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Comment NASA's SLC Team is phoning it in... (Score 1) 163

by djupedal (#62271905) Attached to: Sea Level To Rise Up To a Foot by 2050, Interagency Report Finds
I had an iOS app in the store ten years ago that would use the user's location to show a detailed/satellite view map and sea level change based on their choice of increased ocean height. You could easily see if where you were was at risk, depending on, or, pick any location on the planet, same thing.This was done by layering map data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Google maps and iOS localization. All that data, all those minds, all that funding and NASA still hasn't brought it to a casual user visualization level w/any of their 'tools', yet....sad. Hamlington - if your team wishes for that data to have a real impact, present it to people, in a manner that they can see how it affects them, not just agencies destined to use it to harvest yet more funding for their own pet projects.

Comment Re:Threats are a waste of time (Score 1) 115

Typical small-minded attitude of a domestic reactionary, lacking real world experience. Live in China for a few years and you'll learn why it's a joke for America to lecture them on human rights. Consider how many people are behind bars here, and how our judicial system, bad as it is, is not something China, as an example, could ever adopt.

Comment Re:No worries (Score 1) 115

Pls. back it down a notch - the newly appointed wonk is one of a group that decides how internal info is crafted into public messaging...publicity. He can use the mic to spread current administration propaganda, but he is not the new -head- of NOAA. I agree this is alarming, but it helps to be factual when you want others to engage.

Submission + - Amazon CEO 'Can't Guarantee' Policy Against Using Seller Data Was Violated

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the “Online Platforms and Market Power” virtual antitrust hearing today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke about a policy that is meant to prevent the company from using seller specific data to help it determine what products it should manufacture and sell itself. “What I can tell you is, we have a policy against using seller specific data to aid our private label business,” Bezos said. “But I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.”

Submission + - Attention Rogue Drone Pilots: AI Can See You (ieee.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The minute details of rogue drone’s movements in the air may unwittingly reveal the drone pilot’s location—possibly enabling authorities to bring the drone down before, say, it has the opportunity to disrupt air traffic or cause an accident. And it’s possible without requiring expensive arrays of radio triangulation and signal-location antennas.

So says a team of Israeli researchers who have trained an AI drone-tracking algorithm to reveal the drone operator’s whereabouts, with a better than 80 per cent accuracy level. They are now investigating whether the algorithm can also uncover the pilot’s level of expertise and even possibly their identity.

Weiss said his group tested their drone tracking algorithm using Microsoft Research’s open source drone and autonomous vehicle simulatorAirSim. The group presented their work-in-progress at theFourth International Symposiumon Cyber Security, Cryptology and Machine Learning at Ben-Gurion University earlier this month.

Theirpaperboasts a 73 per cent accuracy rate in discovering drone pilots’ locations. Weiss said that in the few weeks since publishing that result, they’ve now improved the accuracy rate to 83 per cent.

Submission + - AI distinguishes birds that even experts can't (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It’s a fact of life for birders that some species are fiendishly difficult to tell apart—in particular, the sparrows and drab songbirds dubbed “little brown jobs.” Distinguishing individuals is nearly impossible. Now, a computer program analyzing photos and videos has accomplished that feat. The advance promises to reveal new information on bird behaviors.

The tool, called a convolutional neural network, sifts through thousands of pictures to figure out which visual features can be used to classify a given image; it then uses that information to classify new images. When given photos it hadn’t seen before, the neural network correctly identified individual birds 90% of the time, often better than human experts.

Submission + - SPAM: Mr. Bezos, Mr. Cook, Mr. Pichai, and Mr. Zuckerberg (Virtually) Go To Washington

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are set to testify via video conference in a blockbuster U.S. House Judiciary Committee antitrust hearing. GeekWire offers a tl;dr summary of Bezos' prepared opening statement. You can find the full statements of all four CEOs on the House Judiciary Committee's Hearings page for "Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google," which is where you can also catch the livestream.

For what it's worth, Bezos wins the prize for the most-compelling opening statement of the four. Citing examples of how their companies have helped during the global pandemic, Pichai boasts that thanks to Google, Austin fitness company Kettlebell Kings' "YouTube Channel grew 20%, helping them to grow their digital revenue and sales, which are up 3000% since COVID hit," while Bezos explains Amazon's contribution thusly: "During the COVID-19 crisis, we hired an additional 175,000 employees, including many laid off from other jobs during the economic shutdown. We spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter alone to get essential products to customers and keep our employees safe during the COVID-19 crisis." Advantage Bezos.

Submission + - Scientists Solve Mystery Behind Body Odor (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of York traced the source of underarm odor to a particular enzyme in a certain microbe that lives in the human armpit. To prove the enzyme was the chemical culprit, the scientists transferred it to an innocent member of the underarm microbe community and noted – to their delight – that it too began to emanate bad smells. The work paves the way for more effective deodorants and antiperspirants, the scientists believe, and suggests that humans may have inherited the mephitic microbes from our ancient primate ancestors.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the York scientists describe how they delved inside Staphylococcus hominis to learn how it made thioalcohols. They discovered an enzyme that converts Cys-Gly-3M3SH released by apocrine glands into the pungent thioalcohol, 3M3SH. The bacteria take up the molecule and eat some of it, but the rest they spit out, and that is one of the key molecules we recognize as body odor. Having discovered the “BO enzyme”, the researchers confirmed its role by transferring it into Staphylococcus aureus, a common relative that normally has no role in body odor. “Just by moving the gene in, we got Staphylococcus aureus that made body odor," one of the researchers said. "Our noses are extremely good at detecting these thioalcohols at extremely low thresholds, which is why they are really important for body odor. They have a very characteristic cheesy, oniony smell that you would recognize. They are incredibly pungent."

