Daily Archives: August 31, 2017

Large diet study suggests it’s carbs, not fats, that are bad for your health

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A large, 18-country study may turn current nutritional thinking on its head.

The new research suggests that it’s not the fat in your diet that’s raising your risk of premature death, it’s too many carbohydrates — especially the refined, processed kinds of carbs — that may be the real killer.

The research also found that eating fruits, vegetables and legumes can lower your risk of dying prematurely. But three or four servings a day seemed to be plenty. Any additional servings didn’t appear to provide more benefit.

What does all this mean to you? Well, a cheeseburger may be OK to eat, and adding lettuce and tomato to the burger is still good for you, but an excess of white flour burger buns may boost your risk of dying early.

People with a high fat intake — about 35 percent of their daily diet — had a 23 percent lower risk of early death and 18 percent lower risk of stroke compared to people who ate less fat, said lead author Mahshid Dehghan. She’s an investigator with the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Ontario.

The researchers also noted that a very low intake of saturated fats (below 3 percent of daily diet) was associated with a higher risk of death in the study, compared to diets containing up to 13 percent daily.

At the same time, high-carb diets — containing an average 77 percent carbohydrates — were associated with a 28 percent increased risk of death versus low-carb diets, Dehghan said.

Source: Large diet study suggests it’s carbs, not fats, that are bad for your health

Uber riders can choose not to be tracked after they are dropped off

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In response to a chorus of complaints from its users, Uber is revamping privacy settings that it rolled out last fall.

Beginning this week, Uber riders using the iOS version of the ride-hailing company’s app will find a new series of privacy prompts that includes the ability to deny Uber the right to track your whereabouts. Uber is working on similar tweaks to the Android version of its app.

The new options for Uber app users are: Always (Uber is allowed to collect rider location information from the moment the app is opened until the trip ends), While Using The App (information flows to Uber while the app is visible on the screen) and Never (no info is transmitted but riders have to manually input their pick-up and drop-off locations).

One of the old privacy features that gave many users pause was Uber’s ability to track the whereabouts of riders up to 5 minutes after a ride was completed.

Uber says the 5-minute feature was never activated on the iOS version of its app, and that it was disabled a few months after being initiated on the Android version.

Source: Uber riders can make their trips more private

Experts excited by brain ‘wonder-drug’ – BBC News

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Scientists hope they have found a drug to stop all neurodegenerative brain diseases, including dementia.In 2013, a UK Medical Research Council team stopped brain cells dying in an animal for the first time, creating headline news around the world.But the compound used was unsuitable for people, as it caused organ damage.Now two drugs have been found that should have the same protective effect on the brain and are already safely used in people.”It’s really exciting,” said Prof Giovanna Mallucci, from the MRC Toxicology Unit in Leicester.She wants to start human clinical trials on dementia patients soon and expects to know whether the drugs work within two to three years.

Source: Experts excited by brain ‘wonder-drug’ – BBC News

An A.I. Says There Are Six Main Kinds of Stories

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That’s what a group of researchers, from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, set out to do. They collected computer-generated story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction, classifying each into one of six core types of narratives (based on what happens to the protagonist):

1. Rags to Riches (rise)

2. Riches to Rags (fall)

3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)

4. Icarus (rise then fall)

5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)

6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

Their focus was on the emotional trajectory of a story, not merely its plot. They also analyzed which emotional structure writers used most, and how that contrasted with the ones readers liked best, then published a preprint paper of their findings on the scholarship website arXiv.org. More on that in a minute.

First, the researchers had to find a workable dataset. Using a collection of fiction from the digital library Project Gutenberg, they selected 1,737 English-language works of fiction between 10,000 and 200,000 words long. 

Source: An A.I. Says There Are Six Main Kinds of Stories

Make money with open source

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Further on my preachings on making money from open source (see video), it turns out that there is a Fair Source license already available on Github

Not open source. Not closed source. The Fair Source License allows everyone to see the source code and makes the software free to use for a limited number of users in your organization. It offers some of the benefits of open source while preserving the ability to charge for the software.