New Scientist summarizing the Nature paper:

“The most shocking result is that the use of sweeteners aimed at preventing diabetes might actually be contributing to and possibly driving the epidemic that it aims to prevent,” saysPEran ElinavPat the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who co-supervised the work with his colleaguePEran Segal.

Sweet…

A well rounded piece on the new Apple Watch by Benjamin Clymer:

Though I do not believe it poses any threat to haute horology manufactures, I do think the Apple Watch will be a big problem for low-priced quartz watches, and even some entry-level mechanical watches. In years to come, it could pose a larger threat to higher end brands, too. The reason? Apple got more details right on their watch than thePvastPmajority of Swiss and Asian brands do with similarly priced watches, and those details add up to a really impressive piece of design. It offersPsoPmuch more functionality than other digitals it’s almost embarrassing. But it’s not perfect, by any means. Read on to hear my thoughts on the Apple Watch, from the perspective of a watch guy.

I caught myself nodding in agreement while reading this sub-headline:

Market Leader In A Category No One Really Asked For

The Apple Watch is absolutely the best smart watch on the planet. That much I’m sure of. But are we sure that wearable technology is something we really want? In the same way those who publicly wore blue-tooth headsets five years ago and those who wore Google Glass one year ago, will smart watches ever become a thing that people genuinely want? If anyone can make it happen, it’s Apple. It’s going to take a lot of time, and a lot of test cases when this thing launches next year.

I’m skeptical that it will.

Even after having seen the video presentation and reading bits and pieces on the thing across tech news sites, I’m still at a loss as to what it’s supposed to be doing that shouldn’t have been taken care of by your phone to begin with.

If you need to recharge the device every day or so, I can’t imagine you’ll want to be carting it on you once the cool factor wears out. No, keep your Moto 360 yardstick to yourself. You can keep a self-winding mechanical watch on your wrist for much about as long as you want.

That is not to say there’s no room for a smart wearable, of course. The heart beat sensor assuredly looked neat. As did the “taptic” related stuff for notifications and map directions.

I’m a lot more skeptical about the rest, be it the tiny screen, Siri, Apple Pay or other. The wearable could, in my opinion, just as well have been a wristband that would have needed to be paired to an iDevice.

Vox:

Slater had traveled to Indonesia to do a wildlife shoot. While he was there, he left one of his cameras unattended, and aPcrested black macaque monkey began playing with it. She took dozens of photos, most of which were blurry shots of the ground or the sky. But the photos included this crystal-clear selfie.

Slater says he owns the copyright to the photograph and asked Wikimedia to take it down. In itsPfirst-ever transparency report, the Wikimedia Foundation says it refused because it doesn’t believe Slater owns the copyright.

Wikimedia has an interesting point…

Reuters:

People can askPGooglePto delete sensitive information from its Internet search results, Europe’s top court said on Tuesday.

The European Court of Justice is as high as courts get in the EU €€€ bar a handful of issues where constitutionality may be involved (in which case things may get stalled for ages), its rulings supersede top national courts on topics wherever it’s competent. The big question now is whether US privacy advocates will manage to pressure Google into deploying the same type of functionality on the other side of the pond.

Graham Priest writing for aeon:

When Western philosophers look East, they find things they do not understand €€€ not least the fact that the Asian traditions seem to accept, and even endorse, contradictions. Thus we find the great second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna saying:

The nature of things is to have no nature; it is their non-nature that is their nature. For they have only one nature: no-nature.

An abhorrence of contradiction has been high orthodoxy in the West for more than 2,000 years. Statements such as Nagarjuna’s are therefore wont to produce looks of blank incomprehension, or worse.

Alan Levinovitz writing for Wired:

Good opens the article by suggesting that Go is inherently superior to all other strategy games, an opinion shared by pretty much every Go player I’ve met.PP”There is chess in the western world, but Go is incomparably more subtle and intellectual,” says South Korean Lee Sedol, perhaps the greatest living Go player and one of a handful who make over seven figures a year in prize money.

Incomparably more subtle and intellectual sounds just about right.

Tim Adams, writing for The Guardian:

The data suggested that the success of teams had much less to do with experience, education, gender balance, or even personality types; it was closely correlated with a single factor: “Does everybody talk to each other?”

Ideally this talk was in animated short bursts indicating listening, involvement and trust €€€ long speeches generally correlated with unsuccessful outcomes. For creative groups such as drug discovery teams or for traders at financial institutions, say, the other overwhelming factor determining success was: do they also talk to a lot of people outside their group? “What we call ‘engagement’ and ‘exploration’ appeared to be about 40% of the explanation of the difference between a low-performing group and a high-performing group across all the studies,” Pentland says.

It was important that a good deal of engagement happened outside formal meetings. From this data, Pentland extrapolates a series of observations on everything from patterns of home-working (not generally a good idea) to office design (open and collegiate) to leadership. “If you create a highly energetic environment where people want to talk to each other right across the organisation then you have pretty much done your job right there.”

So true.

In French (and German), but take a look regardless as it’s mostly photos and comic strips. Possibly inspired by thePNews from 1930 blog.

The European Union’s highest court on Tuesday overthrew a rule that required telecoms companies to store the communications data of EU citizens for up to two years, on the grounds that it infringed on basic rights.

An update on “the sewers of the Internet” (aka comment sections):

The study found correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet.