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Comment Re:Only 1 sensible answer to interview brainteaser (Score 3, Interesting) 305

by Araes (#44079221) Attached to: Google Respins Its Hiring Process For World Class Employees

The days when a back-of-the envelope calculation is enough are long gone (and probably never existed int he real world anyway).

Very much disagree on the lack of back-of-the-envelope calculations. von Braun and co. solved some of the hardest problems of Satern V development with paper napkins. I use quick calculations and engineering judgement all the time, and hire folks who are good at them too. In fact, we often spend far too much effort doing excessive studies when a few minutes of napkin math would give you the 80% answer. However, being able to figure out brain teasers and being able to quickly perform sound engineering judgements in a real work environment are two very different things.

Submission + - Duke Grad Student Secretly Lived In a Van to Escape Loan Debt

Submitted by sosboknabil87
sosboknabil87 writes: By the time Ken Ilgunas was wrapping up his last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Buffalo in 2005, he had no idea what kind of debt hole he'd dug himself into.

He had majored in the least marketable fields of study possible — English and History — and had zero job prospects after getting turned down for no fewer than 25 paid internships.

"That was a wake-up call," he told Business Insider. "I had this huge $32,000 student debt and at the time I was pushing carts at Home Depot, making $8 an hour. I was just getting kind of frantic."

Back then, student loans had yet to become the front page news they are today. Ilgunas could have simply deferred his loans or declared forbearance. He also could have asked his parents (who were more than willing to help) for a leg up. He could have thrown up his hands and gone to grad school until the job market bounced back.

Instead, he moved to Alaska and spent two years paying back every dime. And when he enrolled at Duke University for graduate school later, he lived out of his van to be sure he wouldn't have to take out loans again. more => Duke Grad Student Secretly Lived In a Van to Escape Loan Debt

regards
Blog Remaja & Pakar SEO

Comment Use Standard Channels but for a Large # of Pilots (Score 3, Interesting) 128

Internet may give you a skewed audience, but there's nothing saying you couldn't just create a large base set of pilots, show all the pilots during a set of "Preview Weeks!" at the beginning of the year, or over the summer, and then pick up those ones that poll well or reasonably for the fall semester.

Submission + - Europe needs genetically engineered crops, scientists say (phys.org)

Submitted by Dorianny
Dorianny writes: "Failing such a change, ultimately the EU will become almost entirely dependent on the outside world for food and feed and scientific progress, ironically because the outside world has embraced the technology which is so unpopular in Europe, realizing this is the only way to achieve sustainable agriculture," said Paul Christou of the University of Lleida-Agrotecnio Center and Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats in Spain.

Submission + - Hard Food Better for Your Teeth (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: "Noncarious cervical lesions," or wedge-shaped divots at the gum line, are found in up to 85% of dental patients. Although not always troublesome, the lesions can be unsightly and painful and can set the stage for tooth decay. Based on archaeological evidence, this type of lesion is a uniquely modern problem: Human teeth from prehistoric and preindustrial times rarely show such damage. While some experts blame erosion from cola drinking or even zealous tooth brushing, others feel that modern teeth simply don't get the workout that they were designed for. Researchers tested the latter theory by creating casts of 19th century molars, which they put through a variety of computer-simulated chewing scenarios. The study confirms the idea that the crunchier, less refined diet of earlier times—including more whole foods, nuts, seeds, and general grit— was actually easier on the teeth and may have even influenced the way human teeth evolved.

Submission + - Harvard Medical School to Shutter Primate Research Center (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Citing an increasingly bleak outlook for federal research funding, Harvard Medical School is shutting down its major primate center, which has recently experienced the departure of several key scientists and an investigation into its handling of animals. In the announcement, which surprised many primate researchers, the school said it will not seek to renew the New England Primate Research Center's (NEPRC's) 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will "wind down operations" at the center in Southborough, Massachusetts, over the next 2 years. The center, which has a nearly 50-year history, had done groundbreaking work on an AIDS vaccine and developed animal models for diseases such as Parkinson's, among other accomplishments.

Submission + - Moore's Law and the Origin of Life 1

Submitted by DoctorBit
DoctorBit writes: MIT Technology Review is running a story about an arXiv paper in which geneticists Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon propose that life as we know it originated 9.7 billion years ago.

