Joggers and festival-goers will convene again this year for the world’s first night running music festival. The event will take place in 35 locations around the world, including two Canadian cities and dozens of U.S. cities.
The 2016 Night Nation Run now has over one million registered members.
On the night of the event, runners will dress up in bright colors and don glow-in-the-dark and illuminated items. Check-ins start at 5:30 p.m. The pre-party will begin at 7:30 p.m.
The run — along an illuminated 5 kilometer course — will be accompanied by live music, lights and lasers, and will start at 8:30 p.m.
At the end of the run, a party will be held for the runners, featuring fog, lights, cyro, confetti guns, and giveaways, besides the music — including a surprise headliner DJ.
The run will happen in Toronto on July 23 and Vancouver on August 6.
Tickets for the event cost $70, but early bird prices of $35 are available until February 12. Tickets include a T-shirt, race bib, and glow necklace, besides admission to all of the night’s events. Kids under 8 years old are free when they accompany a paying adult.
Proceeds from event tickets will go partly to fund the charity organization Stand Up To Cancer.
Night Nation Run is reminding all participants to bring a copy of their confirmation email to the event for faster processing.
Monopolization of community-based information networks by cartels of a few “super editors” among several risks that could lead to a diminished Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s quality benefits from high levels of free participation, but volunteer information databases like Wikipedia can be negatively effected by tendencies toward information monopolization, and, according to a recent study, this negative effect is more prevalent in more frequently edited articles — articles that could be considered to be more important.
In the study, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study looked at how editors interact with each other as well as how they interact with articles, and integrated previously-ignored factors such as the consideration of real time — not just the number of edits used in previous studies to mark time.
Among the team’s findings: infrequently-referred articles grow faster than frequently-referred ones. Not only that, but articles that attracted a high motivation to edit actually reduced the number of participants. Yun and his colleagues inferred that this type of Wikipedia article participation decay results in inequality among community editors. The trend will become more severe as time goes on, they suspected:
“For the previous decade, many of these open-editing access movements have significantly affected the entire
Jinhyuk Yun
society,” Jinhyuk Yun, a Ph.D. candidate at the Complex Systems and Statistical Physics Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, told us.
“Wikipedia, Creative Commons Licenses, GNU, etc. To sustain such movements, they must maintain their motivations for participants, which might be taken away by monopolization.”
Yun explained how communal information databases like Wikipedia slow down.
“There are various reasons to participate in such ‘open-editing’ movements. Some are collective reasons shared in a society, and others are somewhat personal. Because the motivation is diverse, slowing down is also due to various causes. First, there can be a loss of necessity to contribute due to changes in society — or technology. Some GNU software based on old platforms no longer continue because the number of users of such software is getting smaller. In addition, there can be new barriers caused by governmental regulations — not about such communal databases, but considering the case of UBER. One particular candidate we discussed in the paper is the monopolization by few ‘super-editors.'”
Yun also commented on how we can consider the health of such community databases?
“It is very hard to quantify the ‘health’ of such database because of the ambiguity in the definition of health. In my point of view, the databases should meet the standard of accuracy and instantaneity. In other words, it should keep the trend, but it should not lose its accuracy in the contents. Although these databases are mainly based on the contribution of anonymous sources, it should also have reliable references to cross-check.”
However, data monopolization is not a black and white issue, Yun noted.
“To be honest, monopolization sometimes does good in particular occasions,” Yun told us, “yet it has many risks in most cases. Consider political issues in authoritarian governments, where media controlled by the government sometimes manipulates people’s opinions by a simple nudge or filtering. Such manipulation can also happen in Wikipedia — for example, by cartels of super-editors.”
Yun offered some possible remedies for content monopolization on Wikipedia:
“Based on our observations, Wikipedia could consider a reward program to recruit new editors. Simple achievement reward programs — like those in video games — at an early stage might be helpful, yet it should be done under strict supervision to avoid vandals. For instance, giving merit to editors who supply new reliable references might help to keep the quality of articles.”
The report, “Intellectual interchanges in the history of massive online open-editing encyclopedia, Wikipedia” was completed by J. Yun, S. H. Lee, and H. Jeong.
In the first month of 2016, Islamic attacks in 23 countries took the lives of at least 1,508 people and injured 1,714 others, according to Islamic violence watch group The Religion of Peace.
Among the 138 attacks that took place in January, 38 were suicide blasts.
