Slashdot Mirror

cylonlover writes "Given that icebreakers clear a path for other ships by traveling through the ice head-on (or sometimes butt-on), then in order for one of them to clear a wider path, it would have to be wider and thus larger overall ... right? Well, Finland's Arctech Helsinki Shipyard is taking a different, more efficient approach. It's in the process of building an asymmetric-hulled icebreaker that can increase its frontal area, by making its way through the ice at an angle of up to 30 degrees."

New submitter wabrandsma sends this excerpt from New Scientist: "The Bradley Manning case continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the 'hacker madness' strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge. ... We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with "a black screen with white font" as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the judge was a programmer who sharply called them on it."

New submitter Big Nemo '60 writes with news that the National Institute of Mental Health is seeking to modernize the diagnosis of mental illness through the use of neuroscience, genetics, etc. From the article: "The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's 'bible' — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — questioning its validity and stating that 'patients with mental disorders deserve better.' This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5." More importantly, they are going to be shifting funding to research projects that seek to define new categories of mental illness using modern medical science, ignoring the current DSM categorizations: "The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been 'reliability' .. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. ... NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system. ... It became immediately clear that we cannot design a system based on biomarkers or cognitive performance because we lack the data. In this sense, RDoC is a framework for collecting the data needed for a new nosology. But it is critical to realize that we cannot succeed if we use DSM categories as the 'gold standard.' ... Imagine deciding that EKGs were not useful because many patients with chest pain did not have EKG changes. That is what we have been doing for decades when we reject a biomarker because it does not detect a DSM category. We need to begin collecting the genetic, imaging, physiologic, and cognitive data to see how all the data — not just the symptoms — cluster and how these clusters relate to treatment response."

jtogel writes "This New Scientist article describes our AI system that automatically generates card games. The article contains a description of a playable card game generated by our system. But card games are just the beginning... The card game generator is a part of a larger project to automatise all of game development using artificial intelligence methods — we're also working on level generation for a variety of different games, and on rule generation for simple arcade-like games."

recoiledsnake writes "This article notes, 'A new technology built into Google Glass, dug up by New Scientist, takes Google Glass from interesting to down right creepy. Google Glass can now pick a person out of crowd based on their fashion style. The system, InSight, developed in partnership with Google, will take a nice little moment to assess the clothing in frame, and then point out exactly where your friends are in busy settings like a bar, concert, or sporting event. It could probably point you out in a protest, or shopping mall too.' We previously discussed the disorienting effects on the wearer of the device."

Bennett Haselton writes "Evgeny Morozov's forthcoming book To Save Everything, Click Here describes how an overly helpful 'kitchen of the future' might stifle the learning process and threaten culinary innovation. True, but we could certainly do better than the current state of how-to directions (in cooking and most other subjects) that you can find today on Google. I suggest that the answer lies not in intelligent kitchen technology, but in designing an algorithm that would produce the best possible how-to directions -- where the 'best' directions are judged according to the results that are achieved by genuine beginners who attempt to follow the directions without help." Read below for the rest of Bennett's review.
Editor's Note: This article was not intended as a full review, but rather a commentary on one point in the book. The author's actual review of the book will appear in March. To Save Everything, Click Here author Evgeny Morozov pages 432 publisher PublicAffairs rating 9/10 reviewer Bennett Haselton ISBN 1610391381 summary Argues that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies

Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything, Click Here (due out in March), about "the folly of technological solutionism", is that rare animal: a book I would recommend to everyone even if I disagree with about 2/3 of the conclusions in the text. The arguments in the book didn't always change my mind, but they made me reformulate many of my own arguments in the other direction.

In most sections of the book, Morozov attacks the beliefs of "solutionists" who believe that a particular program or algorithm can solve a social program. Usually, I thought his criticisms of a given algorithmic "solution" were spot-on. But I often found myself thinking of a different algorithm that I thought would solve the problem much more effectively than the one Morozov was critiquing. This, naturally, could be construed as missing the point of the book. However, I'm prepared to defend any of the alternative algorithms that I came up with, or bet money on how it would fare in the real world. I'll have a full review of the book when it's released, but I think many of Morozov's argument are interesting enough to deserve an article in their own right.

For example, Morozov describes a new kitchen technology that guides would-be chefs through the process of preparing a meal, by illuminating pathways on the kitchen floor to show the cook where they're supposed to walk next, and then using laser pointers and visual aids to guide them through what they're supposed to do when they get there. If you want to know how to expertly carve a fish, for example, the ceiling-mounted lasers will trace out the exact cuts that you're supposed to make on the fish's skin. The description sounds like a parody of what people think the Big Bang Theory geeks would like their kitchen to do for them.

Morozov argues, not unreasonably, that "[t]o subject [cooking] fully to the debilitating logic of efficiency is to deprive humans of the ability to achieve mastery in this activity, to make human flourishing impossible and to impoverish our lives," and that "deviating from recipes is what creates culinary innovations." Well that's one of the 1/3 of his arguments that I agree with. Besides, if you can afford the cost of a laser-guided kitchen just to cook meals for yourself, you could probably use the same amount of money to take a professional cooking class, order takeout every day to tide you over until you know how to make decent stuff on your own, and still have money left over. If you're using it instead to try and cook to impress party guests, how's that going to work? If you're making the food where your guests can see you being guided around by lasers, they're going to think (correctly) that you don't know how to cook, and if you're making the food in a back room where you're out of sight of the guests, you might as well order takeout and have it smuggled in through the back door.

On the other hand, Morozov says in his next paragraph: "In a world where only a select few could master the tricks of the trade, such 'augmented' kitchens would probably be welcome, if only for their promise to democratize access to this art. But this is not the world we inhabit: detailed recipes and instructional videos on how to cook the most exquisite dish have never been easier to find on Google."

That's where he lost me. I have vastly different views on this, which can be summed up in three points:

• The qualify of most "how-to" instructions aimed at beginners, judged by the results they produce in the hands of actual beginners, is far worse than most people believe.

• Moreover, for reasons I'll describe later, the incentives created by the free market in general (and Google in particular) more or less guarantee this result: How-to directions exist that cover nearly every human activity, but most of the directions are not particularly good.

• I have an idea for a different algorithm (surprise!) that Google, or any other similarly positioned web titan, could use to change the incentives of web publishers, leading them to write how-to instructions that would produce much better results when followed by actual beginners.

The morass of cooking how-tos on the web are a good example. Partly from always having other things that I'd rather learn, and partly from being perfectly happy eating lots of plain fruits and vegetables (good for your health, but not for your cooking skills), I had survived to early adulthood hardly knowing anything about real cooking. Being a decently smart person, I figured that made me well suited to judge the effectiveness of the countless cookbooks written "for people who don't know how to cook". Because I firmly believe that if you follow a set of directions precisely (or, if the directions are written ambiguously, then if you follow some plausible interpretation of each step in the directions), and the result doesn't come out as predicted, then it's the directions that failed, not you. If another set of instructions would have produced better results, then those directions are better. This is not rocket science, but many cooking directions in cookbooks and on the Internet are glaringly missing key pieces of information that would have made the directions better, by the above definition.

Now, I understand the importance of experimenting and deviating from recipes and tailoring things to your own tastes, but I think that has to come after you've produced an edible dish that you can use as a baseline. I make scrambled eggs a little bit differently every time -- curry powder, mussels, capers, tabasco sauce, blue cheese (just not all in the same pan, please) -- but the only reason that's possible is because the simple directions for plain scrambled eggs actually work. When I say that most cooking directions don't work, I mean that if you follow them precisely (but without any prior cooking knowledge), they don't even get you to the baseline of an edible result that you can then use as a jumping-off point to try your own variations.

The odd thing about cooking is that of all the people whose cooking I liked so much that I asked them where they learned how to cook, all of them said that they learned from an in-person instructor (usually a family member); I have yet to meet any really good cooks who learned their skills from written recipes or web videos. This suggests that the learning materials on the Internet are falling short. (By contrast, I know plenty of people who have learned PHP programming or similar skills out of a book.)

And from my experiences helping out friends in the kitchen who had more cooking experience but who were trying to follow a particular recipe, it seemed that their most valuable skill was knowing the crucial parts of the recipe that were missing, or wrong. And then they would use their non-beginner knowledge fill in the missing steps or make the necessary corrections as we went along. With the current mediocre state of most cooking directions out there, that's surely a useful skill. However, it does mean that you could make most recipes produce much better results in the hands of a beginner, if you simply fixed all those parts that were missing, or wrong.

Take, for example, my misadventures making jalapeno poppers. Going to a friend's Super Bowl party, I figured that jalapeno poppers would be an easy thing to make, with just under 200 how-to videos on Youtube and about 600 matching recipe pages on Google, most of them calling for only four ingredients. How hard could it be?

Well, there are two important things that should be in every jalapeno popper recipe, or the recipe is doing more harm than good just by being out there on the web. One is that when you're slicing and handling the raw jalapenos, you have to wear gloves, or the capsaicin in the jalapeno -- which is also the active ingredient in pepper spray -- will leave a burning feeling on your fingers that lasts for about the next 24 hours. (If you touch your eye with your finger, you might even have to go to the emergency room.)

The other indispensable piece of information is that to make the jalapeno poppers edible, you have to remove the seeds and the white ribs from the inside -- not just the white center of the jalapeno (which slides out easily), but the white part of the ribs, which have to be scraped off of the outer wall (a grapefruit spoon works great, otherwise a paring knife or a regular sharp knife will do). Most recipes do tell you to remove the seeds. But the white ribs left inside the jalapeno are just as hot, and if you don't cut them out, the finished product will have a hotness that's too overpowering to taste anything else. (This video shows how to do it right.)

So what's the problem? Here's a table listing the first 10 Google matches for "jalapeno popper recipes", rated according to whether they contain those two must-have pieces of information that a beginner would need. (If the directions said to "devein" the jalapeno or "remove the membranes", I gave it an "Almost" in the second column -- because a first-timer is likely to think that this refers to removing the white center of the jalapeno, and not realize that you also have to remove the ribs attached to the edges. I'm being strict here, because it would have taken almost no effort for the recipe writers to be clear about this, and if you don't do that step correctly, you will have to throw out the finished product.)

Recipe source Tell reader to wear gloves? Tell reader to remove jalapeno ribs? Food Network (Emeril Lagasse) No Almost (instructions say "membranes removed") AllRecipes.com No No Food.com No No KraftRecipes.com No Almost (says to remove "veins") InspiredTaste.net Yes. (Sort of. The directions end halfway down the page, and then another set of written directions starts from the beginning. That's confusing, but I'll give it to them.) Yes. (In both sets of directions. Good job guys!) ThePioneerWoman.com No Yes Epicurious.com No Almost ("devein") About.com No (not counting the comments section, where someone warns other readers to use gloves because they burned their hands following the directions) No RecipeGirl.com No. (This is weird: gives tips on how to neutralize the stinging capsaicin once it gets on your hands, but never actually says to put gloves on.) Almost ("seeds and ribs") JalapenoMadness.com No No

Videos scored a little better, if you're generous and give full credit to any video that shows the scooping out of the jalapenos to include the ribs attached to the sides, even if the verbal directions don't spell that out precisely. Here are the ratings for the first 10 Youtube matches for "jalapeno poppers recipe":

Source (Youtube user) Tell viewer to wear gloves? Tell viewer to remove jalapeno ribs? allrecipes Yes No bettyskitchen No Yes PrincessDiana161 Yes Yes MudRFunR Yes Yes cookingwithcaitlin1 Yes Yes Michael Hultquist (Jalapeno Madness) No No BarbecueWeb No No kooktocook No No Adley Stump No No thatsletitia No No

In most of the videos that didn't explicitly include the step about putting gloves on, the cooks themselves were not wearing gloves. What did their hands feel like later?

eHow.com does have a helpful page about how to treat capsaicin burns from handling jalapenos. Perhaps that's their penance for the fact that half of their 'jalapeno poppers' recipes don't tell you to put gloves on.

If you could have made poppers based on these incomplete instructions, because you knew to put gloves on or to scrape the ribs out, good for you -- you possess the background knowledge to fill in the parts of the directions that were missing, or wrong. But that doesn't do the real newbies any good.

I went to this trouble because I want to beat you over the head with the crucial fact here: Most directions suck. They suck not just in absolute terms (burning your hands, or the mouths of people who eat the jalapenos with the ribs still in them) but they especially suck relative to how easily they could have been fixed. There is no excuse for putting up a recipe for jalapeno poppers that doesn't tell the reader to put gloves on, or that only tells the reader to "remove the seeds". And I've run into the same phenomenon over and over -- whether looking for directions on how to lower memory consumption of a web server, or how to get stains out of a carpet, or how to replace a 12V direct-current power supply with a cartridge of 8 AA batteries in series -- where not only did the directions not work, but I later found out that they could have worked if the author had simply added one or two key pieces of information.

However it seems that almost everyone believes that the quality of directions on the web is much higher than it actually is -- where, by "quality", I'm talking about the results that would be achieved by a beginner following the directions. (If I had asked you, "Where can I find a good recipe for jalapeno poppers?", is there about a 100% chance you would have said, "Google"?) I assume people overestimate the usefulness of all the how-tos out there, for two reasons: (a) they glance at the directions but don't try them themselves, so they just assume the directions work; or (b) they already know how to do the task being described, so when they read the directions, their brain automatically fills in the missing steps or makes the necessary corrections. That doesn't mean the directions would work in the hands of a true beginner.

Unfortunately, the quality of the directions on the web, is perfectly explained by the incentives created by Google. If there's any niche in the how-to space that is not already filled by some article on the web, an author can easily grab some extra web traffic by writing the first page about that topic. For a popular topic like how to make jalapeno poppers, there's enough traffic going around that dozens or hundreds of authors can put up their own how-to pages and each collect just enough web traffic to make it worthwhile. Thus, every "directional" niche will be filled, and some will be filled to overflowing.

Within a particular niche, however, there's not much incentives to make the directions particularly good -- where "good" means "produces good results when followed by someone with no prior knowledge in this area". Whether your directions work or not, they'll attract about the same level of traffic from Google. Even if the author later realizes that the insertion of a few key steps would make their instructions better, there's no incentive for them to do it -- that's not going to make your how-to page rise up in the Google rankings above the other pages on the same topic.

Which brings me to my proposed solution. It would take a company with a giant pre-existing web presence to pull it off (not quite on the level of Google, but at least an eHow or a Food.com). But it would take almost no maintenance on the part of the company themselves, once the process was put in place.

To incentivize people to create instructions that actually work, a given how-to guide would go through three phases:

1. After the directions are written, genuine newbies (recruited from the web site's usual visitors -- people who just want to learn something new in an area where they have no prior expertise) attempt to follow the directions and tell the author about any problems they ran into, or steps in the directions that seemed ambiguous. If the author thinks some reader is just being an overly nit-picky moron, they're free to ignore their questions and suggestions, but they would do so at the risk of their directions faring poorly in the next phase.