Submission + - Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decade (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two theoretical physicists specializing in complex systems conclude that global deforestation due to human activities is on track to trigger the “irreversible collapse” of human civilization within the next two to four decades. If we continue destroying and degrading the world’s forests, Earth will no longer be able to sustain a large human population, according to a peer-reviewed paper published this May in Nature Scientific Reports. They say that if the rate of deforestation continues, "all the forests would disappear approximately in 100–200 years.” "Clearly it is unrealistic to imagine that the human society would start to be affected by the deforestation only when the last tree would be cut down," they write.

This trajectory would make the collapse of human civilization take place much earlier due to the escalating impacts of deforestation on the planetary life-support systems necessary for human survival—including carbon storage, oxygen production, soil conservation, water cycle regulation, support for natural and human food systems, and homes for countless species. In the absence of these critical services, “it is highly unlikely to imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on Earth without [forests]” the study points out. “The progressive degradation of the environment due to deforestation would heavily affect human society and consequently the human collapse would start much earlier.”

Submission + - Fired EPA Scientists To Release Air Pollution Report (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nearly one year ago, the Trump administration fired a panel of more than two dozen scientific experts who assisted the Environmental Protection Agency in its review of air quality standards for particulate matter. Now, as the EPA prepares its report on those standards later this month, 20 of those scientists are meeting independently to release their own assessment of current air pollution levels, with a focus on the particles from fossil fuels that can make people sick.

These scientists and researchers, former members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) on particulate matter, said the EPA has stripped the panel down to its core seven members, who are ill-equipped to set air quality standards and don’t have the time to do it. “They fired the particulate matter review panel and they said the chartered CASAC would do the review,” Chris Zarba, who served as the staff director of the Scientific Advisory Board at the EPA until 2018, said. “In the history of the agency this has never happened. The new panel is unqualified and the new panel has said they were unqualified.” The new panel feels their work is necessary for the very reasons that particle pollution is regulated by the EPA: because extended exposure can cause premature death, nonfatal heart attacks, irregular heartbeat, aggravated asthma, decreased lung function and respiratory issues, according to the agency.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Should People Be Able To Shop Anonymously On The Internet? 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Picture this: You want to buy 3 small items from some online retailer totalling about 50 bucks. A programming book, a USB thumbdrive and an HDMI cable. But you don't want to give this online retailer your full name, credit card number, email address, home postal address, phone number or other data for this insignificant little 50 Dollar online transaction, nor do you want to bother with "registering an account" at the online retailer's webpage with password hassles and such. You want to buy quickly and anonymously, just like you can from a bricks and mortar shop with cash. You now instruct your bank — or another online shopping intermediary you DO trust with your data — to pay for those 3 items, receive them, and send them on to your home address. The online retailer gets 50 bucks as usual, but does NOT get identifying private data about you. You just shopped online, without having to bend over and ID yourself in X different ways to some online retailer, and your private info didn't go into yet another who-knows-where forever-database that may some day be hacked or compromised. Why is this simple, simple service not really a thing in the real world? Why can you walk into a bricks and mortar shop in most countries, pick out some products, pay in cash and walk out, and when you want to buy the exact same (non-dangerous) items online, you have to tell some profit-oriented retailer all sorts of stuff about yourself? Why is real world store shopping pretty much anonymous — as it has been for centuries — and online shopping almost like being ID'd before boarding a flight at an airport?

Submission + - Some Corals Grow After 'Fatal' Warming (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the first time ever, scientists have found corals that were thought to have been killed by heat stress have recovered, a glimmer of hope for the world's climate change-threatened reefs. The chance discovery, made by Diego K. Kersting from the Freie University of Berlin and the University of Barcelona during diving expeditions in the Spanish Mediterranean, was reported in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Kersting and co-author Cristina Linares have been carrying out long-term monitoring of 243 colonies of the endangered reef-builder coral Cladocora caespitosa since 2002, allowing them to describe in previous papers recurring warming-related mass mortalities. [T]he researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several years, growing back and starting a new skeleton. They were then able to gradually re-colonize dead areas through budding.

Submission + - Autistic? There's a company in Los Angeles that wants to hire you (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Lauders Apartment
Lauders Apartment writes: If you are autistic and have a college degree, there is an 85% chance you are unemployed. This is because people with autism often have a hard time fitting in at regular companies and getting through the job interview. A company in Los Angeles called auticon (Sir Richard Branson is involved) is hiring autistic men and women who have expertise in coding, DevOps, software development, full-stack, etc. This company was on a TV show called "Employable Me" on A&E where they interview people with autism for these jobs. They were in the New York Times too. (link below). Their website is www.auticon.us if you want to check it out.

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