SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

Science Daily:

A new study has established that excessive use of social media, in particular the posting of images and selfies, is associated with a subsequent increase in narcissism.
...
They also assessed the participants' usage of social media -- including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat -- during that same period.

Narcissism is a personality characteristic that can involve grandiose exhibitionism, beliefs relating to entitlement, and exploiting others.

Those who used social media excessively, through visual postings, displayed an average 25% increase in such narcissistic traits over the four months of the study.

This increase took many of these participants above the clinical cut-off for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, according to the measurement scale used.

TLDR: Social media encourages narcissism.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila has said the GPS signal in his country's northern airspace was disrupted during recent Nato war games in Scandinavia.

He said he believed the signal had been jammed deliberately and that it was possible Russia was to blame because it had the means to do so.

Finland is not a Nato member but joined the war games which began last month.

Norway also reported GPS problems during the exercises near Russia's north-western borders.
...
The Finnish region of Lapland and northern parts of Norway close to the Russian border were affected, with the Norwegian regional airline Widerøe confirming its pilots had experienced GPS disruption, Germany's DW news site reports.

However, the airline pointed out that pilots aboard civilian aircraft had other options when a GPS signal failed.

Finland has called "shenanigans" on Russia.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Reports are coming in from all across the web that Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee has died:

Stan Lee—the Marvel Comics legend responsible for cultural icons from Spider-Man and Iron Man to X-Men and Black Panther—has died according to multiple reports from places like TMZ and The Hollywood Reporter [(THR)].

THR spoke with a source that said Lee died early Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. TMZ spoke to Lee's daughter, J.C., who said an ambulance rushed to Lee's Hollywood Hills home early Monday morning to take him to Cedars-Sinai. That outlet noted Lee had suffered several illnesses over the last year or so, including dealing with pneumonia. Lee was 95 years old.

[...] Indisputably, Lee's decades-spanning career has spawned some of the most beloved pop culture characters and franchises of all time. He began working on comics as an assistant at Timely Comics in 1939; that entity would eventually morph into Marvel Comics in the 1960s. Alongside other eventual giants of the industry like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Lee helped create seemingly every adored comic hero this side of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman: in addition to the credits above, Lee had a hand in the Hulk, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and characters like Ant-Man and Thor.

Also at: Hollywood Reporter, The Daily Beast, c|net, ComicBook.com, and NPR.

Original Submission   Alternate Submission

takyon writes:

The outcomes of several races in the 2018 midterm elections may have an impact on the Europa Clipper mission, as well as other NASA priorities:

Perhaps the most significant loss occurred in Texas's Seventh Congressional District, home to thousands of the employees at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. A political newcomer, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, defeated the incumbent John Culberson, who has served in the House since 2001. Culberson, an attorney, doesn't have a science background. But he grew up in the 1960s building telescopes, toying with model rockets, and reading popular science magazines. For the past four years, Culberson has pushed his colleagues in the House and the Senate to steadily grow nasa's budget, for projects including its climate-science programs—which may come as a surprise, given the congressman's party line on climate change.

Culberson has fiercely supported one mission in particular: a journey to one of Jupiter's moons, the icy Europa. As chair of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science, Culberson more than doubled the amount of money the space agency requested from Congress for an orbiter around Europa, from $265 million to $545 million. He also threw in $195 million to support a lander to the moon, which nasa hadn't even planned for, but would of course accept. Scientists suspect that Europa's frozen crust covers a liquid ocean that may sustain microbial life. Culberson was intent on sending something there to find it. "This will be tremendously expensive, but worth every penny," he said last year, during a visit to nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to check its progress.

With Culberson out of the House, the funding portfolio for the Europa mission could change. "I don't see any obvious members of Congress, Republican or Democratic, who'd be taking up that mantle of leading the Europa efforts, so I imagine that those are likely to start to wane," said Casey Dreier, a senior space-policy adviser at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space-advocacy group.

Dreier said the development of the Europa orbiter, known as Clipper, will certainly continue. Since nasa formally approved the mission in 2015, engineers and scientists have made significant progress on the design of the spacecraft. But without a steady flow of funding, its launch date could slip, he said. The lander is on shakier ground. "I don't think you're going to see money for the Europa lander to continue showing up, because that's money that nasa has not been requesting," Dreier said.

