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Submission + - ITT Educational Services charged with fraud over student loan program (cbs4indy.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Things are tense in the world of for-profit colleges.

The latest to face problems is ITT Educational Services, which was charged with fraud Tuesday. The Securities & Exchange Commission said the company’s chief executive and chief financial officer misled investors and auditors with “outright misstatements” and “half-truths” about its student loan program.

ITT Educational Services allegedly created a fraudulent scheme to show that it was doing better financially than it really was. Students had been defaulting on their loans in droves, but CEO Kevin Modany and CFO Daniel Fitzpatrick hid the real cost from investors, the SEC said.

More than 51,000 students take online courses or attend the 135 ITT Technical Institute campuses located in 39 states. ITT also runs the Daniel Webster College in New Hampshire.

The charges comes on the heels of financial problems at Corinthian College, which was recently shuttered, affecting about 74,000 students.

Submission + - The Mathematician Who Loves Hitting People 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Kate Murphy writes at NYT about mathematician John Urschel whose latest contribution to the mathematical realm was a paper for the Journal of Computational Mathematics with the impressively esoteric title, "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians." "Believe me, I am aware that terms such as multigrid, Fiedler, and vector are not words that people use in their daily lives," says Urshel.

But as an offensive guard for the Baltimore Ravens, John Urschel regularly goes head to head with the top defensive players in the NFL and does his best to keep quarterback Joe Flacco out of harm's way. "I play because I love the game. I love hitting people," Urshel writes. "There's a rush you get when you go out on the field, lay everything on the line and physically dominate the player across from you. This is a feeling I'm (for lack of a better word) addicted to, and I'm hard-pressed to find anywhere else."

Urschel acknowledges that he has faced questions from NFL officials, journalists, fans and fellow mathematicians about why he runs the risk of potential brain injury from playing football when he has "a bright career ahead of me in mathematics" but doesn't feel able to quit. "When I go too long without physical contact I'm not a pleasant person to be around. This is why, every offseason, I train in kickboxing and wrestling in addition to my lifting, running and position-specific drill work."

Comment Spotting GCJ cheating would be an interesting find (Score 1) 220

by jasax (#48927769) Attached to: Anonymous No More: Your Coding Style Can Give You Away
Ditto. They also could have researched if submissions in a given (same) GCJ identity have been (or had a high probability of being...) written by two or more different coders...

The submissions' speed of top ranked coders seen in early stages of the GCJ contest always amazed me (compared, of course, with my turtle sluggishness...)

;-)

Comment Re:Far too expensive (Score 1) 205

by jasax (#48179961) Attached to: The One App You Need On Your Resume If You Want a Job At Google
In a few time (a couple of years) I think Julia (http://julialang.org/) will be a contender. At present is not fully mature for industrial application IMHO (some evolution in syntax is expected, and debugging is ongoing).

Julia is a mix of Matlab, C and a typical scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby....), wraps several numerical libraries (e.g. LAPACK for 'normal' matrices and SuiteSparse for sparse matrices, BLAS functions, PCRE for regular expressions...) and is prepared from its inception for painless running in parallel platforms. Its loaded with a ton of numerical functions (Bessels, Gammas, etc...) A good JIT compiler makes it run many numerical benchmarks almost as fast as compiled C or Fortran (see examples in the front page of http://julialang.org/), and also allows for many of the functions in Julia's standard library to be written in Julia instead of in C.

Julia is a Swiss knife for (numerical and scientific) programming in the making. It is open source and free and at present already runs in most platforms.

Comment Re:more direct connection to producers (Score 1) 191

by jasax (#47956833) Attached to: Why a Chinese Company Is the Biggest IPO Ever In the US
Alibaba has a front end to the final consumer called aliexpress, very similar to ebay. I've already used it 3 or 4 times, and everything went well (expected items and of good quality, good communication, etc...) I was buying sports stuff from Chinese brands, so the risk of getting fakes was low (although there are Chinese fakes of Chinese brands, such as Li Ning sport clothes). Aliexpress even has a scheme of client protection and refunding such as ebay's, which I've never used (I never used ebay's protection service either). And aliexpress is near 100% Chinese sellers and goods, so in the end it is a big Chinese shop.

