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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Hyundai shows off exoskeleton robot to help assembly line workers

When it comes to building cars, not every job is as easy as screwing in a few bolts or installing a panel. Often, assembly lines call for workers to do their job while reaching over their heads, which can put a strain on the arms, shoulders and other joints. That's where some companies, including Hyundai, see robots as a helping hand.

The South Korean automaker debuted its Wearable Vest Exoskeleton on Wednesday with the goal of transforming how workers complete overhead assemblies. Hyundai says the debut comes after it ran two pilot programs at US production plants with successful results.

The exoskeleton, "Vex" for short, is worn like a backpack and doesn't include a battery. Instead, the contraption mimics the human shoulder joint with multiple link points that create extra leverage. Since there's no battery, it also doesn't weigh a lot. Hyundai said the whole getup tips the scales at 5.5 pounds.

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jmichaelhudsondotnet writes:

https://www.ibtimes.com/mark-zuckerberg-going-jail-us-senator-mentions-prison-time-facebooks-ceo-over-privacy-2821637 [ibtimes.com]

Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon has floated the idea that Mark Zuckerberg has committed crimes by operating the website known as "Facebook."

In an interview published last week, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon discussed the consequences he believes Facebook should face for its repeated lies about privacy practices. Specifically, Wyden told Willamette Week that CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg may deserve prison time.

"Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," Wyden said. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to — and let me underline this — the possibility of a prison term. Because he hurt a lot of people. And, by the way, there is a precedent for this: In financial services, if the CEO and the executives lie about the financials, they can be held personally accountable."

The outlet included a citation of University of Oregon professor Tim Gleason who said the odds of Zuckerberg facing criminal action to be "slim."

Also reported at:

• https://www.marketwatch.com/story/senator-wants-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-to-potentially-face-prison-term-2019-09-03
• https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/03/senator-wyden-prison-for-facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-should-be-considered.html
• https://www.businessinsider.com/senator-wyden-mark-zuckerberg-prosecution-facebook-privacy-2019-9

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Engineers preparing the next American Mars rover have installed one of its most exciting experiments - a chopper. The mini-helicopter is regarded as a bonus on the 2020 mission.

It will be the first such aircraft deployed on another world. If it works, it'll be amazing, but if it doesn't it won't detract from the overall goals.

The US space agency's (Nasa) next Mars rover is a near-copy of the one-tonne Curiosity vehicle that has operated successfully in Gale Crater since 2012.

The new mission will be aimed at a different target - a 50km-wide depression called Jezero Crater.

Engineers are nearing the end of the rover's assembly at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

They've positioned the 1.8kg "Scout" chopper under the big robot. The idea is that the rover will find a safe place to put the aircraft on the ground shortly after landing. That does mean, however, that the twin-rotor device must travel with some protection.

The rover's touchdown mechanism uses rockets and these will kick up stones and dust. As a consequence, a shield is being fitted around the helicopter to deflect any debris. There are no scientific instruments on the solar-powered Scout. Its job is merely to demonstrate the practicality of flight on another planet.

Like the American rover, Rosalind Franklin will search for life signs, but it will do this on a flat equatorial plain known as Oxia. Nasa launched a schools essay-writing competition on Wednesday to find an engaging name for its rover. The new name to replace "Mars 2020" will be announced in February, exactly a year before landing day.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An artificial-intelligence app that allows users to insert their faces in place of those film and TV characters has caused controversy in China. Zao has sparked privacy fears and suggestions it could be used to defeat systems using facial recognition. It appeared in China on 29 August and has proven wildly popular. But it has led to developers Momo apologising for its end-user agreement, which stripped users of the rights to their images. And as the app went viral, Zao's owners aired fears users were devouring its expensively purchased server capacity.

Its popularity has also lead to assurances from Alipay, part of the Chinese web giant Alibaba, saying that it's impossible for so-called deepfake videos created by the app to be used to cheat its Smile to Pay facial-recognition system.

Zao is a face-swapping app that uses clips from films and TV shows, convincingly changing a character's face by using selfies from the user's phone.

But some users had noted the app's terms and conditions "gave the developers the global right to permanently use any image created on the app for free", Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported. "Moreover, the developers had the right to transfer this authorisation to any third party without further permission from the user," the paper said, adding experts believed this broke Chinese law.

