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Submission + - 2009 Darwin Award Winners announced (darwinawards.com)

Submitted by Greg Lindahl
Greg Lindahl writes: From the woman who jumped in a swollen creek to rescue her drowning ... moped, to the man who hopped over the divider at the edge of the highway to take a leak, and plunged 65 feet to his death, 2009 was a year both exceptional and unexceptional for Darwin Award-worthy behavior!
Image

Music By Natural Selection 164

Posted by samzenpus from the survival-of-the-grooviest dept.
maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."
Idle

Submission + - Music by natural selection (darwintunes.org)

Submitted by maccallr
maccallr writes: The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum "genome size" and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change.
Government

Submission + - SSN overlap with Micronesia haunts NH woman

Submitted by stevel
stevel writes: Holly Ramer, who lives in Concord, NH, has never been to the Federated States of Micronesia, but debt collectors dun her mercilessly for unpaid loans taken out by a small business owner in that Pacific island nation. Why? Micronesia and other countries in the region have their own Social Security Administrations which gave out numbers to residents applying for US disaster relief loans. The catch is that the Micronesian SSNs have fewer digits than the nine-digit US version, and when credit bureaus entered these into their database, they padded them out with zeros on the front. These numbers then matched innocent US citizens with SSNs beginning with zeroes, as many in northern New England do. The credit bureaus say to call the Social Security Adminustration, the SSA says call the credit bureaus, the FTC says they can't help, and nobody is taking responsibility for the confusion.
Biotech

Prehistoric Gene Reawakened To Battle HIV 360

Posted by kdawson from the learning-from-our-distant-cousins dept.
Linuss points out research published in PLoS Biology that demonstrates the reawakening of latent human cells' ability to manufacture an HIV defense. A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman began with the knowledge that Old World monkeys have a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein that can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. They examined the human genome for any evidence of a latent gene that could manufacture such a protein, and found the capability in a stretch of what has been dismissively termed "junk DNA." "In this work, we reveal that, upon correction of the premature termination codon in theta-defensin pseudogenes, human myeloid cells produce cyclic, antiviral peptides (which we have termed 'retrocyclins'), indicating that the cells retain the intact machinery to make cyclic peptides. Furthermore, we exploited the ability of aminoglycoside antibiotics to read-through the premature termination codon within retrocyclin transcripts to produce functional peptides that are active against HIV-1. Given that the endogenous production of retrocyclins could also be restored in human cervicovaginal tissues, we propose that aminoglycoside-based topical microbicides might be useful in preventing sexual transmission of HIV-1."

Feed Techdirt: Radiohead's Thom Yorke Explains How Recording Industry Milked CD Business (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
JJ sends in a short quote from Radiohead's Thom Yorke about the music business:

"There's a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about twenty years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead."
Bingo. The "recording industry" has basically been a "sell plastic discs" industry for way too long, and used the monopoly rents it received from the government to significantly overprice its products, and then lived fat and happy for many years. So, of course, when better, more efficient formats for distribution, recording, promotion and listening came along, it wanted absolutely nothing to do with them, because they didn't present the same sort of monopoly rents.

And, that, of course has been the point we've been trying to make here for quite some time. This has always been a business model issue. The record labels lived off the CD business for so long that it refused to recognize that a better, more efficient system was showing up, because it meant giving up some easy profits.

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The Internet

Submission + - Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."

Comment Sliding Average (Score 1) 321

by PeteLarson (#28349693) Attached to: Ideal, and Actual, IT Performance Metrics?

I think the focus should ultimately be on reducing calls. So, perhaps, you're doing really well if the average calls per week continues a downward trend each week.

However, since many IT departments are actually split into different subdivisions, how can you measure the group that just takes calls, addresses issues, and closes tickets. It may be their ONLY job to close tickets/issues. They may have exceedingly little control over any underlying problems. So, to measure their performance, perhaps number of issues closed is not entirely wrong. But, managers of this group should be evaluated over time. Any recurring issues should be brought up as potential bugs or user training or just needing general improvement to the system, whatever that might mean.
Businesses

Ideal, and Actual, IT Performance Metrics? 321

Posted by timothy from the spin-the-dial-shake-the-8-ball dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Recently it was revealed that our company measures IT performance by the time it takes to close trouble tickets. I consider IT's primary goal to be as transparent to the user as possible, thus this metric was rather troubling to me. Shouldn't we be focused on reducing calls, rather than simply closing them quickly? My question is: How is your IT performance measured, and how do you think it should be measured?"
Power

Submission + - First Acoustic Black Hole Created In A BEC (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by
KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: "One of the many curious properties of Bose Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a gravitational field. Now a group of Israeli physicists have exploited this idea to create an acoustic black hole in a BEC. The team created a supersonic flow of atoms within the BEC, a flow that prevents any phonon caught in it from making headway. The region where the flow changes from subsonic to supersonic is an event horizon because any phonon unlucky enough to stray into the supersonic region can never escape. But the real prize is not the acoustic black hole itself but what it makes possible: the first observation of Hawking radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts that pairs of phonon with opposite momentum ought to be constantly springing in and out of existence in a BEC. Were one of the pair to stray across the event horizon into the supersonic region, it could never escape. However, the other would be free to go on its way. This stream of phononic radiation away from an acoustic black hole would be the first observation of Hawking radiation. The team haven't got that far yet but it can't be long now before either they or their numerous competitors make this leap."
Biotech

Submission + - Stem cells used to restore sight for corneal disea (news.com.au)

Submitted by
Sean0michael
Sean0michael writes: "Australian scientists have Restored the sight of three human test subjects using stem cells cultured in contact lenses. All the patients were blind in only one eye. Two were legally blind, but can now read the big letters on an eye chart. The third could read the first few lines, but is now able to pass a driver's test. The University of New South Wales reports that these patients all had damaged corneas, and the stem cells came from each person's good eye. The best part--the procedure is inexpensive, raising hopes for being able to push this to the third world sooner than other, more expensive medications."
Math

Submission + - A Math Geek's Plan to Save Wall Street's Soul 1

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "What if an aeronautics engineer couldn't reconcile his elegant design for a state-of-the-art jumbo jet with Newton's second law of motion and decided to tweak the equation to fit his design? In a way, Newsweek reports, this is what's happened in quantitative finance, which is in desperate need of reform. And 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician Paul Wilmott — arguably the most influential quant today — thinks he knows where to start. With his CQF program, Wilmott is out to save the quants from themselves and the rest of us from their future destruction. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' says Wilmott. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"

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