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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow2718.

Researchers Create AI that Hides your Emotions from Other AI

Humans can communicate a range of nonverbal emotions, from terrified shrieks to exasperated groans. Voice inflections and cues can communicate subtle feelings, from ecstasy to agony, arousal and disgust. Even when simply speaking, the human voice is stuffed with meaning, and a lot of potential value if you're a company collecting personal data.

Now, researchers at the Imperial College London have used AI to mask the emotional cues in users' voices when they're speaking to internet-connected voice assistants. The idea is to put a "layer" between the user and the cloud their data is uploaded to by automatically converting emotional speech into "normal" speech. They recently published their paper "Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants" on the arXiv preprint server.

Our voices can reveal our confidence and stress levels, physical condition, age, gender, and personal traits. This isn't lost on smart speaker makers, and companies such as Amazon are always working to improve the emotion-detecting abilities of AI.

[...] Their method for masking emotion involves collecting speech, analyzing it, and extracting emotional features from the raw signal. Next, an AI program trains on this signal and replaces the emotional indicators in speech, flattening them. Finally, a voice synthesizer re-generates the normalized speech using the AIs outputs, which gets sent to the cloud. The researchers say that this method reduced emotional identification by 96 percent in an experiment, although speech recognition accuracy decreased, with a word error rate of 35 percent.

[...] Alexa speech engineers unveiled research on using adversarial networks to discern emotion in Amazon's home voice assistants. Emotion, they wrote, "can aid in health monitoring; it can make conversational-AI systems more engaging; and it can provide implicit customer feedback that could help voice agents like Alexa learn from their mistakes."

[...] Amazon's 2017 patent for emotional speech recognition uses illness as an example: "physical conditions such as sore throats and coughs may be determined based at least in part on a voice input from the user, and emotional conditions such as an excited emotional state or a sad emotional state may be determined based at least in part on voice input from a user," the patent says. "A cough or sniffle, or crying, may indicate that the user has a specific physical or emotional abnormality."

A virtual assistant such as Alexa would then use these cues—combined with your browsing and purchase history, according to the patent—to offer you hyper-specific advertisements for medications or other products.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD agrees to cough up $35-a-chip payout over eight-core Bulldozer advertising fiasco

AMD has agreed to pay purchasers of its FX Bulldozer processors a total of $12.1m to settle a four-year false advertising lawsuit.

Considering the number of processors sold and assuming a 20 per cent take-up by eligible purchasers, that works out to $35 a chip, the preliminary agreement argues: a figure that is "significantly more than 50 per cent of the value of their certified claims had they prevailed at trial."

It's a good deal, the agreement [PDF] explains, because of the "risks and expenses that further litigation would pose in this case."

The chip giant advertised its processors as being the "first native 8-core desktop processor" and charged a premium for it. But a significant number of those purchasers were then surprised to find that the chip did not contain eight fully independent, fully featured processing units but rather four Bulldozer modules that each contain a pair of fully fledged instruction-executing CPU cores.

A final nail in the module coffin.

Also at AnandTech and Guru3D.

Previously: AMD Sued by Customer Over Misrepresentation of "Multicore"
When is a CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Businesses are turbocharging cryptocurrency adoption as demonstrations against Chinese interference in Hong Kong enter their 12th week.

Hong-Kong based department store, Pricerite announced, on Facebook Monday that it will now accept bitcoin, ether, and litecoin at all its stores.

Starting immediately, its new concept store at the popular MegaBox shopping centre in Hong's Kong's Kowloon Bay area, will convert crypto payments into Hong Kong Dollars (HKD) in real time at its cash registers. With Bitcoin's Lightning Network that's possible in a matter of seconds, according to Pricerite.

Bitcoin Cash is also proving popular among protest supporters, and measures are being taken to further promote the cryptocurrency, as well as to support dissidents.

Genesis Block operates 14 crypto currency ATMs in Hong Kong, trading under the name "CoinHere." In July, the ATM operator distributed water paid for with international donations made in bitcoin cash.

The water bottles had a QR code that allowed recipients to donate bitcoin cash to fund additional supplies for protestors.

The exchange also provided umbrellas to the protestors. The umbrellas featured the bitcoin symbol, and were a nod to the 2014 "Umbrella Revolution" in Hong Kong, during which hundreds of thousands of residents took to the streets in protest.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hong-kong-protests-accelerating-bitcoin-184623552.html?soc_src=community&soc_trk=tw&guccounter=1

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

Mystery of missing votes deepens as Congress investigates Georgia:

To find a clue about what might have gone wrong with Georgia's election last fall, look no further than voting machine No. 3 at the Winterville Train Depot outside Athens.

