Science

Yahoo Japan Corp. has said it suspects up to 22 million user IDs may have been stolen during an unauthorised attempt to access the administrative system of its Yahoo! Japan portal.

This is not the first time Jaron Lanier gets a post on Weird Things, in fact we met him before as he quickly went off the rails in describing AI, then became more incoherent while bemoaning all social media as a dehumanizing waste, all the while trying to pick a fight with the Singularitarian version of a machine-directed utopia. Now, the former virtual reality pioneer has moved on to a book length rumination on how technology is killing the middle class by eliminating jobs. And as per his current modus operandi, he starts off with a tiny kernel of a reasonable statement, and proceeds to strap it to the Hyperbole Rocket and launch it into deep space. Is it true that a new software package or a robot might make your job obsolete? Yes, it absolutely can. But does the technology prevent you from getting a new job? No, it doesn’t because the reasons why you’re going to have trouble finding work in a globalized economy are more political than technological, and it’s short term greed, partisan bickering, and ignorance of the powers that be at fault. Here’s an example. Lanier’s opening salvo says that when Kodak was at the height of its market domination of personal photography, it employed more than 140,000 people. Now, he says, the face of personal photography is Instagram which has only 13 employees. Therefore, jobs were lost because of technology, Q.E.D. Um, no. First and foremost, Kodak died the slow and painful death it did because it first refused to adapt to a world of digital photography, then couldn’t, as it wasted years assuming that as long as they can at least sell the tools to develop all those digital photos on glossy paper, they’ll be fine. They never even thought that paper may be useless for most of the pictures being taken today as social media and smartphones took off. Secondly, as much as tech blogs may have hyped it, Instagram was not "the new face of photography." Take away cheap, mainstream digital photography and it couldn’t exist. It was a distribution network, a network that Kodak could’ve built. But instead of innovating, it slowly withered away. All right, so what happened to those tens of thousands of people laid off by Kodak? Well, they could find new jobs because among those laid off were managers, assistants, chemists, and IT specialists who could’ve applied their skills in other companies, doing other things, and I assure you that there aren’t 140,000 middle class workers out there who haven’t worked a day since a Kodak executive pink slipped them to meet the quarterly numbers. Eeyore would’ve been more optimistic about their future than Lanier, but then again, for optimism, Lanier would’ve needed to see technology as something more than a nefarious tool to use and abuse the populace. Where the disciples of Ray Kurzweil see immorality, sunshine rainbows, and unicorns frolicking in the meadows, he seems to see impending chaos, destruction, and socioeconomic dystopia adapted from the pages of very gloomy science fiction. And yet, Lanier plans to live with this grim future. For a fee of course. You see, in his version of if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them, he’s suggesting that if social media sites use our data to survive, they should pay us for it, and that’s how we will start solving the impending job crisis caused by these evil machines taking our place. Certainly, while being paid to mess around on Facebook would be a great deal, the problem is that paying all of its users even pennies a day would leave the company insolvent. Social media sites simply don’t make all that much money because they fell short of the promises they give a lot of advertisers when it comes to moving product for them. All the data you submit simply won’t give them nearly as good of a picture of who you are and what you like as Lanier and so many tech pundits think it does when they fall for the company’s wil

NASA's senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is driving to a new study area after a dramatic finish to 20 months on "Cape York" with examination of a rock intensely altered by water.

This week saw the 70th anniversary of the World War II Dambuster raids. On 16–17 May 1943 an attack on German dams, carried out by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron, subsequently known as the "Dambusters", used a specially developed "bouncing bomb" invented and developed by Barnes Wallis. The BBC has put together an interactive map that retraces the mission. The interactive uses a hand-drawn map from the official June 1943 British Air Ministry report on the Dambusters raid. The map shows the routes taken by the planes, the location of the planes that crashed and the location of the German dams. The MapBox Blog has this week been showing off the power of their MapBox Streets with vector tiles. Using vector tiles ensures the speed and scalability of MapBox maps. It also allows for some amazing styling of the map tiles. Using MapBox anyone can make "a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device." The blog post includes a number of beautiful examples of styled maps. I think my favourite is the hand-drawn map style (shown in the screenshot above).

A "Russian Tokarev TT-34 Atomiser" that is "very reliable on the lunar battlefield." Shannon Ocean This week, a handful of Ars staffers gathered in San Francisco, CA to see the new Star Trek movie at Starfleet Headquarters. (Ok, just kidding, we saw the movie at San Francisco's Metreon, and most of us were there for Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference.) Besides Google's conference and the rare spotting of more than three Ars employees sharing IRL space with each other, this week also saw notable stories hit the front page. Specifically, we wrote about a Soviet defense satellite that almost came to be and about how the people behind League of Legends are trying to foster a more civil atmosphere in games. “Bdysch!” Guest writer Amy Teitel brought us the story of The secret laser-toting Soviet satellite that almost was and commenters wasted no time diving into the specifics of the political and military atmosphere of the early 80's, when our article takes place. Most interesting were the handful of commenters who brought us first-hand experiences. ucla74 wrote: "I was an Air Force officer stationed in West Germany at the time of this failed launch. We were deploying the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) system in western Europe, and our unit had just achieved Initial Operational Capability—we were poised to deliver warheads against both strategic and tactical targets inside the Soviet Bloc. Following the Polyus failure, the US and USSR signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned GLCM, the Army's Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile system, and the Soviet Union's SS-20 MRBMs, which in turn significantly enhanced the stabilization of Central Europe. While I doubt Polyus was the driving factor behind INF, I feel certain it contributed to Gorbachev's readiness to negotiate at least one threat to the Soviet bloc. AgentSmith40 also gave us his perspective: Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

May 13 to 17 It’s spring! Except in London, where for the past two months, the weather has been stuck in a kind of sodden cold amalgam between spring and winter that’s probably best described as splinter. But back to spring. Among many other eye openers you’ll learn in Ann’s post, men’s reproductive hormones peak in June, as do contraceptive sales and sexually transmitted diseases. And you’ll never feel okay walking through a cloud of gnats again. But where Michelle lives, the spring is false and the fruit is dead. And Cameron wraps up Spring Break with a post about the least welcome rite of spring — the frantic scramble to wash off the poison oak. So many assumptions rest on the behavioural manipulation of toddlers and what we can extrapolate about the human condition. This week’s guest poster, Kendall Powell, reports on what happened when she sent her kids to participate in these experiments. And Erika advances a new theory about why Henry VII had so much trouble having children.

The eastern Asia native has an astonishing ability to eat aphids, but spreads rapidly and harbors a parasite that kills other species. The harlequin ladybird was once a stalwart ally of greenhouse growers around the world. Native to Japan, Korea and other parts of eastern Asia, the bright red ladybugs were prized for their aphid-eating abilities — until they caused serious declines in other ladybug populations.

The school's 'all hands on deck' effort to lure Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson from UCLA included money and the prospect of new collaborations, as well as less tangible personal perks.The courtship that has riveted the neuroscience world blossomed at a Saturday night dinner in a tony Brentwood restaurant.

FlyfotoArkivet LW1944 is a Google Map of Denmark overlaid with historical aerial imagery of the country taken by the Luftwaffe, under occupation, in 1944. Just over 75% of the country is covered by this collection of historical aerial photographs; including Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense. Other Historical Aerial Photo Maps The New Jersey State Atlas - aerial photography of the entire state taken in the 1930's Neighborhood Change in Connecticut - aerial photos from 1934 Catbus - 1947 aerial imagery of Montreal Old Maps of Moscow - a large collection of historical maps & aerial imagery from the 1940's Other Collections of Aerial Imagery The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland has one of the world's largest collections of historical aerial photographs. The WWII Aerial Photos and Maps website has a large collection of Aerial photos taken during the Second World War.

A European research team suggests Victorian era people were more intelligent than we are... (Phys.org) —In a new study, a European research team suggests that the average intelligence level of Victorian-era people was higher than that of modern-day people. They base their controversial assertion on reaction times (RT) to visual stimuli given as tests to people from the late 1800s to modern times—the faster the reaction time, they say, the smarter the person. The Victorian era has been highly touted by historians as one of the most productive in human history—inventions, observations and highly acclaimed art and music from that time still resonate today. The era was defined by Queen Victoria's reign in England which ran from 1837 until her death in 1901. Comparing the average IQ of people from that time with that of modern-day people is, of course, impossible—at least using traditional methods. The researchers suggest that reaction times to stimuli can be used as an alternative way to compare relative IQ levels. IQ tests themselves have come under scrutiny of late because they quite often reflect bias, such as education levels, societal norms, and other not-easily defined factors. Other research has shown that overall health, nutrition levels and degree of fatigue can impact IQ scores as well. For this reason, the team has turned to RT as a means of evaluating what they call general intelligence, which they claim to be a measure of elementary cognition. Read more here...