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It would appear, reports Science magazine, that neutrinos may not travel faster than light after all – a finding from CERN’s OPERA experiment that would mean, assuming that every other aspect of relativity was not broken, that either neutrinos arrive at a destination before they leave a source or that they cross the universe via some other dimensions than our world of spacetime.

It is now suggested that a faulty connection with a GPS transceiver

may have skewed the results.

Related articles

• Faster Than Light Neutrinos Confirmed? (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Faster-than-light neutrinos are back in the game (engadget.com)
• Doubts cast on faster-than-light neutrinos experiment (guardian.co.uk)

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Last week what were reported to be internal fundraising plans and strategy papers from the hard right anti-science Heartland Institute were leaked to the media.

Heartland said the documents – which seemingly reported on plans to scare teachers away teaching climate science – were stolen and/or were fakes.

Now a scientist called Peter Gleick has come forward top confirm that he obtained the documents from Heartland by deception.

Gleick has apologised for his actions and has been subject to a lot of harsh criticism from fellow scientsists. He has, however, also confirmed that the documents are genuine and rather blown Heartland’s attempt to deny that out of the water.

I am in two minds about the ethics of all this. Some years ago the Guardian newspaper brought down the career of a UK Cabinet minister, Jonathan Aitken, through the use of what they called a “cod fax”: they used deception to find out that Aitken, while minister for defence procurement, had had his hotel bill paid by an arms lobbyist. Aitken denied the whole thing, fought a defamation action, lost and ended up in jail for perjury.

Seemed to me that the Guardian’s deception was very much in the public interest. And I find it difficult to say that Gleick’s exposure of Heartland – who have had a major impact on the debate in the US – was not motivated by a similar desire to do public good. But Gleick was not a journalist and – this is pretty important – Heartland were not breaking any laws (or ministerial codes of conduct).

Related articles

• Eco-fraud: Global warming crusader admits lying, stealing, smearing (michellemalkin.com)
• Peter Gleick – Confessions of an Activist (noconsensus.wordpress.com)
• Heartland Institute claim anti-science document is a fake (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
• You: Scientist Peter Gleick admits he lied to get climate documents (latimes.com)
• Crossing the Line as Civilization Implodes: Heartland Institute, Peter Gleick and Andrew Revkin (thinkprogress.org)
• The morality of unmasking Heartland (theconversation.edu.au)
• Peter H. Gleick: The Origin of the Heartland Documents (huffingtonpost.com)
• Heartland Institute Document Leaker Comes Forward, Maintains Documents Are Real (science.slashdot.org)
• Peter Gleick: The Origin of the Heartland Documents (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• Climate Scientists To Heartland Institute: Stop Whining (thinkprogress.org)

Finally nailed the bug in my readdir function.

The code was stuck in an endless loop because it did not return an empty dirent when it reached the end of the directory – instead returning the list of files in the directory over and over again.

To fix this I made sure that any following scan of the directory began where the previous one left off. As this would return an empty dirent, the problem was solved.

CAPTCHA Insanity (Photo credit: JillOW)

Between 2009 and 2011 my work included establishing and editing a website (in English) about news and events in Georgia, in the Caucasus.

Lots goes on in Georgia – it’s a fascinating place – but the number of people interested in reading news in English about it is quite limited: still the site built up a good readership and was widely noted amongst the small international community that follow events there for academic, human rights and other reasons.

But Google Analytics also showed that the bulk of the audience was in Georgia itself. Some times this was because the website was one of the few places that gave a reasonably straight report of some controversial events there, especially if these involved criticism of, or statements by, the Georgian Orthodox Church, by far the most respected institution in the country and one that the government had a deeply uneasy relationship with.

But a growing audience also meant attracting spambots and how to deal with them was an important consideration. Even going away for a few days could attract many dozens of spam messages and deleting them was a pain. Bayesian filters for Drupal (the CMS) seemed to be quite poor, so that was not an automatic solution either.

So, I chose the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) – in this case some mangled text that would be posters had to decipher before they could successfully comment on the site. With the CAPTCHA spam all but disappeared (though plainly there are some desperate people even prepared to wade through CAPTCHAs to post their ads).

Now, nobody likes CAPTCHAs – they are a terrible pain, because quite often the text is so mangled it is difficult to read. But I discovered Georgian readers loathed them. For a start they were in an unfamiliar alphabet -he Georgian – Kartuli – alphabet is completely different (for instance there are no capital forms) from Roman or even Cyrillic, even if there are some Greek influences on it -  and then it required them to use a different keyboard layout. ი სტილლ ჰავე ა გეორგიან ლაყოუტ ავაილაბლე ჰერე – სო ტჰის ის სომე ენგლისჰ ტრანსლიტერატედ ინტო გეორგიან.

So eventually the CAPTCHA had to go and I went back to relying on poor quality Bayesian filtering and hand weeding.

Now, it seems, that might be where we are all headed: as Slashdot reports audio and video CAPTCHAs have been cracked and cracking software can even score a 1% success rate against reCAPTCHAs – the toughest type apparently (do read this link on reCAPTCHAs and the social function they fulfil, I often wondered why it was possible to ‘pass’ them with little better than guesses and now I know why).

The failure of audio CAPTCHAs is, I fear, quite likely to lead to their demise as a widely used security technique – as without them those using screen readers and similar audio technology may face some sever difficulties in accessing CAPTCHA guarded content.

Still, well implemented Bayesian and other filtering has already saved email from complete collapse, so maybe it is time to give the Georgians a break and turn all the CAPTCHAs off?

