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AnonTechie writes:

Mr Perelman is a former director of undergraduate writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is very skeptical of using machines to grade essays. The Babel generator, which Mr. Perelman built with a team of students from MIT and Harvard University, can generate essays from scratch using as many as three keywords. For this essay, Mr. Perelman has entered only one keyword: "privacy." With the click of a button, the program produced a string of bloated sentences that, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning. Not to humans, anyway. But Mr. Perelman is not trying to impress humans. He is trying to fool machines.

From the article:

Critics of automated essay scoring are a small but lively band, and Mr. Perelman is perhaps the most theatrical. He has claimed to be able to guess, from across a room, the scores awarded to SAT essays, judging solely on the basis of length. (It's a skill he happily demonstrated to a New York Times reporter in 2005.) In presentations, he likes to show how the Gettysburg Address would have scored poorly on the SAT writing test. (That test is graded by human readers, but Mr. Perelman says the rubric is so rigid, and time so short, that they may as well be robots.)

In 2012 he published an essay that employed an obscenity (used as a technical term) 46 times, including in the title.

Mr. Perelman's fundamental problem with essay-grading automatons, he explains, is that they "are not measuring any of the real constructs that have to do with writing." They cannot read meaning, and they cannot check facts. More to the point, they cannot tell gibberish from lucid writing. He has spent the past decade finding new ways to make that point, and the Babel Generator is arguably his cleverest stunt to date. Until now, his fight against essay-grading software has followed the classic man-versus-machine trope, with Mr. Perelman criticizing the automatons by appealing to his audience's sense of irony.

By that measure, the Babel Generator is a triumph, turning the concept of automation into a farce: machines fooling machines for the amusement of human skeptics.

lhsi writes about the authors who produce many of the source documents for our own stories:

Authors who have recently published in a "megajournal" (for this study this included BMJ Open, PeerJ, PLOS ONE and SAGE Open) were asked to complete an independent questionnaire about their thoughts on the process and whether they would do it again. This survey consisted of 2,128 authors.

A "megajournal" is widely understood to be an online-only open-access (OA) journal, that covers a very broad subject area and selects content based only on scientific and methodological soundness (or some variation on that statement), with a business model which allows each article to cover its own costs." - http://creativecommons.org.nz/2013/10/open-access- megajournals-have-they-changed-everything/

The survey found that authors were submitting to a megajournal for a number of reasons, were happy with the process and would submit to one again.

Megajournals are drawing an international group of authors who tend to be experienced academics. They are choosing to publish in megajournals for a variety of reasons but most seem to value the quality of the journal and the speed of the review/publication process. Having a broad scope was not a key factor for most authors though being OA was important for PeerJ and SAGE Open authors. Most authors appeared pleased with the experience and indicated they are likely to submit future manuscripts to the same or similar megajournal which seems to suggest these journals will continue to grow in popularity.

kaszz writes:

In 2013, a startup in the USA called Outbox wanted to digitize everybody's snail mail. But it only lasted a year before USPS refused to forward customers mail and killed it. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, that told them:

"We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers-about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers. [Your market model] will never work anyway. Digital is a fad. It will only work in Europe."

In other industrial countries such service already exist.

[As of February 2014, being unable to profitably scale the company, Outbox has shut down. The same month that Outbox shut down, the Post Office incurred a net loss of $354 million, following a fiscal year 2013 loss of $5 billion.]

AnonTechie writes:

Got Gas? It Could Mean You've Got Healthy Gut Microbes

Not long ago, we heard about a catchy idea for a cookbook: "Fart-free food for everybody." In theory, these recipes would be helpful for some people - and those in their vicinity. But being a bit gassy may actually be a small price to pay for a lot of benefits to our health. We know that air often comes after eating nutrient-packed vegetables, such as cabbage, kale and broccoli. And researchers have found that fiber-rich foods, like beans and lentils, boost the levels of beneficial gut bacteria after only a few days, as we reported in December. So all this got us wondering: Could passing gas, in some instances, be a sign that our gut microbes are busy keeping us healthy?

