Month: August 2017

For a lot of scientific topics, there's a big gap between what scientists understand and what the public thinks it knows. For a number of these topics—climate change and evolution are prominent examples—this divide develops along cultural lines, typically religious or political identity.

It would be reassuring to think that the gap is simply a matter of a lack of information. Get the people with doubts about science up to speed, and they'd see things the way that scientists do. Reassuring, but wrong. A variety of studies have indicated that the public's doubts about most scientific topics have nothing to do with how much they understand that topic. And a new study out this week joins a number of earlier ones in indicating that scientific knowledge makes it easier for those who are culturally inclined to reject a scientific consensus.

What’s the consensus?

The new work was done by two social scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fishchoff. They relied on a large, regular survey called the General Social Survey, which attempts to capture the public's perspective on a large variety of issues (they used data from the 2006 and 2010 iterations of the survey). The survey included a number of questions on general education and scientific education, as well as a number of questions that determined basic scientific literacy. In addition, it asked for opinions on a number of scientific issues: acceptance of the evidence for the Big Bang, human evolution, and climate change; thoughts on the safety of GMOs and nanotechnology; and the degree to which the government should fund stem cell research.

Enlarge / Thanks to Sony, these two versions of the same game will not be compatible with each other for online play.

Back in June, Sony told Eurogamer that the company did not have "a profound philosophical stance" against letting PS4 users play games with those on other platforms. That said, the company's continued refusal to allow for cross-console play between PS4 and Xbox One players has become an absolute and unmistakable trend in recent months.

The latest data point in that trend line is Ark: Survival Evolved, which comes out of a two-year early access period next week on Windows, Mac, PS4, and Xbox One. In a Twitter response posted over the weekend, Ark lead designer and programmer Jeremy Stieglitz said that cross-platform play between PS4 and Xbox One is "working internally, but currently Sony won't allow it."

This isn't a huge surprise, considering that the developers of Rocket League, Minecraft, and Gwent have made similar statements in recent months. Since Microsoft very publicly opened Xbox Live to easy cross-platform play back in March, Sony has said that it's "happy to have a conversation" about the issue, but it has failed to follow through by allowing any linkage between the two competing consoles (cross-platform play between the PS4 and PC has been available in certain games since the PS4's launch, though).

To coincide with yesterday's launch of the new 8th-generation processors, which pack four cores and eight threads into the 15W chips found in Ultrabooks, Intel released a sizzle video to give people an idea of what to expect from the new processors.

The star of the video is a little surprising, however. At first glance it looks like a laptop, but MSPoweruser looked a little closer and noticed that it has some very distinctive properties: a vent around the lid and an unusual segmented hinge. The laptop in the video is a Microsoft Surface Book. Only instead of being silver-gray like the current Skylake-based Surface Books, it's black.

The hinge of the Surface Book is rather distinctive. (credit: Intel)

While Microsoft updated the Surface Pro earlier this year to include a dual-core Kaby Lake processor, the Surface Book—launched simultaneously with the previous generation Surface Pro 4—didn't receive an update. As such, it's now rather long in the tooth. A new version with a quad-core processor and a smart black finish would certainly be a welcome update to the premium system.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

The Federal Communications Commission is being pressured to release the text of 47,000 net neutrality complaints before going through with Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to eliminate net neutrality rules.

The FCC has refused to release the text of most neutrality complaints despite a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request that asked for all complaints filed since June 2015. The FCC has provided 1,000 complaints to the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), which filed the public records request but said last month that it's too "burdensome" to redact personally identifiable information from all 47,000.

Today, 16 groups wrote a letter urging the FCC to release all the complaints so they can be reviewed by the public before the commission finalizes a plan to dismantle the 2015 net neutrality rules. "The FCC has failed to make critical evidence available for public review and comment," they wrote to Pai and the other four commissioners.