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Monthly Archives: February 2018

When will phishers learn that their written English needs to improve?

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'Caloric Restriction' Study Finds Surprising Health Benefits
by EditorDavid on 20/07/2019 at 4:34 pm
The New York Times reports positive results from the first major clinical study of caloric restriction (funded by America's National Institutes of Health) in which 143 healthy volunteers ate (on average) 300 calories less each day: They lost weight and body fat. Their cholesterol levels improved, their blood pressure fell slightly, and they had better blood sugar control and less inflammation. At the same time, a control group of 75 healthy people who did not practice caloric restriction saw no improvements in any of these markers. Some of the benefits in the calorie restricted group stemmed from the fact that they lost a large amount of weight, on average about 16 pounds over the two years of the study. But the extent to which their metabolic health got better was greater than would have been expected from weight loss alone, suggesting that caloric restriction might have some unique biological effects on disease pathways in the body, said William Kraus, the lead author of the study and a professor of medicine and cardiology at Duke University. "We weren't surprised that there were changes," he said. "But the magnitude was rather astounding. In a disease population, there aren't five drugs in combination that would cause this aggregate of an improvement...." The researchers looked at measures of quality of life and discovered that the calorie-restricted group reported better sleep, increased energy and improved mood.... One question the study could not answer was whether caloric restriction could extend life span in humans the way that it can in other animals... But ultimately, caloric restriction did have a beneficial impact on a wide range of risk factors for diabetes and heart disease, two conditions that cause death and disability for millions of Americans, especially as they get older. Asked about the study, the chairman of the nutrition department at Harvard's School of Public Health questioned whether caloric restriction would be practical for most people, given that "we are living in an obesogenic environment with an abundance of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods that are cheap, accessible and heavily marketed." Read more of this story at Slashdot. […]
Python 3.8 Will Finally Include the Walrus Operator
by EditorDavid on 20/07/2019 at 3:34 pm
An anonymous reader quotes LWN: Python 3.8 is feature complete at this point, which makes it a good time to see what will be part of it when the final release is made. That is currently scheduled for October, so users don't have that long to wait to start using those new features. The headline feature for Python 3.8 is also its most contentious. The process for deciding on Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 572 ("Assignment Expressions") was a rather bumpy ride that eventually resulted in a new governance model for the language. That model meant that a new steering council would replace longtime benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) Guido van Rossum for decision-making, after Van Rossum stepped down in part due to the "PEP 572 mess". Out of that came a new operator, however, that is often called the "walrus operator" due to its visual appearance. Using ":=" in an if or while statement allows assigning a value to a variable while testing it... It is a feature that many other languages have, but Python has, of course, gone without it for nearly 30 years at this point. In the end, it is actually a fairly small change for all of the uproar it caused. Read more of this story at Slashdot. […]
Facebook Backpedals From Its Original Ambitious Vision for Libra
by EditorDavid on 20/07/2019 at 2:34 pm
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: David Marcus, the head of Facebook's new Calibra payments division, appeared before two hostile congressional committees this week with a simple message: Facebook knows policymakers are concerned about Libra, and Facebook won't move forward with the project until their concerns are addressed. While he didn't say so explicitly, Marcus' comments at hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday represented a dramatic shift in Facebook's conception of Libra. In Facebook's original vision, Libra would be an open and largely decentralized network, akin to Bitcoin. The core network would be beyond the reach of regulators. Regulatory compliance would be the responsibility of exchanges, wallets, and other services that are the "on ramps and off ramps" to the Libra ecosystem. Facebook now seems to recognize its original vision was a non-starter with regulators. So this week Marcus sketched out a new vision for Libra -- one in which the Libra Association will shoulder significant responsibility for ensuring compliance with laws relating to money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes... [T]here's a pretty fundamental tradeoff between network openness and effective enforcement of regulations governing payment networks. If the Libra Association doesn't have a way to enforce compliance by wallet providers, criminals are likely to flock to wallet services that don't strictly enforce the rules -- or to download open source wallet software and use non-custodial accounts. But if the Libra Association does have a mechanism for forcing compliance, that inherently raises the bar for entering the market and makes the Libra network look more like conventional financial networks -- with all the red tape that entails. This could be particularly harmful for marginalized people in developing countries, since developers in those markets will have the fewest resources to jump through regulatory hoops. Read more of this story at Slashdot. […]
