Category: Uncategorised

Enlarge / Workers with massive spools of fiber optic cable. (credit: woodleywonderworks)

AT&T celebrated Google Fiber's reported struggles yesterday by publishing a blog post lecturing its competitor about the difficulties of broadband investment. AT&T also criticized Google for seeking favors from the government—something AT&T would never do, of course.

The blog post is titled "Broadband investment: Not for the faint of heart" and is written by AT&T VP Joan Marsh, who manages AT&T's regulatory interests at the federal government. It provides a timeline of Google investment in broadband infrastructure starting with a bid on spectrum in 2007, saying that the company has never lived up to its grand ambitions. The latest example is Google Fiber, which has reportedly fallen well short of subscriber goals and may be downsizing. (Google hasn't confirmed or denied the reports of impending layoffs.)

AT&T says the "moral of the story" is that "building reliable, ubiquitous high-speed broadband connectivity is tough."

Enlarge / A Redflex red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California as seen in 2013. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

A former Chicago transportation official has been sentenced to a decade in prison. He was found guilty in January on 20 counts of mail and wire fraud, bribery, extortion, and many other charges stemming from a corrupt contract involving Redflex, a major red light camera company. During the Monday hearing, US District Judge Virginia M. Kendall also ordered John Bills to pay over $2 million in restitution.

According to the Chicago Tribune, "Bills’ voice broke with emotion as he acknowledged ‘ethical and moral’ mistakes, but he denied masterminding the massive bribery scheme in exchange for growing the city’s controversial network of red light cameras into the largest in the nation."

As Ars has reported previously, Bills, who was the managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation, helped steer a lucrative city contract to Redflex. After Bills urged his colleagues to approve the deal, the city hired the embattled Australian firm to provide automated enforcement cameras, known formally as its Digital Automated Red Light Enforcement Program (DARLEP), from October 2003 until February 2013.

(credit: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center)

Recent advances in imaging have revealed that false memories can be held by the very same cells that hold accurate ones, but we don't have much information about how false memories get there in the first place. A recent study published in PNAS provides some insight into this issue, finding that false memories may arise from similarities among the items being remembered.

In neuroscience, false memories don’t necessarily refer to a sensational memory that might land you on a daytime talk show. Typically, neuroscientists are more interested in banal false memories. For example, a classic experiment in false memories involves showing a subject a series of words related to the winter season, like ice, snow, wind, etc. In this paradigm, even if subjects aren’t shown the word “cold,” they are still likely to remember having seen it. This is a classic false memory.

Neuroscientists have suspected that this type of false memory arises because the word “cold” is similar conceptually to the list of winter words that the subject did see. Even though the cognitive mechanism that causes this phenomenon (called conceptual similarity) is theoretically understood, however, its neural underpinnings have not been widely explored. Using a combination of the word-recall experiment described above and fMRI scans that could track the brain activity of the participants, the authors of this paper have begun to identify some of what’s behind the false memory effect.

Enlarge (credit: Theranos)

Theranos has withdrawn its application to the Food and Drug Administration for an emergency clearance of a new diagnostic blood test for Zika virus infections, according to the Wall Street Journal. The FDA’s emergency clearance process, used in times of extraordinary medical need, such as the current Zika outbreaks, is a lower regulatory hurdle than normal for new medical products.

The Zika test would have been carried out on Theranos' new MiniLab device; both were unveiled August 1 at a conference of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. However, during a subsequent lab inspection, the FDA found that the company had collected some of the data on its Zika test prior to having patient-safety protocols in place. Theranos informed investors that it “recognized” the problem during the inspection and decided to withdraw its application.

The move is yet another stumble for the company, which appears to be trying to rebrand itself as a device manufacturer after federal regulators handed down heavy sanctions for safety issues in its clinical diagnostic work.