Twitter’s withdrawal of reliable share count API is a bold monetising move
This month, as part of a redesign of its social media sharing buttons, Twitter is going to turn off the public API which has made it possible for plugin developers and amateur coders alike to display, in the context of a web-page itself, how often that page has been shared via Twitter. For many who actually make a living out of leveraging sharing information as part of their business model, it’s the end of a free ride: after the shut-down of the ability to read back statistics from a JSON endpoint, those wanting to continue to display vanity metrics will need to either accept the limitations of the aggregate and non-comprehensive REST API, or dig deep to begin to use more comprehensive statistics via Gnip – the acquisition of which by Twitter in 2014 ballooned the social media company’s stock by 11 points.
Incident of drunk man kicking humanoid robot raises legal questions
A few weeks ago, a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a SoftBank, Corp., store, which develops the robots. According to the police report, the man said he was angry at the attitude of one of the store clerks. The “Pepper robot” now moves more slowly, and its internal computer system may have been damaged.
Under current Japanese law, the man can be charged with damage to property, but not injury, since injury is a charge reserved for humans. Dr. Yueh-Hsuan Weng, who is cofounder of the ROBOLAW.ASIA Initiative at Peking University in China, and former researcher of the Humanoid Robotics Institute at Waseda University in Japan, thinks a better charge lies somewhere in between.
Weng is advocating for special robot laws to address the unique nature of human-robot interactions. He argues that humans perceive highly intelligent, social robots like Pepper (which can read human emotions) differently than normal machines—maybe more like pets—and so the inappropriate treatment of robots by humans should be handled with this in mind.
The biggest moral concern, Weng explains, is that the current laws “do not help human beings to project their empathy while interacting with humanoid robots.” He explains the problem in greater detail in a review at the Tech and Law Center website:
“The incident has been received with immense scrutiny from the public, as it is regarding a human-like sociable machine that was inappropriately treated,” Weng wrote. “If the object had been an ATM or vehicle, the moral impact would be much less, as an evolved set of ethical principles for sophisticated and intelligent machinery like Pepper have yet to be developed.”
Working to develop such ethical principles, Weng has previously proposed that humanoid robots should have a legal status that is different than that of normal machines. He suggests that humanoid robots be legally regarded as a “third existence,” in contrast to the status of humans as the “first existence” and our normal machines and property as the “second existence.” This distinction would allow for special treatment of human-robot incidents, which Weng believes will be essential in the future.
http://techxplore.com/news/2015-10-incident-drunk-humanoid-robot-legal.html
http://techxplore.com/news/2015-10-incident-drunk-humanoid-robot-legal.html
Crucial hurdle overcome in quantum computing
The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature.
“What we have is a game changer,” said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.
“We’ve demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate – the central building block of a quantum computer – and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.
“This makes the building of a quantum computer much more feasible, since it is based on the same manufacturing technology as today’s computer industry,” he added.
http://phys.org/news/2015-10-crucial-hurdle-quantum.html
Machine Learning Generates Clickbait Headlines That Will SHOCK You
Norwegian developer and blogger Lars Eidnes has designed a clickbait generator using a neural network, which is able to create sensationalist headlines that play on human readers’ curiosity.
The internet is littered with clickbait articles, which inflate insignificant news and events to catch a reader’s attention. A growing number of popular publishers, such as Buzzfeed, Jezebel and Upworthy, have all been accused of the tactic. The technique often features emboldened text, capital letters and promise of items that will shock and amaze (i.e. “16 Facts You’ll Never Believe Are True…”)
Walmart Takes Swipe At Amazon With Open Source Cloud
One way in which Walmart is planning to stay afloat amidst intense competition, and to keep up to date with technology trends, is to crack open its OneOps cloud computing code so that anyone can use, effectively making it open source.
OneOps is Walmart’s very own cloud platform, with the company claiming it changed the way its engineers developed and helped shaped how Walmart launched new products to customers.This week WalmartLabs said OneOps will be released to the world as open source, with the source code being uploaded to code repository GitHub by the end of the 2015.
By making the cloud platform open source, Walmart is taking the fight to Amazon Web Services by giving developers a chance to avoid vendor lock-in, a situation in which companies are stuck to contracts and technologies supplied by one cloud provider.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/walmart-open-source-cloud-178927#SuqSgeQBQ0m0oZig.99
Chinese SSD maker eyes U.S. market for 8TB drive intro
Sage Microelectronics (SageMicro), a four-year-old company based in Hangzhou, China, plans to release an 8TB solid-state drive (SSD) next month as it attempts to break into the U.S. market.
The company, which emerged from quiet mode last year, already sells a 5TB SSD in a 2.5-in. form factor, along with SD cards and NAND flash memory controllers. The 8TB SSD simply adds another stack of eMMC flash memory crammed into a 9.5mm-high SSD.
Most earth-like worlds have yet to be born, according to theoretical study
Earth came early to the party in the evolving universe. According to a new theoretical study, when our solar system was born 4.6 billion years ago only eight percent of the potentially habitable planets that will ever form in the universe existed. And, the party won’t be over when the sun burns out in another 6 billion years. The bulk of those planets—92 percent—have yet to be born.
This conclusion is based on an assessment of data collected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the prolific planet-hunting Kepler space observatory.
“Our main motivation was understanding the Earth’s place in the context of the rest of the universe,” said study author Peter Behroozi of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, “Compared to all the planets that will ever form in the universe, the Earth is actually quite early.”
Looking far away and far back in time, Hubble has given astronomers a “family album” of galaxy observations that chronicle the universe’s star formation history as galaxies grew. The data show that the universe was making stars at a fast rate 10 billion years ago, but the fraction of the universe’s hydrogen and helium gas that was involved was very low. Today, star birth is happening at a much slower rate than long ago, but there is so much leftover gas available that the universe will keep cooking up stars and planets for a very long time to come.
http://phys.org/news/2015-10-earth-like-worlds-born-theoretical.html
Life on Earth likely started 4.1 billion years ago—much earlier than scientists thought
UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago—300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago.
The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell—a postdoctoral scholar in Harrison’s laboratory—studied more than 10,000 zircons originally formed from molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia. Zircons are heavy, durable minerals related to the synthetic cubic zirconium used for imitation diamonds. They capture and preserve their immediate environment, meaning they can serve as time capsules.
The scientists identified 656 zircons containing dark specks that could be revealing and closely analyzed 79 of them with Raman spectroscopy, a technique that shows the molecular and chemical structure of ancient microorganisms in three dimensions.
http://phys.org/news/2015-10-life-earth-billion-years-agomuch.html#jCp
