lhsi writes:

Exposure to a bad smell increased endorsement of socially conservative attitudes related to sexuality. When in a room with a bad odour, participants exhibited more conservative attitudes compared to those in a control room without a bad odour.

These data are consistent with theory delineated by Tybur and colleagues [13], which argues that disgust functions to decrease the occurrence (both in the self and society) of sexual behaviors that are perceived as increasing risk of pathogen transmission.

When disgust is evoked, the behavioral immune system engages avoidance to prevent infection (e.g., less interpersonal contact) and appears to moralize sexual conduct in ways that underlie conservative values of purity and sanctity. As seen in the results of our study, it is possible that exposure to a disgusting odorant caused increased feelings of disgust, which in turn activated the harm avoidance system and motivated a desire for purity (cleanliness). Once these two systems were activated, it is possible that participants began to adopt attitudes that they perceived as decreasing social harm and/or increasing moral purity.

In the research presented here, exposure to a disgusting odor caused greater endorsement of conservative views, including: rejecting gay marriage, restricting sex to marriage, disapproving of the use of pornography, and increased beliefs in Biblical truth. Odor induced conservative shifts concerning gay marriage were particularly robust.

AnonTechie writes:

The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads:

What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world's most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?

According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations Washington is full of them that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization's Web site.

The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.

The report can be found here. (PDF)

AnonTechie writes:

Flexible super-capacitor raises bar for volumetric energy density:

Scientists have taken a large step toward making a fiber-like energy storage device that can be woven into clothing and power wearable medical monitors, communications equipment or other small electronics.

The device is a supercapacitor — a cousin to the battery. This one packs an interconnected network of graphene and carbon nanotubes so tightly that it stores energy comparable to some thin-film lithium batteries — an area where batteries have traditionally held a large advantage.

The product's developers, engineers and scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, Tsinghua University in China, and Case Western Reserve University in the United States, believe the storage capacity by volume (called volumetric energy density) is the highest reported for carbon-based microscale supercapacitors to date: 6.3 microwatt hours per cubic millimeter.

The abstract can be found here (full paper is paywalled).
Journal article from the Royal Society of Chemistry (PDF).

You know, this is probably one of the hardest things I've had to write since we went live. My first few attempts just lead to writer's block and frustration, so I tried to take a different tack with this and do it the way I usually do my write-ups for anything; by the seat of my pants. The staff have poked and prodded my early attempts, and I think we're ready to open this up to everyone to add their two cents in as we work towards a final version.

Since we've gone live almost three months ago (yeash, time flies), we've already had our fair share of debates, strife, and conflict, yet at the end of the day we remain operational with an involved community that keeps growing day after day. As I continue my relocation to NH, we're getting scary close to the point we're going to need to start drafting the bylaws and operating principles for this site. One of the pressing questions that have been asked time and time again is, "What will we be?" I'm ready to give you that answer.

Ethanol-fueled writes:

The Wall Street Journal reports that, On Nov. 1 — three days before Election Day — the popular Internet Tax Freedom Act signed into law in 1998 and renewed 3 times since is due to expire.

The Internet Tax Freedom Act prohibits state and local governments from imposing burdens online that don't exist offline. Multiple jurisdictions can't tax the same online transaction — a critical consumer protection in a country with more than 9,600 taxing authorities. The law also bans email taxes and new taxes on Internet access services.

But in a few months customers may begin receiving notices from their Internet providers that new taxes are on the way, due to the renewal of the policy being held hostage by lobbyists for giant retailers. Since the biggest retailers already collect sales taxes on purchases both online and off, they want to impose a greater tax burden on their smaller competitors.

Senators already voted last year to rewrite the rules of interstate commerce when they approved the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would force Web merchants to collect for all of America's taxing authorities. Even if one favors additional tax collections on e-commerce — which most Americans do not — why should this controversial idea be used to destroy a successful policy on which most Americans agree?

