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USB 'Dead Drops' 322

Posted by Soulskill from the peer-to-peer-sneakernet dept.
Okian Warrior writes "Aram Bartholl is building a series of USB dead drops in New York City. Billed as 'an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space,' he has embedded USB sticks as file cache devices throughout the city. Bartholl says, 'I am "injecting" USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your files and data.' Current locations (more to come) include: 87 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (Makerbot), Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY (Dumbo), 235 Bowery, NY (New Museum), Union Square, NY (Subway Station 14th St), and West 21st Street, NY (Eyebeam)"
Music

Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage 151

Posted by samzenpus from the born-to-rock dept.
ByOhTek writes "CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed. The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage. What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."
Media

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Australia

Mystery of the 'Chupacabra' May Be Solved 94

Posted by timothy from the letting-it-live-on-in-my-heart dept.
rhettb writes "The mystery of the legendary chupacabra, a beast said to drain the blood of domestic animals at night, has been solved, according to a University of Michigan scientist. Biologist Barry O'Connor says that most chupacabra sightings are probably linked to coyotes with mange, a disease caused by the same species of mite that triggers scabies in humans. Severe cases of mange cause hair loss and thickening of skin in wild dogs and can lead to bacterial skin infections that produce a foul odor characteristic of the 'chupacabra.' Wombats and squirrels are also susceptible to mange, suggesting that chupacabra are found in trees and Down Under."
Education

Submission + - Comic Sans Makes You Smarter (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by H3xx
H3xx writes: Difficult-to-read fonts make for better learning, according to scientists.

Researchers at Princeton University employed volunteers to learn made-up information about different types of aliens — and found that those reading harder fonts recalled more when tested 15 minutes later. They argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials.

The 28 volunteers in the Princeton study were given 90 seconds to try to memorize a list of seven features for three different species of alien. The idea was to re-create the kind of learning in a biology class. Aliens were chosen to be sure that none of the volunteers' prior knowledge interfered with the results.

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, which is generally regarded to be easy and clear to read. The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.
Education

What If We Ran Universities Like Wikipedia? 380

Posted by Soulskill from the voting-classmates-and-professors-off-the-island dept.
Pickens writes "Do university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks? At the recent Educause conference, David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it operated like Wikipedia. The 'Wiki-ized University' wouldn't have formal admissions, says Staley; people could enter and exit as they wished and the university would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students 'not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages.' In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.' Staley predicts that a new form of academic organization is emerging that will be driven by volunteerism. 'We do see some idea today of how "volunteer teaching" might look: think of the faculty at a place like the University of Phoenix. Most teaching faculty have day jobs — and in fact are hired because they have day jobs — and teach at the university for a nominal stipend,' writes Staley. 'If something like the Phoenix model is what develops in a wiki-ized university setting, this would suggest that a new type of "professorate" will emerge, consisting of those who teach or publish or conduct research for their own personal or professional satisfaction or for some other nonmonetized benefit.'"
Programming

Submission + - Stack Overflow Reaches 1 Million Questions

Submitted by H3xx
H3xx writes: Stack Overflow, the part-forum, part-wiki programming help site, reached 1 million user-submitted questions today, according to their front page.

When the site reaches one million user answered questions, only time will tell.
Oracle

OpenOffice.org Declares Independence From Oracle, Becomes LibreOffice 648

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
Google85 writes "The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers. Driving home the changes, the OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation, while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice."
Mandriva

Developers Fork Mandriva Linux, Creating Mageia 206

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
Anssi55 writes "As most of the Mandriva employees working on the Linux distribution were laid off due to the liquidation of Edge-IT (a subsidiary of Mandriva SA) and trust in the company has diminished, the development community (including the core developers) has decided to fork the project. The new Linux distribution, named Mageia, will be managed by a not-for-profit organization that will be set up in the coming days. There are already many people that have decided to follow the fork, but the people behind it are still welcoming any help offered in the various tasks related to establishing the new distribution."

Comment That One Phone Call... (Score 0) 141

by H3xx (#33505662) Attached to: Journalist Tricked Captors Into Twitter Access

Twitter has too many prerequisites for it to be useful in a situation like this; you need a cell phone whose number is not linked to a previous Twitter account, with MMS capabilities and a network that supports it, or a computer with access to the internet, a usable keyboard and a browser/email client. It's actually just short of a miracle he was able to use a cell phone while in jail—most jails will only allow you access to one POTS call, and many times you do not have access to the keypad while you are using it.

There needs to exist a service that will accept incoming vocal transmissions, transcribe them, then post them on Twitter.
Science

They Finally Found Out We Like Our Computers 184

Posted by Soulskill from the who-let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag dept.
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Sociologist Clifford Nass is talking about how people think of their computers as something like human beings. In one of his experiments, Nass found that people are more willing to 'help' computers when the computer helped them previously: 'When people were then asked to help optimize the screen resolution on a computer where the program had been "helpful," they were much more likely to do so than with the less helpful version.' He also found that people evaluating software's performance were more forgiving if the evaluation was done on the same computer the software was tested on. Nass has recently published the book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, in which he 'uses our interactions with machines to investigate how human relationships could be improved.'"
Image

Winnie-the-Pooh Parodied In Wookie-the-Chew Screenshot-sm 58

Posted by samzenpus from the oh-bother dept.
pickens writes "Erik Hayden writes in the Atlantic that children will see endearing portraits of Chewbacca rendered in the style of "Winnie-the-Pooh" in the book of drawings "Wookie the Chew," a tribute to the combined genius of George Lucas, A.A.Milne and E.H.Sheppard, by artist James Hance released on September 1st. Samples from the book are available at Hance's web site. Hance bases his right to parody Winnie-the-Pooh on Fair Use as parody under which certain uses of copyrighted works, which would otherwise be considered infringing, are permissible. Interestingly enough, the rights to the original Winnie-the-Pooh were the subject of an 18-year feud in which Walt Disney corporation fought off a challenge to its ownership of the rights ending in 2009 when a judge in Los Angeles struck out a claim against Disney lodged by the family of Stephen Slesinger, a comic book pioneer who bought the copyright to Pooh in 1930 from the bear's British creator, A.A. Milne. Stories of Pooh's adventures were originally created by Milne in the 1920s, based on a toy bear owned by the author's son, Christopher Robin."

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