An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades. The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects. The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a "splatometer." This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects. [...] The stream research, published in the journal Conservation Biology, analyzed weekly data from 1969 to 2010 on a stream in a German nature reserve, where the only major human impact is climate change. "Overall, water temperature increased by 1.88C and discharge patterns changed significantly. These changes were accompanied by an 81.6% decline in insect abundance," the scientists reported. "Our results indicate that climate change has already altered [wildlife] communities severely, even in protected areas."

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Google is countering Facebook's Instant Games with its own bid to make web games more accessible. Its Area 120 experimental lab is introducing GameSnacks, HTML5-based casual games that are designed to load quickly and play well even on poor connections and basic smartphones. From a report: The combination of a lean initial web page, compressed media and just-in-time loading means you can start playing within just a few seconds, even on a phone with less than a 1Mbps connection (all too common in the world) and just 1GB of RAM. All titles work with both touch as well as a PC's mouse and keyboard, and are designed to run on virtually any platform and device. Like many casual games, they're designed to be playable with a minimum of instructions -- important when they're meant to reach people across many different languages. Some are not-so-subtle riffs on familiar titles like Puzzle Bobble and Tetris, but that's probably not a bad thing for gamers who otherwise couldn't play those games on their phones.

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They beat us at chess and trivia, supplant jobs by the thousands, and are about to be let loose on highways and roads as chauffeurs and couriers. Now, fresh signs of robot supremacy are emerging on Wall Street in the form of machine stock analysts that make more profitable investment choices than humans. From a report: At least, that's the upshot of one of the first studies of the subject, whose preliminary results were released in January. Buy recommendations peddled by robo-analysts, which supposedly mimic what traditional equity research departments do but faster and at lower costs, outperform their flesh-and-blood counterparts over the long run, according to Indiana University professors. "Using this type of technology to make investment recommendations or to conduct investment analyses is going to become increasingly important," Kenneth Merkley, an associate professor of accounting and one of the authors, said by phone. Whether getting stock calls right is a critical mission of human analysts is debatable. Wall Street research departments serve a variety of functions, among them connecting investors with company executives and gathering earnings and other corporate data. While their buy, sell and hold recommendations still garner attention and can move stocks, the number of clients premising investment decisions off them is probably limited. The study looked at a small and still largely experimental branch of fintech, firms founded on the premise that digital technology does a better job than humans in making equity recommendations. While all analysts use computers, a handful of start-ups has been seeing if programs can handle every aspect of the stock-picking process.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] The most significant improvement was in how the money helped parents, well, to parent. Before the casino opened its doors, parents worked hard through the summer but were often jobless and stressed in the winter. The new income enabled Cherokee families to put money aside and to pay bills in advance. Parents who were lifted out of poverty now reported having more time for their children. They weren't working any less though, Costello discovered. Mothers and fathers alike were putting in just as many hours as before the casino opened. More than anything, said tribe member Vickie L Bradley, the money helped ease the pressure on families, so the energy they'd spent worrying about money was now freed up for their children. And as Bradley put it, that "helps parents be better parents." What, then, is the cause of mental health problems among poorer people? Nature or culture? Costello's conclusion was both: the stress of poverty puts people genetically predisposed to develop an illness or disorder at an elevated risk. But there's a more important takeaway from this study.

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A judge ordered Thursday a temporary block on the JEDI cloud contract in response to a suit filed by Amazon. From a report: A court notice announcing the injunction was filed on Thursday, but wasn't public. It's unclear why the documents were sealed. In April, the Defense Department announced that Amazon and Microsoft were the two finalists to provide the contract, ruling out other contenders like IBM and Oracle. Then in July, President Donald Trump said he was looking into the contract after IBM and other companies protested the bidding process. Microsoft was awarded the contract on Oct. 25. Amazon has been protesting the move, saying that it was driven in part by President Trump's bias against the company. Trump often criticizes Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, claiming the newspaper unfairly covers his administration. Last month, Amazon's cloud-computing arm AWS filed a formal motion asking the court to pause Microsoft's work on the JEDI cloud contract, claiming the evaluation process included "clear deficiencies, errors and unmistakable bias." The court granted that motion on Thursday.

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Joan Walsh who I admire for being a listener, a rare thing among pundits, wants Bloomberg on the debate stage. She imagines that his opponents would tear him apart over things he said about racial profiling and red zoning in past decades. So many things to say about that.

