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Submission + - ACM Awards 2009 Turing Prize to Charles Thacker (acm.org)

Submitted by
scumm
scumm writes: "This years Turing Prize has been awarded to Charles Thacker, whom they describe as (among other things) the "creator of the first modern personal computer."

From the ACM's announcement:
NEW YORK, March 9, 2010 — ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Charles P. Thacker the winner of the 2009 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, the first modern personal computer, and the prototype for networked personal computers. Thacker's design, which he built while at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), reflected a new vision of a self-sufficient, networked computer on every desk, equipped with innovations that are standard in today’s models. Thacker was also cited for his contributions to the Ethernet local area network, which enables multiple computers to communicate and share resources, as well as the first multiprocessor workstation, and the prototype for today’s most used tablet PC, with its capabilities for direct user interaction. The Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc.

For further reading, the Wall Street Journal has an article (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/03/09/computing-prize-winner-did-not-rest-on-his-laurels/) providing more background about Mr. Thacker and the Turing Prize.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the submitter feels compelled to point out that this Mr. Thacker is his uncle, and thinks this is really cool."
Programming

Submission + - New Leader in Netflix Prize Race with 1 Day to Go (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Netfix Prize, an algorithm competition to improve The Netflix Cinematch recommendation system by more than 10% has a new leader — The Ensemble, just one day before the competition ends. The 30 day race to the end was kicked off after BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted the first entry to break the 10% barrier with the results showing 10.08% improvement. The Ensemble, made up of three teams who chose to join forces: "Grand Prize Team", "Opera Solutions", and "Vandelay United", has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. From the article on Techcrunch —

The competition will end tomorrow morning, so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.

"
Earth

Submission + - New Evidence of Shrinking Arctic Ice Sheet 1

Submitted by unapersson
unapersson writes: The Guardian reports new evidence that has come to light after the US Military has declassified some of its Satellite photographs:

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.
Space

Submission + - Is Jupiter Earth's Cosmic Protector?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Last Sunday an object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into Jupiter's colorful cloud tops, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean — the second time in in 15 years that this had happened — after Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year. Better Jupiter than Earth say astronomers who say that part of what makes Earth such a nice place to live is that Jupiter's overbearing gravity acts as a gravitational shield deflecting incoming space junk away from the inner solar system where it could do to humans what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. "If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us," says Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley who first noticed the mark on Jupiter. But other say the warm and fuzzy image of the King of Planets as father-protector may not be true. In 1770 Comet Lexell whizzed by the earth missing us by a cosmic whisker after passing close to Jupiter, which diverted it into a new orbit and straight toward Earth. The comet made two passes around the Sun and in 1779 again passed very close to Jupiter, which then threw it back out of the solar system. "It was as if Jupiter aimed at us and missed," said Dr. Brian G. Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who complains that the comet would never have come anywhere near the Earth if Jupiter hadn't thrown it at us in the first place."
Image

Iran Tries To Pacify Protesters With Lord of The Rings Marathon 419

Posted by samzenpus from the chip-the-glasses-and-crack-the-plates-that's-what-Ahmadinejad-hates dept.
Iranian state television's Channel Two is playing a Lord of the Rings marathon in an attempt to keep people inside watching hobbits and not protesting in the streets. Normally, people in Tehran are treated to one or two Hollywood movies a week, but with recent events the government hopes that sitting through a nine-hour trilogy will take the fight out of most of the protesters. Perhaps this was not the best choice in films if you want your people not to believe that "even the smallest person can change the course of the future."
Math

Submission + - Analyzing Iran's Election Numbers

Submitted by CaroKann
CaroKann writes: The Washington Post has an article in the Opinion section analyzing Iran's election numbers.

The authors base their analysis on the assumption that humans are very bad at creating random numbers. They examined the last two digits of the official vote count from each province, looking for evidence of two human foibles concerning how people pick random numbers.

First, when picking random numbers, people tend to pick some digits more than others. For example, humans tend to pick the number 5 less often than the number 7. In the election results, the last digit is a 5 only 4% of the time, and 7 17% of the time. With completely random numbers, each 5 and 7 would appear as the last digit about 10% of the time.

Second, people have difficulty creating random numbers with non-consecutive digits. This pattern also shows up in the results.

