If you’re an iOS user then it’s a high probability that you’ve heard about the security flaws found in iPhone recently. If you haven’t then you can read about it here.

This time it’s Android which is in the buzz these days. Specifically, it’s the creative phablet Samsung Galaxy Note II which is in the news. A Youtuber named Terence Eden recently uploaded a video on Youtube demonstrating the security flaw in the Samsung Galaxy Note II. The vulnerability shows how a user can bypass the lock screen and access the apps or calls from the home screen of Android OS. This vulnerability was demonstrated on a Note II running on Android 4.1.2 stock OS. Though, a user can only access the homescreen for a second or two but that timespan is enough to make a call or open any app on the homescreen if you’re quick enough.

Galaxy Note 2 Lock Screen Bypass Vulnerability

I wonder if it’s just Galaxy Note II which is having this vulnerability or maybe it’s the same for Galaxy lineup running Android 4.1.2 such as a Samsung Galaxy S3. Well, my colleague has a Galaxy S3 so I reckon that it’s time to test it out on an S3 as well. I’ll update this post after checking that on a Galaxy S3 soon. Till then, happy hacking

Read more at:http://hackingarticles.com/samsung-galaxy-note-ii-lock-screen-bypass-vulnerability/

This news could hurt the reputation of both companies. A passionate (and obviously very competent) reverse-engineer from France, Eloi Vanderbeken forgot the admin interface password of his router and so he just wanted to have fun accessing the administration side and that’s when he discovered a backdoor in his Linksys WAG200G router. After publishing this discovery on Github, other users have confirmed its existence in at least three other routers:

• Netgear DM111Pv2
• Linksys WAG320N
• Linksys WAG54G2

Other routers are suspected of providing equal opportunity to obtain the administrator password through the 32764 port, but it has not yet been confirmed:

• Netgear DG934
• Netgear DG834
• Netgear WPNT834
• Netgear DG834G
• Netgear WG602
• Netgear WGR614
• Netgear DGN2000
• Linksys WAG120N
• Linksys WAG160N
• Linksys WRVS4400N

The backdoor listens for communications sent to port 32764 specifically and answers a series of 13 numbered commands that can be ordered by sending a specific message. It is therefore possible to obtain the complete remote configuration of the router, the administrator password or even restore default settings.

A zinc compound sometimes taken to treat the common cold might have a second career as emergency treatment for anyone unlucky enough to get stung by an Australian box jellyfish, a new study finds. Researchers also find that venom from stings seems to poke holes in red blood cells, triggering the release of potassium that stops the heart when tested in mice. 
Box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri), which roam the seas off northern Australia, deliver some of the most potent venom found in nature. In the last decade, scientists have shown that the venom can create pores in cells, spilling their contents. But the fundamental aspects of the venom’s lethality have been poorly understood.
Australian researchers have proposed that the venom attacks heart muscle cells, which would explain why sting victims sometimes suffer cardiac arrest. But in the new study, published online December 12 in PLOS ONE, Angel Yanagihara and Ralph Shohet of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu report that reinforced pores form in red blood cells exposed to the box jellyfish’s venom.
“These are structurally sound rings of pores that are catastrophic for cells,” says Yanagihara, a biochemist. While the venom can damage any cell, she says, her lab experiments showed that red blood cells formed the pores within 20 minutes of exposure to the venom, triggering potassium discharge. That, she suggests, alters the delicate balance of electrolytes that govern the electrical signals that keep the heart beating. Too much potassium in the blood is fatal.
In tests in mice, animals given a dose of the venom had aberrant heartbeats within 90 seconds, and their hearts showed steadily deteriorating ability to contract afterward. That is consistent with potassium poisoning. But when the scientists treated eight mice with zinc gluconate after exposure to the venom, four survived more than 12 hours. Untreated mice exposed to the venom died within an average of 19 minutes. Mice receiving a standard box jellyfish antivenom died as fast as those getting no medication.
The zinc compound blocks assembly of the pores, stanching potassium discharge, tests in red blood cells show.
The findings offer a “plausible explanation” for the rapid death sometimes seen after box jellyfish stings, says Kenneth Winkel, director of the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne. But he says more work is needed to prove that blood cells, and not heart cells, are the main targets. And while he says the zinc findings create opportunities for further work on zinc as a treatment, Winkel sees zinc as a potential add-on to the standard antivenom, an antibody-based drug aimed at neutralizing the toxin.
Yanagihara cautions that the antivenom not only failed to protect mice in her tests but may have made matters worse. “The fast-acting agent in the venom would be far too quick for an antibody-based approach,” she concludes.

Read More...

