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Earth

Can Earthquakes Be Predicted Algorithmically? 94

Posted by timothy from the hindsight-is-excellent dept.
An anonymous reader with this story about a practical application of big data analysis as applied to the trove of sensor readings taken by satellites and by ground-based senosrs. A company called Terra Seismic says that earthquakes can be predicted 20-30 days before they occur, by sifting data for thermal, ionic, and other abnormalities in areas where quakes are considered likely. Says the linked article: "The company claims to have successfully predicted a number of earthquakes. For example, on 5th of April 2013, the firm issued a forecast for Japan. On 12th April 2013, an earthquake hit the identified area and 33 people were injured. On 4th June 2013, the firm again made a prediction for an earthquake in North Italy. On 21st June, an earthquake hit the identified area. On 3rd March 2013, the firm issued a forecast for an earthquake in Iran. Again, after 35 days, an earthquake hit the identified area."

Submission + - Windows 10 releases this summer (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Gamoid
Gamoid writes: Microsoft quietly confirmed that Windows 10 will in fact launch this summer — and it's encouraging users to put the technical preview on Xiaomi tablets. Oh, plus, Cortana will get a Mandarin localization.

Submission + - Drone v drone, catcher canon nets UAV in flight (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes: To counter the threat of unlawful use of unmanned systems, the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, together with the Dutch National Police and the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, has selected a number of projects in which concepts are developed that can be used to detect, indentify and/or remove these mobile systems in a controlled manner. Project ‘DroneCatcher’ of the Dutch SME Delft Dynamics, is one of the best ideas that has been selected to carry out a feasibility study.

Last week Delft Dynamics successfully completed a range of test flights, which showed that is is feasible to capture drones in midair by shooting a net from another drone.

Submission + - The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty (newyorker.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It was March, 1985 when Richard M. Stallman published the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Software Tools. Thirty years on, The New Yorker has an article commemorating its creation and looking at how it has shaped software in the meantime. "Though proprietary and open-source software publishers might appear at the moment to have the upper hand, Stallman’s influence with developers (among whom he is known simply by his initials, 'rms') remains immense. When I asked around about him, many people spoke of him as one might of a beloved but eccentric and prickly uncle. They would roll their eyes a bit, then hasten to add, as more than one did, 'But he’s right about most things.' I told Stallman that I’d spoken with several developers who venerate his work, and who had even said that without it the course of their lives might have been altered. But they don’t seem to do what you say, I observed; they all have iPhones. 'I don’t understand that either,' he said. 'If they don’t realize that they need to defend their freedom, soon they won’t have any.'"

Submission + - Nvidia To Install Computers In Cars To Learn How To Drive (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Nvidia has unveiled the Drive PX, a $10,000 computer that will be installed in cars and gather data about how to react to driving obstacles. "Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior," said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia. The data collected by Drive PXes will be shared, allowing cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.

Submission + - Google finally explains why Glass failed (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's "Director of Moonshots" Astro Teller gave the final keynote of SXSW's explicitly tech-centric portion, in order to proudly embrace the kind of failure that's usually anathema to the tech industry.

Submission + - White House Proposal Urges All Federal Websites To Adopt HTTPS

Submitted by blottsie
blottsie writes: In an effort to close security gaps that have resulted in multiple security breaches of government servers, the Obama administration on Tuesday introduced a proposal to require all publicly accessible federal websites to use the HTTPS encryption standard.

"The majority of federal websites use HTTP as the as primary protocol to communicate over the public Internet," reads the proposal on the website of the U.S. Chief Information Officer. "Unencrypted HTTP connections create a privacy vulnerability and expose potentially sensitive information about users of unencrypted Federal websites and services."

Submission + - Twitter Adds Tool To Report Tweets To the Police (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Twitter is ramping up its efforts to combat harassment with a tool to help users report abusive content to law enforcement. The reports would include the flagged tweet and its URL, the time at which it was sent, the user name and account URL of the person who posted it, as well as a link to Twitter’s guidelines on how authorities can request non-public user account information from Twitter. It is left up to the user to forward the report to law enforcement and left up to law enforcement to request the user information from Twitter.

