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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 71 declined, 36 accepted (107 total, 33.64% accepted)

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Idle

Submission + - Nathan Myhrvold Becomes Willy Wonka

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, is self-publishing a cook book with scientific underpinnings. The man who presided over the original iterations of Windows has built a laboratory kitchen, hired 5 chefs, and plays with misplaced lab equipment: using an autoclave as a pressure cooker, using a 100-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, and using an ultrasonic welder for... he's not sure yet. Read all about the fun at the New York Times (bonus video: how to how to cryosear and cryorender duck). '“It’s basically like a software project,” Dr. Myhrvold said. “It’s very much like a review we would do at Microsoft.”' Can one BSoD food?"
Medicine

Submission + - Major New Function Discovered For The Spleen

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The spleen doesn't get much respect. Those undergoing a splenectomy seem to be able to carry on without any consequences. However, some studies have suggested an enhanced risk of early death for those who have undergone splenectomies. Now researchers have discovered why: the spleen apparently serves as a vast reservoir for monocytes, the largest of the white blood cells, the wrecking crew of the immune system. After major trauma, such as a heart attack, the monocytes are disgorged into the blood stream and immediately get to work repairing the damage. '"The parallel in military terms is a standing army," said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. "You don't want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it."'"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Alternative Theory About Stolen Wall Street Code

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "A seasoned Wall Street coder turned oyster farmer(!), Michael Osinski, has an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, in which he outlines a much less menacing, alternative motivation for the industrial espionage of Goldman Sachs stock trading code reported 11 days ago. Any professional coder will understand the jist of the argument: the coder was starting a new job, and he just wanted to take his work with him to save time later. 'In 20 years of programming, I have seen people copy code many times. My own employees might have done so, and this would not have brought disaster. A piece of software is often one cog in a vast enterprise, relatively useless in and of itself.' Michael describes his experiences coding for investment banks, concluding 'I came to realize that the ideas and methods behind a piece of software are more valuable than the lines of code themselves.' And perhaps most poignantly, 'Goldman's announcement of record earnings, a mere month after the bank paid back $10 billion in federal aid, strikes me as much more offensive than this programmer's bungled attempt to copy code.'"
United States

Submission + - Open Government Initiative Enters Phase Three

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The Obama administration opened a discussion forum in January of this year which has become an electronic suggestion box. It is now entering stage three, following brainstorm and discussion phases: the draft phase, in which the top subject matter is codified into suggestions for the government. 'Ultimately, the visitors advanced more than 3,900 ideas, which in turn spawned 11,000 comments that received 210,000 thumb votes. The result? Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama's true place of birth.'"
Space

Submission + - A Deadly Lack Of Awareness Of Geomagnetic Storms

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "In 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington noticed "two patches of intensely bright and white light" near some sunspots. At the same time, Victorian era magnetometers went off the charts, stunning auroras were being viewed at the equator, and telegraph networks were disrupted- sparks flew from terminals and ignited telegraph paper on fire. It became known as the Carrington event, and the National Academy of Sciences worries about the impact of another such event today and the lack of awareness among officials. It would turn all high voltage long distance power lines into conductors, and destroy transformers, as Quebec learned in 1989. Without electricity, water would stop flowing from the tap, gasoline would stop being pumped, healthcare would cease after the emergency generators gave up the ghost after 72 hours. Replacing all of the transformers would take months, if not years. The paradox would be that underdeveloped countries would fare better than developed ones. No country currently has a plant to deal with the threat and in fact, China is now implementing an extremely high voltage 1000-kilovolt electric grid, which places the country at even greater risk. Our only warning system is the 11 year old, past its lifespan Advanced Composition Explorer, in solar orbit between the Sun and the Earth. It might give us as much as 15 minutes of warning, and transformers might be able to be disconnected in time. But again, currently no country has such a contingency plan. The New Scientist reports: '"We're in the equivalent of an idyllic summer's day. The sun is quiet and benign, the quietest it has been for 100 years," says Mike Hapgood, who chairs the European Space Agency's space weather team, "but it could turn the other way." The next solar maximum is expected in 2012.'"
Censorship

Submission + - Chinese Fight Censorship With Subversive Humor

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "To any native Chinese speaker, the video of the grass-mud horse is at first shocking, then hilarious, and has been viewed over 1.4 million times in 2 months. With disneyfied children's chorus, the video tells of the grass-mud horse's triumph over the invading river crab as it encroaches on its habitat, the Ma Le Ge Bi desert. There is no such horse, nor such desert. But both the horse and the desert sound like vile obscenities in Chinese. The whole point is, the Chinese government has recently implemented a major crack down on Internet pornography, and used the crack down as a cover to purge political dissent as well, such as Charter 08, appealing for democracy in China. The Chinese authorities refer to such censorship in doublespeak as 'harmonization.' So now, if something is censored on the web, Chinese netizens cynically refer to the material or its author as being 'harmonized.' And guess what? 'River crab' sounds like 'harmonize.' So the video is clearly referring to the triumph of smut, and political dissent, over censorship. The New York Times qoutes Xiao Qiang, a professor of journalism: 'The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule... But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.'"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Surprising Low Tech Fixes To High Tech Problems (circletimessquare.com)

