Cold, dead fingers: Will motorists give up in-car cellphone access without a fight?

Highway deaths are up in the United States, as is the use of smartphone apps. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sees a link and last week issued guidelines – not mandates – that would have the major phone-OS developers figure out a way to severely limit the functionality of smartphones while a car is moving. But only the driver’s phone would be crippled, not the passengers’ phone, in NHTSA’s proposal.

Calling features would still be enabled, via handsfree link. Incoming texts would be read aloud and a speech-to-text response could be generated. Music playback would also be available. That’s about it.

Spike in fatalities unseen since the 1960s, NHTSA says

NHTSA says the 7% increase in fatalities in 2015 is unprecedented in the past half century and preliminary data on 2016 suggests the death toll rose a further 10% this year. The last time it was that high was the 1960s, when fatalities year over year increased by 7% to 9% in four of the 10 years. Since then, the death rate (total fatalities) has been flat or gone down in 26 of 46 years.

Traffic deaths each year per 100,000 population and per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, left axis, and total motor vehicle deaths per year (car, truck, bus, motorcycle, bicyclist, pedestrian). Source: NHTSA FARS database.

How big is the problem? Depends on what stats you use

The concern by safety officials comes from a spike in traffic fatalities. How big of a spike depends on which data gets publicized. The chart above is from NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Here are three ways to look at the data.

• Raw fatalities. This is how many people died in a year. Since the US population grows each year, using this data set often provides the most dramatic increases. The death toll in the US in 1970 (the start of the safety era with seat belts mandatory since 1968) was 52,627 when the population was 205 million; in 2015 the US population was 321 million, 57% more, but the fatality rate was a third lower, 35,092 in 2015. So, historically the death rate is down. But in 2015 the death toll was 2,417 more than in 2014, or 7% more. The five-year increase, 2015 vs. 2010, was 6%.
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• Deaths per 100,000 per year. This accounts, somewhat, for our growing population over time. It’s a measure that’s understandable. If you live in a town of 100,000, on average 11 people died last year. In 1970, it was 26 per 100,000. From 2014 to 2015, deaths per 100,000 went up 7%, too, same as the raw fatalities rate. The five-year increase was 2% (2015 vs. 2010). Deaths-per-100K peaked in the 1930s at almost 30 per 100,000 people. It drops in bad economic times, during World War II (driving restrictions), and during gasoline shortages (mid-1970s, early 1980s), but it’s generally heading down.
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• Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This statistic does the best job of factoring in fluctuations in the economy and fuel shortages, as well as safety improvements in cars and roads. The line slopes steadily downward, from almost 25 deaths per 100 million VMT in 1921 (the first year of more detailed auto fatalities record-keeping)  to just over 1 last year. In 2014 it was the lowest in history, 1.08 deaths per 100 million VMT. In 2015 it was 1.11, an increase of 3%, the only increase in the past decade. That’s noticeable and worrisome, but 3% isn’t 7%.

Even as auto fatalities have gone up 3% or 7% in the past year, you’re still pretty safe in a car. Multiply 11 fatalities per 100,000 people times the 80 years a person is in a car as a passenger or driver (or out walking or biking), you get 880 fatalities per 100,000, or slightly less than a 1% chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident over your lifetime. That’s low but still high enough that you’ll likely know of a friend or family member killed in an accident. It’s a leading cause, (for years the leading cause), of deaths in children and adults under 25. For better or worse, suicides, homicides and drug deaths are now challenging auto accidents among those 25 and under.

What are the odds a cellphone kill switch is adopted?

By asking cellphone-makers and OS providers to voluntarily restrict what services the phone provides in a moving car, the feds look a bit less like spoilsports. There is likely to be pushback. Whenever drivers are asked to self-rate their driving, the majority say they’re above average, which isn’t possible statistically, and they might bristle at seeing their quote freedoms curtailed.  (See below.)

There are reports that Apple in 2008 applied for a patent on technology that would lock out phones that were in motion; the technology supposedly could determine which phone was the driver’s. The patent was cited in a 2014 lawsuit over an alleged distracted-driving fatality.

CellControl, a Baton Rouge, LA, company, offers DriveID, a dash-mounted $129 hardware-software product that can limit the driver’s use of his or her phone. DriveID is managed by parents in a family situation or by a fleet manager in a commercial setting. Pokemon Go has been cited as a factor in some car crashes, so much so that the current version has a lockout that disables the app when it’s being played at greater than walking speeds. The change was hastened by a video showing a Pokemon Go motorist sideswiping a police car.

It’s possible phone-makers will use a limit-your-phone-access mandate as a reason to keep from adding competing apps into the handful now enabled under Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Specifically: You wouldn’t see Apple Maps on an Android phone and you wouldn’t see Google Maps or Waze on an Apple phone running CarPlay.

Americans didn’t like enforced ignition interlocks

History shows motorists reacted badly to heavy-handed behavior modification. In the mid-1970s, cars were equipped with ignition interlocks that wouldn’t allow the car to be started until the driver and front seat passenger had buckled their seat belts. This was supported by the auto industry in part to stave off mandatory airbags, which at the time were seen as a substitute for seat belts. The buzzers were loud, sometimes electrical gremlins kept the cars from starting, and on many cars it was easy to defeat the interlock. Automakers pulled back within a couple years.

Circa 1980 some automakers, again trying to keep airbags out of the picture, installed automatic seat belts with complex (read: not always reliable) mechanical arms that draped the seatbelt across the driver’s and passenger’s torsos. If driver or passenger opened the door while backing up, the belt retracted and wrapped itself around the occupant’s neck. This, too, died an early death.

Is there a sensible compromise?

Given how little Americans like to be told what to do when driving, they’re not going to like limits on their freedom to use their phones in ways ranging from distracting or potentially hazardous to downright stupid.

Driver-assist technology can help make the occupants of a car safer should the driver be distracted while creating or reading a long text. A car equipped with lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection, and forward emergency braking will alert the driver if the car ahead suddenly slows, or if the car is drifting out of lane. For someone who’s texting, that is either a safety feature … or it’s an enabler for someone to write longer texts before they get in trouble.

While texting is the main concern, better voice recognition and one-shot destination entry will make it easier to enter an address without stopping. Right now, every phone has that feature, but only some embedded navigation systems. Already, most automakers lock out the LCD display’s ability to tap in the address. Automakers so far have resisted implementing technologies that could recognize when a passenger, not the driver, is entering address information. Mercedes-Benz offers a unique technology, SplitView, that shows the driver and passenger different views of the same center stack screen. Alternating pixels point left and right.

If NHTSA moves to reign in the use of smartphones in cars, there’s likely to be pushback. Even if distracted driving is the cause of the current 3%-7% increase in fatalities, drivers still see the overall risk to themselves as minor. And there’s conflicting research as to what constitutes distraction. Studies show that just talking on a hands-free phone takes up some of the driver’s attention. Tuning the car radio has always been distracting. Some research says talking to a passenger can be distracting. In the past, two of the biggest distractions were the driver dropping a lit cigarette in his or her lap, or a bee flying in the car. Those are small distractions now with the decrease in smoking and air conditioning that allows for windows-closed driving.

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The Human Connectome Project zeroes in on the firmware of the brain

Is the mind an emergent property of the brain, or is it something… else? Cartesian dualism is a polarizing topic, but like many other ideas that we thought were the province of philosophers, we’re getting light shed on it from a surprising source. Researchers from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) have just released our best-ever functional map of the human brain. It’s twice as finely detailed as anything that has come before it — and it’s tiptoeing closer to settling the mind-body problem. As it turns out, the brain as computer analogy has its shortfalls.

