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Submission + - White Shark RFID/Sattellite Tracking Shows Long Journeys, Many Beach Visits (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Marine biologists from OCEARCH, a non-profit shark research project, have been tagging scores of great whites and other shark species with an array of wireless technologies, gathering granular data on the sharks over the past year or more. For example, Mary Lee, a great white shark that's the same weight and nearly the same length as a Buick, was tagged off of Cape Cod and has made beach visits up and down the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda. She came so close to beaches that the research team alerted local authorities. The team attaches an array of acoustic and satellite tags as well as accelerometers to the sharks, which collect more than 100 data points every second — 8.5 million data points per day. The data has provided a detailed, three-dimensional view of the shark's behavior, which the team has been sharing in real time on its website. OCEARCH plans to expand that data sharing over the next few weeks to social networks and classrooms.

Submission + - Apple quietly bans some medical drug guides from the App Store (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rjupstate
rjupstate writes: Some medical app developers claim that Apple's iOS App Store guidelines prohibits them from including drug and dosing information in reference apps for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. Is Apple being safety conscious or playing favorites?

Submission + - Beginner's guide to R: Introduction (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Why R? It's free, open source, powerful and highly extensible and its hot. Whether measured by more than 4,400 add-on packages, the 18,000+ members of LinkedIn's R group or the close to 80 R Meetup groups currently in existence, there can be little doubt that interest in the R statistics language, especially for data analysis, is soaring. Because it's a programmable environment that uses command-line scripting, you can store a series of complex data-analysis steps in R. That lets you re-use your analysis work on similar data more easily than if you were using a point-and-click interface, notes Hadley Wickham, author of several popular R packages and chief scientist with RStudio.

Comment Re:Result of shootout & escape (Score 3, Insightful) 604

by cweditor (#43505075) Attached to: Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt
There is a continuum on a scale that goes from "I have my own rights and I don't care about anyone else" to "What the individual wants isn't important, it's only the common good that matters." Most of us dislike both extremes and find our beliefs somewhere between the two. In this case, most residents thought the emergency and very temporary needs of their community were significantly more important than their own personal convenience and voluntarily complied with a request to stay in for part of a day. Seems eminently reasonable to me, and so I find it curious to be critical of that.
Censorship

Submission + - Nonpartisan Tax Report Removed After Republican Protest (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: On September 14th a PDF report titled "Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" penned by the Library of Congress' nonpartisan Congressional Research Service was released to little fanfare. However the following conclusion of the report has since roiled the GOP enough to have the report removed from the Library of Congress: 'The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced—lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.' From the New York Times article: 'The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical.' It appears to no longer be found on the Library of Congress' website.
Privacy

Submission + - US Campaign Apps Run Roughshod Over Privacy (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "If you want a quick list of the names and addresses of young women within half a mile of you (who happen to be likely Democratic voters), all you need to do is download the Obama For America app to your smartphone. Want to be given a handy list of your neighbors for you to track to and from the polls? Just download the app from the GOP's Project ORCA. In their quest to put information in the hands of campaign volunteers, the Obama and Romney campaigns are definitely pushing things into creepy territory."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook flaw bypasses password protections (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Facebook has moved quickly to shut down a loophole which made some accounts accessible without a password.

The bug was exposed in a message posted to the Hacker News website.

The message contained a search string that, when used on Google, returned a list of links to 1.32 million Facebook accounts.

In some cases clicking on a link logged in to that account without the need for a password. All the links exposed the email addresses of Facebook users.
Hardware

Submission + - Past and Future: The Evolution of the Computer Keyboard (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: As anyone who's typed on a virtual keyboard — or yelled at a voice-control app like Siri — can attest, no current text input holds a candle to a traditional computer keyboard. From the reed switch keyboards of the early '70s to the buckling spring key mechanism that drove IBM's popular PC keyboards for years to ThinTouch technology that will have about half the travel of a MacBook Air's keys, the technology that drove data entry for decades isn't likely to go anyone anytime soon. Computerworld takes a look back on five decades of keyboard development and where it's likely to go in the future.
Cloud

Submission + - Mexican hotel chain outsources IT to US (computerworld.com)

Submitted by cweditor
cweditor writes: Grupo Posadas has five data centers supporting more than 100 hotels and other lines of business, but it's moving almost all of those operations to a service provider in Texas. Could cloud service providers help the US become a destination for tech outsourcing instead of an exporter of tech jobs? One stumbling block: The US finds itself on the receiving end of protectionist legislation in other countries that discourages use of non-domestic IT service providers, says the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
Iphone

Submission + - Court Docs: iPhone Design Borrowed From Sony (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Documents introduced in court by Samsung show that Apple explicitly looked to Sony for design inspiration when developing the iPhone. Engineers were given the explicit instructions to imagined "What would Sony do?" Such borrowings undermine Apple's claims that Samsung stole their propietary original designs for Samsung's Android phones."
Security

Submission + - Black Hat: Card game turns you into White Hat hacker (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: University of Washington computer scientists have created a tabletop card game that puts players in the role of White Hat hackers, taking on missions such as hacking into hotel minibar payment systems and converting robotic vacuums into toys. While the game is designed to be fun, and not necessarily educational, players will undoubtedly pick up security concepts. The game, called Control-Alt-Hack, is being introduced at the Black Hat security conference this week.
Data Storage

Submission + - Flash Memory Slashes Power Use At Data Centers (discovery.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Researchers from Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science have written a program called SSDAlloc, which tells a computer running to pretend that it's running using RAM, even though it's actually accessing the storage (flash) memory.

Most computers are designed to look in the RAM first for the data they need. Only after that does the operating look elsewhere, such as on the hard drive or a flash drive. That kind of hierarchical searching around can really slow things down.

SSDAlloc changes that, basically making a computer pretend the flash is the RAM. That cuts power consumption by up to 90 percent, the researchers say, because flash doesn't need power to run nor does it use the power that hard drives do.

Submission + - Top 100 Places To Work In IT Reward Employees for Innovation (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A supportive work environment and a commitment to innovation stands out among the top attributes a great company for IT workers, according to the results of a survey of the best places to work by Computerworld. For example, CareerBuilder awarded employees $236,000 for innovative ideas in 2011 and USAA offers $10,000 tuition reimbursement per year. At Commonwealth Financial network staffers get free stay at chairman's vacation home and Quicken Loans
gives IT staffers 4 hours a week for personal tech projects.

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