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takyon writes:

RED cancels Hydrogen phone project as founder Jim Jannard retires

RED's ambitious Hydrogen phone project is ending after the release of just a single device, the Hydrogen One, according to an announcement from Jim Jannard. The company's founder says that he is "shutting down the HYDROGEN project" as he retires due to "a few health issues."

The $1,295 RED Hydrogen One was the first smartphone from the high-end camera company; first announced in 2017, it promised bold new technologies like a "holographic display," a top-notch camera system, and modular attachments to expand the phone over time. After a series of delays, the phone was eventually released to a lackluster reception in October 2018.

[...] Jannard has been the face of RED and its high-end cameras since he founded the company back in 1999. According to Jannard, RED Digital Cinema will live on under the leadership of Jarred Land (RED's current president), Tommy Rios (RED's executive vice president) and Jamin Jannard (RED's president of marketing and creative).

That's enough of that.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously: RED Pitches a $1,200 Holographic Android Smartphone
$1,300 RED Hydrogen One Smartphone Fails to Impress Reviewers
RED Blames Chinese Manufacturer for "Hydrogen One" Issues, Confirms Second Smartphone

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Have you ever sat down to complete your morning crossword or Sudoku and wondered about what's happening in your brain? Somewhere in the activity of the billions of neurons in your brain lies the code that lets you remember a key word, or apply the logic required to complete the puzzle.

Given the brain's intricacy, you might assume that these patterns are incredibly complex and unique to each task. But recent research suggests things are actually more straightforward than that.

It turns out that many structures in your brain work together in precise ways to coordinate their activity, shaping their actions to the requirements of whatever it is that you're trying to achieve.

We call these coordinated patterns the "low-dimensional manifold," which you can think of as analogous to the major roadways that you use to commute to and from work. The majority of the traffic flows along these major highways, which represent an efficient and effective way to get from A to B.

We have found evidence that most brain activity follows these types of patterns. In very simple terms, this saves your brain from needing to work everything out from scratch when performing a task. If someone throws you a ball, for instance, the low-dimensional manifold allows your brain to swiftly coordinate the muscle movements needed to catch the ball, rather than your brain needing to learn how to catch a ball afresh each time.

In a study published today in the journal Neuron, my colleagues and I investigated these patterns further. Specifically, we wanted to find out whether they play a role in shaping brain activity during really challenging cognitive tasks that require lots of concentration.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Lotame unveils Cartographer, its new approach to tracking user identity – TechCrunch

Lotame, a company offering data management tools for publishers and marketers, today unveiled a new product called Cartographer — described by CMO Adam Solomon as “our new people-based ID solution.”

In other words, it’s Lotame’s offering to help businesses connect their visitor and customer data across platforms and devices.

We’ve written about plenty of other cross-device targeting technologies — and in fact, Lotame acquired one of them, AdMobius, in 2014. But Solomon said the landscape has become more challenging given privacy regulations and especially updated browsers that place new limits on the types of cookies that can be used to track users.

“There’s been an explosion of first-party cookies,” Solomon said, referring to cookies that are stored on the domain you’re actually visiting (as opposed to third-party cookies, which are increasingly blocked).

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Stewart Butterfield says Microsoft sees Slack as existential threat – TechCrunch

In a wide ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal’s global technology editor Jason Dean yesterday, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield had some strong words regarding Microsoft, saying the software giant saw his company as an existential threat.

The interview took place at the WSJ Tech Live event. When Butterfield was asked about a chart Microsoft released in July during the Slack quiet period, which showed Microsoft Teams had 13 million daily active users compared to 12 million for Slack, Butterfield appeared taken aback by the chart.

“The bigger point is that’s kind of crazy for Microsoft to do, especially during the quiet period. I had someone say it was unprecedented since the [Steve] Ballmer era. I think it’s more like unprecedented since the Gates’ 98-99 era. I think they feel like we’re an existential threat,” he told Dean.

It’s worth noting, that as Dean pointed out, you could flip that existential threat statement. Microsoft is a much bigger business with a trillion-dollar market cap versus Slack’s $400 million. It also has the benefit of linking Microsoft Teams to Office 365 subscriptions, but Butterfield says the smaller company with the better idea has often won in the past.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

Google is currently rolling out a change to its core search algorithm that it says could change the rankings of results for as many as one in ten queries. It's based on cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) techniques developed by Google researchers and applied to its search product over the course of the past 10 months.

In essence, Google is claiming that it is improving results by having a better understanding of how words relate to each other in a sentence. In one example Google discussed at a briefing with journalists yesterday, its search algorithm was able to parse the meaning of the following phrase: "Can you get medicine for someone pharmacy?"

The old Google search algorithm treated that sentence as a "bag of words," according to Pandu Nayak, Google fellow and VP of search. So it looked at the important words, medicine and pharmacy, and simply returned local results. The new algorithm was able to understand the context of the words "for someone" to realize it was a question about whether you could pick up somebody else's prescription — and it returned the right results.

The tweaked algorithm is based on BERT, which stands for "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers." Every word of that acronym is a term of art in NLP, but the gist is that instead of treating a sentence like a bag of words, BERT looks at all the words in the sentence as a whole. Doing so allows it to realize that the words "for someone" shouldn't be thrown away, but rather are essential to the meaning of the sentence.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/20931657/google-bert-search-context-algorithm-change-10-percent-langauge

I can't help wondering how this is handled in other languages. Chinese, for instance, where (I've read that) a word might have several meanings, but context defines the word.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

Candidates at job interviews expect to be evaluated on their experience, conduct, and ideas, but a new study by Yale researchers provides evidence that interviewees are judged based on their social status seconds after they start to speak.

The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that people can accurately assess a stranger's socioeconomic position -- defined by their income, education, and occupation status -- based on brief speech patterns and shows that these snap perceptions influence hiring managers in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes.

"Our study shows that even during the briefest interactions, a person's speech patterns shape the way people perceive them, including assessing their competence and fitness for a job," said Michael Kraus, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. "While most hiring managers would deny that a job candidate's social class matters, in reality, the socioeconomic position of an applicant or their parents is being assessed within the first seconds they speak -- a circumstance that limits economic mobility and perpetuates inequality."

[...] "We rarely talk explicitly about social class, and yet, people with hiring experience infer competence and fitness based on socioeconomic position estimated from a few second of an applicant's speech," Kraus said. "If we want to move to a more equitable society, then we must contend with these ingrained psychological processes that drive our early impressions of others. Despite what these hiring tendencies may suggest, talent is not found solely among those born to rich or well-educated families. Policies that actively recruit candidates from all levels of status in society are best positioned to match opportunities to the people best suited for them."

Journal Reference:
Michael W. Kraus et al. Evidence for the reproduction of social class in brief speech^[$]. PNAS, 2019 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1900500116

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

U.S. Government, Military Personnel Data Leaked By Autoclerk

The travel reservation data, along with personal details, of hundreds of thousands was discovered in a database exposed online for all to see.

A leaky database owned by reservations management system Autoclerk has exposed the personal data and travel information for thousands of users – including U.S. government and military personnel.

Autoclerk, which was acquired by the Best Western Hotel and Resorts Group in August, provides reservation management software for hotels, accommodation providers, travel agencies and more. Researchers with vpnMentor on Monday said that they discovered an Elasticsearch database, owned by Autoclerk, exposed online that contained over 100,000 booking reservations for travelers.

“The database was hosted by Amazon Web Servers in the USA, containing over 179GB of data,” Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, researchers with vpnMentor, said in a Monday post. “Much of the data exposed originated from external travel and hospitality platforms using the database owner’s platform to interact with one another. The client platforms affected include property management systems (PMS), booking engines, and data services within the tourism and hospitality industries.”

Exposed information included unencrypted login credentials, full names, date of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, dates and costs of travel, and masked credit-card details. For certain reservations, after guests checked in to a hotel, their check-in time and room number also was viewable on the database.

Because Autoclerk software is used by third-party travel agencies, several external accommodation providers’ customers were impacted by the leak. Platforms whose clients were compromised as part of the leak include HAPI Cloud, OpenTravel and Synxis by Sabre Hospitality Solutions.

