Comment Thank goodness... (Score 1) 441
...we have such a selfless paragon of virtue to set us straight.
Submission + - Twitter provides Boston police and Suffolk prosecutors with subscriber info (boston.com)
lmw94002 writes: Anonymous speech is free. But free speech is not necessarily anonymous. "Social media giant Twitter has handed over subscriber information for some Twitter accounts indirectly tied to the Occupy Boston protest, ending a court battle fought behind closed doors as Boston law enforcement investigated hacking attacks on the Boston police and a police union."
Submission + - Nature vs. Nurture: (Humans) Wired for Culture
__aamdvq1432 writes: In 'Culture not genes drives humans forward', PhysOrg notes that:
Evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading Professor, Mark Pagel, argues that our cultural influences are more important to our success as a species than our genes in his new book, 'Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Co-operation,' published this week.
'He (Pagel) says other animals are limited to living in the environment their genes adapt them to, for example wildebeest can't climb trees for fruit...'
Um, humans are genetically specialized to be behaviorally unspecialized thanks to massive amounts of associative, cortical fibers. Anybody note that it's our genes that "wire" us? Outmoded, absolutist, two-valued, "either/or" thinking strikes again.
Submission + - AAAS president "Scared to Death" of New Dark Era (guardian.co.uk)
Layzej writes: Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), recently confessed at an 8000 member strong meeting that she is scared to death "we are sliding back into a dark era." She stated that she is "profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms." Her remarks are backed by a recently published Union of Concerned Scientists report, that chronicles the methods used by corporate businesses to harass individual scientists, ghost-write scientific articles to raise doubts about government research, and undermine the use of science to form government policy. Discover Magazine gives specific examples such as the Heartland Institute's recently revealed plan to subvert public science education, as well as the offer by the the American Enterprise Institute of $10,000 a pop to each scientists or economists who was willing to write op-eds or essays critiquing the IPCC climate report — before it was even published. The AAAS meeting was "set against a background of an entire intellectual discipline that realises that it, and its practitioners, are now under sustained attack."
Submission + - Mainland Chinese Find Chink in the Great Firewall 1
__aamdvq1432 writes: It appears that hundreds of Chinese citizens have found a way around their nation's Internet censorship system and picked President Obama's Google+ page as the place to express their new-found freedom. According to Marianne Barriaux over at PhysOrg, 'The comments centre on freedom of expression and human rights, as well as more mundane issues such as how to get US green cards.' We can but hope that these folks evade reprisals by their despotic overloads.
Submission + - Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Update: Still Hope for Warp-Drive Fans? (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday's report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles' speed. The other effect concerns an oscillator that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.
Submission + - Let's WoW Granny: Boosting Cognition in Older Adults
__aamdvq1432 writes: Science News reports that 'World of Warcraft Boosts Cognitive Functioning in Older Adults'. According to the article, 'Researchers from North Carolina State University have found that playing WoW actually boosted cognitive functioning for older adults — particularly those adults who had scored poorly on cognitive ability tests before playing the game.' If reproducible, this has positive implications for improving cognitive function in old folks who most need it...or at least enhancing their online gaming skills.
Submission + - Why Phishing stays alive and well.
MarcAuslander writes: I just got an email from paypal. Yes, it's really from paypal. And it tells me to click on an embedded link and log in! The link is legitimate. What are they trying to teach me?
"PayPal recently posted a new Policy Update. You can view this Policy Update by logging in to your PayPal account. To log in to your account, go to https://www.paypal.com/ and enter your member log in information. Once you are logged in, look at the Notifications section on the top right side of the page for the latest Policy Updates."
"PayPal recently posted a new Policy Update. You can view this Policy Update by logging in to your PayPal account. To log in to your account, go to https://www.paypal.com/ and enter your member log in information. Once you are logged in, look at the Notifications section on the top right side of the page for the latest Policy Updates."
Submission + - Indian science adviser caught up in plagiarism row (nature.com)
ananyo writes: A cut-and-paste job by a PhD student has embroiled co-author C. N. R. Rao — science adviser to India’s Prime Minister — in controversy.
The paper, by Rao and materials scientist Saluru Baba Krupanidhi at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, along with two of their students — Basant Chitara and L. S. Panchakarla — explored the use of reduced graphene oxide and graphene nanoribbons as infrared photo detectors and was published online by Advanced Materials in July last year (abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201101414). But three sentences in the introduction and a description of an equation had been copied verbatim from a paper published in Applied Physics Letters in April 2010 (abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3415499), with the source referenced. The controversy has led to a degree of introspection in India where some postgraduate students don't regard cutting and pasting a sentence here or there into a paper as scientific plagiarism.
