diversity, Intel, McAfee, Ministry of Innovation

Intel, Apple report “doubled” diversity hiring in 2015

In January, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich addressed the well-publicized issue of hiring diversity within major tech companies by saying that his company would broaden its hiring practices. His announcement largely hinged on a campaign to invest $300 million over the next five years to broaden the applicant pool—particularly by donating at the university level, where the money would go toward teaching and empowering a new generation of minority engineers and tech workers.

A “diversity in technology fund” may very well pay off in future years, but it can only go so far in changing short-term hiring numbers—which makes this week’s diversity reports from both Intel and Apple all the more interesting. According to Intel’s lengthy report, based on first-half 2015 stats, Intel is “tracking” to having 43.3 percent of its 2015 hires comprising women and “underrepresented minorities,” meaning African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

In a USA Today interview, Krzanich confirmed an additional detail not included in the company’s own diversity report—namely, that such hiring numbers double Intel’s underrepresented hiring from 2014, which amounted to roughly 20 percent of its hires last year. That news was followed by Apple’s 2015 diversity report, which claimed that so far this year, Apple had hired “more than double” the number of women, Hispanics, and African Americans hired last year.

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Comcast, data caps, Ministry of Innovation

Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity

Why does Comcast Internet service have a 300GB monthly data cap?

When asked that question today, Comcast’s vice president of Internet services, Jason Livingood, said that he doesn’t know, because setting the monthly data limit is a business decision, not one driven by technical necessity.

“Cable Cares,” a parody account on Twitter, asked Livingood, “Serious question, why are Comcast’s caps set so low compared to the speeds they’re being sold at? 100mbps can hit 300GB in 6hr~.”

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Cars Technica, wireless charging

UK to test roads that recharge cars as they drive

Electric vehicles (EVs) have a lot going for them, but long charging times are still a barrier to adoption for many consumers. This is understandable—society has been conditioned for the last 100 years to think of a car as something that you can refuel in a few minutes. Even the fastest DC fast chargers still take almost half an hour to recharge an EV. What’s more, the laws of physics get involved at some point, limiting the rate at which you can charge a battery before things start to get messy. The answer to impatient drivers needing a recharge may well be special roads that can power up a car on the move, F-Zero style. This week, the UK government announced that it wants to begin testing this tech, and soon.

Wireless recharging isn’t that outlandish a concept, as anyone with an electric toothbrush may well know. Plenty of smartphones also use wireless charging, and we’ve covered Qualcomm’s Halo tech that the company has been demonstrating with a BMW i8 hybrid that travels with the FIA Formula E Championship. The Halo system is designed to charge a car when it’s stationary, but Qualcomm’s Graeme Davison told us that it should be adaptable to low-speed recharging relatively easily.

Meanwhile, South Korea has already been testing a wireless road charging system in the town of Gumi on a special 7.5 mile (12km) stretch of road that powers up special buses. The UK announcement is for off-road trials for now (as in, not on public roads as opposed to dirt tracks) and is looking for bids from contractors wanting to develop the test infrastructure. In a press release, UK Transport Minister Andrew Jones said, “The government is already committing £500 million over the next five years to keep Britain at the forefront of this technology, which will help boost jobs and growth in the sector. As this study shows, we continue to explore options on how to improve journeys and make low-emission vehicles accessible to families and businesses.”

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Ministry of Innovation, Risk Assessment

Report claims Kaspersky faked malware to trip up competitors’ products

Two former employees of Kaspersky Lab have accused the malware protection software company of seeding competitors’ products with fake malware signatures intended to make them erroneously label benign files on customers’ computers as malicious. The allegations, made in a report published by Reuters Friday morning, have been strongly denied by a Kaspersky Lab spokesperson.

According to Reuters, the “junk” files were tailored to have the same signature as legitimate files, based on the fingerprinting mechanisms of competitors’ products. To do this, the two former employees alleged, Kaspersky assigned employees to reverse-engineer competitors’ products to see how they identified malware and then tailored samples that would match the signatures of common, harmless files.

The report does not include many specifics about the alleged faked signatures, such as which files were targeted for identification as false positives.

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Scientific Method

People in rough neighborhoods trade HIV meds instead of taking them

The social environment of an area, including factors such as poverty, stress, and living conditions, contributes to the disease burden. A recent study published in AJPH shows that patients from a disordered environment don’t stick to their medication schedule, even for a potentially lethal condition like HIV. As the researchers found, residents of highly disordered neighborhoods will sell or trade their antiviral medication rather than taking it and adhering to their drug plans.

Poverty, a condition often associated with specific geographic regions or neighborhoods, is linked to many poor health outcomes. People living in poverty often lack access to nutritious food, good healthcare, strong social support, and other structural advantages that can ensure better health. Neighborhood disorder theory focuses on the role of economic disadvantage as a driver of adverse health outcomes among residents of poor neighborhoods. In previous studies, neighborhood disorder has been linked to increased HIV risk-taking behavior, which helps explain why HIV infections tend to cluster in areas with higher poverty and other forms of risk taking.