Disturbingly, one of the platforms exposed in the database was a contractor of the U.S. government, military and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said researchers. The unnamed contractor manages the travel arrangements of U.S. government and military personnel, as well as independent contractors working with American defense and security agencies.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Using the Subaru Telescope and Gemini-North Telescope, a team of astronomers has revealed that the supercluster CL1604, a distant supercluster located about 7.3 billion light-years away, is a large-scale 3-D structure extending over about 160 million light-years in the north-south direction. This is more than two times more extended than previously known. Until now, astronomers saw merely the "tip of the iceberg" of this supercluster. The wide-field capability of the Subaru Telescope enabled the team to survey the whole of the supercluster and the Gemini-North Telescope played a critical role in confirming the structures. This is the outcome of the synergy of the telescopes of the Maunakea observatories.

Galaxies are distributed inhomogeneously in the universe. It is well-known that nearby galaxies are strongly influenced by their environment, e.g., whether they are located in dense areas called galaxy clusters, or less dense areas called voids. However, how galaxies form and evolve along with the growth of the cosmic web structures is one of the hot topics of astronomy. A wide-field survey of the distant universe allows astronomers to witness what actually happened with galaxies in the early phase of structure formation in the universe. Among the few superclusters currently known, one of the best targets for study is the supercluster CL1604. Based on previous studies, its extent is 80 million light-years and its era is 7.3 billion years ago.

The uniqueness of the data taken by Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope is the deep imaging data over a field wide enough to cover the known supercluster and the surrounding area fully. A team led by Masao Hayashi and Yusei Koyama from NAOJ estimated the distances of individual galaxies from the galaxy colors using a technique called "photometric redshift." Then the three-dimensional picture of the large-scale structures appeared, consisting of several galaxy clusters newly discovered in the north-south direction, as well as the structures already known.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Smart bulbs are expected to be a popular purchase this holiday season. But could lighting your home open up your personal information to hackers?

Earlier this year Amazon's Echo made global headlines when it was reported that consumers' conversations were recorded and heard by thousands of employees.

Now researchers at UTSA have conducted a review of the security holes that exist in popular smart-light brands. According to the analysis, the next prime target could be that smart bulb that shoppers buy this coming holiday season.

"Your smart bulb could come equipped with infrared capabilities, and most users don't know that the invisible wave spectrum can be controlled. You can misuse those lights," said Murtuza Jadliwala, professor and director of the Security, Privacy, Trust and Ethics in Computing Research Lab in UTSA's Department of Computer Science. "Any data can be stolen: texts or images. Anything that is stored in a computer."

Anindya Maiti, Murtuza Jadliwala. Light Ears: Information Leakage via Smart Lights^[$]. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2019; 3 (3): 1 DOI: 10.1145/3351256

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Phys.org reports "Special cells contribute to regenerate the heart in zebrafish" which describes a study that has uncovered particular heart cells in the Zebra fish that are marked by SOX10 gene expression and play an enhanced role in the fish's heart's regeneration capability.

It is already known that zebrafish can flexibly regenerate their hearts after injury. An international research group led by Prof. Nadia Mercader of the University of Bern now shows that certain heart muscle cells play a central role in this process. The insights gained could be used to initiate a similar repair process in the human heart.

In humans, unfortunately, the heart has only minimal self-repair ability. Heart cells that die in heart attacks are replaced by scarring which does not assist in contraction.

After heart injury, zebrafish cardiomyocytes can divide and the scar is replaced by new cardiac muscle. The group of Nadia Mercader from the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Bern has been interested in understanding the cellular mechanisms of heart regeneration over the last 10 years. Now, the researchers show that not all cardiomyocytes in the zebrafish heart contribute equally to regenerate the lost muscle, but that there is a specific subset of cardiomyocytes with enhanced regenerative capacity.

Using transgenic tools, Marcos Sande-Melón, lead author of the study, and colleagues could identify a small subset of cardiomyocytes in the zebrafish heart, marked by sox10 gene expression that expanded more than the rest of the myocardial cells in response to injury. These cells differed from the rest of the myocardium also in their gene expression profile, suggesting that they represented a particular cell subset. Furthermore, experimental erasure of this small cell population impaired heart regeneration.

