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Android

Submission + - Facial Recognition To Be Used In San Francisco Bars (techfleece.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "Bars in San Francisco are going to start to use Facial Recognition software that will stream in real-time the male to female ratios of patrons. The app is currently servicing Chicago, Austin, Bloomington, Gainesville, and Madison with SF going live last Friday.

The software is made by an Austin, Texas based night-life startup called SceneTap and will give users of the free app, the ability to see what the the current ambience of the bar/club is like as well as the average age of the clients."
Games

Submission + - Battle Chess Kickstarter: Bringin' the Queen back (playerattack.com)

Submitted by dotarray
dotarray writes: Battle Chess. Even the name evokes a certain imagery, a certain feel, full of knights and bishops and pawns beating the living daylights out of each other. And if you played the original 1988 smash hit game for PC, you'll also have the mental image of two queens engaging in a slap-fight, mid-board.
If you didn't play the original game, you may be about to receive a second chance, with Subdued Software announcing plans to bring the game back — and how else, but via Kickstarter.
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook's Worst Idea Yet: Paid Post Promotion

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook this week started testing a system that lets users pay to promote their posts. Out of all the various different features the social networking giant has trialed on its website, this idea is by far the worst one yet. It sounds like an April Fools’ joke, but it isn’t. 'We're constantly testing new features across the site,' a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. 'This particular test is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of sharing with their friends.'
Earth

Submission + - High School Students Take Global Warming to Court

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Katherine Ellison reports in the Atlantic that a group of high school students is suing the federal government in US District Court claiming the risks of climate change — dangerous storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, and food-supply disruptions — will threaten their generation absent a major turnabout in global energy policy. "I think a lot of young people realize that this is an urgent time, and that we're not going to solve this problem just by riding our bikes more," says 18-year-old Alec Loorz, one of the plaintiffs represented, pro bono, by the Burlingame, California, law firm of former US Republican congressman Paul "Pete" McCloskey. While skeptics may view the case as little more than a publicity stunt, its implications have been serious enough to attract the time and resources of major industry leaders. Last month, Judge Wilkins granted a motion to intervene in the case by the National Association of Manufacturers who says the plaintiffs lack standing because their injuries are too speculative and not likely to be reduced by the relief sought. "At issue is whether a small group of individuals and environmental organizations can dictate through private tort litigation the economic, energy, and environmental policies of the entire nation," wrote NAM spokesman Jeff Ostermeyer. The plaintiffs contend that they have standing to sue under the "public trust doctrine," a legal theory that in past years has helped protect waterways and wildlife. While the adults continue their argument, Loorz says kids his age are much more worried about climate change than many of their parents might imagine. "I used to play a lot of video games, and goof off, and get sent to the office at school," says Loonz. "But once I realized it was my generation that was going to be the first to really be affected by climate change, I made up my mind to do something about it.""
Idle

Submission + - Death Star is not economical: too much metal (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: Washington Post: "Should we build a Death Star? This debate picked up this year after some Lehigh University students estimated that just the steel for a Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion, or 13,000 times the current GDP of the Earth...Death Star is a bit misunderstood. It is primarily a tool of domestic politics rather than warfare, and should be compared to alternative means of suppressing the population of a galaxy. Second, as a weapon of war, it should be compared to alternative uses of scarce defense resources. Understood properly, the Death Star is not worth it.

Submission + - Amazon is eating Seattle (xconomy.com)

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes: Amazon is already the largest private employer in Seattle, but it's about to get a whole lot bigger.
The company's planning to add about 12,000 people in three huge office towers over the next decade, pushing its total Seattle workforce past 20,000.
There's never been a company of that size in the city — Microsoft and Boeing are almost entirely in the suburbs and surrounding cities. The flood of digital creatives that Amazon is bringing to town could fundamentally reshape Seattle, and supercharge its tech scene like never before.
But the company's highly secretive nature could be its Achilles' Heel.
Privacy

Submission + - UK Government Backtracks on Black Box Snooping (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "On the day the so-called snooper's charter was included in proposed UK legislation, as part of the Queen's Speech, it has emerged that the government is already backtracking on the controversial idea of making ISPs install black boxes to collect traffic and pass it to the authorities. The bill is not yet in a draft form, and TechWeek has learnt there is a lot of maneouvring behind the scenes,"

Submission + - Co-op hydro-power at risk under new DOE scheme

Submitted by Scarred Intellect
Scarred Intellect writes: A new proposal by US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will alter the mission of Power Maketing Administrations (such as Bonneville Power Administration, which administrates electricity between multiple dams, wind farms, and natural gas plants throughout the Northwest) and threaten electricity costs.

Sec. Chu served notice that PMAs would serve as laboratories to test various energy initiatives. These energy initiatives will increase the cost and could adversely affect the reliability of power provided by the PMAs.

Electric cooperative members, will pay the additional cost of these energy initiatives while consumers elsewhere would receive any benefits.

I seem to recall hearing about news of this sort of research from several DOE laboratories. It's almost like we already have a National Renewable Energy Laboratory and programs at various other locations.

