SoylentNews

Two Soylentils wrote to let us know about research into changes to a woman's brain as a result of pregnancy:

takyon writes:

Pregnancy causes visible changes in the female brain, enough to allow computers to determine whether a woman is pregnant by analyzing brain scan images:

Pregnancy reduces grey matter in specific parts of a woman's brain, helping her bond with her baby and prepare for the demands of motherhood. Scans of 25 first-time mums showed these structural brain changes lasted for at least two years after giving birth.

European researchers said the scale of brain changes during pregnancy were akin to those seen during adolescence. But they found no evidence of women's memory deteriorating. Many women have said they feel forgetful and emotional during pregnancy and put it down to "pregnancy" or "baby" brain - and, it seems, with good reason.

[...] This study, from researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Leiden University and published in Nature Neuroscience [open, DOI: 10.1038/nn.4458] [DX], looked at the brain scans of women before they became pregnant, soon after they gave birth, and two years later, to see how the brain changed. And they compared these women's brains with those of 19 first-time fathers, 17 men without children and 20 women who had never given birth. The researchers found "substantial" reductions in the volume of grey matter in the brains of first-time mothers. The grey matter changes occurred in areas of the brain involved in social interactions used for attributing thoughts and feelings to other people - known as "theory-of-mind" tasks.

Also at The New York Times .

hubie writes:

The female body undergoes dramatic, hormone-driven changes during pregnancy. In a new study, researchers have shown that gray matter regions shrink in areas involved with processing and responding to social signals. These changes occurred for women who conceived naturally or via in vitro fertilization. The researchers followed up with the study participants and found that, except for the hippocampus region, the gray matter loss remained true two years after they delivered their children. The changes were so consistent that a computer algorithm could predict with 100% accuracy whether a woman had been pregnant from her MRI scan.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The ora, paper money pegged to the South African rand, is one of hundreds of alternative currencies issued for mainly political reasons, but many of the newer currencies are increasingly virtual—digital representations of money consisting of nothing more than computer code. Most prominent among them: bitcoin, which, like conventional currency, can be traded online, transferred, stored or exchanged for cash. But, unlike conventional currency, it lives primarily on the internet, secured by layers of computer code.

This suits bitcoin users just fine. They want a secure way to exchange money by laptop, mobile phone or email. Yet so do terrorists and criminals, whom the U.S. government worries might develop and deploy their own uncrackable virtual currencies. Newsweek has learned hundreds of experts inside the nation's defense and intelligence agencies, as well as private-sector researchers in finance, technology and various think tanks across the country—some of them under contract with the U.S. government—are now investigating how virtual currencies could undermine America's long-standing ability to disrupt the financial networks of its foes and even permanently upend parts of the global financial system.

"There is a real danger and a challenge here with respect to virtual currencies," says Juan Zarate, a senior adviser at Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies and on the board of advisers for San Francisco's Coinbase, one of the most popular virtual currency exchanges in the world. "And it runs contrary to the very fundamentals of the transparency and accountability that we've tried to build for the last three decades to tackle terrorism, human trafficking, money-laundering and many other types of criminal activity."

[...] The biggest concern the U.S. has about virtual currencies, Zarate says, is that terrorists and other enemies might create one so powerful and so untrackable, that they'll no longer need the global banking system, which the U.S. uses to financially starve them. This has yet to happen, but America's defense and intelligence agencies are already trying to figure out how they might infiltrate or block such a malicious financial network.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The New York Times is reporting:

Russia's ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at an Ankara art exhibit on Monday evening by a lone Turkish gunman shouting "God is great!" and "don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria!" in what Russia called a terrorist attack.

The gunman, who was described by Ankara's mayor as a policeman, also wounded at least three others in the assault, which was captured on Turkish video. Turkish officials said he was killed by other officers in a shootout.

Reuters adds:

"The attack comes at a bad time: Moscow and Ankara have only recently restored diplomatic ties after Turkey downed a Russian aircraft in November 2015," the Stratfor think-tank said.

