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Comment Re:The economy is crap (Score 1) 222

Also, it's not safe to be in the office yet, even if you're fully vaccinated.

If you've had either the pfizer or moderna vaccinations, then yes, it is actually safe to go back to the office. It's at least as safe as it was prior to covid, probably more so in the short term thanks to the flu being a noshow this year.

There's still a *lot* of debate on how effective the vaccines are against the new variants, with some studies showing as low as 60% (others in the low 90s%).

No, there really isn't any debate, at least not for the pfizer and moderna vaccines, in the scientific community. They're effective. It's a lot more complicated than the 90% and 60% "scare quotes" numbers you hear reported in the press.

But even in the low 90% a 10% chance of getting sick is fine when you're not constantly in contact with people

Except that what you're describing here isn't actually what happens with vaccinated people. There's a lot more than just 90% and 60% to reason about, and it's not nearly as straightforward as you might expect: there's probabilities for getting infected, for having a severe infection, for being hospitalized, for death, and for various kinds of transmission. Being vaccinated affects them *all*, and all of them by different amounts. Those "90% effective" vaccines you hear about actually have nearly 100% reduction in deaths, but that doesn't sell as many eyeballs.

The press is not your friend. The media is not your friend. They don't have the same incentives you do, they don't have the same goals, and they don't have your best interests in mind.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 104

That's awesome, and a really great idea of something to do with your kids.

I tasted some heavy water ~30 years ago, and I remember very specifically that 1) it definitely tasted different, and 2) it seemed sweet. It seems strange that it would take so long for a paper to be written about the topic.
Transportation

Should We Plan For a Future With Fewer Cars? (nytimes.com) 396

Posted by EditorDavid from the sprung-from-cages-on-Highway-9 dept.
The New York Times ran a detailed piece (with some neat interactive graphics) arguing "cities need to plan for a future of fewer cars, a future in which owning an automobile, even an electric one, is neither the only way nor the best way to get around town..."

It asks us to imagine a world where there's suddenly more room for two-way bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and car-free bus lanes. But it also looks at our current conundrum: Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment; they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people... And cars take up space even while they're not in use. They need to be parked, which consumes yet more space on the sides of streets or in garages. Cars take up a lot of space even when they're just looking for parking... New York's drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add to the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they've been given, they're still stuck in gridlock...

"The one thing we know for sure, because we understand geometry, is that if everyone drives, nobody moves," Brent Toderian, the former chief planner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, told me. Even if you're a committed daily driver, "it's in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you're going to be able to drive easier..." Instead of fighting a war on cars, Toderian told me, urbanists should fight a war on car dependency — on cities that leave residents with few choices other than cars. Alleviating car dependency can improve commutes for everyone in a city...

At the moment, many of the most intractable challenges faced by America's urban centers stem from the same cause — a lack of accessible physical space. We live in a time of epidemic homelessness. There's a national housing affordability crisis caused by an extreme shortage of places to live. And now there's a contagion that thrives on indoor overcrowding.

Given these threats, how can American cities continue to justify wasting such enormous tracts of land on death machines?

Comment Re:Maybe first they should get a clue themselves! (Score 1) 156

by dentin (#59712214) Attached to: Google Experimented on Its Own Employees To Get Them To Eat Healthier

Not only is it not as bad as the summary makes it sound, it's actually really cool and really positive.

I *like* what they're trying to do here. Tweaks like what the article describes make it much easier for me to eat healthy and avoid things I know I shouldn't eat. They're trying to encourage healthier employees; I want to be healthy. Win-win.
Social Networks

'OK' is Now a Hate Symbol, the ADL Says (cnn.com) 495

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The "OK" hand gesture is now a hate symbol, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League. From a report: The ADL added that symbol along with several others on Thursday to its long-standing database of slogans and symbols used by extremists. The finger-and-thumb OK sign is universally known for meaning everything is all right or approval of something. But the ADL says while not everyone means it to be hateful, the sign has been co-opted by the alt-right.
Science

Horns Are Growing on Young People's Skulls. Phone Use is To Blame, Research Suggests (washingtonpost.com) 139

Posted by msmash from the what-in-the-world dept.
What we have not yet grasped is the way the tiny machines in front of us are remolding our skeletons, possibly altering not just the behaviors we exhibit but the bodies we inhabit. From a report: New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls -- bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion.

