BCIT is providing a power-nap room, hoping to allow some of their students — already sleeping in other parts of the school — to boost their energy levels.
The sleep room, launched Monday, is available to book for hour periods between 12:30 and 5 p.m. four days per week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Students can check bed availability at any time on the university’s online portal.
There are 10 beds in the low-lit room — which is also a racquetball court — and a station where students can pick up clean pillow cases and sanitizer. Students are required to spray and wipe the vinyl beds after use.
The nap room has a set of rules provided by the BCIT Student Association. Cell phone noise and talking is prohibited in the nap room and beds are not allowed to be pushed together.
The room was initiated after BCIT authorities noticed students sleeping all over the campus and realized that their students must be very tired. In addition to the benefits of alertness during classes, the school also hopes to cut down on driving accidents. Many BCIT students commute to the university from significant distances.
Students are already using BCIT’s new nap room
The new nap room will be available to students for one booking per week “to start,” according to the BCITSA, and they have plans to eventually allow one booking per day.
ECOFE (European Consortium for Open Field Experimentation), a network of agricultural resources at various locations around Europe, has been proposed by a group of scientists in order to do for agricultural science what CERN has done for nuclear research.
The organization would be a community of research stations across Europe — from an outpost in Sicily to a field in Scotland. Among the benefits looked forward to by the researchers behind the project are the ability to study a wide range of soil properties, atmospheric conditions, and temperatures, and, prospectively, the ability to finance more expensive equipment, which would be shared.
For example, open-field installations that allow researchers to study the effects of artificially elevated levels of carbon dioxide, would be a shared cost and a shared tool.
“Present field research facilities are aimed at making regional agriculture prosperous,” said co-author Hartmut Stützel of Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany. “To us, it is obvious that the ‘challenges’ of the 21st century–productivity increase, climate change, and environmental sustainability–will require more advanced research infrastructures covering a wider range of environments.”
The benefits of community research are also associated with potential downsides: researchers would have to sacrifice some of their scientific autonomy in order to focus on targeted research goals.
“It will be a rather new paradigm for many traditional scientists,” said Stützel but I think the communities are ready to accept this challenge and understand that research in the 21st century requires these types of infrastructures. We must now try to make political decision makers aware that a speedy implementation of a network for open field experimentation is fundamental for future agricultural research.
The report is titled “The Future of Field Trials in Europe: Establishing a Network Beyond Boundaries.” It was completed by Drs. Stutzel, Nicolas Bruggermann, and Dirk Inze, and was published in the journal Cell.
Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps
Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute.
“Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “In our study, we investigated whether chimpanzees show a comparable pattern and extend trust selectively toward those individuals they are closely bonded with. Our findings suggest that they do indeed, and thus that current characteristics of human friendships have a long evolutionary history and extend to primate social bonds.”
Previous studies of chimpanzee friendships had shown that the animals were attracted to sociable partners for friendships, and that they extended their favors to those they preferred. The Max Plank researchers wanted to know if the basis for this preference was “trust.”
Research situation of chimps
In order to find out, the researchers spent five months at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. They set up an arena where the Sweetwaters chimps could play “the trust game” — a game in which two separated chimpanzees get to decide if their partner gets a delicious treat or a less savory one. The partner in turn has the opportunity to share some of their treat back with the one who pulled the rope that opened the door to the treat.
The best case scenario is considered to be that the chimp with the rope will provide the other with the tasty treat, and the other will share some with the first chimp.
Before the researchers put the chimps in the experimental setting, the researchers observed the chimpanzee group to decide for each chimp which other animal was their favorite and least favorite. These two would be paired up against the first chimp in the game.
Each chimp played 12 rounds of the game with each their favorite and least favorite group member.
The result was that chimps were ” significantly more likely to voluntarily place resources at the disposal of a partner, and thus to choose a risky but potentially high-payoff option, when they interacted with a friend as compared to a non-friend.”
Proportion of trust choices
Proportion of reciprocation
The researchers interpreted this finding to mean that chimpanzees show much greater trust when it comes to friends than non-friends.
“Human friendships do not represent an anomaly in the animal kingdom,” Engelmann said. “Other animals, such as chimpanzees, form close and long-term emotional bonds with select individuals. These animal friendships show important parallels with close relationships in humans. One shared characteristic is the tendency to selectively trust friends in costly situations.”
The report, “Chimpanzees Trust Their Friends,” was completed by Drs. Jan Maxim Engelmann and Esther Herrmann and was published in the journal Current Biology. View the research paper at this link.
In the previous year, Islamic violence took the lives of over 27,000 people and critically injured another 26,000, according to an extremism watch organization that tracks Islamic attacks. 2015’s attacks took place in 52 countries worldwide, and included 475 suicide attacks.
The Religion of Peace, an organization that collects information about attacks motivated by Islamic ideas and tallies various statistics, published their yearly figures Friday on their website.
The December figures — 225 deaths and 273 critically injured in 47 separate attacks, brought the totals for the 2015 year to 27,435 deaths and 26,144 critically injured in 2,849 separate attacks in 52 countries.
The numbers provided by TROP are actually lower than what the total deaths would be, the organization’s editor Glen Roberts told The Speaker, because the organization relies on news reports for their tallies. Not all deaths are reported in the news, and deaths that occur after news has been published are usually not included.
The numbers have remained fairly consistent since TROP’s first entries, which date back to the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001.
“It looks like there have been only 12 days since the beginning of 2005 without at least one Islamic attack,” Roberts noted.
There are an average of 5 separate attacks every day that result in at least one death, motivated by Islamic ideas, according to TROP. The numbers tallied do not include deaths like honor killings, although the group does monitor these incidents as well.
Bangkok Metropolitan Police have announced a “New Years Gift” to the city: traffic tickets will be reduced to just 100 baht starting today.
The gift has a serious side: the metro police are dealing with a massive backlog of unpaid traffic tickets. Because the repercussions associated with not paying these tickets are usually insignificant, many people simply leave them unpaid.
The gift doesn’t extend to all offenders, however. Traffic crimes that affect other people are not included in the deal. These crimes include DUIs, illegal parking, and driving on sidewalks.
However, crimes such as not wearing a helmet on a motorbike or not wearing a seatbelt in a car are eligible, so long as the fine was originally for less than 1,000 baht.
The traffic fine promotion will end Jan. 15, 2016, after which time all traffic fines will return to their regular rates.
For plotting to blow up an in-session Parliament, Polish former university professor Brunon Kwiexien has been sentenced to 13 years prison.
On Monday a Polish court handed down the sentence to the former Krakow University of Agriculture chemistry professor.
Kwiecien, 48, an unaffiliated nationalist, cited as motives for the crime, planned in 2012, a belief that his country was headed in the wrong direction and the issue of what he referred to as foreigners holding government positions.
Kwiecien did not deny his plans when arrested.
When the police were tipped off, they found four tonnes of explosives in a car which Kwiecien planned to use to kill the president, prime minister and others during a hearing on the budget.
Facebook’s AI hardware is now, like its software, open source, joining a broad movement towards outsourcing the world’s artificial intelligence intelligence. Facebook also stated it hoped independent AI technicians would develop deep learning tech superior to what the company currently uses, and that it would buy this technology.
The tech giant has developed deep learning technology, which it uses for Facebook-related functions like identifying faces in pictures and curating news feeds, but can also apply to a wide range of computing tasks.
Through the Open Compute Project, Facebook’s custom hardware designs — a GPU-based server called “Big Sur” — will join Google’s and others’ open source deep learning designs. The hope is that more workers will devote themselves to these projects and become familiar with using the technology.
Deep learning technology involves building computers that function similar to the neural networks of animal brains. The computers store masses of data, form neural networks between the data, and draw inferences from the data based on need.
Yann LeCun, head of the Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research lab, commented on the move to make the company’s AI open source, “This is a way of saying, ‘Look, here is what we use, here is what we need. If you make hardware better than this, we’ll probably buy it from you.'”
A Canadian company is now selling bottled air to China, and supplies are selling out.
Vitality Air, and Edmonton-based company, is bottling air from Banff and Lake Louise, world-famous Canadian vacation destinations. The hand-bottled air is then shipped around the world.
For around $13 per bottle, Chinese are buying stocks out.
“We shipped a sample of 500 [bottles] to China,” Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam said this week. “They sold out within a week-and-a-half.”
The company already has sold 1,000 of their next shipment of 4,000 bottles to China as well.
The air is being sold in orders of 10 bottles, according to the company, which markets their product on China’s eBay equivalent, Taobao.
India has also started to buy Vitality’s air.
The company is having a hard time keeping up with demand since starting selling online last June, due to the hand-bottling involved in their product.
Each bottle contains 3 liters of air, which equates to approximately 80 breaths. In a relaxed state, breathing steadily, it would take 4 minutes to breathe the air contained in one can, although consumers may prefer to draw out their enjoyment by sipping at the air over a longer period of time.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department announced a new policing initiative this week to combat illegal drone operation in metropolitan areas.
The police drones will monitor no-fly zones, enforcing Japan’s drone legislation. Upon finding illegal activity, the drone squad will seek for the drone operator and order the drones to be grounded.
If the squad is not able to remove the drone from the air using this method, 10-foot long drone enforcers will be dispatched to collect the offending drones with large nets.
Japan also recently amended its Civil Aeronautics Law to limit the airspace of drones to 500 feet from the ground. Also, now in densely populated areas, all drones over 300 grams are banned.
The police force also has drone terrorism in mind in pursuing the program. The metropolitan police bureau recently told national media that such attacks were a possibility, and that the force hoped to defend Japan against any such scenario.
The potential for a serious attack in Japan was highlighted earlier this year, when an activist flew a drone carrying radioactive sand to the top of the office building of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The act was a protest against nuclear power, the man said, and no one was injured by the symbolic action.
The new drone squad will consist of dozens of trained officers and will begin operations later this month, according to police officials.
