Does your cat walk all over your desk? It’s’ nothing new, cats have been walking all over humans since, like, forever as this photo from Emir O. Filipovic of the University of Sarajevo’s History Department shows. Emir was working on a 15th century manuscript when he ran across this medieval cat paw prints: Link – via The Weasel King
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Medieval Cat Paw Prints
Dr. Peter Fröhlich of Johns Hopkins University grades exams so that the highest scoring exam receives a 100% grade and all others fall below on a curve. It wasn’t a Kobayashi Maru scenario , but his exams are hard. Fröhlich’s students devised a cunning plan to all get A grades. It involved boycotting the exam: Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich. This approach, Fröhlich said, is the “most predictable and consistent way” of comparing students’ work to their peers’, and it worked well. At least it did until the end of the fall term at Hopkins, that is. As the semester ended in December, students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” classes decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A. Dr. Fröhlich abided by his grading policy and gave all students A grades, as well as congratulating them on their cooperative spirit: Fröhlich took a surprisingly philosophical view of his students’ machinations, crediting their collaborative spirit. “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done,” he said via e-mail. “At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible. Link -via The Volokh Conspiracy | Image: Paramount Pictures
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Clever Students Use Game Theory to Get Perfect Scores on an Exam
With the Linux 3.8 merge over, the Intel Linux graphics developers are looking toward 3.9. From a weblog entry by one of them: “Let’s first look at bit at the drm core changes: The headline item this time around is the reworked kernel modeset locking. Finally the kernel doesn’t stall for a few frames while probing outputs in the background! … For general robustness of our GEM implementation we’ve clarified the various gpu reset state transitions. This should prevent applications from crashing while a gpu reset is going on due to the kernel leaking that transitory state to userspace. Ville Syrjälä also started to fix up our handling of pageflips across gpu hangs so that compositors no longer get stuck after a reset. Unfortunately not all of his patches made it into 3.9. Somewhat related is Mika Kuoppala’s work to fix bugs across the seqnqo wrap-around. And to make sure that those bugs won’t pop up again he also added some testing infrastructure. ” The thing I am most looking forward to is the gen4 relocation regression finally being fixed. No more GPU hangs when under heavy I/O load (the bane of my existence for a while now). The bug report is a good read if you think hunting for a tricky bug is fun. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lots of Changes for Intel Graphics Coming in Linux 3.9
We love our pocket routers , because they’re great for both travel and home use. The Satechi Wireless Multifunction Mini Router offers more than just standard internet access over Wi-Fi, however. It also works as a signal repeater, access point, wireless client, and bridge. More »
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Satechi Wireless Multifunction Mini Router Solves Many Wireless Internet Needs with a Tiny Footprint
So you’ve got a bunch of TV shows you watch, but maybe you don’t know exactly what day they air, or where you can watch them online. FollowShows lets you see a schedule with just your favorite shows on it, get notifications, and watch it from one place no matter where it’s available online. More »
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FollowShows Keeps You Up-to-Date on Your Favorite TV Shows, Finds Where to Watch Them Online
sciencehabit writes “When it comes to hanging on tight, the lowly mussel has few rivals in nature. Researchers have sought the secrets behind the bivalve’s steadfast grip on wet, slippery rock. Now, a researcher says he has used the mollusk’s tricks to develop medical applications. These include a biocompatible glue that could one day seal fetal membranes, allowing prenatal surgeons to repair birth defects without triggering dangerous premature labor.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mussel Glue Could Help Repair Birth Defects
When your computer starts behaving strangely, won’t boot, or you start getting strange errors that you can’t pin down, a great way to troubleshoot the problem is to boot to a rescue disc and see if you can isolate the problem. It might be your operating system, it could be hardware, but you’ll never know until you boot to some other media to take a look. That said, there are tons of great system rescue discs to check out if you want a tool to save your ailing system. This week we’re looking at five of the best, nominated by you, our readers. More »
Lucas123 writes “Electrical engineers at Oregon State University (OSU) said yesterday that they have found a technique to use high-frequency sound waves to improve magnetic data storage.The data write-technology breakthrough could allow greater amounts of data to be stored on both hard disk drives and NAND flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), they said. Typically, when magnetic recording material is temporarily heated, even for an instant, it can become momentarily less stiff and more data can be stored at a particular spot. But, the technique has proven difficult to effectively increase capacity because heating tends to spread beyond where it is wanted and the technology involves complex integration of optics, electronics and magnetics, the researchers said. With the new technique, known as acoustic-assisted magnetic recording, ultrasound is directed at a highly specific location on the material while data is being stored, creating elasticity that allows “a tiny portion of the material to bend or stretch.” After the ultrasound is turned off, the material immediately returns to its original shape, but the data stored during the process remains in a dense form.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ultrasound Waves Used To Increase Data Storage Capacity of Magnetic Media
Hugh Pickens writes “Ariel Schwartz reports that researchers are working on an alcoholism vaccine that makes alcohol intolerable to anyone who drinks it. The vaccine builds on what happens naturally in certain people — about 20% of the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean population — with an alcohol intolerance mutation. Normally, the liver breaks down alcohol into an enzyme that’s transformed into the compound acetaldehyde (responsible for that nasty hangover feeling), which in turn is degraded into another enzyme. The acetaldehyde doesn’t usually have time to build up before it’s broken down. But people with the alcohol intolerance mutation lack the ability to produce that second enzyme; acetaldehyde accumulates, and they feel terrible. Dr. Juan Asenjo and his colleagues have come up with a way to stop the synthesis of that second enzyme via a vaccine, mimicking the mutation that sometimes happens naturally. ‘People have this mutation all over the world. It’s like how some people can’t drink milk,’ says Asenjo. Addressing the physiological part of alcohol addiction is just one piece of the battle. Addictive tendencies could very well manifest in other ways; instead of alcohol, perhaps former addicts will move on to cigarettes. Asenjo admits as much: ‘Addiction is a psychological disease, a social disease. Obviously this is only the biological part of it.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Alcoholism Vaccine Makes Alcohol Intolerable To Drinkers
Ever since Microsoft acquired Skype and confirmed the end of Windows Live Messenger , a merger has been a tiny dot off on the horizon. Now Microsoft has pinned down when the two will become one : this April. More »
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Microsoft Is Finally Merging Skype and Windows Live Messenger This Spring