TORONTO – About one in four children and adolescents on average report being the targets of cyberbullying, which is linked to a risk of depression among those victimized through email, texting or social media sites like Facebook, an international research review has found.

The analysis of 36 studies, conducted by researchers at the University of Alberta and the Ontario Centre for Excellence for Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Ottawa, was published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

“Within the depression category, there was a consistent association between exposure to cyberbullying and an increased likelihood of depression,” said lead author Michele Hamm, a research associate at the Edmonton university.

The studies showed that females are more often the objects of cyberbullying than males and that relationship issues — between friends or in a dating situation — are often at the heart of the electronic attacks.

“We did pull out a few themes,” said Hamm. “Girls tended to be bullied about their popularity and appearance, and boys tended to be bullied more with homophobic comments and (about) their physical abilities.”

The research found the prevalence of online bullying ranged from about five per cent to 74 per cent of respondents, depending on the study, for a mean rate of 23 per cent, or about one in four.

Effects of being bullied included becoming withdrawn, angry or embarrassed, she said. Among those who were persecuted, there was a tendency for grades to drop off and school attendance to fall.

Rob Frenette, co-executive director and co-founder of BullyingCanada Inc., said depression is a common response to being cyberbullied and the effects can persist into adulthood, especially if the perpetrator continues their campaign beyond high school or university, for instance.

The stress of being bullied can lead to disturbed sleep, nightmares and sleepwalking. Those on the receiving end may remove themselves from social media and other online interactions, he said Monday from Fredericton.

In some cases, they “remove all technology from their lives. They just don’t feel safe dealing with somebody who is potentially able to access them 24-7 through a computer screen.”

Hamm said children and teens in the studies who were tormented online often found a passive way of coping, either by blocking the sender or by trying to ignore their messages.

“What we did not see a lot of was telling people,” she said. “Kids often did not tell their parents or their teachers. If they told anyone, it tended to be a friend.

“One theme that did keep recurring was that kids were afraid their parents would take away their Internet access. This is a huge source of connection with their friends, so they didn’t want to be cut off.”

Frenette said a child or teen who’s being bullied online by a classmate should tell their guidance counsellor or principal, and parents should also be told when the bully is someone outside school. In that case, it may be prudent to involve the police, as it’s possible in certain cases that Criminal Code charges could be laid.

“It’s very important to let your parents know what’s going on,” he advised young people.

“The other side of that is parents need to understand that the best solution is to not completely unplug your child from all social media. That way you’re punishing your son or daughter for something they didn’t do.”

Hamm said the research review provides a profile of cyberbullying and the context in which it occurs, which could be used to help create prevention and management strategies.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Cyberbullying+linked+risk+depression+kids+teens+research/11157710/story.html

D-Wave’s new 1,000-qubit processor, a step up from its last model with 512-qubits.

Burnaby’s quantum computing company has announced a new computer chip double the size of its previous generation – allowing for more complex computational problems possible than any computer.

D-Wave Systems has developed a 1,000-qubit processor that it claims has the search space containing more possibilities than there are particles in the observable universe.

Goldman Sachs, NASA, and Google have partnered up with or invested in D-Wave – other investors include In-Q-Tel, representing the CIA, and Lockheed Martin, a weapon developer for the U.S.

The new processor is an upgrade from the previous 512-qubit processor, which works at finding optimal solutions to complicated problems using a quantum annealing algorithm.

D-Wave is the only commercial company producing computers using quantum physics as and has more than 150 issued patents worldwide.

The optimization problems the computers try to solve can be used for machine learning, cancer detection and image-labelling.

“Temperature, noise and precision all play a profound role in how well quantum processors solve problems,” said Jeremy Hilton, D-Wave vice-president of processor development, in a statement. “Beyond scaling up the technology by doubling the number of qubits, we also achieved key technology advances prioritized around their impact on performance.”

Hilton said benchmarking data demonstrating the new performance levels will be released later this year.

