Science and Nature

“Some Chimpanzees Have Entered Stone Age.” Scientists On 3 Continents Make Surprising Discovery.

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What is exceptional about this discovery is that the tools were held by non-human hands.

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In South Africa, a carrier pigeon carrying a 4GB memory stick proved to be faster than the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom. Winston the pigeon took one hour and eight minutes to carry the data across the 60-mile course, and it took another hour to upload the data. During the same time, the ADSL had sent just 4% of the data.

--> The race was held by an IT company in Durban, South Africa, called Unlimited IT. One of Unlimited IT's employees complained about the slow speed of data transmission on ADSL, saying that data would get transferred faster by carrier pigeon. To highlight just how slow the broadband internet is, the company decided to test that claim.

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The 11-month-old Winston flew 60 miles from Unlimited IT's call center in Howick to another office in Durban. To make sure that the bird didn't have an unfair advantage, Unlimited IT imposed some rules on its website, including "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within." Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

--> For its part, Telkom said that it was not responsible for Unlimited IT's slow broadband speeds. A Telkom spokesperson said that they had made several recommendations to Unlimited IT to improve its service, but none of the suggestions had been accepted.

As the BBC reports, South Africa is one of the countries that could benefit from three new fiber optic cables being laid around the African continent to improve internet service. -->
For more information about the pigeon race visit the official website.

Sources

BBC NEWS
News24
Reuters
Wikipedia

For Fun

Prison programs that have been in place for decades to rehabilitate convicted sex offenders may not work at all, according to a new study.
Sex offender treatment programs — in which offenders follow a syllabus aimed at “normalizing” their sexual impulses and fantasies — have not been shown to reduce the likelihood that sex offenders will change their behavior after they get out of jail, forensic psychiatrist David K. Ho  in the BMJ medical journal.

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“No evidence from academic or policy research has shown that the treatment program significantly reduces sexual reoffending,” David K. Ho, a forensic psychologist at South Essex Partnership University in England, writes in BMJ. “Victims and the public deserve to know this.”

--> “Sex offenders are sent to prison, undergo this treatment program, are deemed to have been somewhat rehabilitated and are released to the public,” Ho wrote. “However, they are as likely to offend as before receiving treatment.”

In 2012, a major review of sex offender treatment programs concluded that for a regime that has been imposed on so many prisoners, there had not been nearly enough research proving its worth. No one has done studies rigorous enough to prove that it’s useless either, though — and that lack of data is a real problem. “Not only could this result in the continued use of ineffective (and potentially harmful) interventions, but it also means that society is lured into a false sense of security in the belief that once the individual has been treated, their risk of reoffending is reduced,” the authors wrote. “Current available evidence does not support this belief.”

--> Sex offenders who receive outpatient treatment are less likely to repeat offend than those who don’t receive this treatment, but the efficacy of sex offenders’ treatment while in prison is questionable at best. “Treatment varies widely — most programs combine cognitive behavioral therapy with lessons about empathy and anger management — and, in most cases, never ends,” writes Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker.

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