feeling the most unhappy or depressed when their children are in middle school

"Parenting a tween is harder than mothering an infant,"

In recent years, federal regulators shopping undercover have found about 1 in 4 funeral homes break the rule and fail to disclose price information.

"And she said that she had spent pretty much all day on the phone and on the Internet, simply trying to price funeral services, and she couldn't do it. She actually just couldn't get a straight answer about what products and services were being offered and how much they cost."

consumers spend an extra $1,900, on average when they buy a package, versus an "a la carte" funeral.

The Houston-based firm claims 16 percent of the $19 billion North American death care market, which includes the U.S. and Canada. Company documents say it has 24,000 employees and is the largest owner of funeral homes and cemeteries in the world.

In a months-long investigation into pricing and marketing in the funeral business, also known as the death care industry, NPR spoke with funeral directors, consumers and regulators. We collected price information from around the country and visited providers. We found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress.

With Anenke, a French orthodontics company, they are patient-testing a new process that uses digital scanning to create a dental device which is printed with safe polymers.

“We’ve figured out how to print custom wood grain by taking sawdust and plastic, combining it into a filament and extruding or forcing it out,” says Tibbits.

Tibbits has pioneered the field of 4D printing — that is, using 3D printers to create material that then transforms into a predetermined shape (TED Talk: The emergence of 4D printing).

At MIT’s International Design Center, Self-Assembly Lab founder Skylar Tibbits, co-director Jared Laucks and their team are inventing smart materials that can automatically take shape in useful — and sometimes surprising — ways.

The idea that requests for White House tours and the planning of the Easter Egg Roll depend on the president’s spouse should be shocking to our 21st-century sensibilities.

Since their beginnings in the 1990s, charter schools in cities, which are public and free, have cannibalized the Catholic schools

The organization noted that the President’s order “had a significant disproportionate effect on international travel,” which accounts for 12.7 percent of U.S. business travel.

Ms. Cabral, the archaeologist who has spent years studying Rego Grande, said that evidence of large settlements remains elusive, in contrast with other sites in the Amazon like Kuhikugu, at the headwaters of the Xingu River, where researchers have drawn parallels to the legends surrounding the mythical Lost City of Z, long an irresistible lure for explorers and adventurers.

After conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European conquest of the Americas began.

“A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans, and that’s obviously not the case.”

Then in the 1980s, ranchers cleared land to raise cattle, uncovering the true extent of the earthworks in the process. More than 450 of these geoglyphs are concentrated within Acre State in Brazil.

The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.

While Industrial Light & Magic was started to generate special effects for “Star Wars,” the visual effects studio is now the largest in the motion picture industry, working not only with Lucasfilm but also with studios across the globe.)

So she was stunned when she began work at the studio and found herself surrounded by women, particularly in leadership

the women onscreen are only now catching up with those working behind the scenes at Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects studio founded by George Lucas.

Jyn Erso is not a princess or a Jedi. She is, however, the second female character with a lead role in a “Star Wars” movie in the last two years.

Murray and Cantwell are also asking DeVos to give a firm date by which the public can again access information that has been withdrawn.

President Trump has not been an advocate for disability rights.

Japanese handshakes tend to be “very, very limp.”

Where should we draw the ethical and moral lines? Will CRISPR mean people are making designer babies and eliminating genetic diseases, and is that acceptable? We can wipe out whole species, like the mosquitos that carry the malaria parasite. But should we?

The controversial gene editing technique CRISPR could help scientists solve antimicrobial resistance, cure genetic diseases and much more

Here is what we are supposed to do: rebut every single lie. Insist moreover that each lie is retracted — and journalists in press conferences should back up their colleagues with repeated follow-ups if Spicer tries to duck the plain truth. Do not allow them to move on to another question.

None of this, moreover, is ever corrected. No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack.

alligators “not exceeding 20 inches in length” may be shipped through the mail

observing Feb. 9 as Alligators in the Sewers Day

In his spare time, the documentary photographer had been scraping information on Airbnb listings across the city and displaying them in interactive maps on his website, InsideAirbnb.com.

“A lesson about every single element on the periodic table.”

The paper is launching “Decodex”: three fact-checking products powered by a database of 600 websites deemed unreliable as compiled by Le Monde’s fact-checking unit, Les Décodeurs over the last year

One way of tackling the issue is by using First Draft’s platform called Check, a live, open-source site where organizations can add any disputed content, whether it’s a video, image or fake-news site, and the members will assign a verifiable status.

Switzerland has had the fourth-highest number of headlines relating to fake news since October, putting it behind the U.K., the Netherlands and Canada, respectively.

We will continue to work with Tapper and NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations in 2017, which promises to be a busy year as the Republican president and Congress look to make major changes in U.S. policy on climate change, fracking, renewable energy and other issues that SciCheck has been following for over two years.

