Posts Tagged ‘management’
Trying To Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home
sciencehabit writes “Show a native-born Chinese person a picture of the Great Wall, and suddenly they’ll have trouble speaking English, even if they usually speak it fluently. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that reminders of our home country can complicate our ability to speak a new language. The findings could help explain why cultural immersion is the most effective way to learn a foreign tongue and why immigrants who settle within an ethnic enclave acculturate more slowly than those who surround themselves with friends from their new country.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Trying To Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home
NASA Teams With LEGO To Offer Model Competition
coondoggie writes “NASA today said it would team up with Lego to offer a competition to see who can build the coolest models of future airplanes and spacecraft. The ‘NASA’s Missions: Imagine and Build’ competition is open now with an entry deadline of July 31. Winners in each category will be selected by a panel of NASA and LEGO officials and announced Sept. 1.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NASA Teams With LEGO To Offer Model Competition
Human Stem Cell Cloning Paper Contains Reused Images
An anonymous reader writes “A very recent paper in the prestigious biology journal Cell — ‘Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer’ (openly accessible) — reports the novel creation of human embryonic stem cells from somatic nuclei. It has received massive media coverage and is surely penciled in as a strong candidate for scientific publication of the year. It does however have several examples of image reuse that have been pointed out by a submission on PubPeer. In the paper, it is recorded that the journal Cell accepted this paper just 4 days after submission. Perhaps, under the circumstances, the pre-publication peer review had to be a little hasty?
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Human Stem Cell Cloning Paper Contains Reused Images
How To Hack Twitter’s Two-Factor Authentication
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from PC Mag’s SecurityWatch: “We’ve pointed out some problems with Twitter’s new two-factor authentication. For example, since just one phone number can be associated with an account, Twitter’s two-factor authentication won’t work for organizations like the Associated Press, The Onion, or The Guardian. They were hacked; they could still be hacked again in the same way. However, security experts indicate that the problem is worse than that, a lot worse.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How To Hack Twitter’s Two-Factor Authentication
Hanford Nuclear Waste Vitrification Plant "Too Dangerous"
Noryungi writes “Scientific American reports, in a chilling story, that the Hanford, Washington, nuclear waste vitrification treatment plant is off to a bad start. Bad planning, multiple sources of radioactive waste, leaking containment pools are just the beginning. It’s never a good sign when that type of article includes the word ‘spontaneous criticality,’ if you follow my drift…” It seems the main problem is that the waste has settled in distinct layers, and has to be piped through corroded old tubes. Leading to all sorts of exciting problems (e.g.
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Hanford Nuclear Waste Vitrification Plant "Too Dangerous"
Indiana University Dedicates Biggest College-Owned Supercomputer
Indiana University has replaced their supercomputer, Big Red, with a new system predictably named Big Red II. At the dedication HPC scientist Paul Messina said: “It’s important that this is a university-owned resource. … Here you have the opportunity to have your own faculty, staff and students get access with very little difficulty to this wonderful resource.” From the article: “Big Red II is a Cray-built machine, which uses both GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes to deliver a petaflop — or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second — of max performance. Each of the 344 CPU nodes uses two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors, while the 676 GPU nodes use one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20.” Read more of this story at Slashdot
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Indiana University Dedicates Biggest College-Owned Supercomputer
Ask Slashdot: Setting Up a System Integration Room At VAR?
o2binbuzios writes “Due to an office move, I have a chance to do a clean-sheet design for an integration room at a fairly large VAR ($100M+ ). I’m looking for some ideas or best practice to support 100-120 square meters (~50 x 30 ft). I’m particularly interested in ideas around efficient workflow, ways to manage cabling and electrical, and ‘environmental’ solutions that make it a pleasant place to work.
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Ask Slashdot: Setting Up a System Integration Room At VAR?
