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takyon writes:

Exxon Mobil plans to expand its operations along the Gulf Coast:

Exxon Mobil Corp, the world's largest publicly traded oil producer, said on Monday it would invest $20 billion through 2022 to expand its chemical and oil refining plants on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The investments at 11 sites should create 35,000 temporary construction jobs and 12,000 permanent jobs, Chief Executive Darren Woods said in a speech at CERAWeek, the world's largest gathering of energy executives.

Some of the expansions began in 2013, but the scope of the project is now growing and the timeline extended, Exxon said. [...] Exxon last month pledged to boost this year's spending by 16 percent to expand operations, especially in shale production, after the company posted a better-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by rising oil prices and lower costs.

Press release. White House statement. Also at The Houston Chronicle and The Hill.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

BBC reports

Do you really need someone to tell you what to do at work? Three years ago, Swedish software consultancy Crisp decided that the answer was no.

The firm, which has about 40 staff, had already trialled various organisational structures, including the more common practice of having a single leader running the company. Crisp then tried changing its chief executive annually, based on a staff vote, but eventually decided collectively that no boss was needed.

Yassal Sundman, a developer at the firm, explains: "We said, 'what if we had nobody as our next CEO--what would that look like?' And then we went through an exercise and listed down the things that the CEO does."

The staff decided that many of the chief executive's responsibilities overlapped with those of the board, while other roles could be shared among other employees. "When we looked at it we had nothing left in the CEO column, and we said, 'all right, why don't we try it out?'" says Ms Sundman.

Because they are all in charge, workers are more motivated, [says Henrik Kniberg, an organisational coach at the firm]. Crisp regularly measures staff satisfaction, and the average is about 4.1 out of five.

Last March, VentureBeat said

Crisp, a boutique consultancy company in Sweden, is made up of approximately 30 people, but none of them are truly "employees". They have zero managers; not even a CEO. Decisions are made through consensus, and instead of relying on some manager to allocate tasks, Crisp developed its own protocol detailing the chain of responsibilities when a new task appears.

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takyon writes:

SCOTUSblog reports:

A Colorado man who was required to register as a sex offender after being convicted of unlawful sexual contact with two teenage girls will get a shot at a new trial, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled today. Miguel Peña-Rodriguez had asked a state trial court for a new trial after two jurors told his lawyers that a third juror had made racially biased remarks about Peña-Rodriguez and his main witness, who are both Hispanic. But the state trial court rejected Peña-Rodriguez's request, citing a state evidentiary rule that generally bars jurors from testifying about statements made during deliberations that might call the verdict into question. In a major ruling on juror bias and fair trials, the Supreme Court reversed that holding by a vote of 5-3 and sent Peña-Rodriguez's case back to the lower courts for them to consider the two jurors' testimony for the first time.

Supreme Court's decision in Pena-Rodriguez v. Colorado.

Also at Reuters, NYT, NPR, USA Today, and Bloomberg.

Original Submission

GreatAuntAnesthesia writes:

A BBC investigation found 100 "sexualised images of children" on Facebook. Auntie Beeb reported the images to Facebook, who found over 80% of them to be "not in breach of their guidelines" - despite one of them including a still from a child abuse video with a label requesting viewers "share child pornography."

The twist is that when the BBC followed up on this failure, Facebook reported the BBC to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre for "distributing images of child exploitation".

How can Facebook expect users to help them police their content when reporting abuse gets the users accused of the abuses they are reporting?

Alternate articles:

• El Reg:
• Guardian

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Nebraska is one of eight states in the US – including Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wyoming, Tennessee and Kansas – seeking to pass "right to repair" legislation. All eyes will be on the Cornhusker state when the bill has its public hearing on 9 March, because its unique "unicameral legislature" (it's the only state to have a single parliamentary chamber) means laws can be enacted swiftly. If this bill, officially named LB67, gets through, it may lead to a domino effect through the rest of the US, as happened with a similar battle over the right to repair cars. These Nebraska farmers are fighting for all of us.

