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Comment: Re:Risk vs. Reward? (Score 1) 249

by MagicM (#43732057) Attached to: Drones: Coming Soon To the New Jersey Turnpike?

Americans have been conditioned to believe that the "real" speed limit is at least 10 mph over the posted limit.

Actually, it's the other way around. American speed-limit-setters have been told to post a speed limit that is at least 10 mph below the maximum speed people actually drive. More or less.

Or, from wikipedia:

The speed limit is commonly set at or below the 85th percentile speed (being the speed which no more than 15% of traffic is exceeding) and in the USA is typically set 8 to 12 mph (13 to 19 km/h) below that speed.

Businesses

Two Changes To Quirky Could Change The World 103

Posted by timothy
from the buy-cheap-sell-dear dept.
"Quirky.com has generated a lot of buzz," writes frequent contributor Bennett Haselton, "but it's hard to see how it could ever be more than a novelty unless they change two key features of their process. Fortunately, they already have all the infrastructure in place for bringing inventions to fruition, so that with these two changes, Quirky really could deliver on their early promise to change the way products get invented." Read on for Bennett's thoughts — which seem more sensible than quirky.

Comment: eat your oranges! (Score 1) 245

by MagicM (#43453631) Attached to: Giant Snails Invade Florida

"If you got a ham sandwich in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, or an orange, and you didn't eat it all and you bring it back into the States and then you discard it, at some point, things can emerge from those products," Feiber said.

Remember kids, finish your oranges just in case there are baby snails in there. Don't discard, digest!

The Media

ProPublica's Guide To News App Tech 12

Posted by Soulskill
from the blending-technology-and-news dept.
dstates writes "ProPublica, the award winning public interest journalism group and frequently cited Slashdot source, has published an interesting guide to app technology for journalism and a set of data and style guides. Journalism presents unique challenges with potentially enormous but highly variable site traffic, the need to serve a wide variety of information, and most importantly, the need to quickly develop and vet interesting content, and ProPublica serves lots of data sets in addition to the news. They are also doing some cool stuff like using AI to generate specific narratives from tens of thousands of database entries illustrating how school districts and states often don't distribute educational opportunities to rich and poor kids equally. The ProPublica team focuses on some basic practical issues for building a team, rapidly and flexibly deploying technology and insuring that what they serve is correct. A great news app developer needs three key skills: the ability to do journalism, design acumen and the ability to write code quickly — and the last is the easiest to teach. To build a team they look to their own staff rather than competing with Google for CS grads. Most news organizations use either Ruby on Rails or Python/Django, but more important than which specific technology you choose is to just pick a server-side programming language and stick to it. Cloud hosting provides news organizations with incredible flexibility (like increasing your capacity ten-fold for a few days around the election and then scaling back the day after), but they're not as fast as real servers, and cloud costs can scale quickly relative to real servers. Maybe a news app is not the most massive 'big data' application out there, but where else can you find the challenge of millions of users checking in several times a day for the latest news, and all you need to do is sort out which of your many and conflicting sources are providing you with straight information? Oh, and if you screw up, it will be very public."

Comment: Favorite blah blah (Score 2) 321

by MagicM (#42400681) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your Favorite Web Comic of 2012?

The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.

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