Abnormal Heat For Next Four Years, New Model Predicts

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=26425

From California to Switzerland and south to Australia, a global rash of heat waves have scorched our planet in recent weeks, exacerbating drought and wildfires. So, you may want to pour yourself a cold glass of water before you read this.
New long term forecasts suggest the next four years will be unusually warm with higher chances of extreme temps, according to research published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
The study, authored by a pair of European climate scientists, uses sta

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August 14, 2018 at 11:21AM

SpaceX reveals the controls of its Dragon spacecraft for the first time

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1357689

Enlarge /

NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins meets with employees at SpaceX on Monday.

SpaceX

HAWTHORNE, Calif.—Across the cavernous rocket factory, the buzz, whirr, and whine of various machinery never ebbed. Even when the president of SpaceX and four blue-suited astronauts strode confidently onto the factory floor Monday afternoon and took up microphones to address several dozen reporters, the incessant work inside the SpaceX Falcon 9 hatchery continued.

On one side of the factory, technicians produced rolls of carbon fiber and built myriad payload fairings, which cannot yet be reused during a launch. To meet its cadence of a launch every other week, SpaceX must build at least two of these each month. Another section of the factory fabricated the Merlin 1-D rocket engines that power the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage. And in another large white room behind glass, several Dragon spacecraft were in various states of completion.

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

August 14, 2018 at 10:04AM

How to Stop Google From Tracking Your Location

https://www.wired.com/story/google-location-tracking-turn-off


If like most people you thought Google stopped tracking your location once you turned off Location History in your account settings, you were wrong. According to an AP investigation published Monday, even if you disable Location History, the search giant still tracks you every time you open Google Maps, get certain automatic weather updates, or search for things in your browser. There’s a way to stop it—but it takes some digging.

The problem affects anyone with an Android phone and iPhone users running Google Maps on their devices, according to the AP report, which researchers at Princeton University verified. That’s more than two billion people.

The Google support page for managing and deleting your Location History says that once you turn it off, “the places you go are no longer stored. When you turn off Location History for your Google Account, it’s off for all devices associated with that Google Account.” The AP’s investigation found that’s not true. In fact, turning off your Location History only stops Google from creating a timeline of your location that you can view. Some apps will still track you, and store time-stamped location data from your devices.

More specifically, the AP was able to track Princeton researcher Gunes Acar’s home address, as well as his daily activities, using just Google Web & App activity, which he had shared with the news agency.

“If Google is representing to its users that they can turn off or pause location tracking but it’s nevertheless tracking their location, that seems like textbook deception to me,” says Alan Butler, senior council at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

To actually turn off location tracking, Google says you have to navigate to a setting buried deep in your Google Account called Web & App Activity, which is set by default to share your information including not just location but IP address and more. Finding that setting isn’t easy. At all.

Sign in to your Google account on a browser on iOS or your desktop, or through the Android settings menu. In the browser, access your account settings by finding Google Account in the dropdown in the upper right-hand corner, then head to Personal Info & Privacy, choose Go to My Activity, then in the left-hand nav click Activity Controls. Once there you’ll see the setting called Web & App Activity, which you can toggle off.

On your Android phone, go from Google settings to Google Account, then tap on Data & personalization. You’ll find Web & App Activity there.

Google further buries the notion that Web & App Activity has anything to do with location. In fact, the setting sits right above the Location History option, suggesting at a glance that the two things are quite distinct. And Google’s vanilla description of Web & App Activity is that it “Saves your activity on Google sites and apps to give you faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences in Maps, Search, and other Google services.” From there, you have to tap Learn more, then scroll to What’s saved as Web & App Activity, and tap again on Info about your searches & more before Google says anything about location whatsoever.

To stop that tracking, toggle the blue Web & App Activity slider to off. Google will then give you a popup warning: “Pausing Web & App Activity may limit or disable more personalized experiences across Google services. For example, you may stop seeing more relevant search results or recommendations about places you care about. Even when this setting is paused, Google may temporarily use information from recent searches in order to improve the quality of the active search session.”

‘This really reads like a classic case of an unfairly deceptive business practice. I really think that the FTC needs to investigate right away.’

Alan Butler, EPIC

Google told the AP that it provides “clear descriptions of these tools,” but it takes eight taps on an Android phone—if you know exactly where you’re going—to even access that description to begin with. As the AP notes, most people who explicitly turned off their Location History tracking, as WIRED and many other privacy conscious publications have advised people to do, would have assumed they had already taken all steps necessary to keep their location private.

As well they should. Google itself offers at least three support pages on location: Manage or delete your Location History, Turn location on or off for your Android device, and Manage location settings for Android apps. None of these makes any mention of Web & App Activity.

In spite of this, a Google spokesperson told WIRED that “we make sure Location History users know that when they disable the product, we continue to use location to improve the Google experience when they do things like perform a Google search or use Google for driving directions.” This apparently refers to a warning that appears if you turn off Location History, which says that it “does not affect other location services on your device.” However, nowhere in that popup does it indicate that you can turn off other forms of location tracking by pausing Web & App Activity.

“Tracking people without their consent and without proper controls in place is creepy and wrong,” wrote UC Berkeley graduate researcher K Shankar in a blog post that first alerted the AP to the problem.

Beyond creepiness, though, Google’s location-tracking may also violate the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection statutes against deceptive privacy practices. “This really reads like a classic case of an unfairly deceptive business practice. I really think that the FTC needs to investigate right away,” says Butler.

Google’s Location History situation is reminiscent of Facebook’s various runnings with the FTC. In 2011, the agency famously settled with Facebook over the social media giant’s inability to keep privacy promises to consumers. As part of that deal, Facebook agreed to a consent decree in which it promised to reform how it tracked and shared user data. That decree has been in the news lately, after the FTC opened a new investigation this spring into whether Facebook’s data sharing with Cambridge Analytica violated its 2011 settlement. The FTC has more recently penalized Uber, Vizio, the phone maker Blu, and many others for misleading customers about how their data was collected, stored, and shared.