Regarding prices, most sellers in aliexpress targeting western clients have their prices very similar to ebay, despite here and there you see some savings in the same item - but don't expect more than 20 or 30% except in very rare cases. Indeed I suspect that most ebay's Chinese sellers have also a shop in aliexpress where the goods have prices similar to ebay's.

Submission + - How often do economists commit misconduct? (retractionwatch.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A survey of professional academic economists finds that a large percentage are quite willing to cheat or fake data to get the results they want.

From the paper’s abstract:

This study reports the results of a survey of professional, mostly academic economists about their research norms and scientific misbehavior. Behavior such as data fabrication or plagiarism are (almost) unanimously rejected and admitted by less than 4% of participants. Research practices that are often considered “questionable,” e.g., strategic behavior while analyzing results or in the publication process, are rejected by at least 60%. Despite their low justifiability, these behaviors are widespread. Ninety-four percent report having engaged in at least one unaccepted research practice.

That less than 4% engage in “data fabrication or plagiarism” might seem low, but it is a terrible statistic. Worse, the other results make me think that the many of the 96% who said they didn’t do this were lying. 40% admit to doing what they agree are “questionable” research practices, while 94% admit to committing “at least one unaccepted research practice.”

In other words, almost none of these academic economists can be trusted in the slightest. As the paper notes, “these behaviors are widespread.”

Comment Re:Is there a 'less nerdy version'? (Score 1) 347

by jasax (#47310959) Attached to: Evidence of a Correction To the Speed of Light
Unless between us and the supernova is some "dark matter" :-) (or something alike) that caused the photons to have the extra delay :-)

Indeed nobody has examined yet, IMHO, the path between us and the SN1987a supernova. Or even its "surroundings" when it was forming: did space time deformation or any other mysterious event occurred?

And if in general science often new knowledge erases old "facts", in Astronomy and Astrophysics that happens almost every day. So we have to take all this novelty with a grain of salt... (remember the recent flop of the particles travelling between CERN-Geneva and Grand Sasso...)

Submission + - Physicists Check Their Privilege With An Antimatter Beam

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Jon Butterworth has an interesting article at The Guardian about the idea of standpoint-independence in physics and the absence of “privileged observers.” The ASACUSA experiment at CERN plans to make a beam of antimatter, and measure the energy levels as the beam travels in a vacuum, away from the magnetic fields and away from any annihilating matter. The purpose of the experiment is to test CPT (Charge/Parity/Time) inversion to determine if the universe would look the same if we simultaneously swapped all matter for antimatter, left for right, and backwards in time for forwards in time. In string theory for example it is possible to violate this principle so the ASACUSA people plan to measure those antihydrogen energy levels very precisely. Any difference would mean a violation of CPT inversion symmetry. Physicist Ofer Lahav has some interesting observations in the article about how difficult it is these days for physicists to develop independent points of view on cosmology. "Having been surrounded by a culture in which communication is seen as generally a good thing, this came as a surprise to me, but it is a very good point," writes Butterworth. "We gain confidence in the correctness of ideas if they are arrived at independently from different points of view." A good example is the independent, almost simultaneous development of quantum electrodynamics by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. They all three had very different approaches, and Tomonaga in particular was working in wartime Japan, completely cut off from the others. Yet Freeman Dyson was able to prove that the theories each had provided for the quantum behavior of electrons and photons were not only all equally good at describing nature, but were all mathematically equivalent — that is, the same physics, seen from different points of view. Whether we are using thought experiments, antimatter beams, sophisticated instrumentation, or sending spaceships to the outer solar system, Butterworth says the ability for scientists to loosen the constraints of our own point of view is hugely important. "It is also, I think, closely related to the ability to put ourselves into the place of other people in society and to perceive ourselves as seen by them — to check our privilege, if you like. Imperfect and difficult, but a leap away from a childish self-centeredness and into adulthood."

