Google 'Walkout For Real Change' to include 'thousands' Thursday

One week after a New York Times report dug into incidents of sexual misconduct among high-ranking Google and Alphabet executives — followed by departures afterward that included large payouts or continued employment — employees are proceeding with…

Source: Engadget – Google ‘Walkout For Real Change’ to include ‘thousands’ Thursday

FDA Approves New 23andMe Pharmacogenetic Reports, But There Are Some Caveats

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Wednesday that it has approved the marketing of 23andMe’s reports on pharmacogenetics, which the genetic-testing company claims are designed to assess whether genetics may affect an individual’s ability to metabolize certain drugs including antidepressants.

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Source: Gizmodo – FDA Approves New 23andMe Pharmacogenetic Reports, But There Are Some Caveats

'Thousands' of Google Employees Expected to Walk Out on Thursday Over Handling of Sexual Harassment Cases

“Thousands” of employees at Google offices around the world are expected to participate in a “women’s walk” protest on Thursday in response to the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment and other tensions within the technology giant.

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Source: Gizmodo – ‘Thousands’ of Google Employees Expected to Walk Out on Thursday Over Handling of Sexual Harassment Cases

The Halloween Sequel Isn't the Only Decades-Old Scary Story to Get a Reboot This Year, Thanks to the DEA

It’s Halloween, my ghoulish friends, the time of spooks, spirits, and things that serve subpoenas in no-knock raids in the night. So it’s no surprise that the Drug Enforcement Agency is continuing to haunt us with scary campfire tales warning of, uh, children eating “drug laced candy” tonight, despite the near-total…

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Source: Gizmodo – The Halloween Sequel Isn’t the Only Decades-Old Scary Story to Get a Reboot This Year, Thanks to the DEA

Can a Robot Learn a Language the Way a Child Does?

MIT researchers have devised a way to train semantic parsers by mimicking the way a child learns language. “The system observes captioned videos and associates the words with recorded actions and objects,” ZDNet reports, citing the paper presented this week. “It could make it easier to train parsers, and it could potentially improve human interactions with robots.” From the report: To train their parser, the researchers combined a semantic parser with a computer vision component trained in object, human and activity recognition in video. Next, they compiled a dataset of about 400 videos depicting people carrying out actions such as picking up an object or walking toward an object. Participants on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to wrote 1,200 captions for those videos, 840 of which were set aside for training and tuning. The rest were used for testing. By associating the words with the actions and objects in a video, the parser learns how sentences are structured. With that training, it can accurately predict the meaning of a sentence without a video.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Can a Robot Learn a Language the Way a Child Does?

Spinal Implant Helps Three Paralyzed Men Walk Again

Doctors in Switzerland have used an electrical device to help three paralyzed men walk again. The device was inserted around the men’s spines to boost the signals from their brains to their legs. The study has been published in the journal Nature. The BBC reports: The first patient to be treated was 30-year-old Swiss man David M’zee, who suffered a severe spinal injury seven years ago in a sporting accident. David’s doctor said he would never walk again. However, thanks to an electrical implant developed by a team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), he can walk more than half a mile with the implant turned on. Two other men have also managed to walk again, to varying degrees. Gertan Oskan, a 35-year-old engineer from the Netherlands, was knocked over by a car seven years ago. His doctors told him on his birthday that he would be paralyzed for life. He is now beginning to regain some movement. Sebastian Tobler, a 48-year-old man from Germany, was a keen cyclist who loved being out in the countryside before he was knocked off his bike. Now he’s back on a specially adapted bike that is powered mostly by his hands — but also partly by his legs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Spinal Implant Helps Three Paralyzed Men Walk Again

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Explaining The Netflix-Marvel Crac

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Explaining The Netflix-Marvel Crack Up Developer Journal: Day 51TAY Retro: Atari 2600 – Battlezone [TV Commercial, NA]  The Great TAY Pumpkin Carve-Off, 2018!

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Source: Kotaku – Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Explaining The Netflix-Marvel Crac

Influencer Sued for Allegedly Not Influencing Nearly as Hard as He Was Paid To

Grown-ish actor and reported onetime Kourtney Kardashian suitor Luka Sabbat is facing down a lawsuit from Snap Inc.’s public relations firm, PR Consulting, for allegedly violating the terms of an “influencer” agreement worth $60,000.

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Source: Gizmodo – Influencer Sued for Allegedly Not Influencing Nearly as Hard as He Was Paid To

The Average Cable Bill Has Increased More Than 50 Percent Since 2010

According to new research, the average cost households pay for cable is now up to $107 a month — that’s a 50% increase since 2010 when cable bills were $71.24 a month. When compared to last year, it’s only a 1% increase, “thanks in large part to increasing fees for things like regional sports licensing and taxes,” reports Streaming Observer. From the report: Leichtman Research Group’s data was gathered through a telephone survey of 1,152 households from throughout the United States. The research found that 78% of American households still subscribe to a paid TV subscription. That percentage is down from 86% in 2013, 87% in 2008, and 81% in 2004, but 78% is still a pretty high figure given how high cable costs continue to rise each year and how affordable streaming video services are in comparison.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – The Average Cable Bill Has Increased More Than 50 Percent Since 2010

Watch This Sculptor Recreate Raiders of the Lost Ark's Creepiest Scene Using Crayons and a Hair Dryer

If made today, the Raiders of the Lost Ark scene with Major Toht’s grisly demise would undoubtedly be created using a digital stunt double and complex CG fluid simulations. But in the early ‘80s, old-school practical effects were still a Hollywood staple, and using crayons, sculptor Steven Richter demonstrates just…

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Source: Gizmodo – Watch This Sculptor Recreate Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Creepiest Scene Using Crayons and a Hair Dryer

Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves

The Nobel-Prize winning first direct detection of gravitational waves announced in 2016 is being called into question. LIGO calls shenanigans.

