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Gearblog News for week 35
By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 08/26/05
Headline: Man Smarter than Woman, Dumb to Say So
"A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests." reports BBC News. The difference is statistical, based on IQ tests administered to 80,000 people, and amounts to an average of 5 points. One of the researchers, Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, commented that the differences "may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds, such as chess grandmasters, Fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prize-winners and the like". Our highly developed male intelligence tells us that Dr. Irwing is single, divorced, about to become divorced, or sleeping on the sofa. (From the Don't Shoot the Messenger Dept.)
And in other news:
Hold 'em or Fold 'em Dept.: With the explosion of interest in on-line gambling spurred by poker (notably Texas Hold'em) it should come as no surprise that poker-playing bots are now getting into the action. An interesting Wired article discusses WinHoldEm, a program from HixoxiH Software, that will play on-line poker for you and because they are tireless and don't make mistakes, give you an edge. The interesting thing is that pokerbots aren't unbeatable, they are subject to chance just as humans are and there's enough complexity in the game that an unbeatable set of rules that define how your bot is to play can't be defined. While WinHoldEm has got a lot of press that assumes it is the first pokerbot the fact is that it is not the first . Indeed the Wired articles implies that much of the online play may already be bot-driven. Of course, the online casinos are doing their best to detect and ban bots but its a battle as unwinnable for the e-casinos as trying to stop music piracy is for the RIAA. Still feel like playing, John?
Needling PINs Dept.: You know those special tamper-proof envelopes that they use to send Personal Identification Numbers to you for ATM access? Well, it turns out that according to a story in The Register that they aren't at all secure. All you need to read your neighbor's PIN without interfering with the tamper-proofing is a scanner and some image processing software or in many cases just a bright light held at an angle. Sigh.
See the Beeb Dept.: The UK's British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC or Auntie Beeb as it is sometimes called) has announced (through its own news service) that it plans to start broadcasting its television channels simultaneously over the airwaves and the Internet. They also plan to make shows available for viewing up to a week after airing. The good news: They have some outstanding programming that will become available to a wider audience (think news, the early episodes of the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Fawlty Towers, and Dr. Who). The bad news? Some of their latest sitcoms make Benny Hill look good.
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