The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has reported on a potential case of cyber-bullying in Beloiel, Quebec . In a modern twist on high-school interactions, two girls took turns beating and mauling a boy in their school parking lot while the other videotaped the confrontation on a cellphone. The boy chose not to fight back. When posted to Facebook, the video got thousands of views.

Sgt. Harry Wadup of the Richelieu-St-Laurent municipal police force said the girls are facing charges relating to issuing threats, assault and inciting violence.

While bullying does happen in many settings, and bullying in school is something we have all likely witnessed or experienced, what is the motivation for sharing bullying videos on the internet? What can an understanding of the problem do to help potential bullies not go down the "bullying" road?

It's been almost ten years since two Google engineers published a paper describing the architecture of Map Reduce , a framework for simplifying the development and deployment of algorithms that process terabytes or petabytes of data across a cluster of commodity servers. The Open Source community soon responded with Hadoop , a Map Reduce work-alike, and in the following years it seems that most large IT organizations, and many startups, have jumped on the bandwagon pitching the virtues of Big Data, Hadoop and/or NoSQL as a revolutionary set of techniques for capturing actionable trends and correlations from the firehose of real-time data (clickstream, Twitter feeds, Facebook likes, server logs, sensor and surveillance data, mobile call events, and of course, all the stuff the NSA looks at).

Tim Harford of the Financial Times points out that this methodology is subject to various types of sampling bias , even in cases where the more enthusiastic proponents claim to be 'observing the entire population, not just a statistical sample'. First, data collected from social media or smart phone apps is heavily biased by the user profile of those technologies, whch is disproportionately young, affluent, and urban or suburban. Harford mentions the famous case of the Literary Digest, a well-established magazine that forecasted a landslide victory for Alf Landon in the 1936 US Presidential election, based on a massive poll of one out of five eligible voters - whose contact information was pulled from telephone subscriber lists (Landon lost the election to Franklin Roosevelt, who carried all but two of the 48 states; Literary Digest ceased publication soon afterwards).

Second, people adjust their behavior over time with respects to various topics in the news. The sudden increases in flu-related searches that made Google Flu Trends look very prescient five winters ago, turned into a debacle when Google used similar data to warn of a severe flu outbreak four years later; but the flu season turned out to be average when the curated data from the CDC finally came in.

What about the famous anecdote about Target finding out that a teenage customer was pregnant before her dad did? Maybe so, says a researcher quoted in Harford's article, but there's an issue with false positives. The world likely didn't hear about other Target customers who got pregnancy-related marketing materials they wouldn't have any use for.

An abstract of a study released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the study's "2010 [Autism Spectrum Disorder] prevalence estimate of 14.7 per 1,000 (95% CI = 14.3-15.1), or one in 68 children aged 8 years, was 29% higher than the preceding estimate of 11.3 per 1,000 (95% CI = 11.0-11.7), or one in 88 children aged 8 years in 2008." Of the sites surveyed, four counties in New Jersey had the highest prevalence estimate, with 21.9 per 1,000 (95% CI = 20.4-23.6).

National Public Radio quotes CDC experts that "skyrocketing estimates don't necessarily mean that kids are more likely to have autism now than they were 10 years ago."

"It may be that we're getting better at identifying autism," says , director of the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
Researchers say intervention in early childhood may help the developing brain compensate by rewiring to work around the trouble spots.

Another abstract of a "small, explorative study" from The New England Journal of Medicine describes Patches of Disorganization in the Neocortex of Children with Autism and suggests "a probable dysregulation of layer formation and layer-specific neuronal differentiation at prenatal developmental stages." CBS News demystifies the study as "brain abnormalities may begin in utero."

Cross-submitted by the author at Soylent News.

There's a generation of now mostly-retired folks who had the fortune of living through the amazing technological changes that saw the world go digital, the Internet go mainstream, and networking become the conversation not of niche technical specialists but teenagers with smartphones. Bill Krause is one of them. He was a sales engineer in 1967, mentored by none other than Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packard. Along the way in his interesting career, he saw the rise of Ethernet, became the CEO of 3COM, and rubbed shoulders with giants. Now, in a fascinating interview, Bill Krause tells the story of those magnificent decades : the age of 40 pound calculators, his $100 billion mistake, and the early days of the computer revolution.

