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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-stocks-weekahead-idUSKCN1202O8

Deutsche Bank will likely cast a pall over equity markets next week as the largest German lender navigates a possible multi-billion dollar settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ] over the sale of mortgage-backed bonds. Deutsche shares traded in the United States hit a record low on Thursday, falling as much as 24 percent since the DOJ asked the bank to pay $14 billion to settle charges related to its sale of toxic mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.

But the stock had its best day in five years Friday, on record volume, after news agency AFP reported that Deutsche was nearing a much-lower $5.4 billion settlement with the DOJ. Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimated Deutsche could pay about $6 billion to settle with the DOJ.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Twitch boss Matthew DiPietro is clear that the industry needs to do more about online sexism in gaming.

The senior executive was speaking to us from the streaming site's headquarters in San Francisco.

Gamers have told Newsbeat about their experiences and Twitch says it's doing all it can to stamp out sexism on the platform.

But Matthew tells us this isn't a problem that Twitch can solve on its own.

He says the industry needs to invest money to "move forward on this issue".

He's calling for "investment in terms of people, education and money.

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takyon writes:

Here's some useful research from Royal Holloway, University of London's Department of Psychology:

Research published in the journal Psychological Science [DOI: 10.1177/0956797616661523] [DX] has shown that judgements of attractiveness vary depending on who is nearby, and how good-looking they are in comparison. A person will rank higher on a scale of attractiveness when compared alongside less attractive people, than they would when judged alone. Popular opinion points to a person's perceived level of attractiveness as somehow fixed. However, research from Royal Holloway, University of London shows that context is key to assessing attractiveness.

[...] Participants in the study were asked to rate pictures of different faces for attractiveness, one by one. They were then asked to assess the same faces, placed alongside ones perceived to be undesirable. When adding these 'distractor faces', the attractiveness of the same faces increased from the first round of ranking.

Participants were then shown two attractive faces, alongside a 'distractor' face and asked to judge between them. The presence of the less attractive face was found to make the viewers more critical between the attractive face, as Dr Furl explained: "The presence of a less attractive face does not just increase the attractiveness of a single person, but in a crowd could actually make us even more choosey! We found that the presence of a 'distractor' face makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgement."

The DUFF (2015). You may also be interested in this study suggested by Medical Daily:

Attractive Female Romantic Partners Provide a Proxy for Unobservable Male Qualities: The When and Why Behind Human Female Mate Choice Copying (open, DOI: 10.1177/1474704916652144) (DX)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"It has been two years since Robin Williams died, and his widow, Susan Schneider Williams, continues to work to spread awareness of the brain disease that led to his suicide, Lewy Body Disease.

In a heartbreaking essay titled "The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain," Susan writes about her late husband's final few months and how the disease that he didn't know he had consumed his life. Sharing that Robin's many symptoms didn't fit any one diagnosis, Susan explains that he had to deal with not only physical limitations such as heartburn and poor sense of smell but also mental incapacitation.

"By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels - just to name a few - were settling in hard," she writes. "Psychotherapy and other medical help was becoming a constant in trying to manage and solve these seemingly disparate conditions.""

Full Article:

http://www.eonline.com/news/799108/robin-williams-widow-susan-schneider-williams-pens-heartbreaking-essay-about-his-final-months

** Essay ("The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain"):

http://www.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full
http://www.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full.pdf+html

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takyon writes:

Reuters has obtained a document that shows how the European Union intends to punish Alphabet/Google for antitrust violations:

EU antitrust regulators plan to order Alphabet's Google to stop paying financial incentives to smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search exclusively on their devices and warned the company of a large fine, an EU document showed. The document, running to more than 150 pages, was sent to complainants last week for feedback. Google received a copy in April in which the European Commission accused it of using its dominant Android mobile operating system to shut out rivals.

The EU competition enforcer in its charge sheet, known as a statement of objections, said it planned to tell the U.S. technology giant to halt payments or discounts to mobile phone manufacturers in return for pre-installing Google's Play Store with Google Search.

The regulators also want to prevent Google from forcing smartphone makers to pre-install its proprietary apps if this restricts their ability to use competing operating systems based on Android. Google "cannot punish or threaten" companies for not complying with its conditions, according to the document seen by Reuters.

The Commission's investigation followed a complaint by FairSearch, a lobby group supported by companies that want to ensure they are not disadvantaged by search engine market dominance, in March 2013. Google could face a large fine because the anti-competitive practices, which started from January 2011, are still ongoing, the document said.

Here is the FairSearch website.

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mcgrew writes:

I ran across this article, and laughed at its ludicrousness. It seems that a publishing company is sweating bullets and a bunch of science fiction writers around the world are hopping mad.

Galaktika was once a respected Hungarian language science fiction magazine, closed in 1995, and later reopened. Right now it's Hungary's only printed SF magazine. The only trouble is, its publisher, Metropolis Media, took copyrighted fiction from the internet and had it translated to Hungarian and republished it, saying it was in the public domain because it had been on the internet!

