New submitter grunby shares a report from Gothamist: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 -- and had never been updated by the company. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date." NYC DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters -- the NY Times notes that NYC has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix. The report notes that parking meters are still accepting coins, and the ParkNYC app is still working if you want to use credit cards.

Tens of thousands of Australians are fleeing their homes as hundreds of fires rage across the continent's southeast coast. And yes, climate change is almost certainly to blame for the extent of the disaster. From a report: With more than a thousand buildings destroyed and 17 deaths since October, it already ranks as one of the worst fire seasons in Australia's history -- and summer there has barely begun. What's driving the fires? Summer wildfires are common in Australia, but climate change is making them worse. Spring rainfall has declined in recent decades, even as temperatures rise, extreme heat events become more common, and droughts turn more severe, according to a 2018 report by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology. Those forces have contributed to a greater number of days with "very high fire dangers," and helped extend the fire season into spring.

The internet's full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the tiny island nation Tuvalu (located halfway between Hawaii and Australia), but its evolution has made Tuvalu's .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. From a report: Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its annual gross national income (GNI) from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu's contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher. [...] Compulsory public education has brought the nation's adult literacy rate up to nearly 99 percent, and the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy, with its territorial fishing rights accounting for the biggest chunk of its GNI at an estimated $19 million in license fees in 2018. But another sizable portion stems directly from its licensing of its .tv URL suffix, thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites. As sites utilizing .tv grow in prominence, Tuvalu's domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.

Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by .tv. The nation's Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite connection with reduced streaming capacity. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible ways than entertainment. "[.tv] has provided a certain, sure income," said Seve Paeniu, Tuvalu's Minister of Finance. "It enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education for the kids, providing medical services to our people, and also in terms of improving the basic economic infrastructure and service delivery to our communities." To monetize .tv, the government of Tuvalu has negotiated a series of agreements allowing foreign companies to market the top-level domain for commercial use. Under the current deal, signed in 2011, Virginia-based network infrastructure firm Verisign pays Tuvalu around $5 million per year for the right to administer .tv. For a nation whose annual domestic revenues tend to hover around $60 million, this is a substantial benefit.

An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft will end support for the Cortana app in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. Microsoft refocusing Cortana for the enterprise, and specifically for Windows and Office, is not new. Nonetheless, killing off the Cortana app was a bold move. VentureBeat sat down with Andrew Shuman, who has been leading the Cortana team since Javier Soltero's departure last year, to find out why Cortana for Android and iOS is being killed off, what to expect with Cortana for Windows, his thoughts on natural language and typing, what's going on with the Alexa integration, and more.

dryriver writes: Santa -- flying over Australia right now -- is flying across the globe and dropping gifts along the way. Using NORAD's Santa Tracker, we can watch him flying over a Google Earth-style 3D satellite map in realtime. "NORAD's radars detected Saint Nick's sleigh departing the North Pole just after 4 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning, shortly after he reviewed his flight plan with his nine reindeeris first stops were in eastern Russia and Asia, just in time for Christmas Day there," reports CNN.

The public can call 1-877-HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) to speak live with NORAD trackers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The unprecedented bushfires devastating swathes of Australia have already pumped out more than half of the country's annual carbon dioxide emissions in another setback to the fight against climate change. Fires blighting New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a combined 306 million tons of carbon dioxide since Aug. 1, which is more than half of Australia's total greenhouse gas footprint last year, according to Niels Andela, an assistant research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and collaborator with the Global Fire Emissions Database. That compares with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service's estimate of 270 million tons in just over four months. "We have been closely monitoring the intensity of the fires and the smoke they emit and when comparing the results with the average from a 17-year period, they are very unusual in number and intensity, especially in New South Wales, for being so early in the fire season," said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus, the European Union's atmosphere observation program.

