Month: December 2015

(credit: California Air Resources Board)

Outside of a San Fernando Valley neighborhood northwest of Los Angeles, Southern California Gas Company sprung a leak in one of its natural gas wells on October 23.

Just last night at a Los Angeles City Council meeting, the CEO of the private utility said that it could be three to four months before SoCal Gas can plug the underground leak, which has sent tens of thousands of kilograms of methane per hour seeping up into the air.

According to Reuters, SoCal Gas is one of the biggest gas utilities in the country. Its natural gas storage field at Aliso Canyon is the second biggest storage area in the country after a location in Montana.

Actor/rapper Nick Cannon is also Radio Shack's new Chief Shirtless Officer, from the look of that Twitter profile photo. (credit: Twitter)

If you've seen actor, rapper, America's Got Talent host, and TeenNick chairman Nick Cannon in the news lately, you might have assumed it was due to his performance in an upcoming Spike Lee joint about violence in Chicago's south side. But on Wednesday, the entertainer had news from an entirely different dimension when he announced that he'd added another feather to his not-quite-Pharrell-sized hat: chief creative officer at Radio Shack.

Does this "hire" mean anything more than seeing Cannon's face on advertisements, as has been the case with many other major tech company celebrity hires? Radio Shack certainly wants us to think otherwise, as the company's announcement gave a vague list of Cannon's CCO duties, the biggest of which appears to be the "development of Radio Shack-exclusive products." Cannon will also be tasked with in-store music curation, event promotion, and helping the company "continue to grow" its educational and STEM-specific initiatives. Radio Shack didn't specify what existing educational initiatives it was running, and its home page currently offers no official information about such initiatives.

The announcement did recall a story from Cannon's youth, in which he broke a stereo that he'd taken apart then went to a Radio Shack in his home of San Diego to get help fixing it—where he eventually figured out how to assemble and modify his own sound systems. (In other interviews, Cannon has boasted that as a kid, he'd figured out how to connect telephones to turntables and "make hold music.")

Fig. 1: Even used DK2 units demand a premium price on resale sites like eBay.

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From the minute you buy most gadgets, you can expect their market value to go down as time and technology quickly make them obsolete. That hasn't been the case with Oculus' second Rift development kit (DK2). Instead, the opposite has happened; on auction sites like eBay, new and used DK2 units routinely resell for hundreds of dollars more than their original $350 asking price. Unopened DK2 units have sold for as much as $1,200 there in recent days.

Gathering up the data for the most recent successfully completed DK2 eBay auctions (we looked at about 80 new units and 50 used ones, just to keep the data collection manageable) shows just how much of a premium the hardware demands well over a year after it was first made available. The median eBay purchaser has to spend $786 for a new, unused Rift these days or a $565 median for a used unit.

Main Street in Stewart, British Columbia. (credit: District of Stewart)

In Stewart, British Columbia, there is no cell phone service, and aside from satellite, the town had just one option for anything resembling modern Internet access.

Unfortunately, that broadband provider has just shut down, leaving the remote Canadian district of about 500 residents with severely limited access to the Internet. Onewayout.net, a wireless home Internet provider that started in 1995, discontinued service at the end of November.

"The infrastructure required to deliver Internet and possibly cell service is extremely expensive—to do it effectively, Stewart needs a tower that can serve the entire community," Onewayout, a nonprofit organization, said on its website.

Life 360 co-founders Chris Hulls and Alex Haro. (credit: Life360)

Family networking service Life360 won a patent trial earlier this year against a Florida company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS) that sued it for patent infringement. Now it has won a significant chunk of its legal fees for fighting the case.

Yesterday, US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks ordered AGIS to pay Life360 the sum of $684,190.25. That amount represents the legal fees paid from November 21, 2014, when Middlebrooks issued a claim construction order, through the end of the trial on March 13, 2015.

"This was an exceptionally weak case, especially with respect to the asserted method claims, which were the only claims remaining after claim construction," wrote Middlebrooks in his fee order (PDF). "Every claim could only be performed by multiple users, even though infringement requires that "a single party performed each and every step of the claim." He continued:

El Niño reached a record weekly high in mid-November and hasn't let up since. (credit: NOAA)

After setting a record for a single-week period in mid-November, El Niño has continued to produce record warm temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. This climate pattern, characterized by an abnormal warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, has already contributed to a large number of weather effects around the planet, including increased hurricane activity in the Pacific Ocean and heat across much of the United States.

Of the metrics used to gauge the strength of El Niño, the most straightforward is to look at temperatures between 90 degrees west and 160 degrees east longitude, and 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south of the equator, known as the Niño 3.4 region. Back on November 16, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that this area of the Pacific had a weekly average temperature that was 3.0 degrees Celsius above normal, a record high, topping the 2.8 degrees Celsius anomaly recorded during the week of November 26, 1997, the last really strong El Niño.

During the last two weeks, the temperature in this key region of the Pacific has stayed at or slightly above 3.0 degrees Celsius, NOAA says. The agency's Climate Prediction Center predicts that El Niño will likely peak during the Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16 and will transition to neutral conditions during the late spring or early summer 2016. Forecast models predict a peak later this month.