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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:45 | Votes:99

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the seeing-is-believing dept.

The University of Queensland reports:

Mantis shrimp eyes are inspiring the design of new cameras that can detect a variety of cancers and visualise brain activity.

University of Queensland research has found that the shrimp’s compound eyes are superbly tuned to detect polarised light, providing a streamlined framework for technology to mimic.

Professor Justin Marshall, from the Queensland Brain Institute at UQ, said cancerous tissue reflected polarised light differently to surrounding healthy tissue.

“Humans can’t see this, but a mantis shrimp could walk up to it and hit it,” he said.

“We see colour with hues and shades, and objects that contrast – a red apple in a green tree for example – but our research is revealing a number of animals that use polarised light to detect and discriminate between objects.

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @10:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the world's-casino dept.

Jason Clenfield writes in Businessweek that tax returns show that a former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS traded 1.7 trillion yen ($15 Billion) worth of Japanese equities in 2013 -- about half of 1 percent of the value of all the share transactions done by individuals on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The 35-year-old day trader whose name means death in classical Japanese says he made 6 billion yen ($54 Million), after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year. The nickname is a holdover from his gaming days, when he used to crush foes in virtual wrestling rings and online fantasy worlds.

“Games taught me to think fast and stay calm." CIS says he barely got his degree in mechanical engineering, having devoted most of college to the fantasy role-playing game Ultima Online. Holed up in his bedroom, he spent days on end roaming the game’s virtual universe, stockpiling weapons, treasure and food. He calls this an early exercise in building and protecting assets. Wicked keyboard skills were a must. He memorized more than 100 key-stroke shortcuts -- control-A to guzzle a healing potion or shift-S to draw a sword, for example -- and he could dance between them without taking his eyes off the screen. “Some people can do it, some can’t,” he says with a shrug. But the game taught a bigger lesson: when to cut and run. “I was a pretty confident player, but just like in the real world, the more opponents you have, the worse your chances are,” he says. “You lose nothing by running.” That’s how he now plays the stock market. CIS says he bets wrong four out of 10 times. The trick is to sell the losers fast while letting the winners ride. “Self-control is so important. You have to conserve your assets. That’s what insulates you from the downturns and gives you the ammunition to make money.”

posted by janrinok on Monday September 29 2014, @09:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-put-your-left-leg-in,-your-left-leg-out... dept.

ScienceDaily reports:

Researchers say there should be an international database containing the very latest information about organ donations and transplants, so policy makers can make informed decisions on whether to adopt an opt-out or opt-in system.

The call comes after a study [in the UK], carried out by The University of Nottingham, the University of Stirling and Northumbria University, showed that overall an opt-out system might provide a greater number of organs for transplant but many factors can influence the success of either system and a repository of accessible information would help individual countries decide which one would be better for them.

The research published in the online academic journal BioMed Central Medicine (BMC Medicine), is the first international comparison that examines both deceased as well as living organ/transplant rates in opt-in and opt-out systems.

[...] Professor Fergusson argues that it is imperative for transplant organizations to routinely collect data on important organ donation indices -- consent type, procurement procedure, number of intensive care beds and trained surgeons -- and make this publicly available to inform future research and policy recommendations.

posted by janrinok on Monday September 29 2014, @07:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-just-don't-see-it dept.

Inspired perhaps by Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, scientists have recently developed several ways—some simple and some involving new technologies—to hide objects from view. The latest effort, developed at the University of Rochester, not only overcomes some of the limitations of previous devices, but it uses inexpensive, readily available materials in a novel configuration.

“There’ve been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials,” said John Howell, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester. Forgoing the specialized components, Howell and graduate student Joseph Choi developed a combination of four standard lenses that keeps the object hidden as the viewer moves up to several degrees away from the optimal viewing position.

“This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multi-directional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum,” said Choi, a PhD student at Rochester’s Institute of Optics.

http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/watch-rochester-cloak-uses-ordinary-lenses-to-hide-objects-across-continuous-range-of-angles-70592/

posted by martyb on Monday September 29 2014, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the n(a|ur)ture dept.

What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates. In the late 1800s, Francis Galton—founder of the scientific study of intelligence and a cousin of Charles Darwin—analyzed the genealogical records of hundreds of scholars, artists, musicians, and other professionals and found that greatness tends to run in families. For example, he counted more than 20 eminent musicians in the Bach family. (Johann Sebastian was just the most famous.) Galton concluded that experts are “born.” Nearly half a century later, the behaviorist John Watson countered that experts are “made” when he famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents.”

The experts-are-made view has dominated the discussion in recent decades. To test this idea, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues recruited violinists from an elite Berlin music academy and asked them to estimate the amount of time per week they had devoted to deliberate practice for each year of their musical careers. Based on these findings, Ericsson and colleagues argued that prolonged effort, not innate talent, explained differences between experts and novices. These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” ( http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ ) in his book Outliers.

However, recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201516 ) to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.

In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

[Related Abstract]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=(Macnamara+and+Hambrick)

posted by LaminatorX on Monday September 29 2014, @04:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the echo-chamber dept.

Link is: http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7254

This article describes the research done by Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft on how sharing political articles on social sites, namely Facebook and Twitter, affect the way you see the world.

Perhaps the good old newsfeed style of stuff is where it's at, while ones that are sorted using some magical rating (I'm looking at you Facebook, Reddit, etc.) and don't give you an option for chronological order are a bit broken! Don't forget to sort by time SN!

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the wasn't-looking,-too-busy-listening dept.

Time reports on statements made by President Obama during an interview:

When asked about comments by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has said the U.S. overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi military to fight the extremist group, Obama said, “That’s true,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s absolutely true.”

Obama had already admitted that the rise of ISIS took the U.S. by surprise. “I think that there is no doubt that their advance, their movement over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the expectations of policymakers both in and outside of Iraq,”

Statement by the President on Iraq: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/09/statement-president-iraq

posted by LaminatorX on Monday September 29 2014, @01:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the One-word:-"plastics" dept.

Can Google’s winning ways be applied to all kinds of businesses? The authors of “How Google Works,” ( http://www.howgoogleworks.net/ ) Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, and Jonathan Rosenberg, a former senior product manager at Google, firmly believe that they can.

The critical ingredient, they argue in their new book, is to build teams, companies and corporate cultures around people they call “smart creatives.” These are digital-age descendants of yesterday’s “knowledge workers,” a term coined in 1959 by Peter Drucker, the famed management theorist.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/the-google-formula-for-success/

Do people of SN agree that such success can be replicated in diverse environments, diverse cultures? Or, is Google's success one of a kind?

posted by LaminatorX on Monday September 29 2014, @12:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Teddy-Ruxbot dept.

A pair of engineer fathers have created a plush toy robot that teaches science to kids. Now they're on Kickstarter to raise the money to bring it to market. They are currently around half-way to their $60,000 goal with 10 days to go. So, they really need your help.

TROBO links with an app running on iOS 7 or greater to tell its stories, though they've promised an Android version if they reach their stretch goal of $100,000.

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the justice-is-blind dept.

Common Dreams reports:

Despite store surveillance footage that showed a young black man, John Crawford III, casually talking on his cell phone and clearly not threatening other shoppers in an Ohio Walmart store when he was shot and killed, a grand jury on Wednesday announced it would not indict the police officer, Sean Williams, for firing on the man.

The video, which prosecutors had kept out of the public domain until after the grand jury made its decision, was released shortly after the announcement not to indict the officer was made and shows that though Crawford was holding an unpackaged air rifle that he picked up on one of the store's shelves, he was shot from the side while talking on the phone and appeared to be given no warning or understand that police were even on the scene.

