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Space

Submission + - Free Spirit: Stuck Between a Rock and a Soft Place (wired.com) 1

Submitted by
Dave Bullock
Dave Bullock writes: "NASA's Spirit rover is stuck in a pile of silty sand and high-centerd on a rock millions of miles away on the surface of Mars. Here on Earth, JPL is working on getting the rover unstuck. They've built a giant sandbox, filled it with simulated Martian soil and driven in a near duplicate rover which is also now stuck. I took a few trips to JPL and photographed NASA's attempts to free Spirit for Wired.com."
Medicine

Submission + - Blue M&Ms can lessen the damage from spinal in

Submitted by SydShamino
SydShamino writes: Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have found that the dye used in blue M&Ms and other foods can, when given to a patient shortly after a spinal injury, minimizing secondary damage caused by the body when it kills off nearby healthy cells. Given that 85% of spinal injury patients are currently untreated (and some doctors don't trust the treatment given to the other 15%), a relatively safe treatment like this could help preserve some function for thousands of patients. The best part? In lab rats the subjects given the treatment turn blue.

Comment PR (Score 1) 4

by doishmere (#28824279) Attached to: Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man
No matter what your take on the feasibility of 'true' AI, they make a good point in saying that we need to educate people about the realities of these technologies to avoid a public outcry to ban AI and machine learning research.
Robotics

Submission + - Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man 4

Submitted by Strudelkugel
Strudelkugel writes: The NY Times has an article about a conference during which the potential dangers of machine intelligence were discussed. " Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences. " The money quote: "Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years," Dr. Horvitz said. "Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture."
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - iPhone 3Gs Encryption Cracked in 2 Minutes

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a Wired News article, iPhone Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explains how the much touted hardware encryption of the iPhone 3Gs is but a farce, and demonstrates how both the passcode and backup encryption can be bypassed in about 2 minutes. Zdziarski also goes on to say that all data on the iPhone — including deleted data — is automatically decrypted by the iPhone when it's copied, allowing hackers and law enforcement agencies alike access the device's raw disk as if no encryption were present. A second demonstration features the recovery of the iPhone's entire disk while the device is still passcode-locked. According to a similar article in ARS Technica, Zdziarski describes the iPhone's hardware encryption as, "like putting privacy glass on half your shower door," he told Ars. "What, pray tell, is the advantage in that?" with the iPhone being sold into 20% of Fortune-100s and into the military, just how worried should we be with such shoddy security?
Censorship

Submission + - Russia sees Skype as economic & security thre

Submitted by NotBornYesterday
NotBornYesterday writes: It appears that Skype's growing popularity in Russia is causing concern among big business and government types alike.

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE) is concerned about the growing popularity of Skype and internet telephony in Russia. The officials of the union say that, the rapid growth of this segment of the communications market is infringing the interests of Russian cellular operators, Gazeta.Ru reported.

"Infringing the interests" was clarified by Vitaly Kotov, Vice President of TTK, a telecoms unit of state-owned Russian Railways, who called on regulators to stop VoIP services from causing "a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators."

In addition to corporate interests, Skype is alleged to be a security risk for Russia, because it is not controlled by the state. VoIP applications like Skype are not connected to the SORM telephone conversation wiretapping system, and according to Vedomosti business daily on Friday, "Delegates at the meeting also warned that it has been impossible for police to spy on VoIP conversations".

Interestingly, authorities in Italy (according to a Russian News site) are voicing a similar concern, but with what sounds like an Open Source twist: "The encryption system used in this computer program is not being uncovered by a developer which strongly complicates the work of law-enforcement agencies." Are they just looking for the source code? Or are they looking for developer cooperation in making the crypto crackable? The likely Italian-to-Russian-to-English translation makes it hard for me to guess the answer.

One wonders how available Skype services are in Iran.

Robotics

Submission + - Ants More Rational Decision Makers Than Humans

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Humans and animals often make irrational choices when faced with very challenging decisions, but researchers in collective robotics have recently found that is that for ants making collective decisions, the lack of individual options translated into more accurate outcomes by minimizing the chances for individuals to make mistakes. The conclusions arose from an examination of the process of nest selection in the ant, Temnothorax curvispinosus, where the challenge before the colony was to "choose" a nest, when offered two options with very similar advantages. "Rationality in this case should be thought of as meaning that a decision-maker, who is trying to maximize something, should simply be consistent in its preferences." says Stephen Pratt, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "For animals trying to maximize their fitness, for example, they should always rank options, whether these are food sources, mates, or nest sites, according to their fitness contribution. Typically we think having many individual options, strategies and approaches are beneficial," Pratt adds, "but irrational errors are more likely to arise when individuals make direct comparisons among options." Studies of how or why irrationality arises can give insights into cognitive mechanisms and constraints, as well as how collective decision making occurs. "A key idea in collective robotics is that the individual robots can be relatively simple and unsophisticated, but you can still get a complex, intelligent result out of the whole group," says Pratt. "The ability to function without complex central control is really desirable in an artificial system and the idea that limitations at the individual level can actually help at the group level is potentially very useful.""
Programming

Submission + - The Best First Language For A Young Programmer (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year C.S. curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As McAllister sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck, McAllister writes. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"

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