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Stories · 3,462
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Michael Mann Vindicated (Again) Over Climategate
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, was one of the central figures involved in the 'Climategate' controversy, which saw many private email conversations between researchers posted publicly. Now, an investigation (PDF) by the National Science Foundation has found "no basis to conclude that the emails were evidence of research misconduct or that they pointed to such evidence." Phil Plait points out that other investigations have found similarly that claims of Mann's misconduct took his statements out of context. 'A big claim by the deniers is that researchers were using "tricks" to falsify conclusions about global warming, but the NSF report is pretty clear that's not true. The most damning thing the investigators could muster was that there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that's not scandalous at all; there's always some argument in science over methodology. The vague language of the report there indicates to me this isn't a big deal, or else they would've been specific. The big point is that the data were not faked.'"
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Estimated Transfer Time Is No More In Windows 8
MrSeb writes "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar back and forth in a seemingly random, haphazard way, the laws of time all but ceasing to exist — five seconds remaining one moment and 13 minutes the next. That's (almost) all going to change, with the arrival of a greatly improved file management experience in Windows 8. Copy, move, delete, rename, and conflict resolution are all being overhauled and it's about time!"
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Google Launches Identity Verification Badge Scheme
theodp writes "CNET reports that rather than backing down after complaints about its insistence that Google+ user accounts be opened under a real name, Google has upped the ante and will pin 'verification badges' on users in an effort to assure people that 'the person you're adding to a circle is really who they claim to be.' In a Friday night post, Google employee Wen-Ai Yu explained that the Google+ team is initially 'focused on verifying public figures, celebrities, and people who have been added to a large number of Circles, but we're working on expanding this to more folks.'"
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13-Year-Old Uses Fibonacci Sequence For Solar Power Breakthrough
An anonymous reader tips news of 7th grader Aidan Dwyer, who used phyllotaxis — the way leaves are arranged on plant stems in nature — as inspiration to arrange an array of solar panels in a way that generates 20-50% more energy than a uniform, flat panel array. Aidan wrote, "I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing. In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible. ... The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!"His work earned him a Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History and a provisional patent on the design.
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Ask Slashdot: Ebook Reader for Scientific Papers?
An anonymous reader writes "I love the idea of getting an ebook reader primarily for reading research journal papers. However I've heard bad things about the handling of PDFs on the major ones. I don't particularly care for color, but having an e-ink display and the ability to handle PDF/PS docs without conversion would be a major plus. I'd even be open to a hacked Kindle running Linux if it were practical. Does any good solution exist?" A few months ago I found the Asus Eee Note (some folks even figured out how the software works and got it to run other Qt apps), but my hopes were dashed when I learned they had killed it before it even arrived in the U.S. It seems right now that this particular niche is not being served: or is it?
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Microsoft Exec Responds To the Google-Motorola Deal
adeelarshad82 writes "In a statement released yesterday, Microsoft's Windows Phone Division President Andy Lees said 'Investing in a broad and truly open mobile ecosystem is important for the industry and consumers alike, and Windows Phone is now the only platform that does so with equal opportunity for all partners.' What's interesting is that even though some analysts are actually expecting OEMs to switch their focus to Windows Phone 7, past sales figures (especially for Samsung) show that the decision to do so might not come easily."
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IBM Plays SimCity With Portland, Oregon
Hugh Pickens writes "Portland, Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new software called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities, containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities' emergent behavior and help them figure out how policy can affect the lives of their citizens. The program seeks to quantify the cause-and-effect relationships between seemingly uncorrelated urban phenomena. 'What's the connection, for example, between ... obesity rates and carbon emissions?' writes Greg Lindsay. 'To find out, simply round up experts to hash out the linkages, translate them into algorithms, and upload enough historical data to populate the model. Then turn the knobs to see what happens when you nudge the city in one direction.' One of the drivers of the 'Portland Plan' is the city's commitment to a 40 percent decrease in carbon emissions by 2030, which necessitates less driving and more walking and biking. After running the model, planners discovered a positive feedback loop: More walking and biking would lead to lower obesity rates for Portlanders. In turn, a fitter population would find walking and biking a more attractive option. But as the field of urban systems gathers steam, it's important to remember that IBM and its fellow technology companies aren't the first to offer a quantitative toolkit to cities. In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned."
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Smartphone-Style Touch Sensing On an 82-Inch Screen
An anonymous reader writes "Those giant touch screens used by CNN anchors look slick, but have to be several feet thick to make room for the cameras that track the touches. Perceptive Pixel, which makes the screens, has now figured out a way to use capacitive touch (like on an iPhone or tablet screen) at a larger scale, and says giant touch panels with 82-inch screens but just six inches deep will appeal to many businesses."
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Facebook Now Using Natural Language Processing
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has added a new type of story to its News Feed today: if more than one of your friends post about the same topic, and it has a Page on the social network, the posts will be grouped under a Posted About story, even if your friends don't explicitly tag the Page. It turns out Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates as well as the headlines of posted links to figure out if a topic mentioned has a corresponding Page, and then searches to see if your other friends have done so as well."
