SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Google pledges $25 million toward AI solutions for social issues

[Google] is ramping up a AI Impact Challenge that asks academia, non-profits and other organizations (whether they're AI-savvy or not) to submit proposals using AI to solve "social, humanitarian and environmental" problems. Any proposal that makes the cut will receive funding from a $25 million pool, join an accelerator program and receive consulting as well as custom support with the help of the data science non-profit DataKind. Google will pick the winners in spring 2019 with assistance from a panel of experts.

Google.org announcement. Google.org. Also at The Verge and Reuters.

Related: Google Will Not Continue Project Maven After Contract Expires in 2019

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Bigger = better: Big bees fly better in hotter temps than smaller ones do: New research provides a lesson in bee physiology and flies in the face of the temperature-size 'rule'

Arizona State University researchers have found that larger tropical stingless bee species fly better in hot conditions than smaller bees do. Larger size may help certain bee species better tolerate high body temperatures. The findings run contrary to the well-established temperature-size "rule," which suggests that ectotherms -- insects that rely on the external environment to control their temperature -- are larger in cold climates and smaller in hot ones. The research will be presented today at the American Physiological Society's (APS) Comparative Physiology: Complexity and Integration conference in New Orleans.

[...] In the new study, Duell and her collaborator, Jon F. Harrison, PhD, measured air and thorax temperatures of 10 species of stingless bees -- which varied in body mass between 2 and 120 milligrams -- to assess how well bees fly at high temperatures and the variations seen based on body size. The researchers also measured leaf and flower surface temperatures and air temperatures in sun and shade within the bees' native tropical forest canopy.

With the temperature-size rule in mind, the researchers were expecting the smaller bees to perform better in hot weather. Surprisingly, the opposite was true. Their findings showed that large bees seem to have adapted to the high temperatures and by using their ability to maintain their own heat. This flight performance advantage was also seen in cooler altitudes of the hot Panamanian rain forest.

"Essentially the bigger bees are exposed to higher temperatures -- sometimes in excess of 10 degrees Celsius hotter than air temperature -- because they produce a lot of heat while flying. That same heat producing ability gives them an advantage in cooler regions as well because they can be active earlier in the morning, later into the evening or on cooler days compared to smaller bees," Duell said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Scientists debunk the effectiveness of EnChroma glasses for colorblind people

The recent commercialization of the EnChroma glasses has generated great expectations among the color blind thanks to a strong campaign on social networks and the media. Users of the glasses hoped to see new colors or even correct their color blindness.

The North American manufacturer advertises an improvement in color vision for certain types of color blindness, protan and deutan, by extending the range of colors users perceive without affecting the colors that are already distinguished without glasses. In fact, on its website, EnChroma states that their glasses "alleviate red-green color blindness, enhancing colors without the compromise of color accuracy," but say that their glasses "may not work" for severe red-green deficiency.

[...] In an article published in Optics Express, researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) have debunked the effectiveness of these glasses for color vision deficiency (CVD), proving that the EnChroma glasses don't make color blind people's vision comparable to that of people without color blindness.

takyon writes:

More Evidence Identifies China as The Source of Mysterious Ozone-Destroying Emissions

For years, a mystery puzzled environmental scientists. The world had banned the use of many ozone-depleting compounds in 2010. So why were global emission levels [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0106-2] [DX] still so high?

The picture started to clear up in June. That's when The New York Times published an investigation into the issue. China, the paper claimed, was to blame for these mystery emissions. Now it turns out the paper was probably right to point a finger.

In a paper [open, DOI: 10.1029/2018GL079500] [DX] published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, an international team of researchers confirms that eastern China is the source of at least half of the 40,000 tonnes of carbon tetrachloride emissions currently entering the atmosphere each year. They figured this out using a combination of ground-based and airborne atmospheric concentration data from near the Korean peninsula.

Previously: Someone, Somewhere, is Making a Banned Chemical that Destroys the Ozone Layer
Illegal Chinese Refrigerator Factories Are Selling Banned CFCs

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Silicon Valley's largest accelerator is looking for carbon-sucking technologies — including one that could become 'the largest infrastructure project ever'

Earlier this week, Y Combinator, which has backed companies like Airbnb and Reddit, put out a request for startups working on technology that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem — including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work," Y Combinator's website says.

