Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Media

The Rise of Machine-Written Journalism 134

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hey-that's-my-job dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Peter Kirwan has an interesting article in Wired UK on the emergence of software that automates the collection, evaluation, and even reporting of news events. Thomson Reuters, the world's largest news agency, has started moving down this path, courtesy of an intriguing product with the nondescript name NewsScope, a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven trading. The latest iteration of NewsScope 'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment. At Northwestern University, a group of computer science and journalism students have developed a program called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball games. Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated 'narrative arcs' to describe the action in a format recognizable as a news story. 'No doubt Kurt Cagle, editor of XMLToday.org, was engaging in a bit of provocation when he recently suggested that an intelligent agent might win a Pulitzer Prize by 2030,' writes Kirwin. 'Of course, it won't be the software that takes home the prize: it'll be the programmers who wrote the code in the first place, something that Joseph Pultizer could never have anticipated.'"
Iphone

The Speculative Pre-History of the iPhone 195

Posted by CmdrTaco from the remember-back-when dept.
harrymcc writes "The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors about 'iSlate,' Apple's supposed upcoming tablet. It's constructive to look back at coverage of the first iPhone in the months before it was announced. A high percentage of what was reported turned out to be hooey — as I remembered as I reviewed stories that said the iPhone would have a click wheel, a slide-out keyboard, and two batteries, and would run on an Apple-branded wireless network. I'm guessing that much of what we 'know' about iSlate is similarly off-base."

Comment Re:Major problem... (Score 2, Insightful) 249

by d474 (#30545276) Attached to: Is Neurostim Becoming a Reality?
Yeah, it's good way to brick-your-brain. Let the weirdos of the underworld test this out on themselves. There are a lot of humans (usually of the clubbing type) that are perfectly willing to act as guinea pigs because they buy into the idea that the "next thing" is going to open their mind to a whole new world. Let the successes rise out of that mountain of failures (bricked brains) and in 20 years we might actually have some functional neurostim products.
Movies

DRM Flub Prevented 3D Showings of Avatar In Germany 386

Posted by timothy from the token-of-our-appreciation dept.
Fraggy_the_undead writes "According to German IT news site heise.de, yesterday several 3D showings of Avatar couldn't take place (German; Google translation to English), because the movies were DRM protected such that there had to be a key per copy of the film, per film projector, and per movie server in the theater. The key supplier, by the name Deluxe, was apparently unable to provide a sufficient number of valid keys in time. Moviegoers were offered to get a refund or view an analogue 2D showing instead."
Security

Hackers Find Home In Amazon EC2 Cloud 89

Posted by CmdrTaco from the don't-mind-us dept.
snydeq writes "Security researchers have spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This marks the first time Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to threat researcher Don DeBolt. The hackers got onto Amazon's infrastructure by hacking into a Web site hosted on Amazon's servers and then secretly installing their command and control infrastructure."
The Military

Man Pleads Guilty To Selling Fake Chips To US Navy 327

Posted by timothy from the vinegar-was-ersatz-too dept.
itwbennett writes "Neil Felahy of Newport Coast, California, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and counterfeit-goods trafficking for his role in a chip-counterfeiting scam. Felahy, along with his wife and her brother, operated several microchip brokerage companies under a variety of names, including MVP Micro, Red Hat Distributors, Force-One Electronics and Pentagon Components. 'They would buy counterfeit chips from China or else take legitimate chips, sand off the brand markings and melt the plastic casings with acid to make them appear to be of higher quality or a different brand,' the US Department of Justice said in a press release. The chips were then sold to Naval Sea Systems Command, the Washington, DC group responsible for maintaining the US Navy's ships and systems, as well as to an unnamed vacuum-cleaner manufacturer in the Midwest."

Comment Re:False Sense of Security (Score 3, Insightful) 248

by d474 (#30135080) Attached to: Engineered Bacteria Glows To Reveal Land Mines
Exactly. They have the logic backwards. What if an area didn't get covered in spraying? So that area would be "dark" and they think it's safe? Yikes, that's a false negative. They need to reverse it to avoid that false negative.

If the bacteria only glow WITHOUT the presence of landmine. That way, at best you get false positives which is less dangerous than a false negative, in this situation.
NASA

NASA Willing To Team With China; Rumors of a Budget Cut 200

Posted by kdawson from the let's-dance dept.
eldavojohn writes "2009 has been an interesting year for NASA — from a new strategy to even closer ties with an old enemy. So it's perhaps no surprise that NASA has publicly stated that they are ready to team up with China. NASA Chief Charles Bolden said, 'I am perfectly willing, if that's the direction that comes to me, to engage the Chinese in trying to make them a partner in any space endeavor. I think they're a very capable nation. They have demonstrated their capability to do something that only two other nations that have done — that is, to put humans in space. And I think that is an achievement you cannot ignore. They are a nation that is trying to really lead. If we could cooperate we would probably be better off than if we would not.' While the budget of the China National Space Administration is a fraction of NASA's, partnering with them has been considered since 2008. In possibly related news, rumors are circulating of the Obama administration cutting NASA's budget by ten percent for fiscal year 2011 despite the success of Monday's Atlantis launch. Considering the Augustine panel's recommendations, such a cut could halt US human space flight for a decade."
Biotech

Engineered Bacteria Glows To Reveal Land Mines 248

Posted by kdawson from the lamp-unto-your-feet dept.
MikeChino writes "Sifting through minefields to remove hidden threats is a dangerous, tedious, and expensive process. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap. The new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air-dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present."
Earth

NASA Attempts To Assuage 2012 Fears 881

Posted by timothy from the nostalgia-for-y2k dept.
eldavojohn writes "The apocalyptic film 2012 has dominated the box office, taking in $65 million on opening weekend. But with all those uninformed eyeballs watching the film, NASA has found itself answering so many common questions that their Ask an Astrobiologist blog offers calming, professional reassurance that there is no planet Nibiru, nor will it collide with Earth (although I do recall a massive solar storm forecast). NASA's main site even offers a FAQ answering similar questions. NPR has more on NASA scientist David Morrison and his efforts to calm the ensuing public hysteria, but survivalists are already planning for the big one. Pretty funny, right? Not according to Morrison: 'I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide. I've had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, "I'm so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won't suffer?" And I don't know how to answer those questions.'"
The Internet

Pirate Bay Shuts Down Tracker, Switches To Distributed Hash Table 327

Posted by timothy from the look-at-our-semi-clean-hands dept.
think_nix writes "The Pirate Bay has shut down their BitTorrent tracker. Instead TPB is now using Distributed Hash Table to distribute the torrents. The Pirate Bay Blog states that DHT along with PEX (Peer Exchange) Technology is just as effective if not better for finding peers than a centralized service. The Local reports that shutting down the tracker and implementing DHT & PEX could be due to the latest court rulings in Sweden against 2 of TPB's owners, and may decide the outcome of the case."
Google

Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google 773

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-that's-outside-the-box dept.
rsmiller510 writes "Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?"

Slashdot Top Deals

"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs

Close