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Submission + - Body weight heavily influenced by gut microbes: Genes shape body weight. (kcl.ac.uk)

Submitted by FirephoxRising
FirephoxRising writes: Our genetic makeup influences whether we are fat or thin by shaping which types of microbes thrive in our body, according to a new study. Scientists identified a specific, little known bacterial family that is highly heritable and more common in individuals with low body weight. So we are what we eat, what we do and what we got from out parents.

Submission + - Berlin's digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. 'Not knowing whether I’m in a private place or not.' Not knowing if someone’s watching or not. Though she’s under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist 'hard but not impossible'. It’s on a personal level that it’s harder to process. 'I try not to let it get inside my head, but I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure I’m having a private conversation or something, I’ll go outside.'

.....We’re having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where she’d moved to make a film about surveillance before she’d ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a 'watch list'. Every time she entered the US – 'and I travel a lot' – she would be questioned. 'It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do what’s called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and oftentimes take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff.' She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin.

Submission + - Police officer suspended for slapping citizen for refusing a warrantless search 6

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: This story demonstrates why it is becoming essential for every citizen to begin recording their interactions with the police every single time.

Yesterday police were contacted in regard to a video posted online which appeared to show an inappropriate interaction between an on-duty member of the Sheriff’s Office and a civilian, resulting from a suspicious vehicle complaint in the Town of Halfmoon.

The Sheriff’s Office has identified and interviewed all parties involved in the interaction and as a result, the police officer has been suspended without pay effective immediately, pending the outcome of the investigation and possible disciplinary action.

Make sure you watch the video. It is very clear that the officer did not know he was being recorded. It is also clear to me that his behavior in this situation was not unusual, that this police officer is quite used to using violence to get his way, regardless of the law. Had the recording not existed, however, he would not have been suspended, and would not be likely to lose his job.

The recording did exist, however, which has forced the Saratoga police force to take action.

Submission + - When we don't like the solution, we deny the problem. (duke.edu) 2

Submitted by Ichijo
Ichijo writes: A new study from Duke University titled 'Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief' tested whether the desirability of a solution affects beliefs in the existence of the associated problem. Researchers found that yes, people will deny the problem when they don't like the solution:

'Participants in the experiment, including both self-identified Republicans and Democrats, read a statement asserting that global temperatures will rise 3.2 degrees in the 21st century. They were then asked to evaluate a proposed policy solution to address the warming.

'When the policy solution emphasized a tax on carbon emissions or some other form of government regulation, which is generally opposed by Republican ideology, only 22 percent of Republicans said they believed the temperatures would rise at least as much as indicated by the scientific statement they read.

'But when the proposed policy solution emphasized the free market, such as with innovative green technology, 55 percent of Republicans agreed with the scientific statement.

'The researchers found liberal-leaning individuals exhibited a similar aversion to solutions they viewed as politically undesirable in an experiment involving violent home break-ins. When the proposed solution called for looser versus tighter gun-control laws, those with more liberal gun-control ideologies were more likely to downplay the frequency of violent home break-ins.'

Submission + - The Climate-Change Solution No One Will Talk About

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Jason Plautz writes at The Atlantic that the more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment. "And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," says Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau. Even as the population passes 7.2 billion and is projected by the United Nations to reach 10.9 billion by the end of the century, policymakers have been unable—or unwilling—to discuss population in tandem with climate change. Why? Because "talking about population control requires walking a tightrope:," writes Plautz. "It can all too easily sound like a developed world leader telling people in the developing world that they should stop having children—especially because much of the population boom is coming from regions like sub-Saharan Africa." Just look at what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2009, when as secretary of State she acknowledged the overpopulation issue during a discussion with Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh. Clinton praised another panelist for noting "that it's rather odd to talk about climate change and what we must do to stop and prevent the ill effects without talking about population and family planning."

A 2010 study looked at the link between policies that help women plan pregnancies and family size and global emissions. The researchers predicted that lower population growth could provide benefits equivalent to between 16 and 29 percent of the emissions reduction needed to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius warming by 2050, the warning line set by international scientists. But the benefits also come through easing the reduced resources that could result from climate change. The U.N. IPCC report notes the potential for climate-related food shortages, with fish catches falling anywhere from 40 to 60 percent and wheat and maize taking a hit, as well as extreme droughts. With resources already stretched in some areas, the IPCC laid out the potential for famine, water shortages and pestilence. Still, the link remains a "very sensitive topic," says Karen Hardee, "At the global policy level you can't touch population but what's been heartening is that over the last few years it's not just us, but people from the countries themselves talking about this."

Submission + - Jedism becomes a serious religion (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 390,127 Brits declared their religion as Jedism in their last census, many as a joke but some are quite serious, the BBC reports. Cambridge University Divinity Faculty researcher, Beth Singler, estimates at least 2,000 of them are "very genuine", around the same number as the Church of Scientology. The U.K. Church of Jedism has 200,000 members world wide. Their belief system has expanded well beyond the "Star Wars" sound track to include tenents from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samura. Former priest, psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon find says real power in the Jedi story. "The reason it's so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It's by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life."

Submission + - Volunteer work for for-profit companies is illegal in California

Submitted by billrp
billrp writes: It seems it's illegal to provide volunteer work for a for-profit company in California. You must be compensated for your time, and of course taxes must be withheld. Here's a story about a small winery that was recently busted: http://www.wine-searcher.com/m...

But what about all the user data that is collected by Facebook, Google, etc.without compensation and then sold to advertisers?

Submission + - FTDI updates windows driver, causes fake chips to be bricked (eevblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the latest windows update from FTDI (maker of usb/serial converter chips, very often used in arduinos and their download cables), the driver will look for 'fake' chips and overwrite their USB product id (PID), making them useless (unless you work-around it and re-flash the chip with the proper PID). The linux driver is still safe, but the binary blob from windows update is now something that we should all blacklist and uninstall, for our own safety.

Submission + - Software Glitch Caused 911 Outage for 11 Million People

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Brian Fung reports at the Washington Post that earlier this year emergency services went dark for over six hours for more than 11 million people across seven states. "The outage may have gone unnoticed by some, but for the more than 6,000 people trying to reach help, April 9 may well have been the scariest time of their lives." In a 40-page report, the FCC found that an entirely preventable software error was responsible for causing 911 service to drop. "It could have been prevented. But it was not (PDF)," the FCC's report reads. "The causes of this outage highlight vulnerabilities of networks as they transition from the long-familiar methods of reaching 911 to [Internet Protocol]-supported technologies." On April 9, the software responsible for assigning the identifying code to each incoming 911 call maxed out at a pre-set limit; the counter literally stopped counting at 40 million calls. As a result, the routing system stopped accepting new calls, leading to a bottleneck and a series of cascading failures elsewhere in the 911 infrastructure. Adm. David Simpson, the FCC's chief of public safety and homeland security, says that having a single backup does not provide the kind of reliability that is ideal for 911. “Miami is kind of prone to hurricanes. Had a hurricane come at the same time [as the multi-state outage], we would not have had that failover, perhaps. So I think there needs to be more [distribution of 911 capabilities].”

Submission + - Your Online TV Watching Can Now Be Tracked Across Devices (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A partnership between TV measurement company Nielsen and analytics provider Adobe, announced today, will let broadcasters see (in aggregate and anonymized) how people interact with digital video between devices — for example if you begin watching a show on Netflix on your laptop, then switch to a Roku set-top box to finish it. The information learned will help broadcasters decide what to charge advertisers, and deliver targeted ads to viewers. Broadcasters can use the new Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, as they're called, beginning early next year. Early users include ESPN, Sony Pictures Television, Turner Broadcasting and Viacom.

Submission + - High-altitude drones are the future of Internet broadband (lightreading.com)

Submitted by mwagner
mwagner writes: Skynet is coming. But not like in the movie: The future of communications is high-altitude solar-powered drones, flying 13 miles above the ground, running microwave wireless equipment, delivering broadband to the whole planet. This technology will replace satellites, fiber, and copper, and fundamentally change the broadband industry. Call it Skynet, after the antagonist in the Terminator movies. It's coming in about 20 years — the same amount of time between Arthur C. Clarke's predicting the geosynchronous satellite and their reality as a commercial business. "Several important technology milestones need to be reached along the way. The drones that will make up Skynet have a lot more in common with satellites than the flippy-flappy helicopter drone thingies that the popular press is fixated on right now. They’re really effing BIG, for one thing. And, like satellites, they go up, and stay up, pretty much indefinitely. For that to happen, we need two things: lighter, higher-capacity wireless gear; and reliable, hyper-efficient solar tech."

Submission + - Aging and Orphan Open Source Projects 1

Submitted by osage
osage writes: Several colleagues and I have worked on an open source project for over 20 years under a corporate aegis. Though nothing like Apache, we have a sizable user community and the software is considered one of the de facto standards for what it does. The problem is that we have never been able to attract new, younger programmers, and members of the original set have been forced to find jobs elsewhere or are close to retirement. The corporation has no interest in supporting the software. Thus, in the near future, the project will lose its web site host and be devoid of its developers and maintainers. Our initial attempts to find someone to adopt the software haven't worked. We are looking for suggestions as to what course to pursue. We can't be the only open source project in this position.

Submission + - Isaac Asimov: How Do People Get New Ideas? 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Arthur Obermayer, a friend of the Isaac Asimov, writes that he recently rediscovered an unpublished essay by Asimov written in 1959 while cleaning out some old files that is "as broadly relevant today as when he wrote it. It describes not only the creative process and the nature of creative people but also the kind of environment that promotes creativity." Some excerpts from Asimov's essay which is well worth reading in its entirety:

Presumably, the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form, a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors. It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. What is needed is not only people with a good background in a particular field, but also people capable of making a connection between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordinarily seem connected. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

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