They authors conclude that the chances of the election numbers being completely clean are 1 in 200.
Government

Submission + - Steve Chu Still Publishing Physics papers (physicscentral.com) 1

Submitted by
BuzzSkyline
BuzzSkyline writes: "Sure, he's officially the US Energy Secretary now, but Steven Chu still has enough physicist in him to have a paper published in this week's issue of Physical Review Letters. He and his coauthors have developed a new and improved atom interferometer, which could be used to aid aircraft navigation, detect gravitational waves from supernovas and colliding black holes, or perform various other super-sensitive measurements."
Education

Submission + - Wikipedia to add video (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by
viyh
viyh writes: "Wikipedia will soon be adding a video option, within two or three months, according to the MIT Technology Review.

"Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled "Add Media." Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video--initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material--and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article."

They will be requiring all video to use open-source formats. This is in hopes of getting content providers to open up their material to gain wider exposure on the Wikipedia website. There is also an in-browser editor that removes a lot of the headache often associated with any kind of video editing.

"Presently, the work flow is pretty atrocious" for people trying to download, convert, and edit video, says Dale, citing the notoriously confusing array of incompatible video formats now in use. With the new Wikipedia system, "people will be able to easily inject media into pages, in a way that wasn't possible before," says Michael Dale, a software engineer from Kaltura, the company assisting with development of the tools."
The Internet

Submission + - Comcast to bring IPv6 to residential US in 2010 (internetnews.com) 7

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: We all know that IPv4 address space is almost gone — but we also know that no major US carrier has yet migrated its consumer base either. Comcast is no upping the ante a bit and has now said that they are seriously gearing up for IPv6 residential broadband deployment soon.

"Comcast plans to enter into broadband IPv6 technical trials later this year and into 2010," Barry Tishgart, VP of Internet Services for Comcast said. "Planning for general deployment is underway."
The Military

Submission + - Iran's Netwar (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following disputed elections in Iran, opposition groups and activists have turned conventional protests into a major threat to the ruling government. The low-intensity protest movement is rapidly becoming the first true netwar of the 21st century. Opposition protesters have shown that within a few hours or less, the information technologies that are the mainstay of modern society can become its weapons, as well. This article examines the current situation in Iran and the part played by new media technologies and strategies, showing how far the theory and practice of netwar has advanced since the concept first emerged in the late nineties.
Announcements

Submission + - 6000 year old tomb complex discovered 2

Submitted by duh P3rf3ss3r
duh P3rf3ss3r writes: National Geographic reports that a 6000 year old tomb complex on 200 hectares (500 acres) has been discovered on the Salisbury Plain just 24 km (15 miles) from Stonehenge. The site has come as a surprise to the archaeologists who had thought that the area had been studied in such depth that few discoveries of such magnitude remained. The site, fully 1000 years older than Stonehenge, has been called "Britain's oldest architecture".
Communications

Submission + - US State Dept asks Twitter to Postpone Maintenance (cnn.com)

Submitted by
viyh
viyh writes: "The US State Department asked Twitter to postpone it's maintenance window scheduled for June 16th at 2pm PST. The maintenance window was already previously scheduled to take place at 9:45pm on June 15th, but was postponed due to a massive uprising by Twitter users since it has been such a critical tool for communication during the Iran election aftermath. The window is not directly being scheduled from Twitter, rather, it's coming down from their hosting provider, NTT America. No word as of yet on a decision from Twitter or NTT America."
Security

Submission + - The 6 Worst Cloud Security Mistakes

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: Dark Reading has posted a piece on the biggest security blunders companies make with cloud computing. Some of the top ones: assuming you're no longer responsible for your data's safety and security once you've handed it off to a provider, and not verifying how a service provider will secure your data. Another interesting trend: companies often have no clue that some of their business units are already running cloud-based services — without security.
http://www.darkreading.com/securityservices/security/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217702062
The Courts

Submission + - RIAA Wants to Bar Jammie from Making Objections (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In the Duluth, Minnesota, case headed for a re-trial on June 15th, Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, the RIAA has filed a motion seeking to bar the defendant Jammie Thomas-Rasset (she got married recently) from making objections, during trial number 2, to the plaintiffs' copyright registration documents. To preempt those of you reacting with shock and anger at the American judicial system, let me assure you this motion has nothing to do with the American judicial system : the RIAA's motion has the chance of a snowball in Hell of being granted, as there is simply no legal basis for preventing a person from making valid legal objections in Trial #2, just because the lawyer she had in Trial #1 didn't make similar objections. I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short circuiting it; instead, of course, they have merely red flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team. A few days earlier the RIAA lawyers filed a similarly ludicrous motion trying to keep Ms. Thomas-Rasset's expert witness from testifying; that too is doomed."

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