An anonymous reader writes: There's an interesting analysis, which looks at several data points, to conclude that media may have flamed fears that drove the world to enforce lockdowns. From the story: "To put things in perspective, the virus is now known to have an infection fatality rate for most people under 65 that is no more dangerous than driving 13 to 101 miles per day. Even by conservative estimates, the odds of COVID-19 death are roughly in line with existing baseline odds of dying in any given year. Yet we put billions of young healthy people under house arrest, stopped cancer screenings, and sunk ourselves into the worst level of unemployment since the Great Depression. This from a virus that bears a survival rate of 99.99% if you are a healthy individual under 50 years old (1, 2).

"New York City reached over a 25% infection rate and yet 99.98% of all people in the city under 45 survived, making it comparable to death rates by normal accidents. But of course the whole linchpin of the lockdown argument is that it would have been even worse without such a step. Sweden never closed down borders, primary schools, restaurants, or businesses, and never mandated masks, yet 99.998% of all their people under 60 have survived and their hospitals were never overburdened. Why did we lock down the majority of the population who were never at significant risk? What will be the collateral damage? That is what this series will explore.

"In early February the World Health Organization said that travel bans were not necessary. On Feb. 17, just a month before the first U.S. lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that this new strain of coronavirus possessed "just minuscule" danger to the United States. In early March the U.S. surgeon general said that "masks are NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching coronavirus." As late as March 9, the day Italy started its lockdown, Dr. Fauci did not encourage cancellation of "large gatherings in a place [even if] you have community spread," calling it "a judgment call." NBA games were still being played. So how did we go from such a measured tone to locking up 97% of Americans in their homes seemingly overnight?" There's an argument to be made that lockdowns was perhaps the most responsible action a government could have enforced. Additionally, some Silicon Vally tech executives have argued that the media downplayed the significance of the coronavirus pandemic early on.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Studies of the origin of life are replete with paradoxes. Take this doozy: Every known organism on Earth uses a suite of proteins -- and the DNA that helps build it -- to construct the building blocks of our cells. But those very building blocks are also needed to make DNA and proteins. The solution to this chicken-and-egg conundrum may lie at the site of hydrothermal vents, fissures in the sea floor that spew hot water and a wealth of other chemicals, researchers report today. Scientists say they have found that a trio of metal compounds abundant around the vents can cause hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) to react to form a collection of energy-rich organic compounds critical to cell growth. And the high temperatures and pressures around the vents themselves may have jump-started life on Earth, the team argues.

The new work is "thrilling," says Thomas Carell, an origin of life chemist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who was not affiliated with the new project. The organic molecules the study generated include formate, acetate, and pyruvate, which Carell calls "the most fundamental molecules of energy metabolism," the process of converting nutrients into cell growth. The new results support a long-held idea about the origin of life known as "metabolism first hypothesis." It posits that geochemical processes on early Earth created a stew of simple energy-rich compounds that drove the synthesis of complex molecules, which eventually provided the materials for Darwinian evolution and life. The findings appear in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The Chang'e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. From a report: China's robotic Chang'e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon's far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover's instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, a team of Chinese and Italian researchers showed that the top layer of the lunar soil on that part of the moon is considerably thicker than some expected -- about 130 feet of what scientists call regolith.

"It's a fine, dusty, sandy environment," said Elena Pettinelli, a professor of mathematics and physics at Rome Tre University who was one of the authors of the paper. Based on what NASA astronauts observed during the Apollo moon landings, other scientists said they would have expected one-quarter as much soil. "That's a lot of regolith," said David A. Kring, a senior scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who is not involved with the Chinese moon mission. "That's food for thought." Chang'e-4 landed just over a year ago inside Von Karman crater, a 110-mile-wide depression, and continues to explore a part of the moon that has not been seen up close before.

In a new article in Forbes, a Business Technology professor at the Villanova School of Business argues that the way we build software applications is changing: If you're living in the 21st century you turn to your cloud provider for help where many of the most powerful technologies are now offered as-a-service. When your requirements cannot be completely fulfilled from cloud offerings, you build something. But what does "building" mean? What does "programming" mean...? You can program from scratch. You can go to Github (where you can find code of all flavors). Or you can — if you're a little lazier — turn to low-code or no-code programming platforms to develop your applications.

