Happy Birthday, Celsius! Canada’s use of metric system turning 50 - Global News [2024-12-31]

Happy Birthday, Celsius!

Environment Canada’s use of Celsius turns 50 years old in 2025.

It was the catalyst of a lengthy national metric conversion that abruptly ended a decade after it began.

The result is seen and felt every day. Canadians wear clothes measured in inches and buy gas by the litre. They drink from millilitre beer cans and step on bathroom scales in pounds. They eat cereal by the gram and sub sandwiches by the foot.

Give someone an inch, and they’ll take a kilometre.

A bone-chilling April Fools’ Day in 1975 marked the first time Canadians used Celsius to measure weather temperature.

“We were the guinea pig,” said David Phillips with Environment and Climate Change Canada. He joined the weather service seven years before the Celsius switch.

They tried to get the word out, he said.

“I remember that first little flyer that (said), ‘It’s no April Fools’ joke.”

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Global News
December 31, 2024

Evolution journal editors resign en masse - Ars Technica [2024-12-30]

Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry.

"This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."

The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting."

There is also a major restructuring of the editorial board underway that aims to reduce the number of associate editors by more than half, which "will result in fewer AEs handling far more papers, and on topics well outside their areas of expertise."

Furthermore, there are plans to create a third-tier editorial board that functions largely in a figurehead capacity, after Elsevier "unilaterally took full control" of the board's structure in 2023 by requiring all associate editors to renew their contracts annually—which the board believes undermines its editorial independence and integrity.

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Ars Technica
December 30, 2024

Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security - Ars Technica [2024-12-30]

It's that time again, when families and friends gather and implore the more technically inclined among them to troubleshoot problems they're having behind the device screens all around them. One of the most vexing and most common problems is logging into accounts in a way that's both secure and reliable.

Using the same password everywhere is easy, but in an age of mass data breaches and precision-orchestrated phishing attacks, it's also highly unadvisable. Then again, creating hundreds of unique passwords, storing them securely, and keeping them out of the hands of phishers and database hackers is hard enough for experts, let alone Uncle Charlie, who got his first smartphone only a few years ago. No wonder this problem never goes away.

Passkeys—the much-talked-about password alternative to passwords that have been widely available for almost two years—was supposed to fix all that. When I wrote about passkeys two years ago, I was a big believer. I remain convinced that passkeys mount the steepest hurdle yet for phishers, SIM swappers, database plunderers, and other adversaries trying to hijack accounts. How and why is that?

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Ars Technica
December 30, 2024

Captain Sensible – One Christmas Catalogue

 Music Video – YouTube – Captain Sensible – One Christmas Catalogue

Sarah Silverman – Give the Jew Girl Toys

Music Video – YouTube – Sarah Silverman – Give the Jew Girl Toys

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index – Ars Technica – 2024-12-19

The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals amid questions about quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.

On December 16, Clarivate—a scholarly publication analytics company—removed the journal Chemosphere from its platform, the Web of Science, which is a key index for academic journals. The indexing platform tracks citations and calculates journal “impact factors,” a proxy for relevance in its field. It’s a critical metric not only for the journals but for the academic authors of the journal’s articles, who use the score in their pursuit of promotions and research funding.

To be included in the Web of Science, Clarivate requires journals to follow editorial quality criteria. According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.

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Ars Technica
December 19, 2024

Handwriting activates broader brain networks than typing, study shows – PsyPost – 2024-12-19

While keyboards dominate modern classrooms, a new study in Frontiers in Psychology suggests handwriting may be irreplaceable when it comes to learning. Researchers found that writing by hand activates far more extensive and interconnected brain networks compared to typing, particularly in regions linked to memory and sensory processing. These findings provide new evidence that handwriting engages the brain in unique ways, raising concerns about the growing reliance on digital tools for education.

As digital tools replace traditional handwriting in classrooms, concerns have arisen about how this shift might impact learning. Typing on a keyboard is often preferred because it enables children to express themselves more quickly and with less physical strain. However, prior research has shown that handwriting is linked to better memory retention, letter recognition, and overall learning outcomes. The fine motor movements involved in handwriting seem to stimulate the brain differently than typing, but the exact neurological mechanisms behind this difference remained unclear.