Big agriculture and big tech – including John Deere, Apple and AT&T – are lobbying hard against the bill, and have sent representatives to the Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska, to spend hours talking to senators, citing safety, security and intellectual property concerns.

John Deere has gone as far as to claim that farmers don't own the tractors they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for, but instead receive a "license to operate the vehicle". They lock users into license agreements that forbid them from even looking at the software running the tractor or the signals it generates.

Another article on the topic at Techdirt.

Original Submission

When we last left off, with the help of the excellent Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum, we had gotten the damaged Xenix 2.2.3c past the first hurdle of installation, and directly into a post-reboot crash, the cause of which (at the time) I suspected was another emulation failure.

Needless to say, I needed to get past this. At this point, I have been examining the raw images as best I can, and figuring out how the installer comes together. After a few experiments, I managed to determine a few basic facts about how Xenix is installed when booting from N1/N2:

• Coming out of reset, the Xenix kernel loads from N1, prompts for the "filesystem floppy" and starts /etc/init or /etc/inir coming out of IPL
  • Init prints the "Entering System Maintenance Mode" line.
  • Inir is used for running fsck, if necessary. Afterwards, it starts init.
• Initially, the system starts /usr/lib/mkdev/hd which does the following
  • Format the Xenix partition, create slices, and mount the hard drive under /mnt
  • Compile the keyboard configuration files so the language selection sticks past reboot
  • Create a few device nodes manually
  • Cpio is used to copy a list of files from N2 to the root partition.
  • /profile.hd is copied to /mnt/.profile
  • Install a boot sector to the MBR of the hard drive and configure the bootloader for HDD booting
  • The hd script does the initial language selection, followed by fdisk
• After the completion of the script /.profile is run as the system tries to bring up the root prompt which reboots the system after prompting that N1 should be re-inserted after the boot prompt.

So with knowing what the installer is trying to do, it was time to try and get down and dirty with it.

AthanasiusKircher writes:

Charles Murray, controversial author of The Bell Curve, which promoted links between intelligence and race, was shouted down by protesters at Middlebury College last Thursday. PBS reports:

Other sources note that political science professor Allison Stanger, who agreed to moderate the discussion, was attacked while accompanying Murray to the car, ultimately requiring treatment at a hospital for neck injuries caused by protesters pushing her and pulling her hair.

Murray himself later gave an account of his experience on the AEI blog. He emphasized that Middlebury's administration and staff displayed in exemplary ways their encouragement of free speech:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Just when long-suffering Virgin Media customers thought their spam woes had been fixed, it seems the firm's inbound mail server is now blocking the delivery of mail. The grey-listing anti-spam measure has been affecting users for several weeks, with many complaining of delays in receiving emails.

One customer wrote to The Register to explain the problem thus: "The first time round users get a 421 error, then in theory when the sending server attempts redelivery the mail should be accepted. "This is to help sort out the mail servers from the spam bots out there. Spam bots typically won't retry; mail servers always retry unless they get a definite 5xx error. "Virgin's solution continues to reject the mail servers when they come back."

[...] A Virgin Media spokesperson has been in touch to say: "Virgin Media takes internet security extremely seriously in order to protect our customers from viruses and cybercrime. As a result, our email filtering system will block emails it believes are suspicious.

"In this case, we believe a small number of users experienced issues when trying to send mail to Virgin Media email addresses because they were categorised as 'spam'. We've now rectified this and apologise for any inconvenience caused. We continue to review the system to ensure it's working effectively, while keeping our customers safe online. If users experience similar issues in sending mail to Virgin Media email addresses, we advise them to visit netreport.virginmedia.com/netreport."

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

Pumped storage is a decades-old technology with a relatively simple concept: When electricity is cheap and plentiful, use it to pump water up into a reservoir above a turbine, and when electricity is scarce and expensive, send that pumped water down through a turbine to generate more power. Often, these pumped storage facilities are auxiliary to other electricity-generating systems, and they serve to smooth out fluctuations in the amount of power on the grid.

