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Phoenix666 writes:

The bulk of methane emissions in the United States can be traced to a small number of "super emitting" natural gas wells, according to a new study.

"We're finding that when it comes to natural gas leaks, a 50/5 rule applies: That is, the largest 5 percent of leaks are typically responsible for more than 50 percent of the total volume of leakage," said study co-author Adam Brandt, an assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

The findings, published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, could lead to more efficient strategies for sampling emissions and fixing the most significant leaks, said Brandt, who is also a senior fellow at Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy. By focusing on finding and fixing the biggest emitters, companies can significantly reduce the amount of methane leaking into the atmosphere.

[...] For the new study, Brandt and his colleagues analyzed approximately 15,000 measurements from 18 prior studies of natural gas leaks from across the U.S. using a statistical technique called extreme value theory, which is useful for analyzing infrequent but highly consequential events.

"Extreme value theory has been used to study everything from major flood events to crop losses brought on by drought and stock market crashes," Brandt said. "In all of these cases, infrequent events really drive a lot of decision-making and expenditure or have big economic consequences. We are the first to apply this technique in a formal and rigorous way to natural gas leaks."

The referenced paper can be found here (full paper paywalled, abstract only) (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b04303) (DX).

Thank goodness the answer wasn't "cows."

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MrPlow writes in (at the behest of TheMightyBuzzard, via IRC) that the FCC has approved (on Thursday, 27 October 2016) rules which place limits on sharing sensitive data by broadband providers, as well as requiring notifications of data breaches.

Techraptor is reporting on the adoption of these rules:

The Federal Communications Commission(FCC) has adopted new rules which broadband providers must adhere to regarding the privacy of customer data. The FCC has published a press release as well as a fact sheet which explain some of the details of the new rules. The FCC claims authority in this area based on the Communications Act, which requires telecommunications companies to protect the privacy of their customers. The FCC has already implemented rules governing privacy for telephone companies and is now applying the same standard to broadband providers.

The FCC has implemented rules requiring notifications of how ISPs handle customer data. ISPs must tell customers what types of data are collected, the purpose of any data sharing that takes place, and what types of entities the data is shared with. Customers must be informed of the data sharing policy when they sign up for the service, and receive notifications any time the policy is updated. Additionally, the rules require that the policy is “persistently” available either on a website or a mobile app.

The rules distinguish between sensitive data and non-sensitive data. Some of the examples given for sensitive data include precise geolocation data, financial information, social security numbers, browsing history, and the content of communications. Such information can only be shared with third-parties on an opt-in basis and customers must explicitly consent to the sharing. Data like email addresses are considered non-sensitive and can be shared by default, with the opportunity for customers to opt-out. The FCC allows exemptions to the consent requirements for some purposes. For example if sharing data is necessary to provide the broadband service, to bill the customer, or to protect an ISP from fraudulent use of its network.

More information can be gleaned from TFA, and unsurprisingly, the vote and approval of these rules has been widely reported, with coverage from USA Today, Consumer Reports and The Washington Post, among others.

Do these privacy rules go too far, not far enough or are they just about right?
Is this a boon for the privacy minded or just another blatant example of government overreach? Is it both at the same time?

Related coverage:
After Setback, FCC Chairman Keeps Pushing Set-Top Box and Privacy Rules
FCC Waters Down Internet Privacy Proposal
Comcast Wants to Charge for Privacy

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takyon writes:

UC Berkeley will use the Green Bank radio telescope to observe Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative:

Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding over 10 years from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won't be the first to search for intelligent life around this star. "Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby's star has looked at it," he said. "It's been looked at with Hubble, it's been looked at with Keck, it's been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found."

While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star's unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can't not take a look. They've teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University.

The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three nights over the next two months, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion, Wright and Boyajian are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to start the observations, and expect to gather around 1 petabyte of data over hundreds of millions of individual radio channels.

Also at BBC.

Previously:
Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project
Mysterious Star May Be Orbited by Alien Megastructures
I'm STILL Not Sayin' Aliens. but This Star is Really Weird.

