Google has responded to allegations it "censored" searches about Donald Trump after Elon Musk baselessly claimed the company had imposed a "search ban" on the former president. Google explained the bugs in its autocomplete feature caused the issues. But Musk's tweet, viewed more than 118 million times, has forced the search giant to publicly explain one of its most basic features. Google added that the strange suggestions for "president donald" were due to a "bug that spanned the political spectrum." It also affected searches related to former President Barack Obama and other political figures. You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox.

Cigarette butts pose a huge risk to the world's oceans and can be a pain to clean up by hand especially on public spaces like beaches. A group of Italian scientists have built a quadruped robot that can identify litter and pick up the smaller bits with its leg mounted vacuums. VERO, the vacuum equipped quadruped robot, is a four-legged device designed to look for and clean up litter on a variety of terrains. VERO was designed and built by a team of researchers from the Dynamic Legged Systems lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, according to USA Today. The group published a paper back in April on VERO's development and effectiveness in the Journal of Field Robotics. The research paper states that cigarette butts are a serious concern.

Gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) is a widely-used machine learning algorithm in both data analytic competitions and real-world industrial applications. Further, driven by the rapid increase in data volume, efforts have been made to train GBDT in a distributed setting to support large-scale workloads. However, we find it surprising that the existing systems manage the training dataset in different ways, but none of them have studied the impact of data management. To that end, this paper aims to study the pros and cons of different data management methods regarding the performance of distributed GBDT. We first introduce a quadrant categorization of data management policies based on data partitioning and data storage. Then we conduct an in-depth systematic analysis and summarize the advantageous scenarios of the quadrants. Based on the analysis, we further propose a novel distributed GBDT system named Vero, which adopts the unexplored composition of vertical partitioning and row-store and suits for many large-scale cases. To validate our analysis empirically, we implement different quadrants in the same code base and compare them under extensive workloads, and finally compare Vero with other state-of-the-art systems over a wide range of datasets. Our theoretical and experimental results provide a guideline on choosing a proper data management policy for a given workload.

A natural gas fired turbine, manufactured by Caterpillar Inc. subsidiary Solar Turbines Inc., runs a compressor at a Williston Basin Interstate Pipeline Co., a subsidiary of MDU Resources Group Inc., natural gas compression station in Bismarck, North Dakota. In the world of oil and natural gas, engineers, geologists, and drilling and production departments tend to get the lion's share of the credit when good things happen, and most of the blame when they don't. That's fair, given the crucial roles these groups of employees play within the thousands of companies that make up the U.S. oil and gas industry. But in recent years, as overall domestic production has risen at a pace no one could have foreseen even five years ago, the credit has begun to shift. These human resources remain indispensable to the success of any company, but the deployment of a raft of advancing technologies has played an ever-advancing role over time in enabling companies to maximize recoveries and profits.

Vero, the controversial app that hopes to take down Instagram, now has more than a million users. The app has shot up the charts in recent days, amid excitement about its promise to avoid the problems of other apps like Facebook and Instagram. But it has run into problems, spending much of the time offline and attracting criticism over its terms and conditions. Vero had initially said that all users after the first million would have to pay a subscription fee to use the app. But it said that restriction is no longer in place "until further notice".