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Fnord666 writes:

At the University of California's San Francisco campus, 79 IT employees lost their jobs this week, some of them after explaining to their replacements at Indian outsourcing firm HCL how to do their jobs.

The union representing the employees, University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119, says it's the first time a public university has offshored American IT jobs.

In a statement sent yesterday, UPTE-CWA says the layoffs could spread, since the HCL contract can be utilized by any of the 10 campuses in the University of California system, the nation's largest public university. "US taxes should be used to create jobs in the US, not in other countries," said Kurt Ho, a systems administrator who was quoted in the union's press release. Ho was required to train his replacement as a condition of getting his severance pay.

In its statement on the matter, UCSF says that it was pushed to hire outside contractors due to "increased demand for information technology and escalating costs for these services." The university says it will save more than $30 million by hiring HCL, after seeing IT costs nearly triple between 2011 and 2016, "driven by the introduction of the electronic medical record and increased digital connectivity."

The university says 49 UCSF employees were laid off, and it will eliminate another 48 jobs that are currently vacant or filled by contractors. "UCSF will not replace UCSF IT employees with H-1B visa holders, nor will HCL," the university wrote in a statement e-mailed to Ars.

Of the 49 laid-off UCSF employees, 34 have either secured other employment or are retiring, the university said.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-university-lays-off-79-it-workers-after-they-train-h-1b-replacements/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for charon_

The night vision of frogs and toads appears to be superior to that of all other animals. They have the ability to see colour even when it is so dark that humans are not able to see anything at all. This has been shown in a new study by researchers from Lund University in Sweden.

Most vertebrates, including humans, have two types of visual cells located in the retina, namely cones and rods. The cones enable us to see colour, but they usually require a lot of light and therefore stop working when it gets dark, in which case the rods take over so that we can at least find our way home, albeit in black and white.

In toads and frogs the rods are a bit special, however. It was previously known that toads and frogs are unique in having rods with two different sensitivities. This has not been found in other vertebrates, and it is also the reason why researchers have long suspected that frogs and toads might be able to see colour also in low-light conditions. The new study was first in proving this to be true, and the results exceeded all expectations.

"It's amazing that these animals can actually see colour in extreme darkness, down to the absolute threshold of the visual system. These results were unexpected", says Professor of Sensory Biology Almut Kelber at the Faculty of Science, Lund University.

Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-02/lu-fhu022817.php

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Science News reports on the experimental findings of a PhD student suggesting the Earth's mantle may be 60°C hotter than previously thought.

Temperatures across Earth's mantle are about 60 degrees Celsius higher than previously thought, a new experiment suggests. Such toasty temperatures would make the mantle runnier than earlier research suggested, a development that could help explain the details of how tectonic plates glide on top of the mantle, geophysicists report in the March 3 Science.

"Scientists have been arguing over the mantle temperature for decades," says study coauthor Emily Sarafian, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and at MIT. "Scientists will argue over 10 degree changes, so changing it by 60 degrees is quite a large jump."

[...] The new experiment suggests that, if adjusted to surface pressure, the mantle under the eastern Pacific Ocean where two tectonic plates diverge, for example, would be around 1410°, up from 1350°. A hotter mantle is less viscous and more malleable, Sarafian says. Scientists have long been puzzled about some of the specifics of plate tectonics, such as to what extent the mantle resists the movement of the overlying plate. That resistance depends in part on the mix of rock, temperature and how melted the rock is at the boundary between the two layers (SN: 3/7/15, p. 6). This new knowledge could give researchers more accurate information on those details.

Australian Broadcast Corporation ran a more layman's version of the story:

"While we did not necessarily set out to measure the mantle temperature, our experimental results on the melting point of mantle rock showed us the new mantle temperature," Ms Sarafian told ABC News.

"In fact, mantle must be 60 degrees Celsius hotter than current estimates. That's a very significant jump."

[...] As scientists are not able to directly take the mantle's temperature, its conditions are simulated in the laboratory by taking synthetic rock to high pressures and temperatures, said Ms Sarafian, who is in a joint Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) program in collaboration with the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Original Submission

charon writes:

Bipedalism in dinosaurs was inherited from ancient and much smaller proto-dinosaurs. The trick to this evolution is in their tails explains Scott Persons, postdoctoral fellow and lead author on the paper.

"The tails of proto-dinosaurs had big, leg-powering muscles," says Persons. "Having this muscle mass provided the strength and power required for early dinosaurs to stand on and move with their two back feet. We see a similar effect in many modern lizards that rise up and run bipedally."

Over time, proto-dinosaurs evolved to run faster and for longer distances. Adaptations like hind limb elongation allowed ancient dinosaurs to run faster, while smaller forelimbs helped to reduce body weight and improve balance. Eventually, some proto-dinosaurs gave up quadrupedal walking altogether.

