Month: February 2017

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft wants developers to build apps for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), the set of APIs and frameworks that allows developers to build applications that are substantially compatible with desktop PCs, tablets, smartphones, Xbox One, HoloLens, and soon, a range of affordable virtual reality headsets.

The company's annual Build developer conference is taking place in May, which means that it's going to come after the expected release date of next major Windows update, the Creators Update. But there's new developer content in the Creators Update, so instead of having a big conference to talk about that, Microsoft has had a "Windows Developer Day" streaming session to talk about some of the new things coming in the Creators Update for developers. At Build, the company will be talking about what's coming after the Creators Update, looking forward at the next year or so of Windows development.

For the Creators Update today, Microsoft has announced that the current preview SDK is feature complete, meaning that developers can use it to get complete access to every feature that'll be coming in the update when it ships.

Enlarge / Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA) tweaks the hearing's title by donning a red "KEEP THE EPA GREAT" hat.

With a title like "Making EPA Great Again," there should be little surprise that a lot of Tuesday's House Science Committee hearing was focused on criticism of the US Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been a favorite target of the committee's chairman, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas). But the EPA ended up sharing the spotlight with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A recent news story combined with Smith's lingering displeasure over a 2015 NOAA climate study meant that it became two hearings for the price of one.

NOAA in the crosshairs

In an ongoing saga, Smith accused a group of NOAA climate scientists of fudging data in a 2015 study published in Science on the global temperature record. Smith provided no evidence for this claim other than his own rejection of the observed warming trend affirmed by the study. He then attempted to subpoena the researchers’ e-mails—a move that NOAA has (so far) resisted. Last weekend, a story in the UK Mail on Sunday quoted a former NOAA scientist who criticized the 2015 study, primarily alleging that NOAA data archiving procedures were not followed and the study was rushed—claims the researchers reject.

In addition to a series of tweets promoting the story, the House Science Committee promptly put out a press release repeating accusations that NOAA has manipulated its data—even though the results have been duplicated in a recent study and also with every other major dataset available. In his opening statement for Tuesday’s hearing, Rep. Smith said that NOAA “deceived the American people by falsifying data to justify a partisan agenda,” called on Science to retract the peer-reviewed 2015 study, and promised to continue pressuring NOAA to turn over scientists’ e-mails.

Enlarge / Intel's uncompleted Fab 42 in Chandler, AZ.

Intel announced today that it would spend $7 billion to complete Fab 42, a factory in Chandler, Arizona that will eventually be used to build chips on Intel's 7nm manufacturing process. According to Intel's release, the facility will "directly create 3,000 high-tech, high-wage Intel jobs for process engineers, equipment technicians, and facilities-support engineers and technicians who will work at the site" and that a further 7,000 jobs will be created indirectly to support the facility. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich made the announcement at the White House with President Donald Trump; Krzanich briefly attracted controversy last summer when he canceled a Trump fundraising event.

In an e-mail to Intel employees after the announcement (PDF), Krzanich said he made the announcement at the White House as a show of support for "the Administration's policies to level the global playing field and make US manufacturing competitive worldwide through new regulatory standards and investment policies." Krzanich also noted that Intel is "one of the top five exporters and top two R&D spenders in the US—despite the fact that from a tax and regulatory position we have been disadvantaged relative to the rest of the world where we compete."

Though Krzanich bemoans US taxes and regulations, it's also worth noting that US government restrictions make it more difficult for Intel to build cutting-edge chip manufacturing facilities outside of the United States in the first place. Under the terms of the Wassenaar Arrangement, Intel needs to get government approval before it can export manufacturing equipment capable of making anything smaller than 45nm chips (that number changes over time as manufacturing processes improve). This is one reason why Intel only has one factory in China and why that factory was making then-outdated 65nm chips when it opened in 2010. It's not that Intel can't build advanced chip factories outside of the US, but it does appear to be easier overall to keep the most advanced processes in the US.

Get your text right for your Facebook housing ad if you want the company's figurative thumbs-up for it. (credit: American Advisors Group)

Following Facebook's November promises to take action, the company unveiled a suite of rules and machine-learning tactics on Wednesday, all in the name of curtailing discriminatory ad-targeting practices.