Y Combinator is looking for startups working on four approaches that they acknowledge "straddle the border between very difficult to science fiction" — genetically engineering phytoplankton to turn CO2 into a storage-ready form of carbon, speeding up a natural process in which rocks react with CO2, creating cell-free enzymes that can process carbon, and flooding Earth's deserts to create oases.

Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, acknowledged that these ideas are "moonshots," but said that he wants to take an expansive approach to the issue.

Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Storing Carbon Dioxide Underground by Turning It Into Rock
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability
Y Combinator Spreads to China
Lab-Made Magnesite could be Used for CO2 Capture
NASA Announces CO2 Conversion Challenge, With Up to $750k Awards

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

Lest you think this is yet another CoC, the guidelines assure you that they are not a CoC.

Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

The GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, initial version, have been published in https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html. On behalf of the GNU Project, I ask all GNU contributors to make their best efforts to follow these guidelines in GNU Project discuaaions[sic].

[ . . . ] The difference between kind communication guidelines and a code of conduct is a matter of the basic overall approach.

A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them.

[...] The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind.

[ . . . . ] I disagree with making "diversity" a goal. If the developers in a specific free software project do not include demographic D, I don't think that the lack of them as a problem that requires action

The best way to avoid conflict and encourage diversity is to force everyone to voluntarily think alike.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Returns to Science Operations

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope returned to normal operations late Friday, Oct. 26, and completed its first science observations on Saturday, Oct. 27 at 2:10 AM EDT. The observations were of the distant, star-forming galaxy DSF2237B-1-IR and were taken in infrared wavelengths with the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. The return to conducting science comes after successfully recovering a backup gyroscope, or gyro, that had replaced a failed gyro three weeks earlier.

[...] On Thursday, the operations team conducted further maneuvers to collect gyro calibration data. On Friday, Hubble performed activities similar to science observations, including rotating to point at different sky locations, and locking on to test targets. The team completed all of these activities without issue.

Late Friday, the team began the process to restore the scientific instruments to standard operating status. Hubble successfully completed maneuvers to get on target for the first science observations, and the telescope collected its first science data since Oct. 5.

Hubble is now back in its normal science operations mode with three fully functional gyros. Originally required to last 15 years, Hubble has now been at the forefront of scientific discovery for more than 28 years. The team expects the telescope will continue to yield amazing discoveries well into the next decade, enabling it to work alongside the James Webb Space Telescope.

Also at SpaceNews and Spaceflight Insider.

Previously: Hubble Telescope Placed into Safe Mode after Gyroscope Failure
Long-Dormant Gyroscope on the Hubble Telescope Apparently Fixed

Original Submission

martyb writes:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kills-The-VLA:

VLAs [(Varable Length Arrays)] allow for array lengths to be determined at run-time rather than compile time. The Linux kernel has long relied upon VLAs in different parts of the kernel -- including within structures -- but going on for months now (and years if counting the kernel Clang'ing efforts) has been to remove the usage of variable-length arrays within the kernel. The problems with them are:

- Using variable-length arrays can add some minor run-time overhead to the code due to needing to determine the size of the array at run-time.

- VLAs within structures is not supported by the LLVM Clang compiler and thus an issue for those wanting to build the kernel outside of GCC, Clang only supports the C99-style VLAs.

- Arguably most importantly is there can be security implications from VLAs around the kernel's stack usage.

[...] Kees Cook[*] sent out the pull request today for VLA removal that now enables the "-Wvla" compiler flag to emit a warning should any variable-length array be found within the kernel's C code. That will help prevent new code from inadvertently using VLAs and also spot any lingering kernel code still relying upon this behavior.

Kees Cook wrote that there still might be a few places where VLAs could be found, "there may be a couple more VLAs hiding in hard-to-find randconfigs, but nothing big has shaken out in the last month or so in linux-next. We should be basically VLA-free now! Wheee. :)"

[*] KeesCook.

Have you ever used VLAs? Removed them? Why?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

TikTok owner Bytedance is now the world's most valuable startup

A new $3 billion round of investment led by SoftBank has crowned China's Bytedance the world's most valuable startup, Bloomberg reports. Bytedance, the owner of popular karaoke video app TikTok and huge Chinese news aggregator Toutiao, is now valued at $75 billion, which takes it past Uber's most recent figure of $72 billion.

Uber is reported to be considering an IPO for next year that would value it at $120 billion, but for now Bytedance is on top, which is a huge achievement for a company that until recently had very little presence outside China. TikTok, which was acquired as Musical.ly and merged into Bytedance's own Douyin service as TikTok, is a major sensation among teens in the West, and has apparently already achieved the social media rite of passage of having Facebook attempt to clone it.