“The brain is not like a computer that can support any operating system and run any software,” says neuroscientist David Van Essen, Principal Investigator of the Human Connectome Project. “Instead, the software — how the brain works — is intimately correlated with the brain’s structure — its hardware, so to speak. If you want to find out what the brain can do, you have to understand how it is organized and wired.”

Image: Glasser, Van Etten et al

Because different subsurface brain structures look more or less the same from the outside, neuroscientists have heretofore relied mostly on gross anatomy and unfortunate happenstance to tell us what parts of the brain did what. (Here’s looking at you, Phineas Gage and Patient H.M.) Structure and function are tightly coupled in the brain, down to the molecular level. But the brain does so many things. Missing borders between brain structures can badly compromise our ability to understand how the brain works.

The HCP has been working for nigh unto six years to shed light on this problem. Their most recent announcement is impressive: The project just doubled the spatial resolution of our best known functional map. In doing so, they also integrate several different ways of explaining differences between brain regions. The researchers report that they’ve found a total of 180 distinct areas per hemisphere, regions which are bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography. This development stands to change neuroscience, by opening up our understanding of the relationship between structure and function.

Using multimodal MRI data from the HCP and a semi-automated approach, the new “parcellation” of cortical function checked its predictions by comparing them with brain scans from hundreds of healthy volunteers, so that the model could divide functional regions with exquisite accuracy. The parcellation divides both the left and right cerebral hemispheres into 180 areas based on physical differences like cortical thickness, functional distinctions like which areas respond to language stimuli, and differences in the connections between functional regions. If you think of it using the metaphor of, say, Google Maps, this approach combines political maps with satellite imagery; the most important divisions are invisible from a zoomed-out perspective, but important all the same.

Like cartographers from the Age of Exploration, brain cartographers are creating a tool for others to use in exploration and discovery. Prior work on the connectome gave us a directional diagram of information flow through the brain, and a startling semantic atlas that shows where we process the meanings of certain words and abstract topics. This team of researchers hopes that their work will prove an asset to other researchers as they push back the frontier of ignorance.

“We were able to persuade Nature to put online almost 200 extra pages of detailed information on each of the 180 regions as well as all of the algorithms we used to align the brains and create the map,” Van Essen said. “We think it will serve the scientific community best if they can dive down and get these maps onto their computer screens and explore as they see fit.”

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Five Easy Ways To Save Your [Mobile & Computer] Data

 
Things you should do right now to conserve your data.

Worry less about exceeding your data limit by following these five simple tips for Android users:
1. Reduce the data used by your Android mobile device or computer by turning on Chrome Data Saver Mode. From compressing web pages to removing images when loading a page on a slow connection, you’re able to save up to 70% more data.

2. Offline YouTube videos and watch them as often as you like without using data or buffering each time with YouTube Offline.

3. Whether it’s your neighborhood or a weekend getaway destination, there’s a way to use Google Maps without using any data. Download an area of the world and seamlessly use Maps features like turn-by-turn navigation and access useful location information without a network connection using Google Maps Offline.

4. Identify and remove data intensive apps by going to Settings > Data Usage on your Android device. You may be surprised to see data being used by apps you hardly touch!

5. Disable auto-updating apps on your Android device by opening Google Play and tapping the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines) on the top left of the screen. Go to Settings > tap Auto-update apps > select Do not auto-update apps or Auto-update apps over Wi-Fi.

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Neuroscientists just isolated the part of the brain that controls free will

Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we’ve cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision — how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act.

“How do we peek into people’s brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and coauthor of the report. “What parts of the brain are involved in free choice?”

The team devised a novel way to track a participant’s focus without using cues or commands, avoiding a Schrodinger’s-like dilemma of altering the process of choice by calling attention to it. Participants took positions in MRI scanners, and then were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on both sides. They were asked just to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side. When to switch sides, and for how long to look, was entirely up to them. Over the duration of the experiment, the participants glanced back and forth, switching sides dozens of times.

In terms of connectivity in the brain, the actual process of switching attention from one side to the other was tightly linked with activity in the parietal lobe, which is sort of the top back quadrant of the brain. Activity during the period of deliberation before a choice took place in the frontal cortex, which engages in reasoning and plans movement. Deliberation also lit up the basal ganglia, important parts of the deep brain that handle motor control, including the initiation of motion. The basal ganglia has also been an important target for research on dopaminergic diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s, but the area has also been implicated in OCD, which has a lot to do with attention and volition.

Connectivity isn’t the only important factor here, though. Participants’ frontal-lobe activity began earlier than it would have if participants had been cued to shift attention, which demonstrates that the brain was planning a voluntary action rather than merely following an order. Following commands or running through practiced actions, like the way you can sometimes drive home on autopilot, don’t need the same lead time. Timing is crucial.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that this is an entirely novel research tool. It should be examined and held up to criticism and comparison, because it stands to revolutionize how we study not just the brain but the mind. Now that scientists have a way to follow the execution of free will, they can use the technique to watch what’s happening in the brain as people navigate more complex decisions, such as weighing short-term rewards against long-term rewards — and perhaps even pinpoint the tipping point between them.

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Plastic-eating bacteria set to revolutionize waste disposal

 

 

 Few of us are likely to spend much time meditating on the problem of plastic, at least until a tranquil afternoon is violently disrupted by the vision of a stray Walmart bag sailing across the azure sky. Having lived a few streets down from a Walmart, I can personally attest to the menace of runaway shopping bags. But the problem goes far deeper than aesthetics — many plastics leach chemicals that act like the sex hormone estrogen when introduced into the body, increasing the likelihood of birth defects and other health complications.

For these and many other reasons, finding innovative ways to remove plastic waste from the environment has become an issue of increasing importance.  Thankfully a group of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan may have seized upon a solution, one involving the humble bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis.

Bottle breakdown. Illustration: P. Huey. Reprinted with permission from U.T. Bornscheuer, Science 351:1154 (2016)

One of the reasons we find plastics so troublesome is that they are not rapidly biodegradable; they stay resident in the environment long after they have served their purpose. Enter Ideonella sakaiensis: Japanese scientists have shown this bacteria is capable of digesting a chemical called polyethylene terephthalate, the substrate of many plastics we find in household products like bottled drinks, cosmetics and household cleaners. This could be revolutionary – imagine carrying a super soaker charged with an aqueous solution of the bacterium and zapping down those Walmart shopping bags as they careened overhead.

The above equivalent of environmental skeet shooting might even become a popular leisure activity, except for one catch: The bacteria in question digest plastic at an epically slow rate, approximately six weeks to eat through a thin layer of PET. If this method is ever to succeed at disposing of the megalithic Styrofoam structure that my laptop computer shipped in, clearly something faster acting is required.

Thanks to progress being made in genetic engineering, though, a way to rev up the speed at which the bacteria digest plastic could soon be at hand. The scientists performing the study have already sequenced the bacteria’s genome and using gene editing techniques, are well on their way to figuring out a way to increase its plastic eating potency. Technologies like CRISPR, the subject of much hand wringing recently when Chinese scientists used it to edit the genomes of human embryos, are in bad need of a success story.

Thanks to sensationalist media outlets and unquestioning audiences, genetic engineering catches more than its share of flack. In reality, if humanity is to persist very far into the twenty-first century without reverting to primitive hunter-gatherer societies, it will require the aid of advanced forms of genetic engineering – if only to remove the immense amount of plastic waste we are currently producing.

We have previously reported on the success of genetic engineering in combatting the Zika virus, producing bananas enriched with beta-carotene to combat and malnutrition, and making salmon available to a wider range of people. If the removal of plastic waste could be added to that list of accomplishments, it might just succeed in turning the tides of public opinion in favor of genetic engineering. Until then, activities like plastic bag skeet shooting are likely to remain the stuff of imagination (well, at least mine).

