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Feed Verifying The Authenticity Of Organic Foods (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
The supermarket sign in the produce aisle says "organic" and the higher price lends credence. But is that organically grown fruit or vegetable authentic or a mislabeled version of some conventionally grown crop?

Feed Personal trainer uses Wii for workouts (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming, Household

As anyone who's managed to get their hands on a Wii will no doubt have already discovered, it's relatively easy to work up a sweat and lose some pounds using Nintendo's little white box. Now, the real life activity that's required to succeed at virtual Wii Sports has been picked up on by a personal trainer from Glasgow, Scotland: Zander Urquhart found that kids and adults alike don't mind doing exercise when it's accompanied by on-screen actions by the player's Mii, and is using the Wii specifically as an exercise machine. Zander is apparently the first fitness expert to have seen the potential for the Wii in the field of personal training, but we have a strong feeling he won't be the last. Even if the idea doesn't catch on, we suspect he'll have a healthy stream of geeky customers coming into the gym as long as the Wii stock shortage continues to exist (which, judging by the sporadic shortages of the 10 month old DS Lite, could be some time yet). Be honest with us: have you lost any weight thanks to your Wii?

[Via The Raw Feed. Image credit]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Announcements

Submission + - Track Woot - The Definitive Woot Site and tracker

Submitted by
Tyler
Tyler writes: "A couple guys have put a new meaning on the phrase "Woot Tracker." While most trackers just give you basic information until they crash, this tracker gives you detailed info on the current woot and can tell you what other items woot has sold that are related to it. But the best part is the performance. It uses ajax and a shell script to give your browser only the stuff it needs, not the stuff it already knows. Just check it out http://www.trackwoot.com/"
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone wannabes

Submitted by
ahoehn
ahoehn writes: "Slate.com has an article by Paul Boutin which finds fault with the iPhone imitators present at CTIA 2007, and predicts the iPhone's dominance in its market. The article is subtitled "What Apple's competitors get wrong about the next generation of cell phones".

Much of Boutin's prediction rests on his belief that the current restriction on third-party apps on the phone will be loosened. He states that if Apple continues to "limit the iPhone to apps Apple approves of, [...] the thing will never take off like the Mac did"."
The Courts

Submission + - Britain to expand 'talking CCTV' scheme nationally

Submitted by
Jack Dietrich
Jack Dietrich writes: "After a successful trial of CCTV cameras which allow operators to shout at the surveilled masses via speakers attached to the cameras, the British Home Secretary John Reid has announced that he plans to provide £500,000 ($980,000) in funding to twenty areas to establish similar schemes. Competitions are to be held in schools in many of the areas for children to become the "voice" of the cameras. The word Orwellian seems utterly inadequate."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - University of Tennessee fans to Comcast: Bite us

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "It's every sports fans' worst nightmare. Five minutes before the Big Game, your cable or TV fails and you miss the action. Well, the audible scream you heard last night was from over 31,000 (about 10% of its Nashville customers) Comcast customers in Tennessee last night as, you guessed it, five minutes before the game, the Comcast system decided to black out the woman's NCAA Championship game between Rutgers and the University of Tennessee.Comcast issued a lame apology this morning for technical problems that blacked out the game and offered up that equipment failed causing the problem. As you might imagine the outcry over the outage has been loud and so far an apology is all that has been offered these fans. Many would like to see something more substantial. I can't blame them. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1341 3"

RMS Explains GPLv3 Draft 3 139

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the discussion-drafts-doing-their-job dept.
H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "A transcript is now online of a talk Richard Stallman gave in Brussels earlier this week about the discussion draft 3 of GPLv3. Among other things, he explained how it will address the Novell-MS deal, from Novell's point of view and from Microsoft's, and he explained how the tivoisation clause was narrowed to make it more acceptable in the hope that it will be used by more people. After the talk he also gave an interview, and yesterday, draft 2 of LGPLv3 was released."
Music

Submission + - Why I Switched to iTunes from Musicmatch

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've always been one to root for the underdog. In this case, I picked Musicmatch five years ago. But for all my time spent with Musicmatch, I was somewhat disconnected from that group of friends big into using iTunes. So I decided to give iTunes a test run, and now I don't think I can go back. Here's why: http://www.computers.net/2007/04/why_i_switched_.h tml

Feed Agency Tasked With Keeping Nuclear Secrets Can't Keep Track Of Its Computers (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Stories about government agencies losing computers with sensitive information have become depressingly common. Last month it was revealed that the FBI tends to lose three or four laptops every month, either through theft or carelessness. But the FBI can feel better about itself knowing it's not the only agency with this problem. An audit of the National Nuclear Security Agency found that it's lost 20 desktop computers (how do you misplace those?) and that some of the computers it is using were not part of its official inventory. Since the NNSA's job is to safeguard the country's nuclear secrets, this news is not particularly comforting. What makes it even worse is the fact that the agency has failed 13 of these audits over the last four years, so it's not as though this news could be characterized as a wake up call that will prompt better practices. Nope, it looks like the government, across many agencies, is chronically ill-equipped to keep track of its own belongings (though it's not as if that's any surprise).
Education

Submission + - The Term Paper is Dead

Submitted by gyges
gyges writes: The Washington Post picked up an article I wrote on the current outcry in academic circles over cut-and-paste plagiarism based on the following premise:

Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis. Up until now, intent has largely been determined at a functional level (how many lines show up in another source) and the burden of proof weighs heavily against a student.

Now lets add, Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and TurnItIn.com into the equation. Lets go a few years down the road and assume Google has finished scanning the Harvard library, Amazon has expanded there available chapter views, and both Wikipedia and TurnItIn have tripled in size (say 7 years). How many students, writing term papers on old chestnuts like Jane Eyre are going to be able to write a full paper without having several sentences with an 80-100% match with some other source.

So, if schools continue to use papers as primary assessment tools; (I had college classes where papers were 100% of my grade, and 60% or so in high school) and you can fail a paper or be expelled for plagiarism of as little as 2-3 lines; there is a visible point where this system will break down. Schools need to develop more comprehensive systems that include the paper, oral reporting, in class writing, and more in proper ratios. If they do not many innocent students will have their academic careers derailed and schools and teachers will waste millions of dollars on tools (like TurnItIn) that are only assuring they will see an "increase" in plagiarism because there is only one way to write "George Washington was the first President of the United States".

Finally, schools view this so narrowly as a morality issue, that most do not help students to develop the "plagiarizing" skills I use at work on a daily bias. Worse students frequently leave schools thinking that the rules of plagiarism are law, when the real laws are copyright and far more nuanced. It would be nice to see schools develop more models where they synthesize (through a combination of copying and original thought) multiple documents into a complete, single-voiced whole.

Feed JavaScript Hijacking (schneier.com)

From feed by bsfeed
Interesting paper on JavaScript Hijacking: a new type of eavesdropping attack against Ajax-style Web applications. I'm pretty sure it's the first type of attack that specifically targets Ajax code. The attack is possible because Web browsers don't protect JavaScript the...

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