Andrew

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." That quote comes from Battlestar Galactica's Commander Adama. He says it in the second episode of the first season of the series, "Water", written by Ron Moore. That episode is over 10 years old.

It's kinda crazy that a science-fiction story about interstellar warfare can so eloquently describe the horrifying situation in St. Louis County, Missouri. But it does. And so say we all:

The Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow was one of the best movies of the summer, featuring one of its most audacious concepts and, in Emily Blunt's Rita, one of the year's best female characters (in a year that has not exactly been brimming with great female characters, particularly in mainstream Hollywood films). Naturally, it completely bombed at the box office. Having made just under $100 million might mark the film as a success in some circles, but that's against a $178 million budget, so… not so great.

Warner Brothers, the studio behind the film, has decided that what kept the movie from success was its title, according to Criticwire's Sam Adams. This isn't such a bad assumption, considering Edge of Tomorrow sounds like one of the terrible Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies or maybe a film about a young woman and a gentle cowhand who share one summer of forbidden passion amid the African veldt. It does not sound like a movie where Tom Cruise fights a war against aliens by dying endlessly, then being resurrected every time with the knowledge needed to get a few steps further in the next life.

Thus, Warner Brothers has renamed the film, an unprecedented step in this day and age, replacing Edge of Tomorrow with its much better advertising tagline: Live Die Repeat. On the DVD cover, EdgeofTomorrow gets smushed into one word right next to the words "Cruise" and "Blunt" along the bottom of the DVD.

Cruise/Blunt/EdgeofTomorrow

Also, as discovered by The Film Stage, the film is actually being retitled entirely on iTunes, where it now goes by Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow.

It's a bit of a desperate play by Warner Brothers to make a movie that didn't do very well into a bigger hit on DVD and Blu-Ray. Will it work? Probably not. But if it does, look out for Beware the Cloud: Sex Tape and No, We Didn't Just Rip Off E.T.: Earth to Echo replacing the titles of two of this summer's other notable bombs.

Piracy is a hot topic, so when there are statistics to report the media is usually all over it. This week a series of intriguing maps has been doing the rounds.

The data was first published by the piracy experts over at Movoto Real Estate. Based on a large sample of three million unique IP addresses collected over a period of 40 days they presented a map of the most torrented movies, TV-shows and games per state.

This was quickly picked up by The Washington Post, Venturebeat and several other publications, who all shared the findings with their readers. TorrentFreak was ready to jump on the bandwagon too, but we couldn’t help noticing a few odd results.

What stands out immediately is that some of the most-downloaded movies in certain states are barely downloaded at all through torrent sites. “La Grande Bellezza” in New Jersey, for example, or “Cuban Fury” in Florida. The same is true for “Witching and Bitching” which, according to the map, is very popular in Indiana and Tennessee.

Are these movies really more often downloaded than blockbuster successes such as Divergent and X-Men as the map below suggests?

Most pirated movies per state?

The same odd results appear in the games and TV-show maps. Game of Thrones is by far the most downloaded TV-show in America, but for some reason “Awkward” is more popular in Texas and Louisiana. The same Louisianans also download the game “Scribblenauts Unlimited” more frequently than popular releases such as Minecraft and Watch Dogs.

Something is clearly amiss, so we took the unprecedented step of downloading the source data which is readily available.

To our surprise, the maps in question don’t represent the most-downloaded titles. Instead, they appear to reveal for which shows the download numbers differ the most when compared to the national average. This is completely unrelated to which movie, TV-show or game was downloaded the most.

Whoops, not downloads

Now back to our earlier question. Is “La Grande Bellezza” really that popular in New Jersey? No, the actual data shows only 2 downloads in this state…

Similarly, is “Awkward” the most pirated TV-show in Texas? Again, no, it has 232 downloads in the dataset compared to 2,554 for a single Game of Thrones episode. And we can go on and on.

In fact, if we made a real map based on the actual download counts in the dataset, Game of Thrones would be the most downloaded show in each and every state, as expected.

Confusingly, however, a map of the most pirated movies per state would list “Blood Widow” on top in pretty much every state.

This suggests that there’s an issue with the data itself too, as this movie is nowhere to be found in the list of most shared files on The Pirate Bay and elsewhere. The most likely explanation is that the researchers ran into a fake torrent file with bogus IP-addresses.

Whatever the case, it’s safe to say that the maps in question should be taken with a grain of salt, or a barrel of rum perhaps.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Apple may be shipping a new Lightning cable that features a reversible USB connector with forthcoming iOS devices, reports Chinese website Dianxinshouji.com (Google Translate, via Nowhereelse.fr).


The source shares a few photos of the new cables said to be from Apple supplier Foxconn, with the images showing a USB connector that is attached to the center of its metal casing. By comparison, the USB connector on Apple's current Lightning cable attach against the bottom of the metal housing's inner surface.


While it is unable to tell for sure whether these cables are legitimate or not, it is possible that Apple could ship new Lightning cables to match the forthcoming USB 3.1 cables that will soon come with newer smartphones. As revealed last week by the USB 3.0 Promoter Group, the USB 3.1 Type-C cable comes with reversible ends and will start shipping next year. An Apple patent for a reversible USB connector also surfaced last month, perhaps further indicating that the company will look to equip its newer devices with new Lightning cables at some point.

Furthermore, a report this past May from Mac Otakara claimed that Apple is preparing an upgraded Lightning cable to accommodate high-definition playback on Made for iPhone audio accessories, which may include a next-generation version of its In-Ear Headphones. Apple also introduced Lightning Cable MFi specifications for headphones in June, which could also be integrated with newer Lightning cables.

Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 6, next-generation Retina iPad mini and iPad Air 2 by the end of this year, as a new Lightning cable could technically be packaged with those devices.

There’s something unsettling about watching 1,000 robots execute a perfectly choreographed routine. The entire demonstration makes it a bit too easy to forget that humans, researchers at Harvard University, provided the algorithms that allowed them to accomplish various formations. And yet, these machines — tiny $20 robots that take five minutes each to assemble, for a total of 83 hours — are actually completely banal. In fact, according to the researchers, their capabilities are pretty abysmal.

Continue reading…

Your state's most torrented TV show. (Movoto)

Despite the efforts of the government and media companies, millions of Americans stream movies, television, games, and music illegally on the internet.  The team at Movoto looked at "the location of seeding nodes for the top 300 most popular torrents, segmented across movies, television, and PC gaming." A seeding node is a computer that downloads a piece of content and then makes it available for other people to download.

While the number of seeing nodes gathered seems reasonable, it's problematic. We have no idea how many seeders there are per state, so we don't know if that number is a majority of viewers in some states or only a tiny portion in others. For example, it seems unlikely that Kansas really loves the short-lived NBC show Believe. (It was the one about the little girl with the magic powers whose ads you couldn't escape during the Winter Olympics.) It does seem absolutely correct, however, that Game of Thrones is the most torrented show in 15 states.

Check out some other Movoto maps on torrenting:

Most torrented movie

map courtesy of Movoto

I see you Rhode Island and your love for Godzilla.

map courtesy of Movoto

Who knew that Iowa had such great love for The Sims 3: Island Paradise ?

Many big, public buildings have revolving doors at street level. For a lot of people, these doors are a little more annoying to use than normal "swing" doors, leading them to ask the question — are revolving doors really more energy-efficient?

The short answer: yes, they are.

you save about 36 watt hours of energy each time you choose a revolving door

Although there hasn't been a ton of recent research comparing the energy costs of each type of door, the work that has been done is pretty definitive that revolving doors save energy. It varies widely based on the building, climate, and amount of use, but one MIT study found that having everyone use revolving doors on a campus building would save about 1.5 percent of the total energy needed to cool and heat that building annually.

On a single use basis, that works out to about 36 watt hours of energy saved each time you choose revolving over swing doors — the energy needed to run a 60-watt lightbulb for a little over a half hour.

Revolving doors can also be a pain to use: the same study also found that most people avoid them because of the extra effort and time involved. But if you happen to be of the mindset that your personal choices can have some positive impact on the environment, it makes sense to put the use of revolving doors in the same category as, say, recycling — a simple, painless choice that provides modest environmental benefits.

How revolving doors save energy

The revolving door was invented way back in 1881 by a German man named H. Bockhacker as a "door without draft of air." It's basically a series of panels (nowadays, typically four) that rotate to allow people to enter and leave a building without leaving a big opening exposed, which would allow air to rush in or out. Revolving doors still let small pockets of air to escape with each revolution — and older ones with decaying seals allow air to seep out above and below them as well — but on the whole, they permit much less airflow.

An illustration from the original American patent for a revolving door. (Theophilus van Kannel)

Although several experiments measuring just how much energy is saved were done historically, the only recent one conducted on modern revolving doors was the 2006 MIT study. As part of it, engineers calculated how much air flowed out of the revolving doors of one particular building on campus, and compared it to airflow from the building's conventional doors.

A single pass through the swing doors, it turned out, allowed about eight times more air to flow in or out of the building than a pass through the revolving doors. The ultimate energy cost of heating and cooling this air this varies widely by season, but the researchers calculated that if every single person who used the building over the course of a year entered and left through the revolving doors, it'd save nearly 80,000 kilowatt-hours of energy, compared to the current usage (in which about 23 percent of people use them).

if everyone used the revolving door, it'd save about 1.5 percent of the energy used to heat and cool the building

This equals about 1.5 percent of the total energy used to heat and cool the building. These savings, they calculated, would lead to a 14.6 ton reduction in carbon dioxide emitted. For reference, the average American emits about 17.6 tons annually across all his or her activities.

Of course, all these energy savings would be distributed across the thousands of people who use this large building over the course of a whole year. So how much energy can you save by a single use of the revolving doors, versus a push of the swing doors?

It's hard to say exactly, but with a few calculations*, we can roughly estimate that each revolving door use saves about 36.54 watt hours of energy. (This, in other words, is the energy needed to power an incandescent 60 watt lightbulb for a little over a half hour.) For comparison, recycling a single glass bottle saves about 400 watt hours of energy.

So using revolving doors might not be a hugely impactful choice that can prevent climate change, but it is a modest, positive step that can slightly reduce your carbon footprint over the course of time. Although they don't really have this sort of association, we should think of revolving doors as an environmentally-friendly decision, roughly akin to recycling.

But people don't like to use revolving doors

The same study also looked closely at the door preferences of people across the MIT campus — and found that, on the whole, people prefer swing doors over revolving ones.

It varied widely from building to building, but for most of them, fewer than 30 percent of people used revolving doors, opting for swing doors right next to them. When asked why, most people cited the extra effort needed to push the revolving doors.

With standard setups, most people opt for the swing doors. (Cullum et al. 2006)

However, when people approached entrances for which the swing doors were tucked away — so they were basically just confronted with a revolving door, unless they looked hard for another option — habits were different.

The two buildings pictured below had revolving door use rates way up above 70 percent. Similarly, we're also much more likely to use a revolving door if we see a person in front of us use it first. In our door choices, the researchers found, we're largely creatures of habit, unconsciously choosing the obvious option

"Hidden" swing doors encourage far higher rates of revolving door use. (Cullum et al. 2006)

But the researchers also found that simple interventions that forced people to think consciously could make a big difference. Signs that reminded people to use the revolving doors to save energy — and were large enough to see from far away, so people could consciously consider the idea — roughly doubled revolving door use.

We're willing to use revolving doors, it seems, if we think it'll save energy. But most of us don't realize this is the case — or, at least, don't consciously think about it during our day.

---

— Extrapolating from the researchers' calculations, we can roughly estimate that zero percent use of the revolving doors would require somewhere around 120,000 kWh of energy to heat and cool the air that escapes from the swing doors. 100 percent use of the revolving doors would still require about 22,000 kWh of energy for the same purpose. So a complete shift from one type of door to the other would save 98,000 kWh of energy annually.

(Cullum et al. 2006)

— The researchers also counted 837 passages per hour into the building, and their calculations assumed the building was open for 9 hours per day, 365 days per year, so that's a total of 2,749,545 passages.

— That means each individual passage saves 0.03564227377 kWh of energy, or 35.64 watt hours.

In 1988, the BC show "Yes, Minister" outlined Politician's Logic. It goes like this:

1. We must do something.

2. This is something.

3. We must do this!

There is, however, a reverse of Politician's Logic, which might be called Pundit's Logic. It goes like this:

1. Something was done.

2. The problem isn't fixed.

3. We should have done the other thing!

When it comes to looking back on the disappointments of Barack Obama's presidency, the "other thing," particularly this week, is elect Hillary Clinton.

For instance, Megan McArdle writes that "when Obama beat Hillary, we all lost." The basic argument is that if Hillary Clinton had won in 2008, "at the very least, she would not be facing the same level of vehement opposition in Congress." This is because, McArdle says, the emotional engine of the Tea Party was Obamacare, and Hillary Clinton would have spied the intensity of Republican opposition to health reform and turned back.

the argument for Obama was precisely that Republicans hated him less than Clinton

"So there's my counterfactual for the summer," McArdle concludes. "If Hillary Clinton had won, Obamacare wouldn't have happened, and Democrats — and the country — would be better off." (Curiously, there is no mention of the millions of people who gained or will gain insurance through Obamacare, most of whom would presumably be much, much worse off in this counterfactual.)

Is McArdle right? Maybe! But it's a perfect reversal of the argument Clinton's supporters made on her behalf in 2008. Back then, the case for Clinton was that she understood full well that doing big things would mean fighting — and winning — an all-out partisan war, and that the problem with Obama was his naive insistence on bipartisanship ensured he would turn back when the partisan fury began to singe. "Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world," wrote Paul Krugman in a 2007 column criticizing Obama.

Meanwhile, the argument for Obama was precisely that Republicans hated him less than Clinton, and so a vote for Obama was a vote for a less partisan future. "Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many, the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn't admit it. And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it," wrote Andrew Sullivan in an essay endorsing Obama. Sullivan went on to note that "polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans."

All of which is to say it is very easy to imagine a world where Hillary Clinton won the election, party polarization is as bad or worse than it is today, and pundits are looking back to 2008 and wishing Obama had won.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The same is true for the argument between Clinton and Obama on Syria. There, the issue is that Syria continues to be an absolute human disaster: more than 160,000 have died in the country's civil war, and the radical, brutal group ISIS fought through the chaos and built a powerful statelet that they used as a base of operations to expand into Iraq. So the question is: could America have done more?

Inside the administration, Clinton was an advocate of doing more, and doing it earlier. In particular, she wanted to try and identify, train and arm more moderate factions of the opposition. She lost that argument, and it's a loss that she and her supporters emphasize today. The idea is that if Clinton had won — if Obama had feared the risks of inaction more than the risks of action — then Assad might have been ousted by now and ISIS might never have gotten their foothold. The conservative Weekly Standard found this so self-evident that their editorial this week is nothing but edited excerpts of Clinton laying out her foreign policy differences with Obama.

Inside the administration, Clinton was an advocate of doing more, and doing it earlier

There's a part of Clinton's comments on Syria that they leave out, however. "I can't sit here today and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what [Ambassador] Robert Ford recommended, that we'd be in a demonstrably different place," she told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg (the aggression of Clinton's criticisms of Obama has been wildly played-up by the media). And then there's the possibility that we would be in a different place — a worse one.

America does not have a very successful record arming insurgent groups. As political scientist Marc Lynch concludes in a review of the relevant literature:

In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve (for more on this, see the proceedings of this Project on Middle East Political Science symposium in the free PDF download). Worse, as the University of Maryland's David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective.

The reality in Syria is horrible, and so regret is mounting that we didn't do the other thing we considered doing. But it's entirely possible that if we had done the other thing that the reality in Syria would be even worse (and much, much worse for America).

Pundits have no choice but to consider counterfactuals; there's no other way to think about the world and the choices America makes within it. The problem is when the counterfactual is used less to evaluate reality than to lament it.

The fact that something turned out badly often means that it's a hard, and sometimes impossible, problem to solve. George W. Bush ran as a uniter and Barack Obama ran as a post-partisan and each sincerely hoped to heal the widening divisions in American political life, but those divisions are widening because of powerful structural factors that easily overpowered, and ultimately co-opted, both men's presidencies. Syria is a hellish problem that America very likely can't solve.

Sometimes the problem really is that we should have done the other thing. But sometimes the problem is that we don't know how to solve the problem.

Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest prize, earlier today. In this video she speaks briefly about her life and her work, saying she initially got excited about mathematics "just as a challenge" before coming to appreciate its value for its own sake only later. She says that growing up in wartime Iran was difficult, but recounts that "right after the war I had a lot of opportunities" and benefitted from fortuitous timing in that she "was a teenager when things became more stable."

Her work itself relates to "understanding structures you can put on a surface" and if you can fully understand what it's about you are a lot smarter than I am. But watch Mirzakhani try to explain it for herself:

When we think of recipes, more often than not it’s a book or scrap piece of paper, adorned with stains from the ingredients written down on it. Preperation, suggestions and cook time are also present, but almost always in the form of text.

What would happen if someone were to flip the idea of a recipe on its head, instead turning a piece of paper into a visual hierarchy of the ingredients and components needed to create the meal? Berlin-based photographer Nora Luther has an answer for us in the form of her series, Recipes.

Explained in the description of her series, which was done in collaboration with Pavel Becker, she says, “the look of the ready cooked dish is left to one`s own imagination.” It’s this imagination combined with the frozen composition of the meal that has lead to an incredible series of photographs that is as tempting to your stomach as it is pleasing to your eyes.

Below are a few images from the series.

Be sure to check out Luther’s work over on her website.

(via The Fox Is Black)

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Image credits: Photographs by Nora Luther and used with permission

The Centers for Disease Control has opinions on which countries' drinking water is safe, and 5thEye has mapped their advice:

(5thEye)

As you can see, the CDC is very cautious, essentially arguing that only the richest countries have safe drinking water. In my personal experience, drinking tap water in Argentina, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Costa Rica, Slovakia, Russia, and even the dread Mexico has worked out just fine. But your mileage may vary.

The World Health Organization uses a looser criteria for access to safe water, and by their standards it is a very serious problem in quite a few very poor countries but not many of the middle-income ones on the CDC map.

4-year-old Cadence may have just made the best, most adorable argument ever for backing up your files and printing your pictures in a video that had us smiling and tearing up all at the same time.

According to 22 Words, she was playing with her brother’s camera when she accidentally discovered the delete function. Beside herself at having deleted a photo of her ‘Uncle Dave,’ a photo that she now realized was gone FOREVER, she held it together just long enough to record the plea for more photos above.

Look at that face! This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens every time you don’t back up your photos… little girls cry:

Fear not though, Cadence is okay now. 22 Words assures us Uncle Dave responded to her heartfelt request… as if he could have told her no.

(via Laughing Squid)

The next generation of USB connectors is finally ready for production. The completion of the USB Type-C specification has just been announced, meaning we will soon have a new cable and connector scheme designed for both mobile and larger devices. Similar in size to the Micro USB port found on most phones today, the Type-C's most exciting feature is its reversible design, which will allow users to ignore orientation when plugging in one of the new smaller, sleeker cables.

"Representatives from the PC, mobile, automotive, and IoT industries have been knocking down our door anticipating this new standard," said USB 3.0 Promoter Group chairman Brad Saunders. Although the Type-C plug and receptacle cannot be directly paired with their...

Continue reading…

Christopher Wright:

Here is the secret to understanding my take on Amazon: they’re not part of the publishing industry, although the things they do certainly affect it. They’re not a service and retail company, though that is the way they make all their money. At its core, Amazon is and always has been part of the computer industry, and if you view them from that perspective their business practices should scare the shit out of you.

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Tech industry trends follow a fairly predictable pattern: there's a rush of hype, an inevitable backlash, and then a long, tired slog towards a product that actually works. It eventually produces incredible things like the internal combustion engine or my Droid 4, but it can be hard to tell exactly where given technology is on the slow journey from bullshit to reality.

Continue reading…

"Would you like help designing a new logo?"

(Tom doesn't remember where he found this originally, but if you do, let us know! Update: Thomas Baekdal has contacted us claiming to be the creator — and we certainly can't find an earlier tweet. Thanks, Thomas!)

Continue reading…

Mat Honan:

Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post. As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi’s ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.

If a corporation could have a wet dream, this would be Facebook’s.

There are plenty of excellent, trustworthy dentists out there who make their patients' interests their top priority.

But there are also some unethical dentists who provide unnecessary treatments and products simply for profit.

I've discovered this after growing up having dental work done by my father, who is now retired. In the years since, while seeing other dentists, my brother has been told he needed six fillings that turned out to be totally unnecessary (based on my dad's look at his X-rays) and I've been pressured to buy prescription toothpaste and other products I didn't need.

Back when he still practiced, my father occasionally saw this kind of thing firsthand. His patients would visit other dentists for an emergency while he was away and be told they needed superfluous crowns or other complex work when a simple filling would have sufficed.

dentistry has far less oversight than any other branch of medicine

To be clear, this sort of fraud doesn't go on in most dental practices. But experts say it still happens all too often. "There are no precise figures about how widespread dental fraud is. The crime is less than a tsunami and more than a trickle," said James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. "The vast majority of dentists are honest and ethical. Even so, more fraud likely is flying under the radar than people realize."

One of the main reasons* is that, in the United States, dentistry has far less oversight than any other branch of medicine. "For a dentist who practices alone, there's usually no one looking over your shoulder," my father, Sheldon Stromberg, said. "It's easy to take advantage of people. You're basically given a blank check."

Another reason is that dentistry genuinely involves a degree of subjectivity in each diagnosis. Two honest dentists can disagree about whether a tiny fissure requires a filling or not, and all dentists fall on a continuum of philosophies ranging from conservative to aggressive in their treatments. Some dishonest ones, though, abuse this uncertainty to increase their profits.

With this in mind, I spoke to seven dentists — along with Quiggle and the American Dental Association — to get their advice on how to find an honest practice and avoid unnecessary work. Here are their recommendations.

Beware of practices that advertise and offer deals

(Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)

Every single dentist I spoke with offered the same advice for finding a trustworthy practice — ask a friend. "The best way to get a good referral is to ask friends or coworkers," said Robert Rose, a family dentist who practices in Pasadena.

If you don't have anyone to ask, other options might be getting a recommendation from a local dental society, or even asking just asking your doctor who he or she sees.

The one thing you shouldn't do, however, is go to a practice based on an advertisement, especially one that offers a free cleaning, tooth whitening, or other deal. "I would be wary of the big advertisers, who have billboards all over the place and advertise on TV," said Mindy Weinman, who practices in Buffalo and is a professor at the SUNY Buffalo dental school.

these offices often use deals as a tool to get patients in the door

Her husband, Dave Weinman — who practices with Mindy and also works as a consultant for an insurance company assessing cases of potential dental fraud — agrees. "I barely see any dental offices, in my area at least, that are heavy advertisers and that I'd feel comfortable recommending," he said.

The reason for this is that advertising-driven offices often use deals as a tool to get patients in the door and then pressure them to accept an expensive treatment plan, whether they need work done or not. Oftentimes, they're corporate-owned chains, like Aspen Dental. "These big chains are kind of dental mills," Mindy Weinman said. "They're the ones that give you the free cleaning, and the free exam, then they tell you that you need $3,000 worth of dental work."

Relatedly, many of the practices you see in ads rely on a quota-based work model, in which each dentists is required to perform a certain number of procedures per month. These sorts of quotas lead dentists to err on the side of extra treatment, rather than less.

Be skeptical of a new dentist that prescribes a ton of treatment

(Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)

The most common pattern of fraud is a patient visiting a new dentist for a checkup and being told he or she needs a heavy amount of work.

"If you go to a new dentist, and you've barely ever needed any work in your mouth, and all of a sudden he tells you that you need 16 fillings, that's a big red flag," said David Silber, a dentist in Dallas.

Of course, if you're visiting the dentist because of a specific pain, this advice doesn't necessarily apply. But in some cases, an unethical dentist will seek to maximize treatment on a new patient. "If you go in to a new dentist for a cleaning, and things are feeling good in your mouth, and all of a sudden they say you need a ton of work — that's probably not a good thing," Mindy Weinman said.

Related is what James Quiggle calls the pressure trap: "The dentist tries to pressure you to get expensive procedures done right away, citing urgent medical need," he said. "The dentist is evasive about details involving your medical need but is specific about the urgency for that procedure."

Watch out for the following products and procedures

(William Warby)

Apart from the general problems outlined above, the dentists I interviewed mentioned several specific products and procedures that are often abused:

1) Replacing old fillings: Although old fillings can sometimes crack or become surrounded by decay, necessitating a replacement, some dentists will try to replace all your fillings simply due to age — a practice that isn't actually necessary if they're not causing problems.

"The big red flag is if you go to the dentist and they say, 'oh, you've got old silver fillings, we need to take them out because there's mercury leeching out," Mindy Weinman said. "There's been no evidence to prove that actually happens."

2) Veneers. "The highest percentage of unnecessary dental work that we see involves the use of porcelain veneers for whitening purposes," Jyoti Srivastava and Robert Castracane, who practice cosmetic dentistry in New York, told me by email.

Sometimes, a dentist will tell a patient that pricey veneers are necessary to improve the color of a tooth, but if its shape is acceptable to begin with, bleaching — a much cheaper process — is perfectly fine. "A lot of cosmetic dentists tend to push this kind of treatment," said Sean Tomalty, a family dentist in South Florida. If you're certain you do want veneers, Dave Weinman recommends going to a prosthodontist rather than a general dentist.

3) Fluoride toothpaste and treatment. I was recently told I needed a $30 fluoride treatment and $25 prescription high-fluoride toothpaste — neither of which was covered by my insurance — even though I've only had a couple of cavities in my life.

"Most people get enough fluoride in their drinking water and from regular toothpaste, and by the time you're an adult, and your teeth have fully formed, the fluoride treatment doesn't do much," my dad said. "For someone who doesn't get lots of cavities, it's a waste."

4) Night guards. I was also offered a $700 night guard during my recent visit, due to some signs of wear on my teeth, presumably caused by nighttime grinding.

In truth, some people do need night guards — mainly if they have TMJ pain, or show especially high rates of wear. But all people gradually wear down their teeth over the course of their lifetimes, and not everyone needs a night guard. Some dental practices simply prescribe them to most patients as a matter of course.

5) Sealants. Dental sealants are preventative coatings applied to the surface of your molars to prevent plaque from accumulating in the pits on their surfaces. They can be useful in some cases — especially for cavity-prone kids — but are also overprescribed by some dentists.

"The problem is, a lot of the time, those teeth weren't going to decay anyway, you've weakened the tooth by etching into it to adhere the sealant," my dad said. "An office that does a lot of sealant for adults is something to watch out for."

Ask to see X-rays and get a second opinion

(BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

Virtually all honest dentists will gladly show you X-rays of your teeth that contain evidence of the work you need. "X-rays, legally, are your property. A dentist can charge for them, but they have to share them with you," Mindy Weinman said.

You won't necessarily be able to see evidence of every single type of problem in an X-ray, but many of them should be apparent. A dark spot or blemish, in general, corresponds to a cavity. And in general, the dentist should be willing and able to explain why you need certain procedures, both by using X-rays and other means.

if the first dentist seems reluctant to let you get it, that's a bad sign

But regardless of what the X-rays show, if you're skeptical of the treatment a dentist is prescribing — especially if it's your first visit to the practice, and they're recommending far more work than you're ever needed before — the best response is to get a second opinion. This was mentioned to me by every dentist I spoke with, along with the American Dental Association.

"If everything is fine, and all of a sudden I go to a dentist that's telling me I have a bunch of cavities, I would definitely get a second opinion," Tomalty said.

Even before you actually get the second opinion, doing this can provide useful information. If the first dentist seems reluctant to allow you to get it, that's a bad sign. "If they're legitimate in their diagnosis, they should have no concerns about it at all," Dave Weinman said. "It's a red flag if they fight you on that."

It's important to remember that no dentist can force you to have work done — and if you're uncomfortable with how things are proceeding while you're in the chair, it's entirely within your rights to get up and leave. In general, they should be willing to listen to you, hear out your concerns, and patiently explain the work they're prescribing.

Dental insurance can actually cost you more

(Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

To many people, dental insurance sounds a lot like medical insurance — a prudent way of ensuring you can pay for potentially catastrophic treatment costs.

But for a few different reasons, dental insurance is far less important to have than medical insurance (which is now mandatory in the US) — and might even be a bad deal on the whole.

"Insurance is supposed to be for rare, catastrophic losses that can't be predicted — like your house burning down, or a heart attack. But dental care isn't rare, or unexpected, or catastrophic," my father said. "For the most part, it's relatively small charges, on the order of hundreds of dollars, and you know you'll need to visit a dentist every year."

All types of insurance companies aim to make money, so they make sure that the total money everyone pays in premiums is larger than the amount they pay out in treatment costs. For unpredictable, potentially catastrophic things (like heart attacks), this extra cost borne by the policy holders is worthwhile, because virtually no one has a few hundred thousand dollars lying around to pay for a coronary bypass surgery. But for dentistry, that isn't the case.

insurance plans put perverse incentives in place for in-network dentists

As a result, people can opt out of dental insurance, then build up treatment needs over the course of several years, then opt in. Dental companies know this, and so to turn a profit, they're forced to cover relatively little, in terms of treatment. Most dental plans come with a hard cap on the total amount of treatment they'll pay for in a given year — the exact opposite of the out-of-pocket maximums in medical insurance plans.

Even more problematically, insurance plans put perverse incentives in place for in-network dentists. When dentists become part of these networks, they agree to extremely low reimbursements for cleanings and exams, in exchange for a steady stream of patients. "To make up for it, some dentists will find work to do," Silber said. "There's always going to be treatment, because they mathematically need to do something so they don't lose money on the cleaning."

Most often, the treatments they recommend are the very ones that insurance doesn't cover — such as quadrant scaling, an intensive cleaning procedure that requires extra office visits. This is what happened to me when I recently saw a new dentist I found through my insurance network.

Ultimately, your dental plan might give you a free cleaning and exam every six months, but it could also make the dentist more likely to find necessary work that it doesn't cover. Most of the dentists I spoke with strongly recommended against going to a new dentist solely because he or she is accepted by your insurance plan, and a few warned against dental insurance entirely.

One option: dental school clinics

(Wired Photostream)

If you're stuck and having trouble finding a dentist you trust, my father recommended one unorthodox option: going for a consultation at the clinics operated by most dental school.

"The work can take a long time, and the hours can be pretty restricted, but they're inexpensive and the work is generally very good," he said.

That's because having work done at a dental school clinic inherently involves a huge amount of oversight: every diagnosis and filling is checked over by several students and professors. Like massage and salon schools, they provide essentially the same product as professionals for a fraction of the cost. And in general — and contrary to many people's idea of dentists-in-training — dental school students do quality work by the time they're treating actual patients, after learning on models. In any event, these clinics are a great place to go for a second opinion.

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*Why does all this unnecessary work happen?

This article is mainly a guide to avoiding unnecessary work. But it also raises an interesting and important question: why is dentistry more prone to fraud than other branches of medicine? Here are some of the reasons most commonly brought up by the dentists I spoke to:

1) Lack of oversight. "If you go to a doctor, and you have a procedure done in a hospital, the staff and lots of other people know what's going on," my father said. "With dental work, no one's looking at you. You can do and say anything."

In rare cases, oversight can come in the form of audits by insurance companies suspicious of fishy-looking billing patterns (and in extreme cases, in patient complaints to local dental societies or malpractice suits), but on the whole, few dentists have anybody evaluating their work on a consistent basis. Moreover, for most types of finished work — say, a new set of fillings — it's pretty much impossible for any other dentist to tell after the fact whether they were necessary or not.

2) Inherent subjectivity. An individual dentist's treatment philosophies and personal judgement are an inescapable part of dentistry. "You can have five dentists look at your mouth, and sometimes you'll get five different answers on what treatment you need," Tomalty said. "Every dentist has their own philosophy."

Conservative dentists might be content to wait years for a tiny cavity to become bigger before drilling, for instance, while more aggressive ones might want to work on it immediately. Neither is wrong, but in some cases, unethical dentists can take advantage of this grey area to push more treatment.

3) The changing business of dentistry. Several dentists I spoke with singled out a few additional business factors: the increasing amount of debt taken on to pay for dental school and the rising technological costs needed to outfit a new practice.

"The new dentist today is up to their eyeballs with debt and needs to make money, so in some cases, they may be doing too much treatment," Dave Weinman said. This could mean erring on the side of unnecessary work to sustain a fledgling practice, or it could mean joining a large existing practice that has quotas in place for new dentists.

America's Test Kitchen decided to test a rather obvious question: should you thaw frozen steaks before cooking? Of course you should, right?

Right?

Wrong. In their tests, the frozen steaks take a bit longer to cook (of course), but they sear perfectly, they lost less moisture than the thawed steaks, and they won the taste test. It's nice when science comes out on the side of convenience.

Hat tip: Digg.

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes One of the most interesting emerging treatments for certain types of cancer aims to starve the tumor to death. The strategy involves destroying or blocking the blood vessels that supply a tumor with oxygen and nutrients. Without its lifeblood, the unwanted growth shrivels up and dies. This can be done by physically blocking the vessels with blood clots, gels, balloons, glue, nanoparticles and so on. However, these techniques have never been entirely successful because the blockages can be washed away by the blood flow and the materials do not always fill blood vessels entirely, allowing blood to flow round them. Now Chinese researchers say they've solved the problem by filling blood vessels with an indium-gallium alloy that is liquid at body temperature. They've tested the idea in the lab on mice and rabbits. Their experiments show that the alloy is relatively benign but really does fill the vessels, blocks the blood flow entirely and starves the surrounding tissue of oxygen and nutrients. The team has also identified some problems such as the possibility of blobs of metal being washed into the heart and lungs. Nevertheless, they say their approach is a promising injectable tumor treatment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week is "Shark Week" at the Discovery Channel, that magical time of year when shark scientists tear their hair out over all the misleading claims about sharks that get splashed on TV.

Shark week just makes stuff up — and edits the interviews of experts to make it seem like they agree

Case in point: On Sunday, the Discovery Channel ran a documentary called "Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine" about a 35-foot-long great white shark the size of a submarine that supposedly attacked people off the coast of South Africa.

Surprise! None of this is real. As zoologist Michelle Wciesel points out at Southern Fried Science, the submarine shark in South Africa was an urban legend started by journalists in the 1970s who were trying to fool a gullible public. But the Discovery Channel didn't debunk the myth — instead, they came up with computer-generated images and interviewed fake experts with fake names (like "Conrad Manus") about the fake submarine shark.

The Discovery Channel did, however, add this careful disclaimer to its sub shark fan-fiction: "Its existence is highly controversial. Events have been dramatized, but many believe Submarine exists to this day." It's all made up, but hey, there are some people who believe it, so who can say?

This isn't the first time the Discovery Channel has conjured facts about sharks out of thin air. Last year's Shark Week featured a documentary called "Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives," which claimed a giant shark that's been extinct for millennia is now lurking in the oceans, ready to attack. This, too, was completely bogus .

What's bizarre is that some of these documentaries about mythical sharks feature actual shark scientists. How does that happen? As it turns out, there's an answer — over at io9, David Shiffman, a PhD student studying sharks at the University of Miami, reveals that Discovery Channel producers flat-out mislead many of the experts they interview.

One expert, Jonathan Davis, took a Discovery Channel crew to go see sharks in Louisiana back in 2013. The producers never told Davis what the show would actually be about, despite his repeated questions. He was later appalled to see that his interview was featured on a documentary called "Voodoo Shark" about a mythical monster that lived in the bayous.

"In reality, Davis was barely asked about the voodoo shark at all," Shiffman writes. "His answers from unrelated questions were edited together to make it seem like he believed in its existence and was searching for it."

So there you go. There are quite a few good and informative shows during Shark Week, but there's also a lot of utter nonsense. The Discovery Channel claims that the event is great at drumming up public interest about sharks. And that's probably true! But it's hard to see why they have to make things up. Real-life sharks are extremely interesting as is. Why not focus on them?

Further reading:

• Craig Pittman of the Tampa Bay Times wrote an excellent profile of 29-year-old grad student David Shiffman, who tweets at @WhySharksMatter and has made it his personal mission to expose the falsehoods on Shark Week.
• Back in 2012, Juliet Eilperin wrote a very nice history of Shark Week for the Washington Post. Despite the often-simplistic claims on some of the shows, the event still has plenty of defenders among conservationists.

Mother, clinical social worker, and now photographer Krista Long recently created a wonderful little photo series. It’s simply titled I Love Summer, and it it she captures the excited expressions and twisted postures of people as they zoom out of a waterslide and float in mid air on their way to the soft water landing below.

The series started out as a simple fascination: while with her children at the local pool, Long found she was incredibly amused by watching people make their exit from the nearby waterslide. The funny faces and awkward body positions made each rider more entertaining than the last, giving her a seemingly unending stream of not-so-dry humor.

Delighted at the amusing spectacle, the photographer in her quickly realized just how wonderful of a subject these moments would make for a photo series, and after an admittedly healthy dose of trial and error, Long began snapping up frame after frame at the pool, capturing her soaked subjects in flight.

“I love how people’s emotion right before they splash down is either total excitement or fear or cringing,” she tells TIME Magazine. “I just really wanted to capture that moment.”

It seems she succeeded. And in capturing that moment again and again, she ended up with is a wonderful tribute to summer that will probably put a smile on your face and a trip to the local waterpark on your todo list:

If you would like to keep up with Long’s work and see the rest of the I Love Summer series, be sure to visit her Flickr and give her a follow.

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Image credits: Photographs by Krista Long and used with permission

The NCAA lost the biggest antitrust case it has ever faced on Friday, when Judge Claudia Wilken issued an injunction in the O'Bannon v. NCAA antitrust case, stating that the college sports cartel has unreasonably restricted trade by placing limits on how much compensation schools are allowed to offer athletes.

The ruling has two major effects:

1. The NCAA cannot force schools to offer scholarships that cover less than the full cost of attending the university.
2. The NCAA cannot stop schools from offering recruits up to $5,000 per year in a trust fund for after their eligibility has expired.

Currently, NCAA rules prohibit schools from offering anything above a scholarship for tuition, room and board. This ruling will force the organization to allow schools more latitude to determine compensation packages than they've ever had — with competition between programs all-but-certain to drive up the amount of money top talent can command. However, while a win over the NCAA in an antitrust suit is certainly historic in its own right, the NCAA actually fared pretty well all things considered. Here's a look at what this does to college sports, and what's next.

What rules changed and what didn't

The most obvious rule change stemming from the injunction is that athletes can now get paid in some form. The NCAA has strived to keep a level playing field and keep labor costs low by forcing all schools to offer the same financial benefits to athletes.

The payment will be from part of the money that schools get for licensing athletes' name, image and likeness (NIL) rights. The NCAA had argued that athletes don't have NIL rights for live broadcasts, and that they need to sign away their NIL rights for promotional materials in order to keep from being corrupted by the money and to maintain a level playing field throughout the sport.

Wilken rejected that and said it's unreasonable for the NCAA to force every school to offer the same compensation package. She essentially implemented a $5,000-per-year scale in which schools have the ability to unilaterally choose what they want to offer recruits. However, there are restrictions that the NCAA can, and likely will, put in place: the money has to be part of a trust fund, payable after athletes have completed their eligibility, and athletes on the same team in the same class must all be offered the same amount of money.

The NCAA also cannot force schools to offer scholarships with stipends that cover the full cost of attending school. Right now, schools are only allowed to offer tuition, room and board, and they cannot help out with other cost of living expenses that athletes may be responsible for. The organization briefly supported a blanket, $2,000 stipend but then reversed itself. Under the ruling, these stipends will return, but that was already likely to happen very soon under the NCAA's new governance model.

However, there were many restrictions on player compensation that could have changed, but didn't. In somewhat of a surprise decision,Wilken wrote that NCAA rules limiting athletes' ability to receive endorsement money while they're in school is a legitimate means of improving competition. The removal of these limits could have severely limited the NCAA's control and brought more outside influence into the recruiting process, but the organization remained relatively unscathed.

How the NCAA won, despite losing

On the surface, the fact that the NCAA has to allow athletes to make money makes this seem like a really big loss. But looking at just the injunction itself, not much is going to change.

The bigger schools were already going to get the ability to give full-cost scholarships under the new governance structure. Even the payment of NIL money to athletes probably wasn't very far off. In fact, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby and West Virginia athletic director Oliver Luck supported it at a recent forum. All this really did was force the NCAA to move ahead a few years earlier than it would have liked.

Many people thought Wilken would issue broader injunction, saying the NCAA is breaking antitrust law and must stop doing what it's doing unless it reaches a collective bargaining agreement with athletes.

Wilken did find a less restrictive alternative, but as Dennis Cordell, a former lawyer for the NFL players, said, she essentially just imposed an agreement without the bargaining between the players and the league — and a favorable one for the NCAA at that.

The NCAA still controls most of its rules, and the players still have virtually no say in those rules, or any changes that might happen in the future. Could this be a signal that the NCAA should bargain? Sure. But the injunction itself does not give the perpetually reactionary organization an intense pressure to do so. More likely, we'll see further NCAA reform come from more lawsuits rather than from a system set up for bargaining over time to create a fair balance.

Why the NCAA could face more trouble

While Wilken's injunction was favorable to the NCAA, her opinion on the trial should cause reason for the organization to worry. Namely, she spent a lot of time rejecting two of its major defenses:

1. She said that maintaining "amateurism" is not a legitimate rationale for implementing anticompetitive labor rules.
2. She said that people don't just watch college sports because the athletes aren't paid.

Wilken was skeptical of the amateurism defense from the start, and the plaintiffs proved throughout the trial that it is not a sacred principle that justifies itself. The NCAA's definition of amateurism has changed over time, and thus, Wilken said it is not a legitimate reason to restrict how much athletes make. Simply put: You can't create your own definition for something — one that changes as you change your own rules, no less — and use that to defend yourself against antitrust law.

Wilken also called the assertion that people will stop watching college sports if athletes are paid "unpersuasive." The NCAA has often credited its success to collegiate athletics being "amateur" (unpaid), but Wilken ruled that the market is college sports, not amateur sports. People watch Alabama play football because they feel a tie to the university or the team, not because the athletes are unpaid.

But what was odd about Wilken's ruling is that while she found that the NCAA's current limits on athlete compensation are unreasonable — i.e. the product will not suffer — she did find that further compensation, such as athletes receiving endorsements, could be reasonable because it might change too much if some athletes are making a lot of money.

While that is certainly a win for the NCAA in this case, the fact that Wilken destroyed the amateurism defense is bad news for the organization. Wilken may have decided that athletes receiving endorsements is unreasonable, but another judge may set a different standard — or just blow up the whole system — and they could base that opinion off of what Wilken wrote about amateurism not being a strong defense.

What's next?

The NCAA announced that it will appeal the ruling, claiming it has not violated any antitrust laws and that its new governance model is more consistent with Wilken's view of what college sports should be. This always seemed likely, and during the trial, one of the O'Bannon lawyers even suggested that the NCAA knew it was going to lose and was objecting to pretty much everything in order to build a case for appeal.

Another route for the NCAA could be to seek an anti-trust exemption from Congress. Typically organizations need to bargain with a labor union and show some flexibility to be considered for an exemption, so it seems unlikely that Congress would permit the NCAA to stay exactly the same. But this approach does have a backing from some conservative representatives. This was evident during the House hearing on unionization and after Congressional Republicans filed a brief to the National Labor Relations Board opposing the Northwestern football players' unionization decision.

Looking ahead, the NCAA still has a difficult legal battle looming with famed sports antitrust attorney Jeffrey Kessler, who is looking to end all NCAA restraint on athlete compensation. The O'Bannon case was considered a moderate version of Kessler's case — the O'Bannon plaintiffs were fine with the trust fund idea, for example, while Kessler is out to blow up the whole system. Even after Friday's ruling, the NCAA isn't out of the woods in the repercussions from this case, or in future cases.

They may be well reviewed and China's new top selling phone, but reader DavidGilbert99 writes with reason to be cautious about Xiaomi's phones: Finnish security firm F-Secure has seemingly proven that Xiaomi smartphones do in fact upload user data without their permission/knowledge despite the company strongly denying these allegations as late as 30 July. Between commercial malware and government agencies, how do you keep your phone's data relatively private?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fondant icing is the ingredient cake artists use to create their masterpieces. Grocery stores don't always carry it, though, and it's expensive if they do. Use some marshmallows and flavored gelatin instead and make your own.

Read more...

Remember when all national parks banned drones? Well, apparently someone didn’t. Because last weekend, a tourist visiting the beautiful and pristine Yellowstone National Park managed to crash his right into a hot spring.

Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone said the drone’s pilot reported the downed vehicle into the Grand Prismatic Spring last weekend. As is to be expected a number of other tourists witnessed the crash.

Nash said to Missoulian, ”our concern is about any potential impacts to the iconic Yellowstone thermal feature.” rightly so considering the Grand Prismatic hot spring is one of the most popular attractions within Yellowstone, showing off its vibrant colors and 300’ diameter.

Officials said they’re working on removing the drone. However, at 160º Fahrenheit, it’s likely to be nice and tender after soaking in mother nature’s stew. That being said, we’ve seen GoPros survive some pretty intense situations, so who knows! We might have some footage to share with you in the coming days.

(via Missoulian)

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Image credits: Grand Prismatic Spring by Bill Gracey

Earlier this week, Chris Pratt, whose frequent hyper-endearing moments are rapidly making him the male equivalent to Jennifer Lawrence, visited DJ Whoo Kid and his radio show Whoolywood Shuffle and wowed them by rapping Eminem's part in Dr. Dre's 1999 classic "Forgot About Dre." Reddit user TreyTech synced the whole thing to the actual track, and well, the results are magical. It might be better than his performance in Guardians of the Galaxy:

It’s pretty obvious that Lexi Alexander isn’t scared of rocking the boat. In an unprecedented move last month, the movie director was pictured holding up a sign calling for the release of Peter Sunde, an individual not exactly the movie industry’s most-loved man.

But Alexander is no ordinary person or director. Instead of towing the usual line by decrying piracy as a scourge, the 39-year-old recently noted that several studies have found that piracy has actually benefited movie profits. For a movie worker this is a controversial stance to take, but rather than back off, Alexander only seems motivated to continue her abrasive approach.

In new comments Alexander takes aim at Hollywood, this time referencing the recent leak of The Expendables 3. She doesn’t condone the leak, but instead looks at possible reasons why it ended up online.

“The piracy issue makes me want to tear my hair out at times. I do not understand how so many of my filmmaker colleagues have bought into this MPAA propaganda. Recently these think tanks and organizations have popped up which are not officially associated with the MPAA, but definitely on their payroll,” Alexander begins.

“But okay, you want to be mad at the kid in Sweden or Australia for uploading your movie? Go for it. Oh wait, in cases like Expendables 3 it’s actually someone here in Hollywood leaking it,” she notes.

The idea that The Expendables 3 leaked directly from Hollywood is not new. Pristine copies like these simply aren’t available on the streets unless an insider has had a hand in it somehow, whether that interaction was intentional or otherwise.

In some instances the motivation to leak, Alexander suggests, could be borne out of a desire to get even. Assistants to the higher-ups are often treated badly, so more consideration should be given to what they might do in return, the director notes.

“It’s kind of like going to a restaurant and thinking twice about insulting the waiter or busboy because you’re afraid of what they’ll put in the food before they bring it back,” Alexander explains.

“Imagine those famously abusive directors, producers or stars (#notall….) having to tone down the abuse, otherwise LOUD EVENT MOVIE # 5 will show up on The Pirate Bay with a little note that says: ‘Don’t bother seeing this in the theater. Everybody above the line was a monster to us’.”

The thought that leaks might happen as a type of personal revenge is in itself the stuff of a Hollywood plot. However, just as it’s unlikely that a story about a movie leak would ever make the silver screen, Hollywood insiders involved in them also tend to escape criticism.

In fact, history shows us that the *actual* leakers, whether that’s an assistant with a grudge or otherwise, are rarely – if ever – paraded around in public as criminals. That honor is usually reserved for the first uploaders and/or their ‘pirate’ allies. Still, Alexander feels it would be wise to keep those close to home in a good frame of mind.

“Maybe the MPAA should drop some of their $$ on PSAs about the danger of abusing assistants: ‘If you kick me everyday, your film will land on Pirate Bay’,” she warns.

Finally, in a move likely to further annoy the Hollywood brass, Alexander presents a “hypothetical” mechanism through which abused assistants could beat the bullies.

“I’m not suggesting anything, but hypothetically, if there were an anonymous address people could send not-yet-released movie DVDs to, so someone else could upload them without a chance of it being backtracked to the source, then a whole bunch of abused and mistreated assistants wouldn’t be defenseless anymore,” she concludes.

Due to the hugely controversial nature of her comments its difficult to judge how serious Alexander is with her suggestions. But, whatever the case, it’s safe to say that she’s one of a kind and likely to continue rocking the boat in future.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Time zones are a relatively recent invention. They date back to the 19th Century and were designed to reconcile the needs of the then-new railroad industry with the ingrained habits of a population new to clocks.

They were a good idea at the time, but in the modern world they cause more trouble than they are worth. Now that several generations of humanity are accustomed to abstracting time away from the happenstance of where the sun is located, it's time to do away with this barbarous relic of the past. Everyone on the planet should operate according to a single time — Greenwich Mean Time would be suggested by tradition — and then local schedules could differ from place to place according to personal taste and local practicality.

Railroad time

Before the 19th Century, time was generally reckoned with reference to the local position of the sun. Noon was when the sun was at its peak. Midnight was when the peak was furthest away. Sundials and other instruments could directly measure solar position, but with time not generally kept very precisely there simply wasn't a lot of precise scheduling happening. Then came reliable and relatively affordable mechanical clocks, at which point western towns generally began keeping a local mean solar time. Now noon would be exactly 24 hours after the previous noon every day of the year regardless of astronomical perturbations.

But noon in Boston took place earlier than Worcester which was earlier than noon in Hartford which was earlier than noon in New York which was earlier than noon in Philadelphia.

This created a significant practical problem for railroad operators. They needed to schedule the arrival and departure of trains fairly precisely, and wanted to be able to characterize the entire system without reference to dozens of separate time scales. Railroads in the UK and United States began implementing railroad time, and over the decades persuaded governments to adopt it legally. The key conceit of railroad time is the use of time zones. A wide band of territory will all use the same time, and then it will suddenly jump one hour into the next zone.

Time zones are a mess

World Time Zones (TimeZonesBoy)

The simple way to accomplish the dream of railroad time would be to divide the globe into 24 equal slices. The problem, however, is that it is difficult for people to collaborate across time zone boundaries. Consequently, the real world time zones follow what's more of a political and economic logic than a geographical one. Argentina has extensive commercial ties to Brazil, and Brazil's main economic centers are on the coast, so Argentina is in the same time zone Sao Paulo and Rio rather than that of the Brazilian towns directly to its north.

Northern Idaho is connected via I-90 to Spokane and Seattle to its west, but not to Boise to its south so the Couer d'Alene area is on Pacific Time rather than Mountain Time. India has broken with the general scheme and adopted a half-hour staggered time zone so as to place the entire country on one time.

Yet while these zig-zags and 30-minute zones destroy the pristine geometry of railroad time, they serve a very practical purpose. It is genuinely annoying to schedule meetings, calls, and other arrangements across time zones. The need to constantly specify which time zone you're talking about is a drag. Commuting across time zones would be more annoying still, which is why the suburbs of Chicago that are located in Indiana use Illinois' Central Time rather than Indianapolis' Eastern Time.

But the ultimate solution to this problem is not a lot of ad hoc deviations. It's to shift the world to one giant time zone.

One time to rule them all

Wakey wakey (Alex)

Whenever I mention this idea in conversation, people accuse me of wanting to force California office workers to show up at the wee hours of the dawn. This is nonsense. As you may have noticed, it is right now the case that different businesses open at different times. In my neighborhood, Starbucks opens before the other retailers while the bars close later. The McDonalds operates 24 hours a day, but the other eateries don't. The falafel shop stays open later on weekends when there are more late-night drunken revelers.

What's more, my intensive research has revealed that even people who start working at similar times actually live on different personal schedules. Commutes vary, for example. Some people get to the gym before work. Some people have to get their children up and fed and off to school.

All of which is to say that within a given time zone, the point of a common time is not to force everyone to do everything at the same time. It's to allow us to communicate unambiguously with each other about when we are doing things.

If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. But of course London's bartenders would probably be at work while some shift workers in LA would be grabbing a nap. The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there'd be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30 you don't need to remember that it's in a different time zone than the rest of Texas.

This has always been the underlying logic of the railroad time scheme — clockface times should be abstracted away from considerations of solar position. But the initial introduction of railroad time was controversial. It struck people as unnatural. Today, however, we are very accustomed to the idea that time zone boundaries should be bent for the sake of convenience and practicality. That means we should move to the most convenient and most practical time system of all — a single Earth Time for all of humanity.