Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for October 17, 2019

An app that helps the incarcerated stay connected with families and friends; Retraction of much-hyped study linking men's behavior to the size of a women's heels; A web forum cracks vintage passwords from Unix pioneers; The appendix isn't useless. It's part of the immune system.; and a Steem essay reporting that UK renewable energy generation outpaced fossil fuels for the first time

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Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. An app that helps incarcerated people stay connected to their families - In this TED talk, Marcus Bullock tells about his creation of the FlikShop application that turns digital content into post cards, and for $0.99, delivers it to inmates via snail mail so that the prisoners can stay connected with family and friends during their incarceration. The story starts with his own experience of incarceration after a bad decision at the age of 15, then proceeds through a journey of entrepreneurship, before proceeding to the point where he was able to create FlikShop so that he could stay in touch with his own friends who were still incarcerated. The app has now been used to connect more than 140,000 families.


2. In 2014, a study claimed high heels made women more attractive. Now it’s been retracted. - A 2014 study by Nicolas Guéguen received extensive media coverage, including articles in Time and CNBC, after it reported that men's behavior is influenced by the size of the heels in the shoes that women wear. The study, itself, reported that: "men spontaneously approached women more quickly when they wore high-heeled shoes." However, it came under scrutiny in 2015 by Nick Brown and James Heathers, along with other papers by the same author. Now, four years later, the paper has been retracted. The retraction notice said that the paper suffered from "serious methodological weaknesses and statistical errors.." In a message, Heathers said that the 4 year lag from when the problems were reported until the retraction is normal, and that it was reported in a dossier of ten papers, so he hopes the other nine are still receiving scrutiny. I note that the paper is still listed on Guéguen's researchgate page.


3. Forum cracks the vintage passwords of Ken Thompson and other Unix pioneers - Last week, Leah Neukirchen reported that she had come across a 1980 era copy of the UNIX source tree, and cracked many of the passwords, because they were poorly constructed with easily guessable strings. This is from the article:

   BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used “dmac” (his middle name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose “bourne”; Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, relied on “wendy!!!” (the name of his wife); and Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first Fortran compiler, used “axolotl” (the name of a Mexican salamander).
   
   

   Weakest of all was the password for Unix contributor Brian W. Kernighan: “/.,/.,”—representing a three-character string repeated twice using adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard. (None of the passwords included the quotation marks.)

   Passwords from a handful of others, including Unix co-inventor Ken Thomas, remained uncrackable. Neukirchen asked for help on those, and collaborators cracked the last five, determining that Thomas' was “p/q2-q4!”, which describes a common opening move in Chess, and one commenter said that the first half of that password may have been on a T-shirt that was dedicated to a chess game that Thomas contributed to. h/t Bruce Schneier


4. Your Appendix Isn't Useless, After All - In this SciShow youtube video, the narrator tells about recent advances in understanding the appendix. Observing that the appendix has evolved in mammals at least 29 times, and that it has evolved more times than it has been lost, researchers started to question the claim that the appendix is a useless organ. Using computer models, researchers analyzed all sorts of data about animals, including whether or not they have an appendix, and they determined that the appendix is somehow involved in the immune system. This is consistent with observations in humans where it has been found that our appendixes have high numbers of T-cells and B-cells in our appendixes along with "good gut bacteria". A working theory is that the appendix is a holding area, that can reprovision the intestine with gut bacteria during times of extreme stress. Further, a 2015 study found that people who contracted a particular stomach infection were twice as likely to develop a severe infection if their appendix had been removed. Although it's starting to seem like the appendix may not be as useless as once thought, appendicitis can be deadly, so there are certainly times when it should be removed.
   
   

   To save you a click, here is the video:
   

h/t RealClear Science

STEEM United Kingdom: renewable electricity surpasses fossil fuels for the first time - According to @dim753, this July through September period represents the first time that renewables have exceeded fossil fuels in power generation in the UK, with total generation of 29.5 TWh vs. 29.1 TWh, respectively. This came about because of a sudden drop in cost of renewable power generation, along with the increasing price of fossil fuels as a result of aging fossil fuel plants. Wind power represented 20% of the renewable mix, biomass accounted for another 12%, and solar power accounted for 6%. Presumably, the rest of the power came from hydroelectric sources.

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