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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

United Press International reports

A California mother shared video of her 3-year-old daughter being "let off with a warning" by an officer who caught her driving a Barbie Jeep without a license.

Serenity Hanna posted a video to Facebook showing her 3-year-old daughter, Davy, having a run-in with a Huntington Beach Police officer.

"No license, no registration", the officer says, "What are we going to do about this?"

The little girl hits the accelerator and attempts to flee the scene, sparking an ultra slow-speed pursuit.

"I can't believe this is happening", Hanna says through laughter.

"Our 3 year old daughter had a run in with HBPD this evening while out for a drive", she wrote in the Facebook post. "Even though she tried to flee the scene, the officer let her off with a warning and a badge sticker. We failed to ask this officer's name but he made our day and gave us a story to tell our family for years to come!"

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Islamic Republic remains in many ways cut off economically from the rest of the world. Big-name Western brands shun the market for fear of violating sanctions that remain in place even after the country's landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

That means no KFC—just local upstarts like "Iran Fried Chicken"—or credit and ATM cards connected to global banking networks. Visitors to the country must carry in thick wads of dollars. Many popular social-networking sites like Facebook are blocked by government censors.

Order from Amazon or call an Uber? Forget about it.

In their place, a surprisingly active tech startup scene has sprung up. It's driven by a growing number of Iranian millennials who see their country of 80 million people not as an isolated outcast but as a market ripe with opportunity.

Among the fastest-growing companies in the digital transformation is Snapp, the ride-hailing app Meisami uses.

He estimates he makes more than $900 working in a good month, pulling in a much larger cut per fare than he would driving for a traditional taxi-style car service. His hours are long—12 hours a day most days a week—but he likes being able to pick when and where he works.

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Testing general relativity is a fraught business. The theory has proven to be so robust that anyone who thinks it's wrong gets slapped around by reality in a pretty serious way. The tests that we apply are also limited by our environment, in that we can only look at gravity with precision where it's rather weak: in the lab, or by tracking the motion of planets. That's a  whole range of scales and forces, but it doesn't cover where it might truly matter, which is right next to a black hole.

Observing orbits around a black hole would take a career's worth of measurements and, frankly, who has the time? It is also a rare benefactor who will fund a couple of decades worth of telescope time. Luckily, telescopes have been collecting data for a while, and some of that happens to include the vicinity of some black holes. Recently, some scientists decided to dig up the data and test general relativity in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.

At the center of our galaxy, there lies a black hole, which like the Rabbit of Caerbannog, fiercely devours unwary wanderers. Nevertheless, there are a few foolhardy stars that orbit close to the rabbit black hole. These stars have orbits of just a couple of decades, and they experience rather large gravitational forces. So, astronomers expect that accurate observations of these stars might pick out deviations from general relativity.

Luckily, the Keck telescopes have been gathering data from the heavens for about 25 years, and over that time, they have turned their unblinking eyes towards the galactic center on numerous occasions. Each time, the observations were performed a bit differently. For instance, the telescopes were upgraded with adaptive optics in 2005, and some of the observations focused on obtaining spectral data rather than imaging. These latter data contain orbital velocity data, because the motion of the star causes a doppler shift in the observed colors of light.

All of this data was combined in a consistent way to map out the orbital positions and velocities of two stars. This is quite an achievement, because for each observation, the telescope is pointing in a slightly different direction, using different exposure times, and accounting for other slight differences. Although other telescopes also have data available, the public records were not detailed enough to allow the scientists to process the data in a consistent way. This is a pity, because, the data set consists of about 100 observations from just these two telescopes. Imagine what might have been obtained if more telescopes had accessible data?

After all of this, what have we learned? General relativity is still right, and it predicted the stellar motion accurately. These measurements tested general relativity in a way that was distinct from all previous ones—in high gravitational fields over long periods of time. In particular, the new measurements helped to put boundaries on extensions to general relativity that follow a kind of modified Newtonian dynamics model. In these models, there is a distance at which a new force becomes apparent, and that force has some unknown characteristic strength. So, astronomers are looking for a consistent distance at which there is a noticeable deviation from predictions. However, the measurements tell us that for any distance that is relevant to the orbit of these stars, a new force would have zero strength.

Or, more precisely, a new force would have a strength that is so small that we cannot yet measure it. Conclusion: general relativity wins again.

-- submitted from IRC

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"exec" writes:

Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.

She lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring and died at a nearby hospital after a brief illness, said Elizabeth Conlisk, a spokeswoman for Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Ms. Sammet had earned her undergraduate degree and later endowed a professorship in computer science.

The programming language Ms. Sammet helped bring to life is now more than a half-century old, but billions of lines of COBOL code still run on the mainframe computers that underpin the work of corporations and government agencies around the world.

Ms. Sammet was a graduate student in mathematics when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She wasn't impressed.

"I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted nothing to do with," Ms. Sammet recalled in an interview in 2000.

Her initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time, long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later, Ms. Sammet tried programming calculations onto cardboard punched cards, which were then fed into a computer.

"To my utter astonishment," she said, "I loved it."

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html?_r=0

-- submitted from IRC

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

SAN FRANCISCO — When John Battelle's teenage son broke his leg at a suburban soccer game, naturally the first call his parents made was to 911. The second was to Dr. Jordan Shlain, the concierge doctor here who treats Mr. Battelle and his family. "They're taking him to a local hospital," Mr. Battelle's wife, Michelle, told Dr. Shlain as the boy rode in an ambulance to a nearby emergency room in Marin County. "No, they're not," Dr. Shlain instructed them. "You don't want that leg set by an E.R. doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city." Within minutes, the ambulance was on the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for California Pacific Medical Center, one of San Francisco's top hospitals. Dr. Shlain was there to meet them when they arrived, and the boy was seen almost immediately by an orthopedist with decades of experience.

For Mr. Battelle, a veteran media entrepreneur, the experience convinced him that the annual fee he pays to have Dr. Shlain on call is worth it, despite his guilt over what he admits is very special treatment. "I feel badly that I have the means to jump the line," he said. "But when you have kids, you jump the line. You just do. If you have the money, would you not spend it for that?"

Increasingly, it is a question being asked in hospitals and doctor's offices, especially in wealthier enclaves in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and New York. And just as a virtual velvet rope has risen between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else on airplanes, cruise ships and amusement parks, widening inequality is also transforming how health care is delivered. Money has always made a big difference in the medical world: fancier rooms at hospitals, better food and access to the latest treatments and technology. Concierge practices, where patients pay several thousand dollars a year so they can quickly reach their primary care doctor, with guaranteed same-day appointments, have been around for decades.

But these aren't the concierge doctors you've heard about — and that's intentional.

Dr. Shlain's Private Medical group does not advertise and has virtually no presence on the web, and new patients come strictly by word of mouth. But with annual fees that range from $40,000 to $80,000 (more than 10 times what conventional concierge practices charge), the suite of services goes far beyond 24-hour access or a Nespresso machine in the waiting room.

Indeed, as many Americans struggle to pay for health care — or even, with the future of the Affordable Care Act in question on Capitol Hill, face a loss of coverage — this corner of what some doctors call the medical-industrial complex is booming: boutique doctors and high-end hospital wards.

-- submitted from IRC

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Automobiles are facing increasingly strict emissions regulations in an effort to reduce the amount of harmful air pollutants that are released into the environment. In Japan, for example, the current emissions standards for NO_x and nonmethane hydrocarbons are less than 0.05 g/km. Currently, one method of reducing harmful emissions is with a high-performance, three-way catalytic (TWC) converter. This device reduces harmful nitrogen oxides to nitrogen and oxygen, oxidizes carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide, and oxidizes unburnt hydrocarbons to carbon dioxide and water. However, it requires the use of the rare-earth element Cerium (Ce), which is increasing in price and can suffer from supply problems. Professor Masato Machida from Kumamoto University, Japan has been researching ways to reduce the amount of Ce used in catalytic converters and even find an alternative material to replace it.

In their most recent attempt to reduce the amount of Ce in their experimental catalyst, Professor Machida and collaborators from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST) grafted cerium oxide to MnFeO_y (CeO₂/MnFeO_y), and compared their new catalyst with two reference catalysts, CeO₂/Fe₂O₃ and CeO₂/Mn₂O₃. Upon assessing the oxygen-release profiles through carbon monoxide temperature-programmed reduction (CO-TPR), the researchers found that even though CeO₂/Mn₂O₃ exhibited oxygen release rates greater than CeO₂/MnFeO_y between ~350 to ~550 degrees Celsius, the experimental catalyst started releasing at the lowest possible temperature. This provided evidence that oxygen release was improved by both combining Fe₂O₃ and Mn₂O₃, and grafting CeO₂ to the surface.