An international effort has put together the first tally of all the species of butterflies, beetles, ants, bees, roaches and their fellow arthropods that live in a tropical forest. And the count: 25,000.
Arthropods represent a big chunk of the diversity of species on Earth, but biologists analyzing such basic questions as how forest ecosystems will respond to climate change haven’t had much solid data on what’s really scurrying, flying and buzzing through those forests. To get a better sense, a team of 102 researchers from 21 countries sampled arthropods in the San Lorenzo forest, a 60-square-kilometer tropical forest in Panama.
Researchers collected samples from the soil on up to the treetops using professional tree climbers, a crane, even a helium-filled balloon to extend their reach. Then came eight years of determining the species for 129,000 individual specimens.

Read More...

NASA’s twin GRAIL probes are on a crash course to hit the lunar surface on December 17.
The cosmic collision is intentional: Mission engineers need to guide the spacecraft down because they have run out of fuel to keep themselves in lunar orbit. Scientists will be watching until the very end, because how GRAIL hits may yield more discoveries about the moon.
GRAIL consists of two washing machine–sized probes named Ebb and Flow. Launched in September 2011, they arrived in January and completed their main task of mapping lunar gravity between March and May. GRAIL’s discoveries include the fact that the moon’s crust is thinner and more fractured by meteorite impacts than scientists had suspected (SN Online: 12/6/12).
But Ebb and Flow will meet their ends at 5:28 and 5:29 p.m. Eastern time on December 17. NASA will guide them at a very shallow angle into the side of a small mountain, part of the rim of an impact crater. The collision will take place in the dark, but far overhead the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite will photograph the crash site before and after the event. By comparing those pictures, scientists will able to see how much of the mountain’s rock was broken up during the crash — and know how intact the lunar crust is at that spot, says the mission’s chief scientist, MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber.

Read More...

SAN DIEGO -- To paraphrase Jack Nicholson's jealous Joker in the Tim Burton 1989 Batman flick, "Where does he get those wonderful cars?"

The answer, apparently, is: on the Warner Brothers studio lot.

To celebrate next week's release of the final Chris Nolan-helmed Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises," Warner put on display the six Batmobiles built for TV and film at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con. From the iconic 1966 Batmobile used in the Adam West TV show to Christian Bale's tanklike Lambo-Humvee mashup "the Tumbler," fans could get up close and personal with their favorite Batmobile. Check out our gallery of the six drool-worthy cars.

Here is the video for batmobliles...

As we know that many vehicles had already made for batman movies which are outstanding and great.
SAN DIEGO -- To paraphrase Jack Nicholson's jealous Joker in the Tim Burton 1989 Batman flick, "Where does he get those wonderful cars?"

The answer, apparently, is: on the Warner Brothers studio lot.
To celebrate next week's release of the final Chris Nolan-helmed Batman movie, "The Dark Knight Rises," Warner put on display the six Batmobiles built for TV and film at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con. From the iconic 1966 Batmobile used in the Adam West TV show to Christian Bale's tanklike Lambo-Humvee mashup "the Tumbler," fans could get up close and personal with their favorite Batmobile. Check out our gallery of the six drool-worthy cars.

NEC HS100-10 Hybrid Contactless Finger Scanner claims to be the first not to require direct contact with fingers. The HS100-10 in practice is a combined scanner that can read fingerprints, but also the venous system of the fingers, all using sensors that do not require contact.
http://www.devilmindedhackers.blogspot.com/
The new scanner NEC HS100-10, connected to the PC via USB 2.0, will be presented at the Pulse 2011 in Las Vegas this weekend and will be put on the market from next May, with the intent to initially provide companies and organizations public of the United States, Japan and other Asian areas. Prices range between 305 and 370 dollars.

NEC HS100-10 Hybrid Contactless Finger Scanner claims to be the first not to require direct contact with fingers. The HS100-10 in practice is a combined scanner that can read fingerprints, but also the venous system of the fingers, all using sensors that do not require contact.
http://www.devilmindedhackers.blogspot.com/
The new scanner NEC HS100-10, connected to the PC via USB 2.0, will be presented at the Pulse 2011 in Las Vegas this weekend and will be put on the market from next May, with the intent to initially provide companies and organizations public of the United States, Japan and other Asian areas. Prices range between 305 and 370 dollars.

Learning how to program a computer to display the words "Hello World" once may have excited students, but that hoary chestnut of a lesson doesn't cut it in a world of videogames, smartphones and Twitter. One option to take its place and engage a new generation of students in computer programming is a Carnegie Mellon University-developed robot called Finch.

A product of CMU's famed Robotics Institute, Finch was designed specifically to make introductory computer science classes an engaging experience once again.

A white plastic, two-wheeled robot with bird-like features, Finch can quickly be programmed by a novice to say "Hello, World," or do a little dance, or make its beak glow blue in response to cold temperature or some other stimulus. But the simple look of the tabletop robot is deceptive. Based on four years of educational research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Finch includes a number of features that could keep students busy for a semester or more thinking up new things to do with it.

