Comment Re:According to the NSA... (Score 2, Informative) 452
The Emancipation Proclamation was one of Lincoln's Executive Orders. Has it expired?
Comment Re:Polygraph (Score 3, Interesting) 452
Not allowed for court in the US either, though police do use it during their investigations.
Really, all you need is to convince the person you're investigating that it works
Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
Comment Re:Medical... (Score 1) 727
No. Wrong on all counts.
Except for a short stint at a startup it has been at large companies (one about the size of France, slightly fewer people but a bigger GNP). Large risk pools; deductibles/copays ranging from none to low; and I selected the best of the batch where I had a selection.
The only thing that previous plans did was steer you to a company/website/local provider that provided a discount.
Comment Re:Medical... (Score 1) 727
Most insurance, at least in the US, doesn't cover hearing aids. They will cover the tests.
I changed insurance recently. The first policy I've ever had (over 50 years) that pays anything ($1000 per ear every 3 years).
Comment Re:The truth (Score 4, Insightful) 54
You're missing the point. DARPA is about reaching a long-term goal -- one which isn't achievable with existing science/engineering. DARPA contracts are short term contracts whose goal is to determine why one small step towards the ultimate goal is not achievable. This is followed by another contract that determines how to facilitate the previous step
Eventually there is success, and the success flows back to the first step
The PM's job is to keep an eye on the overall goal & to act as a champion for the program. And, although they are generally experienced technical managers, PM's don't remain at DARPA for a long time, it's just too intense.
If you understand what is going on, and DARPA contracts are great to work on, encouraging freedom & creativity, and you'll probably get more contracts. If not then you'll end up frustrated, somebody else will have to dig through your CDRLs to get the needed data, and the followup contract will end up going to somebody who understands the process.
Comment Re:Me things he looses (Score 1) 111
The buses' movement is public data, but the article mentions that transponders were attached to buses to allow this data to be collected. Who paid for this (the article doesn't say)?
If I pay to collect the data & generate a database that doesn't mean that I can be forced to give the data away. But also, I can't stop anybody else from collecting the data & making their own database. If you don't want to buy it from me go forth & make your own database.
New Languages Vs. Old For Parallel Programming 321
joabj writes "Getting the most from multicore processors is becoming an increasingly difficult task for programmers. DARPA has commissioned a number of new programming languages, notably X10 and Chapel, written especially for developing programs that can be run across multiple processors, though others see them as too much of a departure to ever gain widespread usage among coders."
Submission + - How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (dobbscodetalk.com)
viyh writes: "The human genome project was inaugurated at the beginning of the decade as an ambitious international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence of human beings and several experimental animals. The justification for this undertaking is both scientific and medical. By understanding the genetic makeup of an organism in excruciating detail, we hope to better understand how organisms develop from single eggs into complex multicellular beings, how food is metabolized and transformed into the constituents of the body, and how the nervous system assembles itself into a smoothly functioning ensemble. From the medical point of view, the wealth of knowledge that will come from knowing the complete DNA sequence will greatly accelerate the process of finding the causes of, and potential cures for, human diseases.
From the beginning, researchers realized that informatics would have to play a large role in the genome project. An informatics core formed an integral part of every genome center that was created. The mission of this core was twofold: to provide computer support and database services for their affiliated laboratories, and to develop data analysis and management software for use by the genome community as a whole.
Consider the steps that may be performed on a bit of newly sequenced DNA. First, there's a basic quality check on the sequence: Is it long enough, and are the number of ambiguous letters below the maximum limit? Then, there's the "vector check." For technical reasons, the human DNA must be passed through a bacterium before it can be sequenced (this is the process of "cloning"). Not infrequently, the human DNA gets lost somewhere in the process, and the sequence that's read consists entirely of the bacterial vector. The vector check ensures that only human DNA gets into the database.
Next, there's a check for repetitive sequences. Human DNA is full of repetitive elements that make fitting the sequencing jigsaw puzzle together challenging. The repetitive-sequence check tries to match the new sequence against a library of known repetitive elements. The penultimate step is to attempt to match the new sequence against other sequences in a large community database of DNA sequences. Often, a match at this point will provide a clue to the function of the new DNA sequence. After performing all these checks, the sequence (along with the information that's been gathered about it along the way) is loaded into the local laboratory database.