A German research institute has spent years trying to tailor pumped storage to ocean environments. Recently, the institute completed a successful four-week pilot test using a hollow concrete sphere that it placed on the bottom of Lake Constance, a body of water at the foot of the Alps. The sphere has a diameter of three meters and contains a pump and a turbine. Much like traditional pumped storage, when electricity is cheap, water can be pumped out of the sphere, and when it's scarce, water can be let into the sphere to move the turbine and generate electricity.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Engineering envisions spheres with inner diameters of 30m, placed 700m (or about 2,300 ft) underwater. Assuming the spheres would be fitted with existing 5 MW turbines that could function at that depth, the researchers estimate that each sphere would offer 20 MWh of storage with four hours discharge time.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/german-institute-successfully-tests-underwater-energy-storage-sphere/

Original Submission

JimmyCrackCorn writes:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/s-wtr030617.php

More than three in every five Americans see a doctor who receives some form of payment from industry. This is according to a new survey led by Genevieve Pham-Kanter of Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health in the US. It is the first nationally representative study to examine the prevalence of industry payments among the general population of patients.

[...] The survey was done in light of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which addresses concerns that industry payments could lead physicians to make decisions that are not in the best interest of their patients. Since 2013 the Act requires pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to report gifts and payments they make to healthcare providers. This information is publicly available on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Open Payments website.

[...] The survey highlighted that 65 percent of respondents had visited a physician who accepted an industry payment. This was particularly the case for those visiting family medicine physicians (63 percent) and obstetricians and gynecologists (77 percent).

The Open Payments website can be found at: https://www.cms.gov/OpenPayments/index.html

References:
Pham-Kanter, G. , Mello, M., Lehmann, L., Campbell, E., Carpenter, D. (2017). Public Awareness of and Contact with Physicians Who Receive Industry Payments: A National Survey, Journal of General Internal Medicine, DOI: 10.1007/s11606-017-4012-3

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.

Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá's upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words "</head>" and "<body>" stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto's victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.

When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In the US, a number of major milestones occurred on the electric grid in 2016, almost all of them involving wind power. Now the Energy Information Administration is confirming that's because of a big overall trend: wind power is now the largest source of renewable energy generating capacity, passing hydroelectric power in 2016. And since the two sources produce electricity at nearly the same rate, we'll soon see wind surpass hydro in terms of electricity produced.

Wind power capacity has been growing at an astonishing pace (as shown in the graph above), and 2016 was no exception. As companies rushed to take advantage of tax incentives for renewable power, the US saw 8.7 Gigawatts of new wind capacity installed in 2016. That's the most since 2012, the last time tax incentives were scheduled to expire. This has pushed the US' total wind capacity to over 81 GW, edging it past hydroelectric, which has remained relatively stable at roughly 80 GW.

Note that this is only capacity; since generators can't be run non-stop, they only generate a fraction of the electricity that their capacity suggests is possible. That fraction, called a capacity factor, has been in the area of 34 percent for US wind, lower than most traditional sources of electricity. But hydropower's capacity factor isn't that much better, typically sitting at 37-38 percent. As a result, wind won't need to grow much to consistently exceed hydro.

The graphic in the article aptly illustrates the dramatically different growth curves.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The world's largest autism genome database shines new light on many 'autisms'

The newest study out of the Autism Speaks MSSNG project – the world's largest autism genome sequencing program – identified an additional 18 gene variations that appear to increase the risk of autism. The new report appears this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience. It involved the analysis of 5,205 whole genomes from families affected by autism – making it the largest whole genome study of autism to date.

[...] To date, research using the MSSNG genomic database has identified 61 genetic variations that affect autism risk. The research has associated several of these with additional medical conditions that often accompany autism. The goal, Dr. Pletcher says, "is to advance personalized treatments for autism by deepening our understanding of the condition's many subtypes." The findings also illustrate how whole genome sequencing can guide medical care today. For example, at least two of the autism-associated gene changes described in the new paper are also associated with seizures. Another has been linked to increased risk for cardiac defects, and yet another with adult diabetes. These findings illustrate how whole genome sequencing for autism can provide additional medical guidance to individuals, families and their physicians, the investigators say.

