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Submission + - SPAM: Managed capitalism or neoliberalism

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: This month is a time of change, but maybe it should also be a time when we look back to an earlier age of managed capitalism — as exemplified by Bell Labs and perhaps seen in the development of the vaccines to covid-19?
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Seed launches BeagleV, $150 Risc-V Computer (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by shoor
shoor writes: Risc-V is an instruction set for a computer architecture that allows anyone to design and sell computers based upon it. First hardware deliveries are expected in April. Widespread delivery in September 2021.

Submission + - GitHub reportedly fired a Jewish employee who warned co-workers about Nazis (theverge.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: GitHub reportedly fired a Jewish employee after he posted a message in Slack that said “stay safe homies, Nazis are about” the day of the attack on the US Capitol, according to Business Insider.

The message sparked controversy inside the company, with one colleague criticizing him for using divisive language. GitHub’s HR team chastised the employee for using the word “Nazi” in a company Slack channel. Two days later, GitHub allegedly fired him, citing vague patterns of behavior. The employee asked Business Insider to remain anonymous for fear of online harassment.

The move shows a lack of understanding on the part of GitHub management, both about the gravity of the attack on the US Capitol and the contextual use of the word Nazi. After Business Insider published its report, the company was widely criticized on Twitter for trying to “both sides” the issue.

Now, roughly 200 of GitHub’s 1,700 employees have signed a letter asking executives to take a stronger stance against anti-Semitism and white supremacy. They also want to know why the employee was fired.

Submission + - Memory versus disk and cpu - how the balance has changed in 35 years (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Thirty-five years ago a report for Tandem computers concluded (https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf) that the cost balance between memory, disk and CPU on big iron favoured holding items in memory if they were needed every five minutes and using five bytes to save one instruction. Update the analysis for today and what do you see? Well my estimate that we should aim to hold items that we have to access 10 times a second and that we can now balance instructions and bytes — meaning some common data space saving techniques are more efficient than before.

Submission + - Chromium Being Ported to VC++, Compiler Bugs Fixed

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Moving a big software project to a new compiler can be a lot of work, and few projects are bigger than the Chromium web browser. In addition to the main Chromium repository, which includes all of WebKit, there are over a hundred other open-source projects which Chromium incorporates by reference, totaling more than 48,000 C/C++ files and 40,000 header files. As of March 11th, Chromium has switched to Visual C++ 2015, and it doesn't look like it's looking back. The tracking bug for this effort currently has over 330 comments on it, with contributions from dozens of developers. Bruce Dawson has written an interesting showcase of some VC++ compiler bugs that the process has uncovered. His job was to investigate them, come up with a minimal reproduce case, and report them to Microsoft. The Google and Microsoft teams get praise for an excellent symbiotic relationship, and the compiler bugs have been fixed quickly by the Visual Studio team.

Submission + - Neck Pain Can Be Changed Through Altered Visual Feedback

Submitted by sys64764
sys64764 writes: Using virtual reality to misrepresent how far the neck is turned can actually change pain experiences in individuals who suffer from chronic neck pain, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“Our findings show that the brain does not need danger messages coming from the tissues of the body in order to generate pain in that body part — sensable and reliable cues that predict impending pain are enough to produce the experience of pain,” says researcher G. Lorimer Moseley of the University of South Australia. “These results suggest a new approach to developing treatments for pain that are based on separating the non-danger messages from the danger messages associated with a movement.”

Pretty soon we'll all be going to the gym wearing VR headsets while running appropriate programs and that sore neck or aching back won't mean a thing anymore!

Submission + - White House issues veto threat as House prepares to vote on EPA 'secret science' (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The U.S. House of Representatives could vote as early as this week to approve two controversial, Republican-backed bills that would change how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses science and scientific advice to inform its policies. Many Democrats, scientific organizations, and environmental groups are pushing back, calling the bills thinly veiled attempts to weaken future regulations and favor industry. White House advisors today announced that they will recommend that President Barack Obama veto the bills if they reach his desk in their current form.

Submission + - Study: Refactoring Doesn't Improve Code Quality (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A team of researchers in Sri Lanka set out to test whether common refactoring techniques resulted in measurable improvements in software quality, both externally (e.g., Is the code more maintainable?) and internally (e.g., Number of lines of code). Here's the tl;dr version of their findings: Refactoring doesn’t make code easier to analyze or change; it doesn't make code run faster; and it doesn't doesn’t result in lower resource utilization. But it may make code more maintainable.

Submission + - Use astrology to save Britain's health system says MP (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An MP from the governing Conservative Party has said that using astrology could radically improve the performance of Britain's National Health Service and that it's opponents are "racially prejudiced" and, errr, driven by "superstition, ignorance and prejudice". David Treddinick even claims he has "helped" fellow legislators through astrology.

Submission + - For Brits it's back to base 12 (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: British schoolchildren used to be regularly taught multiplication tables up to 12 — because until 1971 the country had a currency based on 12 pennies to a shilling. More recently teaching has been limited to 1 — 10. Now the Conservative education secretary is demanding that the country — or at least England — return to teaching the "12 times tables". But wouldn't 16 make more sense (if it makes any sense) in this day and age?

Submission + - Scottish Parliament asked to treat creationism as equal to science (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: John Mason, a legislator from the governing Scottish National Party, has tabled a motion in the Scottish Parliament demanding that creationist theories be given credence in schools because scientists "cannot disprove" their validity. Mason made his move after it was revealed that the education authority (the equivalent of a school board in the US) in one of Scotland's biggest areas are to set down new rules for religious education in schools after reports of Christian fundamentalist influence over the teaching of science.

Submission + - How bad does a CompSci book have to be? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Computer Scientists are not novelists or journalists but surely that does not excuse them from being to write sentences that at least follow the basic grammatical rules. Nor does it mean that their publishers should get away with seliing extremely badly written works to what are often close-to-captive audiences in Universities and similar institutions. Yet that happens all the time. Recently I bought a Computer Science book — aimed at researchers and specialist engineers that retails for over £70 (approx $105) and yet was written in such poor English that a 10-year-old school child would be failed on work of that standard. It's probably the worst I have seen, but it's not the only one — how do they get away with it?

Submission + - David Cameron says Brits should be taught Imperial measures (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: Children in the UK have been taught in metric measures in school since (at least) 1972, but yesterday British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that they should actually be taught in Imperial measures (which are still in use officially to measure road distances and speeds but not really anywhere else). Is this because he has not got a clue about science or because he is trying to buy off his right wing fringe (who object to "metrication") or because he might be a bit stupid, Oxford degree not withstanding?

Submission + - More evidence for the Chomskian hierarchy (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: A small thought experiment you can try seems to suggest that the Chomskian theory of humans' innate linguistic ability is correct and maybe that means there will be limits to the success of big data based machine translation.

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