The Helper

A new report released this week from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that Facebook remains the leading social network among American teenagers. It’s also the most reviled. While some teenagers interviewed by Pew claimed they “enjoyed using it,” the majority complained of “an increasing adult presence, high-pressure or otherwise negative social interactions (‘drama’), or feeling overwhelmed by others who share too much.”

In other words, Facebook—as any adult with a profile knows—feels a lot like high school. “I think Facebook can be fun, but also it's drama central,” one 14-year-old girl said. “On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a ‘like,’ that they wouldn't say in real life." Said another, “It's so competitive to get the most likes [on a Facebook picture]. It's like your social position.” Ninety-four percent of American teenagers maintain a Facebook profile, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. “Honestly,” one 15-year-old girl told Pew, “I'm on it constantly but I hate it so much.”

If Facebook is high school, other social media platforms can function as opportunities to escape from Facebook's pervasive social structure—the online equivalent to cutting class and hanging out beneath the bleachers. “While ‘drama’ is the result of normal teenage dynamics rather than anything specific to Facebook, teens are sometimes resentful toward Facebook from this negative association,” Pew reports. Online spaces outside of Facebook—all of which attract just a fraction of Facebook’s teen user base—become places “where teens seek out spaces free of adults, and teens who want to avoid the drama of teenage life try to inhabit alternative social spaces.”

Read more here.
Scientific article can be found here.

Pope Francis’s pronouncement that God has “redeemed all of us … even the atheists” Wednesday surprised both believers and nonbelievers around the world, who are used to stricter edicts from the Catholic church. It also got us wondering where the world’s atheists live.

There’s surprisingly little data available on the subject. But a 2012 poll by WIN/Gallup International — an international polling firm that is not associated with the D.C.-based Gallup group — asked more than 50,000 people in 40 countries whether they considered themselves “religious,” “not religious” or “convinced atheist.” Overall, the poll concluded that roughly 13 percent of global respondents identified as atheists, more than double the percentage in the U.S.

The highest reported share of self-described atheists is in China: an astounding 47 percent. Faith has a complicated history in China. The state is deeply skeptical of organized religion, which it has long considered a threat to its authority.

In the Taiping rebellion of the 19th century, a religious cult started a Chinese civil war that killed millions of people and left the country exposed to European powers. The official ideology of the Communist government scorned both “new” Western religions and more traditionally Chinese faiths, destroying countless temples and relics during the Cultural Revolution of 1967 to 1977. While today’s Chinese leaders do not seem to share Mao Zedong’s fervent belief that China’s rich religious history was holding it back from modernity, nor do they seem prepared to bring that history back.

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Scientists said Tuesday they have detected radioactive cesium from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant in plankton collected from all 10 points in the Pacific they checked, with the highest levels at around 25 degrees north latitude and 150 degrees west longitude.

Researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology were among the team members who released a report on the findings at a meeting of the Japan Geoscience Union at the Makuhari Messe international convention center in Chiba Prefecture.

Minoru Kitamura, a marine ecologist and senior researcher at the agency, said plankton are thought to play a key role in the dispersion of the cesium because they are eaten by bigger fish. Kitamura said his team will continue to study the accumulation of radioactive cesium.

The researchers collected plankton at 10 points in the Pacific from off Hokkaido to Guam between January and February 2012.

They detected cesium-134 in plankton at all 10 points. The density of radioactive cesium was the highest at 8.2 to 10.5 becquerels per kilogram in samples collected from waters around 25 degrees north latitude and 150 degrees east longitude. The lowest concentration at any of the 10 points was 1.9 becquerels per kilogram.

The density of cesium in seawater was highest in waters at around latitude 36 to 40 degrees north, the team said.

Source. (Japan Times)

New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione today issued a warning on the potential for 3D printed guns to be used in serious crimes in the state.

The NSW Police revealed that the force has created and tested two 3D-printed firearms. The police used the Liberator pistol blueprints produced by US-firm Defense Distributed. The original plans for the gun were downloaded more than 100,000 times before the company pulled them from its site under pressure from the US State Department.

Police believe that despite this, the files are still circulating. The commissioner said that a Liberator pistol had experienced a catastrophic misfire during testing. The failure would have been capable of seriously injuring the person using the firearm, the police chief said.

One of the motivations for holding today's press conference was to warn of danger to the user if someone attempts to print, assemble and fire a Liberator out of curiosity. As with other firearms, possession of a Liberator is prohibited unless the owner has an appropriate licence. It's an "offence to make one, possess one, use one," Scipione said.

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Cockroaches will eat anything. Except sugar, that is. Some of the common pests have evolved to learn how to detect and avoid a certain kind of glucose often used in bait traps, according to research published in the US journal Science on Thursday.

Scientists focused on the slender and small brown German cockroaches, which live all over the world in homes, offices and apartment buildings — anywhere humans tread and leave crumbs behind.

An apparent disdain for sweet-laced traps was first observed in some of these roaches in the early 1990s, about seven to eight years after commercial traps using glucose came on the market and entered into widespread use, said researcher Coby Schal of North Carolina State University.

The roaches were evolving quickly, scientists found. New generations were emerging that had inherited a genetic aversion to glucose. And now, Schal says he and his colleagues understand why. Glucose-averse roaches use their small taste-hairs to sample food first and if it contains glucose, they actually taste it as bitter, not sweet.

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Kim Dotcom has announced that he is the inventor of the so-called two-step authentication system and has a patent to prove it. The Megaupload founder says the security mechanism, which has just been introduced by Twitter, is being used by U.S. companies more than a billion times every week without permission. Dotcom says he doesn’t want to sue, but might if the likes of Google and Facebook don’t help fund his legal battle with the U.S. Government.

While the United States Government paints Kim Dotcom as some kind of international super criminal, the Megaupload founder sees himself rather differently.

Continually over the past year and half, and particularly since his January 2012 arrest in New Zealand, the German-born entrepreneur has described himself as an innovator, someone who creates rather than destroys as the U.S. would have people believe.

Dotcom’s achievements are many and his cloud storage companies past and present have certainly generated hundreds of headlines. However, it seems that the New Zealand resident’s creative mind was already working overtime more than 15 years ago to come up with an idea that is now gaining serious traction online.

Two-step authentication is a system designed to prevent unauthorized access to online accounts. If a user logs into a service from an unusual device or location, the service sends a message containing a password to a trusted device such as a cellphone. This enables the service to authenticate the access and allow the log in.

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CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study shows there is a gender gap when it comes to behavior and self-control in American young children – one that does not appear to exist in children in Asia.

In the United States, girls had higher levels of self-regulation than boys. Self-regulation is defined as children’s ability to control their behavior and impulses, follow directions, and persist on a task. It has been linked to academic performance and college completion, in past studies by Oregon State University researchers.

In three Asian countries, the gender gap in the United States was not found when researchers directly assessed the self-regulation of 3-6 year olds. The results appear in the new issue of the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

“These findings suggest that although we often expect girls to be more self-regulated than boys, this may not be the case for Asian children,” said Shannon Wanless, lead author of the study. Wanless began conducting the research during her doctoral studies at Oregon State University under Megan McClelland, an associate professor in OSU’s Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families. Wanless is now on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

One interesting part of the researcher’s findings: Although there were no gender differences in self-regulation when the children were directly assessed using a variety of school-readiness tasks, teachers in Asia perceived girls as performing better on self-regulation even when they actually performed equally to boys.

Read more here.

If US kids were to be able to control their behavior and impulses, will it help with preventing them from being idiots on the internet? Thought to ponder...