1. I heard former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, a contemporary of Bloomberg's as mayor of NYC, on NPR yesterday. He's black. They were trying to get him to say Bloomberg was wrong and bad or whatever, but he wouldn't. He said plainly that the violence problem in his city was with black and Hispanic young men, and it was probably the same in NYC. They were the ones walking around with guns. The cities were desperate to get those guns out of their hands.
2. Joy Reid, on MSNBC on Tuesday night, who is also black, said that blacks have only ever felt passionately about one candidate, Obama. Otherwise they make pragmatic choices. They want to get rid of Trump. They'll choose Bloomberg if they think he's the best way to do that. That's how I vote too, I try to do it always, pick the candidates who would best do what should or must be done.
3. OK so Bloomberg is on the debate stage. Each candidate, except perhaps Sanders, is thinking, if I'm the nominee, I'm going to need his support. They aren't likely to go for the jugular. Think of Bloomberg not just as a candidate, but also as a Democratic Koch or Adelson. If he isn't the nominee the Bloomberg PAC is going to play a big role in Democratic politics.
4. If Bloomberg were just throwing money at this it wouldn't work. But it is working. He thinks creatively, is willing to risk not just his money but his reputation and legacy. He's doing the marketing that the Democrats have failed to do for generations. He is so smart, most billionaires want to hold on to their money, which is ridiculous, given how short life is and how old they are. He's using his money for good, now -- and that imho overshadows every past sin he has been accused of and is likely to be accused of. It doesn't eliminate them, but they have to be considered against the good he is doing, which imho is enormous. He's a gift horse and go ahead and look if you must, but he should keep going in the meantime.
5. A creative idea. Bloomberg could offer say $50 million to any still-running candidate, to be used for advertising to position against Trump, now, no strings attached.

Bloomberg is not just a candidate. He's doing the marketing, actually just starting to, that the Democrats have failed to do, ever. All the while the Republicans have mastered it. The Democrats are so unaware of this, they don't even see it. So when they look at Bloomberg they only see what they know to look for. A horse in a race. But he's a developer, working on defining media and politics for the world of 2020. He's going to test every assumption we have about how campaigns work, and that itself will be incredibly valuable. Let's pay close attention.

He's also working in advance of Trump, who hasn't yet managed to shut off political advertising of his opponents. This door should be shoved wide open in the most captivating way possible so when and if he shuts it down, people will miss it.

When Steve Jobs came along he looked at computers differently from the way IBM did. He looked for assumptions that could be broken and the result was the Apple II. When we got blogging and podcasting going, again we looked for assumptions of print journalism and radio that could be broken and it worked. We haven't yet done that for politics. Not just money-raising, that was solved in 2004 by Howard Dean and Joe Trippi. Actually doing politics effectively without being controlled by trolls using the networking technology of today. Bloomberg, a master of tech and media, is probably the best person in the world to try to do this right now. That's what journalism is, predictably, missing.

There was Bartlet for America, which begat Dean for America, now we need to be more specific -- Bloomberg for the rest of us. ;-)

Scientists say they have overturned the prevailing theory of how the planets in our Solar System formed.

Ratcheting up its pressure campaign against Huawei and its affiliates, the Department of Justice and the FBI announced today that it has brought 16 charges against Huawei in a sprawling case with major geopolitical implications. From a report: Huawei is being charged with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute. The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies to access those companies' intellectual property, only to then misappropriate that property and use it to fund Huawei's business. In addition to conspiracy, Huawei and the defendants are charged with lying to federal investigators and obstructing the investigation into the company's activity. According to the statement published by the Department of Justice, "As part of the scheme, Huawei allegedly launched a policy instituting a bonus program to reward employees who obtained confidential information from competitors. The policy made clear that employees who provided valuable information were to be financially rewarded."

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Experts are developing a better knowledge of the brain by studying tissue left over from surgery.

A particularly persistent malware infection has been spreading amongst Android phones -- and removing it only seems to bring it back with a vengeance. From a report: The Trojan xHelper, which Malwarebytes first wrote about last year, is reportedly re-spawning on devices where it's already been removed. If virus-removal software doesn't take care of a nasty infection, a hard reset will usually do the trick. But users report that even a full factory reset of an infected device doesn't wipe xHelper out completely. Within an hour the malware is usually back and ready to wreak havoc. Here's how to remove it.

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Joan Walsh who I admire for beging a listener, a rare thing among pundits, wants Bloomberg on the debate stage. She imagines that his opponents would tear him apart over things he said about racial profiling and red zoning in past decades. So many things to say about that.

