Lincoln teamed up with Harman to put a system in its MKX crossover that's as far from strapping a boom box to the dashboard as possible.
The post How Lincoln Crafted Its New Super-Deluxe Sound System appeared first on WIRED.
Austin.soplataOkay, I'm just too tired of this. It's like 90% of all the Wired articles on their RSS feed, which I presume is their actual "content", feel like advertising pieces, written by Wired, commissioned by Lincoln/whoever. And I understand that in covering tech, you're mostly covering actual products by companies who are trying to sell them, yeah. But if there was anything like a big technical breakdown, or links to papers if possible about what's technically interesting rather than half of an 8 "paragraph" "article", I would consider it, but stuff like this is essentially nothing more than advertising. I still love their sister Ars Technica deeply since they seem to do everything right that Wired does wrong in this regard, and I WANT to give wired a chance in part due to its history, but unless someone can give me a good reason I'm taking off my RSS. 90% of everything feels like ads in my RSS.
I don't normally make a big deal of removing things from RSS, but I wanted Wired to work, and it just feels like crap.
Lincoln teamed up with Harman to put a system in its MKX crossover that's as far from strapping a boom box to the dashboard as possible.
The post How Lincoln Crafted Its New Super-Deluxe Sound System appeared first on WIRED.
Austin.soplatatalk about a horse race, second-by-second analysis
Austin.soplataYou saw it here first, "Interpersonal Neural Synchronization (INS)", measured using "functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNRIS)" measuring I guess "hemodynamic effects"? 33 people in triads => N=11 really. I fully expect "interpersonal neural synchronization" to become a big buzzword in business/leadership seminars based on this; beware.
Who to follow for science-y words and pictures on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and beyond.
The post The Science Blogs, Twitter Feeds, and Channels We Love appeared first on WIRED.
Inside the cosplay-rave Venn diagram that is a DJ set by Game of Thrones actor Kristian Nairn (aka Hodor).
The post What It’s Like to Watch Hodor DJ a ‘Rave of Thrones’ appeared first on WIRED.
This week marks the release of the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education, the fourteenth issue of the series. One of the three studies in the report, “Girls, Boys, and Reading,” examines the gender gap in reading. Girls consistently outscore boys on reading assessments. They have for a long time. A 1942 study in Iowa discovered that girls were superior to boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills.[i] Girls have outscored boys on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessments since the first NAEP was administered in 1971.
I hope you’ll read the full study—and the other studies in the report—but allow me to summarize the main findings of the gender gap study here.
Eight assessments generate valid estimates of U.S. national reading performance: the Main NAEP, given at three grades (fourth, eighth, and 12th grades); the NAEP Long Term Trend (NAEP-LTT), given at three ages (ages nine, 13, and 17); the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), an international assessment given at fourth grade; and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment given to 15-year-olds. Females outscore males on the most recent administration of all eight tests. And the gaps are statistically significant. Expressed in standard deviation units, they range from 0.13 on the NAEP-LTT at age nine to 0.34 on the PISA at age 15.
The gaps are shrinking. At age nine, the gap on the NAEP-LTT declined from 13 scale score points in 1971 to five points in 2012. During the same time period, the gap at age 13 shrank from 11 points to eight points, and at age 17, from 12 points to eight points. Only the decline at age nine is statistically significant, but at ages 13 and 17, declines since the gaps peaked in the 1990s are also statistically significant. At all three ages, gaps are shrinking because of males making larger gains on NAEP than females. In 2012, seventeen-year-old females scored the same on the NAEP reading test as they did in 1971. Otherwise, males and females of all ages registered gains on the NAEP reading test from 1971-2012, with males’ gains outpacing those of females.
The gap is worldwide. On the 2012 PISA, 15-year-old females outperformed males in all sixty-five participating countries. Surprisingly, Finland, a nation known for both equity and excellence because of its performance on PISA, evidenced the widest gap. Girls scored 556 and boys scored 494, producing an astonishing gap of 62 points (about 0.66 standard deviations—or more than one and a half years of schooling). Finland also had one of the world’s largest gender gaps on the 2000 PISA, and since then it has widened. Both girls’ and boys’ reading scores declined, but boys’ declined more (26 points vs. 16 points). To put the 2012 scores in perspective, consider that the OECD average on the reading test is 496. Finland’s strong showing on PISA is completely dependent on the superior performance of its young women.
The gap seems to disappear by adulthood. Tests of adult reading ability show no U.S. gender gap in reading by 25 years of age. Scores even tilt toward men in later years.
The words “seems to disappear” are used on purpose. One must be careful with cross-sectional data not to assume that differences across age groups indicate an age-based trend. A recent Gallup poll, for example, asked several different age groups how optimistic they were about finding jobs as adults. Optimism fell from 68% in grade five to 48% in grade 12. The authors concluded that “optimism about future job pursuits declines over time.” The data do not support that conclusion. The data were collected at a single point in time and cannot speak to what optimism may have been before or after that point. Perhaps today’s 12th graders were even more pessimistic several years ago when they were in fifth grade. Perhaps the 12th-graders are old enough to remember when unemployment spiked during the Great Recession and the fifth-graders are not. Perhaps 12th-graders are simply savvier about job prospects and the pitfalls of seeking employment, topics on which fifth-graders are basically clueless.
At least with the data cited above we can track measures of the same cohorts’ gender gap in reading over time. By analyzing multiple cross-sections—data collected at several different points in time—we can look at real change. Those cohorts of nine-year-olds in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, are—respectively—today in their 50s, 40s, and 30s. Girls were better readers than boys when these cohorts were children, but as grown ups, women are not appreciably better readers than men.
Care must be taken nevertheless in drawing firm conclusions. There exists what are known as cohort effects that can bias measurements. I mentioned the Great Recession. Experiencing great historical cataclysms, especially war or economic chaos, may bias a particular cohort’s responses to survey questions or even its performance on tests. American generations who experienced the Great Depression, World War II, and the Vietnam War—and more recently, the digital revolution, the Great Recession, and the Iraq War—lived through events that uniquely shape their outlook on many aspects of life.
The gender gap is large, worldwide, and persistent through the K-12 years. What should be done about it? Maybe nothing. As just noted, the gap seems to dissipate by adulthood. Moreover, crafting an effective remedy for the gender gap is made more difficult because we don’t definitely know its cause. Enjoyment of reading is a good example. Many commentators argue that schools should make a concerted effort to get boys to enjoy reading more. Enjoyment of reading is statistically correlated with reading performance, and the hope is that making reading more enjoyable would get boys to read more, thereby raising reading skills.
It makes sense, but I’m skeptical. The fact that better readers enjoy reading more than poor readers—and that the relationship stands up even after boatloads of covariates are poured into a regression equation—is unpersuasive evidence of causality. As I stated earlier, PISA produces data collected at a single point in time. It isn’t designed to test causal theories. Reverse causality is a profound problem. Getting kids to enjoy reading more may in fact boost reading ability. But the causal relationship might be flowing in the opposite direction, with enhanced skill leading to enjoyment. The correlation could simply be indicating that people enjoy activities that they’re good at—a relationship that probably exists in sports, music, and many human endeavors, including reading.
A key question for policymakers is whether boosting boys’ enjoyment of reading would help make boys better readers. I investigate by analyzing national changes in PISA reading scores from 2000, when the test was first given, to 2102. PISA creates an Index of Reading Enjoyment based on several responses to a student questionnaire. Enjoyment of reading has increased among males in some countries and decreased in others. Is there any relationship between changes in boys’ enjoyment and changes in PISA reading scores?
There is not. The correlation coefficient for the two phenomena is -0.01. Nations such as Germany raised boys’ enjoyment of reading and increased their reading scores by about 10 points on the PISA scale. France, on the other hand, also raised boys’ enjoyment of reading, but French males’ reading scores declined by 15 points. Ireland increased how much boys enjoy reading by a little bit but the boys’ scores fell a whopping 37 points. Poland’s males actually enjoyed reading less in 2012 than in 2000, but their scores went up more than 14 points. No relationship.
How should policymakers proceed? Large, cross-sectional assessments are good for measuring academic performance at one point in time. They are useful for generating hypotheses based on observed relationships, but they are not designed to confirm or reject causality. To do that, randomized control trials should be conducted of programs purporting to boost reading enjoyment. Also, consider that it ultimately may not matter whether enjoying reading leads to more proficient readers. Enjoyment of reading may be an end worthy of attainment irrespective of its relationship to achievement. In that case, RCTs should carefully evaluate the impact of interventions on both enjoyment of reading and reading achievement, whether the two are related or not.