All of this falls under the umbrella of what, the Gartner Group defines as the "democratization of expertise":

"Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (for example, ML, application development) or business domain expertise (for example, sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training...."

[T]he new repositories, platforms and tools are enabling a whole new set of what we used to call "programming." As Satya Nadella said, "Every business will become a software business, build applications, use advanced analytics and provide SAAS services," and as Sajjad Daya says so well in Hackernoon, "Coding takes too long for it to be both profitable and competitively priced. That's not the case with no-code platforms, though. The platforms do the complicated programming automatically, slashing development time..."

The technology democracy has forever changed corporate strategy. And what does this mean? It means that the technical team scales on cue. But "technical" means competencies around Github, low-code/no-code platforms and especially business domains... [A]ll of this levels the technology playing field among companies — so long as they understand the skills and competencies they need.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons aired The Miseducation Of Lisa Simpson, an episode in which Marge — with the help of a song from John Legend ("STEM, it's not just for dorks, dweebs and nerds / It'll turn all your dumb kids to Zuckerbergs") — convinces Springfield to use a windfall the town reaped by seizing shipwreck treasure to build the Springfield STEM Academy to "prepare kids for the jobs of tomorrow."

All goes well initially — both Lisa and Bart love their new school — until Lisa realizes there's a two-tiered curriculum. While children classified as "divergent pathway assimilators" (i.e., gifted) like Lisa study neural networks and C+++ upstairs, kids like Bart are relegated to the basement where they're prepared via VR and gamified learning for a life of menial, gig economy side-hustles — charging e-scooters, shopping for rich people's produce, driving ride-share.
The school's administrator was even played by Silicon Valley actor Zach Woods, who delivered one of the episode's harshest lines, notes The A.V. Club.

"Staging a Norma Rae-style revolt at how the 'non-gifted' students are being trained to do everyone else's dirty work, Lisa's brought up short with a startled 'Eep' by Woods' administrator asking, 'Isn't that the point of a gifted class?'"

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: NASA will launch a new rover to Mars this July — and 28,000 American schoolchildren wrote essays with suggestions for what NASA should name it.

NASA has now selected the top nine finalists, which they'll let the public vote on through Monday on a special web page where they're also displaying the schoolchildren's essays. "Scientists are tenacious," wrote one student who suggested the name Tenacity. "It is what keeps them thinking and experimenting... When scientists make mistakes they see what they did wrong and then try again.

"If they didn't have tenacity, Mars rovers wouldn't be a thing."
The new rover will also be carrying the names of 10,932,295 earthlings, etched onto a microchip.

Bloomberg points out that because Mars and Earth are unusually close in July and August -- a mere 39 million miles -- another rover will also be launched by the international ExoMars programme (led by the European Space Agency and the Russian Roscosmos State Corporation), while the United Arab Emirates will also try sending an orbiter to Mars, and China will deploy "an orbiter to circle the planet and a rover to land on it."

The cost of living in China has outstripped the 3% government target for the first time in a decade, and a big part of the problem is the soaring price of pork, which is being driven up by a widespread outbreak of African swine fever (ASF). From a report: Pork is a big deal in China. The average Chinese person gets through about 30kg (66 pounds) of pork a year (by comparison, people in US eat about 26kg of beef a year and UK consumers about 18kg). Since August 2018, when China notified the World Organisation for Animal Health that ASF was in the country, the disease has spread with extraordinary speed. Some 40% of Chinese pigs -- hundreds of millions of animals -- have now been lost, and the result has been a chronic shortage of pork and rocketing prices. The Chinese government has been forced to dig into its gigantic emergency reserves of frozen meat. "The producer price has risen 125% since July," said Rupert Claxton of international food consultancy Girafood. That increase has helped drive up China's inflation rate, which in October broke through the government target of 3% to hit 3.8%.

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey called out his counterpart at Facebook, saying Mark Zuckerberg has a "major gap and flaw" in his argument for free speech on social media. From a report: "We talk a lot about speech and expression and we don't talk about reach enough, and we don't talk about amplification," Dorsey said at the Twitter News Summit in New York. "And reach and amplification was not represented in that speech." Zuckerberg gave a lengthy address at Georgetown University last week in which he explained that Facebook's approach to content -- which favors letting people say whatever they want -- is part of an American tradition of free speech in the marketplace of ideas. He evoked the civil rights movement and other grassroots campaigns that were allowed to spread because of free speech.

