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Top news on 21 September 2009 |
Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter?
antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a few times before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Paraplegic Rats Enabled To "Walk" Again
eldavojohn notes a paper released in Nature Neuroscience today describing work in which paraplegic rats were enabled to walk again as early as a week after injury and treatment. The process involves a serotonin-influencing drug and electrical stimulation of the spine, along with an incentive to the paralyzed back legs to move — namely, being placed a treadmill. Soon a poorly understood spinal mechanism called the "central pattern generator" kicks in and the rats' legs move under the stimulus of a rhythmic signal from the spine (the brain is not involved). Eurekalert reports, "Daily treadmill training over several weeks eventually enabled the rats to regain full weight-bearing walking, including backwards, sideways and at running speed. However, the injury still interrupted the brain's connection to the spinal cord-based rhythmic walking circuitry, leaving the rats unable to walk of their own accord."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Forkable Linux Radio Ad Now On the Air In Texas
christian.einfeldt writes "Everyone is familiar with the Linux video ads created by IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, but until recently, there have not been any professionally backed forkable radio ads. Now, Austin-based Linux advocate Ken Starks has obtained the services of a professional radio talent in creating a high quality voice track, which can easily be adapted by local providers of Linux computer services. The raw material (mp3, ogg) addresses end-user frustration with Microsoft Windows malware, and promotes Linux as a more stable alternative. Starks hopes the raw material will seed pro-Linux ads across the US, and he offers his own final product as an example of how the raw material can be remixed with music. He has released all of the raw material and final work under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and has waived the Attribution requirement in his blog. Starks's provocative ad is currently on the air in the Austin market during the popular talk show of Kim Komando, who just happens to be a Microsoft Windows enthusiast."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dead Salmon's "Brain Activity" Cautions fMRI Researchers
AthanasiusKircher sends in a Wired writeup on what should surely be a contender in the next Improbable Research competition: wiring a dead salmon into an fMRI machine and showing it pictures of humans designed to evoke various emotions. "When they got around to analyzing the voxel... data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon's tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown. ... The result is completely nuts — but that's actually exactly the point. [Neuroscientist Craig] Bennett... and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods. ... Bennett notes: 'We could set our threshold [of significance] so high that we have no false positives, but we have no legitimate results.... We could also set it so low that we end up getting voxels in the fish's brain. It's the fine line that we walk.'" The research has been turned down by several publications, according to Wired, but a poster is available (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MIT Project "Gaydar" Shakes Privacy Assumpitons
theodp writes "At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Developers Get Fired
jammag writes "Other coders get canned — but never you, right? From a developer who's now a manager (and who admits to being fired himself) comes the inside story on how the Big Ax might sneak up on you. To prevent it, he recommends some strategic bragging, keeping a CYA (Cover Your ...) folder to document your efforts, and making sure that your talent isn't frittered away so much that even your most mediocre colleagues look good. "Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researcher Dies After Studying Plague Bacteria
Malcolm J. Casadaban, a molecular genetics professor at the University of Chicago, died last Sunday, seemingly from an infection of a weakened form of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the plague. "Because this form of the bacteria is not known to cause problems in healthy people, special safety procedures are not required to handle it, said Dr. Kenneth Alexander, a virologist and chief of pediatric infections at the U. of C. Medical Center. Lab researchers who work with the bacteria would typically wear gloves, a lab coat and protective goggles, and the bacteria would be disposed of in a biohazard bag and heated for about two hours, Alexander said. Two key questions in Casadaban's death will be whether there was anything different about the strain of bacteria he was handling and whether Casadaban had any underlying conditions that may have made him more susceptible to infection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
GBA Emulator Released For the DSi
Busshy writes "Darkchen has released a Gameboy Advance emulator for the Nintendo DS/DSi that plays full speed with frameskip. This can only be played with the homebrew dev cart, the DS iPlayer. The emulator adds save states, cheats and tools to GBA games, and for DSi Fans the ability to finally get over the loss of the GBA Slot on the DSi."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
News Content As a Resource, Not a Final Product
Paul Graham has posted an essay questioning whether we ever really paid for "content," as publishers of news and music are saying while they struggle to stay afloat in the digital age. "If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?" Techdirt's Mike Masnick takes it a step further, suggesting that the content itself should be treated as a resource — one component of many that go into a final product. Masnick also discussed the issue recently with NY Times' columnist David Carr, saying that micropayments won't be the silver bullet the publishers are hoping for because consumers are inundated with free alternatives. "It's putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth, and there's no specific benefit for paying the toll." Reader newscloud points out that the fall 2009 issue of Harvard's Nieman Reports contains a variety of related essays by journalists, technologists, and researchers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bringing Convenience and Open Source Methods To Higher Education
