Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Pi In Space! (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Raspberry Pi that is.
When British astronaut Tim Peake heads off to the International Space Station in November 2015 he will be accompanied on his 6 month mission by two augmented Rapsberry Pis, aka Astro Pis. The Astro Pi board is a Raspberry Pi HAT and provides — gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer and sensors for temperature, barometric pressure and humidity. It also has a real time clock, LED display and some push buttons — it sounds like the sort of addon that we could do with down here on earth as well! It will also be equipped with both camera module and an infra-red camera.
UK school pupils are being challenged to write Rapberry Pi apps or experiments to run in space. During his mission Tim Peake will deploy the Astro Pis, upload the winning code whilst in orbit, set them running, collect the data generated and then download it to be distributed to the winning teams.
If this doesn't get kids turned on to computing and science nothing will.

Submission + - Google Suggests Schools Ban Students With 'Some CS Knowledge' from Classrooms 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: To address the challenge of rapidly increasing CS enrollments and increasing diversity, reports the Computing Education Blog, Google in November put out an RFP to universities for its invite-only 3X in 3 Years: CS Capacity Award program, which aims "to support faculty in finding innovative ways to address the capacity problem in their CS courses." In the linked-to RFP document, Google suggests that "students that have some CS background" should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses where they "may be more likely to create a non-welcoming environment," and recommends that they instead be relegated to online courses. According to a recent NSF press release, this recommendation would largely exclude Asian and White boys from classrooms, which seems to be consistent with a Google-CodeCademy award program that offers $1,000 bonuses to teachers who get 10 or more high school kids to take a JavaScript course, but only counts students from "groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science (girls, or boys who identify as African American, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native)." The project suggested in the Google RFP — which could be worth $1.5 million over 3 years to a large CS department — seems to embrace-and-extend a practice implemented at Harvey Mudd College years ago under President Maria Klawe, which divided the intro CS offering into separate sections based upon prior programming experience to — as the NY Times put it — reduce the intimidation factor of young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. Google Director of Education and University Relations Maggie Johnson, whose name appears on the CS Capacity RFP, is also on the Board of Code.org (where Klawe is coincidentally an Advisory Board member), the K-12 learn-to-code nonprofit that has received $3+ million from Google and many millions more from other tech giants and their execs. Earlier this week, Code.org received the blessing of the White House and NSF to train 25,000 teachers to teach CS, stirring unease among some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools.

Submission + - UX Fails Make Installing Fedora 21 Harder Than It Has To Be (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Swapnil Bhartiya has posted a handy how-to for installing the new Fedora, a process that is made more problematic due to a couple of UX flaws in the Anaconda installer. First, is the all-but-hidden placement of an error message if the user enters a too-weak password. Second, is the de-selection of the 'user creation' button, which would result in the the installation continuing with only a root user.

Submission + - IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects The Pirate Bay

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content. This is much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay; it has a functioning search engine, all the old listings, and working magnet links. New content is being readily uploaded and downloaded.

Submission + - Darwin Awards study says men are far more idiotic than women (cnet.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: In a study published in the British Medical Journal (http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g7094) and reported by CNet (and others): "Scientists analyze the past 10 years of silly, avoidable deaths and find that almost 90 percent of the "protagonists" in these scenarios were male." "According to “male idiot theory” (MIT) many of the differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency department admissions, and mortality may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things." The BMJ Abstract: "Sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented. However, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. This paper reviews the data on winners of the Darwin Award over a 20 year period (1995-2014). Winners of the Darwin Award must eliminate themselves from the gene pool in such an idiotic manner that their action ensures one less idiot will survive. This paper reports a marked sex difference in Darwin Award winners: males are significantly more likely to receive the award than females (P0.0001). We discuss some of the reasons for this difference." Yes, please discuss...

Comment Re:One should be careful on the logic here (Score 2) 155

...But then, one has to understand that every position - no matter how altruistic your motivation - has a consequence. If your local group is protesting anything based on funding from Putin (or the Koch Brothers, or George Soros, etc) understand that as well-intentioned as your protests may be, you are being used as a convenient pawn.

Put you faith in ideas, not persons. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.

Submission + - Governments Shouldn't Auction More Spectrum (saasintheenterprise.com)

Submitted by dkatana
dkatana writes: The FCC recently raised more than $34 billion for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is good news for the treasury coffers, but government auctions threaten the ability of the FCC and similar agencies to manage the spectrum, impose net neutrality rules, and allow new businesses to compete.