The research, conducted by Persons and Phil Currie, paleontologist and Canada Research Chair, also debunks theories that early proto-dinosaurs stood on two legs for the sole purpose of free their hands for use in catching prey.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170303110634.htm

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

If you use NextGEN Gallery, now would be a good time to update.

More than 1 million websites running the WordPress content management system may be vulnerable to hacks that allow visitors to snatch password data and secret keys out of databases, at least under certain conditions.

The vulnerability stems from a "severe" SQL injection bug in NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress plugin with more than 1 million installations. Until the flaw was recently fixed, NextGEN Gallery allowed input from untrusted visitors to be included in WordPress-prepared SQL queries. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit the weakness to pipe powerful commands to a Web server's backend database.

"This is quite a critical issue," Slavco Mihajloski, a researcher with Web security firm Sucuri, wrote in a blog post published Monday. "If you're using a vulnerable version of this plugin, update as soon as possible."

To exploit the vulnerability, attackers would have to create a feature found in the PHP programming language known as the $container_ids string. Untrusted visitors could achieve this against sites that use the NextGEN Basic TagCloud gallery feature by making slight modifications to the gallery URL.

"With this knowledge, an unauthenticated attacker could add extra sprintf/printf directives to the SQL query and use $wpdb->prepare's behavior to add attacker controlled code to the executed query," Monday's blog post explained.

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/severe-vulnerability-in-wordpress-plugin-could-affect-1-million-sites/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Redflex Holdings Limited, the Australian corporate parent of the embattled red-light camera company, announced in official financial filings on Tuesday that it had lost more than A$26.2 million ($19.8 million) during the first half of its 2017 fiscal year, which concluded at the end of 2016.

A notable factor that explains the company's massive drop in profits—compared to a loss of A$2.7 million (~$2 million) during the same period a year earlier—is the recent $20 million settlement that the company reached with the City of Chicago as part of a corruption investigation.

Redflex also noted decreased revenue in the United States and largely flat revenue everywhere else. In a statement written by Adam Gray, the company's chairman, Redflex would now seek increased opportunities in Latin America to try to make up for it.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/redflex-reports-loss-of-nearly-20m-during-last-half-of-2016/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley recently appeared on a panel at GDC 2017 and talked about the very first Civilization video game:

"Let's go back in time to 1990," game developer Sid Meier said to a Thursday crowd at the annual Game Developers Conference. "Back when there was no Civilization."

Meier's silly double entendre framed a "post-mortem" look at the origins and lessons learned from the landmark PC game. With the help of producer and developing partner Bruce Shelley, the hour-long conversation was marked by equal parts history, depth, and humor—which seemed appropriate, considering the game in question juggled the same three elements so elegantly back in 1991.

Development on Civilization began after the completion of Railroad Tycoon during the development of Covert Action and with the momentum of Pirates!, "one of the first open-world games." All those games put wind into the duo's PC game-making sails. "We were young and audacious," Meier says. "It was a time where we thought we could do anything, so, sure, let's take on 'civilization.'"

Meier described a train ride in early 1990 with Shelley in which the duo discussed the elements they liked about Railroad Tycoon, particularly how its disparate systems (building, operation, finances, manufacturing, etc.) added up to let players "make a lot of interesting decisions." Perhaps running an entire civilization would offer a similar mix of crisscrossing systems, Meier posited. (Plus, making a game "more epic" didn't cost any additional budget.)

Shelley recalled losing track of that particular conversation—"Sid always had half-a-dozen prototypes on his computer," he noted. But he remembered a conversation about the British PC war game Empire, which they were both fond of. Meier asked Shelley for "ten things he'd change" about that game, to which Shelley offered a list of a dozen. In May of 1990, Meier responded by dropping a single 5-1/4-inch disk on Shelley's desk: the first playable version of Civilization. "I saved it as a historical artifact," he told the crowd.

[...] Meier admitted that the game's first prototype disc was missing one key Civilization component: turn-based play. His original version of the game looked more like SimCity, with real-time, "zone this area for a purpose" management mechanics. The game "came together" once Meier switched to turn-based play, which was more like the war-gaming board games he loved, anyway. (Turns also immediately offered a tangible benefit, he said: an addictive, "one more turn" quality.)

[...] In terms of development errors, Meier points to a lack of mod support as top on his list. "This is something we did horribly wrong," he said. "Modding and scenarios became such a wonderful important part of Civ as it proceeded through the years. We didn't have the vision that anybody could design anything better than we could!"

