The Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism is hailed by many archeologist as one of the most important finds ever discovered. It was discovered in 1900 off the coast of the island of Antikythera between the islands of and mainland Greece. The mechanism itself is the earliest computing device ever discovered, and has been accurately dated to 150BC - 100 BC.

Over many years of study the basic design, and purpose of the machine has been slowly gleaned from the various fragments that have been recovered and studied. The device itself is meant to model astronomical phenomena, and it does so to very accurate degree.

For more information about the device you can read the NYTimes article on it.
And for very detailed information there is the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
And there is the wikipedia article also.
And for the latest research there is a published piece in the journal Nature.

CAPTCHAs Cracked by Spammers

Everyone knows those ubiquitous, squiggled, words in the text boxes at the bottom of signin/sign-up pages. Those squiggled little words, that can be very hard to read, are called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). And CAPTCHA are for the moment still a vital security device used by companies in helping to secure our data. The purpose of the CAPTCHA itself is to authenticate someone as a human in order to not allow a computer program, most often called a Bot, to get past the security of the signin page

The general plan for a spammer would be to use a computer program to automate the process of signing up for thousands upon thousands of email accounts. Then to use those accounts to send out spam, with 99% of spam being scams of one sort or another.

What CAPTCHAs accomplish is to provide a very effective blocking mechanize against bots from setting up those spam accounts in the first place. One of the toughest problems still left to solve for computer science is that of image recognition for computer programs, and a CAPTCHA will capitalize on that because only a human will be able to read the text.

All of this is leading into a very interesting article in Computer World describing the downfall of the CATPCHA due to advances in computer algorithms utilized by spammers.

"How CAPTCHA got trashed" by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;489635775 - Interesting Link - Blog About this in morning.

ALA Gaming Grant

Well who would have thought that just randomly going to the ALA's homepage would result in really awesome news of the gaming variety. But there it is. The Verizon Foundation has given the ALA $1 million dollar grant to study how gaming can be used to improve problem-solving and literacy skills.

Students And Text Books

Tuition has always been the biggest single bill that has to be paid at college. But the other largest bill is often not seem until the first week of school when the student stops at the school book store is all the text books. A single semester's worth of text books can run anywhere from 400 - 600 dollars.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education highlights the problem. But upon reading the article I noticed a lack of a response for the chief reason that students pirate text books in the first place. That being the excessive cost vs. that actual use that most students get from their text books in your average 4 month college semester.

There is a website which "is a registry of textbooks (and related materials) which are open — that is free for anyone to use, reuse and redistribute. It is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation."

There are some schools that are doing things a bit unconventionally. Some sort of new business model like this is sure to be the future, with many schools now offering extensive material online