65659367
submission
gollum123 writes:
From NPR, Back in the day, computer science was as legitimate a career path for women as in medicine, law or science. But in 1984, the number of females majoring in computing-related subjects began to fall, and is now as low as 20 percent compared to those other three.It's a surprising trend that NPR's Planet Money has uncovered, and the show's latest episode seeks to answer a simple question: Why? According to the show's experts, computers were advertised as a "boy's toy," and combined with early '80s geek culture staples like the novel Hackers, as well as movies like WarGames and Weird Science, the knock-on effect was to exclude women.
59178681
submission
gollum123 writes:
The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans. The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.
52693265
submission
gollum123 writes:
US physicists have studied the fluid dynamics of urine "splashback" — and found tips to help men and women with their accuracy and hygiene. Splashback was low when the jets were used close up with a narrow "angle of attack", said the Brigham Young University team. micturation is still a messier business than it needs to be, according to the research. The team fired coloured water at various target "toilets" at the velocity and pressure of average human urination. Then, using a high-speed camera, they captured the moment of impact in remarkable visual detail. the biggest thing you can do to reduce splashback — sitting or standing — is to alter the "angle of attack".
43877925
submission
gollum123 writes:
Sausages, ham, bacon and other processed meats appear to increase the risk of dying young, a study of half a million people across Europe suggests. It concluded diets high in processed meats were linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer and early deaths. The study followed people from 10 European countries for nearly 13 years on average. It showed people who ate a lot of processed meat were also more likely to smoke, be obese and have other behaviours known to damage health. However, the researchers said even after those risk factors were accounted for, processed meat still damaged health. One in every 17 people followed in the study died. However, those eating more than 160g of processed meat a day — roughly two sausages and a slice of bacon — were 44% more likely to die over a typical follow-up time of 12.7 years than those eating about 20g.
43781309
submission
gollum123 writes:
Swiss voters have overwhelmingly backed proposals to impose some of the world's strictest controls on executive pay, final referendum results show. Nearly 68% of the voters supported plans to give shareholders a veto on compensation and ban big payouts for new and departing managers. The new measures will give Switzerland some of the world's strictest corporate rules Shareholders will have a veto over salaries, golden handshakes will be forbidden, and managers of companies who flout the rules could face prison.The "fat cat initiative", as it has been called, will be written into the Swiss constitution and apply to all Swiss companies listed on Switzerland's stock exchange. Support for the plans — brain child of Swiss businessman turned politician Thomas Minder — has been fuelled by a series of perceived disasters for major Swiss companies, coupled with salaries and bonuses staying high
36135243
submission
gollum123 writes:
The July heat wave that wilted crops, shriveled rivers and fueled wildfires officially went into the books Wednesday as the hottest single month on record for the continental United States. The average temperature across the Lower 48 was 77.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.3 degrees above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported. That edged out the previous high mark, set in 1936, by two-tenths of a degree, NOAA said. n addition, the seven months of 2012 to date are the warmest of any year on record and were drier than average as well, NOAA said. U.S. forecasters started keeping records in 1895. And the past 12 months have been the warmest of any such period on record, topping a mark set between July 2011 and this past June. Every U.S. state except Washington experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, NOAA reported.
35307045
submission
gollum123 writes:
Peter Jacksonwowed the crowd with 13 minutes of highly anticipated footage from the first of his two ultraexpensive “Hobbit” movies. But he also played it safe — very safe — by not so much as mentioning, much less demonstrating, the filmmaking wizardry at the heart of the project. That left big questions about the movie industry’s future unanswered and added to a theme of this year’s Comic-Con: Hollywood has come to fear this place. Mr. Jackson is shooting his two “Hobbit” movies, the first of which is to arrive in theaters in December, at an unusually fast 48 frames a second, twice the standard rate. But an estimated 6,500 fans did not have that experience when they gathered in Comic-Con’s cavernous Hall H moments earlier to see the new footage.Still, Mr. Jackson, one of Hollywood’s boldest directors, made the unexpectedly timid decision to present “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” in a standard format here — it was not even in 3-D — because he feared an online outcry that could hurt box-office results.
35101973
submission
zacharye writes:
AT&T paid dearly for iPhone exclusivity that started in June 2007 and ran for nearly four years. What did it buy? Back in 2Q07, AT&T Wireless generated $10.4 billion in sales, and Verizon Wireless did $10.8 billion. Verizon Wireless edged out AT&T by just 4%. This was a very interesting point in time to inject a revolutionary new smartphone — and the iPhone debuted just two days before the end of 2Q07...
