In the month between Black Friday and Boxing Day, people everywhere deck the Internet with their credit card numbers. Maybe this year Amazon’s servers will finally crash, but it’s more likely that you, or one of your friends, will have their identity stolen as a result of a careless online[Read More…]
Science & Technology
The latest in science and technology.
Poetic programming
What if you could talk to your computer and it actually did what you asked it to do? McGill’s Michael Wagner and Harvard’s Katherine McCurdy hope that their three-year study, published in Cognition magazine this November, will help you do just that. Poetry uses rhythm, syllable stressors, and speech[Read More…]
Suprising space savers
During exams, your apartment is probably going to end up looking like the site of a pipe bomb explosion. It also means you won’t have the time or money to make another trip to Ikea for assorted Scandinavian organizing junk. Instead, some ordinary household objects can be used to tidy[Read More…]
Climatologists try their luck at predicting coming winter
Gabriela Gilmour For a few hours on the night of October 30, Montrealers got their first taste of snow this season. Though they might get a break for the next few weeks, students shouldn’t put their hats and mittens in deep storage. This year, waters are cooler in the[Read More…]
Alcohol worse than crack, says British study
Alcohol is worse than heroin, according to a recent study by the British Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs. The study, conducted by David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology professor at the University of Bristol, along with Drs. Leslie King and Lawrence Phillips, ranks the harmful effects of alcohol and other addictive substances[Read More…]
Genius Bumblebees
paulandscruffy.wordpress.org One of the most challenging problems in theoretical computer science has been solved. Kind of. It was solved, moreover, not by researchers at MIT, Cal Tech, or Carnegie Mellon, but by bumblebees. Scientists researching the critters at Queen Mary and Royal Holloway of the University of London noticed that[Read More…]
Skype vs. Google Voice
Whether you’re chatting with your parents, friends, or boyfriend, long-distance relationships have been made easier with chat programs that allow voice and video communication. Skype seems to have taken the lead in the industry, but there are other chatting and video streaming programs that are just as good, if not[Read More…]
Stealing from the cookie jar
Your online accounts are vulnerable. From Amazon to Yahoo!, your personal information on many of your favourite sites, if used on a public network, can easily be stolen. Thanks to a Firefox plug-in called Firesheep, released last week by hacker Eric Butler, this risk is higher than ever. By installing[Read More…]
Harvard’s Roger Brockett discusses intelligent machines
What is an intelligent machine? On Friday, Roger Brockett, a roboticist at Harvard University, gave a lecture at the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines that attempted to answer this question. In the 1950s, the Turing test was the standard for determining whether or not a machine was intelligent. In the[Read More…]
Comparing the Dell XPS M1730 and HP Mini 210
Holly Stewart I own four computers. Call me a hoarder all you like, but I use all of them on a daily basis. I have two laptops for school and two LAMP servers in my room at home which I use for working on a network application. Having two laptops[Read More…]
