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Remember when Bing Maps lost a city because they used bad Wikipedia data? An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Since knowledge bases like Wikidata are poised to be integrated into all kinds of information systems, wrong facts are not just displayed on Wikidata's pages but may propagate directly to all systems using the knowledge base. Hence, detecting and reverting vandalism and other kinds of damaging edits is an even more important task than on Wikipedia. Recently, German scientists published the first machine learning-based approach on vandalism detection in Wikidata, and now Adobe sponsors a competition on vandalism detection, the WSDM Cup Challenge, awarding $2500 for the best-performing solutions that will also be published open source.
"Given a Wikidata revision, compute a vandalism score denoting the likelihood of this revision being vandalism (or similarly damaging)," read the official rules, pushing for a near real-time solution to be submitted before December 22. And the winners will also be invited to the headquarters of Wikimedia Germany to discuss implenting their solutions.

ms writes: "Yesterday golem.de reported that the Optical Communication and High-Frequency Engineering Group at the University of Paderborn (Germany) claims to have made a technology practical which doubles the transmission capacity of optical fibers to 80 GBit/s. In their so-called "polarization division multiplex data transmission system" they don't only send one but two mutually orthogonal light waves through the fiber. They say the only big problem was the dispersal of the light waves which limits the data rate. Additional they had to fight against the phenomena that the polarization direction of the light waves changes while it goes through the fiber. Now, after two years of research, they invented an "automatic optical compensator of polarization mode dispersion" which fights both the limitations. With this gadget they were able to send data at a rate of twice 40 GBit/s (that's 85,899,345,920 Bps) over a test-line of 212 km. And "only the available equipment limited distance and data rate". As we all know, optical fibers build the (cronically overloaded) backbone of our beloved Net. (BTW: That's Net., not .Net!)" Here's the babelfish translation, too.

Anonymous Coward writes "Greetings from CLOWN, the worlds largest (512-Node) Linux cluster. Theres an english page here. Take a look at the CLOWNs own website story. All 512 Nodes are busy preparing a movie right now (02:20 MET), and many international Television-Channels are carrying the "WDR Computernacht". Were on the air in China as well! " Nice to know it's up and running... More details on this page in German. Apparently the cluster uses Debian Linux.

Anonymous Coward writes "Greetings from CLOWN, the worlds largest (512-Node) Linux cluster. Theres an english page here. Take a look at the CLOWNs own website story. All 512 Nodes are busy preparing a movie right now (02:20 MET), and many international Television-Channels are carrying the "WDR Computernacht". Were on the air in China as well! " Nice to know it's up and running... More details on this page in German. Apparently the cluster uses Debian Linux.

Anonymous Coward writes "Greetings from CLOWN, the worlds largest (512-Node) Linux cluster. Theres an english page here. Take a look at the CLOWNs own website story. All 512 Nodes are busy preparing a movie right now (02:20 MET), and many international Television-Channels are carrying the "WDR Computernacht". Were on the air in China as well! " Nice to know it's up and running... More details on this page in German. Apparently the cluster uses Debian Linux.

Anonymous Coward writes "Greetings from CLOWN, the worlds largest (512-Node) Linux cluster. Theres an english page here. Take a look at the CLOWNs own website story. All 512 Nodes are busy preparing a movie right now (02:20 MET), and many international Television-Channels are carrying the "WDR Computernacht". Were on the air in China as well! " Nice to know it's up and running... More details on this page in German. Apparently the cluster uses Debian Linux.

Axel Boldt writes "In the furtherance of the global gift economy, I would like to invoke the /. effect for the Giveaway List. I have just expanded it to cover hardware and literature in addition to Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD CDs. If you have stuff to give away, don't hesitate to put yourself on the list!" Coasters are selfish! Redistribute!