138591374
submission
00_NOP writes:
Thirty-five years ago a report for Tandem computers concluded (https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf) that the cost balance between memory, disk and CPU on big iron favoured holding items in memory if they were needed every five minutes and using five bytes to save one instruction. Update the analysis for today and what do you see? Well my estimate that we should aim to hold items that we have to access 10 times a second and that we can now balance instructions and bytes — meaning some common data space saving techniques are more efficient than before.
65068973
submission
00_NOP writes:
Children in the UK have been taught in metric measures in school since (at least) 1972, but yesterday British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that they should actually be taught in Imperial measures (which are still in use officially to measure road distances and speeds but not really anywhere else). Is this because he has not got a clue about science or because he is trying to buy off his right wing fringe (who object to "metrication") or because he might be a bit stupid, Oxford degree not withstanding?
57199723
submission
00_NOP writes:
The political battle over Scotland's independence ballot — to take place in September this year — has now moved on to how the BBC project the UK on their national weather forecast. The BBC use a projection based on the view of Britain from geostationary weather satellites and so there is naturally some foreshortening at the northern end of Britain (Scotland, in other words). But nationalist campaigners say this means Scottish viewers are constantly being shown a distorted image of their country which makes it look smaller and hence (in their view) less able to support independence. In response others have suggested that the nationalists are truly "flat earthers".
51852907
submission
00_NOP writes:
Researchers from the New School for Social Research in New York have demonstrated that if you read quality literary fiction you become a better person, in the sense that you are more likely to emphasise with others. Presumably we can all think of books that have changed the way we feel about the world — so this is, in a sense, a scientific confirmation of something fairly intuitive.
46835273
submission
00_NOP writes:
"Universal Credit" — the plan to consolidate all Britain's welfare payments into one — is the world's biggest "agile" software development project but it is now close to collapse the British government admitted yesterday. The failure, if and when it comes, could cost billions and have dire social consequences.
36249973
submission
00_NOP writes:
Venn diagrams are all the rage in this election year, but drawing comprehensible diagrams for anything more than 3 sets has proved to be very difficult. Until the breakthough just announced by Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey of the University of Victoria in Canada, nobody had managed to draw a simple (no more than two lines crossing), symmetric Venn diagram for more than 7 sets (only primes will work). Now they have pushed that on to 11. And it's pretty too.
20674568
submission
00_NOP writes:
Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, has told New Scientist that one of the reasons the search engine launched Google Voice is that it needs more human voice data to perfect the sort of "big data, simple algorithm" probabilistic approach to translating voices to text that drives Google Translate. Norvig says that no one is listening to your calls on Google Voice — it is simply their servers trying to the translation right.
430132
submission
00_NOP writes:
Dreamcast lovers' hopes were raised earlier this month when it came to light that Sega had extended trade mark protection on the console's name. But hopes have now been dashed as even this optimistic take on Sega's motivation makes clear.
For some of us, though, the Dreamcast will never die. Well, not yet, anyway — if you are the same then you can help out this developer by answering a few questions here
