70165175
submission
Nicola Hahn writes:
Both the White House and the U.S. Intelligence Community have recently announced reforms to surveillance programs sanctioned under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But do these reforms represent significant restructuring or are they just bureaucratic gestures intended to create the perception that officials are responding to public pressure?
The Executive’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has written up an assessment of reform measures implemented by the government. For those who want a quick summary the Board published a fact sheet which includes a table listing recommendations made by the board almost a year ago and corresponding reforms. The fact sheet reveals that the Board’s mandate to “end the NSA’s bulk telephone records program” has not been implemented.
In other words, the physical infrastructure of the NSA’s global panopticon is still in place. In fact, it’s growing larger. So despite all of the press statements and associated media buzz very little has changed. There are people who view this as an unsettling indication of where society is headed. Ed Snowden claimed that he wanted to “trigger” a debate, but is that really enough? What will it take to tear down Big Brother?
70070679
submission
Layzej writes:
A leading Canadian climate scientist has been awarded $50,000 in a defamation suit against The National Post newspaper. Andrew Weaver sued the Post over four articles published between December 2009 and February 2010. The articles contain “grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet,” and they “poison” the debate over climate change, Weaver asserted in a statement at the time the suit was filed.
The judge agreed, concluding “the defendants have been careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts. As evident from the testimony of the defendants, they were more interested in espousing a particular view than assessing the accuracy of the facts.”
This is the first of several law suits launched by climate scientists against journalists who have published alleged libels and falsehoods. Climate scientist Ben Santer suggests the following explanation for these types of defamations: "if you can’t attack the underlying science, you go after the scientist.”
70069673
submission
schwit1 writes:
Five years ago, Utah government computer systems faced 25,000 to 30,000 attempted cyberattacks every day.
At the time, Utah Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires thought that was massive. "But this last year we have had spikes of over 300 million attacks against the state databases" each day: a 10,000-fold increase.
Why? Squires says it is probably because Utah is home to the new, secretive National Security Agency computer center, and hackers believe they can somehow get to it through state computer systems.
"I really do believe it was all the attention drawn to the NSA facility. In the cyberworld, that's a big deal," Squires told a legislative budget committee Tuesday. "I watched as those increases jumped so much over the last few years. And talking to counterparts in other states, they weren't seeing that amount of increase like we were."
70059691
submission
szczys writes:
Would you do a better job designing hardware if your life depended on it? Chris Nefcy is in that exact position. Years ago he developed an Automatic External Defibrilator for First Medic. The device allows non-doctors to restart a human heart in the field. When Chris had a heart attack his ticker was restarted with shocks from his own hardware.
His story isn't just heartwarming, he also covers the path that led him into developing the AED and the bumpy road encountered getting the hardware to market.
70056043
submission
mdsolar writes:
Norway, the nation with the largest sovereign fund in the world, is withdrawing from its investments in fossil fuels. A number of universities, cities, and religious institutions have joined the so-called “divestment” movement, but Norway is the first nation to do so officially.
“It’s not the first time a country’s fund has sold off companies,” Jamie Henn, co-founder of the international climate-change advocacy group 350.org, told Quartz. “But it’s definitely the first time they’ve done so in the context of climate risk and environmental concerns.”
Norway is divesting from 32 coal companies, most of which are linked to either high carbon emissions or deforestation. It’s also pulling out of investments in tar sands and cement. Moral high ground aside, investing in these companies—like the fossil fuels they generate—may be unsustainable. While Norway can now boast that it has made a bold move toward a cleaner planet, it has in the process also shed assets that are inherently risky.
70023811
submission
aarondubrow writes:
Automakers have presented a vision of the future where the driver can check his or her email, chat with friends or even sleep while shuttling between home and the office. However, to AI experts, it's not clear that this vision is a realistic one. In many areas, including driving, we'll go through a long period where humans act as co-pilots or supervisors before the technology reaches full autonomy (if it ever does). In such a scenario, the car would need to communicate with drivers to alert them when they need to take over control. In cases where the driver is non-responsive, the car must be able to autonomously make the decision to safely move to the side of the road and stop. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed 'fault-tolerant planning' algorithms that allow semi-autonomous machines to devise and enact a "Plan B."
70023735
submission
Iddo Genuth writes:
2013 was the worst year for the photography industry in decades — but what happened in 2014 and will the upcoming blitz of cameras (including the super resolution Canon 5D S with 50MP sensor to be announced tomorrow) change everything in 2015?
The official numbers published by CIPA (the Camera & Imaging Products Association) are out and they tell a story of a struggling photography industry trying to stay afloat in a sea of smartphones. Will it survive? This is the big question all of the photography manufacturers are facing over the past two years, and eventually what does it all mean for us as consumers?