The researches are now interested in pursuing "whether the absence of such a SOX10 cell population in mammals could explain why their heart does not regenerate well" potentially leading to methods to stimulate heart repair in humans.

More information
Marcos Sande-Melón et al, Adult sox10+ Cardiomyocytes Contribute to Myocardial Regeneration in the Zebrafish, Cell Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.09.041
Ines J. Marques et al. Model systems for regeneration: zebrafish, Development (2019). DOI: 10.1242/dev.167692
Andrés Sanz-Morejón et al. Wilms Tumor 1b Expression Defines a Pro-regenerative Macrophage Subtype and Is Required for Organ Regeneration in the Zebrafish, Cell Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.06.091
Héctor Sánchez-Iranzo et al. Transient fibrosis resolves via fibroblast inactivation in the regenerating zebrafish heart, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1716713115

Original Submission

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

White House kicks infosec team to curb in IT office shakeup

An internal White House memo published today by Axios reveals that recent changes to the information operations and security organizations there have left the security team in tumult, with many members headed for the door. And the chief of the White House's computer network defense branch—who wrote the memo after submitting his resignation—warned that the White House was likely headed toward another network compromise and theft of data.

The White House Office of the Chief Information Security Officer was set up after the 2014 breach of an unclassified White House network by Russian intelligence—a breach discovered by a friendly foreign government. But in a July reorganization, the OCISO was dissolved and its duties placed under the White House Office of the Chief Information Officer, led by CIO Ben Pauwels and Director of White House IT Roger L. Stone. Stone was pulled from the ranks of the National Security Council where he was deputy senior director for resilience policy. (Stone is not related to indicted Republican political consultant Roger J. Stone.)

[...] "It is my express opinion that the remaining incumbent OCISO staff is being systematically targeted for removal from the Office of Administration," departing White House network defense branch chief Dimitrios Vastakis wrote in the memo. The security team had seen incentive pay revoked, scope of duties cut, and access to systems and facilities reduced, Vastakis noted. Staffers' "positions with strategic and tactical decision making authorities" had also been revoked. "In addition, habitually being hostile to incumbent OCISO staff has become a staple tactic for the new leadership... it has forced the majority of [senior civil servant] OCISO staff to resign."

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A study carried out by The University of Western Australia has provided compelling evidence that congenital/early cortical blindness – that is when people are blind from birth or shortly after—is protective against schizophrenia.

The unusual discovery has fascinated scientists and may lead to a better understanding of what causes schizophrenia – a question that has baffled scientists for decades.

Schizophrenia is characterised by symptoms such as losing touch with reality, hearing voices and having visual hallucinations. However, despite numerous bodies of research, the exact cause still remains a mystery.

Lead author Professor Vera Morgan from the UWA Neuropsychiatric Epidemiology Research Unit in the Schools of Population and Global Health and Medicine said they also found no one with congenital or early cortical blindness had developed any other psychotic illnesses.

Can being born blind protect people from schizophrenia?

British Psychological Society Digest Report

[Abstract]: Blindness, Psychosis, and the Visual Construction of the World

[Source]: The University of Western Australia

I didn't know about this nor did I make such a connection. Has anyone here observed this connection, that blindness prevents schizophrenia ??

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Milestone' in polio eradication achieved

The second of three forms of the polio virus has been eradicated, experts have announced.

There are three types of the wild polio virus, which, while scientifically different, cause the same symptoms, including paralysis or even death,

The world was declared free of type 2 four years ago - and now the World Health Organization has said type 3 has also been eradicated.

But type 1 is still circulating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

See also:
Two Strains of Polio Are Gone, but the End of the Disease Is Still Far Off

Related:
'What the hell is going on?' Polio Cases are Vanishing in Pakistan, Yet the Virus Won't go Away
Polio Outbreak in Papua New Guinea
The End Of Guinea Worm Was Just Around the Corner. Not Anymore

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels

Learning to drive small cars helps rats feel less stressed, scientists found.

