Cop Car's Beat

Young and old conversants

Working in the kitchen, I heard Hunky Husband guffawing in his basement den, so I had to go ask him why he was laughing. He showed me an item in a newsletter that he was reading. It illustrated the different ways in which various people use language - particularly when one of the people is young, the other old. I've changed the lead-in, for personal reasons, but not the quote. It sounds like something that HH would have told his troops 40 years ago.

After an aide answered a question, the questioner shook his head and said, “Pick up your phone, call your mother, read her what you just told me” ... “If she understands, we can keep talking.”

This was a lot funnier than what had happened about an hour, previously. I happened to go downstairs for something and heard beeps and siren noises coming from HH's den. He had somehow come upon a scam: the one that displays and announces messages to the effect that a bad thing on your computer is going to bring down the internet unless you call the given phone number RIGHT NOW! HH was trying to figure out what to do - difficult for anyone to do with all the bells, whistles, and flashing images. While he went into the laundry room to iron his weeks' worth of shirts, I shut down his machine and cleaned it up. Not that it will help, but I did change a couple of his security settings while I was at it.

More from News for Nerds - Computers, eyes, & antennae

Light-Based Quantum Computer Exceeds Fastest Classical Supercomputers (scientificamerican.com) 6

Posted by BeauHD on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:00AM from the far-too-complicated dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons -- particles of light -- has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers. Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang. The result, reported in the journal Science, was 76 detected photons -- far above and beyond the previous record of five detected photons and the capabilities of classical supercomputers.

Unlike a traditional computer built from silicon processors, Jiuzhangis an elaborate tabletop setup of lasers, mirrors, prisms and photon detectors. It is not a universal computer that could one day send e-mails or store files, but it does demonstrate the potential of quantum computing. Last year, Google captured headlines when its quantum computer Sycamore took roughly three minutes to do what would take a supercomputer three days (or 10,000 years, depending on your estimation method). In their paper, the USTC team estimates that it would take the Sunway TaihuLight, the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, a staggering 2.5 billion years to perform the same calculation as Jiuzhang. [...] This latest demonstration of quantum computing's potential from the USTC group is critical because it differs dramatically from Google's approach. Sycamore uses superconducting loops of metal to form qubits; in Jiuzhang, the photons themselves are the qubits. Independent corroboration that quantum computing principles can lead to primacy even on totally different hardware "gives us confidence that in the long term, eventually, useful quantum simulators and a fault-tolerant quantum computer will become feasible," Lu says.

... [T]he USTC setup is dauntingly complicated. Jiuzhang begins with a laser that is split so it strikes 25 crystals made of potassium titanyl phosphate. After each crystal is hit, it reliably spits out two photons in opposite directions. The photons are then sent through 100 inputs, where they race through a track made of 300 prisms and 75 mirrors. Finally, the photons land in 100 slots where they are detected. Averaging over 200 seconds of runs, the USTC group detected about 43 photons per run. But in one run, they observed 76 photons -- more than enough to justify their quantum primacy claim. It is difficult to estimate just how much time would be needed for a supercomputer to solve a distribution with 76 detected photons -- in large part because it is not exactly feasible to spend 2.5 billion years running a supercomputer to directly check it. Instead, the researchers extrapolate from the time it takes to classically calculate for smaller numbers of detected photons. At best, solving for 50 photons, the researchers claim, would take a supercomputer two days, which is far slower than the 200-second run time of Jiuzhang.

 

Reversal of Biological Clock Restores Vision In Old Mice (scitechdaily.com) 26

Posted by BeauHD on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:00AM from the epigenetic-reprogramming dept.

John Trumpian shares a report from SciTechDaily: Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function. The team's work, described today in Nature, represents the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve cells of the eye, to an earlier age. In addition to resetting the cells' aging clock, the researchers successfully reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness around the world.

The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression, the team said. If replicated through further studies, the approach could pave the way for therapies to promote tissue repair across various organs and reverse aging and age-related diseases in humans. Sinclair and colleagues caution that the findings remain to be replicated in further studies, including in different animal models, before any human experiments. Nonetheless, they add, the results offer a proof of concept and a pathway to designing treatments for a range of age-related human diseases.

For their work, the team used an adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vehicle to deliver into the retinas of mice three youth-restoring genes -- Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4 -- that are normally switched on during embryonic development. The three genes, together with a fourth one, which was not used in this work, are collectively known as Yamanaka factors. The treatment had multiple beneficial effects on the eye. First, it promoted nerve regeneration following optic-nerve injury in mice with damaged optic nerves. Second, it reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma. And third, it reversed vision loss in aging animals without glaucoma.

