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JesusAmieiro writes:

French schoolchildren will have to leave their smartphones switched off or at home as the new academic year begins in September, after lawmakers voted for a ban on Monday.

The ban on smartphones, tablets and other connected devices, which will apply to pupils up to the age of 14-15, fulfils[sic] a campaign promise by centrist President Emmanuel Macron, while being derided as "cosmetic" by the opposition.

MPs of Macron's centrist LREM party and its allies gave final approval to the bill, while lawmakers on the left and right abstained from the vote, calling the law a "publicity stunt" that would change nothing.

Under the new law, schools may make exceptions for "pedagogical use", extra-curricular activities, or for disabled pupils.

Secondary schools for their part can decide individually whether to impose a partial or total ban on connected devices.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

PM personally approved $443m fund for tiny Barrier Reef foundation

Malcolm Turnbull was at the meeting where $443.8m in funding was offered to a small not-for-profit foundation without a competitive tender process or any application for the money, an inquiry has heard.

Anna Marsden, the managing director of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, told a Senate inquiry on Monday the organisation was offered the funding at a meeting in Sydney in April between Turnbull, environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg, the foundation's chair John Schubert and environment and energy department secretary Finn Pratt.

The inquiry is examining the process by which the foundation, which had just six full-time staff at the time, was awarded the funds and whether it has the capacity to deliver work required under the government's reef 2050 plan.

Also at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

Americans looking to land a first job or break into a dream career face their best odds of success in years.

Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college degrees and specific skill sets to speed-up hiring and broaden the pool of job candidates. Many companies added requirements to job postings after the recession, when millions were out of work and human-resource departments were stacked with resumes.

[...] "Candidates have so many options today," said Amy Glaser, senior vice president of Adecco Group, a staffing agency with around 10,000 company clients in search of employees. "If a company requires a degree, two rounds of interviews and a test for hard-skills, candidates can go down the street to another employer who will make them an offer that day."

Ms. Glaser estimates one in four of the agency's employer clients have made drastic changes to their recruiting process since the start of the year, such as skipping drug tests or criminal background checks, or removing preferences for a higher degree or high-school diploma.

Source: NOTE: Original submission referenced a paywalled page at The Wall Street Journal; this link appears to link to the same story, albeit with a stock chart for Intel Corp., included: http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Employers-Eager-to-Hire-Try-a-New-Policy-No-Experience-Necessary-27016610/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Many commentators considered President Obama’s reversal on same-sex marriage an act of courage. But this isn’t how the public usually perceives moral mind-changers, according to a team led by Tamar Kreps at the University of Utah. Their findings⁰ in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggest that leaders who shift from a moral stance don’t appear brave – they just look like hypocrites.

The researchers conducted 15 studies, of which I’ll focus on one example that illustrates the core approach. Nearly 800 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk read scenarios where a member of the US Congress took a stance on either the death penalty or same-sex marriage. In some cases, their stance was pragmatic, indicated in their statement through phrases like “it’s a matter of not having to invest in the cost of changing government systems”. In other cases the justification for the stance was moral – “it’s a matter of justice.”

Participants rated their initial feelings about the politician and then learned that he or she had since changed their tune, again making a statement based on either pragmatic or moral reasons. For example, a statement might read “It’s still a moral issue for me…I’ve realized, though, that we can never be 100 per cent certain that the convicted party is guilty, and truly defending justice means never taking the risk of killing an innocent victim.” Finally, participants rated the politicians again.

When their initial stance was moral rather than pragmatic, the political leaders suffered costs and gained no benefits after changing their moral mind. Participants rated them as less effective, less worthy of support and more hypocritical, with the intensity of hypocrisy driving the other two negative judgments. Even those participants who agreed with moral mind-changers’ new position saw them as hypocritical, although slightly less so than other participants. At the same time, moral mind changers were seen as no more courageous, effective, or worthy of support, compared to the congress men and women who changed their initial pragmatically grounded position.

Source: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/07/31/political-and-business-leaders-who-change-their-moral-stance-are-perceived-not-as-brave-but-hypocritical-and-ineffective/

⁰Hypocritical flip-flop, or courageous evolution? When leaders change their moral minds. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000103)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Uber's controversial self-driving truck division shuts down

Uber is shutting down its self-driving truck program, the company acknowledged on Monday. It's the latest example of Uber scaling back its self-driving technology efforts in the wake of a deadly Uber self-driving car crash in March.

Uber's self-driving truck program has been embroiled in controversy since Uber acquired the unit two years ago. The acquisition price was reportedly $680 million, though the actual cost may have been much less than that. Previously, it had been a startup called Otto, led by controversial ex-Waymo engineer Anthony Levandowski. Waymo sued Uber, arguing that Levandowski had taken Waymo trade secrets with him on the way out the door.

[...] "We've decided to stop development on our self-driving truck program and move forward exclusively with cars," said Eric Meyhofer, the leader of Uber's self-driving technology program, in a statement to The Verge. Personnel from the truck division will be folded into the company's self-driving car efforts.