Employers Are Mining the Data Their Workers Generate To Figure Out What They're Up To, and With Whom
by BeauHD on 20/07/2019 at 1:00 pm
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: To be an employee of a large company in the U.S. now often means becoming a workforce data generator -- from the first email sent from bed in the morning to the Wi-Fi hotspot used during lunch to the new business contact added before going home. Employers are parsing those interactions to learn who is influential, which teams are most productive and who is a flight risk. Companies, which have wide legal latitude in the U.S. to monitor workers, don't always tell them what they are tracking. [...] It's not just emails that are being tallied and analyzed. Companies are increasingly sifting through texts, Slack chats and, in some cases, recorded and transcribed phone calls on mobile devices. Microsoft Corp. tallies data on the frequency of chats, emails and meetings between its staff and clients using its own Office 365 services to measure employee productivity, management efficacy and work-life balance. Tracking the email, chats and calendar appointments can paint a picture of how employees spend an average of 20 hours of their work time each week, says Natalie McCollough, a general manager at Microsoft who focuses on workplace analytics. The company only allows managers to look at groups of five or more workers. Advocates of using surveillance technology in the workplace say the insights allow companies to better allocate resources, spot problem employees earlier and suss out high performers. Critics warn that the proliferating tools may not be nuanced enough to result in fair, equitable judgments. The report says that "U.S. employers are legally entitled to access any communications or intellectual property created in the workplace or on devices they pay for that employees use for work." Companies are getting smarter by analyzing phone calls and conference room conversations. "In some cases, tonal analysis can help diagnose culture issues on a team, showing who dominates conversations, who demurs and who resists efforts to engage in emotional discussions," the report says. Read more of this story at Slashdot. […]
Largest Hybrid Electric Plane Set To Take Flight
by BeauHD on 20/07/2019 at 10:00 am
Ampair, a Los Angeles clean tech company in my neck of the woods, is set to begin accepting orders for a hybrid electric aircraft at the EAA AirVenture airshow in Wisconsin next week. Dubbed the EEL, the aircraft is in fact a retrofit of a Cessna 337, an aircraft that has a forward-mounted prop engine that pulls and a rear-mounted prop engine that pushes. Ampair's retrofit will replace one of those internal combustion engines with an electric motor powered by batteries. ZDNet reports: Ampair believes hybrid power may be a stopgap, providing fuel savings while still retaining many of the benefits of an internal combustion drivetrain. "The Ampaire Electric EEL is the first step in bringing lower emissions, lower-operating costs, and quieter operations to general aviation through electrification," according to the company's CEO Kevin Noertker. "The original Cessna 337 provided great utility, and this hybrid electric conversion retains those advantages while reducing fuel cost and maintenance by about 50 percent." The EEL is now undergoing a 30 month test program, which began in June. One of the tests will be demonstrating reliable single-engine climbs on each powerplant. Ampair expects the aircraft to be certified by 2021. Ampair's EEL aircraft will seat four or six passengers. The company says the aircraft cost will be competitive with comparable piston twins. Read more of this story at Slashdot. […]
Quantum Leap From Australian Research Promises Super-Fast Computing Power
by BeauHD on 20/07/2019 at 6:00 am
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Simmons, a former Australian of the Year, and her team at the University of New South Wales announced in a paper published in Nature journal on Thursday that they have been able to achieve the first two-qubit gate between atom qubits in silicon, allowing them to communicate with each other at a 200 times faster rate than previously achieved at 0.8 nanoseconds. A two-qubit gate operates like a logic gate in traditional computing, and the team at UNSW was able to achieve the faster operation by putting the two atom qubits closer together than ever before -- just 13 nanometers -- and in real-time controllably observing and measuring their spin states. A scanning tunneling microscope was used to place the atoms in silicon after the optimal distance between the two qubits had been worked out. The research has been two decades in the making, after researchers in Australia opted to build a quantum computer on silicon material. Read more of this story at Slashdot. […]

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