AnonTechie and lhsi wrote:

Inmarsat offers free airline tracking:

UK satellite operator Inmarsat is to offer a free, basic tracking service to all the world's passenger airliners. The offer follows the case of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared without trace on 8 March. It was very brief electronic "pings" from Inmarsat equipment on the lost plane that prompted investigators to look for wreckage in the Indian Ocean. Inmarsat says the free service it is offering would carry definitive positional information. It would see a plane determine its location using GPS and then transmit that data together with a heading, speed and altitude over Inmarsat's global network of satellites every 15 minutes. "Our equipment is on 90% of the world's wide-body jets already. This is an immediate fix for the industry at no cost to the industry," Inmarsat senior vice-president Chris McLaughlin told BBC News.

dmc writes:

ARS Technica reports that the Obama administration has barred some government employees, past and present, from discussing Snowden related news reports in public or even amongst their family.

Personally I'm appalled at this truly Orwellian move, though jaded enough not to be be terribly surprised. Still, beyond it's obvious Orwellian 'unspeak' like 'evilness', it seems to be monumentally stupid. My first instinct is that it provides a way for those who oppose the modern surveillance architecture to easily compile a list of those alleged three percent or so of the population that have such secret access. While I may be a nice enough guy to only want to target that three percent with extra attempts at education and exposure to persuasive artwork, I suspect there are less restrained dissidents out there.

Bytram writes:

For those of you in the United States, Sunday was Mother's Day. It got me thinking about my relationship with my mother and of other people's relationships with their's. I wrote this Sunday morning and it didn't make it onto SN in time. I offer it [with slight temporal modifications] as it was originally written:

I have no masterful prose to offer here. Rather, I'd like to extend an opportunity for the community to share their memorable experiences. A time when you especially felt supported or nurtured or challenged.

In my case, my Mom passed away several years ago. On Mother's Day I especially feel the loss of the exceedingly gentle and yet tough woman who sacrificed greatly so that I might have a chance at a good life. She taught me manners. To say "Please" and "Thank-you". She encouraged me to do my homework, sometimes at the threat of losing certain privileges. When I was just a few years old and puking my guts out from some illness, she sat by me gently stroking my back, encouraged me to have some flat Coca Cola and saltines to give me strength, and applied cool compresses to my forehead to help alleviate my fever. She offered perspective and gentleness when I was getting over my first childhood crush, when I failed my first try at my driver's license, and when I faced career changes in my life.

I realize that some here may have had less than wonderful moms; I have met some of you and my heart goes out to you. I hope that with time, you may be able to find peace.

For those who have had special times, I encourage you to please take some time to visit or call and make a small sacrifice for her.

Also, I ask you to put aside for a moment the black-and-white minutia of the latest gadget or OS and share a vignette of a special time you shared.

I'll close with this: "Mom, I don't know if there is a heaven, but if there is, I know you are there. I hope I've grown to be a man you are proud of; I know I wouldn't be half the man I am without you. Thanks is too little, but it is all I have to offer. I miss you."

lhsi writes:

TorrentFreak has a quick run down of all the Pirate Party candidates that are running in the upcoming European elections.

Sweden is the only country that has existing Pirate Party MEPs that are standing in this election. Germany has the largest number of available seats and the Pirate Party have been performing well in recent elections.

The UK Pirate Party is standing in one region and is crowdfunding their campaign, and are currently over half way towards their target.

The voting process in Finland is slightly different, where voters vote for candidates, not a party list, and Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is running.

While not running in Estonia, the Pirate Party there are endorsing an independent candidate who has similar views. Similarly in Italy, there are no Pirate Party candidates, but they are acting as an advisory party for a left wing coalition.

An anonymous coward writes:

Firefox 29 marked the release of the UI overhaul codenamed "Australis" and the jury is back with a verdict: the vast majority of feedback on Firefox Input is negative and traffic to the Classic Theme Restorer add-on has aggressively spiked since Firefox 29 came out on April 29. Considering this is a year and a half after the backlash against the new Windows 8 user interface, it seems that even though the "dumbing down" trends in UI design are infuriating users, they continue to happen. Chrome will soon be hiding URLs, OS X has hidden scroll bars by default, iOS 7 flattened everything, and Windows 8 made scroll bars hard to see. If most users hate these changes, why are they so ubiquitous?

legont writes:

Wall Street Journal runs an interesting article about a recent research published in the journal Science (pay-walled).

