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AnonTechie writes:

Radical Ideas for Reinventing College, From Stanford’s Design School

Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of Stanford Design School, shared a handful of concepts for redesigning college, culled from a year long workshop. Specifically, they look at how to keep the on-campus experience relevant in an age where online learning is becoming increasingly common. One of the provocations, called Open Loop University, wonders what could happen if you gave students six years of college to use whenever they wanted throughout their adult life.

This sort of speculative thinking is meant to address growing concerns about the traditional four-year undergraduate track—basically that today’s system makes way for a bunch of well-trained sheep. “This is a generation of students who are incredibly highly structured, but they’re going to be entering an increasingly ambiguous world,” Stein Greenberg says. “We need to be training our students not just to expect that they will be society’s leaders, but also to be our most creative, daring, and resilient problem solvers.”

Do you think this concept will work ?

[Ed: 4 years vs. 6 years of college?]

LoRdTAW writes:

It has been over six years since BeagleBoard.org released the original Beagleboard, one of the first open source ARM SBC's for hobbyist use. Now the team has released the details of the upcoming Beagleboard-X15 based on the TI dual-core Sitara AM5728 SoC (system on Chip). It features a number of processor subsystems, modern, high-speed serial I/O ports as well as GPIO ports.

A partial list of SoC features include:
Dual ARM Cortex A15 cores running at 1.5GHz featuring: 128bit NEON SIMD, Hardware Virtualization, Jazelle RCT and LPAE allowing up to 1TB of RAM.
Dual C66x DSP cores
Dual IPU's (Image Processor Units) each containing dual Cortex M4 cores (only one IPU is user programmable, one dedicated to video decode)
1080P 60FPS video decoder (using IPU)
Dual core PowerVR SGX544-MP2 GPU
Dual PRU-ICSS coprocessors (Programmable Real-Time Unit and Industrial Communication Subsystem)
Dual Gigabit ethernet ports via internal switch from single GbE MAC.

The board features:
2GB DDR3 RAM on board
eSATA port @ 3.0Gbps
HDMI, LCD and a Video in ports
Dual PCIe 2.0 5Gbps lanes supporting two x1 or one x2 ports, routed to expansion headers
Audio in and out ports via 3.5mm jacks and HDMI audio out.
GPIO headers
More to come ...

The board is scheduled to be released in late February, 2015. Unfortunately, the price has not yet been announced. The official wiki page is located here: http://www.elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoard-X15 It looks to be quite a powerful board with a lot of connectivity and processing power.

Also revealed in the LinuxGizmos.com article:

Meanwhile, changes may also be in store for the BeagleBone Black. In response to a comment on his Google+ post, Pantelic confirmed rumors that TI was interested in offering the BeagleBoard community a more expensive processor than the low cost, low-margin Sitara AM3359 Cortex-A8 SoC used on the BB Black. BeagleBoard.org’s manufacturing partners Farnell and Embest will “take over producing the BBB, but since TI is not happy to sell to them a low cost processor, it will run with a certain Broadcom CPU instead,” wrote Pantelic. “Remember, you heard it here first.”

tonyPick writes:

Universe Today has a link to a timelapse video from ISS footage.

The video is Astronaut - A journey to space by Guillaume Juin (French page) and is built from NASA Crew Earth Observations Videos.

In addition to the embedded version at Universe Today there's a Vimeo page with a 1920x1080 version available for download.

tonyPick writes:

IFL Science has an article on Burning NH4Cr2O7 With HgSCN (ammonium dichromate and mercury (II) thiocyanate, respectively).

This is the reaction that produces a "crawling tentacles in a fire pit" effect, seen on a number of animated gifs and youtube videos, described in TFA as "tentacles are crawling out of a portal to Hell".

The article contains a Youtube video link, and also IFL Science has an earlier article on burning HgSCN (Mercury thiocyanate), which by itself is a creepy chemical reaction. There's also a 10 minute Youtube video available on how to make the Pharaoh's Serpent, with more detail on the reactions involved.

AnonTechie writes:

Celebrated astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson fact-checked Interstellar on Twitter last night, and he didn’t seem to have very many objections.

http://time.com/3576369/neil-degrasse-tyson-fact-checked-interstellar/

Do SN readers agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which science facts did Interstellar get wrong?

Robotron writes:

Several sources within the Linux community (here, here, here and here) continue to discuss the possibility of NSA involvement with systemd. Various commentaries argue that the pace, scope and vociferousness surrounding the Debian kernel updates signify cause for suspicion. Discussion upon this subject has simmered since April, when Julian Assange branded the Debian project as being under the ownership of the NSA.

iGuru summarizes the arguments in this post, noting the worrying influence of developers working in billion-dollar corporate giant Red Hat, the potential for infiltration and manipulation within and between systemd supporters, plus numerous possible security holes and vulnerabilities in the code. Meanwhile, systemd's 217 update has been announced as implemented.

gewg_ writes:

TechDirt reports

For far too long, public officials have treated Freedom of Information laws as an annoyance...at best. In many cases, information designated as eligible for freedom has to be pried out of officials' hands using lawsuits, needlessly-protracted appeals processes or crowd-sourced tenacity.

Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley said he will issue an arrest affidavit today against Rodney Forte, the executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Alliance in Little Rock, for a violation of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

[...]In Arkansas, any violation of its FOIA law can result in [arrest].