Since the World Trade Center attack in 2001, when TROP began its count, there have been 27,712 attacks that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.
Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable BEAM module — a new lightweight activity module, part of Bigelow’s continued endeavors toward putting into use a wide range of portable expandable habitation spaces, including the living-and-working-space BA-330 (pictured above) — has been scheduled for a March NASA mission to the space station.
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module will be sent to the space station in the SpaceX Dragon capsule, and will be berthed to the space station’s Tranquility node. It will then be pressurized and expand to its full size with air stored in the compressed module.
BEAM will then be monitored through a test period of two years. Astronauts will periodically enter the module to inspect it and gather performance data.
After the test period, BEAM will be jettisoned and will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, burning up.
BEAM and SpaceX Dragon Capsule show scaled to human figure (Image: Bigelow Aerospace)
Bigelow Aerospace is working with NASA to produce expandable systems, including habitational systems, and has already completed two succeful missions with its Genesis pathfinder I and II spacecraft — missions noted for their relatively low-cost.
The low cost comes from the low weight of the Bigelow constructions — one-tenth the weight of some similar modules. Improvements in craft weights have come in large part from advances in lightweight, strong materials such as Kevlar.
The BEAM module walls are made of many layers of Vectran, a material similar to Kevlar but made of spun liquid crystal fibers, and fire-resistant Nomex.
Space modules linked in Bigelow development lab (Photo: Bill-Ingalls/NASA)
The Nevada-based company is working towards a standalone space habitat in addition to its current module projects. A large expandable module is already being developed by Bigelow — three times the size of any individual module on the ISS, the BA330 is designed for a maximum crew size of six in its 330-meter square environment. The BA330 is designed to be used in conjunction with other modules to build larger module complexes in space.
The My French Film Festival has been running for six years. It features movies in and out of competition, with juries, awards, and screenings in theatres and online. We take a look at the festival itself and about what it means for cinema in general.Continue reading “My French Film Festival: How Cinema Is Changing”
A recent study of octopuses off the coast of Australia has discovered that — despite usually being considered a solitary animal — octopuses have a social life, and part of that social life involves physical displays of toughness.
When octopuses meet each other in agonistic interactions, they exhibit certain types of behavior, researchers at the Alaska Pacific University found.
“We found that octopuses are using body patterns and postures to signal to each other during disputes,” said David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University.
“The postures and patterns can be quite flashy, such as standing very tall, raising the body mantle high above the eyes, and turning very dark.”
The impetus for the research came from a member of an online cephalopod community noting something he’d seen octopuses doing that he thought was interesting. The researchers took it from there, watching 186 interactions between Octopus tetricus — a species that lives in Jervis Bay, Australia — which furnished them with 500 interactions.
The agonistic behavior was what they noticed primarily.
Octopus tetricus
Octopus looking tough
Octopus looking meek
When both octopuses turned black, it was more likely they would engage in physical violence to settle the question of dominance, but when one turned black and the other was a pale color, the pale colored octopus more often retreated while the black octopus held the field.
“Dark color appears to be associated with aggression, while paler colors accompany retreat,” said Scheel.
Next for the researchers is further investigation of octopus interactions — specifically, they want to investigate suspicions that social interactions among the species occur when food is abundant and hiding places scarce. They also want to understand the consequences of these types of social interactions in the context of octopus populations.
The report, “Signal Use by Octopuses in Agonistic Interactions,” was completed by Drs. David Scheel, Peter Godfrey-Smith and Matthew Lawrence, and was published in the journal Current Biology.
The Zika virus, which has caused a surge in infant birth defects in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years, and which has now spread to the U.S., is carried by a type of mosquito common in the Southern states, according to Dr. Albert Icksang Ko, an epidemiologist at Yale.
“The mosquito vector for Zika is genus Aedes mosquitos, of which Aedes aegypti as well as Aedes albopictus is found to infest regions of North America, such as Mexico and southern U.S,” Ko, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at Yale, told The Speaker.
Ko, whose work focuses on the health problems which have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity, commented on the possible future of the virus:
“This is a potentially serious public health threat since it can be transmitted rapidly to regions where the mosquito vector is in sufficient abundance and because of the risk it poses to causing birth defects in newborns whose mothers were infected during pregnancy.”
Dr. Albert Icksang Ko
The as-yet untreatable virus has been found in a half-dozen cases in the U.S. over the past two weeks. In all cases the mother had recently travelled to a Latin American or Caribbean country.
A U.S. travel warning is currently in effect advising pregnant women to avoid travel from 22 countries in which the Zika virus is common.
Ko told us that human biological responses to the virus — such as immunity in already-affected areas — are not yet understood. “We presume that after an immunocompetent individual is infected with zika virus they will develop lifelong immunity shortly after infection as with other flavirus infectionsm but we don’t have direct evidence at this point.”
The Zika virus has been known since 1947 when it was identified in Uganda. The virus was initially found in a rhesus monkey during yellow fever research. Seven years later, in 1954, the virus was discovered in a human in Nigeria. Cases were rare until 2007 when larger outbreaks began in several Pacific Island nations.
An accumulation of action potentials is behind Venus Flytraps’ “decision” to keep closed and start producing digestive enzymes once their trap sensors are triggered, scientists at Universität Würzburg have found.
“The carnivorous plant Dionaea muscipula, also known as Venus flytrap, can count how often it has been touched by an insect visiting its capture organ in order to trap and consume the animal prey,” said Rainer Hedrich of Universität Würzburg in Germany.
The researchers wanted to understand how Venus Fly traps decide to close and how they decide they have something to digest. After all, the researchers noted, closing their traps around an object and filling with digestive enzymes is biologically costly, and sometimes their sensors are triggered by stimuli that are not prey at all — “false alarms.”
The researchers sought to test this by implanting artificial sensors in a Venus Flytrap. The sensors are thin spikes that stick out of the inside of the plant’s interior walls. They then flicked the sensors to cause the plant to close. When the scientists continually flicked the sensors, the plant became excited and began to produce the acidic digestive bath that fills their closed lobes.
By means of accumulated action potentials, the plant understands that what it has caught is in fact a struggling insect. It also understands the size of the insect by the number of the sensors it triggers.
“The number of action potentials informs [the plant] about the size and nutrient content of the struggling prey,” Hedrich said. “This allows the Venus flytrap to balance the cost and benefit of hunting.”
To eat, the scientists concluded, a Venus Flytrap requires at least five contacts with its sensors. The second trigger closes the plant, the third and further triggers activate touch hormones and begin the production of digestive enzymes, and the fifth begins the uptake of nutrients.
The report, “The Venus Flytrap Dionaea muscipula Counts Prey-Induced Action Potentials to Induce Sodium Uptake,” was completed by Böhm and Scherzer et al, and was published in the journal Current Biology.
The Globe and Mail has caused a court “book of record” to be released from the Vancouver court in which a trial against a Chinese Vancouverite accused of spying for China is taking place. The most recent development: Two unnamed co-conspirators in the case have been found to be Chinese soldiers.
Allegedly, Su Bin, a 50-year old entrepreneur living in Vancouver, helped the Chinese cyper-spying operation steal American fighter jet plans by providing focus for the hacking efforts of the Chinese soldiers. This help was documented in intercepted emails, according to the court documents.
In the trial, based on a U.S. charge, the two Chinese soldiers were referred to only as “unindicted co-conspirators” “affiliated with mulitiple organizations and entities.” No mention was made that they were tied to the Chinese army.
The Globe and Mail-obtained court documents show that the two had been explicitly referred to as “two Chinese military officers.” The two Chinese soldiers have also been identified by U.S. authories, according to the documents, although the names are not revealed by the Globe-obtained documents.
By Devon James
Read more: Chinese soldiers implicated in U.S. military hacking case
A Repsol fracking operation was ordered to shut down this week after an earthquake shook the region around Fox Creek, Alberta.
The earthquake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale — large enough to rattle pictures handing on walls, according to Fox Creek mayor Jim Ahn, who reported that he thought a truck had rolled by his building when the 1.5-second earthquake took place.
That was enough, though, for Alberta Energy Regulator to shut down the Repsol Oil & Gas site 35 kilometers north of the town.
Fox Creek mayor Jim Ahn
The province’s energy regulator shuts down any fracking site when there is an earthquake of 4.0 or greater magnitude in the area.
Scientists will now investigate whether fracking was the cause of the earthquake. If confirmed to be the cause, the quake would be the largest found to be caused by fracking in Canada.
Currently, the largest fracking-caused earthquake in Canada is a 4.6 magnitude quake that took place in northeastern B.C. last summer.
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