[i] J.B. Stroud and E.F. Lindquist, “Sex differences in achievement in the elementary and secondary schools,” Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 33(9) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1942), 657–667.
The GIF was apparently the official answer Google sent to a reporter in response to his seeming scoop on a new YouTube livestreaming plan.
The post Google Sends Reporter a GIF Instead of a ‘No Comment’ appeared first on WIRED.
Austin.soplataI swear by melatonin. If you use it once/week or so, and at the "optimal" dose of 0.5 mg (which is much smaller than the pills you can buy, since that amount is actually patented by MIT), take around 8-9pm, it greatly increases my sleep propensity from 10-11pm. I then almost always wake up within an hour sunrise. If I take it and then stay up late, though, I lose those effects.
Hospitals are notoriously difficult places to sleep, despite efforts to make them less noisy. Cheap, simple workarounds can help, a study says. Taking the sleep hormone melatonin helped the most.
Neuroscience: Nanoparticles turn on neurons
Nature 519, 7543 (2015). doi:10.1038/519264c
Gold nanoparticles can be attached to neurons and used to stimulate the cells, without introducing any genes.Current 'optogenetic' methods use light to excite specific neurons, but genes must first be inserted into the cells to make them sensitive to light. To develop an alternative
Chuck Wendig in Terrible Minds:
Okay, fine, go read the article.
I’ll wait here.
*checks watch*
Ah, there you are.
I see you’re trembling with barely-concealed rage. Good on you.
I will now whittle down this very bad, very poisonous article — I say “poisonous” because it does a very good job of spreading a lot of mostly bad and provably false information.
Let us begin.
“Writers are born with talent.”
Yep. There I am. Already angry. I’m so angry, I’m actually just peeing bees. If you’re wondering where all these bees came from? I have peed them into the world.
This is one of the worst, most toxic memes that exists when it comes to writers. That somehow, we slide out of the womb with a fountain pen in our mucus-slick hands, a bestseller gleam in our rheumy eyes. We like to believe in talent, as if it’s a definable thing — as if, like with the retconned Jedi, we can just take a blood test and look for literary Midichlorians to chart your authorial potential. Is talent real? Some genetic quirk that makes us good at one thing, bad at another? Don’t know, don’t care.
What I know is this: your desire matters. If you desire something bad enough, if you really want it, you will be driven to reach for it. No promises you’ll find success, but a persistent, almost psychopathic urge forward will allow you to clamber up over those muddy humps of failure and into the eventual fresh green grass of actual accomplishment.
Writers are not born. They are made. Made through willpower and work. Made by iteration, ideation, reiteration. Made through learning — learning that comes from practicing, reading, and through teachers who help shepherd you through those things in order to give your efforts context.
More here.
Austin.soplataI don't know about you all, but on any Xbox Live multiplayer service (like Call of Duty, etc.) that has voice chat, you don't have to go very far to find relatively anonymous racism, homophobia, all kinds of threats, insults you can't imagine. If anything, most of the time it sounds like it's coming from 14 year olds. It is OMNIPRESENT on networks like Xbox Live. This is only the 0.0001% of the time there are actually repercussions. PC games are better on average, but there are still bad communities. This is why newer games like Destiny make you have to go out of your way/"friend" someone to activate voice chat.
A Mississippi sheriff's deputy was fired from his job in Jackson County after a YouTube video allegedly captured him yelling racist slurs and violently threatening other players in an online video game. Friday's firing of deputy Michael Slater was confirmed by Jackson news outlet The Clarion-Ledger, who learned of the deputy's threats by way of a Free Thought Project report.
In the video, a Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare player who identified himself only as "David" received an angry private voice message from someone he'd encountered in a prior game ("you talk a lot of shit to suck as bad as you do, you're fuckin' terrible"), all while recording their play to make a "trolling" video for YouTube. David invited this angry player to a private voice chat session, at which point the conversation escalated quickly on both sides.
"In real life, you wouldn't wanna see me with a fuckin' gun," David was overheard saying to the person who eventually identified himself as a Jackson County sheriff's deputy. David was then heard shouting a stream of threats and asking for Slater's address, to which Slater actually obliged. (When asked for his own address, David responded, in true trolling fashion, "one-two-zero, four-five, D... eez nuts.")
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Austin.soplataI think this may have pushed me over the edge. I love Ars' reporting so much, I may have to start subscribing ;)
Tournaments, brackets, and cut-down basketball nets aren't the typical currency here at Ars, but we like any excuse to apply seasonal sports analogies to nerdy fare. No, really. Look: We're taking a giant logical leap and applying the world of college basketball to, er, the world of hacking movies!
Just go with us here. For decades, Hollywood has had a strange relationship with hacking, computer crime, and cyber warfare, and the results have ranged from fun to tense to so-bad-it's-good hilarious. As a result, the movie-hacking rainbow is pretty diverse and, importantly to us, difficult to rank from best to worst.
Rather than make a definitive, ordered list, we decided to hand the debate to you, our esteemed sci-fi super-fans. And with Spring coming around the corner, we're going with a March-related theme and presenting our picks for best, weirdest, and most interesting hacking-related movies in an elimination tournament. Starting this week, we're pitting 16 films against each other—a sweet selection, really—in eight vote-based contests. (64 would have been way too many, so we've already listed some losers.)
Read 78 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Austin.soplatathis x1000. These people understand my pain.
The near-record winter is testing a longtime Boston tradition of allowing residents to save a parking space they shoveled out 48 hours. The problem is that the snow hasn't stopped falling.
Welcome back to Star Trek Week(s) here at SFAM! I’m going to try and do one comic for each of the five live-action Star Trek TV series. Tuesday’s TOS comic sure did cause some hubbub!
Have you guys seen the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Outcast?
Me neither.
Come on back Friday for more trekky goodness!
The beautiful staircase in my home away from home in London this time at the Hotel Cafe Royal. It feels so deco chic that I keep expecting Fred Astaire to dance down those step at any minute.
Austin.soplataHopefully change will happen soon enough that Winter Doesn't Come for the Reef.
Matt Purple
Politics, Australia
Earlier this week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott beat back a vote to decapitate the center-right Liberal Party of his leadership. The question now is how many more antagonists can he fend off.
There’s Australia’s Labor Party, once moribund after two chaotic prime ministerships, is now surging in popularity. Its only question is whether they should strike Abbott now or let him limp into the next election. There’s Malcolm Turnbull, the environmentalist communications minister who was considered the most likely replacement for Abbott, and is now said to be biding his time, backed by a bloc of moderate Liberals distrustful of their PM’s conservatism. There’s Julie Bishop, the enigmatic Liberal foreign minister, who is officially standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Abbott, but whose support of his leadership is tepid to say the least.
If all this calls to mind a certain HBO show minus the full-frontal nudity, Abbott has a denial ready. He recently promised that his government would never degenerate into a “Game of Thrones circus, which the Labor Party gave us.” But it’s hard to watch the power struggles without thinking that, as Australian memes and T-shirts cheekily responded, “winter is coming” for Abbott. A recent News Corp poll found mammoth margins of voters preferring both Bishop and Turnbull to Abbott, and the prime minister’s approval rating bottoming out at 24 percent. Abbott has often been called an Australian George W. Bush; now the comparison is complete.
And while Abbott did indeed “kill the spill”—Down Under dialect for a party leader not getting canned—his popularity problems began long before any serious chatter of mutiny. His Liberal Party was elected by a landslide margin in 2013 in a sharp rebuke of the Labor Party. From there the Liberals easily formed a coalition with several smaller right-leaning parties and Abbott became the first Liberal prime minister since John Howard.
Read full articleAustin.soplatahighlights: supporting the use of chemical warfare! And yeah, I know it was "in" at the time, but still.
Austin.soplata"heh heh heh"
The "State of the Union Machine" randomly generates text based on different presidents' actual speeches. Their words and phrases can be patched together to create a multi-administration text.
Austin.soplata"Mental disorders are increasingly understood biologically...we find that biological explanations significantly reduce clinicians’ empathy. This is alarming because clinicians’ empathy is important for the therapeutic alliance between mental health providers and patients and significantly predicts positive clinical outcomes. "
not good. I would've guessed the opposite!