Comment Re:Let's define cars' purpose (Score 1) 207
Both of those errands could be accomplished with an electric cargo bike, or maybe a regular human powered option if your terrain is amenable.
Submission + - People Who Claim To Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours (nymag.com)
An anonymous reader writes: I want to thank Kevin Drum from Mother Jones for surfacing a 2011 Bureau of Labor Statistics study that confirms something I’ve long suspected: Virtually anyone you know who claims to be working more than 60 hours a week is not telling the truth. Bureau of Labor Statistics researchers reached this conclusion by comparing regular survey data to diary data from the American Time Use Survey, a Census project that asks Americans to track, diary style, how their weekly time is divided among 163 different activity categories, from sleeping to shopping to pet care.
The BLS study found respondents in the ATUS tend to give an estimate of typical working time that is 5 to 10 percent higher than what shows up in their diaries. But the divergence was not uniform across the population. The largest overestimates came from the people providing the highest estimates: People who said they typically worked 75 or more hours per week tended to provide diaries reflecting 25 hours’ less work per week than they estimated. People claiming to typically work between 65 and 74 hours weekly tended to be overestimating by 18 hours. Again, this sort of misreporting is not limited to work hours. People overestimate how often they do all sorts of things they “ought” to be doing, often by even larger margins than with work for pay.
The BLS study found respondents in the ATUS tend to give an estimate of typical working time that is 5 to 10 percent higher than what shows up in their diaries. But the divergence was not uniform across the population. The largest overestimates came from the people providing the highest estimates: People who said they typically worked 75 or more hours per week tended to provide diaries reflecting 25 hours’ less work per week than they estimated. People claiming to typically work between 65 and 74 hours weekly tended to be overestimating by 18 hours. Again, this sort of misreporting is not limited to work hours. People overestimate how often they do all sorts of things they “ought” to be doing, often by even larger margins than with work for pay.
Submission + - Is cyberwarfare war? Insurers balk at paying for some cyberattacks 1
Lasrick writes: In an era of unceasing cyberattacks, including cases of state-sponsored hacking, insurance companies are beginning to re-interpret an old line in their contracts known as the “war exclusion.” Take the case of snack company Mondelez International, hit in the so-called “NotPetya” attack of 2017. Zurich Insurance rejected a $100 million claim from the company after the White House, in January 2018, attributed the NotPetya attack to the Russian military. Mondelez filed a lawsuit last fall, so the question for Zurich is whether the chain of events that led to NotPetya striking down Mondelez’s network qualifies as warfare. A court ruling in favor of Zurich could make cyberwar much more real, and costly.
Submission + - Several major browsers are removing the option to prevent hyperlink auditing (bleepingcomputer.com)
x_t0ken_407 writes:
A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it. As it is considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature. Now they are going in the opposite direction.
Hyperlink auditing is a HTML standard that allows the creation of special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page that can then examine the request headers to see what page the link was clicked on.
Firefox and Brave (which currently disable hyperlink auditing by default) do not appear to have any plans to remove it in the future, according to the article.
Submission + - Microsoft drops safe removal of USB drives as default in Windows 10 1809 (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Since the arrival of USB drives, we have been warned that they need to be "safely removed" using the correct method in Windows, rather than just being yanked out — but now this changes.
With Windows 10 1809, Microsoft is changing the default setting that's applied to USB drives and other removable media. The change means that the default policy applied to removable storage devices is Quick Removal rather than Better Performance — so you can now just pull it out without a second thought.
With Windows 10 1809, Microsoft is changing the default setting that's applied to USB drives and other removable media. The change means that the default policy applied to removable storage devices is Quick Removal rather than Better Performance — so you can now just pull it out without a second thought.
Submission + - Colorado's 'Open Internet' Bill Would Punish ISPs By Taking Their Grant Money (coloradosun.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Now that Democrats are in charge, Colorado’s second attempt at its own version of a net neutrality law passed the General Assembly and now heads to Gov. Jared Polis for his certain signature. Keeping internet speeds consistent regardless of whether a customer is streaming video from Comcast or Netflix wasn’t the only intent of the Senate Bill 78. The bill also makes internet service providers pay back state grants to build broadband infrastructure if those companies use paid prioritization to favor some internet traffic over others, or slow down speeds for some users.
