Slashdot Mirror

Millions of pixels have been used to talk about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's decision to ban telecommuting and her reasons for doing it. Today's interviewee, Mårten Mickos, built MySQL AB into a billion-dollar company with 70% of its workers, all over the world, telecommuting instead of working in offices. Now he's CEO of another young open source company, Eucalyptus, and is following a similar hiring pattern. Mårten says (toward the end of the video/transcript) that he believes people working out of their homes is entirely natural; that this is how things were done for thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

mask.of.sanity writes "Annual Canadian hack fest Pwn2Own is famous for leaving a trail of bloodied software bits and today it did not disappoint. Security researchers tore holes through all major web browsers, breaking Windows 8 and Java, too (though the latter feat is not remarkable). Thankfully for the rest of us, the cashed-up winners will disclose the holes quietly to Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Oracle, and the proof of concept attack code will remain in the hands of organisers only."

Spearphishing. The deluxe (but easy) way to get unwary employees to put malware on your network. It's basically the same as phishing, except more targeted. That is, a plain phishing scam might offer an unwary web-browsing employee a chance to see a famous starlet naked, while a spearphishing attack might purport to be an urgent request from your Bizzaro County office for 200 Kg of Unobtainium Oxide. Open that email, and... ZAP! So this is social hacking (cracking for the old-timers), and cannot necessarily be fought entirely by technical means. So how about setting up fake spearphishing attempts and immediately sending employees who fall for them to an IT security class with an emphasis on how to avoid phishing scams? You can do this yourself, possibly with help from a bright person or two from a nearby University. Or you can contact PhishMe or another anti-phish training company and have them help you teach spearphishing awareness to your people. Either way, every computer-using person in your company should know about phishing -- and should know how to avoid getting hooked by phishers.

Deathspawner writes with a view on Six Strikes we don't normally see around here: "It's been well-established all over the Web that the just-implemented 'Six Strikes' system is bad... horrible, worthy of death to those who created it. But let's take a deep breath for a moment. Can Six Strikes actually be a good thing for consumers? While the scheme isn't perfect (far from it), one of the biggest benefits from this system is that it introduces a proxy, and any persecution you might have easily faced prior to Six Strikes is delayed under the new program. Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?" A couple of days ago, someone sent Torrentfreak an actual alert they received from Comcast (the alert itself is a few screens down). Noteworthy is that there is zero mention of the appeals process.

New submitter emilcho writes with news for anyone looking for a Free alternative to Skype "Among the most prominent new features people will find quality multi-party video conferences for XMPP, audio device hot-plugging, support for Outlook presence and calls, an overhauled user interface and support for the Opus and VP8 audio/video codec. Jitsi has lately shaped into one of the more viable open Skype Alternatives with features such as end-to-end ZRTP encryption for audio and video calls. The 2.0 version has been in the works for almost a year now, so this is an important step for the project." There are prebuilt packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Windows, and OS X.

eldavojohn writes "One of China's main microblogging services used by 30% of all Chinese internet users is called Sina Weibo (weibo is the Chinese word for 'microblog') and something that is quite different from the West's twitter is, of course, the enforced censorship. Researchers at Rice University in Houston have estimated numbers for how censorship works and identifies the 'velocity of censorship' in China's microblogging censorship. Most of the posts are marked as 'permission denied' between the five minute and ten minute marks after posting. Their research shows that 'If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that's a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day.' The research indicates you would need a small army to meet stringent censorship policies when servicing China and to avoid being shutdown like Fanfou (another weibo). Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo. So the research examines the speed of ex post facto censorship which presumably requires an employee or perhaps government employee to identify 'non-harmonious' posts based on their intrinsic content."

eldavojohn writes "One of China's main microblogging services used by 30% of all Chinese internet users is called Sina Weibo (weibo is the Chinese word for 'microblog') and something that is quite different from the West's twitter is, of course, the enforced censorship. Researchers at Rice University in Houston have estimated numbers for how censorship works and identifies the 'velocity of censorship' in China's microblogging censorship. Most of the posts are marked as 'permission denied' between the five minute and ten minute marks after posting. Their research shows that 'If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that's a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day.' The research indicates you would need a small army to meet stringent censorship policies when servicing China and to avoid being shutdown like Fanfou (another weibo). Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo. So the research examines the speed of ex post facto censorship which presumably requires an employee or perhaps government employee to identify 'non-harmonious' posts based on their intrinsic content."

eldavojohn writes "One of China's main microblogging services used by 30% of all Chinese internet users is called Sina Weibo (weibo is the Chinese word for 'microblog') and something that is quite different from the West's twitter is, of course, the enforced censorship. Researchers at Rice University in Houston have estimated numbers for how censorship works and identifies the 'velocity of censorship' in China's microblogging censorship. Most of the posts are marked as 'permission denied' between the five minute and ten minute marks after posting. Their research shows that 'If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that's a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day.' The research indicates you would need a small army to meet stringent censorship policies when servicing China and to avoid being shutdown like Fanfou (another weibo). Keep in mind that this is not simply identifying keywords and blocking the post based on those words. The researchers noted that a phrase like 'Secretary of the Political and Legislative Committee' will result in you being unable to submit your post to Sina Weibo. So the research examines the speed of ex post facto censorship which presumably requires an employee or perhaps government employee to identify 'non-harmonious' posts based on their intrinsic content."

Kittenman writes "The BBC magazine has an article on human trust of robots. 'As manufacturers get ready to market robots for the home it has become essential for them to overcome the public's suspicion of them. But designing a robot that is fun to be with — as well as useful and safe — is quite difficult.' The article cites a poll done on Facebook over the 'best face' design for a robot that would be trusted. But we still distrust them in general. 'Eighty-eight per cent of respondents [to a different survey] agreed with the statement that robots are "necessary as they can do jobs that are too hard or dangerous for people," such as space exploration, warfare and manufacturing. But 60% thought that robots had no place in the care of children, elderly people and those with disabilities.' We distrust the robots because of the uncanny valley — or, as the article puts it, that they look unwell (or like corpses) and do not behave as expected. So, at what point will you trust robots for more personal tasks? How about one with the 'trusting face'?" It seems much more likely that a company will figure out sneaky ways to make us trust robots than make robots that much more trustworthy.

Today's video is an interview with the Corporate Alliance Director and the Chief Technology Officer of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), a non-profit organization that claims it is "...the largest and most comprehensive global information privacy community and resource, helping practitioners develop and advance their careers and organizations manage and protect their data." In other words, it's not the same as the much-beloved Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), but is -- as its name implies -- a group of people engaged in privacy protection as part of their work or whose work is about privacy full-time, which seems to be the case for more and more IT and Web people lately, what with HIPAA and other privacy-oriented regulations. This is a growing field, well worth learning more about.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Science Daily Headlines reports that researchers have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure the polarization states of light overcoming some important challenges of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle and demonstrating that it is possible to measure key related variables, known as 'conjugate' variables, of a quantum particle or state directly. Such direct measurements of the wave-function had long seemed impossible because of a key tenet of the uncertainty principle — the idea that certain properties of a quantum system could be known only poorly if certain other related properties were known with precision. 'The reason it wasn't thought possible to measure two conjugate variables directly was because measuring one would destroy the wave-function before the other one could be measured,' says co-author Jonathan Leach. The direct measurement technique employs a 'trick' to measure the first property in such a way that the system is not disturbed significantly and information about the second property can still be obtained. This careful measurement relies on the 'weak measurement' of the first property followed by a 'strong measurement' of the second property. First described 25 years ago, weak measurement requires that the coupling between the system and what is used to measure it be, as its name suggests, 'weak,' which means that the system is barely disturbed in the measurement process. The downside of this type of measurement is that a single measurement only provides a small amount of information, and to get an accurate readout, the process has to be repeated multiple times and the average taken. Researchers passed polarized light through two crystals of differing thicknesses: the first, a very thin crystal that 'weakly' measures the horizontal and vertical polarization state; the second, a much thicker crystal that 'strongly' measures the diagonal and anti-diagonal polarization state. As the first measurement was performed weakly, the system is not significantly disturbed, and therefore, information gained from the second measurement was still valid. This process is repeated several times to build up accurate statistics. Putting all of this together gives a full, direct characterization of the polarization states of the light."

