I completely agree. In WWII, american scientists trained pigeons to steer bombs toward targets. One or more pigeons would actually be placed in a bomb and peck on a clear disc that would actuate the bombs fins. Training was fairly straight forward and their accuracy was better than anything else available at the time, including radar (although radar was still fairly new). The project was ultimately disbanded because the military wasn't interested.

If the unemployment rate is above historical rates for Tech jobs, that would suggest there are more workers than jobs to fill. Even if demand for tech workers is high (you suggest it's high by calling it 'so important'), wages should be flat if the supply of workers is meeting that demand. It also makes sense given the availability of substitutes (i.e., out sourcing).

Newsflash: Rest of Earth's population chooses 'suicide' mission at home.

Actually, she was forcibly quarantined twice. The first time was because she was spreading it without her knowledge. After at least a year, she agreed not to work as a cook and they let her go. A few years later, there was an outbreak of Typhoid in a hospital and when investigators arrived, they found Mary working in the kitchen. This time they forcibly quarantined her because she knowingly put others at risk. At the same time, there were a number of individuals in the New York area who were also showed no outward symptoms but were nonetheless infecting others. These individuals were not similarly incarcerated. Hence, in retrospect, incarcerating Typhoid Mary was more 'security theatre' than anything else. It was a visible but largely ineffective solution to a bigger problem.

Perhaps this could be used on the receiving side of a "wireless" power system for spacecraft. A ship could have graphene panels pointed toward Earth where lasers, microwaves, or other forms of transmitted energy could provide power.

He probably could have just turned the game around and been fine. So, secret shoppers could tell him when they catch an employee being "good" (defined as not doing any of those things) and he puts their name in a drawing. At the end of the week/month/quarter, employees who have consistently been "good" will have more opportunities to win the drawing equal to the cash prize of $10/week.

I've played around with Google's OCR framework (tesseract) and it is far from perfect. So, this isn't really a surprise.

You're totally on the mark, but you could take the limitation you mention and turn it into a better test. For example, instead of just asking, "what is the latency to transmit a 200MB file across 84 miles?" You could ask, "What is the relationship between message size and latency for pigeons and copper wire (or, whatever they're using) over 84 miles?" This latter test would involve transmitting files of several different sizes.

I'm betting that, at some point, the curve for pigeons will either asymptote or turn over (e.g., when the mass of 32GB microSD cards begins to exceed the flight capacity of the bird).

That's not research, that is extrapolation and interpretation (there's actually an important difference).

A touch screen is probably your best bet -- a good option would be a back-illuminated multi-touch setup so you can use thick acrylic or glass (unlikely to be broken or damaged by your toddler). If you want to go even younger, research with infants often make use to two that can be readily measures by machines: eye-gaze and suckling (on a pacifier with a sensor). Short of putting together some kind of home-brew eye-tracker, I'd suggesting hacking a pressure sensor into a pacifier. Even with that, I bet you could easily train different patterns of suckling (e.g., one pattern produces skips to the next song on the playlist, another pattern skips to the next artist).

The data might reflect something like "public interest." Any gentoo user knows that to find information related to gentoo, they should go to gentoo.org or #gentoo or the gentoo-wiki. Similar parallels can probably be drawn for debian and ubuntu. So, the data probably do not reflect the number of people using those distros but people seeking more information about them who probably not already users.

Maybe now with a billion samples, we can start training people how to recognize it.

So, basically it's a PS3 without the games and support for codecs that were published after 1992? Sweet!

Honestly, I don't get PITA's position. It's no longer part of an animal because...? Maybe because it doesn't have nerve cells that fire given "painful" stimulation? What if it does? Who's going to care about the poor little piece of meat that has to exercise all day long and experience the burn of its own lactic acid until some fat 'Merican orders it super-sized? Or maybe it's not part of an animal because there's no "brain" for the signals to reach? If that's the case, we should genetically construct brainless cows and have them running off arduinos instead. Does someone have a script for chewing I can download? But, surely someone would protest that. If only those who prefer PIC over ATMEL.