Cop Car's Beat

People are hard to hate close up. Move in. - Brené Brown

PSA (Public Service Announcement)

Although I cannot find it, I recall that sometime within the past two years I have grumbled about being unable to decipher what is meant by various pictograms. At the time, I was struggling with a "care tag" on a new piece of clothing. Today, in a magazine sent out by the grocery store chain that we frequent was included the following legend. Aren't you glad to know?

More from Slashdot.org - Grading Tests, Nuking Mars, Using Old Tech

The following item from Slashdot.org is an excellent rehashing of the reason we were always told "show your work" on tests!

How Should Schools Grade Unexpected-But-Correct Answers On Coding Tests? 76

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 18, 2019 @07:34AM from the does-not-compute dept.

 

There can be more than one correct answer for academic tests of programming ability, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp:

 

Take the first of the Free-Response Questions in this year's AP CS A exam, which asked 70,000 college-bound students to "Write the static method numberOfLeapYears, which returns the number of leap years between year1 and year2." The correct answer, according to the CollegeBoard's 2019 Scoring Guidelines, entails iterating over the range of years and invoking a provided helper method called isLeapYear for each year.

Which does work, of course, but what if a student instead took an Excel-like approach to the same problem that consists of a (hopefully correct!) single formula with no iteration or isLeapYear helper function? Would that be a worse — or better -- example of computational thinking than the endorsed AP CS A Java-based solution? (Here's a 7-minute AP Conference discussion of how to correctly grade this problem)?

So, how have you seen schools and companies deal with unexpected-but-correct approaches to coding test questions?

 

I'm not sure how I should feel about the following item.

Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts (bgr.com) 83

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:34PM from the making-a-statement dept.

 

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

 

The following item makes this oldster chortle.

US Navy Tests WWII-ERA Messaging Tech: Dropping Bean Bags Onto Ships (popularmechanics.com) 70

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @05:34PM from the cornhole-code dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr writes: In World War II, pilots would air-drop messages onto ships using bean-bags. Just as with sextants a few years ago, the Navy is bringing back old tech, because it works.

Just as during the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, the purpose is to prevent eavesdropping. You can read more about the modern bean-bag-drop on Military.com or Popular Mechanics. There's a video about the Doolittle Raid hosted at archive.org with bean-bag-drops at 2:39 and 5:19 into the video. I wonder how many high-density SSD drives fit in a standard Navy bean-bag?
"In a future conflict with a tech-savvy opponent, the U.S. military could discover even its most advanced, secure communications penetrated by the enemy," notes Popular Mechanics. "Secure digital messaging, voice communications, video conferencing, and even chats could be intercepted and decrypted for its intelligence value.

"This could give enemy forces an unimaginable advantage, seemingly predicting the moves and actions of the fleets at sea with uncanny accuracy."

Sherman's Lagoon August 13-17, 2019

Sometimes it takes a comic strip to illustrate large truths in life. This week, it was Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey that did so. The first image comprises the daily cartoon strips for August 13-16, 2019, which may need to be enlarged (by clicking on the image) for ease of reading the script.

The second image is today's cartoon panel - August 17, 2019.

Phishy, phishy

    Men'sTall Traditional Fit Comfort-First Shirt with Coolmax

On August 2, I ordered Hunky Husband a shirt from Lands' End online. Immediately, I received an email acknowledging the order and telling me that they would let me know when it shipped out.

On August 7, I received the "shipped out" email. Five days seemed like a longer "time to ship" than normal; but, perhaps they are especially busy.

On August 9, the shirt arrived in the USPS mail.

This morning, I picked up two emails from Lands' End that had been sent yesterday. I picked them up in reverse order. The first one was time stamped at 7:28PM, August 12. It said:

[CC], your return has been picked up by USPS.

Order number 8492900 was picked up for return Monday, August 12, 2019.

[Link for tracking return]

What???? I didn't send the shirt back. I took it to the tailor, yesterday morning, but did not send it back to Lands' End!

The second email that I picked up this morning was time stamped at 11:07AM, August 12, and said:

We are contacting you today about your recent Order #8492900.

We do apologize, but we may have had a packing error.  Please check your order when it arrives and make sure the items are correct.  If not please email us or call us at 1-800-332-4700. 

Thank you for assisting with this matter and again our apologies for the inconvenience.

What???? The order that I received contained the correct shirt which was the only thing I had ordered. See where I'm going here? I checked that the 1-800 telephone number was not the same number as is given on the Lands' End website. Since it did not match, I picked up their "talk back" email address and forwarded the two weird emails to Lands' End with a note that I suspected an attempt at phishing. Well, it made sense, right?

I got an immediate reply:

Thank you for contacting Lands' End regarding your order. 

Your order was sent to the wrong person.    We realized our error and sent replacements to you.  The email you received about your order being returned was in regards to the first order that was sent out to the wrong person, they sent it back to us but you got the email because your email address is on the order.  Please disregard the email.   We are sorry for any confusion.   

If we may be of further assistance, please let us know.  

That's a relief. My final email to Lands' End:

Thanks, Kevin, for explaining the whole thing. I am relieved that the two emails about which I was concerned were, in fact, legitimate communications from Lands’ End. They surely looked real enough; but, without knowing the whole story, I was not convinced (especially since the phone number did not jibe with the one on your website).

It’s a shame that any of us have to give a second thought to security; but, we do.

 

 

More from Slashdot.com

In the late 1980s, while working on development of a flight control/autopilot system for a new military aircraft, I fought to keep control in the hands of the pilot(s). Although it wasn't my only reason for doings so, I know that when I've nothing to do, I have a tendency to want to go to sleep in the cockpit and I didn't feel myself to be unrepresentative of other pilots. It seems (what a surprise!) that automobile drivers have the same tendency - as reported at Slashdot.com.

People Keep Spotting Teslas With Snoozing Drivers On the Freeway (arstechnica.com) 16

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday June 22, 2019 @04:34PM from the asleep-at-the-wheel dept.

"In the last week, two different people have captured video of Tesla vehicles traveling down a freeway with an apparently sleeping driver behind the wheel," writes Ars Technica.

Iwastheone shares their report: Both incidents happened in California. Last week, local television stations in Los Angeles aired footage from viewer Shawn Miladinovich of a Tesla vehicle driving on LA's 405 freeway. The driver "was just fully sleeping, eyes were shut, hands nowhere near the steering wheel," said Miladinovich, who was a passenger in a nearby car, in an interview with NBC Channel 4. Miladinovich said he saw the vehicle twice, about 30 minutes apart, as both cars traveled along the 405 freeway. The driver appeared to be asleep both times...

Another video of an apparently sleeping Tesla driver was posted to Reddit over the weekend -- this one from the San Francisco Bay Area. The Reddit user who posted the video, MiloWee, said that she tried "several times" to wake him up by honking. "It worked, but he fell back asleep," she wrote....

Last month, police in the Netherlands pulled over a Tesla driver who appeared to be asleep and intoxicated. Another video posted in January appeared to show Tesla drivers asleep at the wheel. In an incident last November, it took police in Silicon Valley seven miles to pull over a Tesla car with an apparently sleeping driver. He was arrested for driving under the influence. Another driver in early 2018 was discovered passed out behind the wheel of his stopped Tesla vehicle on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the man "attempted to reassure arresting CHP officers onsite that the car was 'on autopilot.'"

 

Another tendency I've observed in myself that I think finds a home in many people is thirsting for information - addressed in the following posting from Slashdot.com.

 

How Information is Like Snacks, Money, and Drugs To Your Brain (berkeley.edu) 53

Posted by msmash on Friday June 21, 2019 @01:30PM from the dopamine dept.

A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business has found that information acts on the brain's dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as money or food. From a report: "To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it's useful," says Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, a neuroeconomist. "And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful -- what some may call idle curiosity." The paper, "Common neural code for reward and information value," was published this month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Authored by Hsu and graduate student Kenji Kobayashi, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, it demonstrates that the brain converts information into the same common scale as it does for money. It also lays the groundwork for unraveling the neuroscience behind how we consume information -- and perhaps even digital addiction.

I got a chuckle

Although I don't know the origin of the image, below, I know that I found it at All Hat No Cattle.

As a techie who started college in 1955 (how old am I!), I didn't major in laundry. (And...I must have missed the day in class when it was explained how inheritance is responsible for knowledge of cleaning. Is it tied to the XX chromosomes?)

However, as one who has trouble interpreting pictograms, I whole heartedly agree with the idea of gaining the advice of a more knowledgeable person when faced with indecipherable labels. Fortunately, HH is game on interpreting many pictograms for me and I answer his questions concerning laundry methods. (For the past 29 years, Hunky Husband has had our washing and ironing on his weekly to-do list - and he did his own laundry for the preceding 13 years.)

ADDITION OF 4/20/2019 - Still Laughing

Darlene Costner (who used to have a blog, My Mother's Blog) sent the following video to Ronni Bennett who posted it, today.

 

Postings from Slashdot.com

New Drug Rapidly Repairs Age-Related Memory Loss, Improves Mood (newatlas.com) 70

Posted by BeauHD on Friday February 15, 2019 @09:10PM from the new-and-improved dept.

 

A team of Canadian scientists has developed a fascinating new experimental drug that is purported to result in rapid improvements to both mood and memory following extensive animal testing. It's hoped the drug will move to human trials within the next two years. New Atlas reports: Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a key neurotransmitter, and when altered it can play a role in the development of everything from psychiatric conditions to cognitive degeneration. Benzodiazepines, such as Xanax or Valium, are a class of drugs well known to function by modulating the brain's GABA systems. This new research describes the development of several new molecules that are structurally based on benzodiazepines, but with small tweaks to enhance their ability to specifically target certain brain areas. The goal was to create a new therapeutic agent that can effectively combat age-related mood and memory alterations caused by disruptions in the GABA systems.