It's nice to see someone following the letter of the law. Not following the letter of the law (and steamrolling its spirit) is what put Forte in the prosecutor's sights. Forte had decided to greet a FOIA request he didn't want to fulfill with the time-honored anti-FOIA tactic of pricing his agency out of the market.

The action comes after the Metropolitan Housing Alliance sent an invoice to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette late Tuesday, charging more than $16,000 to hire outside workers to help the agency comply with a records-release request--a practice the Little Rock city attorney and other Arkansas Freedom of Information Act experts say is illegal.

jcd writes:

The GNOME Project is currently grappling with Groupon, which has registered a series of new "GNOME" trademarks in response to GNOME's request that Groupon rename its new POS system.

From the gnome.org announcement:

"Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation." The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications."

GNOME claims that it will need $80,000 to challenge ten of the new trademarks that Groupon has filed.

novak writes:

Mozilla is starting an initiative called Polaris, together with other privacy-centric organizations. https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2014/11/10/introducing-polaris-privacy-initiative-to-accelerate-user-focused-privacy-online/

Polaris does not refer to a single product or software program, but rather to an initiative dedicated to advancing user privacy across the internet. Components of the project include:

• Working to stop tracking code.
• TOR support.

This will include a number of Mozilla hosted TOR middle relays to boost the network. Here's the wiki with more details.

AnonTechie writes:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday approved a genetically engineered potato that is resistant to bruising and cuts down on a possible cancer-causing substance, though some food-safety experts aren’t so excited about the super spud.

The Innate Potato, trademarked by Simplot, contains the DNA of other kinds of potatoes mixed in through a process known as RNA interference technology, The Guardian reports.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The Sunday Times reports that scientists have found a virus that appears to infect human brains, reducing people’s thinking power including their spatial awareness and attention span (paywalled). The virus, ATCV-1, seems to alter genes governing brain function. “Unexpectedly, we identified DNA sequences of ATCV-1, an algal virus not previously known to infect humans, in oropharyngeal [throat] samples from healthy adults,” said the researchers. “ATCV-1 was associated with a modest but measurable decrease in cognitive functioning.” By using modern bioinformatics analysis, the genes effected were found to be involved in pathways related to dopamine receptor signaling, cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (CDK5) signaling, antigen presentation, immune cell adhesion, and eukaryotic initiation factor 2. Note that dopamine is a central component of many psychiatric conditions."

dx3bydt3 writes:

An appeals court has acquitted six of the seven scientists and engineers convicted of manslaughter for their role in the communication around the earthquake that struck the Italian town of L'Aquila in 2009 and killed 309 people.

The seven took part in a meeting six days prior to the quake and informed the public that the risk was low. The judge in the original 2012 case said the scientists had provided a "generic and ineffective" risk assessment. One of the seven, Bernardo De Bernardinis was not acquitted, but did have his sentence reduced to two years from the original six year sentences handed out to the group.

AnonTechie writes with an article from PandoDaily:

There are plenty of reasons not to use hotel Wi-Fi. It’s often expensive, sluggish, and unreliable. Sometimes it seems like nobody knows the network password, and when trouble arises it’s hard to convince the front desk that there’s a problem with their network, not one with your devices.

Now you can add something new to that list: Hackers are using hotel Wi-Fi to steal data through zero-day vulnerabilities that companies like Adobe and Microsoft aren’t even aware of. ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/10/cybercrime-gang-targets-execs-using-hotel-internet/?mod=ST1 )

Kaspersky Lab has appropriately dubbed the attacks the Darkhotel APT ( https://securelist.com/blog/research/66779/the-darkhotel-apt/ ). (It’s not as catchy as Heartbleed, but it’s a little more explanatory, I guess.) Darkhotel works by taking advantage of hotel Wi-Fi’s public nature and the willingness with which many people install updates to popular software like Adobe’s Flash. Hackers are said to have used the tactic to steal information from people traveling in Asia, but researchers found that the malware infected computer across North America and Europe, too.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that according to emails to its supplier Delphi Automotive, General Motors placed an urgent order for 500,000 replacement switches nearly two months before notifying federal regulators and the public that it was recalling cars with a dangerously defective ignition switch. The emails were sent on December 18, 2013, a day after a crucial committee met to discuss the switch issue but declined to order a recall. Despite the official inaction, a GM employee sent an email to Delphi the next day requesting the half-million replacement parts: for “an urgent field action for our customers.” The emails were turned over by Delphi during discovery in sweeping class-action litigation against the automaker and were released to the press by Robert C. Hilliard, one of the three lead attorneys for plaintiffs in the case. The fault had been known to GM for at least a decade prior to the recall being declared. Some have suggested that the company actually approved the switches in 2002 even though they knew they might not meet safety standards

AnonTechie writes with an article from Phys.org:

US President Barack Obama voiced support Monday for "free and open Internet" rules to protect against putting online services that don't pay extra fees into a "slow lane".

Obama endorsed an effort to reclassify the Internet as a public utility to give regulators more authority to enforce "net neutrality", the principle barring Internet service firms from playing favorites or opening up "fast lanes" for services that pay fees for better access.

In a statement, Obama said he wants the independent Federal Communications Commission to "implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality".

Obama's comment comes amid heated debate among online industry sectors as the FCC seeks to draft new rules to replace those struck down this year by a US appeals court, which said the agency lacked authority to regulate Internet service firms as it does telephone carriers.

"'Net neutrality' has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation—but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted," Obama said in a statement.