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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

I remember first learning as a student that some infinities are bigger than others. For some sets of numbers, it was easy to see how. The set of integers is infinite, and the set of real numbers is infinite, and it seemed immediately clear that there are fewer integers than reals. Demonstrations and proofs of the fact were cool, but I already knew what they showed me.

Other relationships between infinities were not so easy to grok. Consider: There are an infinite numbers of points on a sheet of paper. There are an infinite numbers of points on a wall. These infinities are equal to one another. But how? Mathematician Yuri Manin demonstrates how:

I explained this to my grandson, that there are as many points in a sheet of paper as there are on the wall of the room. "Take the sheet of paper, and hold it so that it blocks your view of the wall completely. The paper hides the wall from your sight. Now if a beam of light comes out of every point on the wall and lands in your eye, it must pass through the sheet of paper. Each point on the wall corresponds to a point on the sheet of paper, so there must be the same number of each."

I remember reading that explanation in school and feeling both amazed and enlightened. What sorcery is this? So simple, so beautiful. Informal proofs of this sort made me want to learn more mathematics.

Manin told the story quoted above in an interview a decade or so ago with Mikhail Gelfand, We Do Not Choose Mathematics as Our Profession, It Chooses Us. It was a good read throughout and reminded me again how I came to enjoy math.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Facebook Loses Only Fact-Checking Partner in the Netherlands Over Lies in Political Ads

Facebook has lost its only fact-checking partner in the Netherlands, Dutch digital newspaper NU.nl, over its policy of allowing politicians to openly lie in ads on the platform, according to an article on NPO 3.

NU.nl's decision to bail comes amid widespread blowback over the Facebook policy. Critics, including some of its own employees, have argued it incentivises online disinformation campaigns at an unprecedented level and may have more to do with building influence among politicians. (In the U.S., Facebook is struggling to placate conservative critics who think the company is biased towards liberals, while Donald Trump's re-election campaign has reacted angrily to proposed changes to ad policies it believes could limit its reach on Facebook.) Conversely, Facebook insists that it simply believes that it's not an "appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician's speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny."

According to NPO 3, NU.nl was the only third party partner working with Facebook's beleaguered fact-checking program in the Netherlands. NU.nl said the latest spat came after it ruled that an ad by Dutch politician Esther de Lange stating that 10 percent of Romanian farmland was owned by non-Europeans was unsubstantiated; Facebook then intervened, saying that politicians were off-limits. The Verge noted that Facebook's other fact-checker in the region, Leiden University, stopped participating in the program in 2018.

"What is the point of fighting fake news if you are not allowed to tackle politicians?" NU.nl editor-in-chief Gert-Jaap Hoekman wrote in NPO 3. "Let one thing be clear: we stand behind the content of our fact checks."

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Two members of the public have died after a stabbing attack at London Bridge, in which police also shot dead the suspect.

The Met Police has declared the attack a terrorist incident.

The suspect, who died at the scene, was believed to have been wearing a hoax explosive device, police said.

Videos on social media appear to show passers-by holding down a man. An officer arrives, seems to indicate to the group to move, and fires a shot.

A Whitehall source confirmed two members of the public died to the BBC but gave no further information.

Details are still emerging and Neil Basu, the head of UK counter-terrorism policing, said the force was keeping an open mind over the motive.

He said officers were called to a stabbing at a premises near the bridge just before 14:00.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new technique in chemistry could pave the way for producing uniform nanoparticles for use in drug delivery systems.

Scientists have been investigating how to make better use of nanoparticles in medicine for several decades. Significantly smaller than an average cell, nanoparticles are more similar in size to proteins. This makes them good at interacting with biomolecules and transporting drug molecules attached to their surface across cell membranes.

To date, however, only a handful of nanoparticle-based drugs have succeeded in reaching the clinic. This is because of the challenges in controlling the size and shape of nanoparticles—and understanding fully how these variables affect the way the particles behave in the body.