See also: Culberson's ouster could spell big problems for NASA's Orion program, experts say
NASA's Europa lander may be in jeopardy after the midterms — and some are fine with seeing it go
What the 2018 midterms mean for NASA and planetary science

Previously: House Spending Bill Offers NASA More Money Than the Agency or Administration Wanted

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

China is about to make humankind's first visit to the farside of the moon

China is about to make space history. In December, the country will launch the first spacecraft ever to land on the farside of the moon. Another craft, slated for takeoff in 2019, will be the first to bring lunar rocks back to Earth since 1976.

These two missions — the latest in China’s lunar exploration series named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e — are at the forefront of renewed interest in exploring our nearest celestial body. India’s space agency as well as private companies based in Israel and Germany are also hoping for robotic lunar missions in 2019. And the United States aims to have astronauts orbiting the moon starting in 2023 and to land astronauts on the lunar surface in the late 2020s.

The time is ripe for new lunar exploration. Despite decades of study, Earth’s only natural satellite still contains mysteries about its formation as well as clues to the history of the solar system (SN: 4/15/17, p. 18). “There are too many things we don’t know,” says planetary scientist Long Xiao of China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. He is a coauthor of two studies published in June and July in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets describing the landing sites of the new Chinese missions, Chang’e-4 and -5.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Solar power: largest study to date discovers 25 percent power loss across UK

Researchers at the University of Huddersfield have undertaken the largest study to date into the effectiveness of solar panels across the UK and discovered that parts of the country are suffering an overall power loss of up to 25% because of the issue of regional 'hot spots'. Hot spots were also found to be more prevalent in the North of England than in the south.

Dr Mahmoud Dhimish, a lecturer in Electronics and Control Engineering and co-director of the Photovoltaics Laboratory at the University, analysed 2,580 polycrystalline silicon photovoltaic (PV) panels distributed across the UK. The UK has been fossil-free for two years and demand is constantly increasing for renewable energy.

After quantifying the data, Dr Dhimish discovered that the panels found to have hot spots generated a power output notably less than those that didn't. He also discovered that location was a primary contributor in the distribution of hot spots.

Photovoltaics hot spots are areas of elevated temperature which can affect only part of the solar panel. They are a result of a localised decrease in efficiency and the main cause of accelerated PV ageing, often causing permanent damage to the solar panel's lifetime performance.

According to Dr Dhimish, this is the first time an investigation into how hot spots impact the performance of PV panels has been conducted from such a large scale dataset and says the project uncovered results which demonstrate the preferred location of UK hot spots.

"This research showed the unprecedented density of hot spots in the North of England," said Dr Dhimish. "Over 90% of the hot spots are located in the north and most of these are inland, with considerably less seen on the coast."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Lawsuits Aim Billions in Fines at Equifax and Ad-Targeting Companies

Equifax, Experian and Oracle are among a slate of companies whose business is consumer information, that could soon face billions of dollars in fines for improper data handling.

Privacy International has filed complaints against seven corporations, consisting of data brokers (Acxiom and Oracle), companies that provide consumer profiling and targeting data for advertising purposes (Criteo, Tapad and Quantcast), and two credit-referencing agencies that collect sensitive financial data on roughly everyone in the U.S. as well as many in Europe and elsewhere (Equifax and Experian). The complaints have been lodged with data protection authorities in France, Ireland and the U.K. The group is asking for an investigation into their data-handling practices under the auspices of Europe's strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR, which went into effect in May, gives regulators real teeth when it comes to enforcing privacy mandates, including issuing fines of up to 4 percent of an offending company's annual turnover. That would equal billions of dollars for Fortune 500 companies such as Equifax, which consumers know from the massive data breach last year.

Aside from the credit-reporting giants, the complaints target companies that, despite collecting and using or selling the data of millions of people, are not household names.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Cross shard transactions at 10 million requests per second

Dropbox stores petabytes of metadata to support user-facing features and to power our production infrastructure. The primary system we use to store this metadata is named Edgestore and is described in a previous blog post, (Re)Introducing Edgestore. In simple terms, Edgestore is a service and abstraction over thousands of MySQL nodes that provides users with strongly consistent, transactional reads and writes at low latency.

