Beetle B. - Slashdot User

Submission + - Games That Impact Your Brain (pcworld.com)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Friday August 19, 2011 @10:28PM

Beetle B. writes: "Can playing games be good for you? A number of scientific studies suggest that board games like chess may positively influence the development of critical thinking, memory, and reasoning skills in young children. Could video games have a similarly beneficial effect on developing minds? The article is not exactly "academically" presented. However, it does provide links to all the studies, which may be worth perusing."

Submission + - King's Quest III Remake Released (agdinteractive.com)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Friday February 25, 2011 @12:33AM

Beetle B. writes: "Not being content with remaking Sierra's King's Quest I, King's Quest II and Quest for Glory II, the Anonymous Game Developers Interactive have released a remake of King's Quest III. Sure, the graphics may not appeal to the young'uns out there, but it's the gameplay that matters, right? Last year, after several legal battles, another game in the King's Quest series made by fans was released (with more episodes to come). And did I mention that they're all free? What other remakes of old adventure games are floating out there?"

Submission + - Saudi students in US seek segregation on Facebook (arabnews.com)

Submitted by Beetle B. on Sunday February 13, 2011 @10:36PM

Beetle B. writes: A 22,000-member group for Saudis studying in the US on the social networking website Facebook has been split into two groups, one for women and one for men. The split follows a request from the group's female members who wanted extra privacy.

'The separate page for Saudi women is a valid decision. We took it to fulfill the wishes of the Saudi women in the US. We have been contacted by a lot of women asking for their private group,' Majed Aleid, media chair of the 'Saudis in the US' group, told Arab News in a letter.

Submission + - New Saudi Law: License for Online Media Required (arabnews.com)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Tuesday January 04, 2011 @12:05PM

Beetle B. writes: "According to Saudi Arabia's leading English newspaper, Arab News, online newspapers, blogs and forums will now need to register with the Ministry of Information and Culture for licenses to operate, according to new regulations that the ministry announced Saturday it is to introduce. Abdul Aziz Khoja, minister of information and culture, said that the system is “in line with the development moves that the media sector is witnessing.” He added that the rules do not include any clauses restricting freedom of speech and that the ministry is eager to ensure there is transparency. He also said that the rules will be made open to improvement in the future."

Submission + - Benoit Mandelbrot Rumored to have Passed Away (fooledbyrandomness.com)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Saturday October 16, 2010 @01:57AM

Beetle B. writes: "According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's home page, Benoit Mandelbrot has passed away at the age of 85. At the moment, no news site has reported it officially, though. I first learned of the Mandelbort set while reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost From The Grand Banks. Soon after, I got hold of the best fractal generation software of the day: Fractint, and ran it for long periods of time on my XT, exploring the beautiful world that Mandelbrot, among others, had opened up for me. That it was only on a 4 color CGA did not deter me!"

Submission + - Advent of Religious Search Engines (npr.org)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Monday September 13, 2010 @09:45PM

Beetle B. writes: "Do Google search results contradict your religious views? Tired of getting pornographic results and worried you'll burn in Hell for it? Are you Christian? Try SeekFind — "a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible." Muslim? Look no further: I'm Halal. Jewish? Jewogle is for you. NPR ran a story on the general trend of search engines cropping up to cater to certain religious communities. I wonder how many other "filtered" search engines exist out there to cater to various groups (religious or otherwise) — not counting specialized searches (torrents, etc)."

Submission + - Can Sounds Mimic The Effect of Drugs? (miamiherald.com)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Friday June 25, 2010 @10:16PM

Beetle B. writes: "For decades, parents, doctors and school administrators have worried about the dangers of drugs. In the digital age, they've got a new arena for concern: Sound waves that, some say, affect the brain like a drug — and cost only 99 cents on iTunes and Amazon.com."

Submission + - Wilderness under threat - video games blamed (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Monday February 11, 2008 @11:28PM

Beetle B. writes: "Fewer people are visiting national parks and taking part in outdoor activities such as camping, according to new research that suggests people are falling out of love with the natural world.

The study by US conservationists discovered an "ongoing and fundamental shift away from nature-based recreation" that they say could threaten future efforts to preserve wilderness areas. The experts say people now make up to 25% fewer trips than they did in the 1980s, and say the rise of computer games could be to blame."

Submission + - Should Wikipedia Allow Mathematical Proofs? (wikipedia.org) 4

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Saturday December 15, 2007 @08:07PM

Beetle B. writes: "An argument has arisen over whether Wikipedia should allow pages that provide proofs for mathematical theorems (such as this one).

On the one hand, Wikipedia is a useful source of information and people can benefit from these proofs. On the other hand, how does one choose which proofs to include and which not to? Should Wikipedia just become a textbook that teaches mathematics? Should it just state the bare results of theorems and not provide proofs (except as external links)? Or should they take an intermediate approach and formulate a criterion for which proofs to include and which to exclude?"

Submission + - The ACS's Hostility Toward Open Access Journals (the-scientist.com)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Sunday November 18, 2007 @08:10PM

Beetle B. writes: "'An anonymous email that was circulated on October 10 calls into question the practices of the non-profit publishing giant, the American Chemical Society (ACS), which has long been under scrutiny. The Email, signed only by "ACS insider," was sent to college librarians, ACS administrators, and a science writing listserv. It said that the ACS is growing more corporate in structure and described how it manages the 36 chemical journals under its purview. Among other criticisms, the anonymous emailer wrote that the bonuses given to ACS executives are tied to the profits of the publishing division, and such bonuses explain why the society has had such a strong stance against open-access publishing.'

In 2005, the ACS opposed PubChem, an open access chemical compound database.

Slashdot has covered open access journals numerous times."

Submission + - Algorithm That Seemlesly Patches Holes in Images (cmu.edu)

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @04:09PM

Beetle B. writes: "From the site:

'What can you do with a million images? In this paper we present a new image completion algorithm powered by a huge database of photographs gathered from the Web. The algorithm patches up holes in images by finding similar image regions in the database that are not only seamless but also semantically valid. Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user. Unlike existing image completion methods, our algorithm can generate a diverse set of image completions and we allow users to select among them. We demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over existing image completion approaches.'

English translation: The algorithm replaces arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner."

Submission + - Researchers Study O'Reilly's Propaganda Tactics

Submitted by Beetle B. on Thursday May 10, 2007 @12:24AM

Beetle B. writes: Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric...The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

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