"Students are more interested and more motivated when they can work with something interactive and create programs that operate in the real world," said Tom Lauwers, who earned his Ph.D. in robotics at CMU in 2010 and is now an instructor in the Robotics Institute's CREATE Lab. "We packed Finch with sensors and mechanisms that engage the eyes, the ears -- as many senses as possible."

Lauwers has launched a startup company, BirdBrain Technologies, to produce Finch and now sells them online at www.finchrobot.com for $99 each.

"Our vision is to make Finch affordable enough that every student can have one to take home for assignments," said Lauwers, who developed the robot with Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and director of the CREATE Lab. Less than a foot long, Finch easily fits in a backpack and is rugged enough to survive being hauled around and occasionally dropped.

Finch includes temperature and light sensors, a three-axis accelerometer and a bump sensor. It has color-programmable LED lights, a beeper and speakers. With a pencil inserted in its tail, Finch can be used to draw pictures. It can be programmed to be a moving, noise-making alarm clock. It even has uses beyond a robot; its accelerometer enables it to be used as a 3-D mouse to control a computer display.

Robot kits suitable for students as young as 12 are commercially available, but often cost more than the Finch, Lauwers said. What's more, the idea is to use the robot to make computer programming lessons more interesting, not to use precious instructional time to first build a robot.

Finch is a plug-and-play device, so no drivers or other software must be installed beyond what is used in typical computer science courses. Finch connects with and receives power from the computer over a 15-foot USB cable, eliminating batteries and off-loading its computation to the computer. Support for a wide range of programming languages and environments is coming, including graphical languages appropriate for young students. Finch currently can be programmed with the Java and Python languages widely used by educators.

A number of assignments are available on the Finch Robot website to help teachers drop Finch into their lesson plans, and the website allows instructors to upload their own assignments or ideas in return for company-provided incentives. The robot has been classroom-tested at the Community College of Allegheny County, Pa., and by instructors in high school, university and after-school programs.

"Computer science now touches virtually every scientific discipline and is a critical part of most new technologies, yet U.S. universities saw declining enrollments in computer science through most of the past decade," Nourbakhsh said. "If Finch can help motivate students to give computer science a try, we think many more students will realize that this is a field that they would enjoy exploring."

New research from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine shows that doctors can make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone application with the same accuracy as a diagnosis at a medical computer workstation. This technology can be particularly useful in rural medical settings. This allows for real-time access to specialists such as neurologists, regardless of where the physicians and patients are located.

Neuro-radiologists in the study looked at 120 recent consecutive noncontrast computed tomography (NCCT) brain scans and 70 computed tomography angiogram (CTA) head scans that were obtained from the Calgary Stroke Program database. Scans were read by two neuro-radiologists, on a medical diagnostic workstation and on an iPhone. The research is published in the May 6th edition of Journal of Medical Internet Research. The study was designed by Dr. Mayank Goyal, and involved the iPhone software technology originally developed by Dr. Ross Mitchell, PhD, and his team at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI), then further enhanced and commercialized by Calgary Scientific Inc.

"This iPhone app allows for advanced visualization and our studies show it is between 94% and 100% accurate, compared to a medical workstation, for diagnosing acute stroke," says Mitchell who is from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine. "In a medical emergency, medical imaging plays a critical role in diagnosis and treatment, time is critical in acute stroke care, every minute counts."

Fellow HBI member, Dr. Mayank Goyal who is also the director of research in the department of radiology and one of the neuro-radiologists in the study who analyzed the data. "Time is critical for diagnosing stroke and starting treatment. There are definitely benefits for doctors to have the ability to analyze and diagnose these images from virtually anywhere. We were pleasantly surprised at our ability to detect subtle findings on the CT scan, which are often very critical in patient management, using this software," he says. "Another strength of this platform was its ability to handle massive imaging datasets of over 700 images seamlessly over the iPhone." Goyal is also a member of HBI's Stroke and Vascular Dementia Program.

The study was done using Calgary Scientific Inc.'s ResolutionMD Mobile, an application for iPhone and Android smart-phones. In April 2010, the application was approved by Health Canada so Canadian doctors can now legally make a primary diagnosis using the device.

Resolution MD is different from other medical image applications as a server does all the computing work and streams images to display on a smart-phone in real time. Doctors can see and manipulate medical images in seconds unlike other apps that can take 10-20 minutes to download raw medical images to an iPhone before they can be displayed. It is also unique as all medical images are secure. The confidential patient images remain behind hospital firewalls to prevent any patient data from being lost or stolen. The technology can also be used over great distances. By placing a server in a remote community, distant medical experts, such as stroke neurologists and radiologists, can have immediate secure access to patient scans anywhere, using a device they carry in their pocket.

The images can be viewed on an iPhone, iPad, Android smartphone or web-browser.

Calgary Scientific has licensed the application to many medical imaging companies and over 50,000 hospitals around the world will have access to it in the next 24 months as it's installed in their networks.

The research was funded by Alberta Innovates Health Solutions, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Alberta.

