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stormwyrm writes:

Physicists and mathematicians work with probability and predicting the behaviour of systems all the time, and it was perhaps inevitable that some of them would try to use that knowledge to beat the odds at casinos. Paul Halpern has an article where he tells the stories of several famous mathematicians and physicists who did just that. Physics graduate student Albert Hibbs (who would later on co-author with Richard Feynman Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals and become the mission announcer at JPL), and medical student Roy Walford, did precisely that in 1947, studying the properties of roulette wheels for biases they could exploit.

Early wheels were cruder than today's and sometimes had defects. Such flaws, the students realized, offered the key to successful prediction. By studying the mechanical idiosyncrasies of various machines, they developed predictive models, carefully placed bets, and manage to win thousands of dollars. They used much of their earnings to buy a boat and sail around the world.

Later, Edward Thorp, hearing of Hibbs and Walford's exploits tried to do the same thing himself. By then the casinos had fixed the defects that allowed those two to beat the odds, so a new strategy needed to be employed. He made the acquaintance of Claude Shannon, and in 1961, they developed what became the world's first wearable computer... for cheating at roulette.

By 1961, Thorp and Shannon had built and tested the world's first wearable computer: it was merely the size of a cigarette pack and able to fit into the bottom of a specially-designed shoe. Toe switches would activate the computer once the wheel and ball were set into motion, collecting timing data for both. Once the computer calculated the most likely result, it would transmit that value as musical tones to a tiny speaker lodged in an earpiece. The wires were camouflaged as much as possible.

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Phoenix666 writes:

What if I told you that, contrary to the alarming headlines and eye-catching infographics you may have seen ricocheting around social media, new technologies aren't shaking up the labor market very much by historical standards? You might think I was as loopy as a climate-change denier and suggest that I open my eyes to all the taxi drivers being displaced by Uber, the robots taking over factories, and artificial intelligence doing some of the work lawyers and doctors used to do. Surely, we are in uncharted territory, right?

Right, but not in the way you think. If you study the US labor market from the Civil War era to present, you discover that we are in a period of unprecedented calm – with comparatively few jobs shifting between occupations – and that is a bad sign. In fact, this low level of "churn" is a reflection of too little, not too much technological innovation: Lack of disruption is a marker of our historically low productivity growth, which is slowing improvement in people's living standards.

A new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) examines this trend in detail using large sets of US Census data that researchers at the Minnesota Population Center have curated to harmonize occupational classifications over long periods. ITIF's analysis quantifies the growth or contraction of individual occupations, decade by decade, relative to overall job growth, and it assesses how much of that job churn – whether growth or contraction – is attributable to technological advances. The report concludes that, rather than increasing, the rate of occupational churn in recent years has been the lowest in American history – and only about one-third or one-quarter of the rate we saw in the 1960s, depending on how you measure contracting occupations.

[...] Aside from being methodologically suspect and, as ITIF shows, ahistorical, this false alarmism is politically dangerous, because it feeds the notion that we should pump the breaks on technological progress, avoid risk, and maintain the status quo – a foolish formula that would lock in economic stagnation and ossify living standards. Policymakers certainly can and should do more to improve labor-market transitions for workers who lose their jobs. But if there is any risk for the near future, it is that technological change and productivity growth will be too slow, not too fast.

So, let's all take a deep breath and calm down. Labor market disruption is not abnormally high; it's at an all-time low, and predictions that human labor is just a few more tech "unicorns" away from redundancy are vastly overstated, as they always have been.

IOW, it's all in your imagination.

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Phoenix666 writes:

45,000 years ago, in an area that is now part of Ethiopia, humans found a roomy cave at the base of a limestone cliff and turned it into a special kind of workshop. Inside, they built up a cache of over 40 kilograms of reddish stones high in iron oxide. Using a variety of tools, they ground the stones into different colored powders: deep reds, glowing yellows, rose grays. Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other ingredients to create the world's first paint. For at least 4,500 years, people returned to this cave, known today as Porc-Epic, covering its walls in symbols and inking their bodies and clothes. Some anthropologists call it the first artist's workshop.

