Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Education

Submission + - Help With Homework, Hurt Your Child (wired.com)

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "Experts and studies agree: the best thing we can do as parents to help our kids' learning at home is to "support autonomy." In fact, playing the role of teacher while helping with homework is almost universally associated with decreased achievement.
This article at Wired represents the rabbit hole of experts I dove down after fabricating my son's kindergarten invention fair project, a powered K'nex conveyor belt designed to transport a picture of our aging Labrador, Gus, through a diorama of our living room.
The gist of this expert advice: explain the directions, carve out time, and then get the heck out of the room."

Submission + - Formula Picks the Best Oscar Films for Men (esquire.com)

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "I wrote this equation for Esquire, ranking the BEST Best Pictures for guys. The top five: Godfather, Gladiator, Forrest Gump, Patton, Gandhi (all five titled after the iconic male lead). The bottom five: Oliver, Gigi, Broadway Melody, American in Paris and...The Sound of Music. (Though it didn't win, I ran the numbers for Star Wars IV, which would've come in third...) Driving factor is Rotten Tomatoes audience plus critics score...multiplied the how much MORE the audience liked it than the critics (guys tend to prefer movies the critics dislike). Also important is quotability (via IMDB and Wikiquotes) and Oscar nominations for the male lead. Thoughts on the list?"
Education

Submission + - Academics not productive enough? Sack 'em (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university. Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn’t published at least four “research outputs” over the past three years. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in. Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said.
Education

Submission + - Novel ways to teach computer science to children 1

Submitted by lazarus42
lazarus42 writes: I have the opportunity to teach a small number of very bright children (around age 10) who are being home tutored computer science and IT. The desire is not to focus on products but on concepts and their practical implementation in an engaging way. One idea is to take the approach in 'Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles' by Nisan and Schocken and devise a set of simpler activities paralleling those in the book (which is targeted at university undergrad level). Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions how to bring computer science to life for kids?
Technology

Submission + - RFID Keeps Track of Briefcase Contents (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "Dubai researchers recently published the details of their iPurse — an RFID system built on a mobile platform that uses mini tags to keep track of the contents of a bag. Tag your keys, wallet, smartphone, work ID, laptop and headphones and get an alert is one's missing. Science Daily also points out you could uses iPurse to discover if someone boosts your diary or a pack of cigarettes from your bag."
Idle

Submission + - Mathematical parrot reveals his genius with posthumous paper (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Even in death, the world’s most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published. They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight and three sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates (abstract http://www.springerlink.com/content/q08n44457x236ln6/).
Privacy

Submission + - Anonymous Cowards, Deanonymized (33bits.org) 1

Submitted by mbstone
mbstone writes: Arvind Narayanan writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their "fists," Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses "since" as opposed to "because," can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure.

Comment Chat with reCaptcha Creator (Score 1) 109

by garthsundem (#39105709) Attached to: Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs
I got to chat with Luis von Ahn, co-creator of the Captcha and reCaptcha, and it turns out he's a surprisingly idealistic guy. Taking inspiration from people in gyms pedaling and going nowhere, he hoped to actually *do* something with the brainpower needed to solve a reCaptcha (he said something along the lines of, "actually your brain is doing a pretty amazing thing -- translating an image to text.") Maybe digitizing the archives of the New York Times and ancient manuscripts isn't world hunger or world peace, but it's pretty damn cool. And as you probably know, that's what you're helping to do every time you translate a word in a reCaptcha box.
Science

Submission + - Open Source vs. Academic Journal Publishing (www.cbc.ca) 1

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "Academic publisher Elsevier is the target of a growing boycott over high fees charged to scientific researchers/authors who pay Elsevier and others to print their findings. Does this ensure quality control or does it ball-gag the dissemination of knowledge? Is there a better way? Here's the CBC news headline: About 6,000 medical and science researchers have boycotted one of the world's largest academic publishers over its fees and its alleged push against open access to published research."

Slashdot Top Deals

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

Close