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Submission + - Parents' Privacy Concerns Kill Bill Gates' $100M inBloom Initiative

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: As things turn out, All Your Child's Data Are Not Belong To inBloom, the Bill Gates-bankrolled and News Corp. subsidiary-implemented data initiative that sought to personalize learning. GeekWire's Tricia Duryee reports that inBloom, which was backed by $100 million from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others, is closing up shop after parents worried that its database technology was violating their children's privacy. According to NY Times coverage (reg.), the inBloom database tracked 400 different data fields about students — including family relationships ("foster parent" or "father's significant other”") and reasons for enrollment changes ("withdrawn due to illness" or "leaving school as a victim of a serious violent incident") — that parents objected to, prompting some schools to recoil from the venture. In a statement, inBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger said that personalized learning was still an emerging concept, and complained that the venture had been "the subject of mischaracterizations and a lightning rod for misdirected criticism." He added, "It is a shame that the progress of this important innovation has been stalled because of generalized public concerns about data misuse, even though inBloom has world-class security and privacy protections that have raised the bar for school districts and the industry as a whole [although it was still apparently vulnerable to Heartbleed]." As far as Gates goes, the world's richest man has a couple of irons left in the data-driven personalized learning fire via his ties to Code.org, which seeks 7 years of participating K-12 students' data, and Khan Academy, which recently attracted scrutiny over its data-privacy policies. Khan Academy — which counted the managing partner of Gates' bgC3 think-tank and Google CEO Eric Schmidt as Board members in a recent tax filing — just struck an exclusive partnership with CollegeBoard to prepare students for the redesigned SAT.

Submission + - Venus' crust heals too fast for plate tectonics

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Without plate tectonics, carbon would build up in the atmosphere. Venus, which does not have tectonics, shows the results: an atmosphere that is 96 percent carbon dioxide. It's toxic. Yet Venus is about the same size and composition as our planet, so why doesn't it have plate tectonics? Some researchers made a model to explore how Earth initiated plate movements, and these same researchers made one model of its neighbor for comparison. A 1.5-billion-year-old Earth and a similarly aged Venus were modeled as a hot, mushy material made of tiny particles of rock. The model uses physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale to explain how the whole planet behaves. According to David Bercovici, a geophysicist at Yale who was an author on the paper, the model also shows how plate tectonics emerged on Earth but not on her twin.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Nike to reportedly exit wearables market, fires bulk of FuelBand team [u] - Appl (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Apple Insider
Nike to reportedly exit wearables market, fires bulk of FuelBand team [u]
Apple Insider
A rumor on Friday claims Nike is planning to shut down the division responsible for creating wearable fitness trackers, starting with the axing of as many as 55 people from the FuelBand team. FuelBand SE. Citing people familiar with the situation, CNET...
Bye-Bye FuelBand: Nike Won't Be the Last Company to Get Out of Wearable ... TIME
Nike Fires FuelBand Team in Move to Ditch WearablesMashable
Nike Dismantles their FuelBand Wearables TeamPatently Apple
TechCrunch-CNET-TechRadar UK
all 31 news articles

Submission + - Microsoft Plans $1 Billion Server Farm in Iowa (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: Microsoft will invest $1.1 billion to build a massive new server farm in Iowa, not far from an existing data center in West Des Moines. The 1.2 million square foot campus will be one of the biggest in the history of the data center industry. It further enhances Iowa's status as the data center capital of the Midwest,, with Google and Facebook also operating huge server farms in the state.

Submission + - Pew surveys Americans on likely scientific advances 50 years from now (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Americans are optimistic about scientific inventions on the horizon, though are cautious about future uses of DNA, robots, drones and always-on implants, according to the latest Pew Research Center survey on future technology. http://www.pewinternet.org/fil... Asked about the likelihood of certain advances 50 years from now, survey respondents were most sure that lab-grown custom organs for transplant will happen (81%). Only 19% expect humans will be able to control the weather by then.

Submission + - Detroit: America's Next Tech Boomtown (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Over the past few years, the growth rate in Detroit tech jobs has been twice the natural average. The reason is the industry that still makes Detroit a company town: U.S. automotive companies are getting into high tech in a big way, and need qualified people to help them do it. Another bonus: the rent is a lot cheaper than it is in San Francisco.

Submission + - Investors Value Yahoo's Core Business At Less Than $0 (bloombergview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo is most known for its search, email, and news services. But its U.S. web presence is only part of its corporate portfolio. It also owns large stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba (a web services company based in China). Yahoo Japan is publicly traded, and Alibaba is heading toward an IPO, so both have a pretty firm valuation. The thing is: when you account for Yahoo's share of each and subtract them from Yahoo's current market cap, you get a negative number. Investors actually value Yahoo's business at less than nothing. Bloomberg's Matt Levine explains: 'I guess this is fairly obvious, but it leads you to a general theory of the conglomerate discount, which is that a business can be worth less than zero (to shareholders), but a company can't be (to shareholders). ... A fun question is, as fiduciaries for shareholders, should Yahoo's directors split into three separate companies to maximize value? If YJHI and YAHI are worth around $9 billion and $40 billion, and Core Yahoo Inc. is worth around, I don't know, one penny, then just doing some corporate restructuring should create $13 billion in free shareholder value. Why not do that?'

