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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Investopedia reports:

A week after United Continental Holdings Inc. (UAL) settled a lawsuit over baggage handler workplace injuries, a United worker was locked in an airplane's cargo hold.

The Washington Post reports that the worker spent over an hour locked in an airplane traveling from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., on the afternoon of Jan. 1. The flight was operated by Mesa Airlines, an airline operating regional feeder flights for United and American Airlines Group Inc.

[...] The worker was unharmed in the incident and told The Washington Post that he was advised by his lawyer not to discuss the incident.

Less than a week earlier, on Dec. 27, United Airlines announced it settled a lawsuit brought by its baggage handlers. The workers alleged more than 600 musculoskeletal workplace injuries between 2011 and 2015.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

As we get closer and closer to Nintendo's January 12 announcement of additional Nintendo Switch details—and an expected March launch for the hybrid portable/home console—we're starting to get more information on what kind of support the system might get from third-party developers.

The most interesting tidbit comes from Laura Kate Dale, who's come through with a number of reliable Nintendo Switch leaks in the recent past. Dale's recent tweets suggest Ubisoft's long-anticipated Beyond Good & Evil 2 will reportedly be "exclusive to Switch for 12 months," and the game will come to Xbox One, PS4, and PC only after that time. That information should be confirmed at Nintendo's January reveal, according to Dale.

[...] Unfortunately for Nintendo, not every developer is as interested in bringing big-name titles to the Switch. In an interview with Oceanic gaming site Stevivor, Bioware's Michael Gamble said he had no plans to bring the upcoming Mass Effect Andromeda to the Switch at this point. However, Gamble did leave some wiggle room: "if the Switch launches and everyone's just yammering for Mass Effect, who knows. We never want to close doors like that."

The level of high-quality support that the Switch receives from third-party developers could be a make-or-break question for the console. Will the upcoming Nintendo Switch be a Wii U-style abandoned island, with no one but Nintendo to make compatible games? Will it be a Wii-style repository of third-party shovelware that lacks competent ports of the big-budget games made for competing consoles? Or will it be a return to the SNES era, the last time a Nintendo home console was unquestionably one of the primary destinations for major games from most third-party publishers.

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takyon writes:

Four people have been charged in Chicago over a beating live streamed to Facebook. In addition to hate crime charges, there are counts of aggravated kidnapping, battery, and unlawful restraint:

Authorities in Chicago charged four people with hate crimes Thursday following the emergence of a disturbing video appearing to show them shouting obscenities about President-elect Donald Trump and white people while abusing a man authorities say has mental health problems. The footage, which Chicago's top police officer labeled "sickening," quickly went viral online. In the shaky video, a terrified young man in a gray hooded sweatshirt and dark pants is seen crouching in a corner, his wrists and neck bound with orange bands, his mouth taped shut.

A young woman films as two young men slash the sleeves of his shirt with knives, then take turns punching him, slapping him and stomping on his head. At one point, one of the men can be seen cutting the victim's hair and scalp with a knife, and the victim is later shown bleeding from his injuries. As the victim cowers with his back to the wall, someone can be heard repeatedly shouting, "F‑‑‑ Donald Trump" and "F‑‑‑ white people."

Throughout the 28-minute video — which focuses mostly on the young woman behind the camera — the group laughs, jokes and listens to music as the victim sits motionless on the floor. About halfway through, someone says the man "represents Trump," and threatens to put him in the trunk of a car and "put a brick on the gas."

Also at NPR, USA Today, CNN, and Reuters.

The video is available at LiveLeak. Feel free to search for it if you wish.

So, did Black Mirror predict this type of event?

