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takyon writes:

Microsoft acquires conversational AI startup Semantic Machines

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Semantic Machines to bolster its conversational AI offerings — like Cortana, the Azure Bot Service, and Microsoft Cognitive Services. Semantic Machines works in areas like speech synthesis, deep learning, and natural language processing.

[...] In addition, Semantic Machines has assembled a cadre of experts in the conversational AI arena, like Larry Gillick, former chief scientist for Siri at Apple, and well-known researchers like UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and Stanford University professor Percy Liang.

More details here. Also at The Verge.

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takyon writes:

No "3D audio" headphones for you:

A California startup that sought [to] revolutionize audio headphones, promising personalized devices that would produce sound "indistinguishable from reality," has found that raising interest among investors was easier than delivering the goods.

Ossic raised more than $3.2 million in crowdfunding for its Ossic X, which it touted as the "first 3D audio headphones calibrated to you." But after delivering devices to only about 80 investors who'd paid at least $999 to for the "Developer/Innovator" rewards level on Kickstarter, Ossic announced Saturday it had run out of money — leaving the more than 10,000 other backers with nothing but lighter wallets.

"This was obviously not our desired outcome," the company said in a statement. "To fail at the five-yard line is a tragedy. We are extremely sorry that we cannot deliver your product and want you to know that the team has done everything possible including investing our own savings and working without salary to exhaust all possibilities."

Those who paid $199 ("SUPER EARLY BIRD: SAVE $200 (RETAIL $399)") were lucky. Later backers paid $219, $249, or $279.

Don't help crowdfund something unless you can make peace with your "investment" potentially disappearing into the ether.

Also at TechCrunch, Engadget, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and VR And Fun.

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black6host writes:

I came across this article tonight, and being somewhat interested in music thought others might be interested as well: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/21/scientists-find-secret-behind-sweet-sound-of-stradivarius-violins

The violins made by the Italian masters Andrea Amati and Antonio Stradivari are celebrated as the finest ever made, but the secret behind their perfect sound has mystified experts for centuries.

Now scientists in Taiwan believe they have hit on an answer. Using software normally reserved for speech analysis, they found that violins from the two Cremonese luthiers mimic aspects of the human voice, a feature they argue adds to the instruments' exceptional musical quality.

The scientists recorded a professional violinist playing 15 antique instruments at Taiwan's Chimei Museum and compared the acoustic signatures with those from 16 male and female vocalists who were recorded singing English vowel sounds.

The researchers found that the early Italian instruments produced human-like "formants", the harmonic tones that correspond to resonances in the vocal tract. Specifically, the Amati violins produced formants similar to those from bass and baritone singers, while the Stradivari instruments had higher-frequency formants, closer to those of tenors and contraltos.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

China's space agency has taken a critical first step toward an unprecedented robotic landing on the far side of the Moon. On Monday, local time, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation launched a Long March 4C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. Although it did not broadcast the launch, the Chinese space agency said it went smoothly, according to the state news service Xinhua.

"The launch is a key step for China to realize its goal of being the first country to send a probe to soft-land on and rove the far side of the Moon," Zhang Lihua, manager of the relay satellite project, told Xinhua.

About 25 minutes after the launch, the Queqiao spacecraft separated from the rocket's upper stage, and began a trip toward a halo orbit of the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2. Over the next six months, the 425kg spacecraft will undergo tests to ensure it will function properly as a communications relay.

[...] Of note, the Queqiao spacecraft—which means Magpie bridge and is a reference to Chinese folklore—will also carry two scientific instruments. One is a Dutch radio antenna, which will study celestial radio frequencies blocked by Earth's atmosphere. The other instrument is a large-aperture laser angle reflector for ranging measurements between Earth and the spacecraft.

The relay spacecraft should reach its L2 halo orbit in about eight days.

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takyon writes:

Astronomers have posited an interstellar origin for (514107) 2015 BZ₅₀₉, the first example of a retrograde co-orbital asteroid with one of the solar system's planets (Jupiter):

An asteroid in Jupiter's orbit [Note: actually orbiting the Sun and crossing the orbit of Jupiter] may have come from outside our Solar System, according to a new study. Unlike 'Oumuamua, the interstellar object which briefly visited the Solar System earlier this year, 2015 BZ509 (affectionately known as BZ) seems to have been here for 4.5 billion years. This makes it the first known interstellar asteroid to have taken up residence orbiting the Sun.

It is not yet known where the object came from. "That's what we need to figure out next," laughs Dr Fathi Namouni from the Universite Cote d'Azur, one of the study's authors. "Because 'Oumuamua was just passing by... it's not that difficult to go back and pinpoint where it came from," he told BBC News. "BZ reached the Solar System when it was forming, when the planets themselves were not exactly where they are now. So it's a little more tricky to figure out where it came from."

Also at Scientific American, Science News, EarthSky, and CNN.