The researchers estimated the genetic complexity of phyla in the paleontological record by counting the number of non-redundant functional nucleotides in typical genomes of modern day descendants of each phylum. When plotting genetic complexity against time, the researchers found that genetic complexity increases exponentially, just as with Moore's law, but with a doubling rate of about once every 376 million years.

Extrapolating backwards, the researchers estimate that life began about 4 billion years after the universe formed and evolved the first bacteria just before the earth was formed. One might image that the supernova debris that formed the early solar system could have included bacteria-bearing chunks of rock from doomed planets circling supernova progenitor stars. If true, this retro-prediction has some interesting consequences in partly resolving the Fermi Paradox.

Another interesting consequence for those attempting to recreate life's origins in a lab: bacteria may have evolved under conditions very different from those on earth.

Submission + - Zuckerberg And A Team Of Tech All-Stars Launch Political Advocacy Group FWD.us (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Techcrunch
"Leaders from Facebook, Google, and other tech giants today announced they’re banding together to form a political advocacy group called FWD.us, designed to promote policies that will keep the American workforce competitive."

The group's goal is to ease "immigration for foreign talent, enticing native entrepreneurs to stay in the country, and improving education, the American economy and people will prosper."

Submission + - Brain Signature Reveals Our Level of Pain (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: What's your pain level on a scale of 1 to 10? Soon, doctors may not need to ask you that question, thanks to a new study. Researchers have isolated a neural signal in the brain that gives a consistent a reliable indication of how much pain we're in. The finding could hold the key to better diagnosis and treatment of all kinds of pain in the future.

Submission + - 3D DRAM Spec Published (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: The three largest memory makers announced the final specifications for three-dimensional DRAM, which is aimed at increasing performance for networking and high performance computing markets. Micron, Samsung and Hynix are leading the technology development efforts backed by the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMC). The Hybrid Memory Cube will stack multiple volatile memory dies on top of a DRAM controller. The result is a DRAM chip that has an aggregate bandwidth of 160GB/s, 15 times more throughput as standard DRAMs, while also reducing power by 70%. "Basically, the beauty of it is that it gets rid of all the issues that were keeping DDR3 and DDR4 from going as fast as they could," said Jim Handy, director of research firm Objective Analysis. The first versions of the Hybrid Memory Cube, due out in the second half of 2013, will deliver 2GB and 4GB of memory.

Submission + - An interview with Alan Kay (time.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Over at TIME.com, we've published David Greelish's interview with Alan Kay, the famously quotable visionary whose Dynabook proposal has provided much of the inspiration for advances in mobile computing for over 40 years now. Kay talks about his work, laments that the computer has failed to live up to its potential as an educational tool, and says that the iPad betrays the vision that he and others created at Xerox PARC and elsewhere in the 1970s.

Submission + - How Tim O'Reilly's "Open Source" Is Undermining The Internet--and Society (thebaffler.com)

Submitted by diavolomaestro
diavolomaestro writes: Evgeny Morozov has penned a very long attack on tech publisher Tim O'Reilly in the online Baffler magazine. "The Meme Hustler" accuses O'Reilly of undermining the free software movement with his vaguer, more corporate-friendly "open source" initiative, and extending the metaphor into countless areas where it is less meaningful, like Open Government. Similarly, O'Reilly has aggressively promoted his Web 2.0 buzzword across the Internet and in every segment of business and society, promising that simple collaboration tools will transform outmoded institutions. Morozov argues that these viral techniques are all pushing the Randian notion that the market is the only mechanism for organizing society--online, or in real life. O'Reilly's "government as a platform" is premised on the "naive belief that big data, harnessed through collective intelligence, would allow us to get at the right answer to every problem, making both representation and deliberation unnecessary." The piece is long, but worthwhile reading, and Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman play prominent roles. Is Morozov-- a noted Web pessimist-- unduly critical of the participation society, or is O'Reilly really the bullshit peddler that Morozov claims?

Submission + - New 'Walking' Antarctic Base Keeps Footloose (renewcanada.net)

Submitted by avishere
avishere writes: This is some pretty cool architectural news. After an international competition to redesign a research base in Antarctica whose support stilts were perpetually trapped in ice, Hugh Broughton Architects solved the problem by building a walking city. The Halley VI Antarctic Research Station, which opened this February, is on hydraulically elevated modules that respond to annually rising snow levels.

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