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Earth

+ - If the Earth Stood Still-> 1

Submitted by GrumblyStuff
GrumblyStuff (870046) writes "What would happen if the Earth stop rotating? Aside having a day that lasts 365 times longer, the approximately 8 km of water that is pushed to the equator would flow north and south, forming polar oceans separated entirely by a ring of land.

The geographic changes were modeled with ArcGIS and can be viewed here. There's no mention of possible weather patterns which would be interesting to try to model with both the geographical changes and year long day."
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Microsoft

+ - Ubuntu Fountain-of-Youth for Aging Windows PCs

Submitted by theodp
theodp (442580) writes "When Slate's Farhad Manjoo reviewed Ubuntu 8.04 two years ago, he didn't find much to like. But that was then. This is now. Having gotten his hands on version 10.04, Manjoo now highly recommends giving your creaky old Windows computer an Ubuntu makeover, calling it a pretty fantastic way to get an instantly new computer. 'Thanks to Ubuntu,' says Manjoo, 'a four-year-old machine that I'd been ready to throw out now works amazingly well. It can run multiple tabs, it can play YouTube videos, and it can most certainly let me stream NPR.' Time for Ubuntu Ponce de Leon Edition?"
Education

+ - The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "What is the value of a good teacher? Researchers from Harvard suggest that the value of a good kindergarten teacher — thought previously by some to be negligible — is, in fact, immense: "All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten." The results are preliminary (they haven't been peer-reviewed yet), however, they do raise interesting questions about how valuable early education can be."
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Image

Plastic Bottle Catamaran Crosses The Pacific Ocean 56

Posted by samzenpus
from the not-your-usual-trash-barge dept.
The Plastiki, a catamaran made with plastic bottles, has completed a 8,000 mile trip between San Francisco and Sydney. Captain David de Rothschild said, "The Plastiki is literally a metaphorical message in a bottle about beating waste and reducing our human fingerprints on our natural environment." The boat will go on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum for the next month.

Comment: we could all learn something (Score 1) 419

by avicho (#30403080) Attached to: Company Trains the Autistic To Test Software
wow, this thread actually stays on topic...but i didn't find anything about choosing work for yourself. Those with disabilities usually have someone to help them make bigger decisions in there life (if they're lucky and have family that cares), my point is that when any one of us puts thought into what we really want from life, work friends, recreation, we can be incredibly successful. I work with special needs individuals...specifically "real work for real pay". If you are going to place someone with *insert label here* into a real job, they have to be successful and at least equal to others in that position. If we look back on our own careers (or lack there of) we were probably most happy and therefore successful in a position that best suited who we are. It is called Person Centred Planning (yes that is how canadians spell centered).....so to get back to the story...if an autistic, asbergers (any other label including \.ers) is going to be employed for the long term, they have to be doing what they want. If you like computers but don't know anything about them, read \. (or check out ggl similar pages extension in Chrome)...and then look for a job in the tech industry...shit you might like to count the number of grammar errors in online posts (apparently a favourite past time of \.ers)...then find a way to get paid for it. Any 18 yr old may not be able to jump into a top level job scanning code for errors, there are all kinds of skills to learn first, but as mentioned by some parents, they teach their autistic kids about social rules etc...wow, they teach their kids....so is the difference between asbergers and \.ers the fact that your moms never taught you shit cuz you thought you knew it all first....well good luck trying to get that tech job...if you don't like what your doing, and don't have any help to learn how to do it your scewed, 'special' or not.
Businesses

Company Trains the Autistic To Test Software 419

Posted by samzenpus
from the you-got-99-problems-but-a-glitch-aint-one dept.
Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive.

Comment: Re:So it's a fnacy nmae (Score 1) 1345

by avicho (#29324425) Attached to: Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, "Unschooling"
it is not what you learn, it is the fact that you are learning something, the connections formed in the brain during childhood are what determine your adult brain for the rest of your life, the only way to have more connections is to have more experience as a child...(by the age of 8 for boys and the age of 6 for girls)

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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