Dev.SN

Papas Fritas writes:

Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett died during a botched execution [reuters.com] on Tuesday, minutes after a doctor had called a halt to the procedure, raising more questions about new death penalty cocktails used by the state and others. Thirteen minutes after a doctor administered a lethal injection at the state's death chamber in McAlester, Lockett lifted his head and started mumbling. The doctor halted the execution, said state corrections department spokesman Jerry Massie. Lockett died of an apparent massive heart attack about 40 minutes after the procedure started, he said. "We believe that a vein was blown and the drugs weren't working as they were designed to. The director ordered a halt to the execution," Massie said. The troubled execution was expected to have national implications, with lawyers for death row inmates having argued that new lethal injection cocktails used in Oklahoma and other states could cause undue suffering and violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. [...]

[...]Oklahoma had set up a new lethal injection procedure and cocktail of chemicals earlier this year after it was no longer able to obtain the drugs it had once used for executions. "After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight Clayton Lockett was tortured to death," said Madeline Cohen, an attorney for Warner. Oklahoma and other states have been scrambling to find new suppliers and chemical combinations after drug makers, [nytimes.com] mostly in Europe, imposed sales bans because they objected to having medications made for other purposes being used in lethal injections.[...]

[...] Lockett, 38, was convicted of first-degree murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery [tulsaworld.com] for a 1999 crime spree with two co-defendants. He was found to have shot teen-ager Stephanie Nieman and buried her alive in a shallow grave where she eventually died.

Do you think this is torture, or simply a successful execution?
What alternative execution methods would you prefer to see?

Original Submission

Woods writes:

Google gives us an update on their latest self-driving car escapades. Make sure you check out the video in the article [blogspot.com] for a look at how the car handles various situations thrown at it.

Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. At a busy time of day, a typical city street can leave even experienced drivers sweaty-palmed and irritable. We all dream of a world in which city centers are freed of congestion from cars circling for parking [accessmagazine.org] and have fewer intersections made dangerous by distracted drivers. That's why over the last year we've shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving.[...]

[...] We've improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously-pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can't-and it never gets tired or distracted.

Would you trust your kids crossing the road with autonomous cars driving in the area?
What if you had an emergency situation and needed the car to hurry up and get you to the hospital in a traffic jam?

Original Submission

An anonymous Soylentil asks:

My ad-supported Kindle's buttons are dying, so I'm in the market for a new eBook reader. I figured the upcoming sales would be a good time to buy one. To my surprise, eBook readers seem to be regressing rather than advancing.

My hard requirements are:

1. e-Ink display
2. Text-to-speech
3. Doesn't need company's software to transfer books.

My preferred features include:

1. Good PDF support. I want to read technical books on it, something I can't do with the Kindle.
2. Stable software
3. Doesn't spy on everything you do. Kindles track absolutely everything.
4. Support for multiple voices. The same voice gets annoying after a few books.

I'm unable to find anything which fulfills all those conditions. Any recommendations? Before you say smartphone, it needs an e-Ink display. Are smartphones and tablets killing eBook readers?

Original Submission

Angry Jesus writes:

Recent ATIP (Access to Information Act) requests for Canadian TSP (telecom sevice provider) privacy data have revealed that, on average, TSPs receive a request from law enforcement for subscriber data every 27 seconds, or about 1 out of every 35 Canadian citizens per year. Given the shear volume of requests, it is likely that most have no judicial oversight and it also seems that TSPs rarely, if ever, exercise their legal right to deny a request without a warrant.

Even worse, there is legislation currently pending to permit TSP's to secretly disclose the same information to 3rd parties if they are investigating a contractual breach or possible violation of any law. So basically it would be a complete free for all. In true political fashion, the name of the bill proposing this change is the Digital Privacy Act.

Original Submission

lhsi writes:

An experiment looked at whether an earlier success for an online activity would mean that future success would be more likely (Abstract, Full Text [.pdf]).

The experimenters tested in four different areas:

1. Kickstarter Funding: A number of unfunded projects were selected and some received funding
2. Epinions ratings: A number of helpful ratings were selected and some were given a helpful rating
3. Wikipedia awards: A number of highly productive editors were selected and given a community member status award
4. Change.org petition signatures: A number of petitions were selected and some had a dozen signatures added

In each of the areas, the ones that had been randomly selected for an initial "success" received greater successes compared to the controls that were not given an initial success.

