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Phoenix666 writes:

If you bail on an activity with a preschooler, you'd better have a good excuse.

That's because, according to research published this week in the journal Child Development, children as young as three and a half years old understand and value the obligations that accompany joint commitments. The researchers found that children who abandon a cooperative activity for an apparently selfish reason tend to prompt more resentment from their peers than those who quit the task for another reason.

These findings do not just build on a growing body of research suggesting that the very young possess moral capabilities that are more sophisticated than scientists previously thought. They also suggest that the notion of shared obligation is in some ways fundamental to Homo sapiens, the only known animal to create social institutions.

"The kinds of joint commitments we are seeing here in the three-year-olds can be scaled up into legal contracts, in which we mutually pledge to hold up our end of the bargain," says Margarita Svetlova, a visiting assistant professor at Duke University, who co-authored the study with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "If you really want, you could scale it up to the social contract in general."

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"exec" writes:

This year on General Hospital, central character Anna Devane is stricken with a rare and life-threatening type of blood cancer. Gasp! OK, this may not be shocking; dramatic, unlikely, and always tragic events are the norm on soap operas. But this one is a little different.

Prior to the tear-jerking diagnosis, the ABC daytime drama—the longest running soap opera in the US—made a deal with a pharmaceutical company to come up with her fate. And the company, Incyte Corporation, just so happens to make the only targeted therapy for fictional Anna's very real form of cancer. This did not sit well with two doctors.

In an opinion piece published this week in JAMA, Sham Mailankody of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Vinay Prasad of Oregon Health & Science University systematically question the intent of the promotion. The piece ends with a call to arms to medical policy makers and regulators to try to stamp out these "creative" promotions.

These promotions have "tangible effects on health care behavior and can lead to unintended consequences, including wasteful diagnostic testing, overdiagnosis, and inappropriate therapy," the pair argue. "The status quo appears increasingly untenable: direct-to-consumer advertising is a massive medical intervention with unproven public health benefit, dubious plausibility, and suggestive evidence of harm."

Source: Ars Technica

-- submitted from IRC

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Phoenix666 writes:

A pair of researchers with the University of Massachusetts has found evidence that suggests women are more likely to continue to pursue a degree in engineering if they have a female mentor. Nilanjana Dasgupta, an instructor, and her Ph.D. student Tara Dennehy paired first-year female engineering majors with older mentors for a year and then looked at the impact mentoring had the decision to continue pursuing their degree as they moved into their second year. They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Far fewer women than men receive bachelor's degrees in the STEM fields (just 13 to 33 percent), despite women comprising approximately 56 percent of all students attending college in the United States. Dasgupta and Dennehy note that the disparity is most notable in engineering. They suggest the reason that women choose to drop out or to change majors is because many such environments are unfriendly, or even hostile to female students. Quite often, female students are made to feel as if they do not belong. They note also that some efforts have been made to make such environments friendlier, but thus far, little progress has been made. They wondered if female students in such fields might benefit from having a female mentor. To find out, they enlisted the assistance of 150 people (male and female) working as engineers to serve as mentors for 150 female engineering students during their freshman year. The students met with their mentor once a month and were interviewed by the research pair three times during their first year and then again, a year later.

The researchers found that the female students were much more likely to continue to pursue their engineering degree if they had a female mentor, but not if they had a male mentor (18 percent of them dropped out) or no mentor (11 percent dropped out). They report that all of the female students given a female mentor chose to continue with their major their second year. They also note that mentoring appeared to have a lasting impact, as most of those assigned female mentors reported plans to continue with their engineering degree into their third year.

Paper: Tara C. Dennehya and Nilanjana Dasgupta, Female peer mentors early in college increase women's positive academic experiences and retention in engineering, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1613117114

Additional coverage at UMass, TheAtlantic, insidehighed.com

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n1 writes:

President Donald Trump's proposal to sell half of the U.S. strategic oil reserve highlights a decline in the biggest oil user's reliance on imports - and a weaning off OPEC crude - as its domestic production soars.

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) SPR-STK-T-EIA, the world's largest, holds about 688 million barrels of crude in heavily guarded underground caverns in Louisiana and Texas. Congress created it in 1975 after the Arab oil embargo caused fears of long-term spikes in motor fuel prices that would harm the U.S. economy.

The White House budget, delivered to Congress on Tuesday, proposes to start selling SPR oil in fiscal 2018, which begins on Oct. 1. Under the proposal, the sales would generate $500 million in the first year and gradually rise over the following years. A release of half the SPR over 10 years equals about 95,000 barrels per day (bpd), or 1 percent of current U.S. output.

