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An anonymous reader writes "The discovery of Kepler-186f last week has dusted off an interesting theory regarding the fate of humanity and the link between that fate and the possibility of life on other planets. Known as the The Great Filter, this theory attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox (why we haven't found other complex life forms anywhere in our vast galaxy) by introducing the idea of an evolutionary bottleneck which would make the emergence of a life form capable of interstellar colonization statistically rare. As scientists gear up to search for life on Kepler-186f, some people are wondering if humanity has already gone through The Great Filter and miraculously survived or if it's still on our horizon and may lead to our extinction."

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "My last article on prediction markets contained an erroneous assumption, one whose implications are far-reaching enough that they deserve their own article. (And if you read to the end, I'm offering $100 to be split between the readers who submit the best alternative solution or the best counter-argument to the points made here.)" Read below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

In my last article, I wrote:

There could be rules and safeguards to prevent abuses of the system (rules that could be imposed by U.S. law, even if they're not enforced by overseas betting markets), such as not allowing individuals to bet more than $500. (This is already enforced by the Iowa Electronic Markets.) That's small enough to stop individual bettors from trying to manipulate the market through enormous wagers (although they might find ways to do that anyway). It's also small enough that it wouldn't be worth it for any one individual to try and influence a political outcome just to win a bet. You could try to enlist your friends to help you place a collective $10,000 bet on a single outcome, but the more people you rope into your coalition, the greater the chances of someone (a) turning you in for violating the betting laws, or (b) taking the $500 you lent them, and then refusing to pay it back if they win their portion of the wager.

There's an error here, but one subtle enough that even all the commenters (with no shortage of the usual snark) missed it. To begin with, consider what happens if two different betting markets are taking bets at different odds for the same event.

Suppose CappedEx, a futures exchange that limits each user to betting $500, is publishing 4:1 odds of an Obama victory. If you bet $40 that Obama will win and he wins, you get paid $10 (from other users on the exchange), but if he loses, you pay out $40. Meanwhile FreedomEx, an exchange that has no betting limit for any user, is publishing 6:1 odds for Obama winning. Bet $60 on Obama, and you get $10 if he wins, but pay $60 if he loses. On both markets, of course you can bet in the other direction as well.

What do you conclude from this? That the un-capped FreedomEx probably has more accurate odds, and that as James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds) said, betting limits "make [the markets] less accurate" and "real money is what makes it work"? Or that CappedEx, with its safeguards against manipulation, is more reliable, and FreedomEx is being manipulated by someone trying to change the reported odds of their favored candidate winning? Or that there is simply some random fluctuation in the odds as reported by various markets, so they'll naturally diverge at times?

The correct answer is: you should stop wasting time "concluding" things, and get online as soon as possible and make bets in both markets, because if they're allowing bets to be placed at different odds, you can guarantee yourself a profit.

Make a $50 bet in CappedEx on Obama to win (4:1 odds), and a $10 bet in FreedomEx on Romney to win (1:6 odds). If Obama wins, you win $12.50 in the CappedEx market and lose your $10 in FreedomEx, for a $2.50 profit. If Romney wins, you lose $50 in the CappedEx market but win $60 in FreedomEx, for a $10 profit. With a little algebra, you can show that any time the two markets allow you to place bets at different odds ratios, you can make a guaranteed profit by picking a ratio somewhere in the middle (in this case, the two ratios were 1:4 and 1:6, so we picked 1:5) and making separate bets in the two markets in opposite directions, for amounts in that ratio. (A commenter on the Marginal Revolution blog describes exactly how he made an almost risk-free profit through this kind of "pure arbitrage play". He said it was "almost" risk free because of other factors like currency conversion fluctuations.)

Now, any time a good is trading for a lower price in market A than it is in market B, and the costs of shifting the good between the two markets is negligible, traders will start to buy the good in market A and re-sell it for a profit in market B (the traditional definition of "arbitrage"). This increases demand in market A (driving the price up) and increases supply in market B (driving the price down) until the price difference disappears. In the same way, any time two prediction markets have different "market odds" for the same event, as arbitrage players lock in guaranteed profits by placing opposite bets in the two markets, the market odds in the two markets will converge toward each other until the gap is negligible. This is true even if one of the markets has a cap on what people can invest or how much they can stake on any particular outcome.

For Intrade, there couldn't be a worse time for someone to be pointing this out, but it seems logically inescapable: As long as there is a prediction market anywhere in the world that allows unlimited wagering on a particular outcome, all other prediction markets (whether they are capped or not) can be manipulated indirectly, by playing a large wager in the non-capped market. I was wrong to say that you would have to "enlist your friends" to place bets in the capped market, building a large coalition of market-manipulators (and hoping that none of them would rat you out for using them to circumvent wager-limiting rules). By placing a large wager in the non-capped market, and shifting the market odds there so that they're different from the odds in the capped market, you can indirectly "enlist" all the users in the capped market, to place arbitrage bets and make a guaranteed profit. When this happens, the odds in both the capped market and the non-capped market will shift, as the gap between them narrows -- which means you have manipulated the market odds in the capped market, without ever going near it yourself.

In this case, why have caps on the amounts wagered in prediction markets at all? (The Iowa Electronic Markets have a maximum investment balance of $500, and a 2008 paper, "The Promise of Prediction Markets, authored by several prominent economists, advocated the creation of prediction markets with a maximum investment of $2,000.) Presumably the cap is not to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings, since the law already allows multiple ways to do that, by betting on volatile stocks in the stock market. And it won't stop market manipulation, if the capped market can still be manipulated by using another non-capped market as a proxy. Robin Hanson, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and one of the co-authors of the 2008 paper, candidly told me that the cap was just a matter of selling the idea: "As a practical matter, many people's comfort with such markets increases when there is a cap, so they are more likely to accept the proposal with a cap. So it makes one seem more reasonable to propose a cap, if one can get most of the benefits one wanted from such a system that has a cap, relative to one without it."

So is there a solution to the manipulation problem? Actually, is it even a problem? Robin Hansen and Ryan Oprea wrote another paper arguing that manipulators can improve prediction markets, by subsidizing the existing players in the markets and rewarding them for paying attention. (If a "manipulative" bet causes a sudden shift in the reported odds, opportunistic investors can place bets essentially wagering that the odds will return back to their previous level.) Economist Alex Tabarrok makes the same point here. This opportunism also means that the market shift caused by a manipulative bet usually corrects itself within a few minutes.

