Nearly five years after the state government imposed a curfew and restricted alcohol sales in the city center, some residents and business owners say it is time for a change.
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Price continued to rewrite his difficult postseason history with another strong October outing, leaving Boston two wins from a World Series title.
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Check out our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/teded View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-can-t-some-birds-fly-gillian-gibb Though the common ancestor of all modern birds could fly, many different bird species have independently lost their flight. Flight can have incredible benefits, especially for escaping predators, hunting and traveling long distances. But it also has high costs: consuming huge amounts of energy and limiting body size and weight. Gillian Gibb explores what makes birds give up the power of flight. Lesson by Gillian Gibb, directed by Anton Bogaty. Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible! Paul Beard, Deepak Iyer, Markus Goldhacker, Mihai Sandu, Keven Webb, Hendrik Mueller, Maurice Castonguay, Kristiyan Bonev, Maryam Dadkhah, Joshua Wasniewski, Michał Friedrich, Arlene Spiegelman, Doug Henry, Alick Au, denison martins fernandes, Daniel Nester, Richard A Berkley, Benjamin Chan, Dee Wei, Abdallah Absi, Denise A Pitts, Pi Guanghui, Doris, Kurt Almendras, Raymond Lee, Nicolas Silva, Melvin Williams, Tirath Singh Pandher, Terry Minion, Mauricio Basso, Jamesbo87, Karlee Finch, Chumi Ogbonna, Barthélémy Michalon, Lefty McGoo, Anonymous, Chris Thompson, Derek Drescher, Karisa Caudill, Christina Salvatore, Brady Jones, Todd Gross, Alexis Hevia, Heidi Stolt, Robert Seik, Coenraad Keuning, Charles A Hershberger, Laura Cameron Keith, Max Ngomane and Rafael Kato.From: TED-Ed
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Check out our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/teded View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-princess-who-rewrote-history-leonora-neville Anna Komnene, daughter of Byzantine emperor Alexios, spent the last decade of her life creating a 500-page history of her father’s reign called “The Alexiad.” As a princess writing about her own family, she had to balance her loyalty to her kin with her obligation to portray events accurately. Leonora Neville investigates this epic historical narrative. Lesson by Leonora Neville, directed by Els Decaluwe. Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible! Jen O’Hogan, Renu Balak, JY Kang, Anastasiia, Madee Lo, Arpita Singh, Karl Laius, Barbarossa , Tu-Anh Nguyen, Guy Hardy, Sebastiaan Vleugels, Joel Alfonso, Derya Goekcay, Brandy Sarver, Jose Arcadio Valdes Franco, Akinola Emmanuel, igor romanenko, Dian Atamyanov, Abhishek Bansal, Austin Randall, Jennifer Kurkoski, phkphk12321, Arlene Weston, Mehmet Yusuf Ertekin, Ten Cha, Les Howard, Kevin O’Leary, Francisco Leos, Robert Patrick, Jorge, Marcus Appelbaum, Alan Wilder, Amin Talaei, Mohamed Elsayed, Angel Pantoja, Eimann P. Evarola, Claire Ousey, Carlos H. Costa, Tariq Keblaoui, Bela Namyslik, Nick Johnson, Won Jang, Johnnie Graham, Junjie Huang, Harshita Jagdish Sahijwani, Amber Alexander, Yelena Baykova, Laurence McMillan, John C. Vesey and Karmi Nguyen.From: TED-Ed
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Tim Cook is done with being polite about ad-tracking. At a privacy conference in Brussels this morning, Cook gave a fiery speech denouncing the current state of data collection and targeted misinformation, drawing on aspects of Google’s ad-targeting system and Facebook’s social profile-building practices. For Cook, that system of data collection, collation, and targeting amounts to a “data-industrial complex,” which threatens both privacy and democracy itself.
“This crisis is real,” the Apple CEO said. “It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or crazy.”
