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Submission + - A drastic drop in complaints after San Diego outfitted its PD with body cameras

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Surprise, surprise! Immediately after San Diego outfitted its police force with 600 body camera the number of complaints plunged.

The report, which took one full year into account, found that complaints against police have fallen 40.5 percent and use of “personal body” force by officers has been reduced by 46.5 percent. Use of pepper spray has decreased by 30.5 percent.

Two benefits can be seen immediately. First, the police are being harassed less from false complaints. Second, and more important, the police are finding ways to settle most disputes without the use of force, which means they are abusing their authority less.

These statistics do confirm what many on both the right and the left have begun to believe in recent years, that the police have been almost certainly using force against citizens inappropriately too often. In San Diego at least the cameras are serving to stem this misuse of authority.

Submission + - NY Times: "All The News That Mark Zuckerberg Sees Fit To Print"?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Two years ago, Politico caught Mark Zuckerberg's soon-to-be launched FWD.us PAC boasting how its wealthy tech exec backers would use their companies to 'control the avenues of distribution' for a political message in support of their efforts. Now, the NY Times is reporting that Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook, citing a source who said the Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal. Facebook declined to comment on specific discussions with publishers, but noted it had provided features to help publishers get better traction on Facebook, including tools unveiled in December that let them target their articles to specific groups of Facebook users. The new plan, notes the Times, is championed by Chris Cox, the top lieutenant to Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and a "major supporter" of FWD.us. Exploring Facebook's wooing of the media giants, the Christian Science Monitor asks if social media will control the future of news, citing concerns expressed by Fusion's Felix Salmon, who warns that as news sites sacrifice their brands to reach a wider audience, their incentives for accuracy and editorial judgment will disappear. So, will the Gray Lady's iconic slogan be changed to "All The News That Mark Zuckerberg Sees Fit To Print"?

Submission + - Russian official proposes road that could connect London to NYC

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's great news coming out of Russia for epic road trip lovers. Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed building a highway that would reach from London to Alaska via Russia, a 13,000-mile stretch of road."This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project," the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. "The project should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies."

Submission + - Ordnance Survey releases mapping tool (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by rHBa
rHBa writes: The BBC reports that the UK mapping organisation Ordnance Survey has added 4 new products to its open data portfolio: OS Local, Names, Rivers and Roads. Perhaps the most interesting of the free data sets is OS Local which provides a base map to identify ‘hotspots’ such as property pricing, insurance risk, and crime.

The OS are not creating a new Google Maps-style service of their own but rather are providing their data for use by other third-party apps and online tools. They expect developers and designers to use the data to enhance their own products and improve the information people can access via the web.

What uses would you put this sort of data to if it were available in an easily parsable format for your area?

Submission + - Gene Sequencing at the Speed of Light in TGAC Experiment (theplatform.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: TGAC has an SGI UV 2000 system with 2,500 “Sandy Bridge” Xeon cores and 20TB of shared memory—the latter a necessary feature to keep as much of the genome data in place for analysis versus moving to and from disk during sequence alignment. In essence, during this critical element of bioinformatics, the system seeks strings of DNA characters within a larger string (typically a genome) to find similar genes and thus determine common ancestry, for example. It’s like a complex, memory-intensive “spot the difference” puzzle, which means it can be useful to keep one entire genome (if possible) entirely in memory.

But even with the performance and efficiency savings of a large shared memory machine, it’s still racking up major power and cooling costs. But what if it was possible for this type of processing to happen within a small desktop-sized machine that could plug into a standard main for power and process, on the spot, a human genome? If proven functional at scale, optical processors could displace standard clusters for gene sequencing in a far more power efficient way—there is little heat generated, especially compared to silicon technologies. And even more interesting, what if memory and the scalability limits therein were no longer a concern?

Submission + - Australian government outlines website-blocking scheme (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: The Australian government has revealed its (previously mooted) proposed legislation that will allow copyright holders to apply for court orders that will force ISPs to block access to pirate websites. It forms part of a broader Australian crackdown on online copyright infringement, which also includes a warning notice scheme for alleged infringers.

Submission + - Did Neurons Evolve Twice? (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Fla., first began studying comb jellies, he was puzzled. He knew the primitive sea creatures had nerve cells — responsible, among other things, for orchestrating the darting of their tentacles and the beat of their iridescent cilia. But those neurons appeared to be invisible. The dyes that scientists typically use to stain and study those cells simply didn’t work. The comb jellies’ neural anatomy was like nothing else he had ever encountered.

After years of study, he thinks he knows why. According to traditional evolutionary biology, neurons evolved just once, hundreds of millions of years ago, likely after sea sponges branched off the evolutionary tree. But Moroz thinks it happened twice — once in ancestors of comb jellies, which split off at around the same time as sea sponges, and once in the animals that gave rise to jellyfish and all subsequent animals, including us. He cites as evidence the fact that comb jellies have a relatively alien neural system, employing different chemicals and architecture from our own. “When we look at the genome and other information, we see not only different grammar but a different alphabet,” Moroz said.