The company was founded in 1999 by University of B.C. scientists, and the last generation of computers require a temperature colder than deep space to work.

http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/2015/06/23/burnaby-quantum-computing-firm-announces-new-chip

Liz: For us, one of the most powerful features of the Wolfram Language is the way it understands real-world (or, in this case, real-solar-system) objects, making it easy to incorporate data on all kinds of things into your projects. In this rather lovely instance from the good people at Wolfram, you can calculate and visualise the relative size of a number of those things on your Raspberry Pi, including the state of Texas, the dwarf planet Ceres, the former dwarf planet Pluto, and the Moon.
____

2015 is shaping up to be an interesting year in space exploration. For the first time, we will get up-close views of a dwarf planet. In fact, two different spacecraft will visit two different dwarf planets. The Dawn spacecraft is nearing its second primary target, Ceres, later this week. Later this year, the New Horizons spacecraft will visit Pluto.

Of course, related to all of this is the public controversy over the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) “demotion” of Pluto from planet status. Regardless of your view on the matter, Pluto is still there, just as it always was, and nothing has changed concerning its existence. It doesn’t really matter what we call it. I won’t go into great detail to explain why Pluto was demoted, but we can use the Wolfram Language to explore some of the primary reasons.

One of the requirements for being labeled a planet according to the IAU definition is that the object must have cleared its orbit of other bodies. Planets have typically either absorbed or thrown out intruders so that they dominate their orbital zones. In the case of Ceres and Pluto, both bodies violate this requirement. Here is a graphic showing the orbit paths of Jupiter and Mars in orange, several large asteroids in blue, and the orbit of Ceres in red. As you can see, Ceres lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, along with many other objects, all classified as dwarf planets, asteroids, minor planets, or small solar system bodies, depending on your preference (or in the case of Ceres, by IAU definition).

A similar analysis can be done for Pluto. In the following example, you can see that all of the planets’ orbits (in orange) are relatively nice and concentric until you get to Pluto (in red), which crosses Neptune’s orbit. In addition, there are a number of other known “Plutoids” (in blue) that cross orbits with Pluto. And in fact, there are many more such objects. So if Pluto is a planet, then all of these objects, and many more, could potentially be declared planets, and that would be a nightmare for educational books to keep up with. The traditional question of “How many planets are there in the solar system?” becomes a large number that keeps growing as more objects are discovered.

Something else that is interesting to explore is size. Many people don’t really comprehend the sizes of Ceres and Pluto. The only size restriction provided by the IAU definition for a planet is that the body must be large enough for gravity to have pulled it into a spherical shape. This seems to be the case for both Ceres and Pluto, but this alone doesn’t make them planets. But it’s still interesting to visualize the sizes of these bodies by comparing them to something we are more familiar with. We can make use of GeoGraphics to put the size of these bodies into perspective. Here is a 2D map of the United States, with Texas highlighted in red. The inner disk represents the size of Ceres projected against Texas, the middle disk represents the size of Pluto, and the outer disk represents the size of our Moon. So the cross-section of Ceres is about the same size as Texas. Both Ceres and Pluto are noticeably smaller than our Moon.

With a bit more exploration, we can move this visualization into three dimensions by using texture mapping to move the above map onto a sphere.

First, we define a couple of geographic entities we will need:

Next, we use GeoGraphics to construct our 2D map and then convert it to an image:

Then we obtain several radius values we need, making sure they are all using the same units:

For positioning things, it’s useful to determine a center point for our map:

We need to position Ceres, Pluto, and the Moon near the center point of the map and offset them to appear as if they are sitting on the surface of Earth at that point:

We can apply the map as a texture on a sphere that represents the Earth using ParametricPlot3D:

Finally, we can combine the pieces and compare the sizes of Ceres, Pluto, and the Moon to the Earth:

In the coming days and weeks, the Dawn spacecraft will provide us with the first close-up views of the dwarf planet Ceres. Later this year when New Horizons passes Pluto, we will get our first close-up views of the more controversial member of this group of objects. Nothing we discover will result in Pluto being reinstated as a planet, as the reasons for its demotion are still there. But we will obtain more data on these small objects than has ever been gathered before, and it will give us a new understanding of these often under-appreciated members of our solar system. Dwarf planets are worthy of study regardless of what they are called.