Now, a new study in PLoS One suggests that the cave offers us a new way to understand cultural continuity in the Middle Stone Age, when humans were first becoming sophisticated toolmakers and artisans. Paleoscientists Daniela Eugenia Rosso, Francesco d'Errico, and Alain Queffelec have sorted through the 4,213 pieces of ochre found in the cave, analyzing the layers of history they represent. They argue that Porc-Epic is a rare continuous record of how humans pass on knowledge and rituals across dozens of generations.

4,500 years is a long time for continuous use of a single site.

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butthurt writes:

The Dubai police have a new officer, a life-sized robot one [...]

He has a large touch screen and can be used for paying fines and for reporting incidents of concern. [...]

"This is the official launch of our first Robocop," said Brig Khalid Al Razooqi, Dubai Police director general of smart services, according to the i. "Now most people visit police stations or customer service, but with this tool we can reach the public 24/7 and it won't ask for any sick leave or maternity leave."

Source: The Inquirer

Previous stories:
California Police use a Robot to Take Away a Suspect's Gun
Sniper Attack in Dallas: 5 Cops Dead; 6 More Wounded

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takyon writes:

NVMe is a logical device interface specification for accessing non-volatile storage media attached via a PCI Express bus. The NVMe 1.3 specification has been published, and it introduces several new features:

As with previous updates to the standard, most of the new features are optional but will probably see widespread adoption in their relevant market segments over the next few years. Several of the new NVMe features are based on existing features of other storage interfaces and protocol such as eMMC and ATA. Here are some of the most interesting new features:

Device Self Tests
Boot Partitions
Sanitize
Virtualization
Namespace Optimal IO Boundary
Directives and Streams
Non-Operational Power State Permissive Mode
Host Controlled Thermal Management

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acid andy writes:

Scientists have come up with one more reason to be amazed by Tyrannosaurus rex. When the huge carnivorous dinosaur took a bite, it did so with an awe-inspiring force equal to the weight of three small cars, enabling it to crunch bones with ease.

Researchers on Wednesday said a computer model based on the T. rex jaw muscle anatomy and analyses of living relatives like crocodilians and birds showed its bite force measured about 8,000 pounds (3,630 kg), the strongest of any dinosaur ever estimated.

"T. rex could pretty much bite through whatever it wanted, as long as it was made of flesh and bone," said Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory Erickson.

Given the size of the creature - and the size of what it presumably tried to eat - it makes sense that it evolved those kind of muscles.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hackernews reports:

A 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in Samba networking software that could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected Linux and Unix machines.

[...] The newly discovered remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-7494) affects all versions newer than Samba 3.5.0 that was released on March 1, 2010.

"All versions of Samba from 3.5.0 onwards are vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability, allowing a malicious client to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load and execute it," Samba wrote in an advisory published Wednesday.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Why isn't beer served with ice? Well, the main reason is, the beer will get watered down as the ice melts – it's a problem that also extends to drinks that are served on the rocks, even though the coldness of the ice may help them to go down smoother. That's where the Beyond Zero system comes in. Instead of making ice cubes out of water, it makes them out of booze.

Invented by Kentucky-based entrepreneur Jason Sherman, the system actually consists of two devices – the Liquor Ice Maker and the Liquor Ice Storage Unit.

A liquor of the user's choice is first poured into the Maker, where it's cooled well below the temperature reached by a regular freezer, and formed into cubes. Exactly how that's accomplished is a trade secret, although the process takes just a matter of minutes.

Whiskey slushie, anyone?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Local "academic" Dr Olivia Doll — also known as Staffordshire terrier Ollie — sits on the editorial boards of seven international medical journals and has just been asked to review a research paper on the management of tumours.

