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AnonTechie writes:

"Containment control" model looks at how groups of influencers can manipulate people. The same math that researchers use to control swarms of drones can be used, in theory, to control you on social media.

Facebook isn't the only organization conducting research into how attitudes are affected by social media. The Department of Defense has invested millions of dollars over the past few years investigating social media, social networks, and how information spreads across them. While Facebook and Cornell University researchers manipulated what individuals saw in their social media streams, military-funded research-including projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program-has looked primarily into how messages from influential members of social networks propagate.

One study, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), has gone a step further. "A less investigated problem is once you've identified the network, how do you manipulate it toward an end," said Warren Dixon, a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Florida's Nonlinear Controls and Robotics research group. Dixon was the principal investigator on an Air Force Research Laboratory-funded project, which published its findings in February in a paper entitled "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity." [PDF]

Magic Oddball writes:

Jason Scott, who has been working on the Internet Archive's Console Living Room, recently posted what he calls a "desperate" plea for help fixing serious sound problems with JSMESS and Web Audio API. He asks that people share the request 'far and wide' in hope that someone capable of fixing the problem sees it.

The situation: Internet Explorer gets no audio, Safari is unpredictable, and for Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Chrome the audio ranges from "very nice" to "horrible, grating." (For comparison, see the Web Audio API compatibility chart he linked to.) The Archive has two test cases people can try (click on "toggle MESS performance indicator" to see how your system fares):

Here is the Wizard Test. It's an emulator playing the Psygnosis game "Wiz n' Liz" on an emulated Sega Genesis. This is extremely tough on the browser almost nothing can play it at 100% speed.

Here is the Criminal Test. It is an emulator playing Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal as rendered on a Colecovision. It is not tough on the browser at all. Almost everything should be able to do it at 100% or basically 100%.

He says that he's "happy to entertain all ideas, discuss all possibilities" and will "spend all the time you need to ramp up, or try any suggestion." If anyone might be able to help, he says to go to #jsmess on EFNet if you use IRC, or email him at audio@textfiles.com.

cafebabe writes:

Wired reports that:

In case you haven't heard, Thor is now a girl. In an announcement on The View this morning, it was revealed that a woman will soon be wielding the Mjölnir in the Marvel comics. Naturally, people went nuts over the news.

However:

In the last few years, there have been quite a few efforts to make comics not quite so monolithically white/male/straight/gender-normative/etc. In 2012, Green Lantern Alan Scott came out as gay. In 2011, it was announced that mixed-race teenager Miles Morales would be putting on the Spider-Man suit. Batwoman Kate Kane came out of the closet and took on Dont Ask, Dont Tell. Barbara Gordon (aka Batgirl) got a transgender roommate. The new Ms. Marvel is a Muslim teenager. And each time a change like this was announced, it made a blip on the radar, but it mostly circulated on newswires and blogs. Sure, Chris Hayes may herald the news of Batgirls transgender friend on MSNBC, but that happened after the fact. This time, message is being announced on The View, and Marvel itself is claiming that Thor aims to speak directly to an audience that long was not the target for superhero comic books in America: women and girls.

AnonTechie writes:

bubble bubble toil and trouble dept.

Perimeter Associate Faculty member Matthew Johnson and his colleagues are working to bring the multiverse hypothesis, which to some sounds like a fanciful tale, firmly into the realm of testable science.

Never mind the big bang; in the beginning was the vacuum. The vacuum simmered with energy (variously called dark energy, vacuum energy, the inflation field, or the Higgs field). Like water in a pot, this high energy began to evaporate — bubbles formed.

Each bubble contained another vacuum, whose energy was lower, but still not nothing. This energy drove the bubbles to expand. Inevitably, some bubbles bumped into each other. It's possible some produced secondary bubbles. Maybe the bubbles were rare and far apart; maybe they were packed close as foam. But here's the thing: each of these bubbles was a universe. In this picture, our universe is one bubble in a frothy sea of bubble universes. That's the multiverse hypothesis in a bubbly nutshell.

Conclusion: The real significance of this work is as a proof of principle: it shows that the multiverse can be testable. In other words, if we are living in a bubble universe, we might actually be able to tell.

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/news/universe-bubble-lets-check

The full article appears in the open access Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics as: Simulating the universe(s): from cosmic bubble collisions to cosmological observables with numerical relativity.

taylorvich writes:

What if the best way to change minds isn't to tell people why they're wrong, but to tell them why they're right? Scientists tried this recently and discovered that agreeing with people can be a surprisingly powerful way to shake up strongly held beliefs.

Researchers found that showing people extreme versions of ideas that confirmed not contradicted their opinions on a deeply divisive issue actually caused them to reconsider their stance and become more receptive to other points of view. The scientists attribute this to the fact that the new information caused people to see their views as irrational or absurd, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-07-attitudes-dont-extremely.html

Silentknyght writes:

When rainwater infiltrates into the ground to replenish aquifers, just how deep does it (or can it) go? New research has identified fluids derived from rainwater below the Earth's fractured upper crust, at least 8 miles below Earth's surface.

Scientists believe this research may help our understanding of earthquakes, as well as the generation of valuable mineral deposits.

c0lo writes:

Various sites report FedEx has been indicted for allegedly shipping prescription drugs from online pharmacies. WallStreet Journal provides a bit more details than the others:

The Justice Department on Thursday charged FedEx Corp. with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances for its alleged role in transporting painkillers and other prescription drugs that had been sold illegally.