Business Week has a piece discussing the effects internet-based technology and open sharing are having on the standards of higher education. The author says every product's success or failure depends on its fidelity — the overall quality of experience — and convenience. Since the internet has made the sharing of even expert-level knowledge convenient, he wonders how long it will be until some school or company raises the fidelity enough to have their degrees accepted alongside those of professional-grade colleges. Quoting: "Once in a while, a market gets completely out of balance. Forces conspire to prevent either a high-fidelity or high-convenience player from emerging. All the offerings crowd around one end or the other. Eventually, someone nails a disruptive approach. Customers and competitors rush in and the marketplace wonders why that great idea didn't come sooner. The higher education market is a lot like that. For centuries the university model dominated because nothing else worked. No technology existed that might deliver an interactive, engaging educational experience without gathering students and teachers in the same physical space. ... These days broadband Internet, video games, social networks, and other developments could combine to create an online, inexpensive, super-convenient model for higher education. You wouldn't get the sights and sounds of a campus, personal contact with professors, or beer-soaked frat parties, but you'd end up with the knowledge you need and the degree to prove it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google, Apple Joust Over Rejected Voice App
ZipK writes with an update to last month's FCC inquiry that landed Apple and AT&T in hot water over the apparent rejection of a Google Voice app for the iPhone. All three companies submitted statements to the FCC — Apple claimed the app hadn't been rejected at all, that they were simply "studying" it further. The public version of Google's statement contained a redacted section, which they politely referred to as "sensitive," but after seeing Apple's comments, they decided to reveal the entire document. Google's FCC filing directly contradicts what Apple said: "Apple's representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone. The Apple representatives indicated that the company did not want applications that could potentially replace such functionality." (PDF, page 4.) Apple quickly released a statement reiterating that they did not reject the app.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Long Tail Effect" Doesn't Work As Advertised, Say Wharton Researchers
Death Metal writes "In a working paper titled, 'Is Tom Cruise Threatened? Using Netflix Prize Data to Examine the Long Tail of Electronic Commerce,' Wharton Operations and Information Management professor Serguei Netessine and doctoral student Tom F. Tan pull information from the movie rental company Netflix to explore consumer demand for smash hits and lesser-known films. Netflix made its data available as part of a $1 million prize competition to encourage the development of new ways that will improve its ability to introduce customers to lesser-known titles they might find appealing." In short, the researchers say that the Long Tail effect described by Chris Anderson is much less important in the real world than popularly held. Says the article: "The key difference between the opinion of [Anderson's] book and the study by Wharton researchers is how they define 'hits' and 'niches.' In the book, Anderson focuses on the definition of hits in absolute terms such as the top 10 or top 1,000 products, while Netessine and Tan argue that, to take growing product variety into account, one has to define popularity in relative terms, such as the top 1% or top 10% of products, to properly assess the presence or absence of the Long Tail."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Windows Marketplace For Mobile Kill Switch Details
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft recently gave more details on Windows Marketplace for Mobile during the Tech Ed New Zealand 2009 session titled 'Distributing and Monetizing Applications through Windows Marketplace Mobile,' led by Loke Uei Tan, Senior Product Manager on the Windows Mobile Team. Geekzone covered the event in good detail, but one of their points caused a lot of uproar in the blogosphere: 'If an application is approved but later removed from the marketplace it will then be automatically removed from all mobile devices.' That sounded a bit ominous to Ars Technica, so they checked in with Microsoft. 'In the vast majority of instances where an application is removed from Windows Marketplace for Mobile, users of this application will continue to be able to use these applications on their phones,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'In the rare event an application from Marketplace exhibits harmful behavior or has unforeseen effects, Marketplace has the capability to remotely uninstall these applications. While we hope to avoid this scenario, we will make refunds available in such cases.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Who Wants To Be a Billionaire Coder?
theodp writes "Computerworld reports that 60-year-old billionaire John Sall still enjoys cranking out code as the chief architect of JMP ('John's Macintosh Project'), the less-profitable-but-more-fun software from SAS that's used primarily by research scientists, engineers, and Six Sigma manufacturing types. 'It's always been my job to be a statistical software developer,' explains SAS co-founder Sall. So if you didn't have to work — and had more money than George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — would you be like Sall and continue to program? And if so, what type of projects would you work on?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Intel Core i7 For Laptops — First Benchmarks
Barence writes "PC Pro has benchmarked the first Intel Core i7 processors for laptops. The chips mark the debut of Intel's Turbo Boost technology, which ramps up the speed of the working cores if two or more cores are sitting unused. For the quad-core i7-820QM, this can take the stock speed of 1.73GHz up to a maximum of 3.06GHz. The 2D benchmarks show comparable performance to Core 2 Extreme chips running at 2.53GHz. Power consumption and processor temperature is dramatically lower, which should lead to significant improvements in laptop battery life."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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