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canopic jug writes:

Stephen Foskett has written a detailed post about why he considers ZFS the Best Filesystem (For Now...). He starts out:

ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it's inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it's not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it simply offers the best level of data protection in a small office/home office (SOHO) environment. Here's why.

It's been a long road to get to where it is and there have been many hinderances, including software patents and malicious licensing.

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AnonTechie writes:

Bob: "I can can I I everything else."

Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to."

To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.

This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they'd made a mistake in programming.

"There was no reward to sticking to English language," says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a "generative adversarial network"–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.

"Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves," says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that Facebook as observed again, and again, and again. "Like if I say 'the' five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn't so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands."

Indeed. Humans have developed unique dialects for everything from trading pork bellies on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange to hunting down terrorists as Seal Team Six–simply because humans sometimes perform better by not abiding to normal language conventions. So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.

The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it

[Reminds me of]: Voynich Manuscript

What are your thoughts on this topic?

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mrpg writes:

Women and girls with autism may face greater challenges with real world planning, organization and other daily living skills, according to a study published in the journal Autism Research.

Led by researchers within the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at Children's National Health System, the National Institute of Mental Health, and The George Washington University, the study is the largest to date examining executive function-including the ability to make a plan, get organized, and follow through on the plan as needed-and adaptive skills-ability to perform basic daily tasks like getting up and dressed or making small talk- in women and girls with ASD.

"Our goal was to look at real world skills, not just the diagnostic behaviors we use clinically to diagnose ASD, to understand how people are actually doing in their day to day lives," says Allison Ratto Ph.D., , a psychologist in the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at Children's National and one of the study's authors. "When parents were asked to rate a child's day-to-day functioning, it turns out that girls were struggling more with these independence skills. This was surprising because in general, girls with ASD have better social and communication skills during direct assessments. The natural assumption would be that those communication and social skills would assist them to function more effectively in the world, but we found that this isn't always the case."

The study collected parent-reported data from several rating scales of executive function and adaptive behavior, including the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, Parent Form (BRIEF) and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-II (VABS-II). The group included 79 females and 158 males meeting clinical criteria for autism spectrum disorders, ranging in ages from 7 to 18 years old. The groups were matched for intelligence, age and level of autism and ADHD symptoms.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170714164906.htm

Journal Reference: Emily I. White, Gregory L. Wallace, Julia Bascom, Anna C. Armour, Kelly Register-Brown, Haroon S. Popal, Allison B. Ratto, Alex Martin, Lauren Kenworthy. Sex differences in parent-reported executive functioning and adaptive behavior in children and young adults with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/aur.1811

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The new Dr Who has been announced....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40624288
I'll get the popcorn..

Jodie Whittaker has been announced as Doctor Who's 13th Time Lord - the first woman to get the role.

She was revealed in a trailer that was broadcast on BBC One at the end of the Wimbledon men's singles final.

The Broadchurch star succeeds Peter Capaldi, who took the role in 2013 and leaves in this year's Christmas special.

Whittaker, 35, said it was "more than an honour" to become the Doctor. She will make her debut on the sci-fi show when the Doctor regenerates in the Christmas Day show.

Here are Jodie Wittaker's entries on Wikipedia and IMDb.

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WaPo and many other outlets
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/self-fueling-boat-sets-off-from-paris-on-6-year-world-trip/2017/07/15/03b2ac7a-6976-11e7-94ab-5b1f0ff459df_story.html

report that a 100 foot (~30m) racing catamaran has had the mast(s) removed and instead fitted with a combo of solar cells and vertical axis wind turbines. It also makes H2 by electrolysis of sea water and can run off a hydrogen fuel cell at night.

Originally designed in 1983, the boat enjoyed a successful career in open-sea sailing races before skippers Frederic Dahirel and Victorien Erussard and a French research institute converted it into the Energy Observer project.

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takyon writes:

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and Iranian to win the prestigious Fields Medal, has died:

Nearly three years after she became the first woman to win math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, Maryam Mirzakhani has died of breast cancer at age 40. Her death was confirmed Saturday by Stanford University, where Mirzakhani had been a professor since 2008.

Mirzakhani is survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and a daughter, Anahita — who once referred to her mother's work as "painting," because of the doodles and drawings that marked her process of working on proofs and problems, according to an obituary released by Stanford.

From Wikipedia:

Mirzakhani has made several contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. In her early work, Mirzakhani discovered a formula expressing the volume of a moduli space with a given genus as a polynomial in the number of boundary components. This led her to obtain a new proof for the formula discovered by Edward Witten and Maxim Kontsevich on the intersection numbers of tautological classes on moduli space, as well as an asymptotic formula for the growth of the number of simple closed geodesics on a compact hyperbolic surface, generalizing the theorem of the three geodesics for spherical surfaces. Her subsequent work has focused on Teichmüller dynamics of moduli space. In particular, she was able to prove the long-standing conjecture that William Thurston's earthquake flow on Teichmüller space is ergodic.