The most notable of these is Facebook's new automated toolset that is built to identify advertisements for "housing, employment or credit opportunities"—and flags them if they employ the site's "multicultural affinity targeting" system. In other words, if those types of ads in any way are built with requests that Facebook not deliver them to African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American viewers, the site will attempt to automatically block the ad with a relevant notice. Advertisers can then either remove the cultural limitations from the ad or request a manual review for its approval.

Should the automated toolset recognize this type of ad but not pick up on apparent cultural targeting, advertisers will instead be directed to a three-paragraph "certification" notice, which advertisers will have to sign. This notice, among other things, forces advertisers to pledge that they "will not use Facebook advertising to improperly discriminate." This notice coincides with Facebook updating language in its advertiser-policy pages about discriminatory practices. In an October report, Pro Publica exposed previous issues in the social network's advertising platform by buying and running discriminatory ads that flew in the face of the Fair Housing Act.

Earlier this week, we were surprised by reports that the new Version 4.5 beta firmware for the PlayStation 4 Pro offered an unannounced "Boost Mode" promising "improved gameplay, including higher frame rates, for some games that were released before the introduction of PS4 Pro." The folks over at the excellent Digital Foundry have now put that new mode through its paces, finding frame rate increases of up to 38 percent on unpatched PS4 games.

Those frame rate improvements are very dependent on the specific title in question, though. Destiny for instance, is locked to 30fps in its code, and thus gets no benefit from Boost Mode. An intensive online shooter like Battlefield 4, on the other hand, can stay at a solid 60fps in Boost Mode, without the frequent frame-rate dips that can occur during a 64-player match in base mode.

Many games seem to see the same modest 14 percent bump in their frame rates in Boost Mode. That coincidentally matches the 14 percent faster clock speed that the PS4 Pro's GPU has over the original system (911Mhz vs 800Mhz), suggesting that the additional processor cycles are helping on GPU-limited games. Boost Mode doesn't seem to make any use of the 18 additional compute cores available in the PS4 Pro, however—for that, you need a game-specific patch to be coded by the developer.

Enlarge (credit: Ulrich Baumgarten / Getty Images News)

A federal grand jury has indicted a former National Security Agency contractor on 20 counts of willful retention of national defense information.

According to prosecutors, Harold “Hal” Martin took a slew of highly classified documents out of secure facilities and kept them at his home and in his car. Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that among those materials, Martin is alleged to have taken 75 percent of the hacking tools that were part of the Tailored Access Operations, an elite hacking unit within NSA.

The indictment outlines 20 specific documents that he is accused of having taken, including “a March 2014 NSA leadership briefing outlining the development and future plans for a specific NSA organization.”

“The indictment alleges that for as long as two decades, Harold Martin flagrantly abused the trust placed in him by the government by stealing documents containing highly classified information,” United States Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement on Wednesday.

Federal investigators have not yet accused Martin of distributing the materials he allegedly took.

As Ars reported last year, when Martin was arrested in August 2016, investigators seized 50TB worth of data and many other printed and classified documents from Martin’s home in suburban Maryland. If all of this data was indeed classified, it would be the largest such heist from the NSA, far larger than what former contractor Edward Snowden took.

Martin is scheduled to appear before a federal judge in Baltimore on February 14 at 11:00am ET. Prosecutors say that if convicted, the defendant could face up to 10 years for each of the counts.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | BSIP)

To determine if new vaccines are effective, researchers often closely monitor trends in disease rates for a city or community. However, these observations can be confounded by changes in the health or behavior of the population, so a better “control” comparison is needed. One social science comparison technique called “the synthetic control method” presents a unique way to address this problem: combine the information from several possible control communities to create a superior aggregated control built from many possible controls.

Using this method, authors of a recent paper in PNAS found that vaccines for pneumonia significantly reduce pneumonia disease incidence. This paper works on two levels: it provides compelling evidence that vaccinations against pneumonia are effective in specific populations, and it shows that this social science technique can be effectively used to study human health.

Previous studies that attempted to examine the effects of pneumonia vaccines started with a comparison between the pre-vaccination rates of pneumonia and another infection. These were compared to post-vaccination differences in the rates of the same two diseases—a technique called difference-in-difference. If the ratio of the infections changes in the appropriate direction, it's a sign the vaccine is effective.