A new publication from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides guidelines to secure the earliest stages of the computer boot process. Commonly known as the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), this fundamental system firmware -- computer code built into hardware -- initializes the hardware when you switch on the computer before starting the operating system. BIOS security is a new area of focus for NIST computer security scientists.

"By building security into the firmware, you establish the foundation for a secure system," said Andrew Regenscheid, one of the authors of BIOS Protection Guidelines (NIST Special Publication 800-147). Without appropriate protections, attackers could disable systems or hide malicious software by modifying the BIOS. This guide is focused on reducing the risk of unauthorized changes to the BIOS.

Designed to assist computer manufacturers writing BIOS code, SP 800-147 provides guidelines for building features into the BIOS that help protect it from being modified or corrupted by attackers. Manufacturers routinely update system firmware to fix bugs, patch vulnerabilities and support new hardware. SP 800-147 calls for using cryptographic "digital signatures" to authenticate the BIOS updates before installation based on NIST's current cryptographic guidelines. The publication is available just as computer manufacturers are beginning to deploy a new generation of BIOS firmware. "We believe computer manufacturers are ready to implement these guidelines and we hope to see them in products soon," said Regenscheid.

The publication also suggests management best practices that are tightly coupled with the security guidelines for manufacturers. These practices will help computer administrators take advantage of the BIOS protection features as they become available.

At first glance, a diagram of the complex network of genes that regulate cellular metabolism might seem hopelessly complex, and efforts to control such a system futile.

However, an MIT researcher has come up with a new computational model that can analyze any type of complex network -- biological, social or electronic -- and reveal the critical points that can be used to control the entire system.

Potential applications of this work, which appears as the cover story in the May 12 issue of Nature, include reprogramming adult cells and identifying new drug targets, says study author Jean-Jacques Slotine, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences.

Slotine and his co-authors applied their model to dozens of real-life networks, including cell-phone networks, social networks, the networks that control gene expression in cells and the neuronal network of the C. elegans worm. For each, they calculated the percentage of points that need to be controlled in order to gain control of the entire system.

For sparse networks such as gene regulatory networks, they found the number is high, around 80 percent. For dense networks -- such as neuronal networks -- it's more like 10 percent.

The paper, a collaboration with Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Yang-Yu Liu of Northeastern University, builds on more than half a century of research in the field of control theory.

Control theory -- the study of how to govern the behavior of dynamic systems -- has guided the development of airplanes, robots, cars and electronics. The principles of control theory allow engineers to design feedback loops that monitor input and output of a system and adjust accordingly. One example is the cruise control system in a car.

However, while commonly used in engineering, control theory has been applied only intermittently to complex, self-assembling networks such as living cells or the Internet, Slotine says. Control research on large networks has been concerned mostly with questions of synchronization, he says.

In the past 10 years, researchers have learned a great deal about the organization of such networks, in particular their topology -- the patterns of connections between different points, or nodes, in the network. Slotine and his colleagues applied traditional control theory to these recent advances, devising a new model for controlling complex, self-assembling networks.

"The area of control of networks is a very important one, and although much work has been done in this area, there are a number of open problems of outstanding practical significance," says Adilson Motter, associate professor of physics at Northwestern University. The biggest contribution of the paper by Slotine and his colleagues is to identify the type of nodes that need to be targeted in order to control complex networks, says Motter, who was not involved with this research.

The researchers started by devising a new computer algorithm to determine how many nodes in a particular network need to be controlled in order to gain control of the entire network. (Examples of nodes include members of a social network, or single neurons in the brain.)

"The obvious answer is to put input to all of the nodes of the network, and you can, but that's a silly answer," Slotine says. "The question is how to find a much smaller set of nodes that allows you to do that."

There are other algorithms that can answer this question, but most of them take far too long -- years, even. The new algorithm quickly tells you both how many points need to be controlled, and where those points -- known as "driver nodes" -- are located.

Next, the researchers figured out what determines the number of driver nodes, which is unique to each network. They found that the number depends on a property called "degree distribution," which describes the number of connections per node.

A higher average degree (meaning the points are densely connected) means fewer nodes are needed to control the entire network. Sparse networks, which have fewer connections, are more difficult to control, as are networks where the node degrees are highly variable.

In future work, Slotine and his collaborators plan to delve further into biological networks, such as those governing metabolism. Figuring out how bacterial metabolic networks are controlled could help biologists identify new targets for antibiotics by determining which points in the network are the most vulnerable.

Scientists have attempted to replicate human attributes and abilities such as detailed vision, spatial perception and object grasping in robots.

After three years of intense work, the members of EYESHOTS* have made progress in controlling the interaction between vision and movement, and as a result have designed an advanced three-dimensional visual system synchronized with robotic arms which could allow robots to observe and be aware of their surroundings and also remember the contents of those images in order to act accordingly.

