gerbosan - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Um, or... (Score 1) 603

by gerbosan on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @09:51AM (#24842167) Attached to: Laboring Longer a Growing Trend For Americans

Certainly many are healthy enough to keep working. Due advances in medical care and their living.
But you haven't mentioned about their lives, what a retired and healthy worker can do with the new free time? Staying home watching TV? Taking sunbaths?

That is also one of the main reason retired workforce keep working, on one side is work and the other is voidness and uncertainty.

The Rise of Geekdom 222

Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday May 24, 2008 @11:52AM from the news-to-nobody dept.

cynagh0st writes "In what can only be described as the biggest newsflash for the Slashdot community since Microsoft was sued: It is the age of the geek. New York Times Op-Ed columnist and author David Brooks writes a brief article that can be best summed up in the following: All your culture are belong to us. In the article proper he summarizes the rise to power and discusses a technocratic geek dominance on the social construct. He writes, '... the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds ... They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated ... There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.'" I'm thinking Brooks must have been AFK for the 2nd half of the 90s when this started. To be more precise, late 97 ;)

Google Opens Up (Some) Search Algorithms 86

Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday May 24, 2008 @08:51AM from the nobody-else-has-a-million-servers-anyway dept.

overmars writes "After years of closely guarding the formula for its search algorithms, Google is opening up a little. The search engine company has kept its search formula a closely guarded secret for two reasons: competition and to prevent abuse, said Udi Manber, Google's vice president of engineering, search quality, in a post on the corporate blog. Manber said the blog post is the first part of a renewed effort at the company 'to open up a bit more than we have in the past.' Manber said the most famous part of Google's ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. While PageRank is still in use, it is a 'part of a much larger system,' he said. 'Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing),' he said."

Successful Cold Fusion Experiment? 387

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Saturday May 24, 2008 @05:26AM from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."

Rover Accidentally Uncovers Mars Hydrothermal Vent 53

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Saturday May 24, 2008 @04:04AM from the best-discoveries-by-accident dept.

The rover Spirit has been dragging one wheel around the surface of Mars for some time. One of the resulting gouges revealed a mineral deposit which was probably caused by a hydrothermal vent. This implies a large amount of water was present when the vent was active.

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