By BeauHD from
Slashdot's false-alarm department:
A new study, published in the journal Genetics in Medicine, found that consumer genetic tests bring up a lot of false positives. "In this case, 40 percent of the results from the consumer tests were false positives," reports The Verge, noting that the findings "cover a very small sample size and don't show that consumer tests always have a 40 percent false positive rate." From the report: The research was done by scientists at Ambry Genetics, a medical laboratory in California. By looking through their own database, they found that 49 people had been referred to them because of some worrying results from their consumer genetic tests. Still, scientists at Ambry were able to confirm only 60 percent of the results when they compared the raw data from consumer tests with more thorough genetic tests done by themselves and other clinical laboratories. So, 40 percent of variants in a variety of genes reported in DTC raw data were false positives, meaning that they said a genetic variant was there when it wasn't. (Most of these turned out to be variants linked to cancer.) Additionally, the authors write, some variants classified as "increased risk" were not only classified as "benign" by clinical laboratories, but they were actually common variants.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's next-gen-tech department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Road to VR: This video showcases a new redirected walking implementation project that creates an "unlimited" virtual corridor in a space just 5 x 7 meters in size. Redirected walking (RDW) is a technique which aims to maximize the physical space of a virtual reality play space by tricking your senses. Or, "strongly modifying spatial perception" so that your mind believes, for example, that you're body is traveling in a straight line where in reality, it's traversing a carefully calculated curved course to keep that play space small. At SIGGRAPH last week, a project developed in part by Unity Product Evangelist and Education Lead Yohei Yanase at the University of Tokyo was present, featuring a new "Visuo-Haptic" VR experience which claims to create the illusion via an infinite virtual corridor within an actual physical play space of just 5 x 7 meters in size.
"It works by strongly modifying spatial perception, all while avoiding the typical "reorientation" manipulation methods that most often cause VR motion sickness," states a press release, "And it's designed to let multiple people experience it simultaneously, without risk of bumping into each other. Modern techniques like this could represent the next phase in VR navigation, merging virtual with physical environments to extend the comfort of VR sessions and extensibility of virtual environments."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's tools-of-the-trade department:
dryriver shares a report from Nature about a neural network-based, deep-learning software that is as good as trained chemists in figuring out what reagents and reactions may lead to the successful creation of a desired organic molecule: Chemists have a new lab assistant: artificial intelligence. Researchers have developed a "deep learning" computer program that produces blueprints for the sequences of reactions needed to create small organic molecules, such as drug compounds. The pathways that the tool suggests look just as good on paper as those devised by human chemists. The tool, described in Nature on March 28, is not the first software to wield artificial intelligence (AI) instead of human skill and intuition. Yet chemists hail the development as a milestone, saying that it could speed up the process of drug discovery and make organic chemistry more efficient. Chemists have conventionally scoured lists of reactions recorded by others, and drawn on their own intuition to work out a step-by-step pathway to make a particular compound. They usually work backwards, starting with the molecule they want to create and then analyzing which readily available reagents and sequences of reactions could be used to synthesize it -- a process known as retrosynthesis, which can take hours or even days of planning. The new AI tool, developed by Marwin Segler, an organic chemist and artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Munster in Germany, and his colleagues, uses deep-learning neural networks to imbibe essentially all known single-step organic-chemistry reactions -- about 12.4 million of them. This enables it to predict the chemical reactions that can be used in any single step. The tool repeatedly applies these neural networks in planning a multi-step synthesis, deconstructing the desired molecule until it ends up with the available starting reagents.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's unfortunate-situations department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with MSNBC and Recode on Wednesday that Silicon Valley, and notably Facebook, should be far more careful with its customers' data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures. "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said, according to Recode. "However, I think we're beyond that here." Cook reiterated points that he and former CEO Steve Jobs made previously, that Apple's business model -- unlike Google, Facebook, and many other tech companies -- is predicated on selling physical products rather than capturing data about customers. "We've never believed that these detailed profiles of people that have incredibly deep personal information that is patched together from several sources should exist," he said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer -- if our customer was our product," he added. "We've elected not to do that."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's closer-look department:
Microsoft's January and February security fixes for Intel's Meltdown processor vulnerability opened up an even worse security hole on Windows 7 PCs and Server 2008 R2 boxes. From a report: This is according to researcher Ulf Frisk, who previously found glaring shortcomings in Apple's FileVault disk encryption system. We're told Redmond's early Meltdown fixes for 64-bit Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 left a crucial kernel memory table readable and writable for normal user processes. This, in turn, means any malware on those vulnerable machines, or any logged-in user, can manipulate the operating system's memory map, gain administrator-level privileges, and extract and modify any information in RAM. The Meltdown chip-level bug allows malicious software, or unscrupulous logged-in users, on a modern Intel-powered machine to read passwords, personal information, and other secrets from protected kernel memory. But the security fixes from Microsoft for the bug, on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, issued in January and February, ended up granting normal programs read and write access to all of physical memory.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's closer-look department:
Artificial intelligence and automation are not likely to cause vast unemployment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about the impact on jobs. From a report: "I'm not worried about technological unemployment," said Laura Tyson, a prominent economist at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "But I am worried about the quality of jobs created and the location where they are created." Speaking this week at EmTech Digital, an annual AI conference organized by MIT Technology Review, Tyson suggested we look the effects of increasing automation over the last 30 years. What we know, says Tyson, is that automation has taken away many routine jobs. Particularly hard hit have been middle-skill and middle-income jobs, such as those in manufacturing. "We know from the past that the jobs that require low skills are more likely to be automated," said Tyson. "I worry about income inequality." Automation and AI will create new jobs. But, said Tyson, those new jobs might not be in the same parts of the country in which employment has been decreased by automation. And that has created frustrations and concerns in many parts of the US, including the Midwest. Technology advances have greatly changed jobs in the past, of course, most notably during the Industrial Revolution. But, Tyson said, the rate of change is much faster today, and there are some vital questions unanswered. Can we come up with a way to retrain workers? And, asked Tyson, who will pay for that retraining?
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By msmash from
Slashdot's shady-world department:
A new research paper [PDF] from Princeton University has found that 90 percent of affiliate posts on YouTube and Pinterest aren't disclosed to users. From a report: Affiliate links are customized URLs that content publishers can include in their posts. They're essentially ads, and publishers receive money from companies when users click on them. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that content makers identify when they're being paid to post something, but despite that, influencers continue to skirt around disclosures. The FTC has previously sent out letters to influencers reminding them of the requirement to communicate paid relationships with brands to their followers. The paper from Princeton analyzed over 500,000 YouTube videos and 2.1 million unique pins on Pinterest. Of those, 0.67 percent, or 3,472 videos on YouTube, and 0.85 percent, or 18,237 pins, contained affiliate links.
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