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cubancigar11 writes:

I bet everyone of you will remember what the 'hot coffee lawsuit' was. An elderly woman had sued McDonald for serving her such hot coffee it resulted in 3rd degree burns and millions in punitive damages. A lot of us might also remember it as the poster child of frivolous lawsuits. Some of us might also have taken actions according to our understanding of this issue. A nice summary at Priceonomics reminds us how the 7th amendment has eroded over the two decades following that incident.

carguy writes:

Ever wondered if you've hurt your ears? Too much rock 'n roll, or too many loud race cars? Just discovered this over-the-phone test which is offered free this month in USA, call 866-223-7575.

More info at nationalhearingtest.org:

The critical difference between the NHT and other telephone tests is that the NHT uses digits in noise, rather than pure tones. Previous objections to telephone-administered tests were based on the unreliability of pure-tone tests administered over the telephone. Because the NHT measures an SNR threshold, rather than one based on the absolute level of tones, the NHT can produce a reliable screening measure of hearing, despite the differences in sound levels produced by different telephones.

Scientists at VU University Medical Center in the Netherlands developed the first telephone hearing screenings based on spoken digits in noise. The Dutch National Hearing Test was introduced in 2004 and has since served as a model for similar tests throughout Europe and Australia. The United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Spain, and Australia have developed and introduced their own versions of a telephone hearing screening, all using digit sequences presented in noise. The growing popularity of this form of screening test is due in part to its demonstrated validity and reliability. Testing by telephone is also a convenient, inexpensive way to determine whether a person's functional hearing is within the normal range.

AnonTechie writes:

Why you should not use GIFs to communicate science:

In the age of listicles, the life of a science journalist gets harder and harder. Explaining research clearly and accurately while holding onto readers' attention has never been easy. Doing so when there is a BuzzFeed quiz in the next tab can seem almost impossible.

So if you can't beat them, should you join them? The temptation to sex up science articles with attention-grabbing gimmicks has never been greater. On the face of it, it even looks like a good idea: flashy GIFs break up blocks of text, add flavour and humour, and keep the reader reading. But what does science have to say about this tactic?

Journalists are not the first group of professional communicators to give in to the siren song of shiny graphics. Teachers and other educators have tried to spice up dry lectures with all sorts of flashy tactics over the years. During my own education, I have seen colleagues fight biomedical rap battles and had chemically-propelled soda bottles launched at my head.

Papas Fritas writes:

Rhonda Schwartz reports that master counterfeiter Frank Bourassa has been allowed to walk free after turning over a huge quantity of fake US $20 bills that authorities say are "not detectable by the naked eye." "I'm safe, absolutely," says Bourassa after paying a $1,500 fine in Montreal, Canada, and spending only a month and a half in jail after Canadian authorities agreed that they would not extradite him to the United States for prosecution. "They can't do nothing about that." Bourassa's fake $20 first showed up in Troy, Michigan in 2010 and US and Canadian authorities spent almost four years tracking the source to Bourassa. "To detect the counterfeit on this one is very difficult," says RCMP investigator Dan Michaud. Bourassa says he spent two years studying the details about currency security on the website of the US Secret Service to learn how to produce his fake money. Although special security features were added to US $100 bills in 2010, security features added to the $20 in 2003 have not been updated since then. US bills are "the easiest of them all" to counterfeit says Bourassa, because they are not printed on polymer. "Even third world countries in Africa have polymer bills already."

The RCMP and the US Secret Service raided Bourassa's home, but he still had a card to play because authorities did not know where the remainder of his special paper and fake twenties was hidden. In the end, Bourassa agreed to turn over the remaining fakes and paper in return for a deal his lawyer worked out with Canadian prosecutors that let him walk free. Bourassa regards his accomplishment as a complete victory over the United States government. "It was, like, screw you."

Angry Jesus writes:

Proving what drug legalization advocates have been saying for decades, the rather minor steps towards marijuana legalization in the US have caused the wholesale price in the Sinaloa state of northern Mexico to collapse from $100/kilo to less than $25/kilo. For the first time in recent history, the farmers there have stopped all new marijuana plantings.

But the farmers are not willing to go quietly. They've diversified into growing heroin poppies instead as wholesale prices have basically doubled since 2012.

That same pricing increase has been "filling the coffers of the Taliban" who also grow poppies in Afghanistan. Will the competition from Mexican farmers end up weakening the Taliban resurgence? Perhaps canceling the war on drugs is the easiest way to win the war on terror.

AnonTechie writes:

AT&T claims common carrier rules would ruin the whole Internet:

AT&T today urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid reclassifying broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service, which is something network neutrality advocates are asking the FCC to do. Reclassification would open broadband providers up to common carrier rules under Title II of the Communications Act, similar to regulations that have covered our phone system since 1934. Recent calls for reclassification of broadband stem from a federal appeals court ruling that the FCC could not impose strict network neutrality rules, such as prohibitions against blocking Web services and Internet fast lanes, without first declaring the providers to be common carriers. AT&T's anti-regulatory view isn't surprising. It's already arguing that the Public Switched Telephone Network should be shut down and replaced with largely unregulated Internet-based voice service.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/att-cla ims-common-carrier-rules-would-ruin-the-whole-inte rnet/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/223147218/May-9-Ex-Parte -Letter

Angry Jesus writes:

In Northern Georgia, Davida Kaye Caylor has been convicted of making false statements to a law enforcement officer because her son posted a photo to her facebook wall of his bruised and swollen hand that has been deemed a fake. During the trial, the arresting officer testified that Caylor did not give the photo to the officer and that Caylor was never questioned about the photo. Instead, he was shown the photo by the school nurse who also reported examining the boy's swollen (but not necessarily bruised) hand within an hour of the injury.

Caylor's sentence is 100 hours of community service, $1.5K in fines, 3 years probation and a permanent criminal record.

AnonTechie writes:

Scientists develop first completely covert communication system with lasers:

As computing power continues to increase, previously unbreakable forms of encryption have crumbled. Now, though, we appear to be on the verge of what may be truly unbreakable quantum encryption. It's possible in the not too distant future no one will be able to spy on a message secured with these advanced methods no matter how long they hammer at it. Researchers are now looking to take things one step further and completely camouflage a message so no one even knows that a message was sent in the first place. If you can't even risk an eavesdropper knowing that a message has been sent, let alone what it says, you need a covert communication system. That's the idea at the heart of a new experiment conducted at the University of Massachusetts. Researchers there have developed a method of using photons to make a message invisible to everyone but the intended recipient.

The covert system relies on a technique called pulse position modulation, which is actually much more simple than you'd expect. It involves dividing a second, minute, or other unit of time into discrete bands, each of which correspond to a different letter or symbol. This code would have to be shared with the intended recipient ahead of time, which is perhaps the most notable flaw with the whole scheme. Once that's done, through, a series of pulses could be delivered like optical Morse code to convey a message.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182142-scientis ts-develop-first-completely-covert-communication-s ystem-with-lasers

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7347

Appalbarry writes:

File under "Darwin at work." Washington University (in St Louis, Missouri) brought in a petting zoo to relieve student stress during exam week. So far so good.

Problem was Boo-Boo the bear cub, who managed to nip as in bite hard enough to break the skin eighteen people before anyone thought that maybe Boo-Boo wasn't the best choice for handling.

If you thought "rabies," you are not alone.

As the Worms and Germs blog put it:

You'd think someone would clue into there being an issue after, say, a few bites. Once it hit a dozen, I would have thought anyone with common sense would get concerned. But 18??? Did they even pull Boo Boo out of the petting zoo by then, or did he just get tired of biting people?

lhsi writes:

A look at intergroup judgement between different groups of non-meat eaters (health vegetarians, ethical vegetarians, health vegans and ethical vegans) has found that there is some cross-group hostility. Ethical vegetarians (who are vegetarians for ethical reasons) gave more unfavourable evaluations of health vegetarians (who are vegetarians for health reasons) compared to vegans, whereas vegans did not distinguish between the two sub-groups of vegetarians.

Ethical vegetarians evaluated health vegetarians less favorably than vegans. On a superficial reading, it may appear strange that ethical vegetarians would elevate a group that follows a less similar diet to their own over one that follows a more similar diet. However, it appears that for ethical vegetarians, vegetarianism is about more than the behavior of avoiding meat, but that one's motives are of central importance.

