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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Last week an article from the BBC said:

Google has said it is 'thinking deeply' about ways to improve search, after criticism over how some results - including ones discussing the Holocaust - were ranked.

[...] Google - which processes five billion searches a day - was keen to come up with a solution that was broadly applicable across all searches, rather than just those that have been noticed by users.

"It's very easy to take a search here and there and demand Google change something," explained Mr Sullivan, "and then the next day you find a different search and say, 'why didn't you fix that?' "

This week we see the results of their efforts: Google has modified PageRank to surface "more high-quality, credible content on the web":

Google's technology was changed again after people spoke out about how typing in "are Jews evil" in the autocorrect function resulted in offensive terms. Also, when people searched "who runs Hollywood?" the result, "Jews," was scrubbed last year. Google said its algorithm incorrectly gave "authority" to a site that suggested so because it was linked to over and over again.

But Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Tuesday that Google has a long way to go to "clean up its act." While searching for "did the Holocaust happen?" no longer shows one white supremacist site at the top, searching for "is the Holocaust real?" still provides a site up high that claims it's a hoax.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have developed a vaccine against salmonella poisoning designed to be taken by mouth. The findings are detailed in an article published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.

In earlier studies, the UTMB researchers developed potential vaccines from three genetically mutated versions of the salmonella bacteria, that is Salmonella Typhimurium, that were shown to protect mice against a lethal dose of salmonella. In these studies, the vaccines were given as an injection.

[...] There is no vaccine currently available for salmonella poisoning. Antibiotics are the first choice in treating salmonella infections, but the fact that some strains of salmonella are quickly developing antibiotic resistance is a serious concern. Another dangerous aspect of salmonella is that it can be used as a bioweapon -- this happened in Oregon when a religious cult intentionally contaminated restaurant salad bars and sickened 1,000 people.

[...] Salmonella is responsible for one of the most common food-borne illnesses in the world. In the US alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are about 1.4 million cases with 15,000 hospitalizations and 400 deaths each year. It is thought that for every reported case, there are approximately 39 undiagnosed infections. Overall, the number of salmonella cases in the US has not changed since 1996.

Tatiana E. Erova, et al. Protective Immunity Elicited by Oral Immunization of Mice with Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium Braun Lipoprotein (Lpp) and Acetyltransferase (MsbB) Mutants. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, 2016; 6 DOI: 10.3389/fcimb.2016.00148

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Privacy groups have complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Google is encroaching on user privacy through a policy change in June that allows it to combine personally identifiable information with browsing data collected by its DoubleClick digital advertising service.

The complaint, by Consumer Watchdog and Privacy Rights Clearing House, alleged that Google has created "super-profiles" as it can track user activity on Android mobile phones, with an 88 percent market share of smartphones worldwide. The information can also be gleaned "from any website that uses Google Analytics, hosts YouTube videos, or displays ads served by DoubleClick or AdSense," according to the complaint.

The combination of data is in contrast to Google's pledges not to combine users' personally identifiable information with DoubleClick's browsing data when acquiring the ad serving service in 2008, according to the complaint filed Thursday but made public on Monday. In October this year, ProPublica reported that Google "quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand" by its policy change in June that allowed the DoubleClick database of web browsing records to be combined with personal user data.

On June 28, Google users were informed of some new optional features introduced for their account that would give them more control over the data the company collects and how it's used, while allowing the search giant to show more relevant ads. As part of the changes, Google struck out the language in its privacy policy stating that it would "not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent," according to the complaint. Existing users were presumably given the chance to opt out, but for new users the combination of personal and browsing data was done by default, it added.

[...] Describing the June move as highly deceptive, the groups said the announcement "intentionally misled users," who had no way to figure from the wording that Google was in fact asking users for permission to link their personal information to data reflecting their behavior on as many as 80 percent of the Internet's leading websites.

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martyb and Phoenix666 wrote:

Phys.org (among many other sites) is reporting on a leap second being added before the end of 2016:

As if 2016 has not been long enough, the year's dying minute will last an extra second to make up for time lost to Earth's slowing rotation, timekeepers say.

Countries that use Coordinated Universal Time—several West African nations, Britain, Ireland and Iceland—will add the leap second during the midnight countdown to 2017—making the year's final minute 61 seconds long.

