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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 88 declined, 23 accepted (111 total, 20.72% accepted)

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Programming

Submission + - Fear and Loathing in AIG's IT Department (vdare.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "John Miano of The Programmer's Guild writes: "In the late 1990s the world of computer consulting took me to AIG. Only superlatives can describe what I saw while working at AIG's computer operation. It was the most mismanaged company of any type that I have ever seen...So why are you and I bailing out this company? In a free market, the penalty for mismanagement is going out of business. America owes AIG nothing. AIG has no loyalty to America or the American people. They were willing to replace Americans with foreign workers in a futile attempt to save a few dollars.""
Data Storage

Submission + - $1M In Compression Prizes Announced by Ocarina (ocarinatech.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Ocarina, a storage compression company, is offering $1 million in prize increments of $10,000 for each 3% advance in compression on what Ocarina's Chief Scientist, Matt Mahoney, describes as "extremely challenging data". Matt should know, since, in addition to originating a leading class of compression algorithms and maintaining a benchmark list of top compressors, he is on the board of directors of The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, which stimulated a number of 3% incremental improvements in compressing Wikipedia."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Machine Super Intelligence Thesis Wins $10k Prize (singinst.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has announced Dr. Shane Legg the winner of its $(CDN)10,000 prize for academic achievement in 2008 for his theoretic work relating to "machine super intelligence". In his own words: "My thesis is written and submitted and I will be having my thesis defence in June. The title is 'Machine Super Intelligence' in which I describe Marcus Hutter's AIXI model and study some of its implications, extensions etc." His post-doctoral work is going to be in finance."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - H-1b Visas Not Going to "Best and Brightest (majorityrights.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Norm Matloff has published a continuation of an earlier study investigating the degree to which H-1b visas have been awarded to talent unavailable in the United States — "the best and the brightest" — as is required by law. Using a market-based analysis derived from salary figures, Matloff concludes: '...the data show dramatically that most foreign workers, the vast majority of whom are from Asia, are in fact not "the best and the brightest."' Moreover, he further concludes that 'Most foreign workers work at or near entry level, described by the Department of Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship. This counters the industry's claim that they hire the workers as key innovators, and again we will see a stark difference between the Asians and Europeans.'"
United States

Submission + - Chertoff Recommends Cyber "Manhattan Project&# (news.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "News.com reports that: "Risks from cyberattacks are increasing and the consequences are so great that the country needs a "Manhattan Project" for network security, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in a keynote on Tuesday at RSA 2008... The government needs the "best and brightest" from Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the private sector to work on creating an advanced warning system to prevent such cyberattacks." I'm sure all reasonable readers of /. are now asking themselves, "Why don't they just bring in a bunch of Indians, Chinese, and Israelis on H-1B visas?""
Censorship

Submission + - Free Speech Redefined by Canadian Court (majorityrights.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Saying, essentially, that "If it were free speech then it wouldn't be prohibited!" an Ontario Superior Court has ruled that a dissident must pay damages for calling a lawyer for the Canadian Human Rights Commission "an enemy of free speech". The London Free Press reports that: "Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against "hate speech" sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian speech restrictions. Fromm, a defender of various Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other things, being "an enemy of free speech." Warman sued, claiming that these condemnations are defamatory... Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman — chiefly on the grounds that because Warman's claims were accepted by the legal system, they couldn't accurately be called an attack on free speech." Additional details of the ruling indicate this centers on the use of internet communication."
The Matrix

Submission + - Surfer's Theory of Everything Stuns Physicists (arxiv.org)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "The UK Telegraph reports that: A surfer dude named Garrett Lisi has come up with a new theory of everything which physicists are calling "fabulous", "incredibly beautiful", "profound" and "most compelling". Lisi's peer-reviewed paper titled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is being published with the New Scientist. The Telegraph article continues: "Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.""
Announcements

Submission + - Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold (google.com)

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program) thereby, not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge but, bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character. Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12."
Biotech

Submission + - Flowers For Algernon

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Drug Researcher reports that Algernon lives: ''...[R]esearchers ... have conditionally knocked out a specific gene to prevent an enzyme called cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) from being produced, but only in the brain. This led to the mice becoming more adept at learning and also able to more quickly decipher environmental changes...."It's pretty rare that you make mice 'smarter,' so there are a lot of cognitive implications," said Dr Bibb. "Everything is more meaningful to these mice," he said. "The increase in sensitivity to their surroundings seems to have made them smarter." ''