In animal tests the drug has been found to be remarkably effective, with old mice displaying rapid improvements in memory tests within an hour of administration, resulting in performance similar to that of young mice. Daily administration of the drug over two months was also seen to result in an actual structural regrowth of brain cells, returning their brains to a state that resembles a young animal. The new study was published in the journal Molecular Neuropsychiatry.

I found the above item interesting. (I wish I could remember why!) So...now you know...although it took me a few years to reach that "status", my having been too shy for such until reaching age 16, I am the class clown. Fortunately, some technical positions value that trait (not that they'll be recruiting me at my age!) Please read on.

Researchers Are Working With NASA To See If Comedians Help Team Cohesion On Long Space Missions (theguardian.com) 78

Posted by BeauHD on Friday February 15, 2019 @10:30PM from the laughter-is-the-best-medicine dept.

 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: [R]esearchers have found that the success of a future mission to the red planet may depend on the ship having a class clown. "These are people that have the ability to pull everyone together, bridge gaps when tensions appear and really boost morale," said Jeffrey Johnson, an anthropologist at the University of Florida. "When you're living with others in a confined space for a long period of time, such as on a mission to Mars, tensions are likely to fray. It's vital you have somebody who can help everyone get along, so they can do their jobs and get there and back safely. It's mission critical." Johnson spent four years studying overwintering crews in Antarctica and identified the importance of clowns, leaders, buddies, storytellers, peacemakers and counsellors for bonding teams together and making them work smoothly. He found the same mixes worked in U.S., Russian, Polish, Chinese and Indian bases.

"These roles are informal, they emerge within the group. But the interesting thing is that if you have the right combination the group does very well. And if you don't, the group does very badly," he said. Johnson is now working with Nasa to explore whether clowns and other characters are crucial for the success of long space missions. So far he has monitored four groups of astronauts who spent 30 to 60 days in the agency's mock space habitat, the Human Exploration Research Analog, or Hera, in Houston, Texas. Johnson, who also studied isolated salmon fishers in Alaska, found that clowns were often willing to be the butt of jokes and pranks. In Antarctica, one clown he observed endured a mock funeral and burial in the tundra, but was crucial for building bridges between clusters of overwintering scientists and between contractors and researchers, or "beakers" as the contractors called them.

More from Slashdot.com - All adither

From Slashdot.com:

Ask Slashdot: Is Today's Technology As Cool As You'd Predicted When You Were Young? 229

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday January 13, 2019 @12:34AM from the back-to-the-future dept.

"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver. Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?

If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.

"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?

 

I don't know about you, but I never was a visionary. Being more interested in basic science than in consumer goods, I have pretty much taken things as they come - used some of those things and ignored others.

The next article that appears in the Slashdot.com posting:

Old People Can Produce As Many New Brain Cells As Teenagers (independent.co.uk) 71

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday January 12, 2019 @09:38PM from the senior-momentum dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares this article about a newly-published study which counters previous theories that neurons stop developing after adolescence: Healthy men and women continue to produce new neurons throughout life, suggesting older people remain more cognitively and emotionally intact than previously believed, researchers found. For decades it was thought that adult brains were hard-wired and unable to form new cells. But a Columbia University study found older people continued to produce neurons in the hippocampus -- a part of the brain important for memory, emotion and cognition -- at a similar rate to young people....

However, the researchers also noted fewer blood vessels and connections between cells in the older brains, which Ms Boldrini said "may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience" in the elderly.
The article suggests these newest findings may be hotly debated.

"They come just a month after a University of California study suggested adults do not develop new neurons."

Please note that last quotation. Also, if you didn't catch it the first time through, please note the pun in the "Posted by" line.

Failure of attribution

One of my blog friends emailed me because, unusually (I hope!) for me, I failed to credit the "coexist" exhortation in my Christmas posting. I did not recall where I had picked up the electronic file used in the posting, and I did not really know the origin of coexist signs (per Wikipedia, "...an image created by Polish, Warsaw-based graphic designer Piotr Młodożeniec [pl] in 2000....") nor did I know how many different versions there are of it. Wow! I particularly like one that I found at Amazon's Peacemonger website:

I recall my delight, some years ago, at first sighting of a Coexist bumper sticker - probably with something close to Mr Młodożeniec's original version. I continue to delight in the various versions despite being subjected to chastisement by Daily Beast in an article that says, in part, "...the Coexist bumper sticker mentality, shockingly, isn’t an antidote [to religion-based conflict] at all. It’s not even a [sic] harmless or naïve. It’s a symptom of a much larger phenomenon, one that makes it hard for Americans to talk seriously about religious conflict and history." The subheading of the article is: "America’s simplistic adoption of the COEXIST bumper sticker signals a dangerous inability to understand the roots of religious conflict."

Well, forgive me for breathing, say I. I am sure that I am naïve. I am sure that I am a simpleton because I think the root of religious conflict is religion; but, still, I believe that if we all made greater efforts to coexist, it couldn't make our lives worse.

At this point, I send a raspberry (Bronx cheer) to Daily Beast and the fellow who wrote the article, even as I decide to coexist with them.

Thanks to my blog friend for getting me to investigate, further, and for calling me out on my lack of attribution.