Submission + - The Rise of Chemophobia in the News (plos.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: American news outlets like The New York Times seem to thrive on chemophobia — consumer fear of the ambiguous concept of 'chemicals.' As a result, Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum has decided to call out New York Times journalist Nicholas Kirstof for his secondary crusade (she notes he is an admirable journalist in other realms) against chemicals. She's quick to point out the absurdity of fearing chemicals like Hydrogen which could be a puzzler considering its integral role played in live-giving water as well as life-destroying hydrogen cyanide. Another example is O2 versus O3. Blum calls upon journalists to be more specific, to avoid the use of vague terms like 'toxin' let alone 'chemical' and instead inform the public with lengthy chemical names like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) instead of omitting the actual culprit altogether. Kristof has, of course, resorted to calling makers of these specific compounds "Big Chem" and Blum chastises his poorly researched reporting along with chemophobic lingo. Chemists of Slashdot, have you found reporting on "chemicals" to be as poor as Blum alleges or is this no more erroneous than any scare tactic used to move newspapers and garner eyeballs?
Education

Submission + - Can the Internet save education? (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: The Internet can save everything, even education. At least that's what tech companies would have parents and government officials believe. Too bad it's not true. Just this past week Harvard and MIT announced a joint $60 million project called edX to offer free courses online. (You won't get academic credit, but students can earn completion certificates and a grade.) The poster child for much of the online education movement is the Kahn Academy, which has roughly 3,200 educational videos available for free. But one has to wonder whether any of these online cheerleaders has ever watched a complete "class" on the site, because if they had they would immediately see the multitude of problems with this approach.
Data Storage

Submission + - Your future hard drive might be grown with magnetic bacteria (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "In the future, ultra-high-density non-volatile storage — such as hard drives — could be grown using magnetic bacteria. This breakthrough, shepherded by researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, relies on certain strains of bacteria that ingest iron, which is then converted into magnetite (iron (II, III) oxide). These microbes, by following the Earth’s magnetic field, then use this built-in magnet to navigate. To turn this behavior into something that can actually act as magnetic storage, the researchers identified and extracted the protein responsible for converting iron into magnetite — Mms6. A gold substrate is then covered in a checkerboard fashion with chemicals that bind to Mms6, and the substrate is dunked in the protein. The whole caboodle is then washed with an iron solution, turning each of the Mms6 sites into a magnetic bit. For now the researchers have only managed to create magnetic bits that are 20 micrometers wide, which equates to 20,000 nanometers — a wee bit larger than the 10nm magnetic sites found on modern hard drives, but the researchers seem confident that 20nm magnetic sites should be possible."
Music

Submission + - Pirate Bay Criticises Anonymous' Attack On Virgin (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "Anonymous launched a DDoS attack on Virgin Media, apparently in protest at Virgin's decision to block the Pirate Bay. Now the Pirate Bay has criticised Anonymous, saying it doesn't support DDoS as a form of protest. The statement is interesting, given that Anonymous has been music industry sites and other targets for some years, saying it is in support of the Pirate Bay."
Science

Submission + - One Giant Leap for Wearable Nanogenerators (exabites.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wearable nanogenerators, which harvest kinetic energy from common movement, including walking, a light breeze and waves got a push this week as researchers found....
Earth

Submission + - Methane Producing Dinosaurs May Have Changed Climate

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Telegraph reports that huge plant-eating dinosaurs callled sauropods may have produced enough greenhouse gas by breaking wind to alter the Earth's climate. Scientists believe that, just as in cows, methane-producing bacteria aided the digestion of sauropods by fermenting their plant food. ''A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,'' says study leader Dr Dave Wilkinson. ''Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources — both natural and man-made — put together.'' The key factor is the total mass of the animals which included some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, such as Diplodocus, which measured 150 feet and weighed up to 45 tons. Medium-sized sauropods weighed about 20 tons and lived in herds of up to a few tens of individuals per square kilometer so global methane emissions from the animals would have amounted to around 472 million tons per year, the scientists calculated. Sauropods alone may have been responsible for an atmospheric methane concentration of one to two parts per million (ppm), say the scientists and studies have suggested that the Earth was up to 10C (18F) warmer in the Mesozoic Era. ''The Mesozoic trend to sauropod gigantism led to the evolution of immense microbial vats unequalled in modern land animals. Methane was probably important in Mesozoic greenhouse warming. Our simple proof-of-concept model suggests greenhouse warming by sauropod megaherbivores could have been significant in sustaining warm climates.''"
Medicine

Submission + - Retinal Implants Restore Partial Sight To Three Blind (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "After receiving retinal implants in a trial, two people in the UK and one in China – all blind – regained part of their vision. All of the trial participants were made blind by retinitis pigmentosa in which the light-sensitive rods and cones of the retina deteriorate. British participants Robin Millar and Chris James, whose retinas had not responded to light in over a decade, were able to see immediately after the chip was turned on. Seeing the first flashes of light, James told the BBC, was a “magic moment.”"

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