Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science

Submission + - Teaching Robot Learners to Ask Good Questions (sciencedaily.com) 1

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "I disagree with this article's opening line: "Within a decade, personal robots could become as common in U.S. homes as any other major appliance." Haven't we been promised this since the 50s?
But I'm fascinated by the rest — how do you teach humans to teach robots? Or, more precisely, how can you teach robots to teach humans to teach robots? The idea that designers can put a flexible platform in a robot, that allows users to determine functionality is...more than pretty cool."
Science

Submission + - Computer Programmers Only 5th Most Sleep Deprived Profession (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
garthsundem
garthsundem writes: "As described in the New York Times Economix blog, the mattress chain Sleepy's analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey to find the ten most sleep deprived professions. In order, they are Home Health Aides, Lawyer, Police Officers, Doctors/Paramedics, Tie: (Economists, Social Workers, Computer Programmers), Financial Analysts, Plant Operators (undefined, but we assume "factory" and not "Audrey II"), and Secretaries. ."
Education

Submission + - Academics not productive enough? Sack 'em (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university. Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn’t published at least four “research outputs” over the past three years. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in. Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said.
Idle

Submission + - Mathematical parrot reveals his genius with posthumous paper (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Even in death, the world’s most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published. They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight and three sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates (abstract http://www.springerlink.com/content/q08n44457x236ln6/).
Privacy

Submission + - Anonymous Cowards, Deanonymized (33bits.org) 1

Submitted by mbstone
mbstone writes: Arvind Narayanan writes: What if authors can be identified based on nothing but a comparison of the content they publish to other web content they have previously authored? Naryanan has a new paper to be presented at the 33rd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Just as individual telegraphers could be identified by other telegraphers from their "fists," Naryanan posits that an author's habitual choices of words, such as, for example, the frequency with which the author uses "since" as opposed to "because," can be processed through an algorithm to identify the author's writing. Fortunately, and for now, manually altering one's writing style is effective as a countermeasure.

Comment Chat with reCaptcha Creator (Score 1) 109

by garthsundem (#39105709) Attached to: Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs
I got to chat with Luis von Ahn, co-creator of the Captcha and reCaptcha, and it turns out he's a surprisingly idealistic guy. Taking inspiration from people in gyms pedaling and going nowhere, he hoped to actually *do* something with the brainpower needed to solve a reCaptcha (he said something along the lines of, "actually your brain is doing a pretty amazing thing -- translating an image to text.") Maybe digitizing the archives of the New York Times and ancient manuscripts isn't world hunger or world peace, but it's pretty damn cool. And as you probably know, that's what you're helping to do every time you translate a word in a reCaptcha box.
Twitter

Submission + - Kenyan chief foils robbery via Twitter (cnn.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: A Kenyan chief in a town far from the bustling capital foiled a predawn robbery recently using Twitter, highlighting the far-reaching effects of social media in areas that don't have access to the Internet. Chief Francis Kariuki said he got a call in the dead of the night that thieves had broken into a neighbor's house. Local residents, who subscribe to his tweets through a free text messaging service, jumped into action. They surrounded the house, sending the thugs fleeing into the night.

In the town 100 miles from Nairobi, a majority of residents don't have access to computers, the Internet or smart phones. The sporadic cyber cafes strewn across the landscape charge for Internet access. However, almost every household has a cell phone and text messages are a major form of communication in the nation.
Encryption

Submission + - John Nash's declassified 1955 letter to the NSA (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 1955, John Nash sends an amazing letter to the NSA in order to support an encryption design that he suggested. In it he no less than anticipates computational complexity theory as well as modern cryptography.

In the letter he proposes that the security of encryption can be based on computational hardness and makes the distinction between polynomial time and exponential time: "So a logical way to classify enciphering processes is by the way in which the computation length for the computation of the key increases with increasing length of the key. This is at best exponential and at worst probably at most a relatively small power of r, ar^2 or ar^3, as in substitution ciphers.

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Close