For others, the timing will be determined by the time zone they live in, relative to UTC.

"This extra second, or leap second, makes it possible to align astronomical time, which is irregular and determined by Earth's rotation, with UTC which is extremely stable and has been determined by atomic clocks since 1967," the Paris Observatory said in a statement.

The observatory houses the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), responsible for synchronising time.

"The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2016 December 31 23h 59m 59s, 2016 December 31 23h 59m 60s, 2017 January 1, 0h 0m 0s," the IERS website states.

Here is the original IERS announcement. There have been times in the past when the addition of a leap-second caused havoc — it is non-trivial to update the clocks on all the systems in an organization at the same time. When activity "A" happens before activity "B", but because of inconsistent system clocks the timestamps imply otherwise, things can go sideways in a hurry.

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n1 writes:

A group of Mexican farmer leaders and academics believe that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, will be a good opportunity to review areas of the treaty that are not favorable to the sector in Mexico.

Experts say that after 23 years of its implementation, NAFTA, signed by Mexico, the United States and Canada in the early 90s, has helped dismantle Mexico's agricultural production system through neoliberal policies that have left millions of poor farmers without state support and have increased the country's food dependency on aboard, La Jornada reported Tuesday.

Since his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to force Canada and Mexico to negotiate the trade deal saying it has been detrimental to the manufacturing industry in the United States, sending shocking waves of uncertainty for the already weakened Mexican economy.

[...] In the years that have followed the NAFT signing, the Mexican government has sold itself as a pro-business and lower-cost alternative for U.S. companies and in the process became a manufacturing powerhouse of cars, computers, aerospace technology and televisions.

However, the modernization process also helped dismantle the national agricultural system, which has practically disappeared, according to analysts and producers.

Source: teleSUR

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takyon writes:

The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has unsealed an indictment of three Chinese hackers accused of targeting merger-advising law firms in order to conduct insider trading. According to the DA, the defendants bought shares of five companies before mergers were announced and sold them afterwards, resulting in profits of around $4 million. One of the defendants has been arrested in Hong Kong and faces extradition to the United States:

Law firms that advise on mergers once had to worry about a rogue employee trading on deal tips. Now, they have to worry about hackers doing the same.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged three Chinese citizens with making more than $4 million by trading on information they got by hacking into some of the top merger-advising law firms in New York. The three men targeted at least seven New York law firms to try to obtain information about deals in the works, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday.

The men were successful in hacking two firms, stealing emails of partners who work on mergers, prosecutors said. The three then bought shares of target companies, selling them after the deals were announced, prosecutors said.

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n1 writes:

Boeing's deal to sell $16.6 billion worth of aircraft to Iran may be worth only half that.

The company put that figure on the Iran Air deal for 50 737 airplanes and 30 777s when it was finalized earlier this month. But Iran's deputy transport minister said Sunday that the amount it will pay Boeing (BA) will be nearer $8 billion.

"Given the type of orders and the specifications we have chosen, the value of the deal to buy 80 planes from Boeing is about 50% of that value," said Asghar Fakhreeyeh Kashan, according to official news agency IRNA.

Source: CNN

Delta Air Lines Inc (DAL.N) said on Tuesday that in agreement with Boeing Co (BA.N) it would cancel an order for 18 787 Dreamliner aircraft, which it assumed as a part of its merger with Northwest Airlines.

The order is valued at more than $4 billion at current list prices. Delta, in its statement, did not disclose specific terms of the agreement. (bit.ly/2ibCr6f)

The airline, which acquired Northwest in 2008 for $2.6 billion in shares, said it would continue to take delivery of 737-900ER aircraft through 2019.

Source: Reuters

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aristarchus writes:

Seems someone got the whole thing seriously wrong, but evidently there was a casting call for actors for a Cadillac commercial that was looking for "alt-right" or "neo-nazi" types.

Hmm, maybe now that the "alt-right" has become just another marketing demographic, we do not have to worry about them taking over the country? I mean, who buys Cadillacs as a status symbol anymore? Not like they are your father's Oldsmobile. Except that, really, it was your father's Olds. So that brand no longer exists. Are we at the point where we can say, "Brietbart: it's not your grandpa's fascism!"? Except, really, maybe it is?

