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Submission + - Scientist Investigates Most Painful Body Locations for Bee Stings

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Pain is notoriously difficult to quantify. Many pain-rating scales have been developed to bridge the gap between a patient’s perceived pain, and the medical practitioner who is trying to relieve the patient’s pain. One such scale is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index developed when Justin Schmidt judged the painfulness of stings from 78 species of Hymenopter.Schmidt’s 4-point scale ranges from 0, a sting that cannot penetrate the skin, to 4, the most painful insect sting known. Only the bullet ant, Paraponera clavata, and the tarantula hawk, Pepsis grossa, were awarded a painfulness of 4 . Now Rod McPhee reports at the Mirror that Michael Smith – a postgraduate studying bee behavior at Cornell decided to explore how pain affects different body parts by forcing insects to sting him 190 times, literally from head to toe, over five weeks. “We speculated it probably really would hurt to get stung in the testicles. Two days later, by chance, I did get stung there. But I was really surprised that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.” Smith, who previously studied bee-keeping at United World College of the Atlantic, took agitated bees in forceps and applied them to 25 different areas of his body. He then rated the resulting pain from zero to ten. The results? Although his testicles were the fourth worst place to be stung – with a pain rating of 7.0 – that was only equally as painful as being stung in the palm and the cheek. The penis was only marginally more uncomfortable with a 7.3 rating. His nostril with a rating of 9.0 was the most painful, with the upper lip not far behind on 8.7. “If you’re stung in the nose and the penis, you’re going to want more stings to the penis, over the nose –if you’re forced to choose. There’s definitely no crossing of wires of pleasure and pain down there. It’s painful. Getting stung on the nose is a whole body experience. Your body really reacts. You’re sneezing and wheezing and snot is just dribbling out. It’s electric and pulsating."

Submission + - Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton: How We're Turning Everyone Into DIY Hackers (readwrite.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: Eben Upton, cofounder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is generally credited as the magician behind this incredible machine. While working on his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Cambridge's computer laboratory, Upton painstakingly put together Raspberry Pi prototypes by hand. Today, Upton is CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s trading company, where he oversees production and sales of the Raspberry Pi. In a lengthy interview with ReadWrite, Upton shares how he invented Raspberry Pi, and what's coming next for the $35 microcomputer.

Submission + - Los Angeles Police Officers Suspected of Tampering with Their Monitoring System 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An internal audit conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in March revealed that 'dozens of the [voice] transmitters worn by officers in Southeast Division were missing or damaged.' In the summer of 2013, this same division was found to have mysteriously lost 45% of the antennae placed on their cars to pick up the signals sent by their voice transmitters. The Southeast Division of the LAPD covers an area that has 'historically been marred by mistrust and claims of officer abuse.' For decades, the LAPD had been closely monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice, but a federal judge in 2013 decided to end that practice after being assured by the LAPD and city officials that the LAPD sufficiently monitors itself via dash-cams and voice transmitters. A formal investigation is currently being conducted to determine whether or not police officers intentionally subverted mandatory efforts to monitor and record their patrols.

Submission + - Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us 1

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Land Rover's Transparent Hood Is The Kind Of Automotive Tech That Excites Us

When we were kids, we were promised flying cars in the future, like The Jetsons . Well, now it's the future, and we don't have any flying cars. But Land Rover just unveiled some crazy new technology called the Transparent Hood system. It's brilliant in its simplicity, and yet quite complex in its implementation. Using a web of camera images and projectors, the Transparent Hood system projects the area just in front of and underneath the nose of the vehicle onto a head-up display along the lower portion of the windshield. Not only is this obviously breathtaking, but when it comes to off-roading—or parking in tight urban spaces—this could change the game. It will allow drivers to see precisely what's below them and immediately in front of them allowing precise placement of the vehicle's front wheels. The system also displays key vehicle data including speed, incline, roll angle, steering position, and drive mode. People, this is the future, and the future is now.

Submission + - Snowden's purloined documents are now available online (aclu.org)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: The ACLU and others have long suspected that the National Security Agency has gone far beyond its mandate of gathering information for counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence purposes. Many Those suspicions were confirmed when, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian released the first in a series of documents provided by Edward Snowden detailing the NSA's unlawful spying activities. All of the documents released since that day, both by the media and the government, are housed in a database maintained by the ACLU and accessible by the public on-line.

Submission + - Toyota is becoming more efficient - replacing robots with humans (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: Toyota is becoming more efficient by replacing robots with humans
Inside Toyota Motor Corp.’s oldest plant, there’s a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai’s vision of the future.

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”

Submission + - Tesla Model S has hidden ethernet port, user runs Firefox on the 17" Screen (dragtimes.com) 1

Submitted by FikseGTS
FikseGTS writes: A Tesla Model S owner located a 4 pin connector on the left side of the Tesla Model S dashboard that turns out to be a disguised ethernet networking port. After crafting his owns patch cable to connect with the Tesla’s port, a networking connection was established between the Tesla Model S and a laptop computer.

The Model S is running a 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network and 3 devices were found with assiged IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both of the Model S screens.

Is a jailbroken Tesla Model S on the way?

Submission + - Augmented reality on the cheap (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by mkwan
mkwan writes: A couple of years ago Slashdot ran the story of a baseball cap head-up display: http://hardware-beta.slashdot.... Well, the design has evolved into something a bit more practical, and it now has its own Kickstarter. Just as unfashionable as the Rift, but at a sixth of the price!
Supporting the hat is a new wireless protocol, the Compact Augmented Reality Protocol (CARP). Loosely based on X11, it is more compact than X and improves latency by removing acknowledgements, and adds features such as anti-aliasing and ARGB colours. It also provides AR-specific capabilities such as head movement events and a coordinate system based on degrees rather than pixels.

Submission + - Norwegian Skydiver Almost Gets Hit by Falling Meteor and Captures it on Film (universetoday.com)

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: From the apparently not April Fools department: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago near Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its dark flight — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous.

Submission + - Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO (mozilla.org)

Submitted by matafagafo
matafagafo writes: Mozilla Blog says:
Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.
Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard......

Submission + - FWD.us Wants More H-1B Visas, But 50% Go To Offshore Firms

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On the day the U.S. began accepting H-1B visa applications for FY2015, Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC stepped up its lobbying efforts for more tech visas even as ComputerWorld reported that the major share of H-1B visas go to offshore outsourcing firms that use visa holders to displace U.S. workers. "The two largest H-1B users," notes ComputerWorld, "are Indian-based, Infosys, with 6,298 visas, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), with 6,258." ComputerWorld adds that food and agricultural company Cargill is outsourcing IT jobs to TCS, including 300 in Minnesota, the home of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a friend-of-Zuck and sponsor of the I-Squared Act of 2013, which would allow H-1B visa caps to rise to 300,000 annually.

Submission + - Foxconn to Restaff Entirely with US Adjunct Professors

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: (Xinhua) Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, announced today its response to the increasing cost of local labor: by 2Q 2015, it will have completed replacement of its assembly staff with American adjunct professors. Said an executive who did not wish to be named, “Adjunct professors are not only highly educated but are used to working for nothing more than ramen and a basement cot. They are not spoiled like our local Chinese assembly workers.” They are for the most part docile, and used to operating within rigid bureaucracies.

The US educational system turns out far larger numbers of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, than can ever hope to be employed by academe. The excess adjuncts live on the streets of major American cities, but, after being pushed aside by the tougher and crazier traditional homeless, gravitate to the more congenial west coast, where roving bands of them subsist on odd jobs and shoplifting. Here they are easily picked up by Foxconn raiding parties, which dicker with what we know in China as People’s Shining Path Moral Guidance Cadres. In the US these are called “Homeowner Associations,” and they gratefully cooperate to turn in bands of feral adjuncts, whose constant bickering and messy campsites are an ongoing annoyance to the people of America’s West Coast.

Once captured, the adjuncts are loaded into Foxconn’s fleet of wind-powered EcoFreighters and sedated for the slow sea voyage on the “Central Passage” from Long Beach to the Shanghai labor auction docks. Now that there is human cargo to bring back to China, the EcoFreighters no longer have to return empty after unloading their troves of consumer goods in Los Angeles.

Foxconn has been anxious to grab the most easily trainable workers before more Chinese companies take an interest in American adjunct professor labor. “At first we tried a breeding program for even greater long term savings,” said the Foxconn exec, “But the males, raised as they have been in western academic culture, have developed such a deep-seated fear of their own females that fertile matings were rare, even when naked, unchained females were placed right in males' dormitory cells.” But why fight to change an alien culture, the thinking now goes, when fresh adjuncts are so easily hunted down on the California/Oregon coast? So long as this situation persists, the EcoFreighters will sail full and world’s supply of low-cost products will not be in danger.

Submission + - New York Public Library Releases Over 20,000 Hi-Res Maps (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Finally, you don't have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don't even need to visit the place at all. Over 20,000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public.

"We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions," explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library's map collection. "It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people." The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps.

Submission + - Urine Trouble: Chemists Warn that Peeing in the Pool is Dangerous 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Everybody does it and even celebrated Olympic swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte admit they do it too. "It's kind of a normal thing to do with swimmers," says Phelps. "You know, when we're in the water for two hours we don't really get out, you know, to pee."

Now Julie Beck writes that It turns out that it's a pretty bad idea, for more reasons than just the ick factor as a new study published in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology, has looked at the chemistry of what happens when urine meets chlorine, and it's not pretty. When researchers mixed uric acid, found in both urine and sweat, with chlorine, they found that both trichloramine and cyanogen chloride form within an hour. "We know that there are associations between some of these chemicals and adverse human health outcomes, so we're motivated to understand the chemistry behind their formation and decay," says Ernest Blatchley III.

Exposure to trichloramine has been linked to respiratory problems (PDF), and cyanogen chloride can adversely affect the lungs, central nervous system, and cardiovascular system. Another issue is if a lot of people are peeing in the pool, there's the potential for a lot of cyanogen chloride to form, depleting the chlorine in the pool. While the cyanogen chloride would normally decay quickly, less chlorine means it might stick around longer, and that could be a real problem. All of this is to say that peeing in the pool is not harmless, despite Phelps' and Lochte's claims that it's normal and everybody does it. "There's a lot of people in the swimming community who look up to these people and listen to what they have to say," says Blatchley "[Phelps and Lochte] are not chemists and shouldn't be making statements that are that false."

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