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Hugh Pickens writes:

"Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. “The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. “It’s not a done story.” Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.” The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.

martyb writes:

A recent comment thread here considered SoylentNews' headline capitalization policy. As this has been an ongoing challenge for submitters and editors alike, I'd like to throw this out to assess the SoylentNews community's view on it.

For background, consider that our policy is basically Title Case. Alternatives include: sentence case, initial caps, all caps, and small caps. These variations are well-described in that Wikipedia article, and especially in the section Headings and Publications.

Of course, the devil is in the details! If we were to naïvely use initial caps throughout, it would produce "The Doj And The Fbi Seek Answers". If, instead, we folded everything to lowercase and capitalized the first word, we would have "The doj and the fbi seek answers". So, there would need to be some need to preserve, by default, all words that arrive as all-caps. One would also need to make specific allowances for "iPad" and "iPhone" as well as "Apple Computer" and "Isaac Newton's apple".

I fail to see a simple algorithmic solution to the problem that produces an aesthetically pleasing result. But, maybe there is something that can get us most of the way there coupled with a simple ad hoc solution employing manual capitalization of proper nouns, 'initialisms', and acronyms.

So, what say you fellow Soylentils? Pseudo-code solutions are welcome!

Two stories today about Press Freedom:

Abrupt decline in global media freedom

sigma writes:

Freedom of information defenders, Reporters Without Borders (aka Reporters Sans Frontières, or RSF) have released their 2015 World Press Freedom Index showing that information control has become the weapon du jour for increasingly militant governments and corporations. The report identified an eight percent increase in violations of freedom of information in 180 countries in 2014 compared to the 2013.

Christophe Deloire, head of the Paris-based RSF commented “There has been an overall deterioration linked to very different factors, with information wars, and action by non-state groups acting like news despots”

http://en.rsf.org/world-press-freedom-index-2015-12-02-2015,47573.html

USA Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings

"gewg_" writes:

Glenn Greenwald reports via The Intercept

Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group's 2015 ranking[1] was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.

That is the lowest ranking ever[1] during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd).

The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana. Some of the U.S.'s closest allies fared even worse, including Saudi Arabia (164), Bahrain (163), Egypt (158), the UAE (120), and Israel (101)

[...]To explain the latest drop for the U.S., the press group cited the U.S. government's persecution of New York Times reporter Jim Risen, as well as the fact that the U.S. "continues its war on information in others, such as WikiLeaks." Also cited were the numerous arrests of journalists covering the police protests in Ferguson, Missouri (which included The Intercept's Ryan Devereaux, who was tear-gassed and shot with a rubber bullet prior to his arrest).

[1] Content is behind scripts.

DeKO writes:

For many people, the Titanic is only remembered for its tragic accident; but Bill Hammack (aka engineerguy) takes us on a tour through the fascinating engineering details that build not only the famous ship, but also its more successful siblings:

Bill shares fascinating images and information gleaned from the 1909 to 1911 editions of the Journal The Engineer. It includes photos of the construction of the Titanic and its twin the Olympic, the launching of these Olympic-class ships, and accidents that occurred. The video includes engineering details of the ship’s engines, steering mechanism, and propellers.

Bill made the [presentation] to some geek news sites a while back with an interesting analysis of a 100 year old mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis.

ticho writes:

Duncan Epping, the Chief Technologist working for VMware, writes in his blog Yellow Bricks with an announcement of version 6.0 of the widely-used vSphere enterprise virtualization product.

Main touted features are:

• Virtual Volumes aka a “Virtual SAN”-alike policy-based management for traditional storage systems
• Long Distance vMotion
• Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion
• vMotion L2 adjacency restrictions are lifted!

And lots of other improvements to vSphere's high availability and management features.

The following few posts on his blog all deal with meatier details, topic by topic.

"gewg_" writes:

The old rat-with-drug-laced-water "experiment" is a sham. The only choice the rat in the empty cage has is drinking plain water or drinking drugged water. They never show you a CONTROL where there is a rat with a cage full of cool rat toys and rat friends.

Johann Hari reports via Alternet:

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. [...] just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop [smoking by] using nicotine patches.

[...]Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe [...] They decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts and spend it instead on reconnecting them--to their own feelings and to the wider society.

[...]The [sic] most crucial step is to get [addicts] secure housing [as well as] subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

[...]An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that, since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent.

