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Comment Re:I blame Microsoft (Score 1) 148

by hawguy (#48630697) Attached to: Critical Git Security Vulnerability Announced

For creating case-insensitive file systems.

What.

The.

Fuck.

IBM probably deserves some credit (or blame) as well, VM/CMS's filesystem may not have been case insensitive (since filenames were all upper case), but 3270 monitors had a switch that would toggle the screen display between mixed (or lower) case to all uppercase. You could still type in mixed case, but it was displayed as upper case.

Submission + - Scientists Discover That Exercise Changes Your DNA

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The human genome is astonishingly complex and dynamic, with genes constantly turning on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from the body. Scientists have known that certain genes become active or quieter as a result of exercise but they hadn’t understood how those genes knew how to respond to exercise. Now the NYT reports that scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have completed a study where they recruited 23 young and healthy men and women, brought them to the lab for a series of physical performance and medical tests, including a muscle biopsy, and then asked them to exercise half of their lower bodies for three months. The volunteers pedaled one-legged at a moderate pace for 45 minutes, four times per week for three months. Then the scientists repeated the muscle biopsies and other tests with each volunteer. Not surprisingly, the volunteers’ exercised leg was more powerful now than the other, showing that the exercise had resulted in physical improvements. But there were also changes within the exercised muscle cells’ DNA. Using technology that analyses 480,000 positions throughout the genome, they could see that new methylation patterns had taken place in 7,000 genes (an individual has 20–25,000 genes).

In a process known as DNA methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body. In the exercised portions of the bodies, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied. Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become. Many mysteries still remain but the message of the study is unambiguous. “Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” says Sara Lindholm, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”

Comment Actually a Great Step Forward (Score 1) 130

by DumbSwede (#48620875) Attached to: Research Highlights How AI Sees and How It Knows What It's Looking At

Computer learns to pick out salient features to identify images. Then we are shocked that when trained with no supervision the salient features aren’t what we would have chosen.

I see this as a great ah-ha moment. Humans also have visual systems that can be tricked by optical illusions. The patterns presented while seemingly incomprehensible to us make sense to computers for the same reason our optical illusions do to us -- taking short cuts in visual processing that would fire on patterns not often or ever seen in the real world. Which BTW means even as is, this type of visual identification is still useful, since the random images generating false hits aren’t just any random images, but ones that have visual features similar to the targets identified, even if we humans can’t see the similarities or even if they look like white noise.

Now that we know what computers are picking out as salient features, we can modify the algorithms to add additional constraints on what additional salient features must or must not be in an object identified, such that it would correspond more closely to how humans would classify objects. Baseball’s must have curvature for instance not just zig-zag red lines on white.

Comment Re:Meaningless (Score 1) 173

by Culture20 (#48620741) Attached to: Backblaze's 6 TB Hard Drive Face-Off

"we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintagedue to the proprietary nature of these data". I'm not sure exactly what that means.

Perhaps part of their discount is tied to a deal to provide exclusive data of failure rates to the manufacturers? Same effect as buying silence, but seemingly more legit.

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