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Submission + - Apples to Oranges? Death toll of flu vs COVID-19 (scientificamerican.com) 1

Submitted by sleeves
sleeves writes: Scientific American has published an Observation article noting the different methodologies for published death tolls for Flu and COVID-19. An attending physician noted that he should have seen far more flu deaths than had been the case in his experience if the flu death estimates by CDC are accurate. Turns out, he isn't the only one with that perception.

Submission + - Arizona Man Sues after Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder (phoenixnewtimes.com) 1

Submitted by GoatJuggler
GoatJuggler writes: Police in Avondale, Arizona arrested the wrong man based on location data obtained from Google and the fact that a white Honda was spotted at the crime scene. The case quickly fell apart, but he was not released from jail until six days later. The highly publicized arrest cost him his job, his car, and his reputation.

Submission + - New German study suggests coronavirus doesn't survive everywhere for long (businessinsider.com) 3

Submitted by Mr. Dollar Ton
Mr. Dollar Ton writes: Professor Hendrik Streeck is leading a study on the region, which has been dubbed "Germany's Wuhan" because of its large number of coronavirus cases, but the death rate in the district is five times lower than the national average.

Among other interesting findings, Streeck pointed out that though the virus could "live" on various surfaces for up to seven days, he believed there was little chance that someone could become infected via surfaces, contradicting both the Center for Disease Control and National Institute of Health guidelines.

Submission + - SPAM: Supreme Court Agrees to Decide, What is Hacking?

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

The fundamental question in the case is what Congress did when it criminalized unauthorized access to a computer. In particular, what makes an access to a computer unauthorized? Do the terms of service control? Does there need to be some sort of technical restriction on access that is breached?

To put the question in colloquial terms, the question is, what is the crime of hacking?


Link to Original Source

Submission + - Uber Argues 'Fraud' Absolves It From Paying Star Engineer's $179 Million Fine (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Uber argued in a recent court filing that former employee Anthony Levandowski committed fraud, an action that frees the company from any obligation to pay his legal bills, including a judgment ordering the star engineer to pay Google $179 million. Uber’s fraud claim was part of its response to Levandowski’s motion to compel the ride-hailing company into arbitration in the hopes that his former employee will have to shoulder the cost of the $179 million judgment against him. The motion to compel arbitration, and now Uber’s response, is part of Levandowski’s bankruptcy proceedings. It’s the latest chapter in a legal saga that has entangled Uber and Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet.

In this latest court filing, Uber has agreed to arbitration. However, Uber also pushed back against Levandowski’s primary aim to force the company to stand by an indemnity agreement. Uber signed an indemnity agreement in 2016 when it acquired Levandowski’s self-driving truck startup Otto. Under the agreement, Uber said it would indemnify — or compensate — Levandowski against claims brought by his former employer, Google. Uber said it rescinded the indemnification agreement several months prior to the inception of Levandowski’s bankruptcy case “because it was procured by his fraud,” according to the court filing. Uber revoked the indemnification agreement after Levandowski was indicted by a federal grand jury with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets while working at Google, where he was an engineer and one of the founding members of the group that worked on Google’s self-driving car project.

Submission + - 2 Billion Phones Cannot Use Google and Apple Contact-Tracing Tech (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As many as a billion mobile phone owners around the world will be unable to use the smartphone-based system proposed by Apple and Google to track whether they have come into contact with people infected with the coronavirus, industry researchers estimate. The figure includes many poorer and older people—who are also among the most vulnerable to COVID-19—demonstrating a “digital divide” within a system that the two tech firms have designed to reach the largest possible number of people while also protecting individuals’ privacy.

The particular kind of Bluetooth “low energy” chips that are used to detect proximity between devices without running down the phone’s battery are absent from a quarter of smartphones in active use globally today, according to analysts at Counterpoint Research. A further 1.5 billion people still use basic or “feature” phones that do not run iOS or Android at all. “In all, close to 2 billion [mobile users] will not be benefiting from this initiative globally,” said Neil Shah, analyst at Counterpoint. “And most of these users with the incompatible devices hail from the lower-income segment or from the senior segment which actually are more vulnerable to the virus.”

Submission + - A North Dakota Utility Wants To Build World's Largest Carbon Capture Facility (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Milton R. Young Station, close to the town of Center in North Dakota, is as unremarkable as coal-fired power plants come. But if its owner Minnkota Power Cooperative has its way, the plant could soon be famous the world over. The Grand Forks-based electric cooperative has launched Project Tundra, an initiative to build the largest power plant-based carbon capture facility in the world, with construction commencing as early as 2022. If Minnkota Power raises the US $1 billion the project requires, it plans to retrofit the station with technology the cooperative claims will capture more than 90 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from the plant’s larger generator, a 455-megawatt unit. The effect will be the equivalent of taking 600,000 gasoline-fueled cars off the road.

