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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How and why resistance training is imperative for older adults

"When you poll people on if they want to live to 100 years old, few will respond with a 'yes'," says Maren Fragala, Ph.D., director of scientific affairs at Quest Diagnostics and lead author of the position statement.

"The reason mainly being that many people associate advanced age with physical and cognitive decline, loss of independence and poor quality of life," adds Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., FACSM, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Michigan Medicine and one of the senior authors of the statement.

The position statement, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, and supported by the National Strength and Conditioning Association, highlights the benefits of strength and resistance training in older adults for healthier aging.

Fragala explains that while aging does take a toll on the body, the statement provides evidence-based recommendations for successful resistance training, or exercise focused on building muscle endurance, programs for older adults.

"Aging, even in the absence of chronic disease, is associated with a variety of biological changes that can contribute to decreases in skeletal muscle mass, strength and function," Fragala says. "Such losses decrease physiologic resilience and increase vulnerability to catastrophic events."

She adds, "The exciting part about this position statement is that it provides evidence-based recommendations for resistance training in older adults to promote health and functional benefits, while preventing and minimizing fears."

Maren S. Fragala, Eduardo L. Cadore, Sandor Dorgo, Mikel Izquierdo, William J. Kraemer, Mark D. Peterson, Eric D. Ryan. Resistance Training for Older Adults. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2019; 33 (8): 2019 DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003230

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Safe Deposit Boxes Aren't Safe

In the early 1980s, when Philip Poniz moved to New Jersey from Colorado, he needed a well-protected place to stash his collection of rare watches. He had been gathering unusual pieces since he was a teenager in 1960s Poland, fascinated by their intricate mechanics. His hobby became his profession, and by the time of his relocation, Mr. Poniz was an internationally known expert in the history and restoration of high-end timepieces.

At first, he kept his personal collection in his house, but as it grew, he wanted something more secure. The vault at his neighborhood bank seemed ideal. In 1983, he signed a one-page lease agreement with First National State Bank of Edison in Highland Park, N.J., for a safe deposit box.

Over the next few decades, the bank — a squat brick building on a low-rise suburban street — changed hands many times. First National became First Union, which was sold to Wachovia, which was then bought by Wells Fargo. But its vault remained the same. A foot-thick steel door sheltered cabinets filled with hundreds of stacked metal boxes, each protected by two keys. The bank kept one; the customer held the other. Both were required to open a box.

In 1998, Mr. Poniz rented several additional boxes, and stored in them various items related to his work. He separated a batch of personal effects — photographs, coins he had inherited from his grandfather, dozens of watches — into a box labeled 105. Every time he opened it, he saw the glinting accumulation of his life's work.

Then, on April 7, 2014, he lifted the thin metal lid. Box 105 was empty.

"I thought my heart would fail," Mr. Poniz said. He paused in his retelling of the memory. At age 67, he has a strong Polish accent and speaks English carefully. He struggled to find the right words to describe the day he discovered his watches were missing. "I was devastated," he said. "I was never like that in my life before. I had never known that one can have a feeling like that."

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Every transistor has a unique quantum fingerprint

We might imagine that electric current flows as a smooth, even stream of electrons through our electronics devices, but at the quantum scale the flow of electric current might be more accurately pictured as a bubbling brook containing many tiny ripples. These ripples can be caused by single-electron effects, which arise due to the repulsion among electrons confined in very small spaces, such as trap sites in transistors. Single-electron effects can lead to tiny changes in the current-voltage characteristics of these devices.

As trap sites are basically tiny defects that are randomly distributed in an uncontrollable way during fabrication, the number, location, and energy levels of trap sites differ for every transistor. As a result, single-electron effects lead to a unique modification in the current-voltage characteristics, effectively giving each transistor a unique "fingerprint."

Recently, researchers have been investigating how these quantum fingerprints might one day be used as an inexpensive form of ID to protect users' personal information for technologies in the emerging network of internet-connected devices known as the Internet of Things.

In a new paper published in Applied Physics Letters, physicists T. Tanamoto and Y. Nishi at the Toshiba Corporation in Kawasaki, Japan, and K. Ono at RIKEN in Saitama, Japan, have demonstrated that single-electron effects may be detected by image-recognition algorithms and used for computer chip identification and security.

"So far, no widespread application exists for single-electron devices," Tanamoto told Phys.org. "Our research opens a different way of using the single-electron effect: as a security device. The importance of security is increasing day by day."

As the physicists explain, the fingerprint of an electronic device can be thought of as a physically unclonable function (PUF). Like a human fingerprint, PUFs are based on unique, naturally occurring physical variations and cannot be transferred to other devices. In addition, PUFs retain their key features throughout the lifetime of the device, despite some degradation due to aging effects.

