Category: Uncategorised

If anyone thought that December’s historic Paris climate agreement meant the problem of climate change was officially solved, they got the wrong idea. While a critical first step, the emissions cuts pledged cannot be the end of the story if we want to stabilize our unintentional experiment with Earth’s climate.

Technically, the 195 countries in on the pact are agreeing to keep global average temperatures less than 2°C above pre-industrial times. In fact, a late addition to the agreement purports to aim to stay below 1.5°C above. Unfortunately, it now seems that the actual emissions pledges submitted by each nation (which go through 2030) don’t get us there.

A team led by Joeri Rogelj of Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has published a close look at those pledges to show us just where we’re at. They compare several scenarios for future greenhouse gas emissions: a baseline “no policy” world in which no cuts are made, a world in which only existing (pre-Paris) policies are in effect, a Paris Agreement scenario, and a more aggressive scenario that would obey the 2°C limit.

Cirrus Logic has announced a development kit for hardware developers to make Lightning versions of audio hardware designed for the analog 3.5mm tip/ring/sleeve (TRS) or tip/ring/ring/sleeve (TRRS) connector, reports Apple Insider.

The development kit, named the Cirrus Logic CS42L42, is aimed at hardware developers wanting an easy way to quickly develop Lightning-native headsets. The kit includes a reference design circuit board, suitable for embedding into an inline remote or similar, that combines a 114dB digital-to-audio converter (DAC) with a 35mW headphone driver, and supports microphone input. The kit also provides a development board that has headers for logic probes, a 3.5mm audio jack for use with existing analog hardware, and remote buttons, to aid debugging and development. As well as the hardware, it also includes a sample iOS application.

The kit is available to developers registered in Apple's MFi ("Made For i-device") program.

The bushy look is definitely out.

The vast majority of US women—84 percent—engage in some form of pubic grooming, according to the first nationally representative survey on ladyscaping published Wednesday in JAMA Dermatology. Of the private pruners, 62 percent reported going completely bare at least once.

Earlier, smaller-scale studies hinted that such trimming trends would be linked to sexual activity. But, to the study authors’ surprise, hygiene was the most common reason given for nether shearing, cited by 59 percent of groomers. And, while sexy times still dominated the scheduling of said cropping, 40 percent of groomers said they tidy for upcoming trips to their gynecologist.

Longtime Facebook users know better than to get comfy with how the site looks or works, as the service's decade of longevity has come in part due to constant refreshes—for better and for worse. The same might not be said for major news outlets who've grown to rely on Facebook as a source of traffic, and they may very well not care for the social network's latest site-tweak announcement.

In a Wednesday announcement, Facebook VP of Product Management Adam Mosseri declared that the site's algorithm would now shift towards "friends and family" content—a pledge that seems to appear every time Facebook talks about its algorithms. In today's case, however, Mosseri tucked the announcement's real meaning into a linked clarification: that all "pages" content would be pushed down in the general rankings. Meaning, if content is posted by a news outlet, a restaurant, or another establishment with its own "page" presence on Facebook, those posts will officially see "less of an impact."

Neither announcement touched upon "instant article" publication, a May 2015 initiative that saw multiple major news outlets—which all range from middle- to left-leaning—ally with Facebook to have stories directly publish on the social network as opposed to being hotlinked from their original sources. However, the announcement hinted at these kinds of stories possibly being deprioritized in the future. And the reasoning isn't hard to suss out: that whole conservative news-suppression mess from this May.

The Nonary Game is back for the third (and supposedly final) time, bringing the familiar structure and tropes of previous games 999 and Virtue's Last Reward. If you're not familiar with the Nonary Game — or the odd-sounding titles I just mentioned—prepare for some spoilers for Zero Time Dilemma’s predecessors in the Zero Escape franchise.

In fact, "spoilers" are integral to Zero Time Dilemma. As in the previous two games, the mystery is structured as a series of interlocking timelines: branching decision paths that can be accessed and then escaped through the convenient metaphysical explanation of psychological time travel. The plot of Zero Time Dilemma’s visual-novel-meets-adventure-game sees our nine heroes jumping from one untimely end to another—searching for out-of-order clues about why they are where they are.

This time, the "where" is a seemingly abandoned nuclear bunker. A cast of new and returning 20-somethings who are very good at puzzles have been locked inside by Zero, the Jigsaw-like tormentor whose identity changes between games.

Drowning in a sea of exposition

True to the Zero Escape games of yore, circumstance and Zero's rules split the nine characters into three teams, each of which seems to vaguely represent a different point in the franchise.

In the future, the US Air Force hopes to have armed drones flying in formation with human pilots, responding to their verbal and digital commands to fight the enemy and strike targets. That would require an artificial intelligence capable of interpreting commands and applying knowledge of combat tactics—something that is already being proven in a project funded by the Air Force Research Lab.

ALPHA, an artificial intelligence trained by a retired Air Force expert in air combat, was originally developed as what amounts to ultimate video game AI—an autonomous simulated enemy for use in training fighter pilots. The AI is so good that it has consistently beaten human pilots in simulated air combat—even when heavily handicapped by simulated physics. And now AFRL is investigating using ALPHA as the AI for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) in the physical world, potentially flying missions alongside human pilots.

Described in a paper recently published in the Journal of Defense Management, ALPHA was created using a "genetic fuzzy tree" (GFT) system. There's a lot to unpack in that term, but in short, the methodology uses genetic algorithms—code intended to mimic evolution and natural selection—to train a collection of independent but interconnected "fuzzy inference systems" (FISs). Instead of training each bit of fuzzy logic independently for a given task, as is normally done in fuzzy systems, the genetic algorithm "is utilized to train each system in the Fuzzy Tree simultaneously," lead researcher Nick Ernest, CEO of Psibernetix Inc. (the company that developed ALPHA) and his co-authors wrote in the paper. "Each FIS has membership functions that classify the inputs and outputs into linguistic classifications, such as 'far away' and 'very threatening', as well as if-then rules for every combination of inputs, such as 'If missile launch computer confidence is moderate and mission kill shot accuracy is very high, fire missile'. By breaking up the problem into many sub-decisions, the solution space is significantly reduced."