In what has become the most noted portion of the speech, Cook threw his support behind a new federal privacy law in the US, casting it as a necessary step in countering the growing torrents of data. “We at Apple are in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States,” Cook said, emphasizing that any such law should include rights to data minimization, disclosure, security, and user access — all provisions that are present in Europe’s GDPR.
“This crisis is real”
But while the moment made headlines, Cook’s stance isn’t as bold as it seems. As the tech backlash has grown, nearly every tech company has endorsed some kind of federal privacy bill, often in direct testimony to Congress. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg treat regulation as a given, telling Congress the only question is how such a bill should be written. Google even went so far as laying out what a responsible data-privacy bill might look like, in advance of a Senate Commerce hearing in September. Microsoft has drawn less attention as a regulatory target, but CEO Satya Nadella has spoken in similar terms, endorsing the GDPR as “a good, sound regulation.”
Tech companies haven’t always been so blasé about new privacy laws — but at this point, regulations are coming whether they like it or not. If they want a say in how the rules are written, their best option is to get on board. That lets them steer the conversation toward a weaker version of the bill, much like the one put forward by Google. And with the GDPR already in place in Europe, the most serious damage has already been done.
If Cook’s speech this morning was more full-throated than what you’d hear from Mark Zuckerberg or Sundar Pichai, it’s because Apple isn’t in the targeted advertising business (or at least not mostly).
As a hardware company, Apple’s not as worried about provisions on opt-in consent and web tracking — but that doesn’t mean the company has nothing to lose in this fight. The GDPR required Apple to roll out a new account shutdown procedure, and future regulations could force even more painful regulations. The new iPhone is a handheld facial-recognition device and the Apple Watch collects lots of personal health and medical data, even if none of that data reaches Apple servers. The privacy practices for both systems are strong, but it’s easy to imagine a new law messing them up if it’s written too broadly. And more than any of its competitors, Apple is deeply committed to doing business in China, which brings its own privacy issues. Congress’s current crop of draft bills don’t do much to threaten any of that, but that could easily change. Making fiery speeches to regulators about ad-targeting is a way of making sure it doesn’t.
None of this should detract from the work Apple has already done on privacy, which is significant. By tightening Safari defaults, the company has pushed back against web-tracking in real and powerful ways. Apple’s device security is still the best in the business, and it’s the biggest reason all of that personal health data tends to stay secure. Cook isn’t the first to warn about the dangers of ad-targeting, and it’s a warning we should take seriously. But Apple is still a tech company. Its products are still caught up in the web of logging and targeting that Cook describes, whether it’s the apps that make the phones so essential or the search revenue flowing in through Safari. When it comes to data collection, Apple has a lot more in common with Google and Facebook than he’d like to admit.
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A 4chan poster may have solved part of a very tricky math problem that mathematicians have been working on for at least 25 years. The user was just trying to figure out the most efficient way to watch episodes of a nonlinear anime series, but the result has generated considerable interest from mathematicians around the world who have no way to identify the anonymous user.
Yesterday, Robin Houston, a computer scientist and mathematician tweeted about the bizarre intersection of 4chan and mathematics, inadvertently setting off a wave of public interest in the story. Within hours of his tweet, his phone was vibrating constantly. “It started to go mad,” he says. “My phone started going crazy.”
The 4chan part of this saga began on September 17th, 2011, when a poster posed a question: if you wanted to watch 14 episodes of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in every possible order, what’s the shortest string of episodes you’d need to watch?
if you wanted to watch 14 episodes of ‘Haruhi’ in every possible order, what’s the shortest string of episodes you’d need to watch?
There are 14 episodes in the first season of Haruhi, a 2006 anime based on a series of Japanese light novels. The episodes, which feature time travel and are otherwise chronologically challenging for the viewer, originally aired in a nonlinear order. When the series went to DVD, the episodes were rearranged, and it’s become something of an obsession for fans to rewatch the series over and over again, going through as many chronologies as possible.
An anonymous poster figured out one possible way to solve to the 4chan problem, satisfying the more mathematically inclined Haruhi fans. But in the process, they also helped puzzle out an issue that mathematicians have been working on since 1993. The anonymously authored proof (which was recently reposted on a Fandom wiki) is currently the most elegant solution to part of a mathematical problem involving something called superpermutations. It’s an enigma that goes well beyond anime.