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NASA Sends Lego Figures to Jupiter
bLanark writes "NASA have teamed up with Lego and will send three specially crafted, minifigures towards Jupiter in a probe to be launched on an Atlas V rocket on Friday. The figures, representing Roman gods Jupiter and Juno, and astronomer Galileo, are machined from aluminum and are the normal size for Lego minifigures. From the article: 'This (until now) secret installation was initiated by NASA scientists, who love Lego as much as anyone and wanted to do something memorable for this mission. They approached Lego and the company loved the idea. It saw the project as a way to promote children’s education and STEM programs.'"
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Former Nokia Engineers Fueling Finnish Startups
pbahra writes with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. From the article: "A few weeks ago Microsoft's European chairman told TechEurope that the average amount of venture capital per head across Europe was just $7. ... Finnish blog ArcticStartup has extrapolated figures showing the total average VC investment per capita for the country was $46 in 2010... The question of why this country on the edge of the Arctic Circle should have such active entrepreneurs came up again in a conversation with Wilhelm Taht, the marketing director of Flowd... 'With Nokia changing gear there is a lot of technical know-how all of a sudden which wasn't available even two years ago,' said Mr.Taht, diplomatically, about the savage job cuts at the struggling mobile phone giant. 'There's a culture of technically savvy engineers. Finns are not necessarily very talkative people, but when it comes to what they know about computers and programming it's pretty staggering.'"
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Giant African Rat Kills With Poisonous Mohawk
thebchuckster writes "The African crested rat has been known to kill local dogs, but researchers have just figured out how. After eating the 'poison-arrow plant,' the over-sized rodent stores its poison-laced spit in special hollow hairs in its mohawk. Then, when a predator grabs the rat, the animal gets stung with the poison and spit-tipped hairs which can sicken and kill."
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Prosecuted For Critical Twittering
lee1 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to urge a federal court (PDF) to block what they claim is the unconstitutional use of the federal anti-stalking law to prosecute a man for posting criticism of a public figure to Twitter. The law was originally targeted against crossing state lines for the purpose of stalking, but was modified in 2005 to make the 'intentional infliction of emotional distress' by the use of 'any interactive computer service' a crime. The prosecution's theory in this case is that using Twitter to criticize a public figure can be a criminal act if the person's feelings are hurt."
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War Texting Lets Hackers Unlock Car Doors Via SMS
alphadogg writes "Software that lets drivers unlock car doors and even start their vehicles using a mobile phone could let car thieves do the very same things, according to computer security researchers at iSec Partners. Don Bailey and fellow iSec researcher Mathew Solnik say they've figured out the protocols that some of these software makers use to remote control the cars, and they've produced a video showing how they can unlock a car and turn the engine on via a laptop. According to Bailey, it took them about two hours to figure out how to intercept wireless messages between the car and the network and then recreate them from his laptop. Bailey will discuss the research at next week's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, but he isn't going to name the products they've hacked — they've looked at two so far — or provide full technical details of their work until the software makers can patch them."
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The Net (According To Akamai)
The Installer quotes a gizmag story saying "Akamai might not be a household name but between 15 to 30 percent of the world's Web traffic is carried on the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company's internet platform at any given time. Using data gathered by software constantly monitoring internet conditions via the company's nearly 100,000 servers deployed in 72 countries and spanning most of the networks within the internet, Akamai creates its quarterly State of the internet report. The report provides some interesting facts and figures, such as regions with the slowest and fastest connection speeds, broadband adoption rates and the origins of attack traffic."
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The Uncanny Valley Explained
ColdWetDog writes "Scientists now believe they've figured out what causes the uncanny valley response. They compared functional MRI scans of volunteers watching two different types of videos: those showing human-appearing androids, and those showing the humans that the robots were created to mimic. 'The results suggest that the uneasiness we feel could be caused by a "perceptual mismatch between appearance and motion."' Basically, the brain seemed to react in a strongly negative manner when the robotic motions of the android didn't match its human-like appearance."
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Cornell Software Fingers Fake Online Reviews
Eric Smalley writes "If you're like most people, you give yourself high ratings when it comes to figuring out when someone's trying to con you. Problem is, most people aren't actually good at it — at least as far as detecting fake positive consumer reviews. Fortunately, technology is poised to make up for this all-too-human failing. Cornell University researchers have developed software that they say can detect fake reviews (PDF)."
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The Rise of Polymorphic Malware
twoheadedboy writes "The level of aggressive, polymorphic malware intercepted by Symantec doubled in July, when compared to figures from six months ago. This kind of malware has been typically found inside an executable within an attached ZIP file disguised as a PDF file, and is pretty darn good at getting around traditional anti-virus products. 'There are powerful Darwinian forces acting on the development of malware by criminals,' said Martin Lee, senior software engineer at Symantec. 'Those who look to innovate and improve their malware tend to infect more computers and acquire the resources to reinvest in further development and innovation.'"
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35% Consumers Want iPhone 5... Sight Unseen
judgecorp writes "Apple's iPhone 5 is not announced yet, but 35 percent of consumers say they will buy it, when it comes out, even though they know nothing about it. The figure comes from an online survey of 3,000 US consumers by Experian's PriceGrabber shopping website."
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Get Your Own Action Figure (In Japan)
derGoldstein writes "Makezine points to a very interesting shop in Akihabara that will make miniature clones of your face. This page contains photos of the process and the results. After the miniature head is printed in 3D it's painted and attached to a doll of your choice. Some of the models they produce beg for an exorcism..."