Source: Reuters

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kaszz writes:

Holographic microscopy has been made a reality that can create 3-D images of living cells, almost in real time, and track their reaction to various stimuli without the use of contrast dyes or fluorophores.

The resolution is less than 100 nanometers using a low-intensity laser that scans the sample, numerous images extracted by holography are captured by a digital camera, assembled by a computer and "deconvoluted" in order to eliminate noise.

As a comparison the diameter of the DNA helix is 2 nanometer and a myoglobin protein is 4.5 nanometer in diameter.

DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2012.329 "Marker-free phase nanoscopy"

(From 2013 but still very interesting as it enables researchers to essentially "debug" cells!)

A more recent article at phys.org describes the hardware and software used to create the images:

An EPFL spin-off company, NanoLive, has developed the 3D Cell Explorer first-ever microscope that allows users to see inside living cells without any prior sample preparation, by using MRI-like technology and proprietary software that uses holographic algorithms.

The microscope is called the 3D Cell Explorer. It combines state-of-the-art hardware with cutting-edge imaging software to record stunning 3D images of entire living cells within seconds and with a higher resolution than any conventional microscope available in the market. The device works as an MRI scanner, taking photographs at different depths across the cells. The photographic "slices" are then recombined using clever holography software that digitally "stains" the cells, labeling its different parts. The result is a high-resolution 3D image of the cell that can be rotated and explored in depth.

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n1 writes:

For the first time in 10 years, the Prime Minister said the terror threat had been raised to the highest possible level, from 
severe to critical, meaning an attack 
is "expected imminently".

[...] Mrs May also announced that troops would replace police officers at set-piece events including sports venues and concerts.

It will be the first time since 2003 – when the Government reacted to a plot to bring down an airliner – that troops are deployed on the streets.

[...] It is the first time Britain has been on maximum terrorist alert since 2007, when a blazing car loaded with gas canisters was driven into Glasgow Airport.

Source: The Telegraph

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MostCynical writes:

The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23/google-now-knows-when-you-are-at-a-cash-register-and-how-much-you-are-spending/ reports that Google has talked retailers into sharing data from credit card transactions, which it will link to location and other data, to further enhance consumer profiling*.

The article says "Google for years has been mining location data from Google Maps in an effort to prove that knowledge of people's physical locations could "close the loop" between physical and digital worlds. Users can block this by adjusting the settings on smartphones, but few do so, say privacy experts.

This location tracking ability has allowed Google to send reports to retailers telling them, for example, whether people who saw an ad for a lawn mower later visited or passed by a Home Depot. The location-tracking program has grown since it was first launched with only a handful of retailers. Home Depot, Express, Nissan, and Sephora have participated."

* and erode privacy.

The article also makes it clear than consumers don't get to opt-out, if they even find out their data has been shared.

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takyon writes:

A year after AlphaGo beat the top Go player Lee Sedol, it is facing the world's current top player Ke Jie in a set of three matches (AlphaGo played five matches against Lee Sedol and won 4-1). AlphaGo has won the first match, so Ke Jie must win the next two matches in order to defeat AlphaGo. Although AlphaGo beat Ke Jie by only half a point in this match, edging out an opponent by a small margin is a legitimate strategy:

Ke Jie tried to use a strategy he's seen AlphaGo use online before, but that didn't work out for him in the end. Jie should've probably known that AlphaGo must have already played such moves against itself when training, which should also mean that it should know how to "defeat itself" in such scenarios.

A more successful strategy against AlphaGo may be one that AlphaGo hasn't seen before. However, considering Google has shown it millions of matches from top players, coming up with such "unseen moves" may be difficult, especially for a human player who can't watch millions of hours of video to train.

However, according to Hassabis, the AlphaGo AI also seems to have "liberated" Go players when thinking about Go strategies, by making them think that no move is impossible. This could lead to Go players trying out more innovative moves in the future, but it remains to be seen if Ke Jie will try that strategy in future matches against AlphaGo.

Although Google hasn't mentioned anything about this yet, it's likely that both AlphaGo's neural networks as well as the hardware doing all the computations have received significant upgrades from last year. Google recently introduced the Cloud TPU, its second-generation "Tensor Processing Unit," which should have not only have much faster inference performance, but now it comes with high training performance, too. As Google previously used the TPUs to power AlphaGo, it may have also used the next-gen versions to power AlphaGo in the match against Ke Jie.

