Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Fatal car crashes involving pot use have tripled in U.S. (myfoxwausau.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: WFXS Fox 55 reports, "The legalization of marijuana is an idea that is gaining momentum in the United States, but there may be a dark side to pot becoming more commonplace ... Fatal crashes involving marijuana use tripled during the previous decade, fueling some of the overall increase in drugged-driving traffic deaths ... "Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana," said co-author Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia. "If this trend continues, in five or six years non-alcohol drugs will overtake alcohol to become the most common substance involved in deaths related to impaired driving." ... Alcohol contributed to about the same percentage of traffic fatalities throughout the decade, about 40 percent, Li said. ... Drugged driving accounted for more than 28 percent of traffic deaths in 2010, up from more than 16 percent in 1999. Marijuana proved to be the main drug involved in the increase, contributing to 12 percent of 2010 crashes compared with 4 percent in 1999. The study authors also noted that the combined use of alcohol and marijuana dramatically increases a driver's risk of death. "If a driver is under the influence of alcohol, their risk of a fatal crash is 13 times higher than the risk of the driver who is not under the influence of alcohol," Li said. "But if the driver is under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana, their risk increases to 24 times that of a sober person.""

Submission + - Audience Jeers Contestant Who Uses Game Theory to Win at 'Jeopardy'

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: USA Today reports that Arthur Chu, an insurance compliance analyst and aspiring actor, has won $102,800 in four Jeopardy! appearances using a strategy —- jumping around the board instead of running categories straight down, betting odd amounts on Daily Doubles and doing a final wager to tie — that has fans calling him a "villain" and "smug". Arthur's in-game strategy of searching for the Daily Double that has made him such a target. Typically, contestants choose a single category and progressively move from the lowest amount up to the highest, giving viewers an easy-to-understand escalation of difficulty. But Arthur has his sights solely set on finding those hidden Daily Doubles, which are usually located on the three highest-paying rungs in the categories (the category itself is random). That means, rather than building up in difficulty, he begins at the most difficult questions. Once the two most difficult questions have been taken off the board in one column, he quickly jumps to another category. It's a grating experience for the viewer, who isn't given enough to time to get in a rhythm or fully comprehend the new subject area. "The more unpredictable you are, the more you put your opponents off-balance, the longer you can keep an initial advantage," says Chu. "It greatly increases your chance of winning the game if you can pull it off, and I saw no reason not to do it." Another contra-intuitive move Chu has made is playing for a tie rather than to win in "Final Jeopardy" because that allows you advance to the next round which is the most important thing, not the amount of money you win in one game. "In terms of influence on the game, Arthur looks like a trendsetter of things to come," says Eric Levenson. "Hopefully that has more to do with his game theory than with his aggressive button-pressing."

Submission + - Greenland's fastest glacier sets new speed record (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: The latest observations of Jakobshavn Glacier show that Greenland’s largest glacier is moving ice from land into the ocean at a speed that appears to be the fastest ever recorded. Researchers from the University of Washington and the German Space Agency measured the speed of the glacier in 2012 and 2013. The results were published Feb. 3 in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union.

Jakobshavn Glacier, which is widely believed to be the glacier that produced the large iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912, drains the Greenland ice sheet into a deep-ocean fjord on the west coast of the island. This speedup of Jakobshavn means that the glacier is adding more and more ice to the ocean, contributing to sea-level rise.

“We are now seeing summer speeds more than four times what they were in the 1990s, on a glacier which at that time was believed to be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, glacier in Greenland,” said lead author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the UW’s Polar Science Center.

The new observations show that in summer of 2012 the glacier reached a record speed of more than 10 miles (17 km) per year, or more than 150 feet (46 m) per day. These appear to be the fastest flow rates recorded for any glacier or ice stream in Greenland or Antarctica, researchers said.

