Author: peterjang73

A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
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Scanner ‘Reads’ Pages Of Closed Books

letters

A variant on X-rays could scan the pages of a closed book according to MIT researchers. Tests already show the technique working on a bundle of nine sheets of paper.

The research is detailed in the snappily-titled Nature Communications article “Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures.”

It’s based around using T-rays, the letter coming from terahertz radiation, which is the band between microwave and infrared. The researchers have taken advantage of the fact that ink and paper absorb different frequencies of this radiation in different ways.

They also benefited from the way that even when book pages are closed, there’s a tiny air pocket between them. That’s enough for a T-ray camera to distinguish between paper and air and in turn distinguish individual pages.

After developing an algorithm to exploit these characteristics, the researchers tested it on a stack of nine sheets of paper, each 300 microns (thousandths of a millimeter) thick. That’s actually bulkier than printer paper or most book pages and is more akin to a cheap business card.

Each sheet had one capital letter written on it, around eight millimeters high, which is roughly equivalent to writing with a 24-point typeface. The scanning process produced an image for each sheet that made it possible to correctly identify the letter in each case. The image above is of a sheet with an L. The faint traces of H and Z are shadows cast from sheets on top of this, which is why the system has to be set up so precisely to distinguish the letters.

While this particular set-up would be of fairly limited use, the researchers say it was more of a proof of concept and that it should be possible to scale the principle up to deal with more sheets of paper and/or smaller text.

The most likely use of the technology would be to speed up bulk scanning of documents and books. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has also said its interested in using the concept to scan antique books that are too fragile to open. It could also be used for analyzing structures with lots of thin layers such as paint and coatings.

More excitable responses to the study have suggested spies using it to read intercepted letters without opening them, though the researchers note that this could be countered by using specific types of ink that couldn’t be “seen” this way.

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Fidgeters Gadget Earns Millions Of Dollars

Fidgeters Gadget Earns Millions Of Dollars




fidgetcube

A company has raised nearly $4 million for a small cube aimed at fidgety people. With more than a month to go in a Kickstarter campaign, more than 200,000 Fidget Cubes have been sold.

The cube is being marketed on the idea that having something to fiddle with helps focus attention on more important tasks. Each face is around an inch across and has a different activity, namely:

  • a set of five clickable buttons (similar to retractable pens);
  • a mini-stick similar to the L3 and R3 buttons on Playstation consoles;
  • a pivot switch similar to that on a light fitting;
  • a set of three gear dials (similar to a combination lock) and a rollable/clickable ball;
  • a flat dial to rotate; and
  • a rather disappointing face which simply has an oval depression.

Busting stress this way won’t be cheap as the cube will cost $25 after launch, though as usual the Kickstarter campaign offers discounts. It seems to have hit a nerve however: after setting a $15,000 funding goal, the makers have raised $3,916,783 at the time of writing. They say that despite the huge production run that’s now necessary, they still plan to deliver by December as scheduled but any pledges from now on will have a shipping target of March.




























































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Chemical Giant Bayer Agrees To Buy Monsanto For $66 Billion


The Monsanto logo on a building at the firm Manufacturing Site and Operations Center near Antwerp, Belgium, on May 24.

John Thys/AFP/Getty Images


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John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

The Monsanto logo on a building at the firm Manufacturing Site and Operations Center near Antwerp, Belgium, on May 24.

John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

The German pharmaceutical and chemical giant Bayer says it will buy U.S. seed seller Monsanto for $66 billion in an all-cash deal that will create the world’s largest supplier of seeds and agricultural chemicals.

The takeover offer, which Monsanto has accepted, is $4 billion more than Bayer had initially offered and a 44 percent premium over Monsanto’s stock price on May 9, a day before negotiations began. Bayer says it will be taking on $57 billion in debt to finance the purchase, which is the largest-ever foreign acquisition by a German company.

The two companies have little product overlap, NPR’s Jim Zarroli explained back when the deal was being negotiated. But regulators might still be wary of the purchase, based on the combined control the company would have over agricultural products.

