mokie01 - Slashdot User

Nuclear Power Could See a Revival 415

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday July 14, 2010 @03:34AM from the comforting-bremsstrahlung-glow dept.

shmG writes "As the US moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process. No less than three new configurations for nuclear power are being considered for licensing by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first of them could be generating power in Georgia by 2016."

Man Repairs Crumbling Walls With Legos 106

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday July 13, 2010 @11:57AM from the one-block-at-a-time dept.

Lanxon writes "German-born artist Jan Vormann, 27, has spent the past three years traveling the world repairing crumbling walls and monuments with Lego, reports Wired. His "Dispatchwork" began in 2007 in the small village of Bocchignano, Italy, as part of the contemporary art festival 20 Eventi. Developing the work in situ, he became intrigued by the makeshift repairs that had been made to the crumbling walls. The approach favored function over appearance, reminding Vormann of the haphazard Lego designs created by children."

The Demographics of Web Search 131

Posted by kdawson on Sunday July 11, 2010 @02:37PM from the do-what-i-mean dept.

adaviel sends a link to work out of Yahoo Research indicating that demographics can help Web searches; e.g. a women searching for "wagner" probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US "wagner" is a paint sprayer. The Yahoo researchers claim that by taking user demographics into account, "they managed to get the chosen link to appear as the top-ranked result 7 per cent more often than in the standard Yahoo search." New Scientist mentions this research and two other innovative adjuncts to current search practice: following the mouse cursor as a proxy for eye tracking, and taking back bearings on online criminals by studying the searches they make. (The latter raises disburbing privacy questions: would you want Google trolling through your search data? How about governments?)

Comment Re:Skool... (Score 1) 282

by mokie01 on Friday June 22, 2007 @11:50PM (#19616933) Attached to: Good Ways To Join an Open Source Project?

Two score and 4 years ago as an undergraduate EE at Drexel Inst of Tech (now Drexel U.)in my first ee course we had to take two exams and a final. Each exam consisted of 3 questions. If you had attended class and done the homework, the first question was easy or a least straight forward. The second was a bear. And the third was at best a bitch. Few garnered any points on it. In the class when the papers were handed back, one of the other students asked our instructor (later to become a dearly loved prof). "Mr Kaplan, why haven't we been taught to solve the third question?" His response, which has guided me for a long time now, was "you have been provided the tools to solve the problem, I just showed you that it could be done with your knowledge. You are not here to learn how to solve the known problems, you are here to learn how to solve the unknown." Again, thank you Mr. Kaplan!

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