lpress writes "Most of today's electronic textbooks are re-purposed versions of print books. Nature has published an e-text that departs from the traditional book format and business model. Their Introduction to Biology e-text was created from the ground up and consists of 196 modules rather than a sequential book and the student gets a lifetime subscription for $49. Nature will continuously update the e-text as the science and pedagogy evolve."

cylonlover writes "Automated telephone services may get slightly less annoying thanks to research being carried out at Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universidad de Granada. A team of scientists from those institutions has created a computer system that is able to recognize the emotional state of a person speaking to it, so that it can alter its behavior to make things less stressful."

angry tapir writes "The battle over scarce radio spectrum that has embroiled the mobile broadband world even extends to a little-known type of wireless network that promises to reconnect the human nervous system with paralyzed limbs. At its monthly meeting next week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will consider whether four sets of frequencies between 413MHz and 457MHz can be used by networks of sensors implanted in patients who suffer from various forms of paralysis. One intended purpose of these MMNS (medical micropower network systems) is to transmit movement commands from a sensor on a patient's spinal cord, through a wearable MCU (master control unit), to implants that electrically stimulate nerves."

mikejuk writes "Stanford University is offering the online world more of its undergraduate level CS courses. These free courses consist of You Tube videos with computer-marked quizzes and programming assignments. The ball had been started rolling by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig's free online version of their Stanford AI class, for which they hoped to reach an audience in the order of a hundred thousand, a target which they seem to have achieved. As well as the previously announced Machine learning course you can now sign up to any of: Computer Science 101, Software as a Service, Human-Computer Interaction, Natural Language Processing, Game Theory, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Cryptography and Design and Analysis of Algorithms. Almost a complete computer science course and they are adding more. Introductory videos and details are available from each courses website."

First time accepted submitter perryizgr8 writes "Facebook Data Team has taken all the friends data of everyone on Facebook and analyzed it, finding out the shortest distance between every two persons. They can now confidently say that the average degree of separation between any two humans is 4.74, not six as previously claimed by various entities."

itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."

antdude writes in with a story about two U.S. malls that plan on tracking shoppers' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones this Friday. "The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked. 'We won't be looking at singular shoppers,' said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. 'The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to.' Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones."

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Police departments around the country are moving to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use handheld devices to keep tabs on officers responding to crimes and although law enforcement officials say they want to keep criminals from using officers' internal chatter to evade them, journalists and neighborhood watchdogs say open communications ensures that the public receives information as quickly as possible that can be vital to their safety. 'Whereas listeners used to be tied to stationary scanners, new technology has allowed people — and especially criminals — to listen to police communications on a smartphone from anywhere,' says DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier who says that a group of burglars who police believe were following radio communications on their smartphones pulled off more than a dozen crimes before ultimately being arrested. But encryption also makes it harder for neighboring jurisdictions to communicate in times of emergency. 'The 9/11 commission concluded America's number one vulnerability during the attacks was the lack of interoperability communications,' writes Vernon Herron, 'I spoke to several first responders who were concerned that their efforts to respond and assist at the Pentagon after the attacks were hampered by the lack of interoperability with neighboring jurisdictions.'"

MightyMartian writes "The company I work for has just had their government contract renewed, which is good news, giving me several more years of near-guaranteed employment! However, in going through all the schedules and supplementary documents related to the old contract, which we will begin winding down next spring, we've discovered some pretty stiff data remanence requirements that, for hard drives at least, boil down to 'they must be sent to an appropriately recognized facility for destruction.' Now keep in mind that we are the same organization that has been delivering this contract all along, so the equipment isn't going anywhere. What's more, destruction of hard drives means we have to buy new ones, which is going to cost us a lot of money, particular with prices being so high. I've looked at using encryption as a means of destroying data, in that if you encrypt a drive or a set of files with an appropriately long and complex key, and then destroy all copies of that key, that data effectively is destroyed. I'd like to write up a report to submit to our government contract managers, and would be interested if any Slashdotters have experience with this, or have any references or citations to academic or industry papers on dealing with data remanence without destroying physical media?"

astroengine writes "The lost Russian Mars mission Phobos-Grunt has made a surprise announcement: she's alive. According to the European Space Agency (ESA) in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a tracking station in Perth, Australia, picked up a signal from the ailing spacecraft."

As a security researcher, Moxie Marlinspike has played a big role in explaining what can go wrong in using Certificate Authorities to authenticate SSL traffic, an issue that's been top of mind this year thanks to compromised and faked certificates. On that front, he's lately come up with a system designed to circumvent CAs entirely, which means bypassing compromised (or invidious) authorities, rather than trying to patch the CA system. Another line of research, but not the only one, is mobile security and privacy; his Whisper Monitor Android firewall, released earlier this year, gives Android users notifications (and fine-grained permissions) when apps — including location-tracking or malware apps — want to make outbound connections. Possibly related: Moxie can also speak first-hand about what new border-search policies mean for travelers, having had his laptop and phones seized on returning to the U.S. from a trip. (And by the way, he's also an accomplished sailor and film-maker.) Moxie's agreed to answer your questions. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, be kind of rewind^wask don't ask unrelated questions in the same post.

alphadogg writes with troubling news for the network hardware joint-venture between Nokia and Siemens. Quoting the article: "Struggling network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks is planning to cut 17,000 jobs worldwide, as it aims to cut $1.35 billion from its costs by the end of 2013, the company said Wednesday. About 23% of the company's 74,000 employees will be laid off. The 4 1/2-year-old joint venture between Nokia and Siemens has been struggling to compete with Swedish Ericsson and Chinese vendor Huawei. Parent company Nokia's ongoing problems have made Nokia Siemens' situation even more difficult."