Edgestore hides details of physical sharding from the application layer to allow developers to scale out their metadata storage needs without thinking about complexities of data placement and distribution. Central to building a distributed database on top of individual MySQL shards in Edgestore is the ability to collocate related data items together on the same shard. Developers express logical collocation of data via the concept of a colo, indicating that two pieces of data are typically accessed together. In turn, Edgestore provides low-latency, transactional guarantees for reads and writes within a given colo (by placing them on the same physical MySQL shard), but only best-effort support across colos.

While the product use-cases at Dropbox are usually a good fit for collocation, over time we found that certain ones just aren’t easily partitionable. As a simple example, an association between a user and the content they share with another user is unlikely to be collocated, since the users likely live on different shards. Even if we were to attempt to reorganize physical storage such that related colos land on the same physical shards, we would never get a perfect cut of data.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

'Wallace & Gromit' Producer Aardman Animations Transfers Ownership to Employees

In an era of entertainment industry mergers and acquisitions, the founders of British animation powerhouse Aardman – the much-loved Oscar-winning studio behind Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep – have moved to ensure their company’s continued independence by transferring it into employee ownership.

The decision, made by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who first set up Aardman in 1972, will see the majority of company shares transferred into a trust, which will then hold them on behalf of the workforce.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, both Lord and Sproxton explained that the move was about seven years in the making, and while it wasn’t an indicator of their imminent departure, meant that Aardman was in “the best possible shape” for when that moment came and would help secure its creative legacy and culture.

“We’ve spent so much time building this company up and being so profoundly attached to it. It’s not a business to us, it’s everything, it’s our statement to the world,” said Lord. “Having done that for so many years, the last thing we wanted to do was to just flog it off to someone.”

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Vitamin D And Fish Oil Supplements Disappoint In Long-Awaited Study Results

Many people routinely take nutritional supplements such as vitamin D and fish oil in the hopes of staving off major killers like cancer and heart disease.

But the evidence about the possible benefits of the supplements has been mixed.

Now, long-awaited government-funded research has produced some of the clearest evidence yet about the usefulness of taking the supplements. And the results — published in two papers — are disappointing.

"Both trials were negative," says Dr. Lawrence Fine, chief of the clinical application and prevention branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the studies.

"Overall, they showed that neither fish oil nor vitamin D actually lowered the incidence of heart disease or cancer," Fine says.

The results were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Chicago and released online Saturday by the New England Journal of Medicine. One paper focused on vitamin D supplementation and the other focused on fish oil.

The trials involved nearly 26,000 healthy adults age 50 and older with no history of cancer or heart disease who took part in the VITAL research project. Twenty percent of the participants were African-American.

Some of the participants took either 1 gram of fish oil — which contains omega-3 fatty acids — plus 2,000 international units of vitamin D daily. Others consumed the same dose of vitamin D plus a placebo, while others ingested the same dose of fish oil plus a placebo. The last group took two placebos. After more than five years, researchers were unable to find any overall benefit.

While the overall results were disappointing, there appeared to be a beneficial effect when it came to one aspect of heart disease and fish oil: heart attacks.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Smartwatches know you're getting a cold days before you feel ill

Once we had palm-reading, now we have smartwatches. Wearable tech can now detect when you’re about to fall ill, simply by tracking your vital signs.

Michael Snyder at Stanford University in California experienced this first-hand last year. For over a year he had been wearing seven sensors to test their reliability, when suddenly they began to show abnormal readings. Even though he felt fine, the sensors showed that his heart was beating faster than normal, his skin temperature had risen, and the level of oxygen in his blood had dropped.

“That’s what first alerted me that something wasn’t quite right,” says Snyder. He wondered whether he might have caught Lyme disease from a tick during a recent trip to rural Massachusetts.

A mild fever soon followed, and Snyder asked a doctor for the antibiotic doxycycline, which can be used to treat Lyme disease. His symptoms cleared within a day. Subsequent tests confirmed his self-diagnosis.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Cloudflare rolls out its 1.1.1.1 privacy service to iOS, Android

Months after announcing its privacy-focused DNS service, Cloudflare is bringing 1.1.1.1 to mobile users.