An interstellar origin for Jupiter's retrograde co-orbital asteroid (open, DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly057) (DX)

Related: Possible Interstellar Asteroid/Comet Enters Solar System
Interstellar Asteroid Named: 'Oumuamua
ESO Observations Show First Interstellar Asteroid is Like Nothing Seen Before
Breakthrough Listen to Observe Interstellar Asteroid 'Oumuamua for Radio Emissions (none were found)
'Oumuamua Likely Originated in the Local Association (Pleiades Moving Group)

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Security researchers have found a security flaw in Electron, a software framework that has been used in the past half-decade for building a wealth of popular desktop applications.

Apps built on top of Electron include Microsoft's Skype and Visual Studio Code, GitHub's Atom code editor, the Brave browser, along with official desktop apps for services like Signal, Twitch, Discord, Basecamp, Slack, Ghost, WordPress.com, and many more.

The framework has become very popular among today's software development community because it allows developers to easily port web-based apps coded in HTML, JS, and CSS to run on the desktop. The software framework is a custom API wrapped around the Node.js server-side JavaScript server.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/security-flaw-impacts-electron-based-apps/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The National Post reports:

A former employee of Ontario's 407 private freeway quit suddenly Wednesday as a Progressive Conservative candidate in next month's election, barely an hour after the highway confirmed that information on 60,000 customers had been leaked through an "internal theft."

Simmer Sandhu, the candidate for Brampton East, said in an online statement that he had recently been made aware of anonymous allegations against him "pertaining to both my work life and my nomination campaign."

"These allegations are totally baseless. I absolutely deny them," he said on both Twitter and Facebook. "I will vigorously defend myself and reputation and I am confident I will be cleared."

An opinion piece explains the anonymous allegations:

[...] it is alleged that someone stole 60,000 names, addresses and phone numbers from the privately-owned Highway 407 ETR's internal systems and distributed or sold the data to a couple of dozen candidates in GTA nomination races. Those campaigns then sold fake party memberships under the stolen names, mocked up identification that met the party's requirements (which do not include photo ID), and paid international students $200 a pop to vote under these fraudulent identities.

Wikipedia has an article about the Brampton East riding.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A blockchain standards group made up of hundreds of businesses and tech development members has unveiled its first specification for enabling the development of peer-to-peer, decentralized networks explicitly for automating corporate transactions.

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) last week released the Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification 1.0, an open-source framework to speed business transactions, boost privacy for contracts and create a faster, more efficient business transaction workflow.

The EEA Specification and its architecture stack is based on blockchain components developed by the Ethereum Foundation, the organization behind the world's second most valuable cryptocurrency: Ether.

By using the EEA's new specification, developers can write code that enables interoperability between businesses and their customers, either over a permissioned or public blockchain. The specification sets up a framework for setting up permission to join a blockchain network.

"You think about where Ethereum currently sits. It has great core competencies around value transfer, sending people Ether. It's created the standard for fundraising through token offerings [initial coin offerings]," said Tom Lombardi, EEA's head of market development. "But the goal of the alliance is to build a framework where we can use Ethereum, which has the largest developer based in the world, in a corporate setting.

"These large companies have compliance hurdles, legal hurdles and certain levels of bureaucracy where they have to check all the boxes before they can use a technology like this," Lombardi said.

The blockchain specification and its architectural stack promises greater transactional efficiency because it allows data to be taken "off-chain," or outside the primary blockchain ledger and processed in a separate database behind a firewall. The primary blockchain is then only used to validate completed transactions and can create a separate hash to represent the data offline for privacy and security.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 2015 Ada Colau, an activist with no experience in government, became mayor of Barcelona. She called for a democratic revolution, and for the last two years city hall, working with civic-minded coders and cryptographers, has been designing the technological tools to make it happen.

Their efforts have centred on two things. The first is opening up governance through participatory processes and greater transparency. And the second is redefining the smart city to ensure that it serves its citizens, rather than the other way around.

The group started by creating a digital participatory platform, Decidim ("We Decide", in Catalan). Now the public can participate directly in government as they would on social media, by suggesting ideas, debating them, and voting with their thumbs. Decidim taps into the potential of social networks: the information spreading on Twitter, or the relationships on Facebook. All of these apply to politics — and Decidim seeks to channel them, while guaranteeing personal privacy and public transparency in a way these platforms don't.

"We are experimenting with a hybrid of online and offline participatory democracy," says Francesca Bria, Barcelona's Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer. "We used Decidim to create the government agenda — over 70 per cent of the proposals come directly from citizens. Over 40,000 citizens proposed these policies. And many more citizens were engaged in offline collective assemblies and consultations."

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martyb writes:

Spaceflightnow reports on the next launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket (11 hours from the time this story posts):

Falcon 9 • Iridium Next 51-55 & GRACE Follow-On
Launch time: 1947:58 GMT (3:47:58 p.m. EDT; 12:47:58 p.m. PDT)
Launch site: SLC-4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch five satellites for the Iridium next mobile communications fleet and two Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE Follow-On) satellites for NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The Falcon 9 rocket will launch with a previously-flown first stage.

As it usually does, SpaceX has a live feed page up on YouTube which also notes:

A backup instantaneous launch opportunity is available on Wednesday, May 23 at 12:42 p.m. PDT, or 19:42 UTC.

