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

Amazon fails to unseat pro-tax city council members in Seattle

Amazon has suffered a setback in its own backyard as several candidates for Seattle's City Council won election despite a $1.5 million campaign by business groups to defeat them. That included Kshama Sawant, an incumbent and socialist who has been a thorn in Amazon's side in recent years. The vote was held last Tuesday, but the results only became clear in recent days.

The result is significant for Amazon because last year Seattle's city council passed a $275 per employee tax on large employers. Amazon, Starbucks, and other large Seattle businesses blasted the law and funded a ballot measure to overturn it. Facing the threat of having their law overturned by voters, the city council itself repealed the measure a month after it passed.

If business groups had defeated pro-tax candidates in last week's election, it would have made the city council very reluctant to consider taxing employers again. Instead, the election results have emboldened supporters of an "Amazon tax."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The view among the national security officials was unanimous: Military aid to Ukraine should not be stopped. But the White House's acting chief of staff thought otherwise.

That was the testimony of Laura Cooper, a Defense Department official, whose deposition was released Monday in the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

"My sense is that all of the senior leaders of the US national security departments and agencies were all unified in their - in their view that this assistance was essential," she said. "And they were trying to find ways to engage the president on this."

Cooper's testimony was among several hundred pages of transcripts released Monday, along with those of State Department officials Catherine Croft and Christopher Anderson.

Cooper told investigators that, in a series of July meetings at the White House, she came to understand that Trump's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, was holding up the military aid for the US ally.

[...] When she and others tried to get an explanation, they found none.

[...] She said it was "unusual" to have congressional funds suddenly halted that way, and aides raised concerns about the legality of it. The Pentagon was "concerned" about the hold-up of funds and "any signal that we would send to Ukraine about a wavering in our commitment", she said.

Cooper told investigators that she was visited in August by Kurt Volker, the US special envoy to Ukraine, who explained there was a "statement" that the Ukraine government could make to get the security money flowing.

[...] "Somehow, an effort that he was engaged in to see if there was a statement that the government of Ukraine would make," said Cooper, an assistant defence secretary, "that would somehow disavow any interference in US elections and would commit to the prosecution of any individuals involved in election interference."

For a handy reference to the documents that have been released concerning this, npr has posted Trump Impeachment Inquiry: A Guide To Key People, Facts And Documents:

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

Google has access to detailed health records on tens of millions of Americans

Google quietly partnered last year with Ascension—the country's second-largest health system—and has since gained access to detailed medical records on tens of millions of Americans, according to a November 11 report by The Wall Street Journal.

The endeavor, code-named "Project Nightingale," has enabled at least 150 Google employees to see patient health information, which includes diagnoses, laboratory test results, hospitalization records, and other data, according to internal documents and the newspaper's sources. In all, the data amounts to complete medical records, WSJ notes, and contains patient names and birth dates.

The move is the latest by Google to get a grip on the sprawling health industry. At the start of the month, Google announced a deal to buy Fitbit, prompting concerns over what it will do with all the sensitive health data amassed from the popular wearables. Today's news will likely spur more concern over health privacy issues.

Neither Google nor Ascension has notified patients or doctors about the data sharing. Ascension—a Catholic, non-profit health system—includes 34,000 providers who see patients at more than 2,600 hospitals, doctor offices, and other facilities across 21 states and the District of Columbia.

[...] Both Google and Ascension said that the project is compliant with federal health information privacy protections and is "underpinned by a robust data security and protection effort."

Health privacy experts told WSJ that the project appears to be legal under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). As the newspaper notes, the law "generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without telling patients, as long as the information is used 'only to help the covered entity carry out its health care functions.'"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a paper published by The Journal of Analytical Toxicology, a team of experts from the University of Surrey detail how they have built on their world-leading fingerprint drug testing technology, based on high resolution mass spectrometry, which is now able to detect heroin, 6-monoacetylmorphine (6-AM) and other analytes associated with the class A drug.

The team took fingerprints from people seeking treatment at drug rehabilitation clinics who had testified to taking heroin or cocaine during the previous 24 hours. A fingerprint was collected from each finger of the right hand, and the participants were then asked to wash their hands thoroughly with soap and water and then wear nitrile gloves for a period of time before giving another set of fingerprints. This same process was used to collect samples from 50 drug non-users.

The researchers found that the technology was able to identify traces of heroin and 6-AM on drug non-users in every scenario the researchers devised -- whether someone directly touched the drug, handled it and then thoroughly washed their hands, or had come into contact with heroin via shaking someone else's hand.

