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Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Posted by samzenpus from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."
Education

Submission + - Getting Students to Think at Internet Scale (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that researchers and workers in fields as diverse as bio-technology, astronomy and computer science will soon find themselves overwhelmed with information so the next generation of computer scientists has to learn think in terms of internet scale of petabytes of data. For the most part, university students have used rather modest computing systems to support their studies but these machines fail to churn through enough data to really challenge and train a young mind meant to ponder the mega-scale problems of tomorrow. “If they imprint on these small systems, that becomes their frame of reference and what they’re always thinking about,” said Jim Spohrer, a director at IBM.’s Almaden Research Center. This year, the National Science Foundation funded 14 universities that want to teach their students how to grapple with big data questions and students are beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the largest public data set in the world, which takes detailed images of larger chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data each night. “Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem,” says Jimmy Lin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland."
Intel

Submission + - Intel caught cheating in 3DMark benchmark (techreport.com) 3

Submitted by EconolineCrush
EconolineCrush writes: 3DMark Vantage developer Futuremark has clear guidelines for what sort of driver optimizations are permitted with its graphics benchmark. Intel's current Windows 7 drivers appear to be in direct violation, offloading the graphics workload onto the CPU to artificially inflate scores for the company's integrated graphics chipsets. The Tech Report lays out the evidence, along with Intel's response, and illustrates that 3DMark scores don't necessarily track with game performance, anyway.
Idle

Submission + - Chessboxing Storming the Athletic World

Submitted by samzenpus
samzenpus writes: Have you been craving an athletic competition that combines the raw physical energy of a chess match and the cognitive discipline of boxing? Crave no more. Chessboxing is here. No really, Chessboxing. As the name suggests, Chessboxing combines rounds of chess alternating with rounds of boxing. If there is no winner after 11 rounds, the match is awarded to the fighter with the most points in the boxing ring. Dutch artist, Iepe Rubingh, created chessboxing in 2003. He says, "I got the idea from a Serbian comic. It looked great. I wanted to see if it would work."

Comment Google to the Rescue (Score 1) 513

by innot (#26813849) Attached to: False Fact On Wikipedia Proves Itself
Google results without "Wilhelm" = 236 results.

Google results with "Wilhelm" = 2060 results.

With so many sources agreeing that "Wilhelm" is one of his first names it must be right!

So, Mr. von und zu Guttenberg: You better get your passport checked, there seems to be one name missing on it!

BTW if you can read german you can find a anonymous blog entry from the guy who added the "Wilhelm" to Wikipedia.

On that page I loved the quote from the "Süddeutsche" newspaper which translates into something like:

"...and his ten first names. Somtimes Guttenberg lists them. If you really ask him: Karl(1) Theodor(2) Maria(3) Nikolaus(4) Johann(5) Jacob(6) Philipp(7) Wilhelm(8) Franz(9) Joseph(10) Sylvester(11)"

(emphasis & numbers mine) So they knew he had 10 names, but never bothered to count the names they copied from Wikipedia)

Slashdot.org

Submission + - Europeans taller than Americans

Submitted by
theolein
theolein writes: "The BBC has an article up on a recent study that concludes that Europeans are now on average taller than Americans from being shorter some 200 years ago. It seems that Americans have grown about 1 inch in that time, whereas Europeans are between 3 and 6 inches taller than they were 200 years ago. The study does not include Asian or Hispanic immigrants to the USA and makes no conclusions about why this is, but states that factors, such as dietry, social and economic factors may play a role in the results."
Windows

Submission + - Vista activation cracked by brute force

Submitted by Bengt
Bengt writes: The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack.

From TFA: The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people.

There is really no differentiating between a legit copy with a manually typed in wrong key and a hack attempt. Sure MS can throttle this by limiting key attempts to one a minute or so on new software, but the older variants are already burnt to disk. The cat is out of the bag. The crack was first mentioned on the Keznews forums, a step by step How-to can be found HERE
Windows

Submission + - DST, the new Y2K for Consultants

Submitted by
fatalwall
fatalwall writes: "I work at a consultant firm that is has been looking at the Daylight Savings Time change of three weeks earlier and what updates are needed for various software. We have discovered that there is an update for Windows, Exchange, Outlook, blackberry ect. Grandly Microsoft has not provided updates through Microsoft updates for all of these. We have found various tools online that will help however we have some clients that use outlook with PST's which requires every user to run an update. The only thing I can find our people complaining they cant find a solution. How is everyone else dealing with this problem? What have you found for solutions?"
Republicans

Submission + - Conservapedia - a Christian rival to Wikipedia

Submitted by 99luftballon
99luftballon writes: A rival to Wikipedia has been launched by Christian conservatives to counter left wing and anti-Christian bias in the online encyclopaedia. Conservapedia (warning site very slow, both to load and in content) seeks to address the biased Wikipedia, which uses CE rather than AD for dating (and is thus anti-Christian) and contains many pages that do not deal with Christian 'facts'. A summary of such facts include the news that atheism is responsible for bestiality, Einstein's work had nothing to do with the atom bomb and Christianity is the only religion which is based on faith. Home schooling has a lot to answer for...

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