The Globe and Mail has caused a court “book of record” to be released from the Vancouver court in which a trial against a Chinese Vancouverite accused of spying for China is taking place. The most recent development: Two unnamed co-conspirators in the case have been found to be Chinese soldiers.
Allegedly, Su Bin, a 50-year old entrepreneur living in Vancouver, helped the Chinese cyper-spying operation steal American fighter jet plans by providing focus for the hacking efforts of the Chinese soldiers. This help was documented in intercepted emails, according to the court documents.
In the trial, based on a U.S. charge, the two Chinese soldiers were referred to only as “unindicted co-conspirators” “affiliated with mulitiple organizations and entities.” No mention was made that they were tied to the Chinese army.
The Globe and Mail-obtained court documents show that the two had been explicitly referred to as “two Chinese military officers.” The two Chinese soldiers have also been identified by U.S. authories, according to the documents, although the names are not revealed by the Globe-obtained documents.
What Is If-Modified-Since? … If-Modified-Since (aka “the If-Modified-Since HTTP header”) explained.
(This is an SEO-relevant question asked by web developers who want search engines to understand and rank their webpages.)
“304 status code” or no “304”?
Every so often, the Googlebot spider will visit your website. If you have updated your page since last time it was there, you will want the spider to re-index the page, not just pass it over and think the same material is there as last time.
It takes a lot of time and energy to crawl through an entire website and index all those pages. Googlebot wants you to tell it if you have changed each page or if there is no change.
304 is a signal by which a web page tells a crawler that it has not changed. If there is no 304 signal, the crawler will crawl the page and see what is there.
So you put an “If-Modified-Since HTTP header” on each page. If the page has modified since last time, re-index it, please, you are saying to the spider. If the page has not changed, you can keep your old records in the Google Seach Engine.
– Communicate with your server. Ask them, “Does my web server (the server on which my sites are hosted) support the If Modified Since header?
– You can also install a plugin that does adds the If-Modified-Since HTTP header to your website. Some of these are buggy or not updated, but at least (as long as it works) you can activate it, then run a test to check (HTTP Header Checker by ForBrains.co.uk) if it’s doing “Last-Modified”, and if it is, you can see If-Modified-Since is supported. (However, you may want to code your own code for If-Modified-Since for your website and avoid a plugin, because plugins can cause problems and slow down websites.)
BCIT is providing a power-nap room, hoping to allow some of their students — already sleeping in other parts of the school — to boost their energy levels.
The sleep room, launched Monday, is available to book for hour periods between 12:30 and 5 p.m. four days per week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Students can check bed availability at any time on the university’s online portal.
There are 10 beds in the low-lit room — which is also a racquetball court — and a station where students can pick up clean pillow cases and sanitizer. Students are required to spray and wipe the vinyl beds after use.
The nap room has a set of rules provided by the BCIT Student Association. Cell phone noise and talking is prohibited in the nap room and beds are not allowed to be pushed together.
The room was initiated after BCIT authorities noticed students sleeping all over the campus and realized that their students must be very tired. In addition to the benefits of alertness during classes, the school also hopes to cut down on driving accidents. Many BCIT students commute to the university from significant distances.
Students are already using BCIT’s new nap room
The new nap room will be available to students for one booking per week “to start,” according to the BCITSA, and they have plans to eventually allow one booking per day.
This javascript-based visual representation of the Earth spinning in space was developed and shared on the website CodePen by programmer Eric J Nesser.
Holding down the mouse left-click button while scrolling will zoom or change the viewing angle of the representation of the Earth.
Chimpanzees played the trust game to find out the basis of individual preference for other chimps
Trust is the foundation of close relationships in the world of chimpanzees, according to anthropologists at Max Planck Institute.
“Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets,” said Dr. Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “In our study, we investigated whether chimpanzees show a comparable pattern and extend trust selectively toward those individuals they are closely bonded with. Our findings suggest that they do indeed, and thus that current characteristics of human friendships have a long evolutionary history and extend to primate social bonds.”
Previous studies of chimpanzee friendships had shown that the animals were attracted to sociable partners for friendships, and that they extended their favors to those they preferred. The Max Plank researchers wanted to know if the basis for this preference was “trust.”
Research situation of chimps
In order to find out, the researchers spent five months at Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. They set up an arena where the Sweetwaters chimps could play “the trust game” — a game in which two separated chimpanzees get to decide if their partner gets a delicious treat or a less savory one. The partner in turn has the opportunity to share some of their treat back with the one who pulled the rope that opened the door to the treat.
The best case scenario is considered to be that the chimp with the rope will provide the other with the tasty treat, and the other will share some with the first chimp.
Before the researchers put the chimps in the experimental setting, the researchers observed the chimpanzee group to decide for each chimp which other animal was their favorite and least favorite. These two would be paired up against the first chimp in the game.
Each chimp played 12 rounds of the game with each their favorite and least favorite group member.
The result was that chimps were ” significantly more likely to voluntarily place resources at the disposal of a partner, and thus to choose a risky but potentially high-payoff option, when they interacted with a friend as compared to a non-friend.”
Proportion of trust choices
Proportion of reciprocation
The researchers interpreted this finding to mean that chimpanzees show much greater trust when it comes to friends than non-friends.
