Federal regulators crack down on social media abuse in nursing homes

According to a ProPublica report released late last year, documented cases of nursing home employees sharing abusive or degrading images of their residents on social media are on the rise. To combat the problem, federal health officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which regulates nursing homes and assisted living facilities, have now asked state health departments to enact policies that prohibit employees from taking or sharing demeaning photos of residents.

As NPR reports, some documented cases included employees who took photos of residents at assisted living facilities who were “naked, covered in feces or even deceased.” In a memo from CMS, the agency asks state officials to increase their efforts to investigate and report employees who engage in such activities.

“Treating a nursing home resident in any manner that does not uphold a resident’s sense of self-worth and individuality dehumanizes the resident and creates an environment that perpetuates a disrespectful and/or potentially abusive attitude towards the resident(s),” CMS director David Wright wrote. Adding his voice to the memo, Republican Senator Charles Grassley also called on the Department of Justice and the Office of Civil Rights to insure “rules and protections are in place to prevent and punish these types of abuses.”

According to ProPublica’s report, there have been at least 47 instances of this kind of abuse in nursing homes since 2012. In one recent incident, an employee at a nursing home in Los Angeles was caught after they posted video to Instagram of a co-worker “passing gas” in a resident’s face. In Grassley’s home state of Iowa, ProPublica also reported that it was not illegal for an employee to Snapchat a photo of a resident covered in feces, because the resident’s genitals weren’t visible. Although other states have already started to impose stiff penalties at homes where abuse has been found, the memo from CMS aims to create a federal standard for how facilities and inspectors should deal with these cases.

For their part, the American Health Care Association has also issued guidelines that include new training and reporting pathways to quickly respond to any future allegations of social media abuse. While many social media services have the ability to flag specific content as offensive, those flags are generally meant to remove the content from the service entirely or prevent others on the service from seeing it. Users who spot threatening, illegal or abusive activity still have to report it to the proper authorities themselves.

NASA will build full-scale deep space habitats on Earth

NASA is already preparing for humanity’s journey into the great unknown, and part of its efforts is developing a suitable habitat for future spacefarers. In order to create a place where people can live outside our own planet, the agency has teamed up with six private corporations to build full-scale ground prototypes of the habitats they designed. NASA has chosen those six out of all the proposals it got for the second Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships. And as you can see above, Boeing is one of them.

The Houston-based aerospace company will take the chance to test and validate its design by building a prototype of its modular habitat system. Lockheed Martin, on the other hand, will transform one of its multi-purpose modules used to carry supplies to the ISS into a habitat with integrated avionics (aviation electronics) and Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS).

The third company in the list is Orbital ATK, which plans to continue developing the cislunar habitat –a spacecraft designed to stay between Earth and the moon — concept it conjured up. It’s based on the company’s Cygnus spacecraft that’s used to ferry supplies to the space station. Sierra Nevada Corporation’s prototype will combine its space shuttle-like Dream Chaser vehicle with an inflatable component. It will also feature an ECLSS and a propulsion system.

Texas-based NanoRacks will examine whether converting an existing launch vehicle’s upper stage into a livable environment is feasible. Finally, Bigelow Aerospace is building the XBASE (Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement) prototype. It’s based on the 330 cubic meter ISS add-on the company is developing, except it will be designed to exist on its own. If you’ll recall, the ISS crew recently installed Bigelow’s smaller expandable module to test whether it can withstand the harsh environment outside Earth.

One or more of these prototypes could serve as home to astronauts going to Mars and other locations farther than Low Earth orbit. Since most of us will never set foot on any of them, though, you can check out what they could look like below:

Lockheed Martin:

Orbital ATK:

Sierra Nevada:

NanoRacks:

Bigelow Aerospace:

Source: NASA

Netflix Debuts ‘FAST Speed Test’ App for Quick and Simple Internet Speed Checks

In May, Netflix announced Fast.com, a website where users could quickly and simply check their internet connection speed. The site uses Netflix’s servers and technology to give people an instant look at their current internet speed. The site quickly became popular, and Netflix has now released the FAST Speed Test app for mobile devices.

Once opened, the app instantly begins giving users a reading of their internet speed. Once the test is fully complete, results can be checked against results from SpeedTest.net, another popular internet speed checking solution. Both the website and app utilize simple, minimalist designs, with the service’s logo and download speed tracker taking up much of the space. The refresh button, the lone button in the app, allows users to restart the test.

On its blog, Netflix’s Sergey Fedorov and Ellen Livengood explained that FAST only displays download speeds because thats how most users interact with the internet, whether it be streaming video or loading webpages.

To test speed, the app and website undergoes several download tests using Netflix’s technology and services, including downloading chunks of a 25 MB video file through “a variable number of parallel connections.” Fedorov and Livengood go into technical detail about how the service works on the company’s tech blog.

FAST Speed Test is available in the App Store for free [Direct Link]

Tag: Netflix
Discuss this article in our forums

De La Soul’s samples are why its classic albums stay offline

Have you wondered why De La Soul is more than happy to offer its newer albums online, but has had so much trouble getting its classics (Stakes Is High and earlier) online that it gave them away at one point? You now have a good, if imperfect, explanation. Their label, Warner Music Group, tells the New York Times that its staff “don’t believe it is possible” to clear all the samples in early tracks for digital music services. It doesn’t explain why those samples are being held back, but the group’s current sample clearance agent suspects that many of those samples may have been cleared improperly, sometimes through informal agreements. It’s also possible that many of the sample deals didn’t account for non-physical releases, so Warner might have to start from scratch.