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Katherine Rosenberg reports that the Texas Department of Public Safety has unveiled a new web site dedicated to unsolved cold case homicides to make sure the victims are not forgotten and to try to catch a break in even the coldest of cases. DPS spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger says continual strides in technology make focusing on cold cases more important than ever because there are more opportunities to solve them with each emerging process or device. The web site was created because the more readily available information is the more people may be apt to pick up the phone and report what they know. 'It helps to refresh these cases in the public's mind and hopefully we'll shed new light on it. In some cases, we can also re-examine evidence if there's an opportunity or need there as well,' says Cesinger. One featured case from 1993 is Kathleen Suckley who was 29 when her throat was slashed and she was stabbed about 40 times inside her rented duplex, while her two sons, ages 4 and 1, were home. Officials said they interviewed numerous witnesses but never got enough information for an arrest. Capt. Tim Wilson maintains that in any homicide case there always is someone who knows something. At some point, he believes, the murderer will tell someone out of guilt or pride, or simply the pressure of holding it in. Cesinger points out that over time as relationships change, if prompted by something like the website or a news article, that confidant finally may come forward. 'I think we owe it to Kathleen to be this tenacious. It drives me nuts that somebody can do this and get away with it,' says Kathleen's mother-in-law Luann Suckley. 'I think the website is great ... maybe someone will finally speak up because I'm tired of sitting back and waiting.'"

New submitter jgb writes "WebKit is, now that Opera decided to join the project, in the core of three of the five major web browsers: Apple's Safari, Google's Chromium and Opera. Therefore, WebKit is also a melting pot for many corporate interests, since several competing companies (not only Google and Apple, but also Samsung, RIM, Nokia, Intel and many others) are finding ways of collaborating in the project. All of this makes fascinating the study of how they are contributing to the project. Some weeks ago, a study showed how they were submitting contributions to the code base. Now another one uncovers how they are reviewing those submitted contributions. As expected, most of the reviews during the whole life of the project were done by Apple, with Google as a close second. But things have changed dramatically during the last few years. In 2012, Google is a clear first, reviewing about twice as much (50%) as Apple (25%). RIM (7%) and Nokia (5%) are also relevant reviewers. Code review is very important in WebKit's development process, with reviewers acting as a sort of gatekeepers, deciding which changes make sense, and when they are conforming to the project practices and quality standards. In some sense, review activity reflects the responsibility each company is taking on how WebKit evolves. In some sense, the evolution over time for this activity by the different companies tells the history of how they have been shaping the project."

An anonymous reader writes "We've talked previously about Texan gunsmith Cody Wilson's efforts to create 3-D-printable parts for firearms. He has a printed magazine that can withstand normal operation for quite a while. But he's also been working on building parts of the gun itself. An early version of a 3-D printed 'lower receiver' — the part of the gun holding the operating parts — failed after firing just 6 rounds. Now, a new video posted by Wilson's organization shows their design has improved enough to withstand over 600 rounds. Plus, their test only ended because they used up their ammunition; they say the receiver could have easily withstood a thousand rounds or more. Speaking to Ars, Wilson gave some insight into his reasoning behind this creation with regard to gun laws. 'I believe in evading and disintermediating the state. It seemed to be something we could build an organization around. Just like Bitcoin can circumvent financial mechanisms. ... The message is in what we're doing—the message is: download this gun.' A spokesperson for the ATF said that while operating a business as a firearm manufacturer requires a license, an individual manufacturing one for personal use is legal."

New submitter fluxgate writes "Steve Mann (whom you might know for his having pioneered wearable computing as a grad student at MIT back in the 1990s) writes in IEEE Spectrum magazine about his decades of experience with computerized eyeware. His article warns that Google Glass hasn't been properly engineered to avoid creating disorientating effects and significant eyestrain. While it's hard to imagine that Google has missed something fundamental here, Mann convincingly describes why Google Glass users might experience serious problems. Quoting: 'The very first wearable computer system I put together showed me real-time video on a helmet-mounted display. The camera was situated close to one eye, but it didn’t have quite the same viewpoint. The slight misalignment seemed unimportant at the time, but it produced some strange and unpleasant results. And those troubling effects persisted long after I took the gear off. That’s because my brain had adjusted to an unnatural view, so it took a while to readjust to normal vision. ... Google Glass and several similarly configured systems now in development suffer from another problem I learned about 30 years ago that arises from the basic asymmetry of their designs, in which the wearer views the display through only one eye. These systems all contain lenses that make the display appear to hover in space, farther away than it really is. That’s because the human eye can’t focus on something that’s only a couple of centimeters away, so an optical correction is needed. But what Google and other companies are doing—using fixed-focus lenses to make the display appear farther away—is not good.'"

New submitter oag2 writes "Discover Magazine has a new slideshow of NASA's pie-in-the-sky (or, rather, toroid-in-the-sky) mock-ups of what space colonies would look like, complete with verdant mountains, flowing rivers, cocktail parties, and a guy on a floating bicycle. Though the designs are retro-futuristic, the artist who made them was prescient in other ways. From the accompanying article: "In the context of the 70s, when we had some sense of momentum from Apollo as far as expanding the human presence in space, it seemed like the kind of thing we could have just picked up and moved with," Davis says. "And it's still possible. It's just a matter of where we decide to spend our money." But Guidice remembers a more telling prophecy from O'Neill. "One of the most memorable things I ever heard him say was, 'If we don't do it right now,' meaning in the next 20 years, and that was 20 years ago, 'then we'll never do it, because we'll be overpopulated and the strain on the natural resources will be the number one priority. We will not have any sort of inclination to see this through."'" The O'Neill referenced above is Gerard K. O'Neill, physicist and founder of the Space Studies Institute. He wrote a book in 1976 called The High Frontier which featured these mock-up paintings, and explained in great detail how the space habitats would function. It's a fascinating book, and well worth reading if the pictures pique your curiosity.

An anonymous reader sends word that NASA scientists using the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) about the Van Allen Probes have discovered a third radiation belt surrounding Earth. Scientists have been aware of the Van Allen radiation belts since the 1950s, but it was thought that there were only two of them. The probes were sent up to simply map the belts in fine detail; the discovery of a third belt was a complete surprise. Deputy mission scientist Shri Kanekal said, "By the fifth day REPT was on, we could plot out our observations and watch the formation of a third radiation belt. We started wondering if there was something wrong with our instruments. We checked everything, but there was nothing wrong with them. The third belt persisted beautifully, day after day, week after week, for four weeks." Part of the reason they caught a glimpse of this belt was that they turned the REPT on early, so it would overlap with another probe that had reached end-of-life and was about to de-orbit. If they hadn't decided to do so, or if the REPT hadn't worked perfectly, we still might be in the dark about a third Van Allen belt.

An anonymous reader sends word that NASA scientists using the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) about the Van Allen Probes have discovered a third radiation belt surrounding Earth. Scientists have been aware of the Van Allen radiation belts since the 1950s, but it was thought that there were only two of them. The probes were sent up to simply map the belts in fine detail; the discovery of a third belt was a complete surprise. Deputy mission scientist Shri Kanekal said, "By the fifth day REPT was on, we could plot out our observations and watch the formation of a third radiation belt. We started wondering if there was something wrong with our instruments. We checked everything, but there was nothing wrong with them. The third belt persisted beautifully, day after day, week after week, for four weeks." Part of the reason they caught a glimpse of this belt was that they turned the REPT on early, so it would overlap with another probe that had reached end-of-life and was about to de-orbit. If they hadn't decided to do so, or if the REPT hadn't worked perfectly, we still might be in the dark about a third Van Allen belt.

