The robot will go through an initial assessment phase to check on its overall health and the health of its instruments before it can move on to the deployment phase. Then, once its finally time to deploy its suite of instruments, that process alone is expected to take two to three months. InSight will place its seismometer, and only once the team is happy with its location and initial operations will it return to the deck to get its wind and thermal shields, which will sit atop the seismometer for protection. The lander will then pick up the heat probe to bring to the surface, before beginning its historic dig. Eventually, once it's all settled in, Barrett says we'll be'sitting back listening for Mars quakes.'

Biometric screening is expanding to the rental car industry. Hertz said Tuesday it is teaming up with Clear, the maker of biometric screening kiosks found at many airports, in an effort to slash the time it takes to pick up a rental car. Clear hopes it will lead more travelers to its platform, which has 3 million members in the U.S. It's the latest place consumers will find biometric technology, which has migrated over the last 50 years from secure government facilities and banks to airports, stadiums and even smartphones that unlock with the touch a fingerprint. Hertz is the first rental car company to use the technology. In a first for the rental car industry, Hertz is teaming up with Clear, the maker of biometric screening kiosks found at many airports and stadiums.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have a treat to look forward to after successfully taking delivery of their Christmas dinner. The three-strong team will be treated to smoked turkey, a green bean casserole, candied yams, cranberry sauce and fruitcake. The delivery was sent via Elon Musk's SpaceX Dragon capsule and was received by Commander Alexander Gerst. Musk's astro-firm SpaceX worked with NASA to ship the delivery, which also included shortbread and biscuits with tubes of icing for decoration. In addition to the food the Dragon delivered 40 mice and 36,000 worms for a science experiment and more than 5,000 pounds of other station equipment.

Even Mars robots act like tourists every once in a while. NASA's new InSight lander has snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in. InSight also sent back the first complete view of the 14-by-7-foot swath of land that will soon serve as its'workspace.' Even Mars robots act like tourists every once in a while. NASA's new InSight lander has snapped its first selfie from the red planet, giving the mission team (and the rest of the world) a good look at its solar panels and deck now that it's settled in Each of the new images is a mosaic of several captures stitched together.

Google has'no plans' to relaunch a search engine in China though it is continuing to study the idea, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told a U.S. congressional panel on Tuesday amid increased scrutiny of big tech firms. Lawmakers and Google employees have raised concerns the company would comply with China's internet censorship and surveillance policies if it re-enters the Asian nation's search engine market. Google's main search platform has been blocked in China since 2010, but the Alphabet Inc unit has been attempting to make new inroads into the country, which has the world's largest number of smartphone users. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told a U.S. congressional panel Google had over 100 people working on the project at one point. 'Right now, there are no plans to launch search in China,' Pichai told the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

Even worse, how often do we hear about major data breaches with unprotected or misconfigured servers? Here's an example just last week where records for 57 million American residents were revealed by a search engine that scans for connected devices and open servers. It found at least three IP addresses with identical clusters misconfigured for public access. With 73GB of data, the service held data on almost 57 million US citizens, containing information including first and last name, employers, job title, email, address, state, ZIP code, phone number, and IP address. Another index of the same database included over 25 million business records, which held details on companies including employee counts, revenue numbers, and carrier routes.

Meghan Markle was the most Googled person in Britain this year, the tech giant has revealed. The American actress, who married Prince Harry in May, has seen more people look up her name than any other figure in the UK. This is the second time the former Suits star has soared to the top of the search engine's'top trending people' list. Meghan Markle was the most Googled person in Britain this year, the tech giant has revealed. This is the second time the former Suits star has soared to the top of the search engine's'top trending people' list Celebrity Big Brother contestant Roxanne Pallett came in second place.

A month ago a group convened in the University Club dining room at Arizona State University to discuss the future of national security research. There were retired Army and Marine generals, agents from the CIA and a bevy of scientists. Two trendlines popped out over the peppered bacon and frittatas: Nation states are vying for technological dominance, and the Holy Grail in that sphere is the successful pairing of humans and artificial intelligence. Creating machines that think and act like us is as much grounded in the humanities as it is in engineering. Talk to engineers about the problem, and they'll discuss things far outside the usual lanes of engineering, things like the nature of self, perception and free will.

Recently, an opinion dynamics model has been proposed to describe a network of individuals discussing a set of logically interdependent topics. For each individual, the set of topics and the logical interdependencies between the topics (captured by a logic matrix) form a belief system. We investigate the role the logic matrix and its structure plays in determining the final opinions, including existence of the limiting opinions, of a strongly connected network of individuals. We provide a set of results that, given a set of individuals' belief systems, allow a systematic determination of which topics will reach a consensus, and which topics will disagreement in arise. For irreducible logic matrices, each topic reaches a consensus. For reducible logic matrices, which indicates a cascade interdependence relationship, conditions are given on whether a topic will reach a consensus or not. It turns out that heterogeneity among the individuals' logic matrices, including especially differences in the signs of the off-diagonal entries, can be a key determining factor. This paper thus attributes, for the first time, a strong diversity of limiting opinions to heterogeneity of belief systems in influence networks, in addition to the more typical explanation that strong diversity arises from individual stubbornness.

Islamophobic hate speech on social media inflicts considerable harm on both targeted individuals and wider society, and also risks reputational damage for the host platforms. Accordingly, there is a pressing need for robust tools to detect and classify Islamophobic hate speech at scale. Previous research has largely approached the detection of Islamophobic hate speech on social media as a binary task. However, the varied nature of Islamophobia means that this is often inappropriate for both theoretically-informed social science and effectively monitoring social media. Drawing on in-depth conceptual work we build a multi-class classifier which distinguishes between non-Islamophobic, weak Islamophobic and strong Islamophobic content. Accuracy is 77.6% and balanced accuracy is 83%. We apply the classifier to a dataset of 109,488 tweets produced by far right Twitter accounts during 2017. Whilst most tweets are not Islamophobic, weak Islamophobia is considerably more prevalent (36,963 tweets) than strong (14,895 tweets). Our main input feature is a gloVe word embeddings model trained on a newly collected corpus of 140 million tweets. It outperforms a generic word embeddings model by 5.9 percentage points, demonstrating the importan4ce of context. Unexpectedly, we also find that a one-against-one multi class SVM outperforms a deep learning algorithm.