2. Once the initial wave of corrections and clarifications is finished, the directions are put into a pool marked "Ready to be rated!", where they are rated by the next group of genuine newbies who attempt to follow them. Each reader rates the directions simply: If they followed the directions and got the result they expected, then thumbs up, otherwise, thumbs down. If multiple readers spot a mistake or an omission that somehow got missed in the first phase, then the author can make the necessary changes and start the second phase over. (To prevent the author of the directions from "gaming the system" at this stage, the volunteer newbies should be selected at random from a large pool of people who sign up saying "I'm game for learning how to do anything new." If you let people self-select to go to the directions and rate them, then this enables the author to stack the deck by having all of their friends go to the page and give their directions a high rating.)

3. Finally, once the directions have reached some acceptably high percentage of positive ratings, they get released into the general pool of directions/how-tos/recipes of which the site can promise, "80% of newbies were able to follow these directions successfully." If the system works -- and if the volunteer readers in step #2 are representative of the skill level of the site's general readership -- it should be expected that most readers should be able to follow the directions and get good results at that point.

Almost all of the "how-to" directions that I've read, on any topic, could have benefited from being put through the wringer as described by the steps above. It's not merely that I think this algorithm would produce good directions; it's that my definition of good directions is precisely those directions that would pass the test in step #2.

As for what incentivizes the authors to produce directions that make it through this process, perhaps the hosting site could split the ad revenue with them from the pages containing the author's directions. Perhaps the hosting site could just reward them with a link from the article to the author's professional home page. Or maybe people would happily submit the instructions for free if it went towards a non-profit repository of helpful information, a la Wikipedia. (The huge difference from Wikipedia though, is that if you're an expert on George Washington, it's easy to write a good article about George Washington; but if you're an expert on cooking, that makes it hard to write a set of cooking directions that would fill in all the blanks needed by a beginner. Hence the multi-step vetting process above.)

It's tempting to think this is process would be "overkill" for a simple recipe, but that fails to consider the magnitude of the time savings when multiplied across the hundreds or thousands of people who will read the information over the course of its lifetime on the web. If the author spends an extra 10 minutes on the instructions to clarify things in such a way that saves just 1 minute of reading time for the average reader, when that 1 minute of time savings is multiplied by hundreds of readers, it's clearly an overall time-saver. (What disgusts me about the jalapeno popper recipes is that the authors could have saved me a whole day of painful burning on my fingers, if they had just taken 10 seconds to include the step about putting on gloves -- that would have been an overall time-saver even if only one person had read the recipe.)

So Morozov was right that we don't need laser-guided kitchens guiding us through the algorithm of carving a fish, but we should consider that an entirely different kind of algorithm could change everything for a beginning cook, or a person trying to learn any other skill from scratch. The Star Trek kitchen in To Save Everything, Click Here makes for an easy target for Morozov's argument, but that kitchen technology is hardly making enough inroads to threaten cooking as we know it -- I'll bet you'd never heard of it until this article. Bad directions, on the other hand, are so ubiquitous that we've accepted them as a part of our way of life, and we've all but forgotten to think how they could be made better. Like Robert Kennedy, I see people looking at their capsaicin-burned hands and their inedible jalapeno poppers with the ribs still attached and asking, "Why?", and I imagine eHow.com lining up newbies to critique their recipes until each recipe achieves a high rating from beginners based on the actual results that they got, and ask, "Why not?"

You can purchase To Save Everything, Click Here from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Bennett Haselton writes "Evgeny Morozov's forthcoming book To Save Everything, Click Here describes how an overly helpful 'kitchen of the future' might stifle the learning process and threaten culinary innovation. True, but we could certainly do better than the current state of how-to directions (in cooking and most other subjects) that you can find today on Google. I suggest that the answer lies not in intelligent kitchen technology, but in designing an algorithm that would produce the best possible how-to directions -- where the 'best' directions are judged according to the results that are achieved by genuine beginners who attempt to follow the directions without help." Read below for the rest of Bennett's review.
Editor's Note: This article was not intended as a full review, but rather a commentary on one point in the book. The author's actual review of the book will appear in March. To Save Everything, Click Here author Evgeny Morozov pages 432 publisher PublicAffairs rating 9/10 reviewer Bennett Haselton ISBN 1610391381 summary Argues that we badly need a new, post-Internet way to debate the moral consequences of digital technologies

Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything, Click Here (due out in March), about "the folly of technological solutionism", is that rare animal: a book I would recommend to everyone even if I disagree with about 2/3 of the conclusions in the text. The arguments in the book didn't always change my mind, but they made me reformulate many of my own arguments in the other direction.

In most sections of the book, Morozov attacks the beliefs of "solutionists" who believe that a particular program or algorithm can solve a social program. Usually, I thought his criticisms of a given algorithmic "solution" were spot-on. But I often found myself thinking of a different algorithm that I thought would solve the problem much more effectively than the one Morozov was critiquing. This, naturally, could be construed as missing the point of the book. However, I'm prepared to defend any of the alternative algorithms that I came up with, or bet money on how it would fare in the real world. I'll have a full review of the book when it's released, but I think many of Morozov's argument are interesting enough to deserve an article in their own right.

For example, Morozov describes a new kitchen technology that guides would-be chefs through the process of preparing a meal, by illuminating pathways on the kitchen floor to show the cook where they're supposed to walk next, and then using laser pointers and visual aids to guide them through what they're supposed to do when they get there. If you want to know how to expertly carve a fish, for example, the ceiling-mounted lasers will trace out the exact cuts that you're supposed to make on the fish's skin. The description sounds like a parody of what people think the Big Bang Theory geeks would like their kitchen to do for them.

Morozov argues, not unreasonably, that "[t]o subject [cooking] fully to the debilitating logic of efficiency is to deprive humans of the ability to achieve mastery in this activity, to make human flourishing impossible and to impoverish our lives," and that "deviating from recipes is what creates culinary innovations." Well that's one of the 1/3 of his arguments that I agree with. Besides, if you can afford the cost of a laser-guided kitchen just to cook meals for yourself, you could probably use the same amount of money to take a professional cooking class, order takeout every day to tide you over until you know how to make decent stuff on your own, and still have money left over. If you're using it instead to try and cook to impress party guests, how's that going to work? If you're making the food where your guests can see you being guided around by lasers, they're going to think (correctly) that you don't know how to cook, and if you're making the food in a back room where you're out of sight of the guests, you might as well order takeout and have it smuggled in through the back door.

On the other hand, Morozov says in his next paragraph: "In a world where only a select few could master the tricks of the trade, such 'augmented' kitchens would probably be welcome, if only for their promise to democratize access to this art. But this is not the world we inhabit: detailed recipes and instructional videos on how to cook the most exquisite dish have never been easier to find on Google."

That's where he lost me. I have vastly different views on this, which can be summed up in three points:

• The qualify of most "how-to" instructions aimed at beginners, judged by the results they produce in the hands of actual beginners, is far worse than most people believe.

• Moreover, for reasons I'll describe later, the incentives created by the free market in general (and Google in particular) more or less guarantee this result: How-to directions exist that cover nearly every human activity, but most of the directions are not particularly good.

• I have an idea for a different algorithm (surprise!) that Google, or any other similarly positioned web titan, could use to change the incentives of web publishers, leading them to write how-to instructions that would produce much better results when followed by actual beginners.

