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Science

Ask Slashdot: How To Feed Africa? 592

Posted by Soulskill from the infinite-gnutella dept.
gbrumfiel writes "Africa has some of the poorest soil of anywhere on the earth, and over farming is only making matters worse. As the population grows, governments and NGOs must decide whether to subsidize chemical fertilizers like those used in the west or promote more sustainable agricultural practices. In Malawi, the government has decided to subsidize fertilizers, with impressive results. Corn yields have tripled since the subsidies were introduced. More sustainable practices, such as fertilizer trees can't deliver those kind of results in just a few years. The question is simple: does Africa follow the same, unsustainable road as the rest of the world? Or do they become a testing ground for potentially game-changing new techniques? OR is there a third path? Discuss."

Comment Consultant or Manager (Score 1) 435

by JLavezzo (#38559876) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Re-Entering the Job Market As a Software Engineer?

Your experience makes you an ideal software manager. Coder, Teacher, Sales. You know what makes the clients tick. You know what makes the developers tick. You know how to get them to tick in sync. Don't apply for code monkey jobs. Apply for the jobs where the breadth of your experience will be an asset, where they'll know the team you're in charge of will make the right software the first time around.

Alternately, pick a concentration (Hadoop, for example would be very au currant), blog about it, put up some sample projects, call your self a consultant in your specialty, charge at least twice a reasonable rate and use your sales experience to get yourself a consulting gig. One gig leads to another. Also helpful: work up a couple presentations on your chosen specialty and try to convince someone to let you present to them on it (users groups, industry group, BeCamp meeting, tech conference). For extra bonus cash, read a few books on Software Architecture and add "Architect" to your title.

I don't know who the unemployed software engineers are. Possibly people living in the wrong town. I know no unemployed programmers. My office let go a few people, all of whom had new jobs lined up within 2 weeks. Of course, I mean actual software engineers who are experienced, productive, flexible, customer focused and able to have a conversation out loud with other people.
Science

Fine Structure Constant May Not Be So Constant 273

Posted by Soulskill from the pi-is-exactly-three dept.
BuzzSkyline writes "According to a post at Physics Buzz, 'Just weeks after speeding neutrinos seem to have broken the speed of light, another universal law, the fine structure constant might be about to crumble.' Astronomical observations seem to indicate that the constant, which controls the strength of electromagnetic interactions, is different in distant parts of the universe. Among other things, the paper may explain why the laws of physics in our corner of the universe seem to be finely tuned to support life. The research (abstract) is so controversial that it took over a year to go from submission to publication in Physical Review Letters, rather than the weeks typical of most other papers appearing in the peer-reviewed journal."
Education

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Use Computers 333

Posted by timothy from the back-to-nature dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Matt Richtel writes that many employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard send their children to the Waldorf School in Los Altos where the school's chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. Computers are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home. 'I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,' says Alan Eagle whose daughter, Andie, attends a Waldorf school, an independent school movement that boasts an 86 year history in North America. 'The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that's ridiculous.' Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students' attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them."
AI

Kinect-Based AI System Watches What You're Up To 87

Posted by timothy from the 8-bit-necktie-on-the-door dept.
mikejuk writes "Researchers from Cornell have used AI to create a system based on the Kinect that can recognize what you are doing — cleaning your teeth, cooking, writing on a whiteboard etc. In a smart home it could be used to offer help: 'Would you like some help with that recipe, Dave?' Or it could monitor patients or workers to make sure they are doing what they are told. The study also reveals that there is probably enough information in how activities are performed to recognize an individual — so providing yet more biometrics. There are clearly a lot more things that we can teach the Kinect to do with machine learning than just gesture recognition."

Comment Re:Nothing New Here... (Score 2) 369

by JLavezzo (#35629328) Attached to: Using the Open Records Law To Intimidate Critics

> is that where we're at [as humanity], are we really that childish?
Yes. Pretty much always been this way. A few people manage to grow up and are often the ones involved in public discourse. The Enlightenment was a particularly successful period of time where enough adults got together to come up with some great new ideas.

Comment Tinker Bell is an Engineer Now (Score 1) 298

by JLavezzo (#34699170) Attached to: Can Movies Inspire Kids To Be Future Scientists?

In Disney's 2008 "Tinker Bell" Tinker Bell is an engineer. She spends much of the movie fighting "her destiny" because, basically, the "tinkers" are not cool. The general theme though is that she has a powerful gift for engineering and that she should recognize that. The climax of the film is Tinker Bell frantically producing blueprints while schematics and equations float around her head. She saves the day, wins the admiration and respect of the community, her friends and her self. She also earns the privilege of participating in a group activity she though the was going to be excluded from because she wasn't cool.

Personally, it chokes me up a little bit to imagine 6 year old girls saying, "When I grow up I want to be an engineer just like Tinker Bell."
Firefox

Firefox Lorentz Keeps Plugin Crashes Under Control 115

Posted by timothy from the pleasant-fantasy dept.
pastababa writes "A beta of the Firefox Lorentz project is now available for download and public testing. Eming reports Firefox 'Lorentz' provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in plugins. Plugins run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. The process-isolation feature has been in Google's Chrome from the beginning. Chrome sandboxes individual tabs, and the crash of one tab does not affect the running of the rest of Chrome browser. Firefox currently isolates only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page. Mozilla encourages users to test Firefox 'Lorentz' on their favorite websites. Users who install Firefox 'Lorentz' will eventually be automatically updated to a future version of Firefox 3.6 in which this feature is included."
Biotech

Doctors Skirt FDA To Heal Patients With Stem Cells 394

Posted by kdawson from the self-supplied dept.
kkleiner writes "For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There's no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon."
Google

Google Attack On the Mobile Market Rumored 324

Posted by kdawson from the first-the-itablet-and-now-this dept.
xchg writes in with a somewhat speculative, though plausible, piece from WiseAndroid claiming that Google is gearing up for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market that will include a new, Google-branded handset and the first comprehensive Google phone service with unlimited free calls. "The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Googlephone to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile. International calls start from... just over a penny a minute. Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging. Google sounded its intentions two weeks ago when it purchased a small company called Gizmo5... [E]xperts are predicting that the Googlephone will be launched in the US early next year."

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