Surrey's system cross-referenced the information from the drug non-users with the volunteers who were being treated for drug dependency and found that compounds such as morphine, noscapine and acetylcodeine -- alongside heroin and 6-AM -- are essential to distinguishing those who have used the class A drug from those who have not. These analytes were only present in fingerprints from drug users.

Journal Reference:
Catia Costa, Mahado Ismail, Derek Stevenson, Brian Gibson, Roger Webb, Melanie Bailey. Distinguishing between Contact and Administration of Heroin from a Single Fingerprint using High Resolution Mass Spectrometry. Journal of Analytical Toxicology, 2019; DOI: 10.1093/jat/bkz088

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Ransomware Attack Downs Hosting Service SmarterASP.NET

SmarterASP.NET, a popular web hosting provider with more than 440,480 customers, has been hit with a ransomware attack that took down its customers’ websites that were hosted by the company. The company on Monday said it is in the process of recovering impacted data.

SmarterASP.NET offers shared web hosting services – which allow many websites to reside on one web server connected to the internet – for customers. Many SmarterASP.NET customers specifically are looking to host ASP.NET sites. ASP.NET is an open source web framework, created by Microsoft, for building web apps and services with .NET.

According to reports, the ransomware attack hit and encrypted customers’ web hosting accounts – which give customers access to servers where they can store files and data required to run their websites – thus crippling customer websites. SmarterASP.NET’s website was also initially downed by the attack, but has since been recovered.

“Your hosting account was under attack and hackers have encrypted all your data,” according to a Monday notice on SmartASP’s website. “We are now working with security experts to try to decrypt your data and also to make sure this would never happen again.  Please stay tune for more info.”

While it’s unclear when the ransomware attack first hit, a rash of Tweets, starting Nov. 9, show customers angered that they were not notified of the attack via email after their services stopped.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Hitting the Books: Did the advent of the first desktop computer lead to murder?

Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer
by Meryle Secrest

The world's first desktop computer didn't take shape in a Menlo Park garage or the bowels of a corporate production facility. It was created in a workshop in Northwest Italy owned and operated by the Olivetti family. Already renowned for their mechanical typewriters, the Olivetti pioneered electronic calculation a decade before Apple or IBM, which (as you'll read below) debuted at the New York World's Fair in 1964. The first of its kind, the P101, became an instant smash hit -- everyone from NASA to the US military was clamoring for these highly sought after "super-calculators."

But was the Olivetti family's fortune actually a curse? Shortly after the P101's debut, Adriano Olivetti, the head of the family suffered a mysterious and fatal heart attack at the age of 58, just 18 months before the company's talented engineer, Mario Tchou, died in an equally suspicious car accident. In The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti, author Meryle Secrest reveals the incredible behind-the-scenes story of the first desktop computer.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Why more than 168,000 Valentine's day text messages arrived in November

Did you get a Valentine's Day text message on November 7? If so, you can blame a company called Syniverse, which provides text-messaging services to major mobile carriers.

Syniverse helps deliver text messages via its intercarrier messaging service and boasts that it is "Connected to more than 300 operators" and processes 600 billion messages per month.

Syniverse says it delivers 99.8% of messages within one second. But a server failure caused many messages—exactly 168,149, according to The Washington Post—to be delivered nearly nine months late. (Update: Syniverse later acknowledged that the actual number of late messages was higher, but isn't saying exactly how many there were. See the update later in this article for more.)

"The texts appeared to be sent or received from cellphones with different operating systems and a wide range of carriers, including Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon," the Post noted yesterday.

The incident highlights how mobile carriers aren't the only companies handling your text messages. As the Post story says:

Jon Callas, a senior technology fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union, said text messaging technology is "an incredible mess of software," in which multiple intermediary parties stand between users and carriers. That structure has the potential to create a number of privacy and security issues when a third-party vendor encounters glitches or has its data compromised.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe

Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.

18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.

CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.

38. Employers care about which courses they took.

It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.

90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.

This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.

The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.

Original Submission

rigrig writes:

Hyundai is working on developing the world's first Road Noise Active Noise Control system (RANC)

RANC [...] is able to analyze various types of noise in real-time and produce inverted soundwaves – for example, it can counteract the sounds created between tires and wheels or the rumble sounds coming from the road.

According to Hyundai, RANC can reduce in-cabin noise by 3 db.

This technology was developed with future vehicles in mind. As internal combustion models get phased out, vehicle noise will primarily come from three sources: powertrain, road and wind – but since electric and fuel cell vehicles make almost no powertrain noise, quieting road and wind noise will become imperative.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

On 4 November 2019, Techcrunch published an interview with Thomas Philippon, author of the book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, where he discusses the diminution of competition in many US market sectors.