 

 

SOURCE:  Arecibo Observatory, a U.S. National Science Foundation facility

Drone Footage Shows the Shocking Collapse of the Arecibo Observatory (theverge.com) 91

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:40PM from the video-evidence dept.

Iwastheone shares a report from The Verge: Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released shocking footage of the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory's iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.

The videos of the collapse were captured by a camera located in Arecibo's Operations Control Center, as well as from a drone located above the platform at the time of collapse. The operator of the drone was able to adjust the drone camera once the platform started to fall and capture the moment of impact. NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November. The footage highlights the moment when multiple cables snapped, causing the platform to swing outward and hit the side of the dish. The collapse also brought down the tops of the three support towers surrounding Arecibo, where the cables had been connected to keep the platform in the air. Slashdot reader joshgs shares a petition to rebuild the Arecibo Observatory. "On December 1, the platform of the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory suffered a catastrophic collapse," the petition states. "This telescope had many capabilities that cannot be replaced by any existing or planned facility. It had the world's most powerful and most sensitive planetary radar system, providing unparalleled capacity to track and characterize near-Earth asteroids. The telescope was also a source of tourism, education, and pride for the people of Puerto Rico, inspiring many to pursue careers in science and technology."

"We ask Congress to allocate funding to build a new Arecibo radio telescope with greater capabilities than the previous telescope -- to maintain American leadership in planetary defense, astronomy, and ionospheric studies; and to inspire a new generation of scientists."

A bot or not a bot?

When one's blog traffic increases by a factor of 20, and continues for days, one becomes curious. That's what's been happening, here, for the past several days. It started with an innocuous comment by "Art" who had been referred to my blog by a blog that, in the past, I had visited. At about the same time, my blog was getting referred hits from that blog every few minutes...then, every 10s of minutes, then every hour. This has continued to today when the hits are coming at the rate of once every three hours. Hmmmm....

I checked everything that I knew to check and contacted tech support at Typepad on Monday. They did some checking and, in their final message to me, wrote:

We did some checking but were not able to determine why you started seeing an increase in referrers from [the other blog]. It doesn't appear that they have linked to your blog anywhere, but there could be a different source or a bot spoofing the source.

In no way is your Typepad account compromised by this traffic. Additionally, we monitor traffic, and if a spike is deemed malicious, we will block the source of the unwanted activity.

If any of my blog friends or casual readers can contribute to my understanding of what is going on, especially if you are "Art", please let me know - by email or by comment. The increased traffic is evidently harmless, but very strange.

P.S. to Art: I have taken down your comment and the posting on which the comment was made. I have blocked from commenting the URL from which the referred hits are coming as well as your IP address and email address. If you would be so kind as to contact me by email (under my thumbnail photo at the top of the left side bar) and convince me that you are a real, innocent person, I shall consider re-publishing the posting and your comment. In fact, you could become a real blog friend if you help me understand what's going on.

From MIT - detecting asymptomatic COVID-19

The embedded audio recording, below, is from MIT's SoundCloud. The text may be found at MIT News in the article:

Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs

Results might provide a convenient screening tool for people who may not suspect they are infected.

 

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Publication Date:

October 29, 2020

 

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) · New AI model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through device-recorded coughs

More from News for Nerds - Edge

I've been ticked off for several months because, whenever I try to watch a YouTube video, I am transferred from IE11 to Edge. Grrrr.

Microsoft Will Forcibly Stop Loading Some URLs in Internet Explorer To Move Users To Edge (zdnet.com) 78

Posted by msmash on Monday October 26, 2020 @10:43AM from the how-about-that dept.

Big changes are coming to Internet Explorer. Starting next month, users trying to access certain websites will see IE refuse to load the URL and automatically open the site in Edge instead. From a report: This forced IE-to-Edge behavior is part of Microsoft's Internet Explorer deprecation plans. Microsoft has been gradually rolling out the feature for testing purposes for some Windows users since the release of Edge 84 this summer. However, with the release of Edge 87, scheduled for next month, Microsoft plans to enable the forced IE-to-Edge action for all IE users.

News for Nerds led me to: Rats & Alerts

Oh, Rats!

Most of us have long known of service animals (usually of the canine variety) and work animals (horses, in my day); but there is a new variety about which I may/may not have heard in the past: Mine-Sniffing Rats. The New York Times article tells about a rat that received an award for bravery while working at a speed that humans can only envy.

Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery

Magawa, a 5-year-old African giant pouched rat, was recognized with a prestigious honor for his work detecting mines and explosives in Cambodia.

By Anna Schaverien | Sept. 25, 2020

The medal awarded on Friday lauded the “lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty” for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa.

Magawa is the first rat to receive the award — a gold medal bestowed by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the “animal’s George Cross” after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism.

....

...The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector.

He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.

In case you are interested: Magawa is two feet long.

Alert to Twitter users

According to The Verge, "Twitter says it’s working on bringing its “read the article before you retweet it” prompt to all users “soon.” The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven’t clicked through to actually read."

Tuba Bumblebee

This morning, Bluebird of Bitterness posted another video. I usually skip videos, but I eventually decided to watch this one. I enjoyed it so much that I'm passing it along. The whole video lasts just under three minutes, the Flight of the Tuba Bumblebee commencing at about the 2:01 mark. I must say that I enjoyed the fanfare of introduction as much as did I enjoy the Bumblebee.

 

What I do not enjoy is that YouTube has begun eschewing Internet Explorer, opening instead in Edge. Bah, humbug! Although I was forced to use Edge as early as 2015 or 2016 in accomplishing my volunteer work (although Edge browser did not work with the Edge database that also I had to use), I never learned to appreciate the experience.

More from Slashdot.org - Sleep, Laser Firing, Cell Phone Review

Individualized Circadian Clocks: New Research Suggests Not Everyone Needs 8 Hours of Sleep (time.com) 58

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @05:43PM from the beating-the-clock dept.

Time magazine reports on is a big scientific advance: "the understanding that our bodies often operate according to different clocks." Although the federal government recommends that Americans sleep seven or more hours per night for optimal health and functioning, new research is challenging the assumption that sleep is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Scientists have found that our internal body clocks vary so greatly that they could form the next frontiers of personalized medicine...

Human sleep is largely a mystery. We know it's important; getting too little is linked to heightened risk for metabolic disorders, Type 2 diabetes, psychiatric disorders, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration and many types of cancer. "It's probably true that bad sleep leads to increased risks of virtually every disorder," says Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco... The ideal sleep duration has long been thought to be universal. "There are many people who think everyone needs eight to eight and a half hours of sleep per night and there will be health consequences if they don't get it," says Ptacek. "But that's as crazy as saying everybody has to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall. It's just not true..."

About a decade ago, Ptacek's wife Ying-Hui Fu discovered the first human gene linked to natural short sleep; people who had a rare genetic mutation seemed to get the same benefits from six hours of sleep a night as those without the mutation got from eight hours. In 2019, Fu and Ptacek discovered two more genes connected to natural short sleep, and they'll soon submit a paper describing a fourth, providing even more evidence that functioning well on less sleep is a genetic trait...

Doctors once dismissed short sleepers as depressed or suffering from insomnia. Yet short sleepers may actually have an edge over everyone else. Research is still early, but Fu has found that besides being more efficient at sleep, they tend to be more energetic and optimistic and have a higher tolerance for pain than people who need to spend more time in bed. They also tend to live longer.

 

 

Scientists Solve a Mystery By Firing a Laser at the Moon (yahoo.com) 33

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @04:34PM from the laser-shows dept.

"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.

For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked...

Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface...

In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said.
Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."

 

 

Reviewer Calls Linux-based PinePhone 'the Most Interesting Smartphone I've Tried in Years' (androidpolice.com) 41

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:39PM from the Linux-PC-in-your-palm dept.

A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64's new Linux-based PinePhone "the most interesting smartphone I've tried in years," with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There's a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It's good to know that even if PinePhone vanished overnight, you could still purchase new batteries for around $10-15...

There's a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. While it can be used as extra storage, just like the SD slots in Android phones and tablets, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and put it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means you can move between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping microSD cards, which is amazing for trying out new Linux distributions without wiping data. How great would it be if Android phones could do that?

Finally, the inside of the PinePhone has six hardware killswitches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker over the selfie camera if you're worried about malicious software — just flip the switch and never worry about it again.... For a $150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no previous experience in the smartphone industry, I'm impressed it's built as well as it is...