This story was also submitted by Runaway1956.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Eighty percent of all products of the chemical industry are manufactured with catalytic processes. Catalysis is also indispensable in energy conversion and treatment of exhaust gases. It is important for these processes to run as quickly and efficiently as possible; that protects the environment while also saving time and conserving resources. Industry is always testing new substances and arrangements that could lead to new and better catalytic processes. Researchers of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Villigen and ETH Zurich have now developed a method for improving the precision of such experiments, which may speed up the search for optimal solutions. At the same time, their method has enabled them to settle a scientific controversy more than 50 years old. They describe their approach in the journal Nature.
...
The researchers built a model system that enables them to study catalysis in the most minute detail. The experiments were carried out mainly at the PSI, and the theoretical basis was worked out at ETH Zurich. For the model experiment the team of Karim and van Bokhoven used iron oxide, which was converted to iron through the addition of hydrogen and with assistance from the catalyst platinum. The platinum splits the molecular hydrogen (H2) into elemental hydrogen (H), which can more easily react with iron oxide.

The main attraction of their model: With state-of-the-art electron-beam lithography, otherwise used mainly in semiconductor technology, the researchers were able to place miniscule particles, consisting of just a few atoms each, on a support. The size of the iron oxide particles was only 60 nanometres, and the platinum particles were even smaller at 30 nanometres - about two-thousandths of the diameter of a human hair. The researchers positioned these particles in pairs on a grid-like model at 15 different distances from each other - in the first grid segment the platinum particle lay precisely on top of the iron oxide particle, and in the 15th segment, the particles lay 45 nanometres apart. In a 16th segment, the iron oxide was completely alone. "Thus we were able to test 16 different situations at once and control the size and spacing of the particles with one-nanometre accuracy", Karim explains. Then they vapourised the model with hydrogen and watched what happened.

For this observation in the molecular domain the team had, in an earlier project, employed a method called "single-particle spectromicroscopy" to analyse tiny particles by means of X-rays. The instruments needed to do this are available at the Swiss Light Source SLS of the PSI, a large-scale research facility that generates high-quality X-ray light. Not only is the precision of the particle positioning new, but the correspondingly accurate observation of chemical reactions - including simultaneous observation of many particles in different situations - had not been possible before: "In previous studies, placement of the nanoparticles of two different materials could be off by up to 30 nanometres", Karim explains.

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jrmcferren writes:

According to a recent article on PetaPixel, Kodak Ektachrome film will be brought back into production.

It's not every day that you hear about a classic film line being brought back from the dead, but that's what's being announced today. Kodak Ektachrome film is coming back for film photographers.

The announcement was made today at CES in Las Vegas by Kodak Alaris, the separate company owned by the Kodak Pension Plan in the UK that runs Kodak's old Personalized Imaging division.

The original Kodak Professional Ektachrome color reversal film line was killed off by Kodak back in 2012 after years of sales declines and a drop in usage by photographers. It seems that trend has reversed.

"The reintroduction of one of the most iconic films is supported by the growing popularity of analog photography and a resurgence in shooting film," Kodak Alaris says. "Resurgence in the popularity of analog photography has created demand for new and old film products alike."

[...] The new Ektachrome will be available in 35mm and will hit store shelves in the 4th quarter of 2017.

In addition this press release from Kodak Alaris indicates that it will also be released in the Super 8 Format.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Most current plastics are made from oil, which is unsustainable. However, scientists from the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies (CSCT) at the University of Bath have developed a renewable plastic from a chemical called pinene found in pine needles.

Pinene is the fragrant chemical from the terpene family that gives pine trees their distinctive "Christmas smell" and is a waste product from the paper industry.

The researchers hope the plastic could be used in a range of applications, including food packaging, plastic bags and even medical implants.

Degradable polyesters such as PLA (polylactic acid) are made from crops such as corn or sugar cane, but PLA can be mixed with a rubbery polymer called caprolactone to make it more flexible. Caprolactone is made from crude oil, and so the resulting plastic isn't totally renewable.

The researchers publishing their results in the journal Polymer Chemistry, used pinene as the raw material to make a new type of plastic that can be used in the place of caprolactone.

Helena Quilter, PhD student at the CSCT, explained: "We're not talking about recycling old Christmas trees into plastics, but rather using a waste product from industry that would otherwise be thrown away, and turning it into something useful.