From the Techcrunch article:

Economist Thomas Philippon's new book, "The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets," went on sale this past week, highlighting the United States' failure to block the country's largest companies from inhibiting fair competition.

"The broad picture is that competition is good, but surprisingly fragile," he said. "In today's environment, the U.S. is moving from a place where it was at the forefront of having free markets that worked pretty well for most people to being a laggard in many industries."

Philippon's premise isn't exactly breaking news, but the interview and his book give some good background as to how we got where we are, and how other nations are addressing these issues more (in some cases, much more) effectively.

The deregulation of major U.S. industries like telecom and energy in the 1970s and 80s sparked competition that lowered consumer prices and drove product innovation between competitors. Europe, on the other hand, lagged behind with more expensive internet, phone plans, airline tickets, and more until around 2000 when a major reversal of this trend began. Strikingly, when the EU strengthened deregulation and antitrust efforts to open its markets to more competition, it was the U.S. that reversed course.

[...] Based on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data, the U.S. now has more regulations for opening a new business than every EU country except Greece and Poland — a complete reversal since 1998, when only the UK had fewer rules than the U.S. Per capita GDP growth in the EU outpaced that of the U.S. over 1999-2017. On a purchasing power parity basis, Americans have experienced a 7% increase in prices (relative to EU residents) for the same goods, due specifically to increased profit margins of companies with reduced competition.

The reason for this divergence? According to Philippon, corporate incumbents in the U.S. gained outsized political influence and have used it to a) smother potential antitrust reviews and b) implement regulations that inhibit startups from competing against them. As a result, the U.S. regulatory system prioritizes the interests of incumbents at the expense of free market competition, he says.

What say you, Soylentils? Is competition truly dead in many sectors of the economy, or are there ways to bring it back and keep it?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The more abnormal the microbiome in NICU infants, the more likely they are to experience stunted growth even at 4 years of age. While the growth stunting of premature infants has been well known, the role of the microbiome has not been investigated. The effects of the gut microbiome on this growth faltering were just revealed at the World of Microbiome Conference in Milan, Italy, culminating a five-year, $2.7 million study funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research.

The team of researchers led by the University of South Florida (USF) studied 78 infants born weighing less than three pounds. Lead author Maureen Groer, PhD, RN, professor of nursing and internal medicine at USF, tested their stool samples weekly for their first six weeks in the NICU. She found they all developed an extremely abnormal microbiome, known as dysbiosis, which could affect early and later health as the microbiome controls digestion, the immune system and plays a significant role in faltering length. Dysbiosis was associated with the growth faltering that many of these infants experience.

Most premature babies stay in the NICU for several months and are born with associated illnesses and conditions. While in the hospital, they undergo stressful invasive procedures, receive multiple antibiotics and interact less with their mothers. Their feeding is highly regulated but often consume more formula than breast milk, which transfers beneficial gut bacteria from mother to infant.

"These infants have come into this world having already experienced major stress in the womb," said Groer. "While they may have survived a difficult pregnancy, they are threatened by what the degree of immaturity and many necessary interventions that are done in the NICU, which play roles in the observed dysbiosis."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Post-apocalyptic fossils show rise of mammals after dinosaur demise

A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species including the dinosaurs.

The fossils, described by scientists on Thursday, date from the first million years after the calamity and show that the surviving terrestrial mammalian and plant lineages rebounded with aplomb. Mammals, after 150 million years of subservience, attained dominance. Plant life diversified impressively.

With dinosaurs no longer eating them, mammals made quick evolutionary strides, assuming new forms and lifestyles and taking over ecological niches vacated by extinct competitors. Within 700,000 years of the mass extinction, their body mass had become 100 times bigger than the mammals living immediately after the mass extinction.

“Were it not for the asteroid, humans would never have evolved,” said Ian Miller, curator of paleobotany and director of earth and space sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. “One message I would like people to take from this is that their earliest ancestors - and by ancestors we’re talking fuzzy little squirrel-like critters - had their origins in the wake of the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

The thousands of well-preserved animal and plant fossils, unearthed just east of Colorado Springs, illuminate a time interval that had been shrouded in mystery.

“Essentially, we were able to tease out details of the emergence of the modern world - the age of mammals - from the ashes of the age of the dinosaurs,” Miller said.

Sixteen mammal species were discovered, with skulls and other bones fossilized after being buried in rivers and floodplains. Until now, only tiny mammal fossil fragments from that time had been discovered.