1. I heard former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, a contemporary of Bloomberg's as mayor of NYC, on NPR yesterday. He's black. They were trying to get him to say Bloomberg was wrong and bad or whatever, but he wouldn't. He said plainly that the violence problem in his city was with black and Hispanic young men, and it was probably the same in NYC. They were the ones walking around with guns. The cities were desperate to get those guns out of their hands.
2. Joy Reid, on MSNBC on Tuesday night, who is also black, said that blacks have only ever felt passionately about one candidate, Obama. Otherwise they make pragmatic choices. They want to get rid of Trump. They'll choose Bloomberg if they think he's the best way to do that. That's how I vote too, I try to do it always, pick the candidates who would best do what should or must be done.
3. OK so Bloomberg is on the debate stage. Each candidate, except perhaps Sanders, is thinking, if I'm the nominee, I'm going to need his support. They aren't likely to go for the jugular. Think of Bloomberg not just as a candidate, but also as a Democratic Koch or Adelson. If he isn't the nominee the Bloomberg PAC is going to play a big role in Democratic politics.
4. If Bloomberg were just throwing money at this it wouldn't work. But it is working. He thinks creatively, is willing to risk not just his money but his reputation and legacy. He's doing the marketing that the Democrats have failed to do for generations. He is so smart, most billionaires want to hold on to their money, which is ridiculous, given how short life is and how old they are. He's using his money for good, now -- and that imho overshadows every past sin he has been accused of and is likely to be accused of. It doesn't eliminate them, but they have to be considered against the good he is doing, which imho is enormous. He's a gift horse and go ahead and look if you must, but he should keep going in the meantime.
5. A creative idea. Bloomberg could offer say $50 million to any still-running candidate, to be used for advertising to position against Trump, now, no strings attached.

Bloomberg is not just a candidate. He's doing the marketing, actually just starting to, that the Democrats have failed to do, ever. All the while the Republicans have mastered it. The Democrats are so unaware of this, they don't even see it. So when they look at Bloomberg they only see what they know to look for. A horse in a race. But he's a developer, working on defining media and politics for the world of 2020. He's going to test every assumption we have about how campaigns work, and that itself will be incredibly valuable. Let's pay close attention.

He's also working in advance of Trump, who hasn't yet managed to shut off political advertising of his opponents. This door should be shoved wide open in the most captivating way possible so when and if he shuts it down, people will miss it.

When Steve Jobs came along he looked at computers differently from the way IBM did. He looked for assumptions that could be broken and the result was the Apple II. When we got blogging and podcasting going, again we looked for assumptions of print journalism and radio that could be broken and it worked. We haven't yet done that for politics. Not just money-raising, that was solved in 2004 by Howard Dean and Joe Trippi. Actually doing politics effectively without being controlled by trolls using the networking technology of today. Bloomberg, a master of tech and media, is probably the best person in the world to try to do this right now. That's what journalism is, predictably, missing.

There was Bartlet for America, which begat Dean for America, now we need to be more specific -- Bloomberg for the rest of us. ;-)

Europe's data protection laws are some of the strictest in the world, and have long been a thorn in the side of the data-guzzling Silicon Valley tech giants since they colonized vast swathes of the internet. Two decades later, one Democratic senator wants to bring many of those concepts to the United States. From a report: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has published a bill which, if passed, would create a U.S. federal data protection agency designed to protect the privacy of Americans and with the authority to enforce data practices across the country. The bill, which Gillibrand calls the Data Protection Act, will address a "growing data privacy crisis" in the U.S., the senator said. The U.S. is one of only a few countries without a data protection law (along with Venezuela, Libya, Sudan and Syria). Gillibrand said the U.S. is "vastly behind" other countries on data protection. Gillibrand said a new data protection agency would "create and meaningfully enforce" data protection and privacy rights federally. "The data privacy space remains a complete and total Wild West, and that is a huge problem," the senator said.

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Academics from MIT's computer science laboratory have published a security audit today of Voatz, a mobile app used for online voting during the 2018 US midterm elections and scheduled to be used again in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. From a report: MIT academics claim they identified bugs that could allow hackers to "alter, stop, or expose how an individual user has voted." "We additionally find that Voatz has a number of privacy issues stemming from their use of third party services for crucial app functionality," the research team said in a technical paper released today. "Our findings serve as a concrete illustration of the common wisdom against Internet voting, and of the importance of transparency to the legitimacy of elections," researchers added. MIT academics urge states to continue using paper ballots rather than mobile apps that transmit votes over the internet. They say the current paper ballot voting system is designed to be transparent, and allow citizens and political parties to observe the voting process. "Voatz's app and infrastructure were completely closed-source," said James Koppel, one of the MIT academics.

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Driver Andy Green describes what needs to be done to achieve a land speed record.

Scott Santens, writing for Vocal: Back in June of 2019, I tweeted about the latest egregious example of MSNBC excluding Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang from their ongoing coverage of the 2020 Presidential candidates. There had been previous examples, but that was the worst up to that point because they had photos of all 20 candidates who were going to be in the first debates, and instead of including Yang as one of them, they included someone who wasn't even going to be there. I then started to add each new example as a new reply, and that ongoing thread has now been covered over and over again with each new example as a source of entertaining absurdity. It's been covered by traditional media outlets like The Guardian, Vox, and The Hill. It's also been covered by new media like Ethan and Hila Klein of the H3 Podcast for their two million subscribers. I have gotten many requests to put the entire thread in one place outside of Twitter, so this article has been created to meet that request. Each time a new example occurs, I will update the thread on Twitter, and update this page on Vocal too. I have also made a point here of expanding on the thread in a way I can't on Twitter, by expanding the timeline with earlier examples that had occurred before I started my thread. So instead of starting in June, this timeline starts back in March.

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