Related articles

• I hate captchas! (theomnipotenteye.blogspot.com)
• Photojojo Captcha (konigi.com)
• Did You Know reCAPTCHA Makes You A Translator? (news.dice.com)
• CAPTCHA’s Effect on Conversion Rates (seomoz.org)
• CAPTCHA Easily Bypassed (ritcyberselfdefense.wordpress.com)
• Recent Findings On Captcha & The User Experience (searchengineland.com)
• CAPTCHA: Stopping Bots (ritcyberselfdefense.wordpress.com)
• Tumblr seems to be getting out of hand with their spambots again. Is there a reason why they just don’t make a simple CAPTCHA to keep them away for the most part? The support team doesn’t seem to want to take any suggestions or communicate/construct any i (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• Report: Popular CAPTCHAs easily defeated (go.theregister.com)

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But along the way I have spotted and fixed various bugs. Here is one, I am not even sure why it compiled in the first place, so maybe a C guru could tell me…

Was:

if le16_to_cpu(((u16 *) bh->b_data)[j * VMU_DIR_RECORD_LEN16 + VMUFAT_FIRSTBLOCK_OFFSET16] == ino)

Now:

if (le16_to_cpu(((u16 *) bh->b_data)[j * VMU_DIR_RECORD_LEN16 + VMUFAT_FIRSTBLOCK_OFFSET16]) == ino)

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It must be a situation every programmer is familiar with – you write some code, you are pretty pleased with it, but it just doesn’t work and while you know it is only a small thing that is stopping it from functioning properly, but you just cannot track it down.

That is exactly where I am with my code for the “VMUFAT” file system – the file system for the Sega Dreamcast VMU. After a decade of trying (in fits and starts), I now have a code base which I think is good enough, or almost good enough, to post to LKML without me being burnt to a crisp by the subsequent flames.

But it just doesn’t work! Trying to list the files on the device gets a list of 200 copies of the same file (200 is the maximum number of files that a standard VMU can index in its directory blocks and the code throws an error when you exceed that).

The thing is, the old, ugly, code worked at this. But I cannot see what I am doing wrong with the new, clean, code. Indeed it seems to replicate exactly the same functionality. Last night I picked up a couple of bugs in the code quickly but, whilst they addressed one error, they did not fix the big one.

Time for a rotary debugger? Well, it will be a roti debugger in this house, this Friday evening.

Related articles

• There Was a Dreamcast TV Set. It was Both Hideous and Glorious. [Video] (kotaku.com)
• Working on filesystem code (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
• Dreamcast 2 Concept Shows What Could Have Been (escapistmagazine.com)
• SEGA Dreamcast Collection now available for free with OnLive PackPack Bundle (thesegasource.wordpress.com)
• Play the Dreamcast Half-Life That Never Was (escapistmagazine.com)

Woodhouse College (Photo credit: 2E0MCA)

My eldest daughter is studying for her ‘A’ levels at Woodhouse College, a large sixth form college in North Finchley.

I noticed just now she had posted a meme on her Facebook stream from a page called “Woodhouse Memes“. I went there. There are lots, and some are quite funny…

The amazing thing is, the page is less than two hours old, has 175 likes already and appears to be growing entirely organically at an exponential rate… we are watching the birth of a meta meme

Related articles

• “What I Really Do” meme (holykaw.alltop.com)
• On Memes: An Observation (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
• College Memes Madness: Students Posting Non-Stop on Facebook (pbs.org)
• Internet Memes: The Online Trends That Won’t Go Away (stylecaster.com)
• University of LOLz: Digging for the roots of college memes (digitaltrends.com)

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The Heartland Institute, reports the Guardian, are claiming that the internal memo which appears to show that they are working on plans to “dissuade teachers from teaching science” is a “total fake”.

Heartland had earlier admitted that other documents published alongside the memo were genuine, but later backtracked on that.

They then went on to refuse to discuss the matter – including, it would appear, the issue of whether the controversial memo was a fake – any further.

Much of the material in the memo is similar to that in the other documents that Heartland had earlier admitted to be genuine. But only the memo contains the statement that the ultimate aim of Heartland is to cripple science teaching through fear.

The original publishers of the leaked documents, the DeSmog blog, are standing by their story.

Related articles

• Leaked Heartland Institute Documents Reveal Opposition To Science (news.slashdot.org)
• The REAL Climategate: DeSmog Blog Outs Heartland Propaganda Machine (forbes.com)
• Heartland Institute Under Scrutiny (green.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Toxic Leak Swamps Denial-ville (climatecrocks.com)
• You gets whay you pays for. And climate skeptics pay. (maureenholland.wordpress.com)

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The usual claim from the climate change deniers is that they are merely pointing out that climate science is controversial or disputed. But their internal documents reveal what this is really all about (emphasis added):

Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

The above is a direct quote from an internal strategy document of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago based promoter of – it is now clear – superstition: as that is what we are left with without science.

All of this is funded by a mystery figure known as the “Anonymous Donor”. It is tempting to make a song and dance about Microsoft’s role in funding the shamans too – but it seems their money goes on a project called “ITTN” – which mainly seems to be about stopping US regulators injecting some competition into the telecoms and ICT market over there.

Related articles

• The Heart(land) of the Denial Campaign [Class M] (scienceblogs.com)
• INTERNAL DOCUMENTS: The Secret, Corporate-Funded Plan To Teach Children That Climate Change Is A Hoax (thinkprogress.org)
• Leaked: a plan to teach climate change denial in schools (openchannel.msnbc.msn.com)
• HeartlandGate: Anti-Science Institute’s Insider Reveals Secrets (scienceblogs.com)
• Leaked Heartland Institute documents pull back curtain on climate scepticism | Leo Hickman (guardian.co.uk)
• Heartland Institute budget and strategy revealed (deepclimate.org)
• Heartland Institute documents leaked (go.theregister.com)

But as a workhorse for writing documents, blogs or even compiling the odd piece of code, it does the job.

Should I replace it with something better?