proper manky

Science and Technology

• For the 2012 Olympic Games, Speedo has created a “racing system” called Fastskin 3 that combines suit and goggles and cap working in synergy to reduce drag and improve performance. The company called on experts in kinesiology, biomechanics, fluid dynamics and even a sports psychologist, who suggested a blue-gray tinge on goggle lenses to instill a sense of calm and focus. They tried the “Six Thinking Hats” method of brainstorming, a green hat for creative ways to attack a problem, a black one to look at the feasibility of those ideas. They “reverse brainstormed,” picturing how to make a swimmer go as slow as possible with oversized goggles and a suit compressing the body so parts stuck out, creating drag. [link]
• Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. In field after field, when it came to centrally important skills—stockbrokers recommending stocks, parole officers predicting recidivism, college admissions officials judging applicants—people with lots of experience were no better at their jobs than those with very little experience. (From a comment: “Some people have 3 years experience 10 times.”) [link]
• ‘Agnotology’, the art of spreading doubt (as pioneered by Big Tobacco), distorts the scepticism of research to obscure the truth. Areas of academic life have been tainted by the practice, but some scholars are fighting back by showing the public how to spot such sleight of hand. [link]
• Modern Indo-European languages – which include English – originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago. Researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose. Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages – the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree. The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated confirming the Anatolian origin. [link]
• The behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived. This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly. It turns out that harvester ants behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Researchers found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability. A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off. [link]
• Satellites tracking the extent of the sea ice found that it covered about 1.58 million square miles, or less than 30 percent of the Arctic Ocean’s surface. That is only slightly below the previous record low, set in 2007, but with weeks still to go in the summer melting season, it is clear that the record will be beaten by a wide margin. Parts of the Arctic have become like a giant Slushee this time of year. The amount of sea ice in the summer has declined more than 40 percent since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, a trend that most scientists believe is primarily a consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases. A time will come when the Arctic will be completely free of ice in the summer, perhaps by the middle of the century. By itself, the melting of sea ice does not raise global sea levels, because the floating ice is already displacing its weight in seawater. But the sharp warming that is causing the sea ice to melt also threatens land ice, notably the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting at an increasing rate. Melting land ice does raise sea levels. [link]
• In one of the Mars rover’s first images of Mount Sharp, scientists have spotted what is called an “unconformity.” The term refers to an evidently missing piece in the geological record, where one layer of sediment does not geologically neatly line up with that above it. Images from orbit had indicated that the lower foothills of Mount Sharp consisted of flat-lying sediments rich in “hydrated” minerals, formed in the presence of water, but that layers above seemed to lack the minerals. Now, the rover’s Mastcam – which provided the new colour panorama image – has taken a picture of the divide, showing sediments apparently deposited at a markedly different angle from those below them. Similar deposits on Earth can arise due to tectonic or volcanic activity. [link]
• Google reflects what is, over all, a male-driven engineering culture. Mr. Page values product people like himself over business people, they say, and at Google, as at many technology companies, product engineers tend to be men. The number of women working in professional computing jobs dropped 8 percent, to 25 percent of the total, between 2000 and 2011 while the number of men climbed 16 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. [link]

• Frequent Airline questions. Windows on planes don’t block UVA rays and the dose of UVA at 20,000 feet is a lot bigger dose than one would get on the surface of the Earth. Plane cabin humidity level is generally at 10 to 20 percent, which is lower than the typical indoor humidity level of 30 to 65 percent — so passengers are more likely to become dehydrated. Consuming alcohol in the cabin can further increase dehydration. Alcohol also decreases the ability of the brain to make use of oxygen — an effect that can be magnified by altitude. The Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report includes a “mishandled baggage rate, which combines lost, delayed, damaged and stolen bags. In May, there were 2.77 reports per 1,000 passengers. One reason there’s not Wi-Fi on every flight is that for each model of aircraft that a Wi-Fi system is to be used on, the manufacturer must get F.A.A. certification for the system, and the airline must get F.A.A. operational approval. [link]
• Why do Bedouins wear black in the desert? Because black cools the same way as any other color robe (and perhaps because black doesn’t show dirt.) [link]
• Researchers apparently have demonstrated that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random, or in one improvement on random promotion, randomly chose the people who will make the promotion decisions. [link]
• The type of reasoning Sherlock Holmes uses is of a conjectural kind – sometimes called abductive reasoning – that can’t offer certainty or any precise assessment of probability, only the best available account of events. He does this in many of his cases, but it’s not applying this rule that accounts for his astonishing feats. If Holmes can identify an unlikely pattern in events, it’s by using what Watson describes as his “extraordinary genius for minutiae”. As Holmes tells Inspector Lestrade, the plodding Scotland Yard officer: “You know my method. It is founded on the observation of trifles.” [link]
• A company owned by Ikea is planning a whole new suburb in London’s Stand East. Ikea is already selling pre-fab houses in Sweden and is apparently also getting into the discount/boutique hotel business. [link]
• This article contains a critique of Facebook’s goal to make every user “totally transparent” by encouraging users to chronicle their entire life on FB, and the increasing monetization of user data which forcing uses to constantly “defend themselves against FB.” The article speculates that it is becoming increasingly harder for users to manage their FB personality and will eventually end up using it only for managing their contacts. [link]