Submission + - Now It's Easy To Tell Congress To Fight Patent Trolls

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue writes: Application Developers Alliance is running two campaigns to help get the message to Washington. First is the Fight Patent Trolls initiative, which includes a tool for sending a letter to Senators and Representatives.

The second campaign is Innovators Need Patent Reform, an open letter to Congress that makes the same key points along with a public list of signers.

As both letters note, there are already proposals in both the House and the Senate, plus recommendations from the President, that contain some of the all-important protections that the victims of patent trolls need. Though the future of these specific bills is uncertain, the building blocks are beginning to fall into place, and it's time to run with that momentum.

Submission + - Facebook Sued For Alleged Theft of Data Center Design (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: British engineering company BladeRoom Group says it contacted Facebook in 2011 about using its technique, which involves constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts. What happened next isn’t clear, since much of the public version of BRG’s lawsuit is redacted. But it claims Facebook ended up stealing its ideas and using them to build part of a data center in Lulea, Sweden, that opened last year. 'Facebook’s misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG’s intellectual property was enough,' the company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday at the federal district court in San Jose, California. 'Instead, Facebook went further when it decided to encourage and induce others to use BRG’s intellectual property though an initiative created by Facebook called the ‘Open Compute Project’.'

Submission + - NTT DoCoMo Rolls Out Smartphone-Controlled Wheelchairs (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Japanese phone giant NTT DoCoMo is getting into the mobility game. It's an investor in Whill, a company that produces "smart" wheelchairs, and now DoCoMo is adding technologies such as wireless communication and GPS to the chairs, which will also have real-time, location-monitoring and sharing functions based on DoCoMo’s bicycle-sharing platform.

Submission + - Shape Shifting Frog Goes From Spiky to Smooth, Poses Problems for Taxonomists

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Carrie Arnold reports at National Geographic that on a nighttime walk through Reserva Las Gralarias in Ecuador in 2009, Katherine Krynak spotted a well-camouflaged, marble-size amphibian that was covered in spines. The next day, Krynak pulled the frog from the cup and set it on a smooth white sheet of plastic for Tim to photograph. It wasn't "punk "--it was smooth-skinned. She assumed that, much to her dismay, she must have picked up the wrong frog. "I then put the frog back in the cup and added some moss," says Krynak. "The spines came back... we simply couldn't believe our eyes, our frog changed skin texture! I put the frog back on the smooth white background. Its skin became smooth."

Krynak didn't find another punk rocker frog until 2009, three years after the first sighting. The second animal was covered in thorny spines, like the first, but they had disappeared when she took a closer look. The team then took photos of the shape-shifting frog every ten seconds for several minutes, watching the spines form and then slowly disappear. It's unclear how the frog forms these spines so quickly, or what they're actually made of. The discovery of a variable species poses challenges to amphibian taxonomists and field biologists, who have traditionally used skin texture and presence/absence of tubercles as important discrete traits in diagnosing and identifying species. The discovery illustrates the importance of describing the behavior of new species, and bolsters the argument for preserving amphibian habitats, says Krynak. "Amphibians are declining so rapidly that scientists are oftentimes describing new species from museum specimens because the animals have already gone extinct in the wild, and very recently."

Submission + - Japan to build 250-mile-long, four storey-high wall to stop tsunamis

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Japanese authorities have unveiled plans to build a giant 250-mile long sea barrier to protect its coastline from devastating tsunamis. According to the proposals, the £4.6bn ($6.8bn) barrier would reach 12.5m high in some places – stretching taller than a four storey building. It would be made out of cement – and actually be composed of a chain of smaller sea walls to make construction easier. The plan comes four years after a huge tsunami ravaged Japan’s north-eastern coast.

Submission + - Apple's encrypted iPhone backups leak key user metadata (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Most people think encrypted means hidden. For Apple iDevice users, new research shows that encrypted backups of their devices are coupled with unencrypted metadata that "plainly shows a full list of every application ever installed, software versions, device identifiers, names of all the computers he's ever connected the device to, file names (of contact cards, for instance, to help build a list of known associates), attachment file names for iMessages, file maps, permissions, phone number, hashes, and timestamps for when files are created, accessed, and modified."

Submission + - Microsoft to Rename Modern Apps "Windows Apps"

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: While fumbling with the new application platform for Windows, Microsoft has juggled with different names for the applications: Metro, Modern UI, Windows Store apps, universal apps. Going forward, these apps will be called "Windows apps", Microsoft explained during the Developing for the Windows 10 Hardware Platform session at WinHEC 2015. This is what the future of Windows is all about, and these apps are expected to completely supplant desktop applications. A "Windows app" can run on every device category: phone, PC, Xbox, IoT, and on more obscure devices like the HoloLens. For now the classic Win32 platform will remain fully supported on x86 PCs, but Microsoft is taking a "legacy" attitude towards it.

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