To sequester CO2 from the Young station, Project Tundra will make use of technology similar to that employed at the only two other existing carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities operating at power plants in the world — Petra Nova in Texas and Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Canada. The CO2-removal process begins by passing the flue gas through a scrubber to remove impurities and lower its temperature. The gas then enters an absorber, which contains a liquid-based amine solution that binds to CO2. Heat is applied to release the gas from the amines and the extracted CO2 is then compressed. Project Tundra plans to pump the liquid CO2 into sandstone rocks that lie just over a mile beneath the nearby lignite coal mine, where it will be stored permanently.

Submission + - SPAM: Israel, US law-firms sue China for trillions over coronavirus

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Israeli NGO Shurat HaDin plans to file a class action lawsuit against China in the coming days over its alleged negligence in treating and containing the coronavirus, N12 reported on Sunday.

The Israeli lawsuit, once filed, will join at least four on-going lawsuits submitted to US courts against Chinese authorities over the pandemic, according to Newsweek.
How much compensation would China be forced to pay if and when such lawsuits are ruled upon? According to the Daily Examiner, the figure might be as high as six trillion US Dollars.


Link to Original Source

Submission + - Coronavirus tests were delayed by contamination at CDC lab, report says. (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

A delay by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in quickly making coronavirus test kits available was the result of “a glaring scientific breakdown” at the CDC’s central lab, The Washington Post reported Saturday, citing scientists and federal regulators.

The Post reported that CDC facilities which assembled the testing kits “violated sound manufacturing practices, resulting in contamination of one of the three test components used in the highly sensitive detection process.”

And while the part of the test that was compromised was not critical to detecting the coronavirus, CDC officials took more than a month to remove it from the test kits, according to The Post.

That lag in action aggravated national delays in testing for the virus, and in turn hampered a battle to contain the virus’s spread, the newspaper said.

Sad, but unsurprising. The CDC just isn't very good at its job.

Related: The CDC was Fighting Racism and Obesity Instead of Stopping Epidemics.

You had one job, CDC.

Submission + - Sword-wielding scientists show how ancient fighting techniques spread (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Bronze swords have been found by the thousands in graves, rivers, and bogs all across Europe. But because the alloy is so soft—and easy to mangle compared with later iron weapons—historians have long wondered whether these swords were battlefield tools or mere status symbols. Now, a team of archaeologists has staged modern fights with bronze swords to measure the resulting microscopic dings and dents. Sword-on-sword contact was a “big part” of Bronze Age fighting, they found, done with specific, artful moves that spread from region to region over time.

Submission + - Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA. [...] In a study published earlier this year, Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Alida Bailleul and her colleagues proposed that in that fossil, they had found not only evidence of original proteins and cartilage-creating cells but a chemical signature consistent with DNA.

Recovering genetic material of such antiquity would be a major development. Working on more recently extinct creatures—such as mammoths and giant ground sloths—paleontologists have been able to revise family trees, explore the interrelatedness of species and even gain some insights into biological features such as variations in coloration. DNA from nonavian dinosaurs would add a wealth of new information about the biology of the “terrible lizards.” Such a find would also establish the possibility that genetic material can remain detectable not just for one million years, but for tens of millions. The fossil record would not be bones and footprints alone: it would contain scraps of the genetic record that ties together all life on Earth. Yet first, paleontologists need to confirm that these possible genetic traces are the real thing. Such potential tatters of ancient DNA are not exactly Jurassic Park–quality. At best, their biological makers seem to be degraded remnants of genes that cannot be read—broken-down components rather than intact parts of a sequence. Still, these potential tatters of ancient DNA would be far older (by millions of years) than the next closest trace of degraded genetic material in the fossil record.

Comment Fact Checking is Biased (Score 5, Insightful) 80

by Openstandards.net (#59495224) Attached to: How Fake News Is Still Fooling Facebook's Fact-Checking Systems

I reviewed one of the "fact checking" sites. It is just as biased as the sort of news it claims to check.

  • - It often used only 1 source as the "fact", despite there being dozens or hundreds more with different conclusions.
  • - It does not weigh the preponderance of evidence, but instead uses only one outlier as its "fact" source.
  • - Does not provide a way to counter their claims. No fact checking of the fact checkers.

Realizing that a self-proclaimed fact checking site cannot be more biased, it became clear that NO ONE in power should be doing ANY fact checking. Rather, all fact checking should be on the part of the reader. You want to create tools to help readers obtain information, great. But, don't prevent us from reading things based on some biased "fact checking" that is anything but unbiased.

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