Former FTC chief technologist Ashkan Soltani noted in a tweet that Google’s “confusing privacy dialogue” may merit a closer look from the agency.

“Google’s reaction—that users can delete individual data points, or users can go deep down in settings and turn off certain web settings that appear to have nothing to do with location, therefore it should be okay, I think fundamentally misunderstands what they’re dealing with,” says Butler. “When you’re creating a historical log of someone’s movements over time, that’s information that’s uniquely sensitive and needs to be handled accordingly.”

The revelations are likely to touch off a firestorm for Google. For now, the best thing you can do is navigate through your labyrinthine settings, and hit “pause” on something you likely thought you’d already stopped.


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August 13, 2018 at 12:42PM

AI can spot your eye disease with 94.5 percent accuracy

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/611877/ai-can-spot-your-eye-disease-with-945-percent-accuracy/

AI can spot your eye disease with 94.5 percent accuracy

Source:

Image credit:

  • Amanda Dalbjörn | Unsplash

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August 14, 2018 at 09:23AM

Tiny Worms Survive Forces 400,000 Times Stronger Than Gravity on Earth

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tiny-worms-survive-forces-400-000-times-stronger-than-gravity-on-earth/

Caenorhabditis elegans would make an ace fighter pilot. That’s because the roughly one-millimeter-long roundworm, a type of nematode that is widely used in biological studies, is remarkably adept at tolerating acceleration. Human pilots lose consciousness when they pull only 4 or 5 g‘s (1 g is the force of gravity at Earth’s surface), but C. elegans emerges unscathed from 400,000 g‘s, new research shows.


This is an important benchmark; rocks have been theorized to experience similar forces when blasted off planet surfaces and into space by volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts. Any hitchhiking creatures that survive could theoretically seed another planet with life, an idea known as ballistic panspermia.


Tiago Pereira and Tiago de Souza, both geneticists at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, spun hundreds of roundworms in a device called an ultracentrifuge. After an hour, the researchers pulled them out, convinced that the animals would be dead. But they were “swimming freely as if nothing had happened,” Pereira says. More than 96 percent were still alive, and the survivors did not exhibit any adverse physical or behavioral changes. “Life tolerates much more stress than we typically think,” as Pereira puts it. His team’s results were published online in May in the journal Astrobiology.


Still, this extreme test does not replicate the full brunt of an interplanetary journey, the researchers concede. For one thing, it took roughly five minutes for the ultracentrifuge to build up to these massive g-forces—whereas rocks blasted off a planet would reach them within a 1,000th of a second. Nor did the experiment replicate the harsh conditions of space. “Other factors, such as temperature, vacuum and cosmic radiation, should also be tested,” says Cihan Erkut, a biochemist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, who was not involved in the research. Pereira says his team’s work is a starting point for other experiments to develop “an understanding of the limits of life.”

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August 14, 2018 at 08:02AM

California Officials Admit to Using License Plate Readers to Monitor Welfare Recipients

https://gizmodo.com/california-officials-admit-to-using-license-plate-reade-1828313821

Since 2016, Sacramento County officials have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud, the Sacramento Bee reported over the weekend.

Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance Director Ann Edwards confirmed to the paper that welfare fraud investigators working under the DHA have used the data for two years on a “case-by-case” basis. Edwards said the DHA pays about $5,000 annually for access to the database.

Abbreviated LPR, license plate readers are essentially cameras that upload photographs to a searchable database of images of license plates. Each image captured by these cameras is annotated with information on the registered owner, the make and model of the car, and time-stamped GPS data on where it was last spotted. Those with access, usually police, can search the database using a full or partial license plate number, a date or time, year and model of a car, and so on.

If a driver passed by an LPR four times throughout a city, an officer with access would know where and at what time of day. Anyone with access to that data could use it track where someone drove and when, provided they were scanned by the LPR. The privacy concerns are obvious, as where people go reveals a lot of privileged information about them. For instance, they could be visiting an STI clinic, an immigration office, or a relative’s homes.

“The use of these really invasive tools… really bothers me, because we’re really talking about small amounts of money and people who in the main are not actually committing fraud,” Mike Herald, director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty, told the Sacramento Bee. “I think we’re only picking on a group of people who are extremely poor and they want to create a perception with the public that there is a real big fraud problem with welfare programs.”

It’s not immediately clear how travel patterns might reveal welfare fraud. As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento’s 193,000 recipients.

Following an inquiry from the EFF, the DHA has instituted a privacy policy (one that didn’t exist before their initial inquiry) requiring investigators to justify each request for LPR data. The Sacramento Bee reports the DHA accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.

[Sacramento Bee]

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

August 13, 2018 at 05:03PM

Honda adds driver assist tech to all 2019 Civics

https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/13/honda-driver-assist-2019-honda-civic/


Honda

In 2014, Honda added driver-assist technology called Sensing to its higher-end trim packages on select models. The system is part of the automaker’s plans to bring Sensing to all its vehicles by 2022 and perfect self-driving cars by 2025. It’s available, but not standard, as of 2019 for all Honda vehicles. This year, however, the company will include Sensing safety features for all trim levels of the Civic Sedan and Coupe.

The updated autos will arrive as the 10th-generation of the Civic line of cars launches next year. The company promises updated styling and a new Sport trim for both sedan and coupe along with the Sensing technology. The system includes an automated braking system, forward collision warnings and will help keep you on the road and in your lane along with an adaptive cruise control.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

August 13, 2018 at 03:36PM