Presumably, if more people start to take prediction markets seriously, the incentives to manipulate them would increase. As Tabarrok adds, "prediction markets have truly arrived when people think they are worth manipulating". At the same time though, as more people start to take prediction markets seriously, presumably they'll attract more actual users, and since the amount of money required to shift the market is proportional to the amount already invested by everyone else, this means it will require larger amounts of money to shift the market odds to the same degree.

So these economists all seem to think that prediction market manipulation is a good thing, and that the prediction markets themselves are an even better good thing even when they can be manipulated, but now I'm not so sure. If people do think that market odds are worth manipulating, presumably the point is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: People think that Romney's chances have gone up, so they become more incentivized to support him and vote for him, and soon his chances actually have gone up (although possibly not to the full extent of the boost in the manipulated market odds, so the manipulator may still lose money). If you can boost Romney's market odds even for a few minutes just by spending a few tens of thousands of dollars, how much would it cost to sustain the higher odds for several hours -- and what if those hours were at a crucial time in the election or in the news reporting cycle?

What if, contrary to my last assumption, people start to take prediction markets seriously enough to be influenced by them, but the prediction markets don't see a proportionate influx of actual investors and money -- so the cost of manipulating them remains about the same? IF prediction markets gain more influence in people's actual voting decisions, BUT those markets don't see an influx of new users, AND an election is close enough that the market odds could make a difference depending on when they're reported, AND someone spends enough to sustain the manipulated odds during crucial periods during the election... Well, that's a lot of assumptions you have to grant, but individually they're quite plausible -- and if all of them hold true, you could change the outcome of a presidential election for just a few million dollars spent on the prediction markets.

And in fact, if you successfully swung the election, you'd actually win all the wagers you had just placed -- which means that now rich manipulators can throw their election to their preferred candidate, and make a bundle. It also means that all those opportunists who usually act to "correct" the market odds deviations, by taking your free money when you start placing manipulative bets, could realize that your bets might actually change the outcome, and would decline to take your money -- which in turn means it would be even cheaper for manipulators to change the outcome, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. If smart bettors see that once a behemoth starts the market moving, the behemoth will probably win, they'll just get out of its way and clear an easier path.

The same kind of trick wouldn't normally work on the stock market -- if you're wealthy enough that you can increase the share price of a stock by buying enough of it to shift the market, then when you try to reap your profits by unloading the stock, the price will drift back down as you're selling it off. (Or if your purchases do manage to create a self-fulfilling prophecy -- your infusion of cash into the company enables them to realize their plans and become a genuine success -- well, then you're just a successful angel investor, more power to you.) But a presidential election prediction market would be analogous to a stock where if you can keep the price artificially inflated for several crucial hours on November 6th, 2012, then the price becomes permanently locked in at that point and you can sell it off for a profit, regardless of the value of the underlying company.

So, according to my own reasoning, this idea that I was so gung-ho about a few days ago, could not only be used to create a type of financial instrument that rewards manipulation more perversely than anything we've ever seen, but could also let a Saudi prince pick the next leader of the free world on a bet.

I'm not sure if there's a solution. I'm not a libertarian so I was never in favor of prediction markets as a matter of "personal liberty"; I was in favor of them because they're useful insofar as they can harness the wisdom of crowds to convey important information. But if they can be manipulated to influence real-world events, is it worth it?

In keeping with the theory that money does motivate people to think harder about such things, I'm once again offering $100 to be split between the readers who email me the best-argued solutions to this problem -- or the best counter-argument to any point I've made here. Put "prediction markets" in the subject line. If your submission wins a portion of the award, you can either claim the money for yourself, or to be donated to a preferred charity in your name. (I reserve the right to pay out less than the allotted $100 if there aren't enough worthy submissions, but that didn't happen last time.) Any sufficiently valuable comments are eligible even if they're not strictly counter-arguments or suggested alternatives, and I'll post a follow-up article summarizing what people send in. You can't make as much off of me, as you could have made by taking some market manipulator's intentionally losing bet on Intrade that Romney was going to win the election, but at least it's legal.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes "My last article on prediction markets contained an erroneous assumption, one whose implications are far-reaching enough that they deserve their own article. (And if you read to the end, I'm offering $100 to be split between the readers who submit the best alternative solution or the best counter-argument to the points made here.)" Read below for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

In my last article, I wrote:

There could be rules and safeguards to prevent abuses of the system (rules that could be imposed by U.S. law, even if they're not enforced by overseas betting markets), such as not allowing individuals to bet more than $500. (This is already enforced by the Iowa Electronic Markets.) That's small enough to stop individual bettors from trying to manipulate the market through enormous wagers (although they might find ways to do that anyway). It's also small enough that it wouldn't be worth it for any one individual to try and influence a political outcome just to win a bet. You could try to enlist your friends to help you place a collective $10,000 bet on a single outcome, but the more people you rope into your coalition, the greater the chances of someone (a) turning you in for violating the betting laws, or (b) taking the $500 you lent them, and then refusing to pay it back if they win their portion of the wager.

There's an error here, but one subtle enough that even all the commenters (with no shortage of the usual snark) missed it. To begin with, consider what happens if two different betting markets are taking bets at different odds for the same event.

Suppose CappedEx, a futures exchange that limits each user to betting $500, is publishing 4:1 odds of an Obama victory. If you bet $40 that Obama will win and he wins, you get paid $10 (from other users on the exchange), but if he loses, you pay out $40. Meanwhile FreedomEx, an exchange that has no betting limit for any user, is publishing 6:1 odds for Obama winning. Bet $60 on Obama, and you get $10 if he wins, but pay $60 if he loses. On both markets, of course you can bet in the other direction as well.

What do you conclude from this? That the un-capped FreedomEx probably has more accurate odds, and that as James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom of Crowds) said, betting limits "make [the markets] less accurate" and "real money is what makes it work"? Or that CappedEx, with its safeguards against manipulation, is more reliable, and FreedomEx is being manipulated by someone trying to change the reported odds of their favored candidate winning? Or that there is simply some random fluctuation in the odds as reported by various markets, so they'll naturally diverge at times?

The correct answer is: you should stop wasting time "concluding" things, and get online as soon as possible and make bets in both markets, because if they're allowing bets to be placed at different odds, you can guarantee yourself a profit.

