Slashdot Mirror

cylonlover writes "Millions of years have evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet. Much research is underway into ways to artificially mimic photosynthesis in devices like artificial leaves, but researchers at the University of Georgia are working on a different approach that gives new meaning to the term 'power plant.' Their technology harvests energy generated through photosynthesis before the plants can make use of it (abstract), allowing the energy to instead be used to run low-powered electrical devices."

An anonymous reader writes "A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.' Cornwell went on about what effect this has had now that education has become more pervasive: 'We seem to have gotten to a point in the popular consciousness where people are recognizing the story in these data: Men are falling behind relative to women. Economists have looked at this from a number of different angles, but it's in educational assessments that you make your mark for the labor market. Men's rate of college going has slowed in recent years whereas women's has not, but if you roll the story back far enough, to the 60s and 70s, women were going to college in much fewer numbers. It's at a point now where you've got women earning upward of 60 percent of the bachelors' degrees awarded every year.'"

An anonymous reader writes "If we break a bone it can take weeks or even month to heal depending on the type and severity of the break. In some extreme cases the complexity of the fracture can make it impossible to heal properly. Researchers at the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center have come up with a new solution for healing broken bones that cuts recovery time to days. It relies on the use of stem cells that contain a bone generating protein. These cells are injected in gel form directly into the area of the broken bone, where they quickly get to work forming new bone. The end result is very rapid recovery, possibly sidestepping the muscle atrophy that can come with long bone healing times. The gel has been proven to work on animals as big as a sheep and has funding from the DoD. Lets hope it is proven to work on humans in the coming years."

StatisticallyDeadGuy writes "A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that can, she claims, predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent. Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a 7% chance in Afghanistan (if only they'd known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%. Full elaboration of the forecasting methodology is laid out in a new paper (subscription required — link goes to the abstract). Some details can be gleaned from her 2006 draft (PDF)."

theodp writes "Microsoft was granted a patent Tuesday for Displaying data containing outlying data items, covering the familiar concept of broken y-axis bar charts. Oddly, Microsoft's 2002 'invention' is described in detail in a 1999 listserv post and found its way into scientific journals and other sources before the patent's claims were disclosed. BTW, the patent's term was extended by 269 days, apparently the USPTO's way of apologizing for initially rejecting the patent."

olcrazypete writes: "Click and Clack are apparently fed up with Real Networks. They have switched to Windows Media Player format. 'Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products. This is just our opinion, mind you, but it's shared by enough of our listeners, that we finally decided to take action.' The whole story is here . My favorite line: 'It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?'"

FatherBusa writes "I am a professor of English who specializes in what is usually called "humanities computing"--a discipline concerned with creating and theorizing about the use of computers in humanities research (the homepage for the Association for Computers in the Humanities has some info). I was recently asked to join a working group charged with the task of establishing a peer review process for scholarly software projects in the humanities and stumbled across the Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages put out by the Modern Language Association (the main professional organization for language and literature studies in North America). Hackers working in humanities departments may want to give it a read. It's an interesting statement that speaks to the (sometimes difficult) process of getting "tools" and other sorts of digital work evaluated as academic scholarship in promotion and tenure processes."

jmulvey writes "A new University of Georgia study shows that most of the human genome contains a huge historical record of retroviruses. The study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that viruses were instrumental in the evolution of chimps into humans."

Lothar+0 writes "In United States v. Lucite ball containing lunar material (an actual case, I'm not making this up, folks), the feds are suing to get back a moon rock from an American who brought it back from Honduras. They're alleging that this rock from the Apollo 17 mission is stolen property; ironic considering that NASA took something that wasn't under U.S. jurisdiction."

jpowell writes: "CNN had a story about Kevin Mitnick being ordered off of the lecture circuits. The federal probation office has said that he can no longer write or speak about technology issues." Normally I don't post Mitnick stories here, but, well, huh?

doodzed writes "A massive earthquake has just hit Taiwan. Many buildings have been toppled and over a hundred people are confirmed dead. It is hard to predict what the ramifications to the computer industry will be. Most of the world's motherboards and a lot of chips come from there. Those machines can't be reset overnight if they survived. I guess memory prices are going to go up again, but this pales in comparison to the human toll. Please pray for the victims." The story's at CNN.com - and everywhere else. Things don't look good in Taipei right now. Update:Spock_NPA writes "According to this article, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company indicated at 6:00 PM PDT that the company's building has successfully withstood the effect of the earthquake." But according to this Reuter article, analysts in Seoul still expect to see higher chip prices.

GnuGrendel sent us a News.com Story about Red Hat 6.0. Scheduled to be on shelves on May 10, it ought to be announced on Monday. Supposedly more expensive for the box, but still free for download (of course). Oh, and both KDE & GNOME.

