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Submission + - Group Says Google Appears to Have Planted Obama Interview Questions 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In Obama's Secret Media Weapon, The Google Transparency Project raises an eyebrow over questions posed to President Obama in post-State of the Union YouTube and Google+ Hangout interviews that seemed to align perfectly with Google’s position on policy issues, including a 2013 "Fireside Hangout" in which the President was asked what he would do to limit the abuse of software patents, and whether he would be supportive of limiting patents to only five years (several months later, the White House announced executive actions aimed at reining in patent trolls). While not mentioned by the group, the same interviewer — Adafruit founder Limor Fried, who indicated she was uncertain about the questioning process two days before the Hangout — also asked the President about another policy issue that was coincidentally near-and-dear to Google: "When I attended high school, I had to take a foreign language requirement. So my question is, can we make it a national effort to also add a computer programming language requirement?" To which the President had a lengthy reply, beginning with, "I think it makes sense, I really do." Given the chance to "ask a more personal question" by the Google moderator, Fried asked, "Mr. President, have your daughters expressed any interest in pursuing a career in science or engineering?" The President replied, "I don't think they're yet at the age where they've kind of determined what their career path is going to be," but took the opportunity to add that "the White House Office of Women and Girls has been partnering with the Department of Education so that our STEM education agenda, trying to get more math and science and technology education in the schools, also focuses on making sure underrepresented groups like, like girls, are encouraged in these fields." Less than three years later, following a tech industry PR blitz that began just days after the Hangout, the President launched his Computer Science for All K-12 Initiative, citing Google-provided factoids ("Nine out of ten parents want it taught at their children's schools") to explain the need for the $4B the program. Funding is expected to be made possible by the new Every Student Succeeds Act, which calls for "increasing [CS and STEM] access for students through grade 12 who are members of groups underrepresented in such subject fields, such as female students." So, are you in the coincidence or conspiracy camp?

Submission + - Yet Another Setback for Concentrated Solar (pv-tech.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Ivanpah experiment just keeps getting worse. Now a fire has broken out and the plant must further reduce its already paltry generation output.

It seems that its time to just shut this plant down and stop they tremendous financial bleeding.

Submission + - We Must Weed Out Ignorant Americans From the Electorate

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: When Newsweek asked a thousand voters to take the official citizenship test a few years back, nearly 30 percent couldn’t name the vice president, more than 60 percent did not know the length of U.S. senators’ terms in office, 43 percent couldn’t say that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights, and only 30 percent knew that the U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Now David Harsanyi writes at the Washington Post that if voting is a consecrated rite of democracy, as liberals often argue, surely society can have certain minimal expectations for those participating. And if citizenship itself is as hallowed as Republicans argue, then surely the prospective voter can be asked to know just as much as the prospective citizen. Let’s give voters a test. The citizenship civics test will do just fine and here are some of its questions, which run from easy to preposterously easy: “If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?” “There were 13 original states. Name three.” “What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment?” "What is freedom of religion?

According to Harsanyi, if you have no clue what the hell is going on, you also have a civic duty to avoid subjecting the rest of us to your ignorance. To be fair, the contemporary electorate is probably no less ignorant today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. The difference is that now we have unlimited access to information. Of course, we also must remember the ugly history of poll taxes and other prejudicial methods that Americans used to deny black citizens their equal right to vote. Any effort to improve the quality of the voting public should ensure that all races, creeds, genders and sexual orientations and people of every socioeconomic background are similarly inhibited from voting when ignorant. As James Madison wrote, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” "If you forsake the power of information," concludes Harsanyi, "you have no standing to tell the rest of us how to live our lives."

Submission + - How stingray is zapping the fourth amendment

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: How Militarized Cops Use the Intrusive Technology Stingray, and Much More, to Intrude on Our Rights — Police nationwide are secretly exploiting intrusive technologies with the feds' complicity.

Thanks to this call-and-response process, the Stingray knows both what cell phones are in the area and where they are. In other words, it gathers information not only about a specific suspect, but any bystanders in the area as well. While the police may indeed use this technology to pinpoint a suspect’s location, by casting such a wide net there is also the potential for many kinds of constitutional abuses—for instance, sweeping up the identities of every person attending a demonstration or a political meeting. Some Stingrays are capable of collecting not only cell phone ID numbers but also numbers those phones have dialed and even phone conversations. In other words, the Stingray is a technology that potentially opens the door for law enforcement to sweep up information that not so long ago wouldn’t have been available to them.

This is why it matters who wins the mayor and city council races. Localities do not have to accept this technology.

Submission + - How big was the Universe when it was first born?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we’ve been able to determine not only what it’s made out of, but how long it’s been since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years. Put all that information together, and you can also figure out how large the observable part of that Universe is today. From our point of view, it appears to extend for 46.1 billion light years in all directions. So what if you extrapolate backwards, to the very end of inflation and the start of the hot, dense state we identify with the Big Bang, and ask how large that 46.1 billion light year “size” was back then? How big would it be? Depending on the particulars of when inflation came to an end, the answer is somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and the size of a city block, no smaller and no larger.

Submission + - The loneliest galaxy in the Universe

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: When Einstein put forth his space-and-time changing theory of General Relativity, one of the consequences he didn't anticipate — and, in fact, resisted — was the fact that a static Universe would be unstable, and that the Universe must be either expanding or contracting. While the theoretical work of many, such as de Sitter, Friedmann and Lemaître, pointed towards this conclusion, it was the observational work of Hubble in the 1920s that sealed the deal. By observing the distances and recessional velocities of a great many galaxies, he was able to not only show that the Universe was expanding, but he measured the expansion rate. Yet not every galaxy is as favorably situated as our own; while we have hundreds of thousands of galaxies within a few hundred million light years, some galaxies have none. In fact, if we were situated at the same location as MCG+01-02-015, we wouldn't have discovered a single galaxy beyond our own until the 1960s.

Submission + - A new lightweight and very strong metal

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: UCLA engineers have developed a new superlight and very strong metal.

A team led by researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created a super-strong yet light structural metal with extremely high specific strength and modulus, or stiffness-to-weight ratio. The new metal is composed of magnesium infused with a dense and even dispersal of ceramic silicon carbide nanoparticles. It could be used to make lighter airplanes, spacecraft, and cars, helping to improve fuel efficiency, as well as in mobile electronics and biomedical devices.

Submission + - Pirate Bay Cofounder Utterly Bankrupts the Music Industry (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by JustAnotherOldGuy
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," storing them in /dev/null (which is of course, deleting them even as they're created). The machine, called a "Kopimashin," is cobbled together out of a Raspberry Pi, some hacky python that he doesn't want to show anyone, and an LCD screen that calculates a running tally of the damages he's inflicted upon the record industry through its use. The 8,000,000 copies it makes every day costs the record industry $10m/day in losses. At that rate, they'll be bankrupt in a few weeks at most.

Submission + - Apollo 17 soil matches ancient Earth's ocean ridges in water content

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: They say that one of the most exciting phrases to hear in science is not "eureka!" but "that's funny," and the Apollo 17 astronauts, just over 43 years ago, certainly got such a moment when they discovered orange soil just beneath the grey regiolith. What turned out to be volcanic glass with tin inclusions had another surprise: olivine deposits that showed signs that they contained significant amounts of water inclusions when they were baked, at about ~1200 parts-per-million. This matches the water levels in Earth's upper mantle along ocean ridges, providing further evidence for the giant impact hypothesis and a common origin for the Earth and Moon.

Submission + - California's Worst Gas Leak In 40 Years (And Crews Can't Stop It) (wired.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: While world leaders signed the 'historic' agreement signed in Paris to fix the world's "greatest threat," a natural gas storage site in southern California is belching 145,000 pounds per hour of Methane — a greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide. What is worse, while official proclaim this a "top priority" a fix won't arrive until spring as emergency crews recognize "the leak was far from routine, and the problem was deeper underground."

In just the first month, that's added up to 80,000 tons, or about a quarter of the state's ordinary methane emissions over the same period.

Submission + - Innovative new wind turbine from Iceland is tough enough for the strongest gales (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by LauraSaura
LauraSaura writes: Iceland researchers have recently developed a way to harness the region's incredibly powerful winds. One bright inventor realized that an entirely new type of wind turbine was needed to withstand the nation's gale force winds, and has introduced the IceWind CW1000, a turbine that may be even better than its skinny counterparts.

Submission + - EPA considers sunny days harmful (twitter.com)

Submitted by Trachman
Trachman writes: EPA considers sunny days harmful for plants, according to their recent tweet. According to EPA, sunny days and the inevitable byproduct — Sunlight causes #ozone to form, which harms foliage, weakens trees.

I know that EPA will not try to introduce sun tax, and will try to stick with carbon tax, but I am not sure.

Submission + - Scientists Discover How to Get Kids to Eat Their Vegetables

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Roberto Ferdman writes in the Washington Post that researchers at Texas A&M University, looking for patterns in food consumption among elementary school children, found an interesting quirk about when and why kids choose to eat their vegetables. After analyzing plate waste data from nearly 8,500 students, it seems there's at least one variable that tends to affect whether kids eat their broccoli, spinach or green beans more than anything: what else is on the plate. Kids are much more likely to eat their vegetable portion when it's paired with a food that isn't so delicious that it gets all the attention. For example, when chicken nuggets and burgers, the most popular items among schoolchildren, are on the menu, vegetable waste tends to rise significantly. When other less-beloved foods, like deli sliders or baked potatoes, are served, the opposite seems to happen.“Our research team looked at whether there is a relationship between consumption of certain entrees and vegetables that would lead to plate waste,” says Dr. Oral Capps Jr. “We found that popular entrees such as burgers and chicken nuggets, contributed to greater waste of less popular vegetables.”

Traci Man, who has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for more than 20 years, believes that food pairings are crucial in getting kids to eat vegetables. "Normally, vegetables will lose the competition that they're in — the competition with all the other delicious food on your plate. Vegetables might not lose that battle for everyone, but they do for most of us. This strategy puts vegetables in a competition they can win, by pitting vegetables against no food at all. To do that, you just eat your vegetable first, before any of the other food is there," says Mann. "We tested it with kids in school cafeterias, where it more than quadrupled the amount of vegetables eaten. It's just about making it a little harder to make the wrong choices, and a little easier to make the right ones."

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