Make a $50 bet in CappedEx on Obama to win (4:1 odds), and a $10 bet in FreedomEx on Romney to win (1:6 odds). If Obama wins, you win $12.50 in the CappedEx market and lose your $10 in FreedomEx, for a $2.50 profit. If Romney wins, you lose $50 in the CappedEx market but win $60 in FreedomEx, for a $10 profit. With a little algebra, you can show that any time the two markets allow you to place bets at different odds ratios, you can make a guaranteed profit by picking a ratio somewhere in the middle (in this case, the two ratios were 1:4 and 1:6, so we picked 1:5) and making separate bets in the two markets in opposite directions, for amounts in that ratio. (A commenter on the Marginal Revolution blog describes exactly how he made an almost risk-free profit through this kind of "pure arbitrage play". He said it was "almost" risk free because of other factors like currency conversion fluctuations.)

Now, any time a good is trading for a lower price in market A than it is in market B, and the costs of shifting the good between the two markets is negligible, traders will start to buy the good in market A and re-sell it for a profit in market B (the traditional definition of "arbitrage"). This increases demand in market A (driving the price up) and increases supply in market B (driving the price down) until the price difference disappears. In the same way, any time two prediction markets have different "market odds" for the same event, as arbitrage players lock in guaranteed profits by placing opposite bets in the two markets, the market odds in the two markets will converge toward each other until the gap is negligible. This is true even if one of the markets has a cap on what people can invest or how much they can stake on any particular outcome.

For Intrade, there couldn't be a worse time for someone to be pointing this out, but it seems logically inescapable: As long as there is a prediction market anywhere in the world that allows unlimited wagering on a particular outcome, all other prediction markets (whether they are capped or not) can be manipulated indirectly, by playing a large wager in the non-capped market. I was wrong to say that you would have to "enlist your friends" to place bets in the capped market, building a large coalition of market-manipulators (and hoping that none of them would rat you out for using them to circumvent wager-limiting rules). By placing a large wager in the non-capped market, and shifting the market odds there so that they're different from the odds in the capped market, you can indirectly "enlist" all the users in the capped market, to place arbitrage bets and make a guaranteed profit. When this happens, the odds in both the capped market and the non-capped market will shift, as the gap between them narrows -- which means you have manipulated the market odds in the capped market, without ever going near it yourself.

In this case, why have caps on the amounts wagered in prediction markets at all? (The Iowa Electronic Markets have a maximum investment balance of $500, and a 2008 paper, "The Promise of Prediction Markets, authored by several prominent economists, advocated the creation of prediction markets with a maximum investment of $2,000.) Presumably the cap is not to prevent unlucky investors from losing their life's savings, since the law already allows multiple ways to do that, by betting on volatile stocks in the stock market. And it won't stop market manipulation, if the capped market can still be manipulated by using another non-capped market as a proxy. Robin Hanson, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and one of the co-authors of the 2008 paper, candidly told me that the cap was just a matter of selling the idea: "As a practical matter, many people's comfort with such markets increases when there is a cap, so they are more likely to accept the proposal with a cap. So it makes one seem more reasonable to propose a cap, if one can get most of the benefits one wanted from such a system that has a cap, relative to one without it."

So is there a solution to the manipulation problem? Actually, is it even a problem? Robin Hansen and Ryan Oprea wrote another paper arguing that manipulators can improve prediction markets, by subsidizing the existing players in the markets and rewarding them for paying attention. (If a "manipulative" bet causes a sudden shift in the reported odds, opportunistic investors can place bets essentially wagering that the odds will return back to their previous level.) Economist Alex Tabarrok makes the same point here. This opportunism also means that the market shift caused by a manipulative bet usually corrects itself within a few minutes.

Presumably, if more people start to take prediction markets seriously, the incentives to manipulate them would increase. As Tabarrok adds, "prediction markets have truly arrived when people think they are worth manipulating". At the same time though, as more people start to take prediction markets seriously, presumably they'll attract more actual users, and since the amount of money required to shift the market is proportional to the amount already invested by everyone else, this means it will require larger amounts of money to shift the market odds to the same degree.

So these economists all seem to think that prediction market manipulation is a good thing, and that the prediction markets themselves are an even better good thing even when they can be manipulated, but now I'm not so sure. If people do think that market odds are worth manipulating, presumably the point is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: People think that Romney's chances have gone up, so they become more incentivized to support him and vote for him, and soon his chances actually have gone up (although possibly not to the full extent of the boost in the manipulated market odds, so the manipulator may still lose money). If you can boost Romney's market odds even for a few minutes just by spending a few tens of thousands of dollars, how much would it cost to sustain the higher odds for several hours -- and what if those hours were at a crucial time in the election or in the news reporting cycle?

What if, contrary to my last assumption, people start to take prediction markets seriously enough to be influenced by them, but the prediction markets don't see a proportionate influx of actual investors and money -- so the cost of manipulating them remains about the same? IF prediction markets gain more influence in people's actual voting decisions, BUT those markets don't see an influx of new users, AND an election is close enough that the market odds could make a difference depending on when they're reported, AND someone spends enough to sustain the manipulated odds during crucial periods during the election... Well, that's a lot of assumptions you have to grant, but individually they're quite plausible -- and if all of them hold true, you could change the outcome of a presidential election for just a few million dollars spent on the prediction markets.

And in fact, if you successfully swung the election, you'd actually win all the wagers you had just placed -- which means that now rich manipulators can throw their election to their preferred candidate, and make a bundle. It also means that all those opportunists who usually act to "correct" the market odds deviations, by taking your free money when you start placing manipulative bets, could realize that your bets might actually change the outcome, and would decline to take your money -- which in turn means it would be even cheaper for manipulators to change the outcome, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. If smart bettors see that once a behemoth starts the market moving, the behemoth will probably win, they'll just get out of its way and clear an easier path.

The same kind of trick wouldn't normally work on the stock market -- if you're wealthy enough that you can increase the share price of a stock by buying enough of it to shift the market, then when you try to reap your profits by unloading the stock, the price will drift back down as you're selling it off. (Or if your purchases do manage to create a self-fulfilling prophecy -- your infusion of cash into the company enables them to realize their plans and become a genuine success -- well, then you're just a successful angel investor, more power to you.) But a presidential election prediction market would be analogous to a stock where if you can keep the price artificially inflated for several crucial hours on November 6th, 2012, then the price becomes permanently locked in at that point and you can sell it off for a profit, regardless of the value of the underlying company.