Enlarge / The Nobel-Prize winning first direct detection of gravitational waves announced in 2016 is being called into question. LIGO calls shenanigans. (credit: Julian Stratenschulte/DPA/Getty Images)

The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called “multi-messenger” astronomy. But a team of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, is calling that detection into question, based on their own independent data analysis conducted over the last two-and-a-half years.

As New Scientist reports, the group thinks that the original gravitational wave signal detected by LIGO was an “illusion.” They allege that the collaboration mistook patterns in the noise for a signal. The magazine oddly touts this as an “exclusive,” but group spokesperson Andrew Jackson has been banging this particular drum for a while now, after first experiencing misgivings about LIGO’s analysis as presented during the February 11, 2016 press conference in Washington, DC. The group’s original paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in August of that year, and there has been considerable back and forth within the physics community about his claims since then.

“Andrew Jackson and his group have been saying for the past few years that LIGO’s detections are not real,” says LIGO executive director David Reitze of Caltech. “Their analysis has been looked at by many people who have all concluded there is absolutely no validity to their claims.” Reitz characterized the New Scientist article as “very biased and sensational.”

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Source: Ars Technica – Danish physicists claim to cast doubt on detection of gravitational waves

Hawaiian Supreme Court gives go-ahead to giant telescope

Two large white domes on a barren reddish landscape.

Enlarge / Keck 1 and Keck 2, near the summit of Mauna Kea. (credit: Eric Berger)

The giant volcanoes of Hawaii’s Big Island held a special place for the Polynesians who first settled there, with the peak of Mauna Kea being reserved for that society’s elite. But in recent years, they’ve become home to a new kind of elite: some of the best telescopes humanity has designed. For the past several years, those legacies have clashed through a mix of protests, hearings, and legal maneuvers.

Scientists wanted to build one of our next-generation giant telescopes on Mauna Kea and received approval from the state to do so. But native Hawaiians and their supporters, disturbed by the ever-growing population of observatories and poor past stewardship of the mountain, protested and appealed. Now, the state’s Supreme Court has issued what appears to be a comprehensive ruling that upholds the latest construction approval from the Board of Land and Natural Resources. This appears to clear the last hurdle astronomers faced before starting construction.

A contentious history

Scientists have been building telescopes with state approval on top of Mauna Kea for decades, despite its significance to the Polynesians who first settled the islands. Over time, however, three trends set the stage for the current controversy. One was that a telescope, once built, tended not to come down, and the people doing the building didn’t always plan to keep the hardware unobtrusive or minimize the environmental damages of construction. At the same time, cultural awareness among those who could trace their ancestry to the first Hawaiians increased, as did our knowledge of their political and religious practices. Work on Mauna Kea identified many shrines and features that are of cultural and/or religious significance.

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Source: Ars Technica – Hawaiian Supreme Court gives go-ahead to giant telescope

Alaska's Universal Basic Income Doesn't Increase Unemployment

With Alaska’s gubernatorial election coming up, Business Insider brings up a report from earlier this year which finds that the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend — the only large-scale universal basic income program in the U.S. — doesn’t increase unemployment like many feared. An anonymous reader shares the report: The vast majority of Alaska’s roughly 740,000 citizens support the dividend, which gives virtually every citizen an annual check of about $1,000 to $2,000 (that’s $4,000 to $8,000 for a family of four), and both political parties in the state are in favor. Alaskans’ feelings about this universal cash transfer are supported by the findings of a working paper published in February that was written by University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy professor Damon Jones and University of Pennsylvania School of Public Policy and Practice professor Ioana Marinescu — the annual dividend does not realize fears that such a program would lead people to quit their jobs, lowering employment.

An additional $8,000 for a family is certainly not going to replace a livable income, but, as Jones and Marinescu noted in their paper, studies around a cash assistance experiment in the 1970s, lottery winnings, and a permanent fund dividend for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reduced earned income, and critics of any universal basic income programs have pointed to such findings as proof that anything on a larger scale would be a disaster. But Jones and Marinescu found instead that the larger scale of the program is what allows it to work, and not dissuade people out of the work force. More specifically, Jones and Marinescu determined that part-time employment increased by 17% only in the non-tradable sector (jobs whose output isn’t traded internationally), and that overall employment wasn’t affected because more spending money results in more demand, and thus more jobs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Alaska’s Universal Basic Income Doesn’t Increase Unemployment

How to Get Rich in Space, According to the New Sci-Fi Movie Prospect

In the new sci-fi film Prospect, humans travel to space to get rich. Think of it as a space-set version of the California Gold Rush. And now, the filmmakers have created a guide to give earthlings a leg up on all acquiring those valuable resources.

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Source: io9 – How to Get Rich in Space, According to the New Sci-Fi Movie Prospect