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New iOS 9.2.1 update un-bricks iPhones, fixes ‘Error 53′

 

 Earlier this month we reported on Apple’s “Error 53″ message and how it bricked perfectly functional iPhones without warning, often after the devices were upgraded to iOS 9. Apple eventually clarified that the problem, which was limited to devices equipped with Touch ID, occurred if a third-party performed repairs to the device and replaced either the home button or the cable that connected the Touch ID sensor to the smartphone’s logic board.

Now, Apple has released a new build of iOS 9.2.1 that will “un-brick” devices previously crippled by Error 53. This new build of the operating system doesn’t include any other new features or capabilities, and it’s strictly meant for customers who currently have a $600 rectangular paperweight sitting somewhere around the house.

Initially, Apple defended bricking customer devices by claiming it did so to ensure Touch ID and Apple Pay were kept secure. This never made much sense, given the length of time that could pass between when a customer repaired a device and when the device failed. A security system that doesn’t lock down an insecure device for eight to 12 months isn’t particularly secure.

Error 53

Now, Apple has backed away from this explanation altogether. In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple explained the problem thusly:

This reports as an Error 53 in iTunes and appears when a device fails a security test. This test was designed to check whether Touch ID works properly before the device leaves the factory.
Today, Apple released a software update that allows customers who have encountered this error message to successfully restore their device using iTunes on a Mac or PC.
We apologize for any inconvenience, this was designed to be a factory test and was not intended to affect customers. Customers who paid for an out-of-warranty replacement of their device based on this issue should contact AppleCare about a reimbursement.

There is one caveat to this update: Touch ID will no longer function on an iPhone that’s been repaired by a third party. First, kudos to Apple for doing the right thing on this issue. Disabling Touch ID if the component doesn’t authenticate properly is the sane way to deal with the problem, particularly when the alternative was bricking a device with zero warning or explanation. Given that Apple doesn’t license any third-party stores to provide repairs in the United States, this entire situation looked like an attempt to force people to pay whatever “official” rate Apple wanted to charge for device repair, while freezing small competitors out of business.

The Touch ID sensor. Image by iFixit

Giving users the option to decide if they want to pay for Apple to fix their Touch ID system is a much better way to deal with the problem. We’re also glad to see the company acknowledging users who were forced to buy new devices and offering them reimbursements for the expense. Presumably they won’t have to return the devices they purchased, since the original models were likely thrown away.

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A Tablet or Smartphone Could Power Your Next Laptop

When you get a load of the new NexDock, you may feel like it's 2011 all over again. Similar to the old Motorola Atrix 4G, this new laptop uses a smartphone as its brain. The company is trying to get off the ground via an Indiegogo campaign.



The NexDock includes a 10,000-mAh battery, keyboard and a 14-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display for $149 (though early backers can get it as low as $99 as of this writing), which is cheaper than most laptops. When you plug in a Windows 10 smartphone into its mini HDMI port, you can use Microsoft's Windows Continuum feature to use your tablet or phone as a full-fledged laptop.

Continuum allows all Windows 10 devices, such as tablets and smartphones, to expand onto larger monitors. This Microsoft operating system feature allows Windows apps to resize gracefully, based on what the OS recognizes as the largest screen size available. Essentially it makes the monitor and phone or tablet into dual monitors, where screens and data can be moved back and forth.

As PCWorld points out, the choice of mini HDMI is curious when more and more phones use USB Type-C, which supports video output. NexDock has plans for future USB-C devices, but they aren't part of the current Indiegogo campaign.

In addition to running off of Windows 10 smartphones and tablets, NexDock also claims their shell can connect to mini PCs, as well as Android and iOS devices. Of course, without Windows 10, you will only have one screen. The Motorola Atrix 4G combined a specific Android smartphone with an 11.6-inch dock for $299, so the NexDock has more versatility and value right out of the gate.

As of this writing, the NexDock is at 10 percent of its goal, with one month left to go in its campaign. The Early Bird package is already sold out. The company claims supporters will receive their docks by June 2016. Will you be throwing your money in the ring?

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Storytelling may be the secret to creating ethical artificial intelligence

 

 

 One of the more disturbing trends in robotics is how often some researchers gloss over the moral complexities of AI by suggesting Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” will be sufficient to handle any ambiguities robots encounter. This only serves to demonstrate how unfamiliar many technologists are with the depth of the issue, for as a closer reading of Asimov’s work reveals, the three laws of robotics leave plenty of room for disastrous outcomes.

There are encouraging signs, however, that at least some other researchers are taking the problem seriously. Two figures leading the charge in this direction are Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison of Georgia Institute of Technology. They are pioneering a system called Quixote, by which an artificial intelligence learns “value alignment” by reading stories from different cultures.

This may seem a strange approach to the problem — until one considers how regional questions of morality are. For example, two counties only a few miles apart in the United States may have vastly different ways of perceiving moral and ethical issues. For instance, spanking your child may be considered a morally unacceptable act among an affluent urban population, whereas immigrants or more rural communities may find this form of punishment more acceptable. This is not to caste aspersions in either direction, but simply to point out that even among humans, there is little consensus on moral and ethical issues. How much more difficult will it be for humans to agree on what constitutes ethical robot behavior?

The Quixote system, by which an AI learns ethical behavior through reinforcement learning and multicultural stories

As it turns out, there may be a way, and it’s not so different from how humans learn the values particular to the region they grow up in: by telling stories to each other. The fables and legends particular to a locale are frequently laced with moral directives that provide clues to a growing child on what constitutes morally acceptable behavior in their culture. The idea behind Quixote is that the same principles can be applied to shaping robot behavior.

Quixote builds on Riedl’s prior research project, which demonstrated that an artificial intelligence can be trained to identify a correct sequence of actions by crowdsourcing story plots from the Internet. This is not at all dissimilar from the RoboWatch project we reported on earlier in the year, which showed how an AI could be trained to learn simple household tasks like the steps involved in making a peanut butter sandwich by watching YouTube videos. The Quixote system takes this a step further, adding a reward signal that reinforces certain behaviors and punishes others during a trial-and-error learning process. In essence, the AI learns to imitate the behavior of the “good guy” in the stories it reads from the Internet and avoid the behavior perpetrated by the ignoble characters.

However, the approach is not without its pitfalls. In some parts of the world, for instance, female genital mutilation is considered de rigueur, though the bulk of humanity regards such practices as objectionable and would certainly not want robots perpetuating them. In other words, in training robots on stories modeled after our own cultural precedents, we may wind up giving new life to behaviors that are better left to wither on the vine. Therefore, formulating a robust and universal ethical system — usually the pastime of ivory tower philosophers — is likely to take on increased significance as we consider the possible repercussions of endowing robots with the same porous and inconsistent moral norms exemplified by our own regional populations.

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Why we can’t plug Southern California’s massive methane leak

There’s a burgeoning environmental disaster playing out in Southern California — but unlike the widespread media coverage on the Deepwater Horizon, this leak has been invisible until quite recently. In late October, the Southern California Gas Company detected an underground methane leak spewing an estimated 110,000 lbs of gas per hour into Aliso Canyon. Since it discovered the problem, the company has evacuated an estimated 1,700 people and closed two schools.

The leak is normally invisible, but an infrared video taken by the Environmental Defense Fund captured the massive leak and the methane escaping from it at multiple points.

Several of the problems associated with a leak this size are purely practical. The methane reeks of rotting eggs, because we add a chemical called tert-Butylthiol to the normally odorless gas to make certain people can smell a leak.

Remember Templeton from Charlotte’s Web? It’s that, times a billion. Image by SailorLoveSong

Reeking like an unventilated football stadium on $1 steak and free draft beer night ought to be punishment enough for anyone in one lifetime, but methane is also explosive, an asphyxiant, and a potent greenhouse gas.

CO2 vs. methane

Most of the conversation around greenhouse gas emissions revolves around carbon dioxide, or CO2. According to the EPA, CO2 emissions account for about 82% of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Methane, in contrast, only accounts for about 10% of total warming. Pound-for-pound, methane is about 21x more potent than CO2 over a 100-year cycle, and as much as 72x more potent within shorter timeframes.

The potency discrepancy reflects the different environmental persistence between the two gases. Methane persists in the environment for 10-12 years after it’s released, but ultimately reacts with water vapor in the upper atmosphere and is converted into carbon dioxide and water. The fact that methane still takes a decade or more to dissipate out of the atmosphere, however, means that a massive leak like this one is still capable of having an impact for a significant period of time.

Current estimate of the total gas leak is around 800,000 metric tons. That’s enough methane gas to boost California’s estimated methane emissions by 25% for the year — and bear in mind, this leak is thought to have begun on October 23.

Why can’t we plug the leak?

There’s another parallel between the Deepwater Horizon leak and the current methane problem in Aliso Canyon — in both cases, the depth and ferocity of the leak made it extremely difficult to plug. In this case, the methane is pouring out of a massive underground containment facility more than 8,000 feet below the surface. Traditional methods of sealing the broken pipe have already failed, so SoCalGas has drilled a second well to intersect the broken pipe.

Once the new well intersects the old one, fluid and eventually concrete will be injected to seal the pipe, rather than attempting to perform the injections at the surface. As of this past weekend, the drillers had located the broken pipe responsible for the leak. That’s no small feat, considering that the second well must be drilled far enough away to prevent any risk of explosion, and the broken line is just seven inches in diameter.

Unfortunately, we’re still months away from actually sealing off the problem. The relief well is currently at 3,800 feet, but the rest of the operation is expected to take until February or March. By that point, enough methane will have been released into the atmosphere to make an impact on the United States’ total yearly emissions — to say nothing of the costs and upheaval residents of Aliso Canyon have endured, or the financial cost of repairing the broken line. Residents of the area have already filed suits against the company, and it’s not clear what penalties or lawsuits it might face from the government of California.

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Who Put This Huge Database of U.S. Voting Records Online?

 
Time to get out your deerstalker hat. Somewhere out there is a publicly available database with approximately 191 million voting records, with details like names, birthdates, addresses, phone numbers, and political party affiliation.

The problem? Nobody knows who owns the database, who set it up, how it got online, or why its information is public. According to CSO, which first reported on the story after being alerted to its existence by researcher Chris Vickery, it's likely that the information in the database came from the political data firm NationBuilder, but it's not necessarily the company's fault that the information is live. A customer possibly purchased this information and made it public, but it's unclear if they did so on purpose or by mistake.

"NationBuilder is under no obligation to identify customers, and once the data has been obtained, they cannot control what happens to it," writes CSO's Steve Ragan. "In short, while they provided the data that's in my newly leaked voter record, they're not liable in any way for it being exposed."
In a statement, NationBuilder founder and CEO Jim Gilliam said "the voter information included is already publicly available from each state government so no new or private information was released in this database."
"We strongly believe in making voter information more accessible to political campaigns and advocacy groups, so we provide cleaned versions of that publicly accessible information to them for free," Gilliam said. "We do not provide access to anyone for non-political purposes or that would violate any state's laws. Each state has different restrictions, and we make sure that each campaign understands those restrictions before providing them with any data. It is vital that everyone running for office knows who is registered to vote in their district."

As PCMag explained in our review of NationBuilder, the service is a cross between a content management system and customer relationship management package. An Election add-on lets you import voter files from the NationBuilder Election Center from the U.S., Canada, and the UK. That way you can tell whether a member in your database is a registered voter, and if not, send them a nudge.
That data, however, is not supposed to be used for commercial purposes.

"Most states or data brokers require that anyone obtaining voter data affirm that they're not going to use it for commercial gain and that they'll follow all related state laws," CSO's Ragan points out. "Yet, because the information Vickery discovered is in a database available to anyone on the Internet who knows how to find it, it's essentially unrestricted data."

Ragan expressed concern about the potential for abuse. "Stalking and the exposure of people who normally don't share their personal information is certainly an issue," he writes. "There are other long term issues too. The personal information in this database, including political affiliation, date of birth, could be used to construct a targeted Phishing campaign."

Unfortunately, there's nothing you can really do about the existence of this database beyond petitioning your representatives about data privacy. For security reasons, a link to this database was not published, so you can't even look to see if your information is in there.

"If you are a registered voter, we cannot offer you reassurance that your details have not been obtained and won't be misused. We don't know for how long this database has been left unsecured and how many people may have accessed and downloaded it. At this point, all we're pretty sure of is that the data in the database include data from Nation Builder," reads a report from DataBreaches.net. "Could it be one of their non-hosted clients leaking the database? Maybe. Could it be that someone hacked one of their clients and stored a copy of the database at this IP address? Maybe. Could it be that an employee of a client decided to make themselves a copy for their own purposes? Maybe. The possibilities are numerous."

DataBreaches has contacted a number of different agencies about the leak, including the FBI and the California Attorney General's Office—the latter, since the state puts fairly heavy restrictions on the use of voting records in any capacity.

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Exploit Logs You Into Linux Systems After Hitting Backspace 28 Times

 
Though most of you likely don't run Linux—specifically, one using the Grub2 bootloader—you'll surely appreciate the unintended humor of a brand-new exploit that was recently found for said bootloader. The exploit is being quickly patched by various major Linux distros, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian, and it also requires physical access to an unpatched machine to work, so it's not the worst potential vulnerability, just one of the sillier ones.

As Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll explained in a Dec. 14 security report, "To quickly check if your system is vulnerable, when the Grub ask[s] you the username, press the Backspace 28 times. If your machine reboots or you get a rescue shell then your Grub is affected."

Yes, it's that easy. After you've tapped backspace for the 28th time (on an affected system), you'll gain access to the rescue shell—giving you a lot more power over the system than you previously had. An attacker would be able to have full access to the console without needing to enter any user name or password whatsoever. Said person could then load a customized kernel and do all sorts of things to the host computer—including copying the contents of its hard drive or installing some other, harder-to-find exploit (like a rootkit) that could cause all sorts of issues for a compromised system (or, worse, other networked systems).

"The attacker is able to destroy any data including the grub itself. Even in the case that the disk is ciphered the attacker can overwrite it, causing a [denial of service]," the report reads.

If your Linux distro of choice doesn't happen to have a patch ready just yet, you can grab the emergency patch that Marco and Ripoll have created to fix the isssue—all stemming from a simple integer underflow fault that was introduced to Grub2 in December 2009.

"It is irresponsible for grub to lack decades-old exploit mitigations like stack cookies that could have addressed this issue," said Dan Guido, Trail of Bits founder, in an interview with Motherboard.

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2.5% of U.S. Employees Work from Home

 
I had a voice over IP (VoIP) conference call with Hewlett-Packard (HP) last week. When the presentation started, an HP rep quoted some statistics. One was that 40 percent of workers' time is now spent in meetings and on conference calls—with an average 12 minutes at the start of each call spent dialing and debugging to get everybody online.

These aren't the only statistics being shared at this time of year. In fact, the end of 2015 has brought a fresh crop of work-related statistics and surveys that, taken together, add up to encouraging news for home office fans. According to FlexJobs, an online service for flexible, telecommuting, and freelance work opportunities, we're seeing nothing less than a rejection of the traditional office workspace. A full 76 percent of respondents to a recent FlexJobs survey said that, when they need to get important work done, they avoid the office.

Where do they go instead? Bingo (no, wait, I don't mean they go to bingo, I mean you guessed it): A home office was a far more popular choice than a coffee shop, library, or conventional office outside of normal work hours. As to why they're more productive at home, roughly three-quarters cited fewer interruptions from colleagues and fewer distractions, while 71 percent listed freedom from office politics and 68 percent reduced stress from commuting.