Momo had subsequently deleted the controversial clause and issued an apology, saying its app would not store users' biometric information nor "excessively collect user information", Shanghai-based The Paper said.

But popular social media platform WeChat quickly banned users from uploading Zao videos via its platform, citing "security risks".

[...] And lawyer Zhang Xinnian told it the laws governing phone apps' terms and conditions needed to be tightened.

Zao's initial terms "violated user privacy and once personal information is leaked and abused it could lead to criminal incidents", he added.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Trump's 15 percent tariff on Chinese goods kicks in

It's the first day of September, marked by a new round of tariffs on Chinese imports, which went into effect Sunday. In latest escalation of the trade war with China, the Trump administration has slapped a 15% tariff on $112 billion worth of Chinese goods (PDF), something consumers can expect to feel when buying everything from milk to diapers to some China-manufactured tech products like the Apple Watch.

But on Aug. 13, the USTR said it would offer a temporary reprieve to a batch of about $160 billion products (PDF) like laptops and cellphones. Those goods won't be subject to the new tariffs until Dec. 15 -- an attempt to blunt the impact of the duties on the holiday shopping season. Trump later raised the new tariff on Chinese goods to a 15% rate rather than the initial 10%.

China retaliated Sunday with its own tariff plan taking effect at 12:01 p.m. local time. It's rolling out higher tariffs in stages on a total of about $75 billion in US goods like soybeans and crude oil. It'll also resume an extra 25% duty on cars imported from the US on Dec. 15.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Many Austrians value their privacy and won't accept someone to keep track how many beers they drink. It may sound like a strange thing to enshrine in a country’s constitution: the right to pay cash. But a debate on whether to do just that has entered Austria’s election campaign, shining a light on the country’s love of cold, hard currency.

The Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP, EPP-affiliated) recently made the suggestion as part of its campaign for a parliamentary election in late September, for which it has a commanding poll lead. This led to other parties — though sceptical of the ÖVP’s proposal — vaunting their commitment to protecting cash, with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ) demanding an end to fees levied at cashpoints.

And it is not hard to see why all major parties see protecting cash as a vote-winner.

“In Austria, attitudes change slowly,” an employee of Weinschenke, a burger restaurant in downtown Vienna, told AFP. The woman in her 30s, who only gave her name as Victoria, says she prefers to use cash because “you don’t leave a trace”.

Financial law expert Werner Doralt says Austrians put a high value on privacy and are wary of anything that could be used to keep tabs on them, such as card transactions. “If for example I go shopping, and it’s recorded exactly how much schnapps I’ve bought, that’s an invasion of my privacy,” he says.

A recent survey conducted by the ING bank in 13 European countries, Australia and the US, showed Austrians were the most resistant to the idea of giving up cash payments.

Just 10 percent of those surveyed in Austria said they could imagine doing without cash, compared to a European average of 22%. According to European Central Bank data compiled in 2017, cash accounted for 67% of money spent at points of sale in Austria, compared to just 27% in the Netherlands. Even in neighbouring Germany, another country known for its attachment to cash, the rate is only 55%.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest. One of the key difficulties for protesters is to figure out what’s happening in the crowded, fast-changing, and often chaotic circumstances.

Citizen-led efforts to map protests in real-time are an attempt to address those challenges and answer some pressing questions for protesters and bystanders alike: Where should they go? Where have tear gas and water cannons been deployed? Where are police advancing, and are there armed thugs attacking civilians?

One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.

Founded by a finance professional in his 20s and who only wished to be identified as Kuma, HKMap is an attempt to level the playing field between protesters and officers, he said in an interview over chat app Telegram. While earlier on in the protest movement people relied on text-based, on-the-ground  live updates through public Telegram channels, Kuma found these to be too scattered to be effective, and hard to visualize unless someone knew the particular neighborhood inside out.

“The huge asymmetric information between protesters and officers led to multiple occasions of surround and capture,” said Kuma. Passersby and non-frontline protesters could also make use of the map, he said, to avoid tense conflict zones. After some of his friends were arrested in late July, he decided to build HKMap.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Squirrels listen in to birds' conversations as signal of safety: Hearing casual chatter of birds after predator call reassures squirrels to come off high alert

To test this hypothesis, the researchers observed the behavior of 54 wild Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in public parks and residential areas in Ohio in response to threat, which they simulated by playing back a recording of the call of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), a common predator of both squirrels and small birds. They followed the predator's call with a playback of either multi-species songbird bird chatter or ambient sounds lacking bird calls and monitored the behavior of each squirrel for 3 minutes.