[...]The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect: more crime, more addicts; but when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass--and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.

tonyPick writes:

Over at Linux Weekly News is a quick howto article on building Wifi detection networks using Raspberry Pi..

Years ago, I worked for an automotive IT provider, and occasionally we went out to the plants to search for rogue Wireless Access Points (WAPs). A rogue WAP is one that the company hasn't approved to be there. So if someone were to go and buy a wireless router, and plug it in to the network, that would be a rogue WAP. A rogue WAP also could be someone using a cell phone or MiFi as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

One thing I always wanted was a passive real-time wireless sensor network to watch for changes in Wi-Fi. A passive system, like Kismet and Airodump-NG, collects all the packets in the radio frequency (RF) that the card can detect and displays them. This finds hidden WAPs too, by looking at the clients talking to them.

The article describes how to set up a network of Raspberry Pis as Kismet drones, and using the information collected to triangulate the location of a rogue WAP.

frojack writes:

ArsTechnica is reporting on a bill (which I predict has exactly zero chance of passing) which would put the brakes on US Courts issuing warrants demanding US companies turn over data on their foreign servers:

The bill would require companies based in the US to turn over data stored on its overseas servers only if the warrant targets a "US person." The legislation does not alter the law requiring US industry—when presented with a warrant—to hand over data stored on US servers no matter the target's nationality.

The measure also requires a court to modify or vacate a warrant if a company makes a motion to the court and the court finds that the warrant would require the provider to violate the laws of a foreign country.

The Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad [PDF] is a short but sweet 1 page bill that was introduced by Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah). It says nothing about three letter agencies, or spying, but simply reins in US Courts issuing warrants to US companies and expecting them to be enforced world wide, or forcing US companies to violate the laws of foreign countries where they do business.

Sadly, I expect the administration will pull out all the stops in an effort to defeat this bill.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Farhad Manjoo writes at the New York Timesthat at first glance Google looks plenty healthy, but growth in Google’s primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year for the last few years and although Google has spent considerable resources inventing technologies for the future, it has failed to turn many of its innovations into new moneymakers.

According to Manjoo, as smartphones eclipse laptop and desktop computers to become the planet’s most important computing devices, the digital ad business is rapidly changing and Facebook, Google’s arch rival for advertising dollars, has been quick to profit from the shift. Here’s why: The advertising business is split, roughly, into two. On one side are direct-response ads meant to induce an immediate purchase: Think classifieds, the Yellow Pages, catalogs or Google's own text-based ads running alongside its search results. But the bulk of the ad industry is devoted to something called brand ads, the ads you see on television and print magazines that work on your emotions in the belief that, in time, your dollars will follow.

“Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in,” says Ben Thompson. “Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn’t about that kind of destination. It’s about an experience.” According to Thompson the future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television and is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time and whose ads are proving to be massively more effective and engaging than banner advertisements.

In less than five years, Facebook has also built an enviable ad-technology infrastructure, a huge sales team that aims to persuade marketers of the benefits of Facebook ads over TV ads, and new ways for brands to measure how well their ads are doing. These efforts have paid off quickly: In 2014 Facebook sold $11.5 billion in ads, up 65 percent over 2013.

Google will still make a lot of money if it doesn’t dominate online ads the way it does now. But it will need to find other businesses to keep growing. This is why Google is spending on projects like a self-driving car, Google Glass, fiber-optic lines in American cities, space exploration, and other audacious innovations that have a slim chance of succeeding but might revolutionize the world if they do. But the far-out projects remind Thompson of Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in research and development, and has seen little return on its investments. “To me the Microsoft comparison can’t be more clear. This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”

sigma writes:

Wired reports that Darpa is developing a search engine to shine a spotlight into the dark web:

The project, dubbed Memex, has been in the works for a year and is intended to pry open TOR sites like Silk Road, which have .onion web addresses, are accessible only through the TOR browser, and only to those who know a site’s specific address.

Dr. Chris White, the program manager for Memex, says. “We’re trying to move toward an automated mechanism of finding [Hidden Services sites] and making the public content on them accessible. We think there are, at any given time, between 30,000 and 40,000 Hidden Service Onion sites that have content on them that one could index.” They also want to use automated methods to analyze that content in order to uncover hidden relationships that would be useful to law enforcement, the military, and even the private sector.

