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Submission + - Why You Might Want to Pay the "Apple Tax" On an iPad Charger

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I don't own an iPad, but if I did, I am in the demographic (cheapskates, skinflints, optimists) likely to consider buying a cheap replacement charger if I lost the original. This blog post does a good job of explaining why I might be an idiot to do so, and also offers a well-illustrated crash course (for non-engineers) on some of the components crammed into a tiny switching power-supply, which makes the higher price of the genuine article seem totally justified. On the other hand, of the cheap laptop chargers I've had, only one of them sparked, crackled, and smoked ...

Submission + - Medialink Sues Redditor Who Wrote Negative Review on Amazon

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The review written by the redditor in question happened to be ranked as the most helpful critical review on Amazon for the Medialink router it was written for. The current review is updated to reflect the libel suit, but in his original review, the redditor claimed that most if not all of the positive reviews are fake and that the product is actually a re-branded version of a much cheaper router also sold on Amazon. '[T]hink about it,' he wrote, 'They only sell these routers on Amazon, so the whole success of their company depends on Amazon reviews.' Medialink's lawyers have informed him that litigation will only be avoided if he deletes his Amazon review, stops posting negative reviews of any Medialink products, and no longer buys Medialink products at all.

Submission + - Woman Banned for Wanting a Safe Space Within Star Citizen Community (lauresh.com)

Submitted by snarfies
snarfies writes: Gameranx reports that a woman was banned from Star Citizen for trying to start a safe place for females within the game. She was banned for "trolling" and told that she could only attempt to appeal her ban through customer support, and if she attempted to do so the ban would be made permanent. Anyone else who has asked about this incident has also been banned. She details her entire experience, along with screencaps of the entire thread and the official responses she has recieved, on her page.

Ben Lesnick has been contacted through his Twitter, and says he will look into the matter.

Submission + - Students "Bootstrap" Algebra From Video Games

Submitted by BrownComputerScience
BrownComputerScience writes: by Kevin Stacey (Science News Officer, Physical Sciences)

Middle school teacher Adam Newall calls it “the eternal question” of introductory algebra. As students tread water in a sea of variables, functions, and graphs, they’re bound to ask it: “When are we ever going to use any of this?”

But Newall, who teaches at Pembroke Community Middle School in Pembroke, Mass., is hearing that question a lot less often lately. He’s using a new curriculum in his seventh and eighth grade math classes that answers it right off the bat — and in a way that kids find hard to resist.

The curriculum, called Bootstrap, teaches students to program their own video games — a task that just happens to require understanding and applying fundamental concepts of algebra. Newall says the approach does wonders, engaging students in a subject from which they might otherwise shy away.

“The idea of making a video game is the allure,” he said. “But it opens [students] to the idea that they can learn math, and it’s not something that’s meant to torture people. They learn that math is something that is real and relevant and that they can use it.”

Bootstrap is a group effort of Emmanuel Schanzer, a former computer programmer turned math teacher and now a Ph.D. student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education; Kathi Fisler, professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and Shriram Krishnamurthi, professor of computer science at Brown. It builds on two decades of work done at Northeastern, Brown, and other universities.

Middle school kids ”go from saying, ‘Math is hard,’ to saying, ‘I can’t do math.’ ... We’d like to get to them before they make that decision.”The curriculum started as a 10-week after-school program, which has been taught successfully around the country for six years. Now, based on the success of the after-school experience, Bootstrap is transitioning into an in-school program. The Bootstrap organization has set up training seminars for teachers around the country, and a few schools — like Newall’s Pembroke Community Middle School — are already using the curriculum. Two new partnerships promise to bring Bootstrap to many more schools.

Code.org, a national nonprofit that aims to expand computer science instruction in public schools, recently named Bootstrap as its official middle school math curriculum. CSNYC, a New York City-based group with similar goals, has adopted Bootstrap as well. This summer, as Code.org rolls out its national curriculum, the Bootstrap team will give additional training seminars to teachers all over the country interested in trying Bootstrap.

More than just fun and games

While the educators are mostly interested in the underlying math concepts, for the students, it’s the games they create that are the stars of the show.

“The whole curriculum is a sequence of steps that get you to the point where you have a working game at the end,” Krishnamurthi said. “Once we tell them they’re going to make their own game, the motivation is done. We don’t have to say any more.”

Conceptually the games are fairly simple (though surprisingly addictive). Students choose a main character, a goal for that character to reach, and a danger to avoid. Then the students learn a simple programming language to put it all in motion. And that’s where algebra comes in.

For example, in order for the program to know if a character has reached her goal or been stymied by an obstacle, the relative positions of objects must be plotted on a Cartesian grid.

“To do that, we’re going to need to know the Pythagorean theorem,” Newall said. “To understand the Pythagorean theorem we need to know square roots and squares. And [the students] will follow a lesson on how those things work in order to make it work in their game. They’re so eager to own that.”

When all is said and done, each student has a game to show off to friends and a working understanding of variables, functions, and other fundamental algebra concepts that align with Common Core math standards.

Right skills, right time

One of the reasons Krishnamurthi is so eager to get the curriculum into more middle school classes is that it catches kids at a crucial time.

“Research has found that kids change the way they talk about math right around this age,” he said. “They go from saying, ‘math is hard,’ to saying, ‘I can’t do math.’ And that’s the point where kids make the decision to drop out of algebra. When they do, they’ve actually made a career decision without even knowing it, because there’s nothing you can do in a STEM field without algebra. We’d like to get to them before they make that decision to drop out, so they at least have they can keep their options open.”