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/sid-meier-tells-civilizations-origin-story-cites-childrens-history-books/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Neural networks were all the rage for a while, but progress eventually slowed and interest cooled. Then, as computing power increased, the field experienced a renaissance, and deep learning was the new big thing.

Throughout this ebb and flow of interest, there has been an underlying, annoying fact: neural networks as currently implemented are not that great. Especially when you compare them with the brain of... well, pretty much any creature. Researchers have been trying to make neural networks that have all the advantages of the brain (and none of the disadvantages) for as long as the field has existed. And it may be that they've gone about it wrong. Now, some new work is suggesting that the only way to get the advantages of the brain is to accept the disadvantages as well.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/plastic-synapses-offer-hardware-alternative-to-neural-networks/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

President Trump has accused former President Obama of... something:

In a string of tweets posted early Saturday morning, President Trump let loose a barrage of accusations at his predecessor. He alleged that former President Obama had his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower before Election Day last year, accusing Obama of "McCarthyism" and being a "bad (or sick) guy."

Trump, who is under significant scrutiny for his administration's contacts with Russia before he took office, offered no evidence to support his claims Saturday morning. Neither the White House nor Obama's office has responded immediately to NPR's requests for comment.

[...] Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Also at WaPo, NYT, Reuters, Fox News, BBC, and Snopes, which hints that it may be related to this story.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Okja is a twist on the classic monster movie. It's also a twist on mad science movies, coming-of-age movies, and satires of corporate life. Things are so twisty because it's the latest offering from cult director Bong Joon-ho, who previously gave us wacky, dark science fiction movies like The Host and Snowpiercer.

Okja is the result of Netflix giving Bong $50 million and complete artistic freedom, and the results look just as bizarre as you might hope. The movie stars Ahn Seo-hyun, Tilda Swinton, and Giancarlo Esposito, among others.

The central struggle is between image-obsessed corporate scientist Nancy Mirando (Swinton) and a girl named Mija (Ahn). In this teaser trailer, we hear Nancy proclaim that she's put science and nature together to create something extraordinary. But that "something" is Mija's best friend, who also happens to be a giant monster. We only see a glimpse of the monster, but if Bong's previous monster movie The Host is any indication, this megabeast is going to look great.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/02/first-trailer-for-okja-proves-that-giant-monsters-can-always-get-weirder/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Blocking robocalls from spoofed numbers may soon become easier, as the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to give carriers authority to take more aggressive action against this type of scam call.

The FCC in 2015 made it clear that voice service providers can offer call blocking tools to customers, but commissioners said at the time that more needed to be done about Caller ID spoofing. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has now scheduled a preliminary vote for March 23 on new rules designed to solve the problem.

"One particularly pernicious category of robocalls is spoofed robocalls—i.e., robocalls where the caller ID is faked, hiding the caller's true identity," the proposal says. "Fraudsters bombard consumers' phones at all hours of the day with spoofed robocalls, which in some cases lure consumers into scams (e.g., when a caller claims to be collecting money owed to the Internal Revenue Service) or lead to identity theft."

The proposed rules would let providers "block spoofed robocalls when the spoofed Caller ID can't possibly be valid." Providers would be able to block numbers that aren't valid under the North American Numbering Plan and block valid numbers that haven't been allocated to any phone company. They'd also be able to block valid numbers that have been allocated to a phone company but haven't been assigned to a subscriber.

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/robocalls-begone-fcc-seeks-to-block-calls-from-spoofed-numbers/

Original Submission

Rocky Mudbutt writes:

Weaponized narrative Is the new battlespace and the U.S. is in the unaccustomed position of being seriously behind its adversaries.

An article from defenseone by co-directors Brad Allenby and Joel Garreau discusses the idea that narrative, or storytelling, "is basic to what it means to be human" but it can be "weaponized" by professionals, making it "a deep threat to national security."

What's new is the extraordinary power of today's weaponized narrative. It attacks our group identity – our sense of who we are, our privilege of not being identified as "other." The rise of the Connected Age allows attacks that tear down old identities that have bound us together. But it also allows the creation of narratives that define the new differences between "us" and "them" that are worth fighting for.

Weaponized narrative comes at a critical juncture. The speed of upheaval in our lives is unprecedented. It will be filled by something. We are desperate for something to hang on to.

By offering cheap passage through a complex world, weaponized narrative furnishes emotional certainty at the cost of rational understanding. The emotionally satisfying decision to accept a weaponized narrative — to believe, to have faith — inoculates cultures, institutions, and individuals against counterarguments and inconvenient facts.

This departure from rationality opens such ring-fenced belief communities to manipulation and their societies to attack. These communities can be strengthened through media tools and messages that reinforce the narrative — crucially, by demonizing outsiders. Trust is extended only to those who believe, leaving other institutional and social structures to erode.

In the hands of professionals, the powerful emotions of anger and fear can be used to control adversaries, limit their options, and disrupt their functional capabilities. This is a unique form of soft power. In such campaigns, facts are not necessary because – contrary to the old memes of the Enlightenment – truth does not necessarily prevail. It can be overwhelmed with constantly repeated and replenished falsehood. Especially powerful are falsehoods or simplifications that the target cohort has been primed to believe by the underlying narratives with which they are also being supplied.

[...] Far from being simply a U.S. or U.K. phenomenon, shifts to "post-factualism" can be seen in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, France, and the Philippines, among other democracies. Russia, whose own political culture is deeply post-factual and indeed post-modern, is now ably constructing ironic, highly cynical, weaponized narratives that were effective in the Ukrainian invasion, and are now destabilizing the Baltic states and the U.S. election process.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Phys.org reports

A Norwegian site may have found the key to muzzling malicious commenters on the internet: requiring people to read an article before discussing it.

As an experiment, NRKbeta, a media and technology subsidiary of public broadcaster NRK, has since mid-February required viewers to correctly answer three questions about articles before being able to comment on them.

"Generally, we see that many read only the headline and a few lines before rushing into the comments section to participate in the debate", NRKbeta editor Marius Arnesen told AFP on Thursday.

[...] The experiment is still too new to draw any definitive conclusions, according to Arnesen.

But the number of comments seems to have remained more or less the same and the returns of regular readers are generally positive, he said.

Commenting without reading the article? Can you imagine such a thing?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Since the queue is low, I figured I'd give this topic a try:

I'm sure many of you have been expectantly waiting for the annual report on Major Work Stoppages to come out. Thankfully, you will have to wait no longer.

Last year there were only 15 major stoppages, with the major one being the strike against Verizon (36,500 workers). Fifteen major stoppages is about middle of the road for the past twenty years, but there has been a downward trend since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track:

1947-56: ~340/year
1957-66: ~250/year
1967-76: ~330/year
1977-86: ~140/year
1987-96: ~40/year
1997-2006: ~24/year
2007-16: ~14/year

Have you ever participated in a strike?

Are worker strikes an ineffective tool for change in modern times? Are there other reasons why workers do not participate in strikes?

Work Stoppages Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.toc.htm
Verizon Strike: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/04/12/107217
Union Membership Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/union-membership-rate-10-point-7-percent-in-2016.htm
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_action

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum M.D. has an article (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1702362) in the New England Journal of Medicine about resisting the suppression of science.

In the face of suppression of science, should scientists resist, or quietly proceed with their work? Resistance seems essential. That the CDC postponement prompted a coalition to form and organize an alternative meeting (see article by Hunter et al.) reminds us that resistance is as much about ensuring effective dissemination of findings as about continuing to conduct science. But it's critical to recognize that suppressing science does not cause disbelief; rather, disbelief, particularly of science pertaining to highly politicized topics such as climate change, creates a cultural environment in which suppression of science is tolerated. So the real question is how do we resist effectively? How do we convince a skeptical public to believe in science?

First, we need to stop assuming that disbelief necessarily reflects a knowledge deficit and can thus be remedied by facts. When doubt is wrapped up in one's cultural identity or powerful emotions, facts often not only fail to persuade, but may further entrench skepticism.

[...]Second, in this highly polarized moment, we have to be careful not to inadvertently politicize science that has not already been pegged to a particular worldview.

[...]This risk of adding an identity-laden valence to otherwise neutral scientific matters makes resisting science denialism in the Trump era particularly tricky. Because we pay far more attention to contested than to generally accepted science, it's easy to forget that most scientific facts, and related policies, don't induce tribalism. You don't see partisan battles over treatment for myocardial infarction, say, or the dangers of radiation exposure. But as Kahan points out, Trump thrives on making nonpartisan issues polarizing. The indication that he might appoint a vaccine skeptic to head a commission to review vaccine safety is a worrisome example, since vaccine skepticism has thus far been limited to a minority, albeit vocal, fringe. "I have never seen someone so aggressively intent on just increasing the number of issues that feature that sort of antagonism," Kahan told me. "He is our science communication environment polluter in chief."

[...]Yet perhaps there is a silver lining in the unmooring of many Americans by the widespread embrace of "alternative facts": scientists are not alone in their determination to make the truth believable again. As a medical community, we have long approached the communication of science unscientifically. We are taught in medical school to make eye contact, nod our heads, and demonstrate cultural competence. But if the purpose of communication is to translate science into public policy that can improve the health of our population, then we ought to focus as well — and urgently — on empirically and effectively navigating assaults on truth.

Orac at Respectful Insolence has his own take on the subject as well.

Original Submission