[...] The researchers then put their new catalyst to the test in conditions that more closely resembled the real world. Using the Japanese standard JC08 (hot start) mode for gasoline engines, they developed two (reference and experimental) real-sized honeycomb catalysts and compared their performance using a four cylinder, 1339 cc, gasoline engine on a chassis dynamometer. The experimental catalyst was a 1:2 wt ratio of 1 wt% Rh-loaded CeO₂/MnFeO_y and 2.5 wt% Pd/A₂O₃, and the reference catalyst was a mixture of 1 wt% Rh/CeO₂ and Pd/A₂O₃. The experimental catalyst used 30% less CeO₂ than the reference thereby reducing the need for the rare earth metal.

-- submitted from IRC

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"exec" writes:

Original URL

Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.

"At first, I thought I was crazy," said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. "When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems."

Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.

Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.

But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers' voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother's nursing home or a child's school.

-- submitted from IRC

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butthurt writes:

[...] the tentative date for launch is now June 11th.

The experiment requires specific weather conditions. On the day of launch, a two-stage Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket will carry ten canisters that will be deployed about five minutes after liftoff. The canisters will then create vividly colored artificial clouds aka [also known as] vapor tracers. NASA scientists will then visually track the subsequent particle motions to gain further understanding of the ionosphere.

—Gizmodo

UPDATE (5 a.m., June 4): NASA Postpones Sounding Rocket Launch from Wallops

The launch of a Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket scheduled for June 4 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility has been postponed due to clouds impacting the ability to test a new ampoule ejection system designed to support studies of the ionosphere and aurora.

While the launch window runs through June 6, forecast weather is not conducive for supporting the test mission through the remainder of the window. The launch is now scheduled for no earlier than June 11, pending range availability.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.

-- submitted from IRC

Related:
AI Researchers Develop Curiosity Algorithm

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Open Source Survey asked a broad array of questions. One that caught my eye was about problems people encounter when working with, or contributing to, open source projects. An incredible 93 percent of people reported being frustrated with “incomplete or confusing documentation”.

That’s hardly a surprise. There are a lot of projects on Github with the sparsest of descriptions, and scant instruction on how to use them. If you aren’t clever enough to figure it out for yourself, tough.

[...] According to the Github Open Source Survey, 60 percent of contributors rarely or never contribute to documentation. And that’s fine.

Documenting software is extremely difficult. People go to university to learn to become technical writers, spending thousands of dollars, and several years of their life. It’s not really reasonable to expect every developer to know how to do it, and do it well.

2017 Open Source Survey

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The next time you book a holiday apartment in Barcelona you may wake up to find an inspector standing at the end of the bed.

Amid growing evidence that the massive upsurge in tourist apartments is driving rents up and residents out, the city has launched a crackdown on illegal, unlicensed apartments, and Airbnb, the dominant platform, is in the eye of the storm, although not the only offender.

According to the council, there are about 16,000 holiday rentals in the city, of which nearly 7,000 are unlicensed. Last year Barcelona fined Airbnb €600,000 for continuing to advertise unlicensed flats on its platform.

The city has doubled from 20 to 40 the team of inspectors who roam the streets seeking out illegal rentals, armed with apps that reveal at a click whether properties are legal or not. By next year their number will have risen to more than 100. Cross-referencing licences with property advertised online, they identify rogue apartments which are then ordered to close down. Owners – when they can be found – face fines of up to €60,000.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Nintendo's first foray into a paid online gaming service received two major shake-ups on Thursday: a delay and a content upgrade.

In good news, that means Nintendo won't charge for online Switch gaming for at least a few more months. (The paid service will eventually be required to access newer games' online multiplayer modes, though Nintendo still hasn't clarified whether older, pre-service games will be affected.) In bad news, the original plan was for the service to launch as a fully working free trial by this summer, including ties to the Nintendo Switch Online smart device app. Now, Nintendo says the only thing to expect by this summer is a "limited" version of that app. Nintendo did not clarify which of the app's advertised features (which include online matchmaking, voice chat with friends, and game-invite management) will make it into the limited version.

The much better news comes from a tweak to one of Nintendo Switch Online's advertised features: access to classic Nintendo games, complete with online multiplayer upgrades. Those games are still coming to paying subscribers, but originally, Nintendo said players would only get to access one classic game per month this way—and that the access would expire at month's end, unless Nintendo fans paid up to buy the game in question. Now, Nintendo is making this subscription feature a lot simpler: so long as you subscribe, you get access to the service's entire slew of classic, online-boosted games in perpetuity. (Cancel your subscription, on the other hand, and your access to the games goes away.)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

As Apple prepares to show off new features for the iPhone and other devices at its developer conference on Monday, the company is grappling with an uncomfortable issue: Many of its existing features are already too complicated for many users to figure out.

At last year’s conference, for example, Apple’s top software executive, Craig Federighi, demonstrated how users could order food, scribble doodles and send funny images known as stickers in chats on its Messages app. The idea was to make Messages, one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, into an all-purpose tool like China’s WeChat.

But the process of finding and installing other apps in Messages is so tricky that most users have no idea they can even do it, developers and analysts say.

Source: The New York Times

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

A Swiss court has fined a man for “liking” defamatory comments on Facebook, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

According to a statement from the Zurich district court, the 45-year-old [un-named] defendant accused an animal rights activist, Erwin Kessler, of racism and antisemitism and hit the “like” button under several comments from third parties about Kessler that were deemed inflammatory.

The comments were made in 2015 during heated discussions on a range of Facebook groups about which animal welfare groups should be permitted to take part in a vegan street festival, the Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger reported.

Kessler sued more than a dozen people who took part in those exchanges, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Amr Abdelaziz, said.

Several people have already been convicted in the case, mainly for comments they made. It appears the man convicted on Monday was the first to be sanctioned merely for “liking” comments made by others.

[...] [The lawyer, Amr Abdelaziz] said the courts needed to urgently clarify whether hitting a like button on social media should be given the same weight as other forms of speech more commonly cited in defamation cases.

“If the courts want to prosecute people for likes on Facebook, we could easily need to triple the number of judges in this country,” he said. “This could also obviously easily become an assault on the freedom of expression.”

Source: The Guardian

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takyon writes:

Medicine has progressed a lot since the Civil War, but amputations haven't. Once a limb is sliced off, surgeons wrap muscle around the raw end, bury nerve endings, and often attach a fixed prosthesis that is nowhere near as agile as the flesh-and-blood original. Better robotic limbs are available, but engineers are still figuring out how to attach them to people and give users fine motor control. Now, a team of researchers and clinicians has developed a simple surgical technique that could lead to prosthetics that are almost as responsive as real limbs.

[...] The biggest barrier to lifelike limbs is that signals can no longer travel in an unbroken path from the brain to the limb and back. Scientists have developed several ways to bridge the gap. The simplest is to place electrodes on remaining muscle near the amputation site. For finer control, doctors can use severed nerves themselves to relay the signals, through electronic attachments. But when they aren't rejected by nerve tissue, such attachments tend to receive weak signals. A stronger signal comes from attaching nerve endings to small muscle grafts that amplify the signal and relay it using electrodes. But even this method fails to take advantage of a simple biological solution for joint control: the pairing of agonistic and antagonistic muscles. When you contract your biceps to bend your elbow, for example, your triceps on the other side of the joint stretches, providing resistance and feedback. Together, such opposing muscle pairs let you fluidly adjust a limb's force, position, and speed.

The new technique, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, creates such a pairing for prosthetic joint control. It respects "the fundamental motor unit in biology, two muscles acting in opposition," says Hugh Herr, a biophysicist at MIT and co-developer of the method.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/new-surgical-procedure-could-lead-lifelike-prosthetic-limbs

On prosthetic control: A regenerative agonist-antagonist myoneural interface (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aan2971) (DX)

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Privacy Online News reports

The "Removal of Net Neutrality Simulator" is a new Google Chrome browser extension [1] created by the good activists at Keep Our Net Free for education and awareness purposes. [It] simulates an online world without net neutrality (NN) where internet service providers (ISPs) control and squeeze your internet browsing experience for extra profit. The extension's functionality and stated goals are simple:

To demonstrate the impact of removing Net Neutrality, this extension slows your internet connection and blocks several websites.

All it takes is a few minutes of using the Internet with the "Removal of Net Neutrality Simulator" to get a clear grasp of why consumers deserve net neutrality. The creators of the dystopian simulator explained:

This extension shows you what the ramifications of this decision would be by slowing all websites except for "sponsored sites", and blocking content those sites' competitors' websites.

[1] All content is behind scripts.

Original Submission