Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 7 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100907/23180510930/dailydirt-more-olympic-trivia.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100907/23180510930/dailydirt-more-olympic-trivia.shtml

The speed of sound is apparently too slow for the Olympics now, so the starting pistols have been replaced by electronic beeps. Perhaps there shouldn't be a starting pistol at all, and the judges should simply measure when the athletes start and finish? [url]

Robotic cameras are catching more action at the Olympics. Not too surprising that cameramen can't run alongside Olympic athletes and keep up.... [url]

The modern pentathlon is using laser pistols instead of real guns this year. No sound effects like "pew pew pew!" will be tolerated from the audience. [url]

While the testing for performance enhancing drugs has generated some controversy, the testing of athlete gender seems a bit trickier to handle. Does a person with XXY compete in the male or female events? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100907/23180510930 Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:33:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100108/0309327670.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100108/0309327670.shtml who will monitor the broadband meters themselves to make sure they're accurate? After all, with things like energy meters, they're carefully regulated and audited to make sure they're accurate. But no such luck with broadband meters, for the most part. Broadband Reports points out that it looks like individuals will be on their own to check on whether or not their ISP is being honest with them concerning how much bandwidth they use.

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]]> not-very... http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100108/0309327670 Wed, 4 Nov 2009 22:26:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091104/1339256801.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091104/1339256801.shtml many years, David Chaum has been pushing for a voting system that he claims will be a lot more reliable. Basically, after you vote, you get a coded number, and then after the election, you can go to an election website, punch in your code and make sure that your vote counted, and was for whom you meant to vote. On top of this, there's a system for auditors to check to make sure that votes were counted accurately, with information released publicly so people can "audit" the election without being able to connect voters to their votes. This system tends to generate a lot of controversy (though some of it appears to be from people who just don't like David Chaum, rather than because they really have a problem with his system). However, the system hasn't been really tested in an actual US election... until now. The municipal elections in Takoma Park, Maryland used the system, despite the state recently signing a big deal with Diebold. It's not clear how the overall election went yet -- or how many people actually checked their votes online (approximately 30% in an exit poll said they copied down the code). However, it's good to see that some gov'ts are not just accepting what the big e-voting firms give them, and are willing to explore more sophisticated voting systems that aren't based on pure faith in the e-voting company to get the system right.

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]]> experimenting-away http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091104/1339256801 Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:17:58 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090818/0112385912.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090818/0112385912.shtml series of alarmist studies that get lots of press lately, with titles about how social networks or other technologies are somehow negatively impacting people's brains. Nearly all of these didn't hold up under much scrutiny, as they almost all took things out of context or greatly extrapolated a finding and misinterpreted the results. The latest to add to the pile? A report claiming that texting may be "rewiring young brains." The evidence? Kids who used mobile phones a lot finished a variety of tests much faster, but tended to be "less accurate." That's about it. From there, the guy who did the study concludes that it must be the fact that many mobile phones use "predictive texting" that's training kids to be fast, but inaccurate, assuming something else will come in and fix the mess. Now, perhaps that's true, but it seems like the study doesn't actually show that at all. Also, it's not clear from the report what sort of mistakes are being made. The article talks about spelling mistakes, which are common in texting, but the real question is whether or not that really matters? It may very well depend on context. In a text message, a spelling mistake isn't a big deal. In a resume, it's a different story. But where on that spectrum did these tests land? But more importantly, even if we grant the premise that kids who text a lot are a lot sloppier on certain tests... how do you go from that to immediately concluding that their brains are being wired differently? It sounds a lot more like what they've been trained to do, rather than any serious neurological shift.

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]]> mmm-hmm http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090818/0112385912 Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:44:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081210/0114213067.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081210/0114213067.shtml finally admitted to a glitch with some of its machines, but the company still downplayed the significance of this, claiming that it didn't believe the glitch (which loses votes) had actually impacted any elections.

Yet, even after this glitch was officially revealed, in the election just last month, we're now finding out that Diebold machines caused 200 lost votes in an election in California. Even worse, no one would even know about this at all if it weren't for a highly ambitious and very unique program set up by some voting activists to ensure there was real transparency. They convinced the local government to let them scan every single ballot and put it online for anyone to view. It was that separate process where they discovered the ballot counts didn't match, and that Diebold seemed to show absolutely no records of the missing ballots, despite having scanned them.

Makes you kinda wonder how many other areas lost votes that absolutely no one knows about because they didn't have such a system in place, huh?

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]]> reliable,-huh? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20081210/0114213067 Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:52:33 PST Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080213/114007246.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080213/114007246.shtml prediction markets still have many inefficiencies in their current state, allowing shrewed traders to make tidy profits as a result. In the Intrade market, a political future is worth $10 if the political outcome occurs, and $0 if it does not occur. Therefore, a $5 market price on a particular future is supposed to correlate with a 50% prediction of that future to occur. However, in practice, certain factors push these prices out of the range of their realistic probability. For example, contracts for Ron Paul's predicted as high as a 9% chance of him being selected as the Republican nominee, when in reality, his chances were probably closer to nil. Perhaps driven by a small cadre of Paul supporters, the Intrade market was able to be swayed by a small number of trades. Even today, Intrade shows Paul at a 1.2% -- which is a great opportunity for someone to make money on taking the short side of that contract. On the Democratic side, Al Gore supporters have put a 1% chance on his head, who never even appeared on the ballot -- wishful thinking indeed. That said, the limited amount of volume on these contracts precludes anyone from actually making a crazy amount of money on them, but it does remind us of an important fact about markets -- while they do tend to come up with the right answer in the long term, in the short term, they are incredibly susceptible to very human factors like optimism and group think.

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]]> psst-i-have-a-tip http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080213/114007246