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Submission + - Microsoft Bringing 'The Coding Man' to Broadway, Bill Gates to Star

theodp writes: Drawing inspiration from the play The Music Man , in which "Professor" Harold Hill convinces naive parents he can teach their musically disinclined children to play instruments, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it is adapting Code.org's What Most Schools Don't Teach video into a Broadway musical starring Bill Gates called The Coding Man , in which wealthy tech leaders convince naive parents — including the President of the United States — they can teach their Computer Science-disinclined children to code. In the play, Microsoft advances its U.S. Talent Strategy by bankrolling a learn-to-code nonprofit and partnering with the National Science Foundation, White House officials, and excited CS educators to make the lack of CS education 'an issue like climate change'. The play concludes with a big production number in which the President and schoolkids are 'taught to code' by Disney Princesses. The early buzz is there's a Tony Award in BillG's future!

Submission + - Yet another government software failure, nominated for award

belmolis writes: The Victoria Times-Colonist reports that British Columbia spent C$182 million on a new case management system for social services, whose system was so bad that in 2012 Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Special Representative for Children and Youth, issued a public safety warning. According to a report by the Auditor General, the system only performs 1/3 of the functions of the systems it is intended to replace and fails to protect private information or monitor inappropriate usage. The defective system was nominated by its managers for the Premier's Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Civil Service.

Comment Facebook can be useful if you have this problem: (Score 2) 40

Facebook can be useful if you have this problem: Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you? Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

How to avoid the abusers:
Adblock Edge
NoScript
Ghostery
Better Privacy
Cookies Manager Plus (Does not delete one particular Google cookie.)

Comment Re:meh. (Score 1) 48

This clunky spacebot has no style. Everybody knows that the ultimate vehicle for reentry and soft landing is shaped exactly like a 1959 Corvette.

Just don't bring the green orb with you.

Comment Re:ROI? (Score 1) 139

Pretty sure it means 'return on investment' in this context, but as they don't supply the cost of the investment, the location these salaries are drawn from, the number of years after the degree, etc, etc, etc, it's just another bit of Dice-tastic link bait.

Comment Re:A Corollary for Code (Score 1) 232

which often makes for horribly unintuitive or unnecessarily complex systems.

Indeed. Witness the unmitigated mess which are today's web pages, filled with mountains of complex code creating unintuitive navigation and unnecessarily complex layouts.

KISS has officially been abandoned in favor of crazy language tricks just because the programmer could.

Submission + - Cancer researcher vanishes with tens of millions of dollars (goerie.com)

jd writes: Steven Curley, MD, who ran the Akesogenx corporation (and may indeed have been the sole employee after the dismissal of Robert Zavala) had been working on a radio-frequency cure for cancer with an engineer by the name of John Kanzius.

Kanzius died, Steven Curley set up the aforementioned parallel company that bought all the rights and patents to the technology before shuttering the John Kanzius Foundation. So far, so very uncool.

Last year, just as the company started aproaching the FDA about clinical trials, Dr Curley got blasted with lawsuits accusing him of loading his shortly-to-be ex-wife's computer with spyware.

Two weeks ago, there was to be a major announcement "within two weeks". Shortly after, the company dropped off the Internet and Dr Curley dropped off the face of the planet.

Robert Zavala is the only name mentioned that could be a fit for the company's DNS record owner. The company does not appear to have any employees other than Dr Curley, making it very unlikely he could have ever run a complex engineering project well enough to get to trial stage. His wife doubtless has a few scores to settle. Donors, some providing several millions, were getting frustrated — and as we know from McAfee, not all in IT are terribly sane. There are many people who might want the money and have no confidence any results were forthcoming.

So, what precisely was the device? Simple enough. Every molecule has an absorption line. It can absorb energy on any other frequency. A technique widely exploited in physics, chemistry and astronomy. People have looked into various ways of using it in medicine for a long time.

The idea was to inject patients with nanoparticles on an absorption line well clear of anything the human body cares about. These particles would be preferentially picked up by cancer cells because they're greedy. Once that's done, you blast the body at the specified frequency. The cancer cells are charbroiled and healthy cells remain intact.

It's an idea that's so obvious I was posting about it here and elsewhere in 1998. The difference is, they had a prototype that seemed to work.

But now there is nothing but the sound of Silence, a suspect list of thousands and a list of things they could be suspected of stretching off to infinity. Most likely, there's a doctor sipping champaign on some island with no extradition treaty. Or a future next-door neighbour to Hans Reiser. Regardless, this will set back cancer research. Money is limited and so is trust. It was, in effect, crowdsource funded and that, too, will feel a blow if theft was involved.

Or it could just be the usual absent-minded scientist discovering he hasn't the skills or awesomeness needed, but has got too much pride to admit it, as has happened in so many science fraud cases.

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