Most recently as of 2014, with Alex Eskin and with input from Amir Mohammadi, Mirzakhani proved that complex geodesics and their closures in moduli space are surprisingly regular, rather than irregular or fractal. The closures of complex geodesics are algebraic objects defined in terms of polynomials and therefore they have certain rigidity properties, which is analogous to a celebrated result that Marina Ratner arrived at during the 1990s. The International Mathematical Union said in its press release that, "It is astounding to find that the rigidity in homogeneous spaces has an echo in the inhomogeneous world of moduli space."

Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal in 2014 for "her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

Also at BBC, Stanford, Newsweek, and PressTV.

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takyon writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/14/537271940/noaa-halts-whale-disentanglement-efforts-after-rescuer-dies

After a noted emergency responder died in rescuing an endangered right whale, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it's suspending efforts to free whales that are similarly trapped by fishing lines and gear.

News of the suspension comes as the whale rescue community mourns Joe Howlett, a Canadian who died during a rescue operation on Monday. Howlett, a former fisherman and boat captain, had founded a whale rescue team and was based in Campobello Island, just across the border from Lubec, Maine.

Howlett died after freeing a right whale in Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence. At the time, he was aboard a fast response vessel and had just cut the whale loose — an operation that often involves using long poles with blades on the end to sever crab floats and fishing lines that have become wrapped around the large mammals.

"His colleagues reported that he was struck by the animal as it sped away," Maine Public Radio reports.

[The Maine Public Radio story notes "There are believed to be just 500 Right Whales remaining in the world." -Ed.]

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Championships at Wimbledon, which consumes some 28 tons of strawberries, 10,000 litres of cream, and 320,000 glasses of Pimm's per year, is notable for its seemingly unchecked luxuriant hedonism. But while most companies, organisations, and institutions are looking to cut costs, Wimbledon has stuck to its mantra. Don't do things cheaper; do things better.

Case in point: Wimbledon's use of technology is really quite impressive. I've been lucky enough to follow Wimbledon's tech over the last three years, and it has been very encouraging to see a massive endeavour like The Championships dive deeper and deeper into technology. You might think that after 140 years Wimbledon could be stuck in its ways, but far from it. When technology is the only viable way of providing consistent, significant gains for players, visitors, and hundreds of millions of people spectating remotely, you don't try to fight it; you embrace it.

Of course, Wimbledon is embracing tech in a distinctly Wimbledon way. This year, for example, The Championships are trialling free Wi-Fi—but because they don't yet know how people will behave with free Wi-Fi, it's only available in three specific locations (near the food court, in the ticket resale area, and on the west side of court 12). The tournament continues through this weekend, but its team has already started analysing the data. It turns out that, thankfully, the Wi-Fi users on court 12 only use their phones between points. When play begins, Wi-Fi usage stops. If the trial is a success, Wi-Fi could be rolled out across Wimbledon in 2018.

[...] Perhaps most excitingly, Wimbledon is now storing the 3D state of tennis matches via the Hawk-Eye camera system available on some of the courts. Hawk-Eye, which uses multiple cameras to track the ball and resolve line judging disputes, outputs a constant stream of data that IBM can process into a useful format. But actually doing something with that data is a risky affair, because it isn't clear who owns it. Some tennis players, as you can imagine, aren't keen for some wily big data/machine learning software to reveal the secrets of their play style to the world.

-- submitted from IRC

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canopic jug writes:

Datamation examines the Debian and Ubuntu distros in detail by starting with the question, what is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu? Neither GNU/Linux distro has been out of Distrowatch's top six since 2005, and for the last four years neither has been out of the top three. There are good reasons for that. Though if systemd is not your cup of tea, there is also a Debian fork, Devuan, which is basically Debian GNU/Linux minus systemd.

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takyon writes:

Commercial space companies want NASA to expand the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. SpaceX's senior vice president for global business and government affairs called for the COTS program to be extended to deep space activities:

Commercial space companies today (July 13) urged legislators to extend NASA's successful public-private partnerships for International Space Station transportation to future programs, including human missions to Mars.

NASA already is working with six firms to develop prototype habitats that would augment the agency's multibillion-dollar Orion capsule and Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. NASA has said it intends to use the system to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

[...] Technologies that SpaceX would be interested in developing in partnership with NASA include heavy-cargo missions to Mars, deep-space communications systems, and demonstrations of vertical takeoff and landing on the moon, Hughes said.