RCMP Says Terror Plot Against Canadian Trains Thwarted
An anonymous reader writes “Two men were arrested in Canada, accused of conspiring to carry out an ‘al-Qaeda supported’ attack against a VIA passenger train in the Greater Toronto Area. The arrests were products of ‘extensive’ co-operation between Canadian and US intelligence agencies, who had been investigating the plot since August 2012.” From this article, it’s not clear whether any actual al-Qaeda support was forthcoming, or whether the accused plotters merely thought there was, by means of an FBI sting operation, as in the 2006 case in Florida. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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RCMP Says Terror Plot Against Canadian Trains Thwarted
LLVM Clang Compiler Now C++11 Feature Complete
An anonymous reader writes “With the latest development work on Clang ahead of the release of LLVM version 3.3, Clang is now C++11 feature complete. The last remaining features of the ISO C++11 feature specification have been implemented. C++11 support for GCC is also more or less complete.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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LLVM Clang Compiler Now C++11 Feature Complete
Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It
First time accepted submitter occidental writes in about Etsy’s push to get more women engineers. “You’ve probably heard of Etsy, the bustling online marketplace for crafters and artists. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most of its customers are women, both buyers and sellers. Ditto that the Etsy team is a pretty good representation of the Earth’s gender ratio. Yet when Marc Hedlund took the helm of Etsy’s Product Development & Engineering department, 97% of the engineering department were men
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Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It
Repo Man Director Alex Cox Plans To Edit Next Film With OpenShot
New submitter JonOomph writes “Director Alex Cox, the creator of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, is making plans via Kickstarter for his next film, Bill, the Galactic Hero, a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy. He is challenging the norm by shooting the film on 35mm monochrome (black and white) film, possibly the last film to ever attempt this, and possibly the first feature film to be edited with popular open source video editor OpenShot.” If you don’t like spoilers, I suggest reading this short but fascinating piece on Repo Man (one of my all-time favorite movies) only after watching it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Repo Man Director Alex Cox Plans To Edit Next Film With OpenShot
Australian Networks Block Community University Website
Peter Eckersley writes “At the EFF we were recently contacted by the organisers of the Melbourne Free University (MFU), an Australian community education group, whose website had been unreachable from a number of Australian ISPs since the 4th of April. It turns out that the IP address of MFU’s virtual host has been black-holed by several Australian networks; there is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that this is a result of some sort of government request or order. It is possible that MFU and 1200 other sites that use that IP address are the victims of a block that was put in place for some other reason. Further technical analysis and commentary is in our blog post.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Australian Networks Block Community University Website
Roku Finally Gets a 2D Menu System
DeviceGuru writes “Many of us have griped for years about Roku’s retro one-dimensional user interface. Finally, in conjunction with the release of the new Roku 3 model, the Linux-based media streaming player is getting a two-dimensional facelift, making it quicker and easier to access favorite channels and find new ones. Current Roku users, who will now begin suffering from UI-envy, will be glad to learn that Roku plans to push out a firmware update next month to many earlier models, including the Roku LT, Roku HD (model 2500R), Roku 2 HD, Roku 2 XD, Roku 2 XS, and Roku Streaming Stick. A short demo of the new 2D Roku menu system is available in this YouTube video.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Seagate’s New SSHD Hybrids Have Dual-Mode Flash Caches
crookedvulture writes “Seagate’s has revealed its next-generation hybrid drives, and for the first time, there’s a 3.5″ desktop model in the mix. The new family of so-called SSHDs includes standard and slim notebook variants with 500GB and 1TB capacities, plus 1TB and 2TB desktop versions. All of them combine mechanical platters with 8GB of NAND in a dual-mode SLC/MLC configuration. The SLC component is largely reserved to cache host writes, while the MLC portion is filled with frequently accessed data to speed read performance. Despite MLC NAND’s lower write endurance, Seagate claims the SSHDs have more than enough headroom to last at least five years with typical client workloads.
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Seagate’s New SSHD Hybrids Have Dual-Mode Flash Caches
Editorial In ACM On Open Access Publishing In Computer Science
call -151 writes “An editorial appearing in the ACM notices complains about the effects of the Elsevier boycott particularly with respect to academics refusing to do unpaid review for for-profit journals, particularly the extortionate Elsevier journals. Mathematician Tim Gowers’s post gave energy to this about a year ago and recently he reflected on progress in several directions, including developing new arXIv overlay journals. Not disclosed in the ACM editorial is that the author serves on three Elsevier editorial boards; I take it that his complaining about the difficulty of finding referees is an indication that the boycott is having some good effect.