Researchers at the University of Richmond in the US taught a group of 17 rats how to drive little plastic cars, in exchange for bits of cereal.

Study lead Dr Kelly Lambert said the rats felt more relaxed during the task, a finding that could help with the development of non-pharmaceutical treatments for mental illness.

The rats were not required to take a driving test at the end of the study.

Also at CNN, New Scientist, The Verge, and Boing Boing.

Enriched Environment Exposure Accelerates Rodent Driving Skills^[$] (DOI: 10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112309) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Materials scientists who work with nano-sized components have developed ways of working with their vanishingly small materials. But what if you could get your components to assemble themselves into different structures without actually handling them at all?

Verner Håkonsen works with cubes so tiny that nearly five billion of them could fit on a pinhead.

He cooks up the cubes in the NTNU NanoLab, in a weird-looking glass flask with three necks on the top using a mixture of chemicals and special soap.

And when he exposes these invisible cubes to a magnetic field, they perform a magical feat: they assemble themselves into whatever shape he wants.

"It's like building a house, except you don't have to build it," he says. The magnetic force along with other forces cause "the house to build itself—all the building blocks assemble themselves perfectly under the right conditions."

Although researchers have previously been able to cause nanoparticles to assemble themselves in different ways, Håkonsen and his colleagues are the first to show how important magnetism can be with respect to the mechanical properties of certain nanoparticle structures. The researchers called their tiny nanocube creations superstructures or supercrystals because the nanocubes are organized in an ordered pattern, kind of like atoms in a crystal. "Supercrystals are particularly interesting because they show enhanced properties compared with a single nanoparticle or with a bulk material," Håkonsen said.

The big finding is that when magnetic cubes are self-assembled in what the researchers call a supercrystal—in shapes like lines or rods or helices, for example—the cohesive energy between the particles in the supercrystal can increase by as much 45 percent because of the magnetic interactions between the cubes.

"That means the energy holding the whole thing together increases up to 45 percent," he said.

The strength of the supercrystals in combination with their enhanced magnetic properties will be key to developing future uses, which could span everything from applications for the automotive industry to information technology. Håkonsen's research has just been published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Magnetically Enhanced Mechanical Stability and Super‐Size Effects in Self‐Assembled Superstructures of Nanocubes, Advanced Functional Materials (DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201904825)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Single-use plastics might have more inherent value than you think.

Researchers have developed a new method for upcycling abundant, seemingly low-value plastics into high-quality liquid products, such as motor oils, lubricants, detergents and even cosmetics. The discovery also improves on current recycling methods that result in cheap, low-quality plastic products.

The catalytic method serves a one-two punch by removing plastic pollution from the environment and contributing to a circular economy.

[...] "Our team is delighted to have discovered this new technology that will help us get ahead of the mounting issue of plastic waste accumulation," said Northwestern's Kenneth R. Poeppelmeier, who contributed to the research. "Our findings have broad implications for developing a future in which we can continue to benefit from plastic materials, but do so in a way that is sustainable and less harmful to the environment and potentially human health."

[...] "We sought to recoup the high energy that holds those bonds together by catalytically converting the polyethylene molecules into value-added commercial products," Delferro said.

The catalyst consists of platinum nanoparticles—just two nanometers in size—deposited onto a perovskite nanocubes, which are about 50-60 nanometers in size. The team chose perovskite because it is stable under the high temperatures and pressures and an exceptionally good material for energy conversion.

To deposit nanoparticles onto the nanocubes, the team used atomic layer deposition, a technique developed at Argonne that allows precise control of nanoparticles.

Under moderate pressure and temperature, the catalyst cleaved plastic's carbon-carbon bond to produce high-quality liquid hydrocarbons. These liquids could be used in motor oil, lubricants or waxes or further processed to make ingredients for detergents and cosmetics. This contrasts commercially available catalysts, which generated lower quality products with many short hydrocarbons, limiting the products' usefulness.

Journal Reference:
Gokhan Celik, et. al. Upcycling Single-Use Polyethylene into High-Quality Liquid Products. ACS Central Science, 2019, doi:10.1021/acscentsci.9b00722

Original Submission