SoylentNews

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

Lego fans have always known the colorful plastic bricks are more than just toys. They're worlds waiting to be created. Lego is now expanding its universe even more with a new project, Lego Braille Bricks.

The customized bricks are molded with studs that correspond to letters and numbers in Braille, but are also fully compatible with regular Lego pieces. Lego hopes to encourage blind and visually impaired kids to learn the reading system through interactive games and play.

The Braille Bricks kits contain around 250 pieces covering the full alphabet, plus numbers and math symbols. "To ensure the tool is inclusive allowing sighted teachers, students and family members to interact on equal terms, each brick will also feature a printed letter or character," Lego said in an announcement on Wednesday.

We're super excited to introduce LEGO Braille Bricks – a new product from @TheLegoFoundation that will help blind and visually impaired children learn Braille in a playful and inclusive way! pic.twitter.com/48cqYEZ54t
— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) April 24, 2019

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/lego-braille-bricks-put-the-alphabet-at-blind-kids-fingertips/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

OCR4all: Modern tool for old texts

Historians and other humanities' scholars often have to deal with difficult research objects: centuries-old printed works that are difficult to decipher and often in an unsatisfactory state of conservation. Many of these documents have now been digitized—usually photographed or scanned—and are available online worldwide. For research purposes, this is already a step forward.

However, there is still a challenge to overcome: bringing the digitized old fonts into a modern form with text recognition software that is readable for non-specialists as well as for computers. Scientists at the Center for Philology and Digitality at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, have made a significant contribution to further development in this field.

With OCR4all, the JMU research team is making a new tool available to the scientific community. It converts digitized historical prints with an error rate of less than one percent into computer-readable texts. And it offers a graphical user interface that requires no IT expertise. With previous tools of this kind, user-friendliness was not always a given, as the users mostly had to work with programming commands.

[...] In developing OCR4all, computer scientists have collaborated with the humanities at JMU—including German and Romance studies and literature studies in the project "Narragonien digital." The aim was to digitize the "Narrenschiff," a moral satire by Sebastian Brant, a bestseller of the 15th century that was translated into many languages. Furthermore, OCR4all has been frequently used in the JMU's Kolleg "Medieval and Early Modern Times."

OCR4all is freely available to the public on the GitHub platform (with instructions and examples): https://github.com/OCR4all

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere say they've taken an important step in potentially helping people with a barely understood ailment that's long been viewed skeptically by the public and even some doctors. They claim to have created a blood test that may be able to readily identify people who have myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).

The diagnostic test not only further validates a biological basis for sufferers' symptoms, the authors say, but may point to new avenues of treatment for the often unmanageable condition.

Currently, ME/CFS is a diagnostic label we give to people who experience prolonged, crippling fatigue—especially after exercising—and other symptoms like chronic pain, that can't be explained by any other known illness. The elusiveness of ME/CFS once led many doctors to consider it a psychological ailment, with people's symptoms blamed on a psychosomatic manifestation of their stress or anxiety. But in recent years, the medical community has by and large accepted that the symptoms of ME/CFS have a physical root, even if we still don't know how it happens.

[...] But the researchers behind this current study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say they've devised a test that, at least in a small sample of people, can tell apart people with ME/CFS from the general population.

[...] But there's still a long way to go before their test should be considered a slam dunk, with many questions left unanswered. Researchers elsewhere have made early efforts to find potential biomarkers for ME/CFS, for instance, but these biomarkers are unlikely to help doctors diagnose every case. That's not entirely surprising since there's no single cause or underlying mechanism that will explain every individual's symptoms (among the possible factors are viral infections, genetics, and thyroid problems). So while the team's test may have identified everyone with ME/CFS in their sample, that doesn't mean the same will be true once they start studying larger groups of people.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/researchers-say-they-ve-created-a-blood-test-for-chroni-1834421604

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Judge blasts Assange for jumping bail, sentences him to almost one year

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for fleeing to the Ecuadorian embassy in London while on bail in 2012. At the time, he was facing possible extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.

