Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said. Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said. CHICAGO (AP) -- Police in Dallas were the first in the nation to use a robot to deliver and detonate a bomb to kill a suspect, but other law enforcement agencies are willing and able to follow suit, including some that even have trained for the day when they'd have to do so.

Newspapers and politicians around the world have been reacting to Boris Johnson's appointment as UK foreign secretary. Many were surprised, citing his history of faux pas including insulting the president of Turkey and commenting on the US president's ancestry. Here we take a look at the response in countries where Mr Johnson will now represent the UK. The Washington Post publishes a round-up of "undiplomatic" things Mr Johnson has said during his time in public life. Washington Post writer Ishaan Tharoor also writes that Mr Johnson "has controversially bucked the Western trend and praised Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for battling the Islamic State, no matter its parallel campaign of violence on Syria's civilian population".

It doesn't take long for Mr. Robot to establish just how dark its sophomore season will be. Like Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) standing hunched over -- head tilted, eyes bulging -- and laughing maniacally like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Or that same Elliot taking a bullet point-blank to the forehead, only to stand up seconds later while oozing blood down his face, deadpanning the line, "Are you done?" SEE ALSO: Hackers, experts decode the magic of'Mr. None of it makes sense -- and it's not supposed to. These are the same kind of mind-numbing twists and turns that made USA Network's breakout hacker drama a hit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Google engineer, whose speech recognition software is used in more than a billion Android smartphones, has launched a company that uses blockchain technology to build a new operating system for banks. Paul Taylor, a Cambridge University academic with an expertise in artificial intelligence, speech synthesis and machine learning, started working on the system, called Vault OS, two years ago in a basement in London's Shoreditch district, known for being a tech start-up hub. The technology, which underpins the digital currency bitcoin, creates a shared database in which participants can trace every transaction ever made. The ledger is tamper-proof and transparent, meaning that transactions can be processed without the need for third-party verification. The system also negates the need for costly in-house data centers, as it uses cloud-based systems, which banks can use on a "pay-as-you-go" basis, which means that there is no single point of failure.

Online surveys have the potential to support adaptive questions, where later questions depend on earlier responses. Past work has taken a rule-based approach, uniformly across all respondents. We envision a richer interpretation of adaptive questions, which we call dynamic question ordering (DQO), where question order is personalized. Such an approach could increase engagement, and therefore response rate, as well as imputation quality. We present a DQO framework to improve survey completion and imputation. In the general survey-taking setting, we want to maximize survey completion, and so we focus on ordering questions to engage the respondent and collect hopefully all information, or at least the information that most characterizes the respondent, for accurate imputations. In another scenario, our goal is to provide a personalized prediction. Since it is possible to give reasonable predictions with only a subset of questions, we are not concerned with motivating users to answer all questions. Instead, we want to order questions to get information that reduces prediction uncertainty, while not being too burdensome. We illustrate this framework with an example of providing energy estimates to prospective tenants. We also discuss DQO for national surveys and consider connections between our statistics-based question-ordering approach and cognitive survey methodology.

The second season of the beloved Mr. Robot is here, and Willa Paskin wonders how long the "aesthetically polished and intellectually incensed" show can continue to critique capitalism. "[Showrunner Sam] Esmail, having created a cult TV show, is expressing some skepticism about television, a medium that, for much of its life, existed to sell audiences soap," Paskin observes. Robot is like an iPhone with an'I hate Apple' ring-tone: both are beautifully designed, powerful products that are superficially conflicted about being beautifully designed, powerful products."

Japan is famously wary of immigration, fearing that foreign workers will undermine job security and upset familiar ways of life. But there is one kind of industrious interloper that is greeted more enthusiastically in Japan than in any other country. Robots or "immigrants from the future", as my colleague Oliver Morton calls them, are unusually well assimilated into Japanese society. Japan's obsession with robots is well documented. Foreign journalists seem to like Japan's affection for robots almost as much as Japan likes robots.

With the general availability of the "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us. We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than a processor since it includes high bandwidth memory and fabric interconnect adapters on a single package – is what the future looks like. And that goes for Knights family processors and co-processors as well as the "Pascal" and "Volta" accelerators made by Nvidia, the Sparc64-XIfx and ARM chips that will be used in the used in the Post-K system in Japan made by Fujitsu, the Matrix2000 DSP accelerator being created by China for one of its pre-exascale systems, or the CPU-GPU hybrids based on its "Zen" Opterons that AMD is cooking up for supercomputing systems in the United States and, with licensing partners, in China. During the recent ISC16 supercomputing conference in Frankfurt, Germany, Intel gathered up the executives in charge of some of the largest supercomputing facilities on the planet who are also – not coincidentally, but absolutely intentionally – also early adopters of the Knights Landing Xeon Phi and, in some cases, the Omni-Path interconnect that is a kicker to Intel's True Scale InfiniBand networking.

U.S. officials covered up the Chinese government's attempt to hack computers used by the nation's banking regulator, Republican lawmakers claimed Wednesday. The report from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology alleges that the Chinese government was spying on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which stores confidential data on the nation's largest financial institutions, over a three-year period starting in 2010. "Even the former chairwoman's computer had been hacked by a foreign government, likely the Chinese," the report claims. The intruders were reportedly seeking "economic intelligence," Reuters reported. FDIC officials allegedly tried to cover up the hack to protect the regulator's incoming chairman.

PewDiePie bashed reporters Wednesday for singling him out in articles about the Federal Trade Commission and Warner Bros. "pay for play" settlement." In a video uploaded Wednesday -- titled "THE PEWDIEPIE'SCANDAL'!!" -- the Swedish YouTuber (whose real name is Felix Kjellberg) expressed outrage that the FTC would list him as one of the YouTube creators "reviewing" the publisher's game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The FTC argues the Burbank-based entertainment company failed to adequately disclose that it paid influencers "hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars" to create sponsored videos that only promote the game in a positive way. No particular influencer was named in the FTC settlement itself. However, in its press release, the FTC did mention the "wildly popular" PewDiePie. "It's kind of bullshit," PewDiePie said of the media coverage. "Yes, I could have disclosed it better.