66312853
submission
00_NOP writes:
Computer Scientists are not novelists or journalists but surely that does not excuse them from being to write sentences that at least follow the basic grammatical rules. Nor does it mean that their publishers should get away with seliing extremely badly written works to what are often close-to-captive audiences in Universities and similar institutions. Yet that happens all the time. Recently I bought a Computer Science book — aimed at researchers and specialist engineers that retails for over £70 (approx $105) and yet was written in such poor English that a 10-year-old school child would be failed on work of that standard. It's probably the worst I have seen, but it's not the only one — how do they get away with it?
65068973
submission
00_NOP writes:
Children in the UK have been taught in metric measures in school since (at least) 1972, but yesterday British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that they should actually be taught in Imperial measures (which are still in use officially to measure road distances and speeds but not really anywhere else). Is this because he has not got a clue about science or because he is trying to buy off his right wing fringe (who object to "metrication") or because he might be a bit stupid, Oxford degree not withstanding?
58451021
submission
00_NOP writes:
A small thought experiment you can try seems to suggest that the Chomskian theory of humans' innate linguistic ability is correct and maybe that means there will be limits to the success of big data based machine translation.
58027307
submission
00_NOP writes:
The reason people play Candy Crush seems to be that it is so difficult: in fact it has been proved that the problems faced by players are in the "NP" class, meaning — probably — that no algorithmic solution is known a priori and so the way you get to be good is by improving your heuristic sense — but still there is no way you can become a "perfect" player and so there is always room for improvement.
57199723
submission
00_NOP writes:
The political battle over Scotland's independence ballot — to take place in September this year — has now moved on to how the BBC project the UK on their national weather forecast. The BBC use a projection based on the view of Britain from geostationary weather satellites and so there is naturally some foreshortening at the northern end of Britain (Scotland, in other words). But nationalist campaigners say this means Scottish viewers are constantly being shown a distorted image of their country which makes it look smaller and hence (in their view) less able to support independence. In response others have suggested that the nationalists are truly "flat earthers".
56249227
submission
00_NOP writes:
The idea of a plague breakout in an advanced economy feels like something relegated to the world of shlock movies or bad science fiction, but new evidence from the sequencing of the Yersinia pestis bacterium that killed victims of the sixth century "Plague of Justinian" (which is widely seen to have led to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West) shows that it is of a different strain to that which caused the plagues of the 14th and 19th century — suggesting that a novel form of plague could break out and cause mass deaths.
52009773
submission
00_NOP writes:
Imagine if a novel that celebrated creationism won the Pulitzer? A scandal surely...meanwhile in the UK our top literary prize (open to Commonwealth and Irish authors writing in English) has gone to a book that celebrates astrology and which is written by an author who offers up psycobabble defences of astrology's truth. Seems to me that British distain for US arguments about anti-science is misplaced and we ought to focus a bit more on the way anti-science is promoted over here.
51852907
submission
00_NOP writes:
Researchers from the New School for Social Research in New York have demonstrated that if you read quality literary fiction you become a better person, in the sense that you are more likely to emphasise with others. Presumably we can all think of books that have changed the way we feel about the world — so this is, in a sense, a scientific confirmation of something fairly intuitive.
50299501
submission
00_NOP writes:
A (NSFW — lots of swearing) Australian website contrasting the views of the two main parties in Saturday's Australian website has become an overnight (quite literally) sensation and also earned its creator some anonymous threats and a call from a lawyer claiming to be working for the leader of the opposition.
49835171
submission
00_NOP writes:
Amazon seem to devolve so little power and authority to their customer service staff that they are left to make recommendations to customers that both hurt Amazon's business — by piling up additional costs — and leave customers (this one at least) just as unhappy as before. In my case they stated that the only way I could get an international order correctly charged to my gift card, as opposed to my credit card, was to refuse delivery, have the goods returned and then place a new order. Surely an IT company can have better systems than this?
49695363
submission
00_NOP writes:
Encryption schemes are probably not quite as secure as has been previously thought — not because of the NSA but because source word behaviour does not follow the previously assumed patterns and so entropy in the coded message is not as high as expected, report researchers at the National University of Ireland and MIT.
That lack of entropy gets reflected in the encoded message as patterns of code and so makes it easier to find brute force cracks of the encrypted message.
The threat to real world encrypted messages is probably quite low — but it would not be the first time that a small chink in the armour is revealed to be a massive gash after a bit more work!
46835273
submission
00_NOP writes:
"Universal Credit" — the plan to consolidate all Britain's welfare payments into one — is the world's biggest "agile" software development project but it is now close to collapse the British government admitted yesterday. The failure, if and when it comes, could cost billions and have dire social consequences.
46387883
submission
00_NOP writes:
Probably not, but a couple of pieces of new research suggest that it might help both avoid conflict (or at least predict its spread) and aid stock market investment strategies.
46315153
submission
00_NOP writes:
The British government today outlined its legislative programme for the year ahead. Gone was a plan for a "snoopers' charter" that would have mandated all internet communications being logged for the benefit of law enforcers and in was a plan to match connections to IP addresses in some (unspecified) way. Surely the only way to do this is via IPv6 and noone is mad enough to enforce a transition to IPv6 by law, are they?!
45928691
submission
00_NOP writes:
One of Britain's biggest selling newspapers, the Mail on Sunday, today launches into what it calls the "sinister" idea that refrigerators should be fitted with technology — such as that promoted by Dynamic Demand — which would automatically switch devices off for a few seconds if the UK's unified National Grid showed signs of severe overloading (such as those seen commercial breaks in big TV events when tea-loving Brits rush to switch their kettles on). The claim that this is "Big Brother" technology surely does not stand up to examination, but the Mail On Sunday and its sister Daily Mail already have an unenviable reputation as highly effective anti-science publications.