Bennett Haselton writes "The U.S. government recently announced that academic papers on federally-funded research should become freely available online within one year of publication in a journal. But the real question is why academics don't simply publish most papers freely anyway. If the problem is that traditional journals have a monopoly on the kind of prestige that can only be conferred by having your paper appear in their hallowed pages, that monopoly can easily be broken, because there's no reason why open-access journals can't confer the same imprimatur of quality." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts on the great free-access debate.

Around the time of the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, who lobbied tirelessly for free access to academic articles (in his sometimes grey-hat manner, which ultimately got him in trouble), I admitted to some friends that I didn't understand how this became a problem. Why aren't all journal articles free, all the time?

I don't mean that I didn't know why the journal publishers charged exorbitant fees for their subscriptions. If academic researchers have to have access to journal articles in order to do their jobs, then you can expect the journals to gouge academic libraries on the prices. What I didn't understand was: Why do academics even publish in journals that demand exclusive publishing rights for their work, and then charge readers huge fees to read it?

Well actually, we know the answer to that too: academics want the prestige of publishing in big-name journals that have established reputations, and as a result, those well-known journals are in a position to dictate the terms of the contract. A professor might genuinely want to publish their paper in a journal where it can be read for free by all, but they can hardly be blamed for thinking of their own career path first.

Here's the question I really wanted answered: If "prestige" only exists in the minds of other academics within a field, then why don't the academics within a given field just agree to confer "prestige" on papers published in open-access journals, if they can see for themselves that the quality is equivalent to what would be published in the old-guard journals that charge an arm and a leg? And then make hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions accordingly?

I don't mean that the papers published in an open-access journal would bypass the peer-review process, and that everyone in the field would have to judge the papers for themselves without any prior certification of their quality. One of the points that Peter Suber makes repeatedly in his book Open Access is that open access is not about skipping peer review and dumping papers directly onto the web. Rather, the process would work similarly to peer review for a traditional journal:

1. Author submits a paper to journal XYZ.

2. Journal XYZ selects one or more peer reviewers from among their list of people they consider qualified to review the paper. The peer reviewers send back their usual suggestions and some consensus is reached as to whether or not to publish.

3. If Journal XYZ publishes the paper, then they have certified that the paper passed the quality controls in step #2, and the author can now legitimately claim that they had a paper published in Journal XYZ.

4. If people in the field know that Journal XYZ is not skimping on the quality controls in step #2 — that Journal XYZ is sending the papers to the same academics who would do peer review for one of the old-guard journals, and who are holding the papers to the same standard — then they should respect the paper just as much as if it were published in a traditional journal. If a person has never heard of Journal XYZ, then it should only take a minute to explain to them how it works (and crucially, that Journal XYZ is just as strict about quality as the old-guard journals that everybody has heard of).

Each step in this process should cost the journal virtually nothing. The "hard cost," the part that consumes the time of people with unique skills, is the peer review step, but peer reviewers are usually paid by universities and consider peer review for academic journals to be part of their job description. At a minimum, all the editors really have to do is maintain the list of people they consider qualified to do the peer review, and send the submitted papers off to them.

Moreover, the entire process should be fast. Again, the "hard cost" in time is the peer review, but there's no reason that the delays between submission and publication should be in the range of months or years.

(I'm assuming that the article authors would want their writings to be widely read, or at least would not be opposed to it. That may not be the case if, for example, the authors were commissioned by a pharmaceutical company for a study that cast their drug in a favorable light, but the authors realize that their research methods contained errors and want to minimize the number of eyes on their paper, to reduce the chances of their chicanery being caught. Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma documents these types of problems very thoroughly, but I'm sidestepping that issue for now.)

So, with that in mind as the ideal, I asked my friends, including many current and former academics, why this essentially wasn't the model that was used. Several mentioned the Public Library of Science, which publishes all articles in its journals under a Creative Commons Attribution License (free for anyone to read and reproduce in full, as long as the original author is cited), and finances its operations through publication fees. These fees are in the $2,000-$3,000 range, heavily discounted for low-income countries and authors, and in any case most academic authors pay the fees out of their research grants and not out of their own pockets. That sounded much better than the traditional model, I thought, but I still didn't understand why the costs weren't even closer to zero. Another friend pointed out that PLOS costs cover the expenses for many of their other activities — which are all noble goals, to be sure, but at the same time, why isn't anybody operating a more bare-bones model which minimizes all expenses, and charges almost nothing for publication or subscription?

This, it turns out, appears to be the approach of the PeerJ project, which aims to let authors pay a one-time fee of $99 at article submission time for the right to publish one article per year — or, if you prefer to pay only if your article is accepted for publication, you can pay $129 "on acceptance" (explained here). And the author of the Techdirt piece mentions that he submitted a paper which was published in the inaugural edition of one of PeerJ's journals, 10 weeks after the submission date. This is cheap and fast enough that I'd call it a validation of the theoretical model which predicts the whole process should be able to be done for almost no cost in almost no time. In other words, I think PeerJ will succeed, but even if it does fail, it will only be because of some anomalous business snafu, not because the hard costs of the service they're providing are greater than the dirt-cheap price they're charging for it. If for any reason PeerJ doesn't happen to get it right the first time, they or some other company should keep trying until someone makes it work.

The basic algorithm at work here — taking a piece of content, submitting it to one or more suitably qualified reviewers, and then certifying the content based on the feedback of the reviewers — is something I've advocated in many contexts over the years, for many different types of problems. In one article I argued that we could make success in the music industry into much more of a meritocracy, with far less arbitrariness in determining who succeeds and fails, if a suitably popular site like Pandora simply took new submissions from artists, had the content "rated" by a random sample of listeners interested in that type of music, and if enough of them liked it, push the content out to all of the fans of that genre. In "Crowdsourcing the Censors" I suggested that Facebook's complaint review process should use the same principle: If a given page received enough complaints, have the page contents reviewed by a random subset of Facebook users who had signed up to be "abusive content" reviewers, and then only flag the page for removal if a high enough percentage of those users voted that the page had indeed violated Facebook's guidelines. This year I argued that "We The People", the White House's online petition-drive-organizing website, should rate ideas based on what a random subset of users think of each idea, rather than allowing users to organize mobs of their friends and followers to vote their own ideas to the top of the pile (which, in case you missed it, is how 4chan gave us this). Or, if you think the general public is not qualified to rate ideas according to how they should be prioritized by the White House (and I'd be inclined to agree), you could have the ideas rated by a random subset of, say, the nation's economics professors.

Of course, I haven't heard of any plans to implement this algorithm in any of those contexts. Not that I expected the key power players to be reading my articles, but it's a little surprising that none of them ever came up with this idea independently, either. (To this day, the only website I'm aware of that ever implemented random-sample voting correctly, was HotOrNot.com, where users could rate members' pictures by attractiveness — but each picture's rating was determined by showing it to a random subset of the site's visitors. That system is gone, since the site has made itself over into a date-finding service.)

But academia in general, and science specifically, is different from other arenas in a number of key ways which could help this algorithm succeed:

• Academia, uniquely, is comprised of many professionals whose love of knowledge and intellectual inquiry, is greater than their desire for money. That's not to say that I don't think the same algorithm could work just as well in a business like the music industry, where most of the stakeholders are in it for the money. But even if Pandora did successfully implement the algorithm, it would meet a lot of resistance from entrenched interests in the music industry, who make their money by finding and promoting and managing talent and would not be happy about a new system that threatened to make them irrelevant. In academia, by contrast, it's quite plausible that even the "entrenched interests" — the people who had become superstars under the old system — would see the new system's great potential for disseminating free knowledge, and would welcome it even if it gave scrappy new upstart academics a chance to dethrone them. Not everybody in academia loves knowledge more than they love their own prestige, but I know more people like that in academia than anywhere else.

• In academia, even among people who do care primarily about their own prestige, many of them have tenure and guaranteed job security, a situation that does not exist in most other industries. This gives them the freedom to experiment with new models, such as submitting papers to upstart PeerJ journals. But more importantly for our purposes, it means they can announce that in their department's hiring and promotion decisions, they will count PeerJ-published papers as legitimate professional accomplishments, for the benefit of non-tenured faculty members who do have to worry about their resume.