ByteDance. Tik Tok?

Original Submission

bradley13 writes:

The social network gab.com is apparently going down on Monday, October 29th at 09:00 ET. Their ISP has terminated their services, ostensibly because Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh mass shooting suspect, had made offensive posts on Gab.

To get this out of the way: I have mixed feelings about Gab, more specifically, about the founders. However, the idea that some social network somewhere should refuse to censor anything that is not outright illegal? This is good. Social media has become the modern "market square", and free speech should be guaranteed, even if the platforms are technically private.

If you want free speech, you apparently don't want to be in the U.S.

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

A recent Guardian article encouraging writers to abandon MS Word included a comment from a reader that read:

With 70+ books under my belt, I'm still using WordPerfect 5.1. Luckily there's an excellent website offering free software to enable one to use this DOS software with Windows 10: http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/

If you follow that link you'll find a treasure trove of tools and advice that will help you run WordPerfect 5.1 on any Windows system, as well as Macs and Linux boxes. The author does note that it's much easier on 32 bit systems than 64 bit, but it can be done on either. There's even advice on making printers work.

(Of late I've been using the generally excellent FocusWriter full screen editor for distraction free writing, but if I can get WP 5.1 working....) (And, just for the record, Corel still sells Wordperfect Office.)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Did scientists confirm Earth's dust cloud satellites?

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) said this week (October 25, 2018) that astronomers may now have confirmed the existence of two elusive dust clouds, orbiting Earth much as our moon orbits it, at about the moon's distance. They are known as Kordylewski clouds, first reported by and named for Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1961. If they exist, Earth's dust cloud satellites are exceptionally faint, so that their existence is controversial. The RAS is pointing to two new papers about the Kordylewski clouds in its peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It said in a statement that a team of Hungarian astronomers and physicists may have confirmed the clouds just where Kordylewski said they would be, in semi-stable points just 250,000 miles (400,000 km) from Earth.

For comparison, the moon's average distance is 238,900 miles (385,000 km) from Earth.

If they exist, the Kordylewski clouds lie at two special points in the Earth-moon system. These points – known as Lagrangian or Lagrange points – are known to be relatively stable, gravitationally. Objects, even dust, drifting near these points would tend to move neither toward the Earth nor toward the moon. They'd tend to stay put, moving ahead of and behind the moon in orbit.

Celestial mechanics and polarization optics of the Kordylewski dust cloud in the Earth–Moon Lagrange point L5 – I. Three-dimensional celestial mechanical modelling of dust cloud formation (open, DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2049) (DX)

Celestial mechanics and polarization optics of the Kordylewski dust cloud in the Earth–Moon Lagrange point L5 – Part II. Imaging polarimetric observation: new evidence for the existence of Kordylewski dust cloud (open, DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2630) (DX)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/retraction-watch-launches-its-database-of-papers-65003

On Thursday (October 25), the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks problematic scientific literature, released an online database of more than 18,000 papers and conference materials that have been retracted since the 1970s.

The journal Science partnered with Retraction Watch to analyze the catalog. The upshot, Science concludes, is that although the number of retractions per year has risen in recent decades, that might reflect more policing of science.

[...] The number of retractions has increased in recent years—"from fewer than 100 annually before 2000 to nearly 1000 in 2014," Science reports, amounting to about 4 in 10,000 papers having been retracted. Yet the number of retractions per journal per year has been fairly steady since 1997. Further, the annual number of retractions has basically leveled off since 2012.

Official announcement.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google rolls out '.new' links for instantly creating new Docs, Slides, Sheets and Forms

Google Docs just rolled out a time-saving trick that's sure to be welcomed by heavy users of Docs, or any of Google's other productivity tools like Sheets, Slides, Sites or Forms. The company this week introduced its ".new" domain, which can be used to instantly create a new file across any of these services, it says.

For example, instead of going to Google Drive, clicking the "new" button, then the service you want to use, you can just type "doc.new" to get started in a new Google Doc.

Google helpfully registered many variations on this domain, as well, so docs.new and documents.new also work.

And the same format applies across Google's productivity apps, meaning you can also type in things like sheet.new, sheets.new, spreadsheet.new, site.new, sites.new, website.new, slide.new, slides.new, deck.new, presentation.new, form.new or forms.new.

Original Submission

tadas writes:

From the press release:

IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.

Blog posting from Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst.