Ukraine crisis: Lavrov warns over Russia 'regime change' goal. 22 November 2014Last updated at 13:09 ET Analysts say Western sanctions are beginning to have an impact on Russia Western sanctions against Russia over its role in Ukraine are aimed at forcing regime change in Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says. Speaking to foreign policy advisers in Moscow, Mr Lavrov referred to calls for sanctions "that will destroy the economy and cause public protests". On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin said Moscow must guard against a "colour revolution". Russia denies arming Ukrainian rebels or sending Russian troops there. Western sanctions were first imposed when Russia annexed Ukraine's region of Crimea in March following a controversial referendum. Further measures have been added since, targeting senior Russian officials as well as defence firms, banks and the country's oil industry.
Analysis: Sarah Rainsford, BBC News, Moscow Far from softening under sanctions, Russia has been toughening its stance over the crisis in Ukraine. Troops accusations. America Has A College Dropout Problem. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images America's nagging problem with college dropouts managed to get the tiniest bit worse this year. The National Student Clearinghouse reports that 55 percent of first-time undergraduates who matriculated in the fall of 2008 finished a degree within six years, versus 56.1 percent of those who began in fall 2007.
Keep in mind, we already had the lowest college completion rate in the developed world, at least among the 18 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Much like American health care, American higher education continues to set a global standard for inefficiency. Jordan Weissmann is Slate's senior business and economics correspondent. Our dropout crisis doesn’t get discussed a great deal outside of education circles. But it should, since the issue is directly tied to other problems the public rightly obsesses over like rising tuition and student debt. Now let's take a look at age. Scientists Demonstrate Brain-to-Brain Communication. Two scientific teams this year patched together some well-known technologies to directly exchange information between human brains. The projects, in the U.S. and Europe, appear to represent the first occasions in history that any two people have transmitted information without either of them speaking or moving any muscle.
For now, however, the “telepathy” technology remains so crude that it’s unlikely to have any practical impact. In a paper published last week in the journal PLOS One, neuroscientists and computer engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle described a brain-to-brain interface they built that lets two people coöperatively play a simple video game. Earlier this year, a company in Barcelona called Starlab described transmitting short words like “ciao,” encoded as binary digits, between the brains of individuals on different continents.
Neither EEG recording nor this kind of brain stimulation (called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS) are new technologies. Pure Storage President David Hatfield: We Beat EMC 75 Percent Of The Time. EMC is the 800-pound gorilla in the storage space with a market cap over $60 billion. But every incumbent gets disrupted by a new startup at some point, and EMC has plenty of young, hungry companies nipping at its heels. One of them is Pure Storage, a five-year-old company that has raised over $470 million at a roughly $3 billion valuation. The company says it increased revenues 8x last year, which would be the highest growth rate in storage history. And when you’re growing that fast in this space, that means you’re eating EMC’s lunch in one way or another.
“If we go head-to-head against anybody, we win 75-plus percent of the time,” Pure Storage’s president David Hatfield told Business Insider. Although it continues to be the king of the traditional storage market, EMC has been facing stiff competition in the market for all-flash solid-state disks (SSD), a storage type that Gartner predicts will take 20% of the traditional high-end storage arrays by 2017. So what’s the secret sauce? 4q5QeLI. 15633150207_6bdd8a1dfc_k.jpg (JPEG Image, 2048 × 1284 pixels) - Scaled (50%) PleasedThisCheetah.gif (GIF Image, 600 × 338 pixels) Reese Currie's answer to How do programmers deal with their job when they are old?
Google came up with a formula for deciding who gets promoted—here’s what happened. About 7 years ago, Google founded its People Analytics team, which collects and uses data to bolster the company’s own management practices. (You can thank this group for the death of Google’s infamous brain-teaser interview questions.) The group had a simple founding mission, according to Google’s executive Prasad Setty, who gave a talk at Google’s re:Work conference in October, at the company’s Mountain View headquarters.
“All people decisions at Google should be be based on data and analytics,” he said. “Initially we aspired for living up to a really strong form of this mission statement, we wanted analytics to spit out people decisions.” Google was founded by, and is still dominated, by engineers. For instance, in the early days of the People Analytics team, the group built an equation to help streamline the process Google uses to decide to which of its software engineers should get promoted. It’s not pretty, but apparently, it worked.
