When shopping for MBA programs, I was surprised how few of them were completely devoid of any kind of engineering management options. I don't see engineering and management as mutually exclusive skills, and I would like to be able to understand both so I can lead a group of techies to be as efficient and effective as possible. Managing tech people is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from managing a sales force, but most MBA programs don't seem to recognize the fact that having someone who understands the money/paperwork/organizational side of things may not be sufficient in a manufacturing or technical service environment.
Since I couldn't move to another town near the school with the ideal program, I chose a program that I felt would at least give me the management side of things, and I'll have to do a bit more work to make sure that I can work well with engineers. Not all of us are lucky to have a boss who is a techie also gifted in management.
Motivating tech people is much more than the occasional pizza party or free coffee mugs, it often takes effort to explain why a certain goal or project is important to the organization rather than simply saying "do it because I said so". Most employees respond better when they're informed this way, but tech people tend to be more interested the "why" of things - that's why they're tech people!

Its no secret that when the economy goes south, management philosophy becomes much more "conservative" which means that managers revert back to a stragey of cracking the whip to get results rather than more modern philosophies involving team dynamics, encouraging self-regulation by employees, and so forth. The old-school tactics are easier to explain to the uninitiated shareholders or board members whereas touchy-feely empowerment strategies don't have a x=y effect on a balance sheet.
I'm coming from the hourly IT support side of things and moving into management (getting an MBA in the process) and the traps that managers fall into when dealing with shrunken budgets and raised expectations are so blatantly obvious to me that I'm having a real hard time not grabbing my superiors (who're by no means techies) by the collars and shaking some sense into them. We're in a transitional period of history, IMO (did I mention I'm a historian too?) where the status of employees as resources rather than liabilities is in danger from too many people thinking that better/faster/cheaper can apply to people as well as processes.

I checked the article to be sure, and yep, it says that those CHARGED will have their names published on Twitter. So, even if you are found not guilty, you are going to be publicly named as a DUI offender before you even get a chance to clear your name.
I'm not trying to excuse drunk drivers, but for some reason, its seen as ok to make those charged or convicted of DUIs out to be the scum of the earth, wantonly careening down the roadways, seeking out innocents to mow down, when in fact most people who get DUIs are just ordinary joes who made a bad decision while not in the best state of mind.
The idea that it is somehow ok to humiliate people who are supposedly INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY seems like a prelude to a morality police state.

Who's influential? The rich.
Who's not? The poor.
In American capitalism, we are told that we can vote with our dollars to determine an organization's success or failure. Apparently, Microsoft feels that a poll tax is necessary.
Just as large corporations can use their money to exert disproportionate influence on the local or national political scene, now in marketing decisions the influence of a rich person will hold more weight than the 'common man' who makes up the majority of the market.

Only recently have we even acknowledged that women are not inherently inferior to men, so is it so much of a surprise to learn that there is a strong cultural gender bias in favor of men being superior in intelligence?
In my own family, my mother is a medical doctor, while my father never made it through college, and despite this reversal, I have caught myself falling into the same traps and patterns that society at large puts out as truth that women are inferior to men in certain fields of study, if not all intellectual pursuits.

I am practically a professional light-bulb changer, so I will say that in my non-scientific, non-measured, purely anecdotal experience, that CFLs put out a lot more heat than LEDs. Scads less than incandescents, but still, the ballast in the base of a CFL warms up quite a bit during operation, often growing too hot to touch when the glass spiral is still plenty cool. If you're concerned about minimizing heat, go LED.

The agriculture regulatory agencies want to have their say in the matter so they can include gold farming in the next Five Year Plan.

The folks at the retirement home where I work love Wii bowling.
Really. This is 100% true.

Hy homepage is Slashdot.

A major gripe in the Russian psyche is that they are 'left out' of Europe despite the fact that the majority of their population is in what is geographically defined as Europe. Way to go and snub them.

But when I read the article summary, one of the first questions on my mind was... How does it interact with Japanese schoolgirls?

I work with elderly folks and when people ask me about my job, I joke that the biggest thing old folks fear is change.
As we age, our ability to absorb new information and get it to gel with existing preconceptions degrades. Elderly people aren't incapable of learning, but it takes much more effort to absorb and internalize new concepts that don't already fit into their world view or realm of experience.
Its really un-PC to say, but the older we get, the more inflexible our thinking becomes. We have problems adapting to new situations, information, and the end result is often fear, confusion, or the dismissal of new ideas as irrelevant.

A small Australian town has been over run by first level adventurers who came to farm easy XP.