“For the first time, we were able link together time, fossil plants, fossil animals and temperature in one of the most critical intervals of Earth’s history,” said Tyler Lyson, the museum’s curator of vertebrate paleontology and lead author of the research published in the journal Science.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Manure, trash and wastewater: U.S. utilities get dirty in climate fight

Joey Airoso has always been proud of his cows, whose milk goes into the butter sold by national dairy company Land O’Lakes. Now he has something new to brag about: the vast amounts of gas produced by his 2,900-head herd is powering truck fleets, homes and factories across the state of California.

“It’s pretty incredible if you think about it,” Airoso said during a recent tour of his 1,500-acre (607-hectare) farm, as a stream of watered-down manure flowed from cow sheds into a nearby pit. There the slurry releases methane that is captured and eventually piped into fueling stations and buildings.

Airoso is tapping into a growing market among U.S. utilities for so-called renewable natural gas, or biomethane, that is being driven by the fight against climate change.

For farmers, it is a way to get ahead of a wave of greenhouse gas regulation and make a bit of cash at the same time. And for utilities that buy or transport the gas, it is a way to respond to the increasing demands of customers and lawmakers to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.

“It is not something very many people are aware of yet, but it makes sense once it’s explained,” said Emily O’Connell, director of energy markets policy at the American Gas Association, the trade group for gas utilities.

Renewable natural gas can come from manure, landfills or wastewater and is interchangeable with gas drilled out of the ground. It cuts greenhouse gas emissions by ensuring significant volumes of methane, that would have been produced anyway, never reach the atmosphere. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide when it escapes into the air unburned.

Nationwide, more than a dozen utilities have started developing renewable natural gas production through partnerships with farmers, wastewater treatment plants and landfill operators, while nine have proposed price premiums for customers who choose it as a fuel, according to the American Gas Association. Renewable natural gas is currently between four and seven times more expensive to produce than fossil gas, a gap that its proponents hope will narrow as the fuel becomes more widely used.

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/light-based-tractor-beam-precisely-assembles-nanoscale-structures/

Modern construction is a precision endeavor. Builders must use components manufactured to meet specific standards — such as beams of a desired composition or rivets of a specific size. The building industry relies on manufacturers to create these components reliably and reproducibly in order to construct secure bridges and sound skyscrapers.

Now imagine construction at a smaller scale — less than 1/100th the thickness of a piece of paper. This is the nanoscale. It is the scale at which scientists are working to develop potentially groundbreaking technologies in fields like quantum computing. It is also a scale where traditional fabrication methods simply will not work. Our standard tools, even miniaturized, are too bulky and too corrosive to reproducibly manufacture components at the nanoscale.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology — known as optical traps or optical tweezers — to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.

As the team reports in a paper published October 30, 2019, in the journal Nature Communications, the optical tweezers act as a light-based "tractor beam" that can assemble nanoscale semiconductor materials precisely into larger structures. Unlike the tractor beams of science fiction, which grab spaceships, the team employs the optical tweezers to trap materials that are nearly one billion times shorter than a meter.

Reference: "Optically oriented attachment of nanoscale metal-semiconductor heterostructures in organic solvents via photonic nanosoldering" by Matthew J. Crane, Elena P. Pandres, E. James Davis, Vincent C. Holmberg and Peter J. Pauzauskie, 30 October 2019, Nature Communications.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12827-w

Original Submission

takyon writes:

USPTO Questions if Artificial Intelligence Can Create or Infringe Copyrighted Works

The USPTO is part of the US Department of Commerce and deals with various intellectual property rights issues. It previously raised questions on how AI technology impacts patent law and is now expanding this to copyright matters.

The consultation starts off by asking whether anything created by an AI, without human involvement, can be copyrighted. This can refer to any type of content, including music, images, and texts.

"Should a work produced by an AI algorithm or process, without the involvement of a natural person contributing expression to the resulting work, qualify as a work of authorship protectable under U.S. copyright law? Why or why not?" the Office asks.

The technology and code that makes any AI work obviously relies on human interaction, but USPTO's question is destined to raise a lively debate. Since it's expected that more and more creations will rely heavily on AI in the future, the US Government requests guidance on these issues.

In a follow-up question, the Office zooms in further still by asking what kind of human involvement is required to make something copyrightable. Yet another question deals with possible copyright infringements by an AI. Or in other words, can an AI pirate?

The comment period closes on Dec. 16.

See also: Academy of European Law Conference Report: "Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for Intellectual Property Law"

Original Submission