The result is a hook or hornlike feature jutting out from the skull, just above the neck. In academic papers, a pair of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, argues that the prevalence of the bone growth in younger adults points to shifting body posture brought about by the use of modern technology. They say smartphones and other handheld devices are contorting the human form, requiring users to bend their heads forward to make sense of what's happening on the miniature screens. Counter point: The absurd story about smartphones causing kids to sprout horns.
AI

A Philosopher Argues That an AI Can't Be an Artist (technologyreview.com) 185

Posted by msmash from the what's-intelligence-anyway dept.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, a philosophy professor at Harvard, writes for MIT Technology Review: Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to. This claim is not absolute: it depends on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology. Human beings have, in the past, attributed great power and genius even to lifeless totems. It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.

[...] My argument is not that the creator's responsiveness to social necessity must be conscious for the work to meet the standards of genius. I am arguing instead that we must be able to interpret the work as responding that way. It would be a mistake to interpret a machine's composition as part of such a vision of the world. The argument for this is simple. Claims like Kurzweil's that machines can reach human-level intelligence assume that to have a human mind is just to have a human brain that follows some set of computational algorithms -- a view called computationalism. But though algorithms can have moral implications, they are not themselves moral agents. We can't count the monkey at a typewriter who accidentally types out Othello as a great creative playwright. If there is greatness in the product, it is only an accident. We may be able to see a machine's product as great, but if we know that the output is merely the result of some arbitrary act or algorithmic formalism, we cannot accept it as the expression of a vision for human good.
Science

Is Quantum Computing Impossible? (ieee.org) 222

Posted by EditorDavid from the qubits-and-bytes dept.
"Quantum computing is complex and it's not all it's cracked up to be," writes Slashdot reader nickwinlund77, pointing to this new article from IEEE Spectrum arguing it's "not in our foreseeable future": Having spent decades conducting research in quantum and condensed-matter physics, I've developed my very pessimistic view. It's based on an understanding of the gargantuan technical challenges that would have to be overcome to ever make quantum computing work.... Experts estimate that the number of qubits needed for a useful quantum computer, one that could compete with your laptop in solving certain kinds of interesting problems, is between 1,000 and 100,000. So the number of continuous parameters describing the state of such a useful quantum computer at any given moment must be at least 2**1,000, which is to say about 10**300. That's a very big number indeed. How big? It is much, much greater than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. To repeat: A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. At this point in a description of a possible future technology, a hardheaded engineer loses interest....

[I]t's absolutely unimaginable how to keep errors under control for the 10300 continuous parameters that must be processed by a useful quantum computer. Yet quantum-computing theorists have succeeded in convincing the general public that this is feasible.... Even without considering these impossibly large numbers, it's sobering that no one has yet figured out how to combine many physical qubits into a smaller number of logical qubits that can compute something useful. And it's not like this hasn't long been a key goal.... On the hardware front, advanced research is under way, with a 49-qubit chip (Intel), a 50-qubit chip (IBM), and a 72-qubit chip (Google) having recently been fabricated and studied. The eventual outcome of this activity is not entirely clear, especially because these companies have not revealed the details of their work...

I believe that, appearances to the contrary, the quantum computing fervor is nearing its end. That's because a few decades is the maximum lifetime of any big bubble in technology or science. After a certain period, too many unfulfilled promises have been made, and anyone who has been following the topic starts to get annoyed by further announcements of impending breakthroughs. What's more, by that time all the tenured faculty positions in the field are already occupied. The proponents have grown older and less zealous, while the younger generation seeks something completely new and more likely to succeed.
He advises quantum computing researchers to follow the advice of IBM physicist Rolf Landauer. Decades ago Landauer warned quantum computing's proponents that they needed a disclaimer in all of their publications.

"This scheme, like all other schemes for quantum computation, relies on speculative technology, does not in its current form take into account all possible sources of noise, unreliability and manufacturing error, and probably will not work."
Cellphones

Study of Cellphone Risks Finds 'Some Evidence' of Link To Cancer, At Least In Male Rats (nytimes.com) 153

Posted by BeauHD from the many-caveats-apply dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience." Moreover, the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago. Any concerns arising from the study thus would seem to apply mainly to early adopters who used those bygone devices, not to users of current models.

The lowest level of radiation in the federal study was equal to the maximum exposure that federal regulations allow for cellphone users. That level of exposure rarely occurs in typical cellphone use, the toxicology agency said. The highest level was four times higher than the permitted maximum. The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years -- far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old. Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population. "The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called schwannomas, compared to none in the control group," the NYT reports.