35101517
submission
gollum123 writes:
The mainland United States, which was largely recovering Monday from a near-nationwide heat wave, has experienced the warmest 12 months since record-keeping began in 1895, a top government science and weather agency announced Monday. The report from the National Climatic Data Center, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does not take into account blistering heat from this month, with 2,116 high temperature marks either broken or tied between July 2 and July 8 in communities nationwide. But it does incorporate the warmest March recorded as well as extreme heat in June, which also helped make the first six months of 2012 the warmest recorded of any January-June stretch.
34563059
submission
gollum123 writes:
Arguing against immigration policies that force foreign-born innovators to leave the United States, a new study to be released on Tuesday shows that immigrants played a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities. Conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonprofit group co-founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, the study notes that nearly all the patents were in science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM fields that are a crucial driver of job growth. The Partnership for a New American Economy released a paper in May saying that other nations were aggressively courting highly skilled citizens who had settled in the United States, urging them to return to their home countries. The partnership supports legislation that would make it easier for foreign-born STEM graduates and entrepreneurs to stay in the United States. the study notes that nine out of 10 patents at the University of Illinois system in 2011 had at least one foreign-born inventor. Of those, 64 percent had a foreign inventor who was not yet a professor but rather a student, researcher or postdoctoral fellow, a group more likely to face immigration problems.
34249237
submission
gollum123 writes:
Asians have now taken over Latinos as the largest group of new arrivals every year. In 2010, 36% of new immigrants were Asians compared to 31% for Hispanics, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Pew's exhaustive new report on Asian-Americans found important differences between Asian-Americans and other population groups in America. The Pew survey showed that across the board, Asian-Americans are more satisfied than any other Americans with their lives, finances and direction of the country. They also place more value on traditional marriage, family and parenthood and usually possess a strong work ethic. Nearly seven in 10 respondents said people could get ahead if they are willing to work hard. And 93% of Asian-Americans describe people of their origin as "very hard-working," whereas only 57% said the same about Americans as a whole. Asian-Americans also attain college degrees (61%) at about double the rate of recent non-Asian immigrants (30%), Pew found.
33775017
submission
gollum123 writes:
Just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing and three-quarters say the justices’ decisions are sometimes influenced by their personal or political views, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News. Those findings are a fresh indication that the court’s standing with the public has slipped significantly in the past quarter-century, according to surveys conducted by several polling organizations. Approval was as high as 66 percent in the late 1980s, and by 2000 approached 50 percent. The decline in the court’s standing may stem in part from Americans’ growing distrust in recent years of major institutions in general and the government in particular. But it also could reflect a sense that the court is more political, after the ideologically divided 5-to-4 decisions in Bush v. Gore, which determined the 2000 presidential election, and Citizens United, the 2010 decision allowing unlimited campaign spending by corporations and unions.
33335125
submission
gollum123 writes:
For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United States — cereals, snack foods, salad dressings — have contained ingredients from plants whose DNA was manipulated in a laboratory. Regulators and many scientists say these pose no danger. But as Americans ask more pointed questions about what they are eating, popular suspicions about the health and environmental effects of biotechnology are fueling a movement to require that food from genetically modified crops be labeled, if not eliminated. The most closely watched labeling effort is a proposed ballot initiative in California that cleared a crucial hurdle this month, setting the stage for a probable November vote that could influence not just food packaging but the future of American agriculture. Tens of millions of dollars are expected to be spent on the election showdown. It pits consumer groups and the organic food industry, both of which support mandatory labeling, against more conventional farmers, agricultural biotechnology companies like Monsanto and many of the nation’s best-known food brands like Kellogg’s and Kraft.
33081725
submission
gollum123 writes:
As with past technological threats, network executives are closing ranks against a Dish Network device that undermines the broadcast business model. The disruptive technology at hand is an ad-eraser, embedded in new digital video recorders sold by Charles W. Ergen’s Dish Network, one of the nation’s top distributors of TV programming. Turn it on, and all the ads recorded on most prime-time network shows are automatically skipped, no channel-flipping or fast-forwarding necessary. Some reviewers have already called the feature, called the Auto Hop, a dream come true for consumers. But for broadcasters and advertisers, it is an attack on an entrenched television business model, and it must be strangled, lest it spread elsewhere.
20105828
submission
gollum123 writes:
In a paper, by the US-based economic historian Gregory Clark, finds that, eventually, the descendants of today's England's elite families will stop having an in-built social advantage, and the descendants of poor families will lose their social handicap. That is the good news. The bad news is that it's likely to take about 350 years, and there's not much the government can do to speed the process up. Depressingly, perhaps, the rate of mobility does not seem to have been any higher in the 20th century than it was in the 1300s. Indeed, by some measures, children from poor backgrounds had a better chance of advancing in society in Medieval England than they do now. In fact, the research implies that the only reliable way to increase social mobility in this country would be for the government to force people to marry people from a different social class .
