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Comment Why is the hacking claim questionable? (Score 0) 115

he paper also claims some questionable superlatives such as 'China is one of the countries suffering most from hacking.'

Considering the substantial number of spectacular hacks that originated from China, and the fact that the Chinese have the second largest (or only soon?) Internet population, I don't see why this claim is questionable.

The Internet

Submission + - Algorithm Detects Sarcasm in Product Reviews (science.uva.nl) 1

paleshadows writes: An Israeli research team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has come up with a computer algorithm to identify when online reviewers of products are being sarcastic. The algorithm, called SASI (Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification), was shown to recognize sarcasm with a 77% hit rate; the researchers suggest that it might be beneficial to include the results of such an algorithm in reviews' summary and ranking systems. The training of the algorithm was based on 66,000 Amazon product reviews that were categorized by 80 sarcastic patterns, factoring syntactic features like the length of sentences, the number question and exclamation marks, and number of capitalized words. (Examples include: "All the features you want — too bad they don't work!"; "Well, you know what happened. ALMOST NOTHING HAPPENED!!!" and "Silly me, the Kindle and the Sony eBook can't read these protected formats. Great!".) From the reviewed products, those most likely to draw sarcastic reviews were Shure and Sony noise cancellation earphones, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, and Amazon's Kindle. The researchers noted that "[t]he simpler a product is, the more sarcastic comments it gets if it fails to fill its single function — i.e. noise blocking/cancelling earphones that fail to block the noise". They further speculate that "one of the strong motivations for the use of sarcasm in online communities is the attempt to 'save' or 'enlighten' the crowds and compensate for undeserved hype". The algorithm and its evaluation are described in detail in this academic paper.
Science

Submission + - Scientists Create Synthetic Life (Bacteria) (jcvi.org)

Mark Leaman writes: "I just spotted this breaking story over on BoingBoing.net. "On May 20th, J. Craig Venter and his team at J.C Venter Institute announced the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome in a paper published in SCIENCE. As science historian George Dyson points out, "from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells.""

Comment Re:Statistical significance (Score 0) 248

It seems there was no control group. From TFA:

Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years

And

It analysed data from interviews with 2,708 people with a type of brain cancer called glioma and 2,409 with another type called meningioma, plus around 7,500 people with no cancer.

Those controls would be hard to find these days, anyway.

Although I have to say I'm no cancer expert, more than 5000 cancers in 13,000 interviewees sounds darn high.

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