The Colorado law is similar to the former federal one in that it would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing certain content. It would also force violating ISPs that benefited from state broadband grants to refund all money received in the previous 24 months. After the governor signs the bill into law, Colorado’s attorney general would by Oct. 1 create guidelines on how consumers can file complaints about net neutrality violations.
The Colorado law is similar to the former federal one in that it would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing certain content. It would also force violating ISPs that benefited from state broadband grants to refund all money received in the previous 24 months. After the governor signs the bill into law, Colorado’s attorney general would by Oct. 1 create guidelines on how consumers can file complaints about net neutrality violations.
Submission + - Screen Time Has Little Impact On Teen Well-Being, Study Finds (sciencedaily.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Data from more than 17,000 teenagers show little evidence of a relationship between screen time and well-being in adolescents. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming, or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health. The research found that adolescents' total screen time per day had little impact on their mental health, both on weekends and weekdays. It also found that the use of digital screens 2 hours, 1 hour, or 30 minutes before bedtime didn't have clear associations with decreases in adolescent well-being, even though this is often taken as a fact by media reports and public debates.
Unlike other studies, the Oxford research analyzed data from Ireland, the US, and the UK to support its conclusions. The researchers used a rigorous methodology to gather how much time an adolescent spends on screens per day, including both self-reported measures and time-use diaries. This is important as many studies are based solely on self-reported digital technology use, even though recent work found only one third of participants give accurate accounts of how much time they spend online when asked after the fact. The researchers were also able to create a comprehensive picture of teens' well-being, examining measures of psychosocial functioning, depression symptoms, self-esteem, and mood, with data provided by both young people and their caregivers. Additionally, the final of the three studies conducted was preregistered, meaning that the researchers publicly documented the analyses they would run before they analyzed the data. This prevents hypothesizing after the results are known, a challenge for controversial research topics.
Unlike other studies, the Oxford research analyzed data from Ireland, the US, and the UK to support its conclusions. The researchers used a rigorous methodology to gather how much time an adolescent spends on screens per day, including both self-reported measures and time-use diaries. This is important as many studies are based solely on self-reported digital technology use, even though recent work found only one third of participants give accurate accounts of how much time they spend online when asked after the fact. The researchers were also able to create a comprehensive picture of teens' well-being, examining measures of psychosocial functioning, depression symptoms, self-esteem, and mood, with data provided by both young people and their caregivers. Additionally, the final of the three studies conducted was preregistered, meaning that the researchers publicly documented the analyses they would run before they analyzed the data. This prevents hypothesizing after the results are known, a challenge for controversial research topics.
Submission + - Japanese Spacecraft Drops Explosive On Asteroid To Make Crater (phys.org)
William Robinson writes: Japanese Spacecraft, Hayabusa2, released an explosive onto an asteroid to make a crater on its surface. The spacecraft safely evacuated and remained intact after dropping a "small carry-on impactor" made of copper onto the asteroid. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said that they plan plans to send Hayabusa2 back to the site later, when the dust and debris settle, for observations from above and to collect samples from underground that have not been exposed to the sun or space rays. If successful, it would be the first time for a spacecraft to take such materials. In a 2005 "deep impact" mission to a comet, NASA observed fragments after blasting the surface but did not collect them.
Submission + - SPAM: Tim Cook Wants All Children Coding. Will Big Bird Help Him Make It So?
theodp writes: "Coding should be required in school," Apple CEO Tim Cook stated in 2016. "I would go in and make coding a requirement starting at the fourth or fifth grade." And in 2017, Cook advised President Trump that "coding should be a requirement in every public school." While he may not be able to force schoolchildren to code, there's no law against Cook and Apple using Sesame Street to make preschoolers want to code. Among the original Apple TV+ shows Cook announced at Apple's March Event was Helpsters, an "incredible new preschool show" about coding from "the peeps at Sesame Workshop and Apple." In a skit on stage at the Steve Jobs Theater (YouTube), a Helpster monster from the new show named "Cody" (get it!) explains to Big Bird, "See, coding fosters collaboration, critical-thinking skills, and is an essential language that every child can learn. By teaching preschoolers about coding, we are giving them the opportunity to change the world" (coding Cody, by the way, should not be confused with Sesame Street's original C-is-for-Cody Cody). Just days before the big Apple event, it was announced that the co-founder of the tech-backed CSforALL Consortium — the hub for the national Computer Science for All movement — had been hired to lead the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop "as it drives vital innovation into the next era of learning with media and technology."
