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US Secures World Stock of Key Covid-19 Drug Remdesivir

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

US Secures World Stock of Key Covid-19 Drug Remdesivir:

No other country will be able to buy remdesivir, which can help recovery from Covid-19, for next three months at least

The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world.

Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US.

“They’ve got access to most of the drug supply [of remdesivir], so there’s nothing for Europe,” said Dr Andrew Hill, senior visiting research fellow at Liverpool University.

chromas writes:

London hospital starts virtual ward rounds for medical students

A flock of students stumbling after a consultant on a ward round has long been a familiar sight in hospitals. Perhaps not for much longer though – a university has pioneered the use of augmented reality to allow students to take part from home.

Imperial College has conducted what it said is the world’s first virtual ward round for medical students, which means an entire class of 350 students can watch a consultant examining patients rather than the three or four who have been able to accompany them in person.

The virtual ward round involves the physician wearing Microsoft’s HoloLens glasses, which stream video to the students’ computers. While the doctor talks to the patient, students can hear both of them through the use of two microphones.

Teachers are able to pin virtual pictures to the display, such as X-rays, drug charts or radiographs, or draw lines to highlight something they want to emphasise.

[...] The virtual ward rounds can be recorded, allowing universities to create a library of cases. That means more students will get to see patients with rare conditions and have a better understanding of the symptoms and how the patient acts.

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chromas writes:

YouTube Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Copyright Enforcement, Repeat Infringer Policy * TorrentFreak

For many years, Google-owned YouTube has been wrestling with the vast amounts of copyright-infringing content being uploaded by users to its platform.

The challenge is met by YouTube by taking down content for which copyright holders file a legitimate infringement complaint under the DMCA. It also operates a voluntary system known as Content ID, which allows larger rightsholders to settle disputes by either blocking contentious content automatically at the point of upload or monetizing it to generate revenue.

A class action lawsuit filed Thursday in a California court by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider tears apart YouTube’s efforts. It claims that the video-sharing platform fails on a grand scale to protect “ordinary creators” who are “denied any meaningful opportunity to prevent YouTube’s public display of works that infringe their copyrights — no matter how many times their works have previously been pirated on the platform.”

The 44-page complaint leaves no stone unturned, slamming YouTube as a platform designed from the ground up to draw in users with the lure of a “vast library” of pirated content and incentivizing the posting of even more material. YouTube then reaps the rewards via advertising revenue and exploitation of personal data at the expense of copyright holders who never gave permission for their work to be uploaded.

The lawsuit further criticizes YouTube for not only preventing smaller artists from accessing its Content ID system but denouncing the fingerprinting system itself, describing it as a mechanism used by YouTube to prevent known infringing users from being terminated from the site under the repeat infringer requirements of the DMCA.

The full complaint can be obtained here (pdf)

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chromas writes:

How Infrared Images Could Be Part of Your Daily Life:

A fever is one indicator that someone may be exhibiting coronavirus symptoms, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends temperature screenings in a variety of environments, including schools and businesses.

[...] When the pandemic took hold, I started seeing more and more companies like Amazon using this technology to help identify sick people in their warehouses. Thermal imaging cameras are beginning to appear in Subway restaurants. Carnival Cruise Lines, whose ships became hot spots for the virus’s spread, said all passengers and crew would be screened when it began sailing again.

The rapid adoption of infrared technology had me wondering how helpful it could be. Several systems are being rolled out, including camera-based ones and others that make people walk through thresholds like metal detectors. Could they actually help contain the spread of the virus while we wait for a vaccine?

A Harris Poll conducted in late March, just after the majority of the shelter measures went into place across the United States, found that 84 percent of respondents favored mandatory health screenings to enter public places.

[...] The growing use of the technology has raised privacy and other concerns.

Civil liberties experts have warned about data being collected on employees and used without their permission. Democratic and Republican lawmakers have proposed bills to help protect people’s information and privacy as data like temperature readings is collected, but the legislation has so far stalled in Congress.