70017497
submission
jfruh writes:
Bills were introduced into both the House and Senate yesterday that would amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, requiring a warrant to search Americans' email messages stored on third-party servers even if they're more than 180 days old. The current version of the law was passed in 1986, and was written in an environment where most email users downloaded emails to their computer and erased them after reading them.
70015975
submission
KentuckyFC writes:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But what if the beholder is a machine? Scientists from Yahoo Labs in Barcelona have trained a machine learning algorithm to pick out beautiful photographic portraits from a collection of not-so-beautiful ones. They began with a set of 10,000 portraits that have been rated by humans and then allowed the algorithm to "learn" the difference by taking into account personal factors such as the age, sex and race of the subject as well as technical factors such as the sharpness of the image, the exposure and the contrast between the face and the background and so on. The trained algorithm was then able to reliably pick out the most beautiful portraits. Curiously, the algorithm does this by ignoring personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on and instead focuses only on technical details such as sharpness, exposure and contrast. The team say this suggests that any subject can be part of a stunning portrait regardless of their looks. It also suggests that "perfect portrait" algorithms could be built in to the next generation of cameras, rather like the smile-capturing algorithms of today.
70004121
submission
stephendavion writes:
The device has the potential to save millions of lives. A team of researchers from Columbia University have developed a device that can be plugged into a smartphone and used to quickly test for HIV and syphilis. The mobile device tests for three infectious disease markers in just 15 minutes by using a finger-prick of blood, and draws all the power it needs from the smartphone, Science Daily reports. The accessory costs an estimated $34 to make and is capable of replicating tests done in a laboratory using equipment that costs many thousands of dollars.
69996731
submission
StartsWithABang writes:
Moons in our Solar System — at least the ones that formed along with the planets — all revolve counterclockwise around their planetary parents, with roughly uniform surfaces orbiting in the same plane as their other moons and rings. Yet one of Saturn's moon's, Iapetus, is unique, with a giant equatorial ridge, an orbital plane that doesn't line up, and one half that's five times brighter than the other. While the first two are still mysteries, the last one has finally been solved!
69952421
submission
grimmjeeper writes:
According to a CNN article, Radio Shack is being accused of defaulting on a loan. Their stock has lost 90% of it's value in the last year. They've fallen below the $50M market value and have been delisted by the NYSE. They say they have no intention to submit a plan to raise their market value to be relisted.
The once proud and ubiquitous Radio Shack basically dead. It just doesn't know enough to stop breathing yet. Decades of mismanagement, failing to keep up with changes in the market place, failures to capitalize on their strengths, it's all caught up with them. There is nothing left for them to do at this point. They are too far gone. The fat lady is about to take the stage.
69914863
submission
mdsolar writes:
THE Obama administration’s whiplash decision last week to allow oil and gas companies to drill along a wide area of the Atlantic Coast is a big mistake.
The facts support a ban on offshore drilling not only in the wilds of Alaska — as the administration has announced — but also along our densely populated, economically vibrant and environmentally diverse Eastern Seaboard.
The BP Deepwater Horizon disaster should remind us that the benefits of drilling do not outweigh the threat to local economies, public health and the environment when an inevitable spill occurs. The spill, occurring off the Louisiana coast less than five years ago, devastated the Gulf of Mexico region — most likely costing over $100 billion in lost economic activity and restoration expenses, disrupting or destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and causing long-term damage to 3,000 miles of fragile wetlands and beaches. Experts estimate that only 5 percent of the 4.2 million barrels of oil spilled in the gulf was removed during the cleanup; even today, oil from the spill is still appearing on the white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle.
To allow drilling off the Atlantic Coast is to willfully forget Deepwater’s awful lesson even as the economic, environmental and public health consequences continue to reverberate in communities along the gulf. If a disaster of Deepwater’s scale occurred off the Chesapeake Bay, it would stretch from Richmond to Atlantic City, with states and communities with no say in drilling decisions bearing the consequences. The 50-mile buffer the administration has proposed would be irrelevant. And unlike the gulf, the Chesapeake is a tidal estuary, meaning that oil would remain in the environment for decades.
69884889
submission
buchner.johannes writes:
Putting humans on Mars will get you more bang for the buck, according to a new analysis by the Director of the UCL/Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Science and Astrobiology. Humans are simply better at complex tasks like drilling, while robots have a difficult time just navigating through the rugged terrain, and can thus cover less ground. Small, autonomous, cheap and very intelligent rovers have thus not become a reality — instead the size (and cost) of robots has steadily increased, contrary to Moore-law-like predictions. The autonomous navigation is a hard problem that is not easily solved technically. The article compares the cost of the Apollo missions and the Mars Science Laboratory in detail to illustrate the comparison of human vs. robotic exploration programs. The original article (PDF) also notes that human space-flight benefits from non-scientific motivations, which can further increase the available budget.
