SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

Instead of worksheets, elementary students will be required to read for 20 minutes each night.

One Florida school district is taking a radical stance on homework. Starting in fall 2017, the Marion County public school district has decided to replace all traditional homework with 20 minutes of mandatory reading time for its elementary school students. This goes against the current practice of sending students home with worksheets and assignments based on their daily lessons in the classroom.

The driving force behind this unusual decision is Heidi Maier, the new superintendent of the district. She told the Washington Post that she has based her decision on research that clearly shows the benefits of reading, both silently and aloud, for young children, whereas the benefits of nightly homework have yet to be backed up by legitimate studies, despite the fact that many schools and parents act as if it is.

A retro move, or a smart one?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Wisconsin company is about to become the first in the U.S. to offer microchip implants to its employees.

Yes, you read that right. Microchip implants.

"It's the next thing that's inevitably going to happen, and we want to be a part of it," Three Square Market Chief Executive Officer Todd Westby said.

The company designs software for break room markets that are commonly found in office complexes.

Just as people are able to purchase items at the market using phones, Westby wants to do the sam[sic] thing using a microchip implanted inside a person's hand.

"We'll come up, scan the item," he explained, while showing how the process will work at an actual break room market kiosk. "We'll hit pay with a credit card, and it's asking to swipe my proximity payment now. I'll hold my hand up, just like my cell phone, and it'll pay for my product."

If the company was really cool they would do it by tattooing the sum of the squares of the first seven primes (2² + 3² + 5² + 7² + 11² + 13² + 17²) over the employees' left ear.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Drones will have to be registered and their users required to pass safety tests under new rules to be announced by the U.K.'s Department for Transport on Saturday.

Registration will be mandated for owners of drones 250 grams (8.8 ounces) or larger after research found that drones as small as 400 grams (14 ounces) could damage the windscreens of helicopters. Other security measures like "geo-fencing" -- GPS-based technology programmed into drones to prevent them from flying into sensitive areas such as prisons and airports -- are also under consideration, according to a statement from the department.

"Our measures prioritize protecting the public while maximizing the full potential of drones," aviation minister Martin Callanan will announce Saturday, according to the statement.

The new rules come at a time when drone flights are skyrocketing for both personal and corporate uses but the laws haven't caught up, leaving open the possibility of significant harm. It would only take a drone as big as 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) to "critically" damage the windscreen of an airliner flying at high speed, according to research from the Department for Transport, the British Airline Pilots Association and the Military Aviation Authority.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-21/u-k-to-require-registration-and-safety-tests-for-drone-owners

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA is considering four proposed space telescopes and will likely launch one of them in the 2030s as a flagship mission, like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope:

• Large Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR), a multipurpose follow-up mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope with a 8-16 meter (26-52 foot) primary mirror that would make discoveries on exoplanets, dark matter, star formation, the earliest galaxies of the universe, and within our own solar system.
• Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx), a smaller telescope than LUVOIR with a 4-8 meter (13-26 foot) primary mirror and instruments sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light to find worlds outside our solar system that could harbor life. HabEx could fly with a coronagraph, a component inside the telescope to mask starlight and reveal faint reflections from planets, or a starshade, a separate vehicle flying in formation with the telescope to blot out starlight.
• Origins Space Telescope, a far-infrared surveyor with a primary mirror up to 9 meters (30 feet) in diameter that would be a successor to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory. The Origins Space Telescope will investigate how galaxies, stars and planets form, search for water and greenhouse gases on exoplanets, and study interstellar dust.
• The Lynx X-ray telescope, following in the footsteps of NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton mission, will study the dawn of the first black holes, and the epoch of reionization, when the first galaxies and light sources emerged after the Big Bang.

The LUVOIR space telescope would be the closest to a successor of Hubble, covering a similar range of wavelengths. It is also similar in size to two recent proposals: the High Definition Space Telescope (HDST) and the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST).

The JWST was not designed to be serviceable and will likely only last for 5-10 years after its planned launch in October 2018. It has a 6.5 meter primary mirror. Hubble has been operating since 1990 but only has a 2.4 meter primary mirror.

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope will launch in the 2020s.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BOOM! That's the sound of Luc Besson's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets." US Weekend total is $17 million, not even a multiple of Friday's $6 million. Costing at least $225 million, "Valerian" is a domestic dud.

The only hope for STX Films on the most expensive indie film ever made is people in non English speaking countries not caring about the story or dialogue. This often the case, and dud films– see "The Mummy" — can find audiences who just want the visual flash.

"Valerian" will have to count on China, Russia, South Korea, and other out of the way locales to bail them out.