Assange remained in the embassy until last month, when he was evicted by his Ecuadorian hosts and re-arrested by British authorities.

Wednesday's sentencing is unlikely to be the end of Assange's legal problems. Shortly after he was re-arrested last month, US authorities unsealed an indictment charging him with conspiring with Chelsea Manning to crack a hashed password belonging to a Pentagon computer in 2010. At the time, Manning was an Army private leaking confidential military documents to WikiLeaks. Assange was unable to learn the password, but the US argues that his attempt is sufficient to charge him with conspiracy.

In a letter to the court, Assange argued that he had fled to the embassy out of fear that he'd be extradited to the United States and wind up being held indefinitely at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Also at BBC, The Guardian, CNET, and The Register.

Previously: Inadvertent Court Filing Suggests that the U.S. DoJ is Preparing to Indict Julian Assange
U.S. Ramping Up Probe Against Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Says
Ecuador Denies That Julian Assange Will be Evicted From Embassy in London
Wikileaks Co-Founder Julian Assange Arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London
Julian Assange Associate Arrested In Ecuador

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

As Slack [the owner of a workplace instant messaging app] prepares to go public, the company is warning potential investors that it's a target for malicious attacks from "sophisticated organized crime, nation-state, and nation-state supported actors," according to an SEC filing published today.

Slack said that it faces threats from "sophisticated organized crime, nation-state, and nation-state supported actors" according to an S-1 securities registration form the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was published online today.

The document says that these threats from organized crime and nation-states actors and affiliates are alongside "threats from traditional computer 'hackers;' malicious code (such as malware, viruses, worms, and ransomware), employee theft or misuse, password spraying, phishing, credential stuffing, and denial-of-service attacks." These threats are impossible to entirely mitigate, according to the document.

The S-1 filing does not claim that an attack from organized crime, nation-state, or nation-state affiliate actually happened. Rather, it just says that threats from these actors present an active risk to the company.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pajbj8/slack-warns-investors-its-a-target-for-nation-state-hacking

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Antidisestablishment

Programming language Python's popular extension for Visual Studio Code revamped

While Python has become the go-to language for data scientists and machine-learning applications, VS Code – Microsoft's lightweight code editor that works on Windows, macOS, and Linux – has become somewhat of a hit with developers, even within Google.

In 2016, a year after Microsoft open-sourced VS Code it had 500,000 developers using it. By November 2017, VS Code had 2.6 million developers using it each month, representing year-on-year growth of 160 percent.

In December 2018, Microsoft chief marketing officer Chris Capossela told ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley and fellow Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott that the "majority of Google developers are using it now".

The open-source Microsoft editor now has 4.5 million users and was ranked the most popular developer environment for two years running in Stack Overflow's global developer survey.

Meanwhile, Python has seen a huge and sustained rise in popularity among developers, who now ask more questions each month on Stack Overflow about it than JavaScript, which historically has attracted the most questions.

The updated Python extension fixes 84 issues and now includes a Variable Explore and a Data Viewer within the Python Interactive window. The new features were "highly requested" from users, according to Microsoft, and will allow developers and data scientists to view, inspect and filter variables in their apps.

So fellow Soylentils, has anyone tried this combination as a Python IDE and if so, what did you think?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How the bumble bee got its stripes

Researchers have discovered a gene that drives color differences within a species of bumble bees. This discovery helps to explain the highly diverse color patterns among bumble bee species as well as how mimicry--individuals in an area adopting similar color patterns--evolves. A study describing the gene, which occurs in a highly conserved region of the genome that provides blueprints for segmentation, was led by researchers at Penn State and appears April 29, 2019, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There is exceptional diversity in coloration of bumble bees," said Heather Hines, assistant professor of biology and of entomology at Penn State and principal investigator of the study.