Critics of market economies say that they make participants indifferent to costs imposed on third parties (foreign workers, polluted communities, endangered animals, etc.) in other words, that markets degrade morals. In what may have been a first, the German economists Armin Falk of the University of Bonn and Nora Szech of the University of Bamberg wanted to test this idea empirically.

They gave volunteers €10 ($13.90) and told them that as standard lab protocol, a young, healthy mouse would be killed unless the volunteers bought it for €10 in which case it would live out its life, well cared-for. Did they want to take the money or save the mouse? Of the subjects, 46% wanted to kill the mouse for the money. This constituted the baseline for individual decision-making.

Now for a "bilateral market" involving pairs of subjects. If each pair could agree on a way to split €20, the mouse would die, and the pair would get the money; otherwise, the mouse lived. Thus the mouse became a third party to the pair's dealings. In this case, 72% of subjects would kill the mouse.

However, a core of about 20% of individuals will never take money over the mouse, regardless of financial incentive.

AnonTechie writes:

Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks Move to Startups

Some of the best and brightest of Wall Street's young investment bankers are bailing out of their high-paying, prestigious jobs at big financial institutions. Many are setting up their own businesses, especially in technology. While there are no precise statistics on the trend, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the number of employees aged 25 to 34 in the New York metropolitan area in finance and insurance fell to 109,187 as of the second quarter of 2013, down 19 percent from the second quarter of 2007.

At elite universities, fewer MBA and finance candidates are willing to even consider a life of missed weddings, busted romances and deep-into-the-night deal negotiations. The percentage of Harvard Business School graduates entering investment banking, sales or trading dropped to 5 percent last year from 12 percent in 2006, while those entering technology almost tripled to 18 percent during that period. At the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the percentage of MBAs entering investment banking dropped to 13.3 percent last year from 26 percent in 2006, while those entering tech more than doubled to 11.1 percent.

lhsi writes:

Torrent Freak reports:

After uploading part of a JFK speech to YouTube, a TorrentFreak reader had a surprise when a music distribution company filed a complaint, claiming full monetization rights on the clip. Why would they do that to material in the public domain? With the company involved refusing to respond, TF took a closer look.

The reason for this is believed to be Youtube's ContentID system. The uploaded JFK speech was apparently flagged by the system because a song by Harley & Muscle uses samples of the speech.

AnonTechie writes:

From The Economist:

PEOPLE are living longer, which is good. But old age often brings a decline in mental faculties and many researchers are looking for ways to slow or halt such decline. One group doing so is led by Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lennart Mucke of the Gladstone Institutes, also in San Francisco. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke have been studying the role in ageing of klotho, a protein encoded by a gene called KL. A particular version of this gene, KL-VS, promotes longevity. One way it does so is by reducing age-related heart disease. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke wondered if it might have similar powers over age-related cognitive decline.

What they found was startling. KL-VS did not curb decline, but it did boost cognitive faculties regardless of a person's age by the equivalent of about six IQ points. If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.

AnonTechie writes:

Ars Technica reports:

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale and marketing of a prosthetic arm called the DEKA Arm System, which uses electronic signals from the wearer's muscles to induce up to 10 different movements in the prosthetic. Electrodes attached to the arm above the prosthesis detect muscle contractions and send those signals to a processor, which translates the contractions into movements that the arm should execute. The prosthetic weighs the same as an adult arm, and its design is modular so that it can be fitted to accommodate many different needs. Specifically, the FDA notes that the prosthetic can be used for "limb loss occurring at the shoulder joint, mid-upper arm, or mid-lower arm. It cannot be configured for limb loss at the elbow or wrist joint.

The company behind the prosthetic arm, Deka Research is run by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.