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Submission + - Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy (newrepublic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Work/life balance is a constant problem in the tech industry. Even though experienced and mature engineers have been vocal in fighting it, every new generation buys into the American cultural identity of excessive work being a virtue. Each generation suffers for it, and the economy does, too. This article backs up that wisdom with hard numbers: "The 40-hour workweek is mostly a thing of the past. Ninety-four percent of professional workers put in 50 or more hours, and nearly half work 65 or above. All workers have managed to cut down on our time on the job by 112 hours over the last 40 years, but we’re far behind other countries: The French cut down by 491 hours, the Dutch by 425, and Canadians by 215 in the same time period. ... This overwork shows up in our sleep. Out of five developed peers, four other countries sleep more than us. That has again worsened over the years. In 1942, more than 80 percent of Americans slept seven hours a night or more. Today, 40 percent sleep six hours or less. A lack of sleep makes us poorer workers: People who sleep less than seven hours a night have a much harder time concentrating and getting work done."

Submission + - Programming on a Piano Keyboard (elekslabs.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a fun project: engineer Yuriy Guts built a Visual Studio extension that lets people program using MIDI instruments. You can write code letter by letter on a piano keyboard. Granted, it's not terribly efficient, but it's at least artistic — you can compose music that is also a valid computer program. Somewhat more usefully, it also allows you to turn a simple MIDI input device, like a trigger pad into a set of buttons that will run tests, push/pull code, or other automatable tasks. The extension is open source and open to contributions.

Submission + - Searching for Ocean Life On Another World (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: National Geographic has a detailed article about efforts underway to search for life in the oceans of Europa, which are buried beneath miles of ice. A first mission would have a spacecraft orbit just 16 miles over the moon's surface, analyzing the material ejected from the moon, measuring salinity, and sniffing out its chemical makeup. A later mission would then deploy a rover. But unlike the rovers we've built so far, this one would be designed to go underwater and navigate using the bottom surface of the ice over the oceans. An early design was just tested successfully underneath the ice in Alaska. "[It] crawls along under a foot of ice, its built-in buoyancy keeping it firmly pressed against the frozen subsurface, sensors measuring the temperature, salinity, pH, and other characteristics of the water." Astronomers and astrobiologists are hopeful that these missions will provide definitive evidence of life on other worlds. "Europa certainly seems to have the basic ingredients for life. Liquid water is abundant, and the ocean floor may also have hydrothermal vents, similar to Earth's, that could provide nutrients for any life that might exist there. Up at the surface, comets periodically crash into Europa, depositing organic chemicals that might also serve as the building blocks of life. Particles from Jupiter's radiation belts split apart the hydrogen and oxygen that makes up the ice, forming a whole suite of molecules that living organisms could use to metabolize chemical nutrients from the vents."

Submission + - Evidence Of A Correction To The Speed of Light

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a second burst. These turned out to have been produced by the collapse of the core of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our galaxy. And sure enough, some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant in that region, as it became a supernova, now known as SN1987a. But why the delay of 7.7 hours from the first burst of neutrinos to the arrival of the photons? Astrophysicists soon realised that since neutrinos rarely interact with ordinary matter, they can escape from the star's core immediately. By contrast, photons have to diffuse through the star, a process that would have delayed them by about 3 hours. That accounts for some of the delay but what of the rest? Now one physicist has the answer--the speed of light through space requires a correction. As a photon travels through space, there is a finite chance that it will form an electron-positron pair. This pair exists for only a brief period of time and then goes on to recombine creating another photon which continues along the same path. This is a well-known process called vacuum polarisation. The new idea is that the gravitational potential of the Milky Way must influence the electron-positron pair because they have mass. This changes the energy of the virtual electron-positron pair, which in turn produces a small change in the energy and speed of the photon. And since the analogous effect on neutrinos is negligible, light will travel more slowly than them through a gravitational potential. According to the new calculations which combine quantum electrodynamics with general relativity, the change in speed accounts more or less exactly for the mysterious time difference. Voila!

Submission + - What Happens If You Have A Heart Attack In Space? (popsci.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We're weightless, about 34,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, trying not to vomit from motion sickness while wiggling an ultrasound probe into the esophagus of a $26,000 mannequin. In a moment, the hollowed-out Boeing 727 will reach the top of its parabola and plunge 10,000 feet, nose down—there's just enough time before the dive for the three college students conducting this microgravity experiment to snap a few grainy ultrasound images of the mannequin's lifeless heart.

