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Der Dokumentarfilm Traceroute, der heute in Deutschland anläuft, ist mehr als eine Geek-Pilgerreise durch die USA. Regisseur Johannes Grenzfurthner zeichnet ein Nerd-Selbstporträt ohne Scheu, die Hosen herunterzulassen. (Filmkritik, Internet)

Eine Anlaufstelle für Patente unter einer freien Lizenz hat die US-Raumfahrtbehörde Nasa eingerichtet. Dort sind alle Patente, die von jedermann genutzt werden können, abrufbar - inklusive knapp 60 frisch befreiter. (Nasa, Technologie)

Alle Siemens-Beschäftigten mit Firmenhandy werden von dem Konzern gefragt, ob sie auf den Festnetzzugang verzichten wollen. Sie können über eine Maske im Intranet von Siemens auswählen, ob sie noch einen Festnetzanschluss benötigen. (Siemens, Smartphone)

In The Lobster, a bleak comedy set in a future Ireland, the world is being run by what can only be described as an authoritarian dating service. Anyone who is single for more than 45 days is turned into an animal. To help the good citizens of the world remain human, there are terrifying “hotels” where singles go to be reeducated, their arms bound and movements restricted, as they learn why it’s wrong to be alone—and are given the opportunity to meet eligible mates. Despite its fantastical premise, The Lobster nails the often dark emotional reality of dating life in our world.

Colin Farrell plays David, a sad, awkward man whose wife has just left him. Radiating discomfort and kind of blank desperation, he arrives at the hotel with a fluffy dog who turns out to be his brother. The hotel owner recites the rules to him—masturbation is forbidden, and residents can earn extra days of singlehood if they manage to shoot runaways who have fled into the forest. She also requires him to choose which animal he’ll become. Looking uneasily at his brother/dog, David says he’d like to be a lobster “because they have blue blood” and live for a very long time. Somehow, this sums up everything about David—weird and bug-eyed, but with skin made of armor and very sharp claws.

As he undergoes anti-singles conditioning and endures terrible dance parties, David forms shaky friendships with two of his fellow inmates/romance-seekers, the confused and angry John C. Reilly and tragic widower Ben Whishaw. The acting here is superbly understated, with everyone walking a razor’s edge between pathos and comedy.

Released last year in the UK, The Lobster became a critical hit and is finally making its way to the States this weekend. It's the first English-language offering from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, who is known for his reality-bending movies Dogtooth and Alps, about troubled human relationships.

One of the clever tropes of The Lobster is that everyone seems to believe that people are “suited” for each other if they have the same ailments. David is near-sighted, so he has to find someone with glasses or contacts. Whishaw falls for a girl who gets nosebleeds. so he smashes his face until he gets nosebleeds too. This arbitrary notion of what makes two people a good fit is uncomfortably familiar for anyone who has ticked boxes on an online dating profile, hoping to find the perfect match in a database populated by random attributes like “body type” and “favorite music.”

David’s efforts to hook up are bumbling and funny at first, but eventually land him in a situation that is so horrific he has no choice but to risk death to flee the hotel. In the forest, surrounded by an odd range of animals we presume are all former singles, he meets a group of subversives called the Loners. Led by an angry pro-singles activist (a seriously scary Léa Seydoux), the group swears off all forms of physical affection and plans sneak attacks on couples. In one memorable scene, they go on a mission to break up couples, holding them at gunpoint in their homes and forcing them to question their love for one another.

Among the Loners is Rachel Weisz, who is terrific as the unnamed woman whose social awkwardness and prickly savagery match David’s own. The two are immediately drawn to each other, sneaking away from the Loners to make out—and make plans for a shaky, seemingly impossible future. Can they really have a genuine romance in a world where the government mandates love and subversives try to smash it? Is it even possible for people to form an authentic emotional connection when they’re under such tremendous social pressure? Like all the questions raised by this flick, these are things we should be asking ourselves, about our own lives. Though it starts out as satire, The Lobster eventually punches you in the gut so hard that you’ll be freaked out for a long time afterwards.

