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Comment One more reason to drop the smart phone (Score 1) 249

by Timewasted (#38275660) Attached to: Does your cellphone have Carrier IQ's spyware?
I'm not 100% sure if this software is only on smart phones, but I got rid of my smart phone about 8 months ago -- best decision I ever made.

The main reason I kicked the habit is that I was wasting too much time executing trivial tasks on my smart phone. The only benefit owning a smart phone over a standard cell phone was using it as a GPS. However, I already had a Garmin and this was an easy thing to replace. I'm also loving my phone bill!

Submission + - Terminator COntact Lenses (ecouterre.com)

Submitted by sycodon
sycodon writes: From TFA: "Live data that streams directly before your eyes à la The Terminator sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but researchers are this close to making it a reality. In a study published in the December 2011 issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, University of Washington researchers demonstrated the safety of such a device by testing it in the eye of a rabbit. Although the prototype contained only a pixel of information, which appears as a tiny dot of light, scientists say it’s a proof of concept that could lead to superimposed emails and other messages in your line of sight. Talk about hands-free communication."

A whole new market for Pr0n.
Security

Submission + - FBI: DDoS, Jewelry Scams Follow Cyber Heists (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: Organized crooks have begun launching debilitating cyber attacks against banks and their customers as part of a smoke screen to prevent victims from noticing simultaneous high-dollar cyber heists, the FBI is warning. The thefts, aided by a custom variant of the ZeuS Trojan called "Gameover," are followed by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against banks and the victim customers. The feds say the perpetrators also are wiring some of the money from victim organizations directly to high-end jewelry stores, and then sending money mules to pick up the pricey items.
Firefox

Submission + - Chrome Becomes World's No. 2 Browser (ibtimes.com) 1

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "Google Chrome has eclipsed Mozilla's Firefox browser as the world's second most popular Web browser and now only trailsMicrosoft's Internet Explorer,according to StatCounter.Chrome's worldwide market share is pegged at about 25.7 percent, while Firefox's market share is estimated to be roughly 25.2 percent. Internet Explorer still clearly dominates the market with 40.6 percent of the global share. Similar to the way Safari gets a boost from the iPhone and iPad, Chrome can reach even more people if it became available on Android devices, which sources say is "very likely.""
Science

Submission + - Can Toads Help In Predicting Earthquakes? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ClockEndGooner
ClockEndGooner writes: The BBC is reporting that a team led by Dr. Friedemann Freund from NASA and Dr. Rachel Grant from the UK's Open University have found that “animals may sense chemical changes in groundwater that occur when an earthquake is about to strike.” Just prior to the quake that struck L'Aquila, Italy in 2009, Grant observed a mass toad exodus from a colony she was monitoring as part of her PhD project, and her published results prompted NASA to contact her as they found that highly stressed tectonic plates released a greater amount of positively charged ions that affected the water quality, which was sensed by the toads. According to NASA’s Freund, "Once we understand how all of these signals are connected, if we see four of five signals all pointing in [the same] direction, we can say, 'ok, something is about to happen'."

Submission + - How Photoshopped Is That Picture? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Freddybear
Freddybear writes: Digital forensics experts at Dartmouth have developed software that can analyze digital photos to rate how drastically they have been altered by digital editing techniques. "The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be “hugely important” as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered."
Transportation

Submission + - Algorithm Can Predict Red Light Runners

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: Researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that determines which drivers will run a red light, within one to two seconds before a potential collision. The research based on 15,000 cars at a busy intersection monitored various factors to determine which cars were were likely to run a red light. They found that their predictions were correct about 85 percent of the time, which is about 15-20 percent better than existing traffic prediction algorithms.
Security

Submission + - The Problem with Current Malware Metrics (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: When security companies say that there was an X number of infections from a particular type of malware in the past month or year, or that an Y number of variants of a piece of malware was detected, these numbers mean something to other researchers and to marketing departments, but very little to individual consumers. David Perry from Trend Micro talks about why the currently used malware measurements are not up to the task and about the need to stop sharing with the users statistics that are effectively useless to them.

Comment Re:This article should be named: (Score 1) 297

by Timewasted (#38128474) Attached to: How To Get Into an Elite Comp-Sci Program

Worry about where you go to grad school, what classes you take, what grades you get, not where your undergrad is.

This is bad advice IMO. For grad school, there are 3 things that matter: Publications (most applications won't have). GPA/GRE scores. Undergrad university.

At my university, those are the 3 things we are concerned with for graduate school applications.

Furthermore, for faculty applications we look only at one metric: Publications during their PhD. We don't care if they are from Stanford or ITT Tech. If they have publications to back up their research skills, we want them!

Comment Re:View from the top (Score 1) 297

by Timewasted (#38128422) Attached to: How To Get Into an Elite Comp-Sci Program

Not saying there aren't smart, capable people at the less elite schools, but generally those who claim it doesn't matter where you go are those who really didn't have a choice.

I would disagree. Some of us had a choice, but we chose to only go in debt 50K, rather than 300K. As a white male who's parent's income was over 250K at the time, I had to choose how much debt I wanted for the rest of my life. I chose the less expensive university over the elite one. I was able to get more scholarships and financial aid at the less elite college, brining my total debt down to 30K. This was 1/10th the cost of the prestigious school that I had an option to attend. If you ask me, the person who choses the 30K university is the *smart* one.

The advantage of going to a more elite school is that your peers, on average, are going to be smarter and generally more accomplished. This ripples down in many ways, including a faster paced, more in depth curriculum, better resources, better professors, and, perhaps most importantly, connections & relationships for networking that can last a lifetime.

This is simply untrue. I have been in academia all my life and have worked with many people who went to these elite schools, and I would *not* say they are smarter. Did they have a higher GPA? Yes. Higher SAT? Yes. Are they smart? No.

The truth of the matter is, intelligence is not increased by association and intelligence is impossible to measure. I would argue that my peers at the less elite school were much smarter than my current colleagues from elite schools (these are people with PhDs from these elite schools).
In fact, these "elite" scholars typically over-think many simple problems. This truth certainly exists in the data mining community. Researchers in this community typically over-complicate their problems, over-looking simple solutions that outperform their methods. These are researchers are essentially wasting their time using really complex math, where a simple Euclidean distance measure or nearest neighbor algorithm makes their methods look silly.
Furthermore, I have noticed that people who went to "elite" schools tend to lack common sense and have a sense of self-entitlement. The last conference I was at, a guy from MIT (an American) came up to me (with a map of the hotel in his hand), and asked me where a certain room was. I grabbed the map out of his hand and showed him... I was baffled! How can you attend MIT and lack the ability to read a map?

The bottom line is "elite" schools are only worth it if they are free. Otherwise you are wasting your money (give me 300K and I'll turn it into a million before you graduate).
Government

Submission + - FBI whistleblower: Feds spy too much on us

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The U.S. federal government conducts way too much domestic spying on citizens, by too many federal agencies and targeting people based on their religion and political activity Famous FBI-whistleblower-turned-ACLU-attorney, Mike German, says. “We've documented intelligence activities targeting or obstructing First Amendment-protected activity in 33 states and DC,” he says. He says that citizens need to be aware of the enormous cost of all of this surveillance and realize that “ there's no evidence any of it actually make us safer. We've sacrificed our privacy for no security benefit.” In fact, citizens can’t get a full handle on how much money is being spent on domestic survellience, as budget information has been labeled classified for one of the big programs, the National Intelligence Program

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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