Month: March 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Wolterk)

Mayo Clinic, one of the country's top hospitals, is in the midst of controversy after its CEO said that the elite medical facility would prioritize the care of patients with private health insurance over those with Medicare and Medicaid.

The prioritization by the Rochester, MN-headquartered medical practice was recently revealed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. And it has quickly drawn out some sharp critics—as well as sympathizers.

In a statement to the Minnesota Post Bulletin, Dr. Gerard Anderson, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management, compared the prioritization to policies seen in developing countries. "This is what happens in many low-income countries. The health system is organized to give the most affluent preference in receiving health care,” he wrote.

Enlarge / Grace Lynn Kung as Doris (L), Terry Chen as Praxidike Meng (R). (credit: Rafy/Syfy)

This week in The Expanse, we started to see some of the human fallout from the battle above Ganymede through the eyes of Praxidike Meng, an agricultural researcher working on the moon to design better soybeans. Meng wakes up in the hold of a freighter carrying refugees to Tycho Station, but there's no sign of his daughter Mei. Things get worse for him when the captain of the freighter airlocks all of the Earther and Martian refugees, including his friend Doris.

Anderson Dawes manages to escape Tycho with the Protogen scientist Cortazar, but Naomi and Drummer track down the protomolecule transmission he was listening to; it's coming from Ganymede. The crew of the Roci start looking into Protogen's activity on the Jovian moon, which leads them to... Meng. It turns out his daughter was being treated for a genetic disease by Lawrence Strickland, one of the company's scientists. What's more, it's unlikely that Mei or Strickland were killed when the dome was breached.

Finally, the factional infighting within the OPA took an ugly turn on Tycho. Dawes, it turns out, has plenty of support on the station, and this week they made their move on Fred Johnson and Drummer.

Enlarge (credit: Harry Langdon/Getty Images)

Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent—or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google's new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard.

The new JPEG encoder is called Guetzli, which is Swiss German for cookie (the project was led by Google Research's Zurich office). Don't pay too much attention to the name: after extensive analysis, I can't find anything in the Github repository related to cookies or indeed any other baked good.

There are numerous ways of tweaking JPEG image quality and file size, but Guetzli focuses on the quantization stage of compression. Put simply, quantization is a process that tries to reduce a large amount of disordered data, which is hard to compress, into ordered data, which is very easy to compress. In JPEGs, this process usually reduces gentle colour gradients to single blocks of colour, and often obliterates small details entirely.

Disney

You know the story: girl meets boy, girl gets imprisoned by boy, girl and boy slowly grow closer with the help of his enchanted atlas. Okay, so you know most of the story.

Beauty and the Beast is the latest of the live-action Disney re-imaginings that are so unnecessary to the company's bottom line they can't be viewed merely as cash grabs. They're more like test tracks for a nostalgia engine. And Beauty and the Beast is determined to put a new spin on that tale as old as time, whether it needs it or not.

Enlarge / What's all this gaming blather about Ryzen? Let us explain. (credit: Mark Walton)

The response to AMD's Ryzen processors with their new Zen core has been more than a little uneven. Eight cores and 16 threads for under $500 means that they're unambiguously strong across a wide range of workloads; compute-bound tasks like compiling software and compressing video cry out for cores, and AMD's pricing makes Ryzen very compelling indeed.

But gaming performance has caused more dissatisfaction. AMD promised a substantial improvement in instructions per cycle (IPC), and the general expectation was that Ryzen would be within striking distance of Intel's Broadwell core. Although Broadwell is now several years old—it first hit the market way back in September 2014—the comparison was relevant. Intel's high-core-count processors—both the High End Desktop parts, with six, eight, or 10 cores, and the various Xeon processors for multisocket servers—are all still using Broadwell cores.

Realistically, nobody should have expected Ryzen to be king of the hill when it comes to gaming. We know that Broadwell isn't, after all; Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake parts both beat Broadwell in a wide range of games. This is the case even though Skylake and Kaby Lake are limited to four cores and eight threads; for many or most games, high IPC and high clock speeds are the key to top performance, and that's precisely what Kaby Lake delivers.