Of the roughly 250 species of bumble bees, there are over 400 different color patterns that basically mix and match the same few colors over the different segments of a bee's body."

The most common bumble bee color patterns feature red around a bee's tail, thought to advertise its dangerous sting. In spite of the great diversity available, color patterns tend to converge toward similarity within a particular geographic region because they serve as an important and effective warning signal.

This is an example of Müllerian mimicry, where similar, often vibrant, color patterns are used among multiple species to warn predators of a dangerous feature like toxicity or sharp spines.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

POUNDLAND has banned the sale of kitchen knives across the UK in response to the crime wave hitting the country.

The retailer stopped selling the weapons in London last week and is set to extend the ban to all 850 of its UK and Ireland stores by the end of the year.

The move follows 35 people being fatally stabbed in London since the beginning of the year as violence in the capital spikes.

Austin Cook Poundland's retail director said: "We have committed to take knives out of all our stores, starting with London, which we have done with immediate effect a couple of weeks ago, and we will take them out of the rest of the country by October.

"Since I've come into my role we have had a lot of feedback from our store colleagues that we are retailing knives that can have the wrong ultimate purpose for them.

"We want to take them off our shelves and take them out of the hands of the wrong customers and, whilst there is a sales implication for us, it's much more important to us to protect both our colleagues and our customers from any risk.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6069878/poundland-stop-selling-knives-london-stabbings/

Story continues below:

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2736

Netflix: Python programming language is behind every film you stream

The next time you're streaming on Netflix, you can thank popular programming language Python and the developers who use it for much of the experience. 

According to Python developers at Netflix, the language is used through the "full content lifecycle", from security tools, to its recommendation algorithms, and its proprietary content distribution network (CDN) Open Connect, which ensures that content is streamed from network devices that are as close as possible to end users. 

[...] At Netflix, many of the network devices that make up its CDN are "mostly managed by Python applications", which do tasks like tracking the inventory of network devices, their health and location.     

"Python has long been a popular programming language in the networking space because it's an intuitive language that allows engineers to quickly solve networking problems," notes Netflix senior software engineer, Amjith Ramanujam. 

The momentum behind the language is driven by useful libraries that get developed, he adds. These include the NumPy and SciPy libraries for Python, which Netflix uses to perform numerical analysis for its failover services. It's also a heavy user of Redis Queue and Jupyter Notebooks tools for Python.  

Netflix also uses the Boto 3 AWS SDK for Python configure its AWS infrastructure. Netflix runs on mostly on AWS infrastructure and last year spent $1.3bn on technology and development.

And of course Python is used extensively within Netflix's machine-learning algorithms for things like content recommendations, artwork personalization, and marketing. 

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Bloomberg:

Timex watches are up there with the Ford Mustang and Budweiser beer as quintessentially American products. Even folks outside the watch world are familiar with the once-popular slogan "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking." The company is based in Middlebury, CT, and they've been around the area since 1854. In a way, they've transcended the typical role of a watch manufacturer and become a small slice of American culture. Bill Clinton was known to wear a Timex Ironman while holding office, for example.

But they haven't produced any watches on American soil since well before the era of the quartz crisis in the 1970s. Globalization and market forces pushed (or rather, pulled) manufacturing overseas for many companies during that time. In 2019, Timex is getting involved in domestic production once again with a model that's assembled in the U.S. from mostly domestically-made parts. The quartz movement is the only exception, and that comes from Switzerland.

The article isn't clear if all production will be brought back to America, or if this is for a limited series.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Last year dozens of 'Right to Repair' bills were introduced throughout the US, but defeated. Maybe this time its time has come.

Right to Repair bills, designed to foster competition in the repair industry, require manufacturers to allow repair, and even provide manuals, diagnosic software, and parts. Manufacturers oppose these laws as it can cost them more to address devices repaired by third parties, because repairs are a source of revenue, and because repaired items are less likely to be replaced with new ones.