So, according to my own reasoning, this idea that I was so gung-ho about a few days ago, could not only be used to create a type of financial instrument that rewards manipulation more perversely than anything we've ever seen, but could also let a Saudi prince pick the next leader of the free world on a bet.

I'm not sure if there's a solution. I'm not a libertarian so I was never in favor of prediction markets as a matter of "personal liberty"; I was in favor of them because they're useful insofar as they can harness the wisdom of crowds to convey important information. But if they can be manipulated to influence real-world events, is it worth it?

In keeping with the theory that money does motivate people to think harder about such things, I'm once again offering $100 to be split between the readers who email me the best-argued solutions to this problem -- or the best counter-argument to any point I've made here. Put "prediction markets" in the subject line. If your submission wins a portion of the award, you can either claim the money for yourself, or to be donated to a preferred charity in your name. (I reserve the right to pay out less than the allotted $100 if there aren't enough worthy submissions, but that didn't happen last time.) Any sufficiently valuable comments are eligible even if they're not strictly counter-arguments or suggested alternatives, and I'll post a follow-up article summarizing what people send in. You can't make as much off of me, as you could have made by taking some market manipulator's intentionally losing bet on Intrade that Romney was going to win the election, but at least it's legal.

Hugh Pickens writes "Yoni Appelbaum reports in the Atlantic that as part of their coursework in a class that studies historical hoaxes, undergraduates at George Mason University successfully fooled Wikipedia's community of editors, launching a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of a fictitious 19th-century serial killer named Joe Scafe. The students, enrolled in T. Mills Kelly's course, Lying About the Past, used newspaper databases to identify four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, along with victims of broadly similar crimes, and created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. But while a similar page created previously by Kelly's students went undetected for years, when students posted the story to Reddit, it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries' recent vintage and others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. Why did the hoaxes succeed in 2008 on Wikipedia and not in 2012 on Reddit? According to Appelbaum, the answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. 'Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed,' writes Appelbaum. 'Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism (PDF).""

kodiaktau writes "An interesting article from the BBC News Magazine explores the reasons why most fantasy worlds use British as their primary accent. Citing specific examples from recent and upcoming shows and movies like Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit and Game of Thrones, the article concludes British accents are 'sufficiently exotic,' 'comprehensible' and have a 'splash of otherness.' It would be odd to think of a fantasy world having a New Jersey accent, or even a Mid-West accent, which tends to be the default for TV and movies in the U.S., but how do UK viewers feel about having British as a default? More specifically, what about the range of UK accents, like Scottish, Welsh, Cockney? The International Dialects of English Archive shows at least nine regional sounds, with dozens of sub-regional pronunciations in England alone. In the U.S., there have always been many regional accents that might be used in interesting ways. Filmmakers should consider looking at speech accents from other areas of the world to create more interesting dialects."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that officials at George Mason University are quickly finding out that they have vastly underestimated interest in the school's new bachelor's degree in video game design. 'We've been overwhelmed,' says Scott M. Martin, assistant dean for technology, research, and advancement at GMU. 'Our anticipated enrollment for the fall is 500 percent higher than we expected.' George Mason first offered the program last fall, when officials anticipated that it would enroll about 30 full-time students, but currently 200 students are enrolled and that number is increasing. Course titles under the program include 'History of Computer Game Design,' while other courses focus on computer programming, digital arts, and graphics and motion capture. Although many colleges offer courses and degrees in computer gaming in the United States, GMU offers the only four-year program in the DC area, an important market for gaming because serious games — those used to train military and special operations, doctors, and others who use simulators — are becoming a market force in the region because of the proximity to federal government centers."

Noksagt writes "Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia's George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU's Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format."

Noksagt writes "Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Endnote reference management software, has filed a $10 million lawsuit and a request for injunction against the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia's George Mason University develops Zotero, a free and open source plugin to Mozilla Firefox that researchers may use to manage citations. Thomson alleges that GMU's Center for History and New Media reverse engineered Endnote and that the beta version of Zotero can convert (in violation of the Endnote EULA) the proprietary style files that are used by Endnote to format citations into the open CSL file format."

eldavojohn writes "A new research paper is creating some buzz about the roles of computer engineering in biology. Historically, computational techniques in genome sequencing have proved useful in predicting which DNA sequence produces which amino acid and which amino acid sequence produces which protein. Now, this new research is leading towards a robust model of proteins and their messaging systems. This is one step further in understanding the basics of life and, consequently, pushes us closer to being able to emulate organisms entirely from the bottom up instead of our failed prior approaches of from the top down. A long way from perfect, but an opening into a wide field of study and maybe even a new division of biology."

eldavojohn writes "Google is currently fighting many fronts in its ability to show small images returned in a search from websites. Most recently, Google won the case against them in which they were displaying nude thumbnails of a photographer's work from his site. Prior to this, Google was barred from displaying copyrighted content, even when linking it to the site (owner) from its search results. The verdict: "Saying the District Court erred, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that Google could legally display those images under the fair use doctrine of copyright law." This sets a rather hefty precedence in a search engine's ability to blindly serve content safely under fair use."

eldavojohn writes "While other companies are marrying the obvious functionalities to cell phones (calendar, MP3 player, GPS, etc.), Microsoft is aiming for it to be your next computer. Microsoft Research chief Craig Mundie said that, "Microsoft has a research project called 'Fone+' that would allow the phone to work with a TV as a secondary display, and one that could allow video stored on the device to be played back on the television.""

eldavojohn writes "Reuters is running a story on a study that claims "Online video sites that sell shows and movies such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes will likely peak this year as more programming is made available on free outlets supported by advertising." Many channels have wised up to offering their content hosted from their own sites for free — with commercials — to cut out iTunes as the middle man. End result? Predictions that services like iTunes-Video have no future."

eldavojohn writes "ONLamp.com is running an interesting article about rethinking how the community distributes Linux and the open source applications that often come with Linux. The author isn't arguing that Linux needs to become a full blown web OS over night but instead, asking if the community should be considering 'Software as a Service' and what he means by that is perhaps many of the open source applications that run on Linux should be available through a browser. The reasons for this are obvious, the code is open so anyone could host it, it would be platform independent so anyone could use it and it might attract more users to the Linux environment. The obvious note here is that many of the enterprise software makers are switching to Software as a Service, shouldn't the open source community investigate the possibility of a Web OS?"

