jIyajbe - Slashdot User

Submission + - US Immigration is Gaming Google to Create A Mirage of Mass Deportations (theguardian.com)

Submitted by jIyajbe on Thursday February 06, 2025 @09:46PM

jIyajbe writes: News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens” and, in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.

But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.

Submission + - Cracking the Code on Trump Tweets (varianceexplained.org)

Submitted by jIyajbe on Thursday August 11, 2016 @07:46PM

jIyajbe writes: From Electoral-Vote.com:

"A theory has been circulating that the Donald Trump tweets that come from an Android device are from the candidate himself, while the ones that come from an iPhone are the work of his staff. David Robinson, a data scientist who works for Stack Overflow, decided to test the theory. His conclusion: It's absolutely correct (http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/).

Robinson did some text-mining (using R) to analyze roughly 1,400 tweets from Trump's timeline, and demonstrated conclusively that the iPhone tweets are substantively different than the Android tweets. The former tend to come later at night, and are vastly more likely to incorporate hashtags, images, and links. The latter tend to come in the morning, and are much more likely to be copied and pasted from other people's tweets. In terms of word choice, the iPhone tweets tend to be more neutral, with their three most-used phrases being "join," "#trump2016," and "#makeamericagreatagain." The Android tweets tend to be more emotionally charged, with their three most-used phrases being "badly," "crazy," and "weak.""

Submission + - Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There's No Easy Fix (fivethirtyeight.com)

Submitted by jIyajbe on Friday January 02, 2015 @02:51PM

jIyajbe writes: Christie Awchwanden of FiveThirtyEight.com writes "When the latest international Climate Conference wrapped up in Lima, Peru, last month, delegates boarded their flights home without much official discussion of how the planes that shuttled them to the meeting had altered the climate. Aircraft currently contribute about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions...if the aviation industry were a country, it would be one of the world’s top 10 emitters of CO2. And its emissions are projected to grow between two and four times by 2050."

Beyond just volume of emissions:
Planes don’t just release carbon dioxide, they also emit nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and black carbon, as well as water vapor that can form heat-trapping clouds...These emissions take place in the upper troposphere, where their effects are magnified. When this so-called radiative forcing effect is taken into account, aviation emissions produce about 2.7 times the warming effects of CO2 alone...

Submission + - MIT Removes Online Physics Lectures and Courses by Walter Lewin (mit.edu)

Submitted by jIyajbe on Thursday December 11, 2014 @01:20PM

jIyajbe writes: MIT is indefinitely removing retired physics faculty member Walter Lewin’s online lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and online MITx courses from edX, the online learning platform co-founded by MIT, following a determination that Dr. Lewin engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies.

Submission + - Nightfall: Can Kalgash Exist? (arxiv.org)

Submitted by jIyajbe on Friday July 25, 2014 @12:16PM

jIyajbe writes: Two researchers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics investigate the imaginary world of Kalgash, a planetary system based on the novel ‘Nightfall’ (Asimov & Silverberg, 1991). From the arXiv paper:

"The system consists of a planet, a moon and an astonishing six suns. The six stars cause the wider universe to be invisible to the inhabitants of the planet. The author explores the consequences of an eclipse and the resulting darkness which the Kalgash people experience for the first time. Our task is to verify if this system is feasible, from the duration of the eclipse, the ‘invisibility’ of the universe to the complex orbital dynamics."
Their conclusion?
"We have explored several aspects of Asimov’s novel. We have found that the suns, especially Dovim are bright enough to blot out the stars. Kalgash 2 can eclipse Dovim for a period of 9 hours. We also tested one possible star configuration and after running some simulations, we found that the system is possible for short periods of time."

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