Jvitak

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong resigned from Reddit after a disagreement about a new office, company advisor Sam Altman wrote in a blog post. 

The disagreement had to do with the location and the amount of money to spend on a lease and Wong decided to leave after Reddit's board didn't approve his plan. 

Ellon Pao, Reddit's business exec, will be stepping up as interim CEO and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will be returning to a full-time executive chairman position. 

Before Reddit, Pao was a partner at Kleiner Perkins; she sued the company and her colleagues for sexual discrimination in 2012. 

Here's Altman's complete post:

Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit.

The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease).  To be clear, though, we didn’t ask or suggest that he resign—he decided to when we didn’t approve the new office plan.

We wish him the best and we’re thankful for the work he’s done to grow reddit more than 5x.

I am delighted to announce the new team we have in place.  Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO.  Because of her combination of vision, execution, and leadership, I expect that she’ll do an incredible job.

Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator).  He will be responsible for marketing, communications, strategy, and community.

There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things.  Alexis probably knows the reddit community better than anyone else on the planet.  He had the original product vision for the company and I’m excited he’ll get to finish the job.  Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.

Dan McComas will become SVP Product.  Dan founded redditgifts, where in addition to building a great product he built a great culture, and has already been an integral part of the reddit team—I look forward to seeing him impact the company more broadly.

Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun, I am happy they are coming to a close and I am sure the new team will do a far better job and take reddit to great heights.  It’s interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total.

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You are what you read, so you'd better choose wisely.

For a little help, each year The Financial Times sifts through dozens of new business books. Along with its partner McKinsey (and previously Goldman Sachs) it gives an annual "Business Book of the Year" award to honor the créme de la créme of business writing.

This year, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Pitketty took home the title, but not without some stiff competition. You can check out the short list of finalists here.

Throughout the last decade this award has collectively brought together some of the greatest and most influential business books out there. Here are the winners:

2014: "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
By Thomas Piketty

2013: "The Everything Store"
By Brad Stone

2012: "Private Empire: Exxon Mobile and American Power"
By Steve Coll

2011: "Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty"
By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

2010: "Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy"
By Raghuram Rajan

2009: "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World"
By Liaquat Ahamed

2008: "When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change"
By Mohammed El-Erian

2007: "The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co."
By William Cohan

2006: "China Shakes The World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America"
By James Kynge

2005: "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century"
By Thomas L. Friedman

See more great business books over at The Financial Times.

SEE ALSO: The 6 Most Influential Business Books Of 2014

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Shanghai (AFP) - Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said consumers spent a record $9.3 billion during its 24-hour shopping promotion Singles Day on Tuesday, cementing its position as the world's biggest online retail event.

Shoppers spent $3.5 billion, or 60 percent, more than the $5.8 billion sales recorded for the same day last year, the group said in a statement released on Wednesday.

It also dwarfed the major shopping days in the US in terms of transaction value, toppling the combined online sales of $5.3 billion recorded on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday through to Cyber Monday last year, according to data compiled by Internet analytics firm comScore. 

Alibaba has been pushing November 11 as Singles Day -- so named for the number of ones in the date -- since 2009 as it looks to tap an expanding army of Internet shoppers in China, which has the world's biggest online population.

The day was originally marketed as an "anti-Valentine's Day" in China, featuring hefty discounts to lure the country's singletons and price-sensitive buyers. 

It was expanded globally this year to include more than 27,000 overseas brands and merchants as well as customers from more than 217 countries and regions.

Deals settled on Alibaba's China and international retail market places reached 57.1 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) for the day, the group said in the release.

The number of transactions made per minute peaked at 2.85 million, it added.

"We are very happy with the results of this year's 11.11 shopping festival," said Alibaba chief executive Jonathan Lu. 

"We are particularly encouraged by the growing trend of consumers embracing mobile shopping on a global stage."

Approximately $4 billion of deals, or 42.6 percent of total, were made via mobile devices, according to the company.

Some 278.5 million packages were expected to be shipped after the event, it said.

The strong set of figures came against the backdrop of a growing online retail market in China and increasing spending power of consumers, analysts said.

Nonetheless Alibaba shares, which have risen strongly since its record-breaking $25 billion initial public offering two months ago, dropped 3.87 percent to $114.54 in New York on Tuesday.

China overtook the United States last year to be the world's largest online retail market, with sales of 1.85 trillion yuan, commerce ministry statistics show.

Headquartered in the eastern city of Hangzhou, Alibaba does not sell products directly but acts as an electronic middleman, operating China's most popular consumer-to-consumer platform, Taobao, which is estimated to hold more than 90 percent of the market.