The morass of cooking how-tos on the web are a good example. Partly from always having other things that I'd rather learn, and partly from being perfectly happy eating lots of plain fruits and vegetables (good for your health, but not for your cooking skills), I had survived to early adulthood hardly knowing anything about real cooking. Being a decently smart person, I figured that made me well suited to judge the effectiveness of the countless cookbooks written "for people who don't know how to cook". Because I firmly believe that if you follow a set of directions precisely (or, if the directions are written ambiguously, then if you follow some plausible interpretation of each step in the directions), and the result doesn't come out as predicted, then it's the directions that failed, not you. If another set of instructions would have produced better results, then those directions are better. This is not rocket science, but many cooking directions in cookbooks and on the Internet are glaringly missing key pieces of information that would have made the directions better, by the above definition.

Now, I understand the importance of experimenting and deviating from recipes and tailoring things to your own tastes, but I think that has to come after you've produced an edible dish that you can use as a baseline. I make scrambled eggs a little bit differently every time -- curry powder, mussels, capers, tabasco sauce, blue cheese (just not all in the same pan, please) -- but the only reason that's possible is because the simple directions for plain scrambled eggs actually work. When I say that most cooking directions don't work, I mean that if you follow them precisely (but without any prior cooking knowledge), they don't even get you to the baseline of an edible result that you can then use as a jumping-off point to try your own variations.

The odd thing about cooking is that of all the people whose cooking I liked so much that I asked them where they learned how to cook, all of them said that they learned from an in-person instructor (usually a family member); I have yet to meet any really good cooks who learned their skills from written recipes or web videos. This suggests that the learning materials on the Internet are falling short. (By contrast, I know plenty of people who have learned PHP programming or similar skills out of a book.)

And from my experiences helping out friends in the kitchen who had more cooking experience but who were trying to follow a particular recipe, it seemed that their most valuable skill was knowing the crucial parts of the recipe that were missing, or wrong. And then they would use their non-beginner knowledge fill in the missing steps or make the necessary corrections as we went along. With the current mediocre state of most cooking directions out there, that's surely a useful skill. However, it does mean that you could make most recipes produce much better results in the hands of a beginner, if you simply fixed all those parts that were missing, or wrong.

Take, for example, my misadventures making jalapeno poppers. Going to a friend's Super Bowl party, I figured that jalapeno poppers would be an easy thing to make, with just under 200 how-to videos on Youtube and about 600 matching recipe pages on Google, most of them calling for only four ingredients. How hard could it be?

Well, there are two important things that should be in every jalapeno popper recipe, or the recipe is doing more harm than good just by being out there on the web. One is that when you're slicing and handling the raw jalapenos, you have to wear gloves, or the capsaicin in the jalapeno -- which is also the active ingredient in pepper spray -- will leave a burning feeling on your fingers that lasts for about the next 24 hours. (If you touch your eye with your finger, you might even have to go to the emergency room.)

The other indispensable piece of information is that to make the jalapeno poppers edible, you have to remove the seeds and the white ribs from the inside -- not just the white center of the jalapeno (which slides out easily), but the white part of the ribs, which have to be scraped off of the outer wall (a grapefruit spoon works great, otherwise a paring knife or a regular sharp knife will do). Most recipes do tell you to remove the seeds. But the white ribs left inside the jalapeno are just as hot, and if you don't cut them out, the finished product will have a hotness that's too overpowering to taste anything else. (This video shows how to do it right.)

So what's the problem? Here's a table listing the first 10 Google matches for "jalapeno popper recipes", rated according to whether they contain those two must-have pieces of information that a beginner would need. (If the directions said to "devein" the jalapeno or "remove the membranes", I gave it an "Almost" in the second column -- because a first-timer is likely to think that this refers to removing the white center of the jalapeno, and not realize that you also have to remove the ribs attached to the edges. I'm being strict here, because it would have taken almost no effort for the recipe writers to be clear about this, and if you don't do that step correctly, you will have to throw out the finished product.)

Recipe source Tell reader to wear gloves? Tell reader to remove jalapeno ribs? Food Network (Emeril Lagasse) No Almost (instructions say "membranes removed") AllRecipes.com No No Food.com No No KraftRecipes.com No Almost (says to remove "veins") InspiredTaste.net Yes. (Sort of. The directions end halfway down the page, and then another set of written directions starts from the beginning. That's confusing, but I'll give it to them.) Yes. (In both sets of directions. Good job guys!) ThePioneerWoman.com No Yes Epicurious.com No Almost ("devein") About.com No (not counting the comments section, where someone warns other readers to use gloves because they burned their hands following the directions) No RecipeGirl.com No. (This is weird: gives tips on how to neutralize the stinging capsaicin once it gets on your hands, but never actually says to put gloves on.) Almost ("seeds and ribs") JalapenoMadness.com No No

Videos scored a little better, if you're generous and give full credit to any video that shows the scooping out of the jalapenos to include the ribs attached to the sides, even if the verbal directions don't spell that out precisely. Here are the ratings for the first 10 Youtube matches for "jalapeno poppers recipe":

Source (Youtube user) Tell viewer to wear gloves? Tell viewer to remove jalapeno ribs? allrecipes Yes No bettyskitchen No Yes PrincessDiana161 Yes Yes MudRFunR Yes Yes cookingwithcaitlin1 Yes Yes Michael Hultquist (Jalapeno Madness) No No BarbecueWeb No No kooktocook No No Adley Stump No No thatsletitia No No

In most of the videos that didn't explicitly include the step about putting gloves on, the cooks themselves were not wearing gloves. What did their hands feel like later?

eHow.com does have a helpful page about how to treat capsaicin burns from handling jalapenos. Perhaps that's their penance for the fact that half of their 'jalapeno poppers' recipes don't tell you to put gloves on.

If you could have made poppers based on these incomplete instructions, because you knew to put gloves on or to scrape the ribs out, good for you -- you possess the background knowledge to fill in the parts of the directions that were missing, or wrong. But that doesn't do the real newbies any good.

I went to this trouble because I want to beat you over the head with the crucial fact here: Most directions suck. They suck not just in absolute terms (burning your hands, or the mouths of people who eat the jalapenos with the ribs still in them) but they especially suck relative to how easily they could have been fixed. There is no excuse for putting up a recipe for jalapeno poppers that doesn't tell the reader to put gloves on, or that only tells the reader to "remove the seeds". And I've run into the same phenomenon over and over -- whether looking for directions on how to lower memory consumption of a web server, or how to get stains out of a carpet, or how to replace a 12V direct-current power supply with a cartridge of 8 AA batteries in series -- where not only did the directions not work, but I later found out that they could have worked if the author had simply added one or two key pieces of information.

However it seems that almost everyone believes that the quality of directions on the web is much higher than it actually is -- where, by "quality", I'm talking about the results that would be achieved by a beginner following the directions. (If I had asked you, "Where can I find a good recipe for jalapeno poppers?", is there about a 100% chance you would have said, "Google"?) I assume people overestimate the usefulness of all the how-tos out there, for two reasons: (a) they glance at the directions but don't try them themselves, so they just assume the directions work; or (b) they already know how to do the task being described, so when they read the directions, their brain automatically fills in the missing steps or makes the necessary corrections. That doesn't mean the directions would work in the hands of a true beginner.

Unfortunately, the quality of the directions on the web, is perfectly explained by the incentives created by Google. If there's any niche in the how-to space that is not already filled by some article on the web, an author can easily grab some extra web traffic by writing the first page about that topic. For a popular topic like how to make jalapeno poppers, there's enough traffic going around that dozens or hundreds of authors can put up their own how-to pages and each collect just enough web traffic to make it worthwhile. Thus, every "directional" niche will be filled, and some will be filled to overflowing.

Within a particular niche, however, there's not much incentives to make the directions particularly good -- where "good" means "produces good results when followed by someone with no prior knowledge in this area". Whether your directions work or not, they'll attract about the same level of traffic from Google. Even if the author later realizes that the insertion of a few key steps would make their instructions better, there's no incentive for them to do it -- that's not going to make your how-to page rise up in the Google rankings above the other pages on the same topic.

Which brings me to my proposed solution. It would take a company with a giant pre-existing web presence to pull it off (not quite on the level of Google, but at least an eHow or a Food.com). But it would take almost no maintenance on the part of the company themselves, once the process was put in place.

To incentivize people to create instructions that actually work, a given how-to guide would go through three phases:

1. After the directions are written, genuine newbies (recruited from the web site's usual visitors -- people who just want to learn something new in an area where they have no prior expertise) attempt to follow the directions and tell the author about any problems they ran into, or steps in the directions that seemed ambiguous. If the author thinks some reader is just being an overly nit-picky moron, they're free to ignore their questions and suggestions, but they would do so at the risk of their directions faring poorly in the next phase.

2. Once the initial wave of corrections and clarifications is finished, the directions are put into a pool marked "Ready to be rated!", where they are rated by the next group of genuine newbies who attempt to follow them. Each reader rates the directions simply: If they followed the directions and got the result they expected, then thumbs up, otherwise, thumbs down. If multiple readers spot a mistake or an omission that somehow got missed in the first phase, then the author can make the necessary changes and start the second phase over. (To prevent the author of the directions from "gaming the system" at this stage, the volunteer newbies should be selected at random from a large pool of people who sign up saying "I'm game for learning how to do anything new." If you let people self-select to go to the directions and rate them, then this enables the author to stack the deck by having all of their friends go to the page and give their directions a high rating.)

3. Finally, once the directions have reached some acceptably high percentage of positive ratings, they get released into the general pool of directions/how-tos/recipes of which the site can promise, "80% of newbies were able to follow these directions successfully." If the system works -- and if the volunteer readers in step #2 are representative of the skill level of the site's general readership -- it should be expected that most readers should be able to follow the directions and get good results at that point.

Almost all of the "how-to" directions that I've read, on any topic, could have benefited from being put through the wringer as described by the steps above. It's not merely that I think this algorithm would produce good directions; it's that my definition of good directions is precisely those directions that would pass the test in step #2.

As for what incentivizes the authors to produce directions that make it through this process, perhaps the hosting site could split the ad revenue with them from the pages containing the author's directions. Perhaps the hosting site could just reward them with a link from the article to the author's professional home page. Or maybe people would happily submit the instructions for free if it went towards a non-profit repository of helpful information, a la Wikipedia. (The huge difference from Wikipedia though, is that if you're an expert on George Washington, it's easy to write a good article about George Washington; but if you're an expert on cooking, that makes it hard to write a set of cooking directions that would fill in all the blanks needed by a beginner. Hence the multi-step vetting process above.)

It's tempting to think this is process would be "overkill" for a simple recipe, but that fails to consider the magnitude of the time savings when multiplied across the hundreds or thousands of people who will read the information over the course of its lifetime on the web. If the author spends an extra 10 minutes on the instructions to clarify things in such a way that saves just 1 minute of reading time for the average reader, when that 1 minute of time savings is multiplied by hundreds of readers, it's clearly an overall time-saver. (What disgusts me about the jalapeno popper recipes is that the authors could have saved me a whole day of painful burning on my fingers, if they had just taken 10 seconds to include the step about putting on gloves -- that would have been an overall time-saver even if only one person had read the recipe.)

So Morozov was right that we don't need laser-guided kitchens guiding us through the algorithm of carving a fish, but we should consider that an entirely different kind of algorithm could change everything for a beginning cook, or a person trying to learn any other skill from scratch. The Star Trek kitchen in To Save Everything, Click Here makes for an easy target for Morozov's argument, but that kitchen technology is hardly making enough inroads to threaten cooking as we know it -- I'll bet you'd never heard of it until this article. Bad directions, on the other hand, are so ubiquitous that we've accepted them as a part of our way of life, and we've all but forgotten to think how they could be made better. Like Robert Kennedy, I see people looking at their capsaicin-burned hands and their inedible jalapeno poppers with the ribs still attached and asking, "Why?", and I imagine eHow.com lining up newbies to critique their recipes until each recipe achieves a high rating from beginners based on the actual results that they got, and ask, "Why not?"

You can purchase To Save Everything, Click Here from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

First time accepted submitter Hamsterdan writes "If you're tired of finding that your stuff has been smashed during shipping after opening your package, this device is for you. 'Called DropTag, the gadget combines a battery, a low-energy Bluetooth transmitter, an accelerometer and a memory chip. Stuck on a parcel as it leaves an e-commerce warehouse, it logs any g-forces above a set risky shock level that it experiences. The idea is that when the courier puts it in your hands, you turn on Bluetooth on a smartphone running a DropTag app and scan it before you sign for it.'"

FatLittleMonkey writes "My mind to your mind... my thoughts to your thoughts... Researchers at the University of Essex have shown that combining the output from two non-invasive 'brain-computer interfaces,' computer-interpreted EEG signals, led to a much clearer signal of the subjects' intention than the output from a single subject. To test this idea, they had two subjects try to steer a simulated space-ship at a target planet, by thinking of one of eight possible directions. While a single user could achieve 67% accuracy, this jumped to 90% when two minds were combined. Researchers believe the technique also compensates for individual lapses in attention, and thus may have applications in real-world space missions."

FatLittleMonkey writes "Researchers in Germany have developed a device that allows users of portable devices, such as smartphones, experience force-feedback from games using just their own muscles... and a small EMS device. When stimulated by a painless electric pulse, the player's arm moves the device in whichever direction the game commands. The player then fights the movement with their other muscles, creating a strong sensation that the device itself is bucking in their hands. According to the developers, users found the sensation much more realistic than traditional vibrotactile feedback. (Should make PvP more interesting too.)"

Calopteryx writes "The correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace has gone online for the first time. New Scientist has opened a wormhole between the 21st and 19th centuries and has 'interviewed' the great man."

An anonymous reader writes "NewScientist reports, 'Along with birthdays, names of pets and ascending number sequences, add one more thing to the list of password no-nos: good grammar.' Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University seem to have developed a password cracking algorithm that targets grammatically correct passwords. Can bad grammar really make your password secure?"

New submitter mal0rd writes "NewScientist reports a 'collection of galaxies that is a whopping four billion light years long is the biggest cosmic structure ever seen. The group is roughly one-twentieth the diameter of the observable universe – big enough to challenge a principle dating back to Einstein, that, on large scales, the universe looks the same in every direction.' For reference, Andromeda is only 2.5 million light years away."

Zothecula writes "To paraphrase an old saying, if the astronaut can't go to the asteroid, then the asteroid must come to the astronaut. In a study released by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, researchers outlined a mission (PDF) to tow an asteroid into lunar orbit by 2025 using ion propulsion and a really big bag. The idea is to bring an asteroid close to Earth for easy study and visits by astronauts without the hazards and expense of a deep space mission. Now, Keck researchers say NASA officials are evaluating the plan to see whether it's something they want to do. The total cost is estimated to be roughly $2.6 billion."