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times compiled a few low tech hacks to common problems that, this being slashdot, many of you might already be aware of, although some were surprising to me. For example, holding your key fob to your chin extends your remote car key's range. Cell phone fell in the toilet? Take the battery out and throw it in a jar of uncooked rice. And one I am going to try: your crashed hard drive might be recoverable, momentarily, by putting it in the freezer. 'Lowering the drive's temperature causes its metal and plastic internals to contract ever so slightly. Taking the drive out of the freezer, and returning it to room temperature can cause those parts to expand again. That may help free up binding parts.'"
Idle

Submission + - "The Day The Earth Stood Still" Beamed Int 1

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Deep Space Communications Network has been hired by 20th Century Fox to beam the Keanu Reeves remake of 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' into outer space on its opening day. Whatever you think of the gimmick and its philosophical contradictions, rest assured that only the most important and highest minded of concerns went into the broadcast: 'Jim Lewis, Deep Space's director, said the company had to satisfy 20th Century Fox, the film's producers, that the transmission could not be intercepted and pirated on Earth or in the air.'"
Programming

Submission + - Lots Of Interest In The Netflix Prize Competition

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "It's old news, from October 2006: Netflix has offered $1 million to the person or group who can make a 10% improvement to their Cinematch movie recommendation algorithm. But the competition is still going strong, with a vibrant, competitive roster of some 30,000 programmers around the globe hard at work trying to win the prize. The New York Times profiles some of the more obsessive searchers such as Len Bertoni, a semi-retired computer scientist near Pittsburgh who logs 20 hours a week on the problem, oftentimes with the help of his children. And Martin Chabbert in Montreal: 'After the kids are asleep and I've packed the lunches for school, I come down at 9 in the evening and work until 11 or 12.' The article gets into the history of the search algorithm Netflix currently uses, and explores the hot commodity called 'singular value decomposition' that serves as the basis for most of the algorithms in competition."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Google Labs Introduces Mail Goggles

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "This is the kind of thing you will laugh at out loud, and then quietly and grimly enable. It defaults to late nights and weekends, when you are most likely to be drunk and sending a message you really shouldn't. When enabled, it asks you a series of math questions before the email is sent. Jon Perlow, the Gmail engineer who wrote the app, reveals the genesis of the idea: 'Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.'"
Earth

Submission + - Why Does Hurricane Size Not Get As Much Attention? 1

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Hurricanes can vary greatly in size. As of Thursday Evening, Ike is a Category 2-3 Storm. But it is extremely large. Therefore, in terms of raw destructive energy, it is stronger and more dangerous than even Hurrican Katrina. A good comparison of raw strength, ironically on an experimental NOAA scale called IKE (integrated kinetic energy), quantifies this comparison. Anyone with a passing familiarity with physics understands a wind going 100 mph and 30 miles wide packs more energy than a wind going 200 mph but only 10 miles wide. But there are people who choose to wait things out in Houston and Galveston, for many foolish reasons, but not least of which because they hear that Ike is only Category 2. So why doesn't the NOAA and the media convey more information, use a different scale that takes into account storm size as well as wind speed, or at least quote the numbers together? Such as 'Hurricane Ike is a Category 2x550 storm' (550 miles across)."
United States

Submission + - Shutting Down The Carders (circletimessquare.com)

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times has an engrossing story of how the Secret Service went after and caught a gang of carders: Aleksandr Suvorov, 24, an Estonian hacker, Maksym Yastremskiy, 25, from the Ukraine, and Albert Gonzalez, 27, of Miami. Collectively they traded in millions of stolen credit card numbers. Most notable is the story of Gonzalez and how the Feds figured out he was still playing both sides after turning informant in 2003. They reversed engineered a sniffer program the Estonian had dropped on a Dave & Buster's server and noticed it was the same code from a war-driving intrusion into TJ Maxx by Gonzalez. Interestingly, Maksym was arrested outside a disco in Turkey and Suvorov was nabbed at an airport in Frankfurt. The take home lesson being: if you are going to trade in stolen credit card information from the USA, avoid countries with friendly extradition policies with the USA."
Communications

Submission + - Comcast Will Be Reading Your Comments

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "The New York Times fills us in on Comcast's new customer service push. Don't worry about calling them, just complain online. Frank Eliason monitors blogs, social networking sites, message boards, Twitter, etc., and proactively reaches out to the posters. 'The company was ranked at the very bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, which tracks consumer opinions of more than 200 companies. Hundreds of customers have filed grievances on a site called ComcastMustDie.com. Comcast says the online outreach is part of a larger effort to revamp its customer service. In just about five months, Mr. Eliason, whose job redefines customer service, has reached out to well over 1,000 customers online.' Make sure to say 'Hi Frank!' if you comment on this story."
Censorship

Submission + - Google Trends v Community Standards On Obscenity

Submitted by
circletimessquare
circletimessquare writes: "Google Trends is being used in a novel way in a pornography trial in Florida. Under a 1973 Supreme Court ruling, "contemporary community standards" may be used as a yardstick for judging material as unprotected obscenity. This is a very subjective judgment, and so Lawrence Walters, a defense lawyer for Clinton Raymond McCowen, is using Google Trends to show that in the privacy of their own homes, more people in Pensacola (the only city in the court's jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service's data) are interested in "orgy" than "apple pie". With this new tactic, questions of privacy, as well as hypocrisy, are being raised. '"Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, "we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed," he added.' For the Slashdot user base, the question is: is an invasion of privacy acceptable if it is being used to reveal hypocrisy?"

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