With 97 percent of the people surveyed saying a more flexible job would have a positive impact on their quality of life, and four out of five saying they think it would make them healthier, it's not surprising that 82 percent of the respondents said they'd be more loyal to their employers if they had flexible work options. A full 30 percent said they would take a 10-20 percent pay cut in exchange for such options.

Starting Out SmallAre companies noticing this sentiment? They can't afford not to. From 1995 to 2015, according to Gallup's annual Work and Education poll, the percentage of U.S. workers who say they have telecommuted to their jobs vaulted from 9 to 37 percent.

The overall average is a modest two days per month, increasing to six days among the self-selected group of remote workers. One in four telecommuters (i.e., one in 11 employed Americans) works from home a majority of the time or more than 10 days per month.

According to GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, regular work-at-home (among telecommuters, not self-employed individuals) has grown 103 percent since 2005, and 6.5 percent in 2014. The latter is the largest year-over-year increase since before the recession. This means that 3.7 million employees (2.5 percent of the workforce) now work from home at least half of the time.

Half of U.S. jobs, Global adds, are compatible with at least partial telework, and 20-25 percent of the workforce telecommutes at least occasionally. Approximately 80-90 percent of U.S. workers say they would like to telework at least part time. Global draws a distinction between concentrative work at home and collaborative work at the office, saying the sweet spot or balance between the two seems to be about half time apiece.

Indeed, Fortune 1000 companies are remodeling their offices and their project management practices around the reality of worker mobility. HP says 62 percent of employees work from more than one location. Global says today's office slaves are anything but chained to their desks; in fact, they're away from their desks 50-60 percent of the time.

Educating the CEO
Workers, however, are still leading companies rather than the other way around. While a study by FlexJobs and WorldatWork found that four-fifths of companies surveyed offer flexible work arrangements, only 37 percent have formal, written policies about them. And only three percent quantify return on investment (ROI) by measuring productivity, employee engagement, and performance ratings.

What can you do to get the boss's blessing for telecommuting? Bring in the studies cited here and urge him or her to get with the program. Point out that this year Millennials surpassed Generation X as the largest chunk of the U.S. labor force—and Millennials overwhelmingly desire more flexible work and better work/life balance than their predecessors did.

Chances are, your IT department has already developed (or is working hard to develop) a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy to keep up with workers' embrace of tablets and smartphones. And BYOD is a revolving door for a telecommuting plan (I like to say the flip side of BYOD is THYW, for take-home-your-work).

It's a mix of managerial structure and quantifiable goals with teleworker flexibility that provides peak happiness for bosses and staffers alike. It's not rocket science. It isn't even bingo.

What's your ideal work schedule: full-time telecommuting, alternating between a home office and cubicle office, or doing the Starbucks shuffle? Let's compare notes in the comments below or at robinkhay@gmail.com.

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Don't Buy a Microsoft Surface, Buy This Instead

 

The most exciting tablet I've seen all year runs real Windows. I've been using the Asus Transformer Book T100 at home for a few days. Unlike with an iPad, I can actually do my work on it. 

 

I'm not just talking about having Microsoft Office rather than the weird maroon that is iWork. I'm talking about calling up full desktop websites in Chrome, complete with add-ons and plugins. I'm talking about downloading a picture from a website into a real filesystem, annotating it in real Photoshop (not the crippled Photoshop Express), popping open two different Evernote windows and putting it all together in our content management system. All on a $349, convertible laptop-tablet.

 

The hero here is Intel's new Bay Trail processor, the first x86 chip to offer the right balance of cost, speed, and power consumption for effective low-cost tablet computing. The T100 - with the keyboard! - is $100 less expensive than Microsoft's crippled Surface 2, $150 less than an iPad Air, and $550 less than Microsoft's Surface Pro 2.

 

More Bay Trail tablets are coming soon, too. They're going to make for real competition to the iPad, in ways the limited Surface and expensive Surface Pro were never able to provide. I never saw the point of Intel processors in Android devices, but combined with real Windows, they're killer.

 

This is not a review of the Asus T100 tablet. For benchmarks and lab-based analysis, check out Eric Grevstad's excellent review of the tablet from our sister site, Computer Shopper.

 

The End of Windows RTThe strength of Windows is its ubiquity. You know what runs on Windows; almost everything runs on Windows. When you pick up a Windows PC, you buy into the broadest software ecosystem ever created.

Had Windows RT been sold as a genuinely different operating system, like Apple has sold the Mac and iOS, it might have had a chance. But Microsoft called it Windows 8, made it look exactly like Windows 8, and tried to promote that it ran Windows 8 apps, except for a small set of useless old apps derided as "legacy."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, what the company calls "legacy" apps, most of us call "Windows" apps. That category includes pretty much all of the heavy-hitters for the platform, including many apps and games that are being developed today. The result was a confusing set of "Windows" tablets that didn't do Windows, at least as most of the universe understands it.

With Bay Trail, there is no reason to ever build a Windows RT tablet again. Intel has proven that it can get decent performance at an acceptable price with full Windows compatibility.

That doesn't mean abandoning touch. For many uses, touch is the future. But the split between Photoshop Express and full-blown Photoshop shows why you may want to have both the touch and full desktop options available. Touch is for lightly skimming over the surface of the world by your fingertips: a multi-window desktop interface is for digging in.

With the T100 I found that my workflow was some of this, some of that. In the evening, I'd kick back into the touch version of IE, into the touch version of Kindle, or into the Mail program to read and answer messages. In the morning, I'd open three desktop Chrome tabs in parallel with Evernote and Excel windows and wale on the hardware keyboard.

Can't do that on an iPad.

And Then There Were ThreeWith the coming of the Bay Trail tablets, we now have three valid tablet operating systems. The iPad is still going to be the best choice for many consumers. With Windows 8, you pay a price for power in complexity. The iPad is simple, clean and clear, malware-free, with a unified interface and marvelous apps that spread the Internet before you. Underestimate it at your peril.

Windows 8 now becomes the choice for business: a complete, flexible platform for people who need to get the job done. When you get home, you can flip it into touch mode and hand it to your kids, or use the touch Web browser to look up the names of actors on TV. Because of its more complex user interface, I see this OS as tilting more towards the work side of the work/fun equation.

That leaves Android as the wild card. Android's best bet may be in the low-cost market. Because it's free, Android can provide a lot more value on products like the $229 Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HDX than iOS or Windows could. A huge amount of Android's growth, analysts are now saying, is in sub-$100 tablets that are largely used as e-readers, video players or casual gaming devices, often not even connected to the Web.

Android's challenge now is to prove it has value at the high end; once someone slaps a Wacom pressure-sensitive layer onto a Bay Trail tablet running a real copy of Photoshop, the Samsung Galaxy Note will become a much less appealing product.

The game is now on. Microsoft needed Intel to make it real. Bay Trail finally let them do it. And if you're looking for an inexpensive way to get some work done before you have your touchscreen fun, look straight at the Asus T100.

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Smart Home: Living Room

 
When you hear the phrase smart home, chances are the living room immediately comes to mind. That makes sense, since for most people, the living room is essentially the nucleus of the household. It's the room you're most likely to entertain in, as well as the place you'll fall asleep after eating Chinese food in front of the TV. It's also the room where you're most likely to find technology. Lots and lots of technology. From full-on home theater setups to automation and security, the living room is definitely the most fun space to outfit with a host of digital gadgets.

Home Theater
We've maintained for a while now that organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology is the next big step in HDTVs. LG is the only major brand that has consistently released OLED televisions, and it continues to do so with the curved 4K EG9600 series. The 65-inch 65EG9600 model we tested is extremely expensive, but it has the best picture you can currently buy, and comes with loads of useful features and a beautiful design. If you're looking to assemble the ultimate living room setup and money is no object, it should be on your short list.