On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician's analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.

It just so happens that this occurred in Republican Brian Kemp's home precinct, where he initially had a problem voting when his yellow voter access card didn't work because a poll worker forgot to activate it. At the time, Kemp was secretary of state — Georgia's top election official — and running for governor in a tight contest with Democrat Stacey Abrams.

The suspicious results in Winterville are evidence in the ongoing mystery of whether errors with voting machines contributed to a stark drop-off in votes recorded in the race for Georgia lieutenant governor between Republican Geoff Duncan, who ended up winning, and Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico.

Even though it was the second race on the ballot, fewer votes were counted for lieutenant governor than for labor commissioner, insurance commissioner and every other statewide contest lower on the ballot. Roughly 80,000 fewer votes were counted for lieutenant governor than in other down-ballot elections.

c0lo writes:

$200,000 police patrol car goes up in flame shortly after parking on long dry grass

One of the most expensive police cars used in Australia has gone up in flames following a chase in north-eastern New South Wales.

The turbo diesel BMW highway patrol car had been pursuing a sedan being driven by a teenager near Tweed Heads.

The chase ended in long grass on the edge of the Pacific Highway at Chinderah after road spikes were laid, puncturing the fleeing vehicle's tyres.

Murwillumbah resident Geoff Huxley watched the drama unfold after he pulled over when he heard the police siren.

"We were about to drive off and I said to my wife, 'Hang on, I think the police car is on fire'," he said."I looked over and a fire had developed under the police car and literally within seconds the car was in flames.

[...] The BMW-530d was valued around $200,000, taking into account the equipment inside including an in-car video system, number plate-reading technology, front- and rear-facing cameras to capture mobile offences and breathalysers.

Motoring writer Toby Hagan said modern exhaust systems could reach around 500 degrees Celsius which created a significant fire risk.

"When that goes into its burn-off mode, it actually builds up even more heat and therefore potentially increases that risk.

[...] "They aren't expected to drive over grass too often and are usually confined to bitumen areas, but in this case it has ended up off the side of the road, probably exacerbated by the drought, the dryness of the grass and more prone to catching fire," he said.

Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

The Wall Street Journal reports:

As a new generation grows up surrounded by artificial intelligence, researchers find education as early as preschool can help avoid confusion about robots' role

If you want your preschooler to grow up with a healthy attitude toward artificial intelligence, here's a tip: Don't call that cute talking robot 'he' or 'she.'

Call the robot 'it.'

Today's small children, aka Generation Alpha, are the first to grow up with robots as peers. Those winsome talking devices spawned by a booming education-tech industry can speed children's learning, but they also can be confusing to them, research shows. Many children think robots are smarter than humans or imbue them with magical powers.

The long-term consequences of growing up surrounded by AI-driven devices won't be clear for a while. But an expanding body of research is lending new impetus to efforts to expand technology education beyond learning to code, to understanding how AI works. Children need help drawing boundaries between themselves and the technology, and gaining confidence in their own ability to control and master it, researchers say."

[...] How to Raise an AI-Savvy Child

* Use the pronoun "it" when referring to a robot.

* Display a positive attitude toward the beneficial effects of AI.

* Encourage your child to explore how robots are built.

* Explain that humans are the source of AI-driven devices' intelligence.

* Guard against AI-propelled toys that presume too much, such as claiming to be your child's best friend.

* Invite children to consider the ethics of AI design, such as how a bot should behave after winning a game.

* Encourage skepticism about information received from smart toys and devices.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Gold bars fraudulently stamped with the logos of major refineries are being inserted into the global market to launder smuggled or illegal gold, refining and banking executives tell Reuters. The fakes are hard to detect, making them an ideal fund-runner for narcotics dealers or warlords.

In the last three years, bars worth at least $50 million stamped with Swiss refinery logos, but not actually produced by those facilities, have been identified by all four of Switzerland's leading gold refiners and found in the vaults of JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the major banks at the heart of the market in bullion, said senior executives at gold refineries, banks and other industry sources.

[...] "The latest fake bars ... are highly professionally done," said Michael Mesaric, the chief executive of refinery Valcambi. He said maybe a couple of thousand have been found, but the likelihood is that there are "way, way, way more still in circulation. And it still exists, and it still works."

Fake gold bars - blocks of cheaper metal plated with gold - are relatively common in the gold industry and often easy to detect.