Yes, they discussed the possibility of a superintelligence that could somehow escape human control

So, they descended on a coastal retreat called Asilomar, a name that became synonymous with the guidelines they laid down at this meeting—a strict ethical framework meant to ensure that biotechnology didn’t unleash the apocalypse.

A week after the inauguration, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Origins of Totalitarianism were number one and number 36 respectively on the US Amazon bestseller list,

little thing in outer space known as AG Carinae is one of the brightest objects ever observed.

A collision between Earth and a planet roughly the size of Mars has long been our best working theory for how the moon was formed.

To get there, you can provide some dedicated spaces, or even memberships, for a car-sharing service (six points). Furnish the basement with a fleet of bicycles for residents (one point). Set up a shuttle service to the closest train or bus station (14 points), or stick a handy screen with real-time transit schedules in the lobby (one point). Dedicating space to on-site childcare earns you two points, since it means fewer parents driving to drop off and pick up the kiddos.

Nonprofits again made up a hefty portion of the highlighted work being done to make education more accessible to all students.

Peer review' was a term borrowed from the procedures that government agencies used to decide who would receive financial support for scientific and medical research. When 'referee systems' turned into 'peer review', the process became a mighty public symbol of the claim that these powerful and expensive investigators of the natural world had procedures for regulating themselves and for producing consensus, even though some observers quietly wondered whether scientific referees were up to this grand calling.

The struggle between Whewell and Lubbock represented two distinct visions of what a referee might be. Whewell was the authoritative generalist, glancing down on the landscape of knowledge. He was unconcerned with — and probably not in a position to critique — the details. Such referees were, according to the Royal Society's president, “Elevated by their character and reputation above the influence of personal feelings of rivalry or petty jealousy”4. Lubbock was a younger specialist, Airy's equal. This allowed him to take a fine-tooth comb to Airy's arguments; it also put him in the position of reviewing a direct competitor.

(The temptation to conflate these practices with modern referee systems has led to the stubborn myth that the origins of the scientific referee can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century.)

He suggested that it commission reports on all papers sent for publication in the semi-annual Philosophical Transactions

Ed Thorp was the first 'quant', the first person to make mathematical analysis and statistics the center of his investing.

“Work hard,” he said. “But not every day.”

“Never 100 percent in any session,” Trouw said. “That’s the philosophy.”

WIRED’s exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s revolutionary attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark

The Streisand effect, then, describes the phenomenon in which efforts to conceal or censor information only drive more attention to it.

Despite many editors being unpaid or poorly remunerated for their work, plant scientist Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva believes they “should be held accountable” if authors are made to wait for an “excessive or unreasonable amount of time” before a decision is made on their research.

publisher Tim O’Reilly, who recently published an article on how he vets news online.  It’s very useful, actually, listing a series of practical tips, from looking for references to checking out other links on the same topic.

publisher Tim O’Reilly, who recently published an article on how he vets news online.  It’s very useful, actually, listing a series of practical tips, from looking for references to checking out other links on the same topic.

Rumors are undeniably resilient, but they are far easier to trace, track, and debunk now than they were when Franklin Roosevelt or Al Smith was running for president.

We’ll be able to directly image Earth-like exoplanets, including Proxima b, out to somewhere between 15–30 light years distant. Jupiter-like planets will be visible out to more like 300 light years.

You can even watch the volcanoes on Io — visible in the infrared — erupting in the process!

the three other famous ones — the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT) and Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) — have either suffered major setbacks or been cancelled entirely.

Until we start manufacturing mirrors in zero-gravity, we’ve had two options: cast a single mirror up to the maximum size you can manufacture it — around 8 meters — or build a large number of smaller segments and stitch them together.

Elkins-Tanton has estimated the value of the asteroid’s iron content alone at approximately $10,000 quadrillion. That’s to say nothing of the gold, copper, and platinum to be found.

16 Psyche may be a piece of an ancient protoplanet once as big as Mars, which shattered into pieces over billions of years, due to bombardments and collisions with other bodies, a common occurrence after the birth of our solar system. Today, it’s sort of an astronomical fossil.

metallic monolith is so enormous, it’s considered a minor planet.

For all the talk of AI, it always seems that gossip is faster than progress. But it could be that within this century, we will fully realize the visions science fiction has promised us, says Dr. Ben Goertzel – for better or worse.

He reminds us that synthetic biology is only a fledgling science, and simply getting an organism to retain its unnatural Xs and Ys over multiple generations is already difficult.

“You might as well, I had to open another bottle just for you”

Over time, the provision of researcher workflows might even result in direct to consumer business models, offering either a complete solution for unaffiliated users, added value sales to users with institutional affiliations, or ultimately a complete solution.

In this respect, I will be interested to see whether EBSCO will offer products in support of reference (such as the chat products where OCLC has a business), one of the few components missing from offering a fairly complete researcher workflow.

Springer Nature’s sibling Digital Science is probably Elsevier’s foremost competitor in this space, albeit with a different investment and integration model.