Carriers and internet companies who won the auction might believe the spectrum is theirs to do as they please, blocking access or charging huge fees to others. Issues such as speed throttling and preferential access come to mind.

If governments insist in auctions of the newly available frequencies, it could hurt the industry and potentially destroy any possibility of negotiating universal access and net neutrality.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can a felon work in IT? 10

Submitted by Lesrahpem
Lesrahpem writes: I'm a felon with several prior misdemeanor convictions from an immature time in my life. I've since cleaned up my act, and I want to go back into the IT sector. I keep running into potential employers who tell me they'd like to hire me but can't because of my past record (expunging won't work, I'm in Ohio). Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Should I just give up and change careers?

Submission + - AT&T prepares for war on net neutrality.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AT&T has hired Republican polling company Call Research to conduct a national poll this week on net neutrality. In no way even-handed, the poll misrepresents what net neutrality is and what will happen if it becomes law. This is 'Obamacare for the Internet' they claim, a government takeover of the Internet which will stifle innovation of the Internet, the greatest private sector invention for decades, grant the government greater surveillance powers, threaten liberty and will cause America to lose the moral high ground against authoritarian countries like China. Regulation will cost consumers more to access the net and do to the Internet what regulation has done to the poor power and water companies. It's supported by Obama and opposed by the Tea party and the wonderful companies who provide you the Internet like Comcast and Verizon. On and on for twenty minutes it continues.

The results of this poll will no doubt be used to convince politicians what a bad idea net neutrality is, as the respondents seem to be falling for it.

I apologize for posting as AC but I'm violating my NDA and I need this job.

Submission + - Black Friday: E-commerce Pages Were 20% Slower On Desktop, 57% Slower On Mobile

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Black Friday news kicked off this weekend quite early when Best Buy was hit with a massive outage, but it turns out that was only half the story. The top 50 e-commerce websites were slower overall this year compared to last, suggesting customers were frustrated even if they could get to their favorite shopping site. Web performance monitoring company Catchpoint Systems looked at aggregate performance this weekend and compared it to the same timeframe in 2013. The results are notable: desktop webpages were 19.85 percent slower, while mobile webpages were a whopping 57.21 percent slower.

Submission + - Game Theory Analysis Shows How Evolution Favors Cooperation's Collapse (upenn.edu)

Submitted by Ugmug
Ugmug writes: Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term.

But now they’ve come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature.

Submission + - 10-Year-Old Runs for Job of Town Council Chief (yle.fi)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A little girl with red eyeglasses has applied for job of town council chief in Finland. The application deadline for the job of leader of Kemijärvi municipality passed on Friday last week, and among the candidates vying for the top spot was 4th grader Mili Kasurinen. If she gets the post, half of her day would be dedicated to her municipal tasks, and the other half attending school. In the name of fairness, she would thus also accept a part-time salary. Mili says she holds environmental issues close to her heart. "If the town's kept clean, tourists are likely to be happier here", she says, and adds that fishing is a great way for visitors to enjoy their time in the town. She also believes old people deserve respect. Her granny lives nearby and they have a nice time together. So is she worried about missing out on the job because of her age? "Yes it's a worry, but I'm not going to start complaining about it", she says. "I would get on and do my job, and I definitely wouldn't let the town down", she insists.

Submission + - A survey of RAND's contributions to computer science

Submitted by lpress
lpress writes: RAND Corporation was formed after World War II to do research and development for the Air Force. Perhaps the first "think tank," RAND was instrumental in many computer science developments. They did important early work on communication satellites, artificial intelligence and operations research and RAND's JOHNNIAC was one of the first stored program (Von Neumann architecture) research computers. IPL, the first list processing language, the SIMSCRIPT simulation programming language and JOSS, one of the first interactive time-sharing systems, were developed at RAND. The RAND tablet was the great grandfather of the iPad and its graphical input language (GRAIL) featured object-oriented drawing and character recognition. Paul Baran's work on the design and feasibility of large, distributed, packet-switched networks was RAND's most important theoretical work — leading to the ARPANET.

In 1957, RAND spun off its research division, creating the System Development Corporation (SDC) to build the SAGE air-defense system. SAGE was the first computer network and a huge project that trained most of the system programmers in the US. Those programmers invented many programming and project management techniques and went on to productive careers. SDC also developed the most advanced time-sharing and software development system of its time, which was used in dozens of man-machine research projects.

Slashdot Top Deals

In the sciences, we are now uniquely priviledged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton

Close