St. Louis-based Monsanto is the world’s largest seller of seeds and the leading producer of genetically modified crops.

Bayer, meanwhile, might be familiar to many for its aspirin products — but it’s also a major player in pesticides. As the Two-Way has reported, “the company is a German pharmaceutical and chemical powerhouse with 102,000 employees and $41 billion in revenue last year. Like Monsanto, it sells agricultural products such as seeds and pesticides. That’s in addition to a plastics business, diagnostic imaging products, health products for animals and a biotech division.”

The purchase is part of “a dramatic wave of consolidation among the companies that sell seeds and pesticides to farmers,” as NPR’s Dan Charles puts it.

“Two other such deals are currently in the works,” Dan explains. “DuPont is merging with Dow, and the China National Chemical Corp. is buying Syngenta, which is currently the world’s biggest seller of agricultural chemicals.”

The Bayer-Monsanto deal might have interesting cultural consequences, as well

Monsanto, Dan notes, “has come to represent, in a shorthand way, lots of things that some people love to hate: genetically modified food; patents on seeds; lawsuits against farmers for saving and replanting those seeds; and corporate influence over government food policy.”

Dan says there are a number of questions: Will people still march against Monsanto if Monsanto is no more? And how will Europe — famously opposed to GMOs — respond to the world’s biggest GMO seller becoming an European company, instead of an American one?

Reuters reports that Bernstein Research analysts give the deal a 50/50 chance of being approved by regulators.

The analysts anticipate “political pushback” to the deal, including resistance from farmers, the wire service writes.

The deal comes as falling crop prices have caused a slide in farm profits, “which has cut into the amount that farmers can pay for chemicals and seeds,” Jim tells our Newscast unit.

He says the deal is expected to be completed by the end of 2017. But should the deal fail to win regulatory approval, Bayer has agreed to pay a $2 billion fee.

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The Horrifying Truth Behind Pokemon Professors

Pokemon Professors seem to have a pretty comfy job; they sit in their labs all day, in their freakin’ pajamas, ordering kids to do their bidding and get off their dang bikes. But how did they ever get these positions in the first place?

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This New Electric Bus Can Drive 350 Miles on One Charge

In the world of electric vehicles, Tesla gets most of the love. Over 100,000 of Elon Musk’s big, bad autos are zooming around the world, gasoline-free. But how many of those can claim to take an additional 40-odd cars off the road—each?

That’s the promise of the Catalyst E2 Series, a new electric bus debuting today that’s aimed squarely at city public transit.

The bus from Proterra, a leading North American manufacturer, is set to hit the streets next year. Musk’s top of the line Model S gets 315 miles per charge. Proterra’s newest? Up to 350 miles on city streets—enough, in many places, for a full day’s worth of routes. Last month, this Goliath logged 600 miles on a Michelin track on one juice.

Personal electric cars are great, but larger vehicles like buses and trucks (at least those that operate in cities) are arguably better. Public buses, in particular, are perfect candidates for electrification. They drive predictable routes, so don’t need a sprawling charging infrastructure. Long charge times (three to five hours for the E2) don’t matter, since they’re usually parked overnight.

Electric buses save money on fuel and maintenance, and some cities qualify for pro-electrification local and federal subsidies. That takes the sting out of the Catalyst E2 Series’ $799,000 base price. (A conventional diesel bus can go for as low as $300,000.)

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Proterra

The Bus

The secret to the new Proterra bus’s longevity is its twin mattress-sized battery pack, says Matt Horton, the company’s VP for sales. It can store up to 660 kWh, helpful when motoring a 27,000-pound, 40-foot bus. Compare that to the relatively mini batteries behind your favorite electric passenger car: 60 kWh in the Chevy Bolt, and 100 kWh in the largest Tesla Model S. (It helps that the Catalyst E2 has a lighter body than your average city steed.)

Lightweight materials help on range. So does the Prius-style regenerative braking system, which can help re-capture up to 92 percent of the bus’s kinetic energy. This is the only thing that current bus drivers will have to relearn, says Horton: No more brake-stomping. Oh, without the roaring engine, they’ll be hearing a lot more of their passengers’ inane conversations.

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Proterra

The City

A few cities have already hopped on board: Foothill Transit, which operates near Los Angeles, will get its E2 Catalysts on the road in 2017. Philadelphia already has older Proterra models on the road, and others have purchased e-buses from its competitors. According to the American Public Transit Association, nearly half of the country’s public buses are hybrids or run on alternative fuels.

That’s great, but these things won’t completely transform the city scape. While transportation accounts for 26 percent of American greenhouse gas emissions, buses are just four percent of that. Plus, a “clean” bus is really only as pristine as its energy source. If a city is getting all its electricity from burning coal, an electric bus ain’t so great.

Still, the eco-conscious have a right to be excited about heavy electric vehicles. Electric buses send to a signal to the community about the place where they live. They’re “something people will experience every day and that may well affect their appreciation and personal commitment to greening,” says John Woodrooffe, a clean vehicle and transportation researcher with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

The battery advances on the new Proterra might even trickle down to bigger-time polluters like trucks. That could hold everyone over until Elon gets around to making those big-rigs and buses he says he’s working on.

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Harsh Parents Raise Bullies–So Do Permissive Ones

The consensus is clear: mean parents make mean kids—and the victims of mean kids. Several recent studies confirm an association between strict parenting styles and children’s likelihood of both being a bully and being bullied. Some work also points to a more surprising association—permissive or neglectful parenting might create bullies, too.

In one such study, researchers at the University of Washington and Arizona State University conducted a retrospective study of 419 college students and found that parental authoritativeness—in which parents are warm and caring but set rules for the sake of their child’s safety—lowered kids’ risk of being bullied. Both permissive and authoritarian (strict) parenting styles, on the other hand, were positively correlated with bullying other kids, according to the results published in January in Substance Use and Misuse. Both approaches can result in a lack of respect for rules and the rights of others.

A 2012 study in the Journal of Cybertherapy and Rehabilitation also pointed to lackadaisical parenting as a problem. Researchers investigated online bullying in a sample of college students and found that those with permissive parents had engaged in more bullying behaviors than participants with authoritarian and authoritative parents. Neglectful parenting was associated with the most bullying.

Most research on parents’ influence on bullying, however, has focused on harsh, punitive parenting styles—in which the parents are essentially modeling bullying behavior for their children. One such study, published in January in Child Abuse and Neglect, assessed bullying involvement, parenting styles and disciplinary practices in a sample of 2,060 Spanish high school students. Results indicate that abusive discipline increased teenagers’ risk of abusing peers or being abused by them. For girls, the risk of being a bully was more closely connected to physical punishment, whereas for boys it was linked primarily to psychologically aggressive parental discipline. For both boys and girls, there was a direct correlation between falling victim to a bully and psychological aggression from parents.

Taken together, the studies indicate that the best parenting tactics probably fall in the middle of the spectrum. Indeed, studies have shown that a protective factor against being bullied or becoming a bully is having parents who are facilitative, meaning warm and responsive to their children and encouraging of appropriate levels of autonomy (rather than being either controlling or overly permissive). A 2015 study of 215 grade school children, reported in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, found that bullied children were consistently rated by teachers as having less facilitative parenting than nonbullied children. A 2016 study from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry followed kids for five years and found that those whose parents supported autonomy when the kids were four or five years old bullied less over time than those whose parents showed less support for autonomy.

The bottom line? “If you do not wish to raise a bully, do not bully your own kids,” says Julie A. Patock-Peckham, a psychology professor at Arizona State. “An authoritative parenting style, on the other hand, is protective against so many negative psychological outcomes that people who wish to become better parents should take classes on how to be more authoritative with their children.”

This article was originally published with the title "Harsh Parents Raise Bullies—and Their Victims"

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