For this study, researchers interviewed 503 socioeconomically disadvantaged HIV-positive substance users, approximately half of whom were selling or trading their antiviral medication to other HIV positive individuals who didn’t have access to regular antiviral medication. Participants were from neighborhoods in urban Miami that have high and persistent levels of both HIV infections and poverty. Additionally, environmental risk factors were examined for these neighborhoods, such as prevalence of HIV and poverty levels.

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amazon cloud, data centers, Netflix, Technology Lab

Netflix shuts down its last data center, but it still runs a big IT operation

Netflix has been shifting technology from in-house data centers to third-party facilities for years now, and it says that the process is coming to its logical conclusion—the company is shutting down the last of its data centers.

Netflix still operates a huge IT infrastructure, but it’s located in Amazon’s cloud data centers, the facilities of Internet service providers, and Internet exchange points where many companies exchange traffic.

In an article titled “Netflix to pull plug on final data center,” The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal blog reported yesterday:

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beer, Genetics, Genome, Genomics, Scientific Method, yeast

Lager-brewing yeast was probably born twice

Guinness stout and Bud Lite differ in, to be conservative, several ways, but one is that they’re brewed with very different types of yeast. Lager isn’t just a beer style, it’s a yeast lifestyle. Humans have been brewing with ale yeast—Saccharomyces cerevisiae—for thousands of years. But it was less than 600 years ago that European brewers stumbled on lager yeast, which behaves very differently and produces that distinctive lager flavor.

Lager yeast is a cross of ale yeast with another species, but it took until 2011 for that other species to finally be identified in Patagonian forests. A new study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers EmilyClare Baker and Bing Wang presents the genome of this recently discovered parent, Saccharomyces eubayanus.

By comparing the genome with the two strains of lager yeast around today, the researchers may have settled a dispute about the biological origins of lager yeast. Looking at the two strains, there are many more differences between the ale yeast portions of their genomes than have accumulated in the Saccharomyces eubayanus portions. This points to independent hybridization events starting with different ale yeast parents rather than a single hybrid that has since split into two strains.

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astronomy, comets, ESA, Rosetta, Scientific Method

Rosetta follows Comet 67P through closest approach to the Sun

Thursday, the ESA’s Rosetta probe returned images from the comet it orbits during its closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion. At perihelion, Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is about 186 million kilometers from the Sun, or a bit outside of Earth’s orbit (150 million kilometers).

With the added warming from the Sun, the comet has been experiencing higher levels of activity, with gasses escaping from its interior at higher levels, pushing dust and other material out into space. Rosetta’s instruments indicate about 300 liters of water are being ejected every second, meaning the comet is losing 26 million kilograms per day during this period. Another 86 million kilograms of dust are also being lost. The activity should remain high for several weeks after perihelion.

Because of the large volumes of material jetting out of the comet, the ESA’s operators have backed Rosetta off to an orbit that’s over 325km from the comet’s surface. But that’s still close enough for some pretty spectacular images.

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gallery, Gear & Gadgets, Japan, The Multiverse

Gallery: A practical, low-tech Japan

When I was growing up, I was always told that we have so much to learn from Japan. I grew up during the rise of the Japanese auto industry, I was taught “Japanese” business tactics, and I watched movies like Gung Ho that portrayed discipline, perseverance, and efficiency.

On my first trip to Japan, though, I wanted to explore the weird and wacky high-tech world the media has portrayed so often. What I found was a place that isn’t as “high tech” as many westerners assume but rather a relatively “low tech” cornucopia of conveniences that could make many westerners jealous.

Jennifer Hahn

My Internet: $13/7-day sim from Amazon and Airbnb-provided portable Wi-Fi.

26 more images in gallery

The first thing I noticed was the lack of “open” Wi-Fi before leaving for Japan. My research found that in most places, free Wi-Fi had to be registered for before entering Japan; it’s not ubiquitous. Despite the airports or an occasional restaurant or tourist site offering free Wi-Fi, I found this to be true. Luckily, my Airbnb provided me with a free mobile access point, and my $13 sim for my unlocked Blu Android phone filled in the gaps.

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europe, Law & Disorder, leaks, secrecy, ttip, USA

Politicians can only view secret trade pact in special viewing room

The fact that most people have still never heard of the world’s biggest trade deal—the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and Europe—even after two years of negotiations, might suggest that whatever its problems, maintaining secrecy is not one of them. But the European Commission begs to differ: since the end of July, instead of sending up-to-the-minute summaries of its talks with the US to EU politicians, the Commission now requires that national politicians travel all the way to Brussels to a special reading room where the texts can be viewed under tight security. MEPs must also use this same system.

The EC made this rather drastic move in response to confidential TTIP documents appearing on the non-profit investigative news site Correct!v. News of this secret reading room was revealed in a confidential report of an EU meeting that took place on 24 July… which rather embarrassingly was then also leaked to the same site.

The new system is pretty insulting for top politicians, who are not used to being treated likely naughty schoolchildren that require constant adult supervision. Furthermore, considering the wide-ranging implications of TTIP, you’d think that the EC would want to make it easier for European politicians to read the latest documents, so that they know what is being negotiated in their name.

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