Absolutely, says Purna Kashyap, a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. While no one's sure which foods are good for our microbiomes, eating more veggies can't hurt. "Eating foods that cause gas is the only way for the microbes in the gut to get nutrients," he says. "If we didn't feed them carbohydrates, it would be harder for them to live in our gut."

kaszz and AnonTechie write:

Bioengineers at Stanford have developed a chip and circuit board that simulate neurons and synapses (abstract).

Kwabena Boahen and his team have developed custom Neurocore chips that are assembled on a circuit board with 16 of these chips into a Neurogrid where these 16 chips can simulate 1x10^6 neurons and 10^9 of synaptic connections. This can be compared to the human brain that have 200x10^9 neurons with 125x10^12 synapses.

The team designed these chips with power efficiency in mind and their strategy is to enable certain synapses to share hardware circuits. The current million-neuron Neurogrid circuit boards cost about 40,000 USD. The Neurogrid circuit board is based on 16 Neurocores, each of which supports 65,536 neurons. These chips were made using a fabrication technology from circa 1999 and by switching to a modern manufacturing processes in large volumes, the cost of a Neurocore can be cut 100-fold - suggesting a million-neuron board for 400 USD.

It's no wonder scientists want to recreate the brain in silicon: even a mouse cortex can operate 9,000 times faster than a PC, and a even then the computer uses 40,000 times the power, too. Hence Neurorgrid, which uses 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips to simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. It's 9,000 times faster, and 100,000 times more energy efficient, than a personal computer simulation of 1 million neurons.

omoc writes:

Reported by LWN:

As of tonight, there is no more SPARC in testing. The main reasons were lack of porter commitments, problems with the toolchain and continued stability issues with our machines.

The fate of SPARC in unstable has not been decided yet. It might get removed unless people commit to working on it. Discussion about this should take place on #745938.

(Cross submitted on pipedot.org)

lhsi writes:

An experiment looked at whether an earlier success for an online activity would mean that future success would be more likely (Abstract, Full Text).

The experimenters tested in four different areas:

1. Kickstarter Funding: A number of unfunded projects were selected and some received funding.
2. epinions ratings: A number of helpful ratings were selected and some were given a helpful rating.
3. Wikipedia awards: A number of highly productive editors were selected and given a community member status award.
4. Change.org petition signatures: A number of petitions were selected and some had a dozen signatures added.

In each of the areas, the ones that had been randomly selected for an initial "success" received greater successes compared to the controls that were not given an initial success.

Further experimentation give an greater initial boost to see if the extent of further success would also be greater, but this did not have as much of an effect.

Our findings reveal the presence of a noticeable feedback effect in each of the distinct settings that we investigated, in that initial arbitrary endowments create lasting disparities in individual success. These results suggest that the inadvertent magnification of arbitrary differences between individuals of comparable merit may be a common feature of many types of social reward systems. At the same time, our experimental demonstration of decreasing marginal returns to success may suggest bounds to the degree to which the natural allocation of resources can be disrupted by social feedback effects. Without a priori differentiation in quality or structural sources of advantage, cumulative advantage alone may not be able to generate the extreme kinds of runaway inequality that so commonly are attributed to it. The vulnerability of meritocracies to biases from success-breeds-success effects thus may be more limited than generally assumed.

Papas Fritas writes:

US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White told a US House of Representatives panel that she flatly rejected claims that retail investors are being fleeced by high-frequency traders who can use their speed to jump ahead with buy and sell orders that fetch better prices. "The markets are not rigged," says White. "The U.S. markets are the strongest and most reliable in the world." White's comments to the House Financial Services Committee mark the first time she has directly responded to allegations in Michael Lewis' new book "Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt" that high-speed traders are engaged in a form of front-running, in which the firms are able to quickly identify an investor's desire to buy a stock, rush to buy it first and then sell it back at a higher price. The SEC has been reviewing equity market structure issues, particularly following the May 6, 2010 flash crash incident when the Dow Jones Industrial Average sharply plunged before quickly rebounding. Although staff at SEC are considering whether to launch some pilot studies to test different regulatory proposals, there are no immediate plans to issue rules to crack down on high-speed trading or trading in unlit markets. "I want to be very clear that the market metrics suggest that the retail investor is very well-served by the current market structure."

kaszz writes:

The 3D-printer syringe like attachment called the Rabbit Proto enables printing circuits using silver-filled silicon and conductive ink using graphite is being worked on. The device is expected to ship this summer for US$350. Or fully-assembled with a RepRap 3D printer for US$2499. The creators a group of Standford graduate students, have printed working prototypes like a game controller.

me writes:

The author sums it up for everyone.

