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Comment Re:Careful study by authors who've never met a wom (Score 2) 472

Well... you are right, partly, I think, in pointing out that there's still a lot of bullshit around. However, it is known that culture is, in fact, a very powerful mechanism (I think you can come up yourself with a bunch of examples). It is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish between cultural and biological factors, however, what is interesting in this study, I think, is that did an international comparison of boys vs girls' math scores and compared these to different socio-economic factors. I have to admit, I didn't take the time to read all of it, but they actually show a pretty convincing scatter plot between gender equality index and girls' math performance relative to boys'. If you don't look at anything else, look at that plot.

What about other factors that are different between genders?

I don't know about relative levels of aggression, I guess it is pretty much established that aggression level is at least partly determined by testosterone level and related hormones. An elevated level of aggression (btw, Lorenz defines aggression as social dominance behavior) would affect professional (or leadership) ambition, but I would guess that a lot of that (missing ambition) has to do with gender roles and legislation (parental leave, etc). Language ability? I think, somebody should do a study showing that the more time female caretakers spend with the child, the bigger the gender gap. Sounds like a challenge.

Submission + - Nobel Peace Price goes to African and Arab Women (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The nobel peace prize for 2011 was awarded today to three women from Liberia and Yemen. The winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president, liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy activist
Graphics

Wolfenstein Ray Traced and Anti-Aliased, At 1080p 158

An anonymous reader writes "After Intel displayed their research demo Wolfenstein: Ray Traced on Tablets, the latest progress at IDF focuses on high(est)-end gaming now running at 1080p. Besides image-based post-processing (HDR, Depth of Field) there is now also an implementation of a smart way of calculating anti-aliasing through using mesh IDs and normals and applying adaptive 16x supersampling. All that is powered by the 'cloud,' consisting of a server that holds eight Knights Ferry cards (total of 256 cores / 1024 threads). A lot of hardware, but the next iteration of the 'Many Integrated Core' (MIC) architecture, named Knights Corner (and featuring 50+ cores), might be just around the corner."

Comment Re:even more damning is the guardian (Score 1) 296

I wouldn't assume is was deliberate. He's probably just incompetent and was showing off. Now he tries to give the blame to somebody else: wikileaks, Assange. Just guessing: after the relationship between the guardian and Assange got bad (after they published critical stories about the rape charges), he doesn't have to work so hard to convince people around him.

Comment Repay city? (Score 3, Informative) 488

I just RTFA. It says the money is to
repay the city for its efforts in trying to regain control over the FiberWAN network and later test it for vulnerabilities. City officials had been worried that Childs, who helped set up the network but clashed with his supervisors, might try to sabotage it.
Mind, he already spent 2 years in custody and was convicted to 4 years of jail.
Social Networks

Submission + - Wikipedia flights with retention of contributors (wikimedia.org) 1

rackeer writes: "According to wikipedia's Editor Trends Study, active contributors are leaving, and new contributors don't stay with the project and make up a continuously smaller share of the total number of contributors. A whitepaper by the wikimedia foundation proposes top priorities based on this study. One of these priorities is the creation of a climate which is positive towards newcomers. What is your opinion of what should change?"

Comment Re:I'm ok with a new toolkit, but C is a mistake. (Score 1) 115

I agree that C should not be the way to go for application programming. Developers should value their own time more than they value the computer's time, even more so that computers get so fast and interpreter implementations so good that the difference is hardly noticeable. When I am looking for applications to use and have the choice of one programmed in C/C++/C#/Java and one programmed in python, I'll choose python, because I assume that the code quality is better.

Idle

Submission + - France launches first 3D porn channel (dbune.com)

abhatt writes: A network in France has launched what is believed to be the first 3D adult film service in the country.

The service was launched by renowned French adult movie actor, Marc Dorcel. All the programs were shot in the 3D format and the creators believe that this unique channel will allow viewers to enjoy the porn in a new and exciting way.

Media

Submission + - What is Flattr and How to Use It (myoutsourcedbrain.com)

rackeer writes: Recently the story was slashdotted that Flattr was one of the very few sites that still accepted donations to wikileaks. However even on slashdot, many people haven't heard of this relatively new microdonation platform. This is because, although it has an impressive growth to show, Flattr is still young, in an early stage of development, and users are mostly European. This article explains what flattr is, why people should know about it, how to make money with it, and how to donate. It also shows how to integrate it with any website.

Comment cell cultures as controllers (Score 1) 170

So he uses cell cultures as controllers for robots. I don't have access to his article now to see what he did exactly, but I doubt he can make this work efficiently.

I remember a talk about some DARPA projects after 9/11 for chemical sensing that used also alive cell cultures. Advanced chemical sensing could serve to detect explosives and chemical weapons and therefore shield again terrorist attacks. They would take a cell culture from a rat brain put it onto a dish and then characterize the responses to different kinds of currents (output from chemical sensors), so they could implement a computational model that separated these responses and made sense of them. The problem they had was that the cultures are difficult to maintain in the same state. For chemical sensing they had to be transported which was problematic, because even slight jerks would change the culture. They are very sensitive to temperature and then of course they change over time (as the introduction states). So, the would have to be adjusted again, which is time consuming and expensive. Until he finds a way to maintain the state of the network and control the intrinsic changes of the network (culture) he will have problems with stability and it will not be very useful.

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft helps Russia pursue opposition (nytimes.com)

asaz989 writes: The New York Times reports that Russia selectively pursues software piracy complaints from Microsoft in order to suppress the opposition — confiscating computers for evidence, searching offices, and the like. Microsoft lawyers usually back the authorities in such cases, even when cases such as that of the environmentalist group Baikal Waves, which went out of its way to buy licenses to prevent police harassment and nevertheless had its offices raided, and its computers confiscated. Microsoft participated in this legal process. Published alongside this story, under the same byline, is a related piece on the collusion of Microsoft lawyers with corrupt Russian police in extorting money from the targets of software piracy investigations. In a responding press release, the company states, 'Microsoft antipiracy efforts are designed to honor both [antipiracy concerns and human rights], but we are open to feedback on what we can do to improve in that regard.'

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