Download this post as a Computable Document Format (CDF) file.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/a-big-year-for-dwarf-planets/

The world’s largest Internet company is forging ahead in its push to run your home, and it’s likely not done yet.
Google last week unveiled an updated smoke detector, a new surveillance camera and a revamped app. It’s all designed to work together following a 2014 shopping spree in the home connectivity market.
Refresher: Google has been getting serious in the home automation sphere. It bought the thermostat and smoke detector company Nest in 2014 for $2.75 billion. Then it bought the smart surveillance company Dropcam for almost half a billion.
RELATED STORIES
$167 bikini uses UV sensor, app, to tell you how to tan
$167 bikini uses UV sensor, app, to tell you how to tan
Future in-flight entertainment will know when you’re asleep
The new Protect smoke-and-carbon-monoxide alarm is supposed to do a better job at detecting smoke and it’ll let users silence alarms from smartphones and tablets.
The first-generation Nest Protect was troubled by a bug that meant users could inadvertently silence the alarm in the event of a real fire.
Google also released its new Nest Cam, a Wi-Fi surveillance camera with 1080p video recording and better alerts.
The video recorded by the Nest Cam is fed to the cloud. Once there, computers analyze the video to determine the difference between what’s just a raccoon tipping over your green bin, and what’s an intruder lurking around your garage.
As Wired points out, the data from the Cam will give Nest partners a whole new perspective on what’s going on in your home.
Some residents may see this as a convenient feature, while others might fear the privacy risks of having Google watch over their home.
Not to be left out, the thermostat will receive a software update designed to shut the furnace in the event of a fire, as long as the Wi-Fi, Internet and electricity is still working.
Now that Google has united the trio of devices, what’s next in its quest to manage our homes?
Google’s home hub
There’s still the home automation hub Revolv purchased late last year, which we haven’t heard much about lately.
Revolv addressed fragmentation in the consumer Internet of Things world that’s worse than the Beta vs. VHS battle.
Revolv was a small, teardrop-shaped device designed to get all your smart home gadgets talking to each other.
For example, it could open your garage door when you arrived home, turn on the lights as you parked, and then play music through your Sonos sound system when you walked through the door. And you could control all those devices through one app.
A hub-like device could be beneficial to residents running a handful of Internet-connected home gadgets. Only few devices actually play nice together because they’re often operating on different wireless frequencies and with different apps.

While more devices can now link into the Nest ecosystem , it’s possible the company is working on a vastly updated Revolv hub.
‘Nest, turn up the heat’
There has also been speculation that Nest may be working on a wireless audio system similar to Sonos.
A job posting by Nest last March hinted that the company was seeking a ‘Head of Audio’ for a so-called Nest Audio team.
Between Sonos, Samsung and Sony the home audio segment is crowded with competition. Does Google want to get in on the musical party?

Another job posting, this one for an Audio Software Engineer, seeks a candidate with knowledge of “audio and/or speech signal processing principles.”
Perhaps it’s not the music Nest wants to get involved with, but the things you’re saying to your thermostat.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/5things/google-ramps-up-push-to-control-your-home-1.2434990

Teaching machines to read/comprehend websites, recognize and group faces, and reject fake reviews
June 22, 2015
Three new significant developments in machine-learning were announced last week.

Reading and comprehending natural-language documents

Google DeepMind said it has developed a way to teach machines to read natural-language documents and comprehend them, and like Watson, answer complex questions with minimal prior knowledge of language structure — at least for CNN and Daily Mail websites.

Daily Mail bullet points (credit: Daily Mail)

As noted by the researchers in an arXiv paper (open access), these websites have summaries (such as bulleted lists) and paraphrase sentences. The researchers were able to use these for creating context–query–answer triples for each document. In the process, they generated two new corpora (collections of data) of roughly a million news stories with associated queries to serve as training sets.

Facial recognition for sharing photos with friends

Facebook has launched Moments, an app that uses facial recognition technology to groups the photos on your phone based on when they were taken and, using facial recognition technology, which friends are in them. You can then privately sync those photos quickly and easily with specific friends, and they can choose to sync their photos with you as well.

