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Earth

Caltech Makes Flexible, 86% Efficient Solar Arrays 439

strredwolf writes "Caltech has released a flexible solar array that converts 95% of single-wavelength incandescent light and 86% of all sunlight into electricity. Instead of being flat-panel, they stand thin silicon wires in a plastic substrate that scatters the light onto them. The total composition is 98% plastic, 2% wire — the amount of silicon used is 1/50th that of ordinary panels. So as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." Update: 03/01 21:02 GMT by KD : Reader axelrosen points out evidence that the 80%+ efficiency figure is wrong. MIT's Tech Review, in covering the Caltech announcement, says that the new panel's efficiency is in the 15%-20% range — which is competitive with the current state of the art. And the Caltech panel should be far cheaper to manufacture.
IT

Submission + - How Do You Get Users to Read Error Messages? 3

A BOFH writes: The longer I do desktop support, the more it becomes obvious that my users don't read anything that appears on their screen. Instead, they memorize a series of buttons to press to get whatever result they want and if anything unexpected happens, they're completely lost. Error logs help a lot, but they have their limits. I've been toying with a few ideas, but I don't know if any of them will work and I was hoping my fellow Slashdotters could point me in the right direction. For example, I was thinking about creating icons or logos to identify specific errors. They might not remember that an error about "uninitialized data" but they might be more able to remember that they got the "puppy error" if I showed a puppy picture next to the error message. Or for times when finding images is too time consuming, you could create simple logos from letters, numbers, symbols, colors or shapes, so you could have the "red 5" error or "blue square" error (or any combination of those elements). I've even wondered if it would be possible to expand that to cover the other senses, for example, playing a unique sound with the error. Unfortunately, haptic and olfactory feedback aren't readily available. I like to think that my users would remember the error that caused them to get a swift kick in the balls. And if they forgot it anyhow, I could always help them reproduce it. Does anyone else have experience with ideas like these? Did it work?
Politics

Submission + - Texas Textbooks Battle is Actually an American War (nytimes.com) 1

ideonexus writes: I've been lackadaisical when it comes to following stories about Texas schoolboard attempts to slip creationism into Biology textbooks, dismissing the stories as just "dumbass Texans," but what I didn't realize is that Texas schoolbooks set the standard for the rest of the country, and it's not just Creationism that this Christian coalition is attempting to bring into schoolbooks, but a full frontal assault on history, politics, and the humanities that exploits the fact that final decisions are being made by a school board completely academically unqualified to make informed evaluations of the changes these lobbyists propose. This evangelical lobby has successfully had references to the American Constitution as a "living document," as textbooks have defined it since the 1950s, removed in favor of an "enduring Constitution" not subject to change, as well as attempting to over-emphasize the role Christianity played in the founding of America. The leaders of these efforts outright admit they are attempting to redefine the way our children understand the political landscape so that, when they grow up, they will have preconceived notions of the American political system that favor their evangelical Christian goals.

Comment Re:As in... (Score 1) 576

What exactly makes SI units "correct"? Measurements are just measurements. Maybe your country adopted SI, while ours didn't. One isn't objectively correct. Maybe there are more benefits to one than the other, making it "better" but not "correct". There is no wrong way to measure something, other than inaccurately.

Comment Re:Good developers dont have time to take many tes (Score 1) 440

I think another problem you are going to have though is, unless you give them a fairly trivial solution to solve, they are probably going to need to think about (and or research) the problem for a while. Not only think about it, but take some time to actually complete the problem. You couldn't give a test like "write me a molecular dynamics simulator in the next 15 minutes". You could test their ability to know syntax and functions off the top of their head, maybe their general coding style, or watch them do some simple refactoring after they finish a quick once-over, or maybe you could GIVE them code that needs to be reorganized and watch them reorganize it (which I think is a better test of usable development skill than the quick once-over). I would try to find ways to test things like the latter, and not things like the former so much. I think some of your good coders are going to be put off by the idea of someone trying to measure how quickly they code, or if they know syntax off the top of their head. I tend to know a lot of the syntax but I suspect plenty of programmers need to reference a manual for obscure stuff and I wouldn't hold that against them as long as their design and problem solving ability is good. Measuring the last couple things is harder to do.