I look forward to seeing what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish.
A Pine64 blog post this weekend touts "a boat-load of cool and innovative things" being attempted by the PinePhone community, including users working on things like a fingerprint scanner or a thermal camera, plus a community that's 3D-printing their own custom PinePhone cases. And Pine64 has now identified three candidates for a future keyboard option (each of which can be configured as either a slide-out or clamshell keyboard): I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month... I don't know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days...

While I have no further announcements at this time, what I will say is that we have no intention of slowing down the pace now until February 2021 (when Chinese New Year begins)...

IT roles we old times never filled

Excerpts from NETWORKWORLD

Cisco spotlights new IT roles you've never heard of

A Cisco report on IT trends says new jobs to address changing IT needs include business translator, network guardian and network detective.

By Michael Cooney

Senior Editor, Network World| May 4, 2020 10:18 am PDT

 

From the networking study, Cisco put forward a number of new or developing roles it expects to see in the future, including:

• Business translator: The business translator works to better turn the needs of business into service-level, security and compliance requirements that can be applied and monitored across the network. The translator also works to use network and network data for business value and innovation, and their knowledge of networking and application APIs will help them glue the business to the IT landscape.
• Network guardian: A network guardian works to bridge network and security architectures. They build the distributed intelligence of the network into security architecture and the SecOps process. This is where networking and security meet, and the guardian is at the center of it all, pulling in and pushing out vast amounts of data, distilling it and then taking action to identify faults or adapt to shutdown attackers.
• Network commander: Intent-based networking builds on controller-based automation and orchestration processes. The network commander takes charge of these processes and practices that ensure the health and continuous operation of the network controller and underlying network.
• Network orchestrator: This position translates business needs into network policy. It focuses on policy translation and automation, and policy alignment across network and IT domains.
• Network detective: A network detective uses and tunes network assurance tools that employadvanced analytics and AI to ensure that the network delivers on business intent. They work with IT service-management processes and SecOps teams to identify network anomalies and close potential security holes. Like the network guardian, they use data proactively to identify faults and attacks.

“These new jobs represent a growing tie between business and technology,” Clarke said. "Piece parts of these new criteria are handled by different people but what we are seeing is a need for a hybrid engineer to handle a blend of duties they don’t typically deal with today."

For example, the business intent might be high-quality video calls from a remote workspace that then might be moved from one place to another. The network doesn’t understand that but an engineer can take a multistep configuration to make that happen. How you deal with security, control bandwidth, QoS and use analytics and automation together is part of an evolving role, he said.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Disclosure: I own a few shares (fewer than 200) of Cisco; but, they know nothing about me or my blog and this posting is not, in any way, endorsed by them.

We are edging toward the user-friendly computing arena about which I dreamed 40-50 years ago.

Back in the days when, to make good use of digital computing power, one needed to program to a certain extent (More from Slashdot.org - What was your first coding language?), I lamented that "Just because we have the capability of doing something doesn't mean that we should need to do it."

One of the latest postings on Slashdot.org (below) gives me hope that we'll eventually reach the state in which the person on the street will be able to tell digital computers what to do.

Will Low-Code and No-Code Platforms Revolutionize Programming? (forbes.com) 94

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 23, 2020 @03:34AM from the pondering-platforms dept.

In a new article in Forbes, a Business Technology professor at the Villanova School of Business argues that the way we build software applications is changing: If you're living in the 21st century you turn to your cloud provider for help where many of the most powerful technologies are now offered as-a-service. When your requirements cannot be completely fulfilled from cloud offerings, you build something. But what does "building" mean? What does "programming" mean...? You can program from scratch. You can go to Github (where you can find code of all flavors). Or you can — if you're a little lazier — turn to low-code or no-code programming platforms to develop your applications.

All of this falls under the umbrella of what, the Gartner Group defines as the "democratization of expertise":

"Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (for example, ML, application development) or business domain expertise (for example, sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training...."

[T]he new repositories, platforms and tools are enabling a whole new set of what we used to call "programming." As Satya Nadella said, "Every business will become a software business, build applications, use advanced analytics and provide SAAS services," and as Sajjad Daya says so well in Hackernoon, "Coding takes too long for it to be both profitable and competitively priced. That's not the case with no-code platforms, though. The platforms do the complicated programming automatically, slashing development time..."

The technology democracy has forever changed corporate strategy. And what does this mean? It means that the technical team scales on cue. But "technical" means competencies around Github, low-code/no-code platforms and especially business domains... [A]ll of this levels the technology playing field among companies — so long as they understand the skills and competencies they need.

Today's witty remark from Slashdot.org: "16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Serling"