Like this nugget, for example, about the beginning of 3COM:

No sooner had I started at the company when I get a call from this guy in Seattle. It was Bill Gates. He and Paul Allen were our first customers... Our second customer was a young guy in Cupertino by the name of Steve Jobs. And our third customer was [Sun Microsystems cofounder] Andy Bechtolsheim.

Or this one: 3Com introduced Ethernet Thinnet (CATV-style) cabling, which moved the transceiver electronics onto a PC adapter board to make Ethernet practical for an office. You'd think Steve Jobs would be impressed by the demo, but instead, Krause say Jobs told him and Bob Metcalfe, "Who's the brain-dead a****** that came up with this s***? This is dreck, this is crap. You want to make it easy to install, just plug it into the telephone jack for cryin' out loud."

This Bill Krause interview is just a starting point: if you're hungry for more, there's more on the history of Xerox PARC, 3Com and the PC networking industry at the History of Computer Communications site.

Surgeons at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will try to save the lives of patients with knife or gunshot wounds by placing them in suspended animation , buying time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal to them.

The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. At lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half an hour after they have stopped breathing.

The Swiss National Competence Center of Research will host the first Cybathlon in Switzerland in October 2016. This ' Olympics for bionic athletes ' will include races where competitors who are paralysed from the neck down control an avatar via a brain interface. There will also be races for those wearing arm or leg prosthetics, an exoskeleton race and a wheelchair race.

There will be two medals for each competition, one for the pilot and one for company that developed the device.

How long does it take you to solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle? Because, unless you answered, "under three seconds" you're going to have to do a bit more practice.

The new, mind-blowing record of 3.253 seconds was set on Saturday, March 15th, by a robot at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, U.K. The robot was built by Mike Dobson and David Gilday using LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, LEGO Technic and a smartphone. The record is not only faster than previous record holder, the CUBESTORMER II robot , but also faster than the fastest human time of 5.55 seconds.

Watch a video of the feat here . The Lego website has additional details as well.

[Editor's note: As for me, I'll be impressed when a robot knows how to tie a necktie. Oh, wait ...]

The Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (CJES) has just released its 50th anniversary special issue in honour of John Tuzo Wilson (1908-1993). Tuzo Wilson is one of the key historical figures in the dramatic change that swept the earth science community in the 1960s, when Wegener's previously-vilified theory of continental drift became widely-accepted in the form of plate tectonics .

Feature articles in the 50th issue of CJES review Wilson's scientific contributions and point to new directions in global earth science based on Wilson's legacy, but of particular interest may be Paul Hoffman's description of how Tuzo Wilson was able to discard his anti-plate tectonic model of Earth history, that he had held dear for more than 20 years, and accept the new theory of plate tectonics when it best fit the data. What does it take for scientists' to change their fundamental understanding of nature, anyway?

The Standard C++ Foundation has put together a new "unified" C++ FAQ, combining Marshall Cline's popular FAQ, Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ pages, and many other sources. The Foundation's announcement is a good introduction to what they're trying to do, and after you've read that, check out the FAQ itself .

[Note -- I've already found a few places where the integration of all these sources is less than perfect. I suspect it will be a little while before all the necessary editing is complete. They are accepting both suggestions and volunteers.]

A small study done by The Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at The University of California, San Francisco, suggests that e-cigarettes don't actually help people to quit smoking." Of the 949 smokers in the study, only 88 used e-cigarettes, causing the study's researchers to "admit that their findings should be viewed with some caution."

World Science reports "They also found that e-cigarette use was more commmon among women, younger adults and people with less education." Last year, the US Centers for Disease Control reported e-cigarette use more than doubled among U.S. middle and high school students from 2011-2012. The lack of solid research, potential youth market, and abundance of caution have had anti-tobacco activists and researchers pushing for a ban on advertising of e-cigarettes.

NPR has a recently story about vaping, or using e-cigarettes, indoors and in the workplace.

If you smoke, have you been able to cut back your smoking or quit thanks to electronic cigarettes? If you do not smoke, does it bother you that others use e-cigarettes indoors?