Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: Petras Gagilas)

What's the impact of aggressive policing policies, like New York City's former "stop and frisk" approach to high-crime communities? The evidence suggests that aggressive policing can work to lower the crime rate in some neighborhoods, but it also comes at a cost: lots of innocent individuals stopped and resentment of the police within some communities. While crime statistics are relatively easy to gather, these later issues are much harder to quantify.

But a team of US-based researchers has now attempted to do so, tracking a group of minority male students over a couple of years. Their results suggest that interactions with the police cause distress among these students, and that distress ultimately leads to what they term delinquency—which can include more crime.

Mixed record

The general concept of proactive policing involves putting more police out in high-crime neighborhoods, with the expectation that they'll act as a deterrent to criminal activity. But a large number of approaches that fall under this umbrella lead to a somewhat mixed record. "Although most quantitative studies support that proactive policing is associated with reduced crime," the new paper notes, "there is no consensus in the literature: some studies find no relationship, whereas others find that proactive policing may be counterproductive." In addition, most existing studies have focused on short-term changes in crime rates rather than long-term ones.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a modest but notable deal on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the latest entry in Nintendo's flagship fighting game series. It's just under $50 at Walmart and Amazon today. While that's only $10 off, it's the first significant discount we've seen on the game from major retailers, and deals on big first-party Switch games have generally been rare.

If you've ever played a Smash Bros. game before, you should know what to expect here. You can read our giant review for more details, but the short version is that we called it nothing less than "the best fighting game on any Nintendo system." It'll almost certainly go on sale for less in the future, but if you own a Switch and have been interested in jumping aboard while the game is still in the earlier part of its lifecycle, this looks like a decent entry point.

If Smash Bros. isn't your thing, we also have deals on other big-name games like Resident Evil 2 and Kingdom Hearts III, Vizio 4K TVs, Apple's 9.7-inch iPad, ViewSonic gaming monitors, and much more. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge / Mining operations outside China, like this one in Russia, could benefit if the Chinese government cracks down on cryptocurrency mining. (credit: OLGA MALTSEVA/AFP/Getty Images)

The Chinese government is considering a nationwide ban on mining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Every few years, China's National Development and Reform Commission publishes a list of industries the agency wants to encourage, restrict, or eliminate because they are unsafe, illegal, or bad for the environment. The latest list, published this week, includes cryptocurrency mining on the list of industries to phase out.

A Chinese ban on cryptocurrency mining would be a huge deal for the global bitcoin community. In recent years, China has come to dominate both the manufacturing of bitcoin mining hardware and the operation of bitcoin mining pools.

A Chinese ban on bitcoin mining would transform the bitcoin mining industry, creating openings for bitcoin mining operations elsewhere in the world to gain market share. And that would be significant because bitcoin miners wield significant influence over the evolution of the Bitcoin platform.

Enlarge / Your flight is arriving WAY ahead of schedule, apparently. (credit: China Aviation Review via Twitter)

The world did not come to an end this past weekend when the 10-bit calendar-week counter in the Global Positioning System’s precision timing system “rolled over” back to 0000000—an event that caused older, unpatched GPS systems to suddenly act like they had jumped nearly 20 years back in time. But the long-anticipated reset of the calendar count did apparently lead to cancellations of some airline flights overseas, as technicians failed to catch warnings and update firmware.

According to reports on social media, at least one KLM flight—a Boeing 777 bound from Amsterdam to Bogota—and flights involving as many as 15 Boeing 777s and 787s in China were delayed or canceled over the weekend because of calendar-rollover errors on navigation systems aboard those aircraft. Data for some of the flights identified confirmed lengthy delays in departures, with the KLM flight leaving seven hours behind schedule.

A Reddit user reported that his girlfriend’s KLM flight, KL741 from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, was “grounded because of ‘something to [do] with the date being wrong and Honeywell can't guarantee the plane is safe.’”

Enlarge / What happens when your virtual vacation's metrics go awry? Find out in the delightful, aimless Vacation Simulator. (credit: Owlchemy Labs)

When I think about the history of virtual reality as viable, consumer-grade tech, I think about a certain "game jam" in early 2015. Valve had been putting the final touches on its first SteamVR system, and the company invited a wave of interested developers to get in on the ground floor and make whatever weird demos they wanted, all in order to promote the nascent concept of "room-scale VR."

Four years later, those early efforts remain some of VR's must-play games, apps, and experiences. Chief among those is Job Simulator, a hilarious mini-game reaction to the idea that the rise of VR and robots would lead to a future in which humans forgot what real jobs were like.

That absurd premise was met by a quality still unmatched by most VR games: if you can reach for something in an Owlchemy Labs game, you can grab it, play with it, use it, throw it, juggle it, and more. The game's designers built a world whose best quality was somewhat invisible and therefore often overlooked: you likely won't realize how awesome Job Simulator is until you boot into another VR game and yell at its static, dead environs. Like, why can't I pick up that animal, throw it into a microwave, nuke it, put it between two pieces of bread, add some cheese and sauce, lift that sandwich to my real-life mouth, eat it, and see my VR avatar puke up the result?