Very Important Information about Science And Mathematics, Social Science And More

A free computer game went online Friday that challenges players to become the next “Hero on the Hudson” by safely landing a virtual passenger jet on the New York City waterway.

The streamed game warns players that both jet engines are disabled, it is impossible to make it to an airport, and they must crash land in the Hudson River in a virtual version of the US Airways miracle landing on January 15.

“The fate of the passengers in your hands,” reads an introductory page of the game available online at tastyplay.com.

Players then use left and right arrow keys to keep an animated jet parallel to the surface of the faux river as it makes an emergency descent with dark smoke billowing from its engines.

Level landings are reward with a banner proclaiming the player a hero as tiny figures representing passengers file onto the wings. Sloppy landings are met with the sight and sound of a sinking jet.

The pilot of the US Airways jet that crash landed in icy waters off New York in real life was hailed as a hero for coolly saving 155 passengers and crew.

The former fighter pilot was lauded for smoothly landing the jet belly-first onto the Hudson River.

The soft landing allowed passengers to safely escape from the stricken craft.

The ranking GOP member of the Senate Finance Committee wants Congress to reconsider new funding to the National Science Foundation amid allegations that top staffers spent long stretches of their day surfing the Internet for pornography.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to the foundation’s Office of Inspector General on Tuesday seeking all documents it has related to the inappropriate use of the foundation’s network.

The foundation is the major source of federal backing in fields such as mathematics, computer science and social sciences.

Grassley told The Associated Press on Thursday he wants Congress to reconsider $3 billion in NSF funding that is included in the current stimulus bill until his questions are answered.

“I think they ought to. I think they need to,” he said.

The senator said he sought the information after a team of staffers led by his finance committee aide discovered numerous investigations into the misuse of the Internet by science foundation employees. The investigations were buried inside a semiannual report on NSF’s activities, he said.

According to the report, one senior staff member spent as much as 20 percent of his time during a two-year period at lurid sites and in sexually explicit chat rooms. That time cost taxpayers more than $40,000, the report stated.

Other employees were also alleged to have watched, downloaded and e-mailed porn.

Agency spokesman Jeff Nesbit said the foundation takes the report and Grassley’s inquiry seriously. He said the foundation is cooperating and has already taken steps to address the inspector general’s report.

“NSF immediately implemented additional IT systems controls to focus in particular on enforcement of the foundation’s long-standing policy prohibiting the use of its IT systems to access sexually explicit, gambling and other inappropriate Web sites,” Nesbit said in a written statement.

He said several employees were disciplined and at least three staffers were fired because of their inappropriate use of the Internet.

Grassley is renowned in Washington for using his position on the Finance Committee to practice a particularly aggressive brand of oversight. His staff has previously scrutinized megachurches and the Smithsonian, among other targets.

Grassley said he is pushing for more information about the National Science Foundation because he’s concerned the issues in the report speak to a wider, cultural problem at the agency. He also cites the foundation’s large budget.

The foundation was created as an independent federal agency in 1950 to promote science. It has an annual budget of more than $6 billion and funds, by its own estimate, about 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by the nation’s colleges and universities.

Web queries range from health issues to personal problems, but the most frequently asked question on Ask.com in 2008 was “How do I get pregnant?”.

Ask.com is the world’s fourth largest search engine, and the straightforward medical inquiry ranked as most often asked question in the last year.

In fact, according to Search engine news site Search Engine Land, the second most popular question of the year was also health-related with “How do I lose weight?”.

The questions were ranked ahead of significantly trickier queries, with “What is the meaning of life?” ranking just seventh on Ask.com’s list, and that old favourite “Why is the sky blue?” ranking ninth.

Other queries focussed on more pressing economic issues, including “How do I write a resume?”, “How much is the minimum wage?” and “How much is my car worth?”.

On the other hand Ask.com’s top search terms of last year were “dictionary” and “MySpace,” reports The Courier Mail.

However, a large number of web surfers used the search engine to find another search engine, “Google,” which ranked as the third most sought-out term.

According to digital research firm ComScore Ask.com was responsible for 4.2 per cent of all web queries in October 2008.

A computer virus that may leave Microsoft Windows users vulnerable to digital hijacking is spreading through companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia, already infecting close to 9 million machines, according to a private online security firm.

Fortunately, however, it may be a dud.

Though computer bugs have become a common affliction, Finland-based F-Secure says a virus it has been tracking for the past several weeks has surged more rapidly through corporate networks than anything they’ve seen in years.

But the virus doesn’t appear to be working as its designers intended. F-Secure’s chief security adviser, Patrik Runald, said the virus’s coding suggests a type of bug that alerts computer users to bogus infections on their machines and offers to help by selling them antivirus software.

Instead, the virus is simply spreading to little effect, though it may still pose a threat to infected computers.

“The gang behind this worm haven’t used it yet,” F-Secure’s chief research officer, Nikko Hypponen said by phone. “But they could do anything they like with any of these machines at any time.”

Microsoft issued a security update Tuesday to deal with the so-called “Downadup” or “Conficker” virus, which appears to be a new version of a bug that popped up in October.

“Over the last couple of weeks, a new variant of this worm has been affecting customers,” the company acknowledged in a blog post. Microsoft said the virus is spreading by gaining access to one computer and then guessing at passwords of other users in the same network: “If the password is weak, it may succeed.”

A company representative couldn’t immediately be reached Saturday to comment on F-Secure’s estimate of infected machines.

Most computers with Windows will automatically download Microsoft’s security update, but Hypponen said the virus disables updates on infected machines.

While the origin of the virus is a mystery, F-Secure’s best guess is it came from Ukraine. Hypponen said it is coded to avoid computers there, which may indicate whoever wrote the virus was trying to avoid drawing attention from local authorities.

Researchers at University of California, Davis and Intel Corporation have devised a new strategy to enable computer network administrators to curb attacks by computer worms at low cost.

Many computers are already equipped with software that can detect when another computer is attempting to attack it.

However, research leader Senthil Cheetancheri says that the software usually fail to identify newly-minted worms that do not share features with earlier marauders.

He even highlights the fact that network managers face a major dilemma when they detect any suspicious activity.

“The question is, ‘Should I shut down the network and risk losing business for a couple of hours for what could be a false alarm, or should I keep it running and risk getting infected?’” he says.

Cheetancheri, a graduate student in the Computer Security Laboratory at UC Davis when he did the work, has demonstrated that it is possible to overcome the conundrum by enabling computers to share information about anomalous activity.

He says, as signals come in from other machines in the network, each computer compiles the data to continually calculate the probability that a worm attack is underway.

“One suspicious activity in a network with 100 computers can’t tell you much. But when you see half a dozen activities and counting, you know that something’s happening,” he said.

According to the researcher, the second part of the strategy is an algorithm that weighs the cost of a computer being disconnected from the network against the cost of it being infected by a worm.

Cheetancheri revealed that the results of the new strategy depended upon the calculated probability of an attack, and varied from computer to computer depending on what the machine was used for.

He said that the algorithm would trigger a toggle to disconnect the computer whenever the cost of infection outweighed the benefit of staying online, and vice versa.

The researcher said that the computer used by a person working with online sales, for example, might be disconnected only when the threat of an attack is virtually certain.

On the other hand, a computer used by a copy writer who can complete various tasks offline might disconnect whenever the probability of an attack rises above even a very low level.

The study was published in “Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, 2008,” the proceedings of a symposium that was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September last year.