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martyb writes:

A Recession Is Coming (Eventually). Here's Where You'll See It First:

Last week's report on second-quarter gross domestic product showed that the economy slowed last spring. It also came exactly 10 years since the Great Recession ended, making this officially the longest expansion in American history. (Well, probably. More on that in a second.) So perhaps it's no surprise that forecasters, investors and ordinary people are increasingly asking when the next downturn will arrive.

Economists often say that "expansions don't die of old age." That is, recessions are like coin flips — just because you get heads five times in a row doesn't mean your next flip is more likely to come up tails.

Still, another recession will come eventually. Fortunately, economic expansions, unlike coin-flip streaks, usually provide some hints about when they are nearing their end — if you know where to look. Below is a guide to some of the indicators that have historically done the best job of sounding the alarm.

[...] One caveat: Economists are notoriously terrible at forecasting recessions, especially more than a few months in advance. In fact, it's possible (though unlikely) that a recession has already begun, and we just don't know it yet.

"Historically, the best that forecasters have been able to do consistently is recognize that we're in a recession once we're in one," said Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University. "The dream of an early warning system is still a dream that we're working on."

The article goes on to list and expand upon these indicators which are:

1: The Unemployment Rate
2: The Yield Curve
3: The ISM Manufacturing Index
4: Consumer Sentiment
5: Choose Your Favorite

Do you think the US economy is on the verge of a recession? What have you done, if anything, in preparation for the eventual downturn?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Spicy Diet Could be Linked to Dementia:

A 15-year study of 4582 Chinese adults aged over 55 found evidence of faster cognitive decline in those who consistently ate more than 50 grams of chili a day. Memory decline was even more significant if the chili lovers were slim.

The study, led by Dr Zumin Shi from Qatar University, showed that those who consumed in excess of 50 grams of chili a day had almost double the risk of memory decline and poor cognition.

"Chili consumption was found to be beneficial for body weight and blood pressure in our previous studies. However, in this study, we found adverse effects on cognition among older adults," Dr Zumin says.

[...] Those who ate a lot of chili had a lower income and body mass index (BMI) and were more physically active compared to non-consumers. Researchers say people of normal body weight may be more sensitive to chili intake than overweight people, hence the impact on memory and weight. Education levels may also play a role in cognitive decline and this link requires further research.

Journal Reference:
Zumin Shi, Tahra El-Obeid, Malcolm Riley, Ming Li, Amanda Page, Jianghong Liu. High Chili Intake and Cognitive Function among 4582 Adults: An Open Cohort Study over 15 Years. Nutrients, 2019; 11 (5): 1183 DOI: 10.3390/nu11051183

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Fnord666.

Researcher's innovative floodplain maps help official response

When Jude Kastens was developing a new floodplain mapping model more than a decade ago as part of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Kansas, he aimed to address a critical information gap that often hindered officials during major flooding events: the lack of real-time, wide-area predictions for floodwater extent and depth.

​Dependable, detailed inundation estimates are vital for emergency managers to have enough situational awareness to quickly get the right resources and information to flood-impacted communities. In 2007, severe flooding in southeastern Kansas put a spotlight on the lack of timely, reliable projections for floodwater spread.

With heavy rains this spring (May 2019 was the wettest month ever recorded in Kansas), officials at the Kansas Water Office and Kansas Division of Emergency Management worked with Kastens, now a KU associate research professor with the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program at the Kansas Biological Survey, to get a more precise read on where floodwaters could rise to, based on his approach to integrating data from elevation maps, stream gauges and National Weather Service river stage forecasts.

“I worked with the Kansas Water Office in May,” Kastens said. “The ground was saturated, and the reservoirs were getting full, and with a lot more rain in the forecast, major flooding across central and eastern Kansas was looking imminent. Some years ago we’d developed this inundation library largely in collaboration with the Water Office and the Kansas GIS Policy Board but had never had the chance to put it through its paces in real time. It was based on the approach that I developed for my dissertation, and we had flood libraries for the greater eastern half of Kansas, based on the gauged stream network. For instance, if you drive south of Lawrence on Highway 59, you’ll see a USGS stream gauge box by the bridge over the Wakarusa River. There are about 200 gauges in Kansas that collect real-time stream stage information, and in times of flood, the National Weather Service provides stage forecasts several days out for a lot of these. We can take these data and map estimated current or future flooding, between gauges or around one.”

Kastens’ model (called FLDPLN, or “Floodplain”) maps potential inundation as a function of stage height using basic hydrologic principles and gridded elevation data. Because the approach requires so few inputs and little supervision, it has significant advantages for real-time mapping over existing methods such as the more precise but more complicated hydrodynamic models that FEMA uses to map 100-year floodplains.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Supervisors driven by bottom line fail to get top performance from employees: 'Bottom-line mentality' can lead to loss of employee respect and loyalty, research shows

Supervisors driven by profits could actually be hurting their coveted bottom lines by losing the respect of their employees, who counter by withholding performance, according to a new study led by Baylor University.