The paper, by Rao and materials scientist Saluru Baba Krupanidhi at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, along with two of their students — Basant Chitara and L. S. Panchakarla — explored the use of reduced graphene oxide and graphene nanoribbons as infrared photo detectors and was published online by Advanced Materials in July last year (abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201101414). But three sentences in the introduction and a description of an equation had been copied verbatim from a paper published in Applied Physics Letters in April 2010 (abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3415499), with the source referenced. The controversy has led to a degree of introspection in India where some postgraduate students don't regard cutting and pasting a sentence here or there into a paper as scientific plagiarism.
Submission + - "Faux" French Cops and "Douhgnuts of Doom"
__aamdvq1432 writes: It appears that a French pastry site has been found to serve pastry-lovers with ransomware. According to the article, the malware 'would saddle the machine with the ransomware, which would promptly block it and display a fake notification from the French Police.' Trend Micro has reported similar cop impersonations for Italy and other European police agencies.
Doughnuts, anyone?
Doughnuts, anyone?
Comment Natives AND Immigrants (Score 3, Interesting) 144
From the article: "It’s time to embrace digital natives and give them something cool, that doesn’t try to imitate existing concepts." Maybe. There's still a huge, wealthy immigrant population that has lots more dough than the natives. Before I set about catering to either group, I need a business model. "Something cool" may be part of it - I won't ignore native sensibilities about "coolness." Something saleable will be a larger part, whether conceptually imitative or not.
Comment Good (exclusive) or effective tactics (Score 1) 208
Good
Punch the idiot in charge in the face every time you get stuck with junk technology.
Effective
This one's trickier. It sounds as though your system's policy structure is ill-understood by your "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction." On what basis just he justify overriding the placement of responsibility for purchases from IT to your budget controllers? Take the issue to your school board with clear explanations of the wasted monies that result from buying unusable computers. Explain to the board the failure to provide required educational materials. Convince them to clarify and set up or reaffirm the needed policies and establish or approve procedures to maintain oversight and enforcement of the correct practices. If your board seems recalcitrant, take your arguments upstream to the commissioners (or other public officials) who control the board. Finally, the court of last resort is public opinion; get media coverage to expose the waste and failure of the current practices.
If it's too risky to your employment to attempt these things directly, recruit parents to be your public interface and feed them the needed facts.
Submission + - Anonymous "Credited" with New Attack on Greek Justice Ministry
__aamdvq1432 writes: Anonymous is reported to be behind a 'New cyber-attack on Greek ministry after arrest'. Police say this attack came 'after the arrest of a teenager accused of participating in the first hacking.' In addition to the defacement of the Greek Justice Ministry's (GJM) website, Anonymous offered a variety of coercive threats of future actions, if the GJM continues these prosecutions and Greece continues to support ACTA.
Comment Good (exclusive) or effective tactics (Score 1) 1
Good
Punch the idiot in charge in the face every time you get stuck with junk technology.
Effective
This one's trickier. It sounds as though your system's policy structure is ill-understood by your "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction." On what basis just he justify overriding the placement of responsibility for purchases from IT to your budget controllers? Take the issue to your school board with clear explanations of the wasted monies that result from buying unusable computers. Explain to the board the failure to provide required educational materials. Convince them to clarify and set up or reaffirm the needed policies and establish or approve procedures to maintain oversight and enforcement of the correct practices. If your board seems recalcitrant, take your arguments upstream to the commissioners (or other public officials) who control the board. Finally, the court of last resort is public opinion; get media coverage to expose the waste and failure of the current practices.
If it's too risky to your employment to attempt these things directly, recruit parents to be your public interface and feed them the needed facts.
Punch the idiot in charge in the face every time you get stuck with junk technology.
Effective
This one's trickier. It sounds as though your system's policy structure is ill-understood by your "asst. superintendent of curriculum and instruction." On what basis just he justify overriding the placement of responsibility for purchases from IT to your budget controllers? Take the issue to your school board with clear explanations of the wasted monies that result from buying unusable computers. Explain to the board the failure to provide required educational materials. Convince them to clarify and set up or reaffirm the needed policies and establish or approve procedures to maintain oversight and enforcement of the correct practices. If your board seems recalcitrant, take your arguments upstream to the commissioners (or other public officials) who control the board. Finally, the court of last resort is public opinion; get media coverage to expose the waste and failure of the current practices.
If it's too risky to your employment to attempt these things directly, recruit parents to be your public interface and feed them the needed facts.
Submission + - Even Computers Agree: Physics is Hard (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Students and researchers alike have long understood that physics is challenging. But only now have scientists managed to prove it. It turns out that one of the most common goals in physics—finding an equation that describes how a system changes over time—is defined as "hard" by computer theory. That's bad news for physics students who hope that a machine can solve all their homework problems, but at least their future jobs in the field are safe from automation.