Rocket Lab’s 13th Launch Fails to Reach Orbit After Unknown Problem

chromas writes:

‘We Lost The Flight’ - Rocket Lab’s 13th Launch Fails To Reach Orbit After Unknown Problem:

Today, Saturday, July 4 at 9.21 P.M. Eastern Time, the company’s “Pics Or It Didn’t Happen” mission lifted off as planned from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand.

The primary payload on board was CE-SAT-1B, a satellite for Japanase[sic] company Canon Electronics. Also on the mission was the Faraday-1 satellite for U.K. company In-Space Missions, as well as five satellites for the U.S. Earth imaging company Planet.

The goal was to place the satellites into an orbit 500 kilometers above Earth. However, while the launch took place as planned, including separation of the second stage of the rocket, something subsequently went wrong.

[...] Problems emerged about six minutes into the flight, when a live video from the rocket was interrupted. The speed of the rocket then began to fall, along with a drop in altitude, before the mission’s failure was announced.

[...] The exact cause of the failure is not yet known. However, it is the company’s first failure on one of its commercial missions since it began full operations more than three years ago.

After a Second Stage Failure, Rocket Lab Loses Seven Satellites

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

After a second stage failure, Rocket Lab loses seven satellites:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Exotic never before seen particle discovered at CERN:

The Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) project has observed an exotic particle made up of four charm quarks for the first time.

[...] Quarks form together to form composite particles known as hadrons, which include protons and neutrons. This breakthrough new discovery can help scientists now understand the complex ways in which quarks bind themselves together to form these composite.

Quarks typically combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons. For decades, however, theorists have predicted the existence of four-quark and five-quark hadrons, which are sometimes described as tetraquarks and pentaquarks and in recent years experiments including the LHCb have confirmed the existence of several of these exotic hadrons.

[...] "Particles made up of four quarks are already exotic, and the one we have just discovered is the first to be made up of four heavy quarks of the same type, specifically two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks," says the outgoing spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration, Giovanni Passaleva. "Up until now, the LHCb and other experiments had only observed tetraquarks with two heavy quarks at most and none with more than two quarks of the same type."

[...] As with previous tetraquark discoveries, it is not completely clear whether the new particle is a "true tetraquark", that is, a system of four quarks tightly bound together, or a pair of two-quark particles weakly bound in a molecule-like structure. Either way, the new tetraquark will help theorists test models of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong interaction.

Journal Reference:
LHCb collaboration, Aaij, R., Beteta, C. Abellán, et al. Observation of structure in the $J/ψ$-pair mass spectrum, (arXiv: 2006.16957)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The explosive physics of pooping penguins: they can shoot poo over four feet:

Nature is a brutal place, so during brooding, chinstrap and Adélie penguins are reluctant to leave their eggs unguarded in the nest—even to relieve themselves. But one also does not wish to sully the nest with feces. So instead, a brooding penguin will hunker down, point its rear end away from the nest, lift its tail, and let fly a projectile of poo—thereby ensuring both the safety of the eggs and the cleanliness of the nest.

Back in 2003, two intrepid physicists became fascinated by this behavior and were inspired to calculate the answer to a burning question: just how much pressure can those penguins generate to propel their feces away from the edge of their nests? Answer: about three times more pressure than a human could produce. That paper earned them a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize and lasting glory among those obsessed with pooping penguins. Now, a pair of a Japanese scientists has weighed in on the matter, calculating the projectile trajectory of expelled feces and recalculating the rectal pressure. These scientists reported on their findings in a draft paper they posted to the physics arXiv.

[...] In this latest paper, Hiroyuki Tajima of Kochi University and Fumiya Fujisawa of the Katsurahama Aquarium in Kochi, Japan, note that the original 2003 paper did not take the projectile trajectory of the penguin feces into account. Instead, it focused on a horizontal distance. Tajima and Fujisawa argue that the angle of ejection is not always horizontal, especially if the breeding environment is in a higher location—or if the penguin is standing on a rock while defecating, for instance.

