ radically. Rival testing firm OpenSignal has declared T-Mobile the best overall network, and Speedtest.net regularly crowns T-Mobile the fastest network to boot.

The high score among wireless carriers goes to Verizon.

The differing results come down to how each firm conducts its test. OpenSignal and Speedtest relies on tests run by regular people, which they argue offer vastly more results in real-world situations. RootMetrics uses a fleet of test vans and professional testers with a consistent set of phones.

RootMetrics said it conducted 3.7 million tests, drove 265,386 miles and tested 4,249 indoor locations to get its results.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New 3D printing technology unveiled this week sharply increases the size of objects that can be produced, offering new possibilities to remake manufacturing in the auto, aerospace and other major industries.

One application demonstrated by 3D printing machinery maker Stratasys would allow airlines to pick made-to-order airplane interiors that could be tweaked with the click of a mouse.

By turning the manufacturing plane vertical from the standard horizontal, the "printer" has the potential to create components of unlimited size.

"We're now talking about parts in feet and meters versus centimeters and inches," said Rich Garrity, Americas president for Stratasys. "It's not just a concept."

The advances, by Stratasys, Siemens and others, are beginning to push 3D printing well into the center of manufacturing from around the edges.

Benefits include the ability to reduce weight by substituting plastic compounds for metals. And by making use of a "digital toolbox" and made-to-order technology, it can also can[sic] reduce the need for warehouse space and many conventional manufacturing tools.

The ultimate prize is finished items equal in quality to today's goods, but which are cheaper and faster to make.

Siemens argues that 3D printing, along with an increased role of robotics, greater automation and other innovations are creating a "digital factory" that will force a day of reckoning among manufacturers.

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

Did someone say plasma airplane wings? How cool is that...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/space/plasma-air-control/

We just watched moving air being controlled by plasma, the lesser-known, fourth state of matter which also exists in the blistering core of our sun. And while such lab demonstrations are both uncanny and awe-inspiring, these so-called plasma actuators could produce far more impressive benefits in the real world, especially for the aviation and wind power industries, and maybe even the trucking business.

On airplane wings, for example, tiny plasma actuators could help planes fly more safely, more efficiently, and with greater stability and control. They can speed, slow or divert air flows in ways that can cut drag, fuel use, and CO₂ emissions by as much as 25%, researchers estimate. Some experts even think that these devices might someday replace conventional flight control surfaces such as flaps and ailerons. Imagine witnessing the ghoulish purple glow of the lab demo from the window seat of a transcontinental flight.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Software-defined networking (SDN) controllers respond to network conditions by pushing new flow rules to switches. And that, say Italian researchers, creates an unexpected security problem.

The researchers were able to persuade their SDN environment to leak information that sysadmins probably don't want out in public, including network virtualisation setups, quality of service policies, and more importantly, security tool configuration information such as "attack detection thresholds for network scanning".

Even a single switch's flow table, they write, can provide this kind of information, as well as serving as a side-channel for an attacker to exploit.

The three network boffins – Mauro Conti of the University of Padova, and Sapienza University's Fabio De Gaspari and Luigi Mancini – are particularly concerned about SDN being exploited to help an attacker build a profile of the target network, in what they call a Know Your Enemy (KYE) attack.

For example, they write, an attacker could potentially:

• Connect to the passive listening ports most SDN switches include for remote debugging, to retrieve the flow table (they offer HP Procurve's dpctl utility as an example);
• Infer information about the flow table from jitter (that is, round trip time (RTT) – variance);
• Sniff control traffic, because of inadequate protection (not using TLS, or not using certificates for authentication;
• Exploit vulnerabilities that might exist in switch operating systems, such as backdoors; or
• Copy the flow table or memory content of the switch to an external location.

The paper points out that none of this is specific to particular devices: "the KYE attack exploits a structural vulnerability of SDN, which derives from the on-demand management of network flows, that in turn is one of the main features and strengths" of SDN.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Princeton University researchers presented a 25-core "manycore" CPU at the Hot Chips conference:

It was a week for chip launches with the Hot Chips conference setting the stage for the unveiling of the IBM Power9 processor (report forthcoming) and a custom ARM-based 64-core CPU from Chinese firm Phytium Technology. A 25-core academic manycore processor out of Princeton University also made its debut from the Silicon Valley event.

[...] "With Piton, we really sat down and rethought computer architecture in order to build a chip specifically for data centers and the cloud," said David Wentzlaff, a Princeton assistant professor of electrical engineering and associated faculty in the Department of Computer Science in an official announcement. "The chip we've made is among the largest chips ever built in academia and it shows how servers could run far more efficiently and cheaply."

Piton is based on the SPARC V9 64-bit ISA and supports Debian Linux. After being designed in early 2015, Piton was taped-out in IBM's 32nm SOI process. The 6×6 millimeter die has more than 460 million transistors. The silicon has been tested in the lab and is working, according to the research team.

The design is open source (open, DOI: 10.1145/2954679.2872414) (DX). More information here.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

From Buzz's holy wine to vetting sherry, alcohol and space mix despite NASA policy.

http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/08/an-anecdotal-history-of-space-and-booze/

"Half a century ago, this was an essential part of spaceman culture," said Jeffrey Kluger, senior writer at Time and author of the book that inspired Apollo 13. Presenting at the world's best alcohol event, Kluger wasn't referring to old astronaut traditions like military experience or crew cuts. "Test pilots were male, under 6-feet tall, and had to be a tough and tireless drinker."

Tales of the Cocktail 2016 continued the conference's trend of sneaking science into a series of bar industry seminars. Food scientists from Bacardi discussed internal testing on carbonation in liquor, and alcohol alchemist Camper English unveiled his tireless research on the compounds and combinations that can be lethal (or at least really, really bad) when unleashed in our cocktails. But this year's schedule also featured what seemed like a peculiarity—a panel titled "Cosmic Cocktails: The Final Frontier" that outlined the informal history of NASA and drinking.

According to Kluger, the intertwining of highballs and high altitudes was inescapable—a natural evolution of the downtime imbibing of previous military generations. For many of the US' early space pioneers, this part of training took place outside Southern California's Edwards Air Force Base at a vast and communal pub in the Mojave Desert called the Happy Bottom Riding Club (fittingly considering its clientele, the bar was created by Pancho Barnes, a pioneering female pilot who had bested Amelia Earhart's air speed record at age 29).

[...] Bars still thrive near NASA bases, Kluger pointed out, but the protocol for space travel has become more controlled. "With the nature of modern space travel, you have to trade the open environment of Earth for a sealed environment," he said. "What you eat, what you drink, and what you breathe is parceled out. There's not a lot of room for drinking alcohol."

NASA had and continues to have a "no alcohol" policy for orbit, but some booze has made it to space. Kluger cited Apollo 8 (1968) as the earliest example. While Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders became the first crew to travel beyond low Earth orbit and see the far side of the Moon, they were also astro-alcohol pioneers.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A team of scientists has demonstrated control of chemical delivery in the brain of a cockroach using electromagnetism. For effect, this was made to correspond with specific patterns of brain activity:

A man has used thought alone to control nanorobots inside a living creature for the first time. The technology released a drug inside cockroaches in response to the man's brain activity – a technique that may be useful for treating brain disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD.

Getting drugs to where they need to be exactly when you want them is a challenge. Most drugs diffuse through the blood stream over time – and you're stuck with the side effects until the drug wears off. Now, a team at the Interdisciplinary Center, in Herzliya, and Bar Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, both in Israel, have developed a system that allows precise control over when a drug is active in the body.

The group has built nanorobots out of DNA, forming shell-like shapes that drugs can be tethered to. The bots also have a gate, which has a lock made from iron oxide nanoparticles. The lock opens when heated using electromagnetic energy, exposing the drug to the environment. Because the drug remains tethered to the DNA parcel, a body's exposure to the drug can be controlled by closing and opening the gate.

To get the DNA bots to respond to a person's thoughts, the team trained a computer algorithm to distinguish between a person's brain activity when resting and when doing mental arithmetic. The team then attached a fluorescent drug to the bots and injected them into a cockroach sat inside an electromagnetic coil. A person wearing an EEG cap that measures brain activity was then instructed either to do mental calculations, or rest. The cap was connected to the electromagnetic coil, switching it on when the man was calculating and off when he was resting. By examining when fluorescence appeared inside different cockroaches, the team confirmed that this worked.

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martyb writes:

For many years now, I've been following the blog, Knowing and Doing — Reflections of an Academic and Computer Scientist by University of Iowa college professor Eugene Wallingford. I admire his efforts at understanding his students' perspectives and his taking pains to try and help them to grow and understand what they are doing, meanwhile providing a solid foundation for future exploration.

I found this recent (August 7^th) entry, Some Advice for How To Think, and Some Personal Memories, to be especially interesting (emphasis from original):

I've been reading a bunch of the essays on David Chapman's Meaningness website lately, after seeing a link to one on Twitter. (Thanks, @kaledic.) This morning I read How To Think Real Good, about one of Chapman's abandoned projects: a book of advice for how to think and solve problems. He may never write this book as he once imagined it, but I'm glad he wrote this essay about the idea.

[...] Artificial intelligence has always played a useful role as a reality check on ideas about mind, knowledge, reasoning, and thought. More generally, anyone who writes computer programs knows this, too. You can make ambiguous claims with English sentences, but to write a program you really have to have a precise idea. When you don't have a precise idea, your program itself is a precise formulation of something. Figuring out what that is can be a way of figuring out what you were really thing about in the first place.

This is one of the most important lessons college students learn from their intro CS courses. It's an experience that can benefit all students, not just CS majors.

Chapman also includes a few heuristics for approaching the problem of thinking, basically ways to put yourself in a position to become a better thinker. Two of my favorites are:

Try to figure out how people smarter than you think.

Find a teacher who is willing to go meta and explain how a field works, instead of lecturing you on its subject matter.

This really is good advice. Subject matter is much easier to come by than deep understanding of how the discipline work, especially in these days of the web.

[...] Chapman's project is thinking about thinking, a step up the ladder of abstraction from "simply" thinking. An AI program must reason; an AI researcher must reason about how to reason.

This is the great siren of artificial intelligence, the source of its power and also its weaknesses: Anything you can do, I can do meta.

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wirelessduck writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37062579

Lonnie Johnson was brought up in Mobile, Alabama in the 1960s, when black children were not expected to go far, but such was his talent for engineering that he worked for Nasa, and helped test the first stealth bomber. But as he explains here, the invention that made his fortune was a water pistol - the extremely powerful Super Soaker.

Original Submission