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Comment Re:So, Intelligent Design? (Score 1) 127

by menegator (#64311653) Attached to: 'Monumental' Experiment Suggests How Life on Earth May Have Started
You see engineering in genetics because *you* are expecting to see, because even if you claim you have a grasp of statistics, you doesn't take into account a very very important factor, the interactions, you see it's not only the time frame and the atoms and the molecules, but also their interactions. 4^150 is indeed a big number, but guess what, compared to some numbers from graph theory is practically zero.

Submission + - Population Collapse Almost Wiped Out Human Ancestors, Say Scientists (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Early human ancestors came close to eradication in a severe evolutionary bottleneck between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, according to scientists. A genomics analysis of more than 3,000 living people suggested that our ancestors’ total population plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals for about 117,000 years. Scientists believe that an extreme climate event could have led to the bottleneck that came close to wiping out our ancestral line.

“The numbers that emerge from our study correspond to those of species that are currently at risk of extinction,” said Prof Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the research. However, Manzi and his colleagues believe that the existential pressures of the bottleneck could have triggered the emergence of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, which some believe is the shared ancestor of modern humans and our cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo sapiens are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years ago. “It was lucky [that we survived], but we know from evolutionary biology that the emergence of a new species can happen in small, isolated populations,” said Manzi.

Prof Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the research, said: “It’s an extraordinary length of time. It’s remarkable that we did get through at all. For a population of that size, you just need one bad climate event, an epidemic, a volcanic eruption and you’re gone.” The decline appears to coincide with significant changes in global climate that turned glaciations into long-term events, a decrease in sea surface temperatures, and a possible long period of drought in Africa and Eurasia. The team behind the work said the time window also coincides with a relatively empty period on the fossil record. However, Stringer said there was not convincing evidence for a global “blank” in the fossil record of early humans, raising the possibility that whatever caused the bottleneck was a more local phenomenon. “Maybe this bottleneck population was stuck in some area of Africa surrounded by desert,” he said.

Submission + - The ex-Facebook data expert who helped Trump built a weapon to take him down (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: Whoever wins, the digital political wars aren't going anywhere, and one groupsays it's built the most powerful weapon for persuading voters with Facebook ads, with a hundred experiments, an unparalleled dataset, and a Silicon Valley "dream team" of data and social scientists. This spring, it says its ads lowered Trump's approval rate by 3.6%.

The group's leader, James Barnes, helped pioneer some of its cutting-edge techniques in 2016 while working for the other side: he was the Facebook "embed" who taught the Trump campaign how to use Facebook and Instagram with tremendous success. His new effort—targeting low-information voters on all sides of the spectrum, as part of an aggressive $75 million campaign by a well-funded Democratic super PAC—isn't just an implicit attempt to make up for his work for Trump; it's a response to the mess his former has helped make, and an election marred by waves of misinformation. “One of the reasons that the work that we’re doing is so important, just reminding low-information voters—folks whom we have a lot of evidence that their opinions are easier to shift, and putting mainstream, fact-checked news in front of folks that help them understand what’s actually going on in the world—is because all of the decisions that Facebook has made, especially in the past few years."

Comment Re:That's how science works (Score 1) 542

by menegator (#60368837) Attached to: Why the Pandemic Is So Bad in America
Godel proved that every system that contains Peano arithmetic also contains propositions that cannot be either proved or disproved. On the other hand, the truth of a correctly proved proposition cannot disputed in its system. For example, the fact that in Riemann geometry there cannot be drawn a parallel to a line from a point out of this line, doesn't negate the fact that in Euclidean geometry the sum of the angles of a triangle is always rads

Comment Re:Where is Stallman? (Score 1) 44

by menegator (#59304970) Attached to: Bell Labs Plans Big 50th Anniversary Event For Unix

Faces of open source

Unix was not open source. (It was licensed to parties outside of AT&T, but it was not open source.)

The title of the page is "Faces of Open Source", not faces of Unix. But even if it was "faces of Unix" the absence of Stallman's photo is conspicuous. Gcc and emacs are both pretty iconic unix software.