For a humanoid robot to successfully interact with its environment and develop tasks without supervision, it is first necessary to refine these basic mechanisms that are still not completely resolved, says Spanish researcher Ángel Pasqual del Pobil, director of the Robotic Intelligence Laboratory of the Universitat Jaume I. His team has validated the members' findings with a system built at the University of Castellón (Spain) consisting of a robot head with moving eyes integrated into a torso with articulated arms.

To make the computer models the team started from the knowledge of animal and human biology, for which experts specialised in neuroscience, psychology, robotics and engineering worked together. The study began by recording monkeys' neurons engaged in visual-motor coordination, as humans share our way of perceiving the world with primates.

The first feature of our visual system that the members replicated artificially was our saccadic eye movement which is related to the dynamic change of attention. According to Dr. Pobil: "We constantly change the point of view through very fast eye movements, so fast that we are hardly aware of it. When the eyes are moving, the image is blurred and we can't see clearly. Therefore, the brain must integrate the fragments as if it were a puzzle to give the impression of a continuous and perfect image of our surroundings."

From the neural data, the experts developed computer models of the section of the brain that integrates images with movements of both eyes and arms. This integration is very different from that which is normally carried out by engineers and experts in robotics. The EYESHOTS consortium set out to prove that when we make a grasping movement towards an object, our brain does not previously have to calculate the coordinates.

As the Spanish researcher explains: "The truth is that the sequence is much more straightforward: our eyes look at a point and tell our arm where to go. Babies learn this progressively by connecting neurons." Therefore, these learning mechanisms have also been simulated in EYESHOTS through a neural network that allows robots to learn how to look, how to construct a representation of the environment, how to preserve the appropriate images, and use their memory to reach for objects even if these are out of their sight at that moment.

"Our findings can be applied to any future humanoid robot capable of moving its eyes and focusing on one point. These are priority issues for the other mechanisms to work correctly," points out the researcher.

EYESHOTS was funded by the European Union through the Seventh Framework Programme and coordinated by the University of Genoa (Italy).

* EYESHOTS (Heterogeneous 3-D Visual Perception Across Fragments)

Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences have adopted an innovative data collection method for their latest work in the area of computer vision -- a music video created by the Dutch progressive-electro band C-Mon & Kypski. Individual frames from the band's recent video for its song "More is Less" served as a unique visual database for the Courant researchers' work to develop computer vision technology.

Computer vision, a developing technology, aims to give eyesight to machines and is currently used in a range of applications. These include Microsoft's Kinect, which detects poses in order for game play to be controlled using only the body, and cell-phone technology that allows users to cash checks by merely snapping a picture.

However, for computer vision to truly mimic the human vision system, it must be able to reliably detect specific objects or individuals under a variety of conditions -- poor lighting, cluttered backgrounds, unusual clothing, and other sources of variation. In building such a system, developers have sought to implement an algorithm to perform "pose estimation" -- computer recognition of individuals or objects based on their positioning. However, in order for a computer to succeed at pose estimation it must draw from a large database of people or objects in a variety of poses -- after detecting a certain pose in its field of vision, it draws on its vast database of images to find a match.

"If we had many examples of people in similar pose, but under differing conditions, we could construct an algorithm that matches based on pose and ignores the distracting information -- lighting, clothing, and background," explained Graham Taylor, a post-doctoral fellow at the Courant Institute and one of the project's researchers. "But how do we collect such data?"

Departing from traditional data-collection methods, the team turned to Dutch progressive-electro band C-Mon & Kypski and, specifically, its video crowd-sourcing project--"One Frame of Fame" (http://oneframeoffame.com/)--which asks fans to replace one frame of the band's music video for the song "More or Less" with a capture from their webcams. In the project, a visitor to the band's website is shown a single frame of the video and asked to perform an imitation in front of the camera. The new contribution is spliced into the video that updates once an hour.

"This turned out to be the perfect data source for developing an algorithm that learns to compute similarity based on pose," explained Taylor, who obtained his doctorate in computer science from the University of Toronto. "Armed with the band's data and a few machine learning tricks up our sleeves, we built a system that is highly effective at matching people in similar pose but under widely different settings."

Despite growing concern about the effects of media violence on children, violent television shows and movies continue to be produced and marketed to them. An Indiana University research study concludes that violence doesn't add anything to their enjoyment of such programs and their characters.

In a research study published in the journal Media Psychology, Andrew J. Weaver, an assistant professor of telecommunications in IU's College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues tested a common view presented by media producers that children like to watch violent programming.

"Violence isn't the attractive component in these cartoons, which producers seem to think it is. It's more other things that are often associated with the violence. It's possible to have those other components, such as action specifically, in non-violent ways," Weaver said in an interview. "I think we should be concerned about violent content in cartoons in terms of the potential effect. This is one way that we can get around that from a producer's point of view.

"You don't have to cram violence into these cartoons to get kids to like them. They'll like them without the violence, just as much if not more," he said.

