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Submission + - Earth's Evil Twin (esa.int)

Submitted by
Riding with Robots
Riding with Robots writes: "For the past two years, Europe's Venus Express orbiter has been studying Earth's planetary neighbor up close. Today, mission scientists have released a new collection of findings and amazing images. They include evidence of lightning and other results that flesh out a portrait of a planet that is in many ways like ours, and in many ways hellishly different, such as surface temperatures over 400C and air pressure a hundred times that on Earth."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - NHS take action against Burning Patients!!!

Submitted by ITMagic
ITMagic writes: The UK National Patient Safety Agency has just issued a Rapid Response Report , warning about the dangers of burning patients! This, therefore, requires the NHS staff involved to not only take IMMEDIATE action, but also to to ensure that compliance is policed and enforced (action point 4), and to 'snitch' on patients that do not do as they're told (action point 5)...

From the official document (and I paraphrase)...

  • smoking when covered in petroleum jelly can be a fire hazard.
  • You (the NHS employee) must tell them (the patient) that smoking under these circumstances is a fire hazard. You must keep a record that this advice has been given. You must verify that they are competent to understand the aforesaid advice.
  • You are encouraged to design a suitable poster warning of the dangers of smoking whilst covered in petroleum jelly! :-)
  • If the patient is too stupid to understand the risks, put them in a straight-jacket.
  • Relatives should be warned about the presence of Questionable Darwinian DNA in their gene-pool.


OK. For anyone confused as to WHY the Govt. thinks this is necessary, here is the background...

And now the UK NHS response...

As ALL hospitals are now no smoking zones, thanks to recent legislative changes, this intervention by the Nanny State now seems a little pointless. Or, perhaps the time draws nigh when there will be a "Shoot-to-Incapacitate-With-Dum-Dum-Bullets" policy for anyone seen even holding a packet of ciggies?
Space

Submission + - Mankind damages universe by looking at it.

Submitted by ScentCone
ScentCone writes: The Telegraph covers a New Scientist report (subscribers only) about two US comsologists who suggest that, a la Schrodinger's possibly unhappy cat, the act of obvserving certain facets of our universe may have shortened its life . FTA, 'Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero — back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly.' Warning: if you've read this summary, you may have already changed the article.
Privacy

Submission + - MPAA University 'Toolkit' Raises Privacy Concerns

Submitted by
NewbieV
NewbieV writes: "On the heels of the MPAA's efforts to eliminate peer-to-peer file sharing in colleges and universities, The Washington Post is reporting on a new development:

The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.
The University Toolkit (website), also known as peerwatch, uses xubuntu, Snort, ntop and Apache to gather data and phone home. More from the article:

Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs at EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association that promotes the use of information technology in higher learning, said he'd like to think that "no university network administrator in their right mind would install this toolkit on their networks." But he said some campus IT personnel may fail to dig too deeply into what the device actually does before installing it.
"
Robotics

Submission + - Robots assimilate in cockroach society (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
sufijazz
sufijazz writes: "Scientists have gotten tiny robots to not only integrate into cockroach society but also control it. This experiment in bug peer pressure combined entomology, robotics and the study of ways that complex and even intelligent patterns can arise from simple behavior. Animal behavior research shows that swarms working together can prosper where individuals might fail, and robotics researchers have been experimenting with simple robots that, together, act a little like a swarm.

The BBC also has a video story on this."
Robotics

Submission + - Robotic Cockroaches Raise Ethical Debate (boston.com)

Submitted by xrsblu
xrsblu writes: The Boston Globe reports that European scientists have persuaded a colony of cockroaches to behave differently by planting a robot leader in the midst. With robots imitating and influencing living creatures, this raises the question of how humans and machines will interact as robotic technology advances.

"Already, Asian countries that represent the gold standard in robotic research are pondering unprecedented new laws that would regulate how much independence robots should be given by programmers and even what "rights" should be accorded the clever devices, which one day may possess something approaching wills of their own, according to robotic gurus."
Math

Submission + - When do we start learning from negative feedback?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work on a system which creates a model. In short it learns how to follow/create rules instead of following rules to learn. So far so good. Now I'm on a dead line and realized that it's behavior favors no feedback or positive feedback and that negative feedback is more complicated and therefore it learns it slower and requires a more mature/larger model. So my question is when do babies/kids start learning from negative feedback.
Microsoft

Submission + - Excel 2007 Multiplication Bug reverse-engineered

Submitted by finnw
finnw writes: Research scientist Chris Lomont has analyzed in depth the Excel 2007 "65535" bug. Summary from the article:

This note:
  1. details how the bug works,
  2. shows the bug is a rendering bug, not a math error as many reported,
  3. shows how it was likely introduced by comparison to Excel 2002 and Excel 2000 behavior (the bug seems to have been inserted when updating an older 16-bit formatting routine to a 32-bit equivalent),
  4. explains how the just released hotfix corrects the behavior, confirming the analysis of the bug,
  5. and demonstrates why exactly twelve values out of more than 9*10^18 (approx 2^63) possible 64-bit floating-point values suffer from this bug.
One interesting point is that the affected routine appears to be written in x86 assembly language. Fortunately it doesn't appear to have caused a security hole.
Caldera

Submission + - SCO Threatens to Sue Itself (groklaw.net)

Submitted by
Groklaw Reader
Groklaw Reader writes: "SCO's bankruptcy is nothing if not interesting. In trying to explain why it gave away one of its patents to a subsidiary right before filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection and why this isn't "fraudulent" it has offered an interesting legal filing to explain itself. Apparently, SCO wants to force the Court's hand in approving their plan to weasel out of this, otherwise SCO will be forced to sue itself. One can only hope."
Privacy

Submission + - Bill Seeks Criminalisation of "Extreme" Ad

Submitted by
Brian Ribbon
Brian Ribbon writes: "During the Queen's speech, it was today announced that the "Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill" intends to criminalise the mere possession of "extreme" or "violent" adult pornography. Many flawed and deceitful arguments (often used to justify the criminalisation of the possession of child porn) have been used, including claims that the possessor will somehow "harm" the victim every time the image is viewed, and the unproven belief that the possessor will be "corrupted" by the images and will then act out his fantasies. The "evidence" (pdf) used to justify this aim of the bill came from a study solicited by the Ministry of Justice, conducted by feminist activists. Will the British government ever cease to use pseudo-science in order to invade the private lives of its citizens?"
United States

Submission + - Don't Like Someone? Call the FBI, cry Terrorist. (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
Wellington Grey
Wellington Grey writes: "From the article: A man in Sweden who was angry with his daughter's husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI that the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported on Friday.

The man, who admitted sending the email, said he did not think the US authorities would stupid enough to believe him.

The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs, interrogated and placed in a cell for 11 hours before being put on a flight back to Europe, the paper said.

Link to story"
Media

Submission + - Pollock's fractal signature is NOT unique (arxivblog.com) 2

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "In 1999, researchers claimed to have identified a unique fractal signature in the paintings of the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Now a re-analysis of the idea shows that the fractal signature can easily be reproduced by amateur artists and that even some paintings by Pollock fail to possess the supposed signature (abstract, pdf). That could have big implications for the discovery in 2003 of a cache of more than 25 unrecorded paintings attributed to Pollock that would be worth a lot of money if anybody could prove it."

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