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Submission + - Canadian Analysis: Permanent Daylight Saving Harms Sleep and Mental Health

Submitted by kbahey
kbahey writes: With the push to eliminate the twice yearly clock change, Permanent Daylight Savings Time has emerged as the favourite for most states/provinces.

An analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal

Key points: From the summary:
  • Permanent DST preserves later evening light that may facilitate commuting, recreation, social participation, and some economic activity, but it also prolongs darkness on winter mornings, with potential adverse effects on circadian alignment, sleep, mood, education, and productivity.
  • Permanent ST is more closely aligned with circadian biology, although earlier dusk may limit some evening activities.
  • Choosing pST is supported by accumulated evidence related to health and the recommendations of major sleep and chronobiology societies; if Canadian jurisdictions choose to adopt pDST, implementation should include anticipatory mitigation, protection for disproportionately affected groups, and transparent surveillance of population health impacts.

Sci.News also has a good overview.

Submission + - Cable Lobby to Sue Trump FCC Over Repeal of National TV Ownership Cap (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule, which limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company may own. The cable groups said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in “higher monthly TV bills for consumers.” They said the FCC repeal order “arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the National Cap.”

The cable lobby groups represent top providers Comcast, Charter, and various other cable operators. Top cable companies have also expanded through mergers. Charter completed a purchase of Cox in August after the FCC rejected protests by advocacy groups that said the cable deal “would create unchecked gatekeeper power over Internet distribution” and make it easier for the biggest cable companies to raise prices. [...] The TV ownership rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Congress directed the FCC to set the cap at 39 percent in 2004. On Friday, cable lobby groups submitted a petition asking the FCC to keep the TV ownership cap in place until litigation over the FCC’s authority to repeal the rule is over.

The cable groups’ filing said the FCC repeal of the TV ownership cap violates the 2004 action by US lawmakers. The decision by Congress to set the cap at a precise numerical threshold was unambiguous, the filing said. “Congress established the National Cap at 39 percent in the 2004 CAA [Consolidated Appropriations Act] in direct response to the FCC’s attempt to aggressively raise the Cap to 45 percent and made repeated references to the 39 percent Cap in the statute,” the petition said. The petition to the FCC is mainly a procedural step as the commission isn’t likely to stay its own order. The cable groups said they intend to sue the commission in a US appeals court once the FCC order is published in the Federal Register. After the lawsuit is filed, they can ask the court to issue a preliminary injunction that would keep the TV ownership cap in place pending the outcome of litigation.

[...] The cable groups’ petition said the FCC can’t change the cap because the 2004 law “references the 39 percent Cap as statutory, not regulatory.” A provision requiring divestiture of stations “specified that someone exceeding ‘the 39 percent national audience reach limitation in paragraph (1)(B)’ of ‘section 202(c)’ of ‘[t]he Telecommunications Act of 1996’ ‘shall have not more than 2 years to divest,’” the petition said. “Likewise, Congress singled out the Commission’s only mechanism for setting aside statutory requirements—the Commission’s forbearance authority under 47 U.S.C. 160—and made clear that it ‘shall not apply to any person or entity that exceeds the 39 percent national audience reach limitation,’” the cable lobby petition said. The FCC order argued that the agency’s “ability to forbear from enforcement of its rules is distinct from its power to alter or eliminate those rules,” and that the FCC forbearance authority doesn’t apply to regulation of broadcasters.

Comment Re:Just for clarity (Score 1) 86

What a pointless post.

Everyone knows that bots backed by LLMs aren't people, they're just using words to explain the actions in a way that's more understandable to humans. As a human, this is more helpful since it would be a pretty lame article just listing the weights that guided the decisions made by the model

Comment Re: Sorry, but no (Score 1) 141

There are lots of tools I don't know how to use which are complicated and require some learning to use. For example I've never learned the 3d modelling software Blender and opening it looks hard to use. Does that make people who know how to use Blender and find it helpful that tell me to read the manual "pathetic and not very smart"?

Submission + - Old Hearts Become Biologically Younger When Transplanted Into Younger People (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in â" the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other.

But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens.

The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner.

Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.

Comment Re:But how do you know? - more data needed (Score 1) 88

So #1, I don't know...you could be right, but I am neither confident you're wrong or right. #2, even if it's not a deterrent, arrests are. If they drive a stolen car by a flock camera and it helps police find them and take them off the street for a few years, in a way, it has stopped them from stealing...at least until they get out, at bare minimum.

If they break into a car and the police look at the footage on the dashcam and see that they've kept their license plate out of view, but they are able to cross-correlate it with other cameras and figure out the plate number, then figure out where they drove that car, where it ended up parked, who got out, where they went, etc., then it can make arrests possible where it was not possible previously, making it *massively* more likely to be able to solve the crime.

The problem becomes when it turns into "show us all the plates that were near that spot within a few minutes of that time", and thus a fishing expedition.

Comment Re:Correct. And oh, no. (Score 1) 54

It's not. Full disk access is sticky. When you grant it, the app has it until you go into settings and revoke it.

You're interpreting it in the context of typing "sudo" on the command-line granting a one-time permission. And the original statement from Apple (after correcting the "every -> very" error in the summary) makes it clear that this is *not* what is being proposed, so if that was the original poster's intent, then it was incorrect.

The way I interpreted the original sentence — "They're going to make it like sudo where when you give permission to a program to write protected files once it has it forever after" — is that they're going to make it like the sudoers file, where you edit it to grant permission to a program to do something, and it permanently has the right to do that... which is exactly what happens when you grant full disk permission, just with a dialog box instead of editing a file.

That said, I'm not sure if that's how the original statement was intended to be interpreted. It was a bit confusing. :-)

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