Syncing photos to friend in Moments (credit: Facebook)

The app and this technology is based in part on work conducted by the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team, headed by AI research Yann LeCun, as he explains in this video:

Facebook | Facebook AI research

But an experimental algorithm created by Facebook’s FAIR lab can recognize people in photographs even when it can’t see their faces. Instead it looks for other unique characteristics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose, New Scientist notes.

“The research team pulled almost 40,000 public photos from Flickr — some of people with their full face clearly visible, and others where they were turned away – and ran them through a sophisticated neural network. The final algorithm was able to recognize individual people’s identities with 83 per cent accuracy. An algorithm like this could one day help power photo apps like Facebook’s Moments.

“LeCun also imagines such a tool would be useful for the privacy-conscious – alerting someone whenever a photo of themselves, however obscured, pops up on the internet. The flipside is also true: the ability to identify someone even when they are not looking at the camera raises some serious privacy implications.”

Amazon machine learning algorithm fights fake product reviews

Amazon has developed a machine learning algorithm that will “learn which reviews are most helpful to customers” — that is, which reviews are real and which ones are fake. (Amazon sued a number of websites that specialized in creating fake Amazon reviews in April.) Amazon will give greater weight to newer, more helpful and verified customer reviews and ratings (their 5-star system).

Amazon Web Services began offering its Amazon Machine Learning service in April to make “it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology … without having to learn complex ML algorithms and technology.”

references:
Karl Moritz Hermann, Tomáš Kočiský, Edward Grefenstette, Lasse Espeholt, Will Kay, Mustafa Suleyman, Phil Blunsom. Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend. arXiv:1506.03340 [cs.CL] (open access)

http://www.kurzweilai.net/google-facebook-amazon-advance-machine-learning-applications

June 23, 2015

A micro-tentacle developed by Iowa State engineers spirals gently around an ant (credit: Jaeyoun (Jay) Kim/Iowa State University)

Iowa State University engineers have developed microrobotic tentacles that could allow small robots to safely handle delicate objects.

As described in an open-access research paper in the journal Scientific Reports, the tentacles are microtubes just a third of an inch long and less than a hundredth of an inch wide. They’re made from PDMS, a transparent elastomer that can be a liquid or a soft, rubbery solid.

“Most robots use two fingers and to pick things up they have to squeeze,” said Jaeyoun (Jay) Kim, an Iowa State University associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. “But these tentacles wrap around very gently.”

The researchers sealed one end of the tube and pumped air in and out. The air pressure and the microtube’s asymmetrical wall thickness created a circular bend. They then added a small lump of PDMS to the base of the tube to amplify the bend and create a two-turn spiraling, coiling action. The resulting soft-robotic micro-tentacle can wind around and hold fragile micro-objects.

“Spiraling tentacles are widely utilized in nature for grabbing and squeezing objects,” the engineers wrote in the paper. “There have been continuous soft-robotic efforts to mimic them… but the life-like, multi-turn spiraling motion has been reproduced only by centimeter-scale tentacles so far. At millimeter and sub-millimeter scales, they could bend only up to a single turn.”

Extending the reach of surgical robots

The micro-tentacle’s final spiral radius is about 200 micrometers (millionths of a meter), with a grabbing force in the vicinity of 0.78 millinewtons at 9.8 psi pneumatic pressure — weaker than those of existing elastomer-based pneumatic micro-actuators.

Kim said that makes the microrobotic tentacle ideal for medical applications because the microrobotic tentacles can’t damage tissues or even blood vessels.

The design also unites two current research areas, he said. “There’s microrobotics, where people want to make robots smaller and smaller. And there’s soft robotics, where people don’t want to make robots out of iron and steel. This project is an overlap of both of those fields. I want to pioneer new work in the field with both microscale and soft robotics.”

The study was supported by Kim’s six-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

No ants were harmed in testng the micro-tentacles, just really freaked out.

