ideonexus - Slashdot User

Submission + - Astronomer Who Inspired Carl Sagan's "Contact" Retiring (cbsnews.com)

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ideonexus

on Tuesday May 22, 2012 @02:55PM

ideonexus writes: "Jill Tarter, the woman who inspired the fictional character Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan's "Contact," is retiring as a SETI Astronomer after 35 years in order to focus entirely on raising funds to keep the SETI project operational, which employs 150 people and costs $2 million a year to operate, but had to shut down for several months in 2011 due to budget problems."

Submission + - The Rise of "Brogrammers" (cnn.com)

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ideonexus

on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @01:04PM

ideonexus writes: "Several news stories in recent weeks are covering a culture-shift in computer programming from being a nerd-culture thing to becoming more of a frat-house thing with the rise of "Brogrammers." Businessweek describes it as a "new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder", while Mother Jones editor Tasneem Raja laments that the culture-shift is alienating women. Users on Quora posted satirical answers to the question "How does a programmer become a brogrammer?" with answers about sunglasses, energy drinks, protein, and time at the gym."

Submission + - Growing Evidence of Football Causing Brain Damage (cnn.com)

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ideonexus

on Thursday May 03, 2012 @02:27PM

ideonexus writes: "NFL Linebacker Junior Seau's suicide this week bares a striking similarity to NFL Safety Dave Duerson's suicide last year, who shot himself in the chest so that doctors could study his brain, where they found the same chronic traumatic encephalopathy that has been found in the brains of 20 other dead football players. Malcom Gladwell stirred up controversy in 2009 by comparing professional football to dog fighting for the trauma the game inflicts on players' brains, but with mounting evidence that the repeated concussions football players recieve during their careers causing a lifetime of brain problems, it raises serious concerns about America's most popular sport and ethical questions for its fanbase."

Submission + - Brown University Prof: Economists are Social Scientists (theatlantic.com)

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ideonexus

on Thursday April 26, 2012 @09:50AM

ideonexus writes: "Controversial or insightful? Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University, laments that economists arrogantly pretend to have empirical mathematical certainty on their side but are actually merely glorified social scientists."

Submission + - The Addictive Potential of Brain Hacking with tDCS (lastwordonnothing.com) 4

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ideonexus

on Thursday March 08, 2012 @09:35AM

ideonexus writes: "New Scientist author Sally Adee has a fascinating blogpost up about her personal experiences with using Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation (tDCS), the act of conducting an electric current through the brain, to learn marksmanship with an assault rifle for an article she wrote, and talks about how much she longed to put the electrodes back on a few days later after the effects had worn off. With tDCS devices now available for sale with a prescription and DIYers posting instructions for building your own (see also here), are geeks on the precipice of a revolutionary and potentially addictive new brain hack?"

Submission + - 101 Reasons Why Evolution is True (ideonexus.com)

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ideonexus

on Sunday February 12, 2012 @10:44AM

ideonexus writes: "Today is Darwin Day. With states continuing to introduce bills to teach creationism alongside the established science, like Indiana did at the beginning of this month, it's important to remember the overwhelming evidence supporting the Theory of Macroevolution through Natural Selection. Here are 101 Facts supporting Darwin's theory, in a creative commons licensed post with 101 accompanying photos."

Submission + - The Zynga Skinner Box (theatlantic.com)

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ideonexus

on Thursday January 26, 2012 @10:18AM

ideonexus writes: "Benjamin Jackson has published a summary in the Atlantic of an article to soon be published in the Kickstarter-funded journal Distance concerning the psychological strategy employed by social game makers like Zynga. Games like Angry Birds and Farmville use Pavlovian conditioning to turn human beings into rats in a Skinner box, pushing the button over and over again to get that little dopamine fix from our brains as we earn fake rewards. We have a finite amount of time in this life. If we want to spend it on games, then those games should be creative, challenging, and force us to grow, like Portal, Civilization, Magic the Gathering, Robo Rally, or Memrise."

Submission + - Scientists Compete on Qatar Reality Show (wired.com)

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ideonexus

on Monday January 23, 2012 @10:18AM

ideonexus writes: "Qatar has just wrapped up the third season of the reality show "Stars of Science, where innovators in the Middle East compete to have their inventions funded along the same lines as the American shows "Survivor" and "Project Runway." Wired has a write-up about the show and the drama the Arab Spring has brought on the contestants as well as how some of the more conservative contestants balanced socializing with a female contestant in the latest season. It's easy to forget that while Western Civilization was mired in the millennium-long dark ages, the Middle East was inventing Algebra, optics, and the Scientific Method before the region fell into its own dark ages of religious fundamentalism. Could this be the spark of a European-style Era of Enlightenment for the region?"

Submission + - The Convoluted Life Cycle of a News Story (mediabistro.com)

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ideonexus

on Sunday November 20, 2011 @03:57PM

ideonexus writes: "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we have a perpetual stream of factoids from which a story emerges. Lauren Rabaino of mediabistro details this new lifecycle of a newspaper story, from tweets to blog posts to an eventual print edition, and asks What are the best standards of practice? Should news sources provide a single web address with a stream of updates, post new blog entries that link to older ones, or should they adopt a Wiki approach to the news--revising a single story with a history of revisions available behind the scenes?"

Submission + - Social Networks Increase Brain Matter (scientificamerican.com)

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ideonexus

on Thursday November 17, 2011 @12:49PM

ideonexus writes: "Previous studies have shown a correlation between people who have more friends on Facebook and increased grey matter in their brains, but there remained a question of whether social networking promoted the growth or if people with expanded regions were better at social networking. A new study in Science using 23 macaques assigned to social groups of varying numbers found "monkeys in the larger groups had more gray matterin brain areas linked to processing social information. " Sciam Blogger Eric Michael Johnson has an insightful write-up on this research in the context of historical primate studies and asks whether "online technology has allowed some individuals to express (and expand) a form of social behavior that emerged for other adaptive reasons but which has been underutilized until now?""

Submission + - Startup Dwolla Bypasses Credit Card Fees (sfgate.com)

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ideonexus

on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @02:09PM

ideonexus writes: "SFGate has an inspiring interview with Ben Milne, the 28-year-old founder of Dwolla.com, an online startup that helps consumers and merchants bypass credit card fees by enabling direct bank-to-bank transfers for a flat $0.25 fee compared to the 2% to 4% loss companies take on Credit Card transactions."

Submission + - DOJ: Violating a Site's ToS is a Crime (cnet.com)

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ideonexus

on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @01:45PM

ideonexus writes: "CNET has obtained a statement to be released by the Department of Justice tomorrow defending its broad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that defines violations of "authorized access" in information systems as including any act that violates a Web site's terms of service, while the White House is arguing for expanding the law even further. This would criminalize teenagers using Google for violating its ToS, which says you can't use its services if "you are not of legal age to form a binding contract," and turns multiple attempts to upload copyrighted videos to YouTube into "a pattern of racketeering" according to a GWU professor and an attorney cited in the story."

Submission + - Mars500 Crew 'Lands' After 17 Months in Isolation (esa.int)

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ideonexus

on Friday November 04, 2011 @09:30AM

ideonexus writes: "The Mars500's six crewmembers left their 'spacecraft' today after a record-breaking 17 month Mars Mission simulation. The crew lived off rations and experienced communication delays with Mission Control to make things as real as possible; however, missing from the simulation was a zero-gravity environment. The record for the longest space flight is held by Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days traveling 300,765,000 km orbiting the Earth on the Mir space station and who said his experience showed that “it is possible to preserve your physical and psychological health throughout a mission similar in length to a flight to Mars and back. ”"

Submission + - Federal Contractors are $600 Toilet Seats (ideonexus.com) 3

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ideonexus

on Monday October 31, 2011 @07:57AM

ideonexus writes: "Last month an article appeared on Slashdot about how the Government pays IT contractors twice what it pays its own workers. Missing from the article was how much the IT Contractor pays its own workers. After working for a Federal Contractor for 10 years, a document accidentally leaked to employees by the contractor illustrated the incredible disparity between what the Contractor was paying us and what they were charging the government. Like most contracts according to the GAO, the Government provided our offices, utilities, computers, and training, leaving our salaries as the only overhead to the IT Contractor, giving them an incredible incentive to keep them as low as possible to maximize profits. When the top 100 Defense Contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the Federal Contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."

Submission + - Is the FBI Being Disingenuous About Foiled Terrori (reuters.com)

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ideonexus

on Thursday October 13, 2011 @09:16AM

ideonexus writes: "As the Obama Administration takes the case to the U.N. to unite the world against the Iranian regime for an assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., they quietly admit that much of the alleged plot makes no sense, especially why the Iranian government would seek out a used car salesman to arrange the assassination. The news stories covering the plot emphasize the terrorist intent to also attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies and the car salesman's attempt to hire Mexican Drug Cartel members to perform the assassination, but the fact that the "Mexican Drug Cartel" was actually an undercover DEA Agent and therefore the car salesman had little to no chance of actually ever pulling off the plot gets buried deep in the news stories if it gets mention at all.

This American Life did a story a few years back about the first conviction in the FBI's war on Terror, Hemant Lakhani, a man with no connections to any terrorists or arms traders, but who was greedy enough that, when the FBI came to him pretending to be a terrorist organization, jumped at the chance to make some money finding them a missile to carry out their attack, and the FBI, also pretending to be an arms trader, sold him a fake missile. Then they arrested him and took credit for foiling a terrorist attack involving missile strikes against American targets.

This same pattern of the FBI finding completely incompetent people and setting them up with fake missiles and bombs has been repeated in the 2009 Synagogue Bombing Plot and the 2010 holiday tree lighting bomb plot in Portland. It's hard to sympathize with the people being convicted in these plots, who were given ample opportunity to bow out; however, it does seem like the FBI and news media are being disingenuous in its portrayal of these events and scaring Americans into increasing the Agency's budget with headlines that read "FBI FOILS BOMBING PLOT" when, in reality, without the FBI's involvement, it's extremely unlikely that these incompetent individuals would ever get close to pulling off the dramatic acts of terrorism the FBI is regularly taking credit for preventing.

Thoughts?"

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