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PsyPost
December 19, 2024

Autism Is Not a Trend: Four things autism is and one thing it isn’t – Psychology Today – 2024-12-18

The first I learned about autism was as a kid told I had Asperger’s. For a long time, what autism meant to me was not having friends, feeling misunderstood, and generally being a bit weird. When I began reading more and hearing some of the beliefs people had about autistic people, that we didn’t have empathy or that we lack theory of mind, it felt exceptionally hurtful.

At that time in my life, it felt like autism meant people not viewing me as a whole person. I argued, as an adolescent, that I did not have Asperger’s and cried whenever I saw the word autism on my medical and educational documents.

The neurodiversity movement is revolutionizing how autism is understood. Since my experiences in the early 2000s, most of those troubling myths I encountered have been disproven. We know today that autistic people do have empathy. Some autistic people are hyperempathetic (Kimber colleagues, 2024).

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Psychology Today
December 18, 2024

‘Don’t make us pay’: Northern Ontario mayors say immigration cuts hurt their cities – Global News – 2024-12-15

As the federal government looks to drastically reduce its immigration targets over the next few years, the mayors of northern Ontario’s largest cities say they need more immigrants to sustain local economies and population.

The mayors of Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay and Sudbury are calling on Ottawa to deliver on its promise to make permanent a pilot program that resettled skilled workers in their communities, saying a one-size-fits-all approach to immigration policy doesn’t benefit northern regions.

Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Matthew Shoemaker said the now-closed rural and northern immigration pilot program allowed employers in the city to fill highly skilled positions in aircraft repair, engineering and various trades.

“It has been an enormous success,” Shoemaker said, adding that without economic immigrants such jobs would disappear from the region.

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Global News
December 15, 2024

Cards Against Humanity is suing SpaceX for trespassing on its ‘pristine’ property – The Verge [2024-09-20]

Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX for allegedly trespassing on and damaging its property in Texas. The company behind the card game is asking for $15 million in damages, according to its complaint against SpaceX, filed in Texas state court on Thursday, but has also said it will “accept Twitter.com in compensation.”

SpaceX has been using the “pristine vacant property” in Cameron County, Texas without permission for around six months, the suit claims. Cards Against Humanity bought the plot in 2017 as part of a stunt to “make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for [former President Donald] Trump to build his wall.” SpaceX has since acquired “many of the vacant lots” on the road surrounding Cards Against Humanity’s property, the complaint claims, and started building “large modern-looking buildings, changing the entire dynamic of the area” — and damaging Cards Against Humanity’s land in the process.

As part of the construction process, SpaceX has cleared vegetation, compacted the soil so employees and contractors could park, and brought in generators to run equipment and lights. These actions, the complaint claims, have not only damaged the property but also hurt Cards Against Humanity’s relationship with its customers.

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The Verge
September 20, 2024

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying – Ars Technica [2024-09-12]

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone’s data stored on spinning disks.

“In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know,” Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies.

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Ars Technica
September 12, 2024

Generative AI backlash hits annual writing event, prompting resignations – Ars Technica [2024-09-04]

Over the weekend, the nonprofit National Novel Writing Month organization (NaNoWriMo) published an FAQ outlining its position on AI, calling categorical rejection of AI writing technology “classist” and “ableist.” The statement caused a backlash online, prompted four members of the organization’s board to step down, and prompted a sponsor to withdraw its support.

“We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology,” wrote NaNoWriMo, “and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.”

NaNoWriMo, known for its annual challenge where participants write a 50,000-word manuscript in November, argued in its post that condemning AI would ignore issues of class and ability, suggesting the technology could benefit those who might otherwise need to hire human writing assistants or have differing cognitive abilities.

After word of the FAQ spread, many writers on social media platforms voiced their opposition to NaNoWriMo’s position. Generative AI models are commonly trained on vast amounts of existing text, including copyrighted works, without attribution or compensation to the original authors. Critics say this raises major ethical questions about using such tools in creative writing competitions and challenges.

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Ars Technica
September 4, 2024