Trepidity writes "AI systems can (sort of) paint and compose classical music, but can they design games? Slashdot looked at the question a few years ago, and several research groups now have experimental systems that design board games and platformers with varying levels of success. I've put together a survey of the AI game designers I know of, to round up what they can do so far (and what they can't). Are there any others out there? 'Pell's METAGAME is, to my knowledge, the first published game generator. He defines a generative space of games more general than chess, which he calls "symmetric, chess-like games." They're encoded in a representation specific to this genre, which is also symmetric by construction. By symmetric I mean that mechanics are specified only from the perspective of one player, with the starting positions and rules that apply to the other player always being the mirror of the first player's. The rules themselves are represented in a game grammar, and generation is done by stochastically sampling from that grammar, along with some checks for basic game playability, and generative-parameter knobs to tweak some aspects of what's likely to be generated.'"

FatLittleMonkey writes "New Scientist asks Bryant Walker Smith, from the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, whether the law is able to keep up with recent advances in automated vehicles. Even states which have allowed self-driving cars require the vehicles to have a 'driver,' who is nominally in control and who must comply with the same restrictions as any driver such as not being drunk. What's the point of having a robot car if it can't drive you home from the pub while you go to sleep in the back?"

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Medical Daily about a new theory for what triggered the "Great Dying: " "Researchers believe that they may finally know why the event occurred, but the theory is not without controversy. There are several theories, including the possibility of a meteorite hitting the planet. Previously, most researchers believed that the Permian mass extinction was a result of a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. ... However, Daniel Rothman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is floating around a different theory. As he presented in a meeting for the American Geophysical Union, he believes that the mass extinction could have been caused by something much smaller. His theory is that the extinction was caused by a single strain of bacteria."

kmoser writes "Everybody's favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, makes an appearance in upcoming Superman #14, in which Superman visits the Hayden Planetarium to view his original planet. Meanwhile, back in reality, DC Comics explains that NdGT has used his 'astronomical' powers to select the red dwarf LHS 2520 as the most likely real-life red star to fit with Superman's back story."

CelestialScience writes "A recycling technique has enabled a quantum computer to carry out a quantum calculation known as Shor's algorithm on a larger number than ever before. The benchmark algorithm exploits quantum mechanics to simplify the factorization of numbers into their prime components — a hard task for classical computers when the numbers get large. Until now, the largest number factorized using Shor's algorithm was 15. Now Anthony Laing at the University of Bristol, UK and colleagues report in Nature Photonics that they used a recycled photon to factorize 21 — still far too small and trivial to spook cryptographers, who rely on the difficulty of factorizing large numbers for their widely-used techniques. But a record nonetheless."

MTorrice writes "A beam of electrons can pick up and carry nanoparticles, according to a new study (abstract). The so-called electronic tweezers could help scientists in diverse tasks, such as building up new materials nanoparticle-by-nanoparticle, and measuring the forces between nanoparticles and living cells, the researchers say. In the past, scientists have manipulated microsized particles, including single cells, using a beam of laser light called optical tweezers. But the force required to trap a particle with optical tweezers increases as the particle gets smaller, making grappling with nanoparticles difficult. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed an alternative to optical tweezers by modifying a transmission electron microscope, which produces images by passing a stream of electrons through a sample." Reader Sven-Erik adds news of a tractor beam generated with laser light that can pull microscopic particles over distances of 30 micrometers (abstract).

SchrodingerZ writes "Last week the Mars Curiosity Rover spotted a shiny metallic-looking object in the martian soil. This week scientists have confirmed that it is plastic that has fallen off the 1-ton rover. However, the discovery of this trans-planetary littering has opened up another mystery for the science team. On October 12th the rover took a sample of soil from the ground, feeding it into its Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments for analysis, and a picture of the hole dug by the rover's claw revealed metallic particles in the dirt. The sample was subsequently dropped due to fears that particles from the rover had made it into the dirt. Further study now suggests that the metallic particles are actually native to Mars, as the photo reveals that they are embedded in the soil in clumps. In 2007 the older rover Spirit found evidence of silica for the first time, more testing will occur over the next few days to determine truly if this is again just Curiosity's littler, or something more profound."

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA currently controls its deep space missions through a network of 13 giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia known as the Deep Space Network (DSN) but the network is obsolete and just not up to the job of transmitting the growing workload of extra-terrestrial data from deep space missions. That's why Ouliang Chang has proposed building a massive supercomputer in a deep dark crater on the side of the moon facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would accept signals from space, store them, process them if needed and then relay the data back to Earth as time and bandwidth allows. The supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon's poles where cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and would communicate with spaceships and earth using a system of inflatable, steerable antennas that would hang suspended over moon craters, giving the Deep Space Network a second focal point away from earth. As well as boosting humanity's space-borne communication abilities, Chang's presentation at a space conference (PDF) in Pasadena, California also suggests that the moon-based dishes could work in unison with those on Earth to perform very-long-baseline interferometry, which allows multiple telescopes to be combined to emulate one huge telescope. Best of all the project has the potential to excite the imagination of future spacegoers and get men back on the moon."

Hugh Pickens writes "Draining an infected abscess is a straightforward procedure on Earth but on a spaceship travelling to the moon or Mars, it could kill everyone on board. Now Rebecca Rosen writes that if humans are to one day go to Mars, one logistical hurdle that will need to be overcome is what to do if one of the crew members has a medical emergency and needs surgery. 'Based on statistical probability, there is a high likelihood of trauma or a medical emergency on a deep space mission,' says Carnegie Mellon professor James Antaki. It's not just a matter of whether you'll have the expertise on board to carry out such a task: Surgery in zero gravity presents its own set of potentially deadly complications because in zero gravity, blood and bodily fluids will not just stay put, in the body where they belong but could contaminate the entire cabin, threatening everybody on board. This week, NASA is testing a device known as the Aqueous Immersion Surgical System (AISS) that could possibly make space surgery possible. Designed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Louisville, AISS is a domed box that can fit over a wound. When filled with a sterile saline solution, a water-tight seal is created that prevents fluids from escaping. It can also be used to collect blood for possible reuse."

First time accepted submitter Walking The Walk writes "Your co-workers who keep using Schrödinger's cat metaphor may need to find a new one. New Scientist reports that 'by making constant but weak measurements of a quantum system, physicists have managed to probe a delicate quantum state without destroying it – the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger's metaphorical cat without killing it. The result should make it easier to handle systems such as quantum computers that exploit the exotic properties of the quantum world.'"

New submitter CelestialScience writes "The heavens have aligned in a way never seen before, with two exoplanets overlapping as they cross their star. Teruyuki Hirano of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues used data from the Kepler space telescope to probe KOI-94, a star seemingly orbited by four planets. It seems that one planet candidate, KOI-94.03, passed in front of the star and then the innermost candidate, KOI-94.01, passed between the two. The phenomenon is so new it doesn't yet have a name, though suggestions include 'planet-planet eclipse,' 'double transit,' 'syzygy' and 'exosyzygy.'"