A killer HDTV deserves the ultimate game console. Microsoft takes a huge step forward with the Xbox One with features that range from merely handy to completely game-changing. Kinect's voice controls, along with Xbox One TV integration and OneGuide transform the Xbox from a game system with some media features into a very capable all-in-one media hub. From playing Halo to watching Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp on Netflix, you won't run out of content options anytime soon.

If you don't want to spend your entire living room budget on just the TV, but want to add connectivity to the television you already own, all you need is a free HDMI port to connect the Amazon Fire TV. Amazon's first foray into the crowded media streamer arena is still our favorite. It has more features than the Apple TV and more raw power and potential than the Roku alternatives, not to mention extremely accurate and responsive voice search, right from the remote.

With all your video gear in place, you're going to want a solid sound system. Definitive Technology makes some very impressive speakers. They also tend to be relatively expensive. Both qualifiers certainly apply to the company's W Studio, a soundbar and wireless subwoofer combination that sounds excellent and offers high-end features like HDMI switching and multiroom Wi-Fi audio with Play-Fi. The W Studio also looks stylish and is built rock-solid, making it one of the best soundbars you can buy.



With all the gadgets living in the living room, you'll probably want a universal remote control so you don't have sort through ten different remotes every time you want to change the channel. True to its name, the Logitech Harmony Ultimate Home is the ultimate. In addition to controlling your HDTV, cable box, and Blu-ray player, the Harmony Ultimate Home supports a wide array of connected home devices—including popular lights, locks, and thermostats—letting you control just about every digital device you own right from your smartphone or the remote itself.

Home Automation
When you think of home automation, Nest is probably the first company that comes to mind. But two years before the Nest Learning Thermostat, Canadian-based ecobee had already introduced a smart thermostat. The company has been at it ever since, and the ecobee3 is our top pick for this category. It's an attractive Wi-Fi thermostat that you can control from your iOS or Android phone and from your PC via the Web. The thermostat is easy to install and even easier to program, and it's loaded with features including a remote sensor for heating and cooling rooms outside of the thermostat zone, numerous reminders and alerts, a capacitive touch display, and a Home IQ system monitor that tracks heating and cooling usage.

If you're just dipping your toe into the home automation waters, Belkin's WeMo line is a good place to start. The WeMo Light Switch connects to your Wi-Fi network and can be controlled using a smartphone or tablet and an accompanying app. Installation is quick and relatively easy if you've ever changed a light switch, and setting everything up is a breeze. You can program the switch to turn the lights on or off according to the sunrise, connect it with other WeMo devices, and even use IFTTT (If This Then That) recipes to trigger the switch with certain events.

Another fun connected lighting solution is the Philips Hue Go. Unlike, say, the Hue Connected Bulb, the Hue go is a wireless smart light that runs on a built-in, rechargeable battery and doesn't need to be connected to a hub to work. It offers a wide range of colors with an intuitive, simple-to-use control scheme (one button), and it's easy to carry around. And if you do connect it to a hub, you gain the ability to create customized lighting scenes and access personal alarms, as well as link it up with any of your other Hue lights.
In addition to Philips' own hub, the Hue Go also works with the Wink Connected Home Hub. In fact, the Wink Hub works with more devices than any other hub we've tested. Credit that to its support of an impressive number of connectivity protocols; it works with Bluetooth LE, Lutron Clear Connect, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, and ZigBee, which covers most of the major players in the connected home market. So if you own a number of connected devices and want to control them all from one place, chances are they'll work with the Wink hub.

Robotic vacuums don't connect to hubs (yet), but they still count as automation devices. If you've been searching for a powerful robotic vacuum that won't cost you an arm and a leg, check out the Neato XV Signature Pro. It does an outstanding job of picking up all sorts of household debris and is particularly tough on pet hair and backyard soil. Its laser-guided mapping feature works remarkably well regardless of how your furniture is arranged or the number of walls you have, and its scheduling feature lets you set up cleaning times that fit your lifestyle.



Home Security
With all that cool gear, you'll want to make sure your home is safe. A good home security system won't prevent break-ins, but it will let you know when someone is trying to enter, or already has entered, your home. Unfortunately, the cost of a fully monitored system can be prohibitive, which means plenty of homes are left unprotected due to budgetary concerns. Enter the iSmartAlarm, an affordable home security system designed for do-it-yourselfers that lets you keep tabs on your home from anywhere using your iOS or Android smart device. It's a snap to install, performs flawlessly, and offers plenty of room for expansion.
Another important barrier to home invasions is a powerful door lock. With the LockState LS-500I RemoteLock Wi-Fi Door Lock, you'll never have to worry about whether you remembered to lock up. It's an electronic push-button deadbolt lock that connects to your Wi-Fi network and can be controlled from a remote PC as well as Android and iOS-based devices. Not only can you lock and unlock your door remotely, you can monitor the lock's activity, create individual user codes with specific entry rights, and receive alerts when the door is locked and unlocked.

If using your phone to unlock your door isn't enough for you, you should check out Ring Video Doorbell. With the Ring, you can see who is at your door from the safety and comfort of your couch. It lets you accept or deny visitor calls, and uses motion detection to alert you of activity on your doorstep even when the bell hasn't been rung. The 720p camera delivers sharp video with good color, and it automatically record events and stores video of them in the cloud, so you can see who showed up even when you weren't there.



Make Yourself At Home
It's always fun to have people over for a board game night, but it's also pretty cool to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones on the biggest, highest-definition television in the neighborhood. Still, a fully equipped living room doesn't mean stuffing a huge TV into a small space. Instead, it's about finding the devices that work for you, and making the time you spend at home more relaxing and fulfilling. Just remember to get up off the couch and stretch every now and then.

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TechCityMall explains: What is DirectX 12?

 

 It’s been over 18 months since we first visited the topic of DirectX 12 and what features and benefits it would bring to modern gaming. Much has happened since. Windows 10‘s launch and the debut of Ashes of the Singularity brought the first hints of DirectX 12 gaming performance, as did Fable Legends, which debuted some weeks later. We’ve also covered the work being done on Vulkan, the open-source, Linux-friendly DX12 competitor (now not expected to debut until 2016), how that software might impact the future of Valve and the company’s push for its own SteamOS, and the debut of DirectX 12 on the Xbox One as well.

From debates over the importance of asynchronous computing to confusion over exactly which feature sets are and aren’t supporting on current hardware, DirectX 12 was one of the most important stories we covered in 2015. This story will start you off on a discussion of its capabilities and advantages compared with DirectX 11, and if you want more nuance, feel free to consult the links above.

Enter DX12

Microsoft and Nvidia first took the lid of DirectX 12 at GDC 2014. The new API promised to deliver the same low-overhead benefits of AMD’s custom Mantle UI, along with vastly improved performance and superior hardware utilization compared with DirectX 11. Even better, DirectX 12 (and D3D 12) are backwards compatible with virtually every single GPU from the GTX 400 to the present day. At present, only Nvidia’s Kepler and Maxwell cards are DX12 compatible, but the company has promised that Fermi compatibility is coming in a future update.

Microsoft has published a blog post and accompanying API samples that illustrate how much more powerful the software is, while acknowledging some of the flaws in the DirectX 11 API. One of the central problems with DX11 is that it’s virtually impossible to multi-thread the 3D rendering path. Game rendering ends up running almost entirely on a single CPU thread, bogging down the rest of the system. DirectX 11 also makes certain assumptions about the underlying hardware that have proven to map poorly to GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia.

