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Feed Google News Sci Tech: Mercury's Magnetic Field Was Once As Strong As Earth's - Study - Design & Tr (google.com)

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Design & Trend
Mercury's Magnetic Field Was Once As Strong As Earth's - Study
Design & Trend
(Photo : Getty Images/NASA) Mercury's magnetic field may once have been as strong as Earth's. Data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft, which orbited Mercury for four years before crashing into its surface a week ago, suggests that Mercury's liquid metal...
Data from MESSENGER reveals secrets of Mercury's Magnetic FieldNY City News
NASA Messenger last WORDS, Mercury's magnetic field is 4 billion years oldThe Hoops News
Mercury's Mysterious Magnetic Past Goes Back 4B YearsSci-Tech Today
The Market Business-Space.com-University of British Columbia
all 108 news articles

Comment Re:"Kills Off PCs" -- Um, no it doesn't. (Score 1) 107

by Bomarc (#49635107) Attached to: Self-Destructing Virus Kills Off PCs

Did the submitter even bother to read the article??

Actually he did. The article has the quote "kill off"... (I was going to post the same thing when the article was in Firehose -- but decided not to) however if you read the article the PC isn't killed (reality nothing is) just the MBR is nuked. Anyone ever hear of "backup" ?

The only thing "exciting" about this one is the detection that is being removed ... then it removed the MBR. But there is no elaboration on this action.

Submission + - The Medical Bill Mystery

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Elisabeth Rosenthal writes in the NYT that she has spent the past six months trying to figure out a medical bill for $225 that includes "Test codes: 105, 127, 164, to name a few. CPT codes: 87481, 87491, 87798 and others" and she really doesn't want to pay it until she understands what it’s for. "At first, I left messages on the lab’s billing office voice mail asking for an explanation. A few months ago, when someone finally called back, she said she could not tell me what the codes were for because that would violate patient privacy. After I pointed out that I was the patient in question, she said, politely: “I’m sorry, this is what I’m told, and I don’t want to lose my job.”" Bills variously use CPT, HCPCS or ICD-9 codes. Some have abbreviations and scientific terms that you need a medical dictionary or a graduate degree to comprehend. Some have no information at all. Heather Pearce of Seattle told me how she’d recently received a $45,000 hospital bill with the explanation “miscellaneous.”

So what's the problem? “Medical bills and explanation of benefits are undecipherable and incomprehensible even for experts to understand, and the law is very forgiving about that,” says Mark Hall. “We’ve not seen a lot of pressure to standardize medical billing, but there’s certainly a need.” Hospitals and medical clinics say that detailed bills are simply too complicated for patients and that they provide the information required by insurers but with rising copays and deductibles, patients are shouldering an increasing burden. One recent study found that up to 90 percent of hospital bills contain errors and an audit by Equifax found that hospital bills that totaled more than $10,000 contained an average error of $1,300. “There are no industry standards with regards to what information a patient should receive regarding their bill,” says Cyndee Weston, executive director of the American Medical Billing Association. “The software industry has pretty much decided what information patients should receive, and to my knowledge, they have not had any stakeholder input. That would certainly be a worthwhile project for our industry.”

Submission + - Recent Paper Shows Fracking Chemicals in Drinking Water, Industry Attacks It (nytimes.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences turned up 2-Butoxyethanol from samples collected from three households in Pennsylvania. The paper's level headed conclusion is that more conservative well construction techniques should be used to avoid this in the future and that flowback should be better controlled. Rob Jackson, another scientist who reviewed the paper, stressed that the findings were an exception to normal operations. Despite that, the results angered the PR gods of the Marcellus Shale Gas industry and awoke beltway insider mouthpieces to attack the research — after all, what are they paying them for?

Comment Re:If Boeing believed in software QA.... (Score 1) 250

by Bomarc (#49602665) Attached to: Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Then you have never looked for a software tester / QA position at Boeing.

For example you search Boeing jobs for QA on 5/2/2015 you will see 15 jobs -- none are software specific QA, two of them are software fields ... including Cloud Architect 4 and a Software Release Engineer

If you search for test you will see 97 (Adjusted search for only IT); and a typical job posting (most of the "Software Engineer" postings) will have something like:
Other duties may include:
-- Develops software verification plans, test procedures and test environments, executing the test procedures and documenting test results to ensure software system requirements are met;

They may "conform to the DO-178B / DO-178C standard" ... but my point is the person performing the test is NOT a software QA professional, rather is the developer of the software.

Full disclosure: There currently are a few QA/test positions open -- including one that is a subsidiary of Boeing.

Comment If Boeing believed in software QA.... (Score 2) 250

by Bomarc (#49599917) Attached to: Long Uptime Makes Boeing 787 Lose Electrical Power
For all of the QA at Boing; they don't believe in software QA. Take a look at their job openings some time: In years of searching, I've seen only one software QA position, and it wasn't dealing with aircraft. Any such search results will return developers that are to write their own tests against the spec. Developers are not Testers.... and I'll ask: How many more such bugs are out there?