Using Newton's equations, they calculated that the maximum flying distance of penguin poo is 1.34 meters, or 4.39 feet. Tajima and Fujisawa also revisited the question of the rectal pressure required to achieve such a trajectory and found it would be a bit higher than the original estimation. They noted, however, that their simplified equations did not account for the hydrodynamics of feces in the air and in the stomach, "which are left for future work."

Journal Reference:
Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow, Jozsef Gal. Pressures produced when penguins pooh, Polar Biology (DOI: 10.1007/s00300-003-0563-3)

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Reddit, Acting Against Hate Speech, Bans `The_Donald' Subreddit

captain normal writes:

Reddit has banned 2000 subreddits, including "The Donald" for hate speech.

Reddit, Acting Against Hate Speech, Bans ‘The_Donald’ Subreddit

"The community or “subreddit,” called “The_Donald,” is home to more than 790,000 users who post memes, viral videos and supportive messages about Mr. Trump. Reddit executives said the group, which has been highly influential in cultivating and stoking Mr. Trump’s online base, had consistently broken its rules by allowing people to target and harass others with hate speech.

“Reddit is a place for community and belonging, not for attacking people,” Steve Huffman, the company’s chief executive, said in a call with reporters. “‘The_Donald’ has been in violation of that.”

Also at:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-bans-hundreds-subreddits-hate-speech-including-trump-community-n1232408
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/hi3oht/update_to_our_content_policy/

Twitch, Reddit Crack Down on Trump-Linked Content as Industry Faces Reckoning

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Twitch, Reddit crack down on Trump-linked content as industry faces reckoning:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Uncovered: 1,000 phrases that incorrectly trigger Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant:

As Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and other voice assistants have become fixtures in millions of homes, privacy advocates have grown concerned that their near-constant listening to nearby conversations could pose more risk than benefit to users. New research suggests the privacy threat may be greater than previously thought.

The findings demonstrate how common it is for dialog in TV shows and other sources to produce false triggers that cause the devices to turn on, sometimes sending nearby sounds to Amazon, Apple, Google, or other manufacturers. In all, researchers uncovered more than 1,000 word sequences—including those from Game of Thrones, Modern Family, House of Cards, and news broadcasts—that incorrectly trigger the devices.

“The devices are intentionally programmed in a somewhat forgiving manner, because they are supposed to be able to understand their humans,” one of the researchers, Dorothea Kolossa, said. “Therefore, they are more likely to start up once too often rather than not at all.”

[...] Examples of words or word sequences that provide false triggers include

• Alexa: “unacceptable,” “election,” and “a letter”
• Google Home: “OK, cool,” and “Okay, who is reading”
• Siri: “a city” and “hey jerry”
• Microsoft Cortana: “Montana”

Original Submission

Anonymous Cow Herd writes:

If you fancy yourself as a systems administrator, perhaps you have had the opportunity to administer multiple machines, simultaneously. Perhaps you've had experience with interactions between multiple operating systems, or with struggles to keep multiple machines synchronized.

Cluster administration is a special discipline. When administering a cluster, it is best to keep Sun Microsystem's motto, "The network is the computer", foremost in mind — a cluster IS a computer; it is a computer that is running a task that involves such complex and demanding processing tasks that the different processes that form this 'machine' run on separate-but-connected computers. Clusters are often distinguished by some sort of interconnection — networked file systems, shared memory and machine-spanning inter-process communications.

Throughout this work one encounters issues related to parallelization, as some tasks can be done in parallel, and some cannot. The entire purpose of a cluster is to enable an otherwise sequential task to be worked on, where possible, in parallel, and it frequently involves additional programming and architectural design to allow this to happen in as close to real time as is possible.

This brings us to robots. A robot is a cluster! When I grasped that, I fell in love with robots and I started looking for jobs involving robotics. The processing requirements involved in movement exceed the computing capacity of a single computer, and for this reason, it is common to have one computer dedicated to moving each appendage, dedicated computers for complex tasks like parsing visual input or controlling 'hands', and often yet another computer acting as the master kinesthetic controller over the entire 'infrastructure', in something approaching real time.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs:

MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms.

The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. "We sincerely apologize," a professor told us.

