Nutt - Slashdot User

The Link Between Genius and Insanity 176

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @06:13PM
from the skullcrusher-mountain dept.

An anonymous reader writes in a story about the link between certain mental illnesses and high intelligence. "Genius and insanity may actually go together, according to scientists who found that mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are often found in highly creative and intelligent people. The link is being investigated by a group of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder. Bipolar sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies confirms the idea of the 'tortured genius' or 'mad scientist.'"

MIT Professor Pushes the Envelope of 3D Art and Manufacturing 40

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @05:33PM
from the that's-some-fancy-printing dept.

kkleiner writes "Professor at MIT Neri Oxman's creations are demonstrating the powerful combination of 3D printing and new design algorithms inspired from nature. Just as a computer printer makes copies of 2D images, 3D printers have copied an impressive variety of objects, such as robots, chairs, prosthetics, kidneys, and jaw bones, to mention a few. But Oxman and her colleagues are discovering new design and engineering principles that will help to mature 3D printing into a technology capable of producing complex and beautiful structures impossible by other manufacturing techniques."

Researchers Find Methods For Bypassing Google's Bouncer Android Security 65

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @04:48PM
from the protect-ya-neck dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "Google's Android platform has become the most popular mobile operating system both among consumers and malware writers, and the company earlier this year introduced the Bouncer system to look for malicious apps in the Google Play market. Bouncer, which checks for malicious apps and known malware, is a good first step, but as new work from researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller shows, it can be bypassed quite easily and in ways that will be difficult for Google to address in the long term. Oberheide and Miller, both well-known for their work on mobile security, went into their research without much detailed knowledge of how the Bouncer system works. Google has said little publicly about its capabilities, preferring not to give attackers any insights into the system's inner workings. So Oberheide and Miller looked at it as a challenge, an exercise to see how much they could deduce about Bouncer from the outside, and, as it turns out, the inside."

NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes For Astronomy 173

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @04:04PM
from the hand-me-downs-for-the-heavens dept.

First time accepted submitter SomePgmr writes "The U.S. government's secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens."

Book Review: Elemental Design Patterns 94

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @03:19PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.

jkauzlar writes "Believe it or not, it's been 18 years since Design Patterns by Gamma, et al, first began to hit the desks of programmers world-wide. This was a work of undeniable influence and usefulness, but there is criticism however that pattern-abuse has lead to over-architected software. This failure is perhaps due to wide-spread use of patterns as templates instead of understanding their underlying 'grammar' of this language such that it may be applied gracefully to the problem at hand. What's been missing until now is a sufficiently authoritative study of design patterns at this 'grammatical' level of abstraction. Jason McC. Smith, through a surprisingly captivating series of analytic twists and turns, has developed a theory of Elemental Design Patterns that may yet rejuvenate this aging topic." Keep reading for the rest of Joe's review.

Xbox Second Screen Announced 104

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @02:36PM
from the take-another-look dept.

kodiaktau writes "Microsoft has announced a feature called SmartGlass that provides a new set of features when viewing media on mobile or PC devices. Sources say that it will provide context focused advertising/product placement as well as metadata about the media you are currently viewing. Additionally the interface allows you to store viewing data and share between your desktop and mobile devices to continue viewing content between devices. From the article: 'SmartGlass also allows you to view the web on an Xbox 360 using Internet Explorer. The tablet or phone becomes the keyboard and you can easily browse web pages without having a physical keyboard in the living room.'"

Researchers Find Methods for Bypassing Google's Bouncer Android Security-> 0

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Monday June 04, @02:22PM

Trailrunner7 writes "Google's Android platform has become the most popular mobile operating system both among consumers and malware writers, and the company earlier this year introduced the Bouncer system to look for malicious apps in the Google Play market. Bouncer, which checks for malicious apps and known malware, is a good first step, but as new work from researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller shows, it can be bypassed quite easily and in ways that will be difficult for Google to address in the long term.

Oberheide and Miller, both well-known for their work on mobile security, went into their research without much detailed knowledge of how the Bouncer system works. Google has said little publicly about its capabilities, preferring not to give attackers any insights into the system's inner workings. So Oberheide and Miller looked at it as a challenge, an exercise to see how much they could deduce about Bouncer from the outside, and, as it turns out, the inside.

Oberheide and Miller set up some fake Google accounts and began submitting apps to Google Play, the new name for what was originally called the Android Market. They wanted to get a sense of the kind of environment that Google uses to analyze apps, see what weak spots the system may have and then look for methods to use them to bypass Bouncer entirely. One of the apps that they submitted contained some functionality that called out to a server that the researchers controlled once it was in the Bouncer environment. The app gave them a remote shell on the system and the ability to issue commands and see what was happening as Bouncer was analyzing the app."
Link to Original Source

Online Social Networks Can Be Tipped By Less Than 1% of Their Population 95

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @01:54PM
from the you-are-all-individuals dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new algorithm developed by researchers at West Point seems to break new ground for viral marketing practices in online social networks. Assuming a trend or behavior that spreads in an online social network based on the classic 'tipping' model from sociology (based on the work of Thomas Schelling and Mark Granovetter), the new West Point algorithm can find a set of individuals in the network that can initiate a social cascade – a progressive series of 'tipping' incidents — which leads to everyone in the social network adopting the new behavior. The good news for viral marketers is that this set of individuals is often very small – a sample of the Friendster social network can be influenced when only 0.8% of the initial population is seeded. The trick is finding the seed set. The algorithm is described in a paper to be presented later this summer at the prestigious IEEE ASONAM conference."

Report Says Schools Need 100Mbps Per 1,000 Users 252

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @01:10PM
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children dept.

alphadogg writes "American schools need mega-broadband networks — and they need them soon, a new report says. Specifically, U.S. educational institutions will need networks that deliver broadband performance of 100Mbps for every 1,000 students and staff members in time for the 2014-15 school year. That's the conclusion reached by the State Educational Technology Directors Association. Why the need for speed? For one thing, more and more schools are using online textbooks and collaboration tools, said Christine Fox, director of educational leadership and research at SETDA. Broadband access must be 'ubiquitous' and 'robust,' she said, adding that schools should think of broadband as a 'necessary utility,' not as an add-on. The report, called 'The Broadband Imperative,' further suggests that schools should upgrade their networks to support speeds of 1Gbps per 1,000 users in five years."

Ask Slashdot. Best Online Science Course? 131

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 04, @12:27PM
from the browsing-teachers dept.

First time accepted submitter blubadger writes "Having slept through chemistry at school, I'm looking to fill in the gaps in my science education by following a short online course or two. I've been searching for 'Chemistry 101,' 'Basics of Physics,' 'Biology Primer,' and so on. There's some high-quality stuff on offer – from Academic Earth, MIT and others – but it tends to take the form of videos of traditional university lectures. I was hoping to cut through the chit-chat and blackboards and get straight into the infographics and animations that will help me understand complex ideas. Flash and HTML5 Canvas seem wasted on videos of lectures. If the quality were high enough I would be willing to pay. Have Slashdotters seen anything that fits the bill?"