Submission + - Erin Valenti, CEO of Tinkerventures.co ,found dead in the of her rental car (deseret.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The body of Erin Valenti, a tech entrepreneur who had been missing since Monday, was found Saturday in the trunk of her rental car. The 33-year-old Valenti was the CEO of Utah-based Tinker Ventures (https://tinkerventures.co/ and https://www.linkedin.com/compa...), a company that develops web and smartphone applications.

Silicon Slopes/Utah Tech Council Executive Director Clint Betts described Valenti as a “force for good” in the Utah tech community. “Erin was a such a force for good,” Betts said in a statement. “It’s hard to imagine the Silicon Slopes community without her in it. Our hearts go out to her husband and family during this unimaginable time. We are devastated.”

Valenti was scheduled to receive an award at an event Wednesday hosted by Utah-based Women Tech Council but never appeared at the event in Salt Lake City.

Submission + - Invisible hardware hacks allowing full remote access cost pennies (wired.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as little as $200 worth of equipment.

Submission + - SPAM: CS Now Counts as HS Math Credit in Most States - Is This a Good Idea?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a widely-reprinted essay, Ohio State University Asst. Prof. of Physics Chris Orban ponders whether the tech world did students a favor or disservice by getting states to count computer science as high school math credit. Orban writes:

In 2013, a who's who of the tech world came together to launch a new nonprofit called Code.org. The purpose of the organization was to get more computer science into schools. Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates donated millions of dollars to the group. According to the organization’s last annual report, Code.org spent more than US$91 million between 2013 and 2018. Of that amount, $6.9 million went to advocate for state legislation across the country. As part of the organization’s mission to "make computer science count" in K-12 education, code.org takes credit for having influenced graduation policies in 42 states. Today, 47 states and the District of Columbia allow computer science classes to count in place of math classes like Algebra 2. Prior to the organization’s work, only a few states allowed computer science to count for math credit. In addition, 29 states passed legislation allowing computer science to count in place of a science course. When computer science begins to count as math or science, it makes sense to ask if these changes are helping America’s students or hurting them.
[...]
I worry that students may take computer science just to avoid the more difficult math and science courses they need for college. Computer science could be a way for students to circumvent graduation requirements while adults look the other way.
[...]
Computer science advocates have created a kind of national experiment. The next few years will show if this was a good idea, but only if we’re looking at more than just the numbers of students taking computer science.

Orban may want to check out newly-released AP testing data, which reveals that nearly 11,000 high school freshmen took an exam for the friendlier new AP Computer Science Principles course (dubbed "Coding Lite" by the NY Times) in 2019, far exceeding the number of freshmen taking other STEM AP exams.

Submission + - Carriers Want To Hide Detailed 5G Maps From FCC and Public (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AT&T and other mobile carriers are trying to hide detailed 5G maps from the public despite constantly touting the supposed pace and breadth of their 5G rollouts. With the Federal Communications Commission planning to require carriers to submit more accurate data about broadband deployment, AT&T and the mobile industry's top lobby group are urging the FCC to exclude 5G from the upgraded data collection. "There is broad agreement that it is not yet time to require reporting on 5G coverage," AT&T told the FCC in a filing this week.

As evidence of that "broad agreement," AT&T cited comments by CTIA—the mobile industry lobby group that represents AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. "[A]s CTIA points out, service standards for 5G are still emerging, precluding reporting of service-level coverage for 5G networks (other than the 5G-NR submissions already required)," AT&T wrote. That's a reference to 5G New Radio, the global standard for 5G. CTIA told the FCC in September that it doesn't object to the 5G-NR requirement because "the 5G-NR standards are technical ones; they do not establish what service level consumers should be able to expect when using 5G." But CTIA said requiring more than that would be "premature" because "industry consensus is still emerging around how best to measure the deployment of this still-nascent technology." Verizon also told the FCC in September that "adoption of standardized parameters is premature" for 5G.

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