“Human friendships do not represent an anomaly in the animal kingdom,” Engelmann said. “Other animals, such as chimpanzees, form close and long-term emotional bonds with select individuals. These animal friendships show important parallels with close relationships in humans. One shared characteristic is the tendency to selectively trust friends in costly situations.”
The report, “Chimpanzees Trust Their Friends,” was completed by Drs. Jan Maxim Engelmann and Esther Herrmann and was published in the journal Current Biology. View the research paper at this link.
Designer Nick Kaloterakis has worked on a wide range of future design concepts, incluing vehicles, and this is his SNAP! design. It is a personal wheel vehicle that can attach to other similar vehicles to form collective vehicles.
Kaloterakis works in 3D renderings to develop his concepts. By trade he is a digital artist at 3D/VFX in Syndey, Australia, in addition to owning his own design studio called “kollected.”
Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose confirmed rumors Monday that the original Guns N’ Roses would reunite and play the Coachella festival in 2016. The hard rock singer confirmed the reunion with his former bandmates on Twitter, less than one week after Tweeting opaquely that “The only thing I know ‘confirmed’ is my LOVE of Taco Bell!”
“Ok,ok…,” tweeted Rose, “It’s ‘confirmed!’ Guns N’ Roses is Headlining Coachella 2016!! See Everyone There!!”
The tweet followed an announcement by The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that the lineup for the festival would include Guns N’ Roses, LCD Soundsystem, Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding, Ice Cube, Disclosure, Sia, and dozens of other bands.
From the International Space Station’s 400 km perch, astronauts like New Jerseyite Scott Kelly have been taking impressive photos of the world over the past almost two decades of the ISS’s use.
Kelly, the current Commander of the Year Long Mission aboard the ISS, has been tweeting his photos to his followers for the duration.
Here are some of the best shots from the space above the Great White North, Canada:
Want to try to guess them? The photographs show:
1. North Vancouver Island and Rocky Mountains
2. Vancouver from above
3. Aurora over Calgary
4. Aurora over Saskatchewan
5. Great Lakes near Salte Ste. Marie
6. North of Georgian Bay, Ontario
7. Montreal from above
8. Quebec City from above
In the previous year, Islamic violence took the lives of over 27,000 people and critically injured another 26,000, according to an extremism watch organization that tracks Islamic attacks. 2015’s attacks took place in 52 countries worldwide, and included 475 suicide attacks.
The Religion of Peace, an organization that collects information about attacks motivated by Islamic ideas and tallies various statistics, published their yearly figures Friday on their website.
The December figures — 225 deaths and 273 critically injured in 47 separate attacks, brought the totals for the 2015 year to 27,435 deaths and 26,144 critically injured in 2,849 separate attacks in 52 countries.
The numbers provided by TROP are actually lower than what the total deaths would be, the organization’s editor Glen Roberts told The Speaker, because the organization relies on news reports for their tallies. Not all deaths are reported in the news, and deaths that occur after news has been published are usually not included.
The numbers have remained fairly consistent since TROP’s first entries, which date back to the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001.
“It looks like there have been only 12 days since the beginning of 2005 without at least one Islamic attack,” Roberts noted.
There are an average of 5 separate attacks every day that result in at least one death, motivated by Islamic ideas, according to TROP. The numbers tallied do not include deaths like honor killings, although the group does monitor these incidents as well.
Over the past year, we have seen many drone-cam videos of birds of prey attacking UAVs, sometimes knocking them down. This week, a falcon in Dubai took a drone down as prey, reported The National.
The drone was flying above Jumeirah park when it was taken down by the raptor, whizzed to the ground and crashed. The bird followed it down, and was seen by park-goers guarding its prey.
A man who was concerned about what had happened went to investigate the garden into which it had crashed. The falcon was perched nearby, and after the two exchanged stares, the falcon flew over to perch on the drone.
The man, one Lukas Franciszek, posted the photo he took to social media.
The falcon flew away, and the owner is not yet known, although the bird was tagged.
It is suspected that the falcon may have associated the drone with food. Drones are used to train falcons: they lure birds in the air with dangling bundles of meat and feathers. After a bird tears this bundle off, it is typically rewarded as part of its training.
Bangkok Metropolitan Police have announced a “New Years Gift” to the city: traffic tickets will be reduced to just 100 baht starting today.
The gift has a serious side: the metro police are dealing with a massive backlog of unpaid traffic tickets. Because the repercussions associated with not paying these tickets are usually insignificant, many people simply leave them unpaid.
The gift doesn’t extend to all offenders, however. Traffic crimes that affect other people are not included in the deal. These crimes include DUIs, illegal parking, and driving on sidewalks.
However, crimes such as not wearing a helmet on a motorbike or not wearing a seatbelt in a car are eligible, so long as the fine was originally for less than 1,000 baht.
The traffic fine promotion will end Jan. 15, 2016, after which time all traffic fines will return to their regular rates.
For plotting to blow up an in-session Parliament, Polish former university professor Brunon Kwiexien has been sentenced to 13 years prison.
On Monday a Polish court handed down the sentence to the former Krakow University of Agriculture chemistry professor.
Kwiecien, 48, an unaffiliated nationalist, cited as motives for the crime, planned in 2012, a belief that his country was headed in the wrong direction and the issue of what he referred to as foreigners holding government positions.
Kwiecien did not deny his plans when arrested.
When the police were tipped off, they found four tonnes of explosives in a car which Kwiecien planned to use to kill the president, prime minister and others during a hearing on the budget.