• Academics, particularly in maths and sciences, are more prone to the kind of thinking that would lead a person naturally in the direction of the kind of system that PeerJ embodies. First, think of a theoretical model (like the kind I described near the beginning of the article). This model predicts that, ideally, it should be possible to publish papers at very low cost with quick turnaround times, without sacrificing peer-review quality assurance. Now, try to approximate that model as closely as possible in the real world. (In most other industries that I've worked in, there's much more inertia around the existing way of doing things, and far less willingness to entertain any discussion about whether a theoretical model can show how we could accomplish the same thing with vastly less overhead.)

And that, in the end, is the real reason journal articles should be free. Not because the U.S. government is making it a condition for taxpayer-funded research, although that is a welcome development. But because there's no part of the process that should cost very much to begin with, if article authors and peer reviewers are already being paid by their employers. The last piece of the puzzle is that enough academics and faculty departments have to agree to confer "prestige" on articles published in open-access journals, equivalent to the level of prestige that they would accord for an article published in a traditional journal of the same quality. If they won't do that, then the old-guard journals will maintain their monopoly on conferring "prestige", and don't be surprised if journal prices keep growing to the point where even Harvard can't pay for them.

the_newsbeagle writes "This year, a biotech company called Ion Torrent will introduce a new chip for its genome sequencing machine, which should enable researchers and doctors to scan a complete human genome for $1000 and in just a couple of hours. Compare that to the effort required to complete the first human genome: $3 billion and 13 years. Ion Torrent has nearly reached the $1000-genome milestone by virtue of a process called 'semiconductor sequencing,' and the company's founder says his chip-based sequencing machine benefits from all the efficiencies of the computer industry. At a price point of $1000, genome scans could become a routine part of medicine. And the price could keep dropping. To test out the technology, and to investigate just how useful genome scans are these days for your typical, reasonably healthy person, the IEEE Spectrum reporter got her own genome scanned and analyzed."

On the heels of their December release, the 13.02 release of the Genode multi-server microkernel OS framework continues to deliver major new features. Under the hood, there's support for the IOMMU, bringing safe bus master DMA to userspace drivers (overcoming one of the final advantages monolithic kernels had). They've also added full virtualization support, good enough to boot Linux as an application. In the cool department, they've added a new low latency audio interface that could very well pave the way for something akin to JACK, and right now provides a lightweight way for the system to beep at you in real time . A few more libraries have been ported (libssh, curl, iconv) in preparation for a port of git to the Noux native GNU runtime. There are also a bunch of other improvements to their NOVA microkernel, support for running on the Exynos 5250 and Freescale i.MX53, a new console multiplexer, improvements to the display server, simplification of the base libraries, and more. I'll be attempting to build it and give it a spin to see how well it works in practice sometime soon.

On the heels of their December release, the 13.02 release of the Genode multi-server microkernel OS framework continues to deliver major new features. Under the hood, there's support for the IOMMU, bringing safe bus master DMA to userspace drivers (overcoming one of the final advantages monolithic kernels had). They've also added full virtualization support, good enough to boot Linux as an application. In the cool department, they've added a new low latency audio interface that could very well pave the way for something akin to JACK, and right now provides a lightweight way for the system to beep at you in real time . A few more libraries have been ported (libssh, curl, iconv) in preparation for a port of git to the Noux native GNU runtime. There are also a bunch of other improvements to their NOVA microkernel, support for running on the Exynos 5250 and Freescale i.MX53, a new console multiplexer, improvements to the display server, simplification of the base libraries, and more. I'll be attempting to build it and give it a spin to see how well it works in practice sometime soon.

An anonymous reader writes "While speaking at the TED Conference in California earlier today, Sergey Brin seemingly tried to set the stage for a world where using Google Glass is as normal as using a smartphone. What's more, Brin went so far as to say that using smartphones is 'emasculating.' Brin said that smartphone users often seclude themselves in their own private virtual worlds. 'Is this the way you're meant to interact with other people,' Brin asked. Are people in the future destined to communicate via just walking around, looking down, and 'rubbing a featureless piece of glass,' Brin asked rhetorically. 'It's kind of emasculating. Is this what you're meant to do with your body?' Is wearing futuristic glasses any better?" Another reader sends in an article that also muses on our psychological connection to our devices. Or, as he puts it, the "increasingly weird and perhaps overly intimate relationship we have with our gadgets; the fist we touch when awake, the last at night. Our minds have become bookended by glass."

Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Google is bringing a Quickoffice viewer to its new high-end Chromebook Pixel, with full editing ability expected within three months. According to TechCrunch, Quickoffice-on-Chromebooks comes courtesy of Native Client. If Chromebooks prove a hit (and Google ports Quickoffice onto devices other than the ultra-high-priced Chromebook Pixel), could that mean the beginning of the end of Microsoft Office's market dominance of the productivity software space? While Microsoft has been pushing into the cloud with software like Office 365, that's also Google's home territory. But can Google actually disrupt the game?"

An anonymous reader writes "The Parallel Universe blog has a post about parallel data processing. They start off by talking about how Moore's Law still holds, but the shift from clock frequency to multiple cores has stifled the rate at which hardware allows software to scale. (Basically, Amdahl's Law.) The simplest approach to dealing with this is sharding, but that introduces its own difficulties. The more you shard a data set, the more work you need to do to separate out the data elements that can't interact. Optimizing for 2n cores takes more than twice the work of optimizing for n cores. The article says, 'If we want to continue writing compellingly complex applications at an ever-increasing scale we must come to terms with the new Moore's law and build our software on top of solid infrastructure designed specifically for this new reality; sharding just won't cut it.' Their solution is to transfer some of the processing work to the database. 'This because the database is in a unique position to know which transactions may contend for the same data items, and how to schedule them with respect to one another for the best possible performance. The database can and should be smart.' They demonstrate how SpaceBase does this by simulating a 10,000-spaceship battle on different sets of hardware (code available here). Going from a dual-core system to a quad-core system at the same clock speed actually doubles performance without sharding."

Weezul writes "The Ada Initiative's Valerie Aurora got Violet Blue's Hackers As A High-Risk Population (29c3 abstract) talk on harm reduction methodology pulled from the Security BSides meeting in San Francisco by claiming it contained rape triggers [ed note: you might not want to visit the main page of the weblog as it contains a few pictures that might be considered NSFW in more conservative places]. It's frankly asinine to object to work around hacker ethics as 'off topic' at such broad hacker conference. Is Appelbaum's 29c3 keynote 'off topic' for asking hackers to work for the 'good guys' rather than military, police, their contractors, Facebook, etc.? Yes, obviously harm reduction is a psychological hack that need not involve a computer, but this holds for 'social engineering' as well. It's simply that hacking isn't nearly as specialized or inaccessible as say theoretical physics. Worse, there is no shortage of terrible technology laws like the CFAA, DMCA, etc. that exist partially because early hackers failed to communicate an ethics that seemed coherent and reasoned to outsiders." The Ada Initiative responds that such talks do more harm than good. It could also be argued that "not working for the bad guys" type talks aren't off-topic, since the hacker community has traditionally cared about things like information freedom.

This is a Google Hangout interview with Keith Bergelt, Chief Executive Officer of the Open Invention Network (OIN), which was jointly founded by IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony to share their relevant patents with all Linux and Open Source developers and users in order to prevent patent troll attacks on FOSS, such as the famous SCO vs. IBM lawsuits that hampered Linux adoption during the early 2000s. It costs nothing to become a an OIN licensee, and over 500 companies have done so. Few people know, however, that individual developers and FOSS users can become OIN licensees; that you are welcome to do so, and it costs nothing. Read their license agreement, sign it, and send it in. That's all it takes. They also buy patents and accept patent donations. And "...if your company is being victimized by any entity seeking to assert its patent portfolio against Linux, please contact us so that we can aid you in your battle with these dark forces." This OIN service is called Linux Defenders 911. We hope you never need to use it, but it's good to know it's there if you do need it.