Christmas trees aren't plastic already?

Original Submission

AthanasiusKircher writes:

In a press release Thursday, the National Institutes of Health reported an addendum to its official guidelines for Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy. The specific change is intended to address the precipitous rise in peanut allergies which has occurred recently. For many years, parents have been strictly advised to avoid exposing babies to peanuts, eggs, and other potential allergen foods, on the hypothesis that early exposure could be dangerous and exacerbate problems in those children likely to develop allergies.

The new guidelines are a complete reversal in that the NIH now recommends earliest exposure (4 to 6 months) for children at most risk of developing allergies, such as those with severe eczema and/or known egg allergies. Other children should also have peanuts -- though not whole ones, which can be a choking hazard -- introduced into diets freely along with solid foods. The new guidelines are based on results from the landmark Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study. From the NIH press release:

CNN reports on the history of the LEAP study, noting that there was an earlier practice in Israel to expose children to peanuts as early as possible. Anecdotally, these children had a much lower frequently of allergies than Israeli children raised in the UK. The LEAP study thus assigned over 600 children randomly to a group with early exposure or a group which avoided peanuts completely for the first 5 years of life. The results were striking:

The study and the new NIH guidelines represent one of the most scientifically rigorous rationales to reconsider allergy guidelines in general. Proponents of early exposure to problematic foods, along with the hygiene hypothesis, claim that the obsession with avoiding exposure to potential allergens in early life has actually caused the current epidemic of allergies. Approximately 1 in 13 children in the U.S. has a food allergy; over 2% alone have peanut allergies. While death from anaphylaxis after exposure is relatively rare, various studies indicate that peanuts are likely the most common trigger in children and frequently result in hospital visits. The NIH policy change is also quite relevant, following the extended national debate on cost of anaphylaxis medication, particularly the outrageous prices for EpiPens (see SoylentNews coverage here, here, and here).

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Troubling new findings have been discovered that could affect the lives of (misleadingly* branded) "three-parent" offspring born thanks to breakthrough mitochondrial replacement therapy.

The technique grabbed the world's attention when in September a baby was born bearing the DNA of three parents, a feat that overcame the otherwise fatal Leigh syndrome** genetic disorder carried by the child's mother.

It was heralded as a major step up from in vitro fertilisation. in the technique, the nucleus of an egg from the syndrome-affected mother is implanted into a female donor egg with healthy mitochondria which has had its nucleus removed. The resulting egg is fertilised with the father's sperm.

It has since been approved by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority with the first treatments possible in 2018.

Now a paper (pdf) published in the journal Nature – and written by 30 researchers headed by Oregon Health and Science University Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov – has found mitochondrial replacement therapy in 15 per cent of cases may allow the fatal defects it amends to resurface, even introducing new defects.

[Ed. Note: The asterisk in the first line refers to a footnote in the source article; it is not a typo.]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new declassified report released by US intelligence officials says Russian President Vladimir Putin "ordered" a campaign to influence the 2016 US presidential election.

The 25-page public version of the report was released on Friday after the officials briefed President-elect Donald Trump and top lawmakers on Capitol Hill on a longer, classified version.

The report said Russian efforts to meddle in vote represent the most recent expression of Moscow's long-standing desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.

[...] After his briefing, Trump stopped short of embracing the intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in the presidential campaign, saying only that any hacking attempts had "absolutely no effect" on the outcome of the election.

Having hours earlier dismissed the hacking controversy as a "political witch hunt," Trump later issued a statement whose main aim appeared to be to deflect questions about the legitimacy of his November 8 victory over Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

Full text of report available in many places, including at scribd.

Runaway1956 writes:

The Amazon Echo system which does everything from getting your weather report to ordering more laundry detergent can also do some things you don't want it to.

[...] Which is exactly what happened today during CW6 in the morning when Jim Patton and Lynda Martin were talking about a child who accidentally bought a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies

"I love the little girl, saying 'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse,'" said Patton.