The researchers found that all squirrels showed an increase in predator vigilance behaviors, such as freezing, looking up, or fleeing, after they heard the hawk's call. However, squirrels that were played bird chatter afterwards performed fewer vigilance behaviors and returned to normal levels of watchfulness more quickly than squirrels that did not hear bird calls after the hawk's call. This suggests that the squirrels are able to tap into the casual chatter of many bird species as an indicator of safety, allowing them to quickly return to getting on with normal behaviors like foraging rather than remaining on high alert after a threat has passed.

The authors add: "We knew that squirrels eavesdropped on the alarm calls of some bird species, but we were excited to find that they also eavesdrop on non-alarm sounds that indicate the birds feel relatively safe. Perhaps in some circumstances, cues of safety could be as important as cues of danger."

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists have been researching the effect of precipitation and population size on rising temperatures in cities compared with the surrounding countryside. They have found that more green spaces can help to lower temperatures in urban zones -- but not everywhere.

Urban heat islands are a phenomenon where the temperature in a city is noticeably higher than in the surrounding rural area. When combined with the sort of heatwave that hit many parts of Europe at the beginning of July, urban heat can pose a real threat to the elderly, sick or other vulnerable people. Scientists at ETH Zurich have researched urban heat islands across the globe and have found that the effectiveness of heat-reduction strategies in cities varies depending on the regional climate. "We already know that plants create a more pleasant environment in a city, but we wanted to quantify how many green spaces are actually needed to produce a significant cooling effect," says Gabriele Manoli, former postdoc with the Chair of Hydrology and Water Resources Management at ETH Zurich and lead author of the recently published article in the journal Nature.

Manoli and his colleagues from ETH Zurich, Princeton University and Duke University studied data from some 30,000 cities worldwide and their surrounding environment, taking into consideration the average summer temperature, the population size and the annual rainfall. The urban heat island phenomenon is more pronounced the bigger the city and the more rainfall in that region. As a general rule, more rain encourages plant growth in the surrounding area, making this cooler than the city. This effect is the strongest when annual rainfall averages around 1500 millimetres as in Tokyo, but does not increase further with more rain.

Two climate extremes illustrate well the role of vegetation on the urban heat island phenomenon: very dry regions on the one hand, and tropical areas on the other. Through carefully targeted planting, a city like Phoenix in the USA could achieve cooler temperatures than the surrounding countryside, where conditions are almost desert-like. By comparison, a city surrounded by tropical forests, such as Singapore, would need far more green spaces to reduce temperatures, but this would also create more humidity. In cities located in tropical zones, other cooling methods are therefore expected to be more effective, such as increased wind circulation, more use of shade and new heat-dispersing materials. "There is no single solution," Manoli says. "It all depends on the surrounding environment and regional climate characteristics."

-- submitted from IRC

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Slack plunges after posting first earnings report since going public

Shares of Slack, maker of the popular workplace chat app, plunged as much as 16% on Wednesday after the company issued its first earnings report as a public company, briefly dropping below the reference price from its direct listing.

Here are the key numbers:

• Earnings: Loss of 14 cents per share, excluding certain items, vs. 18 cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
• Revenue: $145 million, vs. $140.7 million as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.

Slack said in a statement that its revenue grew 58% year over year in the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year, which ended on July 31.

Slack debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in June through a direct listing, following the path taken by Spotify last year. A few days before its listing, Slack forecast second-quarter revenue of $139 million to $141 million, representing growth of about 52%.

The company's main competitor is Microsoft, which includes the Teams work chat app in Office 365 business subscriptions. In July, Microsoft released statistics suggesting that Teams is more widely used than Slack. On Wednesday Slack did not provide updated user statistics

"We see an equal opportunity for both Slack and Microsoft Teams to grow as alternatives to traditional e-mail and argue a duopoly-like market structure could form around the two most popular messaging-centric in platforms at maturity," KeyBanc Capital Markets analysts led by Brent Bracelin wrote in a note to clients on Aug. 25.