Submission + - California Reintroduces 'Right To Repair' Bill After Previous Effort Failed (appleinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: California State Assembly member Susan Talamantes Eggman on Monday announced the introduction of Assembly Bill 1163, which will require manufacturers like Apple to "make service literature and equipment or parts available to product owners and to regulated, independent repair shops." "For nearly 30 years California has required that manufacturers provide access to replacement parts and service materials for electronics and appliances to authorized repairers in the state. In that time, manufacturers have captured the market, controlling where and when we repair our property, and inflating the electronic waste stream," Eggman said. "The Right to Repair will provide consumers with the freedom to have their electronic products and appliances fixed by a repair shop or service provider of their choice, creating a competitive market that will be cheaper for consumers and reduce the number of devices thrown in the trash."
The bill, officially filed as legislation relating to electronic waste, is Eggman's second try at right to repair legislation. Her first attempt, 2018's Bill 2110, was introduced last March and subsequently died in assembly that November. Like the pending Bill 1163, last year's tendered legislation was crafted as a play to reduce e-waste. Eggman's announcement includes a word-for-word reproduction of an explainer included in 2018's press release for the now-dead Bill 2110. In it the lawmaker argues that customers who are unable to pay for manufacturer repairs are forced to replace broken equipment like smartphones, TVs and home appliances. Beyond financial benefits, Eggman also says that the repair and reuse of electronics is more efficient than purchasing a new device, noting that such measures can "stimulate local economies instead of unsustainable overseas factories."
The bill, officially filed as legislation relating to electronic waste, is Eggman's second try at right to repair legislation. Her first attempt, 2018's Bill 2110, was introduced last March and subsequently died in assembly that November. Like the pending Bill 1163, last year's tendered legislation was crafted as a play to reduce e-waste. Eggman's announcement includes a word-for-word reproduction of an explainer included in 2018's press release for the now-dead Bill 2110. In it the lawmaker argues that customers who are unable to pay for manufacturer repairs are forced to replace broken equipment like smartphones, TVs and home appliances. Beyond financial benefits, Eggman also says that the repair and reuse of electronics is more efficient than purchasing a new device, noting that such measures can "stimulate local economies instead of unsustainable overseas factories."
Submission + - SPAM: Up until about 7000 Years Ago People's Food Affected Speech Sounds
omfglearntoplay writes: Ancient Hunter-Gatherer people often had front teeth that met together, unlike today's more common agriculture diet teeth where the upper front teeth "overbite" the lower front teeth. This affects the sounds we use in speech, according to a study.
From the article:
[spam URL stripped]...
"It is often assumed that the structure and the processes we see in languages today were the same as 10,000 years ago," Blasi said. "Now we have a very strong case to think that there are some global and very frequent linguistic phenomena that are surprisingly recent in times of human history."
The study: [spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source
From the article:
[spam URL stripped]...
"It is often assumed that the structure and the processes we see in languages today were the same as 10,000 years ago," Blasi said. "Now we have a very strong case to think that there are some global and very frequent linguistic phenomena that are surprisingly recent in times of human history."
The study: [spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source
Submission + - How U.S. surveillance technology is propping up authoritarian regimes (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 writes: From facial recognition software to GPS trackers to computer hacking tools to systems that monitor and redirect flows of Internet traffic, contemporary surveillance technologies enable “high levels of social control at a reasonable cost,” as Nicholas Wright puts it in Foreign Affairs. But these technologies don’t just aid and enable what Wright and other policy analysts have called “digital authoritarianism.” They also promote a sovereign and controlled model of the Internet, one characterized by frequent censorship, pervasive surveillance and tight control by the state. The United States could be a world leader in preventing the spread of this Internet model, but to do so, we must reevaluate the role U.S. companies play in contributing to it.
One way to address the spread of these tools head on is the use of export controls. Such policies have been in the news more than usual recently, not least because the Trump administration has pushed to tighten regulations on American export of emerging technologies such as the chips used in supercomputers that develop artificial intelligence. The administration’s proposed controls would place new limits on what kinds of technology can be sold and to whom. But when it comes to preventing export of surveillance technology to human rights abusers, the United States lags behind, particularly when it comes to Internet-based surveillance equipment.
