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Education

Submission + - The Case For The Blue Collar Coder 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: U.S. tech talent shortage discussions tend to focus on getting more young people to go to college to become CS grads. Nothing wrong with that, writes Anil Dash, but let's not forget about education which teaches mid-level programming as a skilled trade, suitable for apprenticeship and advancement in a way that parallels traditional trade skills like HVAC or welding. Dash encourages less of a focus on 'the next Zuckerberg' in favor of encouraging solid middle-class tech jobs that are primarily focused on creating and maintaining tech infrastructure in non-tech companies. Dash also suggests 'changing the conversation about recruiting technologists from the existing narrow priesthood of highly-skilled experts constantly chasing new technologies to productive workers getting the most out of widely-deployed platforms and frameworks.'
Biotech

Submission + - IBM Microscope Can See 100 Times Smaller Than An Atom (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "Building on their impressive microscopy work over the last few years, a team from IBM has refined their method to precisely measure the structural details of a single molecule. With their technique, they managed to measure very subtle differences in the distribution of electrons within the molecule’s bonds. How subtle? We’re talking 3 picometers or 0.000000000003 meters. That’s one-hundredth the diameter of an atom!"

Submission + - Czech Man Becomes the First Person in the World to Live With No Heart or Pulse 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 37-year-old man from Czech Republic recently became the first man to live without a heart for six months. Jakub Halik, a former firefighter lived without a pulse for six months after undergoing pioneering surgery in April when doctors removed his heart and replaced it with mechanical pumps.
Facebook

Submission + - Man arrested for offensive joke posted on Facebook (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tasteless joke posted on Facebook sees man arrested in the UK under section 127 of the Communications Act for ending a public electronic communication which is 'grossly offensive'.
Matthew Wood, 20, of Eaves Lane, Chorley, UK will appear before Chorley Magistrates' Court on Monday.
Education

Submission + - ask slashdot: What were you taught about computers in High School?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What /was/ taught to you about computers in High School? Computer use and computer science in schools are regular headlines, but what "normal" do we compare it to?

It's not a shared reference. A special class with Commodore PETs was set up just /after/ I graduated, and I'm only starting to grey. Everybody younger has had progressive levels of exposure. What was "normal" for our 40, 30, and 20 year olds here? And how well did it work for you, and your classmates?
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Automated DMCA Takedown Notices Request Censorship of Legitimate Sites (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
Techmeology
Techmeology writes: "Microsoft has sent automated DMCA notices to Google demanding the removal of several legitimate URLs from its search results that it claims were facilitating the distribution if illegal copies of Windows 8, including links to BBC news articles, Wikipedia pages, US government websites, and even Bing! The erroneous DMCA notices are being sent automatically by rights holders, who are increasingly using such techniques."

Submission + - Supreme Court to decide if Monsanto GMO patents are valid (wsj.com) 2

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear an Indiana farmer's appeal that challenges the scope of Monsanto Co.'s patent rights on its Roundup Ready seeds.

Mr. Bowman bought and planted "commodity seeds" from a grain elevator. Those soybean seeds were a mix and included some that contained Monsanto's technology.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case over the objections of the Obama administration, which had urged the justices to leave the lower court rulings in place.

Submission + - Entire Cities in World of Warcraft Dead, Hack Suspected (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Entire cities in the World of Warcraft have been destroyed with no one spared, not even the NPCs. About 13:00 GMT, forums on WOW started getting the first comments from users regarding player and NPCs dying on the Ragnaros-EU realm in Orgrimmar. Users of the online game started reporting that Draenor had a similar sight to offer. Some of the other realms where this was reported include Tarren Mill, Twisting Nether and others.
Power

Submission + - National Ignition Facility Fails to Ignite Support in Congress

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For more than 50 years, physicists have been eager to achieve controlled fusion, an elusive goal that could potentially offer a boundless and inexpensive source of energy. Now Bill Sweet writes in IEEE Spectrum that the National Ignition Facility (NIF), now five billion dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule, deserves to be recognized as perhaps the biggest and fattest white elephant of all time. With the total tab for NIF now running to an estimated $7 billion, the laboratory has been pulling out all the stops to claim success is just around the corner. “We didn’t achieve the goal,” said Donald L. Cook, an official at the National Nuclear Security Administration who oversees the laser project but rather than predicting when it might succeed, he added in an interview, “we’re going to settle into a serious investigation” of what caused the unforeseen snags. On one hand, the laser’s defenders point out, hard science is by definition risky, and no serious progress is possible without occasional failures. On the other, federal science initiatives seldom disappoint on such a gargantuan scale, and the setback comes in an era of tough fiscal choices and skepticism about science among some lawmakers. "If the main goal is to achieve a power source that could replace fossil fuels, we suspect the money would be better spent on renewable sources of energy that are likely to be cheaper and quicker to put into wide use" editorializes the NY Times. "Congress will need to look hard at whether these “stockpile stewardship” and long-term energy goals can be pursued on a smaller budget.""
Hardware

