Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The real objective is to depict Silicon Valley as terrorist-helpers for the crime of offering privacy protections to Internet users.
The CIA's blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving,
was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence
that the perpetrators in Paris used the Internet to plot their attacks,
let alone used encryption technology.
...
The claim that the Paris attackers learned to use encryption from Snowden
is even more misleading. For many years before anyone heard of Snowden,
the U.S. government repeatedly warned that terrorists were using highly
advanced means of evading American surveillance.
The biggest risk we can take is to allow ourselves to feel safe
Constructing giant levees to contain mighty rivers makes people feel safe enough to build on the floodplain, making the consequences of future floods far worse. Introducing helmets and face masks in American football has increased some kinds of injury, because players can use their heads as a battering ram.
More, including a presentation with slides, at Why Safety Can Be Dangerous: A Conversation with Gregory Ip.
In Foolproof, Ip looks at how we often force new, unexpected risks to develop in unexpected places as we seek to minimize risk from crises like financial downturns and natural disasters. This is a phenomenon only likely to increase as our financial systems and cities become more complex and interconnected, but Ip concludes that these crises actually benefit society.
The agricultural revolution was one of the most profound events in human history, leading to the rise of modern civilization. Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago, people's DNA underwent widespread changes, altering their height, digestion, immune system and skin color.
What's the significance of that for current paleo diet mythology?
It crunches hundreds of factors to make personalized plans for controlling blood sugar. Some people even get cake and cookies.
The team found a huge amount of variation between the volunteers.
The same food would cause huge sugar spikes in some people but
tiny blips in others. The volunteers also differed substantially
in the foods that triggered the sharpest spikes: Participant 445,
for example, reacted strongly to bananas, while participant 644
spiked heavily post-cookies.
...
Zeevi and Korem showed that these personal differences were influenced
by familiar factors like age and body mass index, and also less
familiar ones like gut microbes. They found several groups of bacteria,
and families of bacterial genes, that were linked to stronger PPGRs
(postprandial glycemic responses).
"Today's vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices," said AMA Board Chair-elect Patrice A. Harris, M.D., M.A. "Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate."
Why was this ever allowed in the first place?
Mouth microbes, on the other hand, don't seem to care.
Gut microbial diversity was significantly altered by all four kinds of antibiotics, which lasted for months. In participants that took ciprofloxacin, microbial diversity was altered for up to 12 months. The antibiotic treatments also caused a spike in genes associated with antibiotic resistance. Lastly, the researchers noted that clindamycin killed off microbes that produce butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid that inhibit inflammation, carcinogenesis, and oxidative stress in the gut.
Even when sites did cite peer-reviewed studies, their interpretations were flawed.
For example, of the nearly 500 anti-vaccination websites examined
in the study, nearly two-thirds claimed that vaccines cause autism,
the researchers found. However, multiple studies have shown that
there is
no link between vaccines and autism.
...
About two-thirds of the websites used information that they represented
as scientific evidence, but in fact was not, to support their claims
that vaccines are dangerous, and about one-third used people's anecdotes
to reinforce those claims, the scientists found.
...
Some websites also cited actual peer-reviewed studies as their sources
of information, but they misinterpreted and misrepresented the findings
of these studies.
terms kept secret
The deal midway through a trial in Los Angeles federal court was
announced in a short statement that sugar-coated the hostility
that emerged from dueling lawsuits over losses each side blamed
on efforts by their rival to win over consumers.
...
Sugar processors had sought $1.5 billion in a false-advertising claim
against corn refiners and agribusinesses giants Archer Daniels Midland
and Cargill and other companies after they tried to rebrand their
publicity-plagued product as "corn sugar."
...
Corn refiners and the companies countersued for $530 million,
saying they suffered after the sugar industry made false and misleading
statements that included a comment that high fructose corn syrup was
as addictive as crack cocaine.
In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they're not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests.
The developed world's workforce will start to decline next year, threatening future global growth
Ever since the global financial crisis, economists have groped for reasons to explain why growth in the U.S. and abroad has repeatedly disappointed, citing everything from fiscal austerity to the euro meltdown. They are now coming to realize that one of the stiffest headwinds is also one of the hardest to overcome: demographics.
by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini
Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer's ability to remember. We have great features that most people don't realize exist.
'Smart scanner' with foot pedal and WiFi support
Not available yet and a gamble, but:
The Czur's creators at CzurTek describe their baby as "the world's first true smart scanner... Czur can scan books easily and connect to WiFi. Czur is faster than any scanner in the world, and also is a video projector." A 32-bit MIPS CPU and fast software for scanning and correction allow you to do the job at a clip of a page a second or so, aided by a foot pedal included with the scanner. Yes, there's supposed to be first-rate OCR. The Czur also stands out because of the WiFi capabilities you can use to create a book cloud for tablet, e-reader or cell phone, as well as for the visual presentation capabilities, complete with an HDMI port for direct connection to a projector.
Includes an online search tool to discover how much drug companies are paying your doctor.
by A. Michael Noll (April 8, 2012)
It is impossible to obtain a feel for what it was like at
Bell Telephone Laboratories by looking at memos and other archival
documents. You had to be there. This article reports my experiences
in working there in the research area during the 1960s--a period
that is considered to be part of its golden years.
...
Less than 10 percent of the work done at Bell Telephone Laboratories
was basic or fundamental research (performed mostly at the Murray Hill, NJ
facility). But that research had significant impact on today's world
of communication. Of the roughly 22,000 people who worked there
in the early 1980s, about 1500 were in the research area. The cost of
the research portion of the R&D work was about only one-tenth
of the average phone bill--a real bargain.
By Lawrence M. Krauss
Unfortunately for Einstein, entanglement, "spooky" or not,
is apparently real, as researchers in the Netherlands demonstrated
last week, just in time for Halloween. In doing so, the researchers
affirmed once again that quantum mechanics, as strange as it may seem,
works in every way we can test it.
...
Quantum theory, however, suggests that objects which have been carefully
prepared together and placed into a combined quantum state can,
even when separated across the galaxy, remain "entangled," as long as
neither has any significant interactions with other objects to break
the entanglement. If I perform a measurement on one of two entangled
objects, the state of the other object will be instantaneously affected,
no matter how far apart the two objects are.