Slack's uptime — a measure of how frequently the service is operating normally — slipped below 99.9% in June and July, wrote the KeyBanc analysts, who recommend buying the stock. Slack provides customers with credits for future use when uptime is below 99.99%. Those credits can impact revenue. Slack said its revenue for the quarter was negatively impacted by $8.2 million of credits.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Microsoft's adoption of the Google-developed Chromium browser engine for Edge has resulted in a proposal to cleanse the open-source code of "potentially offensive terms."

Issue 981129 in the Chromium bug log lists a suggestion by Microsoft to “cleanup of potentially offensive terms in codebase” aims to rid the software blueprints of language such as whitelist (change to allowlist), blacklist (change to blocklist), “offensive terms using ‘wtf’ as protocol messages,” and other infelicities.

This bug report was raised by a Microsoft contributor, who stated: “We are just sharing a subset of what PoliCheck scanned for us,” Policheck being “a machine-learned model that another team manages that does context based scanning on hundreds of file formats.”

Googler Rick Byers, a Chromium engineer, gave the issue a cautious welcome, saying: "This sounds like a good strategy to me, thanks for doing this! We certainly have never intended for anything in the codebase to be potentially offensive, but I'm also not aware of anyone making an effort to find them all." He added:

I don't expect Chrome teams to necessarily make these bugs a priority (we haven't seen this pose a problem for us in practice as far as I know), but if cleaning this up is valuable for Microsoft (or any another Chromium contributor) then we should have no trouble getting the necessary code reviews (at least in the platform code). And yeah there are folks who look for GoodFirstBug and may want to pick up some easy commits.

Although changing comments or variable names in the source code is generally invisible to the user, this kind of revision can be problematic if it wrecks things like names in preferences and policies.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Drug-resistant bacteria responsible for deadly hospital-acquired infections shut out antibiotics by closing tiny doors in their cell walls.

The new finding by researchers at Imperial College London could allow researchers to design antibiotics into bacterial cells. The result is published today in Nature Communications.

The bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae causes infections in the lungs, blood and wounds of those in hospitals, and patients that have compromised immune systems are especially vulnerable. More than 20,000 K. pneumoniae infections were recorded in UK hospitals in the past year.

Like many bacteria, K. pneumoniae is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, particularly a family of drugs called Carbapenems. Carbapenems are used as antibiotics in hospitals when others have failed or are ineffective.

[...] Now, the team from Imperial has discovered one mechanism by which K. pneumoniae is able to resist Carbapenems. Antibiotics usually enter the K. pneumoniae bacteria through surface doorways known as pores. The team investigated the structure of the pores and showed that by shutting these doorways K. pneumoniae becomes resistant to multiple drugs, since antibiotics cannot enter and kill them.

[...] The closed doors aren't all good news for bacteria. They also mean that the bacteria can take in fewer nutrients, and tests in mice showed that the bacteria grow slower as a result.

However, the advantage in terms of avoiding antibiotics outweighed the negative impact of slower growth for the bacteria, allowing them to maintain a high level of infection.

Journal Article: (Open Access) Joshua L. C. Wong, Maria Romano, Louise E. Kerry; OmpK36-mediated Carbapenem resistance attenuates ST258 Klebsiella pneumoniae in vivo Nature Communications, Vol. 10 Issue1. (2019)

Original Submission

We had two Soylentils write in about President Trump's posting on twitter an image of a failed Iranian attempt to launch a satellite. Analysts were stunned at the resolution and clarity of the picture since it appears to have been taken from a US Spy satellite. A commercial-quality image of the same site is shown in the article from Ars Technica and the difference is striking.

President Trump Tweets Picture of Sensitive Satellite Photo of Iranian Launch Site

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Fnord666.

President Trump tweets picture of sensitive satellite photo of Iranian launch site

President Donald Trump posted a photo today via Twitter of Iran's Imam Khomeini Space Center in northern Iran, showing the damage done to the facility by the explosion of what appears to have been a Safir rocket during launch. The rocket was apparently being used in the attempted launch of Iran's Nahid-1 satellite.

Commercial satellite imagery from Planet Labs made available this morning showed a plume of smoke rising from the space center's launch pad. But the photo posted by President Trump was a much higher-resolution, black and white photo—a resolution that suggested it came from a National Reconnaissance Office satellite.