The counterfeits in these cases are subtler: The gold is real, and very high purity, with only the markings faked. Fake-branded bars are a relatively new way to flout global measures to block conflict minerals and prevent money-laundering. Such forgeries pose a problem for international refiners, financiers and regulators as they attempt to purge the world of illicit trade in bullion.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold-swiss-fakes-exclusive/exclusive-fake-branded-bars-slip-dirty-gold-into-world-markets-idUSKCN1VI0DD

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

With a battery in every apartment, the whole complex can store extra power when the sun shines, and then move it around where it's needed at night.

"When there's excess solar-generated energy produced, instead of just pushing it into the grid right away, it's going to be shifted and harnessed in the batteries," Richetta says. "Rocky Mountain Power will look at that in real time, and every day will constantly be able to say, okay, when can we use this solar?" Right now, in areas with a lot of solar power, there's often so much energy produced when the sun is out that it can't be used; without battery storage, when power is needed at night, utilities have to turn to more polluting sources.

The developer, the Wasatch Group, saw investing in solar power and batteries as the right thing to do for the region, which is already experiencing climate impacts including worsening wildfires and droughts. "We looked at how are we going to be responsible stewards," says Jarom Johnson, chief operating officer for Wasatch Premier Communities. "This was probably the best option that we could identify that allowed us to say, 'Hey, we're going to push the envelope.' It's going to challenge our standard mantra for development. But we have specific outcomes we're trying to pursue, which are we want to limit our footprint, and we want to allow a large portion of individuals to be housed without throwing a bunch of carbon in the air." The company took advantage of federal and state tax credits to offset the cost of the project, and will be paid by the utility for access to the virtual power plant.

But why are they inside the apartments, when they're controlled by the utility company?

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90394337/in-this-new-solar-powered-apartment-complex-all-600-units-have-batteries-that-form-a-virtual-power-plant

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Douglas Adams was right – knowledge without understanding is meaningless

Fans of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42. The computer helpfully points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. And the name of the supercomputer? Why, Deep Thought, of course.

It's years since I read Adams's wonderful novel, but an article published in Nature last month brought it vividly to mind. The article was about the contemporary search for the secret to life and the role of a supercomputer in helping to answer it. The question is how to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. The computer is a machine called AlphaFold. And the company that created it? You guessed it – DeepMind.

Proteins are large biomolecules constructed from amino acid residues and are fundamental to all animal life. They are, says one expert, "the most spectacular machines ever created for moving atoms at the nanoscale and often do chemistry orders of magnitude more efficiently than anything that we've built".

But these vital biomachines are also inscrutable because they assemble themselves into structures of astonishing complexity and beauty. (Illustrations of them make one think of what can go wrong when trying to wrap Christmas presents with those nice ribbons that only shop assistants can manage.) Understanding this "folding" process is one of the key challenges in biochemistry, partly because proteins are necessary for virtually every cell in a body and partly because it's suspected that mis-folding may help to explain diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

[...] Two years ago, DeepMind, having conquered the board game Go, decided to take on the challenge, using the deep-learning technology it had developed for Go. The resulting machine was, predictably, named AlphaFold. At the CASP meeting last December, it unveiled the results. Its machine was, on average, more accurate than the other teams and by some criteria it was significantly ahead of the others. For protein sequences modelled from scratch – 43 of the 90 – AlphaFold made the most accurate prediction for 25 proteins. Its nearest rival only managed three.

[...] It's conceivable that a machine-learning approach will soon enable us to make accurate predictions of how a protein will fold and this may be very useful to know. But it won't be scientific knowledge. After all, AlphaFold knows nothing about biochemistry. We're heading into uncharted territory.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) isn’t something solely to have hooked up to your desktop PC. Your Raspberry Pi SBC might also benefit from it. Yet the available options aren’t too great, or are too expensive. This leads folk including [Joachim Baumann] to modify cheerfully cheap Chinese UPS HAT[*] boards such as the Geekworm UPS HAT to fix its myriad of issues and missing features.

[...] With [Simon]’s project, a PIC MCU was used to provide a supervisor for the UPS HAT. It also bypasses the HAT’s control over whether the Raspberry Pi gets power or not. The results did however not fit [Joachim]’s needs, so the ATtiny Daemon project was born. This uses some of the fixes [Simon] implemented and adds a daemon that runs on the Raspberry Pi to establish two-way communications between the UPS and OS.

The settings for the UPS are stored also on the HAT, in the MCU’s EEPROM, with the daemon able to update and read it out as needed.

[*] HAT = Hardware Attached on Top. Hat tip to commenters who asked what a HAT was.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

No requests for licenses to sell to the Chinese telecom have been issued to date, Reuters reports.

