Ponca City, We Love You writes "Toddlers' brains can effortlessly do what the most powerful computers with the most sophisticated software cannot: learn language simply by hearing it used. A ground-breaking new theory postulates that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining. Researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 children, 12 to 14 months old, six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image. After viewing various combinations of words and images, however, the children were surprisingly successful at figuring out which word went with which picture. Yu and Smith say it's possible that the more words tots hear, and the more information available for any individual word, the better their brains can begin simultaneously ruling out and putting together word-object pairings, thus learning what's what. Yu says if they can identify key factors involved in this form of learning and how it can be manipulated, they might be able to make learning languages easier for children and adults. Understanding children's learning mechanisms could also further machine learning."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We were surprised that even Apple was forced by the movie industry to delay the release of online movie downloads until a month after the DVD release. This seemed totally pointless and self-defeating by the movie industry (though, hardly the first time that's happened). However, it looks like Cablevision has discovered an interesting workaround to this "window" between releases: it's launching a video-on-demand (VOD) system that will let you watch movies the day they're released on DVD. The trick? You need to actually buy the DVD first, via Cablevision. Then, while you're waiting for the physical DVD to arrive in the mail, you're free to watch the movie via the VOD offering. Of course, this sounds something like what the original MP3.com used to do, allowing people to access MP3s of CDs they just bought, while they wait for the CD to arrive. And, as I'm sure many of you remember, the entertainment industry sued MP3.com and actually won that lawsuit. While there was some questionable reasoning in the decision, MP3.com was unable to appeal, due to some quirks of the legal system. Has it really taken 8-years for the entertainment industry to start to come around to this idea? Perhaps not. Apparently, only a very few titles are available on Cablevision's new service.

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A seemingly simple little 5-minute video game by Jason Rohrer. You have to play first, then read about it (via). #

An anonymous reader writes "I have code that I've written for my current company that I'd like to open-source. The only problem is that my company has the usual clause that says that anything I write belongs to them. Now that they've decided to abandon my code for another product that replaces its function, I'd like to continue working on my project as well as open it up to the world. The easy part is cleaning it up and posting it on SourceForge and Freshmeat. The hard part is making sure that I am free of any legal complications in the future. I've looked online to try to find a legal document I could present to my employer to get them to sign off on it, but I'm not having any luck. Has anyone else been in this boat or can refer me to some legal documentation that may help out?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren't sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as "lower fees," but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn't sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving "negative" feedback on buyers. This is quite an interesting move. Years back, eBay was often held up as the epitome of user feedback/rating systems. However, over the years, problems have cropped up, leading to questions about how effective the system really is, as it's often been gamed. A specific complaint is that many buyers are afraid to leave negative feedback, as a seller can retaliate and provide a similarly negative response to the buyers. The hope, then, is that by not allowing negative feedback, buyers can start being more honest about sellers. Of course, from the sellers' standpoint, it also means it's much more likely that buyers can now be problematic, without worrying about a response. eBay claims that it will now personally handle complaints from sellers about problem buyers -- which seems like a pretty big undertaking for the company. Either way, there does seem to be something silly in having a company offer a feedback system if you can only say positive things.

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Tech.Luver notes an AP story on tainted pills that have arrived in the US from — not China this time — Puerto Rico. The article details a disturbing number of incidents of contamination investigated by the FDA over the last few years. "The first warning sign came when a sharp-eyed worker sorting pills noticed that the odd blue flecks dotting the finished drug capsules matched the paint on the factory doors. After the flecks were spotted again on the capsules, a blood-pressure medication called Diltiazem, the plant began placing covers over drugs in carts in its manufacturing areas. But the factory owner, Canadian drug maker Biovail Corp., never tried to find out whether past shipments of the drug were contaminated — or prevent future contamination, according to US regulators... FDA officials say the problems in Puerto Rico are proportionate with the large number of pharmaceutical plants here and generally no worse than those on the US mainland."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AT&T is said to be developing a system to spot and block illicitly copied content sent over its broadband network. The NYT's Saul Hansell grilled Verizon EVP Tom Tauke on whether Verizon was planning to provide similar aid to Hollywood. The one-word summary? No. Snip:

He said the company’s view combines a concern for the privacy of its customers with self interest. It may be costly for it to get into the business of policing the traffic on its network. Indeed, phone companies have largely spent a century trying not to be liable for what people say over their lines.

“We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content,” he said.

Mr. Tauke offered at least three objections to the concept: 1) The slippery slope. Once you start going down the path of looking at the information going down the network, there are many that want you to play the role of policeman. Stop illegal gambling offshore. Stop pornography. Stop a whole array of other kinds of activities that some may think inappropriate.

2) It opens up potential liability for failing to block copyrighted work. When you look back at the history of copyright legislation, there has been an effort by Hollywood to pin the liability for copyright violations on the network that transmits the material. It is no secret they think we have deeper pockets than others and we are easy-to-find targets.

3) Privacy. Anything we do has to balance the need of copyright protection with the desire of customers for privacy.

Link to entry on NYT "Bits" blog.

Previously:

Talking About AT&T's Internet Filtering on AT&T's The Hugh Thompson Show

AT&T to Filter Internet Traffic; Comcast Investigated by FCC for Filtering Internet Traffic

AT&T mulls copyright censorship at the network level

Four undersea communications network cables have been cut this past week -- they're part of the network that handles most of the world's voice and internet traffic. WTF's going on?

Most telecommunications experts and cable operators say that sabotage seems unlikely, but no one knows what damaged the cables or whether the incidents were related.

One theory - that a wayward ship traveling off course because of bad weather was responsible for cutting the first two cables last week - was dismissed by the Egyptian government over the weekend.