Benny_Eggs writes "It's not the pretty screensaver version, but a SETI@HOME client for Linux is now available." For those of you unfamiliar with the project, Seti@Home is like Distributed.net, except instead of brute force encryption cracking, it searches radio signal noise looking for signs of intelligence.

Trevor wrote to let us all know that Filaments is ready for download. For those you who are unfamiliar with Filaments, it is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler. Click below for the full release annoucement. Filaments version 1.0 is now freely available and can be downloaded on the web at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~dkl/filaments/dist.html or via the the University of Georgia CS Department anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.cs.uga.edu/pub/filaments.

The current distribution runs on the following (homogeneous) architectures:

• cluster of Sparcs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Linux,
• SPARC/Solaris symmetric multiprocessor, and
• SGI/Irix symmetric multiprocessor.

The distribution comes with extensive documentation (a programmer's manual plus four other technical papers) and eight sample application kernels.

Filaments is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler.

The package uses a carefully designed API along with machine-specific runtime libraries and preprocessing that allow programs to run unchanged on both shared- and distributed-memory machines. Most importantly, applications programmed in Filaments run efficiently, achieving a speedup of over 4 on 8 processors or nodes in almost all tests that have been performed.

Any questions should be directed to filaments@cs.uga.edu.

Trevor wrote to let us all know that Filaments is ready for download. For those you who are unfamiliar with Filaments, it is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler. Click below for the full release annoucement. Filaments version 1.0 is now freely available and can be downloaded on the web at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~dkl/filaments/dist.html or via the the University of Georgia CS Department anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.cs.uga.edu/pub/filaments.

The current distribution runs on the following (homogeneous) architectures:

• cluster of Sparcs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Linux,
• SPARC/Solaris symmetric multiprocessor, and
• SGI/Irix symmetric multiprocessor.

The distribution comes with extensive documentation (a programmer's manual plus four other technical papers) and eight sample application kernels.

Filaments is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler.

The package uses a carefully designed API along with machine-specific runtime libraries and preprocessing that allow programs to run unchanged on both shared- and distributed-memory machines. Most importantly, applications programmed in Filaments run efficiently, achieving a speedup of over 4 on 8 processors or nodes in almost all tests that have been performed.

Any questions should be directed to filaments@cs.uga.edu.

Trevor wrote to let us all know that Filaments is ready for download. For those you who are unfamiliar with Filaments, it is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler. Click below for the full release annoucement. Filaments version 1.0 is now freely available and can be downloaded on the web at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~dkl/filaments/dist.html or via the the University of Georgia CS Department anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.cs.uga.edu/pub/filaments.

The current distribution runs on the following (homogeneous) architectures:

• cluster of Sparcs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Linux,
• SPARC/Solaris symmetric multiprocessor, and
• SGI/Irix symmetric multiprocessor.

The distribution comes with extensive documentation (a programmer's manual plus four other technical papers) and eight sample application kernels.

Filaments is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler.

The package uses a carefully designed API along with machine-specific runtime libraries and preprocessing that allow programs to run unchanged on both shared- and distributed-memory machines. Most importantly, applications programmed in Filaments run efficiently, achieving a speedup of over 4 on 8 processors or nodes in almost all tests that have been performed.

Any questions should be directed to filaments@cs.uga.edu.

Trevor wrote to let us all know that Filaments is ready for download. For those you who are unfamiliar with Filaments, it is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler. Click below for the full release annoucement. Filaments version 1.0 is now freely available and can be downloaded on the web at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~dkl/filaments/dist.html or via the the University of Georgia CS Department anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.cs.uga.edu/pub/filaments.

The current distribution runs on the following (homogeneous) architectures:

• cluster of Sparcs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Solaris,
• cluster of PCs running Linux,
• SPARC/Solaris symmetric multiprocessor, and
• SGI/Irix symmetric multiprocessor.

The distribution comes with extensive documentation (a programmer's manual plus four other technical papers) and eight sample application kernels.

Filaments is a library package that can be used to create architecture-independent parallel programs-that is, programs that are portable and efficient across different parallel machines. Filaments can be used directly as a subroutine library to write parallel programs, but it is most useful as the target of a parallelizing compiler.

The package uses a carefully designed API along with machine-specific runtime libraries and preprocessing that allow programs to run unchanged on both shared- and distributed-memory machines. Most importantly, applications programmed in Filaments run efficiently, achieving a speedup of over 4 on 8 processors or nodes in almost all tests that have been performed.

Any questions should be directed to filaments@cs.uga.edu.

John Eikenberry was the first to tell us that Windowmaker 0.14 is out. I'm downloading my copy as soon as I finish writing this article. The new feature is a fiend clone. Grab it from the usual place.