Luke.stirling

OakDragon writes: Microsoft has tamped down the earth on XP's grave, steered Internet Explorer toward the nursing home, and is trying to convince everyone Windows 10 is a bright up-and-comer. But in the Paris airport of Orly, a system called DECOR — which helps air traffic controllers relay weather information to pilots — is running on Windows 3.1. That program suffered a glitch recently that grounded planes for some time. The airport actually runs on a variety of old systems, including Windows XP and UNIX. Maintenance is a problem. There are only three people in Paris that work on DECOR issues, and one of them is retiring soon. Hardware is also an issue. "Sometimes we have to go rummaging on eBay to replace certain parts," said Fiacre. "In any case, these machines were not designed to keep working for more than 20 years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

https://youtu.be/YkJS0IzZREk

After many TV networks blurred out parts of Amedeo Modigliani's 1917 painting of a nude woman (Nu Couché) that sold for $170.4 million at Christie's New York on Monday, Stephen Colbert told viewers what you can and can't look at on network TV. [caption id="attachment_434311" align="alignnone" width="950"] CNBC blurred parts of Modigliani's masterpiece, "Nu Couche."[/caption]

https://youtu.be/XwdUXS94yNk

This video was made by Finland-based Fragile Childhood, "an awareness-raising campaign, which aims to reduce parents' use of alcohol by helping them understand the harm it causes to children."

Here's another: https://youtu.be/i46h9dAaDfo What if children could choose their parents?

tastefullyoffensive:

(via Andy H.)

cartoonpolitics:

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear .. kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it …"  .. (General Douglas MacArthur)

This should not work as well as it does.

thebeautyofperception:

Wow. Every one of these could be a writing prompt.

The festival of lights, indeed. (Thanks, Jordan Kurland!)

Albuquerque police officer Jeremy Dear was ordered to wear a body-camera after many of the city's residents complained about their encounters with him. Afterward, he routinely failed to plug in the camera. His camera was not running when he shot and killed a 19-year-old girl in 2014. (more…)

A police officer pulled over a Google self-driving car yesterday because it was going only 24 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone. But the car had no driver, so he could not issue a ticket. The officer asked the human passenger why the car decided to drive so slowly.

From CNN:

In a Google Plus post, the Google Self-Driving Car Project pled guilty to slow driving.

"We've capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25 mph for safety reasons," the post said. "We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets."

In the end, the officer determined the car had broken no law. No harm, no foul.

And no ticket was issued -- not because there was no driver to whom to issue it but because the car had committed no violation.

pic.twitter.com/3tKhtuxxr8

— David E. Weekly (@dweekly) November 12, 2015

An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched a new tool called About me that lets you see, edit, and remove the personal information that the company's services show to other users. Google confirmed to VentureBeat that the feature started rolling out to users this week. Google's various products and services (Gmail, Hangouts, Google Maps, Inbox, Google Play, YouTube, Google+, and so on) sometimes ask you to share certain personal information. These details are then shown to other users who interact with you or search for you. Until now, all of this was stored in Google+, assuming you created an account. But Google+ is no longer a requirement for Google's services, and so the company needs a new solution, and ideally one that isn't public by default.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, we are interrupting our month of party appetizers because PUMPKIN. From brownies to bars to super moist bread, here are 12 mouthwatering recipes we can’t stop thinking about (which would you pick?)…

Pumpkin Bread

Pumpkin Brownies

Pumpkin Mousse

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Pancakes

Pumpkin Crème Brûlée

Pumpkin Pie Bars with Brown Sugar Oatmeal Crust

Pumpkin Flan

Pumpkin Swirl Brownies

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Vermont Spice Pumpkin Cake

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

Which would you pick?… Read more

The post 12 Pumpkin Recipes appeared first on A Cup of Jo.

Terrifying news from the UK: You are more likely to die if admitted to the hospital on the weekend than on a weekday. This can only mean one thing–patients admitted on weekends are being locked in and forced to battle to the death.

Kidding, kidding. Leaping to a single conclusion like that without evidence or consideration of multiple factors would be at best irresponsible and at worst dangerous.

Enter stage right: British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and the British Conservative Party, who have decided that the higher mortality rate among weekend admissions is due to reduced services on the weekends, which can only be solved by creating a “seven-day NHS.”

The problem is that this conclusion seems to have as much evidence to support it as my Battle Royale idea above.

Let’s look at this issue through the lens of today’s bad chart, from the Conservative Home article by Paul Abbott entitled “The graph that shows why Hunt is right about a Seven Day NHS”:

Y-axis label: Statistical risk of death compared with Wednesday baseline
X-axis label: Day of admission to hospital

Right away, before we even get into the flaws in the chart itself, we get a perfect illustration of the leap in logic that is at the heart of the Conservative argument. The graph does not show “why Hunt is right about a Seven Day NHS.” It doesn’t show he’s wrong, either. The graph does not give us any information one way or the other about a seven-day NHS.

Abbott is assuming correlation equals causation. The flawed logic goes like this: The chart shows an increased rate of death on weekends. Services are reduced on weekends. Therefore, reduced services are causing the increase.

But you can make any number of ridiculous claims using that logic alone, without any supporting evidence to show a causal link. For example: The chart shows an increased rate of death on weekends. Television programming is different on the weekends than on weekdays. Therefore, being stuck in the hospital with only crappy weekend programming to entertain/distract people is sapping their will to live.

You don’t even need to jump to the lethality of Murder She Wrote reruns to come up with any number of possible reasons for the increase in weekend hospital deaths. The first thing that popped into my mind was that more deaths would be expected among those admitted on weekends because people going in on the weekend are more likely to have an urgent or emergent problem. In the US, it’s more expensive to seek care over the weekend for most people, so seeking care over the weekend rather than waiting to make an appointment during the week often signals a problem that can’t wait to be addressed. Of course emergencies and urgent symptoms are going to be more likely to indicate a life-threatening problem.

The expense of weekend healthcare might not be an issue for patients in the UK, so maybe this conclusion is not accurate (although I can still see not wasting the weekend by going into the hospital for a non-urgent problem for those who work regular business hours).

Another possible explanation is that hospitals are less likely to admit patients who come in on the weekends unless the health problem is urgent, especially if services on the weekend are reduced–not BECAUSE of reduced services, mind you, but because the hospital is set up to provide routine care during the week, so that would be postponed, increasing the proportion of people with non-routine, higher risk problems among weekend admissions.

On a similar note, more weekday admissions are likely to be for routine, scheduled, and/or elective care, which would throw off the risk ratio when comparing weekends to weekdays. Some, all, or even none of these could directly affect the weekend admission death rate.

The point is that there are other possible reasons that alone or (more likely) together might explain the increase in deaths. Without evidence supporting a causal link, we can’t draw conclusions about the cause of the increase, much less attempt to make policy changes based on these conclusions, especially policy changes that are potentially expensive and have life-or-death consequences.

So Abbott’s graph does not show the conclusion he touts in the title. Even the increases in deaths on Saturday and Sunday are exaggerated by starting the y-axis at 0.96 instead of 0. Here’s the same chart with a corrected y-axis:

EDIT 11/13/2015, 10am EST: Starting at 0 does not actually make sense for relative risk. A column chart is actually a misleading presentation for relative risk in the first place, so I’ve cut my own misleading corrected chart. Below is a more appropriate chart of the data, which is the source of Abbott’s numbers (see below). Thanks to Jamie Bernstein for pointing this out.

There is an increase, but is it significant enough to warrant the reaction from Hunt, Abbott, and others pushing for a seven-day NHS?

To find out, we have to go back to the data themselves. Abbott claims in his article that the graph is from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. When asked for more details on Twitter, he provided this link, which shows a figure from Freeman et al., “Weekend hospitalization and additional risk of death: An analysis of inpatient data,” published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2012. The full text is available at that link, and the paper does not include Abbott’s graph, although the figure he links to appears to be the source of his data.

In fact, the authors of this paper recently provided an updated analysis using more recent numbers (2013-14), published in the BMJ under the title “Increased mortality associated with weekend hospital admission: a case for expanded seven day services?”

This analysis appears to be at the heart of the statements Hunt has been making since July about “11,000 excess deaths” annually in the UK, the alleged number of deaths above the Wednesday baseline that occur on weekends. Oh, and by the way, “weekend” now apparently includes Friday and Monday.

The subtitle of Freeman and colleagues’ analysis certainly suggests that they have found a causal link between these deaths and reduced services on weekends, yet the analysis itself does not study this link, and in the interpretation section, the authors write, “It is not possible to ascertain the extent to which these excess deaths may be preventable; to assume that they are avoidable would be rash and misleading.”

Hmmm, “rash and misleading,” kind of like the subtitle of the analysis? Oh, but they have a question mark at the end! It’s not a conclusion. They’re “just asking questions,” right? Sure, these questions suggest a conclusion and ignore the many, many other questions raised, but you can’t fault the researchers for conclusions other people draw from their innocent questions.

Seem familiar? I do believe we might be seeing the medical research equivalent of JAQing off.

Even if the difference in deaths is statistically significant and the methodology sound (which, judging from the criticism, is not a safe assumption), we don’t know if these deaths are even preventable, and the effects on the public of believing they risk death or poorer quality care on the weekends are themselves potentially harmful.

In fact, a group of physicians has started to document this, what they are calling the “Hunt effect,” the number of people who now avoid seeking care on the weekends out of fear created by Hunt’s misleading statements as well as the health outcomes for these people who delayed care. Whether they are able to demonstrate this effect as significant and conclusive remains to be seen, but it nevertheless illustrates that “just asking questions” and drawing causal conclusions based solely on correlation are potentially harmful even before any changes are implemented based on these flawed conclusions.

I personally think the deaths are worth looking into, even though it seems likely that even if there is a significant increase (still debatable), most are not preventable. But this is difficult to do when people have already made up their minds thanks to the success these politicians and scientists have had in trolling England.

Wil Can’t Draw – Teachable Moment

I was bored while I waited for my plane to take off, so I drew a dumb cartoon that amused me. As many of you observed on Twitter, this is clearly inspired by the always-brilliant Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hovertext: WHY ARE WE LYING TO CHILDREN?!

New comic!
Today's News:

Just under a week left! We have a chance to hit a record for most funding ever for an SMBC book! 

From Herb Lester Associates, clever hotel notepads from fictional movie and television hotels! For £12.00, you get six pads:

• Bertram’s Hotel (At Bertram’s Hotel, Agatha Christie)
• The Great Northern Hotel (Twin Peaks)
• The Overlook Hotel (The Shining)
• Royal Imperial Windsor Arms Hotel (National Lampoon’s European Vacation)
• The Green Man Inn (The Wicker Man)
• The Taft Hotel (The Graduate)

Hotel notepads (Herb Lester)

Last May, Jackie Burns, the deputy leader of the Labour Council in South Lanarkshire in Scotland, voted to close all public toilets as part of the Scottish government's £22 million cost-cutting programme; early last Saturday morning, police issued him a £40 ticket for pissing in public. (via Reddit)

via trollx

If you haven’t already seen this on Twitter, here’s something terrible for you: the image above comes from a catalog for Bloomingdale’s.

Because, apparently, a group of actual human beings sat around a table trying to come up with new ways to sell clothes this holiday season and decided that, really, there was no better way to do that than by conjuring up visions of holiday-themed date rape.

The ad copy is bad enough, but the picture really clinches the ad’s full terribleness: the happy woman, enjoying herself obliviously at some holiday party while her predatory “best friend” contemplates the best way to render her unconscious.

Happily, enough people were publicly disgusted by the ad and its creepy implications that Bloomingdale’s has now apologized for it, though somehow I doubt they will feel apologetic enough to rerelease their catalog with the offending image removed from it.

To me, one of the creepiest things about the ad was its implicit invocation of the notion of the “friend zone,” that mythic land where poor suffering men are exiled by cruel women who just can’t see that the best guy for them is already sitting by their side listening patiently as they cry about the latest bad boy to break their heart. You know this stale old story by heart.

The idea of the “friend zone” turns a woman’s lack of romantic interest in a guy into a sort of injustice that she has supposedly inflicted upon him. It encourages a seemingly contradictory sense of wounded, hopeless entitlement amongst guys who would do far better if they either accepted the friendship of their crush for what it is, or, if this is too painful for them, just moved on.

Guys who see themselves as being trapped in the friend zone feel they are being denied something — well, someone — that should rightfully be theirs. After all, they’re such nice fellows, the best friend a woman could ever have!

But really not.

Needless to say, a “best friend” staring at a woman and thinking about ways to spike her drink is not a friend at all. Neither, really, is any guy — well, anyone of any gender — who considers themselves stuck in the friend zone, which is not actually a zone of friends at all; it’s a zone full of thwarted, passive-aggressive clingers-on who think the fact that they’re your friend(and not something more) is a terrible crime against them. And that’s just as creepy as this Bloomingdale’s ad.

An important story out today confirms that SecureDrop, the open source whistleblower leak system originally programmed by Aaron Swartz and maintained by Freedom of the Press Foundation, works.

(more…)

House Bill HR1737 will create penalties for auto-lenders who substantially overcharge black and latino customers through gouging on dealer markups. (more…)

LEGO has just posted a big batch of previously unreleased photos of the forthcoming 75827 LEGO Ghostbusters Firehouse Headquarters, due out in January 2016.

The new photos focus on the box art, interior, and minifigs. Helping to explain the $350 price tag, the firehouse has a fully furnished interior, with three floors of detailed rooms.

You can see all 27 new photos in our photoset on Flickr.

View

We've all encountered what people today call Black Memorabilia — a Mammy cookie jar, a racist postcard — but have you ever wondered where these depictions came from, and why they are so common? In her latest article for Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix interviewed Dr. David Pilgrim, author of Understanding Jim Crow, to get some answers to these and other questions. Hix learned that Black Memorabilia was popularized by post-Reconstruction whites to dehumanize African Americans, and that while slavery may have ended in 1865, Jim Crow has persisted in various forms and guises to this day, which helps explain why the presence of an African American family in the White House has not been enough to put America's racial history behind us.

Stock caricatures such as Mammy, Uncle Tom, Sambo, pickaninny children, coon, Jezebel, Sapphire, and the black brute were employed to spread these messages to millions of people. Companies mass-produced these images in every form — including postcards, cleaning products, toys and games, ceramic figurines, ashtrays, cast-iron banks, children’s books, dinnerware, songbooks, tea towels, cookie jars, matchbooks, magazines, movies, gag gifts, salt-and-pepper shakers, planters, fishing lures, trade cards, ads, records, and tobacco tins. If you lived during the Jim Crow era, you’d encounter such caricatures everywhere, in your newspaper, on restaurant walls, on the shelves at stores, and at the cinema or live theater.

“If you believed that black men were Sambos, childlike buffoons, for example, then why would they be allowed to vote?” Pilgrim says. “Why would they be allowed to hold office, serve on a jury, or attend public schools with whites? If black men were brutes who were a threat to white women, why would they be allowed to share beaches, public-school classes, or taxicabs? If black women were Mammies whose best roles in life were serving white families, why would they be allowed in other occupations when the society needed them for that? So the caricatures, and the stereotypes which accompanied them, became rationalizations for keeping blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Perpetuating these caricatures was a way to make sure you didn’t have to compete against black people economically. In short, it was a way of sustaining white supremacy."

Mark of Future Forms takes gorgeous photos of his collection of "space-age" electronics from the 1960s to the 1980s, many of which are for sale or rental. You can search by color, brand, or category. I got lost and then found again in "novelty" and then disappeared altogether into "orange." (more…)

Starting with the Agat, a 1984 Apple ][+ clone, moving through several other mass-market and semi-mass-market models, including the gorgeously named Robotron, which was mostly produced in the GDR, and the hobbyist Radio-86RK (an 8-bit computer you assembled yourself, a bit like the Altair) and my favorite, the Apogei BK-01 which was as orange as a very, very orange thing. (more…)

You'd be forgiven for thinking the videocassette format long-dead, but it turns out that Betamax is still around. Sony is finally going to withdraw tapes from sale, bringing a 40-year story to an end.

The last recorders were sold in 2002.

ベータビデオカセットおよびマイクロMVカセットテープ出荷終了のお知らせ [Sony; via The Verge]