Here’s a threading comparison between DX11 (top) and DX12 (bottom):



See how, in DX11, the entire workload is hanging on a single thread with extremely low utilization on the other threads? That’s a problem — with the kernel-mode driver running on the same thread as the game and the D3D layer, there’s just not much for the other threads to do. The second graph shows how, by splitting the workload more evenly, the game can hit much lower latencies. Better latencies translates directly into higher frame rates.

 

3DMark – DX11

3DMark – DX12

This pair of screenshots from 3DMark 2012 further illustrate the difference. Total CPU time is dramatically reduced in DX12 by efficiently reallocating data across all cores.

OS and GPU support

DirectX 12 is currently supported on all Nvidia GPUs based on Kepler and Maxwell. That’s the vast majority of the 6xx series and all of the 7xx and 8xx graphics cards. Fermi support is coming soon, which will extend support all the way back to the 400 and 500-series as well.

AMD supports DirectX 12 on all GCN-class hardware dating back to the launch of that family in 2012. All AMD GPUs from the HD 77xx family (or above), the HD 85xx family (or above), and the Radeon R5 family (or above) all support DirectX 12. This includes the various iterations of GCN, from 1.0 – 1.2.

One thing to understand is that while DirectX 12 is a common API, that API has different optional features, defined as feature levels. AMD’s first-generation GCN products support DirectX 12 at the 11_1 feature level , as do Nvidia’s Fermi and Kepler cards. Cards based on Hawaii, Tonga, and Fiji support the 12_0 feature level. More information on this, and a comprehensive comparison between AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, can be found here.

Windows 10 is the only operating system that supports DirectX 12, which means if you want in on these features you’ll need to take advantage of Microsoft’s free upgrade (or buy a new PC with W10 preloaded).

How’s performance?

There are several facets to DirectX 12 performance, and the benchmarks themselves are very early. As our Ashes and Fable Legends previews demonstrated, AMD gains some ground on its rival in DirectX 12. The gap isn’t enormous, and it varies depending on which cards you compare. The GTX 980 Ti still wins Fable Legends overall, though the Fury X closes that gap in Ashes of the Singularity. Overall, it’s too early to draw conclusions.

If you’re trying to suss out what GPU to buy, my answer is this: With both AMD and Nvidia set to introduce cards based on 14/16nm technology within the next 6-9 months, it’s probably best to wait and see what each company brings to the table. If you have to buy a GPU today, you can expect good DX12 performance from either vendor. The relative difference between the two hasn’t yet been shown to be large enough to justify fans of one company or the other jumping ship. If the early trends hold, DX12 is a bit better for current AMD cards than it is for Nvidia, but I’m not ready to commit to that as fact.

Based on what we’ve seen so far, DirectX 12 won’t automatically deliver higher frame rates as if by magic. Its value is in the way it loosens the stranglehold on multi-threaded CPUs, giving developers the option to use rendering techniques that take advantage of this new ability. We’ve also seen the option to run GPUs from two different vendors in the same PC, and there’s reason to think DX12 could indirectly improve AI calculations as well.

 

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Try the knowledge-based Wolfram Language for free in your browser

 

 Stephen Wolfram introduced the knowledge-based Wolfram Language earlier this year. It extends the work he started with Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha to let people solve problems at an extremely abstracted level that lets them connect knowledge directly with programming. The Wolfram Language was also made available for free to those who bought the $35 Raspberry Pi computer. Now there’s Wolfram Open Cloud, announced and made available earlier this week; it makes the language even easier to access and try.
All you need is a browser and the willingness to create a free Wolfram account. If you’ve already got an account, you can use it to access the Wolfram Open Cloud. Once you login, you can use the prebuilt ThingsToTry notebook to learn how the service works by following the text instructions and sample code in it. Pressing Shift-Enter at the end of a code sample runs the code. Simple code such as, literally, “2 + 2″ produces results nearly instantly. Other, more complex code, such as for generating 3D graphics, may take a few seconds or more before a result is displayed.



If you have a software development background, head over to The Wolfram Language: FAST INTRODUCTION FOR PROGRAMMERS. The sidebar on the left gives you a quick overview of the categories of topics, ranging from the basics of its 5,000 built-in functions to 3D graphics and how to use its natural language input.

Note, however, it looks like some of the language is either not available when using a free account or may not work the way it is described. For example, trying to use the external connection to the Facebook API
SocialMediaData[“Facebook”, “FriendNetwork”]
resulted in this error message:
SocialMediaData::cloudf : ​ SocialMediaData is not currently supported in the Wolfram Cloud.

Testing the natural language interpreter using the test phrase “= picture of dog” (a variation of the example Wolfram gives of “= picture of a wolf”) results in an array listing every dog breed name, instead of displaying the expected generic dog photo or drawing.



On the other hand, when the knowledge-based code works, it is spectacular and demonstrates the real power of Wolfram Language: the ability to immediately use real world data without having to find a source, transform it into a form that can be imported correctly, importing the data, and then finding the right way to work with it.

For example, I took one of the code examples to make a 3D plot of the terrain in a five-mile radius around Mount Everest, and had Wolfram Open Cloud produce 3D terrain maps of two mountains closer to home for me: Haleakala on Maui and Mauna Kea on Hawaii Island. Here’s the code:

ListPlot3D[GeoElevationData[GeoBoundingBox[GeoDisk[Entity[“Mountain”, “Haleakala”],Quantity[5, “Miles”]]]], MeshFunctions -> {#3 &},Filling -> Bottom, ColorFunction -> “Rainbow”]
ListPlot3D[GeoElevationData[GeoBoundingBox[GeoDisk[Entity[“Mountain”, “MaunaKea”],Quantity[5, “Miles”]]]], MeshFunctions -> {#3 &},Filling -> Bottom, ColorFunction -> “Rainbow”]

For a structured introduction to the remarkable Wolfram Language, and in order to further explore Wolfram Open Cloud, Stephen Wolfram made his book An Elementary Introduction to Wolfram Language available as a free download. You can also purchase a hard copy version of the book.

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The 10 most technically impressive games of 2015

After a series of severe disappointments last year, we were worried that the game industry was stuck in a major rut. But much to our delight, 2015 turned out to be an incredible year for video games. From the viewpoints of creativity and mechanics, we saw tiny indie studios and massive AAA devs deliver the goods over and over again.
My personal top ten list this year ranges wildly from a British FMV mystery to a completely bonkers creation suite out of Nintendo, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss. Today, let’s give credit to ten of the most technically impressive games of the year. For just a moment, let’s take story and gameplay mechanics out of the mix, and focus on what game developers were able to accomplish from a technical standpoint.
Keep in mind, this list isn’t designed to count frames and enumerate polygons. We’re highlighting technical accomplishments here, but there is inherent subjectivity in the list. And since this article would be outrageously long if we mentioned every impressive release, there isn’t even room for some personal favorites of my own like Yoshi’s Woolly World and Just Cause 3. By all means, feel free to call out your highlights of the year in the comment section. With all of that out of the way, let’s jump in.

Ori and the Blind Forest

When you think about technically impressive games, it’s easy to forget about the 2D releases. Typical big budget 3D worlds are definitely flashier, but that shouldn’t overshadow what Moon Studios was able to achieve here. The quality of the art is undeniable, but the technical chops of this dev studio is what really turns this download-only game into something of a marvel.

The sheer elegance of the character animation and lighting elevates Ori and the Blind Forest to a higher plane. There are countless stylish side-scrollers on the market, but Moon Studios provides a level of excellence here that is only matched by the likes of Ubisoft Montpellier and Nintendo. Even though the Metroidvania genre holds little personal interest, I just can’t stop looking at this game in motion.

