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Submission + - WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton was once rejected by both Facebook and Twitter (networkworld.com)

colinneagle writes: WhatsApp was originally founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former Yahoo engineers. What's particularly interesting, if not downright inspirational, is that Acton — himself a former Apple engineer — applied for jobs at both Twitter and Facebook way before WhatsApp became a wildly popular mobile app. Both times he was rejected. In May 2009 he tweeted, "Got denied by Twitter HQ. That's ok. Would have been a long commute." And then in August 2009, he tweeted, "Facebook turned me down. It was a great opportunity to connect with some fantastic people. Looking forward to life's next adventure."

His co-founder, Jan Koum, was also reportedly denied for a job at Facebook as well.

Submission + - Robot Launch 2014: The first global startup competition for robotics is here! (robohub.org)

Sabine Hauert writes: Ready, set, launch! Is your prototype the next breakthrough in home robotics? Or are you developing a smart device, sensor, component or software that will help build the robots of the tomorrow? Robohub is partnering with the tech cluster Silicon Valley Robotics to launch the first global startup competition dedicated to robotics. So show us your stuff!

Submission + - How to protect Earth from asteroid destruction (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: There has been much discussion about how NASA and others could protect Earth from the threat of asteroids catastrophically striking the planet. This month NASA issued a report on the conclusions reached by a group of experts on the best ways to find, track and possibly deflect asteroids headed for Earth. Here we take a look at some of the key findings as well as other asteroid detection projects.

Submission + - Researchers Discover Why Evolution Was Initially Stagnant (scienceinpublic.com.au)

mphall21 writes: Researchers discovered that low oxygen levels were to blame for the evolutionary stagnation of early life. Tasmanian researchers analyzed sea floor rocks and found the early oceans lacked the amount of oxygen and biologically-important elements to support more complex life forms.

“We’ve looked at thousands of samples of the mineral pyrite in rocks that formed in the ancient oceans,” said Geologist Professor Ross Large. “By measuring the levels of certain trace elements in the pyrite... we’ve found that we can tell an accurate story about how much oxygen and nutrients were around billions of years ago.”

Large says his team was trying to understand how mineral deposits form by looking at the oxygen levels of the ancient oceans. However, his team found the technology to look for minerals also told them much about the evolution of life.

The findings will be published in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters' March issue.

Submission + - Are You a Competent Cyborg?

An anonymous reader writes: Beyond your smartphone screen lies an infinitely more interesting world, if only you could get past the myopic app view you're currently bound to. Glen Martin ponders the existential unease lying at the root of the Internet of Things "We're already cyborgs: biological matrices augmented by wirelessly connected silicon arrays of various configurations. The problem is that we're pretty clunky as cyborgs go. We rely on screens and mobile devices to extend our powers beyond the biological. That leads to everything from atrophying social skills as face-to-face interactions decline to fatal encounters with garbage trucks as we wander, texting and oblivious, into traffic.
So, if we're going to be cyborgs, argues Breseman, let's be competent, sophisticated cyborgs. For one thing, it's now in our ability to upgrade beyond the screen. For another, being better cyborgs may make us — paradoxically — more human."

Comment Re:Oblig XKCD (Score 1) 166

Same information, but the visual aspect of the animated GIF is somehow much more accessible. One more data point on how the human brain is so poorly adapted to statistical inference as compared to our natural abilities with visual information like "is that tiger going to eat me", or "can I make it across the gap between this tree and that tree when I jump".

Comment Re: The day before Fukashima happened (Score 2) 166

When the core is "shut-down" to prevent accidental thermal runaway (aka meltdown, or "china-syndrome") the system still contains a rather significant amount of heat for quite a while due to the secondary radioactive products, but this heat is not nearly enough to drive the normal steam turbine dynamos which generate the utility load - it takes a rather large amount of torque to generate megawatts of electric current. Until the heat is removed and the reactor core, fuel rods, and associated secondary decay radio-nucleotides reach a lower level, something needs to provide the power for the cooling pumps, and to ensure that the trapped hydrogen gas (byproduct of fission) is recycled and contained. There are various schemes to create "fail-proof" nuclear reactors, one of which happened to be the Chernobyl design (and we all know how well that one worked). It was supposedly "impossible!" for Cherynobyl to melt down because of the built-in systems, and the smart, but not smart-enough, engineers wanted to test those "fail-proof" systems...

Submission + - Joe Armstrong on Why Programming is Hard (github.io)

sixoh1 writes: From the blog of Joe Armstrong (author of the book "Programming Erlang") a nifty bit of summarizing the 'little' constraints that turn programming from something easy into what really happens:

Many years ago I used to think that programming was easy, as the years have passed I have have realized that programming is not easy. This is due to a slow perceptual shift in what I think programming is and what it is that a programmer does. At first I thought programming just involved telling a computer what to do, this part of programming is relatively easy. After practicing for twenty odd years I reckoned that this part of programming was pretty easy.


Submission + - US Navy ready to deploy laser for 1st time (ap.org)

alphadogg writes: Some of the Navy's futuristic weapons sound like something out of "Star Wars," with lasers designed to shoot down aerial drones and electric guns that fire projectiles at hypersonic speeds.
That future is now. The Navy plans to deploy its first laser on a ship later this year, and it intends to test an electromagnetic rail gun prototype aboard a vessel within two years.

Submission + - DARPA helps train cadets, midshipmen as cyber warriors (scienceblog.com)

An anonymous reader writes: DARPA officials say the Defense Department must train 4,000 cybersecurity experts by 2017. Meeting that goal requires building a pipeline for training and education, especially for future officers who'll oversee protection of the cyber domain. During a winter weekend in Pittsburgh, more than 50 cadets and midshipmen from three service academies sat elbow to elbow at nine round tables in a packed room. They’d been training since November to compete in a pilot program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Service Academy Cyber Stakes.

Submission + - 1870s Horse Flu Epidemic Brought US Economy to its Knees

Nemo the Magnificent writes: From the History-We-Hardly-Knew-Ye department: "A new study published in the journal Nature provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the evolutionary relationships of influenza virus across different host species over time... In the 1870s, an immense horse flu outbreak swept across North America. City by city and town by town, horses got sick and perhaps five percent of them died. Half of Boston burned down during the outbreak, because there were no horses to pull the pump wagons. In the West, the US Cavalry was fighting the Apaches on foot because all the horses were sick... The horse flu outbreak pulled the rug out from under the economy."

Submission + - Why Improbable Things Really Aren't (scientificamerican.com)

sixoh1 writes: Scientific American has an excellent summary of a new book "The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day" by David J. Hand. The summary offers a quick way to relate statistical math (something that's really hard to intuit) to our daily experiences with unlikely events. The simple equations here make it easier to understand that improbable things really are not so improbable, which Hand call the "Improbability Principle":

How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The “birthday problem” is a well-known example.

Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!

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