"Though the attack will strain relations between the two countries, it is not likely to rupture them altogether."

[...] Tensions have escalated in recent weeks as Russian-backed Syrian forces have fought for control of the eastern part of Aleppo, triggering a stream of refugees.

Original Submission

charon writes:

For the whole of human history, we have been voyagers. What's over the next hill; on the other side of the valley; beyond the forest? Finding the way back home, on the other hand, is more difficult. And so we learned to pay attention to our surroundings: landmarks, mountains, rivers, the direction of the sun. But when most of that is not available? For our brave ancestors who voyaged on the ocean beyond view of land, how did they keep track of their heading and position? Nainoa Thompson explains it:

The star compass is the basic mental construct for navigation. We have Hawaiian names for the houses of the stars – the place where they come out of the ocean and go back into the ocean. If you can identify the stars as they rise and set, and if you have memorized where they rise and set, you can find your direction.

The star compass also reads the flight path of birds and the direction of waves. It does everything. It is a mental construct to help you memorize what you need to know to navigate.

You cannot look up at the stars and tell where you are. You only know where you are in this kind of navigation by memorizing where you sailed from. That means constant observation. You have to constantly remember your speed, your direction and time. You don't have a speedometer. You don't have a compass. You don't have a watch. It all has to be done in your head. It is easy-in principle-but it's hard to do.

The memorization process is very difficult. Consider that you have to remember those three things for a month-every time you change course, every time you slow down. This mental construct of the star compass with its Hawaiian names is from Mau [Ed's Comment: The author's teacher]. The genius of this construct is that it compacts a lot information and enables you to make decisions based on that information.

How do we tell direction? We use the best clues that we have. We use the sun when it is low down on the horizon. Mau has names for the different widths and the different colors of the sun's path on the water. When the sun is low, the path is narrow, and as the sun rises the path gets wider and wider. When the sun gets too high you cannot tell where it has risen. You have to use other clues.

Sunrise is the most important part of the day. At sunrise you start to look at the shape of the ocean-the character of the sea. You memorize where the wind is coming from. The wind generates the waves. You analyze the character of the waves. When the sun gets too high, you steer by the waves. And then at sunset you repeat the process. The sun goes down-you look at the shape of the waves. Did the wind direction change? Did the swell pattern change? At night we use the stars. We use about 220, memorizing where they come up, where they go down.

When it gets cloudy and you can't use the sun or the stars all you can do is rely on the ocean waves. That's why Mau told me once, "If you can read the ocean you will never be lost." One of the problems is that when the sky gets black at night under heavy clouds you cannot see the waves. You cannot even see the bow of the canoe. This is where traditional navigators like Mau are so skilled. Lying inside the hull of the canoe, he can feel the different wave patterns as they come to the canoe, and from them tell the canoe's direction. I can't do that. I think that's what he started learning when he was a child with his grandfather, when he was placed in tide pools to feel the ocean.

And some people still do it today.

The US Naval Academy seems to think it's a good idea too.

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/elon-musk-hates-sitting-in-traffic-so-now-hes-going-to-build-tunnels/

Brunel had his ships. Trump had his walls. And now Musk wants to make... tunnels, tunnels under cities to reduce traffic congestion and make the world a better, cleaner, less rage-filled place.

Over the weekend, probably while sitting in traffic behind the wheel of an autonomous Tesla, Musk tweeted: "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." An hour later, probably while still sitting in traffic, giving him plenty of time to think of a witty pun, he declared: "It shall be called 'The Boring Company.' Boring, it's what we do."

And finally, an hour after that, just in case any of us were foolish enough to think the billionaire multi-CEO was joking, Musk said, "I am actually going to do this." He also changed his Twitter bio to include "Tunnels."

So, unless Musk was suffering from a prolonged bout of entrepreneurial road rage, we now know roughly how long it takes a pedigree industrialist to pick a new disruptible domain: two hours, give or take.