Like Twitter, Facebook's algorithm for sorting posts in a person's social media feed gives heavier weight to those that users share and comment on. Often that means the most incendiary or surprising messages find their way to the biggest audience. Other than addressing his algorithm, Zuckerberg didn't talk about the difference between content that naturally goes viral and promoted posts that people pay to send to a bigger audience. "It was a major gap and flaw in the substance he was getting across," Dorsey said.

What's the world's most widely used cryptocurrency? If you think it's Bitcoin, which accounts for about 70% of all the digital-asset world's market value, you're probably wrong. From a report: While concrete figures on trading volumes are hard to come by in this often murky corner of finance, data from CoinMarketCap.com show that the token with the highest daily and monthly trading volume is Tether, whose market capitalization is more than 30 times smaller. Tether's volume surpassed that of Bitcoin's for the first time in April and has consistently exceeded it since early August at about $21 billion per day, the data provider says.

With Tether's monthly trading volume about 18% higher than that of Bitcoin, it's arguably the most important coin in the crypto ecosystem. Tether's also one of the main reasons why regulators regard cryptocurrencies with a wary eye, and have put the breaks on crypto exchange-traded funds amid concern of market manipulation. "If there is no Tether, we lose a massive amount of daily volume -- around $1 billion or more depending on the data source," said Lex Sokolin, global financial technology co-head at ConsenSys, which offers blockchain technology. "Some of the concerning potential patters of trading in the market may start to fall away."

Two years ago, Google became the first company of its size to buy as much renewable electricity as the electricity it used. But as the company grows, so does its demand for power. To stay ahead of that demand, Google just made the largest corporate renewable energy purchase in history, with 18 new energy deals around the world that will help build infrastructure worth more than $2 billion. From a report: The projects include massive new solar farms in places like Texas and North Carolina where the company has data centers. "Bringing incremental renewable energy to the grids where we consume energy is a critical component of pursuing 24x7 carbon-free energy for all of our operations," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post today. While most of the renewable energy the company has purchased in the past has come from wind farms, the dropping cost of solar power means that several of the new deals are solar plants. In Chile, a new project combines both wind and solar power, making it possible to generate clean energy for longer each day.

Multiple Slashdotters are reporting the unfortunate news that famed free software advocate and computer scientist Richard Stallman has resigned from MIT. Slashdot reader iamacat writes: Following outrage over his remarks about Jefferey Epstein's victims, Richard Stallman has resigned from his position in MIT, effective immediately. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him -- even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon. "I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT," Stallman wrote in an email, referring to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations."

Stallman also resigned as president from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as well as from the organization's board of directors, FSF announced shortly after.

Slashdot reader dryriver asks a scary what-if question about the detailed digital profiles of our online and offline lives that are being created by "hundreds of privately owned, profit-driven companies operating with no meaningful oversight." Digital profiles are just a collection of 1s and 0s and are wide open to digital tampering or digital distortion. You could easily be made to appear to have done just about anything from visiting questionnable websites on the dark web, to buying things that you never actually bought or would have an interest in buying, to being in places in the physical world at given dates and times that you would never actually visit in real life. In other words, your digital profile(s) may make you appear to be a completely different person, doing completely different things, from who you objectively are in actuality.

For now, these digital profiles mostly sit in data centers around the world, and try to serve ads to you. But what happens if someday your digital profile is weaponized against you?

What happens in a situation where you need to prove that you are a morally upright, law-abiding person, and your digital profile(s) are accessed, and claim that you are anything but a moral, law-abiding person? What happens if these digital profiles are someday routinely examined by courts of law to determine whether you are a person of good character or not?

What happens if one of your digital profiles is purposely leaked into the public realm someday, and your "digital mirror image" did all sorts of crappy things that you, in real life, would never do?

