Month: July 2015

Oversized Bronze Age axes

Radiocarbon dating found the axes were made between 3.8 and 3.5 ka BP, a period bridging the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age. This places them among the earliest bronze artifacts ever discovered in Denmark. Bronze axes from this era are so rare only 5 of them have been found before in Denmark, Sweden and northern Germany. That means the Boest find has in one fell swoop doubled the number of these Bronze Age axes in the archaeological record of northern Europe. When you consider that
Bent Rasmussen and his brother, enlisted by Bent during excavations to cover more ground with their metal detectors, found another 4 smaller axes and a spear tip, it’s clear that this field in Boest was an important place during the early Bronze Age.

Hacking Team

an overview of the nest of vipers doing 0day business with hacking team. all these companies are good targets for being taken down.

The recent compromise of Hacking Team’s email archive offers 1 of the first public case studies of the market for 0days. Because of its secretive nature, this market has been the source of endless debates on the ethics of its participants. The archive also offers insight into the capabilities and limits of offensive-intrusion software developers.

Russia Mapped the World

While Davies and Kent found information that could only have come from spies on the ground—a bridge in Miami, for example, has information that only an eyewitness could have provided—there were fewer of these instances than shows like The Americans might suggest. “There were probably not a lot of people going around with notebooks. There was, after all, plenty in the public domain—maps, but also street directories, tourist guides, railway timetables, and the like.”

The Amiga turns 30

Nice series.

the Amiga 1000 was the first true PC for creatives. The Amiga 1000 was “a radical multimedia machine from a group of thinkers, tinkerers, and visionaries which delivered affordable graphics, animation, music, and multitasking interaction the personal computer world hadn’t even dreamt of.” It pioneered desktop video and introduced PCs to countless new users, rocketing Amiga and Commodore to the top for a brief moment in the sun. History of the Amiga attempts to explain what the device was, what it meant to its designers and users, and why, despite its relative obscurity and early demise, it continues to matter so much to the computer industry and its enthusiasts.

Malaria vaccine

Delays for malaria vaccine. First european approval, then WHO approval, then per-country approval in Africa. No wonder we can’t have nice things with that much redundancy.
2021-04-24: Malaria Vaccine 77% effective

A year-long trial of R21 in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering. This is definitely the best malaria vaccine candidate the world has yet seen, and that is unequivocal good news. Congratulations and thanks to the widespread group of researchers who have made this possible – and especially, thanks to 450 infants and toddlers in central Burkina Faso and to their parents. You have done the world a great service.

2023-07-03: Many vaccines are in development, with different approaches.

Most vaccines aim to reduce malaria deaths and illness. But to eradicate malaria altogether, scientists will also have to find a way to stop transmission. Sporozoite- and merozoite-targeting vaccines could help to reduce transmission by preventing infections or reducing the number of parasites in the blood. Duffy, however, is working on an altogether different vaccine that makes transmission its main aim — one that can destroy the malaria parasite inside the mosquito.
Inside people, a small subset of merozoites differentiate into male and female gametocytes, which the parasite needs to complete the sexual stage of its life cycle. When a mosquito feeds on an infected person, it ingests red blood cells that contain the parasites’ gametocytes. These gametocytes emerge as gametes in the mosquito’s gut, mate, and eventually give rise to fresh sporozoites ready to infect the next person.
The idea behind Duffy’s vaccine is to take out the gametes by stimulating the human immune system to generate antibodies against a protein called Pfs230 that gametes display on their surface. A feeding mosquito will then take up not just the gametocytes, but also those antibodies. When gametes emerge from red blood cells in the mosquito’s gut, the theory goes, the antibodies will be there to destroy them before they can complete their development

Stockholm Rent Control

Dear Seattle, I am writing to you because I heard that you are looking at rent control. Seattle, you need to ask your citizens this: How would citizens like it if they walked into a rental agency and the agent told them to register and come back in 10 years? I’m not joking. The image above is a scan of a booklet sent to a rental applicant by Stockholm City Council’s rental housing service. See those numbers on the map? That’s the waiting time for an apartment in years. Yes, years. Look at the inner city – people are waiting for 10-20 years to get a rental apartment, and around 7-8 years in my suburbs.

Thermal Face Recognition

Cross modal face matching between the thermal and visible spectrum is a much desired capability for night-time surveillance and security applications. Due to a very large modality gap, thermal-to-visible face recognition is one of the most challenging face matching problem. In this paper, we present an approach to bridge this modality gap by a significant margin. Our approach captures the highly non-linear relationship between the 2 modalities by using a deep neural network. Our model attempts to learn a non-linear mapping from visible to thermal spectrum while preserving the identity in- formation. We show substantive performance improvement on a difficult thermal-visible face dataset. The presented approach improves the state-of-the-art by more than 10% in terms of Rank-1 identification and bridge the drop in performance due to the modality gap by more than 40%.

Kazakhstan Sleeping Villages

tl;dr: no known cause

Radiation. Government conspiracy. Mass hysteria. There are plenty of theories as to why the residents of a tiny Kazakh mining region keep falling asleep for days at a time, but no answers. Deputy Prime Minister Berdibek Saparbaev announced that the mystery of the sleeping sickness had been solved: It was the specific combination of reduced levels of oxygen and heightened levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons. But as usual, rumors overshadowed reality. “The real moment is that we came to the conclusion that there are natural processes that lead to the combination of these kinds of factors and that specifically this combination of factors could give this effect. I can’t say for certain now. Our assumption is that all 3 components must coincide. When all 3 exist, that’s when people will start falling and sleeping again.” He had searched for similar cases in scientific literature, but so far had found nothing. He suggested the illness would return in September when people started to heat their homes.

Against Performance Reviews

The annual performance review has been falling out of favor in some quarters. Microsoft and Gap are among several companies that have reformed their evaluation processes in recent years. Accenture, an emblem of traditional corporate culture if ever there was one, announced that it is getting rid of annual evaluations for its 360k employees, replacing the process with a system where managers will give feedback on a more regular basis. The existing evaluations are cumbersome and expensive. “the outcome is not great.”