Found at ScienceDaily.

Whole genome sequencing resource identifies 18 new candidate genes for autism spectrum disorder (DOI: 10.1038/nn.4524) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Ryzen was an important launch for AMD. Arguably more important? Its rollout of x86 "Naples" server chips:

For users keeping track of AMD's rollout of its new Zen microarchitecture, stage one was the launch of Ryzen, its new desktop-oriented product line last week. Stage three is the APU launch, focusing mainly on mobile parts. In the middle is stage two, Naples, and arguably the meatier element to AMD's Zen story. A lot of fuss has been made about Ryzen and Zen, with AMD's re-launch back into high-performance x86. If you go by column inches, the consumer-focused Ryzen platform is the one most talked about and many would argue, the most important. In our interview with Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, the launch of Ryzen was a big hurdle in that journey. However, in the next sentence, Dr. Su lists Naples as another big hurdle, and if you decide to spend some time with one of the regular technology industry analysts, they will tell you that Naples is where AMD's biggest chunk of the pie is. Enterprise is where the money is.

[...] The top end Naples processor will have a total of 32 cores, with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), to give a total of 64 threads. This will be paired with eight channels of DDR4 memory, up to two DIMMs per channel for a total of 16 DIMMs, and altogether a single CPU will support 128 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Naples also qualifies as a system-on-a-chip (SoC), with a measure of internal IO for storage, USB and other things, and thus may be offered without a chipset. Naples will be offered as either a single processor platform (1P), or a dual processor platform (2P). In dual processor mode, and thus a system with 64 cores and 128 threads, each processor will use 64 of its PCIe lanes as a communication bus between the processors as part of AMD's Infinity Fabric. The Infinity Fabric uses a custom protocol over these lanes, but bandwidth is designed to be on the order of PCIe. As each core uses 64 PCIe lanes to talk to the other, this allows each of the CPUs to give 64 lanes to the rest of the system, totaling 128 PCIe 3.0 again.

[...] While not specifically mentioned in the announcement today, we do know that Naples is not a single monolithic die on the order of 500mm² or up. Naples uses four of AMD's Zeppelin dies (the Ryzen dies) in a single package. With each Zeppelin die coming in at 195.2mm², if it were a monolithic die, that means a total of 780mm² of silicon, and around 19.2 billion transistors – which is far bigger than anything Global Foundries has ever produced, let alone tried at 14nm. During our interview with Dr. Su, we postulated that multi-die packages would be the way forward on future process nodes given the difficulty of creating these large imposing dies, and the response from Dr. Su indicated that this was a prominent direction to go in.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

BGR (originally Boy Genius Report) reports

The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a state government official [February 26]. IT became a compulsory subject in Kerala schools from 2003, but it was [only in 2005] that FOSS was introduced in a phased manner and started to replace proprietary software.

[...] "The proprietary version of this software would have incurred a minimum cost of Rs 150,000 per machine [$2250] in terms of [license] fee. Hence, the minimum savings in a year (considering 20,000 machines) is Rs 300 crore [$45M]. It's not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software [license] enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute, and share the contents and use it as they wish", [said K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School.]

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

When the Deepwater Horizon drilling pipe blew out seven years ago, beginning the worst oil spill in U.S. history, those in charge of the recovery discovered a new wrinkle: the millions of gallons of oil bubbling from the sea floor weren't all collecting on the surface where it could be skimmed or burned. Some of it was forming a plume and drifting through the ocean under the surface.

Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have invented a new foam, called Oleo Sponge, that addresses this problem. The material not only easily adsorbs oil from water, but is also reusable and can pull dispersed oil from the entire water column—not just the surface.

"The Oleo Sponge offers a set of possibilities that, as far as we know, are unprecedented," said co-inventor Seth Darling, a scientist with Argonne's Center for Nanoscale Materials and a fellow of the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering.

Argonne invents reusable sponge that soaks up oil, could revolutionize oil spill and diesel cleanup

About Argonne

Original Submission