An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: In the past decade or so, China has been expanding its commitment to scientific research, and it shows. Chinese researchers now produce more scientific publications than U.S. scientists do, and the global ratings of Chinese universities are rising. Five years ago [professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, JaySiegel] became dean of the school of pharmaceutical science and technology at Tianjin University. He says the university president recruited him to build an undergraduate program that would attract students from all over -- not just China. Siegel says the program is taught entirely in English. There's another aspect of getting a pharmaceutical science degree at Tianjin that Siegel expects students from throughout the world to find particularly attractive: The Chinese government plans to offer scholarships to cover the cost for students who enroll. Siegel says this is all part of China's effort to attract international scientists. Of course, there are some drawbacks with working in China. There are internet restrictions, making it difficult to reach certain websites; English isn't spoken throughout most of the country, posing a problem for many foreign visitors; and free speech isn't the same concept as it is in the United States. With that said, "There's no interference politically on the science," says Greg Herczeg, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. "We've had no political restrictions," says Siegel. "I know that people talk about them being out there, and I've heard rumors of things. But, for us personally, I would have to say no, I've not had that experience."

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Early last year, YouTube announced that it would be retiring annotations, those boxes that pop up during a video with links and additional information. It discontinued the annotations editor in May of last year and soon all existing annotations will be going away as well. From a report: The company added an update to the help page announcing the end of its annotations editor, saying, "We will stop showing existing annotations to viewers starting January 15, 2019. All existing annotations will be removed."

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I’ve been working on this app — originally Evergreen 1.0, now NetNewsWire 5.0 — for four years, at least. And now GitHub tells me that the 5.0 alpha milestone is 91% complete.

Which means, yes, I’m down to that last 10%. Old engineering wisdom says that the last 10% takes as much time as the first 90%, which means I have another fours year to go, and it will ship in late 2022.

I’m going to try and beat that, though, and ship in the first quarter of 2019. Let me emphasize the try part of that — there’s no guarantee. But I’m resisting all other temptations and buckling down on NetNewsWire.

What remains, of course, is all the stuff I’ve put off. Like syncing, drag-and-drop in the sidebar, search, and so on. (New app icon coming too.)

Note that I did say the alpha milestone is 91% complete. Let me be clear what I mean by alpha: it will be feature complete and won’t have any known defects. The alpha period will be for testing and finding and fixing bugs.

Once it gets to beta, it will be considered a shipping candidate. If possible there will be zero code changes from beta 1 to shipping. At any rate, code changes, at that point, will be made with extreme reluctance and caution.

(Yes, this is a little different from how other people do things. It’s how I do things.)

My hope is that it will get to alpha in February, and that things will move relatively quickly from there and then it will ship in March. Maybe on my birthday? (March 26.)

Again, that’s just a hope. Anything could happen!

Human emissions of carbon dioxide have gone up for the first time since 2013, according to the UN's ninth annual Emissions Gap Report, meaning the world isn't on track to mitigate the worst of climate change's already disastrous effects. From the report: The report, published on Tuesday, says that while carbon emissions stayed relatively level between 2014 and 2016, carbon emissions in 2017 went up by 1.2 percent. Composed by climate scientists using the most up-to-date scientific data, the report aims to determine whether we're on track to meet the goals set by international climate agreements, such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. The "emissions gap" is the difference between how low our emissions need to be, and where they actually are. The UN report concludes that the world isn't hitting the emissions targets necessary to curb warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. While the goal is not impossible, it's unlikely to be met under current political conditions, which have rendered us unable to take significant action against climate change for more than half a century. "According to the current policy and [Nationally Determined Contributions] scenarios, global emissions are not estimated to peak by 2030, let alone by 2020," the report reads. "As the emissions gap assessment shows, this original level of ambition needs to be roughly tripled for the 2C scenario and increased around fivefold for the 1.5C scenario."

