Month: April 2016

As the website reported: “The app was used by TSA agents to randomly assign passengers to different pre-check lines as part of a now-discontinued program called ‘managed inclusion.’”

Such an app is widely viewed to be an extremely simple program to write. Many are questioning why a government agency overpaid for the app.

A group of researchers ran statistical analyses on human sacrifice data gathered from 93 groups in the Pacific Island region. (credit: Jacques Arago)

Most of us would agree that human sacrifice is a bad idea. Yet many ancient civilizations (and some more modern ones) engaged in religious rituals that involved sacrificing people. Why do so many societies evolve a system of human sacrifice, despite the obvious moral drawbacks? A group of social scientists has just published a statistical analysis in Nature that reveals how this grisly practice has fairly predictable results, which benefit elites in socially stratified cultures.

The group examined 93 Austronesian cultures in the Pacific Islands, drawing information from the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions to determine which groups had human sacrifice and when. Previous analysts have suggested that human sacrifice helps to maintain social stratification. In this new study, the researchers wanted to understand the relationship between human sacrifice and social stratification over time.

To do that, they created statistical models using Bayesian methods, testing to see how human sacrifice affected societies that fit into three buckets: egalitarian, moderately stratified, and highly stratified. They write:

(credit: Erin Pettigrew)

A project to bring free wireless Internet to poor people in California is only providing a fraction of the promised Wi-Fi hotspots, according to multiple reports.

With a state grant issued in 2012, a nonprofit called Manchester Community Technologies was supposed to "install free wireless Internet along busy boulevards in low-income neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County," said a report last week by the Los Angeles Daily News. The organization reported success to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in March 2015, saying it had connected more than 100,000 people to the Internet.

But today, few of the sites actually have Internet access. The Los Angeles Times visited the hotspot locations and reported that hardly any had Wi-Fi signals. CPUC staff visited the Wi-Fi hotspot sites in January in response to the Times' investigation, finding Internet connectivity at just two of 25 locations. CPUC says it is now planning an audit.