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School District Drops 'D' Grades 617 Screenshot-sm

Posted by samzenpus
from the pass-fail-education dept.
Students in one New Jersey school district will no longer be able to squeak by in class after the Morris County School Board approved dropping the D grade. Beginning in the fall students who don't get a C or higher will get an F on their report card. "I'm tired of kids coming to school and not learning and getting credit for it," said Superintendent Larrie Reynolds in a Daily Record report.
Space

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123

Posted by kdawson
from the do-not-look-directly-into-the-quasar dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
The Internet

Researchers Warn of Possible BitTorrent Meltdown 294

Posted by kdawson
from the domino-effect dept.
secmartin writes "Researchers at Delft University warn that large parts of the BitTorrent network might collapse if The Pirate Bay is forced to shut down. A large part of the available torrents use The Pirate Bay as tracker, and other available trackers will probably be overloaded if all traffic is shifted there. TPB is currently using eight servers for their trackers. According to the researchers, even trackerless torrents using the DHT protocol will face problems: 'One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only "stumble upon success", meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.'"
Education

Many Universities Spending $100K/Year Enforcing P2P Rules 323

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the god-bless-america dept.
Scott Jaschik writes "A new study documents just how much money colleges are spending on enforcing P2P rules through software license fees, hardware, and other costs. Many private universities are spending more than $100,000 a year — a major allocation of funds. An article in Inside Higher Ed explains the study and its findings."
The Military

+ - New plastic is strong as steel, transparent 1

Submitted by
Andreaskem
Andreaskem writes "Physorg.com published an article about a new material that supposedly is "strong as steel but lighter and transparent.". "The researchers created this new composite plastic with a machine they developed that builds materials one nanoscale layer after another... Mother of pearl, the iridescent lining of mussel and oyster shells, is built layer-by-layer like this. It's one of the toughest natural mineral-based materials.""
User Journal

Journal: Overturn Umpired Decisions Based on Video? 5

Journal by Le Marteau

I was watching the Colorado Rockies finish off the San Diego Padres the other day, and it appears that the player who scored the winning run did not actually touch home plate. So the umpire evidently did not make the correct call by calling him safe at home and calling it a run.

But you can't really blame the umpire. It took repeated views of the play in slow motion to come to the conclusion that the umpire was wrong.

Bogus Experts Fight Your Right To Broadband 378

Posted by kdawson
from the just-gimme-a-pipe dept.
An anonymous reader writes, "Karl Bode of Broadband Reports takes aim at supposed telecom experts and think tankers who profess to love the 'free market,' but want to ban the country's un-wired towns and cities from offering broadband to their residents. If you didn't know, incumbent providers frequently determine towns and cities unprofitable to serve (fine), but then turn around and lobby for laws that make it illegal to serve themselves (not so fine). They then pay experts to profess their love for a free market and deregulation — unless that regulation helps their bottom line. A simple point: 'Strange how such rabid fans of a free-market wouldn't be interested in allowing market darwinism to play out.'"

Someday your prints will come. -- Kodak

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