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Submission + - Verizon's offer: Let us track you, get free stuff (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Are you comfortable having your location and Web browsing tracked for marketing purposes? If so, Verizon's got a deal for you.

The wireless giant announced a new program this week called "Smart Rewards" that offers customers credit card-style perks like discounts for shopping, travel and dining. You accrue points through the program by doing things like signing onto the Verizon website, paying your bill online and participating in the company's trade-in program.

Verizon emphasizes that the data it collects is anonymized before it's shared with third parties.
The program is novel in that offers Verizon users some compensation for the collection of their data, which has become big business for telecom and tech companies. Some privacy advocates have pushed data-collecting companies to reward customers for their personal information in the interest of transparency.

Submission + - Oso disaster had its roots in earlier landslides (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: The disastrous March 22 landslide that killed 43 people in the rural Washington state community of Oso involved the "remobilization" of a 2006 landslide on the same hillside, a new federally sponsored geological study concludes.

The research indicates the landslide, the deadliest in U.S. history, happened in two major stages. The first stage remobilized the 2006 slide, including part of an adjacent forested slope from an ancient slide, and was made up largely or entirely of deposits from previous landslides. The first stage ultimately moved more than six-tenths of a mile across the north fork of the Stillaguamish River and caused nearly all the destruction in the Steelhead Haven neighborhood. The second stage started several minutes later and consisted of ancient landslide and glacial deposits. That material moved into the space vacated by the first stage and moved rapidly until it reached the trailing edge of the first stage, the study found.

The report, released Tuesday on the four-month anniversary of the slide, details an investigation by a team from the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association, or GEER. The scientists and engineers determined that intense rainfall in the three weeks before the slide likely was a major issue, but factors such as altered groundwater migration, weakened soil consistency because of previous landslides and changes in hillside stresses played key roles.

"Perhaps the most striking finding is that, while the Oso landslide was a rare geologic occurrence, it was not extraordinary," said Joseph Wartman, a University of Washington associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a team leader for the study.

"We observed several other older but very similar long-runout landslides in the surrounding Stillaguamish River Valley. This tells us these may be prevalent in this setting over long time frames. Even the apparent trigger of the event – several weeks of intense rainfall – was not truly exceptional for the region," Wartman said.

Submission + - Experiment claiming dark matter detection explained without dark matter

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The astrophysical evidence for some type of non-baryonic, gravitational source of matter is overwhelming: hence dark mater. For the past two decades, a myriad of experiments searching for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) — the leading dark matter candidate — have come up empty, placing tremendous constraints on whatever properties dark matter can have. But one experiment, DAMA, has seen an annual modulation in its experimental signature that's consistent with dark matter. Other, conventional explanations like nuclear decays, neutrino interactions or atmospheric muons have failed to explain the same observed signal. But a new explanation may have solved the mystery, and provides us with a definitive prediction that should be able to discriminate between dark matter and conventional sources. Very interesting stuff!
Idle

Submission + - Denver Airpot Rental Car Agencies Inundated With Pot Left Behind By Travelers (cbslocal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Rental car workers at Denver International Airport say pot tourists are regularly leaving them with marijuana that travelers don’t want to try to carry through DIA.

“It happens quite often,” a rental car employee at a national chain told a CBS4 employee. “Every couple of days. I just throw it in the trash.” At another major rental car company, an employee told CBS4 pot is handed over to employees “pretty frequently but depends on if there is an occasion.”

Submission + - New treatment stops type II diabetes (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by multicsfan
multicsfan writes: Injection of protein FGF1 stops weight induced diabetes in its tracks in mice. There appear to be no side effects. The cure lasts 2 days at a time. Future research and human trials are needed to both better understand and create a working drug. There are no signs of hypoglycemia.

Submission + - How Hard Is It to Shoot Down a Plane? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Ukrainian government officials say Russian-backed rebel forces shot down a Malaysian Airlines flight with 295 passengers and crew over the embattled border region on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The commercial flight was cruising at 33,000 feet, making it too high for a shoulder-launched missile and more likely that it was targeted by a radar-guided missile defense system, according to military experts. “It does seem depressingly likely,” said Mark Galeotti, a professor of global affairs at New York University currently studying Russian security issues in Moscow. “We know the rebels have the Buk missile system. We know they have shot down planes in the past. They may have believed it was a legitimate target.” Although the Buk system is designed to shoot down fast-moving military aircraft, a high-flying jetliner would have been an easy target. And although it would have been carrying a civilian transponder, if the anti-aircraft missile was being operated by a novice controller, mistakes were most likely made.

Submission + - MIT may have just solved all your data center network lag issues (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A group of MIT researchers say they’ve invented a new technology that should all but eliminate queue length in data center networking. The technology will be fully described in a paper presented at the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication. According to MIT, the paper will detail a system – dubbed Fastpass – that uses a centralized arbiter to analyze network traffic holistically and make routing decisions based on that analysis, in contrast to the more decentralized protocols common today. Experimentation done in Facebook data centers shows that a Fastpass arbiter with just eight cores can be used to manage a network transmitting 2.2 terabits of data per second, according to the researchers.

Submission + - ExoLance: Shooting Darts at Mars to Find Life (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: To find life on Mars, some scientists believe you might want to look underground for microbes that may be hiding from the harsh radiation that bathes the red planet’s surface. Various NASA rovers have scraped away a few inches at a time, but the real paydirt may lie a meter or two below the surface. That’s too deep for existing instruments, so a team of space enthusiasts has launched a more ambitious idea: dropping arrow-like probes from the Martian atmosphere to pierce the soil like bunker-busting bug catchers. The “ExoLance” project aims to drop ground-penetrating devices, each of which would carry a small chemical sampling test to find signs of life. “One of the benefits of doing this mission is that there is less engineering,” said Chris Carberry, executive director of Explore Mars, a non-profit space advocacy group pushing the idea. “With penetrators we can engineer them to get what we want, and send it back to an orbiter. We can theoretically check out more than one site at a time. We could drop five or six, which increases the chances of finding something.”

Submission + - The hacking of NASDAQ (businessweek.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Businessweek has an account of the 2010 hacking of the NASDAQ exchange. From the article, "Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, under pressure to decipher a complex hack, struggled to provide an even moderately clear picture to policymakers. After months of work, there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why. “We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I’ll put it that way, and it’s not crystal clear what their final objective is,” says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, who agreed to talk about the incident only in general terms because the details remain classified. “The bad news of that equation is, I’m not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.”"

Comment Re:Erm (Score 4, Informative) 91

by azav (#47468767) Attached to: Researchers Find Evidence of How Higgs Particle Imparts Mass
"Now finalized based on a total of 34 observed events, the measured interaction rate is in good agreement with that predicted by the Standard Model, a theory describing all known fundamental particles and their interactions."

"Now with the LHC data in hand, the measured rate agrees with the prevailing theory's predictions and establishes a signal at a significance level of 3.6 sigma—strong evidence, according to Pleier. "The probability for this measurement to be a mere background fluctuation is very small—about one in 6000," he said."

"Again, so far, the data indicate that the Higgs is working as expected.

"For the first time, we can rule out certain models or predictions that we could not before," Pleier said. "To complete the job, we need more data, at higher energy, so we can see the fingerprint more clearly."

The LHC will resume data taking at increased collision energies—13 tera-electronvolts (TeV) instead of 8 TeV—in spring of 2015. The datasets collected will be up to 150 times the size of the currently available data and will allow for a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the Higgs at work." "

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