Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Twitter

Submission + - Brand Advocate Fired Over Tweet (thesocialmediahat.com)

Submitted by
Mike Allton
Mike Allton writes: "Adria Richards, brand advocate for SendGrid, has been fired. While attending a Python conference, she sent a Tweet to alert conference organizers that inappropriate behavior was taking place. Organizers escorted the developers from the conference, but one developer employer went so far as to fire that developer. Consequently, Adria began receiving threats and SendGrid is under a DDoS attack, and now they've fired Adria in response."
Robotics

Submission + - Humanoid robot helps train children with autism (vanderbilt.edu)

Submitted by
Science_afficionado
Science_afficionado writes: "Researchers at Vanderbilt University have developed an intelligent, adaptive system centered on a humanoid robot that is designed to help treat young children diagnosed with ASD. An initial test with a dozen children demonstrated that they responded almost as well to the robot as they did to a human therapist in training sessions designed to teach them a critical social communication skill. The system and the test are described in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6373737&contentType=Journals+%26+Magazines&searchWithin%3Dsarkar%26punumber%3D7333]"
Privacy

Submission + - Twitter-shaming can cost you your job - whether you're giving or receiving (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "Hoping to strike a blow against sexism in the tech industry, developer and tech evangelist Adria Richards took to Twitter to complain about two male developers swapping purportedly offensive jokes at PyCon. The decision has set into motion a chain of events that illustrate the impact a tweet or two can make in this age of social networking: One the developers and Richards have since lost their jobs, and even the chair of PyCon has been harassed for his minor role in the incident."
Education

Submission + - Kids Build Pill Dispenser to Win Raspberry Pi Award (channelbiz.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "The first Raspberry Pi Awards have picked the best projects built by schoolchildren using the Raspberry Pi. The winners included a team of 8 to 11 year olds, who built a door-answering machine for elderly or disabled people, and a team of 12 to 16 year olds, who made an automated pill dispenser for forgetful patients. Other categories included adults, who built a wireless home power consumption system."
Science

Submission + - Planck telescope maps light of the big bang scattered across the universe (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by alancronin
alancronin writes: The most detailed map ever made of the oldest light to shine through the universe has been released by scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA). The map reveals tiny variations in the "cosmic microwave background" or CMB – the faint glow of radiation that is left over from the earliest light to illuminate the cosmos. These primordial photons are all around us, and account for 1% of the "snow" that could be seen on untuned television sets. Scientists compiled the map from more than 15 months of observations by the ESA's Planck telescope. The map improves on data gathered by two previous Nasa missions called Cobe and WMAP. The director-general of Europe's space agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain, described the new map as "a giant leap in understanding the origins of the universe".

Comment Re:They just can't do it, cap'n! (Score 2) 605

by kg261 (#43081609) Attached to: Why Can't Intel Kill x86?
IBM missed the small OS Microsoft missed search Funny how that works. You would think they could set up a corporate process to analyze and evaluate alternative approaches, and then meet with the HR department to classify the requirements and determine the appropriate .....

Submission + - Very Bright Comet on November 2013! (blogspot.it)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) will get to within 0.012AU of the Sun (extremely close) at the end of November 2013 and then to ~0.4AU from Earth at the beginning of January 2014! According to its orbit, this comet will be a naked-eye object in the period November 2013 — Janaury 2014. And it could reach a negative magnitude at the end of November 2013.
Education

Submission + - Shared Learning Collaborative offers two $75K bounties for open source apps. (slcedu.org)

Submitted by
OSDiva
OSDiva writes: "Ever wish you could directly contribute to improving the use of Technology in Education? The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) has announced an offer of $75K for each of two Apache 2.0 licensed open source applications aimed at the US K-12 Education market making use of a RESTful API released this past summer by the project. SLC is a non-profit funded by the Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation and CCSSO. They are holding a series of "Camps" to bootstrap public knowledge of the project and the APIs, including one in Boston next weekend that just before the bounty submission deadline of Oct 2. http://dev.slcedu.org/slc-camps"

Submission + - Milky Way is Surrounded by Halo of Hot Gas (nasa.gov)

Submitted by kelk1
kelk1 writes: If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it also could be an explanation for what is known as the "missing baryon" problem for the galaxy [...] a census of the baryons present in stars and gas in our galaxy and nearby galaxies shows at least half the baryons are unaccounted for [...] Although there are uncertainties, the work by Gupta and colleagues provides the best evidence yet that the galaxy's missing baryons have been hiding in a halo of million-kelvin gas that envelopes the galaxy.
Science

Submission + - Fermilab prepares for a future of muons (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: At Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, protons were always the primary particles, coursing through the circular tracks of the the Tevatron, which until 2009 was the highest energy collider in the world. But there's a new particle making the rounds at the Batavia, Illinois campus: the muon, a heavy but short-lived cousin of the electron — interesting both for its usefulness in testing the Standard Model, as well as potentially being used someday in a powerful colliderLink text.
On 19 September, the lab announced that the US Energy Department (DOE) had granted the $40 million experiment “mission need” approval, a first step towards eventual funding. Last month, a second muon experiment, called Mu2e and priced at $200 million, received a second stage blessing from the DOE.
The g-2 experiment will focus on an anomaly in the spin rate of a muon within a magnetic field, which some theorists believe is evidence that supersymmetry could resolve problems in the Standard Model. Meanwhile, the Mu2e experiment, which aims to begin taking data in 2019, will sift through many trillions of muons to see if any happen to spontaneously morph into their cousins, the electron — something that is almost entirely forbidden under the Standard Model.
Bitcoin

BitFloor Joins List of Compromised BitCoin Exchanges 232

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the after-heist-six-bitcoin-becomes-a-real-boy dept.
hypnosec writes "An attacker managed to access an unencrypted backup of wallet keys and steal 24,000 BTC (worth more than a quarter million USD), following which Bitcoin exchange Bitfloor has been shut down while the investigation of the theft is going on. The attack was carried out sometime last night. In a forum post, Shtylman pleads with Bitcoin users that BitFloor needs their help."
Space

Submission + - Probing an 'Invisible' Exoplanet's Atmosphere (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "To study the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, astronomers have had two choices: pick one that flies across the face of its parent star relative to Earth's perspective (an event known as a transit), or wait for a new generation of more sensitive space telescopes that can directly capture the planet's faint light. Now, there's a third option. Using a cryogenically-cooled infrared detector on a telescope in Chile, astronomers ferreted out beams of light coming directly from Tau Boötis b, a massive planet about 50 light-years from Earth."

Comment Design your own? (Score 1) 629

by kg261 (#40313211) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Are Hearing Aids So Expensive?
I see a few people walking around with bluetooth headsets. Maybe "invisible" hearing aids are expensive, but another option would be to use(hack) these cellphone headsets, or even use an iphone (there noise cancelling sw built in). People are used to seeing them - just have to convince your mom.

Slashdot Top Deals

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

Close