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inzkeeper writes:

Tech Dirt reports that Off We Go: Oracle Officially Appeals Google's Fair Use Win:

It was only a matter of time until this happened, but Oracle has officially appealed its fair use Java API loss [PDF] to the Federal Circuit (CAFC [US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit]). As you recall, after a years-long process, including the (correct) ruling that APIs are not covered by copyright being ridiculously overturned by CAFC, a new trial found that even if APIs are copyright-eligible, Google's use was covered by fair use. Oracle then tried multiple times to get Judge William Alsup to throw out the jury's ruling, but failed. In fact, on Oracle's second attempt to get Alsup to throw out the jury's ruling, citing "game changing" evidence that Google failed to hand over important information on discovery, it actually turned out that Oracle's lawyers had simply failed to read what Google had, in fact, handed over.

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Phoenix666 writes:

AMD has deployed a team of folks to charm enterprise server users ahead of the debut of its Zen designed-from-scratch x86 processor microarchitecture and the message they're sending is that the new silicon represents a chance to supersize servers.

As explained to The Register by Vinay Sinha, AMD's senior director for enterprise in Asia Pacific and Japan, the company's plan is first and foremost to convince enterprise that Zen will be stonking x86 CPUs. Beyond that, the company will point out that its significantly-lower-than-Xeon prices mean a chance to supersize servers with other nice-to-haves, perhaps more RAM or some lovely AMD GPUs.

AMD's tried this play in the PC market, where its newly-hired enterprise sales folks have had some success in price-sensitive markets like government and education where buyers want maximum bang for buck and don't see challenger brands as a risk. Big PC-makers also enjoy the company's pricing, as it gives them different price points. Speaking to The Reg at the Canalys Channels Forum in Macau, Sinha takes great heart from the fact that the likes of HP Inc. now offer AMD-powered premium notebooks. HPE, he said, will offer enterprise servers based on Zen. He feels other top-tier manufacturers won't be shy about practicing Zen and the art of server design so they too can show Chipzilla it can't take their business for granted.

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Tesla Reports First Quarterly Profit for Three Years

Phoenix666 writes:

Electric car maker Tesla has reported net income of $21.9m (£17.9m) for the third quarter after 13 consecutive quarterly losses.

This compared with a loss of $230m a year earlier.

Record deliveries helped to offset rising expenses for next year's roll-out of the company's mass-market Model 3 saloon (sedan) car.

Tesla [PDF] delivered a record 24,821 cars during the quarter, more than 300 more than estimated.

Shares in the electric car maker jumped 3.76% in after-hours trading.

"The Tesla third quarter results reflect strong company-wide execution in many areas," said chief executive Elon Musk and chief financial officer Jason Wheeler in a statement [PDF].

A sign of things to come for Tesla's bottom line, or a blip before the big boys catch up?

Tesla Surprises Wall Street, Posts a Profit for Q3

e_armadillo writes:

Forbes is reporting that Tesla reported a profit for the third quarter yesterday. Wall Street expected Tesla to post another loss:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkam/2016/10/27/elon-musk-surprises-wall-street-with-tesla-profits/#732fb8517cec (Javascript required.)

I, for one, am happy to see this. Not just because I have reserved a model 3, but because I am very much in favor of Tesla's mission, and hope very much that they succeed.

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Phoenix666 writes in with a story about the search for a hypothetical particle which may have a significant impact on particle physics and cosmology. The sterile neutrino is a neutrino that interacts even less with the rest of the universe than normal neutrinos:

Sterile neutrinos (or inert neutrinos) are hypothetical particles (neutral leptons – neutrinos) that interact only via gravity and do not interact via any of the other fundamental interactions of the Standard Model. The term sterile neutrino is used to distinguish them from the known active neutrinos in the Standard Model, which are charged under the weak interaction.

From the Phys.Org article:

Dr Justin Evans, senior lecturer in particle physics at The University of Manchester, said the elusive 'sterile' neutrino, if proven to exist, has the potential to unlock the great mysteries of our Universe – even potentially explaining why we exist as we do. Researchers believe identifying this new particle would be even more significant than locating the original so-called 'God particle', the Higgs boson.