Australia has experienced its hottest day on record with the national average temperature reaching a high of 40.9C (105.6F). The Bureau of Meteorology (Bom) said "extensive" heat on Tuesday exceeded the previous record of 40.3C set on 7 January 2013. From a report: Taking the average of maximum temperatures across the country is the most accurate measure of a heatwave. The record comes as the nation battles a severe drought and bushfire crisis. Forecasters had predicted the most intense heat would come later in the week, meaning the record could be broken again. As hundreds of fires rage, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been criticised for his response to the natural disasters and his government's climate policies.

It is no longer safe to have two standard drinks a day, Australian health officials have warned. From a report: Released just in time for Christmas, the National Health and Medical Research Council on Monday published a draft report which updated Australia's alcohol guidelines for the first time since 2009. The new guidelines warn that adults should have "no more than 10 standard drinks per week" to reduce the health risks from alcohol, or roughly 1.4 drinks a day. The maximum an adult should have on a single day is four standard drinks. The NHMRC's 2009 guidelines stated that "no more than two standard drinks" on any day -- or 14 a week -- reduced the lifetime risk of harm from alcohol. But a review of evidence showed the lifetime risk of dying from alcohol-related disease or injury remained below 1 in 100 if alcohol consumption stayed below 10 per week.

Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna brings news of a triumph for a Tesla power project in South Australia: about 900 residential rooftop solar panels, coupled with storage batteries, "all linked up to central control, to form what they are calling a 'Virtual Power Plant.'" Nothing virtual about it, distributed power plant would have been a better name. That project, designed to link 50,000 homes and their solar panels, is just 2% complete. About 1000 homes. That 2% complete project had enough juice and control to step in, detect the frequency drop, increase power from the batteries and save the day.
But does this have implications for the future? "The opportunity for Virtual Power Plants to reach a large scale will benefit all energy users through added competition to deliver services at reducing prices," says the executive general manager of emerging markets and services for the Australian Energy Market Operator (in the linked-to article above from Teslarati).

The original submission from 140Mandak262Jamuna argues this could be a game-changer for renewable energy: This is unprecedented. The electric utilities have been government-sanctioned monopolies for over a century, protected from competition... The battery bank will stabilize the grid so well, there will be no surge pricing for peaker power plants...

At present the Return-on-Investment comparison between solar/wind storage versus gas turbine power plants include the surge pricing benefit in favor of the gas power plants. It will be gone.

Bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a massive pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere since August that is equivalent to almost half of Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions, Guardian Australia can reveal. From a report: Analysis by Nasa shows the NSW fires have emitted about 195m tonnes of CO2 since 1 August, with Queensland's fires adding a further 55m tonnes over the same period. In 2018, Australia's entire greenhouse gas footprint was 532m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Experts say the pulse of CO2 from this season's bushfires is significant, because even under normal conditions it could take decades for forest regrowth to reabsorb the emissions. But scientists have expressed doubt that forests already under drought stress would be able to reabsorb all the emissions back into soils and branches, and said the natural carbon "sinks" of forests could be compromised.

ProPublica has determined that dozens of state and local agencies have purchased "SCAN" training from a company called LSI for reviewing a suspect's written statements -- even though there's no scientific evidence that it works. Local, state and federal agencies from the Louisville Metro Police Department to the Michigan State Police to the U.S. State Department have paid for SCAN training. The LSI website lists 417 agencies nationwide, from small-town police departments to the military, that have been trained in SCAN -- and that list isn't comprehensive, because additional ones show up in procurement databases and in public records obtained by ProPublica. Other training recipients include law enforcement agencies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom, among others...

For Avinoam Sapir, the creator of SCAN, sifting truth from deception is as simple as one, two, three.

1. Give the subject a pen and paper.
2. Ask the subject to write down his/her version of what happened.
3. Analyze the statement and solve the case.