Tunnels are indeed a pretty good solution for traffic congestion, though they take a long time to build, and the construction usually causes a huge amount of disruption above ground—especially if those tunnels are being built in a metropolitan area, which is where you'll find most of the world's congestion.

Depending on the setting, it can be very difficult and expensive to build tunnels as well. Cut-and-cover—where you dig up an existing road, build a tunnel, and put the road back—is the only "cheap" tunnel building method, but it's so incredibly disruptive that most tunnels nowadays are built at deeper depths by automated tunnel boring machines (TBMs). Cost-wise, you're looking at about £1 billion per mile for TBMs: London's Crossrail, with 13 miles of new tunnel, will cost around £15 billion; Manhattan's second avenue subway line, with 8.5 miles of new tunnel, will cost about $17 billion. The costs are much lower if you just want to bore through a mountain—the just-completed 35-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland cost a mere £10 billion (and took 17 years to build!)—but I doubt Musk has those kinds of tunnels in mind.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

A story at Inverse, covers research that concludes that Evolution Made Really Smart People Long to Be Loners:

Psychologists have a pretty good idea of what typically makes a human happy. Dancing delights us. Being in nature brings us joy. And, for most people, frequent contact with good friends makes us feel content.

That is, unless you're really, really smart.

In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology , researchers Norman Li and Satoshi Kanazawa report that highly intelligent people experience lower life satisfaction when they socialize with friends more frequently. These are the Sherlocks and the Newt Scamanders of the world — the very intelligent few who would be happier if they were left alone.

[...] To come to this conclusion, the researchers analyzed the survey responses of 15,197 individuals between the ages of 18 and 28. Their data was a part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health — a survey that measures life satisfaction, intelligence, and health...

Intelligence is believed to have evolved as a psychological mechanism to solve novel problems — the sort of challenges that weren't a regular part of life. For our ancestors, frequent contact with friends and allies was a necessity that allowed them to survive. Being highly intelligent, however, meant an individual was more likely to be able to solve problems without another person's help, which in turn diminished the importance of their friendships.

[...] That certainly doesn't mean that if you enjoy being around your friends that you're unintelligent. But it does mean that the really smart person you know who spends much of their time alone isn't a sad loner — they probably just like it that way.

In my estimation, the community here is above-average in intelligence so I am curious: How many of you are loners? Do you prefer the company of yourself to the company of others?

Original Submission

charon writes:

The thickness of new volcanic crust forming on the seafloor has gotten thinner over the last 170 million years. That suggests that the underlying mantle is cooling about twice as fast as previously thought, researchers reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting.

The rapid mantle cooling offers fresh insight into how plate tectonics regulates Earth's internal temperature, said study coauthor Harm Van Avendonk, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. "We're seeing this kind of thin oceanic crust on the seafloor that may not have existed several hundred million years ago," he said. "We always consider that the present is the clue to the past, but that doesn't work here."

The finding is fascinating, though the underlying data is sparse, said Laurent Montési, a geodynamicist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Measuring the thickness of seafloor crust requires seismic studies, and "you don't have that everywhere; there's nothing in the South Pacific, for example." Still, he said, "it's amazing that we can see the signature of the cooling of the Earth." The finding could help explain why supercontinents such as Pangaea break apart, he added.

Original Submission

charon writes:

The Federal Communications Commission last week approved one of the most important advances in communications technology for deaf and hard of hearing people in decades, in one of the agency's final acts under the leadership of outgoing FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

In a move that's being hailed by accessibility advocates and leaders in the deaf and hard of hearing community as a historic step forward, the five-member FCC unanimously adopted rules to facilitate the transition from outdated, analog teletype (TTY) devices to a new, internet-based, real-time text messaging standard (RTT) compatible with the latest smart phones.

As a result of the FCC's action, the nation's wireless carriers and device manufacturers will be required to support RTT functionality, which allows real-time text messaging—without the need to hit "send"—in which the recipient can instantly see letters, characters and words as they are being typed.

