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What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates. In the late 1800s, Francis Galton—founder of the scientific study of intelligence and a cousin of Charles Darwin—analyzed the genealogical records of hundreds of scholars, artists, musicians, and other professionals and found that greatness tends to run in families. For example, he counted more than 20 eminent musicians in the Bach family. (Johann Sebastian was just the most famous.) Galton concluded that experts are “born.” Nearly half a century later, the behaviorist John Watson countered that experts are “made” when he famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents.”

The experts-are-made view has dominated the discussion in recent decades. To test this idea, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues recruited violinists from an elite Berlin music academy and asked them to estimate the amount of time per week they had devoted to deliberate practice for each year of their musical careers. Based on these findings, Ericsson and colleagues argued that prolonged effort, not innate talent, explained differences between experts and novices. These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” ( http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ ) in his book Outliers.

However, recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201516 ) to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.

In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/09/malcolm_gladwell_s_10_000_hour_rule_for_deliberate_practice_is_wrong_genes.single.html

[Related Abstract]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=(Macnamara+and+Hambrick)

Niagara Celtic festival is this weekend (13-14) in Krull park in Olcott NY. I'll be there with the Sterling Invaders.

Next weekend is Queen City Con Quest - Downtown Buffalo, in the convention center. I should be there one of those days.

exec now has a basic nick tracking script that hooks the join, nick, quit, kick, part and 353 events. this feature is similar but nowhere near as complete as xchat's (or $insert_client_here's) user list.

it has lead to the addition of internal stdout commands for retrieving a space-delimited listing of bucket indexes, and commands for pausing and unpausing the processing of irc data, to prevent corruption of bucket data that might occur due to multiple processes triggered by irc events trying to read/write to the same bucket(s) simultaneously.

http://sylnt.us/exec#Buckets

nick tracking enables scripts to find out what nicks are in a given channel or what channels a given nick are in. currently only channels shared with the bot are tracked, but with additional event hooks (such as a whois 319 numeric) additional channel info can be tracked.

with proposed addition of whois account querying (330 numeric) by the user tracking script, other scripts will be able to authenticate instructions with a simple function call.

the irciv script was originally designed with player authentication using the 330 nickserv account numeric. however it was messy, with irciv-specific code sprinkled throughout the main event handling script (cmd.php). the generalized tracking system will give all scripts access to the same user data via a small set of lib functions.

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http://sylnt.us/exec
https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot

<OfficialDevHat>
So, I'd given an estimate of "by this weekend" for crypto-currency payment processing. I was pretty close for not even having looked at it or picked a payment processor yet. It's looking like I'll finish Monday unless I find another 3-4 hours of coding in my brain today. I can't really speak to when it will deployed to prod afterwards.

The skinny of it is I went through two other payment processors before settling on Bitpay. It would have been nice to accept litecoin and dodgecoin as well as bitcoin but some payment processor who shall remain nameless had a dev environment that did not mirror their prod environment and all the documentation for the API was for their dev environment, so I killed with fire all nine or ten hours of coding I'd done to process payments with them and went back to looking for another processor. Maybe one of these days they'll update and bring some sanity to their system and you lot will be able to use litecoin and dodgecoin here. Until then, bitcoin payments via Bitpay are currently working from my dev environment but in need of some finishing touches and testing before being deployed for you lot to use.
</OfficialDevHat>

<PrivateCitizenHat>
A quick word about Bitpay. If you ever want to receive USD when being sent BTC, I personally highly recommend using them. Aside from test.bitpay.com not being mentioned in the docs at the time, they were bloody brilliant to code against. As a random code monkey on the Internet, they have my resounding personal endorsement.
</PrivateCitizenHat>

if you're chatting away on soylent irc (irc.sylnt.us) check out #comments for a SoylentNews comment feed

the feed is based on the last 50 articles in the atom feed, and is updated every half hour

also highlights score 5 comments

examples:

<exec> *** new comment: Anonymous Coward (Score:0) "Microsoft Defies US Court Order, Will Not Give-up Emails" - http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3678&cid=88065 (parent: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3678&cid=87969)

<exec> *** score 5 comment: Anonymous Coward for article "Microsoft Defies US Court Order, Will Not Give-up Emails" - http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3678&cid=87971

proposed features include opt-in personalized feeds (to pm) with score threshold and other settings

suggestions/criticism/feedback/etc is always welcome

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https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/scripts/comment_feed.php

Over the weekend, there's been a slew of images released showing celebrities in varying states of undress. Now, it appears that a flaw in iCloud could be responsible for the images making their way online.

On Monday, a Python script emerged on Github (which we’re not linking to as there is evidence a fix by Apple is not fully rolled out) that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find my iPhone service. Brute force attacks are where a malicious user uses a script to repeatedly guess passwords to attempt to discover the correct one.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/09/01/this-could-be-the-apple-icloud-flaw-that-led-to-celebrity-photos-being-leaked/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/is-apples-icloud-safe-after-leak-of-jennifer-lawrence-and-other-celebrities-nude-photos-9703142.html

What impact does the proliferation of new mobile technologies have? How does the sharing of personal data over the Internet threaten our society? Interview with Professor Jean-Pierre Hubaux, a specialist in communication networks and privacy protection, a major field of IT security.
Jean-Pierre Hubaux as a professor at the EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences. During the last decade, Jean-Pierre Hubaux and his team at the Laboratory for Computer Communications and Applications have focused their research efforts on privacy protection, in particular for mobile communication networks (and notably geolocation) and personal data (with genomic data as an application example).
http://actu.epfl.ch/news/protecting-privacy-also-means-preserving-democra-2/

So, mod-bombing is becoming a problem. Where mod-bombing is defined as blowing a bunch of moderator points on one person's comments in pursuit of a personal vendetta. I think we're pretty much all in agreement that this type of behavior is NOT what the moderation system was designed to do and can't be allowed to continue.

So, I, personally, not anyone else on staff or the site as a whole, would like some input to use to further refine or outright change my opinion on how to deal with the matter. Bear in mind that I am not the person who gets to decide this, just the guy who would likely be coding it up.

At the moment my favorite idea is that after N downmods from person A to comments made by person B, person A be presented with a page offering them the choice of removing all their moderations from this set of modpoints or to continue on with the knowledge that an admin WILL be checking their moderations for today with the possible consequences of reversal of their moderations and their ineligibility to receive mod points again for a number of days ranging from 1 through infinity.

What say you, SN?

~help <alias>
gets first 3 lines from section of this wiki page: http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec_aliases
followed by a url

~staff meeting
outputs paragraph in site news slashbox containing the word "meeting", with paras delimited by <br>

scripts can call lib.php function bot_ignore_next() to set a flag in the bot that tells it to ignore the next message, which is useful if outputting aliases that you don't want to be processed (such as for ~help)

~count <nick>
counts number of privmsgs in channel. also indicates over how many days and average of privmsgs per day.