Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Frankie Adams as Bobbie Draper

It's been a fun 13 weeks, but the second season of The Expanse has finally drawn to a close. Did it feel like a satisfying conclusion to you? Readers of the books will note we're still not quite at the end of Caliban's War, so there's plenty more to come from the protomolecule and the crew of the Rocinante.

We got neither the cliffhanger nor the reveal of what the protomolecule has been doing, both of which will presumably show up in season three. While I got over my canon shock about the differences between the books and the tv version some time ago, I think the different pacing of the stories between mediums continues to trip me up. At times it feels like we're rushing through the chain of events at a gallop, and yet we're still not at the end of book two yet.

The show remains compelling, so I'm not complaining on those grounds, but I do hope the powers that be at Syfy will stick with it long enough for us to get us as far as Babylon's Ashes or Persepolis Rising. That was a topic of conversation when Tech Culture Editor Annalee Newitz joined me on the podcast this week. And apologies that it's a little late.

Enlarge (credit: Fox Photos/Getty Images)

In 1882, the world's first coal-fired public-use power station opened in London at 57 Holborn Viaduct—today a fairly nondescript location in the centre of London close to Blackfriars. On Friday, some 135 years, a few monarchs, and an entire Industrial Revolution later, the UK power grid had its first ever day without coal energy.

The National Grid control room announced on April 21 that from 11pm on Thursday to 11pm on Friday the UK's electricity demand was supplied without firing up some coal power plants. The UK's power mix for the day was: 50.3% natural gas, 21.2% nuclear, 12.2% wind, 8.3% imported from France, the Netherlands, and Ireland, 6.7% biomass, and 3.6% solar. (That appears to come to 102.3%... better to supply too much power than not enough, perhaps?)

UK National Grid coal power use over the last week. You can see quite a few periods of zero coal use, mostly during daylight hours.

As you can see from the graph above, coal-free Friday was more of an eventual inevitability than a surprise. The UK has been rapidly scaling back its coal use—it accounted for 23 percent of our power use in 2015, then 9 percent in 2016—and the government says it wants to close down all remaining coal power plants by 2025.

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Google has announced a series of workshops designed to apparently tackle the spread of online hate speech and fake news. The "Internet Citizens" workshops aimed at teenagers are intended to promote "tolerance" and "empathy" and to raise "awareness" of the plethora of social issues that plague online communities.

It's promised that the workshops—hosted by YouTubers Nadir Nahdi, Alain Clapham, and Efe Ezekiel and created with the advice of the Metropolitan Police and the Active Change Foundation—will teach teens how to deal with offensive speech, flag inappropriate content, and moderate comments. Google will also note how to spot fake news and (because this is Google, after all) use online video services like YouTube to increase diversity.

The Internet Citizens programme launches in Liverpool and will visit youth clubs across the country in the coming months, Google said.

Enlarge / Can an elementary-school child eat this pile of carrots? (credit: flickr user: Diane Main)

Brian Wansink didn’t mean to spark an investigative fury that revisited his entire life’s work. He meant to write a well-intentioned blog post encouraging PhD students to jump at research opportunities. But his blog post accidentally highlighted some questionable research practices that caused a group of data detectives to jump on the case.

Wansink attracted the attention because he’s a rockstar researcher—when someone’s work has had such astronomical impact, problems in their research are a big deal. His post also came at a time when his field, social sciences, is under increased scrutiny due to problems reproducing some of its key findings.

Wansink is probably regretting he ever started typing. Tim van der Zee, one of the scientists participating in the ongoing examination into Wansink’s past, keeps a running account of what’s turned up so far. “To the best of my knowledge,” van der Zee writes in a blog post most recently updated on April 6, “there are currently 42 publications from Wansink which are alleged to contain minor to very serious issues, which have been cited over 3,700 times, are published in over 25 different journals, and in eight books, spanning over 20 years of research.”