gepr - Slashdot User

Submission + - Intelligence Density and the Creative Class (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Doofus on Saturday May 29, 2010 @10:20AM

Doofus writes: The Atlantic has an interesting review of some open-sourced work by Rob Pitingolo about the comparative educational attainment levels of various metropolitan areas.
While people are now capable of being far more mobile than in generations past, many people remain within 100 miles or so of where they were born. For the technology-partition of the creative class, this is less likely to be the case, in my personal experience. Do we technical people put interesting work and the concentration of human educational capital ahead of other considerations when deciding on a move? Or is it more complicated?
Is it more about the fact that the creative jobs are where the creative people are?

Linus Torvalds For Nobel Peace Prize? 541

Posted by kdawson on Friday November 20, 2009 @12:36PM from the nice-step-towards-world-domination dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm as much of a Linux fanboy as anyone else, but I've never thought of anything in computing as being worth a Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, there are those who take global collaboration seriously, though..." The suggestion has been bouncing around the Portland Linux community, where Torvalds lives. Is it worthy of wider attention and discussion?

Submission + - Linus Torvalds suggested for Nobel Peace Prize (ridenbaugh.com) 7

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19, 2009 @11:52PM

An anonymous reader writes: I'm as much of a fanboy as anyone else, but I've never thought of anything in computing as being worth a Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, there are those who take global collaboration seriously, though...

Researchers Create an Automatic Backup Band for Singers 230

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 07, 2008 @12:47PM from the william-hungs-of-the-world-unite dept.

Researchers at Microsoft Labs are hoping to allow untrained singers to have their own automatic backup band in the near future. A new piece of software, "MySong", promises to take a sung melody and using a probability computation algorithm, generate an appropriate chord accompaniment. There is also a video of the process on the Microsoft Labs website. "'The idea is to let a creative but musically untrained individual get a taste of song writing and music creation,' Morris told New Scientist. 'There was nothing out there that could take a sung vocal melody as an input and then generate appropriate chords to accompany it. [...] Since people rarely sing at precise frequencies, MySong compares a sung melody to the 12 standard musical notes. It then feeds an approximate sequence of notes to the system's chord probability computation algorithm. This algorithm has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognize fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that complement each another.'"

Beer-Drinking Scientist Debunks Productivity Correlation 130

Posted by kdawson on Sunday March 23, 2008 @10:02PM from the sipping-a-magnificent-pacific-northwest-microbrew-porter dept.

austinpoet writes in with a blog post debunking the theory we discussed a few days back that scientists' beer consumption is linearly correlated with the quality of their work. Chris Mack, Gentleman Scientist and beer drinker, has analyzed the paper and found it is severely flawed. From his analysis: "The discovered linear relationship between beer consumption and scientific output had a correlation coefficient (R-squared) of only about 0.5 — not very high by my standards, though I suspect many biologists would be happy to get one that high in their work... Thus, the entire study came down to only one conclusion: the five worst ornithologists in the Czech Republic drank a lot of beer."

Comment Re:Right General? (Score 1) 543

by gepr on Wednesday March 12, 2008 @04:08PM (#22732072) Attached to: Air Force Cyber Command General Answers Slashdot Questions

Honestly, I kind of felt like the response was a subtle jab at how silly and stupid the question was.

The question wasn't silly or stupid. And the answer from General Lord, far from vacuous, demonstrates that he either doesn't understand or wasn't allowed to express the importance of testing and/or HWIL simulation. A testbed of machines/networks that are hardened to the best of their ability, using a suite of hardening methods, and made available to the public (or, even better, to particular subcultures) explicitly as a challenge, would be neither criminal nor even humorous. At best, such a testbed would provide a way for the Cyber Command to test emergent behavior in such co-evolutionary situations. At worst, it could provide a honey pot to identify leads on new recruits and/or threats.

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