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Wikipedia

Submission + - Statisticians Investigate Political Bias on Wikipedia

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Global Economic Intersection reports on a project to statistically measure political bias on Wikipedia. The team first identified 1,000 political phrases based on the number of times these phrases appeared in the text of the 2005 Congressional Record and applied statistical methods to identify the phrases that separated Democratic representatives from Republican representatives, under the model that each group speaks to its respective constituents with a distinct set of coded language. Then the team identified 111,000 Wikipedia articles that include “republican” or “democrat” as keywords and analyzed them to determine whether a given Wikipedia article used phrases favored more by Republican members or by Democratic members of Congress. The results may surprise you. "The average old political article in Wikipedia leans Democratic" but gradually, Wikipedia’s articles have lost the disproportionate use of Democratic phrases and moved to nearly equivalent use of words from both parties (PDF), akin to an NPOV [neutral point of view] on average. Interestingly some articles like civil rights tend to have a Democrat slant, while others like trade tend to have a Republican slant while at the same time many seemingly controversial topics such as foreign policy, war and peace, and abortion have no net slant. "Most articles arrive with a slant, and most articles change only mildly from their initial slant. The overall slant changes due to the entry of articles with opposite slants, leading toward neutrality for many topics, not necessarily within specific articles.""

Comment Re:Oh really? (Score 1) 143

by robcfg (#39965395) Attached to: Xbox 360 Kinect Said To Add Internet Explorer Browsing

"We are told that the browser will let Xbox users surf all parts of the web straight from their living rooms." Does that include YouTube for example? As far as I remember you have to be a XBox Live Gold Member to use the YouTube application...

I'm not trying to be rude, but do people actually buy an Xbox and not have a Gold membership? It equates to something like $5 per month for access to demos, weekly arcade games, an indie game market, promo videos, media streaming, a stable staging environment for multiplayer gaming across games, etc. Not to burst your bubble, but you'll probably need a Gold membership to use the IE browser anyways. Hopefully they launch Skype soon. That's my only real complaint.

For me the key point is why do I have to pay for something that is free? I mean, I can watch youtube without restrictions on my Windows PC but I have to pay extra to do the same on the 360. And I don't have a gold account because I'm not into online gaming, but I'd like to watch youtube in my living room tv.
Linux

Submission + - Why Linux is a desktop flop (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: It's free, easier to use than ever, IT staffers know it and love it, and it has fewer viruses and Trojans than Windows. So, why hasn't Linux on the desktop taken off? When it comes to desktop Linux, the cost savings turn out to be problematic, there are management issues, and compatibility remains an issue. ""We get a lot more questions about switching to Macs than switching to Linux at this point, even though Macs are more expensive," one Gartner analyst says.
Hardware

Submission + - Physicist explains Moore's Law collapse in 10years (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Moore’s Law won’t be true forever, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has explained how it will collapse. And that collapse isn’t going to happen in some distant future, it is going to happen within the next decade.

The problem is one of finding a replacement for silicon coupled with the exponential nature of Moore’s Law. Quite simply, computing power cannot go on doubling every two years indefinitely.

The other issue is we are about to reach the limits of silicon. According to Kaku, once we get done to 5nm processes for chip production, silicon is finished. Any smaller and processors will just overheat.
Hardware

Submission + - Silicene discovered: Single-layer silicon that could beat graphene to market (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Numerous research groups around the world are reporting that they have created silicene, a one-atom-thick hexagonal mesh of silicon atoms — the silicon equivalent of graphene. You will have heard a lot about graphene, especially with regard to its truly wondrous electrical properties, but it has one rather major problem: It doesn't have a bandgap, which makes it very hard to integrate into existing semiconductor processes. Silicene, on the other hand, is theorized to have excellent electrical properties, while still being compatible with silicon-based electronics. For now, silicene has only been observed (with a scanning tunneling electron microscope), but the next step is to grow a silicene film on an insulating substrate so that its properties can be properly investigated."

Comment Re:Australian law made most sense (Score 2) 169

by robcfg (#39608153) Attached to: Proposed Chinese Copyright Changes Would Encourage Re-Use
I think that a person's lifetime + some years is simply too much time. Specially when it comes to software. Think of it, there are still people alive from almost the very first years of computing, imagine 70 years from now... There would be no one able to recover any history of computing, as it's difficult today to dump tapes, roms, disks. In 70 years from now almost nobody will remember how the origins of computing looked like. In this case, copyright is destroying culture.
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Flashback Trojan Hits 600,000 Macs and Counting (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
twoheadedboy
twoheadedboy writes: "A Flashback variant dubbed Backdoor.Flashback.39 has infected over 600,000 Macs, according to Russian security firm Dr Web. The virulent Flashback trojan infecting Apple machines sparked interest earlier this week after it was seen exploiting a Java vulnerability, although it was actually first discovered back in September last year. The Trojan has a global reach after Dr Web found infected Macs in most countries. More than half of the Macs infected are in the US (56.6 percent), while another 19.8 percent are in Canada. The UK has 12.8 percent of infected Macs."
News

Submission + - Next Great Depression? MIT researchers predict 'global economic collapse' by2030 (yahoo.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester's institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from "global economic collapse" and "precipitous population decline" if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace(http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/next-great-depression-mit-researchers-predict-global-economic-190352944.html). The study's researchers created a computing model to forecast different scenarios based on the current models of population growth and global resource consumption, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control and environmental protection efforts. Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030. But without "drastic measures for environmental protection," the scenarios predict the likelihood of a population and economic crash.

Submission + - LHC at 4TeV (web.cern.ch)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists from CERN announced a new world record in the energy beam.The collision energy of 8 TeV is a new world record, and increases the machine’s discovery potential considerably. Although the increase in collision energy is relatively modest, it translates to an increased discovery potential that can be several times higher for certain hypothetical particles. Though it is suspected supersymmetry may not be a fortunate approach, operation at 4 TeV will likely rule out or confirm the existence of Higgs boson.
Emulation (Games)

Submission + - Browser emulation of 1975 computer runs first* 16-bit home game (mlsite.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following up on the 2009 story about the "First Graphics Game Written On/For a 16-Bit Home PC", I though /. readers might be interested in seeing the game in question running in their browsers. The original hardware has been emulated and loaded with the original machine code transcribed from .PDF scans. Some brief background here.
Software

Submission + - Deconcentration of Attention: Addressing the Compl (deconcentration-of-attention.com)

Submitted by ikusakov
ikusakov writes: This article attempts to describe specific mental techniques that are related to resolving very complex tasks in software engineering. This subject may be familiar to some software specialists to different extents; however, there is currently no common consensus and popular terminology for this subject area. In this article, the area is charted from a practical usability perspective.

This article also proposes to treat software engineering itself as research on human thinking because software is meant to simulate thinking.

Submission + - Internet Acess is Not a Human Right - Possibly a C (nytimes.com)

Submitted by lacaprup
lacaprup writes: Vinton G. Cerf contributes an Op-Ed to the New York Times today that makes the assertion that internet access is not, in fact, a human right, and may not even be a civil right (although he does concede that the argument for it as a civil right is far more compelling than the human right case). Cerf posits the correct idea that — in all cases — the internet is simply a means to obtain something much greater: speech, economic productivity, creative collaboration, etc.

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