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Editorial In ACM On Open Access Publishing In Computer Science
NASA Planes Fly Over Bay Area To Measure Air Pollution Levels
An anonymous reader writes “NASA is trying to measure the air pollution by flying a plane at various altitudes over the bay area. The tests are a part of a larger effort led by the DISCOVER-AQ campaign — a multi-year program launched across the United States in 2011 by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. DISCOVER-AQ stands for Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality. NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., is the lead center for the mission.” Read more of this story at Slashdot
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NASA Planes Fly Over Bay Area To Measure Air Pollution Levels
How Facebook Will Power Graph Search
Nerval’s Lobster writes “Last week, Facebook announced Graph Search, a system for searching the social network’s vast collection of users, photos, and ‘Liked’ interests. But how will Facebook power it? The Disaggregated Rack, which will separate compute, RAM, storage, and caching functions in order to remain flexible in the face of Graph Search’s changing needs. By breaking up resources and scaling them independently of each other, Facebook can scale without needing to constantly open up new servers and upgrade new hardware.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Company Turns Your Android Smartphone Into a Game Console
MojoKid writes “The time we spend making calls on smartphones pales in comparison to the other activities we use it for, like surfing the web, logging into Facebook, streaming music and video, and of course playing games. It’s that latter functionality that a startup called Green Throttle wants to tap into, and given the horsepower of today’s smartphones, it makes a lot of sense. The company envisions harnessing the power of today’s well-equipped Android smartphones and tablets in order to play console-like games on your HDTV. Right now the concept is limited to select devices — Google Nexus, Samsung Galaxy S II and S III, HTC One X, Kindle Fire HD, and Asus Transformer — though the company says it’s adding to the list quickly
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Company Turns Your Android Smartphone Into a Game Console
Google Releases Raw Election Polling Results
An anonymous reader writes “Last week, Nate Silver ranked Google Consumer Surveys as one of the most accurate polling firms of the 2012 US election. This week, Google has released the raw data that went into its election-day prediction, and is running a contest for interesting visualizations of that data. They provide a few examples of their own, including a WebGL globe view.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Releases Raw Election Polling Results
Meg Whitman Says HP Was Defrauded By Autonomy; HP Stock Plunges
McGruber writes “CNBC is reporting that Meg Whitman claims HP was defrauded in its purchase of Autonomy. ‘We believed there is a willful effort on the part of certain members of Autonomy management to mislead shareholders when Autonomy was a publicly traded company, and to mislead potential buyers including HP,’ Whitman said. ‘We stand by the forensic review that we’ve seen,’ she added. I wish her the same level of success I had when I filed an eBay claim.” Also covered at SlashBI, which names the write-down damage: $8.8 billion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Meg Whitman Says HP Was Defrauded By Autonomy; HP Stock Plunges
Celebrities turn to theAudience to stealth manage their social media accounts
Since the inception of social media, it has completely changed the way in which celebrities interact with their fans. The New York Times spoke with founder Oliver Luckett of theAudience, a rising company that stealth manages social media accounts on behalf of celebrities like Charlize Theron, Hugh Jackman, and Usher. The company claims to approve all postings with celebrities first, and aims to post “great content” at the optimal time to capture the attention of millions. While the service isn’t without controversy — studios don’t think that they should have to pay actors who use the service more just to have access to their fans — others, like British comedian Russel Brand say that they couldn’t manage their social media identities… Continue reading…
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Celebrities turn to theAudience to stealth manage their social media accounts
A Year After Thailand Flooding, Hard Drive Prices Remain High
crookedvulture writes “Last October, Thailand was hit by massive flooding that put much of the world’s hard drive industry under water. Production slowed to a crawl as drive makers and their suppliers mopped up the damage, and prices predictably skyrocketed. One year later, production has rebounded, with the industry expected to ship more drives in 2012 than it did in 2011. For the most part, though, hard drive prices haven’t returned to pre-flood levels. Although 2.5″ notebook drives are a little cheaper now than before the flood, the average price of 3.5″ desktop drives is up 35% from a year ago
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A Year After Thailand Flooding, Hard Drive Prices Remain High
HP Becomes a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation
who_stole_my_kidneys writes in about how HP has gained a seat on the Linux Foundation’s board of directors. “Snagging a first-class upgrade might empty out the contents of your wallet, but be glad you’re not trying to buy your way to the Linux Foundation’s top table. With a strategic investment of $500,000, Hewlett Packard has just become a platinum member of the body, alongside companies like Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. In exchange for all that cash, HP gets a seat on the Foundation’s board of directors and will have a say in how to advance the foundation’s aims — and hopefully give Open webOS a gentle push, too.” Read more of this story at Slashdot
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HP Becomes a Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation
Federal Judge Approves Warrantless, Covert Video Surveillance
Penurious Penguin writes “Your curtilage may be your castle, but ‘open fields’ are open game for law-enforcement and surveillance technology. Whether ‘No Trespassing’ signs are present or not, your private property is public for the law, with or without a warrant. What the police cannot do, their cameras can — without warrant or court oversight. An article at CNET recounts a case involving the DEA, a federal judge, and two defendants (since charged) who were subjected to video surveillance on private property without a warrant. Presumably, the 4th Amendment suffers an obscure form of agoraphobia further elucidated in the article.” Read more of this story at Slashdot
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Federal Judge Approves Warrantless, Covert Video Surveillance
3-D Model Support Comes To MediaGoblin
paroneayea writes “MediaGoblin and LulzBot have teamed up to bring 3-D model support to MediaGoblin! The announcement shows off a live demo of the new feature… it uses Blender on the backend to render stills and thingiview.js to show realtime WebGL previews. This means MediaGoblin is becoming more useful for 3-D artists and people interested in 3-D printing, especially those looking for a free-as-in-freedom alternative to Thingiverse.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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3-D Model Support Comes To MediaGoblin