So kurz waren die Prüfzeiträume bei Apple für neue Apps und Udpates im App Store schon lange nicht mehr: Aktuell müssen Entwickler nur noch weniger als zwei Tage warten, bis ihre Software zugelassen wird. Hintergrund könnten erhoffte Mehreinnahmen sein. (Apple, iOS)

Eine Bank setzte zur Überprüfung von Transaktionen offenbar keine Hashwerte der einzelnen Vorgänge ein - sondern nimmt eine Sichtprüfung von PDFs vor. So konnten Angreifer ihre gefälschten Transaktionen verstecken. (Malware, Virus)

Die Telekom setzt in einer kleinen Gemeinde an der Mosel auf Holzmasten, um das Glasfaserkabel in den Ort zu bringen. Doch die Telekom baut kein FTTH, es wird ab Oktober in dem Ort eine Versorgung mit nur 100 MBit/s geben. (Glasfaser, Telekom)

Without a doubt, the bubonic plague has been one of the deadliest and most devastating infectious diseases in all of human history. The bacterial infection—caused by Yersinia pestis—has sparked dozens of outbreaks and three massive pandemics, killing hundreds of millions of people. The Justinian Plague from 541 to 767 is estimated to have killed up to 50 percent of the population at the time and spurred the demise of the Roman Empire. Likewise, the fourteenth century Black Death, which circumnavigated Europe in just a few years, ended up slaughtering as much as 60 percent of the continent’s population.

Yet, despite the indelible mark the dark disease has left on humanity, researchers still aren’t certain how exactly Yersinia sweeps through cities and countries. The highly infectious disease has historically been linked to rodents, in which the bacteria can fester, and rat fleas, which take in and then vomit out the bacteria in subsequent bites. Thus, booming vermin populations have long been assumed to spark and sustain outbreaks. But a fresh analysis of a tiny village in England—made famous for its handling of a plague outbreak from 1665 to 1666—stands to challenge the view.

The Derbyshire village of Eyam, estimated to have a population of around 700 at the time of the outbreak, took the remarkable step of imposing a quarantine on itself—a move almost unheard of at the time. While the villagers aimed to spare neighboring parishes—which they did—the quarantine and the villagers’ detailed death records also provided a perfect opportunity for studying plague transmission dynamics.

In a new analysis of the outbreak, researchers estimate that rodent-to-human transmission accounted for only a quarter of all infections, while human-to-human transmission made up the rest. The finding, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds fuel to a hot debate among academics about how plague spreads. And, more importantly, it has the potential to inform public health responses to modern-day plague outbreaks, which still occur around the world, particularly in Africa and South America (albeit on much smaller scales than historical outbreaks).

“This debate is not just of historical importance but also of contemporary relevance to help deal with this neglected tropical disease, which could someday become a worldwide public health priority again,” the study authors, Lilith Whittles and Xavier Didelot of Imperial College London, concluded.

They arrived at the point by first digging into historic population and death records of Eyam—now known as “plague village.” The researchers looked at factors such as age, wealth, household structure, and gender of the 257 people who died of plague. The deaths, which began after the delivery of flea-infested cloth from London, lasted from September 1665 to October 1666.

Next, the researchers used a stochastic compartmental model and Bayesian analytical methods to recreate the pattern of deaths and trajectory of the outbreak revealed by the records. The model included rodent-to-human transmission and human-to-human transmission, which was estimated to occur within a fixed window of 11 days between exposure, infection, and death. (While there were oral reports that three villagers recovered from the plague, those weren’t recorded in documents so the researchers tossed them out of their main analysis. However, when they did try including them, it didn’t alter their overall findings.)

The researchers found that human-to-human transmission accounted for 75 percent of all infections, with age, wealth, and household structure playing big roles in who got sick. Kids and family members of victims were the groups most affected by the plague. The village’s wealthy were less likely to get the plague, possibly due to less contact with general village folk and vermin.

Plague is known to transmit from person-to-person in bodily fluids and aerosols—formed by coughing, which is generally associated with pneumonic plague. But the researchers speculate that such transmission routes were unlikely, given the historical records of people’s symptoms, which rarely included pneumonia. Instead, the researchers hypothesize that lice and human fleas may have been a main bridge by which Yersinia got around. And the finding makes sense with the spread among lower-class kids, who could easily share head lice while playing.

Though the study looked at just one, isolated, historic outbreak, the authors argue that the “results feed into the long ongoing debate about the role of interhuman transmission through human ectoparasites.”

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2016. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0618  (About DOIs).

Parallel zum hochgelobten Uncharted 4 für die Playstation 4 hat Sony mit Uncharted Fortune Hunter auch ein neues Mobilspiel veröffentlicht. Hier müssen Nathan und Sully Schätze finden - der Weg dorthin gestaltet sich allerdings ganz anders. (Uncharted, Spieletest)

Zum Erkennen natürlicher Sprache hat Google ein neues Modell zum Parsen der Syntax entwickelt und mit seinem Deep-Learning-Framework Tensorflow implementiert. Der daraus erstellte Englisch-Parser Parsey McParseface soll die derzeit beste maschinelle Erkennungsrate für Syntaxbäume aufweisen. (Google, Applikationen)