eldavojohn writes "NASA is holding another scientific challenge to see which autonomous robot can move the most regolith in 30 minutes. The finer details: 'To win the cash prizes for NASA's Regolith Challenge, teams must demonstrate fully autonomous robots capable of collecting at least 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of mock Moon dirt within 30 minutes. Whichever robot moves the most regolith over the benchmark limit, while still meeting contest specifications, wins, NASA said. But in order to compete, lunar regolith excavators must weigh less than 88 pounds (40 kilograms) and run on less than 30 kilowatts of power, according to contest rules.'"

eldavojohn writes "There's no doubt been a lot of analysis done recently on energy consumption, especially on the road. Now, a study released today reveals that cars with traffic flow sensors built into them can perform just as efficiently as hybrids. The concept of an 'intelligent' car that communicates with the highway or other cars is an old idea, but the idea of them using sensors to anticipate braking could vastly reduce fossil fuel consumption. From the article, 'Under the US and European cycles, hybrid-matching fuel economy was reached with a look-ahead predictability of less than 60 seconds. If the predictability was boosted to 180 seconds, the newly-intelligent car was 33 percent more fuel-efficient than when it was unconverted.' Now, the real question will be whether or not you can convince consumers that the three minutes of coasting up to a red light or halted traffic is worth the 33 percent less gas and replacing your brake pads/cylinders less often."

eldavojohn writes "Scientists in China have announced finding the gene that makes us human. The article explains that prior work has shown that humans, as compared with the great apes from which we diverged over 5 million years ago, have a longer form of a protein (type II neuropsin) located in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain. From the article: 'Gene sequencing revealed a mutation specific to humans that triggers a change in the splicing pattern of the neuropsin gene, creating a new splicing site and a longer protein. Introducing this mutation into chimpanzee DNA resulted in the creation of type II neuropsin. "Hence, the human-specific mutation is not only necessary but also sufficient in creating the novel splice form," the authors state.' The team is urging further analysis of the extra 45 amino acids in type II neuropsin since they believe that chain may cause protein structural and functional changes. The research didn't link anything with this protein, simply identifying it as a very distinct difference between us and our closest cousins."

eldavojohn writes "Thailand is hitting YouTube with charges of lese majeste (up to 15 years in prison) regarding the recent videos on YouTube showing the king next to feet, something extremely offensive in Thailand. 'Since the first clip, more new videos mocking the king have appeared on YouTube, including pictures of the monarch that had been digitally altered to make him resemble a monkey. Thailand's 79-year-old king, almost universally adored by Thais, is the world's longest-reigning monarch, and one of the few who is still protected by tough laws that prohibit any insult against the royal family.'"

eldavojohn writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been talking smack about DRM and has recently issued a verbal offer to major music lables stating that if they are willing to lose the DRM, he'd be willing to raise his 99 cent price for those iTunes songs. These tracks (such as the recent EMI deal) would also have better sound quality & cost about 30 cents more."

eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is running a piece on a recent speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs about DRM free music. While we know that Jobs is a self proclaimed proponent of DRM free music who's not all talk, he's now said that 'by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions. I think we're going to achieve that.' Jobs pointed out what's obvious to us, the consumers, but isn't obvious to the music industry — 'People want to own their music.' He also dismissed subscription based music as a failure, and claimed a lot of other music labels are intrigued by the EMI deal."

eldavojohn writes "Scientists are hoping that the 'coaxial cable' style nanotube they developed will resolve energy issues that come with converting sunlight to energy. The plants currently have us beat in this department but research is discovering new ways to eliminate inefficiencies in transferring photons to energy. Traditional methods involve exciting electrons to the point of jumping to a higher state which leaves 'holes.' Unfortunately, these electrons and holes remain in the same regions and therefore tend to recombine. The new nanotubes hope to route these excited electrons off in the same way a coaxial cable allows a return route for electrons. End result is fewer electrons settling back into their holes once they are elevated out of them yielding a higher return in energy."

eldavojohn writes "The electronic voting machine has soured another election. Some French voters have reportedly turned away in disgust after facing up to two hours in lines to use the machines. Further, the article reports, 'Researchers at Paul Verlaine University in Metz said that trials on two of the three machines used in France showed that four people out of every seven aged over 65 could not get their votes recorded.' This article concentrates primarily on usability and efficiency, but surprisingly mentions little (aside from user trust issues) about the security embodied in the machines or whether it was satisfactory. I think all three aspects are important to anyone aiming to produce voting machines. The manufacturer of these particular machines is France Élection."

eldavojohn writes "Space.com's Mystery Monday has an article proposing a hypothesis that our solar system's undulations directly affects biodiversity on earth through cosmic-ray exposure. There's data that, through the fossil record, shows us earth's biodiversity peaking again and again until a great cataclysmic period where it is greatly reduced. The theory essentially suggests that this 62 million year cycle can be attributed to how our solar system moves within the milky way galaxy which turns out to be a 64 million year cycle. It's a plausible explanation though very tough to prove, hopefully we don't have to wait around 64 million years to draw a conclusion on this hypothesis."

eldavojohn writes "The internet in China is diverging rapidly from the state that the rest of the world enjoys it. Recent news of China's leader, Hu Jintao, has revealed a strategy to distort it even further. Jintao is tackling the issue his Communist party is having with the youth of China that are too young to remember Chairman Mao and the fanaticism the populace had for him. A strategy he is proposing is 'cleaning up' China's internet & lacing it with a little propaganda like the need to 'Consolidate the guiding status of Marxism in the ideological sphere' online. The meeting notes also declared that 'Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance.'"

eldavojohn writes "The shots you take in CONE Sutro Forest don't come from shotguns or sniper rifles. In the game, players manipulate remote control cameras, taking pictures of birds and classifying them. It starts next week with the premise being that the more birds you take pictures of and classify correctly, the more points you get. It's more of an experiment in collaborative technology than a game ... but if you can get your users to do work for you and have fun at the same time, you might have something big."

eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is covering an interesting year-old paper that proposes an alternative six-dimensional theory of space and time. George Sparling's proposition, based on Einstein's general relativity and Elie Cartan's triality, is a twistor space (which I've only read of in Roger Penrose's latest work). The gist is that space-time is modeled not by four dimensions but by six, and that the extra two dimensions are time-like. Sparling is hoping that tests from the Large Hadron Collider will help prove his theory. The paper is heavy but the PhysOrg article summarizes it nicely."

eldavojohn writes "In my browser, I regularly go to the tools menu and clear my private data. This includes my cookies. As a result, people like me who destroy cookies by the thousands may be inflating estimates of Web traffic by up to 150 percent. People have good reasons for clearing out cookies — we've heard about bad cookies before (and I think the FCC is still investigating the issue). But every time you delete cookies, many of the sites you've visited count you as a new visitor next time."

eldavojohn writes "Researchers at UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science managed to push our control of frequencies to another level when they hit a submillimeter 324 gigahertz frequency. As any signal geek out there might tell you, this is a non-trivial task. 'With traditional 90-nanometer CMOS circuit approaches, it is virtually impossible to generate usable submillimeter signals with a frequency higher than about 190 GHz. That's because conventional oscillator circuits are nonlinear systems in which increases in frequency are accompanied by a corresponding loss in gain or efficiency and an increase in noise, making them unsuitable for practical applications.' The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into."

eldavojohn writes "The Indiana Court of Appeals has ruled that a judge violated the constitution after placing a juvenile on probation for an expletive laden MySpace entry on the principal. The court decided that the juvenile's free speech rights had been unconstitutionally revoked, and the original judge had suppressed politically motivated free speech since the comments were directly attacking school policy. I think we are starting to see a fine line develop online as it did with print — bullying & slander are punishable while we have to allow criticism of ideas no matter how harsh it is."

eldavojohn writes "Recently, the city government of Tokyo has requested that political speeches to be pulled from YouTube, claiming that it gave certain hopefuls an advantage over others for Sunday's election. You may recall YouTube being in trouble with more than a few countries in the past. 'Japanese election law limits the broadcasting of speeches, which are aired only on public broadcaster NHK. Soon after the race kicked off last month, the speech by one fringe candidate, street musician Koichi Toyama, 36, has become a popular attraction on YouTube due to his eccentric, confrontational approach.' Is it fair that some government officials are being viewed more on YouTube than others or is it simply leveling the playing field for anyone with a message since it costs very little to put a video on YouTube?"

eldavojohn writes "I've heard a lot of talk about software being used to detect pirated media anywhere on the web, but haven't seen a lot of details. PhysOrg has a good article on one of the tools out there. Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection (ACID) boasts a patented technology dubbed 'meaning-based computing' that is reportedly capable of finding relationships among 1,000 different types of files. The important thing is that this is not tagging-based searching. 'Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.' For more details on how this magic works, check out Autonomy's patent and the many patents by its subdivision, Virage."

eldavojohn writes "A non-profit alumni group from the University of Wisconsin (WARF) has suffered a preliminary ruling against three of their recent patents regarding stem cells. Given that these patents have been upheld in prior rulings, there is a lot of speculation that they will be upheld in a future court case. From the PhysOrg article: 'The patents, which cover virtually all stem cell research in the country, have brought in at least $3.2 million and could net much more money before they expire in 2015, the newspaper said. Companies wanting to study the cells must buy licenses costing $75,000 to $400,000. The newspaper said WARF recently started waiving the fees if the research is conducted at universities or by non-profit groups.' Should universities (or groups within universities) be allowed to hold patents and intellectual property while at the same time gaining donations and grants as an educational institution — or for that matter government funds?"

SlashRating^© $slashrating slashdottit! ^tm eldavojohn writes "ThinkGeek (Owned by same parent corporation as Slashdot) has recently started selling WiiHelms which allows the user to effortlessly play the Wii without tirelessly moving their arms around. An added foot pedal controls the A, B button pushing to minimize activity. According to the article, "After extensive scientific study it was found that manipulating muscles in your neck for 10 minutes uses 64% less energy than waving your arms about like a lunatic." Indeed, after watching the demonstration video, I myself will order four or five — I'm sick of flailing my arms around like a chump. Don't forget to check out ThinkGeek's other offerings today including inhalable caffeine sticks, the 8-bit tie and the most amazing T-shirt ever."

eldavojohn writes "Dust off your fundamental physics books, an aspiring astrophysicist by the name of Alex Ignatiev has published a paper that proposes testing special cases of Newton's Second Law on earth's surface. His goal is sort of ambitious. The time he has to test his theory is only 1/1000th of a second, twice each year, in either Greenland or Antarctica. What would he look for? Spontaneous motion. From his interview with PhysOrg: 'If these experiments were to take place, Ignatiev says that scientists would look for what he calls the SHLEM effect. This acronym stands for static high latitude equinox modified inertia and would be noticed in a condition where the forces of the earth's rotation on its axis, and of the orbital force of the earth as it moves around the sun, would be canceled out ... In the end, if Newton's Second Law could be violated, he would be forcing physicists to reevaluate much of what we understand derived from that law — which is quite a bit.'"

eldavojohn writes "Strange as it may sound, Mexico City is giving it their all in their efforts to crack down on gun related violence. The chief of police has 'announced that anyone prepared to surrender a high-calibre weapon, such as a machine gun, will receive a free computer in exchange. And, perhaps in the interests of scale and fair play, anyone turning in a smaller calibre handgun will be presented with either cash remuneration or an Xbox videogame console.'"

eldavojohn writes "After yet another contentious vote on the .xxx concept, ICANN has finally rejected the pornography TLD. The debate has gone on for quite some time, and the 9-5 decision was the third time a decision was reached on the subject. This is the second time the body has ruled against the idea, and is likely the last time we'll see it come up for vote any time soon. One member abstained from voting. From the article: 'Many of the board members said they were concerned about the possibility that ICANN could find itself in the content regulation business if the domain name was approved. Others criticized that, saying ICANN should not block new domains over fears like that, noting that local, state and national laws could be used to decide what is pornographic and what is not. Other board members said they believed that opposition to the domain by the adult industry, including Web masters, content providers and others, was proof that the issue was divisive and that .xxx was not a welcome domain.'"

eldavojohn writes "Steve Ballmer spoke to the Seattle PI this week, commenting that Google's pace of employee growth is 'insane,' and the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising. He referred to Google's non-search efforts as 'cute.' Google's current number of employees is nearly doubling each year. 'I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.' Mr. Ballmer went on complain that, in general, competition for good programmers has become an issue. Even 'hedge funds' are looking for skilled coders, making the HR fight between the two companies that much more challenging."

eldavojohn writes "Recently in the UK, a Biobank project has been rolled out to 'unpick' the genetic basis of diseases such as cancer on half a million volunteers. This is based on the success of a three-month pilot phase conducted on 3,800 participants. From the article: 'Over the next four years, blood and urine samples will be collected from volunteers aged 40 to 69, to help scientists unravel the genetic foundations of common diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and joint problems. If you live in the UK, agreeing to this survey may involve a little more than you would expect."

An anonymous reader writes "There are lots of multi-robot designs out there. Most are either research platforms well over $2K (often $10K or more), or are hobbyist bots under $400 with tiny brains and few sensors. But George Mason University's new FlockBots wiki is interesting. They're trying to pack as much functionality as possible into a roughly $800, 7" mobile swarmbot, and publish the design and software as a free and open spec. So far their design includes a wireless 200MHz Gumstix Linux computer, a camera, range and bump sensors, wheel encoders, a can gripper, and lots more. It's a great-looking design and I think the cost could drop to $500 with vendors doing consolidation."

Different River writes "Someone broke into the administrative computers at George Mason University and accessed personal information, including social security numbers, of 30,000 students, faculty, and staff. "Before the hacking, the university was in the process of replacing students' Social Security numbers with other internal numbers to protect against identity theft." Looks like they just missed it."

JT Olds writes "Apparently George Mason University is running a project to document differences in speech and accents from different backgrounds and the like. They have a paragraph that 306 sample readers have read and recorded, and all of these sound files are categorized by background, gender, age, and other things. They say that this is primarily for teaching and learning, and is especially useful for any linguists out there, but I just thought it was cool. The sound bytes are released under the Creative Commons license. Of course, the Google cache of the main frame is here. As a side note, I did get the link to this from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins."

JT Olds writes "Apparently George Mason University is running a project to document differences in speech and accents from different backgrounds and the like. They have a paragraph that 306 sample readers have read and recorded, and all of these sound files are categorized by background, gender, age, and other things. They say that this is primarily for teaching and learning, and is especially useful for any linguists out there, but I just thought it was cool. The sound bytes are released under the Creative Commons license. Of course, the Google cache of the main frame is here. As a side note, I did get the link to this from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins."

doom writes "The general concept of Robert Ehrlich's book is absolutely superb: Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True. Here, someone with a technical background (Ehrlich is a physics prof at George Mason) and an open mind investigates in detail a number of 'crazy' ideas, to see if there's anything to them. The execution of the idea is not quite as superb, but Robert Ehrlich has done better at this difficult job than anyone else I know of. This book is highly recommend as a good review of the evidence on some scientific controversies." Read on for doom's review, in which he goes through Erlich's nine-part list, but mind the spoilers. Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True author Robert Ehrlich pages 244 publisher Princeton University Press rating Great idea, very good execution reviewer doom ISBN 0691070016 summary A scientist evaluates some "crazy ideas"

Here's the deck of nine ideas under consideration:

• More Guns Mean Less Crime
• AIDS is Not Caused by HIV
• Sun Exposure is Beneficial
• Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are Beneficial
• The Solar System Has Two Suns
• Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic Origins
• Time Travel is Possible
• Faster-than-Light Particles Exist
• There Was No Big Bang

The game here is that Ehrlich is not telling you in advance what his conclusions were. He says he's tried to keep an open mind, and claims that during his investigations he actually changed his mind about some things (though he never says about what exactly).

So in this review I'm going to give you generalities first, and bury "the butler did it" type information after a SPOILER warning.

One of the problems with the execution of this work is that you can pretty often tell when Ehrlich is enthusiastic about an idea just from his general tone as he writes about it... and conversely, in retrospect I think I should've been able to spot when he disagreed with, because the writing in those chapters was a little confusing.

Part of his schtick is that at the end of each chapter he rates the idea on a scale of 0 to 4 "cuckoos". Oddly enough I often find that I strongly disagree with his cuckoo ratings even just based on the evidence that he presents. But the absolute magnitude of my disagreements are typically no more than a single "cuckoo".

I was worried about some of his evaluation criteria (see the introduction available on-line as a sample chapter), because he includes several points that strike me as fairly dicey: "Who proposed the idea?"; "How attached is the proposer to the idea?" and "Does the proposer have an agenda?" These all relate to judging the person rather than the idea itself. (Consider that "consider the source" and "ad hominem argument" are pretty much the same as far as logic goes.) But he does clearly understand that these are just rules of thumb, and I note with some amusement that he doesn't resort to these particular rules anywhere in the later chapters. He's more interested in the logic of the arguments, which is as it should be.

I could bring up lots of quibbles (and I probably will after the spoiler warning), but overall I found this to be a great breezy read. I learned quite a bit from it. While nothing here made me do a reversal of my beliefs, I was often surprised that the evidence for something was stronger or weaker than I'd supposed.

Here we have an educated, astute, person doing a relatively independent review of some controversial, interesting technical subjects. Why aren't there more books like this?

Ah, but at least there's one more! I see that a sequel has just come out: Eight Preposterous Propositions: From the Genetics of Homosexuality to the Benefits of Global Warming . I bet I'll be submitting a review on that one shortly ...

Anyway, now into the nitty gritty. Here's your SPOILER WARNING. Skip the following if you want to play the "guess where he's going" game with this book. Let's take it chapter by chapter:

More Guns Mean Less Crime

I'm a "right to bear arms" kind of guy myself, and I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent. Ehrlich argues persuasively that the statistical evidence for this is very weak. I appreciate the fact that Ehrlich concludes that both the pro and anti gun sides are nuts: he rates them 3 and 2 "cuckoos" respectively, where a 3 is "almost certainly not true" and 2 is "very likely not true."

But here, we come to my first strong disagreement with him. If the effects aren't strong enough to measure, why the asymmetry in the "cuckoo" rating for the pro and anti side? I might rate them both at a 2 myself.

AIDS is Not Caused by HIV

I've had the impression that the the Duesberg hypothesis was pretty screwy, but I was willing to tentatively consider it might have something of value. For example, what about the possibility that multiple diseases are now being diagnosed incorrectly as one single syndrome "HIV"?

But Ehrlich's analysis satisfies me that there's not much of scientific value in Duesberg's ideas at all. I don't argue with his 3 cuckoo rating (but I wouldn't blame you if you thought it deserved the full 4).