The previews looked visually amazing. Was the movie really that bad?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting developments in hobbyist computing today. Across the world, people are using it to automate beer making, open up the world of robotics and revolutionise STEM education in a world overrun by film students. These are all laudable pursuits. Meanwhile, what is Microsoft doing with it? Creating squirrel-hunting water robots.

Over at the firm's Machine Learning and Optimization group, a researcher saw squirrels stealing flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. The research team trained a computer vision model to detect squirrels, and then put it onto a Raspberry Pi 3 board. Whenever an adventurous rodent happened by, it would turn on the sprinkler system.

Microsoft's sciurine aversions aren't the point of that story – its shoehorning of a convolutional neural network onto an ARM CPU is. It shows how organizations are pushing hardware further to support AI algorithms. As AI continues to make the headlines, researchers are pushing its capabilities to make it increasingly competent at basic tasks such as recognizing vision and speech.

Do you go with the cloud, GPUs, FPGAs, or other?

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Last October, AngelList, a company that helps tech start-ups raise money and hire employees, held an office retreat. In the Hollywood Hills, far from Silicon Valley, the firm's mostly male staff mingled poolside with bikini-clad women who had been invited to the event.

Before the afternoon was over, Babak Nivi, a founder and board member at AngelList, said things that made Julie Ruvolo, a contractor, uncomfortable about working at the company. His comments included a suggestion that the women, who were not employees, warm up the pool by jumping in and rubbing their bodies together. The incident was described by two entrepreneurs who were told about it in the weeks after it occurred but were not authorized to speak about it.

Precisely what occurred at the Hollywood Hills event and the details of the agreement are not publicly known. Several weeks after the party, each side signed a nondisparagement clause as part of a settlement, the two people said. And neither Ms. Ruvolo nor AngelList are permitted to talk about what happened that day.

As more harassment allegations come to light, employment lawyers say nondisparagement agreements have helped enable a culture of secrecy. In particular, the tech start-up world has been roiled by accounts of workplace sexual harassment, and nondisparagement clauses have played a significant role in keeping those accusations secret. Harassers move on and harass again. Women have no way of knowing their history. Nor do future employers or business partners.

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/21/abuses-hide-in-the-silence-of-non-disparagement-agreements.html

Related: Silicon Valley Women Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Amid relentless scrutiny over possible ties between his presidential campaign and Russia, an extraordinary suggestion has emerged - that Donald Trump could pardon himself or his family.

Source: BBC News

US President Donald Trump has insisted he has the "complete power" to pardon people, amid reports he is considering presidential pardons for family members, aides and even himself.

A Democratic Party spokesman has called the reports "extremely disturbing".

The US authorities are probing possible collusion between the Trump team and Russia. Intelligence agencies think Russia tried to help Mr Trump to power.

Russia denies this, and the president says there was no collusion.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Mr Trump and his team were looking at ways to pardon people close to him.

Source: BBC News

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Fnord666 writes:

In the early 1950s, just as rock 'n' roll was hinting at social change, the first video games were quietly being designed in the form of technology demonstrations—and a scientist was behind it. In October 1958, Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two. Despite graphics that are ridiculously primitive by today's standards, it has been described as the first video game in history.

Higinbotham was inspired by the government research institution's Donner Model 30 analog computer, which could simulate trajectories with wind resistance, and the game was designed for display at an annual public exhibition. Although his purpose in creating the game was rather academic, Tennis for Two turned out to be a hit at the three-day exhibition, with thousands of students lining up to see the game.

At first glance, today's video gamers and scientists might appear to be worlds apart. But starting with Tennis for Two, video games have quietly and consistently been within the purview of academic study. Each generation of gamers has seen new titles created at various research institutions in order to explore programming, human-computer interaction, and algorithms. Lesser-known chapters of history reveal these two worlds are not as far apart as you might think

Source: Ars Technica

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

After nearly two decades of war against technologically unsophisticated foes, the Army Research Lab is reorienting to counter China and Russia.

The Army Research Lab is turning more of its attention to fighting land wars against far more technologically sophisticated adversaries than it has in the past several decades. In the coming months, the Lab will fund new programs related to highly (but not fully) autonomous drones and robots that can withstand adversary electronic warfare operations. The Lab will also fund new efforts to develop battlefield communications and sensing networks that perform well against foes with advanced electronic warfare capabilities, according to Philip Perconti, who became the director of the Lab in June.

After nearly two decades of war against determined but technologically unsophisticated foes in the Middle East, U.S. Army tech has, in some ways, fallen behind that of competing states, according to a May report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies on U.S. Army modernization.

For instance, Russia has invested heavily in anti-access / area denial technologies meant to keep U.S. forces out of certain areas. "There are regions in Donbass where no electromagnetic communications—including radio, cell phone, and television—work," says the CSIS report. "Electronic warfare is the single largest killer of Ukrainian systems by jamming either the controller or GPS signals."