Further experimentation give a greater initial boost to see if the extent of further success would also be greater, but this did not have as much of an effect. The researchers note:

Our findings reveal the presence of a noticeable feedback effect in each of the distinct settings that we investigated, in that initial arbitrary endowments create lasting disparities in individual success. These results suggest that the inadvertent magnification of arbitrary differences between individuals of comparable merit may be a common feature of many types of social reward systems. At the same time, our experimental demonstration of decreasing marginal returns to success may suggest bounds to the degree to which the natural allocation of resources can be disrupted by social feedback effects. Without a priori differentiation in quality or structural sources of advantage, cumulative advantage alone may not be able to generate the extreme kinds of runaway inequality that so commonly are attributed to it. The vulnerability of meritocracies to biases from success-breeds-success effects thus may be more limited than generally assumed

Original Submission

lhsi writes:

A look at personal performance and assisting teammates in a highly competitive environment has found that personal performance increases at the expense of working together as a team. While bad for the team as a whole, it often awarded the non-team-player with better future contracts.

High-stakes team competitions can present a social dilemma in which participants must choose between concentrating on their personal performance and assisting teammates as a means of achieving group objectives. We find that despite the seemingly strong group incentive to win the NBA title, cooperative play actually diminishes during playoff games, negatively affecting team performance. Thus team cooperation decreases in the very high stakes contexts in which it is most important to perform well together. Highlighting the mixed incentives that underlie selfish play, personal scoring is rewarded with more lucrative future contracts, whereas assisting teammates to score is associated with reduced pay due to lost opportunities for personal scoring. A combination of misaligned incentives and psychological biases in performance evaluation bring out the "I" in "team" when cooperation is most critical.

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New Life at the Bottom of the Sea

mrpg writes:

Scientists found life in the Marianas in a recent trip under the sea.

Amoebas Found in the Caribbean

Anonymous Coward writes:

The WoodsHole Oceanographic Institute has revealed in a press conference their recent findings of life in Arecibo Bay.

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gewg_ writes:

From dartmouth.edu

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born. Those innovations made computing accessible to all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, to people across the nation and the world.

Dartmouth's April 30, 2014, BASIC at 50 anniversary celebration will kick off with the public premiere of a documentary on the history and impact of BASIC, created by filmmakers Bob Drake and Mike Murray with Professor Dan Rockmore. The event will be held from 1 to 2:30 p.m. in the Hood Museum of Art's Hood Auditorium.

Any memories about your first programs?

Original Submission

Woods writes:

Remi Soummer, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD., led his team to reanalyze images that had been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope to search for planetary disks using improved detection algorithms.

The stars were initially targeted with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) based on unusual heat signatures obtained from NASA space-based telescopes, including IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The previous data provided interesting clues that dusty disks might exist around these stars. Such disks might be seen in scattered light from small dust particles. But when Hubble first viewed the stars between 1999 and 2006, no visible-light disks were detected in the NICMOS pictures.

Recently, with improvements in image processing — including algorithms used for face-recognition software — Soummer and his team reanalyzed the archived images. This time, they could unequivocally see the debris disks, and they could even determine their shapes.

"We are also working to implement the same techniques as a standard processing method for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope," said STScI teammate Laurent Pueyo. "These disks will also be prime targets for the Webb Telescope."

The James Webb Space Telescope is slated to be launched in 2018, and with a collecting area about five times larger than that of Hubble, JWST will have unprecedented resolution.

The full journal article (pdf) is available.

Original Submission

Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC's 5 Live science podcast has a section on research at University College London (UCL) looking at the limits on fossil fuel consumption while meeting the goal of limiting to a 2°C Temperature rise by 2050 as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The interesting result is that we actually already have access to more fossil fuels than we could use according to the models available.

The authors show that the overwhelming majority of the huge coal reserves in China, Russia and the United States should remain unused along with over 260 thousand million barrels oil reserves in the Middle East, equivalent to all of the oil reserves held by Saudi Arabia. The Middle East should also leave over 60% of its gas reserves in the ground.

[...] Lead author Dr Christophe McGlade, Research Associate at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources said: "We've now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2°C temperature limit.

"Policy makers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2°C goal. If they go ahead with developing their own resources, they must be asked which reserves elsewhere should remain unburnt in order for the carbon budget not to be exceeded."

The research is being published in full in Nature (paywalled link only), and there is additional coverage in International Business Times, The Engineer and The Independent

Original Submission