Sun Exposure is Beneficial

Ehrlich concludes that this looks fairly plausible, and gives it a 0 cuckoo rating, pretty much as I would have expected. Many people might find this surprising though, certainly the popular impression these days seems to be that sunlight is deadly.

Low Doses of Nuclear Radiation Are Beneficial

Here, Ehrlich lays out the case for "radiation hormesis", and I really don't think this is that fantastic a notion (the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a matter of dosage, why wouldn't this be true of radiation?). But radiation is so demonized in the popular imagination that "radiation is good for you" comes off an insane joke. Ehrlich takes it seriously, and essentially concludes that while there are reasons for suspecting that this effect exists, it hasn't been entirely established. And here we have one of my quibbles: he awards it 1 cuckoo, which translates to "probably not true, but who knows". But there is no reason for saying it's probably not true. If something is not crazy, just not established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why not?"

The Solar System Has Two Suns

This is the "Nemesis" hypothesis, which it will probably come as no surprise is rated at 2 cuckoos. The short version of the story: originally they looked at part of the extinction record, and it looked like there was a definite cycle. But if you look at the whole record it doesn't seem to be there.

Oil, Coal, and Gas Have Abiogenic Origins

This is subject that's been of some interest to me, ever since I heard Thomas Gold give a talk on this idea about a decade ago. It turns out that this is now looking much less like "an intriguing possibility" and much more like a truth awaiting a few funerals before it will be declared established. The odds are good that "fossil fuels" don't actually come from fossils, rather they're from hydrocarbons that pre-existed the formation of the earth, which means we're probably not going to run out of them. (So that means we can ignore those environmental wackos, right? Nope: imagine what happens to the atmosphere if we keep ramping up the rate at which we burn this stuff.)

Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but maybe he should have invented a "-1 cuckoo" for this one.

Time Travel is Possible

2 cuckoos: no surprises.

Faster-than-Light Particles Exist

Ehrlich mentions in his introduction in the interests of "full disclosure" that he's actually strongly attached to one of the ideas discussed here (the existence of tachyons), but by the time I'd gotten to that chapter I'd entirely forgotten about this, and I was disappointed to realize that he was being an advocate, not an independent reviewer (it includes a picture of him wearing a "no tardy-centrism" T-shirt).

Ehrlich rates this at 0 cuckoos, but come on. Even just based on the write-up he presents, it's a clear 1 cuckoo.

There Was No Big Bang

Clocks in at 3 cuckoos, as you might expect.

You can purchase Nine Crazy Ideas in Science: A Few Might Even Be True from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at George Mason University have published a preliminary report which suggests that the Smallpox vaccine might be able to slow the spread of AIDS. Various news stories have suggested that it may be due to the vaccine interacting with the CCR5 receptor, which is a cellular infection route in another related poxvirus, and also commented on the rise of AIDS in the years after smallpox was declared eradicated and the smallpox vaccine was no longer given as a matter of course."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at George Mason University have published a preliminary report which suggests that the Smallpox vaccine might be able to slow the spread of AIDS. Various news stories have suggested that it may be due to the vaccine interacting with the CCR5 receptor, which is a cellular infection route in another related poxvirus, and also commented on the rise of AIDS in the years after smallpox was declared eradicated and the smallpox vaccine was no longer given as a matter of course."

Elysdir writes "DARPA is creating an idea futures market, the Policy Analysis Market, to try to predict events in the Middle East. See Bloomberg article for more info." Read this article. I mean it. This is amazing. Update: 07/29 14:45 GMT by J : The NYT story claims "The White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events ... that were visible earlier in the day ... could no longer be seen," but those example images are still being served: Jordanian overthrow, bidding on assassinations, cool graphics... Update: 07/29 16:44 GMT by M : Looks like the publicity was too much.

A reader writes: "Central Europe Review is running an article on a gulag-condemned Soviet scientist whose contribution to the first computer is virtually unknown because of the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937, American digital computer pioneer John Atanasoff came across a Myhailo Krawtchouk paper on a new method for finding approximate solutions to differential equations. Atanasoff tried sending a letter to him, but received no response. Krawtchouk had been attainted for giving a favorable review of the work of "enemies of the people" and shipped to Siberia for 20 years of gold mining, where he died four years later. Krawtchouk's biography gives a more detailed account of how Krawtchouk was labeled a "Polish spy" and "Ukrainian nationalist," stripped of his Academy of Sciences membership, and forced to sign a confession -- that he later retracted -- under torture and threats upon his family. "

Augustus De Morgan writes "Five years ago today a brainstorming session in Palo Alto led to the adoption and promotion of the "open source" label. (You can find references to the label much earlier, however.) For some, it was a dark divergence from the free software movement; for others, the beginning of the adoption of key software principles into mainstream. Here's a growing set of resources and stories about the history of free and open source software, and a lament about the decline of altruism in the open source community."

Augustus De Morgan writes "Five years ago today a brainstorming session in Palo Alto led to the adoption and promotion of the "open source" label. (You can find references to the label much earlier, however.) For some, it was a dark divergence from the free software movement; for others, the beginning of the adoption of key software principles into mainstream. Here's a growing set of resources and stories about the history of free and open source software, and a lament about the decline of altruism in the open source community."

blackcoot asks: "I'm about to start work on a summer project with my advisor, part of which involves getting a lab set up for real time (or as close as we can get) computer vision applications. Currently, the only machines in the lab with digital video cameras attached to them are Win2k boxen, and that's only because we haven't been able to find reasonable drivers for the firewire cameras that we have. My advisor and I would much rather *not* write our own driver for these cameras; right now my advisor has the budget for a couple reasonably inexpensive cameras. This leads me to a couple questions: are there firewire (or equivalently high bandwidth bus) based digital video cameras (not framegrabbbers) out there that have reasonably solid Linux or Video4Linux drivers; have any Slashdot readers tried to build a vision type application under Linux (something that does more processing than Xaw TV); Am I setting myself up for a whole world of pain trying to make this happen under Linux, or is it doable? Any words of wisdom? Your help is much appreciated."

SanLouBlues asks: "I'm slow and still deciding on what video card to get, but it's caused me to wonder what the performance of ATI's TRUFORM n-patching is like. I've heard plenty of subjective comments and seen the pictures, but despite my best efforts, no benchmarks. I would hope that similar benchmarks would be available for GeForce3s since I believe ATI claims that n-patching is part of DirectX."