Submission + - Mathematicians Devise Typefaces Based On Problems of Computational Geometry (medium.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Typeface design is something of an art. For many centuries, this art has been constrained by the materials available to typographers, mainly lead and wood. More recently, typographers have been freed from this constraint with the advent of digital typesetting and the number of typefaces has mushroomed. Verdana, for example, is designed specifically for computer screens. Now a father and son team of mathematicians have devised a number of typefaces based on problems they have studied in computational geometry. For example, one typeface is inspired by the folds and valleys generated by computational origami designs. Another is based on the open problem of “whether every disjoint set of unit disks (gears or wheels) in the plane can be visited by a single taut non-self-intersecting conveyer belt.” Interestingly, several of the new typefaces also serve as puzzles in which messages are the solutions.

Submission + - Samsung's Position On Tizen May Hurt Developer Recruitment (programmableweb.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: Samsung isn’t making it easy for developers. The company may have released a handful of SDKs for its latest devices, but Samsung’s non-committal approach to its Tizen platform is probably going to cost it developer support. Samsung’s first smartwatch, released in October last year, ran a modified version of Google’s Android platform. The device had access to about 80 apps at launch, all of which were managed by a central smartphone app. Samsung offered developers an SDK for the Galaxy Gear so they could create more apps. Developers obliged. Then Samsung changed direction.

Submission + - #IoTH: The Internet of Things and Humans

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Speculating the future of human computer interaction, Tim O'Reilly contemplates how humans and things cooperate differently when things get smarter. "Rod Smith of IBM and I had a call the other day to prepare for our onstage conversation at O'Reilly's upcoming Solid Conference, and I was surprised to find how much we were in agreement about one idea: so many of the most interesting applications of the Internet of Things involve new ways of thinking about how humans and things cooperate differently when the things get smarter. It really ought to be called the Internet of Things and Humans — #IoTH, not just #IoT!"

Submission + - Survey: 56 Percent of U.S. Developers Expect To Become Millionaires (adtmag.com) 1

Submitted by msmoriarty
msmoriarty writes: According to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S.-based software developers, 56 percent expect to become millionaires in their lifetime. 66 percent also said they expect to get raises in the next year, despite the current state of the economy. Note that some of the other findings of the study (scroll to bulleted list) seem overly positive: 84 percent said they believe they are paid what they're worth, 95 percent report they feel they are "one of the most valued employees at their organization," and 80 percent said that "outsourcing has been a positive factor in the quality of work at their organization."

Submission + - "Thermoelectrics" Could One Day Power Cars (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Fossil fuels power modern society by generating heat, but much of that heat is wasted. Researchers have tried to reclaim some of it with semiconductor devices called thermoelectrics, which convert the heat into power. But they remain too inefficient and expensive to be useful beyond a handful of niche applications. Now, scientists in Illinois report that they have used a cheap, well-known material to create the most heat-hungry thermoelectric so far. In the process, the researchers say, they learned valuable lessons that could push the materials to the efficiencies needed for widespread applications. If that happens, thermoelectrics could one day power cars and scavenge energy from myriad engines, boilers, and electrical plants.

Submission + - Children can swipe a screen but can't use toy building blocks (theguardian.com)

Submitted by SpankiMonki
SpankiMonki writes: Children are arriving at nursery school able to "swipe a screen" but lack the manipulative skills to play with building blocks, teachers have warned.

They fear that children are being given tablets to use "as a replacement for contact time with the parent" and say such habits are hindering progress at school.

Addressing the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference in Manchester on Tuesday, Colin Kinney said excessive use of technology damages concentration and causes behavioural problems such as irritability and a lack of control.

Kinney, a teacher from Northern Ireland, also noted "I've spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks – or pupils who can't socialise with other pupils, but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone."
___________________________________

According to research by U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom, tablet usage among children is on the rise, with growing numbers of younger kids turning to tablets to watch videos, play games and access the Internet. Use of tablets has tripled among 5-15s since 2012, rising from 14% to 42% over that period, while 28% of infants aged 3-4 now use a tablet computer at home.

Submission + - 'Tilt-a-worlds' could harbor life (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: A fluctuating tilt in a planet’s orbit does not preclude the possibility of life, according to new research by astronomers at the University of Washington, Utah’s Weber State University and NASA. In fact, sometimes it helps. That’s because such “tilt-a-worlds,” as astronomers sometimes call them — turned from their orbital plane by the influence of companion planets — are less likely than fixed-spin planets to freeze over, as heat from their host star is more evenly distributed.

This happens only at the outer edge of a star’s habitable zone, the swath of space around it where rocky worlds could maintain liquid water at their surface, a necessary condition for life. Further out, a “snowball state” of global ice becomes inevitable, and life impossible. The findings, which are published online and will appear in the April issue of Astrobiology, have the effect of expanding that perceived habitable zone by 10 to 20 percent.

Submission + - Cringely on Big Data and AI

Submitted by squideatingdough
squideatingdough writes: Once again, Robert X. Cringely provides an insightful (and somewhat scary) vision of the future: http://www.cringely.com/2014/0.... He describes how today's Artificial Intelligence is so very different from the vision of those IT folks working in the field back in the 80's. And then he goes on to posit how algorithms are improving at a rate that exceeds Moore's Law for hardware. A very interesting read.

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