Submission + - Gates-Backed Echodyne's Metamaterials Radar for Drones

Submitted by Benjamin Romano
Benjamin Romano writes: High-performance radar: Not just for the nose cone of your F-22 anymore. Metamaterials enable radars capable of things like simultaneous scanning and tracking at costs and weights low enough to be viable for commercial applications including drones, self-driving cars, and other autonomous vehiclesaccording to Echodyne, a Seattle-area startup developing the technology with investment from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, among others.

Submission + - SoftMaker sponsors a paid developer for Thunderbird (softmaker.com)

Submitted by martin-k
martin-k writes: Mozilla Thunderbird is used by millions of people as the e-mail client of choice. Even after Mozilla cut back their support, usage worldwide has been rising and continues to grow. German office-suite developer SoftMaker has now announced that it will pay for a full-time developer to participate in the Thunderbird project and help the Thunderbird volunteer developers fix bugs and add features. First topics include CardDav support and a rewrite of Thunderbird's addressbook. Disclosure: The submitter is head of SoftMaker.

Submission + - Science's Path From Myth to Multiverse (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We can think of the history of physics as an attempt to unify the world around us: Gradually, over many centuries, we’ve come to see that seemingly unrelated phenomena are intimately connected. The physicist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin, received his Nobel Prize in 1979 for a major breakthrough in that quest — showing how electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are manifestations of the same underlying theory (he shared the prize with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow). That work became a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes how the fundamental building blocks of the universe come together to create the world we see.

In his new book To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Weinberg examines how modern science was born. By tracing the development of what we now call the “scientific method” — an approach, developed over centuries, that emphasizes experiments and observations rather than reasoning from first principles — he makes the argument that science, unlike other ways of interpreting the world around us, can offer true progress. Through science, our understanding of the world improves over time, building on what has come before. Mistakes can happen, but are eventually corrected. Weinberg spoke with Quanta Magazine about the past and future of physics, the role of philosophy within science, and the startling possibility that the universe we see around us is a tiny sliver of a much larger multiverse.

Submission + - Most Powerful Geomagnetic Storm of Solar Cycle 24 is Happening (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: The most powerful solar storm of the current solar cycle is currently reverberating around the globe. Initially triggered by the impact of a coronal mass ejection (CME) hitting our planet’s magnetosphere, a relatively mild geomagnetic storm erupted at around 04:30 UT (12:30 a.m. EDT), but it has since ramped-up to an impressive G4-class geomagnetic storm, priming high latitudes for some bright auroral displays.

Submission + - Scientists may have solved mystery of dwarf planet's enigmatic bright spot (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A mysterious bright spot on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is looking more and more like ice—and could even be emitting water vapor into space on a daily basis, researchers report. The bright spot, simply called feature #5, had been noticed before by the Hubble Space Telescope as sitting within an 80-kilometer-wide crater. But the Dawn spacecraft, which went into orbit around Ceres on 6 March, is now close to resolving the feature, which is less than 4 kilometers wide. Andreas Nathues, principal investigator for Dawn’s framing camera, says the feature has spectral characteristics that are consistent with ice. Intriguingly, the brightness can be seen even when the spacecraft is looking on edge at the crater rim, suggesting that the feature may be outgassing water vapor above the rim and into space.

Submission + - Data research reveals when taking a yellow cab is cheaper than an Uber (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of data scientists have come up with a system to identify times when regular yellow taxis are cheaper alternatives to an Uber. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Nanmur in Belgium have compared a broad dataset of both yellow taxi and Uber fares in New York and have discovered that for a trip costing less than $35 Uber is often the most expensive option. The data scientists were able to reach this conclusion by comparing trip and fare data for each yellow taxi ride taken in 2013 and entering it into Uber’s fare query system. Prices were taken from Uber’s lowest-cost service Uber X and the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission.

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