[O]ne of the most effective anti-repair tactics is to spread FUD about the supposed security risks of independent repairs.

Without a concerted and coordinated effort to counteract this tactic, legislators receive primarily well-heeled opposing views, and vote accordingly.

takyon writes:

Venezuela Crisis Live Updates: Clashes Erupt After Opposition Leader Calls for Uprising

• Clashes between anti-government protesters and law enforcement officers erupted in Caracas on Tuesday after the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, appeared alongside soldiers at a military base and called for the population to rise up against the president, Nicolás Maduro.

• Mr. Guaidó has urged the Venezuela military to join his side since he declared himself interim president more than three months ago. But it was a new step for him to make the declaration with men in uniform by his side. Still, it is unclear how much of the military supports him.

• The Trump administration, which has backed Mr. Guaidó since he first declared himself interim president in January, expressed immediate support for his latest move. President Trump tweeted, "The United States stands with the People of Venezuela and their Freedom!"

• Video and photos showed at least one instance where an armored vehicle rammed protesters. It was not immediately clear how many people were injured.

See also: Venezuela's Guaidó accused of coup attempt by government

Previously: Turmoil in Venezuela Surrounding Aid Deliveries

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

CNet:

Electric cars are becoming an increasingly common sight on American roads. And while just a few brands may dominate the news cycle, there are actually well over a dozen fully battery-electric models on sale in the US today.

We thought it would be helpful to throw together a guide to better make sense of all your electric options if you're on the hunt for a new car. And to go a step further, we're also adding just how far each one will go on a single charge.

The range of most models still relegate them to commuter cars.

Original Submission

Whale with Harness Could Be Russian Weapon, Say Norwegian Experts

Phoenix666 writes:

The Guardian:

"We were going to put out nets when we saw a whale swimming between the boats," fisherman Joar Hesten told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. "It came over to us, and as it approached, we saw that it had some sort of harness on it."

The strange behaviour of the whale, which was actively seeking out the vessels and trying to pull straps and ropes from the sides of the boats, as well as the fact it was wearing a tight harness which seemed to be for a camera or weapon, raised suspicions among marine experts that the animal had been given military-grade training by neighbouring Russia. Inside the harness, which has now been removed from the whale, were the words "Equipment of St. Petersburg".

The Russians are winning the race to weaponize sharks whales with laser beams.

Harnessed Beluga May Have Been Part of Quiet Russian Project

RandomFactor writes:

A white beluga whale made a splash last week when it was found to be wearing a harness by fisherman in Norway.

Norwegian fishermen discovered a beluga whale wearing a harness off the country’s northern coast last week. The fishermen were fascinated with how tame it was, but there might be a good reason that it was comfortable around humans. Scientists from Norway’s Institute of Marine Research suspect the whale and its harness may be part of an operation cooked up by the Russian military.

Because of the reported tightness of the harnass, scientists were concerned that the whale has been wearing the harness for a very long time which could be dangerous for it.

The scientists tracked down the whale near the town of Ingoy and attempted to remove its harness. Just as the fishermen had reported, the harness looked way too tight, according to Norwegian news outlet NRK

takyon writes:

Samsung has shown off a TV that can rotate into portrait orientation:

Samsung has unveiled a TV that switches from a horizontal, landscape-style orientation to vertical - so it can easily display smartphone content. The 43in device is called Sero and comes with an integrated easel-like stand upon which the screen pivots. It will go on sale in South Korea towards the end of May and cost 1.89m won (£1,250).

One TV analyst said it was an interesting concept - but might have limited applications. Sero will come with a microphone and Samsung's virtual assistant Bixby built in. It can also be set up to display photographs, a clock face or other images. Among the content users might choose to watch on it may be a new series of shows by Snapchat, designed for mobile consumption and set to be launched in May.

See also: Samsung thinks millennials want vertical TVs

Original Submission