Open access advocates might be concerned about some of these directions, but my sense is that many of these scientists and librarians remain largely focused on trying to compete with, or at least influence, scientific publishing.

One’s data and notes are stored and deposited in systems that, even if they allow ready export, are difficult if not impossible to utilize outside the original environment.

“workflow is the new content.”

Imagine searching for “401k matching” and instead of just receiving relevant messages or files, you also get a list of people in HR that can answer your question, or a list of channels for your query where you might be able to find the information you are looking for, or even a list of commonly asked questions relevant to that topic with links to the channel where each one was answered.

Relevant search relaxes the age constraint and takes into account the Lucene score of the document — how well it matches the query terms (Solr powers search at Slack).

Recent search finds the messages that match all terms, and presents them in reverse chronological order.

On average, 20% of a knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for the information they need to get their work done.

Kiwi Rose Fizz mocktail

The journey of Qatar Airways flight QR920, which spanned a staggering 9,032 miles and ten time zones, was hailed as a new milestone for both global aviation and New Zealand as a whole.

The STM sharing principles calls for building usage stats across legal sharing networks but that infrastructure has not been built yet.

vast arrays of information that they produce and collect in the process of conducting their research and engage in idiosyncratic practices for organizing and storing their information.

They are always somewhere, stored on somebody’s hard drive.

The summarization script collects all the Hypothesis direct links on the page, gathers the annotations, extracts the URLs and quotes, injects them into the Footnotes section of the page, and rewrites the links to point to corresponding footnotes.

When you follow the link Hypothesis takes you to the page, scrolls to the passage, and highlights it. That’s a powerful interactive experience!

Even so, URLs address only a small part of a larger infinity of resources: words and phrases in texts, regions within images, segments of audio and video. Web annotation enables us to address that larger infinity.

The crawler represented a third option: a way to figure out how humans work.

Because the robot built a model of itself that was distinct from its real physical body, he suggested that its creators had – perhaps inadvertently – given it a sense of self.

It was creepy: a four-legged metal crawler that could figure out how to limp if one of its legs was shortened.

The American Dream Academy, which offers its two-hour morning and evening classes in both Spanish and English, aims to bridge that gap. It teaches parents how to navigate the educational system, demystifying standards, assessments, and educational tracks, and to negotiate the often intimidating process of applying for college and student aid. It offers tips on communicating with teachers, counselors, and principals, and shows parents how to create a supportive home learning environment and build their child’s self-esteem.

In the humanities, the real value lies in the argument and this is found in the published article. This is very different to science, where most often the paper describes the experimental finding and it is in this finding that the value lies.

Karin Wulf’s Scholarly Kitchen piece on “Open Access and Historical Scholarship”

Sarah Bond, in an interesting article in Forbes, entitled “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu”, urges readers to delete their Academia.edu account. She suspects its motivations, pointing out it is not a real .edu, with no educational affiliations and motivated strictly by profit.

It is interesting to look at the activities of the successful, for-profit sharing sites, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu.

The question is whether proper attribution is really taking place

The author can transfer copyright to a publisher, or, as is becoming more common in scholarly publishing, sign a license allowing publication of the work while still retaining copyright.

by introducing editorial management software systems.

It’s about whether we’re abiding by the principles we claim as being core to our profession—in particular, those principles related to intellectual freedom, the public good, and service.

Where the library is the copyright holder, the library is completely within its rights to require patrons to ask permission before making use of the documents in question that goes beyond fair use.

the newspaper’s reporters had published content from those collections without asking permission, as library policy requires.

The press receives an annual subsidy north of $200,000.

After a brief training session, participants spent six hours archiving environmental data from government websites, including those of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department.

An anonymous donor has provided storage on Amazon servers, and the information can be searched from a website at the University of Pennsylvania called Data Refuge. Though the Federal Records Act theoretically protects government data from deletion, scientists who rely on it say would rather be safe than sorry.

researchers realize that their own aloofness may largely be to blame for public disregard for the evidence on issues like climate change or vaccine safety.

“But if we want to defend the role of science in policy making, scientists need to run for office.

I was supposed to make a deck for a meeting

Well, the mailman, but that was through the blinds. I don’t know if that counts.

The fact that it can be used in conjunction with Slack indicates that it would readily fit into enterprise workflow.

A smart Twitter user who follows researchers and practicing scientists could, using Nuzzel, easily and swiftly pick up on the hot articles that engender excitement.

using Nuzzel, I could still immediately understand the importance of Crossref’s content to my network of professionals and use that to gauge whether I ought to be reading it as well.

Nuzzel will even show me if there’s ongoing discussion of the article on sites such as Reddit, Hacker News, and TechMeme.

Nuzzel is a tool that allows the user to focus in on linked, full-text articles shared within his or her Twitter network during a particular time frame.

The sewer is not the theater of the sewer.

we must put digital literacy at the core of the curriculum

While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand.

Hand sanitizer gets rid of Sharpie

the recent fascination with MOOCs.