Violent cartoons have been a staple of Saturday morning programming for decades and now are readily available on cable television channels specializing in children's shows and cartoons. Many classic cartoons, such as those in the "Looney Tunes" series, have featured slapstick violence. But in recent years, action programs such as "Pokemon" and "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" have drawn much attention both because of their violent content and their popularity with young people.

Some content analyses have found that as many as 70 percent of children's television shows have violent content.

"For many producers and media critics, the question is not if children love violence, but rather why children love violence," Weaver and his co-authors wrote in the paper. "Our goal in this study was to examine children's liking of violent content while independently manipulating the amount of action, which is often confounded with violence in the existing research."

Co-authors include Jakob Jensen of Purdue University, Nicole Martins of IU, Ryan Hurley of North Carolina State University and Barbara Wilson of the University of Illinois.

The researchers used a sample group of 128 school children, ranging in age from five to 11 and from kindergarten to the fourth grade. There were a nearly equal number of boys and girls.

Research assistants showed each child one of four versions of a five-minute animated short created for the study and then led them through a questionnaire. The short was designed to resemble familiar slapstick cartoons. Four different versions of the cartoon were used. Six violent scenes were added to one version, which was carried out by both characters and in response to earlier aggression. Nine action scenes were added to another version. Two other versions had lower amounts of action or violence.

What they found was violent content had an indirect negative effect on whether boys enjoyed a program, due to how they identified with the characters.

"That was a little surprising," said Weaver, the father of two young sons. "There is a lot of talk about boys being more violent and more aggressive, for whatever reason, social or biological, and yet we found that they identified with the characters more when they were non-violent . . . They liked the characters more and they enjoyed the overall cartoon more.

"This is good news. If producers are willing to work on making cartoons that aren't violent so much as action packed, they can still capture their target audience better . . . and without the harmful consequences."

On the other hand, among girls violence did not decrease wishful identification of the characters. Weaver believes this may be because such slapstick cartoons are geared more toward boys than girls. Also, girls perceived the characters as boys, even though they were created without sexual attributes.

"They're not going to identify with what they perceive to be male characters, whether they are violent or not," he said. "They didn't prefer the more violent programming. They were just using other cues besides the character's violent or non-violent behavior to determine how much they enjoyed the show."

Weaver would like to apply his research to characters in more female-oriented programs, like "The Powerpuff Girls." He also recognizes that violence is seen by producers as an easy means to introduce action and conflict into a story.

"Alternatives could be things related to speed -- characters going fast, moving quickly. It was one way that we manipulated action in this study," he said. "If you can increase action without increasing violence, which clearly is possible as we did it in this study, then you can increase the enjoyment without potential harmful effects that violence can bring.

The cartoon the researchers used, "Picture Perfect Thief," featured a villain called Eggle, who attempted to steal a painting created by a hero called Orangehead. Eggle ultimately fails and the hero's painting wins first place in an art show. It was created by a friend using Macromedia Flash.

The violent version of the cartoon can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU1-yL84bl4 and the less violent version is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiN26SiEd9c&feature=related.

In a world where everything from placement in a Google search result to World Cup eligibility depends on ranking and numerical ratings of some kind, it is becoming increasingly important to analyze the algorithms and techniques that underlie such ranking methods in order to ensure fairness, eliminate bias, and tailor them to specific applications.

In a paper published this month in the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, authors Timothy Chartier, Erich Kreutzer, Amy Langville, and Kathryn Pedings mathematically analyze three commonly-used ranking methods. "We studied the sensitivity and stability of three popular ranking methods: PageRank, which is the method Google has used to rank web pages, and the Colley and Massey methods, which have been used by the Bowl Championship Series to rank U.S. college football teams," explains Langville.

All three methods analyzed -- the Colley and the Massey ranking techniques and the Markov web page rankings -- which is a generalized version of PageRank -- are linear algebra-based with simple elegant formulations. Here, the authors apply a modified version of PageRank to a sports season.

"Both web page authors and teams sometimes try to game, or spam, ranking systems to achieve a higher ranking. For instance, web page authors try to modify their incoming and outgoing links while teams try to run up the score against weak opponents," says Langville, pointing out the significance of studying such methods. "Mathematically, such spamming can be viewed as changes to the input data required by the ranking method."

Most methods, including the aforementioned three, produce "ratings" of numerical scores for each team, which represents their playing ability. When sorted, these ratings produce ranks with integer values for each team, simply representing a numerical listing of the teams based on their rating.

In the first step of their analysis, the authors assume a simple rating scheme with constant difference of 1 in scores and apply it to a perfect sports season. In a perfect season, each team plays every other team only once and there are no upset victories or losses. In such an ideal scenario, a highly-ranked team would always beat a lower-ranked team. Thus, in a system with teams numbered 1 through 4 for their ranks, team 1 would beat all other teams; team 2 would beat teams 3 and 4, and lose to 1; team 3 would beat team 4, losing to teams 1 and 2; and team 4 would lose to all other teams. They then compute the output rating for each of the three methods and compare them to the input rating.