• Platforms: Windows, Xbox One
• Buy on Amazon

Until Dawn

What L.A. Noire was to film noir, Until Dawn is to teen slasher flicks. It’s dumb, over-the-top, and cringe-inducing at times, but it’s just so much fun to play and watch. But truth be told, what makes this B-movie game work so well is how the developers at Supermassive Games nail the slasher aesthetic in every way imaginable.
Until Dawn has numerous problems — especially in the frame rate department. But the game wouldn’t work at all if the dramatic lighting and the facial capture weren’t so superb. The underlying tech here serves the storytelling in a major way, and that’s why it deserves a spot on this list.

• Platform: PlayStation 4
• Buy on Amazon

Xenoblade Chronicles X

In most ways, the Wii U is a last-gen console. It simply doesn’t have the same kind of horsepower as a PS4 and Xbox One, so the fact that Monolith Soft was able to deliver such an incredible open world RPG on this underpowered hardware is impressive in and of itself.
That’s not to say that Xenoblade Chronicles X is only impressive “for a Wii U game,” though. It’s legitimately spectacular regardless of platform. Obviously, better hardware would make for a higher resolution and more polygons, but the product as it exists is kind of mind boggling in terms of scope and scale.

• Platform: Wii U
• Buy on Amazon

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

As a follow up to Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture doesn’t possess the same level of novelty and unsettling atmosphere as its predecessor. However, it does one-up Dear Esther in one vital aspect: the fidelity of the environment. Set in a lovingly rendered fictional village, the folks over at The Chinese Room expertly showcase both the sweet and creepy aspects of the English countryside.
While it falls short of photorealism on the whole, the outdoor environments come pretty damn close on multiple occasions. And even with the added development resources from Sony Santa Monica on this project, it’s impressive that a relatively small indie studio can deliver one of the best looking games of the year.

• Platform: PlayStation 4
• Buy on Amazon

Halo 5: Guardians

The concessions that 343 Industries made to allow Halo 5: Guardians to run at 60 frames per second were substantial. Not only was local co-op axed, but some aspects of the graphical fidelity suffered as well. But now that I’ve had some time to consider the final result, I think 343 made the right decision. 60fps Halo looks incredible, and helps to make the experience tighter than ever.
Obviously, it would be preferable if there weren’t any sacrifices made, but that’s just not possible on the Xbox One. If we ever get to see a PC port of Halo 5: Guardians, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be one of the best looking shooters ever released.

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Why stars explode, creating the universe as we know it

 

 There are quite a few ways for a star to die, but in general people tend to think of stars as going out with a bang.
The term “supernova” refers to the incredibly energetic explosions caused when certain stars reach certain points in their life-cycles. Supernovae can often briefly outshine whole galaxies of billions of stars, and wreak utter destruction on anything unlucky enough to be within a hundred or so light years of the event. But supernovae aren’t just incredible natural events — they’re also the most important type of event for the development of complex matter and, by extension, life.

This image composite shows the search for the supernova, nicknamed Refsdal, using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The image to the left shows a part of the the deep field observation of the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 from the Frontier Fields programme. The circle indicates the predicted position of the newest appearance of the supernova. To the lower right the Einstein cross event from late 2014 is visible. The image on the top right shows observations by Hubble from October 2015, taken at the beginning of observation programme to detect the newest appearance of the supernova. The image on the lower right shows the discovery of the Refsdal Supernova on 11 December 2015, as predicted by several different models.

Artists conception of the first stars. Image Credit: Wikipedia

First, why supernova occur. Essentially, when enough gas all collects in one place, it starts to have enough mass to exert a meaningful amount of gravitational energy, focused most powerfully on the center of the growing sphere-like cloud. When this pressure builds past a certain point, hydrogen atoms at the center of the sphere begin to undergo fusion, which ignites the ball of gas into a star — great! But at all times, as the star continues to live and burn, and likely acquires new matter as it goes, there is an interplay between the outward pressure of the thermal reaction, and the inward pressure of the star’s own gravity.
As the star burns down over billions of years, that outward pressure becomes weaker, while the magnitude of gravitational force stays largely the same. So, as a smallish or medium-sized star cools down, its gravitational potential comes to dominate, but since it’s a fairly small star, that potential is too weak to do more than just continue holding the star together. This safely cooled star is called a white dwarf. The mass threshold below which a star will not create enough gravitational force to cause a supernova is called the Chandrasekhar Limit, which lies at about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. If you’re smaller than that, you can expect a relatively quiet stellar exit.

Supernova are so bright they shine out even against the backdrop of galaxies.

However, we need not give up hope that a white dwarf could still end its life with some fireworks. White dwarfs are still stars, after all, and in principle they can be reignited. This can happen in one of two ways. Either it can acquire enough mass to create an absurd amount of pressure at the core, and fuse carbon (as opposed to hydrogen and helium), causing a runaway fusion reaction that causes the star to explode.
On the other hand, if the white dwarf’s core is mostly made of neon, as some are, then it will undergo core collapse not unlike that which ignited the star in the first place. This super-collapse also results in a stellar explosion, but this time it leaves a neutron star behind. This almost always occurs in binary systems like this twin-star system, in which one star slowly approaches the Chandrasekhar Limit by sucking up matter from its partner. Since astronomers currently have no way of seeing what’s in the growing star’s core, they don’t know which of the two paths it will will follow once it passes that limit.

This image of the Tycho supernova remnant contains evidence of a double-star collision.

So, that’s what happens when a white dwarf passes the Chandrasekhar Limit, but white dwarfs are already considered largely dead stars. Stars bigger than 1.4 suns while still alive (and they can get much, much bigger than that) have different life-cycles. A red giant star will slowly burn down, and thus gravity will come to dominate as before — but this time, that gravity is strong enough that if its isn’t offset by fusion, it can create core collapse and trigger a supernova. Stars above the 1.4 solar masses but below about three solar masses tend to collapse down to form neutron stars, much like the core-collapse of a white dwarf, seen above.
Stars heavier than about three of our sun also collapse, but they actually keep on going and can form a black hole. This is the most famous upshot of a star’s death, yet it actually only occurs in a small minority of stars. Black holes are fairly numerous in the universe (there’s thought to be a supermassive black hole at the center of every major galaxy, for instance,) but they are still far less common than other types of stellar remnant.

Artist’s impression of a binary star system. (Credit: NASA)

There are other, less common ways for a supernova to start. For instance, while most white dwarfs that acquire new mass will do so slowly, inching toward the Chandrasekhar Limit before explode as they pass it, some other stars will acquire a ton of mass all at once (like from a direct stellar collision) and rocket way, way past that limit before they’ve really had a chance to start collapsing. These sorts can vary widely in terms of their radiation output, and scientists are interested in their chaotic, poorly understood mechanisms and implications.
Supernovae of various types actually have some fairly useful real-world applications, at least for astronomers. In particular, Type Ia supernovae (the white-dwarf-undergoes-carbon-fusion type from above) seem to send out uniform signals, time after time. This has led to their being dubbed astronomy’s “standard candles,” since their uniformity can make them useful as optical measuring sticks. However, recent research seems to indicate that while they are useful, they might be slightly less reliable than previously believed. At the least, there is likely more variation is how Type Ia supernovae proceed than perviously believed.
Yet, I said that supernovae are the most important events to complex matter, not just that they’re big and cool and useful. Well, you’ll notice that in the above explanation, we talked about the fusion ignition of carbon. Carbon is the heaviest metal (neon is heavier, but not a metal) created by stars in their normal state. That is it say: if you want heavier elements like sodium, lead, gold, or uranium, you’re going to need more power than a puny old red giant star can provide. And what has more energy than a star? A dying star.
Virtually everything you interact with was, at one point, thrown out by a star in its final moments. The Earth is a rocky collection of debris thrown out by supernovae, as are comets, asteroids, and everything else composed of heavy matter. And we, being made of the matter that collected into the Earth, are made of supernova shrapnel as well. This is why Carl Sagan said that we are star stuff — because, in a very real way, we are.

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