They're presently in some deep trouble with professional writers and their agents. Did they really believe that, I wonder? I'll bet if it was movies they'd REALLY be in trouble!

The article is worth a read. It was written by by Cat Rambo (honest, that's her real name), an old sciene fiction writer who has won Hugo and Nebula awards, and is president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; the SFWA is a professional guild.

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[Eds Comment: Deleted incorrect statement]

takyon writes:

A Texas jury has ordered Apple to pay VirnetX $302.4 million for patent infringement:

This was the third trial in a case that began in 2010. An appeals court upheld a portion of the first verdict, which found Apple's VOD infringed two patents, leaving the jury only to determine how much Apple should pay. Separately, the appeals court ordered a reconsideration of whether FaceTime infringed two other patents. The last time a jury heard the case -- the second trial -- VirnetX was awarded $625.6 million, though that also involved newer versions of the two Apple products. A trial judge threw out that case in July, saying it was unfair to Apple to combine all the issues.

The amount was on point with what VirnetX argued it was entitled to during Sept. 26 opening arguments, based on the billions of dollars worth of products sold by Cupertino, California-based Apple. The iPhone maker countered that VirnetX was entitled to no more than $25 million. VirnetX, which had 20 full- and part-time employees as of Dec. 31, has been unsuccessful in marketing its own software and relies on patent licensing for revenue. Its last big payout was from a $23 million settlement with Microsoft Corp. announced in December 2014.

Also at Reuters.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Consumerist reports:

[Dozens of] owners of Samsung top-loading washing machines say their appliances exploded while in normal use.

[...] The Consumer Product Safety Commission confirmed it is working with Samsung to address safety issues related to the top-loading washing machines after receiving dozens of reports that the appliances have exploded while in use.

[...] Owners of the machines, sold between March 2011 and April 2016, are advised to only use the delicate cycle when washing bedding, water-resistant, and bulky items. The lower spin speed of the delicate cycle lessens the risk of impact injuries or property damage due to the washing machine becoming dislodged

A Georgia woman [said] that on April 8, she and her four-year-old son were standing next to the machine when it exploded. "It was the loudest sound. It sounded like a bomb went off in my ear", the woman said, recalling that nuts, bolts, and wires were laying on the floor.

[...] Several consumers have banded together to sue Samsung in federal court, claiming that a support rod in the appliance is insufficient to hold the tub in place and can become unfastened during the spin cycle.

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t-3 writes:

https://www.rt.com/uk/361200-robot-sex-cafe-london/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In the age of Big Data, automated systems can track societal events on a global scale. These systems code and collect vast stores of real-time "event data"—happenings gleaned from news articles covering everything from political protests to ecological shifts around the world.

In new research published Thursday in the journal Science, Northeastern network scientist David Lazer and his colleagues analyzed the effectiveness of four global-scale databases and found they are falling short when tested for reliability and validity.

[...] The fully-automated systems studied were the International Crisis Early Warning System, or ICEWS, maintained by Lockheed Martin, and Global Data on Events Language and Tone, or GDELT, developed and run out of Georgetown University. The others were the hand-coded Gold Standard Report, or GSR, generated by the nonprofit MITRE Corp., and the Social, Political, and Economic Event Database, or SPEED, at the University of Illinois, which uses both human and automated coding.

First the researchers tested the systems' reliability: Did they all detect the same protest events in Latin America? The answer was "not very well." ICEWS and GDELT, they found, rarely reported the same protests, and ICEWS and SPEED agreed on just 10.3 percent of them.

Next they assessed the systems' validity: Did the protest events reported actually occur? Here they found that only 21 percent of GDELT's reported events referred to real protests. ICEWS' track record was better, but the system reported the same event more than once, jacking up the protest count.

Vast reams of data are analyzed every millisecond of every day about the stock market, but still nobody can predict which way it will go...

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Google's Cloud has experienced a fifteen-hour hiccup, after some subscriptions to its "Cloud Pub/Sub ... were deleted unexpectedly approximately from Tuesday."

Cloud Pub/Sub is middleware that Google says "delivers low-latency, durable messaging that helps developers quickly integrate systems hosted on the Google Cloud Platform and externally."

Scratch the "durable" because on September 27th at 21:34 Pacific Time Google notified the world it had spotted deleted accounts and pledged to restore them.

By 15:26 on September 28th the company said "We have restored most of the missing Google Cloud Pub/Sub subscriptions for affected projects. We expect to restore the remaining missing subscriptions within one hour."

It took less than an hour for Google to advise customers they could "re-create missing subscriptions manually in order to make them available." Which isn't exactly how clouds are supposed to work!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/298589-judges-pauses-changes-to-federal-red-wolf-protections

A federal judge is [to] order the government to hold off on its plan to roll back measures to protect the red wolf in North Carolina. District Judge Terrence Boyle ordered Thursday that the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) hold off on its plan to remove wild red wolf populations from private land, unless they can show certain harms being caused by the wolves, in a major win for conservationists.

