We need to have a lot of difficult conversations in order to resolve the issues we are facing as a society, and the only way these conversations will be productive and enduring is if we all can agree on the facts. Right now, with Americans believing more than 40 percent of the news they see is fake, we aren’t quite there as a society, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be. The internet is an amazing tool, but to use it most effectively we have to embrace its benefits while also understanding the ways in which it makes us vulnerable. If students are still learning dated practices such as cursive writing in school, shouldn’t they be learning how to navigate and consume the internet responsibly as well?

Much misinformation and many falsehoods related to politics circulate online. This paper investigates how youth judge the accuracy of truth claims tied to controversial public issues. In an experiment embedded within a nationally representative survey of youth ages 15-27 (N=2,101), we examined factors that influenced youth judgements regarding the accuracy of the content. Consistent with research on motivated reasoning, youth assessments depended on a) the alignment of the claim with their prior policy position and, to a lesser extent, on b) whether the post included an inaccurate statement. However, and most importantly, among those participants who reported the most media literacy learning experiences, there was a large, statistically significant difference in ratings of accuracy between those exposed to a post that employed misinformation and those who saw an evidence-based post. Implications for educators and policymakers are discussed.

In this blog post, we’ll demonstrate how the HAProxy load balancer protects you from application-layer DDoS attacks that could, otherwise, render your web application dead in the water, unreachable by ordinary users. In particular, we’ll discuss HTTP floods. An HTTP flood operates at the application layer and entails being immersed with web requests, wherein the attacker hopes to overwhelm your application’s capacity to respond.

Most people are familiar with white noise, that static sound of an air conditioner that lulls us to sleep by drowning out any background noise.

Except technically, the whirl of a fan or hum of the AC isn’t white noise at all. Many of the sounds we associate with white noise are actually pink noise, or brown, or green, or blue. In audio engineering, there’s a whole rainbow of noise colors, each with its own unique properties, that are used to produce music, help relaxation, and describe natural rhythms like the human heartbeat. If you know what to look for, you can start to notice the colors of the noise that make up the soundscape around us.

The open source community produces a large amount of software for different uses. I have already told you about open source tools for interactive fictions. Here are eleven open source tools to help authors be creative.

Son has started his month-long guest appearance at the local school here in Japan.

In contrast to previous assumptions, the learning process leads to a reorganization that extends to deep brain structures in the thalamus and the brainstem. The relatively young phenomenon of human writing, therefore, changes brain regions that are very old in evolutionary terms and already core parts of mice and other mammalian brains.

Axiom is an extremely flexible node-based realtime audio synthesizer. It was originally designed for size-constrained environments such as PC intros in the demoscene, but is entirely open source and is becoming an excellent free tool for any musician.

Features:

• Musician-friendly (ie knobs and sliders) interface
• Highly customizable and flexible through a node editor and custom scripting language, named Maxim
• Export to replayer with no dependencies (not even the standard library)
• Use any DAW with VSTi support for note editing and automation

"To be honest, the spooks love PGP," Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the Usenix Enigma conference in San Francisco on Wednesdy. "It's really chatty and it gives them a lot of metadata and communication records. PGP is the NSA's friend."