As part of an international collaboration Dr Evans has been the Physics Coordinator on the MINOS experiment, leading the experiment's physics programme. As well as leading this part of the MINOS collaboration he also coordinated the research combination with another programme called Daya Bay.

        --The MINOS experiment uses an intense beam of muon neutrinos that travels 735 km from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Chicago to the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. MINOS has made world-leading measurements to study how these neutrinos disappear as they travel between the two detectors.
        --The Daya Bay experiment looks at electron antineutrinos coming from a nuclear power plant in the Guangdong province of China. The Daya Bay project measured, for the first time, one of the parameters governing neutrino oscillations.
...
"The sterile neutrino could explain the puzzle of why the neutrino is so much lighter - by orders of magnitude - than any other massive particle. It could help to explain why the universe contains more matter than antimatter, ie help to explain why we exist as we do. And, if the sterile neutrino is heavy enough, it could even be part of the solution for the dark matter puzzle."

'God Particle' is taken. How about 'Satan Particle?'

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takyon writes:

Google Fiber is hitting the pause button on discussion with "potential fiber cities", and will lay off about 9% of its approximately 1,500 employees. Craig Barratt, the CEO of Alphabet's Access division, is also stepping down.

After rolling out its Fiber product in about a dozen cities, Google is hitting pause on its project to deploy superfast Internet across the country. The news may come as a disappointment to those who were hoping the search giant would bring competition and faster speeds to their area.

[...] Even as Google Fiber pays lots of money to lay down cables and secure access to TV programming, a different type of technology is coming down the pike: wireless fiber. [...] There are signs that Google is moving in this direction, too. In June, it acquired Webpass, a provider of wireless broadband. Other acquisitions support this theory. And in its announcement Tuesday, Google Fiber said it would be looking at "new technology and deployment methods to make superfast Internet more abundant than it is today." So even if Google Fiber is on hold in its current incarnation, changes in technology may someday reduce the costs Google faces today.

Comcast and AT&T are still trying to hinder Google Fiber access to utility poles in Nashville. Both ISPs have filed suit against the Metro Government of Nashville for passing a "One Touch Make Ready" ordinance that benefits Google Fiber.

Previously: Google Fiber Gets Rid of "Free" Service in Kansas City
Costly Google Fiber Service Being Scaled Back in Favor of Google Wireless
Nashville Officials Approve Ordinance to Give Google Fiber Faster Access to Utility Poles

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Fnord666 writes:

ArsTechinca has an article about a new system created by a researcher that exploits weaknesses in the DSMx control protocol that allows them to take over a remotely controlled drone.

Now that the information is out there I would expect to see DIY versions of this on hackaday pretty soon.

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takyon writes:

Don't believe everything you see on TV... or Facebook:

People have been getting very excited about videos from the International Space Station (ISS) apparently broadcast "live" on Facebook - but they are not what they appear to be. The pictures are certainly stunning - astronauts in space suits apparently working outside the ISS against the background of the blue orb of the Earth.

Huge numbers have watching and commented on the feeds. Some 17m people viewed the "live" on Unilad's Facebook page and another 26m people watched four hours of footage on Viral USA's page. They appear to be old material from between one and three years ago. The eagle-eyed may have noticed that there was no mention of any such Facebook live on the social media accounts of NASA or the ISS, which would seem unusual.

Next up: live footage of the Challenger explosion.

Also at Newsweek and The Verge.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Samsung Electronics on Thursday reported an expected 30 percent profit plunge on the back of a highly damaging recall crisis that hammered the reputation of the world's largest smartphone maker. The third quarter earnings were announced just hours before the start of an annual shareholder meeting which was set to approve the latest step in a complex generational change of leadership at the family-run South Korean conglomerate.

Samsung said its operating profit for the July-September period stood at 5.2 trillion won ($4.6 billion), compared with 7.3 trillion won a year ago. The profit slump was in line with a revised earning estimate issued by Samsung two weeks earlier after it killed off its flagship Galaxy Note 7 smartphone due to devices overheating and bursting into flames.