I know of two other software "bugs" ... that can be attributed to a lack of QA. How many people will die due to a bad management decision on the part of Boeing?
Disclosure: Yes, I'm a software QA / Test professional.

Submission + - Scientists have paper on gender bias rejected because they're both women (dailylife.com.au)

Submitted by ferrisoxide.com
ferrisoxide.com writes: A paper co-authored by researcher fellow Dr. Fiona Ingleby and evolutionary biologist Dr. Megan Head — on how gender differences affect the experiences that PhD students have when moving into post-doctoral work — was rejected by peer-reviewed PLoS One journal because they didn’t ask a man for help.

A (male) peer reviewer for the journal suggested that the scientists find male co-authors, to prevent “ideologically biased assumptions.” The same reviewer also provided his own ironically biased advice, when explaining that women may have fewer articles published because men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average", "just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster".

Submission + - White House Outsources K-12 CS Education to Infosys Charity 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In December, the White House praised the leadership of Code.org for their efforts to get more computer science into K-12 schools, which were bankrolled by $20 million in philanthropic contributions from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Mark Zuckerberg. On Monday, it was announced that Infosys Foundation USA will be partnering with Code.org to bring CS education to millions of U.S. students. Infosys Foundation USA Chair Vandana Sikk, who joins execs from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon execs on Code.org's Board, is the spouse of Infosys CEO Vishal Sikk. The announcement from the tax-deductible charity comes as India-based Infosys finds itself scrutinized by U.S. Senators over allegations of H-1B visa program abuses.

Submission + - Verizon Tells Customer He Needs 75Mbps For Smoother Netflix Video (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon recently told a customer that upgrading his 50Mbps service to 75 Mbps would result in smoother streaming of Netflix video. Of course, that's not true — Netflix streams at a rate of about 3.5 Mbps on average for Verizon's fiber service, so there's more than enough headroom either way. But this customer was an analyst for the online video industry, so he did some testing and snapped some screenshots for evidence. He fired up 10 concurrent streams of a Game of Thrones episode and found only 29Mbps of connection being used. This guy was savvy enough to see through Verizon's BS, but I'm sure there are millions of customers who wouldn't bat an eye at the statements they were making. The analyst "believes that the sales pitch he received is not just an isolated incident, since he got the same pitch from three sales reps over the phone and one online."

Submission + - LinkedIN Reference Search is legal, but it shouldn't be. (google.com)

Submitted by ciscoguy01
ciscoguy01 writes: LinkedIN has a paid product "Reference Search" which allows subscribers to search to find someone who worked at a company at the same time as another person, with the idea that you might be able to get a reference from someone it finds.
Tracee Sweet applied for a job, got an offer, then when the employer used the Reference Search to check her out with previous co-workers rescinded the offer.
She sued LinkedIN saying that the LinkedIN product should fall under the FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) and she should have had the right to review and challenge information there as if it were a credit report. She lost in court last week.
The issue here is this: Anyone can create any number of LinkedIN accounts, can put any employment history in that account, this is not verified by anyone.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act protects consumers from information that may affect credit decisions, employment decisions and more when compiled by a credit reporting agency. Which today LinkedIN is not. But should they be?
Nothing would stop anyone from creating as many accounts on LinkedIN as they want with completely fabricated information in it, for the purpose of having the references there returned by the LinkedIN paid subscriber "Reference Search" Tool.
At the moment LinkedIn Reference Search is legal. But since it can easily contain wholly unverified and possibly forged or otherwise fake information, should it be? Shouldn't someone be responsible for information about *YOU* contained in a database and then being sold for profit?

Comment What to label this story as "BS" comes to mind... (Score 0) 1

by Bomarc (#49552793) Attached to: Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures
Went to Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) web site graphical data; and it clearly shows a "up" (rising) trend with temperature. I would not trust University of Alabama (agenda with a political party / business).

This ''article'' lists no sources supporting their opinion; no information about why they have a differing opinion; no source info other than generic "trust me, they said this". "Not the best" would be an understatement.

Submission + - Hubble finds something astronomers can't explain

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the explosion of a star that does not fit into any theory for stellar evolution.

The exploding star, which was seen in the constellation Eridanus, faded over two weeks — much too rapidly to qualify as a supernova. The outburst was also about ten times fainter than most supernovae, explosions that destroy some or all of a star. But it was about 100 times brighter than an ordinary nova, which is a type of surface explosion that leaves a star intact. "The combination of properties is puzzling," says Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "I thought about a number of possibilities, but each of them fails" to account for all characteristics of the outburst, he adds.

We can put this discovery on the bottom of a very long list of similar discoveries by Hubble, which this week is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its launch.

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