Abstract of Microrobotic tentacles with spiral bending capability based on shape-engineered elastomeric microtubes

Microscale soft-robots hold great promise as safe handlers of delicate micro-objects but their wider adoption requires micro-actuators with greater efficiency and ease-of-fabrication. Here we present an elastomeric microtube-based pneumatic actuator that can be extended into a microrobotic tentacle. We establish a new, direct peeling-based technique for building long and thin, highly deformable microtubes and a semi-analytical model for their shape-engineering. Using them in combination, we amplify the microtube’s pneumatically-driven bending into multi-turn inward spiraling. The resulting micro-tentacle exhibit spiraling with the final radius as small as ~185 μm and grabbing force of ~0.78 mN, rendering itself ideal for non-damaging manipulation of soft, fragile micro-objects. This spiraling tentacle-based grabbing modality, the direct peeling-enabled elastomeric microtube fabrication technique, and the concept of microtube shape-engineering are all unprecedented and will enrich the field of soft-robotics.

references:
ungwook Paek, Inho Cho, Jaeyoun Kim. Microrobotic tentacles with spiral bending capability based on shape-engineered elastomeric microtubes. Scientific Reports, 2015; 5: 10768 DOI: 10.1038/srep10768 (open access)
related:
Iowa State engineers develop micro-tentacles so tiny robots can handle delicate objects

http://www.kurzweilai.net/micro-tentacles-for-tiny-robots-can-handle-delicate-objects-like-blood-vessels

by Stacey Higginbotham @gigastacey JUNE 22, 2015, 9:07 AM EDT

Curb measures energy consumption in your home as it’s happening.

When it comes to the smart home, after security, most consumers are drawn to connected devices for energy savings. The idea that you could save a few bucks a month by automating your thermostat settings or switching to outlets that let you turn off appliances while also showing how much energy those appliances consume, is a powerful draw for consumers.

But a new device launching on Indiegogo today wants to do these devices one better. Curb, a gadget that installs in your circuit breaker box, aims to show consumers exactly how much electricity they are consuming, as they are consuming it. Plug in your iPhone and the Curb app immediately shows you exactly how much your electricity consumption increased. Turn off a light switch and you can watch the meter on your iOS and Android device fall.

This solves a crucial problem for consumers. By giving them exact data for their home, about how they consume electricity, it allows them to change their habits so they can save. Having installed two connected thermostats, a handful of LED lights, and a few other gadgets that could save me energy, I still have no idea exactly how much each device saves me, although I suspect it is less than the claims touted by the manufacturers.

Nest claims it saves people an average of up to $145 per year, but that’s based on averages. Because I work from home, I suspect my Nest and my Ecobee thermostats save me far less. And after paying $60 a bulb for some Hue lights I question how much they save me. For a price Curb can tell me that. For example, one Curb beta customer used the device and app to realize that charging his two Tesla’s (a Model S and Roadster) for the last week cost him about $27.77. That’s great information to have, and could be even more useful in aggregate. With enough users, Curb could actually tell people in a specific area how much it costs to own a Tesla or plug in a phone overnight.

But that’s going to be a tough sell for now. The device is selling to consumers on Indiegogo for $350 for one unit and $649 for a two-pack. If your home has more than one circuit breaker box, you will the two-pack. The devices require a professional electrician for installation as well. Erik Norwood, the CEO of Curb, says he’s trying to get a network of installers to agree to a $100 to $150 price for the basic install, but that hasn’t happened yet because electricians’ rates vary so much regionally. That’s a lot of money just to get a granular understanding of your electricity usage.

Norwood acknowledges that the consumer market may be sparse for the product, but the Indiegogo campaign, which seeks to raise $25,000, is mostly about getting interest in the product and getting it in the hands of more users. The company’s eventual strategy is to work with utilities, solar power manufacturers and perhaps home builders to have Curbs installed as part of the construction process or subsidized as a way to get better data.

Because that is where the power of this device really is. Being able to track exactly how much power a device or object uses turns the world of electricity usage and consumption on its head. With that data a utility could tell the exact drain consumers’ electric vehicles make on the grid or a maker of appliances could learn exactly how much their fridge costs to run in a specific area, as opposed to generating an estimate. At the individual level a consumer could see that turning their heat up might be more costeffective than running a cheap space heater.

It’s the beginning of a truly quantified home.

http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/curb-quantified-house/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE

The Burnaby company behind the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer has taken another leap in advancing the field.