It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.
AI

Flex Logix Says It's Solved Deep Learning's DRAM Problem (ieee.org) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the problem-solved dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Deep learning has a DRAM problem. Systems designed to do difficult things in real time, such as telling a cat from a kid in a car's backup camera video stream, are continuously shuttling the data that makes up the neural network's guts from memory to the processor. The problem, according to startup Flex Logix, isn't a lack of storage for that data; it's a lack of bandwidth between the processor and memory. Some systems need four or even eight DRAM chips to sling the 100s of gigabits to the processor, which adds a lot of space and consumes considerable power. Flex Logix says that the interconnect technology and tile-based architecture it developed for reconfigurable chips will lead to AI systems that need the bandwidth of only a single DRAM chip and consume one-tenth the power.

Mountain View-based Flex Logix had started to commercialize a new architecture for embedded field programmable gate arrays (eFPGAs). But after some exploration, one of the founders, Cheng C. Wang, realized the technology could speed neural networks. A neural network is made up of connections and "weights" that denote how strong those connections are. A good AI chip needs two things, explains the other founder Geoff Tate. One is a lot of circuits that do the critical "inferencing" computation, called multiply and accumulate. "But what's even harder is that you have to be very good at bringing in all these weights, so that the multipliers always have the data they need in order to do the math that's required. [Wang] realized that the technology that we have in the interconnect of our FPGA, he could adapt to make an architecture that was extremely good at loading weights rapidly and efficiently, giving high performance and low power."
Medicine

Microplastics Found In Human Stools For the First Time (nytimes.com) 307

Posted by BeauHD from the stinky-news dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics.

The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in our oceans. But the paper suggests that microplastics are entering our bodies through other means, as well. To conduct the study, they selected volunteers from each country who kept food diaries for a week and provided stool samples. Dr. Philipp Schwabl, a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna who led the study, and his colleagues analyzed the samples with a spectrometer. Up to nine different kinds of plastics were detected, ranging in size from .002 to .02 inches. The most common plastics detected were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate -- both major components of plastic bottles and caps.
Space

Pluto Should Be Reclassified as a Planet, Experts Say (sciencedaily.com) 194

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The reason Pluto lost its planet status is not valid, according to new research from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. From a report: In 2006, the International Astronomical Union, a global group of astronomy experts, established a definition of a planet that required it to "clear" its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit. Since Neptune's gravity influences its neighboring planet Pluto, and Pluto shares its orbit with frozen gases and objects in the Kuiper belt, that meant Pluto was out of planet status. However, in a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Icarus, UCF planetary scientist Philip Metzger, who is with the university's Florida Space Institute, reported that this standard for classifying planets is not supported in the research literature. Metzger, who is lead author on the study, reviewed scientific literature from the past 200 years and found only one publication -- from 1802 -- that used the clearing-orbit requirement to classify planets, and it was based on since-disproven reasoning. He said moons such as Saturn's Titan and Jupiter's Europa have been routinely called planets by planetary scientists since the time of Galileo.

"The IAU definition would say that the fundamental object of planetary science, the planet, is supposed to be a defined on the basis of a concept that nobody uses in their research," Metzger said. "And it would leave out the second-most complex, interesting planet in our solar system." "We now have a list of well over 100 recent examples of planetary scientists using the word planet in a way that violates the IAU definition, but they are doing it because it's functionally useful," he said. "It's a sloppy definition," Metzger said of the IAU's definition. "They didn't say what they meant by clearing their orbit. If you take that literally, then there are no planets, because no planet clears its orbit."

Comment Re:Is "mansplaining" a pejorative term? (Score 4, Interesting) 1056

So if I say "you're cluelessly explaining", versus "you're cluelessly explaining in a MAN way", does the second add any information besides the implication that men are bad? If "mansplaining" is a pejorative term, this situation becomes simple: in the US, if someone is a bigot in public and gets caught, their company typically fires them.

I don't think you've quite gotten the definition of "mansplaining", it's men making simple, condescending explanations to women on the assumption that women are either ignorant or less intelligent. Basically she's accusing him of being a bigot and that he'd not talk like that to her if she was a man. However the world is full of armchair quarterbacks who offer advice or opinions on things they know very little about, often dismissing or belittling experts with many years of experience.

As a multi-decade game developer, I can't even count the number of times somebody has "mansplained" various aspects of game design to me. Thing is, I'm male, and everyone knows it. The world is indeed full of armchair quarterbacks, and men aren't exempt from it.

God, if only my typical armchair quarterback message was as polite as Derior's. What wonderful world that would be.

Comment Re:Good. (Score 1) 301

by dentin (#56786688) Attached to: Most Organizations Are Not Fully Embracing DevOps

I've seen it work at large scale in exactly one place.

In order for dev/ops to work well, a lot of things have to be done correctly. Most of it is culture and design of the organizations and communications channels; social engineering in terms of how the groups are set up and their incentives. Failure to do this is generally why dev/ops fails or doesn't perform.

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