Month: April 2016

Frontier's Service Status Map only shows outages in California, but customers in Texas and Florida have been affected, too. (credit: Frontier)

Frontier Communications took over former Verizon territory in California, Florida, and Texas on Friday last week, but the transition has caused problems for many customers and Frontier now says it needs until mid-April to fix everything.

Frontier, which bought FiOS and DSL networks in the three states from Verizon for $10.54 billion, set up a webpage to provide updates on the transition. Video on Demand content from FiOS TV will take longer to fix than the other services. This affects video from premium channels including HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax, and Epix. "Many" videos are available now, but "the vast majority of titles, including any previously purchased titles, will be available by mid-April," Frontier said in an update yesterday.

Billing and account problems should be resolved by Friday of this week, Frontier says.

Attraction is a mysterious phenomenon that science keeps trying to decode. We have examined the neurochemicals that may be associated with personal chemistry, we have conducted experiments to see if we can make people fall in love, and major online dating sites mine their data to look for patterns among potential matches. A recent article published in PNAS adds a new piece of information to the scientific puzzle: humans tend to be more attracted to other people who take up more space.

These results echo earlier findings that suggest “power poses” can help individuals feel more confident—perhaps a similar phenomenon makes people who engage in dominant non-verbal displays more attractive to potential mates.

For this paper, researchers conducted two field studies in which they tracked nonverbal behaviors that might be associated with attraction and dominance. The first study took place in a speed-dating setting and was an observational study in which the researchers simply watched daters’ behavior. The second study was experimental; it tracked participants’ romantic attraction to potential matches presented by a freely available GPS-based dating app in the San Francisco area (presumably something similar to dating apps like Tinder or OKCupid).

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) says his son spent over $1,300 of campaign funds on Steam games. (credit: David Brooks / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Update: August 21, 2018 In a 47-page indictment today, federal prosecutors formally charged Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and his wife Margaret with wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations, and conspiracy involving $250,000 of campaign funds. That includes $1,528.68 spent "at Steam Games on video games" in 2015, according to the criminal complaint.

Margaret Hunter claimed at one point those purchases were "personal" and put on the campaign credit card in error, according to the documents. The campaign later promised in FEC reports that the Hunter family would pay back over $1,300 in Steam purchases from personal funds for this reason. But in 2016, according to the charging documents, Margaret Hunter falsely told her bank that the Steam charges were "fraudulent" and received a $1,302 credit for the purchases.

The indictment also alleges the Hunters used campaign funds for lavish personal spending on vacations, clothing, food and drink, salon trips, dental work, and more while concealing this spending from the FEC and investigators.

Neil Jacobs, chief atmospheric scientist with Panasonic Weather Solutions, talks about his global weather model (credit: Panasonic Weather Solutions)

For a long time, weather forecasting was largely the domain of governments, with the National Weather Service leading the way in the United States. During the last two decades, however, the private weather forecasting industry—which includes well-known companies such as AccuWeather and many hundreds of smaller businesses—has grown up and is now estimated to be worth as much as $6 billion.

Even so, these companies largely just repackage model forecasts and incorporate data from government weather agencies. The heavy lifting, in the form of sophisticated computer modeling and the processing power to run them, is still done by the large ECMWF center in Europe, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction in the United States, and similar forecasting services in Canada, Japan, and elsewhere.

All of these government agencies, with staffs generally in the hundreds of scientists, forecasters, and coders, collect weather data from a variety of sources, including shared satellite data along with in-situ observations from aircraft, balloon soundings, surface observations, and other sources. Then, using their own software, they "assimilate" these observations into physics-based forecast models that simulate weather conditions around the globe, at various levels of the atmosphere, over a 10- to 16-day period. The results from these global models are then used to predict things like the high temperature on Wednesday and whether it is likely to rain on Saturday afternoon for little Joey's birthday party.