More than 130 applications have been submitted to the Commerce Department for licenses to sell US goods to Huawei, Reuters reported Tuesday. The report comes nearly two months after the Trump Administration said some sales to the embattled Chinese telecom would be allowed.

President Donald Trump effectively banned US companies from doing business with Huawei in May out of national security concerns that the company is too closely tied to the Chinese government. Huawei has repeatedly said those fears are unfounded.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confirmed the process in July, but the Trump Administration has yet to issue any licenses, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The number of applications exceeds the 50 or so Ross said the department had received in July.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Ever since the discovery of cuprate (copper oxide) superconductors in 1986, scientists have wondered if oxides of nickel, which sits next to copper on the periodic table, could also be used to form superconducting materials, and more importantly high-temperature superconductors.

Now, post doctoral researcher Danfeng Li and other scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC (named from the original 'Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have reported the first nickel oxide material that shows clear signs of superconductivity.

Research on the new material is in a "very, very early stage, and there's a lot of work ahead," cautioned Harold Hwang, a SIMES investigator, professor at SLAC and Stanford and senior author of the report. "We have just seen the first basic experiments, and now we need to do the whole battery of investigations that are still going on with cuprates."

Among other things, he said, scientists will want to dope the nickelate material in various ways to see how this affects its superconductivity across a range of temperatures, and determine whether other nickelates can become superconducting. Other studies will explore the material's magnetic structure and its relationship to superconductivity.

The newly discovered material, a strontium-doped nickelate is a potential harbinger of what may be a new family of superconductors similar to the cuprates.

Journal Reference
Danfeng Li, et al. 29 August 2019, Superconductivity in an infinite-layer nickelate, Nature, volume 572, pages 624–627. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1496-5

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Microsoft today announced that it:

is supporting the addition of Microsoft's exFAT technology to the Linux kernel.

Microsoft has published the exFAT file system specification on its Windows Dev Center site.

While the code remains under copyright, Microsoft also stated that the exFAT code incorporated into the Linux kernel will be available under GPLv2.

We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN's 3040+ members and licensees.

It is noteworthy that there is already a free and open source exFAT driver available for FreeBSD and multiple Linux distributions, but it is not an official part of the Linux kernel due to the patent encumbrance of exFAT.

Also at TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Liquid crystals are widely used in technologies such as displays, which manipulate their orientation to display colors across the spectrum.

In traditional displays, liquid crystals are stationary and uniform, free of defects. But that stillness can be altered by adding bacteria to the crystals, creating what scientists and engineers call "living liquid crystals": liquid crystal, they generate "defects" that can be used for engineering purposes.

Researchers with the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, along with colleagues at UChicago-affiliated Argonne National Laboratory, have shown how this material becomes active and disordered through this process, creating floral patterns from the bending instabilities that eventually lead to creation of defects. But the results are not just aesthetic: They are an important step toward understanding how to ultimately control this material for emerging technologies that rely on defect formation.

[...] Living liquid crystals are an example of materials that can act on their own. In nature, these materials are responsible for the motility of cells. Proteins within the cells "walk" along the surface of polymer molecules and exert a force that causes displacement and motion.

[...] The researchers hope to use this information to be able to fully control these living liquid crystals. That would allow them to eventually create a new kind of microfluidic device that transports fluids autonomously without pumps or pressure, or to create synthetic systems that resemble cells and that could move autonomously from one place to another.

Emergence of Radial Tree of Bend Stripes in Active Nematics, Physical Review X (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.9.031014)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Eight individuals have been charged with an indictment by the United States for allegedly running two of the "largest unauthorized streaming services".

The federal grand jury that gave the indictment alleges that the two streaming services, Jetflicks and iStreamItAll (ISIA), caused copyright owners to lose millions of dollars.

Both services were used by tens of thousands of subscribers, and could be accessed online and on numerous systems including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, video game consoles, digital media players, set-top boxes, and web browsers.

Jetflicks allegedly obtained infringing television programs from pirate websites -- such as The Pirate Bay, RARBG and Torrentz -- by using automated computer scripts, and then would provide the pirated content to subscribers soon after the shows were aired.

ISIA allegedly used many of the same automated tools that Jetflicks employed to locate, download, process, and store illegal content -- but ISIA also provided movies in addition to television programs -- to quickly make pirated content available to ISIA subscribers.

The two services allegedly reproduced tens of thousands of copyrighted television episodes and movies without authorization, the Justice Department said, and distributed the infringing programs to tens of thousands of paid subscribers located throughout the US and Canada.

Original Submission