Month: August 2016

(credit: Getty x Aurich x GITS:SAC)

Regardless of whether you love cars or not, you probably aren't a fan of the process to actually buy one. Visiting a dealership to purchase a car—new or used—is a gigantic hassle. First, you have to persuade them to let you test-drive one, and success usually means 10 minutes on side streets with a salesperson sitting next to you. Then there are the hours of negotiation, full of obfuscation and upselling. The salesdroid often does their best to get you to sign a finance agreement that's most beneficial to them rather than you, the customer. Unsurprisingly, a recent poll found that most of us are deeply unsatisfied with the entire process.

The poll was commissioned by Beepi, one of a number of startups that's trying to use the Internet to change the way we purchase our vehicles in much the same way Amazon revolutionized the book market. According to Beepi, three in five Americans feel like they're being taken advantage of when it comes to buying a car, and the dissatisfaction is greater the younger you are. Tellingly, 34 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds would rather wait in line at the DMV than go to a dealership; 24 percent say they'd even rather have a root canal.

"For decades now people have been buying a car the same way their grandparents did," said Alex Lloyd, Beepi's head of content. "It's not a very pleasant experience."

Bouncy house ... of danger?! (credit: Mom's Party Rental)

The bouncy house seems like an innocuous childhood delight. What's not to love about a giant, inflatable room where kids can jump and scream in one safely contained location? The problem, recounted in a dubious study by a team of geographers and doctors, is that bouncy houses can cause heat stroke, especially this summer during our hottest year on record.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and the Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas knew that bouncy castles caused an enormous number of injuries. But over the past 20 years, the numbers have skyrocketed. As the researchers write in a paper out today in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, "One of the most staggering findings is that during the period of 1995 to 2010, a 15-fold increase was observed in the rate and number of bounce house injuries (roughly 5.28 injuries per 100 000 children in the United States annually)." Staggering, indeed. Mostly these were fractures, strains, and "other injuries to the upper and lower extremities."

The researchers decided to find out whether heat stroke was another, hidden danger to be found in these funhouses of pain. Though they could find only one reported instance of heat stroke from a bouncy castle, they forged ahead with their quest. Last summer, they spent a single afternoon measuring the "air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and computed heat index values" inside a typical bouncy castle, which they inflated in a grassy plaza on the University of Georgia campus. What they discovered is that these puffy joy rooms are actually heat-trapping danger chambers:

(credit: B Rosen)

Authorities finally arrested an alleged Nigerian online scammer accused of orchestrating schemes totaling more than $60 million, according to Interpol. The 40-year-old man, whom authorities have said is known as “Mike,” is also believed to have convinced one person to pay out $15.4 million. The man was arrested in Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria

Mike and another unnamed Nigerian now face charges including hacking, conspiracy, and obtaining money under false pretenses.

According to the international law enforcement organization, Mike used “a network of at least 40 individuals across Nigeria, Malaysia, and South Africa which both provided malware and carried out the frauds. The alleged mastermind also had money laundering contacts in China, Europe, and the US who provided bank account details for the illicit cash flow.”

Some may like it hot, but probably not quite this hot. (credit: Climate.gov)

This summer has been particularly hot across the US, and scorching temperatures have forced most of us to take refuge somewhere with air-conditioning. This leads to high electricity demand, especially in the hottest regions. As climate change continues, we are likely to experience similar hot temperatures more frequently.

Climate change modeling also forecasts that these increased temperatures will result in increased storm intensity and flooding. These types of extreme weather-related events could have a profound impact on the population distribution, if populations shift away from regions affected by extreme storms.

Combined, the change in weather and population movement can present regional infrastructure challenges due to significant changes in electricity demand. Understanding where electricity service is most vulnerable is of utmost importance if we're going to plan ahead for these future challenges. In an investigation recently published in Nature Energy, researchers have predicted how this combination of climate and population stresses will influence electricity demand using high-resolution, spatially explicit tools.

Seymour Papert (right) seen here in 2005. (credit: Rodrigo Mesquita)

Seymour Papert, one of the creators of the Logo programming language and a significant influence behind One Laptop Per Child and Lego Mindstorms, died Sunday at home in Maine. He was 88.

On Monday, the Logo Foundation announced Papert’s passing in a tweet, but it did not cite a cause of death. Papert had sustained a serious brain injury after being hit by a motorcycle in Vietnam in 2006.

Papert was born February 29, 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, where he completed his doctorate in mathematics in 1952 at the University of the Witwatersrand. He then emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he completed another doctorate at Cambridge University. After bouncing around European universities in the early 1960s as a researcher, he finally landed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963.

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson today announced a $100 million consumer protection lawsuit against Comcast, alleging that the nation's biggest cable company "engag[ed] in a pattern of deceptive practices constituting more than 1.8 million individual violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act." Comcast's conduct affected about 500,000 customers who purchased service protection plans in Washington, Ferguson said.

State officials filed the lawsuit (full text) in King County Superior Court, seeking refunds for consumers. The "lawsuit accuses Comcast of misleading 500,000 Washington consumers and deceiving them into paying at least $73 million in subscription fees over the last five years for a near-worthless 'protection plan' without disclosing its significant limitations," the state AG's announcement said. "Customers who sign up for Comcast’s Service Protection Plan pay a $4.99 monthly fee ostensibly to avoid being charged if a Comcast technician visits their home to fix an issue covered by the plan."

Washington said it alleges 1.8 million violations because Comcast made false claims regarding the scope of its service protection plans to 700,000 customers, and "deceptively represented the scope of its Customer Guarantee to over 1.17 million Washington consumers." Comcast allegedly led customers to believe that they needed to buy service protection plans to get services that were actually covered for free by the "Customer Guarantee."

Alden Ehrenreich, who will play Han Solo in at least one upcoming film, appears at the Star Wars Celebration 2016 in London, England. (credit: Getty Images / Ben A. Pruchnie)

The nebulous cloud of upcoming Star Wars content is hard to keep up with. There's the official trilogy, this winter's Rogue One spin-off film, and a ton of still-in-production, big-budget video games starting off the list. This cache also includes a new film featuring a much younger Han Solo than the one fans met in the original Star Wars.

Actually, scratch that. We might be getting an entire Han Solo trilogy as well.

That's the buzz, at any rate, suggested by a New York Daily News story that broke on Monday. Actor Alden Ehrenreich, the 26-year-old who's been tapped to lead the still-unnamed Han Solo film, has signed a three-film contract with Disney. The point of the contract, according to the Daily News, is to lock the actor down should the first Han Solo film "strike gold at the box office."