Getting spacecraft like the Interplanetary Spaceship to Mars will probably require SpaceX to dip into the NASA coffers yet again:

This proposal was foreshadowed last year in Guadalajara, Mexico. At the International Astronautical Congress there, Musk presented a sketch of the architecture needed to lower the cost of transit to Mars enough to make colonization feasible. His top-line cost of $10 billion, however, is likely out of reach for SpaceX in the near term—without the help of a big-pocketed government. "There's a lot of people in the private sector who are interested in helping fund a base on Mars, and perhaps there will be interest on the government sector side to do that," Musk said last fall.

Also at Ars Technica and LA Times (broader article about the economics of heavy launch capabilities).

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new era of treating disease has moved a step closer to reality in the United States.

A Food and Drug Administration panel gave a thumbs-up Wednesday to a gene therapy that involves genetically engineering a patient's T-cells to fight a particular type of leukemia, The New York Times reports.

If the FDA agrees with the panel's recommendation and moves to approve the treatment for commercial use, it would be the first such gene-altering treatment to make it to market.

[...] Once the stuff of science fiction, altering human genes has been creeping into reality of late. Also on Wednesday, researchers at Harvard announced they'd managed to encode video files into the genetic material of living cells, demonstrating the viability of a "molecular recorder" that could lead to more disease treatments in the future.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Here are some links from the past two weeks on the plans to add Digital Restrictions Management technology to HTML5. Maybe there are more links...

• Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C member organizations have two weeks to appeal
• The W3C has overruled members' objections and will publish its DRM for videos
• Disposition of Comments for Encrypted Media Extensions and Director's decision
• A DRM standard has been approved for the web, and security researchers are worried
• DRM Is Toxic To Culture
• How big is the market for DRM-Free?
• Encrypted Media Extensions: Copyright, DRM and the end of the open Web
• Global Web standard for integrating DRM into browsers hits a snag
• EFF has appealed the W3C's decision to make DRM for the web without protections
• If you're worried about Net Neutrality, you should be worried about web DRM, too
• Net Neutrality Won't Save Us if DRM is Baked Into the Web

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"Congress allowed the government to scan faces of foreign nationals to keep track of visa overstays. But now that's set to be extended to Americans worrying some privacy advocates."

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martyb writes:

How much do you worry about security? For me, it's a risk/value assessment. How much is my stuff worth? How much am I willing to be inconvenienced to protect it? How well do the protections actually work? Periodically, that last one comes up for reassessment. New threats are revealed and suddenly what seemed reasonable behavior undergoes a major reappraisal.

Well, here we go again. The Blackhat USA 2017 conference is coming to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 22-27. There are 118 briefings scheduled — the result of 225 researcher's work. I've extracted the titles (and provided links) to these briefings and provided them below.

Just reading the titles of these 118 presentations seems overwhelming. On first try, I skimmed through the briefings on about half of them and then my eyes started glazing over. One thing I am sure of, after these presentations are made public, there will be a surge of implementations that will affect our daily activities. On the internet, of course, but also in other areas such as power grid security, home/office automation, and GPS jammers.

On the other hand, there are presentations geared to improving security of devices and applications, as well.

And these are the ones that are being publicized — how many more are known and NOT published? Is there any hope for genuine privacy and security these days? Building a cabin in the woods and eschewing all technology may be one effective, albeit draconian, response. Just go along and hope that any problems are going to include a bunch of other folks and I'll just end up doing what they do to recover from the breach? What about friends and family who are even less technology-savvy? What practical warnings and cautions can one realistically offer to them?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Human beings largely object to income inequality and are willing to correct injustice—unless, of course, it rattles their status quo.

That's the conclusion of a recent study looking at how far people would go to redistribute resources between the haves and have nots. Participants fiercely objected to "when winners become losers and losers become winners," researchers note in the paper, published in the latest issue of Nature Human Behaviour.

Researchers initially recruited Indian, American, and Chinese participants take part in an experimental game they called "the redistribution game." The gist of the game was simple: Participants were given a number of scenarios that would redistribute a fixed sum from a richer person to someone poorer. Participants were told the original standing of wealth was assigned randomly.

In the first scenario, participants had to decide if they wanted to transfer two coins from person A (who already had four coins) to person B (who had one). Researchers note the "transfer would reduce inequality," (as there's less of a gap between them), but person B would end up one coin richer than person A, reversing their status.

In the second version of game, participants were asked whether they'd transfer one coin to person B (where person A ended up with three coins and person B with two coins). Researchers ran a third and fourth scenario that allowed participants to transfer coins from person A to B, where the outcome still left person A with significantly more coins.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission