Month: October 2016

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The precipitous drop in the value of the pound caused by Brexit has led to rocketing prices for Microsoft's cloud and on-premise business services in the UK.

From the start of next year, Microsoft's enterprise software will be 13 percent more expensive, while enterprise cloud services will be hiked by 22 percent, the company has warned.

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An artificial intelligence "judge" that can accurately predict many of Europe's top human rights court rulings has been created by a team of computer scientists and legal experts.

The AI system—developed by researchers from University College London, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Pennsylvania—parsed 584 cases which had previously been heard at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), successfully predicting 79 percent of its decisions.

A machine learning algorithm was trained to search for patterns in English-language datasets relating to three articles of the European Convention on Human Rights: Article 3, concerning torture and inhuman and degrading treatment; Article 6, which protects the right to fair trial; and Article 8, on the right to a private and family life. It examined as many cases which did find rights violations as those which didn't.

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Karen Finley, former CEO of embattled red light camera vendor Redflex, was sentenced last week to 14 months in prison. Finley pled guilty last year to federal corruption charges in Ohio.

As prosecutors wrote in a statement in June 2015: on Friday:

From December 2005 to February 2013, Finley served as CEO of a red light camera enforcement company. As part of her plea agreement, Finley admitted that, between 2005 and 2013, she participated in a scheme in which the company made campaign contributions to elected public officials in the cities of Columbus and Cincinnati through a consultant retained by the company. According to admissions made in connection with her plea, Finley and others, including another executive of the company, agreed to provide the conduit campaign contributions with the understanding that the elected public officials would assist the company in obtaining or retaining municipal contracts, including a photo red light enforcement contract with the City of Columbus.

The federal judge overseeing the case rebuked Finley during the Wednesday hearing.

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You don’t have to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons to know that mice run away from cats. Mice and rats are born with an innate, hardwired fear of their feline predators, and the very scent of a cat is terrifying to them. So it was quite a surprise when in 2000, parasitologist Joanne Webster found rats that had not only lost their fear of cat urine, they were attracted to it. The key feature of these rats? They were infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

This phenomenon, which Webster dubbed “fatal feline attraction,” is particularly fascinating given the peculiarities of the parasite. Toxoplasma, or Toxo for short, is seemingly able to infect just about any warm-blooded animal anywhere in the world—dogs, cows, kangaroos, koalas, chickens, pigeons, sea otters, dolphins, et al.

Yet despite its ubiquity, Toxoplasma reproduces sexually only in cats. One idea is that if Toxo-infected mice and rats become easier prey, the parasite can get into cats and complete its lifecycle. It’s a compelling story, and one made even more so by the fact that Toxo also hangs out in the brain cells of its hosts—a great location for a mind-manipulating parasite.