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Submission + - Watch This Inventor Survive a Fireworks Blast in a Metal Suit (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Labor Day is nigh, and with it the official end of summer. It’s time to pack away the umbrellas and beach towels, and perhaps spend a few minutes flipping through photos of all the fun times you had over the past couple months: the grilling, the trips, the fireworks oh yes, the fireworks Chances are pretty good that you’ve set off more than a few fireworks in your time. But Colin Furze, the British inventor and YouTube celebrity who once co-hosted Sky1’s Gadget Geeks? Well, he puts everybody’s love of fireworks to shame. He loves fireworks so much, in fact, that he built a giant metal suit so he could stand in the middle of an epic pyrotechnic display. No matter how good your own engineering skills (or strong your courage), it's inadvisable to try this at home. But it's sure fun to watch.

Submission + - Coffee Naps Better For Alertness Than Coffee or Naps Alone (vox.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Caffeine is a staple of most workplaces — it's rare to find an office without a coffee pot or a fridge full of soda. It's necessary (or at least feels like it's necessary) because it's sometimes hard to stay awake sitting at a desk for hours at a time, and the alternative — naps — aren't usually allowed. But new research shows it might be more efficient for employers to encourage brief "coffee naps," which are more effective at returning people to an alert state than either caffeine or naps by themselves. A "coffee nap" is when you drink a cup of coffee, and then take a sub-20-minute nap immediately afterward. This works because caffeine takes about 20 minutes to get into your bloodstream, and a 20-minute nap clears adenosine from your brain without entering deeper stages of sleep. In multiple studies, tired participants who took coffee naps made fewer mistakes in a driving simulator after they awoke than the people who drank coffee without a nap or slept without ingesting caffeine.

Submission + - 64% of All Emails Opened on iPhone or iPad (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: New research shows that Apple's mobile devices dominate the email landscape in the UK, with 46% of all emails opened there being done on an iPhone with a further 18% on iPad. Despite Android being the dominant smartphone market leader with a 60% share, emails opened on Google's mobile operating system fell by a huge 31% between 2013 and 2014.

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.

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