D-Wave Systems has broken the 1,000 qubit barrier, doubling its processor capacity from 512 qubits.

“This updated processor will allow significantly more complex computational problems to be solved than ever before,” Jeremy Hilton, D-Wave’s vice-president of processor development, wrote in a June 22 blog entry.

Regular computers use two bits – ones and zeroes – to make calculations, while quantum computers rely on qubits.

Qubits possess a “superposition” that allow it to be one and zero at the same time, meaning it can calculate all possible values in a single operation.

But the algorithm for a full-scale quantum computer requires 8,000 qubits.

So while D-Wave hasn’t actually built a full-scale quantum computer, it has developed a quantum coprocessor that mimics the functions of a quantum computer by conducting least-path analysis.

A least-path algorithm calculates the shortest length between two points, or else, the simplest and most likely answer to a complex question.

“Breaking the 1,000 qubit barrier marks the culmination of years of research and development by our scientists, engineers and manufacturing team,” D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell said in a statement.

“It is a critical step toward bringing the promise of quantum computing to bear on some of the most challenging technical, commercial, scientific, and national defense problems that organizations face.”

https://www.biv.com/article/2015/6/computing-takes-quantum-leap-burnabys-d-wave-break/

Americans have reached a weighty milestone: Adults who are obese now outnumber those who are merely overweight, according to a new report in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

lRelated
SCIENCE NOW
Don’t count on dance class to give your kid a workout, study warns
SEE ALL RELATED
8

What urine reveals about obesity
A tally by researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis estimated that 67.6 million Americans over the age of 25 were obese as of 2012, and an additional 65.2 million were overweight. Their count was based on data collected between 2007 and 2012 as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an ongoing study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

cComments
We need to stop allowing people on food stamps (ebt cards) to be used at fast food places (really any restaurant) and don’t allow them to be used for any drinks except milk. Sugar drinks (including all natural juice are the easiest way to get fat). And then tax sugar drinks and candy and…
JONHAT
AT 9:35 AM JUNE 22, 2015
ADD A COMMENTSEE ALL COMMENTS
5

The NHANES data included information on height and weight, which are used to calculate a person’s body mass index. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal. Someone with a BMI in the 25-to-29.9 range is considered overweight, and a BMI over 30 qualifies a person as obese. (You can calculate your BMI here.)

Women were much more likely to be obese than overweight, with 37% of women in the former category and 30% in the latter. Altogether, two out every three women in the U.S. were above a normal weight.

The proportion of men who were obese was almost as high as women – 35%. But that figure was lower than the 40% of men who were in the overweight zone. With both groups combined, three out of four men in the U.S. exceeded a normal weight.

Want to maximize weight loss? Let someone else pick your diet
African Americans had the highest rates of obesity among both men (39%) and women (57%). The researchers found that 17% of black women and 7% of black men were extremely obese, meaning their body mass index was over 40.

Among the group labeled Mexican Americans, 38% of men and 43% of women were obese. For whites, 35% of men and 34% of women were obese. No data were reported for Asian Americans, who until recently have been undersampled in NHANES surveys.

Rates of overweight and obesity were comparable for younger (ages 25 to 54) and older (ages 55 and up) adults, according to the study.

Being overweight or obese increases the risk of a variety of chronic health conditions, including Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Extra weight can also make people more vulnerable to certain types of cancer. The more you weigh, the greater the health risk, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-sn-more-americans-obese-than-overweight-20150620-story.html

June 22, 2015

Research shows human relationships with domestic animals go back thousands of years, says Stanley Coren, psychology professor emeritus at UBC and author of several books about dogs. What’s new though is the level of pampering pets now generally receive, partly because people have greater disposable income and changing family ties.

“Nowadays, we no longer have the extended family all living within a half hour’s drive from us … and furthermore, we’re living a hell of a lot longer,” Coren said. “So there’s a whole lot of people who live well into an era of life where the kids have gone away and they have empty-nest syndrome.”

http://news.ubc.ca/2015/06/22/oh-we-americans-love-our-pets-heres-proof/