Submission + - Parallella: an open multi-core CPU architecture (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by thrae
thrae writes: Adapteva has just released the architecture and software reference manuals for their many-core Epiphany processors. Adapteva's goal is to bring massively parallel programming to the masses with a sub-$100 16-core system and a sub-$200 64-core system. The architecture has advantages over GPUs in terms of future scaling and ease of use. Adapteva is planning to make the products open source. Ars Technica has a nice overview of the project.
Education

Submission + - Free Networking Class from Stanford (stanford.edu)

Submitted by
philip.levis
philip.levis writes: "Nick McKeown and I are offering a free, online class on computer networking. We're professors of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford and are also co-teaching Stanford's networking course this quarter.

The free, online class will run about 6 weeks and is intended to be accessible to people who don't program: the prerequisites are an understanding of probability, bits and bytes, and how computers lay out memory. Given how important the Internet is, we think a more accessible course on the principles and practice of computer networks could be a very valuable educational resource. I'm sure many Slashdot readers will already know much of what we'll cover, but for those who don't, here's an opportunity to learn!"
Businesses

Submission + - They Work Long Hours, But What About Results?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: HBS lecturer Robert C. Pozen says it's high time for management to stop emphasizing hours over results. By viewing those employees who come in over the weekend or stay late in the evening as more 'committed' and 'dedicated' to their work, as a UC Davis study showed, managers create a perverse incentive to not be efficient and get work done during normal business hours. 'It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace,' writes Pozen. 'Focusing on results rather than hours will help you accomplish more at work and leave more time for the rest of your life.'
Space

Submission + - Democratize Astronomy Now

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Hakeem Oluseyi, an astronomer at the Florida Institute of Technology and president of the African Astronomical Society, says his goal is to put one research telescope in every country, starting with African and Southern Hemisphere nations because there is now an amazing opportunity for small telescopes to discover and characterize new planetary systems, as well as measure the structure of the Milky Way. "Astronomers are no longer looking at high-definition pictures but at HD movies, scanning for objects that change and for transient ones," says Oluseyi. "A 4-inch telescope was used to discover the first exoplanet by the transit method, where you watch the brightness vary." Small telescopes capable to doing real science are a lot cheaper than people think. A 1-meter telescope costs $300,000 but reduce the size by 60 percent, and it falls to just $30,000. For example the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) uses hardware costing less than $75,000 to look at millions of very bright stars at once, over broad sections of sky, and at low resolution to see if the starlight dims just a little — an indication that a planet has crossed in front of the star. The KELT team has already discovered the existence of a very unusual faraway planet — KELT-1b, a super hot, super dense ball of metallic hydrogen so massive that it may better be described as a 'failed star' and located so close to its star that it whips through an entire "yearly" orbit in a little over a day. "We're going to crowdsource fund these telescopes. Then we're going to open-source the knowledge needed to complete the science. Last, we're going to combine everyone into a single intellectual community," says Oluseyi. "I guarantee someday soon we'll have a deluge of scientific authors from the developing world like we've never seen before.""
Google

Submission + - Microsoft Asks Google to Takedown BBC, TechCrunch, CNN, US Gov, Wikipedia URLs (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Recent Microsoft DMCA takedown request to Google has targeted some of the most well-known sites in the cyberspace – BBC, TechCrunch, Wikepedia and HuffPo among others. Microsoft has sent out the take down requests stating that the URLs are involved in illegal distribution of its Windows 8 Beta operating system. The list of URLs contain 4 from BBC, 4 from Wikipedia, 1 each from HuffPo, TechCrunch, CCN, Washington post, Science Direct, and CBSlocal. None of the URLs listed for these sites and surprisingly half of the URLs listed under the section – “WINDOWS 8 BETA” of DMCA complaint actually don’t have anything to do with Windows 8 at all.
Intel

Submission + - Intel, Samsung Spar Over Tizen OS (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung and Intel are two of the contributors to the open-source Tizen Linux software platform for mobile devices, but now they are at ends with each other. An Intel Linux developer has accused Samsung of clobbering others with Tizen. The bout comes about following a large, secretive code drop where they replaced the modern Bootchart utility with an old Java-based version that is several years out of date.
Input Devices

Submission + - Barcodes are 60 years old today (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Sunday the 7 October is the 60th anniversary of the barcode patent, filed in the US in 1952. However the distinctive black-and-white stripes did not make their first appearance in an American shop until 1974 — because the laser technology used to read them did not exist.
Education

Submission + - U.S. House Science Committee Member calls Evolution a lie from the "Pit of Hell" (bostonherald.com) 2

Submitted by badford
badford writes: Representative Paul Broun (Georgia Republican) said that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of hell" meant to convince people that they do not need a savior. It would not be quite as shocking if Broun did not sit on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. What impact could this have on policy? What impact could this have on STEM education not just in Georgia but all over the U.S.?

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