Billy the Mountain writes "A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold. According to this piece in The Economist: A tantalising prospect, the key is a technique similar to smelting aluminum with a new twist: The metallic oxides are not melted as with aluminum but blended in powder form with a molten salt that serves as a medium and electrolyte. This technology is known as the FFC Cambridge Process. Other metals include Neodymium, Tungsten, and Vanadium."

New submitter KublaCant writes "'At this very moment, researchers around the world – including in the United States – are working to develop fully autonomous war machines: killer robots. This is not science fiction. It is a real and powerful threat to humanity.' These are the first words of a Human Rights Watch Petition to President Obama to keep robots from the battlefield. The argument is that robots possess neither common sense, 'real' reason, any sense of mercy nor — most important — the option to not obey illegal commands. With the fast-spreading use of drones et al., we are allegedly a long way off from Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics being implanted in autonomous fighting machines, or into any ( semi- ) autonomous robot. A 'Stop the Killer Robots' campaign will also be launched in April at the British House of Commons and includes many of the groups that successfully campaigned to have international action taken against cluster bombs and landmines. They hope to get a similar global treaty against autonomous weapons. The Guardian has more about this, including quotes from well-known robotics researcher Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University."

silentbrad writes sends this excerpt from a blog post about the history of working from home: "Remote working has existed for centuries. And now is the perfect time for its comeback. ... Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were manufactured by contracting individual craftsmen who worked out of their homes. The merchant would drum up sales, and would coordinate the production with at-home sub-contractors. ... This all changed with the Industrial Revolution: production was centralized in factories and cities. For merchant capitalists, this made sense: it was cheaper and more efficient to produce goods in one place, with machinery. ... We've been in the Information Age for at least 25 years. We've made huge leaps in technology. Many of us would describe ourselves as Knowledge Workers: we don't work in factories, we work at desks in front of glowing screens. We don't make goods with physical materials, but rather things made out of bits. The great thing about bits + the internet is that the materials and means needed for production aren't dependent on location. But here's the funny thing: the way work is organized hasn't changed. Despite all these advances, most of us still work in central offices. Employees leave their computer-equipped homes and drive long distances to work at computer-equipped offices. ... CEOs, like Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Apple's Steve Jobs, think that a central office fosters more innovation and productivity. I think they're wrong. We're still early in the research, but recent studies seem to dispute their claim. ... Managers have developed centuries worth of habits based on the central workplace. The hallmarks of office work (meetings, cubicle workstations, colocation) need to be seen for what they are: traditions we've kept alive since the Industrial Revolution. We need to question these institutions: are they really more innovative and efficient?"

theodp writes "Before iTunes, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook, and the Kindle, 17-year-old Shawn Fanning and 18-year-old Sean Parker gave the world Napster. And it was very good. The Observer's Tom Lamont reports on VH1's soon-to-premiere Downloaded, a documentary that tells the story of the rise and fall of the file-sharing software that started the digital music revolution, and shares remembrances of how Napster rocked his world. 'I was 17,' writes Lamont, 'and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame (OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.' Sound familiar?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The 'Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of the Roman Pontiff' is surprisingly detailed. Now as the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like Bruce Schneier wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote? First, the system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky. Second, the small group of voters — all of whom know each other — makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way. The chapel is cleared and locked before voting. No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel. In short, the voter verification process is about as good as you're ever going to find. A cardinal can't stuff ballots when he votes. Then the complicated paten-and-chalice ritual ensures that each cardinal votes once — his ballot is visible — and also keeps his hand out of the chalice holding the other votes. Ballots from previous votes are burned, which makes it harder to use one to stuff the ballot box. What are the lessons here? First, open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure. This kind of process works to elect a pope or a club president, but quickly becomes unwieldy for a large-scale election. And third: When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."

cervesaebraciator writes "U.S. Representative Judy Chu (D-CA) will be starting a new caucus with the ostensible purpose of protecting the intellectual property rights of filmmakers, musicians and other artists. The new caucus, styled the Congressional Creative Rights Caucus, will be formed along with Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC). Chu's office released a statement, including the following: 'American innovation hinges on creativity – it is what allows our kids to dream big and our artists to create works that inspire us all. The jobs that result are thanks entirely to our willingness to foster creative talent, and an environment where it can thrive and prosper. [...] The Congressional Creative Rights Caucus will serve to educate Members of Congress and the general public about the importance of preserving and protecting the rights of the creative community in the U.S. American creators of motion pictures, music, software and other creative works rely on Congress to protect their copyrights, human rights, First Amendment rights and property rights.'"

Kagetsuki writes "There's a project on KickStarter for a Free and Open set of emoji [the graphical emoticon glyph set which has a block reserved in Unicode]. Currently there are no full sets of Emoji that are completely free (as in beer and and freedom), so if this project gets funded it will be the first and only set of emoji that can, say, be distributed with FLOSS Linux/BSD/GNU systems. Not to mention anyone will be able to incorporate them into any project without any restrictive conditions." And lest you think emoji devoid of literary value, reader coondoggie points out that the Library of Congress has just welcomed (or at least allowed) onto its vaunted shelves an all-emoji version of Melville's Moby Dick, created with the help of translators working through Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

An anonymous reader writes "Recently, I had found out (through my log files) that my wireless router was subject to a Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) brute force PIN attack. After looking on the Internet and discovering that there are indeed many vulnerabilities to WPS, I disabled it. After a few days, I noticed that I kept intermittently getting disconnected at around the same time every day (indicative of a WPA deauthentication handshake capture attempt). I also noticed that an evil twin has been set up in an effort to get me to connect to it. Through Wi-Fi monitoring software, I have noticed that certain MAC addresses are connected to multiple WEP and WPA2 access points in my neighborhood. I believe that I (and my neighbors) may be dealing with an advanced Wi-Fi leech. What can I do in this situation? Should I bother purchasing a directional antenna, figuring out exactly where the clients are situated, and knocking on their door? Is this something the local police can help me with?"

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.

Two years ago Guile Scheme, the official extension language of the GNU project, released version 2.0, a major upgrade to the implementation. As part of the two year anniversary, the maintainers organized a challenge to hack a small project using Guile in 30 days as part of a birthday software potluck. The two coolest dishes appear to be OpenGL support using the FFI, and XCB bindings built using the XML specification for XCB: "guile-xcb is a language implemented in the Guile VM that parses the XML files used by the xcb project to specify the X protocol and compiles them into Guile modules containing all the methods and data needed to send requests to the X server and receive replies/events back. If new X extensions are added to the xcb library, guile-xcb can compile and add them with no additional work. " See the release announcement for details on the other dishes.

Michael Ross writes "Upon hearing the name "Enyo," one may wonder if the speaker is referring to the Greek war goddess, or if it is the name of some Celtic New Age music with a Latin twist. In the world of front-end software development, Enyo is a cross-platform open-source JavaScript framework that can be used to build HTML5 web applications for the desktop and for mobile devices, including those powered by iOS and Android. The project website bills it as "an object-oriented JavaScript application framework emphasizing modularity and encapsulation." Any programmer interested in learning Enyo — or at least exploring what it is capable of — can consult the online documentation and the forums, but a more time-efficient approach might be to read a book focusing on the topic, such as Enyo: Up and Running, written by Roy Sutton, a contributor to the project." Read below for the rest of Michael's review. Enyo: Up and Running author Roy Sutton pages 74 pages publisher O'Reilly Media rating 6/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-1449343125 summary A brief introduction to a mobile-inspired JavaScript framework. The book was published by O'Reilly Media on 6 February 2013, under the ISBN 978-1449343125. (My thanks to O'Reilly for providing a review copy.) On the publisher's page, visitors can find limited information about the book and its author, some reader reviews, links to purchase the electronic and print versions, and a page for errata (of which there are none, as of this writing). At 74 pages in length, this title comprises seven chapters, plus an appendix explaining how to set up a local development environment for working with Enyo, with a few options to choose from. Thus, the appendix is where most readers should and likely will start. In the preface, the author notes that the book assumes "some familiarity with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript"; that "or" should be an "and," since all three technologies are foundational to Enyo.

