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Research Supports "Snowball Earth" Hypothesis 243

Posted by kdawson from the big-chill dept.
u2boy_nl writes, "A new U.S. study finds evidence for 'Snowball Earth,' the hypothesis that the entire Earth was ice-covered for long periods on several occasions, most recently 600-700 million years ago. The icy conditions (Earth's oceans frozen completely with ice more than a kilometer thick) ended violently under extreme greenhouse conditions — snowballearth.org suggests the meltdown could have occurred in as little as 2,000 years. Snowball Earth challenges long-held assumptions regarding the limits of global change. Wikipedia has more on the hypothesis."

Pentagon Reveals News Correction Unit 757

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the propaganda-juggernauts dept.
Jonas Wisser writes "BBC is reporting that a newly created Pentagon unit has a mandate to fight 'inaccurate' news stories. From the article: 'The Pentagon has set up a new unit to focus on promoting its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet. [...] A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit will "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to "correct the record". A spokesman said the unit would monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ "surrogates", or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.'"

First Hutter Prize Awarded 191

Posted by kdawson from the compress-this dept.
stefanb writes, "The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, an ongoing challenge to compress a 100-MB excerpt of the Wikipedia, has been awarded for the first time. Alexander Ratushnyak managed to improve the compression factor to 5.86 and will receive a 3,416-Euro award. Being able to compress knowledge well is believed to be related to acting intelligently." The Usenet announcement notes that at Ratushnyak's request, part of the prize will go to Przemyslaw Skibinski of the University of Wroclaw Institute of Computer Science, for his early contributions to the PAQ compression algorithm.

Diebold Disks May Have Been For Testers 182

Posted by Zonk from the concientious-tester dept.
opencity writes "The Washington Post reports on the two Diebold source disks that were anonymously sent to a Maryland election official this past week. Further investigation has lead individuals involved to believe the disks came from a security check demanded by the Maryland legislature sometime in 2003." From the article: "Critics of electronic voting said the most recent incident in Maryland casts doubt on Lamone's claim that Maryland has the nation's most secure voting system. "There now may be numerous copies of the Diebold software floating around in unauthorized hands," said Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote."

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