In mathematics, a permutation is the order of a set of numbers. In anime terms, one permutation of Haruhi would be watching all 14 episodes in the order that they aired. But what if you’re a Haruhi superfan and watching the season once isn’t enough for you? In that case, you might be interested in a superpermutation, or all of the possible permutations of a set strung together. Think of it as the ultimate Haruhi marathon.
Think of it as the ultimate ‘Haruhi’ marathon
The branch of math that deals with permutations and superpermutations is called combinatorics. It doesn’t require years of study to be good at it, either. “It’s more accessible to amateur and casual mathematicians,” Houston says.
The poster’s anonymity doesn’t invalidate the solution for the mathematicians. “What’s beautiful about mathematics is that it’s a proof that starts with your hypothesis and leads to your conclusion,” Jay Pantone, a mathematician at Marquette University says. “You have to convince a skeptical reader that you’re correct. That doesn’t rely on your identity being known.”
Pantone was that skeptical reader for the 4chan proof. This week, he translated it from the more informal 4chan posting into a more formal layout that mathematicians like himself could more easily understand. He says the proof holds up.
With the Haruhi problem, people were looking for the shortest possible superpermutation for the 14-episode set. But no one has found a formula that would actually solve that problem. The 1993 paper suggested one part of that solution. But in 2014, Houston figured out that the math used in the 1993 problem didn’t work for sets containing more than six numbers. The result got mathematicians really excited about the problem again after it had languished in the literature for a quarter century. Eventually, one of them found the 4chan proof, and all those numbers and symbols started to fall into place.
The 4chan proof outlines how to find the smallest possible number of episodes for the solution. But that doesn’t fully solve the problem. An even bigger breakthrough came earlier this month when sci-fi author and mathematician Greg Egan wrote up a proof that outlined how to find the largest possible number for any given superpermutation problem.
Pantone crunched the numbers of the Haruhi problem for The Verge and found that you’d need to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to watch the season in any possible order. At most, you’d need to watch 93,924,230,411 episodes to accomplish the task. There’s still a ways to go to narrow down the exact answer, but they’re getting there.
Now, mathematicians have a way to figure out the range of answers, and a group of them — including Houston and Pantone — are actively working to figure out a formula that combines Egan’s work and the anonymous proof into a cohesive formula. “It might be possible to crack the thing completely open,” Houston says.
Beyond answering obscure anime questions, there are no known applications for the formula
Beyond answering obscure anime questions, there are no known applications for the formula, which isn’t unusual in the field. It often takes decades, Pantone says, for formulas that are discovered in pure mathematics to make their way into real-world applications. But the 4chan episode does show that math can be accessible to anyone.
“This proof shows that you don’t need to be a professional mathematician to understand mathematics and advance the frontier of knowledge,” Pantone says. “That’s the beautiful thing about math, is that anyone can understand the questions.”
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Tesla has posted its first profitable quarter in two years, its third ever, thanks to the popularity of the Model 3 sedan. The automaker said on Wednesday that it generated $6.8 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2018 and walked away with $311 million in profit — the most the company has ever made in a quarter.
The company finished the quarter with $3 billion in cash, up $731 million from the second quarter of the year. Tesla’s last two profitable quarters came in 2013 and 2016, and it has never made a profit over an entire year.
“Q3 2018 was a truly historic quarter for Tesla,” CEO Elon Musk and CFO Deepak Ahuja wrote in a letter to investors. “Model 3 is attracting customers of both premium and non-premium brands, making it a truly mainstream product.”
“A truly historic quarter”
The turning of financial fortunes can be largely attributed to how Tesla nearly doubled production of the Model 3 from the second quarter to the third this year. In fact, the company has made so many cars recently that it overwhelmed itself with delivery efforts, switching from so-called “production hell” to “delivery logistics hell,” as Musk famously put it. “Fortunately, these challenges are easier to solve than vehicle manufacturing, and we made improvements through the quarter,” Musk and Ahuja write.
