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Phoenix666 writes:

For a few years now, alarms have been sounded in various quarters about Facebook's teen problem. In 2013, one author explored why teens are tiring of Facebook, and according to Time, more than 11 million young people have fled Facebook since 2011. But many of these articles theorized that teens were moving instead to Instagram (a Facebook-owned property) and other social media platforms. In other words, teen flight was a Facebook problem, not a social media problem.

Today, however, the newest data increasingly support the idea that young people are actually transitioning out of using what we might term broadcast social media – like Facebook and Twitter – and switching instead to using narrowcast tools – like Messenger or Snapchat. Instead of posting generic and sanitized updates for all to see, they are sharing their transient goofy selfies and blow-by-blow descriptions of class with only their closest friends. [...]

1. As social media usage has spread beyond the young, social media have become less attractive to young people.
2. Many of the students I've spoken with avoid posting on sites like Facebook because, to quote one student, "Those pics are there forever!" Having grown up with these platforms, college students are well aware that nothing posted on Facebook is ever truly forgotten, and they are increasingly wary of the implications.
3. Increasingly, young people are being warned that future employers, college admissions departments and even banks will use their social media profiles to form assessments. In response, many of them seem to be using social media more strategically.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Several news sites are reporting on India's support of net neutrality including the BBC, Fortune, The Hindu, and Ars Technica, to name a few. At question was Facebook's attempt at zero-rating their own 'free' basics service. Zero-rating schemes are where certain services are not counted against data caps while others do, essentially creating a tiered Internet and increasing the barriers for certain sites or services.

According to the decision, discriminiatory tariffs are disallowed, paving the way for continued access for all. The decision does not prohibit providing free or limited free net access, provided it can be used to access any content, not just pre-approve sites.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A new study says the obvious: suspects' brains are briefly scrambled when they are on the receiving end of a Taser stun gun and its 50,000-volt delivery. But the study, "TASER Exposure and Cognitive Impairment: Implications for Valid Miranda Waivers and the Timing of Police Custodial Interrogations," (PDF) questions whether suspects who were just shocked have the mental capacity to validly waive their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning.

"TASER-exposed participants resembled patients with mild cognitive impairment, which suggests that not only might our participants be more likely to waive their Miranda rights directly after TASER exposure, but also they would be more likely to give inaccurate information to investigators," reads the study, which appears in the journal Criminology & Public Policy. "Thus, part of our findings implicates a suspect's ability to issue a valid waiver, whereas another part implicates the accuracy of information he or she might give investigators during a custodial interrogation (e.g., false confessions or statements)."

DOI link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12173

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

In a stunning example of failure to understand the meaning of the word equality, Github's "social impact team" is now actively discriminating against people based on gender and skin color; white women in particular:

One insider criticized GitHub's "social impact team," which is in charge of figuring out how to use the product to tackle social issues, including diversity within the company itself. It's led by Nicole Sanchez, vice president of social impact, who joined GitHub in May after working as a diversity consultant.

While people inside the company approve of the goal to hire a more diverse workforce, some think the team is contributing to the internal cultural battle.

"They are trying to control culture, interviewing and firing. Scary times at the company without a seasoned leader. While their efforts are admirable it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white' which makes things challenging," this person said.

Sanchez is known for some strong views about diversity. She wrote an article for USA Today shortly before she joined GitHub titled, "More white women does not equal tech diversity."

At one diversity training talk held at a different company and geared toward people of color, she came on a bit stronger with a point that says, "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women."

From a site policy standpoint, this really makes me want to argue for finding another host for our rehash repository, enormous pain in the ass though that would be.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

How acidic is the ocean on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus? It's a fundamental question to understanding if this geyser-spouting moon could support life.

Enceladus is part of a family of icy worlds, including Europa (at Jupiter) and Titan (also at Saturn), populating our outer solar system. These bodies are some of the most promising places for life because they receive tidal energy from the gas giants they orbit and some contain liquid water.

The Cassini spacecraft has been taking regular measurements of Enceladus for more than a decade to evaluate its environment. One of the key factors influencing the habitability of an environment is its chemical composition, in particular its pH. On Earth, it's possible for life to exist near the extremes of the pH scale that ranges from 0 (battery acid) to 14 (drain cleaner). Knowing the pH can help us to identify geochemical reactions that affect the habitability of an environment, because many reactions cause predictable changes in pH.

[...] Recently, geochemist Christopher Glein led a team that developed a new approach to estimating the pH of Enceladus' ocean using observational data of the carbonate geochemistry of plume material. This is a classic problem in geochemical studies of Earth (such as rainwater), but scientists can now solve the carbonate problem on an extraterrestrial body thanks to measurements of dissolved inorganic carbon by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA), and carbon dioxide gas by the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) onboard Cassini.

Glein's team tried to create the most comprehensive chemical model to date of the ocean by accounting for compositional constraints from both INMS and CDA, such as the salinity of the plume. Their model suggests that Enceladus has a sodium, chloride and carbonate ocean with an alkaline pH of 11 or 12, close to the equivalent of ammonia or soapy water. The estimated pH is slightly higher by 1 to 2 units than an earlier estimate based on CDA data alone, but the different modeling approaches are consistent in terms of the overall chemistry of an alkaline ocean.

The pH of Enceladus' ocean (DOI: 10.1016/j.gca.2015.04.017)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Indian officials say a meteorite struck the campus of a private engineering college on Saturday, killing one person. If scientists confirm the explosion was due to a meteorite, it would be the first recorded human fatality due to a falling space rock.

According to local reports, a bus driver was killed on Saturday when a meteorite landed in the area where he was walking, damaging the window panes of nearby buses and buildings. Three other people were injured.

On Sunday, various Indian publications, including The Hindu, reported that the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa, issued a statement confirming the death: "A mishap occurred yesterday when a meteorite fell in the campus of a private engineering college in Vellore district's K Pantharappalli village." Tamil Nadu is located in southern India, and has a population of more than 70 million people.

There have been no confirmed human deaths due to meteorite strikes, although there have been a number of interesting close calls, based upon a list kept by International Comet Quarterly. For example, meteorites have landed in homes and hit people as they have slept, but have not killed them.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

The site Little Atoms has a detailed breakdown on the problems with David Grimes' paper on the mathematics of conspiracy theories.

Can we predict how long a conspiracy of a given size will last? That's the question asked by Dr David Grimes - the researcher, skeptic and writer who published the paper.

[...] It's a nice idea. Unfortunately the answer is a resounding "no", and the resulting paper ends up being a sort of case study in how not to do statistics.

[...] It would be easy to blame Grimes for all this, but the bigger failure here is in PLOS ONE's peer review process. It's easy to screw up calculus. What's less excusable is that expert reviewers looked at this paper ahead of publication, and none of them spotted an elementary mistake that myself and others saw almost immediately. Numerous other helpers are cited in the acknowledgements, but none of them seem to have glanced at the math or challenged some really odd assumptions. Grimes made a mistake – we all do – but he was also severely let down by his peers and colleagues.

Some of the problems were mentioned in the original article on Soylent.

Originally spotted at Cocktail Party Physics.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

LinkedIn shares dropped 26% after the company projected lower than expected profits for the first quarter of 2016.

The social media site forecast earnings of $0.55 per share - far below analysts expectations of $0.74 per share. LinkedIn also reported a loss of $8m (£5.4m) for the year, compared with a $3m profit in 2014.

LinkedIn has been investing heavily in expansion outside the US, and said it plans to continue those efforts.

"We enter 2016 with increased focus on core initiatives that will help drive growth and scale across our portfolio," said chief executive Jeff Weiner.

The company also said it was phasing-out one of its newer advertising services that had not worked out as planned.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Consumers [on February 2, 2016] filed a class-action lawsuit against data storage company Seagate, after it had continued to sell a 3TB hard drive model that had an 'exceptionally' high failure rate. The case is based on figures released by data backup company Backblaze, who found that failure rates for the ST3000DM001 were not only far higher than other drives, but also did not display a typical 'bathtub-shaped' failure rate curve. Backblaze's report has since been accused of not representing real-world use. Seagate is likely to adopt this line as it responds to the suit.

Also covered at Tom's Hardware which goes into considerable detail as to how these were consumer drives, used in a 24/7 enterprise environment.

In short, by its own admission, Backblaze employed consumer-class drives in a high-volume enterprise-class environment that far exceeded the warranty conditions of the HDDs. Backblaze installed consumer drives into a number of revisions of its own internally developed chassis, many of which utilized a rubber band to "reduce the vibration" of a vertically mounted HDD.

The first revision of the pods, pictured above, had no fasteners for securing the drive into the chassis. As shown, a heavy HDD is mounted vertically on top of a thin multiplexer PCB. The SATA connectors are bearing the full weight of the drive, and factoring the vibration of a normal HDD into the non-supported equation creates the almost perfect recipe for device failure.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

I recently read New Physician-Assisted Suicide Law Opens Dialogue On Difficult Subject and found it to have an eminently readable, well-reasoned, and compassionate discussion. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

After a contentious debate, California's new physician-assisted suicide law was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last October. Once it takes effect, it will give terminally ill patients and their doctors a legally sanctioned process to have responsible and compassionate conversations about choices at the end of life. Hospitals and physicians must now develop their own policies for how the new law may be implemented. U Magazine contributor Dan Gordon spoke recently with two physicians at the forefront of these discussions at UCLA: Dr. Neil Wenger, director of the UCLA Health Ethics Center, and Dr. David Wallenstein, a specialist in pain management and palliative medicine.

[...] data show that in the four states where physician-assisted suicide has been legal (Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana), the number of people who actually go through with physician-assisted suicide is really quite small.

[...] Certain groups at the end of life, especially disenfranchised groups that have had difficulty getting adequate medical care all the way along, have difficulty believing that the right thing to do may be to receive less medical care. And if the physician has ... the consent of the state to actually help provoke death, that is an additional potentially difficult point that may need to be addressed in these rather sticky end-of life discussions. Thus, it is particularly important to be aware of the protections within the law. The law contains many carefully crafted checks and balances. There even is a provision in the California law that isn't in the Oregon law that requires patients to be taken aside in a closed space, with no one else there, to make sure that they're not being coerced.

[...] It is written into the law that this does not allow an infusion of medication to kill the patient. It does not allow mercy killing, and the patient has to self-administer the lethal medication.

The full article from which the referenced story was excerpted appeared as: Death Becomes a Matter of Choice. For more information, read the End of Life Option Act.

What say you fellow Soylentils? How can society properly care for the most vulnerable among us and yet also provide for their wishes to end what they perceive to be unbearable pain, suffering, and cost? Do you want all possible measures taken to keep you alive? At what point would you say "Enough is enough; let me go!"

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

I seldom go on Facebook, but, there is an AWOL family member whose page I have open. The page was grayed out, and I was "greeted" with an announcement that I had to verify my name to continue on Facebook. I clicked "verify", and I got another screen asking if I preferred to confirm now, or later. Some mumbo jumbo about supplying documentation that my name was real.

Well, the fact is, my Facebook name is quite obviously not a real name. Just as obviously, I had been flagged by someone, or something. So — I used the real-sounding name that I used when I registered my gmail account with which I registered on Facebook. I got one more little thingy over top of the grayed out Facebook page, thanking me for updating my name.

So, the name, "Noneofyourbusiness" has disappeared from Facebook, and Agent Smith has appeared in his place. (Did anyone make any attempt to count how many Agent Smiths there were in the movie?)

My apologies, I had just fallen out of bed, and didn't think to take screenshots until after I had verified that the knucklehead was still AWOL, and still had not responded to anyone on Facebook.

It's quite possible that my Facebook account will be canceled sometime soon, as I will refuse to supply any identification to anyone on the internet.

So, has anyone else here met a similar challenge on Facebook? Or, was I singled out for having a very obvious false surname? Maybe you've been "invited" to Facebook Headquarters to sign ze papers, and verify your identity?

What other sites have fellow Soylentils encountered (other than the obvious government/financial sites) that required you to authenticate yourself? Did you acquiesce? What workarounds have you employed?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 suggested this article:

No big story, just a neat animation of a Fourier series.

[Ed. additions follow.]

JavaScript is required, but it seems to run okay after in Pale Moon and NoScript after enabling bgrawi.com and ajax.googleapis.com; also, the page benefits from a large display: be sure to scroll down and see the component equations and their output, too.

Sometimes, a picture IS worth a thousand words. Was taught Fourier series back in my college days, but that was before MATLAB and Maple were generally available. Posting this in hopes others may find this interesting and illuminating, too.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The home secretary's plan to force internet service providers to store everyone's internet activity is vague and confusing, says a committee of MPs.

Police and security services will be able to see names of sites visited in the past year without a warrant, under the draft Investigatory Powers Bill.

The science and technology Committee says its requirements are confusing, and firms fear a rise in hacking.

The Home Office said it would study the report's findings.

When she announced the draft bill last year, Theresa May stressed that the authorities would not be able to see individual web pages visited, just basic data, such as domain names like bbc.co.uk or facebook.com.

The information would, of course, only be used for 'official purposes'.

Original Submission

ghost informed us about:

Nothing warms the soul on a cold winter morning like a VI vs EMACS flamewar. But when was the last time you saw one? Kids these days, using their javascript-powered editors. And with VI and EMACS both eligible for Social Security, perhaps their fighting days are over. But fear not! A new generation of VI and EMACS is here to fight and fight and fight fight fight.

Neovim (github) is a VIM fork for the 21st century. Removing cruft (like support for the Amiga platform where VIM originated) and other updates.

Spacemacs (github) claims to be a "Mnemonic, Discoverable, Consistent, and Crowd-Funded" (vim and emacs) distribution. Confused? Me too.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A fansubbing group will sue the Netherlands anti-piracy group BREIN to test the legality of subtitle distribution:

A group of fan-made subtitle creators are taking the Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN to court. The fansubbers want a Dutch court to decide whether their activities are protected by freedom of expression and if BREIN is permitted to crack down on their work.

[...] Every day millions of people enjoy homemade subtitles but if it was up to some copyright holder groups, the websites offering these files would all cease to exist. This has created a fair amount of tension between both sides and several subtitle websites have had to close shop as a result of this pressure. In the Netherlands, however, a group of subtitle fanatics has decided to go on the offensive.

A group of fansubbers united in the "Free Subtitles Foundation" (Stichting Laat Ondertitels Vrij – SLOV) and raised $15,000 over the past two years for a legal campaign against the local anti-piracy group BREIN, which is about to kick off.

BREIN, who represent the major Hollywood studios and various other film companies, has previously threatened legal action against subtitle sites on several occasions and the Free Subtitles Foundation hopes to bring an end to this.

TorrentFreak contacted Camiel Beijer, the group's lawyer, who informed us that the case revolves around two issues. "The main question is whether the creation and publishing of film subtitles is an act only reserved to the maker of the film work in question," Beijer says. "The second issue concerns a review of the conduct of BREIN against people who create and reproduce subtitles. The Free Subtitles Foundation anticipates that a court verdicts will shed more light on these two themes."

The foundation will send out the summons next week and believes that the case is essential for the future of fansubbing in the Netherlands. It hopes that the court will side with their view that the right to freedom of expression and information trumps copyright.

[BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland) translates roughly as association for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands. ]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Médicines Sans Frontières as well as many here overestimate the contribution of universities and research institutes in producing new drugs. Dr. Lowe, a researcher at Vertex, responds to this claim by citing a 2010 review that covered drug approvals from 1998 to 2007. Dr. Lowe finds that approximately 15% (31/215) of FDA approved drugs came from academic sources.

Put another way, 85% of FDA approved drugs came from other sources.

http://www.msfaccess.org/about-us/media-room/press-releases/pfizer-attempts-mislead-public-over-research-and-development-%E2%80%98fac
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/02/02/drugs-purely-from-academia
http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v9/n11/abs/nrd3251.html

Original Submission