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Submission + - New eyeglasses translate languages on restaurant menus, street signs (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: NTT Docomo introduced a new head-worn device that overlays the user's native language onto foreign-language text as the user looks at it during the recent Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies show in Japan.

The glasses will be the most useful when travelers are navigating a foreign country or trying to read text in a foreign language. Examples given in a statement provided to AFP include reading restaurant menus, although the ability to read foreign-language street signs may prove quite valuable as well. The report also mentions that "the glasses are likely to be ready for visitors attending the 2020 Tokyo Olympics," which explains why NTT Docomo developed the technology to begin with. Such a massive, international event is a great opportunity to introduce a product that bridges the langauge gap. It's similar to Twitter's presence at the 2007 South by Southwest conference, where the company mounted massive televisions that streamed attendees' Tweets and allowed them to communicate en masse.

Submission + - Researchers divulge the price of personal data (inrialpes.fr)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A recent INRIA project shows the price of user's data at which it is sold off to advertisers is about $0.0005. The price is highly user-specific as advertisers use sophisticated targeting techniques.
The money paid for displaying ads and acquiring users' data is detected using Firefox and Chrome plugins and users can see their own value.

The project is able to unveil this monetary values by leveraging mechanisms in Real-time bidding auctions. Real-time bidding (RTB) is an enticing option in display advertising where advertising space is sold in real time. The winning advertiser is notified about the paid money with encrypted prices. However, for some RTB systems this information is sent in clear-text, which allowed the discovery of value of private data from the advertisers' perspectives.

Submission + - Why are younger people losing interest in cars? (chicagotribune.com) 14

Submitted by Strudelkugel
Strudelkugel writes: The average car on the road is 11.4 years old, according to Polk, a global automotive analysis firm, which reviewed 247 million light vehicles in the U.S. The age of cars has been gradually increasing since 2002, when the average car was 9.8 years old. Polk expects the trend to continue over the next five years. Automotive density is projected to decline to 77.5 cars per 100 people, down from 80 cars per 100 in 2007, according to Kelsey Mays of Cars.com.

Another study, from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, analyzed the reason for the decline in young driver licensing. Of the 618 unlicensed respondents aged 18-39, 26.9 percent said the main reason they did not get a license was “too busy or not enough time to get a driver’s license.”

Submission + - New Threat to Seaside Nuclear Plants, Datacenters: Jellyfish (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: One of the largest nuclear-power plants in the world was forced to shut down temporarily Sept. 29, after pipes that bring Baltic Sea water in to cool the plant’s turbines became clogged with tons of jellyfish. The sudden influx of common moon jellyfish overwhelmed the screens and filters that keep flotsam and most sea life out of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden. The plant was forced to shut down its No. 3 reactor – the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, which generates 1,400 megawatts of electricity when it is jellyfish-free and running at full power. The reactor stayed down until early Oct. 1, after the jellyfish had been cleared out and engineers approved the cooling system as invertebrate-free. It’s not easy to overwhelm the cooling system for a nuclear power plant, but Oskarshamn’s is unusually resilient. There is a separate intake- and cooling system for each reactor, all of which were designed for the brackish, polluted water in that area of the Baltic Sea. Most datacenters are too far inland to worry about jellyfish in their cooling water, though green-IT-promoters Vertatique estimated that a 5,000-sq.-ft. datacenter would consume almost 9 million gallons of water for cooling. That means ocean-side datacenters that use sea water for cooling (such as Google's datacenter in Hamina, Finland — also on the Baltic Sea) are just as susceptible to jellyfish attacks as nuclear power plants.

Submission + - Servers at Risk from IPMI, BMC Flaws (threatpost.com)

Submitted by L3sPau1
L3sPau1 writes: Security vulnerabilities in the Intelligent Platform Management Interface found in baseboard management controllers apparently put thousands of servers at risk to authentication bypass and other abuses of legitimate credentials.

