Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai arrives for his confirmation hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee on July 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

Net neutrality is the number-one reason many rural Americans still lack broadband access—at least, that's what Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai says.

In a speech to the American Cable Association (ACA) today, Pai said that "closing the digital divide is the FCC's top policy priority" and that nothing impeded that goal more than net neutrality rules.

The ACA is a lobby group for small- and medium-sized cable companies and was one of Pai's major supporters in the December 2017 vote to repeal net neutrality rules.

Enlarge / JAKARTA, Indonesia: An apitherapy practitioner administers a bee sting to the hand of a patient. (credit: Getty Images | Dimas Ardian)

A 55-year-old Spanish woman has died following repeated exposures to an acupuncture method that uses live, stinging bees instead of traditional needles, according to a recent case report in the Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology.

The painful and dangerous practice—called apipuncture—is generally peddled by nonmedical practitioners and, in recent years, has generated buzz among celebrities, most notably Gwyneth Paltrow and her chic lifestyle brand Goop. Paltrow and other proponents claim that insect venom can relieve a swarm of ailments, including inflammation, arthritis, generalized pain, scarring, and skin issues.

But evidence to back those claims is weak and mixed, and numerous medical studies have tallied serious risks and adverse events, including anaphylaxis, stroke, and death. Perhaps most alarming is that people with no history of allergies to bee venom can become sensitive to it over time. In fact, the more exposure, the greater the risk of developing a sensitivity. And life-threatening reactions appear unpredictable.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Ars Technica is looking for an experienced writer who loves to help readers understand new technology and innovative ideas—and why they matter. The ideal candidate will be deeply conversant with science and technology and can independently research complex technical issues.

With this position, we're not trying to fill a pre-defined "beat"—we're trying to find a rock star of a writer, whether they cover drones or biotech, CPU design or operating systems, Linux or robots, AI or bitcoin.

We're looking for someone senior (at least 3-5 years of quality experience in sci-tech writing) and someone who already knows what we mean by an "Ars story." Can you craft stories that will become "can't miss" additions to a site reaching 15 million unique worldwide readers? Do you have serious writing skills, technical depth, and reporting chops? Would you call yourself a "subject matter expert" in at least a few areas you regularly cover?

SAN FRANCISCO—Blind people might not seem like a natural audience for most video games since they can’t experience the “video” part that’s a definitional piece of the experience. At a fascinating Game Developers Conference Presentation this week, though, EA Sports Accessibility Lead Karen Stevens talked about how she discovered a significant, existing base of blind players in EA's games and how the company is moving to serve it.

The process began when Stevens received an email from a blind gamer complaining that changes to the kick-power meter in Madden NFL were making the latest version of the game impossible for them to play. Reaching out to other blind gamers through the forums on audiogames.net, Stevens found plenty of players figuring out their way through UFC, NHL, and even Need for Speed games without being able to see the menus or action on-screen.

“We already had an audience; they were just struggling,” Stevens said. “We were ignoring part of our audience.”

Lytro

A report from TechCrunch claims that Google is going to buy the camera company Lytro for "around 40 million dollars." Lytro is best known for creating an innovative "Light field camera," but the company has lately pivoted to professional camera technology for filmmaking and capturing VR video.

You might remember the first Lytro camera, which came in a crazy "tube" form factor with a lens at one end and a 1.5-inch touchscreen on the other. The tube was full of lenses and a special "Light Field Sensor" that would capture images as light-field data rather than a grid of pixels. The benefit was that you could just take a picture without worrying about the focus, and you could later selectively focus the image however you wanted. The downside is that you needed a much denser CMOS sensor to capture a high megapixel image. In 2012, when the camera came out, Lytro could compute all this light-field data down to only a 1MP image.