The process of passing a DNA sequence through these independent, analytic steps looks like a pipeline, and we realized that a UNIX pipe could handle the job. We developed a simple Perl-based data-exchange format called "boulderio" that allowed loosely coupled programs to add information to a pipe-based I/O stream. Boulderio is based on tag/value pairs. A Perl module makes it easy for programs to reach into the input stream, pull out only the tags it is interested in, do something with them, and drop new tags into the output stream. Tags that the program isn't interested in are just passed through to standard output so that other programs in the pipeline can get to them."
From the beginning, researchers realized that informatics would have to play a large role in the genome project. An informatics core formed an integral part of every genome center that was created. The mission of this core was twofold: to provide computer support and database services for their affiliated laboratories, and to develop data analysis and management software for use by the genome community as a whole.
Consider the steps that may be performed on a bit of newly sequenced DNA. First, there's a basic quality check on the sequence: Is it long enough, and are the number of ambiguous letters below the maximum limit? Then, there's the "vector check." For technical reasons, the human DNA must be passed through a bacterium before it can be sequenced (this is the process of "cloning"). Not infrequently, the human DNA gets lost somewhere in the process, and the sequence that's read consists entirely of the bacterial vector. The vector check ensures that only human DNA gets into the database.
Next, there's a check for repetitive sequences. Human DNA is full of repetitive elements that make fitting the sequencing jigsaw puzzle together challenging. The repetitive-sequence check tries to match the new sequence against a library of known repetitive elements. The penultimate step is to attempt to match the new sequence against other sequences in a large community database of DNA sequences. Often, a match at this point will provide a clue to the function of the new DNA sequence. After performing all these checks, the sequence (along with the information that's been gathered about it along the way) is loaded into the local laboratory database.
The process of passing a DNA sequence through these independent, analytic steps looks like a pipeline, and we realized that a UNIX pipe could handle the job. We developed a simple Perl-based data-exchange format called "boulderio" that allowed loosely coupled programs to add information to a pipe-based I/O stream. Boulderio is based on tag/value pairs. A Perl module makes it easy for programs to reach into the input stream, pull out only the tags it is interested in, do something with them, and drop new tags into the output stream. Tags that the program isn't interested in are just passed through to standard output so that other programs in the pipeline can get to them."
Comment Re:Work Experience (Score 1) 834
The working level at my location (primarily EE & CS, some other engineering & science) is BS + 2 masters degrees. Generally hired with a BS, then an MS in a technical field & MBA later in the career.
Comment Already in Toronto -- really bad for travellers (Score 2, Interesting) 585
I ran into this system in Toronto a few years ago.
There's no way to pay manually. Sections that are toll aren't well marked. Cost isn't clearly defined and changes as a function of time and/or traffic density. So when turning in the rental car there's no way to determine the charges for tolls.
Months after the trip I got a bill from the car rental agency: cost of tolls + several taxes + surcharge by the car rental agency + a billing fee.
Can you tell I'm not a fan of this technology?! Car rental agency added costs were more than twice the cost of tolls.
Comment Worked 9/80 15 years ago, still miss it! (Score 1) 1055
It's been almost 15 years and I still miss it -- it was great! We had 9 hour days Mon-Thu, either 0 or 8 hours on Friday.
The company originally instituted it in California to meet a mandate to reduce pollution by 20%. They shut down 1 day out of 10 + took credit for 10% reduction in employee commuting. It was popular enough that they spread it to other sites.
One side effect was that the week started/stopped at noon Friday. Part of the plant was unionized and union rules said anything over 40 hours in a week was paid at overtime rates, and if the company scheduled you for less than 40 hours work in the week you still got paid for 40 hours. Nothing in the contract specified when the week started. So it was timecards at noon Friday.
The company originally instituted it in California to meet a mandate to reduce pollution by 20%. They shut down 1 day out of 10 + took credit for 10% reduction in employee commuting. It was popular enough that they spread it to other sites.
One side effect was that the week started/stopped at noon Friday. Part of the plant was unionized and union rules said anything over 40 hours in a week was paid at overtime rates, and if the company scheduled you for less than 40 hours work in the week you still got paid for 40 hours. Nothing in the contract specified when the week started. So it was timecards at noon Friday.
Comment Re:finally! (Score 5, Insightful) 369
No, we'll only know what they think they want.
