The FCC's net neutrality rules, passed last year, explicitly ban internet providers from a number of discriminatory measures like throttling and blocking, but there's evidently a huge loophole that every major wireless carrier in the US has rushed to exploit. T-Mobile's Binge On program, which throttles video content, is troublesome — but AT&T and Verizon's programs are much worse, especially the one Verizon just announced today in the fine print of an update for its Go90 video app.
Verizon's Go90 video platform, the company's effort to compete with video providers by offering its own bundle, now won't count against customers' data caps. That's a huge deal, since video eats up a lot of data on mobile devices, and especially since...
An anonymous reader writes: William Holt, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, has said at a conference that chips will become slower after industry re-tools for new technologies such as spintronics and tunneling transistors. "The best pure technology improvements we can make will bring improvements in power consumption but will reduce speed." If true, it's not just the end of Moore's Law, but a rolling back of the progress it made over the last fifty years.
A Comcast customer who is dissatisfied with Internet speeds set up a Raspberry Pi to automatically tweet at Comcast each time speeds are much lower than advertised.
"I pay for 150Mbps down and 10Mbps up," Reddit user AlekseyP wrote over the weekend. "The Raspberry Pi runs a series of speed tests every hour and stores the data. Whenever the down[load] speed is below 50Mbps the Pi uses a Twitter API to send an automatic tweet to Comcast listing the speeds. I know some people might say I should not be complaining about 50Mbps down, but when they advertise 150 and I get 10-30 I am unsatisfied."
AlekseyP made the Twitter bot's code available on Pastebin. "I am by no means some fancy programmer so there is no need to point out that my code is ugly or could be better," the Redditor wrote. AlekseyP set the tweeting threshold at 50Mbps in part because the Raspberry Pi's Ethernet port tops out at 100Mbps.
Modern chemistry can sometimes produce the most unlikely things, including materials familiar to everyone but with totally new—and useful—properties. A recent example of such a material is "flexiramics," which is being developed by Dutch startup Eurekite at the University of Twente.
As the name suggests, flexiramics is a foldable, tissue-like material that is also fireproof and non-conducting, like most other ceramics. As Eurekite commercializes flexiramics and prepares to take it to market, we decided to pay the startup a visit.
The startup's founding team consists of three people: two international students coming from Spain and Azerbaijan and their academic supervisor. Eurekite CEO Gerard Cadafalch Gazquez, who came to the Netherlands from Barcelona in 2010 to pursue a Master's and then a PhD degree, showed his favorite trick with a sheet of flexiramics:
The debate over the potential harm of T-Mobile's Binge On continues, with a new study from Stanford University claiming that the perk violates key net neutrality principles and is "likely illegal." Binge On lets T-Mobile subscribers watch videos from streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu without eating into their data plan. It's proved popular with users, with T-Mobile claiming video views on its network have "more than doubled" since the deal was introduced, but critics say it's creating a tiered internet service, with the Uncarrier given the unfair advantage of deciding who wins and who loses.
Clichés are everywhere on Instagram, and trending hashtags are an easy way for users to shoot nearly identical photos on the same topics. For their latest music video for the song titled “Clichés,” Hiérophante decided to create a hypnotic rapid-fire slideshow that shows how much of what you find on Instagram is completely unoriginal. From hashtags, to locations, to celebrities — each group of photos has an eerie level of uniformity.
“I took advantage of our tendency to be unoriginal on social media to make this animation,” Hiérophante writes. “Everything from images search to editing is made ‘by hand’ without any automated software. Some people point out to me that some similar videos already exists so it seems that making a video about clichés is a cliché too…”
You know that mind-bending scene in the movie Inception in which the dream world is folding up on itself? Photographer Aydın Büyüktaş‘ “Flatland” project is like that. The Turkish artist creates each of the images through a meticulous planning process and aerial drone photography.
Büyüktaş says he always planned for the images to be the result of photo composites. The shots were planned using 3D software that allowed Büyüktaş to explore possible locations in Istanbul, Turkey. It took 2 months of planning to figure out how to make the smooth curving landscape of his photos. Each location was photographed multiple times from different angles and altitudes using a camera-equipped quadcopter.
The project was originally done by making a collage of physical prints, but Büyüktaş wasn’t happy with the results so he turned to creating a digital composite in Photoshop. Each image takes days of editing before it comes together into the final product.
“Waiting for right weather was challenging,” Büyüktaş tells PetaPixel. “There were so many times I had to turn back without any photos because of bad weather, technical problems, birds that attacked my drone, and permission issues with flying.”
The middle of winter is a somber time of year for the spaceflight community. The three worst tragedies of NASA's manned space program fall within just six days on the calendar, from January 27 to February 1: Apollo 1, less than three years before Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon; Challenger, watched live by millions around the world; Columbia—like Challenger before it, an avoidable accident rooted in NASA's internal culture.
Apollo 1: January 27, 1967
NASA
The prime crew of Apollo 1, Virgil I "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White, II, and Roger B. Chaffee, during training in Florida.
8 more images in gallery
The loss of the Apollo 1 crew (along with the spacecraft) several weeks before its intended launch date was a severe setback for America's lunar ambition. Apollo 1 was supposed to carry Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee into low Earth orbit on February 21, 1967, the first launch in a series that would culminate in a pair of American astronauts walking on the Moon's surface in July 1969. Instead, all three suffocated when fire broke out in the Command Module during what was thought to be a low-risk test.
Both Grissom and White had been into space before; Grissom was one of the original Mercury Seven, White was one of NASA's second wave of astronauts—recruited for Gemini—which saw him become the first American to walk in space. Chaffee was part of NASA's third astronaut intake, and Apollo 1 was to be his first mission.
The accident occurred on January 27 during a test that involved the Apollo spacecraft running on internal power. Grissom, White, and Chaffee were strapped in and sealed into the command module. It's thought there was a spark from one of the myriad exposed wires which quickly turned into a fire, helped no end by the oxygen-enriched environment. The pressurized atmosphere (16.7psi, 2psi above ambient) inside the spacecraft held the capsule's inward-opening hatch in place, and it was not designed to be removed quickly. The fire prevented the astronauts from trying to vent the capsule's atmosphere. Even if they had, the system would not have coped with pressures that quickly reached 29psi.
The skills you’ll need to land a job as a front-end web developer will vary from one place or one position to another, but there are several skills that are common to most web development jobs. Skillcrush shares 11 of them below.
Leo Perrero has sued his former employer, The Walt Disney Company. He says the company gave him 90 days to train his replacement, who had an H-1B visa. (credit: WWSB)
Two former IT workers at Disney have sued, saying that Disney broke the law when it hired cheaper foreign replacements, then fired its current IT department. Disney IT employees were told they would be kept on for 90 days in order to train their replacements, who were H-1B visa holders, according to the complaints. The workers were told "if they did not stay and train they would not get a bonus and severance, which most employees reluctantly accepted."
Both lawsuits are proposed class-actions, filed in federal court in Florida. The suit filed by Dena Moore (PDF) names Disney and labor contractor Cognizant Technology Solutions, while a complaint filed by Leo Perrero (PDF) names Disney and HCL, another labor contractor.
They make a novel claim, saying that Disney violated the anti-racketeering RICO statute by engaging in a "conspiracy to displace US workers." The plaintiffs allege that Disney and the contractors weren't truthful when they filled out immigration documents, thus violating a section of the RICO law that bars "fraud and misuse of visas, passports, and other documents."
Iowa farmer David Ausberger had thought he was close to making up his mind about who he’d support in his state’s presidential caucus. "Both my wife and I were leaning toward Ted," he told me. "Now I guess maybe we gotta go back to the drawing board."
That’s because Iowa’s governor had recently said that he wanted Ted Cruz to lose. And so did the groups that campaign for renewable biofuels. That’s a problem for Ausberger. He’s a big, easy-going guy — a former college mascot who cares a lot about conservation techniques in farming but doesn’t get too heated up about presidential elections. Cruz looks to him like a defiant outsider who could clean house in Washington and upend political business as usual. But Ausberger also sells a lot of corn to ethanol plants.
Many Iowans are mulling the same problem. A fortnight before the caucuses, Ted Cruz seemed to be leading the crowded Republican field in Iowa, and heading into the caucuses he is neck-and-neck with national favorite Donald Trump. That’s surprising because Cruz has championed the slaying of one of Iowa’s sacred cows: the Renewable Fuel Standard, which Congress passed in 2005.
The RFS required renewable fuels to replace a percentage of fossil fuels used for cars, airplanes, and heating. That amount has increased over time and currently stands at just over 10 percent. The RFS is a government mandate that creates a market for biofuels, and therefore creates a market for corn, and therefore helps Midwestern farmers.
For a while, it seemed like supporting ethanol and the RFS was a prerequisite for topping the Iowa heap — but that’s changing.
REUTERS/Scott Morgan/Grist
Nonsense, say biofuel boosters
When I called up Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, he assured me that ethanol still had plenty of clout.
"So, if Ted Cruz wins in Iowa …" I began.
"There will certainly be people who crow, and tell us we should learn the incorrect lesson from that," he finished my sentence. The correct lesson, Shaw said, is that when you split the Republican vote 12 ways, you create an opportunity for dark-horse candidates. "Iowans will overwhelmingly vote for pro-RFS candidates," he said. "That’s a fact."
He’s almost certainly correct. All the Democrats and 10 out of 12 Republicans support a strong renewable fuels standard.
"I have a hard time imagining someone winning in the Iowa general election who was against the RFS," he continued. "And Iowa is one of seven swing states."
OK, I said, back that up. Why do Iowans care about ethanol?
"Our economy runs on agriculture," Shaw said. "Even if you are sitting on your butt in Des Moines working in insurance, you are affected by ag." Even modest slow-downs in the ethanol mandate have hurt, he added, and shutting down the program entirely would devastate the economy.
The price of corn has indeed plummeted from the early days of the biofuel boom. But I asked, "Do you really think that’s all because of the slowdown in the amount of ethanol the RFS requires us to consume?"
"There are always multiple factors, but most observers would say the pause in the RFS was the largest," he said.
Well, that depends who you talk to.
The ethanol boom is over
Agricultural economist Brian Wright finds it a bit amusing that biofuel boosters are now insisting that grain prices are tied closely to the ethanol program. "When I was writing this [a paper demonstrating that the RFS had caused a spike in world grain prices], farmers were saying that biofuels had nothing to do with the price increase. When the politicians want to change the policy, they say you are ruining us by dragging down the price of grain," he said.
Another economist, David Swenson at Iowa State University, told me that when ethanol plants started buying up increasing amounts of corn in 2006, it really did drive up prices. It was a brand new market, and there was more demand for corn than farmers could supply.
But Swenson said, "The industry has simply matured. There was this phenomenal structural shift, and for a while farmers weren’t growing enough corn, but now there’s a glut." And because of that, the importance of ethanol has waned.
Swenson calculates the effect of the industry very differently than Shaw. "If all the ethanol plants closed, how much would Iowa’s economy contract? The answer to that question is less than 8,000 jobs." Even that unlikely scenario doesn’t amount to much in an economy of 1.7 million workers.
Of course, people like Ausberger who are directly connected to the ethanol industry would feel any shift in government policy most directly. "I can see the plumes of an ethanol plant six miles away from my office here," he said. And it was transformative to have an industry that wanted to buy his corn rise up next door, he said. Before, pretty much all his corn went to feed animals.
via Grist
FSI is mostly ethanol, plus corn syrup sweeteners.
The ethanol industry was a new buyer around for Ausberger’s corn. That gave him more pricing power, and more money to invest in better tools and to experiment with techniques. One change led to a cascade of opportunities and innovations, he said.
The end result was greater efficiency and higher production — and eventually, the supply of corn overtook the demand. "The cure for high prices," Ausberger said, "is high prices."
Other issues rise in importance relative to ethanol
It would be hard for Iowa farmers to vote for an anti-ethanol candidate at a time when the biofuels industry had tripled the price of corn. Now that prices have fallen, ethanol may not be important as other issues.
That’s the sense that Scientific American editor David Biello got while reporting in Iowa last week. He was working on documentary called The Ethanol Effect with Detroit Public Television for PBS. I caught him in the airport as he was heading home.
Ethanol just wasn’t at the top of the mind for the conservatives he’d talked to. What were they worried about? "Immigration and the sense that the country is in some kind of death spiral — and that Obama is responsible for that," he said.
There are different reasons for various stripes of conservatives to oppose the ethanol mandate. Free marketeers don’t like the government imposing a quota on the market. Those who work with the fossil fuel industry, like the Koch brothers, don’t like the competition from biofuels. That might weigh against ethanol in the Republican caucuses. I asked Biello what he thought of Shaw’s assertion that no anti-ethanol candidate could win the general election in Iowa. "I don’t buy it," he said.
To be fair, the ethanol lobby has already had some big political successes this year: Bush, Sanders, and other candidates who made noises about ending, or reducing, the ethanol mandate have come around to supporting it after spending time in Iowa. But these gains took extraordinary effort, Biello said. "The ethanol folks are making the largest push they have ever made to show their power," he said.
And then, significantly, there’s Rep. Steve King. He’s an ethanol stalwart who represents the northwest corner of Iowa — ethanol central — but he’s campaigning for Cruz. "If the person from the most pro-ethanol district in all of Iowa feels politically secure enough to support Cruz — who the ethanol industry hates — it means something has shifted," Biello said.
Part of that shift, as I’ve already suggested, comes from the fact that ethanol is no longer jacking up the price of corn. Another part may come from the declining price of oil. Once, energy independence — the idea that we shouldn’t be beholden to the Middle East for energy — provided an important argument for ethanol. But now the U.S. produces more oil than it can use. "There’s nothing like $1.70 gas to make you change your mind about energy security," Swenson said.
The environmental stakes — it’s complicated
A couple months ago I did some reporting to compare the relative greenhouse gas emissions from corn ethanol and from oil. On that pass it seemed pretty cut and dry: Ethanol appeared worse. Now I’m not sure.
After that piece, sources got in touch to let me know that the publicly funded Argonne National Lab had come to different conclusions. When I talked to Jennifer Dunn, a researcher there, she patiently walked me through the factors that they considered. They had included everything I had thought they might be ignoring, including indirect land-use change. They also keep updating the model as new information comes in. At this point, their model shows that replacing oil with corn ethanol leads to a 37 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Other scientists (like the ones I’d read initially) have come to different conclusions. A lot depends on economic models that estimate if and where new land is cleared for agriculture. There’s a huge range of uncertainty about indirect land use change.
I asked Biello if he’d figured out who to trust. He said it all depends on what you care about: "If you are interested in water quality, it’s pretty clear that ethanol is terrible [because of fertilizer run-off from corn fields]. If you are interested in smog in cities, maybe you are pro-ethanol because of its oxygenating properties. If you are interested in climate change, it really gets tricky, because it all comes down to land use change."
I haven’t been able to figure this out definitively (though I intend to keep working on it). The usual cop-out is to say that corn ethanol is complicated and troubled, but cellulosic ethanol is coming and will make everything better (because we could turn perennial grasses and corn cobs into fuel). But cellulosic ethanol has been a huge disappointment: There are a couple of small plants making the stuff, but no one has been able to produce it at scale.
Ausberger isn’t sure if the ethanol issue will sway him against Cruz. He apologized for his vagueness: He’s not particularly fixated on politics, he said, and offered to put me in touch with some farmers who were. I told him I was happy to talk to a normal person rather than someone who would rant at me. He laughed. "I know, some of the things I’ve been reading on Facebook recently, like wow, some of my friends are crazy!"
At this point, Ausberger just wants it to be over — he’s sick of the campaigning and the spin. But it’s Iowans like him — people who caucus, but haven’t made up their mind; people who know they will be affected by changes in biofuel policy, but may care about other policies even more — who will determine the state’s Republican nominee. That vote will provide a signal. Ethanol’s economic clout has already waned; on February 1, we’ll see if its political clout is fading as well.
Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
Nearly 200 Wikipedia editors have taken the unprecedented step of calling for a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors to be tossed out.
The voting, which has no legally binding effect on the Wikimedia Foundation, is now underway. As of press time, 187 editors had voted in favor of this proposition: "In the best interests of the Wikimedia Foundation, Arnnon Geshuri must be removed from his appointment as a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board." Just 13 editors have voted against, including Wikimedia board member Guy Kawasaki.
An anonymous reader writes: A network administrator in Denmark is requiring users to perform a finger press on a banana to receive their Wi-Fi passwords. "The banana is mounted and in production," he posted Thursday, sharing two pictures. The banana uses a special new circuit board from Makey Makey to form a connection between the banana and a cheap Raspberry Pi computer with a screen attached, according to one technology site. They note that it could also detect finger presses on a doughnut, an apple, or even Jell-o, and offer this quote from the sys-admin about his motivations. "It's fun... It'll make people smile. It beats a static WPA password in funnyness." And most importantly, "When people leave our office, they can't access our WI-Fi because there's no banana to touch." This guy deserves some kind of award, come July 29th.
There are a lot of superhero movies and even more superhero TV shows. While I love everything about superhero shows, sometimes even I have to admit that they can start to feel the same. While I love to think of myself as badass as Jessica Jones, as honorable as Supergirl, and as skilled a fighter as Black Canary, I have to face the facts: I’m just a normal human. But sometimes, it can be nice to watch normal humans try their best to do crazy, super human things to inspire us to do amazing things. Or in the case of the Evil Iguana Production’s latest web series, Vigilant, sometimes we want to watch a normal human try to do super human things and totally suck at it. You know, whatever floats your boat.
Vigilant is the perfect show if you’re looking for a superhero that strays from the normal superhero story. The show follows Wayne, a guy who has no money, no girlfriend, and really no hope. Feeling directionless, he decides to start protecting the city as a vigilante known as The Watchdog. Wayne ends up joining with two other vigilantes, Virago and The Silencer, who do their best to help him go from a hapless wannabe superhero to… a slightly less hapless wannabe superhero. Wayne has a lot of heart, but he’s not fast, he’s not strong, he’s not brave, and he has a really bad habit of getting a violently bloody nose whenever he sneezes. Still, Wayne wants to make a difference, and he continues to work to help people in need.
While the story is a ton of fun, what really makes Vigilant stand out in the saturated world of superhero shows is the characters. Wayne doesn’t have your typical vigilante origin story. Sure, he’s not really been living his best life, but he wasn’t trapped on a hellish island for five years, he didn’t watch his parents die in an alley when he was a kid, and he wasn’t trained by the League of Assassins. Wayne’s got a solid support system in his friends, and while they’ve got their doubts about Wayne’s foray into the vigilante life, they ultimately they support him. I wish I could relate more to someone like Jessica Jones, Sara Lance, Oliver Queen, or Bruce Wayne, but the fact is, out of all of those, I’m definitely more like Wayne than I’d like to admit. He’s just a goofy guy who’s trying to do something bigger than himself. Watching a superhero show where the main character seems very flawed (and not in a tortured, man-tears sort of way), goofy, and very human is a fun change of pace. And while characters like Silencer and Virago are awesome and bad-ass, I love watching Wayne have normal interactions with his friends, and his relationship with Rita, the first person he “saves,” is very normal, despite the fact that he moonlights as The Watchdog. Vigilant is funny, and they manage to weave in humor with superhero story lines in a fun way, but it’s really the characters that kept me watching.
I think a lot of that has to do with the brains behind Vigilant. The show was created by Kyle Bridges and Zac Coleman, and is written by Kyle, Zac, Craig Deering (Wayne), and Allen Murphy (Chris). These guys have been making web videos together for years, and that chemistry absolutely comes through on camera. Allen and Craig play best friends in Vigilant, and their real life friendship makes it almost impossible not to fall in love with their characters.
Vigilant is a great example of what makes YouTube and the internet so awesome. It’s an example of friends having a cool idea, and going out and creating something new and exciting instead of waiting for someone else to create it. Obviously, we at Geek & Sundry have a soft spot for that since our fearless leader, Felicia Day did just that with The Guild.
If you haven’t watched Vigilant, then now’s the time. Take a look at the trailer for the show:
Like most of the Eastern seaboard, we at Vox are snowed in. But as long as the Smithsonian National Zoo keeps posting videos like this, it will all be OK:
Tian Tian woke up this morning to a lot of snow...and he was pretty excited about it. #Blizzard2016
That blissed-out ball of ice and fluff is Tian Tian, the National Zoo's 275-pound male giant panda. Tian Tian and Mei Xiang, the Zoo's female giant panda, are the proud parents of this little guy, Bei Bei, who also got a "taste" of the snow:
As my colleague Dara Lind explains, giant pandas in the wild are actually pretty ferocious creatures. But Chinese propaganda has encouraged the world to see them as the "ideal zoo animals," cuddly and sedate. (Color me indoctrinated!) That perception has allowed China to charge foreign zoos exorbitant fees to loan out and display pandas. It's also helped turn pandas into a bizarre diplomatic bargaining chip for China.
Sadly, Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and Bei Bei could be whisked back to China at any time — even though Bei Bei was born in the United States. No matter where a giant panda is born, it is considered the property of China. That's why Vox's Matt Yglesias argues that we need birthright citizenship for pandas.
Apostrophes are by far the most misused and abused punctuation mark in the English language. Many people seem to have absolutely no idea how to use them. Are they to pluralize? Are they for contractions? Are they meant to indicate a possessive?
The answer is all of the above. That's what makes apostrophes so confusing to many people: They're so versatile that it's hard to gauge when it's not right to use them.
It shows. Apostrophe catastrophes are so common that they've even inspired a genre of writing — including at Vox! — in which journalists take time out from putting together hot takes and breaking news to teach readers proper grammar.
You may be wondering why any of this matters, and I'm not going to oppose your nihilism. But apostrophes offer an exciting opportunity to show other people how smart and educated you are. That should be a good enough reason to read this short explainer and share it with your friends on as many social media platforms as possible.
Possessiveness: the best use of an apostrophe
The most basic use of an apostrophe is to show possession. The general rule of thumb: Singular words get an apostrophe and an s, and plural words get an apostrophe.
Example: The duck-sized horses' numbers outmatched the horse-sized duck's strength.
Things can get a little tricky with words that end with the letter s, like Charles. Depending on the writing style you adhere to, you can add just an apostrophe (Charles') or an apostrophe and an s (Charles's). So either can work, although more civilized people prefer adding both an apostrophe and an s. But whatever you do, be consistent.
One common mistake occurs with words that end with the letter y, like company, for which people add "ies" (to spell out, for example, companies'). This is not necessary unless you want to make the word plural. If you only want to turn the word possessive, just add an apostrophe and an s (company's).
Another common issue is irregular plural words, like children and teeth. For these words, you add an apostrophe and an s — so children's toys and teeth's roots.
Contractions: another great, but sometimes tricky, use of apostrophes
Apostrophes also have the wonderful — but sometimes butchered — ability to literally combine words. So with an apostrophe, you have the incredible power to merge "you" and "are" into "you're." Whoa!
Some other examples: "They are" turns into "they're," "who is" turns into "who's," and "do not" turns into "don't." "Cannot" is also a special word that can be shortened into "can't," because the world is filled with weird, beautiful things and we don't have time to say two syllables.
The great conflict here is "its" vs. "it's." The simple rule is that "its" signifies possession ("it" owns something), and "it's" can also be written as "it is." One easy way to get this right is to sound out the sentence with "it is." If "it is" doesn't work, then you probably mean to use "its."
Along these lines, sometimes people mix up other similar-sounding words — so they write "they're" when they mean "their" or "who's" when they mean "whose." This is an absolute disaster. Again, the easy way to get ahold of this problem is to sound out the sentence with the contraction split into two words. For example, "they're lawnmower" is obviously wrong if you pronounce it out as "they are lawnmower," unless you mean to say that a group of people or things is one lawnmower, which is a weird situation.
Since some people can never get a handle on this, the best strategy for them might be to give up on it all and avoid apostrophes for contractions. So skip the "it's" and use "it is."
Pluralization: Stop using apostrophes for it — with one exception
The most common and by far the worst mistake is when people use apostrophes to pluralize a word. This is an easy way to get German Lopez to mark your email as spam.
With one exception that will almost certainly not come up in your daily life, do not use apostrophes to pluralize. The plural of duck is ducks, not duck's. The plural of mother is mothers, not mother's. The plural of status is statuses, not status's. And so on.
Here's a handy guide by writer Kate Brannen for pluralizing names, which often trips people up:
There is one very, very rare exception: Sometimes an apostrophe is needed for clarity. The Chicago Manual of Style explains:
Capital letters used as words, numerals used as nouns, and abbreviations usually form the plural by adding s. To aid comprehension, lowercase letters form the plural with an apostrophe and an s.
This exception can also apply to when you want to pluralize a word with special clarity — for example, "These are the do's and don'ts of apostrophes."
But generally, you should not use an apostrophe to pluralize a word.
Why do apostrophes matter?
Ultimately they don't, because nothing matters. Being a grammar stickler in informal conversation is also pretty gross and generally should be avoided, so there's a good case that apostrophes really don't matter.
But apostrophes do offer a chance to show other people how smart you are — and that does count for something.
I can't even begin to tell you how many résumés and cover letters get thrown out because they have very basic grammar and spelling errors. Mastering apostrophes, then, offers a fairly simple way to quickly rise above everyone else as they struggle to spell words correctly. It might not get you hired, but it might get you in the door.
Plus, getting it right takes barely any effort once you know how. Just do it.
An anonymous reader writes: You may have heard recently of the Remix OS, a fork of Android that targets desktop computing. The operating system, which was created by former Google employees and features a traditional desktop layout in addition to the ability to run Android apps, was previewed on Ars Technica a few weeks ago, but it was not actually released for end-users to download until earlier this week.
Now that Remix OS has been released, The Linux Homefront Project is reporting that the Android-based operating system, for which source code is not readily available, violates both the GPL and the Apache License. The RemixOS installer includes a "Remix OS USB Tool" that is really a re-branded copy of popular disk imaging tool UNetbootin, which falls under the GPL. Additionally, browsing through the install image files reveals that the operating system is based on the Apache Licensed Android-x86 project. From the article: "Output is absolutely clear – no differences! No authors, no changed files, no trademarks, just copy-paste development." Is this a blatant disregard for the GPL and Apache licenses by an optimistic startup, or were the authors too eager to release that they forgot to provide access to the repo?
Google's Chromecast media streaming dongle has always been cheap, but if $35 is too rich for your blood, you'll want to pay attention to a new Android Pay promotion in the US. If you make ten purchases with Google's contactless-payment app before the end of February, you'll get a free Chromecast.
As spotted by a number of tech blogs, the offer is active now. It's called Tap10, and if you want to use it, you'll need to pay attention to a few salient details. First, you'll need to download and install the Android Pay app, and once you're there, hopefully you'll see the offer. Then you just need to make ten purchases — spaced out by at least five minutes each — and you'll get a code to redeem your Chromecast. On the way to ten, you'll also...
After the #WheresRey debate hit a fever pitch last week, Lucasfilm and American toymakers are doing all they can to address the lack of Rey toys on shelves. Entertainment Weekly now has photos showing the so-called second wave of toys due to hit stores this month, and Rey is finally featured in the prominent position she deserved from the very beginning.
Addressing the social discussion that was created by the #WheresRey movement
"This new wave of product has got key elements from the film. You see Rey with a saber, her blaster, and a number of other elements we wanted to hold back until the film had been released," Lucasfilm's Paul Southern told EW. "The timing is good to try to address some of the social discussion that has been...
Alan Rickman, the British stage and screen actor best known internationally for his roles in Harry Potter and Die Hard, has died in London at the age of 69. As reported by BBC News, his family said in a statement that he died "surrounded by friends and family."
Known for his aquiline features and languid, mesmerizing voice, Rickman began his acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late '70s and early '80s, before moving onto British TV shows and Broadway. In 1988 he starred in Die Hard alongside Bruce Willis as the incomparable villain Hans Gruber, following this up with the role of Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Then, with the Harry Potter franchise, Rickman's talents were embraced by a whole...
Welcome to Dear Julia, a column where readers submit everyday health questions. Which over-the-counter painkillers work best? Is it better to run or walk for exercise? Julia Belluz sifts through the research and consults with experts in the field to figure out how science can help us live happier and healthier lives.
Dear Julia: Is it really that bad to skip breakfast?
You probably feel guilty when you skip breakfast. Why wouldn't you? Many of us grew up with parents fussing to make sure we had something in our bellies before we set off for school. Or we were brainwashed by TV commercial propaganda that promised eating cereal would make us lean and athletic.
But it turns out the research on eating breakfast has been far, far less conclusive than either your mother or Tony the Tiger would have you believe.
Before we get into what the science says, it's worth understanding how the myth of breakfast was created.
The origins of the breakfast myth
Much of the research suggesting that breakfast is absolutely crucial for your health is ... funded by cereal makers.
As nutrition researcher Marion Nestle puts it: "Many — if not most — studies demonstrating that breakfast eaters are healthier and manage weight better than non-breakfast eaters were sponsored by Kellogg or other breakfast cereal companies whose businesses depend on people believing that breakfast means ready-to-eat cereal."
Check out the disclosures on these papers to get a sense of the conflicts: This review of observational data, which concluded breakfast skipping is not a good way to manage weight, was funded by the Kellogg Company. Another study, which found health costs to skipping breakfast, was funded by the Quaker Oats. Quaker also contributed to the study design — and edited the manuscript! Granted, that's not proof that the study is wrong, but it should make one awfully skeptical.
Who can forget Kellogg's Tony the Tiger? (Archive.org)
Second, it's true that there are some independent studies suggesting breakfast has health benefits. But even these are less convincing than they appear at first glance.
Researchers have published a number of observational studies that find an association between abstaining from breakfast and having a higher body mass index or higher rates of illnesses like coronary heart disease. (Some are sponsored by industry, some aren't.) If you glance over those studies, you might assume that skipping breakfast is bad for you, that it somehow screws up your metabolism, brings on diseases, and causes you to gain weight, possibly by eating more later in the day.
But it's important not to confuse correlation with causation. These observational studies generally took people who were already eating breakfast and then compared them with people who weren't. They weren't experiments that randomly assigned people to eat breakfast or not and compared the difference.
That means breakfast itself may not account for differences in bodyweight or disease between the two groups. People who eat breakfast might differ in other ways from those who don't. Maybe people who exercise are more likely to eat breakfast, and that explains the difference. Or maybe it's a function of income. It's hard to tell.
This commercial about Wheaties cereal has two words for you: bran fiber. (Archive.org)
That's why careful reviews of these observational studies have been hesitant to proclaim any link between breakfast and certain health outcomes. "Causality should not be assumed based on these findings," one study explains.
What the science on breakfast actually says
More recently, researchers have tried to conduct rigorous randomized controlled trials that can pinpoint the effects eating or skipping breakfast have on weight loss. The largest such trial to date followed 300 people who were trying to slim down for 16 weeks. The researchers found that eating breakfast had no effect on weight loss during this period. (Another, older randomized trial found people lost more weight when they skipped breakfast.)
One of the investigators on that study, University of Alabama Birmingham researcher David Allison, has been tracking the results of other, independent randomized controlled trials on breakfast. To date, he's found six trials that address whether eating or skipping breakfast leads to more or less weight gain or loss. All but one found the morning meal has no significant effect on weight loss. The other found skipping breakfast actually promotes weight loss. Again, none were funded by industry.
I asked Allison whether there are any harms related to avoiding breakfast. He noted that there's some suggestion skipping meals and eating late in the day can affect one's metabolic health, in particular, one's glucose regulation. But eating too many calories late in the day is not quite the same as skipping breakfast, he pointed out.
Many researchers are also skeptical of the oft-repeated claim that breakfast makes kids smarter. The data here is equivocal, as this 2009 review of the research notes. There was some compelling evidence to suggest undernourished kids perform better at cognitive tests when enrolled in a breakfast program. But it wasn't clear that the breakfast itself was doing the trick — it might have been the fact that the program led to increased school attendance. Maybe feeding children dinner would have the same effect.
So should you eat breakfast?
It's worth being clear about what research on breakfast says and doesn't say. It suggests the health halo around breakfast may be undeserved — but not that breakfast is pointless. It's entirely possible that breakfast has amazing health effects, especially for some groups, like growing children and athletes. It's just that there's not a lot of good evidence behind those benefits.
And maybe such evidence is too much to ask for. You'd need long-term randomized controlled trials that are expensive and extremely difficult to set up (because the participants would have to stick with breakfast habits for years — read more about that here.)
Some experts, like Yale nutrition specialist David Katz, still make a case for breakfast: He says it's a good time of day to stock up on fiber and fruit. And for growing kids, breakfast is as good a time as any to eat.
Others, like Nestle, the nutrition researcher (and longtime a breakfast skipper), argue that "any eating pattern can promote health if it provides vegetables and fruits, balances calories, and does not include much junk food."
I find that starting my day with muesli — a mixture of yogurt, fruit, nuts, and high-fiber cereal — sets me up very nicely. But that's just me. If you're a breakfast eater, carry on; just make sure to choose healthy foods. If you're not, don't fret. The best science we have suggests you're fine either way.
Update: After this piece went up, David Allison reached out to expand on his review of trials on breakfast and weight loss, noting that one trial showed breakfast skippers lost weight. I have updated the piece to reflect that.
Vogue magazine sparked controversy earlier this month by recommending that brides say “I don’t” to “hiring a professional wedding photographer.” Needless to say, the suggestion didn’t go over well in the photography community.
Now one bride is hitting back at Vogue by posting an Instagram photo that shows why you should hire a pro wedding photographer.
DIYPhotography writes that a bride named Stephanie didn’t like Vogue‘s idea of relying on photos by guests with smartphones and disposable cameras. So, she posted one of her wedding smartphone selfies side-by-side with a professional photo captured at exactly the same time by Melbourne, Australia-based wedding photographer John Warren.
“And this is why you hire a professional wedding photographer,” Stephanie writes in the caption, along with the hashtags #nailedit, #voguemagazine, and #whatareyoutalkingabout.
“Nailed it,” the photographer replies in a comment on the post. Another commenter writes: “YEESSSSS!!!! Let’s see vogue use a cell phone picture as a cover!!! Love this so much it hurts!”
You can find more examples of Warren’s beautiful wedding photography on his website, blog, Facebook, and Instagram.
Be careful when mounting cameras to the insides of cars — a badly-placed mount could be hazardous to your head’s health. Here’s a humorous blooper reel video from a few years ago in which Top Gear co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May keep forgetting that the mount is there. They receive multiple painful reminders after leaning forward and banging their noggins on the sharp corner.
They’re lucky they didn’t get into a fender bender…
Holy cow. So Abinadi - you'll need, like, 4 of these, right?
Seagate Technology on Wednesday introduced its first helium-filled hard disk drive. The novelty is designed for cloud datacenters that require maximum amount of storage and enhanced reliability. By filling its HDDs with helium, Seagate can substantially increase their capacity and lower power consumption while using current magnetic recording technologies. At present, two major customers of the company are already evaluating the new hard drives. Volume shipments of the HDDs will start later.
The helium-filled Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD with 10 TB capacity incorporates seven perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) platters with 1.43 TB capacity each as well as 14 heads. The manufacturer claims that the new drive features an advanced caching sub-system to increase performance. In addition, the new helium-filled Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD sports the company’s PowerChoice technology, which helps to manage power consumption during idle time, as well as PowerBalance technology, which enables operators of datacenters to balance power consumption and IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance of hard drives. Seagate claims 2.5 million hours MTBF for its helium-filled HDD, which is significantly higher compared to traditional enterprise-class drives.
Typically, Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity HDDs feature 7200 revolutions per minute (RPM) spindle speed as well as special top and bottom attached motors (in a bid to reduce vibration), but the manufacturer did not confirm such details about its 10 TB helium-filled hard disk drive. Since hermetically sealed HDDs feature significantly different internal architecture, many actual specs of the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10 TB may differ from predecessors.
The new hermetically sealed helium-filled hard drives from Seagate use either Serial ATA-6 Gb/s or SAS-12 Gb/s interfaces and can be installed into various environments. The manufacturer did not reveal sector sizes of the new HDDs, but typically modern high-capacity hard drives have 4 KB sectors and can support 512-byte sectors via emulation. Typically, enterprise-class hard drives also optionally support data security features, such as self-encryption, secure erase and so on. Unfortunately, Seagate did not reveal exact feature-set of the helium-filled 10 TB HDDs, possibly because customers are only evaluating them at the moment and commercial drives may be different from today’s.
The density of helium is one-seventh that of air, which reduces drag force acting on the spinning disk stack and lowers fluid flow forces affecting the disks and the heads. By filling hard drives with helium, makers of HDDs can install up to seven platters into one industry-standard 3.5/1-inch hard drive, reduce power consumption of HDD motors and improve accuracy of arm’s positioning. All three benefits are crucial for modern datacenters.
By expanding capacity of its top-of-the-range Enterprise Capacity 3.5-inch HDD to 10 TB (up 2 TB from 8 TB, or by 25%), Seagate increases capacity per rack to 2400 TB (up from 1920 TB), which significantly bolsters storage density in a datacenter while decreasing power consumption per terabyte. For datacenter owners such changes reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and help to maximize their storage capabilities without expanding area of their facilities.
Seagate said last year that it had experimented with helium-filled hard disk drives for about 12 years. While the company is several generations behind HGST with its hermetically sealed commercial HDDs, the company’s helium platform should be rather robust in terms of both reliability and performance.
At present, Alibaba and Huawei, who both said that the new hard drives help them to reduce their costs, evaluate Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDDs. Some other companies have also received Seagate's new HDDs. HGST’s 10 TB helium-filled hard disk drives are already deployed by companies like Netflix, which need maximum amount of storage.
Seagate itself predicted recently that in 2016 its 8 TB hard drives would be its most popular high-capacity models. The company did not announce high-volume availability timeframe of its 10 TB HDDs, but it is unlikely that Seagate will ship a lot of such products this year. Pricing of Seagate’s Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDD is unknown.
Mobile devices, Big Data analytics, 4K ultra-high-definition video, modern workloads and emerging devices generate tremendous amounts of data, which greatly increases storage requirements for datacenters. Since technologies like two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) are not ready for commercial hard drives just not, helium-filled HDDs will gradually gain importance for companies like Alibaba or Netflix. So far, HGST has shipped over four million helium-filled hard drives and in in the recent quarters adoption of such HDDs intensified among its customers.
Ron Bastien holds an aerogel tile that flew into the tail of a comet, captured dust particles, and survived to tell the tale. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)
HOUSTON, Tex.—Building 31 on the campus of Johnson Space Center lacks the Tower of London’s majesty and history. No Queen’s Guard stand outside. But this drab, 1960s-era building is nonetheless where NASA keeps the crown jewels of its exploration program. Inside various clean rooms, curators watch over meteorites from Mars and the asteroid belt, cosmic dust, samples of the solar wind, comet particles, and, of course, hundreds of kilograms of Moon rocks.
In late December, Ars spent a day visiting these collections, including the rarely accessed Genesis Lab. While our request for a Moon rock keepsake was sadly rebuffed, we nonetheless got a VIP tour of every astromaterial NASA has collected from other bodies in the Solar System and beyond. With Senior Space Editor Eric Berger providing the words and Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson capturing the photos, we can now offer an unprecedented look at how NASA protects its rarest and most valuable off-world samples.
Power users on Instagram have millions of followers who view and interact with their photos. They also almost certainly also have push notifications for those interactions turned off on their phones.
Why? Because the number of notifications they receive is mind-boggling.
Here’s a peek into just how crazy it is: Demy De Zeeuw is a guy who runs a soccer-oriented Instagram account called @433 — an account with over 8 million followers. His photos and video posts each typically attract thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of likes.
Well, Demy just decided to switch on the app’s push notifications on his iPhone before posting a new photo. He then recorded this video showing what the resulting notifications look like:
When you post epic content on instagram.com/433 8 million followers, this is how your pushnotification will look like.. ☕
Pretty wild, huh? But keep in mind that Demy is a relative unknown compared to some Instagram users. For example, Taylor Swift has 62.5 million followers and well over 1 million likes on every photo she shares.
T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere apologized to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for mocking its concerns about the wireless carrier's "Binge On" program that throttles online video.
In an "Open Letter to Consumers About Binge On," Legere said T-Mobile plans to meet with the EFF, which argues that T-Mobile is violating net neutrality rules. Legere was less gracious to the EFF last week when he answered their concerns by saying "Who the fuck are you, anyway, EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble, and who pays you?"
T-Mobile CEO John Legere is fighting really hard to spin his company's probable violation of net neutrality rules as some immaculately conceived benefit for consumers because it's "FREE." After a rant last week whose collateral damage included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Legere has just published another screed about T-Mobile's Binge On scheme — and it's just more of the same misdirection.
To recap: last week, the EFF published an investigation that found T-Mobile was throttling all video traffic over its network, including video downloads, for all customers who had not disabled the Binge On feature that the company automatically enabled for everyone in November. Before the EFF published its report, I even noticed the downgraded...
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