Previously: Uber Buys Autonomous Truck Startup Otto
The Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Uber Pulls Self-Driving Cars After First Fatal Crash of Autonomous Vehicle

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple Comes Under Media Fire in China

Apple Inc. has come under fire by Chinese state media, which claims the U.S. technology giant isn't doing enough to block texts and images trafficking in prohibited content including pornography, gambling and counterfeit goods.

In a barrage that began last week, China's state-controlled news agency Xinhua and at least four state-supported media outlets have published criticism of Apple for not doing enough to filter banned content on its iMessage service.

State broadcaster CCTV joined in Tuesday on another front, saying Apple's app store allowed illegal gambling apps disguised as official lottery apps.

[...] On Monday, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other top government agencies said they would impose new requirements requiring mobile-phone makers to include spam-filtering features.

Also at 9to5Mac.

Related: India Regulator Threatens to Ban Iphones Over Anti-Spam App

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Activist publishes 11,000 Wikileaks Twitter direct messages

An activist has published 11,000 direct messages on Twitter between the Wikileaks account and a group of its supporters. The direct messages were published by Emma Best on her own website. Her Twitter account states that she is a journalist on the East Coast. Best has been critical of Wikileaks and has advocated for government transparency. Some of the direct messages were previously published, but this is the first time all of the direct messages have been posted.

The messages show that Wikileaks wanted the GOP to defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential elections. "We believe it would be much better for the GOP to win," the Wikileaks account states to a supporter named "Emmy B" in one of the messages from 2015.

Why would they do that?

Clinton: I don't recall joking about droning Julian Assange

Oh.

Original Submission

JesusAmieiro writes:

Mozilla is rebranding Firefox. The company is asking for feedback on the new look, which will try to cover the various Firefox offerings. For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company wants the brand to encompass all the various apps and services that the Firefox family of internet products cover, “from easy screenshotting and file sharing to innovative ways to access the internet using voice and virtual reality.” The fox with a flaming tail “doesn’t offer enough design tools to represent this entire product family,” Mozilla believes. Instead of recoloring the logo and dissecting the fox, the company wants to start from scratch. That said, the name “Firefox” is staying, so Mozilla doesn’t have that much wiggle room.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

CCN:

Valve Corporation, the company behind the gaming website Steam, suddenly pulled a game called Abstractism from its store. Customer complaints and game performance point to another crypto jacking.

Abstractism has been marketed as a simple platformer where you control a bunch of pixels and try to carry it successfully to the other end of the level. In this case, you were managing a square in a black and white environment. All you had to do, was make it jump from one wall to the other — entertaining and straightforward enough.

[...] Players first noticed something was wrong when the game started using enormous amounts of CPU and GPU — the first red flag we’ve all grown used to spot by now. One customer accused the developer of crypto jacking, to which the company replied with a joke and a half-baked explanation.

Bitcoin is outdated, we currently use Abstractism to mine only Monero coins.

Abstractism does not mine any of cryptocurrency. Probably, you are playing on high graphics settings, because they take a bit of CPU and GPU power, required for post-processing effects rendering.

takyon writes:

Trump says public availability of 3D-printed guns 'doesn't seem to make much sense'

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is "looking into" the availability of plans for the 3D printing of guns, writing on Twitter that he had already been in touch with the NRA on the issue.

"I am looking into 3-D Plastic Guns being sold to the public. Already spoke to NRA, doesn't seem to make much sense!" the president wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning.

After a years-long legal battle, Defense Distributed, a Texas-based group, has announced plans to release instructions on Wednesday for guns that can be created by a 3-D printer, including a handgun and parts for a semi-automatic assault rifle. Although plans were not supposed to be available until Wednesday, instructions have already begun to appear online for download, CNN reported Tuesday.

takyon writes:

Google bans Android phones from having three or more notches

Google is building official notch support into Android P, but it's laying down some ground rules first: two notches is the limit. In a blog post for developers yesterday, Android UI product manager Megan Potoski wrote that Google is working with device partners "to mandate a few requirements" for app compatibility purposes. Among those are limits on notches.

The mandate says that Android P phones can't have "more than two cutouts on a device." Only one notch is allowed per side, and notches are only allowed on the top and bottom edges — not the left and right.

At this point, we haven't even seen phones with two notches, so the ban on tri- or quad-notch phones and left- and right-side notches is all theoretical. But the switch over to notched phones felt like it happened overnight (well, in the span of a few months), so putting some restrictions in place before things devolve should be helpful for making sure that apps continue to run properly on these strange new screens.

But I want a notch on my notch.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Ever wonder why a pizza made in your home oven doesn't taste as good as one made in a brick oven? You're not the only one. Some researchers think they've figured it out:

The fact that you need a vaulted brick oven to bake a great Italian-style pizza is well-known, but Glatz and Andrey Varlamov, also a pizza-eater and physicist at the Institute of Superconductors, Oxides and Other Innovative Materials and Devices in Rome, wanted to know why. The secret behind a pizzeria's magic, they concluded in a paper published on arXiv.org last month, is in some unique thermal properties of the brick oven.

