GENETICALLY modified maize causes cancer: that was the gist of a study, among the most controversial in recent memory, published in September 2012 in the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Well, actually, it doesn’t. The journal has just retracted the article. It would be too much to say that GM foods have therefore been proven safe. But no other study has so far found significant health risks in mammals as a result of eating GM foods.
A newly published study, “Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain”, shows that male and female brains exhibit distinct patterns in the way neurons are connected to each other.
One could suggest the headline, Gender stereotypes map directly affect the growing brain, tenuously extrapolated from this paragraph in the Independent, a variant of which is also in the Guardian:
The research was carried out on 949 individuals — 521 females and 428 males — aged between 8 and 22. The brain differences between the sexes only became apparent after adolescence, the study found.
HTML is a clumsy language to write in, and I’ve long used a plain text markup language to format posts on this site. Until now, I used an older system called textile. I didn’t use that anywhere but this site, so was always having to look up the syntax. While not an excuse for my lack of writing, the prospect of syntactic frustration did add a further small blockade to my getting started.
Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You
Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you’re twenty-five or over. It’s something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, particularly web-apps. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they’re lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking Klingon.
Over the past week or so I’ve been playing with adding real-time sync to One to Watch using TouchDB, syncing via Cloudant (where I now work). The idea is two fold:
- All your devices will be in sync. The same list of films, the same ratings, the whole caboodle. At the moment this is within a few seconds, but I'm wondering how much this drains the battery (TouchDB holds open a connection to Cloudant to receive notification of changes). It might be best to do periodic sync rather than always-on.
- I'd like to add a web app once the sync works well, talking to the Cloudant database.
Cloudant’s service is based on CouchDB. CouchDB is a document database built from the ground up with disconnected operation in mind. It has a robust protocol for transferring data between databases, including getting two or more databases into an identical state. It’s obvious this should be a great fit for keeping mobile devices in sync with each other. Even better, the protocol is designed around the assumption that all devices are peers, and so doesn’t require a central point for a “master” copy of the data. Think git rather than svn.