Democracy Now! has more details:

a caller[...]said on the 911 call--maybe he was trying to fill in some gaps in what he saw, but he very clearly tells the 911 operator--"I'm in a Wal-Mart. There's a guy in here with an assault rifle. He's loading it, and he's pointing it at people." And this is what is communicated to the police officers. But one officer even calls back in, and he's basically, "Wait a minute. Are you saying he's actually pointing it at people?" And they say, "Yes." And the law is real clear. When you're a police officer responding to the scene, it's not what is true or not true, it's what you reasonably believe to be true. And there's no reason for these officers not to believe that's what's going on.

[...]While the caller, Ronald Ritchie, claims Crawford is pointing the gun at people, the surveillance footage shows he's pointing the gun at the ground, occasionally swinging it and prodding supplies on a shelf in front of him. Ritchie later acknowledged to The Guardian, quote, "At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody."

[...]Ohio has open-carry laws [...which] means that you can carry a gun around openly in the state of Ohio. You can carry a gun into Wal-Mart. So, in fact, even if he did have the gun in the store, he was not breaking the law. These laws do not protect black people, because police officers are not trained to see black people as human.

[...]in Ohio, we know Mark Piepmeier as the prosecutor who failed to bring justice in the Timothy Thomas trial, which, before the events in Ferguson, was the last time there was an uprising in an American city around race relations. We know him as the prosecutor who sent the inmates in Lucasville prison uprising to death row. When he was appointed, it was clear that this was not a good sign for what would happen in Greene County, and it was more fuel to the fire in terms of trying to bring the Department of Justice in to open their own investigation.

[...]the last time that Beavercreek, Ohio, was in national news, they were trying to keep black people out of their city, trying to keep black people from shopping in their mall, trying to keep the black people who work in their mall from having an easy access through public transit. You know, Greene County is a place where, in the '30s and '40s and even before that, many Southerners were moving up for job opportunities, working at the Air Force base in the area. And those mentalities and attitudes are still prevalent.

Related:
Police Shoot Man Dead in Wal-Mart for Carrying BB Gun from Toy Aisle
Update: Video Shows Police Shot Man As He Leaned On Toy Gun

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @09:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the highly-charged dept.

We may finally have a breakthrough in battery technology to drastically improve the life-cycle and safety of lithium-ion batteries.

Researchers at Siemens, in a project funded by the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, have developed a new kind of battery chemistry promising to eliminate both issues at the same time. In a published statement, Siemens says “it is now possible to create lithium-ion batteries that are very safe, even when they are overcharged, and that last for a much higher number of charge-discharge cycles (20,000).”

To accomplish this, the company uses novel lithium titanate anodes and lithium iron phosphate cathodes together in combination with new battery chemistry, the composition of which remains undisclosed.

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @07:18AM   Printer-friendly

An online fundraiser for legendary phone phreaker John Draper, better known as Cap'n Crunch, has passed its target $5,000 in just three days. Draper himself doesn't even know who started the fundraiser, but the money is intended to help with his medical bills. According to a recent blog post, he suffers from both degenerative spine disease and C. Diff, an inflammation of the colon.

In conjunction with others in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Draper figured out that a toy whistle given out in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal emitted a tone at 2600 Hertz. By pure coincidence, that happened to be the tone AT&T used to reset its trunk lines. As a result, Draper became a legend in the nascent world of phone phreaking, a predecessor to early personal computer hacking.

posted by n1 on Monday September 29 2014, @05:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-time-to-grow-up dept.

The Guardian has has published an op-ed piece calling for college fraternities to be banned.

Armstrong reminded me of what I hear on campus visits myself – that fraternities are hotbeds for all sorts of risk beyond sexual assault: there’s also alcoholism, alcohol poisoning, people falling out of windows and dangerous hazing incidents. She insists that frats “vary tremendously” in terms of how sexually dangerous they are – traditionally African American frats, gender-inclusive frats and multicultural frats are not as threatening as those populated by mostly-white, economically-entitled students, for example – but when you look at the overall risk fraternities create for students on campus, “reforming or preserving these organizations doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Armstrong said.

