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Submission + - An OS/2 Warp Community is Merging with the Flat Earth Society (os2world.com)

Submitted by martiniturbide
martiniturbide writes: OS2World, a community known as the online reunion place of IBM's OS/2 Warp users, is merging with the Flat Earth Society. The OS/2 community expects that this action will benefit the platform by getting the funds to finally create an open source clone of it. OS2World asks every OS/2 user to start believing that the earth is flat to get the "big bucks" that will finally turn the operating system into a Windows 10, Ubuntu, MacOS X and Android competitor in the final OS Wars of all ages.

Submission + - Will the World Embrace the Radical Proposal To Mandate Open Access To Science? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How far will Plan S spread? Since the September 2018 launch of the Europe-backed program to mandate immediate open access (OA) to scientific literature, 16 funders in 13 countries have signed on. That's still far shy of Plan S's ambition: to convince the world's major research funders to require immediate OA to all published papers stemming from their grants. Whether it will reach that goal depends in part on details that remain to be settled, including a cap on the author charges that funders will pay for OA publication. But the plan has gained momentum: In December 2018, China stunned many by expressing strong support for Plan S. This month, a national funding agency in Africa is expected to join, possibly followed by a second U.S. funder. Others around the world are considering whether to sign on. Plan S, scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2020, has drawn support from many scientists, who welcome a shake-up of a publishing system that can generate large profits while keeping taxpayer-funded research results behind paywalls. But publishers (including AAAS, which publishes Science) are concerned, and some scientists worry that Plan S could restrict their choices.

If Plan S fails to grow, it could remain a divisive mandate that applies to only a small percentage of the world's scientific papers. (Delta Think, a consulting company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, estimates that the first 15 funders to back Plan S accounted for 3.5% of the global research articles in 2017.) To transform publishing, the plan needs global buy-in. The more funders join, the more articles will be published in OA journals that comply with its requirements, pushing publishers to flip their journals from paywall-protected subscriptions to OA, says librarian Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the chief digital scholarship officer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Submission + - PepsiCo Hello Goodness Snackbot To Tackle College Munchies On Select Campuses (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: College students used to have to fend for themselves at the campus convenient store but soon may have the snacks coming to them courtesy of a new delivery service. The PepsiCo Hello Goodness Snackbot, an autonomous delivery robot, will now run snacks around select college campuses to satiate whatever case of the munchies it can. Students, staff and faculty at the University of Pacific in Stockton, California can now order snacks between 9AM and 5PM through the Snackbot app, which is currently only available on iOS. The robot will deliver goods at 50 designated Snackbot areas across campuses. The delivery bot can go more than 20 miles on a single charge and includes a camera, headlights, and all-wheel drive to help it navigate thorugh tough terrain if need be. The bot will deliver food and drinks from PepsiCo's Hello Goodness brand, including products from Smartfood Delight, Baked Lay's, SunChips, Pure Leaf Tea, bubly, LIFEWTR, and Starbucks Cold Brew. The Snackbots are part of the company's goal of expanding the reach of their line healthier product lines to 50,000 points of presence by the end of 2019.

Submission + - Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Rubisco has one job. It picks up carbon dioxide from the air, and it uses the carbon to make sugar molecules. It gets the energy to do this from the sun. This is photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to make food, a foundation of life on Earth. "But it has what we like to call one fatal flaw," Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, says. Unfortunately, Rubisco isn't picky enough about what it grabs from the air. It also picks up oxygen. "When it does that, it makes a toxic compound, so the plant has to detoxify it."

Plants have a whole complicated chemical assembly line to carry out this detoxification, and the process uses up a lot of energy. This means the plant has less energy for making leaves, or food for us. Cavanagh and her colleagues in a research program called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which is based at the University of Illinois, have spent the last five years trying to fix Rubisco's problem. "We're sort of hacking photosynthesis," she says. They experimented with tobacco plants, just because tobacco is easy to work with. They inserted some new genes into these plants, which shut down the existing detoxification assembly line and set up a new one that's way more efficient. And they created super tobacco plants. "They grew faster, and they grew up to 40 percent bigger" than normal tobacco plants, Cavanagh says. These measurements were done both in greenhouses and open-air field plots.

Submission + - Strange Waves Rippled Across Earth And Only One Person Spotted Them (forbes.com) 2

Submitted by The Grim Reefer
The Grim Reefer writes: On November 11 there were strange rumbling waves that traveled at 9,000mph across the globe, nearly undetected and unnoticed by the world. Except for one person, a seismologist, who spotted the signal and quickly put out an alert to see if other systems detected the same unusual wave.

The waves began 15 miles off the coast of the small French island of Mayotte, wedged between Madagascar and Mozambique. Seismographs picked up the waves as they traveled as far as New Zealand, Chile, Hawaii and Canada. In total, the waves were detected as far as 11,000 miles from their origin, ringing for 20 minutes or more minutes as they passed. It took only 40 minutes for the waves to travel from Mayotte to the UK and 75 minutes to reach the Hawaiian islands.

The seismologists noted the strange nature of the waves, they were unnaturally monotone and low-frequency as they traveled across the globe. When we think of seismic waves the most common association is an earthquake, which triggers a sudden release of fast moving waves at different frequencies. Toward the later tail of an earthquake's rumbling, they do emit low-frequency waves that can spread out across the globe. For this to have been the case there would have had to be a major earthquake somewhere in the region, yet none was detected.

Submission + - Music Industry Asks US Government to Reconsider Website Blocking (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the start of this decade, US lawmakers drafted several controversial bills to make it easier for copyright holders to enforce their rights online. These proposals, including SOPA and PIPA, were met with fierce resistance from the public as well as major technology companies. They feared that the plans, which included pirate site-blocking measures, went too far. In the many years that followed, the “site blocking” issue was avoided like the plague. The aversion was mostly limited to the US, as website blocking became more and more common abroad, where it’s one of the entertainment industries’ preferred anti-piracy tools.

Emboldened by these foreign successes, it appears that rightsholders in the US are now confident enough to bring the subject up again, albeit very gently. Most recently the site-blocking option was mentioned in a joint letter from the RIAA and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), which contained recommendations to the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) Vishal Amin. The IPEC requested input from the public on the new version of its Joint Strategic Plan for Intellectual Property Enforcement. According to the music industry groups, website blocking should be reconsidered an anti-piracy tool.

Submission + - France to close 14 nuclear & 4 remaining coal power plants. (cleantechnica.com)

Submitted by Socguy
Socguy writes: French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech on Tuesday in which he announced a raft of new energy policies, including a promise to close the country’s remaining four coal-fired power plants by 2022 and 14 of the country’s 900 MW first-generation nuclear reactors by 2035.

The generation capacity will be replaced with wind and solar.

Submission + - Amazon Starts Selling Software To Mine Patient Health Records (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon is starting to sell software to mine patient medical records for information that doctors and hospitals could use to improve treatment and cut costs, the latest move by a big technology company into the health care industry. The software can read digitized patient records and other clinical notes, analyze them and pluck out key data points, Amazon says. The company is expected to announce the launch Tuesday. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division, has been selling such text-analysis software to companies outside medicine for use in areas such as travel booking, customer support and supply-chain management. The technology’s health-care application is the newest effort by Amazon to tap into the lucrative market.

Amazon officials say the company’s software developers trained the system using a process known as deep learning to recognize all the ways a doctor might record notes. “We’re able to completely, automatically look inside medical language and identify patient details,” including diagnoses, treatments, dosage and strengths, “with incredibly high accuracy,” said Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services. During testing, the software performed on par or better than other published efforts, and can extract data on patients’ diseases, prescriptions, lab orders and procedures, said Taha Kass-Hout, a senior leader with Amazon’s health-care and artificial intelligence efforts.

Submission + - China Expands Research Funding, Luring US Scientists and Students (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the past decade or so, China has been expanding its commitment to scientific research, and it shows. Chinese researchers now produce more scientific publications than U.S. scientists do, and the global ratings of Chinese universities are rising. Five years ago [professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, JaySiegel] became dean of the school of pharmaceutical science and technology at Tianjin University. He says the university president recruited him to build an undergraduate program that would attract students from all over — not just China. Siegel says the program is taught entirely in English. There's another aspect of getting a pharmaceutical science degree at Tianjin that Siegel expects students from throughout the world to find particularly attractive: The Chinese government plans to offer scholarships to cover the cost for students who enroll. Siegel says this is all part of China's effort to attract international scientists.