Comment Re:Summary named the sattelite wrong... (Score 1) 61

by jasax (#46191185) Attached to: Weird Asteroid Itokawa Has a Dual Personality
Its the type of wood (or of several types of carbon, glass fiber, titanium, etc...) layers used in its assembly that dictate the offensiveness of the blade (in a defensive-offensive scale). The gluing, the thickness and the relative placement of the layers also are important in defining the type of the blade, and in conjunction with the type of the rubbers they set the type of the complete TT racket. There are several thousands of commercial blades and rubbers, so the choice is enormous ;-)

Usually its the top layers in both sides that count more to the offensive-defensive grade. Blades are usually symmetrical (both sides are equal) but there are some models prepared for defense in one side and for attack in the other. The offensive blades have usually harder outer layers that cause a faster rebound of the ball when compared with defensive types.

More details about common types of wood in TT blades are found, for example, in http://www.tabletennisdb.com/b...

Comment Re:Summary named the sattelite wrong... (Score 1) 61

by jasax (#46165995) Attached to: Weird Asteroid Itokawa Has a Dual Personality
From ask.com, a bit of culture...

"The Japanese name 'Hayabusa' means a peregrine falcon; a bird that often serves as a metaphor for speed due to its vertical hunting dive. The name was made popular by Japanese professional wrestler Hayabusa, also known as The Masked Falcon."

A bit off-topic, there's also a family of very good offensive table tennis blades from the Xiom brand (http://www.xiomtt.com/) with that name :-) I'm a player and aficionado of TT, so forgive me this hiatus.

Submission + - AMD Announces Sampling Of Eight-Core ARM 'Seattle' Processor (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack the datacenter, breaking the replication of resources and low volume, high-margin parts that have traditionally been Intel's bread-and-butter. AMD is claiming that the eight ARM cores offer 2-4x the compute performance of the Opteron X1250 — which isn't terribly surprising considering that the X1250 is a four-core chip based on the Jaguar CPU, with a relatively low clock speed of 1.1 — 1.9GHz. We still don't know the target clock speeds for the Seattle cores, but the embedded roadmaps AMD has released show the ARM embedded part actually targeting a higher level of CPU performance (and a higher TDP) than the Jaguar core itself.

Submission + - Rare Exoplanet Found in Star Cluster, Orbits Sun's 'Twin' (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Three new exoplanets have been discovered inside a star cluster, which is a rare find as only a handful of such exoplanets are known to exist. However, one of the three new finds is even more remarkable — it orbits a star that appears to be “an almost perfect solar twin.” The discovery was made by astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS exoplanet-hunting instrument attached to the 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile and was confirmed by other collaborating observatories. The astronomers’ attention was focused on the Messier 67 open star cluster, which is located approximately 2,600 light-years away in the constellation Cancer.

Submission + - Regex Golf, XKCD And Peter Norvig (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A recent xkcd cartoon has started some deep academic thinking. When AI expert Peter Novig gets involved you know the algorithms are going to fly. Code Golf is a reasonably well known sport of trying to code an algorithm in the shortest possible code. Regex Golf is similar, but in general the aim is to create a regular expression that accepts the strings in one list and rejects the strings in a second list. The xkcd cartoon in question http://xkcd.com/1313/ revealed that this is but the first step. Programmers like recursion and a regex is a string after all and a regex can process a string so a regex can process a regex and this means you can have meta-regex golf and meta-meta-regex golf.... Yes my friend, it's regexes all the way down!
The hover over text gives a regular expression that matches the last names of the elected US presidents, but not the losers. This started Peter Norvig, the well-known computer scientist, director of research at Google and wearer of brightly colored shirts, thinking about the problem. Is it possible to write a program that would create a regular expression to solve the xkcd problem? The result is an NP hard problem that needs AI like techniques to get an approximate answer.
To find out more read the complete description, including Python code, at Peter Norvig's blog post http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb which ends with the challenge:
"I hope you found this interesting, and perhaps you can find ways to improve my algorithm, or more interesting lists to apply it to. I found it was fun to play with, and I hope this page gives you an idea of how to address problems like this."

Submission + - SpaceShipTwo sets a new altitude record

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo reached an altitude of 71,000 feet, beating out its previous record of 69,000 feet. From the article: 'This time around, Virgin Galactic and Mojave-based Scaled Composites, the plane's builder, tested a new reflective coating on the rocket plane's tail booms. The flight also marked the first tryout for a thruster system that's designed to keep the plane on course when it's above the atmosphere. Virgin Galactic said all of the test objectives were met.'

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