FatLittleMonkey writes "You may recall Cody Wilson's project to create a 3D printed gun, mentioned previously on Slashdot. Well, the Defense Distributed project has suffered a decidedly non-technical setback, with printer manufacturer Stratasys revoking the lease and repossessing the printer (presumably prying it from plastic models of Cory's cold dead hands). According to New Scientist, the manufacturer cited his lack of a federal firearms manufacturer's license as their reason for the repossession, adding that it does not knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes." Homemade firearms are not (in the U.S.) per se illegal on a federal basis, though states have varying degrees of regulation. It would be helpful if anyone more conversant with firearms law than me can point out what law or laws this project might be breaking.

submeta writes "Researchers in Munich have successfully performed a quantum key exchange between a moving aircraft and a ground station. Quantum key distribution, which exploits the phenomenon of entanglement, offers theoretically perfect encryption (although it can be vulnerable in practice). This advance is an important step on the way to key exchange with a satellite, which could enable practical usage of the technology."

submeta writes "Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University has released a paper which claims to prove the decades-old ABC conjecture, which involves the relationship between prime numbers, addition, and multiplication. His solution involves thinking of numbers not as members of sets (the standard interpretation), but instead as objects which exist in 'new, conceptual universes.' As one would expect, the proof is extremely dense and difficult to understand, even for experts in the field, so it may take a while to verify. However, Mochizuki has a strong reputation, so this is likely to get attention. Proof of the conjecture could potentially lead to a revolution in number theory, including a greatly simplified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem."

MrSeb writes "The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun rolling out its new $1 billion biometric Next Generation Identification (NGI) system. In essence, NGI is a nationwide database of mugshots, iris scans, DNA records, voice samples, and other biometrics that will help the FBI identify and catch criminals — but it is how this biometric data is captured, through a nationwide network of cameras and photo databases, that is raising the eyebrows of privacy advocates. Until now, the FBI relied on IAFIS, a national fingerprint database that has long been due an overhaul. Over the last few months, the FBI has been pilot testing a face recognition system, which will soon be scaled up (PDF) until it's nationwide. In theory, this should result in much faster positive identifications of criminals and fewer unsolved cases. The problem is, the FBI hasn't guaranteed that the NGI will only use photos of known criminals. There may come a time when the NGI is filled with as many photos as possible, from as many sources as possible, of as many people as possible — criminal or otherwise. Imagine if the NGI had full access to every driving license and passport photo in the country — and DNA records kept by doctors, and iris scans kept by businesses. The FBI's NGI, if the right checks and balances aren't in place, could very easily become a tool that decimates civilian privacy and freedom."

An anonymous reader sends this depressing excerpt from New Scientist: "A serious blow to science-based medical practices has been dealt in the UK with the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Health Secretary. The fortunes of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are about to be transformed with the help of the magical waters of homeopathic medicine. Top marks to The Telegraph's science writer Tom Chivers for quickly picking up on talk that the UK's new health minister, Jeremy Hunt – who replaced Andrew Lansley yesterday in a government reshuffle – thinks that homeopathy works, and should be provided at public expense by the NHS."

derekmead writes "A new study from Birmingham University in the U.K. found that people will likely be monitored within hours of downloading popular torrents by at least one of ten or more major monitoring firms. The team, led by security researcher Tom Chothia, ran software that acted like a BitTorrent client for three years and recorded all of the connections made to it. At SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy this week, the team announced that they found huge monitoring operations tracking downloaders that have been up and running for at least the entirety of their research. According to the team's presentation (PDF), monitors were only regularly detected in Top 100 torrents, while monitoring of more obscure material was more spotty. What's really mysterious is who all of the firms are. Chothia's crew found around 10 different monitoring entities, of which a few were identifiable as security companies, copyright firms, or other torrent researchers. But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting. Now, despite firms focusing mostly on just the top few searches out there at any given time, that's still a massive amount of user data to collect and store. Why? Well, if a reverse class-action lawsuit were feasible, those treasure troves of stored data would be extremely valuable."

New submitter submeta writes "Katsunobu Imai at Hiroshima University has figured out a way to construct a universal Turing machine using cellular automata in a Penrose tile universe. 'Tiles in the first state act as wires that transmit signals between the logic gates, with the signal itself consisting of either a 'front' or 'back' state. Four other states manage the redirecting of the signal within the logic gates, while the final state is simply an unused background to keep the various states separate.' He was not aware of the recent development of the Penrose glider, so he developed this alternative approach."

New submitter Celarent Darii writes "Prospects for harvesting Uranium from seawater turned interesting by using shrimp shells as a sort of catalyst." Researchers at ORNL presented their findings from a test of a chitin net for harvesting Uranium at the ACS fall meeting. From the ORNL press release: "In a direct comparison to the current state-of-the-art adsorbent, HiCap provides significantly higher uranium adsorption capacity, faster uptake and higher selectivity, according to test results. Specifically, HiCap's adsorption capacity is seven times higher (146 vs. 22 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent) in spiked solutions containing 6 parts per million of uranium at 20 degrees Celsius. In seawater, HiCap's adsorption capacity of 3.94 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent was more than five times higher than the world's best at 0.74 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent. The numbers for selectivity showed HiCap to be seven times higher."

An anonymous reader writes "Conway's Game of Life is now forty two years old, but it continues to inspire as well as being the basis of an actively researched field, with computer scientists now announcing they have found a new form of the famous 'glider' pattern (once suggested by Eric S Raymond as the insignia of computer hackers) that runs over a so-called Penrose universe."

bricko writes with an analysis at New Scientist of recent violence by self-described anarchists against scientists or scientific establishments, including the non-fatal shooting in Genoa in May of the head of a nuclear energy company. That attack "was the latest in a series of alleged anarchist attacks on scientists and engineers, including the attempted bombing of nanotechnology labs in Switzerland and Mexico. This wave of politically motivated violence has raised the question: why do anarchists hate science? Beyond the unsubtle threat of brute force, there are deeper issues that merit attention." The "hate science" line is just a line; the author is under no illusion that there is a single conspiracy, or that all who claim the "anarchist" mantle have identical (or even similar) views of science. "Despite the recent attacks and propaganda, anarchists actually have a complex relationship with science and technology. Some leading figures from anarchist history were scientists, notably Russian biologist Peter Kropotkin. Many hacktivists are anarchists who embrace technology; fiction authors sometimes look toward a future 'technotopia' based on anarchist ideals."

MrSeb writes "An Israeli student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar. Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, Tirosh Shapira has controlled a humanoid robot some 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) away, at the Béziers Technology Institute in France, using just his mind. The system must be trained so that a particular "thought" (fMRI blood flow pattern) equates to a certain command. In this case, when Shapira thinks about moving forward or backward, the robot moves forward or backward; when Shapira thinks about moving one of his hands, the robot surrogate turns in that direction. To complete the loop, the robot has a camera on its head, with the image being displayed in front of Shapira. Speaking to New Scientist, it sounds like Shapira really became one with the robot: 'It was mind-blowing. I really felt like I was there, moving around,' he says. 'At one point the connection failed. One of the researchers picked the robot up to see what the problem was and I was like, "Oi, put me down!"'"

dangle writes "BAE Systems has developed a positioning solution that it claims will work even when GPS is unavailable. Its strategy is to use the collection of radio frequency signals from TV, radio and cellphone masts, even WiFi routers, to deduce a position. BAE's answer is dubbed Navigation via Signals of Opportunity (NAVSOP). It interrogates the airwaves for the ID and signal strength of local digital TV and radio signals, plus air traffic control radars, with finer grained adjustments coming from cellphone masts and WiFi routers. In any given area, the TV, radio, cellphone and radar signals tend to be at constant frequencies and power levels as they are are heavily regulated — so positions could be calculated from them. "The real beauty of NAVSOP is that the infrastructure required to make it work is already in place," says a BAE spokesman — and "software defined radio" microchips that run NAVSOP routines can easily be integrated into existing satnavs. The firm believes the technology could also work in urban concrete canyons where GPS signals cannot currently reach."