No ships passed the area in the Mediterranean where the cables were located, the country's Ministry of Communications said Sunday.

Link.

UPDATE: The majority of BB readers who've commented on the story say, in summary, "my money's on monsters."

Jake writes in with the story behind an explosive NYTimes scoop last week. It seems that the Times's pharmaceutical industry reporter, Alex Berenson, scored a page-one blockbuster when he revealed that Eli Lilly was looking to reach a settlement with federal prosecutors over the company's alleged inappropriate marketing of anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. A settlement figure of $1 billion was mentioned. This scoop dropped into Berenson's inbox when a lawyer for one of Lilly's retained firms mis-addressed an email to a colleague with the same last name as that of the Times reporter. Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame, but this has not been confirmed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has a decently long history of exaggerating the impacts of copyright infringement on its business, even as there's a fair bit of evidence that the company has benefited greatly from lax enforcement of copyright. However, now the company has taken to exaggerating what copyright law actually says up in Canada. Michael Geist does a nice job picking apart a recent Microsoft-penned editorial claiming that copyright law in Canada just isn't strong enough. Even better, he does so using examples of Microsoft's own actions to prove the company wrong. For example, the editorial claimed that current Canadian copyright law didn't protect a content creator from someone using their content for commercial purposes. Yet, as Geist points out, Microsoft itself won just such a lawsuit a year ago, trumpeting the results in a press release. Perhaps Microsoft saw how the movie industry was able to lie about existing copyright law in Canada -- which convinced politicians to pass unnecessary new legislation -- and figured that Canadian politicians seem mighty gullible on the subject.

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Victor Piñeiro says: "Just wanted to share my first feature documentary trailer with you, Second Skin. Its all about virtual worlds and the gamers who 'live' in them." Link

An anonymous reader writes in with news from the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco of a new energy-efficient chip designed by researchers at MIT. It's said to be able to run on 1/10 the power of current chips. Texas Instruments worked with MIT on the design, which is maybe five years from production. "The key to the chip's improved energy efficiency lies in making it work at a reduced voltage level, according to... a member of the chip design project team. Most of the mobile processors today operate at about 1 volt. The requirement for MIT's new design, however, drops to 0.3 volts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Ding: "You don't have to change the oil in your car. You can always replace the engine instead. Works the same way with health care."

Great essay on the cost heath care.

netbuzz alerts us to a letter the EFF sent today to Senators Leahy and Specter pointing out a deleterious clause in the current draft of the Patent Reform Act of 2007 — which EFF generally supports. As written, the proposal would kill the EFF's Patent Busting Project. Fine print in the bill would limit the time in which a patent could be challenged, by anyone other than those suffering direct financial harm, to one year after the patent's grant. Since the EFF is non-profit it would have a hard time showing financial harm.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Blow N Glo Special, built and driven by Maddog, is a nice-looking car built to compete in the San Fernando Valley Illegal Soap Box Federation races. The February issue of Hot Rod has an article about the S.F.V.I.S.B.F.

"I've been doing dumb and dangerous stuff for years," Paul de Valera, 36, said with a strange sort of exasperated enthusiasm during a conversation a few days earlier at his one-man Atomic Cycles bicycleshop in Van Nuys. Paul and his friend Tick One (it's a name he chose) are the S.F.V.I.S.B.F.'s co-instigators and currently act as the group's half-serious organizers and fun-first spiritual advisors. "It's stupidity," Paul added, "and it infects all of us."

This isn't soap box racing the way it's practiced at the All-American Soap Box Derby -- where squeaky-clean preteens line up in cars built by their fathers and a gaggle of aerospace engineers to race down a sanitized hill in proscribed, arrow-straight lanes. In the S.F.V.I.S.B.F., adults in makeshift gravity-powered jalopies clandestinely sneak out early on the second Sunday of each month from March through December to meet and then barrel through unsuspecting suburban neighborhoods or over dirt fire roads with plenty of collisions, corners, and comeuppances.

Link

Whenever reports come out about e-voting machine vulnerabilities, a common response from the various e-voting companies is that to exploit any of those vulnerabilities, someone would have to spend a significant amount of time with the e-voting machine, undoubtedly raising suspicions. That might be true on election day, but what about before election day? Back in 2006, Ed Felten randomly noticed that in the days before election day, he came across a bunch of e-voting machines just stored in a hallway, waiting for election day. This should have made people concerned, and convinced them to better protect these machines. Yet, here we are on Super Tuesday, and Ed Felten has a post noting that, once again, it was easy to come across totally unattended e-voting machines. He notes that he stood next to one batch of machines for 15 minutes, plenty of time to have mucked with the machine (not that he did), and not a single person came by. Is it any wonder that these e-voting machines are undermining confidence in our elections?

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Lucas123 writes "According to a Reuters' story, Dutch inventors today took the wraps off a $110,000 car-fueling robot they say is the first of its kind. (It was inspired by a cow milking robot.) After registering the car as it pulls up to the pump, the machine matches your fuel cap design with those in a database and your car's fuel type, and then a robotic arm fitted with multiple sensors extends from a regular gas pump, 'opens the car's flap, unscrews the cap, picks up the fuel nozzle and directs it towards the tank opening, much as a human arm would, and as efficiently.' Wait till Hollywood gets hold of this scenario."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roger says: "Here's a review of an extremely weird vintage bicycle safety film from 1962 in which a group of kids show us the dangers of disobeying bicycle safety rules - all while wearing some of the creepiest monkey masks you'll ever see."

The typeface used in the title is excellent.

Link | Link to YouTube video