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Comment Who are Young Climate Leaders? (Score 1) 626

by AlejandroTejadaC (#59241158) Attached to: Trolls Are Swarming Young Climate Activists Online
"Young people traveling the world and working together to start their career as climate leaders." From the website: https://www.youthclimateleader... Just now I learn that Climate Change provides an opportunity to create networks and opportunities to start a career in the field of climate change. What could they do as Young Climate Change Leaders? Maybe... 1) Boycott China Industrial Production? The Worst Polluter according to: https://www.activesustainabili... 2) Stop everyone from using any kind of plastic? https://myplasticfreelife.com/... 3) Change the eating habits of 7 billions people? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Now, I want to learn how they could achieve all these goals while preserving peace, liberty and freedom of choice.

Submission + - Scientists stunned by 'city-killer' asteroid that just missed Earth on July 25 (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.”

“I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week.

Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.

“I was stunned,” he said. “This was a true shock.”

This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”

“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Brown, an associate professor in Australia with Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”

Submission + - Historic Computer Science Boolean Sensitivity Conjecture Solved (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Faizdog
Faizdog writes: The “sensitivity” conjecture stumped many top computer scientists, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.

“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science,” he added in an email.

The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them “the bricks and mortar of whatever you’re doing in computer science,” said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.

“People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress,” said Ryan O’Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.

Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. “It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl,” wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview.

Aaronson and O’Donnell both called Huang’s paper the “book” proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erds’ notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. “I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this,” Aaronson wrote.

It can even be described in a single tweet!

Comment Now I remember... (Score 1) 156

After reading many comments in this thread, I just remember the very first time that I wrote to Amazon Customer Support. I asked them: "Why do you erased many accurate reviews about this book?" Their answer was: "The book author removed all unfair and biased comment about his book". I have almost forgotten about this, but now I remember.

Comment Not as easy as it sounds (Score 3, Interesting) 156

After reading this article, I visited Amazon, signed in with my own account and tried to left a review for an article that I bought in a local store. SURPRISE! Amazon do not let me write a review for an article that I own and use everyday. How it's possible that thousands of people could left fake reviews without being spotted and stopped by Amazon, in the same way that they stopped me today from writing a review?

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