I don't think that fraternities need to be eradicated from universities and colleges. I think that more women just need to be more aware about their environment. Stay with people you know. Watch your drink or better yet BYOB. If you feel uncomfortable, then leave the situation. I had an awesome undergrad experience and I even lived on campus. It was a time for exploration for me both sexually and drug-wise. The type of behavior that can be found in fraternities aren't just relegated to fraternity houses; they are also found in dorm parties, house parties, and other off-campus housing.

Be wise. Be safe. You are on the verge of adulthood. Don't be stupid! What do you think?

posted by azrael on Monday September 29 2014, @02:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the lifetime-of-regret dept.

Rachel Feltman writes in the Washington Post that if you've never gotten a tattoo, you might think that a tattoo needle works by "injecting" ink under the skin which is true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Tattoo artists don't simply inject ink from some chamber in the machine into your skin. They dip the needles into pots of ink, the same way another artist would dip a brush. The ink is actually held between the needles and the purpose is the needles is to puncture the skin. "There are hundreds of tiny holes leading down to your dermis — the layer of skin between the epidermis (outer layer) and subcutaneous tissues — the ink between the needles is drawn into them by capillary action," writes Kyle Hill. "In short, the surface tension and forces holding the ink together encourages the ink to seep into the holes left by the needles."

So how does tattoo removal work? Although dermabrasion (where skin is "sanded" to remove the surface and middle layers), cryosurgery (where the area is frozen prior to its removal), and excision (where the dermatologic surgeon removes the tattoo with a scalpel and closes the wound with stitches) were the preferred methods before the 1980s, today lasers have become the standard treatment for tattoo removal because they offer a bloodless, low risk, effective alternative with minimal side effects. The type of laser used to remove a tattoo depends on the tattoo's pigment colors. (Yellow and green are the hardest colors to remove; blue and black are the easiest.) By producing short pulses of intense light that pass harmlessly through the top layers of the skin to be selectively absorbed by the tattoo pigment, the laser energy causes the tattoo pigment to fragment into smaller particles that are then removed by the body's immune system. Side effects of laser procedures are generally few but may include hyperpigmentation, or an abundance of color in the skin at the treatment site, and hypopigmentation, where the treated area lacks normal skin color. Other possible side effects include infection of the site, lack of complete pigment removal and a 5 percent chance of permanent scarring.

According to John Tierney the choice to get a tattoo that is later regretted is related to the end-of-history illusion, in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.” Teenagers and adults of all ages know that their tastes have changed regularly over the years before the current moment, but believe that their tastes will somehow not continue to grow and mature in the future. As a result, they wrongly believe that any tattoo that appeals to them today will always appeal to them in the future.

posted by azrael on Monday September 29 2014, @01:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-happens-if-it-strikes-twice dept.

Ferris Jabr writes in Outside Magazine that every year, more than 500 Americans are struck by lightning. Roughly 90 percent of them will survive but those that survive will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads.

For example Michael Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing before he was struck by lightning. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance. “I don’t work. I can’t work. My memory’s fried, and I don’t have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second. I walk and talk and play golf—but I still fall down. I’m in pain most of the time. I can’t walk 100 yards without stopping. I look like a drunk.”

Lightning also dramatically altered Utley's personality. “It made me a mean, ornery son of a bitch. I’m short-tempered. Nothing is fun anymore. I am just not the same person my wife married." Utley created a website devoted to educating people about preventing lightning injury and started regularly speaking at schools and doing guest spots on televised weather reports.

Mary Ann Cooper, professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of the few medical doctors who have attempted to investigate how lightning alters the brain’s circuitry. According to Cooper the evidence suggests that lightning injuries are, for the most part, injuries to the brain, the nervous system, and the muscles.

Lightning can ravage or kill cells, but it can also leave a trail of much subtler damage and Cooper and other researchers speculate that chronic issues are the result of lightning scrambling each individual survivor’s unique internal circuitry. "Those who attempt to return to work often find they are unable to carry out their former functions and after a few weeks, when coworkers get weary of 'covering' for them, they either are put on disability (if they are lucky) or fired," writes Cooper. "Survivors often find themselves isolated because friends, family and physicians do not recognize their disability or feel they are 'faking'. (PDF)"