avatarharuki zaemon

Justice, Interrupted: The Effect of Gender, Ideology and Seniority at Supreme Court Oral Arguments by Tonja Jacobi, Dylan Schweers :: SSRN

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We find that judicial interactions at oral argument are highly gendered, with women being interrupted at disproportionate rates by their male colleagues, as well as by male advocates. Oral argument interruptions are also highly ideological, not only because ideological foes interrupt each other far more than ideological allies do, but we show that conservatives interrupt liberals more frequently than vice versa.

How you can be tracked even with your GPS turned off

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This new tracking method comes from researchers at Princeton University. The team was able to create an app to detect information from sensors that it doesn’t need special permission to access. The trick in accurately tracking a person with this method is finding out what kind of activity they’re performing. Whether they’re walking, driving a car, or riding in a train or airplane, it’s pretty easy to figure out when you know what you’re looking for.

Guerrilla Public Service

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In the early morning of August 5, 2001, artist Richard Ankrom and a group of friends assembled on the 4th Street bridge over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles. They had gathered to commit a crime — one Ankrom had plotted for years.

Uncivil: The Sentence

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In 1640 three men attempted to escape indentured servitude. The outcome lay the foundation for the split in America that lead to Civil War.

ADSL works over wet string

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It has always been said that ADSL will work over a bit of wet string. Well one of our techies (www.aa.net.uk) took it upon himself to try it today at the office, and well done.

The sentence that helped set off the opioid crisis

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When OxyContin went to market in 1996, sales reps from Purdue Pharma hit one point particularly hard: Compared to other prescription opioids, this new painkiller was believed to be less likely to be addictive or abused. But recently unsealed documents in this investigative episode shed light on how the maker of OxyContin seems to have relied more on focus groups than on scientific studies to create an aggressive and misleading marketing campaign that helped fuel the national opioid crisis.

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo

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On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration  involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg set out to convince an all-male Supreme Court to take sex discrimination seriously

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“Equal protection of the laws” was granted to all persons by the 14th Amendment in 1868. But for nearly a century after that, women had a hard time convincing the courts that they should be allowed to be jurors, lawyers, and bartenders, just the same as men. A then-lawyer at the ACLU named Ruth Bader Ginsburg set out to convince an all-male Supreme Court to take sex discrimination seriously with an unconventional strategy. She didn’t just bring cases where women were the victims of discrimination; she also brought cases where men were the victims. In this episode, we look at how a key battle for gender equality was won with frat boys and beer.

Mathematicians Measure Infinities, Find They’re Equal

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In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two mathematicians have shown that two different variants of infinity are actually the same size. The advance touches on one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics: whether there exist infinities between the infinite size of the natural numbers and the larger infinite size of the real numbers.

CLKSCREW: Exposing the perils of security-oblivious energy management

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In this work, we present the CLKSCREW attack, a new class of fault attacks that exploit the security-obliviousness of energy management systems to break security. A novel benefit for the attackers is that these fault attacks become more accessible since they can now be conducted without the need for physical access to the devices or fault injection equipment.

My year inside the international alt-right

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For the past year, Patrik Hermansson, a young, gay, anti-racist activist from Sweden has been undercover inside the alt-right for HOPE not hate. He risked all to go undercover in some of the most notorious far-right networks in the US and the UK, culminating in the violent clashes in Charlottesville.

Lightning storms triggered by exhaust from cargo ships

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Aerosol particles from ships’ engine exhausts act as seeds, around which water vapour condenses into cloud droplets which ultimately leads to more intense thunderstorms and greater lightning activity.

The great nutrient collapse

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To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.

JavaScript is for Girls

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The traits of a “good programmer” differed by country, but they were universally male-gendered, enforced by hiring managers and other programmers who sought to replicate their own characteristics—not consciously, for the most part, but simply because the jobs were important.

Hicks, the computing historian, can’t stand it when people tout coding camps as a solution to technology’s gender problem. “I think these initiatives are well-meaning, but they totally misunderstand the problem. The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem. The idea that we’ll just stuff people into the pipeline assumes a meritocracy that does not exist.”

Are There Optical Communication Channels in Our Brains?

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Neuroscientists have long observed biophotons produced in brain tissue. Nobody knows what these photons are for, but researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities.

Women in Computer Science: A 1983 MIT Report

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In 1983, female computer scientists at MIT wrote a report on how sexism was pushing women out of their—historically female—field. These were their recommendations.

James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965)

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Historic debate between James Baldwin v. William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University on the question: “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”

J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)

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In 1952, a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien showed him a tape recorder, which the author had never seen before. Delighted, Tolkien sat for his friend and read from The Hobbit for 30 minutes “in this one incredible take”.

Birds on Islands Are Losing the Ability to Fly

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Flight muscles come with a cost. Even at rest, larger ones require more energy to maintain. So if birds can get away with smaller ones, evolution pushes them in that direction. Large flight muscles are especially useful when birds take off. That’s the most energetically demanding part of flying, and the bit that’s most important for escaping from ground predators. If such predators are absent, birds can take off at a more leisurely pace, and they can afford to have smaller (and cheaper) flight muscles.

As cockroaches scurry for the darkness, so do the [tech] Nazis

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But why? Why would American computer programmers drift towards Naziism? I think there’s an answer to that, too. They’re saturated in triumphal capitalism, and in particular, Libertarianism, which is the gateway drug to full-blown greed, which they’ve branded as “liberty”.