Category: Science &Technology

{If you think computers are quickly approaching true human communication, think again. Computers like Siri often get confused because they judge meaning by looking at a word’s statistical regularity. This is unlike humans, for whom context is more important than the word or signal, according to a researcher who invented a communication game allowing only nonverbal cues, and used it to pinpoint regions of the brain where mutual understanding takes place.}

From Apple’s Siri to Honda’s robot Asimo, machines seem to be getting better and better at communicating with humans.

But some neuroscientists caution that today’s computers will never truly understand what we’re saying because they do not take into account the context of a conversation the way people do.

Specifically, say University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral fellow Arjen Stolk and his Dutch colleagues, machines don’t develop a shared understanding of the people, place and situation — often including a long social history — that is key to human communication. Without such common ground, a computer cannot help but be confused.

“People tend to think of communication as an exchange of linguistic signs or gestures, forgetting that much of communication is about the social context, about who you are communicating with,” Stolk said.

The word “bank,” for example, would be interpreted one way if you’re holding a credit card but a different way if you’re holding a fishing pole. Without context, making a “V” with two fingers could mean victory, the number two, or “these are the two fingers I broke.”

“All these subtleties are quite crucial to understanding one another,” Stolk said, perhaps more so than the words and signals that computers and many neuroscientists focus on as the key to communication. “In fact, we can understand one another without language, without words and signs that already have a shared meaning.”

Babies and parents, not to mention strangers lacking a common language, communicate effectively all the time, based solely on gestures and a shared context they build up over even a short time.

Stolk argues that scientists and engineers should focus more on the contextual aspects of mutual understanding, basing his argument on experimental evidence from brain scans that humans achieve nonverbal mutual understanding using unique computational and neural mechanisms. Some of the studies Stolk has conducted suggest that a breakdown in mutual understanding is behind social disorders such as autism.

“This shift in understanding how people communicate without any need for language provides a new theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding normal social communication, and provides a new window into understanding and treating disorders of social communication in neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders,” said Dr. Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology in the campus’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at UCSF.

Stolk and his colleagues discuss the importance of conceptual alignment for mutual understanding in an opinion piece appearing Jan. 11 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Brain scans pinpoint site for ‘meeting of minds’

To explore how brains achieve mutual understanding, Stolk created a game that requires two players to communicate the rules to each other solely by game movements, without talking or even seeing one another, eliminating the influence of language or gesture. He then placed both players in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imager) and scanned their brains as they nonverbally communicated with one another via computer.

He found that the same regions of the brain — located in the poorly understood right temporal lobe, just above the ear — became active in both players during attempts to communicate the rules of the game. Critically, the superior temporal gyrus of the right temporal lobe maintained a steady, baseline activity throughout the game but became more active when one player suddenly understood what the other player was trying to communicate. The brain’s right hemisphere is more involved in abstract thought and social interactions than the left hemisphere.

“These regions in the right temporal lobe increase in activity the moment you establish a shared meaning for something, but not when you communicate a signal,” Stolk said. “The better the players got at understanding each other, the more active this region became.”

This means that both players are building a similar conceptual framework in the same area of the brain, constantly testing one another to make sure their concepts align, and updating only when new information changes that mutual understanding. The results were reported in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It is surprising,” said Stolk, “that for both the communicator, who has static input while she is planning her move, and the addressee, who is observing dynamic visual input during the game, the same region of the brain becomes more active over the course of the experiment as they improve their mutual understanding.”

Robots’ statistical reasoning

Robots and computers, on the other hand, converse based on a statistical analysis of a word’s meaning, Stolk said. If you usually use the word “bank” to mean a place to cash a check, then that will be the assumed meaning in a conversation, even when the conversation is about fishing.

“Apple’s Siri focuses on statistical regularities, but communication is not about statistical regularities,” he said. “Statistical regularities may get you far, but it is not how the brain does it. In order for computers to communicate with us, they would need a cognitive architecture that continuously captures and updates the conceptual space shared with their communication partner during a conversation.”

Hypothetically, such a dynamic conceptual framework would allow computers to resolve the intrinsically ambiguous communication signals produced by a real person, including drawing upon information stored years earlier.

Stolk’s studies have pinpointed other brain areas critical to mutual understanding. In a 2014 study, he used brain stimulation to disrupt a rear portion of the temporal lobe and found that it is important for integrating incoming signals with knowledge from previous interactions. A later study found that in patients with damage to the frontal lobe (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), decisions to communicate are no longer fine-tuned to stored knowledge about an addressee. Both studies could explain why such patients appear socially awkward in everyday social interactions.

Stolk plans future studies with Knight using fine-tuned brain mapping on the actual surfaces of the brains of volunteers, so-called electrocorticography.

Stolk said he wrote the new paper in hopes of moving the study of communication to a new level with a focus on conceptual alignment.

“Most cognitive neuroscientists focus on the signals themselves, on the words, gestures and their statistical relationships, ignoring the underlying conceptual ability that we use during communication and the flexibility of everyday life,” he said. “Language is very helpful, but it is a tool for communication, it is not communication per se. By focusing on language, you may be focusing on the tool, not on the underlying mechanism, the cognitive architecture we have in our brain that helps us to communicate.”

Stolk’s co-authors are Ivan Toni of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior at Radboud University in the Netherlands, where the studies were conducted, and Lennart Verhagen of the University of Oxford.

{We’re living through one of the most extraordinary events in Earth’s history — the start of a new geological epoch, an international group of scientists says.
}
Welcome to the Anthropocene, everyone.

Geological epochs are long periods of time — typically lasting around two million years — separated by major, global changes to the planet, such as the massive exploding meteor that ended the Late Cretaceous and wiped out the dinosaurs.

Modern humans arose during the Pleistocene epoch, and since the sudden warming that ended the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, we had been living in the Holocene epoch.

But modern human technology has had such a profound effect on our planet that we’re now in a new epoch that started during the mid-20th century — the Anthropocene, argues an international group of researchers in a new paper published today in the journal Science.

The boundary between two epochs is visible to geologists as some kind of “marker” between layers of rock, soil or ice that are deposited all over the Earth over time. For example, the Late Cretaceous-ending meteor left a distinct layer of iridium.

In the case of the Anthropocene, scientists note that humans have produced unusual materials like radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s.

“They’ve left a permanent record in our sediments and our soils and our glacial ice that’s going to be detectable for millennia,” said Colin Waters, a geologist with the British Geological Survey and secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group, whose members authored the new report.

“Geologists in millions of years time will look back at and say, ‘Something quite incredible happened at this time’ and be quite precise about when it happened.”

In their paper, the researchers added, “Not only would this represent the first instance of a new epoch having been witnessed firsthand by advanced human societies, it would be one stemming from the consequences of their own doing.”

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen first proposed in 2002 that a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene be assigned to the present to describe the profound changes that humans have made to the planet.

That eventually led the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific body that officially decides when epochs begin and end, to ask a group of geologists, paleontologists and other scientists to look into whether there was enough science to back up that proposal. The Anthropocene Working Group has been working on the question since 2009.

Many markers

In the new paper summarizing their findings, they list a large number of “markers” that humans have left in rock, soil and ice around the world. In addition to the radioactive fallout, they make a note of:

Pottery
Glass
Bricks
Concrete
Copper alloys
Elemental aluminum (only found as an ore in nature).
Plastics
Black carbon and other particles from fossil fuel combustion.
High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and pesticides.
The start of new epochs is often accompanied by climate change and mass extinctions, both of which humans are causing now.

“Humans now control several of the fundamental dials or knobs on the planetary system,” said Alexander Wolfe, an adjunct professor of paelobiology at the University of Alberta who is a member of the working group and a co-author of the paper.

Wolfe studies the remains of lake microorganisms in sediments deposited over decades and centuries, and says he has personally observed enormous changes marking the past 50 years.

Making new rocks

Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the group has faced some criticism from people who feel the Earth hasn’t had enough time to make enough rock to really define a new geological epoch.

“The reality is we’ve done some calculations and there’s the equivalent of one kilogram of concrete produced by humans for every square metre of the planet,” he said.

The new epoch isn’t official yet. The Anthropocene Working Group still needs to:

Decide exactly when the Anthropocene began.
Decide what formal marker they’ll use to define it and then choose a location in which to drive a “golden spike” into the rock at that marker at a place on Earth where the marker is very distinct.
Formally present its arguments to the International Commission of Stratigraphy and have them accepted.
For now, the group suggests making the start 1950 — when humans started having a really major effect on the planet — and the marker of nuclear fallout from Cold War nuclear tests.

“It’s an absolutely bomber marker that fits right in the middle of this transition,” Wolfe said.

Source”CBC NEWS:[A new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, has begun, scientists say->http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/anthropocene-paper-1.3393823]

{Scientists have warned the world is in “volcano season” and there is up to a 10% chance of an eruption soon killing millions of people and devastating the planet.}

Instances of volcanic eruptions are their highest for 300 years and scientists fear a major one that could kill millions and devastate the planet is a real possibility.

Experts at the European Science Foundation said volcanoes – especially super-volcanoes like the one at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, which has a caldera measuring 34 by 45 miles (55 by 72 km) – pose more threat to Earth and the survival of humans than asteroids, earthquakes, nuclear war and global warming.

There are few real contingency plans in place to deal with the ticking time bomb, which they conclude is likely to go off within the next 80 years.

The world’s most dangerous active volcanoes include Yellowstone, Mount Vesuvius in Campagnia, Italy, and Popocatépetl i near Mexico City.

If any of them or other massive volcanic peaks suffered a major eruption the team said millions of people would die and earth’s atmosphere would be poisoned with ash and other toxins “beyond the imagination of anything man’s activity and global warming could do over 1,000 years.

The chance of such as eruption happening at one of the major volcanoes within 80 years is put at five to ten per cent by the experts.

There are already fears that Yellowstone could blow any time within the next 70 years on a scale that would wiped out the western USA and affect the course of global history.

The report – “Extreme Geo-hazards: Reducing the Disaster Risk and Increasing Resilience,” warns global government’s preparations for such happenings are virtually non-existent.

It said: “Although in the last few decades earthquakes have been the main cause of fatalities and damage, the main global risk is large volcanic eruptions that are less frequent but far more impactfull than the largest earthquakes.

“Due to their far-reaching effects on climate, food security, transportation, and supply chains, these events have the potential to trigger global disaster and catastrophe.

“The cost of response and the ability to respond to these events is beyond the financial and political capabilities of any individual country.”

The report looked at other major geo-hazards facing the globe, including earthquakes, drought, asteroids floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, avalanches and wildfires.

Large earthquakes and tsunamis have happened more in the last 2,000 years, meaning there was better preparedness.

The report concluded: “Volcanic eruptions can have more severe impacts through atmospheric and climate effects and can lead to drastic problems in food and water security, as emphasized by the widespread famine and diseases that were rampant after the Laki 1783 and Tambora 1815 eruptions.

“Hence extreme volcanic eruptions pose a higher associated risk than all other natural hazards with similar recurrence periods, including asteroid impacts.”

The eruption of Tambora on Sumbawa, Indonesia killed about 100,000 people, but ash clouds meant there was no summer the following year and it was “one of the most important climatic and socially repercussive events of the last millennium,” the report said.

The earlier Icelandic event killed close to 10,000 instantly, but the long-term, effects wiped out 25% of the population and were felt across the planet.

A famine in Egypt reduced the population by one sixth, 25,000 died in the UK from breathing problems and there was worldwide extreme weather.

Similar scale events today would be much more catastrophic, the team warned, due to much bigger populations, global travel and food chains and reliance on technology.

Worryingly, scientists say research over the last 300 years of volcanic activity shows we are currently in a “volcano season” meaning increased activity.

Volcanoes are also more likely from November to April in the northern hemisphere when ice, rain and snowfall can compress the bedrock.

Source:Express:[Yellowstone about to blow? Scientists warning over SUPER-VOLCANO that could kill MILLIONS->http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/632054/Yellowstone-about-to-blow-1-in-10-chance-super-volcano-will-kill-millions]

{Apple is expected to cut production of its latest iPhone models by about 30 per cent in the January-March quarter due to slower shipments. The news has rattled the nerves of investors in the US giant’s Asian suppliers.}

As inventories of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have “piled up at retailers” since they were launched last September, production will be scaled back to let dealers go through their current stock, the business daily Nikkei reported.

The report prompted a 2.5 per cent drop in Apple shares, which have lost about a quarter of their value from record highs in April, reflecting worries over slowing shipments. Shares in the mainly Asian makers of the iPhones’ screens and chips were also sharply lower on Wednesday.

“This is an eye-opening production cut which speaks to the softer demand that Apple has seen with 6s out of the gates,” FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives said, adding the magnitude of the cut was “worrisome”.

Among LCD panel makers, Japan Display fell 4.7 per cent while LG Display fell 3.4 per cent.

The major iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, known as Foxconn, was down 1.8 per cent.

TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker and which has supplied some of the chips used in iPhones, was off about 1.1 per cent, levels not seen since mid-November. Another Taiwanese assembler, Pegatron, was off about 4 per cent, lows not seen in a year.
Production is expected to return to normal in the April-June quarter, the Nikkei reported.

However, Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said he was a bit sceptical about the production cut reports.

“Apple has been gaining significant market share in pretty much every region, and I’m not seeing a global slowdown,” Mr Moorhead said.

Apple was not available for comment.

Tepid forecasts by Apple suppliers such as Jabil Circuit , which manufactures casings for iPhones, and Dialog Semiconductor in December stoked fears that iPhone shipments could fall for the first time.

Wall Street has also tempered its view on the high-flying stock in recent months. Since early December, about a third of the analysts tracked by Thomson Reuters have trimmed their estimates on Apple.

For the 2016 financial year, Apple is expected, on average, to grow revenue by under 4 per cent, a far cry from the 28 per cent revenue growth it achieved in the previous financial year.

Source:Reuters:[Apple expected to cut iPhone 6s production by a third
->http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/apple-expected-to-cut-iphone-6s-production-by-a-third-20160106-gm0bqx.html]

{Facebook has begun rolling out a new feature on its social network which allows users to stream live video.}

A select group of celebrities and high profile users have been able to use the service for several months.

Live streaming via mobile phones has become one of the big technology trends of the year, with Twitter-owned Periscope and Meerkat proving popular.

Last year, Amazon paid $1bn for live streaming game site Twitch.

Initially Facebook’s live video feature will be available only to a small percentage of people in the US and will be limited to iPhones.

The tech giant said that “over time, the company plans to bring it to all users” but it did not give specific timescales.

In a blogpost introducing the service, Facebook said: “Live lets you show the people you care about what you’re seeing in real time – whether visiting a new place, cooking your favourite recipe or just want to share some thoughts.”

The stream will display the number of live viewers, the names of friends who are watching and real-time comments as they are written. The video will be saved to users’ timelines until they choose to delete them.
Nation of sharers

Facebook has also updated the way people can share photo collages – allowing users to mix photos and videos.

Ian Maude, an analyst with research firm Enders said of the streaming service: “Facebook has a vast audience to promote services to so there is nothing stopping it from becoming a significant player in video streaming.”

He said that Britain, like many other countries, had become “a nation of sharers”.

“We like to tell what what we are doing all the time.”

Privacy advocates have raised concerns about such services but Mr Maude believes that Facebook will be keen to avoid any controversy.

“They will be cognisant of the privacy concerns and I believe there are restrictions on how the content can be shared, so that it won’t be automatically broadcast to everyone.”

SOURCE:BBC:[Facebook rolls out live streaming video service->http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35006618]

{The organiser of Formula E, an electric car race, has announced it will introduce a driverless championship from next year.
}

The Roborace series will provide a “competitive platform for the autonomous driving solutions being developed”, it said.

The races will take place on the same circuits in major cities used by Formula E.

Many traditional carmakers are developing autonomous vehicles.

“Roborace is an open challenge to the most innovative scientific and technology-focused companies in the world,” said Formula E chief executive Alejandro Agag.

Denis Sverdlov, founder of Kinetik, which is a partner in the initiative, said: “We passionately believe that, in the future, all of the world’s vehicles will be assisted by AI and powered by electricity, thus improving the environment and road safety.”

“Roborace is a celebration of revolutionary technology and innovation that humanity has achieved in that area so far.”

One of the teams will be organised as a crowdsourced community team which, organisers said, would be open to both experts and hobbyists.

Formula E has been operating for two years and has become well-known for crowdsourcing initiatives such as allowing fans to vote to give their favourite driver a boost during races.

London’s Formula E race is due to take place in Battersea Park in June next year but faces opposition from local residents.

SOURCE:BBC:[Formula E plan driverless championships->http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34942691]

{Vtech, a company which specialises in electronic toys and educational material for children, has had its app store database, Learning Lodge, hacked.}

The firm said that there was “unauthorised access” to the database on 14 November.

The app is a gateway for customers to download games, e-books and other content on to their Vtech devices.

It is not clear how many customers have been affected, but some have told the BBC they have received an email.

A large amount of data, which looked like it could be from the hack, was seen online but has now been hidden, according to some experts. It also appeared to include a considerable number of children’s names, dates of birth and gender.

In an email to customers, the company said: “Upon discovering the unauthorised access we immediately conducted a thorough investigation, which involved a comprehensive check of the affected site and implementation of measures to defend against further attacks.”

The company stressed it was “important to note that our customer database does not contain any credit card or banking information” nor social security numbers.

However it does contain what the Vtech describes as “general user profile information”, such as “name, email address, encrypted password, secret question and answer for password retrieval, IP address, mailing address and download history”.
Image copyright Getty Images

The firm sells a range of electronic products ranging from toy cars and interactive garages to cameras, games, e-books and tablets.

Professor Alan Woodward, cyber security expert at Surrey University, said it looks like the firm may have been subjected to a simple hacking technique known as an SQL injection.

“If that is the case then it really is unforgivable – it is such an old attack that any standard security testing should look for it,” he said.

“If initial reports are correct then they should be taking their website connection to their databases offline immediately until they can discover how this was done and correct the issue.

“They also need to be alerting the parents as soon as possible, with particular emphasis on how their children might be approached using this type of data.

“These breaches are endemic and we have to stop. If that means focusing the minds of these companies through big fines then so be it. It needs to be taken seriously and those responsible held to account.”

Another security expert, Troy Hunt, said he was extremely concerned by the breach.

“When it’s hundreds of thousands of children including their names, genders and birthdates, that’s off the charts,” he wrote.

“When it includes their parents as well – along with their home address – and you can link the two and emphatically say ‘Here is 9 year old Mary, I know where she lives and I have other personally identifiable information about her parents (including their password and security question)’, I start to run out of superlatives to even describe how bad that is.”

The BBC has contacted Vtech for further information.

SOURCE:BBC:[Children’s electronic toy maker Vtech hacked->http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34944140]

{Mars is blanketed by a thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere — one that is far too thin to keep water from freezing or quickly evaporating. However, geological evidence has led scientists to conclude that ancient Mars was once a warmer, wetter place than it is today. To produce a more temperate climate, several researchers have suggested that the planet was once shrouded in a much thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere. For decades that left the question, “Where did all the carbon go?”}

The solar wind stripped away much of Mars’ ancient atmosphere and is still removing tons of it every day. But scientists have been puzzled by why they haven’t found more carbon — in the form of carbonate — captured into Martian rocks. They have also sought to explain the ratio of heavier and lighter carbons in the modern Martian atmosphere.

Now a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in Pasadena, offer an explanation of the “missing” carbon, in a paper published today by the journal Nature Communications.

They suggest that 3.8 billion years ago, Mars might have had a moderately dense atmosphere. Such an atmosphere — with a surface pressure equal to or less than that found on Earth — could have evolved into the current thin one, not only minus the “missing” carbon problem, but also in a way consistent with the observed ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12, which differ only by how many neutrons are in each nucleus.

“Our paper shows that transitioning from a moderately dense atmosphere to the current thin one is entirely possible,” says Caltech postdoctoral fellow Renyu Hu, the lead author. “It is exciting that what we know about the Martian atmosphere can now be pieced together into a consistent picture of its evolution — and this does not require a massive undetected carbon reservoir.”

When considering how the early Martian atmosphere might have transitioned to its current state, there are two possible mechanisms for the removal of the excess carbon dioxide. Either the carbon dioxide was incorporated into minerals in rocks called carbonates or it was lost to space.

An August 2015 study used data from several Mars-orbiting spacecraft to inventory carbonates, showing there are nowhere near enough in the upper half mile (one kilometer) or the crust to contain the missing carbon from a thick early atmosphere during a time when networks of ancient river channels were active, about 3.8 billion years ago.

The escaped-to-space scenario has also been problematic. Because various processes can change the relative amounts of carbon-13 to carbon-12 isotopes in the atmosphere, “we can use these measurements of the ratio at different points in time as a fingerprint to infer exactly what happened to the Martian atmosphere in the past,” says Hu. The first constraint is set by measurements of the ratio in meteorites that contain gases released volcanically from deep inside Mars, providing insight into the starting isotopic ratio of the original Martian atmosphere. The modern ratio comes from measurements by the SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instrument on NASA’s Curiosity rover.

This graphic depicts paths by which carbon has been exchanged among Martian interior, surface rocks, polar caps, waters and atmosphere, and also depicts a mechanism by which it is lost from the atmosphere with a strong effect on isotope ratio. Image Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech via NASA.

SOURCE:ENN:[NASA finds answer to why Mars’ atmosphere doesn’t have more carbon->http://www.enn.com/sci-tech/article/49181]