The training set, built by the university, has been used to teach machine-learning models to automatically identify and list the people and objects depicted in still images. For example, if you show one of these systems a photo of a park, it might tell you about the children, adults, pets, picnic spreads, grass, and trees present in the snap. Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language. The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for GrandFireWizard:

Coronavirus US: People try microwaving library books amid virus fears:

A US library took to Facebook to share their outrage over people's latest attempts to disinfect public property, like library books.

"Noooooooo!!!!!! Oh no no no," Tampa Bay Library Consortium captioned a picture of a book badly burnt after borrowers tried microwaving it to kill germs.

The book was loaned out from Temple Terrace Public Library in Florida, where staff assured everyone that books were disinfected safely before being loaned out again.

"Temple Terrace and all Hillsborough County Library Cooperative libraries quarantine all materials for 72 hours after they are returned. Please do NOT attempt to microwave library materials as the RFID tags, located inside, will catch fire. Stay safe out there," they shared on Facebook.

It comes after news stories in the US that claimed people could sanitise library books by placing them in the microwave.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://uproxx.com/life/diy-magic-mushrooms-uncle-ben/

There's a subreddit for just about everything, but if you're a legit Uncle Ben's fan who is also a serious Redditor (that's a lonely island), you might be disappointed to find that the subreddit r/UncleBens isn't so much a gathering of hardcore pre-cooked rice fans, as it is an online sub-community of DIY psilocybin cultivators who are using Uncle Ben's and other supermarket staples to grow magic mushrooms.

[...] What makes Uncle Bens the perfect vessel for psilocybin, according to the r/UncleBens crew, is that mushroom cultivation "requires a sterile, nutrient-rich environment in which their spores can grow," and since Uncle Ben's rice is pre-cooked, sterilized and vacuum-sealed, it provides the necessary environment for cultivation.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Neural SuperSampling Is a Hardware Agnostic DLSS Alternative by Facebook

A new paper published by Facebook researchers just ahead of SIGGRAPH 2020 introduces neural supersampling, a machine learning-based upsampling approach not too dissimilar from NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling. However, neural supersampling does not require any proprietary hardware or software to run and its results are quite impressive as you can see in the example images, with researchers comparing them to the quality we've come to expect from DLSS.

Video examples on Facebook's blog post.

The researchers use some extremely low-fi upscales to make their point, but you could also imagine scaling from a resolution like 1080p straight to 8K. Upscaling could be combined with eye tracking and foveated rendering to reduce rendering times even further.

Also at UploadVR and VentureBeat.

Journal Reference:
Lei Xiao, Salah Nouri, Matt Chapman, Alexander Fix, Douglas Lanman, Anton Kaplanyan,Neural Supersampling for Real-time Rendering - Facebook Research, (DOI: https://research.fb.com/publications/neural-supersampling-for-real-time-rendering/)

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Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Jupiter Just Sprouted a Brand New Spot:

An amateur astronomer in South Africa has detected a bright new surface feature rising above the cloud tops on Jupiter.

The largest planet in the solar system has a bright new blotch in its southern hemisphere, reports NASA. The cloudy plume, dubbed "Clyde's Spot," appears between Jupiter's iconic Great Red Spot and S2-AWO A7, another big storm to the southeast.

Jupiter's new spot was discovered on the morning of May 31, 2020 by Clyde Foster, director of the Shallow Sky section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa and the astronomer for whom the feature is now named. Foster was imaging Jupiter at the time, spotting the spot with a filter that's sensitive to methane gas. Interestingly, the feature was not seen by astronomers in Australia just a few hours earlier.

[...] Known as a "convective outbreak," Clyde's spot is a plume of cloud extending up above the cloud layers. Such features are easily detectable in methane wavelengths, appearing as bright splotches. According to NASA, convective outbreaks are not uncommon within Jupiter's South Temperate belt, including one that appeared in this latitude band two years ago.

Juno will be making another perijove on July 25, 2020, at which time NASA will get another close-up view of this storm, so we'll get to see how this outbreak has changed over the days and weeks since its initial discovery.

Original Submission