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Submission + - More on the Disposable Tech Worker (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: At a press conference this week, in response to a question by a Science Careers reporter, Scott Corley, the Executive Director of immigration-reform group Compete America, argued that retraining workers doesn't make sense for IT companies. For the company, he argued, H-1B guest workers are a much better choice. "It's not easy to retrain people," Corley said. "The further you get away from your education the less knowledge you have of the new technologies, and technology is always moving forward."

Submission + - "STEM Shortage" Debate Reveals Fundamental Disagreements, Some Common Ground (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: Among the usual arguments over whether a shortage (or a glut) exists of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers, some illuminating statements were made. Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Information Foundation (ITIF), seemed to imply that STEM-shortage claim is at least in part a rhetorical device aimed at encouraging U.S. educational reform. That's an angle I hadn't seen before. There is also a clear tendency on the part of the pro-shortage crowd to lump all fields together, whereas those who don't see a generalized shortage insist on distinguishing among fields.

Submission + - Sydney Brenner: How to Discourage Great Discoveries (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sydney Brenner equates grad school in the U.S. to slavery, and the postdoc to indentured servitude, and suggests that our system of academic research could hardly be designed more effectively--if the goal is to cripple innovation.

Comment Not factual (Score 1) 153

Safety is about learning to do things with good technique. Surgeons learn good sterile technique--and many operations are improvisational. Precisely the same thing: If you know what you're doing, you can skillfully and safely handle the unexpected. The idea that safety in industry is about filling out forms is also false. Unfortunately it's a tale that many academic scientists repeatedly tell themselves, and it helps reinforce the (lazy) status quot. (I do not mean that people working in academic labs are lazy; as others have pointed out, they work too much. I'm saying that as a culture, academia is lazy about safety and messages like this reinforce that.) In industry, people learn good technique--just like the surgeon. They view safety considerations as a routine part of what they do. If you're a coder, I assume, you annotate your code, or structure it well. (Sorry, it's been decades since I did any significant coding, or had anything to do with it really.) In the lab you use good technique: sterility, controls, safety. It all fits together into the skill set that defines you as a professional and not some brilliant hack.

Submission + - NASA: Hubble telescope catches asteroid death (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA said today that the Hubble Space Telescope snapped what the agency called a never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid in mid-space. The asteroid, designated P/2013 R3 has broken into as many as ten smaller pieces , each with a comet -like tail, that NASA says are drifting away from each other at a leisurely 1.5 kilometers per hour — slower than the speed of a strolling human.

Submission + - Chemistry Students and Postdocs Take Safety Into Their Own Hands (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: It's a scandal: Academic science labs are generally far less safe than labs in industry; one estimate says that people working in academic labs are 11x more likely to die than their industrial counterparts. A group of grad students and postdocs in Minnesota decided to address the issue had-on. With encouragement and funding from DOW, and some leadership from their department chairs, they're in the process of totally remaking their departments' safety cultures.

Submission + - The Postdoc: A Special Kind of Hell (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: In a very funny column, Adam Ruben reviews the disadvantages and, well, the disadvantages of doing a postdoc, noting that "The term "postdoc" refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it's much like the term "bar mitzvah.") So you can be a postdoc, but you can also do a postdoc, which unfortunately isn't as sexual as it sounds."

Submission + - The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Joseph Stromberg writes at the Smithsonian that one afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk," writes Fallon. “I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological." When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own. When he underwent a series of genetic tests, he got more bad news. “I had all these high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy,” he says, such as a variant of the MAO-A gene that has been linked with aggressive behavior. It wasn’t entirely a shock to Fallon, as he’d always been aware that he was someone especially motivated by power and manipulating others. Additionally, his family line included seven alleged murderers, including Lizzie Borden, infamously accused of killing her father and stepmother in 1892. Many of us would hide this discovery and never tell a soul, out of fear or embarrassment of being labeled a psychopath. Perhaps because boldness and disinhibition are noted psychopathic tendencies, Fallon has gone in the opposite direction, telling the world about his finding in a TED Talk, an NPR interview and now a new book published last month, The Psychopath Inside. “Since finding all this out and looking into it, I’ve made an effort to try to change my behavior,” says Fallon. “I’ve more consciously been doing things that are considered ‘the right thing to do,’ and thinking more about other people’s feelings.”

Submission + - Glut in Stolen Identities Forces Price Cut (darkreading.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: The price of a stolen identity has dropped as much as 37 percent in the cybercrime underground: to $25 for a U.S. identity, and $40 for an overseas identity. For $300 or less, you can acquire credentials for a bank account with a balance of $70,000 to $150,000, and $400 is all it takes to get a rival or targeted business knocked offline with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire attack. Meanwhile, ID theft and bank account credentials are getting cheaper because there is just so much inventory (a.k.a. stolen personal information) out there. Bots are cheap, too: 1,000 bots go for $20, and 15,000, for $250.

Submission + - Do Cell Phone Companies Improve Your Service at Contract Time? 1

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: Has anyone else noticed this? After years of dropped calls and failed connections, suddenly your service improves as the end of your contract approaches. Thinking that your provider--in my case AT&T--has finally gotten their act together, you re-up and get that nice new phone. It works great during your trial period--and then it all falls apart again: dropped calls, failed connections.

Am I paranoid, or do the cell phone companies--or maybe it's just AT&T--get better near decision time?

Comment For me, faster (Score 1) 488

by Jim_Austin (#44926311) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Is iOS 7 Slow?
My immediate impression, on my 4S, was that it was much snappier. Also, my voice quality went from unacceptable to great. I realize that's almost certainly a coincidence--something happened on my network at the same time, or something--but that was my experience. As for speed though, no question: My iPhone 4S got faster. Jim

Submission + - They found the God particle--what now? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Jim_Austin
Jim_Austin writes: Teams of hundreds of young scientists--including many grad students and postdocs--staffed the Large Hadron Collider and helped make one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent decades. Now they must compete for just a handful of jobs.

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