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Medicine

Four Cups of Coffee A Day Cuts Risk of Oral Cancer 151

An anonymous reader writes "Coffee may help lower the risk of developing oral and pharyngeal cancer and of dying from the disease. The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted using the Cancer Prevention Study II. The large cohort study began in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Researchers were able to examine 968,432 men and women, none of whom had cancer at the time of their enrollment in the study." Four or more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by a whopping 49%.
Blackberry

Black Sheep Blackberry Blackballed By Business 349

Hugh Pickens writes "Nicole Perlroth writes that the BlackBerry, once proudly carried by the high-powered and the elite, has become a magnet for mockery and derision from those with iPhones and the latest Android phones. as Research in Motion clings to less than 5 percent of the smartphone market — down from a dominating 50 percent just three years ago. One of the first steps Marissa Mayer took as Yahoo's newly appointed chief executive to remake the company's stodgy image was to trade in employees' BlackBerrys for iPhones and Androids and although BlackBerrys may still linger in Washington, Wall Street and the legal profession, in Silicon Valley they are as rare as a necktie. BlackBerry outcasts say that, increasingly, they suffer from shame and public humiliation as they watch their counterparts mingle on social networking apps that are not available to them, take higher-resolution photos, and effortlessly navigate streets — and the Internet — with better GPS and faster browsing."
The Internet

Why Are We So Rude Online? 341

kodiaktau writes "An article in the WSJ discusses why internet users are more rude online than they are in person. The story discusses some of the possible reasons. For example, a study found that browsing Facebook tends to lower people's self control. An MIT professor says people posting on the internet have lowered inhibitions because there is no formal social interaction. Another theory is that communicating through a phone or other device feels like communicating with a 'toy,' which dehumanizes the conversation. Of course, a rude conversation has never happened on Slashdot in the last 15 years."

Comment Re:the message is clear: MAKE IT !!! (Score 1) 632

Still not fixed. If the US has X guns/capita, and France has (X - 2.5X) guns/capita, then France has -1.5X guns/captia (i.e. negative guns/capita) which is clearly absurd.

If the US has 2.5 times more guns per capita than France, that does not mean that France has 2.5 times fewer than the US, it means that France has 72% fewer, or 0.7 times fewer.

(On the other hand, if the US has 2.5 times as many guns per capita than France, then France has 60% fewer, or 0.6 times fewer.)

If Y is 100% more than X, it does not mean that X is 100% less than Y, it is 50% less than Y. In the first instance, you're measuring % of X, and in the other you're measuring % of Y. As X and Y are different, N% of X and Y are different, even for the same N.

Comment Re:The what? (Score 1) 328

Well, we had it tough.

cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

(via bash.org)

Comment Re:It's like this. (Score 1) 878

So, what you're saying is, it's all three. Congratulations on writing many paragraphs without summarising the answer I was actually seeking. :-p

I realise that it's the possessive case of shit, but are we really talking about ownership? Does someone who "knows their shit" - i.e. is particularly knowledgable in an area of expertise - own their metaphorical fæces? Is knowledge something that can be owned? Seems like we're stretching the language to the point where it might actually sprain.

I also dispute your assertion that the apostrophe could be avoided while retaining meaning. "Knowing youre shit" is nonsensical, as "youre" is not a word. You have to parse it as either "you're" or "your", and the one that you choose dramatically changes the meaning of the sentence, as the pun demonstrates.

FWIW, the pun also works in my particular dialect of English called, um, English. English English? Ah - British English. Where "you're" and "your" sound almost identical in all UK accents I can think of, including (I think) Received Pronunciation.

Comment Re:really?? (Score 2) 1134

I cannot type "text file editor" to Linux CLI and have it launch nano or similar or at least display what the currently installed text file editors are.

Really?

$ update-alternatives --list editor
/bin/ed
/bin/nano
/usr/bin/emacs23
/usr/bin/vim.gtk
/usr/bin/vim.tiny

$ update-alternatives --config editor

  There are 5 choices for the alternative editor (providing /usr/bin/editor).

    Selection Path Priority Status
    0 /usr/bin/vim.gtk 50 auto mode
    1 /bin/ed -100 manual mode
    2 /bin/nano 40 manual mode
    3 /usr/bin/emacs23 0 manual mode
    4 /usr/bin/vim.gtk 50 manual mode
* 5 /usr/bin/vim.tiny 10 manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:
$ editor --version
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15, compiled Jun 7 2012 00:28:35)
Included patches: 1-547
$

I have to do a Google search to translate between what I want to do and CLI (google "Linux how to extract tar.bz2",

Why not "man tar"?

The first set of options listed shows you that "-c" is for "create" and "-x" is for extract. "-v" is the same as for many linux programs: "verbose", so that's not even needed, and should be easy to remember if you do want it. You don't need "-z" for extracting compressed archives, tar (at least recent versions) will figure that out from the filename. It will also figure out which type of compression to use for archive creation based on the filename if you use "-a" (still listed on the first screen of the man page) so you don't need to remember each of the different compression options.

Last, "-f" is for specifying the filename of the archive you're working on, instead of using the default stdin/stdout. Arguably "tar" should always take a filename and allow "-" for stdin/stdout, but if that was changed now then far too many existing things would break. :-(

So, Extract File:
$ tar -x -f filename.tar.bz2

Create (Automatic compression) File:
$ tar -c -a -f filename.tar.bz2 file*

Wikipedia

Statisticians Investigate Political Bias On Wikipedia 221

Hugh Pickens writes "The Global Economic Intersection reports on a project to statistically measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified 1,000 political phrases based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. Then the team identified 111,000 Wikipedia articles that include 'republican' or 'democrat' as keywords, and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. 'The average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic' but gradually, Wikipedia's articles have lost the disproportionate use of Democratic phrases and moved to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly, some articles have the expected political slant (civil rights tends Democrat; trade tends Republican), but at the same time many seemingly controversial topics, such as foreign policy, war and peace, and abortion have no net slant. 'Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles.'"

Comment Re:That Moment (Score 2) 414

In fact, Newton did this himself.

I recall a story of some mathematical puzzle or hypothesis which had been unsolved by a number of mathematicians for many years. It was brought to Newton's attention, whereupon over the course of a few days (maybe a weekend?) he invented a new branch of mathematics and solved the puzzle. He published his results anonymously, but no-one was fooled and immediately (if somewhat resignedly) congratulated Newton on his genius (again).

Can't remember the hypothesis or the resulting branch of mathematics though.

The Almighty Buck

Chevy Volt Meets High Resistance, GM Suspends Sales 599

Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill reports that GM has announced to employees at one of its facilities that it is suspending production of the Chevy Volt for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees. Back when GM launched the beleaguered electric car, it boldly targeted sales of 10,000 in 2011 and 60,000 in 2012 but GM only sold 7,671 Volts in 2011 and just 1,626 so far this year. 'We needed to maintain proper inventory and make sure that we continued to meet market demand,' says GM spokesman Chris Lee. 'We see positive trends, but we needed to make this market adjustment.' Although President Obama promised he would buy a Volt 'five years from now, when I'm not president anymore,' the Volt has come under criticism from Republicans in Congress because of reports of its batteries catching on fire during testing. Ironically, the shutdown comes as gas prices are soaring, exactly the time when an electric car should be an easy sell." If it's still true that GM was taking a loss on every Volt sold, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise.

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