The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One. pic.twitter.com/z0iDj2L0Y3

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2019

Amateurs Identify U.S. Spy Satellite Behind President Trump's Tweet

takyon writes:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u-s-spy-satellite-behind-president-trumps-tweet

The image almost certainly came from a satellite known as USA 224, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite-tracker based in the Netherlands. The satellite was launched by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2011. Almost everything about it remains highly classified, but Langbroek says that based on its size and orbit, most observers believe USA 224 is one of America's multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance satellites.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Hypersonic missiles, stealthy cruise missiles, and weaponized artificial intelligence have so reduced the amount of time that decision makers in the United States would theoretically have to respond to a nuclear attack that, two military experts say, it’s time for a new US nuclear command, control, and communications system. Their solution? Give artificial intelligence control over the launch button.

In an article in War on the Rocks titled, ominously, “America Needs a ‘Dead Hand,’” US deterrence experts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin propose a nuclear command, control, and communications setup with some eerie similarities to the Soviet system referenced in the title to their piece. The Dead Hand was a semiautomated system developed to launch the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal under certain conditions, including, particularly, the loss of national leaders who could do so on their own. Given the increasing time pressure Lowther and McGiffin say US nuclear decision makers are under, “[I]t may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.”

In case handing over the control of nuclear weapons to HAL 9000 sounds risky, the authors also put forward a few other solutions to the nuclear time-pressure problem: Bolster the United States’ ability to respond to a nuclear attack after the fact, that is, ensure a so-called second-strike capability; adopt a willingness to pre-emptively attack other countries based on warnings that they are preparing to attack the United States; or destabilize the country’s adversaries by fielding nukes near their borders, the idea here being that such a move would bring countries to the arms control negotiating table.

Still, the authors clearly appear to favor an artificial intelligence-based solution.

“Nuclear deterrence creates stability and depends on an adversary’s perception that it cannot destroy the United States with a surprise attack, prevent a guaranteed retaliatory strike, or prevent the United States from effectively commanding and controlling its nuclear forces,” they write. “That perception begins with an assured ability to detect, decide, and direct a second strike. In this area, the balance is shifting away from the United States.”

History is replete with instances in which it seems, in retrospect, that nuclear war could have started were it not for some flesh-and-blood human refusing to begin Armageddon. Perhaps the most famous such hero was Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, who was the officer on duty in charge of the Soviet Union’s missile-launch detection system when it registered five inbound missiles on Sept. 26, 1983. Petrov decided the signal was in error and reported it as a false alarm. It was. Whether an artificial intelligence would have reached the same decision is, at the least, uncertain.

One of the risks of incorporating more artificial intelligence into the nuclear command, control, and communications system involves the phenomenon known as automation bias. Studies have shown that people will trust what an automated system is telling them. In one study, pilots who told researchers that they wouldn’t trust an automated system that reported an engine fire unless there was corroborating evidence nonetheless did just that in simulations. (Furthermore, they told experimenters that there had in fact been corroborating information, when there hadn’t.)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

As growing numbers of people are using cannabis to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new UCL study reports that prescriptions are not backed up by adequate evidence.

The systematic review, published in the Journal of Dual Diagnosis, finds that the active components of cannabis, called cannabinoids, may hold promise as a treatment for PTSD, particularly for reducing nightmares and helping people sleep, but more research is needed to determine whether these drugs should be used in routine clinical practice.

"There has been a recent surge of interest in the use of cannabinoids to treat PTSD, particularly from military veterans, many of whom are already self-medicating or obtaining prescriptions in some American states," said the study's lead author, Dr Chandni Hindocha (UCL Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit).

"The lack of evidence supporting cannabis as a PTSD treatment is striking given the vast interest in it, and the large unmet need for better PTSD treatments," she said.

PTSD is a potentially debilitating condition affecting roughly 1% of the UK population, typically consisting of re-experiencing a traumatic event through intrusive memories, flashbacks or nightmares, and often involves hyper-reactivity (a state of constant vigilance) and insomnia.

Psychotherapies (talking therapies) including trauma-focussed cognitive-behavioural therapy have been shown to be effective for PTSD. However, not everyone can access talking therapies and they do not work for everyone, so many people still need to take prescribed medications. Existing drugs approved for PTSD do not work for everyone, and can have side effects, so researchers say there is an urgent need to identify new treatments.

A growing number of people have turned to cannabinoids, which is an approved treatment for PTSD in most states in the USA that permit medical cannabis.

Original Submission