Her impressive curriculum vitae lists her current role as senior lecturer at the Subiaco College of Veterinary Science and past associate of the Shenton Park Institute for Canine Refuge Studies — which is code for her earlier life in the dog refuge.

Ollie's owner, veteran public health expert Mike Daube, decided to test how carefully some journals scrutinised their editorial reviewers, by inventing Dr Doll and making up her credentials.

The five-year-old pooch has managed to dupe a range of publications specialising in drug abuse, psychiatry and respiratory medicine into appointing her to their editorial boards.

Dr Doll has even been fast-tracked to the position of associate editor of the Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine.

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/the-perth-dog-thats-probably-smarter-than-you/news-story/a4de0d201ce420e0302c69532a399419

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Phoenix666 writes:

IBM gave the audience a deeper dive into the OpenCAPI initiative and hardware at the recently concluded HPC Advisory Council annual meeting in Lugano, Switzerland.

OpenCAPI is a new connection type that gives a high bandwidth, low latency, connection for memory, accelerators, network, storage, and other devices like ASICs.

One of the design goals for CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) was to minimise latency – shooting for "equivalent effective latency of DDR standards". They've done a good job of reaching that goal, with very low 10 nanosecond latency for devices like accelerators and even achieving 5ns latency for advanced memory.

The latency numbers are a pretty big deal – POWER8 round trip latency is about 10ns, and that's very sporty for a processor. Even more important is that the 10ns latency of OpenCAPI beats PCIe like a drum, since a typical PCIe round trip incurs a 100ns latency penalty.

When it comes to bandwidth, OpenCAPI today offers 25GBps while PCIe gen 3 currently offers 32GBps. The speaker, IBM's Jeff Stuecheli, explained that succeeding instances of OpenCAPI will run at 32GBps then 56GBps and higher.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In the wake of this spring's Senate ruling nixing FCC privacy regulations imposed on ISPs, you may be (even more) worried about how your data is used, misused, and abused. There have been a lot of opinions on this topic since, ranging from "the sky is falling" to "move along, citizen, nothing to see here." The fact is, ISPs tend to be pretty unscrupulous, sometimes even ruthless, about how they gather and use their customers' data. You may not be sure how it's a problem if your ISP gives advertisers more info to serve ads you'd like to see—but what about when your ISP literally edits your HTTP traffic, inserting more ads and possibly breaking webpages?

With a Congress that has demonstrated its lack of interest in protecting you from your ISP, and ISPs that have repeatedly demonstrated a "whatever-we-can-get-away-with" attitude toward customers' data privacy and integrity, it may be time to look into how to get your data out from under your ISP's prying eyes and grubby fingers intact. To do that, you'll need a VPN.

Source: Ars Technica

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Phoenix666 writes:

New research from the University of Cincinnati (UC) reveals that residents of the Mid-Ohio River Valley (from Evansville, Indiana, north to Huntington, West Virginia) had higher than normal levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) based on blood samples collected over a 22-year span. The exposure source was likely from drinking water contaminated by industrial discharges upriver.

The study, appearing in the latest publication of Environmental Pollution, looked at levels of PFOA and 10 other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in 931 Mid-Ohio River Valley residents, testing blood serum samples collected between 1991 and 2013, to determine whether the Ohio River and Ohio River Aquifer were sources of exposure. This is the first study of PFOA serum concentrations in U.S. residents in the 1990s.

"These Mid-Ohio River Valley residents appear to have had concentrations of PFOA in their bloodstream at higher than average U.S. levels," says Susan Pinney, PhD, professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the UC College of Medicine, a member of both the Cincinnati Cancer Consortium and UC Cancer Institute and senior author of the study.

Ohio River PFOA concentrations downstream were elevated, suggesting Mid-Ohio River Valley residents were exposed through drinking water, primarily contaminated by industrial discharges as far as 666 kilometers (413 miles) upstream. Industrial discharges of PFOA to the Ohio River, contaminating water systems near Parkersburg, West Virginia, were previously associated with nearby residents' serum PFOA concentrations above U.S. general population medians.

