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China

Submission + - Beijing's Hacker Bike Pumps Clean Air Into Your Lungs as You Ride (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Beijing is a smog-infested hellhole, everybody knows that. Pollution level are off the charts, but a man's gotta eat, so millions of people are out and about moving through the muck every day, lining their blackening lungs with toxic air. And millions of them are riding bikes. If only, then, those bikes came equipped with a clean supply of oxygen, so the good people of China might shield their lungs from airborne decay.

So here's Beijing resident Matt Hope with their ticket: a bike that actually purifies that black air for them, through a filtration system on the back and feeds it through a gas mask nozzle up front. It's called the Breathing Bike."
Math

Submission + - How Your Ears Do Math Better Than Mathematicians (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "The assumption was that ears use something akin to a Fourier transformation. A Fourier transform, named after the French mathematician who also identified the Greenhouse Effect, is essentially when a sound wave is stretched way out until its details are revealed. In more mathy terms, you take a signal, which is a mathematical function of time--a mechanical thing of air molecules traveling through space--and turn it into an array, or series of different frequencies. The Fourier transform is found all over science, and not just sound.

The transformation is done through what's called an "integration" of the original, mechanical function of time. (If you've taken calculus, you should remember integration.) Basically, this is taking that function and recovering information from it by mathematically slicing it up into tiny bits. It's pretty neat. This, it turns out, is how we get meaning (words, music, whatever) from sound (that big wave in the ocean). Or so scientists have thought.

Turns out this might not be quite the case. Researchers at Rockefeller University devised an experiment to test the limit of this kind of analysis via Fourier transformation.

Rockefeller researchers, Jacob Oppenheim and Marcelo Magnasco, took a group of 12 composers and musicians and tested them to see if they could analyze a sound beyond the uncertainty limit of Fourier analysis. And guess what? They busted it down. "Our subjects often exceeded the uncertainty limit, sometimes by more than tenfold, mostly through remarkable timing acuity," the authors write in Physical Review Letters."
Japan

Submission + - This Year, More Japanese Tsunami Debris Will Wash Up on U.S. Shores Than Ever (vice.com) 1

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "When the tragedy-bearing tsunami slammed into Japan in 2011 the fallout was felt all around the world, both figuratively and literally. The crisis that unfolded at Fukushima led to a globe-spanning conversation about the merits and pitfalls of nuclear power, and to nations like Germany and Japan taking their reactors offline. But a less momentous and oft-overlooked result of the earthquake is that for two years now, it has lined the oceans and the west coast of North America with an impressive amount of debris.

The detritus—everything from Styrofoam trash to whole refrigerators—has washed ashore everywhere from Hawaii to California to British Columbia to Alaska. Especially Alaska. Chris Pallister, the president of an environmental NGO in Alaska recently told NPR it’s gotten so bad on some of Alaska’s shores that it’s like “standing in landfill out here.”"
News

Submission + - The Moth-Driven Robot Is a Step Towards Automatons That Mimic Life (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "a team from the University of Tokyo developed a small robot and gave it to silkmoth a to drive.

Essentially, the team was able to develop a scent-detecting robot that is directed by a silkmoth, and which actually was able to tracks scents even better than the silkmoth could on its own. All 14 silkmoths tested in the rig were successful in driving it towards the goal."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook's Doing Face Recognition Again and This Time America Doesn't Care (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "At the end of last week, Facebook quietly rolled its Tag Suggestions tool back out to American users. Just like the first time around, the social network talked up the new tool's ability "to help [users] easily identify a friend in a photo and share that content with them." Given the backlash from a couple years ago, you'd think that Facebook would make a few adjustments to the software like, say, not turning facial recognition on for everyone by default. (Opting out is a three step process, explained here) But that's not the case. The tool is virtually exactly the same as it was before, and Facebook doesn't seem at all interested in changing it. "If this new feature is as useful as Facebook claims," Rep. Ed Markey pointed out the last time around, "it should be able to stand on its own, without an automatic sign-up that changes users' privacy settings without their permission.""
The Internet

Submission + - The FCC Wants to Blanket the Country in Free Wi-Fi (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Internet access is an essential need on par with education access, but at what point do regulators recognize that? When will government officials acknowledge that widespread, guaranteed access is essential to fostering growth in the country? Somewhat surprisingly, that time is now, as the FCC is now calling for nationwide free wi-fi networks to be opened up to the public.

The FCC proposes buying back spectrum from TV stations that would allow for what the Washington Post is dubbing "super wi-fi," as the commission wants to cover the country with wide-ranging, highly-penetrative networks. Essentially, you can imagine the proposal as covering a majority of the country with open-access data networks, similar to cell networks now, that your car, tablet, or even phone could connect to. That means no one is ever disconnected, and some folks–especially light users and the poor–could likely ditch regular Internet and cell plans altogether."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The Silk Road Is Showing Cracks (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "It always sounded like a hoax, didn't it? Silk Road: an Internet website where you can buy any drug in the world? Yeah, right. But it's real. It was almost two years ago that we first heard about the site, which hosts everything from Adderall to Ketamine, LSD to MDMA and tons and tons of weed. After it started to pick up a ton of press and exposure, we all thought that certainly the Silk Road would get shut down. It's super illegal to sell drugs or even to help people sell drugs. But it didn't. Silk Road survives to this day. However, with the arrival this week of the first conviction of a Silk Road-related crime, you have to wonder if Silk Road's days might be numbered after all.

The trouble is brewing in Australia, where a guy named Paul Leslie Howard is facing as many as five years in prison for selling drugs on Silk Road. We're not talking millions of dollars worth of drugs, but we are talking about thousands of dollars worth. And just as Silk Road natives had feared, Howard was one of those Silk Road n00bs who read a newspaper article about the site and decided to try it out for himself."
The Internet

Submission + - Free Wi-Fi: The Movement to Give Away Your Internet for the Good of Humanity (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "We are strangely territorial when it comes to our wireless networks. The idea of someone siphoning off our precious bandwidth without paying for it is, for most people, completely unacceptable. But the Open Wireless Movement wants to change all that.

“We are trying to create a movement where people are willing to share their network for the common good,” says Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It's a neighborly thing to do.”

That's right, upstanding citizen of the Internet, you can be a good neighbor just by opening your wireless network to strangers--or so the line goes. The ultimate vision is one of neighborhoods completely void of passwords, where any passerby can quickly jump on your network and use Google Maps to find directions or check their email or do whatever they want to do (or, whatever you decide they can do)."
Google

Submission + - North Korea's Prison Camps Are Now on Google Maps (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "It's been nearly a decade since Shin Dong-hyuk, an ex-prisoner of North Korea's Camp 14, crawled over the electrocuted body of a friend lying dead on a fence, a boundary he was born inside of and lived within for 23 years. He made his way across the Chinese border on foot and was granted political asylum and citizenship in Seoul. Now, thanks to updated Google maps of the region, you can actually (if somewhat loosely) retrace the steps of his incredible escape.

Through its Map Maker program, which crowdsources cartographic info, Google has published finer details of some North Korean roads. More notably, it has included shaded-in locations of the country's notorious prison camps. The data has flowed in from a few different sources, including defected North Korean expats now living in Seoul. Geographically-minded tourists and visitors of North Korea have weighed in, and historic map data from pre-partitioned Korea into has also been helpful. (Google maintains that the recent trip to Pyongyang by CEO Eric Schmidt had nothing to do with this project.)"
Media

Submission + - Memorex Will Bend Your Nostalgic Mind (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "According to Smash TV, who produced the 50-minute tour de force, 'Memorex' was sourced from nearly two days' worth of '80s television commercials ripped off old videotapes. The end product is the nightmarish, glowing detritus of the dreams of the middle class. This is the sheen off sleek Nissan Sentras and beach party babes, dually shot in slow motion; this is warped, sugary charm of cereal jingles, long-forgotten station identifications, and fledgling computer graphics. This is "the ultimate VHS tape," as Smash put it. "The advertising industry's collective wet dream.""
China

Submission + - Beijing's Pollution Problem Is Everyone's Problem (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Even as gross examples exhort us to take note, wiggling our way out of considering the obvious isn’t that hard. One thousand nine hundred seventy-three people died in Chinese coal mines in 2011, but it’s easy for me to leave my lights on because I’ve never met any of them. Rivers turn all sorts of crazy colors from pollution and algae growth, but as long as I don’t live near any of them, why should I care? Coal-burning furnaces and polluted groundwater are creating entire cancer villages but OK, this one is a little tough to rationalize, but let’s go with the most popular justification: Villages with increased incidences of cancer are regrettable, but these sacrifices are necessary for the sake of continued economic development.

The Chinese people, knowingly or not, are engaged in a Faustian bargain with their rulers. They have surrendered their right to complain in exchange for economic development. To put it more bluntly, the Communist Party can do whatever it wants so long as the rising middle class can buy new refrigerators and handbags every once in a while. In modern China, development is paramount—all other concerns are secondary."
Games

Submission + - Namco Is Planning Adult Versions of Classic Arcades (vice.com) 1

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "If you were born before 1990, chances are you've long bemoaned the disappearance of a meaningful pillar of your upbringing: video arcades. There used to be 13,000 of them across the country, back in the early 1980s when arcades were a $3 billion industry. Now there are too few to merit counting. Where did they go? You fed them all the quarters in your mom's purse! Why did they leave?

The rapid tumble of American arcades — the real arcades, the loud dark rooms with gross carpets and no parents — has left a hole where a piece of culture used to be. Rather than try and recreate that vintage arcade experience, Japanese video game maker Namco is rolling out a "restaurant-centered, destination entertainment concept." The arcade pioneer, which produced such golden-age gems as Pac-Man and Space Invaders, is poised to roll out a chain of the arcade-restaurants in Chicago. They're called "Level 256," a reference to the mythical final level of Pac-Man."
The Internet

Submission + - Aleksey Vayner, the Laughing Stock of the Internet, Has Died at 29 (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Aleksey Vayner, the Yale graduate who garnered the Internet's mistrust for a video résumé he made called “Impossible is Nothing,” has died at the age of 29.

According to IvyGate, the website that first reported on his fabrications in 2006, a spokesman for the New York Medical Examiner's office said the cause of death was pending investigation. A Facebook posting by a family member indicated that he passed away on January 17 at a hospital in New York.

Vayner, a driven athlete and entrepreneur, had become synonymous with the perils of unintended Internet fame. He had emigrated from Uzbekistan and settled in New York City at a young age with his mother, and after attending Yale, married and had been living in New York City. He had started his own company, dabbled in finance, philanthropy, and internet marketing. Last year, he reportedly changed his name to Alex Stone."
The Internet

Submission + - The Rhino Horn Crisis and the Darknet (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Last fall, I logged into an underground message board in the anonymized recesses of the Internet they call the deep web or the dark web,in search of rhinoceros horn.

Once thought to posess magical abilities, and now used primarily for supposed medicinal purposes across Asia, rhino horn is now an incredibly rare commodity that's worth more than cocaine, gold, or platinum. In Southeast Asia, a single horn--often ripped from the head of a dead rhinoceros by global criminal gangs--can sell for half a million dollars or more.

After I posted my request, plenty of people wrote back, though it wasn't clear who was trying to sell and who was trying to scam. But one respondent sounded more serious. His email handle was "Keros," the Greek word for horn, and he dismissed my request as amateurish, explaining that the horn trade isn't something to take lightly. "Anyway," he wrote, "my material is black rhino horn pure keratin hunted in Namibia. I have three in the US right now.""

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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