lawrencekhoo - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Debunks Trump's Claim It Censored His State of the Union Address (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @08:01PM

An anonymous reader writes: President Donald Trump intensified his criticism of Google today, posting a native video of unknown origin to his Twitter account this afternoon claiming the search giant stopped promoting the State of the Union (SOTU) address on its homepage after he took office. It turns out the video he posted is not only misleading, but also contains what appears to be a fake screenshot of the Google homepage on the day in question. It has since been viewed more than 1.5 million times. In a statement given to The Verge, a Google spokesperson clarifies that the company promoted neither former President Barack Obama nor Trump’s inaugural SOTU addresses in 2009 and 2017, respectively. That’s because they were not technically State of the Union addresses, but “addresses to a joint session” of Congress, a tradition set back in 1993 so that new presidents didn’t have to immediately deliver SOTU addresses after holding office for just a few weeks. Google resumed promoting Obama’s SOTU address in 2010 and continued to do so through 2016, as he held office for all six of those years.

With regards to the 2018 SOTU, Google says it did in fact promote it on its homepage. “On January 30th 2018, we highlighted the livestream of President Trump’s State of the Union on the google.com homepage,” reads Google’s statement. “We have historically not promoted the first address to Congress by a new President, which is not a State of the Union address. As a result, we didn’t include a promotion on google.com for this address in either 2009 or 2017.”

Submission + - Climate Change Could Lead To Nutrient Deficiency For Hundreds of Millions (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @05:30PM

An anonymous reader writes: According to new research, rising carbon dioxide levels will sap some of the nutrients from our crops and lead to dietary deficiencies in millions of humans. In 2014, field trials of common food crops including wheat, rice, corn and soybeans showed that as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased, the levels of iron, zinc and protein decreased in the dietary staples by 3 to 17 percent. While the decrease in a few nutrients may not seem important in food secure countries, it could have a big impact in poorer nations.

In the new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers calculated the impact of declining nutrients on human health. According to a press release, the team looked at the impact of rising CO2 on 225 different types of food. Based on population estimates for 2050 and an expected rise of carbon dioxide from about 400 parts per million today to 550 ppm by mid-century, the team found that the nutrient deficiencies of those already suffering will worsen, and 175 million more people could join the 1.2 billion who are zinc deficient and 122 million people would be added to the 622 million who don’t receive enough protein. About 1.4 billion women of childbearing age and children under 5 could see their iron intake drop by about 4 percent.

Submission + - CERN's Pioneering Mini-Accelerator Passes First Test (nature.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29, 2018 @04:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: An experiment at CERN has demonstrated a new way of accelerating electrons to high energies — one that could dramatically shrink the size of future particle accelerators and lower their costs. The technique is the latest entrant in a hot race to develop a technology called plasma wakefield acceleration. The method uses waves in plasma, a soup of ionized atoms, to push electrons to ever-higher energies over distances much shorter than those required in today’s particle accelerators. Several laboratories have demonstrated plasma wakefield acceleration using two different approaches; most teams use laser beams to create the plasma waves needed. The latest work is the first to show that protons can also induce the waves and achieve electron acceleration — a technique that may have advantages over the others because protons can carry high energies over long distances.

In this case, researchers diverted protons that would usually be fed into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, and instead inserted them into the wakefield accelerator, called the Advanced Wakefield Experiment (AWAKE). The machine worked as expected and created a consistent beam of accelerated electrons. “That, for us, was a major achievement,” says Matthew Wing, a physicist at University College London, who is deputy spokesperson for AWAKE. “It essentially says that the method works, and it’s never been done before.” The work is described in Nature on 29 August.

Comment Re:Won't work (Score 2, Insightful) 185

by lawrencekhoo on Wednesday January 24, 2007 @05:40AM (#17735752) Attached to: The iPod International Currency Index

You are right in that this price index won't work. But, the crucial difference is *not* whether they are consumed immediately or not. But rather, Big Macs are produced largely using local labour and materials, and so their price reflects the local prices levels of rents, labour, and misc. materials in the country. IPods on the other hand are produced in China or somewhere, and shipped all over the world. As such, IPod prices only reflects Apple's estimate of the demand for IPods vs the competitors that they have in that country.

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