[...] Pinney points out that the primary concern with PFCs/PFOA is that they take a very long time to leave the human body, and studies indicate that exposure to PFOA and PFOS over certain levels may result in adverse health effects, including developmental effects, liver and tissue damage and immune and thyroid impacts.

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AnonTechie writes:

As the MPAA tells it, piracy is really killing the movie industry. It's been whining about piracy for basically my entire lifetime, and constantly predicting its own demise if "something" is not done. And, despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly obliged Hollywood in ratcheting up copyright anti-piracy laws and despite the fact that the MPAA has been clearly wrong repeatedly (such that the new technologies it feared actually helped expand Hollywood's business), the studios continue to push for awful changes to copyright law, citing the horrors of piracy.
And yet... now it's coming out that Disney not only had a good year last year, it had the best year ever for a movie studio. Not surprisingly, Disney put out its own glowing press release over this:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170525/10481837456/piracy-killing-hollywood-so-bad-that-disney-made-more-money-2016-than-any-studio-ever.shtml

[Also Covered By]: Disney made more money in a single year than any other movie studio—ever

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Phoenix666 writes:

Animal-hair cords dating to the late 1700s contain a writing system that might generate insights into how the Inca communicated, a new study suggests.

Researchers have long wondered whether some twisted and knotted cords from the Inca Empire, which ran from 1400 to 1532, represent a kind of writing about events and people. Many scholars suspect that these textile artifacts, known as khipus, mainly recorded decimal numbers in an accounting system. Yet Spanish colonial documents say that some Inca khipus contained messages that runners carried to various destinations. 

Now a new twist in this knotty mystery comes from two late 18th century khipus stored in a wooden box at San Juan de Collata, a Peruvian village located high in the Andes Mountains. A total of 95 cord combinations of different colors, animal fibers and ply directions, identified among hundreds of hanging cords on these khipus, signify specific syllables, reports Sabine Hyland. Hyland, a social anthropologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, describes the khipus online April 19 in Current Anthropology.

Her findings support a story told by Collata villagers that the khipus are sacred writings of two local chiefs concerning a late 18th century rebellion against Spanish authorities.

The Collata khipus display intriguing similarities to Inca khipus, including hanging cords with nearly the same proportions of two basic ply directions, Hyland says. A better understanding of Central Andean khipus from the 1700s through the 1900s will permit a reevaluation of the earlier Inca twisted cords, she suggests.

Messages hidden in plain sight? Or should that be "plaid" site?

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takyon writes:

Intel is planning to make the Thunderbolt specification royalty-free, and include support for the protocol on its CPUs rather than on external chips:

Intel's dream of making one cable to rule them all took a huge step forward this week. On Wednesday, Intel announced it will integrate Thunderbolt 3 into future CPUs. More importantly, the company said it would open up the long-secret protocol to the world, royalty-free. The company's explanation for the change is practically utopian. "Intel's vision for Thunderbolt was not just to make a faster computer port, but a simpler and more versatile port available to everyone," wrote Chris Walker, Intel's vice president for Client Computing, in a blog post.

[...] By moving Thunderbolt onto the CPU, Intel says it can lower the cost and the power requirements. Intel didn't actually detail which CPUs would get Thunderbolt 3 or when. If it's truly coming to all of them, it would mean every PC that uses an Intel chip would get the much sought-after feature. There's no fear of a proprietary lock now, either. "In addition to Intel's (CPU integrated) Thunderbolt silicon," Walker wrote, "next year Intel plans to make the Thunderbolt protocol specification available to the industry under a nonexclusive, royalty-free license."

Here's an idea: take the Intel Management Engine off at the same time.

Also at BusinessInsider, Wired, CNET, Tom's Hardware, and Ars Technica.

Original Submission