Major Wikipedia Donors Caught Editing Their Own Articles
As reported before on Slashdot, one of the most terrible sins on Wikipedia is to edit articles for pay, or otherwise violate the 'neutral point of view' policy, per their co-founder Jimmy Wales. And yet, the Wikipedia-criticism website Wikipediocracy recently began a study showing that dozens of the Wikimedia… Read More ⊳
Posted on 11 March 2014 | 9:05 am
NASA Offers Bounty For Improved Asteroid Detection Algorithms
Dara Kerr reports at CNET that NASA is launching an 'Asteroid Data Hunter' contest to inspire the creation of algorithms that identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes. ... The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections… Read More ⊳
Posted on 11 March 2014 | 8:23 am
Valve Open Sources Their DirectX To OpenGL Layer
A bit surprisingly, Valve Software has uploaded their Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer onto GitHub as open source. It is provided as-is and with no support, under the MIT license allowing you to do pretty much anything with it. Taken directly from the DOTA2 source tree, the translation layer supports limited subset of D3D… Read More ⊳
Posted on 11 March 2014 | 7:44 am
Men And Women Think Women Are Bad At Basic Math
Think women can't do math? You're wrong — but new research (paywalled) shows you might not change your mind, even if you get evidence to the contrary. A study of how both men and women perceive each other's mathematical ability finds that an unconscious bias against women — by both men and women — could be… Read More ⊳
Posted on 11 March 2014 | 7:03 am
CanSecWest Presenter Self-Censors Risky Critical Infrastructure Talk
A presenter at this week's CanSecWest security conference withdrew his scheduled talk for fear the information could be used to attack critical infrastructure worldwide. Eric Filiol, scientific director of the Operational Cryptology and Virology lab. CTO/CSO of the ESIEA in France, pulled his talk on Sunday, informing organizer… Read More ⊳
Posted on 11 March 2014 | 4:02 am
Drones Used To Smuggle Drugs Into Prison
Over the weekend, Ma 28-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of using a small quadcopter drone to smuggle an unknown quantity of illegal drugs into a prison in Melbourne, Australia. While it's certainly not the first time small-fry UAV technology has been used by a mid-level mule to airmail drugs into the clink, it does… Read More ⊳
Posted on 11 March 2014 | 2:07 am