Those steps appear on the website for Sapir's company, based in Phoenix. "SCAN Unlocks the Mystery!" the homepage says, alongside a logo of a question mark stamped on someone's brain. The site includes dozens of testimonials with no names attached. "Since January when I first attended your course, everybody I meet just walks up to me and confesses!" one says. [Another testimonial says "The Army finally got its money's worth..."] SCAN saves time, the site says. It saves money. Police can fax a questionnaire to a hundred people at once, the site says. Those hundred people can fax it back "and then, in less than an hour, the investigator will be able to review the questionnaires and solve the case."
In 2009 the U.S. government created a special interagency task force to review scientific studies and independently investigate which interrogation techniques worked, assessed by the FBI, CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. "When all 12 SCAN criteria were used in a laboratory study, SCAN did not distinguish truth-tellers from liars above the level of chance," the review said, also challenging two of the method's 12 criteria. "Both gaps in memory and spontaneous corrections have been shown to be indicators of truth, contrary to what is claimed by SCAN."
In a footnote, the review identified three specific agencies that use SCAN: the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army military intelligence, which falls under the Department of Defense...

In 2016, the same year the federal task force released its review of interrogation techniques, four scholars published a study on SCAN in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The authors -- three from the Netherlands, one from England -- noted that there had been only four prior studies in peer-reviewed journals on SCAN's effectiveness. Each of those studies (in 1996, 2012, 2014 and 2015) concluded that SCAN failed to help discriminate between truthful and fabricated statements. The 2016 study found the same. Raters trained in SCAN evaluated 234 statements -- 117 true, 117 false. Their results in trying to separate fact from fiction were about the same as chance....

Steven Drizin, a Northwestern University law professor who specializes in wrongful convictions, said SCAN and assorted other lie-detection tools suffer from "over-claim syndrome" -- big claims made without scientific grounding. Asked why police would trust such tools, Drizin said: "A lot has to do with hubris -- a belief on the part of police officers that they can tell when someone is lying to them with a high degree of accuracy. These tools play in to that belief and confirm that belief."
SCAN's creator "declined to be interviewed for this story," but they spoke to some users of the technique. Travis Marsh, the head of an Indiana sheriff's department, has been using the tool for nearly two decades, while acknowledging that he can't explain how it works. "It really is, for lack of a better term, a faith-based system because you can't see behind the curtain."

Pro Publica also reports that "Years ago his wife left a note saying she and the kids were off doing one thing, whereas Marsh, analyzing her writing, could tell they had actually gone shopping. His wife has not left him another note in at least 15 years..."

It was a video of a waving robot that attracted NASA to the world's most isolated city. Engineers at Woodside Petroleum Ltd. in Perth, Australia, were just "messing around" teaching a toy robot to wave when they filmed it, Chief Technology Officer Shaun Gregory told a conference recently, but NASA liked what it saw. From a report: The U.S. space agency got in touch, and the two are now studying how to use robot technology to tackle problems in remote and difficult locations. This sort of collaboration represents exactly what Australia's largest state is trying to achieve. With some of the world's biggest resource companies operating in the region, the state aims to become a hot spot for developing technology to help miners and oil explorers cut costs and boost efficiency. "Western Australia has the opportunity to cement a place as the world's epicenter of resources technology and innovation," Mike Henry, the incoming chief executive officer of mining giant BHP Group, said at the inaugural Resources Technology Showcase in Perth last week. "Whether its autonomous haulage, robotics, drones, big data or artificial intelligence, we're changing the way we work."

"The desperate search for ways to help the world's coral reefs rebound from the devastating effects of climate change has given rise to some radical solutions," reports the Washington Post. There's coral "nurseries" in the Caribbean, while Hawaiian scientists are trying to breed a new and more resilient type of coral.

But at least one team focused on the herbivorous fish which improve the microbiomes around the reefs -- party by eating the seaweed that would otherwise compete with the coral. And they think the solution lies in sounds: On Friday, British and Australian researchers rolled out another unorthodox strategy that they say could help restoration efforts: broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs in dying ones. In a six-week field experiment, researchers placed underwater loudspeakers in patches of dead coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and played audio recordings taken from healthy reefs... The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that twice as many fish flocked to the dead coral patches where healthy reef sounds were played compared with the patches where no sound was played... According to the study, the number of species present in the reef patches where healthy sounds were played increased by 50 percent over the other patches. The new fish populations included species from all parts of the food web, such as scavengers, herbivores and predatory fish. Importantly, the fish that arrived at the patches tended to stay there...