[...] This innovation will facilitate more natural, conversation-friendly communication for deaf and hard of hearing people—without the need for separate, specialized hardware. It will also allow 911 operators to receive incomplete messages during an emergency, potentially saving lives. RTT technology is expected to be inter-operable across wireless networks and devices, creating the potential for unprecedented ease of communication between deaf and hearing people.

Original Submission

charon writes:

When a company reorganizes itself through a bankruptcy, is it the same company? And if so, is it liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by the previous version of itself?

These are questions raised by General Motors' efforts to dodge hundreds of lawsuits related to a potentially fatal ignition-switch flaw in millions of its older sedans. After receiving a stinging defeat in a federal appellate court this past summer, the automaker is now making a Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to convince judges that it has reincarnated into a seven-year-old car company free of liabilities from its previous life.

With potentially billions of dollars' worth of personal and financial injury claims at stake, the Detroit automaker's lawyers argue that allowing these lawsuits to go through would undermine an important aspect of corporate bankruptcy: giving assurance to the buyers of troubled companies that they aren't also buying a whole bunch of unexpected legal headaches.

But in GM's case there was no outside buyer. It essentially bought itself (with taxpayer money) in the wake of the mortgage-lending crisis that tipped the nation into recession and steered the American auto industry into a ditch.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At the AMD Tech Summit in Sonoma, Calif., last week (Dec. 7-9), CEO Lisa Su unveiled the company's vision to accelerate machine intelligence over the next five to ten years with an open and heterogeneous computing approach and a new suite of hardware and open-source software offerings.

The roots for this strategy can be traced back to the company's acquisition of graphics chipset manufacturer ATI in 2006 and the subsequent launch of the CPU-GPU hybrid Fusion generation of computer processors. In 2012, the Fusion platform matured into the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), now owned and maintained by the HSA Foundation.

Ten years since launching Fusion, AMD believes it has found the killer app for heterogeneous computing in machine intelligence, which is driven by exponential data surges.

"We generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day – whether you're talking about Tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook, Instagram, Google searches or emails," said Su. "We have incredible amounts of data out there. And the thing about this data is it's all different – text, video, audio, monitoring data. With all this different data, you really are in a heterogeneous system and that means you need all types of computing to satisfy this demand. You need CPUs, you need GPUs, you need accelerators, you need ASICS, you need fast interconnect technology. The key to it is it's a heterogeneous computing architecture.

"Why are we so excited about this? We've actually been talking about heterogeneous computing for the last ten years," Su continued. "This is the reason we wanted to bring CPUs and GPUs together under one roof and we were doing this when people didn't understand why we were doing this and we were also learning about what the market was and where the market needed these applications, but it's absolutely clear that for the machine intelligence era, we need heterogeneous compute."

Aiming to boost the performance, efficiency, and ease of implementation of deep learning workloads, AMD is introducing a brand-new hardware platform, Radeon Instinct, and new Radeon open source software solutions.

[...] "We are going to address key verticals that leverage a common infrastructure," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of Radeon Technologies Group. "The building block is our Radeon Instinct hardware platform, and above that we have the completely open source Radeon software platform. On top of that we're building optimized machine learning frameworks and libraries."

AMD is also investing in open interconnect technologies for heterogeneous accelerators; the company is a founding member of CCIX, Gen-Z and OpenCAPI.

[...] The AMD Tech Summit is a follow-on to the inaugural summit that debuted last December (2015). That first event was initiated by Raja Koduri as a team-building activity for the newly minted Radeon Technologies Group. The initial team of about 80, essentially hand-picked by Koduri to focus on graphics, met in Sonoma along with about 15 members of the press. The event was expanded this year to accommodate other AMD departments and nearly 100 media and analyst representatives.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After leaving a negative review and opening a support ticket about HRDSOFTWARE, a customer was told that he needed to download and install the latest version; then they would be able to provide support. He followed their directions, and once the download was installed, the program started, displayed the splash screen, and then completely shut down. After calling the support line to ask them to explain what they were doing, they informed him that he was blacklisted and the file they directed him to download blocked the software on the computer from running. PDF of ticket.

This thread on a ham radio enthusiast forum details the customer's complaint along with the expected peanut gallery postings. Discussion spread to other fora, accusations flew of favoritism and deleted posts. One co-owner pops in to say he's fixed the user's problem. Then something interesting happens on page 37. The other co-owner of HRDSoftware steps in and apologizes, reinstates the user's software, and spends the next 25 (and counting) pages engaging with the community and talking about how he can improve things going forward.

This story started out being about how users get punished for giving negative feedback, but now it is also about how to be a responsible business owner and respond to your userbase.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Trustwave recently reported a locally exploitable issue in the Skype Desktop API Mac OS-X which provides an API to local programs/plugins executing on the local machine. The API is formally known as the Desktop API (previously known as the Skype Public API – Application Programming Interface) and it enables third-party applications to communicate with Skype. As described in the Trustwave advisory, the issue is an authentication by-pass discovered in the API whereby a local program could by-pass authentication if they identified themselves as the program responsible for interfacing with the Desktop API on behalf of the Skype Dashboard widget program.

An interesting possibility is that this bug is the result of a backdoor entered into the Desktop API to permit a particular program written by the vendor to access the Desktop API without user interaction. Indeed, this possibility seems even more likely when you consider that the Desktop API provides for an undocumented client name identifier (namely "Skype Dashbd Wdgt Plugin").

Notifying the user of Desktop API through the backdoor works differently than the normal course of action which is to notify the user of an access attempt and prompt the user for permission. In the case of the backdoor no such notification attempt is made and as such the user is not given the opportunity to deny access. Furthermore, no mention is made in the "Manage API Clients" list. This allows any program accessing the Desktop API through the backdoor to remain hidden from the user.

Finally, no attempts are made to determine what programs that are accessing the Desktop API since they identify themselves as the undocumented client name identifier "Skype Dashbd Wdgt Plugin". This opens up the potential for abuse by third-party programs, including malware, running locally on the machine.

Curiously, the actual Skype Dashboard widget does not seem to utilize the backdoor into the Skype Desktop API despite the name "Skype Dashbd Wdgt Plugin". This raises the possibility that the backdoor is the result of a development accident which left the code behind accidentally during the process of implementing the Dashboard plugin. If it was a coding accident, it is an old one. Our investigations have shown that the string "Skype Dashbd Wdgt Plugin" has been present in versions of Skype for Mac OS-X for some 5+ years.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Two weeks ago, twitter was the only company willing to publicly commit to not aiding the government in building a database of muslims or any other religious minority. At the time, many criticized the Intercept for a click-baity, misleading headline.

But the public shaming had an effect and now more companies have come forward to vow non-cooperation in repeating one of America's biggest mistakes - when the census bureau provided the names of Japanese to be rounded up for internment camps.

One company notably missing from the list is Oracle which owns the big-data profiling company BlueKai and whose CEO recently joined the president elect's transition team. Also absent is IBM, a company with a history of aiding the German government with their execution of the Holocaust.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

When we give up human judgment in favor of software, code becomes law and programmers our unelected legislators.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Economics affects us all, so why do so many remain ignorant of the fundamentals? Murray Rothbard said: "[I]t is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Personally I'm tired of having to defend economics against both the mainstream advocates (with their broken models) and their critics (who tar economics with one brush). I take the time to educate myself and speak out, based on reason, not angry ignorance, and not on smugness, numerology, and appeals to the authority Lord Keynes.

There is a deep-seated tendency for people to misapply physical science techniques to the social sciences. This has resulted in mainstream economics degenerating into a modern day numerology. However there are intellectually sound schools of economics that do not attempt to treat human actions like Newtonian atoms.

This article from The Mises Institute discusses how and why mainstream economics has lost its way.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

This report from Gallup and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, "An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline" was released last week as a 120 page pdf. Here is the table of contents:

Now being reviewed by various pundits, for example, Robert Samuelson's take:

Original Submission