Poll Savvy battered bird flinger KFC has made sure no one will forget its greasy wares during the coronavirus pandemic by ditching its Finger Lickin’ slogan.
ETA: current results. Poll still open, go to the linked article to cast your vote.
In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.
The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”
In a world mired in misinformation and populated by politicians who don’t seem to care if they are caught lying, researchers have shed light on the brain activity underlying deception.
It all depends on what kind of person is doing the cheating.
New research from the Rotterdam School of Management claims to show that the neurocognitive processes for cheating differs between people who are usually honest and those who are less so.
Mr Red Shorts could have come from a Jacques Tati film. Perfect.
Again highlighting cosy relations between Amazon and UK.gov, Alex Chisholm, Cabinet Office permanent secretary and head of the civil service, has confirmed the etail giant’s UK’s head Doug Gurr will sit on a panel that chooses the next government chief digital officer (GCDO).
Reclusive data analytics outfit Palantir has filed to go public, giving a small glimmer of insight into the highly secretive company and its finances, or lack of them.
That’s actually quite fucking depressing, given how few people are native Scots speakers now.
Professor Ale Smidts, who helped conduct the study along with Prof Maarten Boksem, said: “There are immense economic costs caused by dishonest behaviour, such as tax evasion, music piracy or business scandals, so finding effective ways to reduce dishonest behaviour are of great relevance to policy makers. Also, during the COVID-19 pandemic dishonesty in the form of selling low-quality face masks and fraud on governmental subsidies are highly prevalent, which highlights the relevance of our findings.”
Or the upper echelons of corporations believing they deserve 1,000 times as much reward as the normal workers. If we are truly objective, the basic theory they are studying creates the economic septic tank we live in.
The US Marines are doing away with tanks entirely.
It’s kind of amazing how comforting that story was. Telling of the times we live in, and the expectations we have because of it all.
Alibaba’s payment arm, Ant Group, has filed for its initial public offering and disclosed the current and possible future impact of the China/USA trade war on the companies.
Ant runs Alipay, which boasts a billion users for its payment products that use smartphones and scanned barcodes or QR codes to conduct transactions and does so at a rate of around 100 million payments per day. Alipay is considered the world’s most-used such service and Ant’s IPO reportedly seeks a valuation of $225bn to reflect its dominance and potential.
New Zealand’s stock exchange (NZX) has closed for a third day thanks to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The exact nature of the incident is not known: an NZX spokesperson told The Register that “network connectivity issues relating to DDoS cybersecurity attacks” were behind the decision to close the market after around 70 minutes of Thursday today. The market also closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the NZX expressing a desire for swift restoration after those incidents.
Google wants its Nest Hub to become a fixture in hotel rooms so that guests can enjoy their stay without having to actually touch any of the amenities they are paying for.
The device, which is being piloted in several hotels across the US and the UK, offers guests the chance to replace calls to hotel staff with a Hub device that listens in on requests for more towels or information about pool closing times.
US electronics engineers and physicists have built micrometre-scale swimming robots that use a new type of actuator, forming the basis for a tiny automaton that could be injected into humans to perform minor medical procedures.
Powered by onboard silicon photovoltaics, the robots, which are less than 0.1mm in size, wriggle when stimulated by laser light. Built from common semiconductor material, one million of the tiny critters could be produced from a four-inch wafer, according to the author of a paper published in Nature .
Non-shielded quantum computers may only be able to run for a few milliseconds before background radiation completely destabilizes the systems, according to lab experiments described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.
In 1999, quantum computers could only operate for less than a nanosecond. Fast forward more than 20 years, and today’s systems can now last for around 200 microseconds. However, experimenters at MIT say about four milliseconds is going to be the absolute limit for today’s technology – when not sufficiently radiation shielded – due to cosmic rays and emissions from radioactive materials all around us affecting the computers’ qubits. Specifically, the radiation will cause the qubits to lose coherence.
The organizers are looking for a total of 1,500 participants, 120 of which will receive €1,200 ($1,420) per month for a period of three years.
“They don’t have to do anything for it except fill in seven online questionnaires during those three years,” says a description of the experiment on the project’s website.
The money comes from around 150,000 donors right now and is tax-free for all recipients. In the end, every participant will get €43,200, adding up to a total of €5.2 million for the project. All of this has been initiated by a Berlin-based public charity.
It seems that the Scots Wikipedia project was started by several native Scots speakers who are no longer active, leaving room for this vandal to come in and ruin it all. One of the admins started a thread on the Scotland subreddit seeking input and advice from actual Scottish people, with the top choices being delete it all and start over, delete it all and let it die, and roll back every edit & article made by the vandal to start with a cleaner slate.
Hopefully, it’s the last choice…