Submission + - Why the only thing better than big data is bigger data (qz.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Quartz reports in a Kajiu illustrated feature that scientists have discovered a kind of data that, like black holes or evil wizards of Middle Earth, only becomes more powerful the larger it grows. The implication being that competing firms can actually gain advantages over each other, depending on which type and how much data they gather. Is this the beginning of a corporate data war or has the outcome already been decided in favor of the larger firms?

Submission + - Revolutionary Scuba Mask Creates Breathable Oxygen Underwater On Its Own (themindunleashed.org) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: With the Triton Oxygen Respirator, it might be possible to breathe beneath the surface of the water as if you were a fish. Requiring no bulky tank to keep your lungs pumping properly, this invention of scuba diving equipment is much more ergonomic and organic in design.

The regulator comprises a plastic mouthpiece that requires you to simply bite down. There are two arms that branch out to the sides of the scuba mask that have been developed to function like the efficient gills of a marine creature. The scaly texture conceals small holes in the material where water is sucked into Jeabyun Yeon's Triton. Chambers inside separate the oxygen and release the liquid so that you can breath comfortably in the ocean.

Submission + - TrueCrypt Master Key Extraction And Volume Identification (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Volatility memory forensics project has developed plugins that can automatically find instances of Truecrypt within RAM dumps and extract the associated keys and parameters. Previous research in this area has focused specifically on AES keys and led to the development of tools such as aeskeyfind. The Volatility plugin takes a different approach by finding and analyzing the same data structures in memory that Truecrypt uses to manage encryption and decryption of data that is being read from and written to disk. With the creation of these plugins a wide range of investigators can now decrypt Truecrypt volumes regardless of the algorithm used (AES, Seperent, combinations of algos, etc.). Users of Truecrypt should be extra careful of physical security of their systems to prevent investigators from gaining access to the contents of physical memory.

Submission + - Torrent site redirected to FBI.gov

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BitTorrent site Waffles.fm currently redirects to *.fbi.gov

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Report: NSA paid RSA to make flawed crypto algorithm the default - Ars Technica (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Firstpost
Report: NSA paid RSA to make flawed crypto algorithm the default
Ars Technica
Security company RSA was paid $10 million to use the flawed Dual_EC_DRBG pseudorandom number generating algorithm as the default algorithm in its BSafe crypto library, according to sources speaking to Reuters.
NSA Reportedly Paid A Security Firm Millions To Ship Deliberately Flawed ... TechCrunch
Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneerReuters
NSA Gave RSA $10 Million To Promote Crypto It Had Purposely WeakenedTechdirt
The Verge-SlashGear
all 15 news articles

Submission + - Open source add-on rewrites the user interface of IE11 (quero.at)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is how Internet Explorer would look like if you move the tabs to the top like in other browsers. Developed as a design and UX study, the open source add-on replaces the default navigation bar and combines three traditionally separate toolbars into one. The UX project started in 2004 to demonstrate that it is feasible to combine the address, search, and find box into one. Additionally, Quero offers a variety of customization options for IE, including making the UI themeable or starting Microsoft's desktop browser always maximized.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why do mobile versions of websites suck? 4

Submitted by Kelbear
Kelbear writes: As user traffic over mobile devices grows in leaps and bounds, it's surprising to me as a layman that so many companies still have crippled and broken mobile pages in late 2013. There must be justifiable reasons for this, so: Fellow Slashdotters, can you please share the obstacles you've seen in your own companies that have delayed or defeated efforts to develop competent mobile sites? Are the issues in obtaining or maintaining compatibility driven by platform owners like Apple and Google?

Submission + - BBC: US Scientists Report "Reverse Aging" Drug (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by retroworks
retroworks writes: US scientists have performed a dramatic reversal of the ageing process in animal studies.

They used a chemical to rejuvenate muscle in mice and said it was the equivalent of transforming a 60-year-old's muscle to that of a 20-year-old — but muscle strength did not improve. Their study, in the journal Cell, identified an entirely new mechanism of ageing and then reversed it. http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213

Other researchers said it was an "exciting finding".

Slashdot Top Deals

Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein

Close