parkland - Slashdot User

Submission + - Vivek Kundra on Government Inefficiency (itworld.com) 6

Submitted by parkland on Thursday March 04, 2010 @09:41PM

parkland writes: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra described some dismaying government inefficiencies in a speech on Thursday at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs in Seattle. It takes 160 days to process benefits for veterans, he said 'because the Veteran's Administration is processing paperwork by passing manila folders from one desk to another.' Another example bound to make you grind your teeth is why it takes the Patent and Trademark Office 3 years to process a patent. 'One reason,' says Kundra, 'is because the U.S. PTO receives these applications online, prints them out, and then someone manually rekeys the information into an antiquated system.'

Submission + - China's Human Flesh Search Engine

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Thursday March 04, 2010 @04:19PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times has an interesting article about Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — that have become a phenomenon in China: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, or run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results. “In the United States, traditional media are still playing the key role in setting the agenda for the public,” says Jin Liwen. “But in China, you will see that a lot of hot topics, hot news or events actually originate from online discussions.” In one well known case, when a video appeared in China of a woman stomping a cat to death with the sharp point of her high heel, the human flesh search engine tracked the kitten killer’s home to the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. “Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” says one Luobei resident . “She left town and went somewhere else." The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon. Searches have also been directed against cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. “The idea that you manage the local bureaucracy by sicking the masses on them is actually not a democratic tradition but a Maoist tradition,” says Rebecca MacKinnon. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”"

Submission + - Where Android Beats The iPhone (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @06:08PM

snydeq writes: "Peter Wayner provides a developer's comparison of Android and the iPhone and finds Android not only competitive but in fact a better choice than the iPhone for many developers, largely due to its Java foundation. 'While iPhone developers have found that one path to success is playing to our baser instincts (until Apple shuts them down), a number of Android applications are offering practical solutions that unlock the power of a phone that's really a Unix machine you can slip into your pocket,' Wayner writes, pointing out GScript and Remote DB as two powerful tools for developers to make rough but workable custom tools for Android. But the real gem is Java: 'The pure Java foundation of Android will be one of the biggest attractions for many businesses with Java programmers on the staff. Any Java developer familiar with Eclipse should be able to use Google's Android documentation to turn out a very basic application in just a few hours. Not only that, but all of the code from other Java programs will run on your Android phone — although it won't look pretty or run as fast as it does on multicore servers.'"

Submission + - Researchers Convert Mouth Movements Into Speech. 1

Submitted by andylim on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @06:02PM

andylim writes: According to Cellular News, researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed a method for mobile phones to convert silent mouth movements into speech. As recombu.com points out, the "potential for secret conversations just got huge". You could pass the time by making phone calls from the cinema without disturbing anyone. In noisy places like bars and clubs you could feasibly make yourself heard without having to shout.

Submission + - Losing Google would hit Chinese science hard 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @09:57PM

An anonymous reader writes: More than three-quarters of scientists in China use the search engine Google as a primary research tool and say their work would be significantly hampered if they were to lose it, a survey showed on Wednesday. In the survey, 84 percent said losing Google would "somewhat or significantly" hamper their research and 78 percent said international collaborations would be affected.

"Research without Google would be like life without electricity," one Chinese scientist said in the survey, which asked more than 700 scientists for their views

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