The mice did have a more difficult adolescence than the "normal" mice, who bit them and pushed them off the wheel when the researcher wasn't looking."
Biotech

Submission + - Founding Researcher Says Algae Oil Claims Absurd

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "John Benemann, who ran the open algae pond project for the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, takes aim and fires at "absurd" claims of biodiesel from algae with a new article posted at The Oil Drum, concluding with: "I hope that this posting helps persuade GFT, and all others in this "business", to CEASE AND DESIST from the absurd and totally bizarre claims they are making. PLEASE!""
Space

Submission + - Armadillo Publishes Their Space Access 2007 Video

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Armadillo Aerospace has published their Space Access 2007 video. Highlights include a collage of the various flight systems flown by the team at Armadillo Aerospace. Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack states during the video: "Real experience isn't gained by running simulations and doing paper studies. You get it by actually building and testing things. Our small team at Armadillo Aerospace has built an experience base that may be unique in the entire world. We've made over a hundred rocket powered test flights using 3 different propellant combinations, 50 engines spanning over a hundred different vehicles, using 4 different attitude control systems, 6 generations of electronics boxes, ... and our work on this project is just done 2 days a week with an all-volunteer team.""
Space

Submission + - Reagan's Order to Launch the Challenger

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Of his new book "Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age", author Richard C. Cook, NASA analyst, says: "...the (Presidential) Commission claimed there was no political pressure from outside NASA to launch Challenger, which my book shows conclusively to be false." Others have documented the role of the four Morton Thiokol engineers who opposed the launch of the Challenge, but this is the first book to focus on the choice facing the administration of NASA. Either, 1) Defy their chain of command going all the way to the White House on the eve of a State of the Union Address or 2) Throw a pair of dice claiming it won't come up 7 dead astronauts."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - X-Prize Foundation Goes VC

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Redherring interviews Tom Vander Ark, former head of the Gates Foundation's education philanthropy, who is now heading up the X-Prize Foundation's outreach to venture capital: "Define a new area for innovation in collaboration with venture capitalists, put up a prize for it, and see what companies come out of the woodwork. Promote the heck out of the contest. Award the prize to the company with the best solution, and see if VCs are interested in backing the company with a round of funding.""
Space

Submission + - Griffin Backpedals on NASA As Prize Underwriter

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Spaceref reports NASA administrator Mike Griffin's comments before the Space Transportation Association wherein he states: "While we have learned many lessons from the X-Prize for our own prize program, and are learning how to leverage commercial space interests, Burt will admit that he only had one stakeholder to whom he answered, Microsoft founder Paul Allen. As a public institution, we at NASA have hundreds of stakeholders to whom we must answer." Why not compare NASA with the Ansari family? Competitors for a prize such as Allen are different from underwriters of a prize such as the Ansari family — a distinction that Griffin recognized as recently as October when he said: "So what are the lessons to be gleaned? First, the U.S. government acted through the Post Office Department as a major purchaser of potential air transport services, as opposed to being a technology developer." So this appears to be a genuine backpedal from NASA as prize creator to NASA as competitor, unless, of course, it is merely the first stage of Idiocracy setting in."
The Matrix

Submission + - In The Beginning Was The Code.

Submitted by
Baldrson
Baldrson writes: "Just in case you were wondering what makes our universe tick, an hypothesized (meta)algorithm running our universe has been proposed in "The New AI: General & Sound & Relevant for Physics" by Jürgen Schmidhuber of Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence: "Systematically create and execute all programs for a universal computer, such as a Turing machine or a CA; the first program is run for one instruction every second step on average, the next for one instruction every second of the remaining steps on average, and so on." This actually computes all parallel universes — not just ours. Among the consequences of this hypothesis is: "Large scale quantum computation will not work well, essentially because it would require too many exponentially growing computational resources in interfering 'parallel universes'". Prof. Schmidhuber's post-doc student, Marcus Hutter, of Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge fame came up with some of the key breakthroughs in "The New AI" upon which Schmidhuber's hypothesis is based."

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