Dan Lorenc writes "Using the StackOverflow.com data dump, I measured the activity of various programming languages throughout the week. The results: Ruby and Python saw a rise in questions asked on the weekend while C# and Java saw a dropoff in activity on the weekend. This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use. Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that statisticians from the University of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through Twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. '"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now," says Peter Dodds, adding that the goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time.' Dodds says he and his colleagues are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that indicate moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public reaction to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people communicate on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is affected by another might shed some light on crowd behavior and emotional contagion. 'All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being,' Dodds says."

An anonymous reader writes "AMD invited 100 people up to their private suite in the hotel that Quakecon 2009 is being hosted at for a first look at gaming on one of their upcoming DirectX 11 graphics cards. This card has not been officially named yet, but it has the internal code name of 'Evergreen,' and was first shown to the media back at Computex over in Taiwan earlier this year. The guys from Legit Reviews were shown two different systems running DX11 hardware. One system was set up running a bunch of DX11 SDKs and the other was running a demo for the upcoming shooter Wolfenstein. The video card appears to be on schedule for its launch next month."

Death Metal points out a CNet report saying that the Justice Department has come out in favor of the $1.92 million verdict awarded to the RIAA in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. Their support came in the form of a legal brief filed on Friday, which notes, "Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed." It also says, "The Copyright Act's statutory damages provision serves both to compensate and deter. Congress established a scheme to allow copyright holders to elect to receive statutory damages for copyright infringement instead of actual damages and profits because of the difficulty of calculating and proving actual damages."

Kristina writes "Interviews with several geophysicists reveal that new data and new understandings about how earthquakes really happen inspire some hope in pursuing the short-term prediction of earthquakes. 'Much of the current work aims to decode how stress is distributed and redistributed far below the surface and among more than one fault in an area. Understanding that pattern could help scientists recognize when stress is setting the stage for a large quake.' This article goes into the latest ideas on what we know and don't know about when large earthquakes happen, and it talks with two Italian scientists about the large quake that hit central Italy in April."

marcog123 writes "The International Olympiad in Informatics was held earlier this week in Bulgaria. The IOI is a programming competition for high school learners up to 20 years of age that has a focus on problem solving and algorithms. It was won by 14-year-old Henadzi Karatkevich of Belarus (PDF, list of gold medalists), beating the world's top high school programmers, including 18- and 19-year-olds, to become the youngest winner in the IOI's 21-year history. Competition is really tough, with some countries taking months off school to concentrate only on IOI training. Henadzi first entered the IOI in 2006 when he was only 11 years old and won silver (missing gold by only six points). He won gold in 2007 and 2008. He has the opportunity to enter for the next three years; that is, unless he follows the path of Terence Tao, who won IMO gold at 12 and then went to university the following year. If he continues his current streak, he will easily surpass the current record of six IOI medals by South Africa's Bruce Merry."

fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."

Dr_Barnowl writes "The BBC reports that Sony is to convert its online bookstore to the EPUB format. While this format still allows DRM, it's supported on a much wider variety of readers. Is this a challenge to the Kindle? It's nice to see Sony opening up to the idea of open standards. Even if you still have reservations about buying a Sony device, you might be able to patronize their bookstore sometime soon."

xp65 writes "For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."

Briden writes "Earlier this week, we discussed the EFF's criticism of the Burning Man Photo Policy. Burning Man has now responded at length on their own blog. Here's an excerpt: 'In fact, there are but two essential reasons we maintain these increased controls on behalf of our community: to protect our participants so that images that violate their privacy are not displayed, and to prevent companies from using Burning Man to sell products. We don't remove images from pages just because they criticize us (I've never been involved in taking down an image from an editorial blog criticizing Burning Man, and it's certainly not because there haven't been any!). We're also not at all interested [in] preventing participants from sharing their personal imagery or impressions of the event on third party sharing sites in a noncommercial manner, so long as they observe the concerns about privacy and commercialism. We're delighted to see people sharing videos, stories, and pictures on our official Facebook page, and we know that it, along with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. are representative of the way many of us share personal imagery in the digital age.'"

AlexMax2742 writes "Great news for those anxious gamers who have been waiting for a Linux and Mac version of Quake Live. Support for both is being implemented with next Tuesday's update, according to project lead Marty Stratton, who gave the release date during a press conference held at QuakeCon 2009. A video of the press conference is up at QuakeUnity." John Carmack revealed that they're working on a "premium" subscription service for Quake Live, which will allow players to configure and run their own private servers. Also at QuakeCon, a new trailer was released for id's upcoming shooter, Rage. Kotaku posted an extensive preview of Rage, saying, "I've seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich with visual splendor." A detailed presentation on id Tech 5, the new game engine behind Rage, was given at SIGGRAPH 2009 last week.

wonkavader sends us this quote from an article in PCWorld: "In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks ... Smartbooks with Arm chips have inherent advantages over x86 chips like Atom, such as lower power consumption and longer battery life, according to Finch. The chips are also becoming more powerful, as indicated by the growing number of applications on smartphones, he said. 'I think it's natural and reasonable for us to begin looking at them as they begin scaling their processors up.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A London-based industrial designer has had his work ripped off in Second Life and is now looking to file a DMCA grievance against his client. Commissioned to recreate the French Quarter in New Orleans, the designer, Gospel Voom, spent six months on the project, only to sign on to Second Life after its completion to find it was deleted by the client. She claimed it was taken down because it wasn't making money. However, despite having signed a contract that let Voom retain creative rights over his work, he later found out it was sold to another community, OpenLife, without his knowledge or permission."

Lucas123 writes "This year at KansasFest, computer fans from around the world gathered to celebrate the Apple II — the computer that put Apple on the map. But the Apple-1 (a.k.a. the Apple I), the machine Steve Wozniak invented and first demonstrated at the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club in 1976, has always been near to my heart. In attendance at KansasFest was Vince Briel, who created an authorized reproduction the Apple-1 and showed others how to build their own. 'As a regular KansasFest attendee (and the conference's marketing director), I was one of his students. Follow along as I assemble a fully functional Apple-1 clone.'"

Death Metal writes with this excerpt from CNN: "About 30 children aged 3 to 12 years old and their parents are participating in a new program that uses DNA testing to identify genetic gifts and predict the future. ... The test is conducted by the Shanghai Biochip Corporation. Scientists claim a simple saliva swab collects as many as 10,000 cells that enable them to isolate eleven different genes. By taking a closer look at the genetic codes, they say they can extract information about a child's IQ, emotional control, focus, memory, athletic ability and more. For about $880, Chinese parents can sign their kids up for the test and five days of summer camp in Chongqing, where the children will be evaluated in various settings from sports to art. The scientific results, combined with observations by experts throughout the week, will be used to make recommendations to parents about what their child should pursue."