The technique, if it can be replicated on larger scales, could offer scientists another tool to revive coral reefs around the world that have been ravaged by climate change, overfishing and pollution in recent years. Scientists have warned that climate change may already be accelerating too fast for some reefs to recover at all and that conservation efforts are not keeping pace with the devastation. Severe coral bleaching triggered by extreme heat waves killed off 50 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, the planet's largest coral reef, in 2016 and 2017. Such bleaching events -- which occur when the nutrient-rich and color-providing algae that live in corals are expelled because of heat stress -- are occurring four times as frequently as they did in the 1980s, as The Washington Post has reported.

From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music. From a report: The study focused on musical recordings and ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in Australia. Music was broadly found to be associated with behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings, funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals. The researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study published in the journal Science. "The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And that's something we could not really test until we had a lot of data about music from many different cultures," Mehr said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Greenhouse gas emissions have risen steadily for the past decade despite the current and future threat posed by climate change, according to a new United Nations report. The annual report compares how clean the world's economies are to how clean they need to be to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change -- a disparity known as the "emissions gap." However, this year's report describes more of a chasm than a gap. Global emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases have continued to steadily increase over the past decade. In 2018, the report notes that global fossil fuel CO2 emissions from electricity generation and industry grew by 2%.

"There is no sign of [greenhouse gas] emissions peaking in the next few years," the authors write. Every year that emissions continue to increase "means that deeper and faster cuts will be required" to keep Earth from warming more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. [...] The United States is currently not on track to meet its greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement, which the United States ratified and is technically still part of until its withdrawal takes effect in November 2020. According to the new report, six other major economies are also lagging behind their commitments, including Canada, Japan, Australia, Brazil, the Republic of Korea and South Africa. What's interesting is that China's per capita emissions are now "in the same range" as the European Union, thanks to the country's large investments in renewable energy such as solar and wind.

Some of the recommendations for how the world's top economies could cut emissions include: banning new coal-fired power plants, requiring all new vehicles to be CO2-free by 2030, expanding mass transit and/or requiring all new buildings to be entirely electric.

Amazon announced today that developers can now have Alexa respond to questions from U.S. users with a "happy/excited" or a "disappointed/empathetic" tone. The Verge reports: Amazon suggests the happy/excited tone could be used when you answer a trivia question correctly, for example, and that the disappointed/empathetic tone could be used when you ask for a sports score and your favorite team has lost. (One day, I'm sure she'll express disappointment at some dumb question that I ask, and I'll deserve it.) If you want to hear the different voices for yourself, Amazon shared six examples, three for each emotion at increasing levels of excitement or disappointment: Disappointed (Low Intensity), Disappointed (Medium Intensity), Disappointed (High Intensity), Excited (Low Intensity), Excited (Medium Intensity), and Excited (High Intensity).

Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat. Tangential writes: Dr. Fangfang Chen and Dr. Xiaoen Wang from Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials claim to have made a breakthrough with "the first clear and useful example of liquid-free and efficient transportation of lithium-ion in the scientific community." The new technology uses a solid polymer material, weakly bonded to the lithium-ion, to replace the volatile liquid solvents typically used as electrolytes in current battery cells. The liquid electrolyte is the part of the system that becomes flammable during the kinds of infamous battery fires Samsung would rather forget. "If industry implements our findings I see a future where battery reliant devices can be safely packed in airplane baggage, for example, or where electric cars don't pose a fire risk for occupants or emergency services like they currently do," Dr Chen said in a press release. In addition to making batteries safer, the team believes this solid polymer electrolyte will finally allow batteries to work with a lithium metal anode. That would be big news in the battery world, where the lithium anode has been recently described in Trends in Chemistry as "critical to break the energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry" -- the bottleneck that's stopping electric vehicles, aircraft and portable electronics from developing at the pace they should be.

