ThunderNews Blog
Experts Claim Usenet Newsgroups Make You Smarter
February 22nd, 2010
Most experts agree that the Internet and USENET won’t make us stupid. Now there is proof. USENET newsgroups report that a good 76% of technology stakeholders and critics interviewed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University believe that the Internet and the online worlds such as USENET will enhance human intelligence by 2020.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Internet Center at Elon University teamed up to survey 895 experts about the future of the Internet and its effect on human intelligence. The survey required them to assess 10 different “tension pairs” – each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes – and to select the one most likely choice of two statements.
Although a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and interested institutions was sought, this survey, fielded from Dec. 2, 2009 to Jan. 11, 2010, should not be taken as a representative canvassing of internet experts. By design, the survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort.
Out of the online experts surveyed, 81% agreed with the statement “as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices.” In contrast, 21 percent of the respondents believe the Internet and USENET will be responsible for lowering the IQs of those who use it frequently. The survey also revealed that 42 percent of experts think that anonymous online activity will be cracked down on by 2020, due to tighter security and ID systems used online. Another tally reported on newsgroups showed that 55 percent believe it will still be fairly easy to surf the ‘Net and Newsgroups anonymously by then while a contrast of 16 percent said that dependency on them was making people dumber. Four percent choose to keep their opinions to their selves.
Some of the respondents worked or were affiliated with tech companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft, while others came from universities and federal organizations or were identified by Pew as “Internet veterans,” many of whom have been online for more than a decade.
The survey was conducted with the Imagining the Internet Center at North Carolina’s Elon University. It responded in part to last summer’s Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, in which author Nicholas Carr had argued that the ease of online searching and the distractions that come up when you browse online were possibly limiting people’s ability to concentrate.
CERN Hadron Collider Back Online Causes Newsgroup Spike
November 24th, 2009
Science, Physics, Chemistry, Astrological and even more themed newsgroups are all about the Hadron Collider again. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, designed to recreate the Big Bang of the universe, has been restarted after more than a year of repairs, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said on Friday.
Excitingly, these USENET newsgroups report that after being stalled by a catastrophic leak, a speck of bread and alleged time travelers, CERN has brought the Large Hadron
Collider successfully back online with the full orbit of a proton beam. The first collision occurred at injection energy of 450 billion electron volts. Now the energy of Proton beams has been increased from 450 to 540 billion electron volts.
As beams of protons travel in opposite direction, they will gain energy with every lap. The first real test for LHC will come early next year, when proton beams will collide with enormous energy to give insight into dark matter and recreate forces and conditions that existed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.
Technical problems forced CERN to shut down the $10 billion collider just nine days after it was started for the first time in September 2008. The problem was a faulty splice in the super-conducting cable connecting two cooling magnets in the underground ring, which smashes particles at a temperature of just above absolute zero to re-create conditions believed to exist at the start of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Scientists will analyze the particles created as the result of collision and will start giving clues about the origin of the Universe.
Study: USENET Newsgroups Does Not Cause Anti-Social Behavior
November 5th, 2009
Officially, you can’t complain that spending your day on USENET is the reason why your anti-social. Researchers at Pew Internet and American Life Project released the results of its recent study that was aimed at determining whether if online could lead to a reduction in the size and diversity of core discussion networks and social networks more broadly.
Result: Using technology has not made us less social.
The national study is the first to explore how people use the USENET and World Wide Web to interact with close family and friends. The project found that both the size and diversity of people’s discussion networks are actually higher on average for those who participate on online social networks, like USENET newsgroups, challenging a 2006 report that blamed technology for an increase in social isolation.
“We find that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then,” Pew researchers report.
Online use does not pull people away from places such as parks, cafes and restaurants, Pew researchers conclude: “Online access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces.” Also, in opposition to the conclusion that online usage primarily bridges gaps between people who are geographically far from each other, the survey found that there is little difference between local social usage of technology and distant communication.
The findings clearly stand in contrast to the notion that technology “might cause people to retreat from life,” says Lee Rainie, who directs the Pew Internet project. Spending time with online social networks – such as USENET newsgroups, he says, gives people “new powers to extend themselves and extend their interests.”
Medical Newsgroups: Virus May Cause Prostate Cancer
September 8th, 2009
Medical newsgroups are reporting a finding with potentially major implications for identifying a viral cause of prostate cancer. The report states that researchers at the University of Utah and Columbia University medical schools have discovered a type of virus known to cause leukemia and sarcomas in animals and has been found for the first time in malignant human prostate cancer cells.
A team of researchers, led by senior study author Dr. Ila R. Singh, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah, studied 200 samples of prostate cancer cells and then compared them with 100 samples of healthy prostate cells.
Singh and his team discovered that the XMRV virus (Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) was present in 44% of tumors that received measure of a 9-10 point Gleason severity scale. The scale measures aggressiveness of prostate cancers, with lower ratings associated with having a normal prostate.
Discussions on newsgroups reveal that XMRV has been under investigation for its potential role in causing cancer for some time. The new study strengthens the link and also dispels the previous belief that certain people with genetic mutations are more susceptible than others the XMRV infection.
XMRV is a retrovirus like HIV and it works by making a replica of its own DNA into chromosomes of a cell they infect. Proteins from the virus were found nearly entirely in the malignant cells, which indicate an association between being infected with the virus and developing tumors. The virus XMRV was previously known to cause leukemia in animals, but has now been connected to human prostate cancer, indicating that the disease could have a viral origin.
Posts on these medicine related newsgroups relay that this is the first time researchers have given strong evidence that a virus known to cause cancer in animals is linked to prostate cancer in humans.
Approximately 1 in 4 prostate cancers tested contained the XMRV virus, compared to only 6 per cent of cancer-free tissues. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men in the U.S. behind skin cancer. According to the National Academy of Sciences, 190 thousand men have received a diagnosis of prostate cancer this year in the United States. If further research shows that XMRV causes prostate cancer in males, it could assist in making diagnostic tests, vaccines and therapies for treating the cancer.
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