Something for the Weekend Another coffee, please. Yes, I know we're about to start. There is always time for one more coffee. It's good for your brain. Thanks.
Could you hold my cup for a moment? I need to visit the restroom. Yes, I know we're about to start; you told me that already. There is always time for coffee AND a comfort break. Yes, I know the two are related but I don't have time to chat about it. I'm bursting here.
How about I drink the coffee straight away, nip to the WC, and return pronto? Slurp argh that's hot. Thanks, I'll be right back.
While I'm in the loo, could you get me another coffee?
Actually, I'm not convinced that coffee is any better for your brain than it is for my bladder. Studies abound which invariably indicate that moderate coffee-drinking will lower your chances of Parkinson's and dementia but the final paragraphs always include the word "inconclusive." I suppose I'm a coffee-cup-half-full type of person: if there's one thing that nutritional research has shown us time and again, it's that if something is enjoyable, it's bad for your health and you must stop it immediately.
That said, some very smart coffee drinkers at the University of Cincinnati are extracting the carbon from spent coffee grounds to produce electrode coatings for bio-sensors used in neurochemistry. The porous carbon fibers created in this way turn out to be more sensitive than standard carbon coatings in the presence of dopamine – even trapping dopamine molecules momentarily, allowing researchers to carry out faster measurements.
To get the project rolling, the researchers went out and bought lots of coffee so that they would have lots of source material to work on. According to the team leader, they ended up with "more than we will ever need," adding: "My entire lab really loved this project."
I bet they did. I am now checking Indeed every day for job vacancies in research labs. With a bit of luck, I'll find a project that wants to tackle the climate crisis with Victoria sponge cake leftovers.
But hang on, these research boffins in Cincinnati sound pretty smart and they've been drinking coffee by the popcorn-bucket load. Maybe I should start imbibing a bit more rather than less, and drink myself cleverer.
Currently, I can only aspire to cleverness. I have always enjoyed mathematics, even at school, and later tried to keep it going by studying it as a subsidiary subject for my politics degree at university.
The problem is that I am not very good at it. Mathematicians have a knack for formulating complex theoretical descriptions, while I'm still bumbling about trying to remember what subscript N stands for. I am akin to those thespian enthusiasts in a small-town drama society who adore being on stage but cannot act to save their lives.
That doesn't prevent me from appreciating a good play. For example, I love it when physicists come up with wild new mathematical approaches to explain existence. Earlier this year, eggheads at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and MIT published a paper explaining how they developed a "simplified" (heh) model to describe quantum gravity.
This raises two monumental questions about our place in the universe. First, how closer are we to learning how and why microscopic quantum mechanical ripples arise? Second, how much coffee did the researchers go through?
I bet there's an algorithm to determine the optimum coffee consumption. There's an "algorithm" for everything these days.
Just this week, a colleague showed me a business plan for a proposed editorial app project whose entire backroom technology was glibly summarized in four words: "AI algorithm recognizes context." When I asked what this "algorithm" was, they said they would find some IT students to write it as work experience over the next few weeks.
I suspect that one of us does not understand what an algorithm is. If I asked them what this algorithm might look like in its final form, they'd probably say: "Er… brown?"
Another blithe mention of "algorithm" appeared recently in a paper by MIT researchers [PDF] to describe a data analysis tool for identifying trends in time-based data and predicting what will happen next. Luckily, it uses a "simplified" (heh) interface they've called Time Series Predict Database (tspDB) so that all the complex modeling is done behind the scenes, such that even a dimbo like me might be able to draw up a prediction in only a few seconds.
Hang on, did I catch that right? It sounds like they've written an algorithm for predicting the future… and instead of running down to the bookies or buying lottery tickets, they're announcing it to the world. Surely not.
"This is a beautiful concept of actually building prediction functionalities directly into the database," confirms co-author Devavrat Shah. "It has never been done before, and so we want to make sure the world uses it."
Blimey, they DO mean it.
One can imagine how this will be applied in the first instance. My joke about gamblers was well chosen: almost certainly it will be popular in the world of finance and other such crooks. It could be a boon for crypto dealers, if only they could get tspDB to make sense of the loopy historic data. With the out-of-control rollercoaster that is Bitcoin rising and falling in value against the dollar by +10 and -10 percent on a daily basis, this algorithm will have its work cut out for it.
It would be nice if somebody could use it with legally acquired medical big data to help predict – with greater than typical accuracy – an individual's chances of developing disease. Maybe it could analyse retail trends and predict a specific date when flares will definitely come back.
But no, I reckon it will be used as a substitute cephalopod for predicting the group stages of international sporting events. The algorithm will also hopefully enjoy a longer and more fruitful life than Paul the World Cup Octopus, and certainly longer than Rabio, who accurately predicted the result of every game at the last World Cup in Japan before being sold off to make sashimi.
Living in a country in which vast numbers of otherwise sane people not only believe in horoscopes but regularly spend money on visits to tarot readers, I look forward to tspDB disrupting the gullibility market by not spouting bollocks. And while I do not wish to encourage Minority Report scenarios by putting unquestioned faith into its predictions, it would be nice if it could at least tell me if COVID will still be an issue the summer after next.
The big problem is, of course, whether in fact anybody will take any notice of tspDB's predictions. The pandemic was not just predicted but anticipated by international governments, yet they all ignored the warnings. And the only way to know whether they will continue to ignore the warnings is to predict how they will respond to tspDB predictions, which er… predict that, er…
Oh no, I think I have gone cross-eyed. It's too much for my tiny mind to comprehend.
Fetch me another coffee, would you?
Chinese cyberspies targeted two Russian defense institutes and possibly another research facility in Belarus, according to Check Point Research.
The new campaign, dubbed Twisted Panda, is part of a larger, state-sponsored espionage operation that has been ongoing for several months, if not nearly a year, according to the security shop.
In a technical analysis, the researchers detail the various malicious stages and payloads of the campaign that used sanctions-related phishing emails to attack Russian entities, which are part of the state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec Corporation.
The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday said it intends to take action against educational technology companies that unlawfully collect data from children using online educational services.
In a policy statement, the agency said, "Children should not have to needlessly hand over their data and forfeit their privacy in order to do their schoolwork or participate in remote learning, especially given the wide and increasing adoption of ed tech tools."
The agency says it will scrutinize educational service providers to ensure that they are meeting their legal obligations under COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
The saga surrounding Arm's joint venture in China just took another intriguing turn: a mysterious firm named Lotcap Group claims it has signed a letter of intent to buy a 51 percent stake in Arm China from existing investors in the country.
In a Chinese-language press release posted Wednesday, Lotcap said it has formed a subsidiary, Lotcap Fund, to buy a majority stake in the joint venture. However, reporting by one newspaper suggested that the investment firm still needs the approval of one significant investor to gain 51 percent control of Arm China.
The development comes a couple of weeks after Arm China said that its former CEO, Allen Wu, was refusing once again to step down from his position, despite the company's board voting in late April to replace Wu with two co-chief executives. SoftBank Group, which owns 49 percent of the Chinese venture, has been trying to unentangle Arm China from Wu as the Japanese tech investment giant plans for an initial public offering of the British parent company.
SmartNICs have the potential to accelerate enterprise workloads, but don't expect to see them bring hyperscale-class efficiency to most datacenters anytime soon, ZK Research's Zeus Kerravala told The Register.
SmartNICs are widely deployed in cloud and hyperscale datacenters as a means to offload input/output (I/O) intensive network, security, and storage operations from the CPU, freeing it up to run revenue generating tenant workloads. Some more advanced chips even offload the hypervisor to further separate the infrastructure management layer from the rest of the server.
Despite relative success in the cloud and a flurry of innovation from the still-limited vendor SmartNIC ecosystem, including Mellanox (Nvidia), Intel, Marvell, and Xilinx (AMD), Kerravala argues that the use cases for enterprise datacenters are unlikely to resemble those of the major hyperscalers, at least in the near term.
The US is racing to catch up with China in supercomputing performance amid fears that the country may widen its lead in exascale computers over the next decade, according to reports.
The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is expected to be the first exascale system in the US once it is fully operational, but China already has two exascale systems up and running since last year, as reported on our sister site The Next Platform.
This lead may widen as the US has three exascale systems in the pipeline, while China aims to have up to 10 operational systems by 2025, says a report in the Financial times.
Laptop vendor Framework Computer has launched new faster models. Unlike in the case of any other laptop maker, if you already have one, this is good news.
Modern laptops tend to be promoted on the basis of thinness and lightness, and the Framework range is no different. The machines have 13.5-inch (8.89cm) screens, are just under 16mm thick (0.6 inch), and weigh 1.3kg (2lb 14oz).
The new models have faster 12th-generation Intel Core CPUs.
Two and a half years after its first disastrous launch, Boeing has once again fired its CST-100 Starliner capsule at the International Space Station.
This time it appeared to go well, launching at 18:54 ET from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. The RD-180 main engine and twin solid rocket boosters of the Atlas V performed as planned before Starliner was pushed to near orbital velocity by the Centaur upper stage.
After separation from the Centaur, Starliner fired its own thrusters for orbital insertion and is on course for the ISS. Docking is scheduled for approximately 19:10 ET today (23:10 UTC).
US president Joe Biden kicked off his first Asian tour since taking office in South Korea, where he visited a Samsung semiconductor fab said to be the model for the company's planned plant in Taylor, Texas.
While speaking at the Samsung Electronics Pyeongtaek Campus, Biden said the region will be a key part of the next several decades – a reason "to invest in one another to deepen our business ties.".
Much of the talk on Biden's five-day trip to South Korea and Japan will center around broader deepening of economic and business ties. In Pyeongtaek, however, the emphasis was on semiconductor cooperation. While touring the plant with recently elected South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, Biden noted "these little chips are the key to propelling us into the next era of humanity's technological development."
At Meta's first Conversations keynote yesterday, the company announced the WhatsApp Cloud API, aimed at improving the customer service experience for businesses of all sizes.
Meta already has the WhatsApp Business API, the first revenue-generating enterprise product for the otherwise free messaging app, where companies pay WhatsApp on a per-message basis and can use the platform to direct customer communications to other lines like SMS, email, other apps, and more.
It's basically another online presence where enterprises can set up shop to make it easier for customers to get in touch. But the WhatsApp Business API is on-premises and would normally need a solutions provider like Twilio to facilitate back-end integration.
Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch to deal with an authentication issue that was introduced in the May 10 Windows update.
Elizabeth Tyler, cyber security consultant on Microsoft's Detection and Response Team, confirmed the fix to worried administrators early this morning.
UK customers of datacenter and colo service provider Sungard Availability Services are to be transferred to Daisy Corporate Services, part of the Daisy Group, months after Sungard went into administration.
According to some reports, Daisy Group has signed a deal to acquire the UK arm of Sungard, in a move that would see the company pick up Sungard's former customers, including major banks and other financial institutions.
However, a statement given to The Register by the administrators, Teneo Financial Advisory, merely states that some Sungard customers will be transferred to Daisy Corporate Services, and it is not clear how many are included this arrangement.
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