An anonymous reader writes "Eugene Goostman, a chatbot imbued with the personality of a 13-year-old boy, won the biggest Turing test ever staged on 23 June, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. Held at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, UK, where Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma code during World War 2, the test involved over 150 separate conversations, 30 judges, 25 hidden humans and five elite, chattering software programs. 'Thirteen years old is not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing,' explains Eugene's creator, Vladimir Veselov."

McGruber writes "Joseph Bonneau, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, calculated the password strengths of nearly 70 million Yahoo! users. He compared the strengths of passwords chosen by different demographic groups and compared the results. People over the age of 55 pick passwords double the strength of those chosen by people under 25 years old." Does this mean that the younger users are more cavalier and naive, or are they simply more cynical about the actual value of strong passwords in the era of large-scale user-database compromises?

colinneagle writes with an excerpt from Network World: "Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London began trials of a Kinect-driven camera last week that would sense body position, and by waving his or her hands, the surgeon can sift through medical images, such as CT scans or real-time X-rays, while in the middle of an operation. During surgery, a surgeon will stop and consult medical images anywhere from once an hour to every few minutes. So the surgeon doesn't have to leave the table, the doctor will work with assistants, but sometimes, if you want things done to your satisfaction, you have to do it yourself. Dr. Tom Carrell, a consultant vascular surgeon at Guy's and St Thomas', described an operation on a patient's aorta earlier this month to New Scientist. 'Up until now, I'd been calling out across the room to one of our technical assistants, asking them to manipulate the image, rotate one way, rotate the other, pan up, pan down, zoom in, zoom out.' With the Kinect, he says, 'I had very intuitive control.'"

cedarhillbilly writes "In his new book The Geek Manifesto, Mark Henderson 'pleads for citizens who value science to force it onto the mainstream political agenda and other main walks of life.' There are some important questions that need answers: 'Do you have to give up your tech practice to undertake a public role?' Also, 'Is political life (compromise, working by consensus, irrationality) antithetical to the "geek" values?'" The Guardian's coverage sums up the idea nicely: "What I desperately want is a move toward an evidence-based culture in politics. Politicians are free to say: 'I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.' That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not a moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."

An anonymous reader writes "Not a single judge was fooled by the chatbots in the 2012 Loebner Prize, which was won by the bot Chip Vivant. According to a journalist who was a human decoy in this year's Turing Test, interactions with the humans was a tad robotic while the bots went off on crazy tangents talking about being a cat and offering condolences for the death of a pet dragon."

hypnosec writes with good news for folks who want to live in a Faraday cage. From the article: "A new type of wallpaper, which has been developed by scientists from the Institut Polytechnique Grenoble INP and the Centre Technique du Papier, will go on sale in 2013 after a Finnish firm Ahlstrom acquired the license. What looks like a bog-standard wallpaper roll actually contains silver particles that allows it to filter out up to three different frequencies simultaneously. It is not the first time that such a technology has surfaced. Back in 2004, BAE Systems was tasked by Ofcom to come up with a similar solution based on what was then called a stealth wallpaper. It used copper instead of silver and blocked Wi-Fi signals while letting GSM, 4G and emergency calls through. Back then, though, a square meter cost £500, whereas the Wi-Fi wallpaper devised by the French researchers should be priced reasonably, with costs matching those of a 'classic,' mid-range wallpaper according to M. Lemaître-Auger, from Grenoble INP."

Taco Cowboy writes "Arctic methane release is a well recorded phenomenon. Methane stored in both permafrost (which is melting) and methane hydrates (methane trapped in marine reservoirs) are vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere as the planet warms. However, researchers who are trying to map atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on a global basis have discovered that the amount of methane emissions in the Arctic region do not total up. Further research revealed that significant amounts of methane releases came from the Arctic ocean (abstract) — as much as 2 milligrams of the gas is released per square meter of ocean, each day — presumably by marine bacteria surviving in low-nutrient environments."

An anonymous reader writes "The world's largest brain study to date, with a team of more than 200 scientists from 100 institutions worldwide collaborated to map the human genes that boost or sabotage the brain's resistance to a variety of mental illnesses and Alzheimer's disease. The study also uncovered new genes that may explain individual differences in brain size and intelligence. From the article: 'Following a brain study on an unprecedented scale, an international collaboration has now managed to tease out a single gene that does have a measurable effect on intelligence. But the effect – although measurable – is small: the gene alters IQ by just 1.29 points. According to some researchers, that essentially proves that intelligence relies on the action of a multitude of genes after all.'"

mikejuk writes "You can build a computer out of all sorts of things — mechanical components, vacuum tubes, transistors, fluids and ... crabs. Researchers at Kobe University in Japan have discovered that soldier crabs have behaviors suitable for implementing simple logic and hence — with enough crabs — you can achieve a complete computer. The Soldier crab Mictyris guinotae has a swarming behavior that is just right for simple logic gates (PDF). When two crab swarms collide they fuse to make a single swarm — and this is enough to build an OR gate."

Adrian Bachtold at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology in Barcelona has created the world's most sensitive scale. The new subatomic weight scale can measure masses as tiny as one yoctogram, less than the mass of a proton. From the article: "Bachtold hopes the scales could be used to distinguish different elements in chemical samples, which might differ only by a few protons. They might also diagnose health conditions by identifying proton-scale differences in molecular mass that are markers of disease."

braindrainbahrain writes "Coincidence or conspiracy? Two new science fiction magazines have just been announced and they are both being published by more serious science publications. New Scientist magazine has announced the publication of Arc, 'A new digital magazine about the future.' Arc features such articles as 'The best time travel movie ever made' and 'The future of science fiction, games, galleries — and futurism.' They are advertising new fact and fiction from the likes of Maragret Atwood and Alastair Reynold. The MIT Technology Review has announced the TRSF, dubbed 'the first installment of a to-be-annual "hard" SF collection.' Some authors: Joe Haldeman and Cory Doctorow. As an interesting note, both publications will be printed on paper for the first ('collectable') issue only; all forthcoming ones will be e-books."

braindrainbahrain writes "Coincidence or conspiracy? Two new science fiction magazines have just been announced and they are both being published by more serious science publications. New Scientist magazine has announced the publication of Arc, 'A new digital magazine about the future.' Arc features such articles as 'The best time travel movie ever made' and 'The future of science fiction, games, galleries — and futurism.' They are advertising new fact and fiction from the likes of Maragret Atwood and Alastair Reynold. The MIT Technology Review has announced the TRSF, dubbed 'the first installment of a to-be-annual "hard" SF collection.' Some authors: Joe Haldeman and Cory Doctorow. As an interesting note, both publications will be printed on paper for the first ('collectable') issue only; all forthcoming ones will be e-books."

New submitter Morganth writes "According to New Scientist, researchers at DARPA are investing efforts in transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) machines to cut the time it takes to train snipers. From the article: 'a 2-milliamp current will run through the part of the brain associated with object recognition — an important skill when visually combing a scene for assailants.' The story also gives a nice explanation on the psychology of 'flow' — the state that experts tend to enter (e.g. programmers, tennis players, pianists) when focusing on their work." We covered similar research done on mice to improve their memory in September.