"To sum it up for everyone, I took part in what I (and many others) would consider theft of money from the publishers by Google, and from direct orders of management. There were many AdSense employees involved, and it spanned many years, and I hear it still is happening today except on a much wider scale."

lhsi writes:

Participants of a study were asked to rate the attractiveness as a face. Both the nose and mouth were tweaked and it was found that manipulations to the nose affected how people rated a face, but similar manipulations of the mouth didn't have an affect on ratings.

Effects on perceived attractiveness were clearly found when the nose was the manipulated feature, while none were found for the mouth manipulations, despite these were of the same magnitude than that used for the nose. The most extreme, off-centered, deviation of the nose resulted in decreased perceived attractiveness, whereas an artificially centered nose resulted in increased perceived attractiveness.

There was no difference in the attractiveness ratings of male and female viewers and these attractiveness ratings were not related to whether faces of one's own or of the other sex were viewed. That is, males and females do not seem to disagree on ratings of either male or female faces under the current manipulations.

AnonTechie writes:

It's conventional knowledge that writing notes by hand is better for learning than typing, but now there's science to back it up. Psychological researchers have found that students who hand-write notes remembering conceptual information over a longer period. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University reckon that writing by hand forces note-takers to process information and then selectively write it, while laptop users are more prone to transcribing information verbatim. The study can be found here.

AnonTechie writes:

Siemens is doing a bit of trumpet blowing with their press release: High Voltage at the World's Tallest Dam, but it is no less interesting for that.

Siemens is bringing electricity to the surface from the world's deepest arch-dam turbines. The dam of the Jinping-1 Hydropower Station in China's Sichuan province is 305 meters tall; the turbines are located 230 meters deep. The facility will have a total power output of 3.6 gigawatts. In order to transport this huge amount of energy up out of the mountain, Yalong Hydro is using gas-insulated transmission lines (GIL) from Siemens. This technology is especially well suited for the transmission of large amounts of electricity in restricted spaces.

Gas-insulated tubular lines can transmit up to 5,000 amperes at up to 550 kilovolts (kV). Every line consists of two concentric aluminum tubes. The space between the inner conductor and the earthed outer tube is filled with insulating gas. GIL systems not only transmit huge amounts of electricity in very restricted spaces, they are also fireproof unlike standard power cables. As a result, GILs are a safe and easy-to-install solution for the transmission of electricity out of underground power stations or tunnels. The Jinping-I transmission line consists of a total of three parallel GIL systems, each of which has three monopolar tubular lines that lead vertically up at the dam.

While Siemens is rightly proud of their accomplishment, there may also be some unintended consequences from a project of such magnitude.

AnonTechie and kaszz write:

The Brazilian government have decided in a 2-year trial to test genetically modified variant of the male mosquito Aedes aegypti that's common in the northeastern Brazil to combat the spread of dengue fever. Dengue is endemic in three of the host cities for this summer's World Cup. "We need to provide the government alternatives because the system we are using now in Brazil doesn't work," says Aldo Malavasi, president of Moscamed, the Brazilian company that's running the trial from a lab just outside of Jacobina.

The mosquitoes in the lab have their genes modified in the lab such that their offspring dies. Only the female mosquitoes bite, so only male mosquitoes are released which mate with wild females and produce offspring that die before they can reproduce. The technique is developed by the British company Oxitec with roots in Syngenta and GeneWatch points out that Oxitec are not totally transparent about the potential risks (like spontaneous DNA alterations).

We're going to be doing some site maintenance tonight which may leave the site in a read-only mode for awhile as we migrate to a new database backend node (and eventually to full DB redundancy). The site should remain up and usable during this period, though it might briefly fall into read-only mode during the master migration.