They started off interviewing pizzaiolos, or pizza makers, in Rome who were masters of the Roman style of pizza. For this, the bake lasts 2 minutes at 626 degrees Fahrenheit. (Neapolitan pizzas usually bake at an even higher temperature — at least 700 degrees.) That turns out a "well-baked but still moist dough and well-cooked toppings," Glatz says. The same settings in a conventional steel oven produce far less ideal results. "You burn the dough before the surface of the pizza even reaches boiling, so this is not a product you will want to eat," he says.

The story goes on to note that the temperature conductivity of a metal oven is much greater than a brick oven, leading to burning of the crust. Adjusting with a lower temperature fails as it then leaves a dried-out crust and toppings. Accommodations with a pizza stone, oil, and a broiler can help, but cannot entirely mitigate the difference.

If you're hungry, and in a hurry, it looks like the brick-oven pizzas can be prepared much more quickly, too.

When I was in college the original Battlestar Galactica television series came out. We would gather in an upperclassman's dorm room and watch the show on a 13-inch TV. This was followed immediately by a trip to the local Rathskeller and an order for what we called a "death star" pizza... "double loaded extra everything, no guppies" (i.e. anchovies). That and a couple of pitchers of beer was a fine way to wrap up a Sunday.

What are your favorite toppings? Alternatively, are there any toppings you think should never be put on a pizza (such as pineapple)?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

How technology could preserve abortion rights

Abortion rights advocates are exploring how technology might preserve or even expand women's access to abortion if the Supreme Court scales back Roe v. Wade. A nonprofit group is testing whether it's safe to let women take abortion pills in their own homes after taking screening tests and consulting with a doctor on their phones or computers. Because the study is part of an FDA clinical trial, the group isn't bound by current rules requiring the drugs be administered in a doctor's office or clinic.

The group, called Gynuity Health Projects, is carrying out the trial in five states that already allow virtual doctors to oversee administration of the abortion pill, and may expand to others. If the trial proves that allowing women to take the pill at home is safe — under a virtual doctor's supervision — the group hopes the FDA could eventually loosen restrictions to allow women to take pills mailed to them after the consult. If FDA took that step, it could even help women in states with restrictive abortion laws get around them, potentially blurring the strict boundaries between abortion laws in different states if — as is likely — the Senate confirms a high court justice who is open to further limits on Roe.

[...] Right now, even in states that allow a licensed provider to administer the abortion pill by video hookup, the provider must watch, in person or by video, as a woman takes the first medication in a clinic or other health care setting. The drugs abort the fetus without surgery but are safe and effective only in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. If the group's study shows it's safe for women to administer the drug themselves after an online consultation with a health care provider, it will petition the FDA to lift the requirement.

Or: Get a drug printer, download drug plans, print desired drug.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New Electron Microscope Achieves Record-Breaking Resolution (0.039 nm)

Researchers have developed a new approach to electron microscopy that not only allows us to see individual atoms but to also learn about several of their properties at the same time.

The technology is called an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD). The tech, developed last year, goes beyond imaging individual atoms – it was employed to study two one-atom-thick layers of molybdenum disulfide, with one layer on top of the other and slightly askew so that the single atoms are visible. EMPAD reached a world-record resolution for such an image.

As reported in Nature, researchers were able to resolve a distance of 0.039 nanometers, a distance smaller than the smallest atom. The usual distance for atomic bonds is 0.1-0.2 nanometers, with the EMPAD able to visualize these bonds.

Also at Cornell University.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Alzheimer's study sparks a new round of debate over the amyloid hypothesis

In the long-running debate over just what causes Alzheimer's disease, one side looks to have scored a victory with new results with an in-development drug. But there's enough variation in the data to ensure that the squabbling factions of Alzheimer's will have plenty to fight about.

At issue is the so-called amyloid hypothesis, a decades-old theory claiming that Alzheimer's gradual degradation of the brain is caused by the accumulation of sticky plaques. And the new drug is BAN2401, designed by Biogen and Eisai to prevent those amyloid plaques from clustering and attack the clumps that already have.

In data presented last week, one group of patients receiving BAN2401 saw their amyloid levels plummet, a result that was tied to a significant reduction in cognitive decline compared with placebo.

[...] But to skeptics, the trial was laden with confounding details that make it impossible to draw conclusions. "These results are a mess," wrote Baird biotech analyst Brian Skorney. "Not so much that they indicate an outright failure of the [amyloid] hypothesis, but they don't really say anything informative at all."

Related: Alzheimer's Disease: A "Whole Body" Problem?
Evidence That Alzheimer's Protein Spreads Like an Infection
Pfizer Halts Research Into Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; Axovant Sciences Abandons Intepirdine
Positive Result in Mice as Alzheimer's Drug Trials Fail and Regulatory Barriers Are Rolled Back

Original Submission