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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Paul Krugman did something that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias, Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as she pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums often received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as a public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there was absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband did.

Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former First Lady, two-term New York Senator, Secretary of State, and current establishment-backed multi-millionaire presidential front-runner. Krugman — in a tweet-proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it felt like a moral duty.”

[...] The reality is that large, pro-Clinton liberal media platforms — such as Vox, and The Huffington Post, and prime-time MSNBC programs, and the columnists and editorialists of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and most major New-York-based weekly magazines — have been openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I don’t personally see anything wrong with that — I’m glad when journalists shed their faux-objectivity; I believe the danger of Trump’s candidacy warrants that; and I hope this candor continues past the November election — but the everyone-is-against-us self-pity from Clinton partisans is just a joke. They are the dominant voices in elite media discourse, and it’s a big reason why Clinton is highly likely to win.

That’s all the more reason why journalists should be subjecting Clinton’s financial relationships, associations, and secret communications to as much scrutiny as Donald Trump’s. That certainly does not mean that journalists should treat their various sins and transgressions as equivalent: nothing in the campaign compares to Trump’s deport-11-million-people or ban-all-Muslim policies, or his attacks on a judge for his Mexican ethnicity, etc. But this emerging narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the White House is itself quite dangerous. Clinton partisans in the media — including those who regard themselves as journalists — will continue to reflexively attack all reporting that reflects negatively on her, but that reporting should nonetheless continue with unrestrained aggression.

Source: The Intercept

Original Submission

ghost writes:

Douglas Crockford (JSON, JSLint, JSMin, Javascript: The Good Parts) is a founding father of modern Javascript. He is a frequent speaker on the Javascript circuit and, until recently, was the scheduled as the keynote speaker for the Nodevember Conference. For reasons no one can explain, he was removed from the conference schedule to help foster inclusivity. No one (including Crockford) knows why he was banned. Internet commenters have speculated it may have been due to a talk titled "Monads and Gonads" or slut shaming the "promiscuous" web or a his use of the gender (and species) exclusive phrase "hanging out there like a pair of dog balls". Others believe it's because he's a curmudgeon (aka grumpy old white cis heterosexual man). One of the Nodevember organizers (not involved with the decision to ban Crockford) has stepped down.

This is not the first time Crockford has experienced censorship -- he previously ported Maniac Mansion to the NES.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Power-Driven Articulated Dummy is a strange aside in NASA's space race story, and now you can own it. The space suit testing robot is going up for grabs as part of RR Auctions' Remarkable Rarities Auction.

[...] The 104-kilogram (230-pound) PDAD was designed between 1963 and 1965 to be representative of the average American male. Its height was adjustable between 5'5" and 6'2", and it was equipped with a circulatory system of nylon tubes. Oil flowing through these tubes powered the 35 actuators, which allowed for the replication of the motion of the body with realistic force. Sensors on the robot's aluminium body could measure the forces applied by the prototype suits.

Only two of the robots were ever made before the program was shut down. The nylon circulatory system could not handle the hydraulic pressures required to move the robot without leaking. So NASA defunded the project and moved on.

One of the robots is owned by the Smithsonian. The other is missing an arm and some of its wiring is damaged, but it's still expected to fetch over $80,000. Online ore-bidding on the auction will commence on September 15, and the live auction itself will take place on September 26.

YouTube video here.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Earlier this week in Westcott Bay, San Juan Island, a team of volunteer monitors caught an invasive green crab, marking the first confirmation of this global invader in Washington's inland waters.

The volunteers are part of Washington Sea Grant's Crab Team, an early detection and monitoring program to look for European green crab (Carcinus maenas) and collect information on local marine life. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is responsible for controlling aquatic invasive animals and is working closely with University of Washington-based Washington Sea Grant to determine next steps for limiting further spread of the crab.

Until now, green crab populations in Washington have been limited to Pacific coastal estuaries. However, the 2012 discovery of invasive crabs in Canadian waters across the Strait of Juan de Fuca prompted the state's wildlife department to invest in Salish Sea monitoring and early detection.

This week's sighting was confirmed by green crab experts P. Sean McDonald of the UW and Sylvia Yamada of Oregon State University. A single, large, 3-inch adult male crab was captured during the Crab Team's regular monitoring activity. The agencies are coordinating a response to the sighting, working with scientists at the UW's Friday Harbor Laboratories.

"Although unexpected and unwelcome, this finding is a perfect example of how volunteers can spur positive environmental action, and it shows that the monitoring program is working as it was designed," said Jeff Adams, Washington Sea Grant marine ecologist and project manager.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The closest star system to the Earth is the famous Alpha Centauri group. Located in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), at a distance of 4.3 light-years, this system is made up of the binary formed by the stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, plus the faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri C, also known as Proxima Centauri.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given us this stunning view of the bright Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the right), flashing like huge cosmic headlamps in the dark. The image was captured by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). WFPC2 was Hubble's most used instrument for the first 13 years of the space telescope's life, being replaced in 2009 by WFC3 during Servicing Mission 4. This portrait of Alpha Centauri was produced by observations carried out at optical and near-infrared wavelengths.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Japan's foreign ministry has taken the unusual step of publishing a very public Message to the United Kingdom and the European Union (PDF) in which it outlines how it wants Brexit to happen in order to protect the substantial investments its businesses have made in Europe and especially in the United Kingdom.

The document opens by stating that "Uncertainty is a major concern for an economy", before going on to explain that Japanese businesses that have chosen to make major investments in the UK are worried about what Brexit will mean.

"What Japanese businesses in Europe most wish to avoid is the situation in which that they are unable to discern clearly the way the Brexit negotiations are going, only grasping the whole picture at the last minute." The document therefore asks that the UK and the European Union negotiate transparently, provide lots of information about ongoing negotiations and offer decent advance warnings of any changes. Japan also hopes, fervently, that certain things don't change between Blighty and its continental pals.

High on that list is "maintaining the current level of information protection and the free transfer of data." [...] Japan also wants uniform intellectual property rights across the EU and UK and for Japanese businesses based in the UK to be able to employ Europeans. And vice-versa.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Bloomberg reports:

If you believe that government meddling in financial markets was responsible for the last recession and the lackluster recovery, you might be right. But probably not in the way you think.

Imagine what would happen in a free market if everyone suddenly decided that future economic growth would be very slow. The price of safe assets such as U.S. government bonds -- assets that pay off even in a low-growth environment -- would rise sharply. As a result, the real (inflation-adjusted) interest rate, which always moves opposite to the price of safe assets, would fall. In principle, if the demand for safe assets was strong enough, the real interest rate could go deep into negative territory.

Yet two government mechanisms prevent real interest rates from getting too negative. The first is cash: As long as people can hold currency, which loses its value only at the rate of inflation, they won't buy safe assets that yield even less. The second is the central bank's promise to keep the inflation rate low and stable -- at about 2 percent in most developed nations. As a result, people have little reason to hold any asset that yields less than negative 2 percent (perhaps negative 3 percent, considering that cash is bulky and hard to store).

In other words, governments -- by issuing cash and managing inflation -- put a floor on how low interest rates can go and how high asset prices can rise. That's hardly a free market.

[...] The right answer is to abolish currency and move completely to electronic cash, an idea suggested at various times by Marvin Goodfriend of Carnegie-Mellon University, Miles Kimball of the University of Colorado and Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England. Because electronic cash can have any yield, interest rates would be able go as far into negative territory as the market required.

[...] If cash were abolished, I would support the adoption of two complementary measures. First, instead of targeting a positive inflation rate, central banks could target true price stability by aiming to keep the level of prices constant over time. (To be clear, this would be disastrous unless cash were eliminated first.)

Second, currency does provide a service beyond being a store of value and a medium of exchange: It's anonymous and thus ensures the privacy of transactions. In its absence, governments would have to allow the private sector to offer alternatives with the same attractive features.

We've endured a deep recession and a miserable recovery because the government, through its provision of currency, interferes with the proper functioning of financial markets. Why not ensure that doesn't happen again?

Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015.

Original Submission

JNCF writes:

Quartz reports that a former NASA intern has made a Github repository for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer code.

[Continues...]

HughPickens.com writes:

CNN reports that URL, the porn-sniffing dog, is the newest crime-fighting tool at the Weber County Sheriff's office with a nose that could help put away some of the country's most predatory and dangerous criminals. URL (pronounced Earl) sniffs out electronic storage media. Still just a pup, the 18-month-old K-9 is one of fewer than two dozen such dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices. While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it, they are able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss.

Detective Cameron Hartman points to the high-profile case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who was convicted on child pornography and other charges last year. A K-9 named Bear, who was trained by the same man who trained URL, led investigators to hidden thumb drives inside Fogle's home. The US Attorney's office for Southern Indiana confirmed those devices contained evidence against Fogle. URL has found evidence relating to pornography during the execution of search warrants for the task force in several investigations of child sex crimes and child trafficking. "He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."

Original Submission

Obama Cancels Meeting with Philippine President Duterte

takyon writes:

President Obama has cancelled a planned meeting with Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte after Duterte described Obama as a "son of a bitch" in comments made to reporters. Obama will instead meet with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, presumably to discuss North Korea's latest missile tests. Here is our previous article about Duterte.

G20 Summit in China: U.S.-China Tensions, North Korea, and Low-Cost Steel

The Group of 20 summit is now underway in Hangzhou, China. Before the summit even began, tensions between the U.S. and China were reflected by shouting matches between Chinese and American officials on the tarmac and at the West Lake State House where President Obama and President Xi Jinping met. Security guards also attempted to prevent foreign media from covering Obama's departure from Air Force One, and in a departure from protocol, no rolling staircase was provided for the President. When questioned about the incidents the next day, President Obama said that Americans "don't leave our values and ideals behind when we take these trips" but dismissed the incidents:

[Continues...]

hubie writes:

As a platform for meeting people, online dating has been growing in popularity. As the dating sites were growing, there wasn't a lot of easily available data on the people who used them to draw many conclusions from a sociological standpoint, but now that the numbers of people who use these sites is in the tens of millions, that is changing. When looking at the balance between choosing traits that make for a good relationship match verses eliminating people based upon negative attributes, aka "deal breakers", it appears people predominately employ the latter strategy.

A group of sociologists from the University of Michigan led by Elizabeth Bruch obtained data from one of the large dating sites and they looked at a randomly-selected group of people from New York City to determine what factors in their decision-making process led them to select or eliminate potential mates.

Bruch and her team divided the rules into two broad categories, "deal breakers" and "deal makers," used to exclude or include people for the next level of contact. Bruch wondered: Is mate selection like a job interview process, where the person with the best combination of positive factors wins? Or is it more like a Survivor-style reality show, where contestants are picked off one by one for a single failing?

Among the deal breakers are:

• No profile photo: Men and women were 20 times less likely to look at this profile.
• Smoker: A 10-fold drop in interest.
• Age difference: Young women (20 yo) were 10X less likely to look at a profile of a man ten years older than her, older women (45 yo) were 10% more likely to consider a man ten years older than her, and men overall preferred women younger than them.
• Height difference: Women were 10X more likely to look at a profile of a guy 17 cm (6 in) taller than her while guys were 3X more likely to look a the profile of a woman 17cm shorter than him
• Body weight: Men were less likely to view a profile of a heavy-set woman while women showed no aversion to a heavy-set guy.

Original Submission

nishi.b writes:

The BBC reports that Philae, the lander of the Rosetta probe on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been located in a high-resolution image from Rosetta.

It was assumed Philae had bounced into a dark ditch on touchdown - an analysis now borne out by the latest pictures, which were acquired from a distance of 2.7km from the icy body.

[...] Rosetta had previously surveyed this location - dubbed Abydos - without success. "Candidate detections" were made but none were very convincing.

The difference today is a closer-in perspective and a change in the seasons on the comet, which means the hiding place is now better illuminated. The discovery comes just a few weeks before controllers plan to crash-land Rosetta itself on to the comet to formally end its mission.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports:

A team of hackers working for cybersecurity startup MedSec found a bevy of flaws in medical devices sold by St. Jude Medical Inc, ranging from a lack of overall encryption to vulnerabilities letting unauthorized devices communicate with the company's pacemakers and defibrillators. And while we've talked about the threat of hackable pacemakers for more than a decade, hackers are increasingly worming their way into poorly secured radiology equipment, blood gas analyzers and other hospital and nursing home equipment to steal data for identity theft, giving the threat an added dimension.

[...] Historically, many hackers and security firms either contact companies to alert them to vulnerabilities, or try to sell the not-yet-public vulnerabilities to corporate espionage and security firms or government agencies, who then happily exploit any impacted, unpatched systems (in this case, with potentially fatal results). But MedSec did something notably different. It reached out to the Muddy Waters Capital LLC investment firm, suggesting a partnership to short sell St. Jude stock before reporting the vulnerabilities to the FDA. Under the deal, MedSec makes more money the further shares fall.

Updated: El Reg reports:

"We're not saying the [MedSec] report [on St Jude Medical's implanted pacemakers and defibrillators] is false. We're saying it's inconclusive because the evidence does not support their conclusions. We were able to generate the reported conditions without there being a security issue", said Kevin Fu, [University of Michigan] associate professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security.

[...] MedSec's report [...] reads:

In many cases, the Crash Attack made the Cardiac Device completely unresponsive to interrogations from Merlin@home devices and Merlin programmers. It was therefore impossible to tell whether, and how the Cardiac Devices, are functioning. MedSec strongly suspects they were in many cases "bricked"--i.e., made to be non-functional. It is likely physicians would explant a device that did not respond to the programmer.

In some cases, a Cardiac Device subjected to a Crash Attack was still able to communicate with the programmer, and the information displayed was alarming.

According to U-M's team, though, the implanted pacemaker or defibrillators can and will continue operating as normal even if readings to the monitoring station are disrupted.

In other words, there's no conclusive evidence that the pacemaker or defibrillator actually stopped working after the radio communications were jammed. It's more of an annoyance for whoever is using the monitoring terminal than a potentially lethal situation.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Flames once again licked the historic buildings of Britain's capital as a wooden replica of 17th century London went up in smoke to mark the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London.

The Great Fire began at a baker's shop in Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sept. 2, 1666, and spread rapidly through the wooden structures of the old city.

[...] The old, medieval St Paul's Cathedral was completely destroyed by the fire, and then rebuilt in its present form following the designs of architect Christopher Wren.

The wooden replica was designed by American artist David Best and built by unemployed young Londoners over several months.

Source: Reuters

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On a technological behemoth like a ship, in many cases the crew, or "human element" get little attention when planning the design and operations – a mistake, as statistics show: most accidents at sea can be traced back to human error, not technical error. The CyClaDes project brought the industry together and showed how more consideration can be given to the human operators and their contexts in the shipbuilding and operational process.

Ships are a safe means of transport. When something happens, ships are being planned and designed. How the crew can be included in the on-board procedures then either takes second chair or gets left out completely. "Established ergonomic concepts that improve the interaction between man and machine have, up to now, scarcely been implemented in the maritime industry. The reason often lies in the lack of communication or understanding between crews and engineers, who build the vessels and approve them. Even when there is a transfer of available knowledge, there are often still barriers to implementing it, such as extra costs and inherent risk in changes to a technically proven design," says Dr. Eric Holder of the Human-Machine System's Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Wachtberg near Bonn.

In the EU-sponsored CyClaDes (Crew-Centered Design and Operation of Ships and Ship Systems) project, the FKIE sat at one table with universities, professional organizations, shipbuilders, ship owners, government agencies and ship crews. The goal of the collaboration: To better integrate the "human factor" in the development phase and the life cycle of a ship – to make shipping even safer. The interdisciplinary team extensively analyzed the places on ships where human needs have been neglected up to now, discovered potential areas where processes could be improved and sent the latest research findings to the relevant parties involved.

[...]

This knowledge is critical since these days architects and engineers seldom go to sea and sailors hardly have any opportunities to meet with them and exchange ideas. Government agencies can use the guidelines and checklists developed during CyClaDes in regulatory standards and design guidelines or directly in the ship design audit.

Original Submission