Bruce Perens co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond -- and he's also Slashdot reader #3872. Bruce Perens writes: Here's the IBM ad used to open their Think 2019 conference, featuring Buzz Aldrin, Arianna Huffington, Janelle Monae, Miaym Bialik, and astonishingly: me. Interesting of IBM to have an ad including Open Source, security, and data rights as human rights! Web version with subtitles. Version used to open the Think conference, on Youtube.. "I would like to make open source software the standard..." Perens says in the video, adding "Let's champion data rights as human rights," and asking "How do we bake security into everything we do?" But it's a montage of different speakers who each begin their comments by saying "Dear Tech," offering open letters with their hopes for the entire industry. "Let's use blockchain to help reduce poverty." "Let's use IoT to help victims of natural disasters." "I feel like you have the potential to do so much more." "Are you working for all of us, or just a few of us?"

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Remember that landmark 2013 study that found that people on a Mediterranean diet had a 30% lower chance of heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular disease than people on low-fat diets? An anonymous reader quotes Vox: Last June, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine pulled the original paper from the record, issuing a rare retraction. It also republished a new version [of the PREDIMED study] based on a reanalysis of the data that accounted for the missteps... But after spending several days talking with some of the brightest minds in nutrition research and epidemiology, I now feel the PREDIMED retraction is actually cause for hope -- maybe even a new beginning for the field. Yes, studies with big flaws pass peer review and make it into high-impact journals, but the record can eventually be corrected because of skeptical researchers questioning things. It's science working as it should, and the PREDIMED takedown is a wonderful example of that. This process should bring us a step closer to what really matters: informing people who want to know how to eat for a healthy life.

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Long-time Slashdot reader kbahey writes: The increased reliance on machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyze data, is producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong, according to the BBC. Dr. Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a "crisis in science". She warned scientists that if they didn't improve their techniques they would be wasting both time and money. Her research was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. This is the oft-discussed 'reproducibility problem' in modern science. The BBC writes that this irreproducibility happens when experiments "aren't designed well enough to ensure that the scientists don't fool themselves and see what they want to see in the results." But machine learning now has apparently become part of the problem. Dr. Allen asks "If we had an additional dataset would we see the same scientific discovery or principle...? Unfortunately the answer is often probably not.â

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Tehran dismisses accusations by US Vice President, saying it 'supports Jews' but is 'against Zionists'.

Remember when America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported Tesla's Autopilot reduced crashes by 40%? Two years later the small research and consulting firm Quality Control Systems (QCS) finally obtained the underlying data -- and found flaws in the methodology "serious enough to completely discredit the 40 percent figure," reports Ars Technica, "which Tesla has cited multiple times over the last two years." The majority of the vehicles in the Tesla data set suffered from missing data or other problems that made it impossible to say whether the activation of Autosteer increased or decreased the crash rate. But when QCS focused on 5,714 vehicles whose data didn't suffer from these problems, it found that the activation of Autosteer actually increased crash rates by 59 percent... NHTSA undertook its study of Autopilot safety in the wake of the fatal crash of Tesla owner Josh Brown in 2016. Autopilot -- more specifically Tesla's lane-keeping function called Autosteer -- was active at the time of the crash, and Brown ignored multiple warnings to put his hands back on the wheel. Critics questioned whether Autopilot actually made Tesla owners less safe by encouraging them to pay less attention to the road. NHTSA's 2017 finding that Autosteer reduced crash rates by 40 percent seemed to put that concern to rest. When another Tesla customer, Walter Huang, died in an Autosteer-related crash last March, Tesla cited NHTSA's 40 percent figure in a blog post defending the technology. A few weeks later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk berated reporters for focusing on stories about crashes instead of touting the safety benefits of Autopilot.... [T]hese new findings are relevant to a larger debate about how the federal government oversees driver-assistance systems like Autopilot. By publishing that 40 percent figure, NHTSA conferred unwarranted legitimacy on Tesla's Autopilot technology. NHTSA then fought to prevent the public release of data that could help the public independently evaluate these findings, allowing Tesla to continue citing the figure for another year.... NHTSA fought QCS' FOIA request after Tesla indicated that the data was confidential and would cause Tesla competitive harm if it was released. Last May the NHTSA finally clarified that their study "did not assess the effectiveness of this technology." Ars Technica also points out that the data focused on version 1 of Autopilot, "which Tesla hasn't sold since 2016."

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Factory manager and human resources official are among Gary Martin's five victims, local police chief says.

In 2018, Bangladesh launched a 'war on drugs' after a proliferation of illegal substances, mostly pills called 'yaba'.

After making threats for months, Donald Trump has finally declared the US-Mexico border a national emergency.

Narendra Modi under pressure from supporters to punish Pakistan for suicide attack on Indian paramilitary convoy.

fstack writes: Intel is still a year out from releasing their first discrete graphics processors, but the company has begun publishing their open-source Linux GPU driver code. This week they began by publishing patches on top of their existing Intel Linux driver for supporting device local memory for dedicated video memory as part of their restructuring effort to support discrete graphics cards. Intel later confirmed this is the start of their open-source driver support for discrete graphics solutions. They have also begun working on Linux driver support for Adaptive-Sync and better reset recovery.

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Saudi students attending US colleges got away after being charged with crimes like murder and rape.

Brexit has created a war of words on bridges, boats and buses - some entirely false.

20-year-old Timothy Dalton Vaughn from Winston-Salem, N.C now faces 80 years in federal prison, reports KrebsOnSecurity.com: Federal authorities this week arrested a North Carolina man who allegedly ran with a group of online hooligans that attacked Web sites (including this one), took requests on Twitter to call in bomb threats to thousands of schools, and tried to frame various online gaming sites as the culprits. In an ironic twist, the accused -- who had fairly well separated his real life identity from his online personas -- appears to have been caught after a gaming Web site he frequented got hacked... [T]he real-life identity of HDGZero remained a mystery...as there was little publicly available information at the time connecting that moniker to anyone. That is, until early January 2019, when news broke that hackers had broken into the servers of computer game maker BlankMediaGames and made off with account details of some 7.6 million people who had signed up to play "Town of Salem," the company's browser-based role playing game. That stolen information has since been posted and resold in underground forums. A review of the leaked BlankMediaGames user database shows that in late 2018, someone who selected the username "hdgzero" signed up to play Town of Salem... The data also shows this person registered at the site using a Sprint mobile device with an Internet address that traced back to the Carolinas. This week America's Justice Department released an indictment of Vaughn and co-conspirator George Duke-Cohan for spoofed bomb threat emails to more than 2,400 schools, according to Krebs, adding that the government also alleges the two reported a fake hijacking of an airline bound for the United States. "That flight, which had almost 300 passengers on board, was later quarantined for four hours in San Francisco pending a full security check." The two now face charges of conspiracy and eight additional felony offenses, "including making threats to injure in interstate commerce and making interstate threats involving explosives."

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A Twitter thread that will become a blog post, about integrated software. I left out the conclusion. The answer imho turned out to be making the apps scriptable, and tying them together via a system scripting language. That's the software we developed at UserLand.

Techniques used to analyse data are producing misleading and often wrong results, critics say.