Month: February 2015

On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to grant a terror defendant access to secret court documents that paved the way for the monitoring of his electronic communications.

Without comment, the high court let stand a lower court opinion denying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court records connected to the phone and Internet monitoring of Adel Daoud. The 21-year-old denies he pressed the trigger of what he thought was a real bomb outside a Chicago bar as part of an FBI sting operation. His lawyers said the records were necessary to mount a defense during the defendant’s upcoming federal terror trial.

“Without access to FISA materials, it is virtually impossible for defendants to challenge the lawfulness of the government’s surveillance of them,” according to the Daoud petition the justices rejected reviewing Monday.

In recent years, perhaps in response to an uptick in inquiries about hospital performance and its effect on patient outcomes, a number of programs have been developed to help hospitals track how the patients they care for do. The most prominent of these is the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP). This system allows hospitals to compare their performance relative to that of other participating hospitals and provides them with detailed descriptions of patient outcomes as adjusted for the patients’ risks.

Since 1994, the ACS NSQIP has been tracking data on 135 patient-related variables. As its name implies (Quality Improvement Program), the hope is that this will lead to improvements for patient care—having this information will hopefully motivate hospitals to improve their outcomes and reduce the payments charged to Medicare. However, there has not been a study examining whether this expectation has been met until now. The new study published in JAMA seems to indicate that a hospital’s participation in this outcomes/costs-tracking program does not directly lead to improved patient care or reduced Medicare costs.

The study was performed by faculty from the Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy at the University of Michigan. It aims to examine the association between participation/non-participation in the ACS NSQIP and Medicare patient outcomes/Medicare costs.

If you ever wondered as a child who invented the English language, the answer might have surprised you: no one did. We got this incredibly sophisticated system of communication from no particular person. Languages just sort of sprung up and evolved, just like biological organisms.

But is their evolution really like-life? How does the process happen? These questions have been addressed and analyzed in theoretical models, but there are competing explanations that are difficult to discriminate between. A group of researchers has constructed and performed a study to test how languages change in different environments, and the new results could provide clues about the underlying mechanisms by which languages evolve.

The aim of the study was to test how the language-using population size affects the rate of change. Languages lose old words and gain new words all the time—but does that happen faster or slower when there are large populations of speakers?

Google is regularly bombarded with notices to remove links to infringing content from its search results—nearly 34 million last month alone.

The search giant also routinely gets hit with bogus notices, too, and Google often denies them. It’s all part of the copyright Whac-a-Mole game courtesy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For the most part, the DMCA requires Internet companies like Google to remove links to infringing content at a rightsholder’s request or face legal liability.

At Ars, we don’t normally report on ridiculous claims for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they are so common that they’re not usually newsworthy. That said, it’s worth pointing out some of the more recent bizarre ones—those coming from German-based Total Wipes Music Group. The company told Ars on Monday that it didn’t mean to bombard Google with the bogus notices; rather, a faulty “script” was to blame.

MUNICH—As a perennial fan of “How It’s Made” videos, my visit last month to GE’s Global Research Center in Munich was particularly fascinating. Although the campus is not involved with any actual large-scale manufacturing, the scientists and researchers there do focus on finding ways to take manufacturing processes and make them better. There were endless miniature manufacturing nooks and crannies that we got to poke our noses into over the course of our week.

I came away fixated on carbon fiber. It’s most famously used as a lightweight, high-strength construction material in exotic cars and aircraft, but it’s becoming downright common these days. Today carbon fiber is in bicycles and golf clubs, and you can even get yourself a carbon fiber wallet if you’re so inclined. But its growing presence in everyday life belies its beauty and complexity—there’s nothing common about this increasingly common material.

It takes a lot to make a composite

Carbon fiber is properly described as a “composite material,” a term that is used to describe any substance with multiple components that combine in interesting ways to produce a material with complex, desirable properties. Most of our time on the GE campus was spent in the center’s composite manufacturing lab, and we were surrounded by tons of different composite materials, from glass to metals—but carbon fiber was the thing we focused on.

This week, the tech world will be watching a jury trial between reddit’s interim CEO Ellen Pao and her former employer, the illustrious venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB). Back in 2012, Ellen Pao, then a junior partner at KPCB, filed a lawsuit (PDF) against the firm, alleging systematic gender discrimination against her and other female staff.

It’s surprising that Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins wasn’t settled long ago. Parties often avoid high-profile trials because they can damage company and personal reputations alike, sometimes irreparably. For KPCB, involvement in the case could tarnish its stellar reputation as the firm that helped build Amazon, Netscape, Genentech, and Google. For Pao, a jury trial will mean putting the details of her private life under a microscope for the world to see. Of course, the two parties could settle at the last minute, but recent reports suggest that the fighting has become so bitter that a last-minute accord seems unlikely.

In a broader sense, this means that lawyers in a San Francisco courtroom will spend the next month fleshing out what could become the most notorious data point in the long-standing contention that overt and not-so-overt discrimination hobbles women in tech and finance. It’s no secret that venture capital firms are overwhelmingly male-dominated and that tech firms often exhibit behavior that would be unwelcome in all but the worst fraternities. In her complaint against Kleiner, Pao suggests that she has evidence to prove a litany of awkward sexual overtures made toward her by colleagues, as well as proof of a deafening silence when she brought the issues up to management. KPCB, for its part, says it champions women (PDF) and that Pao created her own drama wherever she went. Whatever the jury decides, the trial with undoubtedly cast light on a complex and difficult issue.