In a new study, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Bath have demonstrated a technique that will allow chemists to more closely control the size and shape of nanoparticles.

Dr. Tom Wilks, in the University of Birmingham's School of Chemistry, is one of the lead authors of the study. He explains: "If you change the shape of a nanoparticle from, for example, a spherical to a cylindrical shape, others have shown that this can have a dramatic effect on how it interacts with cells in the body, and how it is distributed through the body. By being able to control the size and shape, we can start to design and test nanoparticles that are exactly suited to an intended function."

Currently, to produce differently shaped nanoparticles for drug delivery scientists have to develop a bespoke chemical synthesis for each, which can be a laborious, time-consuming and expensive process.

Journal information: Anisotropic polymer nanoparticles with controlled dimensions from the morphological transformation of isotropic seeds, Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13263-6)

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyGuest61688

The herd donned VR systems adapted for the "structural features of cow heads" and were shown a "unique summer field simulation program".

Moscow's Ministry of Agriculture and Food cited research which they say has shown a link between a cow's emotional experience and its milk yield.

Initial tests reportedly boosted "the overall emotional mood of the herd".

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50571010

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard says Mexico would not tolerate any move that violates the country's sovereignty.

US President Donald Trump has announced that the United States wants to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups for their role in trafficking narcotics and people, prompting a speedy request for talks by Mexico.

"They will be designated ... I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know, designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we are well into that process," Trump said in an interview  with former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly that aired on Tuesday.

Soon afterwards, Mexico's Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying it would quickly seek a high-level meeting with US State Department officials to address the legal designation, as well as the flow of arms and money from the US to organised crime in Mexico.

"The foreign minister will establish contact with his counterpart, Michael R. Pompeo, in order to discuss this very important issue for the bilateral agenda," the ministry said.

Once a particular group is designated as a terrorist organisation, it is illegal under US law for people in the United States to knowingly offer support.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Producing glass objects using 3-D printing is not easy. Only a few groups of researchers around the world have attempted to produce glass using additive methods. Some have made objects by printing molten glass, but the disadvantage is that this requires extremely high temperatures and heat-resistant equipment. Others have used powdered ceramic particles that can be printed at room temperature and then sintered later to create glass; however, objects produced in this way are not very complex.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have now used a new technique to produce complex glass objects with 3-D printing. The method is based on stereolithography, one of the first 3-D printing techniques developed during the 1980s. David Moore, Lorenzo Barbera, and Kunal Masania in the Complex Materials group led by ETH processor André Studart have developed a special resin that contains a plastic, and organic molecules to which glass precursors are bonded. The researchers reported their results in the latest issue of the journal Natural Materials.

[...] These 3-D-printed glass objects are still no bigger than a die. Large glass objects, such as bottles, drinking glasses or window panes, cannot be produced in this way—which was not actually the goal of the project, says Masania.

The aim was rather to prove the feasibility of producing glass objects of complex geometry using a 3-D printing process. However, the new technology is not just a gimmick. The researchers applied for a patent and are currently negotiating with a major Swiss glassware dealer who wants to use the technology in his company.

More information: David G. Moore et al. Three-dimensional printing of multicomponent glasses using phase-separating resins, Nature Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0525-y

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Watching a sport can be a bit odd if you aren’t familiar with it. Most Americans, for example, would think a cricket match looked funny because they don’t know the rules. If you were not familiar with baseball, you might wonder why one of the coaches was waving his hands around, touching his nose, his ears, and his hat seemingly at random. Those in the know however understand that this is a secret signal to the player. The coach might be telling the player to steal a base or bunt. The other team tries to decode the signals, but if you don’t know the code that is notoriously difficult. Unless you have the machine learning phone app you can see in the video below.

[...] The code uses SDEC (Sequence-Domain Encompassed Correlations) to look for patterns in an ASCII string. We couldn’t help but think this would probably be applicable to a lot of other things where you were looking for a sequence of things.