The three methods are applied to this ideal data, and all three methods recover the input ranking. However, while the Colley and Massey methods produce ratings that are uniformly spaced as would be desirable in a rating system, the Markov method, produces non-uniformly spaced ratings.

The authors analyze the sensitivity of the methods to small perturbations and determine how much the rating and ranking is affected by these changes. If, for instance, small changes in input data cause large changes in the output ratings, the method is considered sensitive. Similar discrepancies in the input and output ranking data would show instability of the ranking method.

The authors conclude that while the Colley and Massey methods are insensitive to small changes, the Markov method (or Page Rank method) is highly sensitive to such changes, often resulting in anomalies in rankings. For instance, there are cases of a single upset in a perfect season resulting in rearrangements of rankings for all teams because of the Markov method's high sensitivity. In these cases, the Colley and Massey methods would have an isolated response, resulting in changes to the rankings of only the two teams in question.

In addition, the sensitivity of the PageRank or Markov method gets more pronounced further down in the rankings. "The PageRank vector is quite sensitive to small changes in the input data. Further, this sensitivity increases as the rank position increases," Langville explains. "In other words, values in the tail (low-ranked positions) of the PageRank vector are extremely sensitive, which calls into question PageRank's use to produce a full ranking, as opposed to a simply top-k ranking. It also partially explains PageRank's susceptibility to spam. On the other hand, the Colley and Massey methods are stable throughout the entire ranking."

PageRank has recently evolved from being used exclusively for web pages to rank various entities, from species to social networks, reinforcing the ubiquity of these ranking systems.

But the stability displayed by the Colley and Massey methods in this study shows that these two methods would perhaps be effective even in ranking other entities, such as web pages and movies, though originally conceived for sports rankings.

"As future work, we are exploring the use of the Colley and Massey methods in other settings beyond sports. For example, we have found that these two methods are more appropriate than PageRank for ranking in social networks such as Twitter," says Langville.

While ranking methods can be applied to a wide range of areas, modifications are often required in order to translate a particular method to suit a specific application, making analyses of sensitivity and stability that much more important

Up until recently, users needed a mouse and a keyboard, a touch-screen or a joystick to control a computer system. Researchers in Germany have now developed a new kind of gesture command system that makes it possible to use just the fingers of a hand.

Before a new vehicle rolls off the assembly lines, it first takes shape as a virtual model. In a cave -- a room for the virtual representation of objects -- the developers look at it from all sides. They "sit" in it, they examine and improve it. For example, are all the switches easy to reach? The developers have so far used a joystick to interact with the computer which displays the virtual car model.

In the future, they will be able to do so without such an aid -- their hand alone is intended to be enough to provide the computer with the respective signals. A multi-touch interface, which h was developed by Georg Hackenberg during his Master's thesis work at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, made this possible. His work earned him first place in the Hugo Geiger Prizes. "We are using a camera that, instead of providing color information, provides pixel for pixel the distance of how far this point is from the camera. Basically this is achieved by means of a type of gray-scale image where the shade of gray represents the distance of the objects. The camera also provides three-dimensional information that the system evaluates with the help of special algorithms," explains Georg Hackenberg.

Hackenberg's main work consisted in developing the corresponding algorithms. They ensure that the system is first able to recognize a hand and then able to follow its movements. The result: The 3D camera system processes gestures down to the movements of individual fingers and processes them in real time. Up to this point in time comparable processes with finger support could only detect how hands moved in the image level -- they could not solve the depth information, in other words, how far the hand is from the camera system. For this reason it was often difficult to answer with which object the hand was interacting. Is it activating the windshield wipers or is it turning on the radio? Small movements of the hand, such as gripping, have so far been hardly possible to detect in real time -- or only with great amounts of computing power. That is no problem for the new system.

Gesture commands are also interesting for computer games. A gesture recognition prototype already exists. The researchers want to improve weaknesses in the algorithm now and carry out initial application studies. Hackenberg hopes that the system could be ready for series production within a year, from a technical viewpoint. In the medium term, the researchers hope to further develop it such that it can be used in mobile applications as well, which means that it will also find its way into laptops and cell phones.

Physicists have demonstrated a crucial element for a future functioning quantum computer: repetitive error correction. This allows scientists to correct errors occurring in a quantum computer efficiently.

A general rule in data processing is that disturbances cause the distortion or deletion of information during data storage or transfer. Methods for conventional computers were developed that automatically identify and correct errors: Data are processed several times and if errors occur, the most likely correct option is chosen. As quantum systems are even more sensitive to environmental disturbances than classical systems, a quantum computer requires a highly efficient algorithm for error correction. The research group of Rainer Blatt from the Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IQOQI) has now demonstrated such an algorithm experimentally.

