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Education

200 Students Admit Cheating After Professor's Online Rant 693

Posted by samzenpus from the people-get-what-they-deserve dept.
Over 200 University of Central Florida students admitted to cheating on a midterm exam after their professor figured out at least a third of his class had cheated. In a lecture posted on YouTube, Professor Richard Quinn told the students that he had done a statistical analysis of the grades and was using other methods to identify the cheats, but instead of turning the list over to the university authorities he offered the following deal: "I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you didn't graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don't identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course."

Comment CSI (Score 1) 874

by maccallr (#32085162) Attached to: Top 10 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do

While on the subject of CSI, don't you love the way they just happen to have a custom spinny-roundy 3D database for just about anything you can care to think of.

That, and the rather optimistic natural language queries they type into the aforementioned databases.
Earth

Cooling the Planet With a Bubble Bath 219

Posted by Soulskill from the rubber-ducky-optional dept.
cremeglace writes "A Harvard University physicist has come up with a new way to cool parts of the planet: pump vast swarms of tiny bubbles into the sea to increase its reflectivity and lower water temperatures. 'Since water covers most of the earth, don't dim the sun,' says the scientist, Russell Seitz, speaking from an international meeting on geoengineering research. 'Brighten the water.' From ScienceNOW: 'Computer simulations show that tiny bubbles could have a profound cooling effect. Using a model that simulates how light, water, and air interact, Seitz found that microbubbles could double the reflectivity of water at a concentration of only one part per million by volume. When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C. He has submitted a paper on the concept he calls “Bright Water" to the journal Climatic Change.'"
Software

OpenOffice 3.2 Released 260

Posted by timothy from the compatability-can-opener dept.
harmonise writes "Version 3.2 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is now available. This marks the tenth anniversary year of the office suite, with over three hundred million downloads recorded in total. The new features include faster start up times; improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats; improvements to all components, particularly the Calc spreadsheet, with over a dozen new or enhanced features; and the Chart module (usable throughout OpenOffice.org) has had a usability makeover as well as offering new chart types."

Comment Re:my thoughts (Score 1) 164

by maccallr (#30525304) Attached to: Music By Natural Selection

Thanks for the comments. I'll take them one by one (while I wait for the algorithm to tick over to 250 generations).

1. to give a fair comparison with the hand-picked better sounding loops given in all the subsequent "tasters", the time=zero loops are also hand-picked. Rest assured that most of them sounded pretty horrific. Yes we did set a minimum amount of complexity (I think it was at least 8 different "tracks") in the initial Adam and Eve, but then let them evolve under no selection for a long time.

2. yes we have to keep it short so that rating can happen in this lifetime :-) I have put several tracks together for my own projects (just me doing the ratings, and using pre-recorded samples as well as evolved synths) - here's the best example. I'll probably put something from DarwinTunes together over the holidays (prob using consistently highly rated loops from the slashdot surge)

3. there are no constraints on harmonies or anything, however the "palette" of notes is defined once (all evolved from random) and then the notes are picked from the palette. Mutations to the palette are going to be rare (because defining it takes many fewer "genes" than defining all the music) - hence the good agreement between loops.

4. yep, there have been scientific studies showing herd behaviour in music "selection". The rest of what you say can't be denied, and that's what we're interested in and why we're doing the experiment.

5. no it's real - but I didn't know about the tenori-on, so thanks for the heads up on that :-)

nearly at 250 generations now...

Comment Re:Responding faster for me now... (Score 1) 164

by maccallr (#30523022) Attached to: Music By Natural Selection

For the last time...

darwintunes.org has no ads at all - it's an academic experiment website, it would be inappropriate. Even my slightly more commercial evolectronica.com doesn't have ads. From my experience that would just be a colossal waste of time and turn people away.

What newscientist.com (or perhaps DNS hackers) do with their ads is nothing to do with me!

And finally, it was Slashdot who made the New Scientist link look like the main link for the article, not me! See my original submission:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1136438/Music-by-natural-selection

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