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Comment Re:Whine (Score 1) 412

If Daily Doubles were 100% random, they would be located in the 3 higher slots more than 50% of the time because those slots make up 60% of the board. Of course the real article http://www.mentalfloss.com/art... states that when IBM's Watson analyzed Jeopardy it discovered that Daily Doubles actually were more likely to be placed in the highest 2 slots indicating non-random placement.

Comment Re:Interesting ideas (Score 1) 690

What the study found was that in the early grades, the marks given by the teacher were better predicted by "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization" than by test scores and the outcome was that girls received better marks than boys. This could lead to boys developing a feeling that school is unfair so they'll put less effort into it. Also, some might be routed into classes below their ability, making them bored and unlikely to get into the college-favored honors and AP classes.
The hard part, as always, is figuring out how to use these findings in order to maximize the achievement of all students.

Comment Redirection versus rebroadcast (Score 2) 250

The point of one antenna per customer is to avoid the rebroadcast and carriage fee issue. They aren't rebroadcasting into the air, or even into a shared CATV (community access television) cable. They are "retransmitting" portions of the freely received signal privately over the internet. It seems logical that this should be legal, but logic left the intersection of copyright and technology long ago.

Businesses

Submission + - Intel Co-Founder Calls for Tax on Offshored Labor

theodp writes: Intel co-founder and ex-CEO Andy Grove calls BS on the truism that moving production offshore to locations with much lower wages is a sound idea. 'Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs,' says Grove, 'we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's 'commodity' manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry.' To rebuild its industrial commons, Grove says the U.S. should develop a system of financial incentives, including an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. 'If the result is a trade war,' Grove advises, 'treat it like other wars — fight to win.'

Submission + - BBC Lowers HDTV bitrate, users notice

aws910 writes: According to an article on the bbc website, BBC HD lowered the bitrate of their broadcasts by almost 50% and are surprised that users noticed. From the article: "The replacement encoders work at a bitrate of 9.7Mbps (megabits per second), while their predecessors worked at 16Mbps, the standard for other broadcasters". The BBC claims "We did extensive testing on the new encoders which showed that they could produce pictures at the same or even better quality than the old encoders..." I got a good laugh off of this, but is it really possible to get better quality from a lower bitrate?
Earth

Submission + - Tokamak fusion experiment facing financial trouble (bbc.co.uk) 1

fiannaFailMan writes: An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges.

Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled. Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away. At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.

Iter will be a Tokamak device, a successor to the Joint European Torus (JET) in England. Meanwhile, an experiment in fusion by laser doesn't seem to be running into the same high profile funding problems just yet.

Enlightenment

Submission + - How do IT guys get respect and not become BOFHs? 1

An anonymous reader writes: I work for a small software company (around 60 people) as the sole IT guy. It's my first time in a position like this and after about 1.5 years I'm starting to get a bit of burnout. I try to be friendly, helpful and responsive and I get no respect whatsoever. Users tend to be flat out rude when they have a problem, violate our pretty liberal policies constantly, and expect complex projects to be finished immediately upon requesting them. My knee-jerk reaction is to be a bastard, although I've avoided it up to this point. It's getting harder. For those of you who have been doing this a lot longer, how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?
Businesses

Submission + - Has AT&T Lost its Corporate Mind?

Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for "Transitory Digital Network Communications" — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data "without selection of the material by the service provider" and "without modification of its content" but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. "As the world's largest gatekeeper," Wu writes, "AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits." ATT's new strategy "exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders," concludes Wu."
Music

Submission + - The Death of High Fidelity 1

Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Rolling Stone has an interesting story on how record producers alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. Much of the information left out during MP3 compression is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Without enough low end, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord." The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness and human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. After a few minutes, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song. "We're conforming to the way machines pay music. It's robots' choice. It used to be ladies' choice — now it's robots' choice," says Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen."
Microsoft

Submission + - IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test

notamicrosoftlover writes: From Channel9: '...on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we're committed to for this release...' You can read the whole blog entry here. There's also a video interview regarding IE8 development on Channel9.
Biotech

Submission + - Nanotube-Excreting Bacteria Allow Mass Production (eurekalert.org)

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "Engineers at the University of California, Riverside have found semiconducting nanotubes produced by living bacteria — a discovery that could help in the creation of a new generation of nanoelectronic devices. According to the lead researcher, 'We have shown that a jar with a bug in it can create potentially useful nanostructures.' This is the first time nanotubes have been shown to be produced by biological rather than chemical means. This research began when they observed something unexpected happening while attempting to clean up arsenic contamination using the metal-reducing bacterium Shewanella. In a process that is not yet fully understood, the bacterium secretes polysacarides that seem to produce the template for the arsenic-sulfide nanotubes. These nanotubes behave as metals with electrical and photoconductive properties useful in nanoelectronics. The article abstract is available from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
AMD

Submission + - Errata plagues quad-core Opterons, Phenoms

theraindog writes: "Errata are not uncommon with new processors, but a problem with the TLB logic in AMD's quad-core Opteron and Phenom processors appears to be quite serious. The errata is so severe that AMD has issued a "stop ship" order on all quad-core Opterons. AMD has also blamed it for the delay of the 2.4GHz Phenom, despite the fact that the errata is unrelated to clock speed. A BIOS-based workaround for the issue has been made available to motherboard makers, but it apparently carries a 10-20% performance penalty. What's more disturbing is that AMD knew of the errata and the potential performance hit associated with fixing it before it launched the Phenom processor. Hardware provided to the press for reviews did not include the fix, conveniently overstating Phenom performance."
Music

Submission + - Drop the DRM - UK retailers beg recording industry (blorge.com)

thefickler writes: Consumers aren't the only ones carrying "Death to DRM" placards. UK music retailers are telling the recording industry enough is enough — that the industry's obsession with copy protection is hurting, not helping profit. Kim Bayley, director-general of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) said that the anti-piracy technologies are not protecting industry revenue but instead "stifling growth and working against the consumer interest".
Biotech

Submission + - Cannabis compound 'halts cancer'

h.ross.perot writes: BBC reports: Cannabis compound 'halts cancer' The CBD compound found in cannabis is non-toxic A compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer spreading throughout the body, US scientists believe. The California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute team are hopeful that cannabidiol or CBD could be a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy. So; does this mean we will be seeing "Growth" in the industry? ;) Article link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7098340.stm
Books

Submission + - New Explanation for the Industrial Revolution (hughpickens.com)

Pcol writes: "The New York Times is running a story on Dr. Gregory Clark's book "A Farewell to Alms" with a new explanation for the Industrial Revolution and the affluence it created. Dr. Clark, an economic historian at the University of California Davis, postulates that the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 came about because of the strange new behaviors of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save. Clark's research shows that between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor and that this caused constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. "The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages," Clark concludes. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped. Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency caused a significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England's escape from the Malthusian trap. Why did the Industrial Revolution first occur in England instead of the much larger populations of China or Japan. Clark has found data showing that their richer classes, the Samurai in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China, were surprisingly unfertile and failed to generate the downward social mobility that spread production-oriented values."

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