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Phoenix666 writes:

The mouth and anus are not connected in the development of the embryo as earlier thought, shows a Norwegian ground-breaking study.

Animals often form either the mouth or the anus from an opening that appears in the early embryo, which is called the blastopore.

For instance, starfish develop the anus from the blastopore, but earthworms form the mouth out of it. How this happens has not been clear until now.

"Our findings demonstrate that whether the blastopore forms the mouth or the anus is a consequence of how each embryo is organized during early development. It is not a predefined attribute of the species, as previously thought," says postdoctoral researcher Jose Maria Martin-Duran, at the Hejnol Group at Sars Centre at the Department of Biology, University of Bergen (UiB).

"One of the most important conclusions of our work is that there is no necessary association of the mouth and the anus with the embryonic blastopore," says Martin-Duran.

The developmental basis for the recurrent evolution of deuterostomy and protostomy (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-016-0005) (DX)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Original URL: The Register

IBM staff have petitioned the company to – among other things – express concern that "IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's open letter to President-elect Donald Trump does not affirm IBMers' core values of diversity, inclusiveness, and ethical business conduct."

The petition's authors respect Rometty's "willingness to engage in constructive dialogue with the president-elect" but argue IBM's culture is essential "to our transformation underpinned by cloud and cognitive initiatives."

[...] There's also a call to "Respect our right to refuse participation in any U.S. contracts that violate constitutional and civil liberties" which sounds like an option to opt out of working on Trump's planned register of Muslims. Another demand wants IBM to "Prohibit perceived influence-peddling of elected officials by restricting IBM and its employees from using any Trump owned or Trump branded properties for business purposes, in accordance with the IBM Business Conduct Guidelines."

In part the petition reads:

We have a moral and business imperative to uphold the pillars of a free society by declining any projects which undermine liberty, such as surveillance tools threatening freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

[...] Taking a conservative approach has grave implications. Our own founder's experience and the rest of history teach us that accommodating those who unleash forces of aggressive nationalism, bigotry, racism, fear, and exclusion inevitably yields devastating outcomes for millions of innocents.

Full text: IBMers to CEO Ginni Rometty: Affirm IBM values!

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n1 writes:

Think twice before complaining on your next Korean Air flight - flight crew can now use Tasers to deal with mid-air disturbances. The airline has made the decision to loosen its Taser usage policy after a violent incident on a flight last week resulted in 80s pop star Richard Marx having to subdue an unruly passenger.

On-board crew already have had Tasers on hand for years but could only use them when lives or the physical safety of passengers and cabin crew was threatened. But new rules will allow for "more active use" of Tasers, a Korean Air spokesperson told CNN.

Source: CNN

Also at The Independent

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] Renowned astrophysicist and National Medal of Science awardee Vera Rubin passed away in Princeton N.J., the evening of December 25, 2016, at the age of 88. Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter—the invisible material that makes up more than 90% of the mass of the universe. She was a retired staff astronomer at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C.

"Vera Rubin was a national treasure as an accomplished astronomer and a wonderful role model for young scientists," remarked Carnegie president Matthew Scott. "We are very saddened by this loss."

In the 1960s, Rubin's interest in how stars orbit their galactic centers led her and colleague Kent Ford to study the Andromeda galaxy, M31, a nearby spiral. The two scientists wanted to determine the distribution of mass in M31 by looking at the orbital speeds of stars and gas at varying distances from the galactic center. They expected the speeds to conform to Newtonian gravitational theory, whereby an object farther from its central mass orbits slower than those closer in. To their surprise, the scientists found that stars far from the center traveled as fast as those near the center.

After observing dozens more galaxies by the 1970s, Rubin and colleagues found that something other than the visible mass was responsible for the stars' motions. Each spiral galaxy is embedded in a "halo" of dark matter—material that does not emit light and extends beyond the optical galaxy. They found it contains 5 to 10 times as much mass as the luminous galaxy. As a result of Rubin's groundbreaking work, it has become apparent that more than 90% of the universe is composed of this invisible material. The first inkling that dark matter existed came in 1933 when Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky of Caltech proposed it. But it was not until Rubin's work that dark matter was confirmed.

Besides her remarkable scientific contributions, as noted by colleague Neta Bahcall of Princeton University: "Vera was an amazing scientist and an amazing human being.  A pioneering astronomer, the 'mother' of flat rotation curves and dark-matter, a champion of women in science, a mentor and role model to generations of astronomers."