As soon as Patton said that, viewers all over San Diego started complaining their echo devices had tried to order doll houses. It's a common problem experts say can be avoided.

[...] Cobb says the Federal Trade Commission is already looking into voice-command devices and toys to make sure the technology is safe and secure. For now, he recommends do your research to keep your personal information controlled and protected.

Source: News anchor sets off Alexa devices around San Diego ordering unwanted dollhouses

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Where is the geographic center of a state, country or a continent?

It's a question fraught with uncertainty. Do you include water in your calculation? What about islands? What happens when the shoreline shifts?

The U.S. Geological Survey alluded to these complexities in a 1964 report on the centers of states, which opened by stating, "There is no generally accepted definition of geographic center, and no completely satisfactory method for determining it." More recently, various representatives of the agency have given quotes to newspapers saying much the same, hedging.

But to University at Buffalo geologist Peter Rogerson, PhD, the challenge of finding a middle doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

"There are all these people out there saying, 'There's no real good way to do this,'" says Rogerson, a SUNY Distinguished Professor of geography in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. He respectfully disagrees: "As a geographer, my feeling is that if we want to come up with a good way of defining a center, we can and we should."

In a 2015 paper in The Professional Geographer, an academic journal, Rogerson describes a new method for pinpointing the heart of a spatial entity. The approach improves on past techniques, he says, by taking the curvature of the Earth into account appropriately and by identifying geographic centers using a definition that's mathematically sound.

In late 2016, he employed his method to find the heart of North America. The result was serendipitous: According to his calculations, the center of the continent is in a place called Center, a town of 570 people in North Dakota.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Federal Trade Commission announces

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hosting a prize competition that challenges the public to create a technical solution ("tool") that consumers can use to guard against security vulnerabilities in software found on the Internet of Things (IoT) devices in their homes.

The tool would, at a minimum, help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software. Contestants have the option of adding features, such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.

The prize for the competition is up to $25,000, with $3,000 available for each [of three] honorable mention winner(s).

However, not only do the gov't workers not put ALL of the details on ONE page like people with normal intelligence, you also can't see the part of the page that contains the Registration and Submission link unless you have JavaScript enabled.

In their coverage, El Reg notes

Anyone who gets a genuinely good solution to this stuff won't need the $25,000 for long: they'll be scooped up by Silicon Valley in less time than it takes to say "elevator pitch".

Submissions for the [FTC] contest open on March 1, 2017 and close on May 22, 2017. Winners will be announced on July 27, 2017.

They also have a not-exactly-short list of IoT stuff that has already been pwned or has shipped with insecure configurations.

We can probably all agree that the current situation with insecure devices that can be hijacked and used as bots is unsatisfactory, but has anyone got any suggestions that would still enable a company to market secure devices while keeping the costs at a reasonable level?

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takyon writes:

The key specifications for the HDMI 2.1 standard have been announced:

The HDMI Forum on Wednesday announced key specifications of the HDMI 2.1 standard, which will be published in the second quarter. The new standard will increase link bandwidth to 48 Gbps and will enable support for up to 10K resolutions without compression, new color spaces with up to 16 bits per component, dynamic HDR, variable refresh rates for gaming applications as well as new audio formats

The most important feature that the HDMI 2.1 specification brings is massively increased bandwidth over predecessors. That additional bandwidth (48 Gbps over 18 Gbps, a bit more than what a USB-C cable is rated for) will enable longer-term evolution of displays and TVs, but will require the industry to adopt the new 48G cable, which will keep using the existing connectors (Type A, C and D) and will retain backwards compatibility with existing equipment (which probably means 8b/10b encoding and effective bandwidth of around 38 Gbps). The standard-length 48G cables (up to two meters) will use copper wires, but it remains to be seen what happens to long cables. It is noteworthy that while some of the new features that the HDMI 2.1 spec brings to the table require the new cable, others do not. As a result, some of the new features might be supported on some devices, whereas others might be not.

