Month: November 2016

(credit: James Workman)

According to sources speaking to Reuters, Volkswagen has come to an agreement with authorities over how to deal with the remaining 80,000 3.0L diesel VWs, Audis, and Porsches that used illegal software to cheat on federal and state emissions tests.

Apparently, VW Group will buy back 20,000 older Audi and VW SUVs, and the remaining 60,000 vehicles will receive software updates to the cars’ emissions control systems so that they comply with federal emissions regulations. If the owners of the older Audis and VWs want to keep their cars, a separate and more complicated fix has apparently been approved. But by offering a software fix for at least 60,000 cars, VW Group is expected to save billions in buyback costs.

Reuters says that talks are ongoing between consumer plaintiffs’ lawyers and VW Group to mete out exactly how much money consumers will be compensated.

Enlarge / In the movie Children of Men, declining public health leads to extreme social inequality.

Levels of disease in the environment may be linked to gains in women's political power. That's the finding of two psychologists who pored over six decades of data, looking at connections between ecological stressors and gender equality. Arizona State - Tempe's Michael E. W. Varnum and University of Waterloo, Canada's Igor Grossmann found that declining infectious disease rates in the US were strongly correlated with a rise in gender equality. The big question is why. Writing in Nature Human Behavior, the researchers say the trend can be partly explained by looking at how pathogens "cue people to adopt faster life strategies."

Varnum and Grossman's study was inspired by the field of behavioral ecology, where scientists explore how the physical environment affects animal behavior. Obviously, social equality among humans is affected by political events such as the passage of Title IX and anti-discrimination laws. But the researchers were curious about whether environmental factors might also have an impact on whether we build societies that are more egalitarian or more authoritarian. To get an answer, Varnum and Grossmann narrowed their focus to looking strictly at gender equality between the years 1951 and 2013 in the US and the UK. They explain that they created "an index of gender equality using data on indicators of political representation (the number of women in Congress), wage inequality (male:female wage ratio based on data from the US Women’s Bureau and the National Committee on Equal Pay), linguistic representation in cultural products (use of male versus female pronouns in published books) and sexist work attitudes (percentage of respondents in Gallup polls preferring a male boss)."

The decline in gender inequality was preceded by lower levels of infectious disease in the US and the UK.

They stacked this data up against changes in four environmental problems that affect humanity: infectious disease, resource scarcity, warfare, and climatic stress. Of the four, only infectious disease could predict levels of gender equality. But the effect was striking. As levels of infectious disease dropped, Varnum and Grossmann could see a similar drop in gender inequality. Making the relationship more believable was the fact that it operated at a temporal remove. Fifteen years after a decline in nine infectious diseases, there's an uptick in gender equality. Essentially, it took almost a generation for the environmental conditions to affect social ones. The researchers got these results by looking at CDC data on the prevalence of tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, malaria, typhoid, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and polio in the US. As a point of comparison, they looked at deaths from measles and tuberculosis in the UK. In both countries, the pattern was the same. As diseases dropped, gender equality rose.

Enlarge / Ragequit. (credit: redditor chipotlemcnuggies)

Matt Harrigan, the CEO of San Diego-based network security startup PacketSled, resigned yesterday after a flurry of comments he made on Facebook went viral over the weekend, prompting the company to place him on administrative leave and to report his comments to the Secret Service. Harrigan's comments weren't the usual sort of executive meltdown—they amounted to a declaration that Harrigan was going to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump.

In a Facebook thread about last week's presidential election, Matt Harrigan wrote, "I'm going to kill the President Elect."

"Bring it secret service," he wrote.

OnePlus has announced an upgraded version of the OnePlus 3 called the "OnePlus 3T." The original OnePlus 3 had a Snapdragon 820 and 6GB of RAM, so I doubt anyone really felt like it was lacking for power. Now though, for an extra $40 over the $399 OnePlus 3, you can upgrade to a 2.35Ghz Snapdragon 821, a new camera, and a bigger battery.

The design and case looks exactly the same, so you're mainly here for the better internals. The battery jumps from 3000mAh to 3400mAh, a 15 percent increase. The camera is still a 16MP sensor with optical image stabilization, but should be improved over the OnePlus 3's mediocre camera. There's also a sapphire camera lens now.  The front camera gets a big boost from 8MP on the OnePlus 3 to 16MP on the OnePlus 3T.

When Comcast brought its gigabit cable Internet service to the Chicago area in August, it gave customers in some parts of Chicago and nearby towns the option of subscribing for $70 a month—half off the standard, no-contract price of $140.

Though the $70 gigabit offer required a three-year contract, it came with unlimited data, which normally costs an extra $50 a month on top of the $140 no-contract price. For Comcast customers, this was a good deal.

But Comcast didn’t make the $70 offer available throughout the Chicago area, and now the company has restricted it even further. The offer remains available in parts of Chicago, namely Uptown, Grand Crossing, the Loop, and South Loop.