The first chapter introduces Enyo by examining a fairly simple web app — one that displays a traffic light on the web page. Naturally, in a black-and-white book such as this, the red/yellow/green colors are all in grayscale. Much more importantly, of the seven jsFiddle-hosted code examples provided in the chapter, the first five do not work (as of this writing), apparently because in each case there exists in the code some sort of control character, displayed as a red dot. (In the third example, the dot character is in the JavaScript and not the HTML.) Readers should delete that character and click the "Run" button, to see the intended results. The last two examples work only because the dot character comes after the closing </script> tag. It is baffling how these flaws could have gone undetected by the production staff and technical reviewers.

The material seems to raise as many questions as it answers. Assuming that the code printed in the book works (no downloadable code archive is offered), readers will probably be left pondering questions such as: Is create: function() some sort of constructor? Why isn't a new color passed through the call this.colorChanged()? Why is oldValue apparently not used? Where is setColor() defined? While it is a good idea to entice the reader to try a new technology by showing its capabilities, if that reader is expected to understand the example code presented, then it should be fully explained; otherwise, it should not be presented. As an alternative, the author could have limited the discussion to what functionality Enyo provides to the programmer, without listing source code in print or on jsFiddle. This would have provided the reader with greater motivation to invest the time and effort in learning what can be a challenging subject.

As a result of these early problems, this first chapter does not get the book off to a promising start. The second chapter, "Core Concepts," is perhaps the one that should have begun the book, because it describes many of the core ideas critical to Enyo: kinds, encapsulation, published properties, events, signals, inheritance, constructors, and statics. However, the pace is too fast for beginners, and more examples are needed to explain the concepts, step-by-step. By the bottom of page 11, countless readers will likely be bewildered with the terse discussion of getter and setter functions, "changed" functions, construction, and passed values (which are properties or not). Also, readers will again encounter the aforesaid problem of the red dot character breaking the example code on jsFiddle. (Further instances in the book will not be documented here.) The third chapter continues the discussion, focusing on components, menu and form controls, and functions, as well as some components for animation and making web requests. All of the information looks correct. The only puzzling aspect is why break tags are used (on page 22) instead of a CSS display: block; declaration.

User interface is addressed in the next two chapters, the first of which presents layout components commonly needed for Enyo apps — scrollers, repeaters, fittables, lists, and panels. The second one explores CSS styling of an Enyo app, performance considerations of apps on handheld devices, debugging, common mistakes, jsFiddle, internationalization, and localization. With these chapters, the narrative in the book becomes noticeably more comprehensible.

The penultimate chapter — essentially comprising two pages — delineates some options that the Enyo developer has for deploying a newly-built app to any one of the supported platforms. This chapter, like all the earlier ones, ends with a summary that is so brief, and applicable to so few pages, that each one seems pointless. Why do publishers feel obligated to include these useless chapter summaries in almost every technical book? The final chapter is a one-page conclusion, in which the author encourages readers to learn more and become involved in the Enyo community.

This book is more of an introduction, although no reason is provided as to why it was not instead made a more extensive treatment of the subject. Upon completing the book, the average reader will probably conclude that she did not absorb enough knowledge of the Enyo core to begin immediately developing apps using this framework, and the best course of action might be to start over again on page 1, or perhaps seek out a second source, before optionally returning to this one for a second run-through. The material could have been structured so all information is presented sequentially — so the reader does not encounter concepts yet unseen — with more step-by-step explanations.

Rather than presenting the reader with code snippets that have no relation to one another, it would have been much more interesting and motivating if the author had devised and explained code that incrementally builds into a nontrivial app. Furthermore, the example source code should have been made available on the publisher's website, so readers could avoid typing it from the text or extracting it from jsFiddle if they wished to try it in their local development environments.

In terms of typography, the font size of this book is a bit too small, especially for extended reading, and for people with subpar vision. This is even more true for the code snippets, which are in an even smaller font. In many of the lines of prose, the words are too close to one another — a problem exhibited in a few other recent O'Reilly titles. Did the production team feel it necessary to further compress a 74-page book?! In fact, proper names, such as those of components, are oftentimes broken between two lines in the text — sometimes nonsensically, e.g., "FittableR" followed by "owsLayout" (page 32). The book contains several errata: "This is [not] to say" (page viii), "such as [a] local installation" (viii), "url" (27), "we might modify add" (34), "woud" (35), "one [of] the most" (35), and "allow you [to] easily debug" (56). For such a slender volume, the production quality seems to have received less attention than it deserved.

Overall, this offering does not reach O'Reilly's usual high standards. It's a shame, because it seems like such a promising topic — one that could be more thoroughly explored in a larger volume. Perhaps this feedback, and that of other readers, could be folded into a second edition. This is a real possibility, given that the author notes in his conclusion that he considers the book an active project, and intends to keep it up-to-date with the changes to Enyo itself. In the meantime, this is a promising start that can give readers a taste of Enyo's potential for building modern web apps for desktop and mobile platforms.

Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.

You can purchase Enyo: Up and Running from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft confirms a recent increase in the number of malicious proxy auto-config (PAC) scripts being used to sneakily route webmail and online banking traffic through rogue proxy servers. The scripts are designed to only proxy traffic destined for certain websites, while all other traffic is allowed to go direct. If the proxy can force the user to keep using HTTP instead of HTTPS, the fraudsters running these attacks can steal usernames, passwords, session cookies and other sensitive information from online banking sessions."

An anonymous reader writes "In a real life Prisoner's Dilemma taking place in the French city of Marseille, twin brothers have been arrested for a string of sexual assaults. While say they are sure that one of them committed the crimes (corroborated by a standard DNA test), police were told that it would cost upwards of €1m euros (£850,000, $1.3m USD) to distinguish between them using DNA evidence."

Tooke writes "I've developed focal hand dystonia from playing clarinet. It affects my right pinky (and my ring finger, but to a lesser extent). My pinky isn't totally unusable when typing; however, it isn't nearly as agile as it used to be. When I must press a key with it, I tend to keep the whole finger rigid and move my entire hand instead. I also use my ring finger to press the P and semicolon keys (on QWERTY) which is a bit awkward but better than using the pinky. Thus my question: are there any keyboard layouts that are optimized to reduce right pinky/ring finger usage? I switched to Programmer Dvorak a few years ago, but Dvorak seems to make me use my right hand significantly more than my left. I'm considering mirroring the letter keys so my left hand would be used more. I also came across the Workman layout which looks interesting. I might try using that after switching the numbers and symbols around to be more like Programmer Dvorak. Has anyone been in a similar situation? What else could I do to make typing more comfortable? I've got a long career ahead of me as a programmer (I'm currently a high school senior) and I'd like to take care of my hands as much as possible."

"It uses a totally different process called Stereolithography," says Max Lobovsky, while other low-cost 3D printers use a process called FDM (fused deposition modeling). Max explains the differences between the two processes in the video, but what it comes down to in the real world is that his process can "do features down to 0.3 mm," which, he says, is much finer than you can get with FDM. It also seems that structures made with Stereolithography can be made stronger and can be machined more accurately than those made by the FDM process. So this is another step toward fully-useful home fabrication of... almost anything. So Formlabs and the company's initial product, the Form 1, are interesting. And surely there will be other "consumer" Stereolithography machines in the market before long, and prices for both the machine and the chemicals they use as raw materials will come down. Meanwhile, a company called 3D Systems is suing Formlabs for patent infringement. This isn't a nickel and dime deal; Formlabs raised $2,945,885 through Kickstarter, says TechCrunch in a story about the suit. And since their 3D printer is an order of magnitude less expensive than earlier Stereolithography machines and the company's future looks bright, 3D Systems might be better off taking a stock settlement than going for cash. They've settled with other alleged infringers before, so there's a precedent for that idea. Suit or no suit, Formlabs is going forward, building and shipping 3D printers as fast as they can -- and President Obama mentioned 3D printing in his State of the Union speech last night, which will surely help boost the entire industry, including Formlabs.