Submission + - Latest Windows 10 Update Breaks Windows Media Player, Win32 Apps In General (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The important data loss bug that interrupted the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, may be fixed, but it turns out there are plenty of other weird problems with the release. As spotted by Paul Thurrott, the update also breaks the seek bar in Windows Media Player when playing "specific files." Microsoft does promise to fix the bug, but the timeframe is vaguely open-ended: it will be "in an upcoming release."

Also in the "how did that happen" category comes another bug: some Win32 programs can't be set as the default program for a given file type. So if you want certain files to always open in Notepad, for example, you're currently out of luck. A fix for this is promised by the end of the month. Setting default program associations is something that's been in Windows for 20-something years, so it's a little alarming that it should be broken. On top of this, there continue to be complaints that Windows 10 version 1809 doesn't work with iCloud, and machines with the iCloud client are currently blacklisted to prevent them from receiving the 1809 update. It's not immediately clear whose fault this one is—it could be Microsoft's, but it's also possible that Apple is to blame.

Comment useless data sources (Score 5, Funny) 295

by sweet reason (#57345348) Attached to: John Hancock Will Include Fitness Tracking In All Life Insurance Policies

a friend of mine mentioned that when he wears his fitbit on his right hand and plays his ukulele, his recorded activity level goes through the roof. so getting those insurance discounts while sitting on your couch will be easy. ditto for posted food choices. when the company figures that out their next move will be to become big brother.

Submission + - 'Pirates' Tend To Be the Biggest Buyers of Legal Content, Study Shows (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a paywalled survey of 1,000 UK residents by anti-piracy outfit MUSO first spotted by Torrent Freak, 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that they had illegally streamed or downloaded music, film, or TV shows sometime in the past. But the study also showed that 83 percent of those questioned try to find the content they are looking for through above board services before trying anything else. And while the study found that 86 percent of survey takers subscribe to a streaming subscription service like Netflix, that total jumped to 91 percent among those that admit to piracy. The survey found that the top reason that users pirate is the content they were looking for wasn’t legally available (34 percent) was too cumbersome or difficult to access (34 percent), or wasn’t affordable (35 percent).

Submission + - 'Carbon Bubble' Could Spark Global Financial Crisis, Study Warns (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The existence of a “carbon bubble” — assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because, in the medium and long-term, the world will have to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions – has long been proposed by academics, activists and investors. The new study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that a sharp slump in the value of fossil fuels would cause this bubble to burst, and posits that such a slump is likely before 2035 based on current patterns of energy use. Crucially, the findings suggest that a rapid decline in fossil fuel demand is no longer dependent on stronger policies and actions from governments around the world. Instead, the authors’ detailed simulations found the demand drop would take place even if major nations undertake no new climate policies, or reverse some previous commitments. That is because advances in technologies for energy efficiency and renewable power, and the accompanying drop in their price, have made low-carbon energy much more economically and technically attractive.

Submission + - American Tech Giants Are Making Life Tough For Startups (economist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Venture capitalists, such as Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, who was an early investor in Twitter, now talk of a “kill-zone” around the giants. Once a young firm enters, it can be extremely difficult to survive. Tech giants try to squash startups by copying them, or they pay to scoop them up early to eliminate a threat. The idea of a kill-zone may bring to mind Microsoft’s long reign in the 1990s, as it embraced a strategy of “embrace, extend and extinguish” and tried to intimidate startups from entering its domain. But entrepreneurs’ and venture capitalists’ concerns are striking because for a long while afterwards, startups had free rein. [...] Venture capitalists are wary of backing startups in online search, social media, mobile and e-commerce. It has become harder for startups to secure a first financing round. According to Pitchbook, a research company, in 2017 the number of these rounds were down by around 22% from 2012 (see chart).

The wariness comes from seeing what happens to startups when they enter the kill-zone, either deliberately or accidentally. Snap is the most prominent example; after Snap rebuffed Facebook’s attempts to buy the firm in 2013, for $3 billion, Facebook cloned many of its successful features and has put a damper on its growth. A less known example is Life on Air, which launched Meerkat, a live video-streaming app, in 2015. It was obliterated when Twitter acquired and promoted a competing app, Periscope. Life on Air shut Meerkat down and launched a different app, called Houseparty, which offered group video chats. This briefly gained prominence, but was then copied by Facebook, seizing users and attention away from the startup.

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