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Comment Re:Indian Point == Ticking Timb Bomb (Score 1) 213

by weilawei (#49656437) Attached to: Transformer Explosion Closes Nuclear Plant Unit North of NYC

Pull your electrical for heating (use a MSRE) from the grid. Have a mechanical (gravity operated) backup to kill the heaters if you lose the grid connection, just in case. No more heat, no more power generation. You can come up with something else for dumping the excess load in the short term (pump water, spin a flywheel, doesn't matter).

Submission + - Ames Labortory scientists create cheaper magnetic material (ameslab.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Karl A. Gschneidner and fellow scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have created a new magnetic alloy that is an alternative to traditional rare-earth permanent magnets.

The new alloy—a potential replacement for high-performance permanent magnets found in automobile engines and wind turbines--eliminates the use of one of the scarcest and costliest rare earth elements, dysprosium, and instead uses cerium, the most abundant rare earth.

The result, an alloy of neodymium, iron and boron co-doped with cerium and cobalt, is a less expensive material with properties that are competitive with traditional sintered magnets containing dysprosium.

Submission + - Using Smartphones for Contactless Sleep Apnea Diagnosis (washington.edu)

Submitted by techamaze
techamaze writes: The gold standard for diagnosing sleep apnea — a disease which affects roughly 1 in 13 Americans — requires an overnight hospital stay and costs thousands of dollars. The patient sleeps in a strange bed, gets hooked up to a tangle of wires and undergoes an intensive polysomnography test to count how many times a night he or she struggles to breathe.

By contrast, a new app developed at the University of Washington uses a smartphone to wirelessly test for sleep apnea events in a person’s own bedroom. To determine if a person is experiencing sleep apnea events, ApneaApp transforms an Android smartphone phone into an active sonar system that tracks tiny changes in a person’s breathing movements. The phone’s speaker sends out inaudible sound waves, which bounce off a sleeping person’s body and are picked back up by the phone’s microphone.

The clinical study tested ApneaApp on 37 patients undergoing sleep studies at Harborview Medical Center because of apnea concerns. Researchers put a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone on a corner of the bed during the overnight sleep study. During nearly 300 hours of testing, the app tracked various respiratory events including central apnea, obstructive apnea and hypopnea with between 95 and 99 percent accuracy, compared to intensive polysomnography.

“Right now we don’t have enough sleep clinics, sleep laboratories and sleep specialists in the country to address all the sleep apnea that is out there,” said co-author Dr. Nathaniel F. Watson, professor of neurology and co-director of the UW Medicine Sleep Center.

http://www.washington.edu/news...

Submission + - Imagination to Release Open MIPS Design to Academia (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Imagination Technologies has developed a Linux-ready academic version of its 32-bit MIPS architecture MicroAptiv processor design, and is giving it away free to universities for use in computer research and education. As the MIPSfpga name suggests, the production-quality RTL (register transfer level) design abstraction is intended to run on industry standard FPGAs. Although MIPSfpga is available as a fully visible RTL design, MIPSfpga is not fully open source, according to the announcement from Robert Owen, Manager of Imagination’s University Programme. Academic users can use and modify MIPSfpga as they wish, but cannot build it into silicon. 'If you modify it, you must talk to us first if you wish to patent the changes,' writes Owen.

Submission + - First open ranking of Wikipedia based on Wikimedia available 1

Submitted by vigna
vigna writes: The Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli studi di Milano did it again: after creating the first open ranking of the World Wide Web they have put together the first entirely open ranking of Wikipedia, using Wikidata to categorize pages. The ranking is based on classic and easily explainable centrality measures or page views, and it is entirely open — all data (Wikipedia and Wikidata dumps) and all software used is publicly available. Just in case you wonder, the most important food is chocolate, the most important band are the Beatles and the most important idea is atheism.

Comment Re:Acid is not a power source. (Score 1) 118

by weilawei (#49534561) Attached to: Swallowing Your Password

...and any time you needed a password for something, you could go with your gut!

I tried putting in "yourgut!" for my most recent password, and it failed the security check for not having a capital letter or a number. What kind of lousy password suggestions are you peddling?!

Instead, I went with "Yourgut1!" and now it tells me that it's Highly Secure.

Comment Re: Silly (Score 1) 118

by weilawei (#49534535) Attached to: Swallowing Your Password

Identity is a capability. What do you ask someone to do? Identify themselves. How do they do it? By providing a piece of information you know to be known to them, either by fact of being born attached to it, or by fact of regurgitating it somehow.

All the bank needs is assurance that you're the only one likely to possess it, short of dedicated efforts to illicitly acquire it. Assurance is not a black and white thing, settled once and for all; it's a bar you have to jump over. That's the whole idea of security.

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