-- submitted from IRC

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takyon writes:

Six former executives and managers from Arizona-based drugmaker, Insys Therapeutics, face conspiracy charges over what a federal prosecutor calls a "racketeering crime." In this case, according to the indictment, the former employees of the drug manufacturer are alleged to have rewarded doctors for prescribing their spray version of the opiate fentanyl, even when it wasn't medically appropriate.

[...] Three years ago on CNBC, Michael Babich demonstrated the company's drug, "Subsys," a prescription pain reliever for cancer patients which is delivered through a spray. The medication, which the company first sold in 2012, racked up $329 milllion in sales last year. "The device that I brought with me today allows the patient to simply with no priming spray the drug underneath their tongue," Babich explained.

According to the indictment, the defendants "conspired with one another to use bribes and kickbacks" for doctors who "wrote large numbers of... prescriptions, most often for patients who did not have cancer." The scheme allegedly funneled tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to practitioners, including one whom a sales representative boasted in an email was running "a very shady pill mill and only accepts cash."

Source: CBS News

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"exec" submits this very interesting article from The New Yorker:

Shortly after the dam went into use, Nadhir al-Ansari, a consulting engineer, made an inspection for the Ministry of Water Resources. “I was shocked,” he told me. Sinkholes were forming around the dam, and pools of water had begun bubbling up on the banks downstream. “You could see the cracks, you could see the fractures underground,” Ansari said. The water travelling around the dam, known as “seepage,” is normal in limited amounts, but the gypsum makes it potentially catastrophic. “When I took my report back to Baghdad, the chief engineer was furious—he was more than furious. But it was too late. The dam was already finished.”

The dam was built in an area that contains a high amount of water-soluble gypsum. The pressure from the dam's water is causing this gypsum to dissolve, leaving behind voids in the ground beneath the dam. Workers and engineers have been working to fill the voids with 'grout' - a cement mixture:

Inside the gallery, the engineers are engaged in what amounts to an endless struggle against nature. Using antiquated pumps as large as truck engines, they drive enormous quantities of liquid cement into the earth. Since the dam opened, in 1984, engineers working in the gallery have pumped close to a hundred thousand tons of grout—an average of ten tons a day—into the voids below.

[...]When ISIS fighters took the dam, in 2014, they drove away the overwhelming majority of the dam’s workers, and also captured the main grout-manufacturing plant in Mosul. Much of the dam’s equipment was destroyed, some by ISIS and some by American air strikes. The grouting came to a standstill—but the passage of water underneath the dam did not.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-problem-than-isis

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

International investigators hunting for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have admitted after combing the Indian Ocean for two years search crews were likely looking in the wrong place.

Tuesday's conclusion raises the possibility the search for the Boeing 777 could continue well beyond next month, when crews are expected to finish their deep sea sonar hunt of the current search zone west of Australia.

Australia's transport minister, however, suggested that was doubtful.

The latest analysis of the plane's whereabouts comes in a report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), which is leading the search for the aircraft.

The report is the result of a November meeting of international and Australian experts who re-examined all the data used to narrow down the search area for the plane, which vanished during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.

In the years since the plane disappeared, experts have analysed a series of exchanges between the aircraft and a satellite to estimate a probable crash site along what's known as the seventh arc - a vast arc of ocean that runs through the southern hemisphere. A deep sea search of a 120,000sq km stretch of water along the seventh arc has so far come up empty.

In November, the experts went back over the satellite data, along with the results of a new ocean drift analysis of the more than 20 items of debris likely to have come from the plane that have washed ashore on beaches throughout the Indian Ocean. The analysis, which looked at where the items washed ashore and when, suggested the debris originated in an area farther north along the arc from the current search zone.

Given the number of aircraft parts found so far, the team concluded there must have been a debris field floating on the surface of the water when the plane crashed. So they eliminated an area that had already been the subject of a surface search by air crews in the early stages of the hunt.

That left a 25,000-square kilometre area immediately to the north of the current search zone as the most likely place where the plane hit the ocean, the ATSB report said.

The investigators concluded there is "a high degree of confidence" the plane is not in the current search area and they agreed the new area needs to be searched.

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