Comment Good developers dont have time to take many tests (Score 2, Insightful) 440

The problem you're going to run into is that developers in high demand are well, in high demand. Their time is valuable. Every hoop you make them jump through is fewer jobs they can apply to (if they even bother to apply anymore, they aren't just thrown job opportunities like cans of free beer), so that makes your job less attractive. Unless you can hire 1000 people, why are a large number of people going to waste their time taking these tests? Perhaps you could do the test, but only after you've narrowed your applicant pool to a small number of people, and only if your job entices them enough to not apply to 4 or 5 other jobs in the time it takes to apply to yours. I do like your solution though of actually watching them write the code though, because that does prevent them just copying and pasting other code and sending it to you.
Businesses

Appropriate Interviewing For a Worldwide Search? 440

jellomizer writes 'I am a manager of a small Software Development department, looking to hire some more developers. By edict of the CEO, the search must be made globally, so we are dealing with different cultures and different ideas of truth and embellishment, etc. To try to counteract this, we give the potential employees tests where I watch what they do, to see if they actually know what they say they know. However, it seems a lot of applicants drop out when I mention that this test is mandatory. Is this a sign that we caught them in a lie, or are we weeding out good people where we shouldn't be? Would you be willing to take a test as part of an interview? If so, is there any type of heads up you would like to know beforehand to make the decision of whether to take the test easier?' What other difficulties have people seen while trying to hire from many different cultures?
Education

Submission + - U.S. Colleges Say Hiring U.S. Students a Bad Deal 1

theodp writes: "Many U.S. colleges and universities have notices posted on their websites informing U.S. companies that they're tax chumps if they hire students who are U.S. citizens. "In fact, a company may save money by hiring international students because the majority of them are exempt from Social Security (FICA) and Medicare tax requirements," advises the taxpayer-supported University of Pittsburgh (pdf) as it makes the case against hiring its own U.S. students. You'll find identical pitches made by the University of Delaware, the University of Cincinnati, Kansas State University, the University of Southern California, the University of Wisconsin, Iowa State University, and other public colleges and universities. The same messsage is also echoed by private schools, such as John Hopkins University, Brown University, Rollins College and Loyola University Chicago."
Businesses

Submission + - Are Information Technology's Glory Days Over?

Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days long past, having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years, from 1980 to 2000, when, he said, worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. "All you had to do was show up and not goof it up," Siebel says. "All ships were rising." Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent, Siebel says. Siebel's explanation for the sharp decline is that "the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized." Three successive inventions — the mini-computer, the PC, and then the Internet — were essentially "total market takeover" products, each wiping out the market for the product before it. No new technological advances, Siebel believes, will impel IT customers to replace the computer technology they now have: "I would suggest to you that most of what's going on today is not very exciting." In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was "where the action was" when he finished graduate school, he says, "if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.""

Comment Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score 1) 987

Why is it that so many people feel the need to give people some kneejerk economics lesson. Nothing in the original post indicates the person doesn't understand basic economics. As others have mentioned, the book wouldn't be worth writing for $5 (and no I am not implying that what it's worth to him is what it's worth to the market). Sure, writing the book was a sunk cost, but that doesn't make it completely unethical for others to be stealing the product of all the hours he put in writing that book. And the prospect of working several hundred or a thousand hours writing a technical book in a subject where you are a highly educated expert, to make the equivalent of McDonalds wages, is probably not going to encourage people to write books. Sure, some people will write for pleasure, for recognition, or for other reasons, but money is a great motivator too. If you don't reward people for the value they provide, they won't provide it anymore. And no, I'm not saying the price = the value or any other simple economics mistake, and I'm not going to give you any more disclaimers -- if I didn't specifically make an argument for an economic position, don't assume I'm taking a mistaken position. Inquire before you assume.

Comment Re:Let's put the question into perspective. (Score 1) 586

I think each of these job titles should be broken down into levels of knowledge as well. For example a Front End Web Developer (I) might know only HTML and CSS, (II) might know how to integrate JavaScript, (III) might just be better at those and also have some design skills that would overlap with a Web Designer (I). Another way to look at it might be... Markup Editor, for the HTML guy? But is just knowing some HTML even worth anything without CSS and so on? Markup and Stylesheet Editor?

Comment Re:Give me a break (Score 1) 312

You'd be surprised how much time it takes to find and format this data. It's not generally all available in an easy to digest form all on one page, complete with full book list and cover shots of the books. However, the comparisons and so on are definitely in the works. It takes a while to develop that on such a complicated subject. Thanks for the input though.

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