The video has a pretty good Sunday supplement explanation of machine learning. It includes some details like hidden layers without getting bogged down too much in math or actual coding. If you haven’t dug into machine learning yet, this won’t make you an expert, but it will give you some orientation.

If you want a more detailed explanation of how machine learning works, try this one. Even the Arduino can get in on the act.

The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlRbfSavbI

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The UK's data watchdog has confirmed it failed to collect up to £7m worth of fines dished out in the past four years.

Since 2015, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued 152 penalties totalling £16.6m, of which 47 remain unpaid, according to Freedom of Information responses issued to SMS API company The SMS Works.

The claims management industry was the worst, receiving a total of £3.2m in fines since 2015 mainly due to nuisance calls. However, just £490,000 has so far been collected.

The largest outstanding amount is an unpaid £400,000 fine to Keurboom Communications, a company behind 99.5 million nuisance calls in 2017.

Financial punishment for data breaches have had the greatest success rate, with 85 per cent accounted for.

[...] "Some nuisance call directors liquidate their firms to avoid paying fines from the ICO. In December 2018, the law changed to make directors themselves responsible for nuisance marketing. This should have a real deterrent effect on those who deliberately set out to disrupt people with troublesome calls, texts and emails."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) have developed a new three-valued memory device inspired by solid lithium-ion batteries. The proposed device, which has an extremely low energy consumption, may be key for the development of more energy-efficient and faster random-access memory (RAM) components, which are ubiquitous in modern computers.

[...] A research team from Tokyo Tech led by Prof. Taro Hitosugi and student Yuki Watanabe recently reached a new milestone in this area. These researchers had previously developed a novel memory device inspired by the design of solid lithium-ion batteries. It consisted of a stack of three solid layers made of lithium, lithium phosphate and gold. This stack is essentially a miniature low-capacity battery that functions as a memory cell; it can be quickly switched between charged and discharged states that represent the two possible values of a bit. However, gold combines with lithium to form a thick alloy layer, which increases the amount of energy required to switch from one state to the other.

In their latest study, the researchers created a similar three-layer memory cell using nickel instead of gold. They expected better results using nickel because it does not easily form alloys with lithium, which would lead to lower energy consumption when switching. The memory device they produced was much better than the previous one; it could actually hold three voltage states instead of two, meaning that it is a three-valued memory device. "This system can be viewed as an extremely low-capacity thin-film lithium battery with three charged states," explains Prof. Hitosugi. This is a very interesting feature with potential advantages for three-valued memory implementations, which may be more area efficient.

More information: Yuki Watanabe et al, Low-Energy-Consumption Three-Valued Memory Device Inspired by Solid-State Batteries, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.9b15366

Original Submission

KritonK writes:

Machines' ability to learn by processing data gleaned from sensors underlies automated vehicles, medical devices and a host of other emerging technologies. But that learning ability leaves systems vulnerable to hackers in unexpected ways, researchers at Princeton University have found.

In a series of recent papers, a research team has explored how adversarial tactics applied to artificial intelligence (AI) could, for instance, trick a traffic-efficiency system into causing gridlock or manipulate a health-related AI application to reveal patients' private medical history. As an example of one such attack, the team altered a driving robot's perception of a road sign from a speed limit to a "Stop" sign, which could cause the vehicle to dangerously slam the brakes at highway speeds; in other examples, they altered Stop signs to be perceived as a variety of other traffic instructions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

The Dangers of Cell Phone Radiation. The Right to Know. Don't Put in Your Shirt Pocket - Global Research

Of relevance to the ongoing debate on the health impacts of cell phones. First published on July 10, 2019

A landmark Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the City of Berkeley's cell phone right to know ordinance rejecting industries argument that the ordinance violates the first amendment.  The Berkeley ordinance requires retailers to inform consumers that cell phones emit radiation and that "if you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation." In upholding this decision, the panel concluded that the public health issues at hand were "substantial" and that the "text of the Berkeley notice was literally true," and "uncontroversial."

