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The decision to class gaming addiction as a mental health disorder was “premature” and based on a “moral panic,” experts have said. From a report: The World Health Organization included “gaming disorder” in the latest version of its disease classification manual. But biological psychology lecturer Dr Peter Etchells said the move risked “pathologising” a behaviour that was harmless for most people. The WHO said it had reviewed available evidence before including it. It added that the views reflected a “consensus of experts from different disciplines and geographical regions” and defined addiction as a pattern of persistent gaming behaviour so severe it “takes precedence over other life interests.” Speaking at the Science Media Centre in London, experts said that while the decision was well intentioned, there was a lack of good quality scientific evidence about how to properly diagnose video game addiction.

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Source:: Slashdot

What do you do if you’re laying out a PCB, and you need to jump over a trace, but don’t want to use a via? The usual trick is using a zero Ohm resistor to make a bridge over a PCB trace. Zero Ohm resistors — otherwise known as ‘wire’ — are a handy tool for PCB designers who have backed themselves into a corner and don’t mind putting another reel on the pick and place machine. Here’s a new product from Keystone that is basically wire on a tape and reel. It’s designed to jump traces on a PCB where SMD zero ohm resistors and through-hole jumpers aren’t possible. I suppose you could also use it as a test point. They’re designed for high current applications, but before we get to that, let’s consider how much power is dissipated into a zero ohm resistor.

By the way, as of this writing, Mouser is showing 1,595 for Keystone’s 5100TR PCB jumpers in stock. They come on a reel of 1,000, and a full reel will cost you $280. This is significantly more expensive than any SMD zero ohm resistor, and it means someone bought four hundred of them. The electronic components industry is weird and you will never understand it.

There’s a new product from ODROID, and you want it. The ODROID-GO is a Game Boy and Sega Master System emulator running on an ESP-32, has a fantastic injection molded case, and looks phenomenal. You can buy it now for $32. Does this sound familiar? Yes, a few months ago, the PocketSprite was released. The PocketSprite is the tiniest Game Boy ever, and a project [Sprite_TM] introduced to the world at the 2016 Hackaday Superconference.

This week, the speaker schedules for two awesome cons were announced. The first is HOPE, at the Hotel Penn on July 20th. Highlights of this year? [Mitch Altman] is talking about DSP, [Chelsea Manning] will be on stage, someone is talking about HAARP (have fun with the conspiracy theorists), and someone is presenting an argument that [Snowden] is an ideological turd. The speaker schedule for DEF CON was also announced. The main takeaway: god bless the CFP board for reigning in all the blockchain talks, the Nintendo Switch was broken wide open this year, but there’s only a talk on the 3DS, and there’s more than enough talks on election hacking, even though that was a success of propaganda instead of balaclava-wearing hackers.

The C.H.I.P. is no more, or at least that’s the rumor we’re running with until we get some official confirmation. When it was introduced, the C.H.I.P. was a Linux system on a chip with complete register documentation. It appears the end of C.H.I.P. is upon us, but have no fear: there’s a community building the PocketC.H.I.P., or the C.H.I.PBeagle. It’s a single board computer based around the OSD3358 from Octavo, the same system found in the PocketBeagle. Source in …read more

Source:: Hackaday

In December 2019, J.J. Abrams will close out the Star Wars trilogy he kicked off with The Force Awakens. …read more

Source:: CNet

The most interesting developments in the first half revolved around software-as-a-service as the infrastructure space narrowed. Nevertheless, IoT, AI and machine learning were difference makers. …read more

Source:: ZDNet

Erika Engelhaupt, National Geographic: A few years ago, a man began telling his family members a horrifying tale: There are bugs living inside him. […] He shows the classic signs of what scientists call delusory parasitosis, or Ekbom syndrome, an unwavering but incorrect belief that the patient’s body has been infested with something. For years, entomologists have insisted that these delusions aren’t as rare as psychiatrists and the public may think. And now, a study by the Mayo Clinic suggests they’re right. The first population-based study of the condition’s prevalence suggests that about 27 out of a hundred thousand Americans a year have delusions of an infestation. That would mean around 89,000 people in the U.S. right now are plagued by the condition. For many sufferers of such delusions, the infestation takes the form of insects or mites, usually tiny and often described as biting or crawling on the skin. Others report feeling worms or leeches or some kind of unknown parasite. Many of the afflicted turn up, eventually, in an entomologist’s office. And as the entomologists tell them, only two kinds of arthropods actually infest humans: lice and a mite that causes scabies. Both are easy to identify and cause characteristic symptoms. Bedbugs or fleas might infest a house, but they don’t actually live on or inside the human body; they just feed on us and leave. Likewise, there are mites that live on our skin, especially the face, but they’re a normal part of everyone’s body, much like the bacteria living in our guts.

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Source:: Slashdot

‘It breaks my heart to see the ideas we wrote about in the Agile Manifesto used to make developers’ lives worse, instead of better,’ a co-author of the 2001 Agile Manifesto laments. …read more

Source:: ZDNet

Aruba gets the SD-WAN bug, Huawei patches slowly and so much more

Roundup Nokia has claimed a first by demonstrating a cloud-based radio access network (RAN) running on an operational carrier network.…

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Source:: TheRegister

Roland Kelts, writing for The Times Literary Supplement: At fifty-one, Hideo Furukawa is among the generation of Japanese writers I’ll call “A. M.,” for “After Murakami.” Haruki Murakami is Japan’s most internationally renowned living author. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, his books sell in the millions, and there is annual speculation about his winning the Nobel Prize. Over four decades, he has become one of the most famous living Japanese people on the planet. It’s impossible to overestimate the depth of his influence on contemporary Japanese literature and culture, but it is possible to characterize it. The American poet Louise Gluck once said that younger writers couldn’t appreciate the shadow cast over her generation by T. S. Eliot. Murakami in Japan is something like that. Yet unlike Eliot in English-speaking nations, Murakami in Japan has been a liberator, casting rays of light instead of a pall, breathing gusts of fresh air into Japan’s literary landscape. Now on the verge of seventy, he generates little of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” among his younger peers. For them he has opened three key doors: to licentious play with the Japanese language; to the binary worlds of life in today’s Japanese culture, a hybrid of East and West; and to a mode of personal behaviour — cool, disciplined, solitary — in stark contrast to the cliques and clubs of Japan’s past literati. Japan’s current literary and cultural scene takes in “light novels,” brisk narratives that lean heavily on sentimentality and romance and often feature visuals drawn from manga-style aesthetics, and dystopian post-apocalyptic stories of intimate violence, such as Natsuo Kirino’s suspense thrillers, Out and Grotesque. Post-Fukushima narratives in film and fiction explore a Japan whose tightly managed surfaces disfigure the animal spirits of its citizens; and many of the strongest voices and characters in this recent trend have been female.

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Source:: Slashdot

What went down in iPhone news this week. …read more

Source:: CNet

Logitech’s education-targeted keyboard case and stylus work with the newest iPad but have features anyone would like. …read more

Source:: CNet