251801
submission
goombah99 writes:
Dan Rather Reports has posted a lengthy YouTube teaser of their upcoming touchscreen voting expose (to air tuesday at 8 or 11pm ET)
This is sort of a "60-minutes" style investigation of touchscreen voting. It's apparently not a rehash either. Rather turns up some new evidence such as tracking down the dilapidated plant where the ES&S ivotronic touchscreens were assembled. There they were having a 30 to 40% rejection rate on the screen themselves. Apparently the issue here was a rush to market to meet the election schedule. They needed lots of machines, fast. So plant workers say the rejects got shipped too. The "rush to market" aspect demonstrates an often overlooked strength of the use of open source software with commodity hardware and a multiple vendor business model like open voting consortium. This should be much less subject to single source point failures and has a built-in adversarial oversight nature that might lend some quality control. I just hope their conclusion is not "we need perfect machines and perfectly trained operators" and instead is we need a different approach that is transparent, robust and self correcting in the face of errors.
251731
submission
Julie188 writes:
A team of four Thai students beat out 10,000 competitors to win the $25,000 prize in Microsoft 2007 Imagine Cup. Their project is text-to-speech software in which computers read aloud typed and handwritten commands. The software will allow people who cannot read to interact with a PC. Imagine Cup judge Rand Morimoto has been blogging on the whole experience — from his video of the opening ceremonies to how contestants swilled free Cokes to keep themselves awake during the 24-hour, no-sleep phase of the competition. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/18087
251173
submission
soccer_Dude88888 writes:
Russia faces embarrassment over its flag planting expedition to the North Pole after claims that state broadcasters borrowed scenes from the movie Titanic to "beef-up" footage.
Television company Rossiya sent images of mini submarines descending to the ocean floor around the world in its report about the mission.
But a 13-year-old boy from Finland spotted the scenes in the national daily newspaper Ilta-Sanomat, and realised that they resembled images on his Titanic DVD.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2007/08/11/wrussia111.xml