One way to address the spread of these tools head on is the use of export controls. Such policies have been in the news more than usual recently, not least because the Trump administration has pushed to tighten regulations on American export of emerging technologies such as the chips used in supercomputers that develop artificial intelligence. The administration’s proposed controls would place new limits on what kinds of technology can be sold and to whom. But when it comes to preventing export of surveillance technology to human rights abusers, the United States lags behind, particularly when it comes to Internet-based surveillance equipment.
Submission + - A Neural Network Can Learn To Recognize the World It Sees Into Concepts (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As good as they are at causing mischief, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab realized GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are also a powerful tool: because they paint what they’re “thinking,” they could give humans insight into how neural networks learn and reason. This has been something the broader research community has sought for a long time—and it’s become more important with our increasing reliance on algorithms. So the researchers began probing a GAN’s learning mechanics by feeding it various photos of scenery—trees, grass, buildings, and sky. They wanted to see whether it would learn to organize the pixels into sensible groups without being explicitly told how. Stunningly, over time, it did. By turning “on” and “off” various “neurons” and asking the GAN to paint what it thought, the researchers found distinct neuron clusters that had learned to represent a tree, for example. Other clusters represented grass, while still others represented walls or doors. In other words, it had managed to group tree pixels with tree pixels and door pixels with door pixels regardless of how these objects changed color from photo to photo in the training set.
Not only that, but the GAN seemed to know what kind of door to paint depending on the type of wall pictured in an image. It would paint a Georgian-style door on a brick building with Georgian architecture, or a stone door on a Gothic building. It also refused to paint any doors on a piece of sky. Without being told, the GAN had somehow grasped certain unspoken truths about the world. Being able to identify which clusters correspond to which concepts makes it possible to control the neural network’s output. The researchers can turn on just the tree neurons, for example, to make the GAN paint trees, or turn on just the door neurons to make it paint doors. Language networks, similarly, can be manipulated to change their output — say, to swap the gender of the pronouns while translating from one language to another. “We’re starting to enable the ability for a person to do interventions to cause different outputs,” Bau says. The team has now released an app called GANpaint that turns this newfound ability into an artistic tool. It allows you to turn on specific neuron clusters to paint scenes of buildings in grassy fields with lots of doors. Beyond its silliness as a playful outlet, it also speaks to the greater potential of this research.
Not only that, but the GAN seemed to know what kind of door to paint depending on the type of wall pictured in an image. It would paint a Georgian-style door on a brick building with Georgian architecture, or a stone door on a Gothic building. It also refused to paint any doors on a piece of sky. Without being told, the GAN had somehow grasped certain unspoken truths about the world. Being able to identify which clusters correspond to which concepts makes it possible to control the neural network’s output. The researchers can turn on just the tree neurons, for example, to make the GAN paint trees, or turn on just the door neurons to make it paint doors. Language networks, similarly, can be manipulated to change their output — say, to swap the gender of the pronouns while translating from one language to another. “We’re starting to enable the ability for a person to do interventions to cause different outputs,” Bau says. The team has now released an app called GANpaint that turns this newfound ability into an artistic tool. It allows you to turn on specific neuron clusters to paint scenes of buildings in grassy fields with lots of doors. Beyond its silliness as a playful outlet, it also speaks to the greater potential of this research.
Submission + - Plants Can Hear Animals Using Their Flowers (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The latest experiments in this niche but increasingly vocal field come from Lilach Hadany and Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University. In one set, they showed that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by rapidly sweetening their nectar. In a second set, they found that other plants make high-pitched noises that lie beyond the scope of human hearing but can nonetheless be detected some distance away. After the team released early copies of two papers describing their work, not yet published in a scientific journal, I ran them past several independent researchers. Some of these researchers have argued that plants are surprisingly communicative; others have doubted the idea. Their views on the new studies, however, didn’t fall along obvious partisan lines. Almost unanimously, they loved the paper asserting that plants can hear and were skeptical about the one reporting that plants make noise. Those opposite responses to work done by the same team underscore how controversial this line of research still is, and how hard it is to study the sensory worlds of organisms that are so different from us.
First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee’s wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That’s probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around. But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!)
First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee’s wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That’s probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around. But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!)
Comment Turing Test? (Score 2) 170
What if only bots that could not pass a Turing Test had to be labeled? This could be implemented with something (more captcha than Voight-Kompff) before allowing a submitted tweet/comment/etc to post.
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