773301
submission
mlimber writes:
The New York Times has a story about how Congress has quietly begun to press for an equal number of women in the hard sciences and engineering under Title IX, which is best known for mandating numerical equality for boys and girls sports for institutions that accept federal funding. The problem is, the article says, it is not merely that women face discrimination from male colleagues, though that is often true, or that they are discouraged from pursuing these fields. Rather, women with aptitude in these areas often simply have other interests and so pursue their education and careers in other fields like law, education, or biology. Opponents of this plan, including many women in scientific fields, say implementing sex-based quotas will actually be detrimental because it will communicate that the women can't compete on even terms with men and will be 'devastating' to the quality of science 'if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women's level of interest.'
554276
submission
mlimber writes:
The Facebook app Scrabulous was written by two Scrabble-loving brothers in India, has over 700,000 users, brings in about $25,000 per month in advertising revenue, and is in flagrant violation of copyright law. The corporate owners of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, have threatened legal action against the creators and have made deals with Electronic Arts and RealNetworks to release official online versions of the game. But according to the NYTimes article, 'Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated,' and according to one consultant to the entertainment industry, 'If you're Hasbro or Mattel, it isn't in your interest to shut this down.' Hasbro's partner RealNetworks is 'working closely' with the piratical brothers, but Mattel says that 'settling with the [brothers] would set a bad precedent' for other board games going online.
554122
submission
mlimber writes:
The Freakonomics blog asks a panel of experts, "Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over? What can we learn from it?" The panel suggests, among other things, that Sony achieved a Pyrrhic victory because DVDs will be out-moded before they reap enough profits to make up for what they (and Toshiba) paid out for both product development and bribes to win the support of content providers.
522612
submission
mlimber writes:
The NYTimes has a story about the discovery of a solar system that is analogous to ours. The 250 or so exoplanets found thus far, 'few of them are in systems that even faintly resemble our own. In many cases, giant Jupiter-like planets are whizzing around inside the orbit of Mercury,' whereas in this new system, 'a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star about half the mass of the Sun, at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun.'
The researchers used gravitational microlensing to detect the planets, and two of the lead authors of the paper to be published in Science are amateur astronomers, one of whom describes herself as 'an ordinary New Zealand mother.'
462796
submission
mlimber writes:
The Freakonomics blog has a post in which they asked six knowledgeable people, Is space exploration is worth the public cost? Their answers are generally in the affirmative and illuminating.
461234
submission
mlimber writes:
Dr Dobb's Journal has a peek at what is coming in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008. Most of the features discussed in the article are related to .NET and web development and the IDE itself, but Herb Sutter, Microsoft software architect and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee, blogged about some developments on the C++ front, including a significantly enhanced MFC for GUI building and inclusion of TR1 (library extensions published by the C++ standards committee, most of which have also been incorporated into the next C++ standard).
461014
submission
mlimber writes:
Nature magazine's news section has an interesting story about how the seats in the US House of Representatives should be divided up. The problem is that the population isn't evenly divided by the number of seats in the House (435). So how should one allocate the fractional parts? The current method tends to favor big states, while a recent proposal by a mathematician is for what he calls a "minimally unfair" allotment. He is predicting "one person, one vote" challenges on this topic in the near future.
440888
submission
mlimber writes:
Slate has an article up on the best free web games. Just what is needed for testing out that new laptop you got for Christmas.
433484
submission
mlimber writes:
Do you ever find yourself in a traffic jam, thinking, "Man, there must be a bad accident up ahead," but as you plod along, you see no evidence of any crash? Some mathematicians have solved the mystery by developing a mathematical model that shows how one driver hitting the brakes a little too hard can cascade into a backup miles behind. The mathematicians' future research will investigate how automatic braking systems may alleviate the problem.
432416
submission
mlimber writes:
According to an article in NewScientist, "Astronomers are puzzling over a powerful cosmic explosion that seems to have detonated in a region of empty space, far away from any nearby galaxy." The leading theory is that the explosion was a star exploding in the gas trail that is yanked out of a galaxy when it passes or begins merging with another. Said the lead author of the study, "Even if the galaxies have stopped forming stars, in the tidal tails you can trigger new episodes of star formation [not to mention detonation]," and indeed the authors have identified two candidate galaxies that give weight to their theory.
430028
submission
mlimber writes:
In the New York Times science section, there is an interesting article discussing the nature of the scientific laws. It comes partly in reply to physicist Paul Davies, whose recent op-ed in same paper lit up the blogosphere and solicited flurry of reader responses to the editorial page. It asks, "Are [laws of nature] merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?" And then it proceeds to survey different views on the matter.
428414
submission
mlimber writes:
The Washington Post has a story about the future of biotech: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.... Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core 'operating system' for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands."
428218
submission
mlimber writes:
The New York Times is running a story about multicore computing and the efforts of Microsoft et al. to try to switch to the new paradigm: "The challenges [of parallel programming] have not dented the enthusiasm for the potential of the new parallel chips at Microsoft, where executives are betting that the arrival of manycore chips — processors with more than eight cores, possible as soon as 2010 — will transform the world of personal computing.... Engineers and computer scientists acknowledge that despite advances in recent decades, the computer industry is still lagging in its ability to write parallel programs."
It mirrors what C++ guru and now Microsoft architect Herb Sutter has been saying in articles such as his "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software." Sutter is part of the C++ standards committee that is working hard to make multithreading standard in C++.
419911
submission
mlimber writes:
The NYTimes is running a story about flying humans who jump from planes or other high locations wearing a wing suits akin to flying squirrels. Their efforts have potential military and X-treme sports applications. They have some good pictures and a video at the site, and here's an excerpt:
Modern suit design features tightly woven nylon sewn between the legs and between the arms and torso, creating wings that fill with air and create lift, allowing for forward motion and aerial maneuvers while slowing descent. As the suits, which cost about $1,000, have become more sophisticated, so have the pilots. The best fliers, and there are not many, can trace the horizontal contours of cliffs, ridges and mountainsides.
YouTube also has some video along these lines, one with a flier "skimming six feet above skiers in the Swiss Alps."
292183
submission
mlimber writes:
The Wall Street Journal has a sobering piece describing the research of medical scholar John Ioannidis, who showed that "in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year ... most published research findings are wrong." The article continues: "These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis.... To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be vigilant. Even so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently replicated. Retractions, while more common, are still relatively infrequent. Findings that have been refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly by other researchers, compounding the errors."