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Treating melanoma in the UK costs more than £100 million every year, but the skin cancer can be treated easily and at less cost if detected in advance. An app developed by a team from Romania's University of Bucharest, called SkinVision, provides a new weapon against the disease, and is capable of detecting melanoma with an accuracy of 73% with just a picture. 

The app is not a replacement for a dermatologist, but should raise awareness about the risks of melanoma, which killed an estimated 2,000 people died in the UK in 2012, according to figures from the country's Cancer Research center.

SkinVision is based on a technology called "fractal geometry" — a branch of mathematics that can be used to simulate the natural growth of tissue. The SkinVision team used it to develop an algorithm that analyzes tissue growth using a picture of a mole that is uploaded to your smartphone. The algorithm can detect symptoms that are generally associated with risky moles.

"The skin is made up by cells that have replicated over and over again by following a rule," SkinVision co-founder Mircea Popa told Business Insider UK. "That leads to patterns that are measurable in a mathematical way." Malignant cells are diverted cells and they replicate in a different way so the patterns get mixed up when you look at both the skin and the mole.

Shape and colour are the both dependent on these patterns, and those are the characteristics the app targets.

In 2012, the SkinVision won a startup award from Dutch investment firm Personal Health Solutions. While researchers, led by Polytechnic of Bucharest professor Andreea Udrea, continued to work on algorithm in Romania, the enterprise arm of the company relocated to Amsterdam. 

In June, a panel of lecturers from the University of Munich in Germany prasied the app, calling it "a promising tool in the pre-evaluation of moles." They found that out of all melanoma cases the app had been used on, 73 out of 100 were correctly detected.

We tried the app using the Google Android version. There is also an app available for the iPhone. It costs $4.99.

The opening screen lists its features. Users press the biggest button the screen to take a picture of their skin. The picture is used to provide an analysis of the mole or growth:

Here's a picture of my arm:

Taking several pictures of the same mole allows the app to analyze its growth and evolution. The analysis can also be sent to your doctor through email, or to other doctors in your area. The app uses a GPS locator to lists the specialists that you can contact. These are the ones around the BI newsroom in London: 

Another feature analyses the UV exposure in your area. It tells you what the risks are and what you should to protect yourself, like wearing sunglasses or putting on SPF.  

Since the apps were first launched in 2012, around 100,000 people have already downloaded the app, creating a database of 175,000 pictures of moles. This information will be used to improve the app even further.

Watch the video below to see how the SkinVision mobile app works:

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If you were to peek inside the brain of someone who regularly smoked marijuana, you'd find that it didn't look quite like the brain of someone who didn't smoke.

First, you might notice that a critical part of the brain that helps us process emotions and make decisions appeared smaller than in the brains of the nonsmoker.

But you'd see something else too — that the connections passing through that region of the brain were stronger and thicker.

Thankfully, you don't have to go excavating brains anytime soon. A group of researchers has done the hard work for you. In a recent study, scientists used a combination of MRI-based brain scans to get one of the first comprehensive, three-dimensional pictures of the brains of adults who've smoked weed at least four times a week, often multiple times a day, for years.

Compared to people who don't use, long-term, heavy marijuana smokers tend to have a smaller orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a brain region critical for processing emotions and making decisions. But they also have more cross-brain connections that scientists think smokers may develop as a means of compensating for the difference in size.

Unlike previous research, which has looked mainly at short-term smokers or simply at young or older users, this study is one of the first to look at pot's longterm effects on men and women between 20 and 40 years old who'd smoked almost daily for anywhere between two and 30 years. The researchers looked at the brains of 110 people — 62 who didn't smoke and 48 who did — using three different types of MRI scans. 

In the smokers, these increased brain connections appeared to help them counteract the behavioral problems commonly associated with weed use, like trouble maintaining relationships or staying motivated enough to find or keep a job. 

But while new connections blossom throughout the brain during the first few years of regular use, they eventually recede. Researchers saw a significant drop-off in new brain links after about six years of regular use.

So does smoking weed every day for a decade shrink your brain and make you dumber? Not quite.

The regular smokers did have lower IQ scores overall when compared to the people who didn't smoke, but there's no way to know yet whether or how that might be linked to smaller orbitofrontal cortices or marijuana use in general. 

"We cannot honestly say that that is what’s happening here," says lead study author and Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, Dallas professor of neuropsychology Francesca Filbey.

