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Submission + - Astrology: the celebrated anti-science (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
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.

Submission + - Read better books to be a better person (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by 00_NOP
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.

Submission + - Newest YouTube user to fight a takedown is copyright guru Lawrence Lessig (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by onehitwonder
onehitwonder writes: Lawrence Lessig has teamed with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to sue Liberation Music, which recently demanded that YouTube take down a lecture Lessig had posted that features clips from the song "Lisztomania" by the French band Phoenix (on Liberation Music's label). Liberation claimed copyright infringement as the reason it demanded the takedown, but in his countersuit, Lessig is claiming Liberation's "overly aggressive takedown violates the DMCA and that it should be made to pay damages," according to Ars Technica.

Submission + - "Please refuse our delivery," advice from Amazon (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
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?

Submission + - Saving Rupert Murdoch's job

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: The Telegraph is reporting that Rupert Murdoch is threatening to shut down his entire British newspaper operation in an effort to protect the rest of his empire.

The Telegraph revealed last week that the Metropolitan Police is now treating News UK, the newspaper corporation, as a corporate suspect in its investigations of alleged hacking and bribery at the News of the World. ...

...However, the potential case would “go away” altogether if the company News UK ceased to exist, in the same way as the CPS cannot press charges against a person who has died.

Neil Chenoweth suggests that this is nonsense.

News Corp & 21st Fox are separate companies they can't protect each other without shareholder suit

This is really about saving Rupert Murdoch's job.

For while Murdoch himself is not the target, the consequences of charging News International as opposed to charging News International directors including Rupert Murdoch himself may be indistinguishable—they would both spell the end of his control of at least the greater part of his split empire, 21st Century Fox.

Currently the odds seem to be against either of these things happening, but Murdoch must bitterly regret the comments he made to Sun journalists in March.

Submission + - Encryption not quite as secure as we thought (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
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!

Submission + - Crowdsourcing comes to fundamental physics (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Crowdsourcing seems set to play a key role in a piece of fundamental physics research — into the nature of gravity — after an initial successful test of the concept by particle physicists at CERN.
Physicists seeking to measure the impact of gravity on anti-matter particles asked the public, on 16 August, to assist them in finding and marking cloud chamber tracks produced as part of the AEgIS experiment into how anti-matter accelerates under gravity.
The conventional assumption is that matter and anti-matter behave the same way under gravity, but AEgIS aims to demonstrate the truth or otherwise of this assumption. As gravity is poorly understood — though we do know our theory of it, Einstein's general relativity, is incompatible with quantum physics — the experiment could be of huge value to our understanding of the physical fundamentals of the universe.
It is expected that there will be further calls for public assistance as the scientists develop the crowd sourcing software and move towards a public beta. Bad news: maximum number of people who can share a nobel prize is three!

Submission + - English High Court bans scientific paper (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The High Court — England's highest civil court — has temporarily banned the publication of a scientific paper that would reveal the details of a zero day vulnerability in vehicle immobilisers and, crucially, give details of how to crack the system. Motor manufacturers argued that revealing the details of the crack would allow criminals to steal cars. Could this presage the courts getting involved in what gets posted on your local Bugzilla? It certainly means that software giants who dislike security researchers publishing the full facts on vulnerabilities might want to consider a full legal route.

Comment Re:That is the worst article I ever red (Score 1) 349

by 00_NOP (#43822169) Attached to: World's Biggest 'Agile' Software Project Close To Failure

Sorry you didn't like the article. I have written a few other pieces on UC on the blog and maybe they make it clearer (or maybe not! De gustibus non est disputandum).

For background in late 2010 the DWP announced at an Institute of Government seminar in Whitehall (that I attended) that they would use "agile" to deliver UC. The seminar was a real Emperor's New Clothes affair as lots of small development companies were in the room and they all thought/hoped they'd get a chunk of the action - nobody (including me - I was just a lowly computer science MSc student) dared to say what seemed obvious to me - that this was a massive mission criticial project that it was a mistake to use an experimental (for the government) development methodology on to meet a political - as opposed to evidence - defined timetable on.
My gripe is not with agile per se - strip away the corporate hoopla and it seems to make a lot of sense to me. My fear is that "agile" was seized upon by politicians who know nothing about software development as a way of solving their problems and defining themselves positively against the previous Labour government (declaration of interest: I worked in a political role for that government).

Submission + - World's biggest "agile" software project close to failure (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
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.

Submission + - End of the line for Linux in Norway's educational system?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, in the organization "UNINETT", in an executive meeting from the 13. May 2013, a decision was taken under the title "UNINETT felles IKT-verktøykasse". For explanation: UNINETT is some government-sponsored institute for providing IT support for higher education in Norway (universities and university colleges (called høyskole in Norwegian)). The title of the project means: ``common ICT-toolbox". It's the attempt to "harmonize" (their words) IT systems throughout education Norway.
The core basically is an ``office solution'' for everyone (with perspective to cloud outsourcing), based on Microsoft office software, Microsoft exchange etc. This will be forced throughout all universities and colleges. The announcement also states (I quote): En eventuell brukerstøtte for
Linux-plattform er ikke en del av dette prosjektet... which translates: a potential support of the Linux-platform is _NOT_ part of this project... (emphasis by me).

This seems currently not public information, it's decided a few days week ago (behind closed doors, it seems).

Submission + - Is Nestle Patenting the Fennell Flower? (yahoo.com)

Submitted by wreckignize
wreckignize writes: Nestlé's international patent number WO2010133574 claims the company "discovered" what has been known for thousands of years. That Thymoquinone, the extract from the Fennell Flower's seeds, is a natural analgesic (pain relief) and stimulates the Opioid receptors in the human brain, thereby preventing or reducing allergic reactions in foods. Nestlé' researchers demonsrated this effect by inducing an egg allergy into rodents, then feeding them black seed oil, which contains the compound Thymoquinone. With the addition of black seed oil into their diet, the researchers were discovered the mice exhibited a less severe allergic reaction to the eggs.

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