"We all want to be rich by having a computer just generate piles of money for us," writes long-time Slashdot reader TekBoy. "Here's one man's attempt at using AI to predict the market. From the article (by tinkerer/writer/network guy Jason Bowling): Models that did great during their initial training and validation runs might do ok during runs on later data, but could also fail spectacularly and burn all the seed money. Half the time the simulation would make money, and half of the time it would go broke. Sometimes it would be just a few percentage points better than a coin toss, and other times it would be far worse. What had happened? It had looked so promising. It finally dawned on me what I had done. The results cycling around 50% was exactly what you'd expect if the stock price was a random walk. By letting my program hunt through hundreds of stocks to find ones it did well on, it did stumble across some stocks that it happened to predict well for the validation time frame. However, just a few weeks or months later, during a different slice of the random walk, it failed. There was no subtle underlying pattern. The model had simply gotten lucky a few times by sheer chance, and I had cherry picked those instances. It was not repeatable. Thus, it was driven home -- machine learning is not magic. It can't predict a random sequence, and you have to be very careful of your own biases when training models. Careful validation is critical. I am sure I will not be the last to fall victim to the call of the old treasure map in the attic, but exercise caution. There are far less random time series to play with if you are looking to learn. Simulate, validate carefully, and be aware of your own biases.

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President Geingob’s win comes days after corruption allegations led to resignation and arrest of two ministers.

Fenech pleads innocent to charges of complicity in murder and accomplice to bombing as pressure on PM to quit mounts.

Masalmeh, 18, was killed near the city of Hebron, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

"FedEx delivery robots invade New York City streets," read one newspaper's headline, describing the six-wheeled "SameDay" bots that the company is testing in four cities. But this week New York City told them they're not welcome, CNN reports: The delivery robot, called Roxo, is not actually being tested in New York, but was visiting the city for a special event, a FedEx spokesperson told CNN. Nevertherless, lawyers for the New York City Department of Transportation delivered a cease-and-desist letter to FedEx on Monday, warning that the robots were violating multiple traffic provisions... Motor vehicles are not permitted to operate on New York City sidewalks, and no motor vehicles may be operated without "having at least one hand" on the the steering mechanism any time the vehicle is moving, according to the letter. "FedEx's robots wouldn't just undercut the jobs of hardworking New Yorkers -- they would be a danger on our crowded streets," Will Baskin-Gerwitz, Mayor Bill De Blasio's deputy press secretary, told CNN.

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Armed group claims one of its 'fighters' behind killing of two people in the UK's capital as police probe continues.

Tino Chrupalla, a legislator from Saxony, will lead Germany's largest opposition party with Joerg Meuthen.

Parliament to meet on Sunday to decide on Iraqi PM's fate amid ongoing anti-government protests.

Long-time Slashdot reader clawsoon writes: Among Sunday's releases from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on leaked Chinese documents about the detention of Xinjiang Uighurs — which they are calling the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority since World War II — is a section on detention by algorithm which "is more than a 'pre-crime' platform, but a 'machine-learning, artificial intelligence (AI), command and control' platform that substitutes artificial intelligence for human judgment...." "The Chinese have bought into a model of policing where they believe that through the collection of large-scale data run through AI and machine learning that they can, in fact, predict ahead of time where possible incidents might take place, as well as identify possible populations that have the propensity to engage in anti-state anti-regime action," reports James Mulvenon, director of intelligence integration at SOS International LLC, an intelligence and information technology contractor for several U.S. government agencies. "And then they are preemptively going after those people using that data." The Chinese government responded by calling the leaked documents "fake news."

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Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil (Denis "Jaromil" Roio) writes: A few days ago Devuan ASCII 2.1 was announced and one update has been overlooked by most media outlets: our dbus patch to re-generate machine-id at every boot. This patch matters for everyone's privacy and I hope more distributions will follow our example, let alone Debian. We are dealing with important privacy implications: non-consensual user tracking is illegal in many countries and is not even mentioned in the machine-id documentation so far. "In theory, the machine-id should be a persistent identifier of the current host," explains the README documentation. "In practice, this causes some privacy concerns..."