On Monday, the XPrize Foundation announced its latest competition: the$7 Million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, which aims to map the ocean floor in high resolution, and find sources of pollution autonomously. Teams will test their technologies in two rounds at two separate undisclosed locations, mapping a 500 square kilometer area of ocean floor in high resolution at depths of 2, and 4 kilometers; winners will receive a grand prize of $4 million.
An additional $1 million will be awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to teams that have technology capable of “sniffing out” specified objects through biological and chemical signals. Xprize claims that such technology could also help us learn about our own history, and find medical advancements to currently fatal diseases.
The competition was designed to create better maps, and expand our present knowledge of the oceans, as they are currently 95% unexplored, and remain as one of Earth’s last mysteries. We have mapped the moon, Venus, and Mars, all in much higher resolution than our own oceans. It is also estimated that two thirds of species in the ocean remain to be discovered.
Each of the 25 teams will try to create new, relatively low cost technology that can map the ocean floor, and identify archaeological, Biological, and geological features. Each team must prove their robotics can function efficiently at a depth of 2 and 4 kilometers, where there is no sunlight, high pressure, and temperatures below freezing. A bonus $1 million will go to any team that can make technology that can track chemical and biological signatures to find objects. Such technology could lead to many other discoveries and inventions, as well as helping to find sources of human-caused pollution and slow global warming.
Unlike land, the sea floor can’t be mapped in high resolution by satellite, since radar waves don’t pass through water. Satellites rely on precisely measuring the height of the ocean, and when enough data is collected, scientists can calculate the differences in the ocean surface caused by the landscape below the surface. This technology has given us a full map of the ocean to a resolution of 5 kilometers, which allows us to see the largest features, such as ocean trenches; leaving us with plenty of room for discovery under the water that covers two-thirds of our planet. We’ve mapped the entire surface of the moon at a resolution of 7 meters, and most of Mars and Venus at 100 meters.
XPrize is hopeful that the competition will usher a new era of ocean exploration, and help to better humanity through future innovation from it. The competition is the third of five multi-million dollar ocean based challenges to be created by 2020. The 10 year XPrize Ocean Initiative was created to address critical challenges in ocean exploration and technology; with the goal to make the oceans “healthy, valued, and understood”.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who filmed the historical adventure picture ‘The Revenant’ in Alberta and British Columbia this year, recently commented on his northern experience at a Q&A, expressing grave concern over the weather phenomena known as the “Chinook.”
“We were in Calgary,” said DiCaprio, “and the locals were saying, ‘This has never happened in our province ever.’ We would come and there would be eight feet of snow, and then all of a sudden a warm gust of wind would come.”
DiCaprio has become somewhat of an expert on environment matters in recent years, producing the climate change documentary “The 11th Hour” in 2007. Reportedly, the actor is now working on another climate change documentary. However, many Canadians were surprised that the actor would refer to what in Canada is commonly known as a Chinook, a warm breeze felt during colder weather, as a sign of impending disaster.
DiCaprio stated:
“[I]t was scary. I’ve never experienced something so firsthand that was so dramatic. You see the fragility of nature and how easily things can be completely transformed with just a few degrees difference. It’s terrifying, and it’s what people are talking about all over the world. And it’s simply just going to get worse.”
Despite what may be an unusual cause of concern, 2015 was the warmest year on record, and the cast of the film had to relocate to a glacier in Argentina to find a snowy location — the snow at their Canadian location melted in August, forcing the unexpected move.
CHILLIWACK, British Columbia — In the latest of the trials over Trinity Western University’s planned law school, a B.C. Supreme Court judge has found in favor of the school, rejecting the Law Society of BC’s rejection of TWU.
The Law Society had not properly maintained its discretion when it went back on its initial approval of Trinity Western’s law school after holding a referendum among its disapproving members, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson found.
“I conclude that the benchers permitted a non-binding vote of the LSBC membership to supplant their judgment,” said Hinkson.
“In so doing, the benchers disabled their discretion under the [Legal Profession Act] by binding themselves to a fixed blanket policy set by LSBC members. The benchers thereby wrongfully fettered their discretion.”
The matter at issue is Trinity Western’s “Community Covenant,” which all staff and students must sign. The covenant is a pledge that an individual will maintain the teachings of the Bible and refrain from sex outside traditional marriage.
The Langley, B.C.-based school — Canada’s largest Christian university with 4,000 students — applied for and received permission from the British Columbia Law Society in 2013.
Afterwards, responding to the disapproval of its members — B.C. lawyers — the LSBC held a referendum. After finding that 74 percent of its members wanted to deny graduates of Trinity Western to practice, the Law Society changed its decision and withdrew its approval.
Hinkson concluded that, besides allowing their discretion to be clouded by popular sentiment, the Law Society had infringed on the freedom of religion guaranteed by the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Hinkson ordered the Law Society to return to its original decision to allow Trinity Western’s graduates to practice law in B.C.
Provincial courts across Canada have been hearing Trinity Western’s case — some are finding for the school, some against. It is expected that the matter will proceed to the Supreme Court of Canada to be settled.
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