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Submission + - Aussie scientists find coconut-carrying octopus (myway.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @09:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot. "I was gobsmacked," said Finn, a research biologist at the museum who specializes in cephalopods. "I mean, I've seen a lot of octopuses hiding in shells, but I've never seen one that grabs it up and jogs across the sea floor. I was trying hard not to laugh."

Submission + - Micro-Wind Turbines for use in the city

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday March 22, 2007 @12:52PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Engineers at the University of Hong Kong and a private renewable energy company have developed a new micro wind turbine that can generate electricity even if wind speeds are as low as two meters per second. Lucien Gambarota , the main inventor of the technology, says this is its advantage over conventional small wind turbines, which only work about 40 percent of the time because of low wind speed. "We never stop this machine and they never stop because there is always one meter per second wind — 365 days, 24 hours a day, they keep working," said Gambarota. "They deliver different levels of energy because the wind changes but these turbines they keep moving, they keep spinning." More: http://www.energyhack.com/"

Submission + - The U.S. military mulls user-driven content

Submitted by

PetManimal

on Thursday January 25, 2007 @11:44AM

PetManimal writes: "Computerworld reports that the U.S. military is being urged to embrace user-driven Internet tools to communicate with each other and outside organizations, such as non-profits and businesses. Some potential apps: Shareable whiteboards, instant messaging, and image-sharing. In certain cases, military users are going out and creating these applications on their own, but such efforts sometimes are resisted by top brass:
For example, a group of military officers launched CompanyCommand.com in the early days of the current Iraq war. At the site, they shared tips and warnings about locations in Iraq, and the site rapidly grew to have thousands of members, Ben-Ari said. The U.S. military threatened to shut the site down because it was on the open Internet, but it eventually moved the site in-house and restricted access via passwords.
"

Submission + - Wikipedia Used for Artificial Intelligence

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Sunday January 07, 2007 @11:13AM

eldavojohn writes: "It may be no surprise but Wikipedia is now being used in the field of artificial intelligence. The applications for this may be endless. For instance, the front of spam fighting is a tough one and it looks as though researchers are now turning towards an ontology or taxonomy based solution to fight spammers. The concept is also on the forefront of artificial intelligence and progress towards an application passing the Turing Test and creating semantically aware applications. The article comments on uses of Wikipedia in this manner:
"... spam filters block all messages containing the word 'vitamin,' but fail to block messages containing the word 'B12.' If the program never saw 'B12' before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said. "With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that 'B12' is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.
"

Submission + - eBay's Innovation Machine?

Submitted by Anonymous on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @01:13PM

Anonymous writes: CIOInsight.com has published a case study on eBay and its efforts to expand beyond online auctions. Writer Ed Cone says the company may struggle to meet investor demands unless it does so, despite double-digit growth rates and profits of $1.08 billion. "They are in a tough spot, because they're approaching maturity with the core auction business," says Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior retail analyst with Forrester Research Inc.

To make it happen, eBay is retooling its technology platform to "help its large sellers become more efficient and grow its fixed-price marketplaces, and turbocharge its international business, which has not developed as planned; in late 2006, eBay shut down its Chinese affiliate and entered a minority partnership with a Beijing company." The key is service-oriented architecture and a growing community of third-party developers.

Submission + - Lazy Programming and Evaluation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, 2007 @11:14AM

An anonymous reader writes: Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Submission + - Where are the C++ frameworks?

Submitted by wandazulu on Monday December 25, 2006 @02:31PM

wandazulu writes: Objective C has Cocoa, C# has .NET, Java has its packages, and every scripting language has an extensive library of functionality for handling things like XML, HTTP, encryption, regular expressions, etc. So why is there no likewise unified library of functionality for C++? At this point I can pretty much count on having a standard template library for any C++ compiler I use on any platform, but that provides basic functionality, like containers and strings. Why is it that I have to write my own socket-based routines for getting a web page, or hashing a string, etc.? So why is there no unified framework for C++? Is it because it's not "owned" by a particular organization or person? Has anyone even attempted to create a library to rival Java's or Ruby's or Perl's or Python's....

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