SoylentNews

lhsi writes:

Air pollution in many of the worlds cities is breaching guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Its survey of 1,600 cities in 91 countries revealed that nearly 90% of people in urban centres breathe air that fails to meet levels deemed safe.

The WHO says that about half of the world's urban population is exposed to pollution at least 2.5 times higher than it recommends.

Air quality was poorest in Asia, followed by South America and Africa.

Angry Jesus writes:

Larry Lessig is trying to start a SuperPAC dedicated to reforming campaign finance laws. He's using a crowd-funding approach with matching levels at the $1M and $5M marks. After less than a week, the project is already halfway to the $1M milestone.

lhsi writes:

The high rate of incarceration of black males in the USA is affecting research as anyone imprisoned has to be dropped from any medical studies they are participating in.

During the past three decades, high rates of incarceration of black men may have accounted for up to 65% of the loss of follow-up among this group. Conditions such as cardiovascular disease and sickle cell disease are more common among black men than in white men, and have complex factors that influence illness and death. This makes it important for analysts to have access to a large number of cases so that they can draw statistically significant conclusions, say the researchers.

"A black man who begins a research study is less likely to follow up because he is statistically more likely to be jailed or imprisoned during the study than his white counterpart," said the study's first author Emily Wang, M.D., assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine. The impact of incarceration on health outcome studies was far less among white men, white women, and black women.

jackb_guppy writes:

Been working on restoring some old machines. Why? Because I have them! Along with the 'death' of XP, others may be in the same boat, wanting to reuse a machine that is no longer current.

Looking for a newer Linux that will support not having PAE and pre-i686 processors. The machine I am currently working on is an I-Opener (winchip-c6 200Mhz, 128MB, 20G, 1x USB1, NO floppy, NO CD-Rom, NO network. I do have USB Ethernet device (old Belkin) that works, but only after OS fires up and only at 1.1Mb! Windows ME currently works along with FreeDOS 1, Grub4dos and Plop. With these I can get thumb drives to work so I can move Operating Systems and ISOs to a partition and boot. I also use VM on another machine to build base images and use Clonezilla to copy the partition directly to the pulled hard drive.

kwerle writes:

GitHub announced today that the editor it has been working on is now open source.

Today, we're excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Atom under the MIT License. We see Atom as a perfect complement to GitHub's primary mission of building better software by working together. Atom is a long-term investment, and GitHub will continue to support its development with a dedicated team going forward. But we also know that we can't achieve our vision for Atom alone. As Emacs and Vim have demonstrated over the past three decades, if you want to build a thriving, long-lasting community around a text editor, it has to be open source.

I have been using the Atom beta as my primary editor for the past few weeks and have been very happy with it.

It is currently only available for the mac, but it is based on Chromium and Node, and "Windows and Linux releases are on the roadmap."

takochan and Angry Jesus wrote:

The Obama administration announced plans to permit the spouses of certain, "highly-skilled" H1B visa holders the right to work too. The backlog of green-card applications for H1B holders can be as much as 11 years. If the goal is to attract and keep more high-quality talent within the USA (rather than H1B off-shoring), it seems like streamlining the "green card" permanent residence process would be more effective. Making the H1B visa a mandatory path to a green card within a very short period, such as 2 years might be a much better way to encourage highly talented individuals to stay in the country compared to requiring more than a decade of uncertainty.

Some claim that this will actually have the perverse effect of enabling IT salaries to fall even further. The New York Times article notes there are representatives who question the wisdom of the proposal and that there is a 60-day comment window.

AnonTechie writes:

Billboards could do more than just advertise, if scientists at the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Peru have their way. While UTEC's earlier billboard produced drinkable water, its latest creation scrubs the air free of pollutants. According to the team, a single billboard can do the work of 1,200 trees, purifying 100,000 cubic meters (3.5 million cubic feet) of air daily in crowded cities. The University has installed its first air-purifying billboard near a construction zone in Lima, a city that's famous for having the worst air quality in all of South America. The billboard works by combining polluted air with water, using basic thermodynamic principles to actively dissolve the pollutants (such as bacteria, dust and germs) in water to release fresh air. The scientists claim that their billboard filtered 489,000 cubic meters of air within one week in March, scrubbing it free of 99 percent of its airborne bacteria. The effects of the billboard can be experienced, the team says, within a 5-block radius, benefiting both construction workers and the area's residents. The extracted pollutants are held for analysis, presumably with a view to creating more effective billboards in the future.

The original article in Spanish from UTEC has not been translated into English as of the time of this writing.

[Editor's Note: the 100,000 and 489,000 figures are copied verbatim from the second linked article.]

Angry Jesus writes:

In light of two recent studies, expecting parents might consider doing a little social engineering when naming their children. New evidence suggests if you're trying to convey intelligence the more middle initials in your name, the smarter people will assume you to be.