In a 15-count indictment filed in San Francisco, federal prosecutors say that beginning in 2004 the company repeatedly ignored warnings from the government it was breaking the law by shipping drugs ordered from online pharmacies that dispensed them to anyone who filled out an online questionnaire. Among the charges included in the indictment are conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, conspiracy to distribute misbranded drugs, distribution of controlled substances and misbranding drugs.

Libidinous Coward writes:

A man suspected of being drunk posed as a security screener at San Francisco International Airport long enough to direct a couple of women into a private booth for pat downs before real security staffers caught on to him, authorities said Wednesday.

And nobody complained because the TSA's own procedures are functionally indistinguishable from sexual assault.

AnonTechie writes:

Mathematical equations can make Internet communication via computer, mobile phone or satellite many times faster and more secure than today. Results with software developed by researchers from Aalborg University in collaboration with the US universities the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are attracting attention in the international technology media.

A new study uses a four minute long mobile video as an example. The method used by the Danish and US researchers in the study resulted in the video being downloaded five times faster than state of the art technology. The video also streamed without interruptions. In comparison, the original video got stuck 13 times along the way.

lhsi writes:

A novel glass surface has been developed for use in mobile devices that reduces both glare and reflection.

On a very fine scale, they roughened a glass surface so it could scatter light and ward off glare but without hurting the glass's transparency. Then the researchers etched nano-size teeth into the surface to make it anti-reflective. In addition to achieving both of these visual traits, the researchers showed the textured surface repelled water, mimicking a lotus leaf. Although the anti-glare roughening protects the nano-size glass teeth, further research is needed to ensure that the surface can withstand heavy touchscreen use, they say. They add that the method is inexpensive and can easily be scaled up for industry use.

lhsi writes:

A study (abstract) into the effectiveness of mobile adverts has found that only adverts for some products are effective; if a product is either practical or something that takes thought and investigation before making a purchase, mobile adverts were more effective.

• Mobile ads do work for products that have a practical and important use, like a lawn mower or a washing machine
• Mobile ads do work for high-involvement products (a lot of time, thought and energy is placed into the decision, like a family car).
• Mobile ads don't work for just-for-pleasure items, like fancy watches
• Mobile ads don't work for low-involvement purchases like movie tickets or toothbrush (ones that pose a low risk to the buyer)

MDA campaigns that ran between 2007 and 2010 and involved 39,946 consumers show that MDA campaigns significantly increased consumers' favorable attitudes and purchase intentions only when the campaigns advertised products that were higher (vs. lower) involvement and utilitarian (vs. hedonic).

AnonTechie writes:

Australia's Senate has voted to repeal the carbon tax, a levy on the biggest polluters passed by the previous Labor government. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, whose Liberal-National coalition beat Labor in an election last year, had made the repeal a central aim of his government.

Politicians have been locked in a fierce row about the tax for years. Labor says it helps to combat climate change, but the Liberals claim it penalises legitimate businesses. The Australian Senate voted by 39 to 32 votes to repeal the tax. Introduced in July 2012, it charges the 348 highest polluters A$ 23 (£ 13; US$ 22.60) for every tonne of greenhouse gases they produce.

The Climate Institute think-tank said in a statement that the move left Australia "bereft of credible climate policy".

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot said the carbon tax had been "useless and destructive". He says he plans to replace it with a A$2.55bn taxpayer-funded plan under which industries will be paid to reduce emissions and use cleaner energy.

lhsi writes:

MIT researchers are to present a new network-management system dubbed "Fastpass" that reduced the average queue length of routers in a Facebook data center by 99.6 percent virtually doing away with queues, according to experiments performed. Instead of using a decentralised method, Fastpass uses a central server called an "arbiter" to decide which nodes in the network may send data to which others during which periods of time.

With Fastpass, a node that wishes to transmit data first issues a request to the arbiter and receives a routing assignment in return. "If you have to pay these maybe 40 microseconds to go to the arbiter, can you really gain much from the whole scheme?" says Jonathan Perry, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and another of the paper's authors. "Surprisingly, you can." The researchers' experiments indicate that an arbiter with eight cores, or processing units, can keep up with a network transmitting 2.2 terabits of data per second. That's the equivalent of a 2,000-server data center with gigabit-per-second connections transmitting at full bore all the time.

lhsi writes:

New research (abstract) suggests that those in higher-level positions are more likely to make decisions that value security over privacy, and be more determined to carry out those decisions. In one experiment, people who were appointed supervisors showed a significant increase in their concern for security. The researchers also found that participants who were assigned a worker-level status expressed higher concern for privacy, but not significantly higher.

We find that a high-status assignment significantly increases security concerns. This effect is observable for two predefined sub-dimensions of security (i.e., personal and societal concerns) as well as for the composite measure. We find only weak support for an increase in the demand for privacy with a low-status manipulation.

Maybe this explains why the UK Government think their data retention law needed an emergency process.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

An article on Inside 3DP discusses 3D printing prosthetic hands.

e-NABLE is a hype[r]-decentralized online community of makers, 3D printer operators, designers & engineers who design 3D printed prosthetic hands. Volunteers from all over the world cooperate by writing the copy, doing designs, doing photography and together help kids who don't have prosthetic hands. Regular prosthetics costs tens of thousands of dollars. They are unaffordable in developing countries.

Furthermore, even in wealthy nations they are not given to kids. Since kids grow rapidly it would necessitate giving them new prosthetics every few months or years. This is too expensive. Because of this kids are often given simple plastic hands or hooks that provide little or no functionality. Only when they are fully grown are they given a hand that can be used to pick up things. e-NABLE is trying to change this and make functional desktop 3D printed prosthetics available to kids everywhere for $25-$50.