The first domains Darpa targeted were sites that appear to be involved in human trafficking, and Dr White demonstrated to the TV show "60 Minutes" how Memex was used to gather and analyse data that could be used to halt the traffic. While this is a valid and valuable use of the technology, there is little doubt that it will also be used for less savory purposes. It also spells the end of TOR as a means of anonymity on the web.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/12/a-search-engine-that-finds-online-criminals/

The Guardian reports that:

"Several British police forces have questioned newsagents in an attempt to monitor sales of a special edition of Charlie Hebdo magazine following the Paris attacks"

"In at least two cases – in Wiltshire and in Presteigne, Wales – officers have requested that newsagents hand over the names of customers who bought the magazine."

Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of free expression campaign group Index on Censorship is quoted as saying...

"This is so ridiculous as to be almost laughable. And it would be funny if it didn’t reflect a more general worrying increase in abuse of police powers in invading privacy and stifling free speech in Britain”.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Neil Irwin writes at the NYT that financially literate people like to complain that buying lottery tickets is among the silliest decisions a person could make but there are a couple of dimensions that these tut-tutted warnings miss, perhaps fueled by a class divide between those who commonly buy lottery tickets and those who choose to throw away money on other things like expensive wine or mansions. According to Irwin, as long as you think about the purchase of lottery tickets the right way — purely a consumption good, not an investment — it can be a completely rational decision. "Fantasizing about what you would do if you suddenly encountered great wealth is fun, and it is more fun if there some chance, however minuscule, that it could happen," says Irwin. "The $2 price for a ticket is a relatively small one to pay for the enjoyment of thinking through how you might organize your life differently if you had all those millions."

Right now the Multi-State Lottery Association estimates the chances of winning the grand prize at about 1 in 175 million, and the cash value of the prize at $337.8 million. The simplest math points to that $2 ticket having an expected value of about $1.93 so while you are still throwing away money when buying a lottery ticket, you are throwing away less in strictly economic terms when you buy into an unusually large Powerball jackpot. "I am the type of financial decision-maker who tracks bond and currency markets and builds elaborate spreadsheets to simulate outcomes of various retirement savings strategies," says Irwin. "I can easily afford to spend a few dollars on a Powerball ticket. Time to head to the convenience store and do just that."

Appalbarry writes:

Thanks to lead from WAT HiFi, I found an fascinating article that compares various storage media - HDD, SSD, RAID - and how that choice affects playback of audio. If you're an audiophile like me, you'll want to read this.

I'd love to hear from other fans of ultra high-end audio with their experiences.

The SSD initially seemed to have an advantage, but we had walked into a trap. While it seemed to have higher definition, sounding more evenly tempered, sophisticated, certainly a little clearer and also somehow more vitally connected, there was also an slightly foreign processed quality, almost a coloration – not quite a 'glare' but more as if the lights at the recording venue had been turned up a little too much. Direct comparison with the HDD version showed that the SSD's subtle 'halo' effect was indeed less natural. And the HDD version has a clear advantage on one aspect of sound quality: music flowed a little better and timing was superior too, with more natural dynamic expression. So despite the SSD's advantage in clarity and audible sophistication, in the end we considered that the hard disk version beat the SSD by about 13%...

Of course, much also depends on your choice of Cable Elevators.

otherwhere writes:

NASA announced its plan for a policy ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from the approximately $3 billion it invests annually in basic and applied research. Actually, almost exactly like the NIH -- within 12 months and in PubMed.

The provisions of NASA’s policy on articles track with those in the current NIH Public Access policy, and will require NASA-funded researchers to deposit articles into the PubMed Central database, to be made accessible with no more than than a 12 month embargo. However, the NASA plan notes that, “publishers may petition for longer embargo periods, but strong evidence of the benefits would be needed.” This language is notable, as it seems to suggest that any determination of changes in embargo length will be measured against the public good, rather than specific industry concerns.

Original NASA PDF here.

Via techdirt.

monster writes:

In a top secret April 2013 internal memo, NSA officials warned that the aggresive and sophisticated cyberattack Iran faced from the West allowed it to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating the tactics involved.

As quoted from the document, "Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others."

In an ironic twist, the same document suggests that offensive cyberattacks on other states do not merely provoke counter-attacks, but can also teach adversaries how to launch their own. Talk about "aiding the enemy"!