The plight is a fairly common one for other artists from the ’80s and ’90s, when electronics enabled easy sampling before the copyright system could fully account for it. It’s a minor miracle that artists like the Beastie Boys or DJ Shadow can offer their earlier work online at all. However, De La Soul faces more trouble than most. Its legendary 3 Feet High and Rising debut has over 60 samples by itself. Combine that with the high profile of many samples (Buhloone Mindstate’s “Breakadawn” drew from Michael Jackson and Smokey Robinson, for example) and it could be very expensive or impossible to clear the albums.

At the same time, there’s pressure to do something to get those albums on the internet. It’s not just that Dave, Maseo, Posdnous and Prince Paul are losing a lot of potential revenue as the industry shifts to streaming. Like the Beatles and other pre-digital bands, it’s also a matter of preserving music for the ages. What happens if and when physical albums are virtually extinct? Will people have to rely solely on pirated copies and YouTube videos to reminisce? De La Soul will have a footprint through its newer catalog (the upcoming And the Anonymous Nobody is conspicuously devoid of samples). However, there could be whole generations that don’t know what made the group famous in the first place.

Source: New York Times

EPA hands out $4.5 million to build better air pollution sensors

The Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t just want to clamp down on pollution… it wants to develop the technology that helps spot that pollution. It’s handing out a total of $4.5 million in grants to six research teams (including Carnegie Mellon, MIT and the University of Washington) to help develop lower-cost, easier-to-use air pollution sensors. EPA officials hope that this will help neighborhoods track their own air quality and improve health on a local level. You’d have a better idea of whether or not industry really is contributing to the smog in your neighborhood, for instance. Although it’ll likely take a long while before you see results come out these grants, they could easily pay off if they lead to cleaner air in your neck of the woods.

Source: EPA

Why don’t I have the new Nearby mode in Pokémon Go?

Why do I only have Sightings in Pokémon Go?

Pokémon tracking has been restored in the latest updated to Pokémon Go! Well, sort of. What used to ready Nearby for some now reads Sightings for all. Instead of footprints telling you roughly how far away some of these critters are, you get a single icon that tells you Pokémon are somewhere within 70 feet of your current location, and you’re going to have to walk around to find out specifically where your prey is hiding.

Actually, it turns out there’s a whole lot more to this Nearby menu but most of us don’t have access to the new features yet.

What you’re seeing there is the new and improved way to track Pokémon, and what little information you grab from that video is pretty cool. There’s a compass system to show you more generally where to find different Pokémon over a larger area, which means no more wandering around endlessly for something that might run away. This looks like a huge upgrade over the original paw print system, but not everyone has this feature yet.

Why? Did Niantic let an unfinished build leak or something?

Not exactly. What you’re actually seeing is one of many players who have access to a beta feature that isn’t fully available yet. Niantic is testing this feature by releasing it to a small number of people and collecting data on how it gets used. The feature is available exclusively to those select users for now, and it will likely change based on the information collected by this group before it is rolled out to the rest of the world.

How do I get in on this beta?

There’s nothing you can do to be a part of the beta if you aren’t already in it. These aren’t users who have opted-in to something, and these users aren’t contained within a specific place in the world. From what anyone can tell, it was random and could probably be removed at a moment’s notice. It’s not a matter of software version, you can’t sideload a special version of the app. If you don’t have this feature, you have to wait like everyone else.

Look at the bright side, it’ll work really well when it’s activated for you!

Pokémon Go

• Join our Pokémon Go forums!
• How to deal with GPS errors in-game
• Which team should you choose?
• How to play without killing your battery
• The Ultimate Pokémon Go Game Guide!
• Listen to the Pokémon Go podcast!

Seagate’s new 60TB SSD dwarfs the others on the market

Seagate has just announced a whopping 60 TB solid-state-drive, the largest SSD yet with that sort of capacity. Unfortunately, the SSD is only meant for businesses, released as an addition to Seagate’s data center portfolio. With four times the capacity of the next leading SSD, this massive hard drive could hold up to 12,000 DVD movies or even a whopping 400 million photos. Just sit back and think about how ridiculous an amount of data that really is.

The drive was created with quick accessibility in mind, and its flexibile artchitecture means it’ll be simple for data centers to grow from 60TB to accommodate 100TB or more of data in the future, all using the same form factor.

The 60TB SAS SSD is only available right now for demonstration, though it will officially make its debut some time in 2017. Unfortunately, we don’t yet know exactly what the drive itself will look like, though given the fact that it’s just a SSD, I can’t imagine it’ll look especially wild.

Source: BusinessWire

Intel buys an AI processing powerhouse

Intel isn’t the biggest player in the artificial intelligence world, but it might change that very shortly. The chip giant just bought Nervana, a startup specializing in processor-based “deep learning as a service” through technology like its upcoming Nervana Engine, a dedicated AI hardware accelerator due in early 2017. The Intel crew isn’t shy about its intentions. It wants Nervana’s expertise to help boost the AI performance of its Xeon and Xeon Phi processors on top of broadening its AI know-how — it’s a fast track to the future.

The buyout may well be a hedge against NVIDIA. The graphics firm has been big on accelerating AI in both self-driving car systems and its high-powered graphics cards. It could face serious challenges if Intel offers similar power, especially if it’s in a run-of-the-mill server that doesn’t need pricey extras to handle machine learning tasks. Whether or not Intel is targeting NVIDIA, there’s no question that it’s getting serious about one of the hottest fields in tech.

Source: Intel, Playground