Last year nearly 400 million people experienced Dengue fever, according to All Things Considered. (Just Brazil alone had more than 2 million cases.) But The World Mosquito Project is trying an interesting solution: Scientists are cultivating and releasing mosquitoes, except these mosquitoes are special: They've been infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia. Wolbachia occurs naturally in many insects, but not normally in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue. It has to be introduced into the mosquitoes in the lab. But then the bacterium is passed down to future generations. The bacterium appears to block Aedes aegypti from transmitting arboviruses, which include dengue as well as chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika...

"In Indonesia, we've [released Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in] a community of 50,000 people and compared it to a community that was left without Wolbachia," says Cameron Simmons, director of the impact assessment team for the World Mosquito Program. "We've seen a 75% reduction [of dengue cases] over the last 2 1/2 years in the Wolbachia-treated community...." The problem in the real world is that other people and other mosquitoes keep migrating into the areas being treated, messing up the experiments. But from a theoretical perspective Simmons sees Wolbachia as potentially a way to wipe out dengue entirely.

"If you had a big island," he proposes, "[and] you stop people from moving in and out of that island, and you put Wolbachia across all the mosquitoes on that island, the science suggests that you'll eliminate dengue in that location."

Some countries are trying to do just that. Australia started using Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes nearly a decade ago to control outbreaks of imported dengue in the state of Queensland. This year the government of Malaysia launched a campaign called "Wolbachia Malaysia" to attack dengue.

schwit1 shares a report from The Age, a daily newspaper published in Australia: A Chinese spy has risked his life to defect to Australia and is now offering a trove of unprecedented inside intelligence on how China conducts its interference operations abroad. Wang "William" Liqiang is the first Chinese operative to ever blow his cover. He has revealed the identities of China's senior military intelligence officers in Hong Kong, as well as providing details of how they fund and conduct political interference operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia.

In interviews with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, he has revealed in granular detail how Beijing covertly controls listed companies to fund intelligence operations, including the surveillance and profiling of dissidents and the co-opting of media organizations. [...] Mr Wang said he was part of an intelligence operation hidden within a Hong Kong-listed company, China Innovation Investment Limited (CIIL), which infiltrated Hong Kong's universities and media with pro-Chinese Communist Party operatives who could be activated to counter the democracy movement. He says he had personal involvement in an October 2015 operation to kidnap and abduct to the Chinese mainland a Hong Kong bookseller, Lee Bo, and played a role in a clandestine organization that also directed bashings or cyber attacks on Hong Kong dissidents. His handlers in China issued him a fake South Korean passport to gain entry to Taiwan and help China's efforts to systematically infiltrate its political system, including directing a "cyber army" and Taiwanese operatives to meddle in the 2018 municipal elections. Plans are underway to influence the 2020 presidential election - plans that partly motivated him to defect to Australia. Mr Wang is currently at an undisclosed location in Sydney pending formal protections from the Australian government. More information is expected to be revealed on Monday.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference this month, the company announced a new vision for its personal productivity assistant, Cortana -- one which aimed to make it more useful in your day-to-day work, including email, but one which also saw Microsoft scaling its ambitions back from Cortana as a true Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant competitor. Now, the other shoe has dropped, as Microsoft says it's planning to shut down its standalone Cortana mobile apps across a number of markets. From a report: The company quietly revealed its plans to wind down support for Cortana on iOS and Android in several regions, with an end-of-life date of January 31st, 2020. After this point, Cortana mobile app will no longer be supported. Microsoft also said it will release an updated version of its Microsoft Launcher, that will have Cortana removed. Microsoft tells us the impacted markets include Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Mexico, China, Spain, Canada, and India. While the U.S. isn't in this list today, it would not be surprising to see its support pulled at a later date. The Cortana app for iOS is only ranked No. 254 in the Productivity category on the App Store, and only No. 145 on Google Play, according to current data from Sensor Tower.