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Submission + - Drought Inspires a Boom in Pseudoscience, From Rain Machines to 'Water Witches'

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: Across drought-stricken California, farmers are desperate for water. So many of them are calling dowsers. These 'water witches', draped in dubious pseudoscience or self-assembled mythologies—or both—typically use divining rods and some sort of practiced intuition to "find" water. The professional variety do so for a fee. And business is booming. They're just part of a storied tradition of pseudoscientific hucksters exploiting our thirst for water, with everything from cloudbusters to rainmachines to New Age rituals.

Submission + - Why women have no time for Wikipedia 2

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance, with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit, the most male-dominated major social media platform, and it has a palpable effect on Wikipedia content. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless. Wikipedia’s demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented. It indicates that it isn’t lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive. Wikipedia’s user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere.

Comment CentruyLink did this to me (Score 1) 110

by tomhath (#47773327) Attached to: CenturyLink: Comcast Is Trying To Prevent Competition In Its Territories
About ten years ago they replaced the copper phone lines along my street with fiber. It made the land line phone connection a lot more reliable (cell service here still sucks), but they said we were too far from town to get DSL. Then about 5 years ago they called and asked if I wanted DSL. Cable is still a few miles away but they'll never bother running it out here because everyone who wants it has a dish and DSL already. Not the fastest broadband, but plenty fast for us up here in Appalachia.

Comment Finding work in statistics (Score 1) 115

by tomhath (#47766451) Attached to: Statistics Losing Ground To CS, Losing Image Among Students

I work with a couple of very good statisticians. What they do is a mystery to me, but one thing I can say for sure - a good programmer or DBA will find work much more easily than a good statistician. In large part because PHBs have no clue why they need someone with more than two semesters of probability in almost every application.

Another problem with students going into statistics in the US is that virtually all of the instructors don't speak very good English. To this day I want to say things like "probabirity", "rotatation about the ashes", and the one that confused everyone in the class - "ashama" (eventually translated to axiom).

Comment Re:Average lifespan is misleading (Score 1) 281

by tomhath (#47757413) Attached to: The Evolution of Diet

We tend to make the assumption that an average lifespan of 30 means that nobody lives past 35 years old

We who? I doubt anyone thinks that.

Otherwise I generally agree with what you way - median life expectancy of those who reach adulthood would be a far more useful statistic here.

Submission + - Numerous methane leaks found on Atlantic sea floor (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methane’s contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.

Submission + - Princeton nuclear fusion reactor will run again (nj.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Tucked away from major roadways and nestled amid more than 80 acres of forest sits a massive warehouse-like building where inside, a device that can produce temperatures hotter than the sun has sat cold and quiet for more than two years.

But the wait is almost over for the nuclear fusion reactor to get back up and running at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

“We’re very excited and we’re all anxious to turn that machine back on,” said Adam Cohen, deputy director for operations at PPPL.

The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has been shut down since 2012 as it underwent a $94 million upgrade that will make it what officials say will be the most powerful fusion facility of its kind in the world. It is expected to be ready for operations in late winter or early spring, Cohen said.

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 1) 511

by tomhath (#47743817) Attached to: If Java Wasn't Cool 10 Years Ago, What About Now?

There's zero chance that's going to be easier using a loosely typed language with porous ideas of module boundaries

Nonsense. The typical Java project is a big steaming mess of factory classes, wired beans, annotations, aspects, xml, and all the other workarounds that are needed to give the same functionality that's built into dynamically typed languages. And you still get logs overflowing with run time exceptions.

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