Granted, nothing ever stopped anyone from using 1.1.1.1 on their phones or tablets already. But now the app, now available for iPhones, iPads and Android devices, aims to make it easier for anyone to use its free consumer DNS service.

The app is a one-button push to switch on and off again. That's it.

Cloudflare rolled out 1.1.1.1 earlier this year on April Fools' Day, no less, but privacy is no joke to the San Francisco-based networking giant. In using the service, you let Cloudflare handle all of your DNS information, like when an app on your phone tries to connect to the internet, or you type in the web address of any site. By funneling that DNS data through 1.1.1.1, it can make it more difficult for your internet provider to know which sites you're visiting, and also ensure that you can get to the site you want without having your connection censored or hijacked.

Apple and Google Play.

Also at Android Police and Fast Company.

Previously: Cloudflare Launches 1.1.1.1 Consumer DNS Service
Cloudflare's New DNS Attracting 'Gigabits Per Second' Of Rubbish

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Rocket Lab's Modest Launch Is Giant Leap for Small Rocket Business:

The company's Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business.

A small rocket from a little-known company lifted off Sunday from the east coast of New Zealand, carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. That modest event — the first commercial launch by a U.S.-New Zealand company known as Rocket Lab — could mark the beginning of a new era in the space business, where countless small rockets pop off from spaceports around the world. This miniaturization of rockets and spacecraft places outer space within reach of a broader swath of the economy.

The rocket, called the Electron, is a mere sliver compared to the giant rockets that Elon Musk, of SpaceX, and Jeffrey P. Bezos, of Blue Origin, envisage using to send people into the solar system. It is just 56 feet tall and can carry only 500 pounds into space.

But Rocket Lab is aiming for markets closer to home. "We're FedEx," said Peter Beck, the New Zealand-born founder and chief executive of Rocket Lab. "We're a little man that delivers a parcel to your door."

Behind Rocket Lab, a host of start-up companies are also jockeying to provide transportation to space for a growing number of small satellites. The payloads include constellations of telecommunications satellites that would provide the world with ubiquitous internet access. The payload of this mission, which Rocket Lab whimsically named "It's Business Time," offered a glimpse of this future: two ship-tracking satellites for Spire Global; a small climate- and environment-monitoring satellite for GeoOptics; a small probe built by high school students in Irvine, Calif., and a demonstration version of a drag sail that would pull defunct satellites out of orbit.

Subsentient writes:

Apple's MacBook Pro laptops have become increasingly unfriendly with Linux in recent years [...] But now with the latest Mac Mini systems employing Apple's T2 security chip, they too are likely to crush any Linux dreams.

At least until further notice, these new Apple systems sporting the T2 chip will not be able to boot Linux operating systems.

[...] By default, Microsoft Windows isn't even bootable on the new Apple systems until enabling support for Windows via the Boot Camp Assistant macOS software.

From Phoronix.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Comcast heads to trial with Washington state over consumer protection dispute

Lawyers from Comcast and the State of Washington met in King County Superior Court Friday debating evidence in a rare consumer protection lawsuit headed for trial.

The case involves a Comcast product called the Service Protection Plan (SPP), a monthly paid service that covers maintenance of in-home wiring for Xfinity TV, internet and voice, and troubleshooting for customer-owned equipment. Washington claims Comcast repeatedly violated the state's Consumer Protection Act (CPA) by signing customers up for the SPP without their consent, misleading them to believe the service was free, and misrepresenting what the service guaranteed.

"Consumers who get signed up for a service over the phone without being told about it are potentially deceived as to whether or not they have that service, even if they get disclosures later," Assistant Attorney General Seann Colgan said during the hearing Friday. "That's really where this comes down under the law."

Colgan also noted that the SPP is a lucrative product for Comcast, claiming sales of the product accounted for $85 million in revenue for the company between 2011 and 2016.

Comcast's attorneys claim that the cases cited by the Attorney General's office were in the extreme minority and the result of a few bad apples who were fired or seriously disciplined.

"When you're dealing with millions of interactions, there will be mistakes," said Comcast attorney Howard Shapiro. "There will be misconduct. Comcast, like any other large entity, is not full of perfect humans who every time, do everything right. But that is not a CPA violation."

Comcast revised its SPP policies in 2017 to be more transparent.

Original Submission