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Four accused remanded in judicial custody for 14 days over suspected rape and killing of 27-year-old veterinarian.

Jimmy Wales' new social network WT.Social started November with just 1,500 members. Four weeks later, it's skyrocketed up to 345,680 members -- and that's just the beginning. Next year Wales plans to hire journalists, with the site's users acting as their "editors-in-chief," fulfilling the dreams Wales had for the site's earlier incarnation as a crowd-sourced news platform Wikitribune, reports the journalism magazine Press Gazette: Wikitribune originally employed about ten to 12 journalists who created content and hit publish on stories for the site. But the whole editorial team was laid off in October last year after Wales told them costs were unsustainable with not enough money coming in from crowdfunding and no major investors. [On WT.Social] he instead enabled thousands of users to publish articles, a right that had previously been limited to Wikitribune's staff journalists.... "[T]here was a real feeling that this site was a journalists' website and you as a member are allowed to help them as a junior mini-journalist on the side. And that just didn't really work. Whereas to really foster that sense of community engagement and moral ownership of what they're doing, you kind of want to reverse that and say actually the journalists are here to serve whatever you're interested in so send them out, get them busy, you be the editor-in-chief and direct their work.... "We'll say: 'Here are some of the most active communities, you work for them -- what do they need you to do? What are the things that they want you to look into? Who do they want you to go and hunt down and interview?' So it's really putting journalists at the disposal of people who are in a certain area." Wales tell the Press Gazette that his original WikiTribune site had had a design that was "too intimidating" for non-journalists. "People felt like 'okay I have to go and write a whole big piece, edit it, publish it, all of that' rather than just sharing, interacting in a much more casual way..." "So far [on WT Social] that's proven to be overwhelmingly true," Wales added. On his new site users are signed up for four "subwikis" by default -- Internet News, Long Reads, Fighting Misinformation, and Upcoming Newsworthy Events -- and this has started some good conversations. "People come on the platform and they're discussing things, sharing things, writing things in a much more fluid way." WT.Social is currently looking for volunteer laravel or vue developers, as well as admins, and there's even a paid position as a community assistant.

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I love this piece by John Naughton up to the point where he says Ben Hammersley coined the term podcasting. We have the archive, in pointers from this page, to show how the name was chosen. This is even better than contemporaneous notes, the decisions were made online, so the record is perfect, not subject to interpretation. (Unfortunately, Yahoo is taking the archive offline in December, but the Internet Archive has copies.) Hammersely's use of the term in a story is analogous to someone anticipating that Apple's phone would be called iPhone. It would not be correct to say that such a person gave the product its name. I normally don't comment on this, but Naughton is such a careful journalist, no doubt he took the info from the Wikipedia page on podcasting, which is incorrect.

The mammal, believed to be a minke whale, was found below Battersea Bridge in London.

"The world is getting windier," reports WBUR, citing a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. And they add that this could actually be a boon to wind farm operators, "since faster wind means more efficient wind turbines." Researchers analyzed decades of weather data and determined global wind speeds have risen dramatically over the past 10 years... Princeton University scholar Timothy Searchinger, one of the study's authors, says researchers expect wind speed to continue to increase, he says, which has multiple positive effects. Green energy through wind turbines will see these impacts. "When you increase the wind speed by a little bit, you still increase the power quite a lot," he says... As a result of increasing wind speed, the average wind turbine generated roughly 17% more electricity in 2017 than it did in 2010, the study found... Now, humans can capitalize on this change for at least the next decade, he says. "When you size wind turbines, you can size them differently to take advantage of that additional power," he says. "That's really the key point, is that if we can predict these changing patterns 10 years in advance, we can size our turbines so that they take advantage of the maximum amount of wind that is reasonable and economical."

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