Along with the Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo matches, there will also be a match between five human players and one AlphaGo instance, as well as a "Pair Go" in which two human players will face each other while assisted by two AlphaGo instances. This intended to demonstrate how Go could continue to exist even after Go-playing AI can routinely beat human players.

Also at NPR.

Previously:
Google DeepMind's AlphaGo Beats "Go" Champion Using Neural Networks
AlphaGo Cements Dominance Over Humanity, Wins Best-Out-of-5 Against Go Champion
AlphaGo Wins Game 5, Wins Challenge Match 4-1 vs. Lee Sedol
AlphaGo Continues to Crush Human Go Players

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Register reports

The US Supreme Court has issued a ruling that could block patent-holding firms from seeking out friendly courts to hear their infringement claims.

An 8-0 ruling by the nation's top court in the TC Heartland v Kraft Foods [PDF] case held that a company can be sued only in the state where it is incorporated, rather than in any district where the company happens to do business.

The unanimous decision (newcomer Neil Gorsuch did not take part in the hearing) will place stricter limitations on where patent infringement suits can take place, and will bar plaintiffs from seeking out friendly judges more likely to side with patent holders.

TechDirt adds

Another Supreme Court case on patents, and another complete smackdown of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the court that is supposed to be the "expert" on patent cases. [...] As you've probably heard, for years now patent trolls and other aggressive patent litigants have been filing their cases in East Texas, as it's become a jurisdiction that is ridiculous friendly to patent holders. The towns of Marshall and Tyler, Texas have practically built up industries around the fact that they are "patent friendly" jurisdictions. In the past few years, a second favored jurisdiction has popped up: Delaware, after a few academic studies showed that the courts there may have been even more friendly than East Texas. The TC Heartland case was about a case filed in Delaware, and raised the issue of whether or not this kind of patent forum shopping was okay.

CAFC, in its usual CAFC manner, said "sure, that's great, we love jurisdiction shopping and have since our 1990 ruling in VE Holding v. Johnson Gas". This was kind of ironic, as one of the key justifications given for setting up CAFC in the first place was to put an end to jurisdiction shopping in patent cases.

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n1 submitted:

A former Space Exploration Technologies Corp. technician told a jury he was fired for complaining to management that rocket-building test protocols weren't followed and results were falsified, jeopardizing the safety of eventual manned trips into orbit.

Jason Blasdell claims he took his concerns as high as SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in the months before he was terminated in 2014, purportedly for being "disruptive."

A Los Angeles state court jury will be asked to decide whether Blasdell had good reason to believe testing documents were falsified and whether his firing was unjustified.

"He went up the chain of command as he had learned in the Marines was the proper procedure," Blasdell's lawyer, Carney Shegerian, told jurors in his opening statement Tuesday. "He had nothing personal to benefit from this other than to do the right thing."

[...] California Superior Court Judge William Fahey has ruled that the jury won't be second-guessing the scientific decisions of SpaceX's engineers or the business judgment of its managers. The trial is expected to take two weeks.

"Jason Blasdell is not a whistle-blower and this is not a whistle-blower case," SpaceX's lawyer, Lynne Hermle, said in her opening statement.

Source: Bloomberg

Have you ever been in this kind of situation? What did you do? How do you weigh the risks to the product, others, and yourself?

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takyon writes:

According to the Wall Street Journal (non-paywalled version), hedge funds run by quantitative analysts ("quants"), some of whom are utilizing supercomputers, are now dominating stock trading:

In case you didn't know, The Quants Run Wall Street Now, or so says a headline in today's Wall Street Journal. Quant-run hedge funds now control the largest share (27 percent) of stock trading of any investor type, according to the article. That's up from 2010 when quant-based trading was tied with bank trades for the bottom share. Algorithm-based trading is, of course, the 'sine qua non' of hedge funds and has helped lift them to the top of the investing crowd. [...]

Guggenheim Partners LLC built what it calls a "supercomputing cluster" for $1 million at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to help crunch numbers for Guggenheim's quant investment funds, says Marcos Lopez de Prado, a Guggenheim senior managing director. Electricity for the computers costs another $1 million a year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Do you leave work behind when you physically move out of your workplace? Or do the texts, messages, emails keep pulling you back, monopolizing your life beyond work hours? Do you believe that this can get to a point where an individual eventually breaks down?

These questions were answered with a new French labour reform law enforced from January 1 2017. It requires French companies with more than 50 workers to guarantee their employees a "right to disconnect" from technology after office hours. Companies need to start discussions with employees to define their rights to ignore work related messages. If a deal cannot be reached, the company must publish a charter that would state the demands on, and rights of, employees out-of-hours.