The increased bandwidth of HDMI 2.1's 48G cables will enable support of new UHD resolutions, including 4Kp120, 8Kp100/120, 10Kp100/120, and increased frame rates. It is no less important that increased bandwidth will enable support of the latest and upcoming color spaces, such as BT.2020 (Rec. 2020) with 10, 12, or even more advanced with 16 bits per color component and without compression. HDMI Forum does not say it explicitly, but the version 2.1 of their standard will also likely support the BT.2100 (Rec. 2100), which has a number of important enhancements to the BT.2020 when it comes to HDR. While HDMI 2.0 already supports BT.2020 and HDMI 2.0b adds support for HDR10 (through support for Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG)), it only can transmit 10 and 12 bits per sample at 4Kp60 resolution. To support HDR at 8K, one will need HDMI 2.1.

10K resolution (5760p)? 16-bits per channel color (281,474,976,710,656 shades of grey)? It's necessary!

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Norway is set to become the first nation to start switching off its FM radio network next week, in a risky and unpopular leap to digital technology that will be closely watched by other countries considering whether to follow suit.

Critics say the government is rushing the move and many people may miss warnings on emergencies that have until now been broadcast via the radio. Of particular concern are the two million cars on Norway's roads that are not equipped with digital audio broadcasting (DAB) receivers, they say.

Sixty-six per cent of Norwegians oppose switching off FM, with just 17 per cent in favour and the rest undecided, according to an opinion poll published by the daily Dagbladet last month.

Nevertheless, parliament gave the final go-ahead for the move last month, swayed by the fact that digital networks can carry more radio channels.

Should there be a push to switch off FM radio in order to 'persuade' users to upgrade their receiving equipment? Or should the change be implemented much more slowly to enable FM radios to be replaced as they age? How would you do it?

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BK writes:

I found an interesting article on fivethirtyeight.com about fake news and how to address it. It's a long article but worth the read. This bit is near the end:

Media outlets keep trying to debunk fake news. This won't work, particularly for readers who have already decided that the traditional press is fake news — and, fair or not, partisan. Research suggests that the more partisan a topic, the more likely people who identify strongly with one side will double down on their argument even if they are presented with facts that counter it.

Maybe, instead, the media should do a better job of distinguishing real news from fake news, to regain readers' trust. Click-based advertising has left us adrift in a sea of inaccurate, sensational headlines, even at legitimate news outlets; this makes it easier for dramatic fake news headlines to survive. Aggregation has us spreading stories with no original research or corroboration, and it makes everyone look bad when outlets fall for fake bait. Over the holidays, a heartwarming story about a Santa Claus who visited a child's deathbed went viral. Three days later, the Knoxville News Sentinel, which originally published the story, retracted it, but not before it had spread to CNN, Fox, USA Today and more.

Maybe the news should stop trying so hard to entertain.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

A report on eSecurityPlanet says that a hospital patient has posted 15,000 people's personal information on a social media site. This includes names, addresses, Social Security information and Medicaid information.

The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) recently announced that personal information belonging to as many as 15,000 DHHS clients was posted to a social media site over a year ago by a patient at New Hampshire Hospital.

"The personal information was accessed, in October 2015, by an individual who was a patient at New Hampshire Hospital at that time, using a computer that was available for use by patients in the library of the hospital," DHHS said in a statement. "In the course of investigation, we learned that this individual was observed by a staff member to have accessed non-confidential DHHS information on a personal computer located in the New Hampshire Hospital library."

The staff member notified a supervisor, who restricted access to library computers -- but the incident was never reported to hospital management or to DHHS.

In August of 2016, almost a year later, a hospital security official notified DHHS that the same person may have posted some DHHS information on social media, though an investigation didn't uncover any evidence that confidential information had been exposed.

Finally, on November 4, 2016, New Hampshire Hospital security notified DHHS that the same individual had in fact posted confidential, personal information to a social media site.

Original Submission