SoylentNews

Michelle Rindel reports at AP that despite being two of the largest cities in the Southwest, Las Vegas and Phoenix are linked by a road that narrows to two lanes, hits stoplights in a Depression-era town and until recently backed up traffic over the Hoover Dam. An effort to improve what's now a 4 1/2-hour drive to cover the 300 miles of desert between Sin City and the Valley of the Sun with a more reliable road has heavy-hitting allies, including business leaders and the Republican governor of each state. "Long-term jobs are created by our connectivity," says Steve Betts, noting that the stretch would be the first piece of a new shipping route between Mexico and Canada. That the cities aren't already linked by an interstate is a fluke of timing. The Phoenix and Las Vegas populations exploded just after the national road-building frenzy that started in the 1950s. The Las Vegas metro area, population 2 million, is 40 times larger than it was in 1950. The Phoenix area, population 4.3 million, has grown 13-fold over that span. Highway supporters won a key victory last year when Congress formally designated Interstate 11. The legislation provides no funding, but it allows builders to tap into interstate construction dollars. An interstate could link Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas as partners in a "megaregion" that competes with other regions, and could open a trade route from Mexico to Pacific Ocean ports and Canada. Arizona and Nevada are currently losing much of that flow and its attendant development to Texas and California, according to Betts, chairman of CAN-DO, an acronym for Connecting Arizona and Nevada-Delivering Opportunities. Still, other critics worry that pushing further toward the interstate dream would contribute to urban sprawl and hurt the environment. "The last thing we need is another freeway," says Sandy Bahr, president of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club. "We need to look for other transportation modes."

Kimberly Hefling reports from AP that the SAT college entrance exam is undergoing sweeping revisions in the first major update since 2005 which College Board officials say is needed to make the exam more representative of what students study in high school and the skills they need to succeed in college and afterward. The test should offer "worthy challenges, not artificial obstacles," says College Board President David Coleman. Scoring will return to a 1,600-point scale last used in 2004. (Fun Fact: Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen earned scores of 1590 and 1600.) There will be a separate score for the optional essay and students will have the option of taking the test on computers. One of the biggest changes in the SAT is that the extra penalty for wrong answers, which discouraged guessing, will be eliminated and some vocabulary words will be replaced with words such as "synthesis" and "empirical" that are used more widely in classrooms and in work settings. Some high school and college admissions counselors say eliminating the penalty for wrong answers and making the essay optional could make the test less stressful for some students. According to Jeff Rickey "it will encourage students to consider the questions more carefully and to attempt them, where before if a cursory glance at a question made it seem too complex to them, they may go ahead and skip that question." College Board is also partnering with Khan Academy to address one of the greatest inequities around college entrance exams, namely the culture and practice of high-priced test preparation which critics call a tool to protect the interests of the elite. "For too long, there's been a well-known imbalance between students who could afford test-prep courses and those who couldn't," says Sal Khan, founder and executive director of Khan Academy. "We're thrilled to collaborate closely with the College Board to level the playing field by making truly world-class test-prep materials freely available to all students."

Elizabeth Howell reports at Space.com that a Canadian team exploring Antarctica this month is testing Astroskin, a garment that fits over a person's upper body and is embedded with wireless sensors. The eight crewmembers of the the XPAntarctik expedition, who have vowed to use no motorized vehicles during their trek, are spending 45 days in a previously unexplored region of the continent and beaming their medical information back to the University of Quebec at Montreal while wearing Astroskin. Doctors can see each explorers' vital signs, including blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing rate, and skin temperature, as well as how well the they are sleeping and how they are moving. "The great thing about this technology is since it's wireless, it can be monitored at a distance," says CSA chief medical officer Raffi Kuyumijian. "People who live in remote communities, for example, will have an easy access to a doctor. They can have these shirts on them all the time. It can trigger alarms if something wrong is happening, and alert the doctors following at a distance." The Canadian team has not indicated when Astroskin could fly in space, but says it could be used on the International Space Station during future missions.

Robert Channick reports at the Chicago Tribune that Comcast is set to turn hundreds of thousands of Chicago-area homes into wi-fi hot spots, using existing Comcast equipment to build out its publicly accessible wireless network. The neighborhood hot spots initiative, rolling out during the next several months, will send a separate Wi-Fi signal from Comcast-issued home equipment, enabling anyone within range to get online. Soon, entire residential blocks will begin to show as hot spots on Xfinity's Wi-Fi mobile app. Because the Comcast subscriber's signal will be kept separate from the second, publicly available signal, the subscriber's speed and privacy shouldn't be affected. "They'll look like two separate networks and they'll act like two separate networks," says Tom Nagel. "Any use on the public side doesn't impact the private side." Once the dual-mode modems are activated remotely by Comcast, visitors will use their own Xfinity credentials to sign on, and will not need the homeowner's permission or password to tap into the public Wi-Fi signal. Nonsubscribers will get two free hours a month; beyond that, they can access Xfinity Wi-Fi on a per-use basis. Rates run from $2.95 per hour to $19.95 per week, according to Comcast. Xfinity subscribers can travel from hot spot to hot spot - in this case, from home to home - without needing to log on again through their mobile device. "The Utopian ideal of a massive, free Wi-Fi network has been around since the early days of Wi-Fi, but there was never an economically viable path to deliver it," says Craig Moffett. "Comcast has a better shot at it than just about anybody else."

Heavy-duty trucks spend more time on the road than passenger vehicles, so improving their fuel efficiency of 5 or 6 mpg can have a major effect on emissions--and their owners' bottom lines. Now Stephen Edelstein reports that Walmart has unveiled the Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience (WAVE), designed for optimum aerodynamic efficiency featuring a convex nose to reduce aerodynamic drag and constructed of carbon-fiber reducing its weight by 4,000 pounds allowing the truck to carry more freight without the need for increased power or fuel consumption. The design was achieved in part by placing the driver in the center of the cab (video). The steering wheel is flanked by LCD screens--in place of conventional gauges--and there is a sleeping compartment directly behind the driver's pod. The WAVE is powered by a Capstone Turbine engine coupled to an electrical powertrain. Capstone Turbines is a California based gas turbine manufacturer that specializes in microturbine power along with heating and cooling cogeneration systems. Key to the Capstone design is its use of foil bearings, which provides maintenance and fluid-free operation for the lifetime of the turbine and reduces the system to a single moving part which also eliminates the need for any cooling or other secondary systems. With over 7000 trucks, Walmart's fleet of vehicles provides a large opportunity to increase fuel efficiency across the board and set an example for the rest of the big box stores. They'll also be necessary in the near future: President Barack Obama has directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to draft a new set of fuel-economy rules for medium and heavy-duty trucks.

"Kyle Vanhemert reports that a group of researchers in Barcelona are using the Oculus Rift headset to let participants experience the creative process through someone else's eyes and in their latest experiment are letting men and women swap bodies. Two subjects are outfitted with headsets connected so that each participant sees a video stream from point-of-view cameras attached to the other person's rig. The participants are instructed to mimic each other's movements, wordlessly dictating the action in tandem like kids playing with a Ouija board. They start out moving their hands around and touching their arms and bellies, but they then shed clothes, graze their own bare skin, and look into their underwear to give their partner a sense of what it's like to look down and see equipment that's not usually there. The effect is profound says Philippe Bertrand. "Deep inside you know it's not your body, but you feel like it is." "The discovery of 'mirror neurons' by Giacomo Rizzolatti has shown us that you can't conceive an "I" without an "us," Bertrand explains. The group calls it "The Machine To Be Another" and over the last several months, the group has found a diverse group of researchers interested in their "embodiment experience platform," from artists to therapists to anthropologists. Their latest project is focused on VR's potential for fields like gender studies and queer theory, but they're already formulating applications from artistic performances to neurorehabilitation. Other studies suggest the effectiveness of embodiment for reducing implicit racial bias. The Machine To Be Another "aims to promote self understanding, empathy and tolerance among users" across the spectrum. It's basically highly conceptual performance art, though we could see the technology being used in educational settings to help broaden discussions on gender, race, disabilities, and aging."

Tom Friedman writes at the NYT that Google has determined that GPA's are worthless as a criteria for hiring, test scores are worthless, and brainteasers are a complete waste of time. " They don't predict anything," says Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. "The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it's not IQ. It's learning ability. It's the ability to process on the fly. It's the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they're predictive." Many jobs at Google require math, computing and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more and the least important attribute Google looks for is "expertise." "The expert will go: 'I've seen this 100 times before; here's what you do.' " Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer "because most of the time it's not that hard, "says Bock, "but once in a while they'll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that." Finally Google looks for intellectual humility. "Without humility, you are unable to learn." It is why research shows that many graduates from hotshot business schools plateau. "Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don't learn how to learn from that failure," says Bock. "What we've seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They'll argue like hell. They'll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, 'here's a new fact,' and they'll go, 'Oh, well, that changes things; you're right.' " You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time."

Bruce Schneier writes that the three characteristics of a good backdoor are a low chance of discovery, high deniability if discovered, and minimal conspiracy to implement and says that the critical iOS and OSX vulnerability that Apple patched last week meets these criteria and could be an example of a deliberate change by a bad actor. "Look at the code. What caused the vulnerability is a single line of code," writes Schneier. "Since that statement isn't a conditional, it causes the whole procedure to terminate." If the Apple auditing system is any good, they will be able to trace this errant goto line to the specific login that made the change. "Was this done on purpose? I have no idea. But if I wanted to do something like this on purpose, this is exactly how I would do it."

Steve Bellovin has another take on the vulnerability. "It may have been an accident," writes Bellovin. "If it was enemy action, it was fairly clumsy. We can hope that Apple will announce the results of its investigation and review its test procedures."

Reuters reports that Boeing has unveiled a smartphone that deletes all data and renders the device inoperable if any attempt to open the casing. "The Boeing Black phone is manufactured as a sealed device both with epoxy around the casing and with screws, the heads of which are covered with tamper proof covering to identify attempted disassembly," says a letter included in the FCC filing. "Any attempt to break open the casing of the device would trigger functions that would delete the data and software contained within the device and make the device inoperable." Boeing's Black phone will be sold primarily to government agencies and companies engaged in contractual activities with those agencies that are related to defense and homeland security. The device will be marketed and sold in a manner such that low level technical and operational information about the product will not be provided to the general public. "We saw a need for our customers in a certain market space" says Boeing spokeswoman Rebecca Yeamans.

In the United States, about 37 million mammograms are performed annually at a cost of about $100 per mammogram and nearly three-quarters of women age 40 and over say they had a mammogram in the past year. Now the NYT reports that a study involving 90,000 women and lasting a quarter-century has added powerful new doubts about the value of the screening test for women of any age finding that the death rates from breast cancer and from all causes were the same in women who got mammograms and those who did not. "It will make women uncomfortable, and they should be uncomfortable," says screening expert Dr. Russell P. Harris who was not involved in the study. "The decision to have a mammogram should not be a slam dunk." An editorial accompanying the new study says that earlier studies that found mammograms helped women were done before the routine use of drugs like tamoxifen that sharply reduced the breast cancer death rate. In addition, many previous studies did not use the gold-standard methods of the clinical trial, randomly assigning women to be screened or not, noted the editorial's author, Dr. Mette Kalager. According to Kalager, with better treatments, like tamoxifen, it is less important to find cancers early. Also, she says, women in the study were aware of breast cancer and its dangers, unlike women in earlier studies who were more likely to ignore lumps. "As time goes by we do indeed need more efficient mechanisms to reconsider priorities and recommendations for mammography screening and other medical interventions," concludes Kalager. "This is not an easy task, because governments, research funders, scientists, and medical practitioners may have vested interests in continuing activities that are well established."