In conclusion, the present research adds to a growing body of literature that despite their shared status as non-meat eating minorities, vegetarians and vegans do make evaluative distinctions between each other. Overall, ethical vegetarians evaluated themselves less similarly to health vegetarians than they did vegans, a group they may assume holds a similar worldview, while ethical vegans in turn rated ethical vegetarians closer to the ingroup than they rated health vegetarians. Health vegetarians were similar to the other groups in exhibiting ingroup bias, but they showed little differentiation between ethical vegetarians and vegans. While a bit of an oversimplification, it appears, then, that what is most important among non-meat eating minorities at least in terms of perceptions of others is one's worldview and philosophical framework. The specific diet chosen to embody one's beliefs seems less critical in these intergroup perceptions. It is understandable that outsiders would focus on the observable behavior of what individuals consume and incorrectly assume that diet is the most important dimension of their non-omnivore status; after all, they likely do not have access to the interior motives of others. However, to those abstaining from meat, the internal motives may constitute a much larger basis of self-definition and in defining others.

AnonTechie writes:

Detection devices: how a 'sensor society' quietly takes over

As our cars, phones and computers get "smarter" they and the companies that provide them know a lot more about us than they used to. A large part of this data collection stems from the fact that these devices act as sensors, collecting information we'd probably rather keep to ourselves. This explosion of sensing devices and the growing embrace of "big data" logic means that we are creating a sensor society: a society which demands that all sensor-derived data is collected, stored and used down the track. So what are the implications of a world populated by sensors?

http://theconversation.com/detection-devices-how-a -sensor-society-quietly-takes-over-26089

c0lo writes:

International Business Times reports of a startup (called the Disease Diagnostic Group) raised more than $200,000 from investors interested in their new device, capable of diagnosing malaria using magnets and laser light. The devices may be small enough to keep in one hand, cost as low as $300 and have a claimed accuracy of 93% even for infected but asymptomatic persons

The device uses the discovery, published in 2008 by Dave M. Newman and his Exeter University colleagues, on a way to exploit the magneto-optical behaviour of "haemozoin" (also called malaria pigment) a crystalline substance excreted by malaria parasites. When the parasites turn hemoglobin into malaria pigment, it becomes magnetic, unlike any other substances in the human body. Placing an infected blood sample in a magnetic field forces all the crystals to align with the magnetic field. Their collective effect on a polarized light (such as a laser) reveals malaria infection.

Well, my question: with 219 million documented cases of malaria in 2010, why does SN-ers think it needed more than 5 years for the discovery to reach the implementation stage?

Subsentient writes:

I was digging through the piles of garbage in my server today and found a rather large program I had written when I barely knew C. It was so bad, it naively reimplemented strlen(), had mixed and inconsistent case for identifiers, and it had a comment next to a const char *const saying /*constant pointers*/, to name a few. It was so bad, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or vomit, or perhaps both at the same time.

So, I ask you, what is the worst code you ever wrote? Were you a noob? Were you exhausted? I'm interested to see what soylenters have buried deep, deep in their drives.

edIII writes:

Splitting a log requires a surprising amount of force, but Finnish inventor Heikki Karna has invented a new kind of axe that makes it much easier and safer.

The Vipukirves does what the name implies, assuming you speak Finnish. It's essentially acting as a lever instead of a wedge (Vipukirves translates as Leveraxe).

So what makes a lever different than a wedge in this scenario? The Vipukirves still has a sharpened blade at the end, but it has a projection coming off the side that shifts the center of gravity away from the middle. At the point of impact, the edge is driven into the wood and slows down, but the kinetic energy contained in the 1.9 kilogram axe head continues down and to the side (because of the odd center of gravity). The rotational energy actually pushes the wood apart like a lever. A single strike can open an 8 cm gap in a log, which is more than enough to separate it.

YouTube video demonstration shows most logs being split into a dozen or more small pieces of kindling within 30-45 seconds by hand.

Angry Jesus writes:

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is a recent protocol design that tries to address problems with TCP in the modern network environment like hand-offs from cellular data to wifi. Previous attempts to improve on TCP have had limited success, some of them breaking TCP's critical congestion-control functionality and others, like SCTP, having adoption problems because nobody wants to go first.

In a nutshell, MPTCP works by layering on top TCP so path-based congestion-control still works and all the software infrastructure for TCP handling is also maintained. The design goals for MPTCP are:

• It should be capable of using multiple network paths for a single connection.
• It must be able to use the available network paths at least as well as regular TCP, but without starving TCP.
• It must be as usable as regular TCP for existing applications.
• Enabling MPTCP must not prevent connectivity on a path where regular TCP works.

A FreeBSD implementation is under development and linux sources are currently available and packaged with APT.