For starters, this study — which was the first ever to look at the longterm effects of weed smoking in heavy adult users across a wide age range — did not show that pot smoking causes certain regions of the brain to shrink. In fact, other studies suggest that having smaller orbitofrontal cortices in the first place could make someone more likely to start smoking. One recent study, for example, found that children as young as 12 who had smaller orbitofrontal cortices were significantly more likely to start smoking weed by the time they hit their 16th birthday.

In other words, it could be that people with naturally smaller versions of this region may simply be more likely to smoke, and the weed might not be shrinking that section of the brain at all. There's also no clear evidence linking the brain differences the researchers found with any particular behaviors.

In addition, all three things the researchers studied — drug-use habits, brain development, and IQ scores — are shaped by a variety of factors. Both the environment we grow up in and the specific combination of genes we inherit from our parents affect behavior and intelligence.

The age when someone starts smoking pot can also be a key clue to how the brain will be different from a non-user's brain and how often someone smokes thereafter. Picking up the habit while young seems to be especially influential.

“The earlier the use — especially during adolescence, when the brain is developing — the greater the effects,” says Filbey. Of her study participants, those who started using the earliest had the most pronounced differences in brain development in terms of the size of the orbitofrontal cortex and the connections between parts of that region of the brain.

Other studies in people have shown similar links between weed and smaller prefrontal cortex regions, but only research in animals has suggested that marijuana may kill brain cells or reduce their size.

Scientists still don't know if giving up weed can reverse its changes to the brain (if the noted differences are indeed caused by pot in the first place — still an open question) or if the alterations are also present in recreational or short-term users. But as legal marijuana becomes a reality in the US, researchers are scrambling to find out.

SEE ALSO: How Tripping On Mushrooms Changes The Brain

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Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're covering poop, car washes, bread, orgasms, and more.

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The 1980s and 1990s were a pivotal time for innovation in Silicon Valley. In 1981, shortly after Apple released the Apple 1, IBM introduced the first PC. A few years later, the World Wide Web would be born.

Documentary photographer Doug Menuez happened to be in Silicon Valley at the time. He had done freelance work with major publications like Fortune and TIME, but he found that tech companies were difficult to crack. 

"I would go to Silicon Valley occasionally, and it was terrible. There was this massive PR bubble keeping you from getting any access," Menuez told Business Insider. "You knew these people were going to change the world, but no one knew anything about them."

In 1985, shortly after Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, Menuez asked if he could document the Apple founder's new venture, a personal computing company he called NeXT. 

To his surprise, Jobs agreed.

"He knew he was a historical figure," Menuez said. "I just showed up at the right place at the right time."

Menuez spent the next three years documenting what was happening inside the young company.  Life magazine would underwrite and publish the photos. 

"At NeXT, they were constantly hiring absolutely brilliant people. Steve was constantly challenging, prodding people to work above their abilities," Menuez said. "Steve had a lot at risk here. The stakes were high. He wanted revenge. He was becoming a symbol of a whole new generation coming into the Valley."

Once word got out that the notoriously private Jobs had granted Menuez access to his fledgling company, other Silicon Valley leaders followed suit. Over the next 15 years, Menuez would spend time photographing intimate scenes at some of the most influential tech companies in the world. 

Menuez has assembled his work from that period in a book called "Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley," which Atria Books published in June. 

"Fearless Genius" features stark, black-and-white photos that capture influential personalities.

In 1990, Menuez photographed then-Apple CEO John Sculley before a press event in 1990. Sculley was shy, and he seemed withdrawn to reporters.

"After forcing Steve out, John grew Apple from $800 million to $8 billion a year in revenue," Menuez wrote in the below photo's caption. "Despite this significant achievement, he was often dismissed in the Valley as the man who fired Steve and, unfairly, as a technology lightweight without vision." 

"He didn't get credit for a lot of important things he did," Menuez told Business Insider.

Here, Sculley and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak check out an early Nintendo Game Boy backstage at a 1991 Apple product announcement.

Adobe was another favorite project of Menuez's. He was there when Photoshop was released in 1990. 

"As digital technology grew more powerful, Silicon Valley became an expected crossroads of culture. Artists arrived from all over the world, eager to experiment," he writes in "Fearless Genius."

He continues: "Here, painter David Hockney, holding one of his beloved dachshunds, attends Russell Brown's first Adobe Photoshop Invitational,  where he learned how to use the first release version of Photoshop, happily smoking in the computer room and playing with his dogs on breaks."

Backstage at the Agenda '92 conference, Bill Gates debated cheap content and delayed vaporware upgrades to Windows. 

Menuez met Jeff Bezos during Kleiner Perkins' annual Aspen Summit in 1995. 

"He was wearing this shirt that said 'Amazon' on it. My wife is Brazilian, so she said, 'Let's go talk to him,'" Menuez said to Business Insider. "He gave us the whole pitch for Amazon, and it was amazing. Some things you hear and you just know it's going to work." 

Menuez captured Marc Andreessen and his publicist during a phone interview at the Netscape offices. 

"[He] was exhausted and riding a monstrous wave of digital global change he helped precipitate," Menuez writes in the photo's caption. "The press had been pleading for interviews with him ever since the Netscape Navigator browser was released, making internet access easy and fast for the masses."

Menuez had the opportunity to meet many notable figures, but he says it was Jobs who had the biggest impact on his life.

"Steve was the most inspiring person I ever met. As a photojournalist, I like to hide behind my lens and capture other people's moments," Menuez said. "He forced me to confront my own motivations, who I was. I wasn't trying to be his friend, but just being in the room was amazing."

Some may wonder why the photos are just being published now, two decades after they were taken.

After Menuez had finished his work with NeXT, Jobs decided Life magazine just wasn't cool anymore. Menuez put the photos away in boxes and completely forgot about them. 

"By 2000, I had burned out on the topic. There had been this crazy gold rush, and it all just burst," Menuez said.

Stanford later acquired his archives, and Menuez started going back through the notes to help with the scanning process.

Those scans would eventually become "Fearless Genius," which Menuez says is an imperfect history of the Valley at a pivotal time. He hopes to turn the project into a full digital experience, with a documentary, web series, educational program, and conference hopefully on the way. 

"I really want this book to reach young entrepreneurs to show how hard it was. The sacrifice isn't really understood," he said. "There are many lessons to be learned there."

SEE ALSO: How Larry Ellison's Vision For An Italian Sandwich Shop Started A New Era For Food In Silicon Valley

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Greg Schiano took some shit awhile back for instructing his team to try and blow up a victory formation, and the Steelers took their own crack at it today when when Mike Mitchell came over the top to try and get the ball back with Pittsburgh down only a touchdown. It's just another example of the ridiculous crap that took place in the game.

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An anonymous reader writes The company has rolled out some changes that make it easier to control what comes in your News Feed. From the article: "The social network unveiled a new settings menu and customization options for News Feed that allows users to personalize the types of content they see. The News Feed settings menu, which appears in the Facebook apps and on the web, displays which friends appear most often in your News Feed and which friends you've chosen to unfollow. From there, you can choose to unfollow people you don't want to see anymore or re-follow (Facebook calls it "reconnecting" with) those you've previously hidden from your feed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hackingbear writes Bummed that you're home alone on date night, or stuck in your mom's basement, yet again? Don't worry. A new gadget or some scuba gear could help. Observed on November 11 — or "11.11," for the date with the most 1s — Singles Day, which started out as a joke among a group of male college students attending Nanjing University in the 1990s, has become the world's biggest online shopping day, thanks to the e-commerce prowess of China's Alibaba Group. On this day last year, they sold twice what all US companies sold on Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. This year, Alibaba has decided to take its 11.11 promotions worldwide, highlighting global brands including online jewelry store Blue Nile, clothing brand Juicy Couture, and even Costco. Amazon has tried to get a piece of the action. The Seattle-based company launched promotions for the holiday last year on its Chinese site, and it's done so again this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When bees from commercially run hives go out looking for food, they're basically limited to eating nectar and pollen from the crops farmers want pollinated. That can be problematic for the insect's diet — and their long-term survival amid the mass die-off of honeybees over the past decade.

That's what Penn State entomologist Christina Grozinger discovered while in the middle of a recent bee research study. She and her colleagues originally set out to look at the effects of pesticides on bee genes, but when they started seeing the consequences a restricted diet had on bees, they were intrigued. Read more...

FirephoxRising writes Our genetic makeup influences whether we are fat or thin by shaping which types of microbes thrive in our body, according to a new study. Scientists identified a specific, little known bacterial family that is highly heritable and more common in individuals with low body weight. So we are what we eat, and what we got from out parents. From the article: "The study, funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers sequenced the genes of microbes found in more than 1,000 fecal samples from 416 pairs of twins. The abundances of specific types of microbes were found to be more similar in identical twins, who share 100 per cent of their genes, than in non-identical twins, who share on average only half of the genes that vary between people. These findings demonstrate that genes influence the composition of gut microbes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 writes U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said the bureau's Next Generation Identification program represents a "significant public interest" due to concerns regarding its potential impact on privacy rights and should be subject to rigorous transparency oversight. "There can be little dispute that the general public has a genuine, tangible interest in a system designed to store and manipulate significant quantities of its own biometric data, particularly given the great numbers of people from whom such data will be gathered," Chutkan wrote in an opinion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shubham Banerjee, the 13-year old CEO of the Braille printer maker Braigo Labs, had no idea what Braille was until last year. 

It was only when he came across a fundraising flyer for the visually impaired that he started to wonder how blind people read. So, like any other 7th grader would do, he asked his parents. His father’s response: “Go Google it.”

As he searched the web, Banerjee discovered the high cost of Braille printers, which usually cost upwards of $2,000. He also learned more about Braille, the tactile writing system used by the visually impaired.

“When I found out the cost of a Braille printer, I was shocked,” Banerjee told Business Insider. “I just wanted to help the visually impaired. I had a Lego Robotics kit, so I asked, ‘Why not just try that?’”

Built out of Lego’s Mindstorms EV3 blocks and little pieces from Home Depot (Braigo stands for Braille and Lego), Braigo Lab’s printer turned out to function quite well. It earned Banerjee a lot of recognition too, including The Tech Awards 2014 and an invitation to the White House Maker Faire, an event that awards student entrepreneurs and innovators.

But most importantly, Banerjee believes it could solve a decades-long problem that’s been holding back so many visually impaired people around the world: the high cost of Braille printers.

Banerjee says his printer could significantly cut down the price of Braille printers to less than $500. According to his website, there are 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and 90% of them live in developing countries. It’s not easy to drop a couple grand on a printer, even by a developed country’s standards.

“I want to tell (big company manufacturers) to stop taking advantage of blind people,” he says.

Impressed by his product and vision, Intel came calling last September and told him it would invest in his company. And last week, the investment was made official at the Intel Capital Global Summit, when Braigo Labs was mentioned as one of the 16 tech startups Intel’s investing in this year. Although the exact amount of the investment was not disclosed, it’s reported to be a few hundred thousand dollars. That makes Banerjee the youngest tech entrepreneur ever funded by a VC firm.

“I didn’t think such a big company would ever invest in my company. That was pretty amazing,” Banerjee says.

With Intel’s funding, Braigo Labs plans to build a new prototype that more resembles a regular printer, and bring it to market by next year. Banerjee says he has no plans to expand into other product categories at this point, but Braille printers seem to be just a part of a bigger dream he has in mind. 

“I want to do engineering in the medical area when I grow up,” he says. “And I want to finish college.”

This is the Lego Mindstorm EV3 kit he used to build it. 

These are some of the pieces he used. He also bought some small pieces from Home Depot to build it.

 

This is the part that holds the main processor, or the “brain,” of the product. It comes with the Lego Mindstorm.

 

This is what the first prototype looks like.

 

Here’s a better angle.

 

This is the second prototype, which more resembles a regular printer. The printer that goes into mass production will look more like this one.

 

He also presented at the Intel Capital Summit 2014 last week, with Intel Capital’s president Arvind Sodhani and Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson.  

You can see the full video below:

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An anonymous reader writes Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson, but some scientists believe that the particle may not have been discovered yet at all. A new study by a group of scientists from the University of Southern Denmark raises the possibility that the data collected from the Large Hadron Collider could instead explain another type of subatomic particle. Mads Toudal Frandsen, a particle physicist, explained in a statement, "The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particular particle is the Higgs particle ... It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles."

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Until recently, the last time I drank boxed wine was in college when "slap the bag” was an acceptable party game and everyone’s goal was to get as drunk as possible. 

Needless to say my memories of boxed wine were not the best.

But on a recent liquor store trip, I was intrigued by a good-looking box of wine. On the side of the box it claimed that it had three liters or four standard bottles-worth of wine, and that it would keep for over a month. It sounded too good to be true, but my frugal curiosity got the best of me.

And it was actually delicious.

Aside from the taste, I loved that I could have a casual glass without the pressure to finish an entire bottle. It helped that it cost about $20 for four bottles worth of wine, too.

Since then, I’ve tried a variety of boxed wines. Black Box, Wineberry, Bota Box, Trader Joe’s, and more, all with approximately four bottles of wine in a thick food-grade plastic bag. And I’ve learned one really important thing: We should all be drinking more boxed wine.

The fact that more people don’t drink boxed wine in America stems from our own cultural biases. Other areas of the world are much more liberal with how they partake: 50% of the wine sold in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, and Norway for example is boxed wine, according to Wines & Vines magazine. The Grape Vine Magazine reported that boxed wine is one of the fastest growing wine segments in the world with sales increasing 20% every year since 2000.

And even though boxed wine only accounts for 18% of sales in America, that could all be changing.

“The US wine market is growing tremendously and we’re developing a taste for wine,” Steffan Bankier, co-founder and CEO of the boxed wine brand Public House, told Business Insider. “People are starting to put good wine in the box, realizing that there are lots of benefits. Our generation is also rejecting anything that’s overly expensive, wasteful, or bad for the environment.”

Even if you’re a wine snob, there are simply too many benefits to ignore the growing market. 

First of all, it stores better — and longer — than regular opened wine. After pouring your first glass, boxed wine will stay fresh between six and eight weeks while your average bottle of red or white wine lasts less than a week once it’s been opened. The plastic bag keeps the air out and prevents oxidation until the wine has been dispensed into your glass, unlike a bottle which lets air in immediately after uncorking. 

Boxed wine also generates less waste. You don’t have to toss out wine that has gone bad, plus there’s less packaging since four bottles-worth of wine can fit inside one box.

The packaging is also more durable than a bottle. Glass is heavy and can easily break, but food-grade plastic and cardboard transport safely and don’t take up much space. Because the packaging is lighter-weight than glass bottles, when the wine travels across the country there’s less of a carbon footprint, too.

And because it can’t break as easily, is more light-weight, and is easy to transport, it’s better for on-the-go social settings. “It’s really convenient to carry. There’s a lot of places where they don’t allow you to have glass on rooftops, grassy areas, on the beach, and so on,” Jordan Gutman, co-founder and President of Public House, said. “Boxed wine naturally allows for that.”

All of this means that boxed wine ends up being cheaper. Prices typically range from $13 (Trader Joe’s) to $40 after tax for three liter boxed wines, and that’s not even including Tetra Pak options which are essentially adult juice boxes with a bottle and a half of wine inside (Bandit and French Rabbit are popular brands for those interested).

“The consumer right now pays so much for the bottles through shipping and packaging that it’s just unnecessary,” Gutman told me. “Our wine is such a better value. The average consumer is going to save about 40% just on the wine when they purchase a boxed wine simply because of the packaging.” 

I’m not a complete convert to boxed wine yet. I’ve continued to buy bottles to bring to dinner parties and friend’s houses and I still enjoy a high-quality wine as a splurge.  

It’s also worth noting that the only two areas boxed wine really falls short are perception (I’d never give boxed wine as a hostess gift, for example) and in the vintage market since boxed wine doesn’t age like bottled wine can (boxed wine can keep 6-8 months for unopened whites and 10-13 months for unopened reds).

So if you’re a wine snob and you can only drink the best of the best, ignore my advice. Get all the expensive vintages you want and fill up that pretentious wine cellar of yours. 

But for the rest of us, when it comes to day-to-day wine to drink with dinner, give boxed wine a chance.

SEE ALSO: The States That Love Wine The Most [MAP]

DON'T FORGET: Follow Business Insider's Life on Facebook!

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During its Nintendo Direct online event on Wednesday afternoon, Nintendo announced the classic N64 game "The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask" will be remade on the Nintendo 3DS, the company's 3D handheld console.

For those unfamiliar with the game, "Majora's Mask" was by far one of the darker "Zelda" games ever created by Nintendo.

Released in 2000, the story revolves around Link, the hero from the franchise, as he attempts to stop the moon from crashing into his planet in three days' time. To prevent the catastrophe, players must continually send Link back in time to the beginning of the three-day period, complete quests and figure out how to stop the world's destruction before time runs out.

The initial release of "Majora's Mask" sold about 3.36 million copies worldwide. Critics called the game "the finest adventure the Nintendo 64 has to offer," and "one of the most inventive premises in all of gaming."

"As we worked on the remake version, we set out to maintain the original level of challenge, while keeping the game accessible for anyone," Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president, said in the announcement. "So we also focused on making sure the gameplay experience was as soon as possible."

Nintendo previously remade another "Zelda" classic from the N64 back in 2011, "The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time." "Majora's Mask" is the direct follow-up to that game.

The new version of "The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask" will be available for the Nintendo 3DS sometime in the spring, according to Iwata. Check out the trailer below.

SEE ALSO: The 11 Hottest Video Games You Can Buy Right Now

SEE ALSO: 10 Reasons To Buy A Wii U Right Now

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The next chapter in the Star Wars saga is called The Force Awakens, Lucasfilm revealed Thursday morning.

The Disney subsidiary also confirmed that director J.J. Abrams had finished principal photography — that is, all the live shots of the actors and sets. CGI work and "pickups" — short inserted scenes — are still to come.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens has completed principal photography#StarWarsVII #TheForceAwakens pic.twitter.com/mFTP9YbKNN

— Star Wars (@starwars) November 6, 2014

An earlier, erroneous rumor suggested the title would be "The Ancient Fear." A great deal of other rumors have swirled around the content of the script, but all Lucasfilm has actually confirmed is that it will be set 30 years after Return of the Jedi and feature Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 alongside a cast of new characters. Read more...

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David Ng and Ben Cohen performed acts of science (realistic ones) in order to determine, once and for all, a true and empirical understanding of which Halloween candies induce the most joy and despair. With more than 40,000 of your votes duly recorded, the results below are indisputably unassailable. Read the rest

Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're covering voodoo, Papa John, handcuffing, and more.

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A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in Samsung's "Find My Mobile" feature that could let hackers interfere with phones over the internet. 

The Find My Mobile service lets Samsung customers track their devices, and lock or erase them if they get stolen. However, The Register reports that Mohamed Baset discovered that Samsung doesn't properly check where requests to Find My Mobile come from. This means that hackers can impersonate the device owners and interfere with the account. 

So what can hackers do with this security flaw? They can display a customized message on the phone screen, or find the phone's most recent location on a map. A hacker who attacked someone through the service could also force phones to ring on full volume for a minute, or even erase all data on the phone.

Baset uploaded a video to YouTube showing just how easy it is to hack into Samsung phones using Find My Mobile.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology examined the hack, and issued this statement:

The Remote Controls feature on Samsung mobile devices does not validate the source of lock-code data received over a network, which makes it easier for remote attackers to cause a denial of service (screen locking with an arbitrary code) by triggering unexpected Find My Mobile network traffic.

Computer World reports that the "Find My Mobile" vulnerability was given a 7.8 score in the Institute's seriousness scale, indicating that it could be harmful to a wide number of Samsung phone users.

SEE ALSO: North Korea Is Using Infected Mobile Games To Hack The Phones Of South Koreans

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Who can beat digital Mike Tyson at his own game? Maybe the real Mike TysonMaybe.

On Tuesday's Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon challenged Tyson to a game of the 1987 Nintendo classic Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! to see which Tyson would prevail. (Tyson only first played the game in 2013.)

The game is notoriously hard to beat — Tyson claims only one person has ever told him about winning the game, and that was a 10-year-old. "The Baddest Man on the Planet" probably should have asked the kid for tips.

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When your employees call in sick, there's a good chance they aren't really under the weather at all, new research finds.

Nearly 30% of workers surveyed said they have called in to work sick when they were feeling just fine, according to a study from CareerBuilder.

The most popular reason for faking a sick day? Just not wanting to head in to work. Specifically, 30% of those who have skipped work when they were not sick said they did so simply because they didn't feel like going to work that day. The research also found that 29% said they wanted the day to relax, and 19% wanted to catch up on some sleep. For 11%, bad weather was a good enough reason to call in sick. Read more...

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Two female pilots for Air Canada have now spoken out about a pornography issue among the airline's employees: One said "definitely pornographic" images are regularly left behind in the flight decks — or cockpits — of the carrier's planes. Another said some of the images show violence.

In response to a CBC News story, the airline said the images were actually just "inappropriate business cards" from Las Vegas.

However, one pilot said she encountered the images, ranging from suggestive pin-ups to clearly explicit images, once or twice a month. She said she believed that most of the images were left in the flight decks as jokes for the next set of pilots to discover, but that some of the images may have been meant to harass female pilots. Read more...

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"A new study revealed this week shows that in spite of past claims, marijuana use does not affect IQ. The research, performed by the University College of London, was presented on Tuesday at the European Conference of Neuropsychopharmacology in Berlin." [via]

Sean Harrington, a 35-year-old Highway Patrol officer in Martinez, California, is under investigation for allegedly stealing nude photos off the phones of women he arrested, Inside Bay Area News reports.

During the investigation, Harrington admitted to stealing indecent photos off of a DUI suspect in August, according to a search warrant affidavit cited by Inside Bay Area News. Worse, he reportedly says he's done it "a half a dozen times in the last several years" and that it's a "game" he and other officers play.

Harrington reportedly told police he learned the steal-nude-selfies "game" while he was working in Los Angeles at another department. Stealing the photos is a felony computer theft, according to the affidavit reviewed by Inside Bay Area.

The August DUI suspect reportedly first noticed her photos had been compromised when she saw some had been sent to an unknown number on her iPad. Traces of the messages had been deleted on her phone, but they were still viewable on her iPad, which had been synced with her mobile device, according to Inside Bay Area.

Inside Bay Area explains how the officer's alleged stolen selfie "game" works:

From the affidavit: "Harrington said he first learned of this scheme when he was working in the Los Angeles office. Harrington said when he was assigned to the Dublin office, he learned from other officers that they would access the cell phones of female arrestees and look for nude photographs of them. Harrington said if photographs were located, the officers would then text the photographs to other sworn members of the office, and, to non-CHP individuals. Harrington described this scheme as a game."

Here's a disturbing text message allegedly sent by Harrington to a friend, calling the woman a "horse face" whose looks are "like a 5 or a 6 at best."

Harrington allegedly sent another set of images — this time of a 19-year-old, bikini-clad woman — to a fellow officer with the message, "Taken from the phone of my 10-15x while she's in X-rays. Enjoy buddy!!!"

The officer allegedly responded, "No f------- nudes?"

Other uncovered texts between Harrington and other officers allegedly discuss "rocking" bodies and chests of arrested women. 

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In aftermath of LeBron James returning to Cleveland, NBA fans and basketball writers conducted an interesting thought experiment: What would happen if every NBA player signed with his hometown team?

Using a fantastic database of NBA player hometowns compiled by Deadspin's Reuben Fischer-Baum last summer, we went through all 482 players who played at least one minute in the NBA in 2013-14 and made "hometown rosters" for all 30 teams.

We used "hometown," not "birthplace" to determine team affiliation. Kevin Love was born in Los Angeles but he grew up in Oregon, so he goes on the Portland Trail Blazers, not the Los Angeles Lakers, for example.

Here are all 30 teams. We ranked them from best to worst (check out more on our methodology below):

Some notes:

• We gave smaller markets that don't produce a ton of NBA players more leeway than big markets. We allowed players from most of Ohio to play for the Cavaliers, for example. A lot of small markets would have trouble fielding a team, so we had to be generous. In general, a two-hour drive was the maximum limit, though.
• How we sorted out the New York: The Brooklyn Net got all players from Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island. The New York Knicks got all players from Manhattan, the Bronx, and northern New Jersey.
• How we sorted out Los Angeles: The Lakers got all the players whose hometowns were listed as simply "Los Angeles" or "Compton." The Clippers got all players from other neighborhoods. Arbitrary? Yes.
• After some deliberation, we decided that players from Baltimore (like Carmelo Anthony) can be on the Washington Wizards.
• Charlotte didn't get players from Raleigh. We're sorry, Charlotte, the two cities are just too far away. But if we did give them Raleigh, they'd have John Wall.
• We gave the Lopez brothers to Sacramento even though they grew up in Fresno. It's probably the biggest reach on the entire list, but it helps them fill out the roster.
• The biggest surprise: Indianapolis! We knew the Hoosier state was a high school basketball hot bed, but we didn't realize just how good they'd be. They're above Philly, Brooklyn, Houston, and Miami.
• The biggest disappointment: Miami. What the heck, Miami? How is Udonis Haslem your best big man?
• Observation: The NBA would be much worse in this dream scenario because all the foreign players wouldn't have teams.
• Poor Seattle. They have have had Jamal Crawford, Isaiah Thomas, Martell Webster, Avery Bradley, and Marvin Williams.
• Team St. Louis would be pretty good: Ben McLemore, Bradley Beal, Anthony Tolliver, Alec Burks, and David Lee.

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A Department of Homeland Security investigator who led an internal review of the 2012 prostitution scandal that rocked the Secret Service resigned in August after being implicated as allegedly visiting a prostitute himself, The New York Times reports.

The Times has more:

Sheriff’s deputies in Broward County, Fla., saw David Nieland, the investigator, entering and leaving a building they had under surveillance as part of a prostitution investigation, according to officials briefed on the investigation. They later interviewed a prostitute who identified Mr. Nieland in a photograph and said he had paid her for sex.

Nieland declined to answer any questions of The Times, only emailing that "the allegation is not true."

As the head of the Miami office of the DHS Inspector General, Nieland was tasked with looking in to allegations that Secret Service agents had paid for prostitutes ahead of President Obama's visit to Cartagena, Colombia in April 2012.

More than a dozen Secret Service agents and military personnel working in advance of an Obama visit to Cartagena got drunk and brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms at the time, according to CNN. The scandal rocked the agency and cost more than ten Secret Service employees their jobs, in addition to overshadowing the president's trip to the Summit of the Americas.

Although he was stopped by deputies, Nieland told them he was working on an investigation, The Times reported. He refused to answer questions posed by DHS, but resigned from the agency on Aug. 9.

Check out the full story at The Times >

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