"It uses a totally different process called Stereolithography," says Max Lobovsky, while other low-cost 3D printers use a process called FDM (fused deposition modeling). Max explains the differences between the two processes in the video, but what it comes down to in the real world is that his process can "do features down to 0.3 mm," which, he says, is much finer than you can get with FDM. It also seems that structures made with Stereolithography can be made stronger and can be machined more accurately than those made by the FDM process. So this is another step toward fully-useful home fabrication of... almost anything. So Formlabs and the company's initial product, the Form 1, are interesting. And surely there will be other "consumer" Stereolithography machines in the market before long, and prices for both the machine and the chemicals they use as raw materials will come down. Meanwhile, a company called 3D Systems is suing Formlabs for patent infringement. This isn't a nickel and dime deal; Formlabs raised $2,945,885 through Kickstarter, says TechCrunch in a story about the suit. And since their 3D printer is an order of magnitude less expensive than earlier Stereolithography machines and the company's future looks bright, 3D Systems might be better off taking a stock settlement than going for cash. They've settled with other alleged infringers before, so there's a precedent for that idea. Suit or no suit, Formlabs is going forward, building and shipping 3D printers as fast as they can -- and President Obama mentioned 3D printing in his State of the Union speech last night, which will surely help boost the entire industry, including Formlabs.

dstates writes with news from NASA about the state of available water in the Middle East. From the NASA article: "'GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,' said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. 'The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.'" dstates adds: "Water is a huge global security issue. To understand the middle east, you need to understand that the Golan Heights provides a significant amount of the water used in Israel. Focusing on conflicts and politics means that huge volumes of valuable water are being wasted in the Middle East, and this will only exacerbate future conflicts. Water is a serious issue between India and China. And then there is Africa. U.S. food exports are in effect exporting irrigation water drawn from the Ogallala aquifer. Fracking trades water for energy, and lack of water limits fracking in many parts of th world. Think about it."

hypnosec writes "Oracle is going to open source JavaFX ports for Android and iOS soon as a part of its efforts to open source the framework. JavaFX, destined to replace Swing GUI library as the default method to develop graphical user interfaces, is a framework used to develop cross-platform rich Internet applications. The ports for iOS and Android are based on an 'unreleased version of JavaSE Embedded for iOS/Android.' Oracle's Richard Bair revealed that the 'first bits and pieces' for JavaFX for iOS should probably be out sometime next week. The rest of the release will be scheduled along with the release of Prism (the next-generation toolkit). Oracle is going to keep javafx-font proprietary, but Bair has said developers are already working toward an open source native replacement of the component through the OpenJFX list."

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers including Dr. H. Shaw Warren of Mass. General Hospital and Stanford genomics researcher Ronald W. Davis have published a paper challenging the effectiveness of the 'mouse model' as a basis for medical research, based on a decade-long study involving 39 doctors and scientists across the country. In clinical studies of sepsis (a severe inflammatory disorder caused by the immune system's abnormal response to a pathogen), trauma, and burns, the researchers found that certain drugs triggered completely different genetic responses in mice compared with humans. The Warren-Davis paper was rejected by both Science and Nature before its acceptance by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, perhaps suggesting the degree to which the 'mouse model' has become entrenched within the medical research community. Ninety five percent of the laboratory animals used in research are mice or rats. Mice in particular are ideal subjects for research: they are cheap to obtain and house, easy to handle, and share at least 80 percent of their genes with humans (by some reckoning, closer to 99 percent). Over the past twenty five years, powerful methods of genetically engineering mice by 'knocking out' individual genes have become widely adopted, so that use of mice for drug testing prior to human clinical trials has become standard procedure."

First time accepted submitter WolfeCanada writes "North Korea apparently conducted a widely anticipated nuclear test Tuesday, strongly indicated by an 'explosion-like' earthquake that monitoring agencies around the globe said appeared to be unnatural." North Korea has confirmed the test, according to the Washington Post, in an article that touches on its political context. Among other things, the Post notes that this "is the first under new North Korean leader Kim Jong Eun and the clearest sign that the third-generation leader, like his father and grandfather, prefers to confront the United States and its allies rather than make peace with them." Adds reader eldavojohn "KCNA news claims that the test was safe and cited the threat of the U.S. for conducting the test, saying 'The test was carried out as part of practical measure of counteraction to defend the country's security and sovereignty in the face of the ferocious hostile act of the U.S. which wantonly violated the DPRK's legitimate right to launch satellite for peaceful purposes.' RT is posting a feed of the many condemnations from governments and organizations."

dakohli writes "The Conservative Goverment of Canada is scrapping the controversial bill C-30 They will instead make 'modest' changes to the existing Warrantless Wiretap bill. This bill was widely panned by Privacy Critics and members of the opposition. Another victory for online privacy!"

New submitter jeditobe writes "Aleksey Bragin reported that starting in February he would be a lecturer at the Moscow State Technical University teaching the operating system course. He said that he intends to incorporate ReactOS into the lab work so that students would have the opportunity to work on an actual operating system. He also intends to translate and upload the slides he will use for class for others to see." (Bragin is the Project Coordinator for ReactOS.)

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton is still thinking about prediction markets, and giving away money. He writes: "In an article last December I described a problem with prediction markets, where even markets with cap on betting limits could be manipulated by a single trader willing to spend a lot of money to distort the marketplace odds. So I offered a $100 cash prize to be split between readers who collectively came up with the best solution to the problem. Here's an idea that I think would work." Read on for the rest.

In November I wrote an article arguing that prediction markets like Intrade -- where users can bet on the odds of, say, Obama or Romney becoming president -- were a useful tool for aggregating the wisdom of crowds, but could be manipulated by someone placing a large bet in order to create the illusion that "the markets" were favoring their candidate. If the fake "market odds" were reported in the news, it could have the effect of causing more supporters to switch to that candidate, thus increasing the true odds of their victory and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy before the markets had the chance to correct themselves. The solution, I thought at first, was to have a cap on the amount that individual users could bet (which is one of the rules at the Iowa Electronic Markets), and make it illegal for a single mastermind to pay large numbers of third parties to make bets in order to circumvent the single-bettor limit.

As I admitted in a follow-up article, it turns out this regulation would not work after all. The problem is that as long as long as overseas betting markets like Intrade have no limit on wagers, a market manipulator could place a huge bet on Intrade to cause the odds to shift on that market -- for example, changing the odds of Obama-to-win from 4:1 to 6:1. Meanwhile, the odds in a domestic prediction market with a betting limit -- call it CappedEx -- would initially stay at their non-manipulated value of 4:1. But then "arbitrage players" could spot the difference in the odds being offered, and make opposing bets in the two markets in a way that would be guaranteed to make a net profit. (The details are spelled out in my last article, but basically, any time two markets are offering different odds of an event happening, you can pick appropriate amounts to bet in the two markets so that you're guaranteed a profit whether the event occurs or not.) These arbitrage players would continue making opposing bets in the two markets until the odds being offered in the two markets converged onto the same value -- at which point, the market manipulator has successfully manipulated the odds in the capped market, even without ever placing a bet there. Essentially, the market manipulator has hired all of those arbitrage players and paid them to make bets on his behalf, but done so indirectly to avoid violating laws against hiring an army of bet-placers.