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Leaders of 19 of the world's biggest economies, as well as the European Union gather to discuss policy and trade deals.

Turkish Police have searched two villas outside Istanbul in the latest efforts into the Khashoggi murder investigation.

Four out of every 10 people in the country's workforce are either unemployed or underemployed.

By the end of 2025, 5G will reach more than 40 percent of the world's population and cover 1.5 billion people, according to the latest mobility report [PDF] from telecommunications company Ericsson, which says its networks currently carry nearly half the world's mobile traffic. From the report: 5G, short for fifth-generation network technology, promises a massive boost in speed and responsiveness. Industry watchers expect the first 5G smartphones to come out in the first half of next year. Researchers forecast that mobile data consumption will reach more than 21GB per month by 2024, which is nearly four times the consumption in 2018. 5G networks will carry 25 percent of global mobile data traffic, according to Ericsson. North America and North East Asia are expected to lead the 5G rollout, followed by Western Europe.

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A UK Commons committee chair claims a seized trove of Facebook documents reveals that a company engineer flagged Russian "entities" were using a Pinterest API to pull billions of points of Facebook data every day in 2014. From a report: Damian Collins appeared to use parliamentary privilege to outline the detail from the sealed documents, during a fiery session of questioning of Facebook executive Richard Allan before the first sitting of the "international grand committee on disinformation and fake news" in London on Tuesday. The most contentious moment came during an exchange between Allan and the chair of the committee over what's alleged to be in a set of documents that are subject to the protective order of a California court. During the questioning of Allan on Tuesday, Collins said the emails would not be released. But he did outline details from an alleged incident which, if true, would raise further questions about how Facebook responded to learning about data being taken from the platform. "An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October 2014 that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using a Pinterest API key to pull over 3 billion data points a day," Collins said. "Now was that reported to any external body at the time?" Allan dismissed the claim by focusing on the source of the information, Six4Three, labelling it a "hostile litigant." Further reading: Facebook Exec Admits Zuckerberg Not Appearing Before UK Parliament Doesn't Look Great (CNBC); 'The Problem is Facebook,' Lawmakers From Nine Countries Tell Zuckerberg's Accountability Stand-in (TechCrunch); and "When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own Bullshit": The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg (VanityFair).

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Thousands greet Felix Tshisekedi as he lands in the capital, Kinshasa to start presidential election campaign.

Shipping companies have been put off delivering supplies due to clashes between Houthi rebels and Saudi-led alliance.

Police in the UK want to predict serious violent crime using artificial intelligence, New Scientist is reporting. The idea is that individuals flagged by the system will be offered interventions, such as counseling, to avert potential criminal behavior. From the report: However, one of the world's leading data science institutes has expressed serious concerns about the project after seeing a redacted version of the proposals. The system, called the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), uses a combination of AI and statistics to try to assess the risk of someone committing or becoming a victim of gun or knife crime, as well as the likelihood of someone falling victim to modern slavery. West Midlands Police is leading the project and has until the end of March 2019 to produce a prototype. Eight other police forces, including London's Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police, are also involved. NDAS is being designed so that every police force in the UK could eventually use it. Police funding has been cut significantly over recent years, so forces need a system that can look at all individuals already known to officers, with the aim of prioritizing those who need interventions most urgently, says Iain Donnelly, the police lead on the project.

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I ❤️ how Likes is working. For example, I noticed that the post above that mentions Scott Mace had one Like. Guess who? Scott Mace. Haha. See how that works. I actually was wondering if he saw it. This is a bit of culture/tech that works. I like where it's going.

In order to get a bootstrap to work you need a blog that has a certain amount of community. Luckily there is still enough life left in Scripting News to get a bootstrap going. That was the most fun of the salad days of blogging, I had the ability to boot up new protocols and formats. Not all of them worked, but some did. I love making new stuff up and seeing it take root. Maybe we can do it now that social media is morphing into something else.

Physics is a bitch.