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Submission + - Is Leadership Overvalued?

Submitted by gspec
gspec writes: I am an engineer with about 14 years experience in the industry. Lately I have been interviewing with a few companies hoping to land a better position. Almost in all those interviews, I was asked these types of question "Have you been a leader in a project?" or "Why after these many years, you are not in a management? Are you lack of leadership skills?" etc. Sometimes these questions discourage me and make me feel like an underachiever.
An article from Peter M. (http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474976728328) talked exactly about this, and I agree with him. I think in this modern society, especially in the US, we overvalue the leaders and undervalue the followers to the point that we forget that leaders cannot do any good if they do not have good followers.

Submission + - Google's Second Generation Nexus 7 Rips Through Latest Benchmarks (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Google's second gen Nexus 7 tablet is a worthy successor to the original, boasting an improved design both internally and externally. It's thinner and lighter, has a faster Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC, 2GB of RAM, a higher resolution 1920X1200 display and it's running the latest Android 4.3 Jelly Bean release. The display alone was a nice upgrade in a 7-inch slate that retails for well under $300. However, it turns out the new Nexus 7 is also one of the fastest tablets out there right now, with benchmark numbers that best some of the top tablets on the market, especially in graphics and gaming. From a price/performance standpoint, Google's second generation Nexus 7 seems to be the tablet to beat right now.

Submission + - Deal done with Henrietta Lacks' family to publish HeLa cell line genome data (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, has brokered a deal with the family of Henrietta Lacks to release the genetic sequence of the HeLa cell line to researchers. The HeLa cell line was established in 1951 from a biopsy of a cervical tumour taken from Henrietta Lacks, a working-class African-American woman living near Baltimore. The cells were taken without the knowledge or permission of her or her family, and they became the first human cells to grow well in a lab. They contributed to the development of a polio vaccine, the discovery of human telomerase and countless other advances.
Controversy erupted earlier this year after researchers published the sequence without the permission of the Lacks family. In a Q&A with the journal Nature, Collins explains how the deal was reached.

Submission + - Why More Data and Simple Algorithms Beat Complex Analytics Models (data-informed.com)

Submitted by MGoldbergatDI
MGoldbergatDI writes: There is a debate going on, and many experienced statisticians argue that the secret to taming your big data problems is by embracing the size of your detail data, rather than the complexity of your models. Dozens of articles have been written detailing how more data beats better algorithms. But very few address why this approach yields the greatest return. In this article, Garrett Wu, a former technical lead at Google's personalized recommendations team explains that having more data allows the “data to speak for itself,” instead of relying on unproven assumptions and weak correlations.

Submission + - Darling, a Wine-like emulator to run Mac OSX apps on Linux (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Lubo Doleel of the Chez Republic has created an app called Darling, a Wine like emulator for OS X. The name Darling comes from Darvin (Apple’s open source operating system) and Linux. I don’t know where the G came from, may be from GNU to keep RMS happy :-) Which Mac OSX apps would you like to run under GNULinux?

Submission + - About Those Startling Government Phone Alerts That You Never Signed Up For (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the last 24 hours, Californians have become the latest group to discover the government’s new mobile phone emergency alert system. It could have been a groundbreaking demonstration of how technology can be used to assist in public safety. Instead, we have yet another case study showing what happens when good government intentions meet poor design and execution.

Submission + - Extreme Ultraviolet Chip Manufacturing Process Technology Closer to Reality (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the greatest obstacles standing between chip manufacturers and the pursuit of smaller, faster, processors is the lack of a proper light source. Current chips are etched using a deep ultraviolet wavelength of 193nm, but at a 28nm semiconductor process geometry, we've reached the limits of what a 193nm wavelength is small enough to etch. Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) has been pegged as the most likely replacement for current 193nm technology, but repeated problems with ramping EUV have left it stalled on the runway. Now, for the first time, foundry technology developer ASML, which made headlines last year by partnering more closely with Intel and TSMC, believes it has cleared some of the hurdles between it and widespread EUV commercialization. The company predicts EUV technology could be ready for ramp by 2015. Two problems have stymied EUV deployment thus far. The first is the strength of the light source. Generating EUV at the intensities required for mass production can require as much as an order of magnitude more input power than conventional lithography. Second, there's the issue of exposure time. The two are linked — a higher-power system can etch wafers more quickly, but the power requirements could edge into the kilowatt range for each piece of equipment. The NXE:3300, which ASML is shipping this year, will be capable of hitting 125 wafers per hour, once the company boosts the light source up to 250W. That boost is still off in the future. Current NXE:3300 machines are targeting 80W by the end of the year.
Biotech

Submission + - Regulators discover suspect gene in GMO crops (independentsciencenews.org)

Submitted by opencity
opencity writes: Regulators in the EU have discovered a potentially troubling gene in 54 of the 86 transgenic events (unique insertions of foreign DNA) commercialized to-date in the United States. How troubling is this from a technical standpoint? Should the plantings be revoked or studied more? As GMO inflames passions on both sides in the wider world here's a submission to slashdot where cooler heads discuss such things rationally.
NASA

Submission + - Company set to blast squadron of tiny satellites into space to mine asteroids (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "new company intends by 2015 to send a fleet of tiny satellites, known as cubesats into near-Earth space to mine passing asteroids for high-value metals. Deep Space Industries asteroid mining proposal begins in 2015 when the company plans to send out a squadron of 55lb cubesats called Fireflies that will explore near-Earth space for two to six months looking for target asteroids"
Businesses

Submission + - Microsoft announces release date for the most expensive tablet ever! (foxnews.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: FoxNews has the news (really!) that the Microsoft has announced that its Intel-powered Surface Windows 8 Pro will go on sale on February 9, 2013 in the U.S. and Canada.

FoxNews helpfully points out that you could get the best iPad money can buy for $829, the one 64GB of storage space and LTE connectivity.... or you could spend $70 more and get Microsoft’s Surface Pro — which, by the way, doesn’t even include the company’s slick new keyboard cover (that costs another $129.99).
Games

Submission + - Henk Rogers Looks to Social Games for World Peace (theepochtimes.com)

Submitted by jjp9999
jjp9999 writes: Henk Rogers, the publisher who brought Tetris to the world, and who created Japan's first RPG, Black Onyx, has another trick up his sleeve. Facing with controversy around whether video games are a source of real-world violence, Rogers is working out the concepts for a new type of game he belies can foster peace, solve real-world conflicts, and help people overcome social differences. To do this, he is looking at what brings people closer together, and what pushes people apart; and he believes that the key to creating such a project will be eliminating isolation in an online world. “Society, even though we are pushing seven or eight billion people in the world, we’re a society that isolates people, and I think that’s kind of creepy,” Rogers told The Epoch Times. “Let’s just put the isolated people together and let them be friends. Technology exists to do that, but somehow, technologically we haven’t done that.”
KDE

Submission + - The Road to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2 (vizzzion.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "KDE’s Next Generation user interfaces will run on top of Qt5, on Linux, they will run atop Wayland or Xorg as display server. The user interfaces move away from widget-based X11 rendering to OpenGL. Monolithic libraries are being split up, interdependencies removed and portability and dependencies cut by stronger modularization.

For users, this means higher quality graphics, more organic user interfaces and availability of applications on a wider range of devices.
Developers will find an extensive archive of high-quality, libraries and solutions on top of Qt. Complex problems and a high-level of integration between apps and the workspace allow easy creation of portable, high-quality applications.

The projects to achieve this goal are KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2. In this article, you’ll learn about the reasons for this migration and the status of the individual steps to be taken."
Privacy

Submission + - Got A Wi-Fi-Enabled Phone? Stores Are Tracking You (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Call it Google Analytics for physical storefronts: if you've got a phone with wi-fi, stores can detect your MAC address and track your comings and goings, determining which aisles you go to and whether you're a repeat customer. The creator of one of the most popular tracking software packages says that the addresses are hashed and not personally identifiable, but it might make you think twice about leaving your phone on when you head to the mall."

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I think there's a world market for about five computers. -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943

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