"The difficulty arises because quantum information cannot be copied," explains Schindler. "This means that we cannot save information repeatedly and then compare it." Therefore, the physicists use one of the peculiarities of quantum physics and use quantum mechanical entanglement to perform error correction.

Quick and efficient error correction

The Innsbruck physicists demonstrate the mechanism by storing three calcium ions in an ion trap. All three particles are used as quantum bits (qubits), where one ion represents the system qubit and the other two ions auxiliary qubits. "First we entangle the system qubit with the other qubits, which transfers the quantum information to all three particles," says Philipp Schindler. "Then a quantum algorithm determines whether an error occurs and if so, which one. Subsequently, the algorithm itself corrects the error." After having made the correction, the auxiliary qubits are reset using a laser beam. "This last point is the new element in our experiment, which enables repetitive error correction," says Rainer Blatt. "Some years ago, American colleagues demonstrated the general functioning of quantum error correction. Our new mechanism allows us to repeatedly and efficiently correct errors."

Leading the field

"For a quantum computer to become reality, we need a quantum processor with many quantum bits," explains Schindler. "Moreover, we need quantum operations that work nearly error-free. The third crucial element is an efficient error correction." For many years Rainer Blatt's research group, which is one of the global leaders in the field, has been working on realizing a quantum computer. Three years ago they presented the first quantum gate with fidelity of more than 99 percent. Now they have realized another key element: repetitive error correction.

This research work is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the European Commission, the European Research Council and the Federation of Austrian Industries Tyrol and is published in the scientific journal Science.

Because of its strange consequences the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement has been called "spooky action at a distance" by Albert Einstein. For several years physicists have been developing concepts how to use this phenomenon for practical applications such as absolutely safe data transmission. For this purpose, the entanglement which is generated in a local process has to be distributed among remote quantum systems.

A team of scientists led by Prof. Gerhard Rempe, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and head of the Quantum Dynamics Division, has now demonstrated that two remote atomic quantum systems can be prepared in a shared "entangled" state (Physical Review Letters, Advance Online Publication, May 26, 2011): one system is a single atom trapped in an optical resonator, the other one a Bose-Einstein condensate consisting of hundreds of thousands of ultracold atoms. With the hybrid system thus generated, the researchers have realized a fundamental building block of a quantum network.

In the quantum mechanical phenomenon of "entanglement" two quantum systems are coupled in such a way that their properties become strictly correlated. This requires the particles to be in close contact. For many applications in a quantum network, however, it is necessary that entanglement is shared between two remote nodes ("stationary" quantum bits). One way to achieve this is to use photons ("flying" quantum bits) for transporting the entanglement. This is somewhat analogous to classical telecommunication, were light is used to transmit information between computers or telephones. In the case of a quantum network, however, this task is much more difficult as entangled quantum states are extremely fragile and can only survive if the particles are well isolated from their environment.

The team of Professor Rempe has now taken this hurdle by preparing two atomic quantum systems located in two different laboratories in an entangled state: on the one hand a single rubidium atom trapped inside an optical resonator formed by two highly reflective mirrors, on the other hand an ensemble of hundreds of thousands of ultracold rubidium atoms which form a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC). In a BEC, all particles have the same quantum properties so that they all act as a single "superatom."

First, a laser pulse stimulates the single atom to emit a single photon. In this process, internal degrees of freedom of the atom are coupled to the polarisation of the photon, so that both particles become entangled. The photon is transported through a 30 m long optical fibre into a neighbouring laboratory where it is directed to the BEC. There, it is absorbed by the whole ensemble. This process converts the photon into a collective excitation of the BEC. "The exchange of quantum information between photons and atomic quantum systems requires a strong light-matter interaction," explains Matthias Lettner, a doctoral student working on the experiment. "For the single atom, we achieve this by multiple reflections between the two resonator mirrors, whereas for the BEC the light-matter interaction is enhanced by the large number of atoms."

In a subsequent step, the physicists prove that the single atom and the BEC are really entangled. To this end, the photon absorbed in the BEC is retrieved with the help of a laser pulse and the state of the single atom is read out by generating a second photon. The entanglement of the two photons reaches 95 % of the maximally possible value, thus showing that the entanglement of the two atomic quantum systems must have been equally good, or even better. Moreover, the entanglement is detectable for approximately 100 microseconds.

"A BEC is very well suited as a quantum memory because this exotic state does not suffer from any disturbances caused by thermal motion," says Matthias Lettner. "This makes it possible to store and retrieve quantum information with high efficiency and to conserve this state for a long time."

In this experiment, the team of Professor Rempe has realized a building block for a quantum network consisting of two remote, entangled, stationary nodes. This is a milestone on the way to large-scale quantum networks in which, for example, quantum information can be transmitted absolutely safe. In addition, such networks might help realizing a universal quantum computer in which quantum bits can be exchanged with photons between nodes designed for information storage and processing.