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Submission + - Interviews: Ask Adora Svitak About Education and Women In STEM and Politics

samzenpus writes: Adora Svitak is a child prodigy, author and activist. She taught her first class on writing at a local elementary school when she was 7, the same year her book, Flying Fingers was published. In 2010, Adora spoke at the TED Conference. Her speech, "What Adults Can Learn from Kids", has been viewed over 3.7 million times and has been translated into over 40 different languages. She is an advocate for literacy, youth empowerment, and for the inclusion of more women and girls in STEM and politics. 17 this year, she served as a Youth Advisor to the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, DC. and is a freshman at UC Berkeley. Adora has agreed to take some time from her books and answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
Hardware

Video CMI Director Alex King Talks About Rare Earth Supplies (Video) 27

CMI in this context is the Critical Materials Institute at the Iowa State Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. They have partners from other national laboratories, universities, and industry, too. Rare earths, while not necessarily as rare as the word "rare" implies, are hard to mine, separate, and use. They are often found in parts per million quantities, so it takes supercomputers to suss out which deposits are worth going after. This is what Dr. King and his coworkers spend their time doing; finding concentrations of rare earths that can be mined and refined profitably.

On November 3 we asked you for questions to put to Dr. King. Timothy incorporated some of those questions into the conversation in this video -- and tomorrow's video too, since we broke this into two parts because, while the subject matter may be fascinating, we are supposed to hold video lengths down to around 10 minutes, and in this case we still ended up with two videos close to 15 minutes each. And this stuff is important enough that instead of lining up a list of links, we are giving you one link to Google using the search term "rare earths." Yes, we know Rare Earth would be a great name for a rock band. But the mineral rare earths are important in the manufacture of items from strong magnets to touch screens and rechargeable batteries. (Alternate Video Link)

Comment Re:Systemd works OK in Fedora (Score 1) 581

I had a system where switching a SCSI card with a NIC from PCI1 to PCI2 (and vice versa of course), made Windows 2000 bluescreen. Just switching those two cards. Nothing else and the SCSI had only a scanner attached, no bootable devices.

So, yes, that is long ago, but Windows 2000 implies at least the year 2000.

Linux didn't complain at all.... Yes, I was running Linux back then in dual boot.

Comment Re:Wooden bikes are cool (Score 1) 71

I've been to Calfee and seen the best-known bike. Yes, the tubes are just bamboo. It's just that simple.

You should see how carbon fiber bike frames are prototyped. Cut and scallop your CF tubing, epoxy the tubes together into a frame shape, put it into a clamp and then wrap the joints with CF twine while brushing on the resin. When done, stick it in the oven and cook it. When it comes out you take a die grinder to the places where the tubes come together and just smooth it out and make it pretty, done and done. It's literally just done by hand on a table. For the final bike they make molds for the pieces which join the tubes, but you only save a couple ounces on the final frame and the end result has about the same strength.

Comment Re:Toronto Municipal Gov't divided (Score -1, Troll) 169

There is a difference between sharing a journey which would happen anyway (and being compensated for fuel used, etc.) and someone actively earning a living from driving people around.

Yes, and that difference is who is getting paid. That is literally the only difference.

this Uber nonsense threatens to lower the quality massively, as well as put people at risk.

No, it really doesn't, because Taxis suck anyway. They do not receive special safety inspections above and beyond the normal, the drivers do not receive special scrutiny above and beyond a normal driver, the only issue is insurance which the ride services already require be handled, or handle themselves.

Taxi drivers are usually shitty drivers. The twat who drives a [licensed taxi] minivan around the county in which I live can't even figure out that left turn always yields at an intersection. Bitch almost hit me. And when you drive through a city, the taxi drivers are always the biggest assholes, cutting people off and whatnot, even when they don't actually know where they are going.

Fuck Taxis, and fuck Toronto

Comment Re:Wait a second, this is very interesting. (Score 1) 109

The design is so close one has to wonder if they are actually using the same machinery for some of the components between this tablet and the iPad. They really are that similar.

Foxconn makes the Apple iDevices, and China is known worldwide for its copying. Foxconn actually has some real engineers that can design things. So they just went ahead and copied the overall design, making only those changes which were necessary. They won't be using any of the same components, but the devices might well be produced on lines formerly used for Apple equipment.

Comment Re: Traffic signals (Score 1) 71

Even with my metal recumbent trike, position is a huge thing when tripping stop lights. This is one of the "discussed to death" topics on sites like http://www.bentrideronline.com.... A lot depends on the sensitivity of the loop and the circuitry it triggers, and a lot of the detectors are specifically set to be triggered only by a metal mass lots larger than a baby stroller, wheelchair or bicycle.

Transportation

Video Collin Graver and his Wooden Bicycle (Video) 71

This is not a practical bike. "Even on smooth pavement, your vision goes blurry because you're vibrating so hard," Collin said to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter back in 2012 when he was only 15 -- and already building wooden bicycles. Collin's wooden bikes are far from the first ones. Wikipedia says, "The first bicycles recorded, known variously as velocipedes, dandy horses, or hobby horses, were constructed from wood, starting in 1817." And not all wooden bicycles made today are as crude as Collin's. A Portland (OR) company called Renovo makes competition-quality hardwood bicycle frames -- for as little as $2200, and a bunch more for a complete bike with all its hardware fitted and ready to roll.

Of course, while it might be sensible to buy a Renovo product if you want a wood-framed bike to Race Across America, you won't improve your woodworking skills the way Collin's projects have improved his to the point where he's made a nice-looking pair of wood-framed sunglasses described in his WOOD YOU? SHOULD YOU? blog. (Alternate Video Link)

Comment Re:AMD wins again (Score 1) 75

Most of Intel's desktop Core i3s are STILL running circles around AMD in single threaded performance tests. Sure, if you can use 8+threads AMD has a few decent options, but that's not most consumer workloads.

Most consumer workloads won't tax either processor, the AMD chip costs a lot less, and the AMD chipset costs a lot less, too. When the system is "good enough" (even my old-ass 1045T is peppy both when puttering around and also when the system is heavily loaded) and literally a couple hundred dollars cheaper between the cost of the CPU and the cost of the motherboard, a lot of people are going to go AMD. I have other places to spend my money, and wringing a few more FPS out of a game isn't worth adding 20% or more to the cost of the system.

For highly-parallelized tasks, AMD is still cheaper than intel flop for flop, and if you're planning to throw all your servers away every few years as many businesses do, you can punt on the power consumption issue. For a home user, it's usually not even on the radar. And it's not like AMD is just burning power, either. The lowest-end systems still have better graphics than intel; though I'm certainly no fan of ATI graphics, intel is only now getting serious about graphics performance, or perhaps that's becoming competent in.

If you need/want balls-out single thread performance, or can be convinced that it's important to you even when it isn't, sure you're going to buy intel. But you're going to pay a premium. It has been ever thus. At times, it made great sense, because for example around the P55C vs. K6 days everyone else had apparently forgotten completely how to make a chipset. Today, not so much.

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