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Bill Dimm writes:

A Chemistry World article summarizes a study by Cornell University psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci finding that faculty members asked to evaluate hypothetical male and female applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology gave preference to female applicants. Quoting the study:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference. Comparing different lifestyles revealed that women preferred divorced mothers to married fathers and that men preferred mothers who took parental leaves to mothers who did not. Our findings, supported by real-world academic hiring data, suggest advantages for women launching academic science careers.

The article concludes:

To be hired, women must first apply and the authors question whether ‘omniprescent and discouraging’ messages about sexism in academic appointments makes them reluctant to do so.

takyon writes:

April 20th (420) is a celebration of stoner/cannabis culture. In recent years, decriminalization and legalization of marijuana has accelerated as public opinion has shifted, so there are more reasons to celebrate...

Phoenix666 writes:

China intends to invest $46 billion in infrastructure links to Pakistan:

The focus of spending is on building a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) - a network of roads, railway and pipelines between the long-time allies. They will run some 3,000km (1,865 miles) from Gwadar in Pakistan to China's western Xinjiang region.

The projects will give China direct access to the Indian Ocean and beyond. This marks a major advance in China's plans to boost its economic influence in Central and South Asia, correspondents say, and far exceeds US spending in Pakistan.

[...] Some $15.5bn worth of coal, wind, solar and hydro energy projects will come online by 2017 and add 10,400 megawatts of energy to Pakistan's national grid, according to officials. A $44m optical fibre cable between the two countries is also due to be built.

The Great Game lives. Different players, same game. Equally large implications. Diplomacy game geeks, awake! Who are the players, and what's the play?

Jaruzel writes:

A spacecraft that carries a sensor built at the University of Michigan (among others) is about to crash into the planet closest to the sun — just as NASA intended, reports Phys.org:

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) launched from Earth in 2004, traveled 4.9 billion miles, and has been orbiting Mercury for the past three years, giving scientists an unprecedented look into both the history of the solar system and a planet they knew relatively little about. It will run out of fuel around April 30 and end its mission with a bang.

Without a thick atmosphere to slow the craft down and partially incinerate it, MESSENGER will keep accelerating as it barrels toward Mercury. It'll be traveling around 8,750 mph when it hits.

tonyPick writes:

The Guardian has an article on the verification of a 250-year-old claim by clock maker John Harrison over the accuracy of his designs:

After a 100-day trial, the timepiece known as Clock B – which had been sealed in a clear plastic box to prevent tampering – was officially declared, by Guinness, to be the world's "most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air".

It was an intriguing enough award. But what is really astonishing is that the clock was designed more than 250 years ago by a man who was derided at the time for "an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity", and whose plans for the clock lay ignored for two centuries.

[...] At a conference, Harrison Decoded: Towards a Perfect Pendulum Clock, held at Greenwich yesterday, observatory scientists revealed that a clock that had been built to the clockmaker's exact specifications had run for 100 days during official tests and had lost only five-eighths of a second in that period.

The same story is also covered at The Telegraph and The Independent.

Wikipedia has more background on John Harrison. NOVA's Lost At Sea: The Search For Longitude (transcript) may also be of interest.

carguy writes:

Shell is funding Gordon Murray Design (designer for 3 McLaren F1 championship wins and also the F1 supercar) and engine specialists Geo Technology with Osamu Goto (ex-Honda F1 engines) to build a city car prototype by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if they are able to bring the un-obtanium technology of F1 to a super mileage small city car--at an affordable price.

Shell has a long history of funding Economy Runs (first informal event in 1939) and Eco-marathon engineering competitions.

Murray has already done the T25 concept city car with central driver's seat. (Caution -- Flash-heavy and ego-heavy(!) site. Murray may be a design genius, but he wants to make sure that you know this...)

From the article:

One billion reasons why car technology has got to get better

Imagine twice as many people moving around your city. What would that mean for you getting to where you need to be? More traffic, more pollution, less space to move around. There are an estimated one billion cars on our roads right now and the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts this will have doubled by 2050.

While alternatives, including electric vehicles, have an increasing role in meeting this demand, experts predict that we will still be relying on fossil fuels to power our vehicles for decades to come. This means we need to think of more innovative ways to move people and goods around. We need to consider how we could make the conventional internal combustion engine work more efficiently, while emitting less CO2, and we need to explore how we can put this into action using existing and readily available infrastructures.

Ryuugami writes:

TorrentFreak reports on the April 10th public release of BitTorrent Inc's torrent-powered browser Maelstrom:

In short, Maelstrom takes Google's Chromium framework and stuffs a powerful BitTorrent engine under the hood, meaning that torrents can be played directly from the browser. More excitingly, however, Maelstrom also supports torrent-powered websites that no longer have to rely on central servers.

By simply publishing a website in a torrent format the website will be accessible if others are sharing it. This can be assisted by web-seeds but also completely peer-to-peer.

Project Maelstrom's stated primary goal is to keep the Internet open and neutral:

If we are successful, we believe this project has the potential to help address some of the most vexing problems facing the Internet today. How can we keep the Internet open? How can we keep access to the Internet neutral? How can we better ensure our private data is not misused by large companies? How can we help the Internet scale efficiently for content?

TorrentFreak notes that it's not an all-in-one solution, though:

While Maelstrom can bypass Internet censors, it's good to keep in mind that all shared files are visible to the public. Maelstrom is caching accessed content to keep it seeded, so using a VPN might not be a bad idea. After all, users leave a trail of their browsing history behind.

Unfortunately, it seems that the project is closed-source, and the beta is currently Windows-only, with a Mac version announced. The devs have stated that a Linux version is planned, but is a low priority.

AnonTechie writes:

It was Ben Bernanke who pointed out that economics isn't really all that much good at predicting the next recession (and the long-standing joke is that economists have predicted 11 out of the past three), but it is pretty good at working out why the world is the way it is.

Which brings us to the cutting edge of modern economic research and an explanation of why the tech bit of the tech industry is so hugely concentrated in Silicon Valley, and also why the nerds get paid so damn much.

Our starting point is, as always when looking at the structure of firms and industries, Ronald Coase and his paper Theory of the Firm ( http://lib.cufe.edu.cn/upload_files/other/4_20140516101548_13%20Coase.pdf ). Essentially, he asked why do we have firms? The answer being that sometimes it is more efficient to do so than to have a network of contractors dealing with each other.

Critical mass there is obviously akin to clustering. But they are taking it a stage further, in that they're not arguing that it's just more convenient or efficient, as in clustering, but that there's got to be some minimum amount for it all to work at all.

No economist is going to go around shouting that his model solves everything: economists have a name for people that do that and it's “non-economists”.

A model explains only those aspects of reality that the model was set up to explore. So the mapping of any one model over reality is never going to be one to one.

We do think that this model, where knowledge is a combination of good and also where the asset is really the knowledge holders themselves, explains some aspects of why the top end of the tech business is so concentrated in Silicon Valley and also why people get paid so blindingly much.

But nobody is arrogant enough to suggest that it explains all behaviour in the industry, nor that it even explains all about the clustering and the incomes. Only that it shines a light on some of it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/19/so_why_is_tech_all_in_silicon_valley/

[Related]: http://antidismal.blogspot.cz/2015/04/modelling-science-as-contribution-good-2.html

Phoenix666 writes:

Prof. Nancy Kanwisher at MIT shaved her head to give her students a 3D roadmap to the parts of the brain and its functions:

The video is an introduction to your cortex. This “large pizza”-sized layer of brain tissue is scrunched up to fit right under your scalp, and it is responsible for all your higher brain functions. Reading? Thinking? Face recognition? Check check check.

Once Kanwisher’s hair all shaved off, the folds of the cortex are drawn onto her skull and a few areas are highlighted and explained. And yes, they even scanned her brain to make sure the highlighted areas of the brain are drawn in the exact position. Intrigued? There are many more videos about the brain at Nancy’s Brain Talks,

There is no information available whether students in the class were subsequently happier about the $43,720 they pay in annual tuition.

kadal writes:

Google's high-altitude (stratospheric) balloon wireless provider system, Project Loon, has released a publicity video, including interesting shots of balloons, mission control, and a balloon factory, New Zealand mountains and all that goodness. It is a publicity video, so not much detail here. They claim the balloons now last in the air for ~100 days, and their factory can produce one balloon in a "few hours".

I'm not the biggest fan of Google but they do have some cool projects going.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Natasha Singer reports at The New York Times on a new generation of devices whose primary function is to prod people to change.

This new category of nudging technology includes "hydration reminder" apps like Waterlogged that exhort people to increase their water consumption; the HAPIfork, a utensil that vibrates and turns on a light indicator when people eat too quickly; and Thync, "neurosignaling" headgear that delivers electrical pulses intended to energize or relax people.

"There is this dumbing-down, which assumes people do not want the data, they just want the devices to help them," says Natasha Dow Schüll. "It is not really about self-knowledge anymore. It's the nurselike application of technology." While some self-zapping gizmos may resemble human cattle prods, other devices use more complex cues to encourage people to adopt new behavior. For example, the Muse, a brain-wave monitoring headband, is intended to help people understand their state of mind by playing different sounds depending on whether they are distracted or calm. "Based on what it registers, it plays loud, disruptive wind or waves lapping or, if you are supercalm and you maintain it for a while, you get calm, lovely noises of birds tweeting," says Schüll. "You do learn to calm your mind."

But do the new self-tracking and self-improvement technologies benefit people or just create more anxiety? An article published in The BMJ, a British medical journal, describes healthy people who use self-tracking apps as "young, asymptomatic, middle-class neurotics continuously monitoring their vital signs while they sleep." Dr. Des Spence argues that many health tracking apps encouraged healthy people to unnecessarily record their normal activities and vital signs — turning users into continuously self-monitoring "neurotics." Spence recommends people view these new technologies with skepticism.

"The truth is that these apps and devices are untested and unscientific, and they will open the door of uncertainty," says Spence. "Make no mistake: Diagnostic uncertainty ignites extreme anxiety in people."

frojack writes:

The Washington Post has a story about flawed FBI science, and its effects on hundreds of cases prior to the year 2000.

The FBI has admitted that virtually all of their elite examiners have given tainted testimony overstating forensic hair matches.

Hair match wasn't the ONLY evidence in these cases. But in many cases it may have been the only evidence that placed defendants at the scene. However, 32 of these cases were death penalty cases, and 14 of those defendants have been executed.

All of these cases are now going to be reviewed.

This is the second major use of junk science the FBI has been forced to admit. There was the whole Bullet Lead Analysis used for decades to claim that the lead in bullets used in a crime matched batches of bullets the defendant had access to.

AnonTechie writes:

Ars Technica recently reviewed two "Tor routers", devices that are supposed to improve your privacy by routing all traffic through the Tor anonymity network. Although the initial release of Anonabox proved woefully insecure, the basic premise itself is flawed. Using these instead of the Tor Browser Bundle is bad: less secure and less private than simply not using these "Tor Routers" in the first place. They are, in a word, EPICFAIL.

There are four possible spies on your traffic when you use these Tor "routers", those who can both see what you do and potentially attack your communication: your ISP, the websites themselves, the Tor exit routers, and the NSA with its 5EYES buddies.

Now it's true that these devices do protect you against your ISP. And if your ISP wants to extort over $30 per month for them to not spy on you, this does offer protection. But if you want protection from your ISP, just use a VPN service or run your own VPN using Amazon EC2 ($9.50/month plus $.09/GB bandwidth for a t2 micro instance). These services offer much better performance and equal privacy. At the same time, if your ISP wants to extort your privacy, choose a different ISP.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/op-ed-why-the-entire-premise-of-tor-enabled-routers-is-ridiculous/

takyon writes:

Chromium Blog has published an update on Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC). QUIC is a UDP-based transport layer network protocol which began testing in the Google Chrome browser in 2013. One of the goals of QUIC is to reduce latency compared to TCP by making fewer round trips between clients and servers. It also handles multiplexing and packet loss better.

QUIC clients store information about QUIC-enabled servers that have been connected to previously, allowing a secure connection to be established immediately (zero-round-trip). Google claims this can enable significant reductions in page load times:

The data shows that 75% percent of connections can take advantage of QUIC's zero-round-trip feature. Even on a well-optimized site like Google Search, where connections are often pre-established, we still see a 3% improvement in mean page load time with QUIC.

Another substantial gain for QUIC is improved congestion control and loss recovery. Packet sequence numbers are never reused when retransmitting a packet. This avoids ambiguity about which packets have been received and avoids dreaded retransmission timeouts. As a result, QUIC outshines TCP under poor network conditions, shaving a full second off the Google Search page load time for the slowest 1% of connections. These benefits are even more apparent for video services like YouTube. Users report 30% fewer rebuffers when watching videos over QUIC. This means less time spent staring at the spinner and more time watching videos.

Google plans to propose QUIC to the Internet Engineering Task Force as an Internet standard, just as it has done with SPDY, which is being superseded by the HTTP/2 standard.

tonyPick writes:

As reported at Ars Technica, 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot is laying off staff:

On Friday, Motherboard reported that 3D printing company MakerBot laid off 20 percent of its staff today, estimating that approximately 100 people from the 500-person company had their positions cut.

Make magazine also has coverage. MakerBot is closing all of its retail locations (in Manhattan, Boston, and Greenwich, Connecticut). The layoffs have been attributed to consolidation with Stratasys, which bought MakerBot for $403 million in 2013, and Stratasys' recent $100 million write-down on MakerBot's valuation.