Also, if you want to be trusted more, use a first name that everyone can pronounce. That effect seems to be in line with another study (not peer-reviewed) indicating short first names correlate with higher earnings.

Perhaps one should combine the two and just use initials for all but the surname, like J.P. Morgan?

AnonTechie links to an article:

Two sets of emails obtained by Al Jazeera America under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that Google's cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA) may have been less coerced than the company has let on. The emails date back to June 2012 and chronicle communications between NSA director General Keith Alexander and Google executives Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin. In one email, Alexander refers to a previous meeting between NSA and Google officials and then invites Schmidt to a four-hour "topic-specific" and "decision-oriented" classified briefing on mobile threats and security. "Google's participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential," Alexander said in the missive.

Read the rest at computerworld.com.

Papas Fritas writes:

Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post that according to the government's newest national assessment of climate change, Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. "For a long time we have perceived climate change as an issue that's distant, affecting just polar bears or something that matters to our kids," says Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and lead co-author of the changing climate chapter of the assessment. "This shows it's not just in the future; it matters today. Many people are feeling the effects." The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. "Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation."

The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. "What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from burning coal, oil, and gas, with additional contributions from forest clearing and some agricultural practices."

Chaos writes:

In a response perceived to have been pre-empted by the sanctions applied by VISA and MasterCard against Russian banks, President Putin has passed a law requiring a $3.8 Billion security payment from the card providers.

The payment is required to cover the cost of 2-days worth of payment processing for the entire country and to help fund the creation of a new Russian national payment system that hopes to compete with the two U.S. companies.

Are we finally seeing the sanctions fallout which Visa and Mastercard previously feared?

taylorvich writes:

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.

In a statement to CNET, Subsentio President Steve Bock said that the measure provides a "safe harbor" for Internet companies as long as the interception techniques are "'good enough' solutions approved by the attorney general."
Another option that would be permitted, Bock said, is if companies "supply the government with proprietary information to decode information" obtained through a wiretap or other type of lawful interception, rather than "provide a complex system for converting the information into an industry standard format."

http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready -web-sites-now/

Papas Fritas writes:

After the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s, the FBI opened 5,490 criminal investigations, 1,100 people were prosecuted, and 839 were convicted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. But Jesse Eisinger writes in the NYT that the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker, Kareem Serageldin, to 30 months in jail. Many assume that federal authorities simply lacked the guts to go after powerful Wall Street bankers but according to Eisinger, the truth is more complicated. "During the past decade, the Justice Department suffered a series of corporate prosecutorial fiascos, which led to critical changes in how it approached white-collar crime. The department began to focus on reaching settlements rather than seeking prison sentences, which over time unintentionally deprived its ranks of the experience needed to win trials against the most formidable law firms."

From 2004 to 2012, the Justice Department reached 242 deferred and nonprosecution agreements with corporations, compared with 26 in the previous 12 years, and while companies paid huge sums in the settlements, several veteran Justice Department officials say that these settlements emboldened defense lawyers. More crucially, they allowed the Justice Department's lawyers to "succeed" without learning how to develop important prosecutorial skills. The erosion of the department's actual trial skills soon became apparent. In November 2009, the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn lost the first criminal case of the crisis against two Bear Stearns executives accused of misleading investors. The prosecutors rushed into trial, failing to prepare for the exculpatory emails uncovered by the defense team. After two days, the jury acquitted the two money managers. "For sure, it put a chill" on investigations says one former prosecutor. "Politicos care about winning and losing." Federal prosecutors have their own explanation for how only one Wall Street executive landed in jail in the wake of the financial crisis, says Eisinger. "The cases were complex to investigate and would have been infernally difficult to explain to juries."

Angry Jesus writes:

Less than a year after the FBI shut down the original, the new Silk Road 2.0 darkweb marketplace has surpassed it in size with 5% more listings. The new site's success seems to be the result of an effort to build trust with users. Other sites that blossomed in the vacuum left by the shut down have had problems with integrity, one of them absconding with $44M worth of customer bitcoins. But when Silk Road 2.0 suffered a security breach earlier this year, they pledged to make their customers whole.

AnonTechie writes:

A nature.com story reports that humans and squids evolved the same eyes using the same genes.

Eyes and wings are among the most stunning innovations evolution has created. Remarkably these features have evolved multiple times in different lineages of animals. For instance, the avian ancestors of birds and the mammalian ancestors of bats both evolved wings independently, in an example of convergent evolution. The same happened for the eyes of squid and humans. Exactly how such convergent evolution arises is not always clear. In a new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers have found that, despite belonging to completely different lineages, humans and squid evolved through tweaks to the same gene.