Researchers design bionic leaf capable of converting sunlight into liquid fuel

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“We’re almost at a 1 percent efficiency rate of converting sunlight into isopropanol,” Nocera said. “There have been 2.6 billion years of evolution, and Pam and I working together a year and a half have already achieved the efficiency of photosynthesis.”

via Researchers design bionic leaf capable of converting sunlight into liquid fuel – Techie News.

Mayfield told CBS News that the exact same thing – turning electrons into biomass – has already been done many a times previously by using the same bacteria.

Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY

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HTTP/2’s primary changes from HTTP/1.1 focus on improved performance. Some key features such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY. Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it’s time to say goodbye. We plan to remove support for SPDY in early 2016, and to also remove support for the TLS extension named NPN in favor of ALPN in Chrome at the same time. Server developers are strongly encouraged to move to HTTP/2 and ALPN.

via Chromium Blog: Hello HTTP/2, Goodbye SPDY.

Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically

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A single sentence buried in a dense “privacy policy” for Samsung’s Internet-connected SmartTV advises users that its nifty voice command feature might capture more than just your request to play the latest episode of Downton Abbey.

“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party,” the policy reads.

via Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically – The Daily Beast.

The First Ubuntu Phone Won’t Rely On Apps. Here’s Why That’s Brilliant

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“We’re producing an experience where content and services come directly to the screen in an unfragmented way,” says Cristian Parrino, VP of Mobile at Canonical. “It makes for a much richer and faster user experience

via The First Ubuntu Phone Won’t Rely On Apps. Here’s Why That’s Brilliant | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers

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Manufacturers have every legal right to put a password or an encryption over the tECU. Owners, on the other hand, don’t have the legal right to break the digital lock over their own equipment. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act—a 1998 copyright law designed to prevent digital piracy—classifies breaking a technological protection measure over a device’s programming as a breach of copyright. So, it’s entirely possible that changing the engine timing on his own tractor makes a farmer a criminal.

via New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers | WIRED.

Large Telecoms Strangle Municipal Broadband, But FCC Intervention May Provide Relief

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Greenlight provides Internet-only service ranging from 40 Mbps for $39.95 per month to 1 Gbps for $104.95 per month. There are also package bundles available that add TV and phone service.

And wouldn’t you know it; that finally got the big telecoms to respond. However, the response wasn’t to build out infrastructure in Wilson or compete on price; it was to kill municipal broadband efforts altogether in NC, citing unfair competition. In early 2011, House Bill 129 was introduced, which seriously hampered the ability of cities to create brand new broadband Internet networks, and put in place new restrictions to limit the pricing competitiveness of existing services versus private alternatives.

via Large Telecoms Strangle Municipal Broadband, But FCC Intervention May Provide Relief.

Test shows big data text analysis inconsistent, inaccurate

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Accuracy of 90 percent with 80 percent consistency sounds good, but the scores are “actually very poor, since they are for an exceedingly easy case,” Amaral said in an announcement from Northwestern about the study.

Applied to messy, inconsistently scrubbed data from many sources in many formats – the base of data for which big data is often praised for its ability to manage – the results would be far less accurate and far less reproducible, according to the paper.

via Test shows big data text analysis inconsistent, inaccurate | Computerworld.

Here’s an interesting explanation as to how LDA, Latent Dinchlet Allocation works.  From: What is a good explanation of Latent Dirichlet Allocation?

From a 3000 foot level as I understand the explanation of LDA; it seems like a mechanism to score words in order to categorize sets of words like paragraphs or entire papers.  Interesting exercise but a human must data model this first.  Any time some program has to estimate or guess like this there will be error, the only issue is how much is acceptable to even use the results that this kind of analysis produces.

Surviving Data Science “at the Speed of Hype”

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A good predictive model requires a stable set of inputs with a predictable range of values that won’t drift away from the training set. And the response variable needs to remain of organizational interest.

via Surviving Data Science “at the Speed of Hype” – John Foreman, Data Scientist.

If you want to move at the speed of “now, light, big data, thought, stuff,” pick your big data analytics battles. If your business is currently too chaotic to support a complex model, don’t build one. Focus on providing solid, simple analysis until an opportunity arises that is revenue-important enough and stable enough to merit the type of investment a full-fledged data science modeling effort requires.

Anonymized’ credit card data not so anonymous, study shows

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As an example, the researchers wrote about looking at data from September 23 and 24 and who went to a bakery one day and a restaurant the other. Searching through the data set, they found there could be only person who fits the bill – they called him Scott. The study said, “and we now know all of his other transactions, such as the fact that he went shopping for shoes and groceries on 23 September, and how much he spent.”

via News from The Associated Press.

Lensless space telescope could be 1,000 times stronger than Hubble

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The Aragoscope is named after French scientist Francois Arago who first noticed how a disk diffracted light waves. The principle is based on using a large disk as a diffraction lens, which bends light from distant objects around the edge of the disk and focuses it like a conventional refraction lens. The phenomenon isn’t very pronounced on the small scale, but if the telescope is extremely large, it not only becomes practical, but also extremely powerful.

via Lensless space telescope could be 1,000 times stronger than Hubble.