The study, "The Influence of Supervisor Bottom-Line Mentality and Employee Bottom-Line Mentality on Leader-Member Exchange and Subsequent Employee Performance," is published in the journal Human Relations.

"Supervisors who focus only on profits to the exclusion of caring about other important outcomes, such as employee well-being or environmental or ethical concerns, turn out to be detrimental to employees," said lead researcher Matthew Quade, Ph.D., assistant professor of management in Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. "This results in relationships that are marked by distrust, dissatisfaction and lack of affection for the supervisor. And ultimately, that leads to employees who are less likely to complete tasks at a high level and less likely to go above and beyond the call of duty."

While other studies have examined the impact of bottom-line mentality (BLM) on employee behavior, Quade said this is the first to identify why employees respond with negative behaviors to supervisors they perceive to have BLM.

Matthew J Quade, Benjamin D McLarty, Julena M Bonner. The influence of supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee bottom-line mentality on leader-member exchange and subsequent employee performance. Human Relations, 2019; 001872671985839 DOI: 10.1177/0018726719858394

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser.

Kickstarter game teaches players how to identify fake news

The idea of Misinformer is for the player to take on the role of a citizen journalist cracking a conspiracy. You start off as a moderator for a typical dull gardening forum, but things change when a wave of political spam arrives and you have to uncover the culprit.

It's a text-based game which unfolds on a smartphone UI and requires you to identify the truth in a world of fake news and misinformation. Playing the game teaches the skills people need to identify and debunk misinformation in the real world.

The game is being created by Jay McGregor who runs the investigative journalism startup Point. For the sake of full disclosure, here at Engadget we collaborate with Point to produce a feature series covering technology, internet and political issues.

As an ongoing project, real investigations from Point's YouTube channel will be fictionalized and added to the game as downloadable content, so there will be plenty of new material to play and the game will stay up to date with the news.

Sign up for it on Kickstarter.

Original Submission

SemperOSS writes:

Hello fellow Soylentils, I could use some of your insights and suggestions.

I am looking for a lean, mean, and safe open source solution that implements a small blog where I can rant and rave to my heart's delight to my two followers.

To set the scene, I am not looking for something big and/or unwieldy, which basically rules out the major platforms like Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. The software is going to be self hosted on my existing web server, which already runs Linux with Apache2, MySQL, PHP, Perl, and PostgreSQL (LAMPPP?) on a Debian platform.

I would like the following features:

Anonymous writes:

'Anonymised' data can never be totally anonymous, says study

"Anonymised" data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset.

An anonymised dataset is supposed to have had all personally identifiable information removed from it, while retaining a core of useful information for researchers to operate on without fear of invading privacy. For instance, a hospital may remove patients' names, addresses and dates of birth from a set of health records in the hope researchers may be able to use the large sets of records to uncover hidden links between conditions.

But in practice, data can be deanonymised in a number of ways. In 2008, an anonymised Netflix dataset of film ratings was deanonymised by comparing the ratings with public scores on the IMDb film website in 2014; the home addresses of New York taxi drivers were uncovered from an anonymous data set of individual trips in the city; and an attempt by Australia's health department to offer anonymous medical billing data could be reidentified by cross-referencing "mundane facts" such as the year of birth for older mothers and their children, or for mothers with many children.

Now researchers from Belgium's Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) and Imperial College London have built a model to estimate how easy it would be to deanonymise any arbitrary dataset. A dataset with 15 demographic attributes, for instance, "would render 99.98% of people in Massachusetts unique". And for smaller populations, it gets easier: if town-level location data is included, for instance, "it would not take much to reidentify people living in Harwich Port, Massachusetts, a city of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants".

Original Submission

upstart writes for Bytram:

Attempters' Longterm Survival

Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide at a later date. This has been well-established in the suicidology literature. A literature review summarized 90 studies that have followed over time people who have made suicide attempts that resulted in medical care. Approximately 7% (range: 5-11%) of attempters eventually died by suicide, approximately 23% reattempted nonfatally, and 70% had no further attempts.

Even studies that focused on medically serious attempts–such as people who jumped in front of a train–and studies that followed attempters for many decades found similarly low suicide completion rates. At least one study, published after the 90-study review, found a slightly higher completion rate. This was a 37-year follow-up of self-poisoners in Finland that found an eventual completion rate of 13%.

This relatively good long-term survival rate is consistent with the observation that suicidal crises are often short-lived, even if there may be underylying, more chronic risk factors present that give rise to these crises.

Original Submission

upstart writes for AnonymousLuser

Shaping light with a Smartlens

In a study recently published in Nature Photonics, [...] researchers demonstrate an adjustable technique to manipulate light without any mechanical movement. In this approach, coined Smartlens, a current is passed through a well-optimized micrometer-scale resistor, and the heating locally changes the optical properties of the transparent polymer plate holding the resistor.

In much the same way as a mirage bends light passing through hot air to create illusions of distant lakes, this microscale hot region is able to deviate light. Within milliseconds, a simple slab of polymer can be turned into a lens and back: small, micrometer-scale Smartlenses heat up and cool down quickly and with minimal power consumption. They can even be fabricated in arrays, and the authors show that several objects located at very different distances can be brought into focus within the same image by activating the Smartlenses located in front of each of them, even if the scene is in colours.

By modelling the diffusion of heat and the propagation of light and using algorithms inspired by the laws of natural selection the authors show they can go way beyond simple lenses: a properly engineered resistor can shape light with a very high level of control and achieve a wide variety of optical functions. For instance, if the right resistor is imprinted on it, a piece of polymer could be activated or deactivated at will to generate a given "freeform" and correct specific defects in our eyesight, or the aberrations of an optical instrument.

Tunable and free-form planar optics^[$], Nature photonics (DOI: 10.1038/s41566-019-0486-3)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Using the same tactics as ‘Big Tobacco,’ Juul may have intentionally targeted teens

After a hearing this week, members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform said that Juul, the ultra-popular e-cigarette brand, may have intentionally targeted teens in schools and online.

Based on 55,000 non-public documents out of Juul Labs, the subcommittee said that Juul's Youth Prevention Plan recruited schools into a program that put Juul representatives and students in the same room. Schools received payment for participating in the program.

According to the release, one testimony put before the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy described a Juul representative telling students that vaping was “totally safe,” and recommended that one already nicotine-addicted student use Juul.

The subcommittee also reported that Juul spent $134,000 to set up a five-week summer camp for 80 children through a charter school, according to documents obtained for the hearing. The camp was meant to be a “holistic health education program.”

Dr. Robert Jackler, Stanford University School of Medicine, testified about his conversations with Juul co-founder James Monsees, who said the use of Stanford’s tobacco advertising database was “very helpful as they designed JUUL’s advertising,” according to information provided by the subcommittee.

“The Subcommittee found that: JUUL deployed a sophisticated program to enter schools and convey its messaging directly to teenage children; JUUL also targeted teenagers and children, as young as eight years old, in summer camps and public out-of-school programs; and JUUL recruited thousands of online ‘influencers’ to market to teens,” the memo states.

[...] Juul declined to comment at the time of publication.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

A new bill is being written with input from both the House and Senate in the hopes of speeding the introduction of self driving vehicles on the roads.

Similar legislation last year (the SELF DRIVE Act in the House and the 'AV START Act' in the Senate) failed to pass even though amended repeatedly in response to Democrat

raised objections that it didn’t do enough to address safety concerns. The hope is that with Democrats now in control of the House, a bill can be crafted from the start that addresses those concerns.

The new bipartisan legislation will also address

what these vehicles look like in the future, allowing for automakers to manufacture vehicles without steering wheels, gas, and brake pedals so long as the Department of Transportation exempts them from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).

Movement on this front was unexpected considering that

the AV industry has mostly dialed down its efforts in Washington. According to Politico, lobbying on driverless cars dropped 35 percent between the end of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019.

Perhaps due to focusing on technical challenges.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Decades-Old Computer Science Conjecture Solved in Two Pages

Over the years, computer scientists have developed many ways to measure the complexity of a given Boolean function. Each measure captures a different aspect of how the information in the input string determines the output bit. For instance, the "sensitivity" of a Boolean function tracks, roughly speaking, the likelihood that flipping a single input bit will alter the output bit. And "query complexity" calculates how many input bits you have to ask about before you can be sure of the output.

Each measure provides a unique window into the structure of the Boolean function. Yet computer scientists have found that nearly all these measures fit into a unified framework, so that the value of any one of them is a rough gauge for the value of the others. Only one complexity measure didn't seem to fit in: sensitivity.

In 1992, Noam Nisan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Mario Szegedy, now of Rutgers University, conjectured that sensitivity does indeed fit into this framework. But no one could prove it. "This, I would say, probably was the outstanding open question in the study of Boolean functions," Servedio said. "People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress," said Ryan O'Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.

Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. "It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl," wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview. Aaronson and O'Donnell both called Huang's paper the "book" proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erdős' notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. "I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this," Aaronson wrote.

Original Submission