In total, Tesla wound up delivering 56,065 Model 3s in North America in the third quarter, which is 225 more than it said when it announced initial delivery counts for the quarter in early October. The company also sounds ready to cash in on demand in other markets, with Musk and Ahuja saying Tesla will start taking orders in Europe and China for the Model 3 “before the end of this year.”
After finally turning a profit on the Model 3 earlier this year, Tesla now says it is now pulling in more than a 20 percent margin on the car. It did this thanks to a reduced cost of raw materials, but also by cutting the number of labor hours needed to make each Model 3. Tesla says this figure dropped 30 percent from the second quarter to the third, and that it now takes less time to produce a Model 3 than to make a Model S or X. Also helping boost the company into profit was the sale of $52 million worth of zero-emission vehicle credits to other automakers.
Tesla says it is still targeting early 2019 for the launch of the long-promised $35,000, 220-mile version of the Model 3. The company delayed the most affordable version of its small electric sedan in order to focus on the higher-cost, higher-margin versions. Musk even said this year that focusing on the lower-cost Model 3 would cause the company to “die.”
Tesla will open up Model 3 orders in Europe and China this year
The delay, combined with the fact that Tesla’s cars are now no longer eligible for the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit, has contributed to some cancellations. But Tesla says demand for the Model 3 remains strong, and that “less than 20 percent” of the 455,000 reservation holders have asked for a refund. The company also says that it doesn’t expect selling lower-priced cars to impact profitability long term.
Despite the boost in production’s effect on Tesla’s bottom line, the company is still running into problems related to that explosion in scale. Tesla has had problems with customer service, with Musk recently admitting that the company has “major gaps” in its nationwide coverage. And while the company’s cars consistently earn some of the highest safety ratings in the industry, its widely documented quality control issues continue to plague customers new and old. Before the earnings letter dropped on Wednesday, Consumer Reports said that Tesla ranked the third worst for reliability among major automakers.
Tesla also has more than $10 billion in debt, with more than $1 billion due in the next six months. This, along with future projects like the Model Y crossover, Tesla Semi, and factories in Europe and China, has had many financial analysts expecting Tesla to raise new money sometime soon. But an increase in cash on hand coupled with increasing revenue from other parts of Tesla’s business — like its energy generation and storage business, which increased by $25 million to just shy of $400 million this quarter — could help Musk continue to make his case that he won’t need to take more of anyone else’s money.
The release of the quarterly letter wraps one of the wildest quarters in Tesla’s history, which is saying something for a company with as many ups and downs as a reality TV show. On August 7th, just days after the company recapped its second quarter performance, Musk made a surprise announcement on Twitter about how he was considering taking the publicly traded company private again. Musk said he wanted to delist the company from the NASDAQ once its stock price hit $420 per share and claimed that he had “funding secured” to back the potentially massive buyout required to pull off such a move.
Musk, it turned out, did not have any funding secured. The $420 share price cutoff he suggested was, in part, a joke about weed meant to impress his girlfriend, the musician Grimes. Less than two months after Musk sent those tweets, he was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for committing securities fraud.
It’s been a drama-filled quarter, to say the least
The SEC’s complaint, built largely on subpoenaed internal communications at Tesla, showed that Musk’s privatization attempt (and the way he went about it) was also a surprise to many of the people inside the company.
While Musk had told Tesla’s board of directors that he was considering the idea, he didn’t give them a heads-up that he was about to make a public announcement. Tesla’s CFO had to email Musk shortly after his first tweets to suggest the company draft an official press release, and the company’s head of Investor Relations spent the hours and days after reassuring shareholders that the plan was legitimate, despite a lack of evidence to support that claim.
Musk quickly settled the suit. He agreed to step down as chairman of Tesla for three years, and both he and Tesla were ordered to pay $20 million fines. The company has been ordered to hire a lawyer to oversee all of his public communications, including his tweets.