Submission + - North Dakota researchers evaluate use of UAS in crop and livestock production

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: Researchers at North Dakota State University (NDSU) are working with the university's Carrington Research Extension Center to evaluate the use of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to monitor crop and livestock research projects. As part of the study, researchers are using UAS-mounted thermal, infrared sensors and cameras that capture images at specific frequencies to gather data from fields and livestock at specified times. NDSU Extension Service agricultural machine systems specialist and the project lead John Nowatzki said: "There is currently much interest in using UAS in agriculture.

Submission + - A Laser Message from Space (nasa.gov)

Submitted by stephendavion
stephendavion writes: Anyone who remembers dialup internet can sympathize with the plight of NASA mission controllers. Waiting for images to arrive from deep space, slowly downloading line by line, can be a little like the World Wide Web of the 1990s. Patience is required.

A laser on the International Space Station (ISS) could change all that. On June 5th, 2014, the ISS passed over the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California, and beamed an HD video to researchers waiting below. Unlike normal data transmissions, which are encoded in radio waves, this one came to Earth on a beam of light.

"It was incredible to see this magnificent beam of light arriving from our tiny payload on the space station," says Matt Abrahamson, who manages the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Submission + - "Stupid App" Yo Reached Over 1 Million Users (gizmobeast.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: YO, a one-tap messaging app that was labeled by a US TV host as a stupid app has surpassed 1 million users and raised over 1 million dollars in venture capital funding. What made it so appealing? Its simple and easy to use.
Here’s how this app works. Want to say “good morning” to your friends? Just Yo to them. wanna say “Baby I miss you” just simply put Yo. Possibilities are endless. Sound absurd? For some, not really. Why tweet 140 characters, when you can just Yo.

Some critics say the popularity will soon fade, but so far, the app is still currently in the top charts.

Submission + - $500k "Energy-Harvesting" Kickstarter scam unfolding right now. (drop-kicker.com)

Submitted by FryingLizard
FryingLizard writes: For a while I've been following the saga of the Kickstarter "iFind" Bluetooth 4.0 tracking tag. Nothing new about such tags (there are many crowdfunded examples; some have delivered, some have disappointed), but this one claims it doesn't require any batteries — it harvests its energy from electromagnetic emissions (wifi, cell towers, TV signals, etc). The creators have posted no evidence other than some slick photoshop work, an obviously faked video, and some easily disproven data and classic bad science.
So far they've picked up half a million in pledges. With six days to go until they walk off with the money, skeptics abound (10min in) including some excellent dissections of their claims. The creators have yet to post even a single photo of the magical device, instead posting empty platitudes and claims that such secrecy is necessary to protect their IP.

Using just their published figures, their claims are readily refuted, yet still backers flock in. Kickstarter appear uninterested in what can only be described as a slow-motion bank robbery, despite their basic requirement to demonstrate a prototype.
It seems self-evident that such scams should not be allowed to propagate on Kickstarter, for the good of other genuine projects and the community at large.
Skeptics are maintaining a google doc with many of the highlights of the action.

Bring your own popcorn and enjoy the show.

Submission + - McMillen: Net Neutrality is not about cost of bandwidth

Submitted by ygslash
ygslash writes: Robert McMillen of Wired claims that we have gotten Net Neutrality all wrong. While we are all busy arguing about whether there should be regulations preventing large content providers from getting preferential bandwidth, McMillen says that not only have the large content providers already had preferential bandwidth for ten years, but that by now this has become an inherent part of the structure of the Internet and in practice cannot be changed. Instead, he says, the Net Neutrality discussion should be about ensuring a free and open competitive market for bandwidth, so that anyone who wants bandwidth can purchase it at a fair price.

Submission + - Best mass email software/services?

Submitted by badlapje
badlapje writes: I'm a second year ACS student doing volunteer work for a national non-profit (country = Belgium). One of the things they'd like me to implement is a new system for sending out news-letters. Currently they're using Interspire Email Marketer, which seems to be a very bad fit and unbelievably slow in use (10-30 seconds for a page load/response after a click). The only alternative i've experience with is Mailchimp, but that seems to be rather expensive. We're talking several email lists with near 30k subscribers, with emails being sent out 1-4 times/month, and the number of subscribers growing fast.

So what EMSP's/Mass Mail Software/other possible solutions would slashdot users recommend? The main concerns for the non-profit are:
- price (being non-profit they don't have a lot of money to throw around)
- usability: volunteers and a not so tech-savvy staff will have to use this so the easier in use the better
- multi-accounting or subaccounts so that their local groups can send newsletters to the local members with as little bother as possible
- responsive design (i can code this if the service/software allows for own templates, better if the service/software can do this via some kind of wizard/wysiwyg)
- possibility of integration with a membership database to import lists and add people to the email lists automatically if at all possible

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