H&âOEouml;vding spent four years developing their next-generation bicycle helmet, the Metro reports: Easier to use, adjustable and enabled with Bluetooth technology, the helmet, according to H&âOEouml;vding 's CEO Frederik Carling, is the world's safest. Donning advanced airbag tech and functions such as the ability to contact next-of-kin in the event of an accident, Frederik and the team spent years surveying people to make the kit as bespoke, safe and desirable as possible. Fredrik says: "Our surveys of cyclists in seven major European cities show that 70% would cycle more if they felt safer. We have focused on this and want to contribute to greater safety."

New features include the new patented airbag, along with an upgraded battery that can last for up to 15 hours. An iOS and Android compatible app allows the company to gather data relating to where urban cyclists experience the most accidents. The result? Data that can be used to argue for more cycling infrastructure and, of course, tech that saves more lives...

When the design-savvy headgear is activated, it registers movements 200 times a second and in the event of an accident, is inflated in 0.1 seconds to enclose the head and hold the cyclist's neck in place. 185,000 cyclists currently use it, with over 4,000 saying that it had made a significant difference during close calls.

In addition to all its safety features, Carling hopes that his helmet can be used to help the environment in the long run. "Cycling may be the answer to many of the challenges relating to the environment, congestion in cities and health, and we want to take cyclist protection to the next level," he says.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Kyle Milliken, a 29-year-old Arkansas man, was released last week from a federal work camp. He served 17 months for hacking into the servers of several companies and stealing their user databases. Some of the victims included Disqus, from where he stole 17.5 million user records, Kickstarter, from where he took 5.2 million records, and Imgur, with 1.7 million records. For years, Milliken and his partners operated by using the credentials stolen from other companies to break into more lucrative accounts on other services.

If users had reused their passwords, Milliken would access their email inboxes, Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace accounts, and post spam promoting various products and services. From 2010 to 2014, Milliken and his colleagues operated a successful spam campaign using this simple scheme, making more than $1.4 million in profits, and living the high life. Authorities eventually caught up with the hacker. He was arrested in 2014, and collaborated with authorities for the next years, until last year, when it leaked that he was collaborating with authorities and was blackballed on the cybercrime underground....

In an interview with ZDNet last week, Milliken said he's planning to go back to school and then start a career in cyber-security... [H]e publicly apologized to the Kickstarter CEO on Twitter. "I've had a lot of time to reflect and see things from a different perspective," Milliken told ZDNet. "When you're hacking or have an objective to dump a database, you don't think about who's on the other end. There's a lot of talented people, a ton of work, and even more money that goes into creating a company... there's a bit of remorse for putting these people through cyber hell."
He also has a message for internet uesrs: stop reusing your passwords. And he also suggests enabling two-factor authentication.

"I honestly think that the big three email providers (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google) added this feature because of me."

"A comprehensive national privacy law cannot be developed overnight..." argues the chief "data ethics officer" for Acxiom, a database marketing company, in a New York Times op-ed: Still, people deserve to know who is collecting data about them, why it's being collected and the types of companies with which the data is being shared. They should also have assurances that companies collecting data have adequate measures in place to ensure security and confidentiality. That's why, until we have a national privacy law, we should pursue a national data broker registry to help consumers discover this information -- and learn the difference between good data actors and bad ones.

People who today use Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple understand that these companies collect their data in an effort to improve their experience and to generate revenue by selling advertising. But there is less awareness of companies -- generally referred to as data brokers -- that collect, source and otherwise license information about consumers who are not their customers. The growing commercial use of data is outpacing the public's understanding....

Data-driven marketing helps businesses reduce wasteful ad spending and helps fund free or low-cost consumer products and services on the internet, including free search, email and social media platforms, as well as customized content. In many cases, it also funds the press and other channels of expression. Our business is underpinned by policies on comprehensive data governance, in an effort to ensure that data use is transparent, fair and just, that there are benefits for both businesses and consumers. We help marketers follow the golden rule of business -- "Know Your Customer" -- so that they can deliver a better experience. Unfortunately, the irresponsible actions of some individuals and organizations have cast a shadow over our industry. They violate consumers' privacy, profit from stolen data and commit fraud.

Increasing transparency -- initially through a data broker registry and ultimately through a robust and balanced national privacy law -- would help reduce the conflation of legitimate, regulated entities with unethical companies and criminals.