The decision to discontinue production of a model aimed at competing with arch-rival Apple's iPhone was a devastating move for a company that prides itself on the quality production of cutting-edge technology.

Live by the smartphone, die by the smartphone.

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ticho writes:

Spearheaded by German software company SAP, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) and Ireland's Galway Education Centre, the programme aims to tackle the unemployment that has accompanied the refugee crisis in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt by equipping participants with the type of technical know-how that is in increasingly high demand by employers.

Information and communications technology (ICT) spending in the Middle East and Africa will reach $260bn this year, according to the American market research firm IDC, while a recent survey of MENA educators by Microsoft found that just 32 percent include digital literacy as part of their curricula.

"The region has an acute lack of skills in the ICT area, yet there is growth in the market," Batoul Husseini, the corporate social responsibility manager for SAP MENA, tells Al Jazeera. "Bridging this skills gap is a great opportunity for those countries most affected by the refugee crisis."

Read more at aljazeera.com

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takyon writes:

North Carolina libraries will begin to lend out motion-activated cameras for citizens to track backyard wildlife as part of the Candid Critters program:

The News & Observer of Raleigh reports organizers of the Candid Critters program hope to have the camera traps at 20,000 to 30,000 locations in backyards, state and national parks, game lands and forests over a three-year period. The cameras will be camouflaged and use an infrared flash so they don't disturb the animals when they go off. "For a long time, scientists have wanted to collect this kind of large-scale data using camera traps," said Roland Kays, the head of the Biodiversity Research Lab at the state Museum of Natural Sciences. "But it's daunting to do by yourself. We basically have built an e-Mammal data management system so that researchers can see and use the information that comes from citizen scientists' camera traps."

Kays said scientists are especially interested in studying the distribution patterns of deer across the state, and how that relates to the number of coyotes. Coyotes aren't native to North Carolina, but they have increased in recent years. Kays said scientists also hope the project will yield new information about bears, skunks, chipmunks, feral hogs and other animals.

Also at WUNC.

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Phoenix666 writes:

a team of Dutch inventors has unveiled a giant air-cleaning vacuum that they say filters out fine particle pollution from the surrounding air, but this project isn't about art, it's purely about functionality.

"It's a large industrial filter about eight meters long, made of steel... placed basically on top of buildings and it works like a big vacuum cleaner," Henk Boersen of the Envinity Group, the makers of the device, told the AFP.

The device can suck in air from a 300-meter radius and from up to four miles above and can clean 800,000 cubic meters of air an hour. It filters out 100 percent of fine particles and 95 percent of ultra-fine particles, based on prototype tests carried out by the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands.

All they need now is to build another two dozen coal-fired power plants to run the vacuums.

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AnonTechie writes:

The creator of the new Light digital camera explains how he made it work:

The best digital cameras today are SLRs (single-lens reflex cameras), which use a movable mirror to guide the same light rays that fall on the sensor into the viewfinder. These cameras normally have precisely ground glass lenses and large, high-quality image sensors. In the right hands, they can shoot amazing pictures, with brilliant colours and pleasing lighting effects, often showing a crisply focused subject and an aesthetically blurred background.

But these cameras are big, heavy, and expensive: A good digital SLR (DSLR) with a decent set of lenses—including a standard 50 mm, a wide angle, and a telephoto, for example—can easily set you back thousands of dollars.

So most photos today aren't being shot with DSLRs but with the tiny camera modules built into mobile phones. Nobody pretends these pictures match the quality of a photograph taken by a good DSLR; they tend to be grainy, and the camera allows very little artistic control. But smartphone cameras certainly are easy to carry around.

Can't we have it both ways ? Couldn't a high-quality yet still-tiny camera somehow be fit into a mobile device ?

The Light camera starts with a collection of inexpensive plastic-lens camera modules and mechanically driven mirrors. We put them in a device that runs the standard Android operating system along with some smart algorithms. The result is a camera that can do just about everything a DSLR can—and one thing it can't: fit in your pocket.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/inside-the-development-of-light-the-tiny-digital-camera-that-outperforms-dslrs

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