As it moves into the final quarter of 2018, Tesla still has to name a successor Musk as chairman of the board of directors. The board is also getting two new independent directors as a result of the settlement with the SEC, though one of those roles can be filled by the new chairman.
Tesla also reiterated plans to accelerate its manufacturing timeline in China. The company recently signed off on a lease for the land outside Shanghai where it plans to build a new Gigafactory, and on Wednesday it said it is “aiming to bring portions of Model 3 production to China during 2019.” China has been an increasingly important market for Tesla over the years, but the recent trade war with the US has caused the company’s cars to be subjected to a 40 percent tariff.
Developing…
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Major international airline Cathay Pacific revealed today that as many as 9.4 million passengers had their records stolen in a data breach that occurred in March. Passport information, including identity card numbers, names, dates of birth, and postal addresses may all have been compromised.
The breach also included details about where each passenger had traveled and any comments made by customer service representatives. The amount of data accessed varied among passengers. Cathay also noted that 403 expired credit card numbers were accessed and so were 27 credit card numbers with no CVV numbers attached. We’ve reached out to the airline to ask if other credit cards with CVVs that haven’t expired were accessed.
In a statement on Wednesday, the airline said, “The company has no evidence that any personal information has been misused. The IT systems affected are totally separate from its flight operations systems, and there is no impact on flight safety.” It also said that no passwords were compromised.
Cathay Pacific’s breach exposed passport details
Cathay Pacific is based in Hong Kong but serves flights around the world, including in North America, Europe, China, Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. While airlines like Delta and British Airways have been increasingly targeted by cyberattacks in the past year, the breach Cathay suffered is notable for exposing passport details. Internet security company Webroot’s senior security analyst Randy Abrams told The Verge in an email, “The Cathay Pacific breach disclosed a feature-rich set of data, including more than 40 times more passports than the Air Canada breach, meaning it will have a much greater impact on passengers.”
The breach also differs from others because Cathay took over six months from the time the breach occurred in March to announcing it in public now. As the company has a presence in Europe, it might run into trouble with newly passed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules that require companies to tell customers and law enforcement within three days of discovering a breach. “In addition to the reputation cost, Cathay Pacific may face costly GDPR repercussions due to the amount of time that passed,” Abrams said.
The airline is communicating with local police in Hong Kong and other relevant authorities, it said. Customers who think they might have been affected should visit infosecurity.cathaypacific.com or call or email the company directly.
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Samsung launched two new Galaxy A series phones in China today, the Galaxy A6s and the Galaxy A9s, via SamMobile. The Galaxy A9s is just a renamed Galaxy A9 for the Chinese market, so it’s still the same mid-range phone with a whopping four cameras on the back. What’s more interesting is the Galaxy A6s, which is Samsung’s first ODM phone, or one produced by another company. According to The Korea Herald, Samsung had been in talks to outsource production of its mid- to low-end Galaxy phones to Chinese original design manufacturing company Wingtech, which produces Xiaomi phones.
The Galaxy A6s has two 12MP cameras on the back, and one 12MP front camera. The screen is a 1080p 6-inch Super AMOLED display. It’s powered by a Snapdragon 660 chip, and has 6GB of RAM, with 64 and 128GB storage variants. It starts at CNY 1,800, which is about $260 USD, but the phone will most likely only be available in China for now.
Samsung
The two new phones represent a shift in Samsung’s strategy to boost sales in China and India, as the company is struggling to compete against Chinese phone makers like Huawei and Xiaomi. It’s been reported by Strategy Analytics that Samsung has less than 1 percent of the share in the Chinese market, leading Samsung to consider shutting down one of its two factories in China, while it looks increasingly to ODM firms to cut costs on manufacturing.
Samsung Mobile CEO DJ Koh also recently told CNBC that the company was changing its strategy to “bring technology and differentiation points starting from the mid-end,” rather than starting with the flagship model. The Galaxy A9s is the latest example of this, and if the Galaxy A6s does well in China, it could mean that more ODM phones may be on the way.
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