Further, the panel determined that the Berkeley ordinance did not constitute preemption.

"Far from conflicting with federal law and policy, the Berkeley ordinance complemented and enforced it."

The panel held that Berkeley's required disclosure simply alerted consumers to the safety disclosures that the Federal Communications Commission required, and directed consumers to federally compelled instructions in their user manuals providing specific information about how to avoid excessive exposure.

Industry is expected to appeal for a full court en banc review, but this reviewing "panel concluded that CTIA had little likelihood of success based on conflict preemption."

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Apple has faced criticism from lawmakers for several reasons recently, including its presence in China and its repair programs. Now, The Washington Post reports that Apple is being questioned for using its focus on user privacy as a "guise for anti-competitive behavior."

The concern comes from Congressman David N. Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island who serves as chairman of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. Cicilline explained that he's concerned about "the use of privacy as a shield for anticompetitive behavior."

The lawmaker went on to explain that a "strong privacy law" in the United States would mean that companies like Apple would no longer have to regulate privacy themselves:

"I'm increasingly concerned about the use of privacy as a shield for anti-competitive conduct," said Rep. David N. Cicilline (R.I.), who serves as chairman of the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee. "There is a growing risk that without a strong privacy law in the United States, platforms will exploit their role as de facto private regulators by placing a thumb on the scale in their own favor."

Cicilline's concern was prompted by the changes Apple made to location services in iOS 13. Essentially, Apple has cracked down on the access that third-party applications have to a user's location, and made more information about to users about when an app is using their location. Lawmakers are now concerned that Apple itself has access to additional location data that is not available to competitors.

Source: https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/26/apple-privacy-anti-trust-concern/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/raccoon-was-once-thanksgiving-feast-fit-president-180973665/

Turkey, ham, and even a bit of venison or elk would pass muster on most modern Thanksgiving tables. But a century ago, many diners would have been just as happy to see some raccoon sitting next to the gravy boat.

Americans' appetite for raccoon and small game began to diminish as meat produced in factory farms became cheaper and more widely available. As Matthew L. Miller writes for the Nature Conservancy, perceptions of the charismatic critter shifted over the decades, with raccoons gaining a reputation as mischievous nighttime pests (and rabies carriers) rather than delectable delicacies.

Still, raccoon meat's culinary legacy remains apparent in many areas of the country. The animals are sold in some markets, including by vendors in the Soulard Market in St. Louis, and directly to the public by hunters and trappers. For the past 93 years, the American Legion in Delafield, Wisconsin, has hosted a "Coon Feed" in January; the event feeds guests about 350 plates of raccoon meat. Gillett, Arkansas, has hosted a "Coon Supper" for 76 years.

[...] The exact number of raccoons set to appear on Thanksgiving tables this year is difficult to pinpoint, but at least one notable celebrity—Anthony Mackie, an actor who portrays Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—has gone on record as a fan of the practice. As he tells "Entertainment Tonight," raccoon is "honestly the best meat you'll ever have."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Company Stock Prices Fall When Women Are Added To Boards Of Directors

Turns out that many companies who seek to embrace equality by any means could actually be doing their shareholders a disservice. But hey, we thought equality of outcome was a guaranteed fast track to utopia! What happened?

In fact, many companies experience stock price declines when women are added to the board of directors, Bloomberg points out.

An analysis of 14 years of market returns across almost 1,900 companies recently revealed that when companies appoint female directors, they experienced two years of stock declines. Companies saw their stock fall by an average of 2.3% just from adding one additional woman to their board.

Kaisa Snellman, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD business school and a co-author of the study said: "Shareholders penalize these companies, despite the fact that increased gender diversity doesn't have a material effect on a company's return on assets. Nothing happens to the actual value of the companies. It's just the perceptions that change."