But algebra isn’t the only thing students learn through Bootstrap. They also become familiar with ins and outs of coding, a crucial skill in an increasingly digital world. When students present their games to their classmates, they’re also expected to stand up and explain the code that makes it work — an exercise software engineers call a code review.

“I do code reviews with my college students,” Krishnamurthi said. “They are one of the most challenging experiences a college student can have. It’s a hard-core professional skill. We teach it to middle schoolers as a natural part of our curricular design.”

The first time Newall taught the class, those code reviews were given at a launch party at semester’s end.

“The superintendent came; parents came. Just the amount of celebration from kids making a one-screen, side scrolling video game was more than I had ever anticipated,” Newall said.

And as for that eternal math class question, Newall says his Bootstrap students are now asking a new question.

“They go from, ‘What are we going to use this for?’ to ‘What are we going to use this for next?’”

Submission + - Canonical Halts Ubuntu For Android Development 1

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: In a since-removed bug report on Launchpad, Ubuntu’s issue tracker, Canonical’s Matthew Paul Thomas stated that Ubuntu for Android is no longer in active development. In a statement http://sdt.bz/70157, Canonical stated that while the project is not completely dead, Canonical is currently focusing on pushing Ubuntu for Phones. The company is open to working with partners on Ubuntu for Android, but will not proceed with further U4A development unless they can form a partnership with an OEM partner to launch it.The Ubuntu for Android project http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ub... was first announced http://news.slashdot.org/story... in early 2012.

Submission + - OpenBSD 5.5 Released today. (openbsd.org)

Submitted by Ayourk
Ayourk writes: In the midst of all the OpenSSL problems, it appears OpenBSD was released today. I just refreshed the page a few minutes ago and saw the new home page.

Submission + - Google Alledgedly Stealing From AdSense Accounts (pastebin.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A pastebin posted today is quicly accumulating thousands of views and raising some interesting questions.
Alledgedly a leak by a former Google employee, it describes how Google is stealing money from AdSense publishers. Accounts who accumulate too much money per month are quicly banned for any reason just before the payout date, and all appeals are rejected.
This "new policy" would have started in 2009.

Submission + - NASA Honors William Shatner With Distinguished Public Service Medal

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Red Orbit reports that after nearly 50 years of warping across galaxies and saving the universe from a variety of alien threats and celestial disasters, Star Trek’s William Shatner was honored with NASA’s Distinguished Public Service medal, the highest award bestowed by the agency to non-government personnel. “William Shatner has been so generous with his time and energy in encouraging students to study science and math, and for inspiring generations of explorers, including many of the astronauts and engineers who are a part of NASA today, ” said David Weaver, NASA’s associate administrator for the Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “He’s most deserving of this prestigious award.” Past recipients of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory director and Voyager project scientist Edward Stone, theoretical physicist and astronomer Lyman Spitzer, and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. The award is presented to those who “ have personally made a contribution representing substantial progress to the NASA mission. The contribution must be so extraordinary that other forms of recognition would be inadequate.”

In related news Shatner’s one-man show “Shatner’s World” was presented in nearly 700 movie theaters nationwide on April 24 providing audiences a behind-the-scenes look at Shatner’s career and life. “Everything can be termed positively and that’s what I attempt to do in this one-man show,” he said. “This one-man show is very important to me. It’s the culmination of a long career.”

Submission + - Parallella ships to Kickstart backers!

Submitted by Amigan
Amigan writes: Adapteva went the kickstarter route for funding of it's Home HPC machine. It was successfully funded 10/27/2012 w/4965 backers. Shipment was originally thought to be August 2013 — which came and passed. They have now successfully shipped to over 2000 of the kickstart funders (16 core), and are working their way through the 64 core implementation delivery.

Submission + - Space Hackers preparing to recover a 36 year old historic Spacecraft from Deep S

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A band of engineers, space hackers, has picked up the carrier signal and is now trying to do something hard and never done before — recover a 36 year old NASA spacecraft (http://makezine.com/2014/04/24/crowdfunding-the-recovery-of-a-lost-spacecraft/) from the grips of deep space and time. ISEE-3, later rechristened ICE, the International Cometary Explorer, is returning to Earth. With old NASA original documents and with Rockethub crowdfunding (http://www.rockethub.com/42228), a team led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing is attempting to steer the spacecraft back into a Earth orbit and return it to scientific operations. Dennis says, "ISEE-3 can become a great teaching tool for future engineers and scientists that will design and travel to Mars". Only 40 days remain before the spacecraft will be out of range for recovery. A radio telescope is available, command and telemetry, propulsion design are in hand but things have to come together (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/how-to-resurrect-a-35-year-old-spacecraft-16724874?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1457_54583169) and the team is hoping for public support to provide the small amount needed to accomplish a very unique milestone in space exploration.
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not part of story ----------------------
Dear Slashdot. My user account is staffinfection but I have not used it for some time. I do not have the linked email to recover the password. Can you send me the password to telluric@hotmail.com or tim.reyes@yahoo.com? I am a nasa engineer (http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/profile/treyes/).

Submission + - The Hackers Who Recovered NASA's Lost Lunar Photos (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties.

Submission + - Contacting the author of lost software?

Submitted by AAWood
AAWood writes: I used to love a freeware PalmOS game from way back... so much so that I'd like a crack at making my own version for modern systems. I don't want to go ahead without contacting the author for their blessing, which is a problem when I don't have the game, aren't sure I remember the name, and can't find any indication is ever existed online.

Are there any useful avenues for tracking down forgotten developers? Should I go ahead if I can't find them? Have you ever had a situation where you needed something you knew was out there, but could no longer find?

Submission + - Click Like? You may have given up the right to sue. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The New York Times reports that General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, 'join' it in social media communities. Who'd have imagined that clicking like requires a EULA?

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