[...] SpaceX will not attempt to recover Falcon 9's first stage after launch.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] The fourth variant can be potentially exploited by script files running within a program – such as JavaScript on a webpage in a browser tab – to lift sensitive information out of other parts of the application – such as personal details from another tab.

According to Intel, mitigations already released to the public for variant 1, which is the hardest vulnerability to tackle, should make attacks leveraging variant 4 much more difficult. In other words, web browsers, and similar programs with just-in-time execution of scripts and other languages, patched to thwart variant 1 attacks should also derail variant 4 exploits.

[...] If the processor core, while looking ahead in a program, finds an instruction that loads data from memory, it will predict whether or not this load operation is affected by any of the preceding stores. For example, if a store is writing to memory that a later load fetches back from memory, you'll want the store to complete first. If a load is predicted to be safe to run, the processor executes it speculatively while other parts of the chip are busy with store operations and other code.

That speculative act involves pulling data from memory into the level-one data cache. If it turns out the program should not have run the load before a store, it's too late to unwind the instruction flow and restart it: part of the cache was touched based on the contents of the fetched data, leaving enough evidence for a malicious program to figure out that fetched data. Repeat this over and over, and gradually you can copy data from other parts of the application. It allows, say, JavaScript running in one browser tab to potentially snoop on webpages in other tabs, for instance.

-- submitted from IRC

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Schools are to be given advice on how to disable a glitch that allows pupils sitting online spelling tests to right-click their mouse and find the answer.

[...] A spokesman said the issue was not with the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSA) but with browser or device settings on some machines.

Former head teacher George Gilchrist tweeted about the issue after it emerged primary seven pupils were using the online spellchecker on the test.

He wrote: "SNSA P7 spelling. Pupils asked to correct spelling of words. P7 pupils worked out if you right click on your answer, the computer tells you if it is correct! Brilliant! 😂"

Introduced in 2017, the spelling test asks children to identify misspelt words.

However, on some school computers the words were highlighted with a red line. Pupils who right-clicked on the words were then able to access the correct spelling.

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requerdanos writes:

This bit of possibly counter-intuitive finding from The Guardian:

Childhood acute leukaemia, says the highly respected Prof Mel Greaves, is nothing to do with power lines or nuclear fuel reprocessing stations. Nor is it to do with hot dogs and hamburgers or the Vatican radio mast, as have also been suggested. After the best part of a century of speculation, some of it with little basis in science, Greaves – who recently won the Royal Society's prestigious Royal Medal – says the cancer is caused by a combination of genetic mutations and a lack of childhood infection... [P]art of the answer could be to ensure children under the age of one have social contact with others, possibly at daycare centres.

[...] Greaves describes a "triple whammy" that he believes is the cause [of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia]. One in 20 children, he says, are born with a genetic mutation that puts them potentially at risk. But they will be fine if their immune system is properly set up. For that to happen, they must encounter benign bacteria or viruses in their first year of life. Those whose immune systems are not fully functioning because they have not had an early challenge to deal with – and who then later encounter an infection such as a cold or flu – may develop a second genetic mutation that will make them susceptible to the cancer.

Also at Discovery Medicine as "A Paradox of Progress?" and Science Magazine as "Study May Explain Mysterious Cancer - Day Care Connection".

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takyon writes:

SpaceX's controversial rocket fueling procedure appears 'viable,' says NASA safety advisory panel

A NASA safety advisory group weighed in Thursday on SpaceX's highly scrutinized proposal to load rocket propellants while astronauts are aboard, saying it appears to be a "viable option."

Several members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said that as long as potential hazards can be controlled, loading crew before fueling is finished could be acceptable.

"My sense is that, assuming there are adequate, verifiable controls identified and implemented for the credible hazard causes, and those which could potentially result in an emergency situation ... it appears load-and-go is a viable option for the program to consider," panel member Capt. Brent Jett Jr. (Ret.) said during Thursday's meeting.

SpaceX and Boeing Co. each have NASA contracts to develop separate crew capsules to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. Both SpaceX and Boeing are scheduled to conduct uncrewed flight tests of their vehicles in August, with crewed flight tests set for several months later.

A Falcon 9 blew up during propellant loading in 2016.

Previously: NASA Advisory Committee Skeptical of SpaceX Manned Refueling Plan

Related: SpaceX Identifies Cause of September Explosion
Problems With SpaceX Falcon 9 Design Could Delay Manned Missions

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hubie writes:

Plants know which direction is up, but it was never entirely clear how they know. A brief blurb in the most recent Science summarizes a paper that shows how plants are able to use built-in tilt meters they have in their cells.

Gravity-sensing cells in plants contain tiny grains of starch called statoliths. The orientation of the statoliths changes with the plant's orientation. The gravity-sensing cells respond to even the slightest tilt off of the established plane. Plant statoliths seem to evade the rules of physics that govern other granular materials. In live-cell imaging of young wheat shoots, Bérut et al. observed that statolith piles behave more like slowly creeping liquids than like granular accumulations. The reason is that the individual statoliths are always jiggling around, perhaps because of interactions with the plant cytoskeleton.

Paper reference: 10.1073/pnas.1801895115 (2018)

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