Boyle agreed with conservationists that the red wolf is in peril, and said they are likely to win on the merits in their challenge to the FWS's decision to stop the managed reintroduction plan for wild red wolves, and limit their population to a small swath of federal land. [...] "In November 2013, there were an estimated 100 red wolves in the wild with an estimated eight breeding pairs," Boyle said. "In March 2016, defendants estimated there to be only 45-60 red wolves in the wild. Such rapid population decline has been described as a catastrophic indicator that the wild red wolf population is in extreme danger of extinction."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/09/29/u-s-government-you-can-kill-red-wolves-if-they-bother-you-u-s-court-no-you-cant/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

If I died today it'd be a holiday... on Mars. Elon Musk has suggested that the first Martian settlers should be prepared to die:

The first people who fly with SpaceX to Mars should be OK with the possibility that the decision could cost them their lives, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said. SpaceX aims to ferry 1 million people to the Red Planet over the next 50 to 100 years using the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), a rocket-spaceship combo that Musk unveiled Tuesday (Sept. 27) during a talk at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico. (Well, he unveiled the ITS in concept; neither vehicle has been built yet.)

Musk painted a picture of a not-too-distant future in which 1,000 or more ITS spaceships, each loaded up with 100 or 200 settlers, zoom off toward Mars simultaneously from Earth orbit. But it's naïve to expect that everything will work perfectly from the start, he said. "I think the first journeys to Mars are going to be really very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high; there's just no way around it," Musk said at the IAC, adding that, for this reason, he would not suggest sending children on these flights. "It would be, basically, 'Are you prepared to die?' If that's OK, then, you know, you're a candidate for going," he said. Musk said he'd like to go to Mars, but it's unclear if he'll be among the Red Planet vanguard.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The New York Times has obtained a recording of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry voicing his frustration over the Syrian civil war:

Secretary of State John Kerry was clearly exasperated, not least at his own government. Over and over again, he complained to a small group of Syrian civilians that his diplomacy had not been backed by a serious threat of military force, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

"I think you're looking at three people, four people in the administration who have all argued for use of force, and I lost the argument."

The 40-minute discussion, on the sidelines of last week's United Nations General Assembly in New York, provides a glimpse of Mr. Kerry's frustration with his inability to end the Syrian crisis. He veered between voicing sympathy for the Syrians' frustration with United States policy and trying to justify it. The conversation took place days after a brief cease-fire he had spearheaded crumbled, and as his Russian counterpart rejected outright his new proposal to stop the bombing of Aleppo. Those setbacks were followed by days of crippling Russian and Syrian airstrikes in Aleppo that the World Health Organization said Wednesday had killed 338 people, including 100 children.

At the meeting last week, Mr. Kerry was trying to explain that the United States has no legal justification for attacking Mr. Assad's government, whereas Russia was invited in by the government.

"The problem is the Russians don't care about international law, and we do." [...] "We're trying to pursue the diplomacy, and I understand it's frustrating. You have nobody more frustrated than we are."

Also at Reuters.

Original Submission

Melbourne Launches World-Class Free Wi-Fi Network

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following stories:

Victoria has cemented its reputation as Australia's tech leader with the launch of the country's largest and fastest free Wi-Fi network across Melbourne's CBD today.

Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis joined City of Melbourne's Chief Digital Officer Michelle Fitzgerald at Southern Cross Station to announce the first of many Wi-Fi access points to be rolled-out across Melbourne as part of the Andrews Labor Government's $11 million Victorian Free Wi-Fi Pilot.

From today, visitors can use the VicFreeWiFi service within all Melbourne CBD train stations, the Bourke St Mall, Queen Victoria Market, and South Wharf Promenade at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

[...] Once the Melbourne network is complete, the VicFreeWiFi service will be the largest free public Wi-Fi network of its kind in Australia, covering an area of 600,000 square metres across the three cities.

Running for five years, the project is managed by telecommunications company TPG, allows for up to 250 MB per device, per day – and does not require personal logins or feature pop-up advertising.

You might recall that we published a story that Bing Maps appeared to have misplaced Melbourne, changing it from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere:

Microsoft's maps lost Melbourne because it used bad Wikipedia data • The Register

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for crutchy

Microsoft has laid part of the blame for Bing Maps' mis-location of the Australian city of Melbourne by a whole hemisphere on Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia, "the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit."

Microsoft made its admission after your correspondent took to Twitter on Monday to do what we in publishing call "pimping"the story of Melbourne's mis-placement.

[...] Deletion may be an option because our exploration of the Wikipedia page for Melbourne suggests it had the correct co-ordinates back in February 2012. So there you have it: Bing Maps sometimes relies on Wikipedia data. That data can be edited by anyone and is therefore often contentious.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/microsoft_lost_a_city_because_it_used_bad_wikipedia_data/

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