Submission + - Digia Releases Qt 5.1 With Preliminary Support for Android And iOS

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Finnish software and services firm Digia, which bought Qt from Nokia back in August, has released version 5.1 of the cross-platform application framework. Among the changes are ‘significant improvements’ to Qt Quick and preliminary support for Android and iOS. The latter means Qt on Android and iOS are both considered Technology Previews, letting developers start building for the two mobile operating systems and porting apps from other platforms by reusing the same code base. Although most of the Qt functionality and tool integration is already in place to start developing mobile apps, Digia promises complete ports to Android and iOS will come with the release of Qt 5.2 "later this year."

Submission + - Low-Cost Micromachine Writes Calligraphy With Atoms (acs.org) 1

Submitted by ckwu
ckwu writes: Scientists at Boston University have put together an inexpensive microelectromechanical machine that can direct atoms onto a surface in a controlled manner. The device—which acts as a moving stencil—can lay down such precise, complex patterns that the technique is akin to writing with atoms, the researchers say. They've used the machine to draw rings and infinity symbols out of gold atoms, but the technique should be compatible with almost any material.

Submission + - Underground 'Wind Mines' Could Keep Datacenters Powered (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Major IT vendors have been including custom-built wind- and solar-power farms in their datacenter construction plans. But while wind and solar power may be clean, they’re often unreliable, especially by the standards of datacenters that need a way to keep operating through any unexpected surges or drops in power. How about saving the wind that generates the power? That might work, according to researchers at the federal Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), and U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. A study published in February (PDF) outlined the potential benefit of pumping pressurized air into caverns deep underground as a way to store wind energy, then letting it out whenever demand spikes, or the wind drops, and the above-ground facilities need help spinning enough turbines to keep power levels steady. The technique, called Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) isn’t new: existing CAES plants in Alabama and Huntorf, Germany (built in 1991 and 1978, respectively) store compressed air in underground salt caverns hollowed out by solution mining (pumping salt-saturated water out of concentrations of salt buried far underground and replacing it with fresh water). But implementing such a technique for datacenters might take a little work. The BPA and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have already identified, and are evaluating, sites in the Pacific Northwest that would be suitable for CAES underground reservoirs; the first, which could be located in Washington’s Columbia Hills could—via existing CAES technology—store enough compressed air to generate a steady 207MW for 40 days of continuous usage, ultimately delivering 400 additional hours without adding any compressed air.

Submission + - The Search For Beal's Treasure (Beal's Conjecture) (bealstreasure.com)

Submitted by piratecaptainjoe
piratecaptainjoe writes: The Search For Beal's Treasure is attempting to disprove Beal's Conjecture using crowd sourcing and a chance to win part of the prize. The website uses an API that allows a member to search the math space of areas relatively untouched (searches are triplicated for verification) by other members. This prevents everyone having to search in the same areas, allowing the project to cover a greater space of numbers. This also provides relatively equal chances for success by all members, with slightly higher chances for members with higher computaion rates.

Submission + - The Los Angeles Schools buy iPad Trojan Horses for 30,000 students

Submitted by lpress
lpress writes: The Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $30 million over the next two years on iPads for 30,000 students. Coverage of the announcement has focused on Apple winning over other tablets, but that is not the key point. The top three proposals each included an app to deliver Pearson's K-12 Common Core System of Courses along with other third-party educational apps.

The Common Core curriculum is not yet established, but many states are committed to it, starting next year. The new tablets and the new commitment to the Common Core curriculum will arrive around the same time, and busy faculty (and those hired to train them) will adopt the Pearson material. The tablets will be obsolete in a few years and the hardware platform may change, but lock-in to Pearson's default curriculum may last for generations.

Submission + - 16-Yr-Old Student Has Developed a Way to Turn Banana Peels Into Bioplastic (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by formaggio
formaggio writes: A sixteen-year-old Turkish student recently discovered that the starches and cellulose contained in a banana peel can also be used to create materials that insulate wires and form medical protheses. Bilgin developed a chemical process that turns the peels into a non-decaying bioplastic. She hopes that it will help replace the need for petroleum and combat pollution.

Submission + - D-Wave large-scale quantum chip validated (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of scientists says it has verified that quantum effects are indeed at work in the D-Wave processor, the first commercial quantum optimization computer processor. The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics has a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip’s 128 qubits, but in other words, the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor.

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