Month: June 2016

(credit: National Institutes of Health)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has access to as many as 411.9 million images as part of its face-recognition database. The bulk of those images are photographs of people who have committed no crime, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report says the bureau's Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation Services Unit contains not only 30 million mug shots, but also has access to driver license photos from 16 states, the State Department's visa and passport database, and the biometric database maintained by the Defense Department.

The GAO report, titled "FACE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY: FBI Should Better Ensure Privacy and Accuracy," comes nearly two years after the bureau said its facial recognition project graduated from a pilot project to "full operational capability." The facial recognition project is combined with a fingerprint database. Here's how the GAO report summarized the program:

LOS ANGELES—Another E3 is officially in the books, and we at Ars are still forming opinions and parsing the real content from the hype and illusions. While we work on writing impressions and picking conference favorites, please enjoy our gallery of photos from the event's weirdest and largest stations. Click through to see selections from all three major publishers, along with a mix of indie fare, weird costumes, and, er, sex toys as game controllers.

Don't worry, the giant NES controller was back this year.

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These galleries are missing a few photos, including shots from EA's off-site event, as well as photos and videos we've already included in other E3 pieces, like our hands-on look at the new Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, coming in 2017 for Wii U and Nintendo NX.

We've included an additional gallery for any of you who want a better look at Microsoft's new Xbox Design Lab, which lets fans pick and choose colors and accents for every element of an Xbox One controller. It's one thing to see the product's website, but getting to handle the controllers and see how the colors pop is another. Full disclosure: Ars' Sam Machkovech placed an order after going hands-on with these suckers.

Jonathan Gitlin

This tractor is planting seeds according to a precise GPS-based map of the field.

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Despite misperceptions to the contrary, farming in the 21st century is a high-tech endeavor. We're not just talking about genetically modified crops or biotech-derived pesticides though; farm vehicles like tractors and combines are now networked to the cloud and in many cases are even capable of driving themselves. To find out more about what the modern technofarm is all about, I drove up to Clear Meadow Farm in Harford County, Maryland to meet farmer Greg Rose and his self-driving John Deeres.

Rose and his family have been farming in the area for decades, and Clear Meadow is an 8000-acre farm that grows corn, soy, wheat, barley, sunflowers and sorghum in addition to raising Black Angus cattle (which you might find in Whole Foods). "We first dipped our hand into precision agriculture with yield monitors in 2000," Rose told me as I checked out a gigantic combine, its tires taller than me. His description of the job is as much data science as it is field work. Complex field maps are informed by a multitude of sensors from different farm machines, all gathering data to feed it to Rose via the cloud. The setup allows for extremely precise seed and nutrient prescriptions that can vary multiple times across the same field.

"The combine has load sensors in it that sense the volume of crop coming in, recording that as you go across the field," Rose said. That tells him how many bushels per acre each field is producing, data that gets fed into multi-year maps of each field that are color-coded to indicate different yields. "We take several years of data and make composite maps of a given field, then divide it into zones. You can manage those zones individually—taking soil samples to measure nutrient levels, and from there you know how much nutrients you need to apply in different areas," he told Ars.

Randall Newman and his colleagues have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against The Richmond Organization (TRO) and Ludlow Music, the two entities that also claim to own the copyright for "We Shall Overcome."

The new suit is filed on behalf of a Brooklyn, New York-based band, Satorii, which obtained a license (at $45.40 for the privilege) to record a version that they sell as a download. However, the band has recorded another version with a different melody, and the musicians are concerned that they'll be sued over it.

This is what Silk Road looked like during its heyday. (credit: US DOJ)

Nearly five months after convicted Silk Road druglord Ross Ulbricht filed his opening brief in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the government finally responded with its own brief late Friday evening. The government included over 200 pages of exhibits from the trial.

The 186-page reply rebuts, point-for-point, defense attorney Joshua Dratel’s claims that

• his client wasn’t the primary operator of the notorious underground website,
• that Ulbricht’s defense was hampered by two corrupt federal agents,
• that Dratel was not adequately able to cross-examine government witnesses, and
• that two witnesses were unable to testify on Ulbricht’s behalf, denying him constitutional rights, among other arguments.

After a lengthy recap of the entire case, United States Attorney Preet Bharara opened his arguments with a notable flaw in Ulbricht’s logic:

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage right here—and let us know what you think.

Richard Garfield, the mad genius behind complex games like Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, has seen renewed success in the last few years with family-oriented titles like the terrific monster-fest King of Tokyo and its sequel, King of New York. So it's perhaps not surprising that Garfield has gotten even lighter and more chaotic with his new board game, Greedy, Greedy Goblins, which ditches turns altogether.

You, as one of the titular goblins, are encouraged to delve deeply into the eight mines open at the start of every round. Gameplay is simple enough: pick a tile from the pool in the center of the table and place it facedown on any one of the mines. Then pick up another tile and repeat. Meanwhile, everyone else at the table does the same simultaneously (and as quickly or slowly as they like), so mines steadily fill with hidden monsters, treasures, and explosives. When you wish to claim a mine, simply play one of your three goblin tokens on it; no one can add any further tiles. Once all mines are claimed, the tiles get flipped over and their effects are applied to whoever owns that mine. Gain enough gold coins across multiple rounds and you win.

(credit: Penguin Random House)

The title of physicist Sean Carroll’s latest book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, is proof of its ambition. This book wants to tie together, well, everything. That’s no surprise; many popular science books have wide scopes and aim to tie together disparate scientific information.

But The Big Picture is more philosophical than scientific, which is a bit of a departure for Dr. Carroll. Another of his books, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is equally ambitious but heavy on the science. That book was largely about examining and weighing various scientific possibilities. His new book takes a step back and asks how we should be thinking about these possibilities in the first place.

But don’t be discouraged if you prefer science over philosophy: Carroll seamlessly weaves the two together. The Big Picture lives up to its title. It starts at the Big Bang, explains how time works (drawing on ideas from Carroll's previous book), passes through chemistry, biology, computer science, evolution, abiogenesis (the study of how life on Earth started), quantum mechanics, and neuroscience, all before finally arriving at a discussion of how consciousness is possible.

If I were to summarize the ideal scientific paper in four sentences, it would look like this:

• Look at this cool thing we did.
• This is how we did the cool thing.
• This is the cool thing.
• Wasn't that cool?

We like to think that the standard format (not to be confused with the Standard Model) was beautifully followed in days of yore. Nowadays, of course, it is not. Because things always get worse, right? In reality, scientific papers have always looked more like this:

• Look at this cool thing we did, IT IS REALLY COOL, BE INTERESTED.
• This is how we did the cool thing (apart from this bit that we "forgot" to mention, the other thing that we didn't think was important, and that bit that a company contributed and wants to keep a secret. Have fun replicating the results!).
• This is the cool thing.
• This thing we did is not only cool, but is totally going to cure cancer, even if we never mentioned cancer and, in fact, are studying the ecology of the lesser spotted physicist.

Call me cynical, but missing information in the methods section, as described in the parenthetical in item two, really, really bugs me. I think it bugs me more now than it did ten years ago, even though I'm no longer the student in the lab who's stuck with filling in the missing methods himself.