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Submission + - The Problem With #MeToo and Viral Outrage (wired.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: #MeToo has the makings of an earnest and effective social movement: It’s galvanizing women and trans people everywhere to speak out about harassment and abuse. But as Jessi Hempel writes at Backchannel, the meme is too perfect. “It harnesses social media’s mechanisms to drive users (that’s you and me) into escalating states of outrage while exhausting us to the point where we cannot meaningfully act. In other words, #MeToo—despite the best intentions of so many participating—is everything that’s wrong with social media.” Drawing upon recent research from Yale assistant professor Molly Crockett, Hempel argues that outrage inspires sharing, which causes all of us to spend more time engaged with the platform—and that translates directly to revenue for the companies. Any meme this perfect should give us pause.

Submission + - SPAM: Cycling to Work Can Cut Cancer and Heart Disease

Submitted by randomErr
randomErr writes: Want to live longer, reduce your risk of cancer, heart disease? Then cycle to work, say scientists. The five-year study of 250,000 UK commuters also showed walking had some benefits over sitting on public transport or taking the car. Published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) today, the University of Glasgow study compared those who had an ‘active’ commute with those who were mostly stationary on their journey to work. However, the effect was still there even after adjusting the statistics to remove the effects of other potential explanations like smoking, diet or how heavy people are.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Light Sail propulsion could reach Sirius sooner than Alpha Centauri (arxiv.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A recent proposition to launch probes to other star systems driven by lasers which remain in the Solar system has garnered considerable attention. But recently published work suggests that there are unexpected complexities to the system.

One would think that the closest star systems would be the easiest to reach. But unless you are content with a fly-by examination of the star system, with much reduced science returns, you will need to decelerate the probe at the far end, without any infrastructure to assist with the braking.

By combining both light-pressure braking and gravitational slingshots, a team of German, French and Chilean astronomers discover that the brightness of the destination star can significantly increase deceleration, and thus travel time (because higher flight velocities can be used. Sling-shotting around a companion star to lengthen deceleration times can help shed flight velocity to allow capture into a stable orbit.

The 4.37 light year distant binary stars Alpha Centauri A and B could be reached in 75 years from Earth. Covering the 0.24 light year distance to Proxima Centauri depends on arriving at the correct relative orientations of Alpha Centauri A and B in their mutual 80 year orbit for the sling shot to work. Without a companion star, Proxima Centauri can only absorb a final leg velocity of about 1280km/s, so that leg of the trip would take an additional 46 years.

Using the same performance characteristics for the light sail the corresponding duration for an approach to the Sirius system, almost twice as far away (8.58ly), is a mere 68.9 years, making it (and it's white dwarf companion) possibly a more attractive target.

Of course, none of this addresses the question of how to get any data from there to here. Or, indeed, how to manage a project that will last longer than a working lifetime. There are also issues of aiming — the motion of the Alpha Centauri system isn't well-enough known at the moment to achieve the precise manoeuvring needed without course corrections (and so, data transmission from there to here) en route.

Submission + - Sorry But Jeff Sessions Absolutely Did NOT Perjure Himself Under Oath When Asked (lawnewz.com)

Submitted by TrancePhreak
TrancePhreak writes: submit to reddit
Some of the same liberal law professors and journalists who thought Hillary should be President after lying to Congress about hiding emails and who also praised Clapper’s “independence” after he repeatedly lied to Congress about NSA spying, now attack Attorney General Sessions under a bogus claim of “lying” to Congress. There is no basis to suggest Sessions committed any crime at all for doing his job as a Senator on the Armed Services Committee.

Sessions, as a Senator on the Armed Services Committee, met with over 20 ambassadors in 2016. One of them was the Russian ambassador. There is no evidence, at all, Sessions met with the ambassador to review Trump campaign strategy, or anything of the sort. The suggestion that our Senators should not be meeting with representatives of foreign governments is ludicrous, especially coming from people who championed the Clinton Foundation meeting with foreign governments frequently to fund their Clinton Foundation and personal enrichment.

Submission + - Sorry, Apple, the Headphone Jack Isn't Going Anywhere (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two things unite almost every phone on display here at Mobile World Congress 2017: Android and a headphone jack. Apple doesn’t exhibit its wares at this trade show, so the domination of Google’s operating system is predictable. But the headphone jack’s persistence did not look so inevitable when Apple cut it from the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus last September. Lenovo’s Motorola subsidiary had already shipped a phone without a headphone hack, the Moto Z, and Apple’s influence over the rest of the smartphone industry remains formidable — indeed, within months, the Chinese firm LeEco had debuted a lineup of Android phones devoid of headphone jacks. As my colleague David Pogue predicted in a post approving Apple’s move: “Other brands worldwide will be following suit.” The hardware on display here at the world’s largest mobile tech conference, though, suggests otherwise. Two days of walking around the show floor showed companies expressing a consistent unwillingness to abandon the humble headphone jack, even on models as thin as, or thinner than, the iPhone 7. The MWC floor revealed only one company willing to do away with the headphone jack: HTC. The Taiwan-based firm, which has struggled financially for years despite shipping such well-reviewed models at the HTC 10, used its exhibit to showcase the U Ultra and the U Play, which rely on their USB-C ports for audio output. Unlike, Apple, though, the company didn’t make the move to save space, but rather to incorporate its “USonic” feature, which lets the phones’ headphones calibrate themselves to your ears and provide noise cancellation.

Submission + - NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Faster Than Titan X For $699 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA just lifted the veil on its latest monster graphics card for gamers — the long-rumored GeForce GTX 1080 Ti — at an event this evening in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The card will sit at the top of NVIDIA's GeForce offering with the Titan X and GeForce GTX 1080 in NVIDIA's Pascal-powered product stack, promising significant performance gains over the GTX 1080 and faster than Titan X performance, for a much lower price of $699. The 12 billion transistor NVIDIA GP102 on the card has 3,584 CUDA cores, which is actually the same as NVIDIA's Titan X. However, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will have fewer ROP units at 88, versus 96 in the Titan X. The 1080 Ti will also, however, come equipped with 11GB of premium GDDR5X memory from Micron clocked at 11,000 MHz for an effective 11Gbps data rate. Peak compute throughput of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is slightly higher than the Titan X due to the Ti's higher Boost clock. Memory bandwidth over its narrower 352-bit GDDR5 memory interface is 484GB/s, which is also slightly higher than a Titan X as well. NVIDIA also noted that peak overclocks on the core should hit 2GHz or higher with minimal coaxing. As a result, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will be faster than the Titan X out of the box, faster still when overclocked.

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