Source: DefenseOne.com

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Last August, after being alerted by GitHub's security team that the certificate authority WoSign had errantly issued a certificate for a GitHub domain to someone other than GitHub, Google began an investigation in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and a group of security professionals into the company's certificate issuance practices. The investigation uncovered a pattern of bad practices at WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom dating back to the spring of 2015. As a result, Google moved last October to begin distrusting new certificates issued by the two companies, stating "Google has determined that two CAs, WoSign and StartCom, have not maintained the high standards expected of CAs and will no longer be trusted by Google Chrome."

WoSign (based in Shenzen, China) and StartCom (based in Eliat, Israel) are among the few low-cost certificate providers who've offered wildcard certificates. StartCom's StartSSL offers free Class 1 certificates, and $60-per-year wildcard certificates—allowing the use of a single certificate on multiple subdomains with a single confirmation. This made the service wildly popular. But bugs in WoSign's software allowed a number of misregistrations of certificates. One bug allowed someone with control of a subdomain to claim control of the whole root domain for certificates. The investigation also found that WoSign was backdating the SSL certificates it issued to get around the deadline set for certificate authorities to stop issuing SHA-1 SSL certificates by January 1, 2016. WoSign continued to issue the less secure SHA-1 SSL certificates well into 2016.

Source: Google drops the boom on WoSign, StartCom certs for good

Previously:
Heads Roll as Qihoo 360 Moves to End Wosign, Startcom Certificate Row
Game Over for WoSign and StartCom Certificate Authorities?

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Ligatures in programming fonts — a misguided trend I was hoping would collapse under its own illogic. But several readers have already sent me this new argument in favor.

Let me save you some time:

Ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea.

And not because I’m a purist or a grump. (Some days, but not today.) Programming code has special semantic considerations. Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in the end, even if they’re cute, the risk of error isn’t worth it.

There are good reasons we have Unicode and this is NOT one of them.

Source: http://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/q-ligatures-in-programming-fonts-a-hell-no

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The most common moth in the west is called the miller, and it is the adult of the army cutworm. Researchers are just now starting to understand the intricate relationship between this supposed-pest and bears, but that relationship is very important.

Each summer, moths of the army cutworm fly into tall mountain rocky slides, where they burrow away from the intense mountain sunlight into dark crevices. Hundreds of thousands of them. These moths come from farmland many miles away to these high, remote mountain slopes in Yellowstone.

At these places of slide rock and sunshine, both grizzly and black bears gather each year, climbing high above timberline to feed on the moths. The bears will dig through the slide rock and eat the moths that they uncover. It is estimated that some 40,000 moths per day can end up in the stomach of a hungry bear.

It's amazing how many calories you can get out of a single Mothra.

Source: https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/bears-eat-moths-in-august

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

This week the British papers revelled in news about how much the BBC's on-air stars get paid, though the salaries of their counterparts in commercial TV remain under wraps. In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid - and it rarely causes problems.

In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone's income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact.

"It became pure entertainment for many," says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG.

"At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-40669239

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Slower boat speeds reduce risks to manatees. Or do they? Not exactly, according to research conducted at Florida Atlantic University. In fact, the very laws enacted to slow down boats in manatee habitats may actually be doing more harm than good. However, an innovative alerting device is proving to deliver a better solution.

About 100 manatees are killed each year by boats, making it the leading cause of death for this species. Not only are they hit frequently, they are hit repeatedly and have the scars to prove it. It is often thought that's because these gentle giants move too slowly to get out of harm's way or perhaps they are not smart enough to know better.

Not true according to Edmund Gerstein, Ph.D., director of marine mammal research in FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science and his wife Laura, who have spent the last 20 years researching manatees to get to the root of this problem and to dispel these myths. What they have discovered is that manatees have difficulty hearing and locating low frequency sounds like the humming of an idling engine or a slow moving boat. Shallow and murky waters further exacerbate this problem and make boats both acoustically and visually invisible to unwary manatees.

"The idea of slowing down boats to protect manatees might make us feel better, but it has direct acoustic consequences in shallow water that place manatees at greater risk of collisions," said Edmund Gerstein. "While a slow speed zone may reduce the chance of death during a collision, they have not mitigated the number of collisions that kill and may have actually increased the number of non-fatal injuries."

Slowing down boats makes it more difficult for manatees to detect and locate approaching boats, while increasing the transect times or how long it takes for boats to actually pass through manatee habitats. When manatees are unable to reliably detect approaching boats, increasing time of exposure increases the risk of collisions.

"The increase in multiple propeller and boat scar patterns we are seeing on surviving animals is consistent with the implementation of slow speed zones in their habitats," said Edmund Gerstein. "Today, we have living manatees that have been hit dozens of times some with as much as 50 different scar patterns from boat encounters."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission