Everyone knows that smartphones are a hot target of thieves these days. They even have a special name for techniques used to snag iPhones from unsuspecting victims. But you know what nobody is stealing these days? Flip phones. Well, aside from the...

Two separate studies released this week are announcing a bleak future for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — and an accompanying sea-level rise across the globe. Both groups of researchers conclude that global warming is accelerating the disintegration of large parts of the ice sheets, and that the melting that is already under way is likely unstoppable. This, the researchers say, will eventually cause global sea levels to rise by at least 10 feet.

The first study, published today in Science by researchers at the University of Washington, used computer modeling and topography maps to conclude that the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier, an extremely large glacier flowing into Pine Island Bay, is already underway. This process, the researchers...

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Apple is gearing up to incorporate Near Field Communication (NFC) technology in the iPhone 6, according to a report from BrightWire citing sources familiar with the matter. The report also notes that Apple has struck a deal with China UnionPay to integrate the banking company's services into Passbook and elsewhere.

Apple is likely to incorporate a Near Field Communication (NFC) payment function in the next generation iPhone and has reached an agreement with China UnionPay on a mobile payment service, according to a source close to the matter.

...In addition to NFC payment, the two companies will also work together on another mobile payment solution that can be used for purchases in Apple Stores, added the source.

Integrating NFC into the iPhone 6 would be a bit of a surprise move by Apple, as the company's head of marketing Phil Schiller stated in 2012 that the technology was "not the solution to any current problem." Notably, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted last month that Apple would integrate NFC chips into the next-generation iPhone alongside a host of other features.

The news also comes as Apple is pursuing plans to develop a mobile payment solution, which will be possibly tied to the Touch ID fingerprint sensor currently found in the iPhone 5s and reportedly headed for the iPhone 6 and next-generation iPads. It is also possible that Apple combines its existing Touch ID fingerprint scanner and NFC technology into the home button, as the company filed for a patent detailing such a system last September.

Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 6 in two sizes of 4.7-inches and 5.5-inches later this year, with the smaller version of the phone launching ahead of the larger model. Aside from a larger display, the iPhone 6 will likely feature a thinner profile, a faster A8 processor, and an improved camera in the form of image stabilization. Apple is also said to be negotating with carriers for a $100 price increase on the iPhone 6.

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Community's run at NBC is over. The network has officially canceled the beloved cult sitcom after five seasons, cutting short the "six seasons and a movie" dream that was jokingly written into one episode. Community has gradually slipped in ratings over the years, and even the return of show creator Dan Harmon for season five couldn't rejuvenate the series — at least in terms of overall viewership. Community has risked cancellation more than once, but NBC has stuck by the Joel McHale-led program until now. That was mostly thanks to enduring support from fans, and the show's writers never hesitated to poke fun at their uneasy relationship with the network. The video at the bottom of this article is just one example.

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Let this be a lesson to any company selling products on Amazon: going after a customer for a negative review can get you booted from the store entirely. A company called Mediabridge Products has had its Amazon selling privileges revoked after aggressively intimidating and harassing a user for posting a harsh review on one of its routers. Unfortunately for Mediabridge, that Amazon customer also frequents Reddit and chronicled the entire saga there. The original overview has since seemingly been removed, but Ars Technica has been following the story closely.

After discovering the negative review — which quickly rose to become the "most helpful" negative feedback — Mediabridge threatened to sue the customer, claiming he was waging an...

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Remember when we told you to brace yourself because the death of unlimited wireless data in the United States is imminent? Well, the beginning of the end is finally upon us: Sprint, one of unlimited mobile data’s last and biggest and last defenders, will soon begin to throttle some wireless subscribers with unlimited data plans.

FierceWireless on Thursday reported that Sprint is “slamming the brakes” on unlimited high-speed data for around 5% of its wireless customers in congested areas. According to the report, postpaid Sprint customers and prepaid subscribers on Virgin Mobile or Boost Mobile will be throttled.

“[Throttling] will enable us to provide more customers with a high quality data experience during heavy usage times,” Sprint said in a statement to FierceWireless. “Once the customer is no longer connected to a congested cell site, or the site is no longer congested, speeds will return to normal.”

How do you know if you’re at risk of being throttled? According to the carrier, subscribers who use more than 5GB of data in a single billing period could experience slowed data speeds.

What constitutes a congested area? Whatever Sprint decides constitutes a congested area.

Of note, Sprint did say that subscribers will no longer be throttled once the leave congested areas.

Below is an example of a text message received by subscribers who might be at risk of having their data speeds throttled:

Beginning 6/1/14, to provide more customers with a high quality data experience during heavy usage times, Virgin Mobile USA may manage prioritization of access to network resources in congested areas for customers within the top 5 percent of data users.

As various films have shown, Godzilla is a devastating opponent in a fight. With a new movie coming out just a week from now, Smithsonian's Air & Space decided to sit down with two in the US Air Force's 18th Wing at Kadena Air Base in Japan to see how they would deal with the giant monster should it show up. "I think Godzilla would be expecting an aerial attack, so to catch him off guard, I think we could need 4,000 Segways and slingshots," says master sergeant Jason Edwards, of the 18th Wing's public affairs. Don't expect much in the way of detailed strategy from the video, but it may be humbling to know that the Air Force likely shares some ideas with you about who might make a good crew member for taking on such a powerful creature.

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Client: I want the site in multicolor Comic Sans, on a blue background, with plenty of funny animated gifs and sound effects.

Me: I can do that, but I think that it would turn out horrible.

Client: Just kidding, I was making sure that you’d stop me if I ever suggested something like that. I’m emailing the brief now…

Five Nobel Prize-winning economists are calling for an end to the global war on drugs and a shift over to policies that focus on public health. The economists, along with over a dozen professors and politicians, have all endorsed a report released last night by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which breaks down the successes and failures of the worldwide drug war and finds that it has had "enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage." The report recommends that countries instead focus on individualized approaches to drug laws and encourages experimentation with lifting prohibitions.

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Many movies follow the familiar three-act structure, but Paul Verhoeven's 1987 classic RoboCop may have gone further than that. With only one exception, argues The Deja Reviewer, the film is completely symmetrical from beginning to end. From the solitary "RoboCop" title and closing credits, to the placement of action sequences, to the way the film reveals and removes its villains from the picture, practically every scene seems to have been intended to beautifully balance out an equation. You can find out just how those scenes match up at our source link below.

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Conservatives love the internet. They don't just love using it, they also love to point to it as an example of the power of free markets. And they're right. The internet has had a remarkable 20-year run of rapid innovation with minimal government regulation.

That was possible because the internet has a different structure than other communications networks. Most networks, like the 20th century telephone market, are natural monopolies requiring close government supervision. But the internet is organized in a way that allows markets, rather than monopolists or government regulators, to set prices.

That structure has been remarkably durable, but it's not indestructible. And unfortunately, it's now in danger. In recent years, Comcast has waged a campaign to change the internet's structure to make it more like the monopolistic telephone network that came before it, making Comcast more money in the process.

Conservatives are naturally and properly skeptical of government regulation. But this is a case where the question isn't whether to regulate, but what kind of regulation is preferable. If federal regulators don't step in now to preserve the structures that make internet competition possible, they will be forced to step in later to prevent the largest ISPs from abusing their growing monopoly power.

The old, busted way to run a network

For most of the 20th Century, the telephone market looked like this:

The telephone industry was dominated by a single monopoly called AT&T. Everyone paid AT&T a flat subscription for a telephone. Long-distance calls came with an extra per-minute fee.

If you want to build a network that reaches everyone in America and provides a consistent quality of service, this isn't a bad way to do it. But it has some obvious problems that practically require government oversight.

The simple danger is that monopolies tend to charge high prices. Another problem is that monopolies are often bad for innovation. If you had an idea for a new telecommunications product in 1950, you needed AT&T's permission to try it. And AT&T generally refused to allow third-party devices to be attached to its network. Regulators had to step in frequently to force AT&T to be more accommodating toward third-party innovators.

In 1974, the Ford Administration began a lawsuit that led to AT&T's breakup a decade later. The result looked like this:

AT&T was forced to spin off its local telephone business into seven independent companies that were dubbed the "Baby Bells." The economics of long-distance calling became a lot more complicated. Before, making a long-distance call just involved one company, AT&T. Now it involved three companies: a Baby Bell at each end and a long-distance company in the middle. AT&T was one option for long-distance service, but it competed against rivals such as Sprint or MCI. (Baby Bells are outside the grey circle, long-distance companies are inside of it.)

The long distance market is based on a sender-pays principle, which I have illustrated with green arrows. The customer who dials the phone pays for the call. The payment goes to the long-distance company of the customer's choice. The long-distance company, in turn, makes a payment to the local phone company that operates the other end of the connection.

The terminating monopoly problem

This restructuring of the telephone market helped to create a competitive market for long-distance service. But there's still a serious problem, known in telecom jargon as a "terminating access monopoly." Suppose an Ameritech customer in Detroit wants to call her sister, a BellSouth customer in Atlanta. She has several options for long-distance service. AT&T, MCI, and Sprint are all competing for her business. But no matter which long-distance company she chooses, that long-distance provider is ultimately going to need to connect to BellSouth to complete the call. That means BellSouth always gets to collect a fee for the call.

Thanks to competition among transit providers, prices have fallen by a factor of 1000

In a revealing post on its public policy blog, the modern AT&T (which has reunited with four of its seven former subsidiaries) described what happened as a result: "In the late ‘90s, CLECs began to tariff ever-increasing rates for terminating access services." In plain English, certain phone companies began demanding higher and higher fees to complete incoming calls, a problem that ultimately forced the FCC to regulate the market more strictly.

Unfortunately, while all-knowing perfectly benevolent regulators could make this work, in practice regulators tend to be neither all-knowing nor benevolent. Special interest can "capture" regulatory agencies and bend rules to their own ends, and even when acting in perfect good faith regulators simply may make the wrong call. Even worse, a regulated system tends to discourage innovation since any company who'd be disadvantaged by change can use the regulatory process to block at.

At the same time, regulation is the worst solution to the terminating monopoly problem except for all the alternatives. The sender-pays rule creates terminating monopolies. Absent price regulation, that will necessarily lead to exorbitant prices.

How the internet solved the terminating monopoly problem

The solution was simple: get rid of the sender-pays rule. Internet billing is based on a different principle, known as "bill and keep." It works like this:

Note: Links are shown for illustration purposes only. I don't know if companies really have the specific transit agreements depicted here.

In the bill-and-keep internet, companies at each "end" of a connection bill their own customers — whether that customer is a big web company like Google, or a an average household. Neither end pays the other for interconnection. Instead, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) at each end is responsible for ensuring that its traffic can reach the ISP at the other end. This is part of the service that the ISP sells to its customers, a guarantee that traffic will get where you want it to go.

ISP's typically do this by hiring a third party to provide "transit," the service of carrying data from one network to another. Transit providers often swap traffic with one another without money changing hands. The transit providers are the ones inside the grey circle in the middle of the figure.

"Every day I have someone come up to me and say 'Comcast came up to us asking for money'"

The terminating monopoly problem occurs when a company at the end of a network not only charges its own customers for their connection, but charges companies in the middle of the network an extra premium to be able to reach its customers. In a bill-and-keep regime, the money always flows in the other direction — from customers to ISPs to transit companies. And because the market for transit is highly competitive, there's no need for government regulation of transit fees. It's an ordinary market where if a transit company tries to charge too much, ISPs will switch to another company.

Bill and keep has worked well. Thanks to competition among transit providers, average transit prices have fallen by a factor of 1000 since 1998:

Typical market transit rates, based on data collected by DrPeering.com.

People who love the internet's lack of regulation have bill-and-keep to thank. By solving the terminating monopoly problem, bill-and-keep makes possible a robust and competitive market for internet connectivity that requires minimal government oversight.

Comcast is trying to break bill-and-keep

Over the last four years, Comcast has engaged in a campaign to undermine the bill-and-keep system. The effort first came to public attention in 2010. Level 3 had just signed a contract to host Netflix content, and Level 3 asked Comcast to upgrade a connection between them to accommodate the higher traffic. Level 3 expected this to be an easy sell since Comcast had previously paid Level 3 for transit service. But instead, Comcast demanded that Level 3 pay it for the costs of the upgrade.

Comcast has engaged in a campaign to undermine the bill-and-keep system

Since then, Comcast has evidently begun demanding that other transit and content providers pay it for faster connections too. "Every day I have someone come up to me and say 'Comcast came up to us asking for money,'" says Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term "network neutrality."

Comcast itself has been silent on the details of these agreements, but the company's defenders take it for granted that transit providers should be paying Comcast, not the other way around. For example, Dan Rayburn has argued that "the reason for the poor [Netflix] quality streaming is that Cogent refuses to pay Comcast to add more capacity." This, of course, is begging the question. Why should Cogent pay Comcast to deliver content that Comcast customers requested in the first place?

In a letter to the FCC defending its handling of the dispute with Level 3, Comcast provides an answer. Comcast argued that the two companies' "traffic ratio" — the ratio between the traffic Comcast was sending Level 3 and the traffic Level 3 was sending Comcast — had been thrown out of balance by the growth of Netflix streaming. Comcast portrayed it as a standard industry practice for the network that sends a disproportionate amount of traffic to pay the receiving network for the costs of carrying the traffic.

But that's not how the internet works. Consumer-facing ISPs have always received more traffic than they send out. Comcast itself sells "unbalanced" internet service to its customers, with download speeds much faster than upload speeds. That makes it inevitable that ISPs like Comcast will receive more data than they send. But in the bill-and-keep model, ISPs generally pay transit providers for connectivity, regardless of traffic ratios.

The traffic ratio rule Comcast advocated in 2010 was a variation on the sender-pays rule. It will create the same kind of terminating monopoly problem that plagued the long distance telephone market. But that might not seem like a bad thing if you own the monopoly.

The importance of market share

Two factors tend to make the bill-and-keep model stable. One is competition in the consumer ISP market. If customers can easily switch between broadband providers, then it would be foolish for a broadband provider to allow network quality to degrade as a way to force content companies to the bargaining table.

A merged cable giant would have even more leverage to demand monopoly rents

The second factor is ISP size. When ISPs are relatively small, payments naturally flow from the edges of the network to the middle because small edge networks need large transit networks to reach the rest of the internet.

Imagine, for example, if the Vermont Telephone Company, a tiny telecom company that recently started offering ultra-fast internet services, tried to emulate Comcast. Suppose it began complaining that Netflix was sending it too much traffic and demanding that its transit providers start paying it for the costs of delivering Netflix content to its subscribers. Netflix and the big transit companies that provide it with connectivity would laugh at this kind of demand. It would be obvious to everyone that VTel needs transit service more than transit providers need VTel.

But when an ISP's market share gets large enough, the calculus changes. Comcast has 80 times as many subscribers as Vermont has households. So when Comcast demands payment to deliver content to its own customers, Netflix and its transit suppliers can't afford to laugh it off. The potential costs to Netflix's bottom line are too large.

This provides a clear argument against allowing the Comcast/Time Warner merger. Defenders of the merger have argued that it won't reduce competition because Comcast and Time Warner don't serve the same customers. That's true, but it ignores how the merger would affect the interconnection market. A merged cable giant would have even more leverage to demand monopoly rents from companies across the internet.

A century ago, the Wilson administration decided not to press its antitrust case against AT&T, allowing the firm to continue the acquisition spree that made it a monopoly. In retrospect, that decision looks like a mistake. Wilson's decision not to intervene in the market led to a telephone monopoly, which in turn led to 70 years of regulation and a messy, 10-year antitrust case.

Obviously, the combination of Comcast and Time Warner would not dominate the internet the way AT&T dominated the telephone industry. But recent events suggest that Comcast is already large enough to threaten competition on the internet. Preventing the company from getting even larger might avoid the need for a lot more regulation in the years ahead.

Comcast declined to comment for this story.

If you're the customer of a major American internet provider, you might have been noticing it's not very reliable lately. If so, there's a pretty good chance that a graph like this is the reason:

These graphs comes from Level 3, one of the world's largest providers of "transit," or long-distance internet connectivity. The graph on the left shows the level of congestion between Level 3 and a large American ISP in the Dallas area. In the middle of the night, the connection is less than half-full and everything works fine. But during peak hours, the connection is saturated. That produces the graph on the right, which shows the packet loss rate. When the loss rate is high, thousands of Dallas-area consumers are having difficulty using bandwidth-heavy applications like Netflix, Skype, or YouTube (though to be clear, Level 3 doesn't say what specific kind of traffic was being carried over this link).

This isn't how these graphs are supposed to look. Level 3 swaps traffic with 51 other large networks, known as peers. For 45 of those networks, the utilization graph looks more like this:

The graph on the left shows that there is enough capacity to handle demand even during peak hours.  As a result, you get the graph at the right, which shows no problems with dropped packets.

So what's going on? Level 3 says the six bandwidth providers with congested links are all "large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market." One of them is in Europe, and the other five are in the United States.

Level 3 says its links to these customers suffer from "congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content."

The basic problem is those six broadband providers want Level 3 to pay them to deliver traffic. Level 3 believes that's unreasonable. After all, the ISPs' own customers have already paid these ISPs to deliver the traffic to them. And the long-standing norm on the internet is that endpoint ISPs pay intermediaries, not the other way around. Level 3 notes that "in countries or markets where consumers have multiple broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers." In short, broadband providers that face serious competition don't engage in this kind of brinksmanship.

Unfortunately, most parts of the US suffer from a severe lack of broadband competition. And the leading ISPs in some of these markets appear to view network congestion not as a technical problem to be solved so much as an opportunity to gain leverage in negotiations with other networks.

One of the many great things about review aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and MRQE is that they enable us to stack reviewers up against each other and see whose taste matches our own; once you have that, tracking that critic's ratings can be a better guide than score averages, at least for determining what you personally want to watch (I find the gang at The Dissolve pretty solid, for example).

It can also tell you which critics love everything and which are perpetually disappointed, neither of which is a particularly helpful approach when you're just trying to find something to watch. Adam Raymond and Mitan Gilat at Vocativ crunched the numbers to determine which critics give more positive or more negative ratings than Metacritic as a whole. The Tampa Bay Times' Steve Persall and Owen Gleiberman (formerly of Entertainment Weekly) are the happy-go-luckiest of the bunch, while The New Yorker's Anthony Lane and Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern were the most negative:

Obviously, what this means for your estimation of particular reviewers will depend on what kinds of movies cause them to deviate from the consensus, and how thoughtful they are in defending those deviations. Manohla Dargis is graded as a "hater" but she often has solid arguments to back up her harsher judgments; her critique of Blue is the Warmest Color was a much-needed corrective to the rapturous reception it got from most critics. But it's still useful for Metacritic users to have a baseline when considering how important a rave or pan from given reviewer is. If nothing else, the chart shows that a Steve Persall rave and a Anthony Lane rave mean very, very different things.

Hat-tip to Allison McCann.

Should we destroy the last living samples of smallpox? The World Health Organization will decide this month. Some major microbiologists are arguing that we should keep them to help develop smallpox treatments and that we should discuss possible new experiments with live smallpox to better understand it, in general.

The reasons to destroy the virus seem fairly obvious. After all, smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century. And despite all the best precautions, there's a slight risk that it could escape. (Or that a worker could steal some.)

Smallpox is still the only human disease that's ever been eradicated through an intentional campaign. Ever since the WHO declared the disease officially eradicated in 1980, people have been arguing about whether to destroy all of the samples for good. There are only two official locations with live smallpox samples: one in the US and one in Russia.

smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century

(I'm sparing you the photo of what smallpox looks like. If you really want to see it, click here. Just don't tell me that I didn't warn you.)

For the time being, the WHO is letting researchers keep smallpox in order to produce antiviral drugs, diagnostic tests, and safer vaccines that could be used in the event of a future outbreak. Expert opinions vary on whether these efforts are far enough along to justify destroying all of the virus.

The authors of the recent essay argue that the research is not yet finished. (For example, drugs are only in phase two of three-phase clinical trials.)

They also mention something that I hadn't before considered: drug-resistant smallpox. "While the likelihood of the emergence of, or creation of, either drug- or vaccine-resistant versions of smallpox is unknown," they say, "continued investigation to identify additional countermeasures, for example, through screening using functional genomics or proteomics approaches, can further enhance our state of preparedness."

Basically, if you don't know how likely smallpox is to become resistant to your vaccine, then you don't really know how many versions of a vaccine you need.

And where could a new smallpox threat come from?

• Bioterrorism from some unofficial test tube of smallpox that someone might have hidden away decades ago
• Bioterrorism using currently available DNA sequence information to create a deadly smallpox-like virus
• Smallpox from the grave. (No one knows how long smallpox can survive in a dead body, according to this Smithsonian article.)
• New diseases. They're always popping up, often after making the leap from some other animal to us, like a new smallpox cousin that appeared last week. Although that particular one doesn't seem especially problematic so far, you never know when one might. Some of the reasons to study smallpox are actually to understand deadly diseases in general. Smallpox itself is particularly interesting because, unlike other viruses in its family, it only infects humans (and not any other animals). This unique quality is something worth studying, according to the authors of the essay.

Ai Weiwei is one of the most highly-regarded, controversial artists of his time. In the West, he is viewed as China's preeminent artist and cultural critic; his written and visual work has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times over, and he currently enjoys a new exhibit, Ai Weiwei: According to What?, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. (You should go if you get the chance.) However, his reach in China is considerably more limited — since domestic media cannot even utter his name, most people there simply don't know who he is. And because the government holds his passport, Ai can't leave the country, all while the authorities constantly keep tabs on him. However, as Aeon Magazine reports, Ai's art is perfectly suited for the...

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According to The Wall Street Journal, a report investigating the US speedskating team's lackluster performance at the Winter Olympics has identified the late introduction of Under Armour's racing suit as "a factor" in the debacle. The report also points to the team's pre-Olympic travel schedule, poorly planned practice locations, and the skate sharpening system used during Sochi as other problems. With a history of medal wins, the United States entered Sochi as an immediate favorite in several long-track speed skating races. But no American ever finished better than seventh place. The US Olympic Committee immediately began searching for answers that could explain the meltdown.

The racing suit created by Under Armour worn by the team...

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The conventional wisdom says that using your middle initial on a regular basis is a pretentious affectation — especially in the digital era.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for instance, was told to use a "D." in his byline way back when he was a cub reporter at the Harvard Crimson. When he finally dropped it in January, he admitted that, "the internet age, the middle initial conveys a formality that is a bit of a barrier to our audience. It feels a bit ostentatious, even priggish."

we tend to perceive people with middle initials are more eloquent and qualified

It's hard to argue with this — part of the reason you'll find only one middle initial on Vox's staff. (It belongs to tech writer Timothy B. Lee, who's forced to distinguish himself from Timothy H. Lee, a think tank tech policy writer.)

But new research shows that for pragmatic reasons, we may want to rethink this mindset. A series of studies conducted by social psychologists Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg and Eric R. Igou show that when participants are asked to judge strangers they never meet in person, those with middle initials (to use the researchers' example, "David F. Clark") are perceived as smarter, more eloquent, and more qualified than those without ("David Clark.") And two initials, it turns out — "David F.P. Clark" — are even better than one.

Experiments show that middle initials make you seem smarter

The researchers conducted seven different studies in all. The sample sizes of each individual study were relatively small — in total, they had 526 participants, mostly European university students — but they consistently showed that the more middle initials someone had, the higher status they were accorded in intellectual endeavors. Many other cultures, such as China's, don't even traditionally have middle names, but in Western culture, at least, it seems that using an initial is a good idea.

we interpret an initial as a shorthand for intelligence

This was true for a range of different scenarios. Participants picked people with middle initials to join their teams in academic competitions and they judged middle-initialed authors to be better writers. When asked simply to judge which names signaled status, participants said those with multiple initials ("David F.P.R. Mitchell," for instance) more often than those with one or none, and even more than those with infixes ("David van Mitchell").

But interestingly, it seems that the middle initials signaled gravitas only when the initialed person's identity and qualifications were a mystery. In one of the studies, participants judged a piece of academic writing to better written when it was by someone with a middle initial. But if the writer was already identified as a professor or undergrad, having an initial no longer made a difference — the professor's writing was judged to be better, and the undergrad's worse, initial or not.

Why is this the case? The researchers argue that it's basically due to association. We often see middle initials printed on things like diplomas and academic publications, so we subconsciously begin to associate them with intellectual achievement over time — and in situations where we're otherwise unable to make an informed decision, we interpret an initial as a shorthand for intelligence.

Billion-Story Building

My daughter—age 4.5—maintains she wants a billion-story building. It turns out not only is that hard to help her appreciate this size, I am not at all able to explain all of the other difficulties you'd have to overcome.

Keira, via Steve Brodovicz, Media, PA

Keira,

If you make a building too big, the top part is heavy and it squishes the bottom part.

Have you ever tried to make a tower of peanut butter? It's easy to make a little tiny one, like a blobby castle on a cracker. It will be strong enough to stay standing. But if you try to build a really big castle, the whole thing smushes flat like a pancake.

The same thing happens with buildings. The buildings we make are strong, but we couldn't make one that went all the way up to space, or the top part would squish the bottom part.

We can make buildings pretty tall. The tallest buildings are almost 1 kilometer tall, and we could probably make buildings 2 or even 3 kilometers tall if we wanted, and they would still be able to stand up under their own weight. Higher than that might be tricky.

But there would be other problems with a tall building besides weight.

One issue would be wind. The wind up high is very strong, and buildings have to be very strong to stand up against the wind.

Another big problem would be, surprisingly, elevators. Tall buildings need elevators, since no one wants to climb hundreds of flights of stairs. If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms.

Maybe you can think of a way to get people to their floors without having too many elevators. Maybe you could make a giant elevator that takes up 10 floors. Or you could make fast elevators that work like roller coasters. Or you could fly people up to their rooms with hot air balloons. Or you could launch them with catapults.

Elevators and wind are big problems, but the biggest problem would be money.

To make a building really tall, someone has to spend a lot of money, and no one wants a really tall building enough to pay for it. A building many miles tall would cost billions of dollars. A billion dollars is a lot of money! If you had a billion dollars, you could rent a giant spaceship, save all the world's endangered lemurs, give a dollar to everyone in the US, and still have some left over. Most people don't think giant towers a few miles tall are important enough to spend a lot of money on.

If you got really rich, so you could pay for a tower to space yourself, and solved all those engineering problems, you'd still have problems making a tower a billion stories tall. A billion stories is just too many.

A big skyscraper might have about 100 floors, which means it's as tall as 100 little houses.

If you stacked 100 skyscrapers on each other to make a mega-skyscraper, it would reach halfway to space:

This skyscraper would still only have 10,000 floors, which is way less than your billion floors! Each of those 100 skyscrapers would have 100 floors, so the whole mega-skyscraper would have 100 times 100 is 10,000 floors.

But you said you wanted a skyscraper with 1,000,000,000 floors. Let's stack 100 mega-skyscrapers to make a mega-mega-skyscraper:

The mega-mega-skyscraper would stick out so far from the Earth that spaceships would crash into it. If the space station were heading toward the tower, they could use its rockets to steer away from it.[1]They'd probably get pretty grumpy after having to dodge your tower repeatedly, so you might want to launch fuel and snacks out the window with a rail gun as they go by. The bad news is that space is full of broken spaceships and satellites and pieces of junk, all flying around at random. If you build a mega-mega-skyscraper, spaceship parts will eventually smash into it.

Anyway, a mega-mega-skyscraper is only 100 times 10,000 = 1,000,000 floors. That's still a lot smaller than the 1,000,000,000 that you want!

Let's make a new skyscraper by stacking up 100 mega-mega-skyscrapers, to make a mega-mega-MEGA-skyscraper:

The mega-mega-MEGA-skyscraper would be so tall that the top would just barely brush against the Moon.

But it would only be 100,000,000 floors! To get to 1,000,000,000 floors, we have to stack 10 mega-mega-MEGA-skyscrapers on top of each other, to make one Keira-skyscraper:

The Keira-skyscraper would be pretty close to impossible to build. You would have to keep it from crashing into the Moon, being pulled apart by the Earth's gravity, or falling over and smashing into the planet like the giant meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

But some engineers have an idea sort of like your tower—it's called a space elevator. It's not quite as tall as yours (the space elevator would only reach partway to the Moon), but it's close!

Some people think we can build a space elevator, but other people think it's a crazy idea. We can't build one yet because there are some problems we don't know how to solve, like how to make the tower strong enough and how to send power up it to run the elevators. If you really want to build a gigantic tower, you can find out more about some of the problems they're working on, and eventually become one of the people coming up with ideas to solve them. Maybe, someday, you could build a giant tower to space.

I'm pretty sure it won't be made of peanut butter, though.

Since Thunderbolt ports can support up to six peripherals in a daisy chain, which is a wiring scheme where multiple devices are chained together in a certain order, Macworld decided to test how many devices they could daisy chain together with the new Mac Pro's six Thunderbolt ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one HDMI port and two gigabit Ethernet ports.


Macworld named the test the "Mac Pro Daisy Chain Challenge" and was able to connect a total of 42 peripheral devices to the Mac Pro.

We connected 36 drives (19 Thunderbolt, 15 USB, 2 FireWire 800) with a combined capacity of 100.63TB. In addition to the drives, we also connected two Thunderbolt docks (the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock and the CalDigit Thunderbolt Station, an Apple Thunderbolt Display, two Apple Cinema Displays, and one HP Z Display Z27. All this to a single Mac Pro.

Only a dozen of the drives were being powered from the cables connecting them to the Mac Pro. The 24 remaining drives required external power and had to be plugged into three power strips with an attached Watts Up power meter. The combine power draw when Macworld ran a script that copied data from the Mac Pro's internal flash storage to the drives was 865 Watts.

Through Mac OS X's Activity Monitor, the lab found that there was a combined throughput of 3 Gbps. The rate slowed as the fastest drives, of which OWC's Mercury Helios was the fastest, finished transferring data.

The lab also found that the daisy chains didn't affect the performance of a single drive working alone. Rather, the location of the drive within the daisy chain affected performance. For instance, one drive's average write speed was 709.8 Mbps when tested at the beginning of the daisy chain and without a daisy chain and only 556.7 Mbps when placed at the end of the chain.

The full list of devices connected to the Mac Pro, along with more information on the challenge and future tests can be found at Macworld.

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The nation has been having essentially the same debate about who controls the Internet — and, more specifically, about whether and how the Federal Communications Commission should protect network neutrality — for close to a decade. People who have spent time in the trenches of that debate aren't just feeling a sense of deja vu. They're getting exhausted.

The cycle goes like this: the FCC comes up with a plan to regulate network neutrality. A telecom company (Comcast in 2008, Verizon in 2011) sues, arguing the FCC is exceeding its authority. The DC Circuit Appeals Court rules against the FCC. But the court also signals that a different approach might pass legal muster, sending the agency back to try again. The FCC's new Chairman, Tom Wheeler, is about to begin the cycle again, hoping the third time will be a charm.

Why has it proven so difficult for the commission to craft regulations the courts will accept? A big reason is that Congress hasn't overhauled telecommunications law since 1996. In 1996, Amazon.com was still just a book store, Larry and Sergey were still just Stanford grad students, and Justin Bieber was still just a toddler. It's little wonder that the FCC and the courts have found it so difficult to apply an 18-year-old law to the modern internet.

The concept of network neutrality hadn't been coined yet in 1996

The 1996 Telecommunications Act prohibits the FCC from imposing common carrier regulations on "information services," which (according to the FCC) includes broadband internet access. The law says that information services can't be subject to common carrier regulations. In its January ruling, the court said that the FCC's 2010 net neutrality rules constituted common carrier regulation and was therefore illegal. But the court signaled that it would accept a revised set of rules that only prohibited discrimination if it was "commercially unreasonable."

Is that the result Congress intended? No one really knows. The term "network neutrality" hadn't been coined yet in 1996. Cable modems and fiber optic services like FiOS were still in the future. Unsurprisingly, Congress wasn't clear about how to handle concepts and technologies that didn't exist yet, so the courts have had to make up the rules as they went along.

A better way to resolve the controversy over the FCC's authority would be for Congress to pass a new telecommunications law that either clearly authorizes network neutrality regulations or clearly prohibits them. A clear statement from Congress authorizing network neutrality rules would make it easier for the FCC to write rules that pass muster with the courts. A clear statement prohibiting network neutrality regulations would end the decade-long uncertainty about how broadband networks would be regulated. Either way, the nation would be spared another decade of legal Calvinball as the courts struggle to interpret a statute that gets more outdated with each passing year.

But Congress hasn't been doing much lawmaking in recent years. So big-picture policy issues that ought to be resolved by our elected representatives are instead being hashed out by a convoluted process of rulemaking and judicial review.

This is another example of the phenomenon Vox's Ezra Klein has noted many times before: when Congress stops doing its job, the policymaking process doesn't stop. It just shifts to other parts of government that are less transparent, less effective, and less accountable to the public.

Last month, members of /r/Dogecoin, a subreddit dedicated to the meme-inspired cryptocurrency, helped raise more than $50,000 for NASCAR driver Josh Wise. As a result, his number 98 racecar will be sporting Dogecoin imagery during the upcoming race at Talladega Superspeedway on May 4th. Photos of the finished "Dogecar," as some are calling it, were tweeted by Phil Parsons Racing yesterday. An illustrated likeness of Kabosu, the now iconic Shiba Inu, features prominently on both the hood and rear bumper of the vehicle.

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Quick: what's the scariest animal? Sharks? Grizzly bears? Alligators? Nope. In terms of sheer deadliness, nothing can hold a candle to mosquitoes, as this great chart from Bill Gates' personal blog shows:

To be fair to the tiny insects, almost all of the killing here is done by infections spread by mosquitoes (predominantly malaria), rather than the mosquitoes themselves. But they're very, very good at spreading those infections, and many of those infections kill with alarming frequency.

That's why Gates is throwing a "Shark Week"-style "Mosquito Week," publishing articles on what it's like to have malaria, raising dengue-resistant mosquitoes, and more. If you're interested in ways we could conceivably eradicate mosquito-borne illnesses altogether, be sure to check out Andy Mills' fantastic Radiolab segment on biotech entrepreneur Hadyn Parry's efforts to genetically engineer mosquitoes carrying genes that will cause their offspring to die well before reproducing themselves, a scheme which Parry claims is capable of killing off 80 percent of the mosquitoes in a given area in a matter of months. There are less dramatic options in that vein as well, like engineering mosquitoes with immune systems strong enough to kill the parasite that causes malaria before it can spread to human.

Crazy genetic engineering schemes like that are probably a number of years from being viable at a large scale, and in the meantime, distributing anti-malarial bednets is probably the most cost-effective way to fight the illness. The Against Malaria Foundation is a particularly good charity in that area, if you're looking for a place to donate.

Street artists can be some of the cheekiest people around. Their approach to satire, be it politically motivated or otherwise, is often worth a laugh or two… if not a round of applause. The latest project in London by Guus Ter Beek and Tayfun Sarier is no exception. They’ve taken Photoshop’s erase tool quite literally into the real world to great effect.

Simply called ‘Street Eraser,’ this duo has gone around sticking cutouts of the Photoshop erase tool on objects, leaving behind the instantly recognizable checkered background that you’re left with when you erase something in Photoshop.

As you can see in the images, the effect is extremely well done when used in certain spots, while mediocre in others. But regardless of where it is, it’s a fun and rather unique way to blend the real world with a program many of us are all too familiar with:

To see more of London fade away into checkered transparency, head over to the Street Eraser blog or check out Beek and Sarier‘s websites.

(via Design Taxi via SLRLounge)

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Image credits: Photographs by Guus Ter Beek and Tayfun Sarier and used with permission

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