[...] Other countries too have attempted to address the issue of out-of-office work stress. In Japan, Tokyo's governor has ordered strict monitoring of those working beyond 8pm. A German law forbids managers from contacting employees on vacation. South Korea, known for its gruelling work hours, launched a work-life balance campaign last year to encourage annual leaves.

But despite these examples, most remain skeptical of such a law being passed in other countries, especially the U.S., where long workweeks and foregone vacation time are the norm. In 2015, the French worked an average of 1,482 hours a year, while Americans worked about 1,790 hours. U.S. workers not just get less vacation time than their European counterparts but also end up using only 73% of it.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The UN's World Health Organization ponies up some $200 million a year for luxury travel, including first-class tickets and posh hotels – much more than it spends on combatting[sic] AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria, the AP has revealed.

According to internal files obtained by the news agency, since 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO) has allocated $803 million for travel – approximately $200 million per year. The WHO's two-billion-dollar annual budget is made up of contributions made by 194 member countries, of which the US is the largest sponsor.

Last year, the WHO allocated just over $60 million to tackling malaria and $59 million to containing the spread of tuberculosis, while $71 million was spent on fighting AIDS and hepatitis. Programs aimed at containing certain diseases, such as polio, do get considerably larger funding, however, with $450 million allocated annually.

Though the organization has been struggling to achieve its goals, while at the same time appealing for more financing, its employees and top brass apparently do not shy away from booking first-class airline tickets and rooms in luxurious five-star hotels.

In particular, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan and Executive Director Bruce Aylward are first and second on the list of the agency's top spenders, according to a confidential 25-page analysis of the WHO's expenses seen by AP.

Source: https://www.rt.com/news/389198-who-travel-costs-report/

Additional Coverage: U.S. News & World Report

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takyon writes:

Researchers at the University of Texas, including the 94-year-old John Goodenough, claim to have achieved up to five times better energy density in a solid lithium glass battery. The technology supposedly charges much faster than other batteries. One expert says that the battery's proposed mechanism violates the first law of thermodynamics:

At the center of this debate is a towering figure in the world of science — John Goodenough, who teaches material science at the university.

In 1980, his work led to the invention of the lithium-ion battery — now crucial to powering everything from cellphones and laptops to electric cars. For a lot of people, that would probably be enough. But at 94 years old, he's still at it. [...] Now, Goodenough and his team say they've created a new battery that may store up to five times more power than current ones. And, even better, such a battery would charge and recharge in a matter of minutes — all without exploding.

[...] Goodenough's team is using a solid — a lithium glass. In their paper [DOI: 10.1039/C6EE02888H] [DX], they say this glass along with a new design allows their battery to perform so much better. But many others are skeptical. "If you could accomplish what this paper claims, it would rewrite the way we think about chemistry," says Dan Steingart, a professor of mechanical engineering at Princeton. He says batteries are sealed, so it's hard to know what's really going on. And he doubts the team's interpretation of what's happening here. In fact, he says, the chemical ingredients shouldn't be storing any power, what he calls "anomalous capacity."

NOVA, which aired Search for the Super Battery in February, covered John Goodenough in March.

Daimler is investing half a billion euros in a lithium-ion battery factory:

Daimler didn't give any projections for its factory's potential capacity, but it did say that its investment would quadruple the size of an existing battery factory on the site, which is run by Accumotive, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daimler. The German automaker is also pledging another €500 million to expand battery production worldwide. And if all goes well at the Kamenz site, Daimler says it will "go into operation in mid-2018."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Next month, the electric car company's CEO revealed on Twitter, that a software update for Tesla's autopilot software will make the control algorithm "as smooth as silk."

The software update will be pushed out to all second-generation Teslas, known as HW2. These cars currently have fewer features than the first-generation cars, but are gradually catching up and have more sensors and computing power, so promise to be better in the long term.

In March the Autosteer speed limit for HW2 Teslas increased to 80 mph, and in May to 90 mph, which left the cars feeling "safe, but unpleasant" to drive, according to Musk. The new control algorithm, set to be rolled out next month, "is even safer, but super smooth."

[ n1: During this Twitter foray Musk also responded to a request for a Model 3 update; he said there will be no updates until deliveries begin in July. Earlier in the month Musk stated that the company is taking an "anti-selling" strategy on the Model 3 with no advertising or test-drives for the first six to nine months of production. This is apparently in part due to "confusion" that some people had, thinking the Model 3 is a replacement to the Model S. ]

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