I should be clear about the two different time frames being discussed here. If a manipulator places a large bet on Intrade, causing the odds on Intrade to diverse significantly from the odds on CappedEx, then the arbitrage players should cause the odds on the two markets to converge to the same value very rapidly -- plausibly in less than one minute. (Whoever spots the difference first, gets guaranteed free money. It would be easy to write a bot that could watch for any divergence in the odds in the two markets, and place guaranteed-profit bets as soon as a gap appeared.) Then, as political observers noticed that the odds have shifted (without any real-world event in the news that could plausibly explain the shift), another wave of bettors would take advantage of the distorted odds, to bet on the side of the event whose odds had been artificially lowered by the market manipulation. (The odds favor making such a bet, although it's not as good as a guaranteed profit.) As enough people made these opportunistic bets, the market odds would correct themselves to their original values. However, this second wave of betting would probably take a few hours, because it requires humans to think critically about the events. (One likely case of manipulation managed to shift the odds for a few minutes for just $20,000, so it's not unreasonable to think that a million dollars or two -- still small change by the standards of presidential candidates, especially when it's not subject to spending limits -- could distort the market for several hours.) The danger is that the market manipulation could cause the odds to shift in the capped market almost instantly, but the market correction would not take place until several hours later, and in that time the damage (in altering people's perceptions, and possibly creating a self-fulfilling prophecy) would already be done.

It didn't seem like there was any obvious solution to this problem. The U.S. government could ban its citizens from betting on foreign uncapped markets, but it would be too easy for a U.S. citizen to coordinate with an overseas partner to place the arbitrage bets together and split the profits. Or the U.S. could try to ban prediction markets entirely (capped or uncapped), but many economists argue that they're a useful tool for assessing the wisdom of crowds to assess the odds of an event. You could ban media reporting on the odds given by prediction markets (to try and avoid the self-fulfilling-prophecy problem), but that would probably be unconstitutional in the U.S., and unenforceable anyway if people could get their news from overseas.

So in my last article I offered up to $100 to be split between readers who came up with the best arguments for how to stop prediction markets, even markets with individual betting limits, from being shifted by manipulators who place large bets on foreign markets and then count on arbitrage players to pass on the effects to the capped markets. (I've offered cash prizes to readers who submit winning ideas before, and it usually doesn't take this long to get to the follow-up and pay out the prizes. Some follow-up articles that I submitted got lost in the editors' spam filters, sigh, and then there were some other articles in the pipeline that had to go out first. If I offer prize money for ideas and you submit a winning idea, normally you'll get your money much faster.)

Before reading any further, you might want to stop and try to think of what you would consider to be the best solution to this problem (even if the prize money has already been allocated), and then compare it to what we came up with.

... And, welcome back. Here's what I think is the best answer so far: For each event that the capped markets allow users to bet on, the capped market should also be required to monitor the odds that any overseas uncapped markets are offering on the same event. Then if there has been any recent time period where the odds on the overseas markets differed significantly from the odds on the domestic market (significantly enough to indicate manipulation -- and, similarly, significantly enough that the difference probably motivated arbitrage players to place bets to close the gap), then the reported odds should appear with a disclaimer saying, "There was a recent divergence in the odds on capped vs. uncapped markets, so the odds displayed here may have been manipulated, and should be regarded skeptically." This would help to avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy problem, if people are less likely to regard the manipulated odds as a reflection of reality.

The key assumption here is that if a real-world event happens that changes the probability of, say, an Obama victory, then the market odds in both the capped and uncapped markets should shift at about the same time to reflect that new probability. On the other hand, if the odds have shifted significantly in only one of those markets, that could be taken as a sign that that market was being manipulated. Arbitrage players would still be free to make opposing bets in the two markets to narrow the gap, so the odds in both the capped and uncapped marketplaces would still change in the short term, but in the regulated capped market, the odds would be reported with a disclaimer that they're not reliable. After a few more hours, opportunistic bettors would make bets taking advantage of the distorted odds, and the market would correct itself.

This idea did not come from any particular reader but came up as the result of the back-and-forth I had with several people.

A few readers also had interesting ideas for regulations that could fix the problem if they could be applied to all markets. For example, Nathan Dykman suggested that in order to wager larger amounts, you would have to wager that your candidate would win by a larger margin (e.g. if you can bet $1,000 that Romney would win by 1 million votes or more, or you could bet $10,000 that Romney would win by 10 million votes or more -- so that large "manipulative" bets would stand out more obviously). Andy Jobe suggested "staggering" bets so that high rollers could only bet large amounts by placing lots of small bets in sequence, paced slowly enough that the market would probably detect the manipulation attempt and start correcting for it, before all of your bets went through. Jonathan Pearson suggested mandating that markets report the number of people making particular bets as well as the market odds, so that single large manipulative bets could be easily spotted. Ben Griffin suggested simply requiring disclosure of large bets by certain people (as he put it, the headline "Saudi Prince believes that Romney will win the election. What does he know that we don't?!" contains more useful information than "Romney's odds of victory looking better at Intrade").

I think these points are all correct, but the problem with all of these ideas is that they only work if all of the relevant markets are regulated. And if you allow that assumption, then the problem becomes trivial -- because you can just require an individual betting cap in all of the markets. On the other hand, if there's at least one market anywhere in the world that is beyond the reach of your regulations, then they don't have to disclose any statistics about their bettors or follow any other rules that you make. Then when a manipulator places a large bet in that unregulated market, when the arbitrage players place their many small corresponding bets in your domestic regulated market, the detection mechanisms described above, won't do anything to stop that -- those bets in your regulated market look like real bets because they are real bets.

By contrast, if you require domestic capped markets to monitor the overseas uncapped markets, and disclose if the uncapped odds have diverged recently from the capped odds, this still works even if the regulations only apply to your domestic capped market. People can still place manipulative bets on foreign markets, but if the media reports the current "market odds" by looking at the capped market, those odds will be harder to manipulate without getting caught, because they'll run a disclaimer if manipulation has been detected recently. (Of course if the media gets their "odds" from the overseas uncapped market, and reports those odds as literal truth even when the domestic capped markets are running a disclaimer saying that those same odds have recently been manipulated, we can't do anything about that. The hope is that news agencies, no matter how lazy they may be, will at least choose to report accurate information if it takes the same effort as reporting inaccurate information, and thus would prefer getting their information from the domestic capped market, where they can easily check if there's a disclaimer saying the odds have been manipulated recently.)

Some interesting points made by other readers:

• Carl Pearson mentioned that if campaigns had to start diverting attention to prediction market manipulation in addition to all of their other business, this might hurt small third-party candidates more than big campaigns -- because smaller campaigns have fewer available resources to put towards handling new kinds of problems. (True, I think, but only if the markets can be manipulated. If they can't be manipulated, and they're just a barometer of what people are thinking will happen, then you don't need to waste campaign time fighting on that front.)

• Michael Mendenhall pointed out that even in a capped market, the cap should be high enough to create a high "signal-to-noise" ratio. If the cap is too low, the market odds will reflect the betting of more uninformed people who use the betting as a low-cost opportunity to cheer for what they think should happen instead of what they think will happen. (On the other hand, if the cap is too high, then the market is too easily to manipulate.)

• Marc Beaupré argued that prediction markets can probably never be stamped out anyway, because anonymous payment protocols like Bitcoin make it possible for crypto-anarchists to place best on unregulated darknets where they can ignore caps and disclosure requirements all they want. I'm not sure that's true (how do you place a bet in an anonymous peer-to-peer market -- who enforces the payment from the loser to the winner, depending on the outcome?) but it actually doesn't change the main thrust of my argument -- you can still have a regulated, capped domestic market, which is where the media could go for accurate information about the current market odds. So a manipulator could throw their Bitcoin money away on an unregulated peer-to-peer betting network, but it wouldn't do them any good.

Splitting the $100 in prize money, all 7 of the readers credited here get $15. There may be a simpler idea that we missed, or a different reason why this proposed idea would not work. Either way, I'm always grateful for the high quality of the comments that get emailed to me as part of these contests. Eventually I'd like to run some article contests for people to email ideas for a follow-up article, but without offering prize money, to see if that affects the quality of the submissions. It would be impossible to run a precisely controlled experiment (because you can't write a single article where half of your readers are eligible to submit ideas for prize money, and the other half are expected to submit ideas for free), but if we run contests for a large number of articles, and about half of those contests involve cash prizes while the other half offer only acknowledgement, it should eventually become clear if there's a difference in the quality of submissions. It may be that, unlike prediction markets, idea-improvement contests work just as well when there's no money involved.