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Submission + - Alibaba Turned 1111 Into $$$$ (cnet.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Bummed that you're home alone on date night, or stuck in your mom's basement, yet again? Don't worry. A new gadget or some scuba gear could help. Observed on November 11 — or "11.11," for the date with the most 1s — Singles Day, which started out as a joke among a group of male college students attending Nanjing University in the 1990s, has become the world's biggest online shopping day, thanks to the e-commerce prowess of China's Alibaba Group, which on this day last year, sold twice what all US companies sold on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. This year, Alibaba has decided to take its 11.11 promotions worldwide, highlighting global brands including online jewelry store Blue Nile, clothing brand Juicy Couture, and even Costco. Amazon has tried to get a piece of the action. The Seattle-based company launched promotions for the holiday last year on its Chinese site, and it's done so again this year.

Submission + - Police officer suspended for slapping citizen for refusing a warrantless search 6

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: This story demonstrates why it is becoming essential for every citizen to begin recording their interactions with the police every single time.

Yesterday police were contacted in regard to a video posted online which appeared to show an inappropriate interaction between an on-duty member of the Sheriff’s Office and a civilian, resulting from a suspicious vehicle complaint in the Town of Halfmoon.

The Sheriff’s Office has identified and interviewed all parties involved in the interaction and as a result, the police officer has been suspended without pay effective immediately, pending the outcome of the investigation and possible disciplinary action.

Make sure you watch the video. It is very clear that the officer did not know he was being recorded. It is also clear to me that his behavior in this situation was not unusual, that this police officer is quite used to using violence to get his way, regardless of the law. Had the recording not existed, however, he would not have been suspended, and would not be likely to lose his job.

The recording did exist, however, which has forced the Saratoga police force to take action.

Submission + - Interviews: Ask Rachel Sussman About Photography and The oldest living things

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Rachel Sussman is a photographer whose work covers the junction of art, science, and philosophy. Perhaps her most famous work is the "Oldest Living Things in the World" project. Working with biologists, she traveled all over the world to find and photograph organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Sussman gave a TED talk highlighting parts of the project including a clonal colony of quaking aspen 80,000-years-old and 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago's coast. Rachel has agreed to put down her camera and answer any questions you may have about photography or any of her projects. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Submission + - fMRI Data Reveals the Number of Parallel Processes Running in the Brain (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by xgeorgio
xgeorgio writes: From MIT Technology Review — Emerging Technology From the arXiv (5-Nov-2014):

The human brain carries out many tasks at the same time, but how many? Now fMRI data has revealed just how parallel gray matter is...
...The results make for interesting reading. Although the analysis is complex, the outcome is simple to state. Georgiou says that independent component analysis reveals that about 50 independent processes are at work in human brains performing the complex visuo-motor tasks of indicating the presence of green and red boxes. However, the brain uses fewer processes when carrying out simple tasks, like visual recognition.
That’s a fascinating result that has important implications for the way computer scientists should design chips intended to mimic human performance. It implies that parallelism in the brain does not occur on the level of individual neurons but on a much higher structural and functional level, and that there are about 50 of these.
“This means that, in theory, an artificial equivalent of a brain-like cognitive structure may not require a massively parallel architecture at the level of single neurons, but rather a properly designed set of limited processes that run in parallel on a much lower scale,” he concludes..."

Full paper link:
“Estimating the intrinsic dimension in fMRI space via dataset fractal analysis – Counting the `cpu cores’ of the human brain” (arXiv:1410.7100v1 [cs.AI])

Comment Don't copy crazy behavior. (Score 1, Offtopic) 185

by Futurepower(R) (#48332877) Attached to: Big Data Knows When You Are About To Quit Your Job
Why have public relationships? Public internet relationships are a fad of fake, self-destructive behavior, like the way women dressed in the 1950's.

All of the LinkedIn requests I've ever received have been attempts to pretend that a relationship exists that is more meaningful than in reality.

Sometimes a large percentage of people do crazy things. Don't follow them. I have friends, customers, and business contacts who sometimes read and reply to only the first paragraph of an email, and don't read the rest. It's part of the nonsense of the times.

I told a dentist with a Facebook page that Facebook was showing an ad for another dental clinic on his Facebook page. The dentist just accepted the abuse.

The free open source diaspora* social network software allows privacy.

This book is about the development of Diaspora: More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook. The book is poorly written by someone with no programming experience and no interest in learning, but it does tend to show the difficulties of developing software.

Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

The first result in a Google search for 50's clothing and hairstyles says, "Ever ready to suffer for the cause of soft feminine looking Fifties styles, after the perm, we still had to roll, curl our hair." A Wikipedia article says, "One ingredient in 1950s hair spray was vinyl chloride monomer; used as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), it was subsequently found to be both toxic and flammable."

Avoid the craziness you see around you.

Submission + - ALCU: NSA can't stop US citizen data if it wanted to (techdirt.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The American Civil Liberties Association's Freedom of Information requests have revealed this tidbit in the NSA's reasoning: "As a practical matterit is not possible to determine what communications are to or from U.S, persons nearly as readily as is the case with telephony, and often is not possible at all."

In other words, since the poor guys just have to collect everything. Not their fault.

Submission + - Slashdot Skeptics Were Right About Dual-Core TK1 Performance 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In August, Slashdot published a scoop titled NVIDIAs 64-bit Tegra K1: The Ghost of Transmeta Rides Again, Out of Order. In the comments section, many skeptics chimed in, saying that while the out-of-order architecture being re-introduced by NVIDIA would likely lead to improved benchmarks, real-world use scenarios might experience stalls-aplenty.

Turns out the skeptics were right, as The Verge, Gizmodo, and even the rather Google-biased Android Police have panned the user experience rendered by the 64-bit to be choppy, laggy, slow, and unacceptable. Needless to say, this is rather ironic, considering the chip has been flaunted by NVIDIA as the fastest mobile SoC ever.

After stepping out of the phone game, the lack of design wins for the past few years, the spontaneously cracked trim and weak WiFi antenna on their flagship SHIELD Tablet, it seems that NVIDIA's future in producing fabless mobile SoC's is in serious peril. Stock 64-bit ARM A57/53 cores (which stick to the proven out-of-order architecture) are predicted to be smoking fast, while even the current 32-bit A15, and even A12/17 (which are next generation's midrange cores) provide a very smooth user experience. ARM's high-end stock GPU, the MALI T-T60 series, is no slouch either, and when scaled up to its maximum of 16 cores, provides similar computing power to the 192 Core Kepler architecture used in both the 32-bit A15 and 64-bit Denver variations of the Tegra K1 SoC.

NVIDIA has essentially run out of wildcards to differentiate themselves in the high-end segment, which their own CEO has claimed is all they are aiming for at this point. It would not be far fetched to imagine a world in which NVIDIA totally bows out from the mobile-SoC game in only 1 or 2 years. They simply can't keep losing billions on it year after year, forever; not when the future looks this bleak.

Submission + - Big Data Knows When You Are About to Quit Your Job

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets. “We’ve applied machine learning to affect consumer tastes,” says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. “putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right.” Already, Sabah says, “we’re surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job.” The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won’t make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. “Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations.

Submission + - CNN Anchors Caught On Camera Using Microsoft Surface As An iPad Stand (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Since the release of its Surface Pro 3 tablet, Microsoft has pushed their new slate hard. It's as if the company wanted it to overwrite that part of our memory that recalls the Surface RT and it's monumental losses. This past August, we saw the company make a big move by deploying a boatload of Surface Pro tablets to every team in the NFL, gratis. All season so far, coaches and even players have made use of them to plan their next course-of-action, and for the most part, they seemed to be well-received. Unlike some of the products Microsoft tries to get us to adopt, the Surface Pro 3 really is a solid tablet / convertible. Unfortunately, at least where the CNN political team is concerned, Microsoft hasn't one over a few anchors, like they have in NFL, when they were supplied with brand-new Surface Pros. In recent shots captured and tweeted about, a Surface Pro 3 can be seen acting as an "iPad stand" and quite an expensive one. As humorous as this is, it might not seem that interesting if it were just one correspondent who pulled that stunt. Let's be honest, some people just like their iPads. That wasn't the case, though. There were at least two commentators using an iPad on the same set, despite having the Surface right in front of them and seemingly hiding it behind Microsoft's darling Windows 8 slate.

Submission + - Number of billionaires globally doubles since start of financial crisis (westmeathexaminer.ie)

Submitted by monkeyFuzz
monkeyFuzz writes: According to the article, since the financial crisis began, the number of billionaires worldwide has more than doubled and interestingly enough apparently, if the world's three richest people were to spend $1m every single day each, it would take each one of them around 200 years to exhaust all of their wealth

Submission + - Facebook Wants You to Vote Tuesday

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Six years in the making, Facebook's get-out-the-vote tool — a high-profile button that proclaims "I'm Voting" or "I'm a Voter" — will on Tuesday give many of the social network's more than 150 million American users a gentle but effective nudge to vote. "If past research is any guide," writes Micah L. Sifry in Mother Jones, "up to a few million more people will head to the polls partly because their Facebook friends encouraged them. Yet the process by which Facebook has developed this tool — what the firm calls the 'voter megaphone' — has not been very transparent, raising questions about its use and Facebook's ability to influence elections. Moreover, while Facebook has been developing and promoting this tool, it has also been quietly conducting experiments on how the company's actions can affect the voting behavior of its users." Sifry adds, "There may be another reason for Facebook's lack of transparency regarding its voting promotion experiments: politics. Facebook officials likely do not want Republicans on Capitol Hill to realize that their voter megaphone isn't a neutral get-out-the-vote mechanism. It's not that Facebook uses this tool to remind only users who identify themselves as Democrats to vote — though the company certainly has the technical means to do so. But the Facebook user base tilts Democratic." So, it's probably worth mentioning again that Facebook caught flack last summer for deliberately experimenting on users' emotions without their consent. And just last June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC put out a call for "pissed off Data Scientists" to data mine critical legislative districts and "growth hack" ways to motivate "registered voters who are registered Republicans who we think are likely to support immigration reform."

Submission + - Can doctors be trained to use open source to save hospitals from bankruptcy? (opensource.com)

Submitted by jenwike
jenwike writes: Luis Ibanez is a software engineer at Google and before that worked on open science at Kitware. He lays out the financial crisis many US hospitals are in after they have purchased closed, proprietary Electronic Health Records systems they cannot maintain and do not understand. So, how much would it cost to implement VistaA, an open source software EHR system developed by the VA? Zero dollars. And, how many developers would it take to employ to run and maintain VistA in hospitals across the country? Four. Do the math.

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