The People Analytics team was thrilled. iDdHNOQ. Sleep's Link To Learning And Memory Traced To Brain Chemistry. Sleep well, young lad, so we can hear you tell us all the details in the morning. G. Lynn Sumner Co. /Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis hide caption itoggle caption G. Sleep well, young lad, so we can hear you tell us all the details in the morning. G. Almost a century after the discovery that sleep helps us remember things, scientists are beginning to understand why. During sleep, the brain produces chemicals that are important to memory and relives events we want to remember, scientists reported this week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington D.C. "One of the most profound effects of a night of sleep is the improvement in our ability to remember things," says Ravi Allada, a sleep researcher at Northwestern University.
That's changing, though, thanks to recent research from scientists including Jennifer Choi Tudor from the University of Pennsylvania. Previous experiments have shown that sleep-deprived mice have memory problems and lower levels of this chemical. Senate Republicans block landmark NSA surveillance reform bill | US news. Nearly 18 months after Edward Snowden’s disclosures upended the secret world of US surveillance, the US Senate has rejected the most politically viable effort to rein in the National Security Agency in almost four decades. The USA Freedom Act, a bill introduced last year that sought to end the NSA’s ongoing daily collection of practically all US phone data, failed to reach a 60-vote threshold to cut off debate and move to passage.
Senators, mostly Republicans warning of leaving the country exposed to another terrorist attack, voted to beat back the bill, which had been warily backed by the Obama administration, technology giants and most civil libertarian groups. It was the denouement to over a year’s worth of political drama, characterized by shifting alliances and a reduction in ambitions for constraining the NSA, even in a post-Snowden Congress.
“God forbid we wake up tomorrow and Isil is in the United States,” said Florida Republican Marco Rubio, using an acronym for the Islamic State. 10 Things You May Not Know About Abraham Lincoln. This fall, Hollywood threw its support behind Honest Abe. With the release of the new biopic “Lincoln,” America’s 16th president is now a box office draw. As Steven Spielberg’s film hits the big screen, explore 10 things you may not know about Abraham Lincoln. 1. Lincoln is enshrined in the Wrestling Hall of Fame. The Great Emancipator wasn’t quite WWE material, but thanks to his long limbs he was an accomplished wrestler as a young man. Defeated only once in approximately 300 matches, Lincoln reportedly talked a little smack in the ring.
According to Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, Honest Abe once challenged an entire crowd of onlookers after dispatching an opponent: “I’m the big buck of this lick. 2. Abraham Lincoln circa 1846. 3. 4. 5. 6. Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes, as Hamlet in 1870. 7. 8. 9. 10. Businesses turn to 3-D printing to shorten R&D time. WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Three-dimensional printing sounds like science fiction, but it's being applied to some old-fashioned trades, such as wood carving at Knickerbocker Bench in Congers. "Once I came up with that basic design, I wanted to see what it was like if I changed angles," said Tim Englert of Knickerbocker Bench, which designed wood furniture at Congers Lake Memorial Park. "To do that in wood, even in miniature, is very time-consuming. "Working in 3-D allows you to quickly explore your ideas. " Throughout the Lower Hudson Valley, businesses are starting to use 3-D printing to shorten their research, development, patenting and production times, saving money in the process and bringing new products to market more quickly.
That's what Marty Snider, president of MSA Products Inc. in Nyack, has been doing with the 3-D printers at Rockland Community College's 3D Smart Printing Lab in Haverstraw for free, thanks to a state grant. "It had a major change in the way we're doing business. China employs two million microblog monitors state media say. 4 October 2013Last updated at 12:46 ET Sina Weibo, launched in 2010, has more than 500 million registered users with 100 million messages posted daily More than two million people in China are employed by the government to monitor web activity, state media say, providing a rare glimpse into how the state tries to control the internet.
The Beijing News says the monitors, described as internet opinion analysts, are on state and commercial payrolls. China's hundreds of millions of web users increasingly use microblogs to criticise the state or vent anger. Recent research suggested Chinese censors actively target social media. The report by the Beijing News said that these monitors were not required to delete postings.
Continue reading the main story Analysis Dong Le BBC Chinese Service China's internet is one of the most controlled and censored in the world. Websites deemed to be subversive are blocked. The more postings deleted, the more they appear, it says. PLA Unit 61398. History[edit] On 19 May 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a Federal grand jury had returned an indictment of five 61398 officers on charges of theft of confidential business information and intellectual property from U.S. commercial firms and of planting malware on their computers.[4][5] The five are Huang Zhenyu (黄振宇), Wen Xinyu (文新宇), Sun Kailiang (孙凯亮), Gu Chunhui (顾春晖), and Wang Dong (王东).
Forensic evidence traces the base of operations to a 12-story building off Datong Road in a public, mixed-use area of Pudong in Shanghai.[2] The group is also known by various other names including "Advanced Persistent Threat 1" ("APT1"), "the Comment group" and "Byzantine Candor", a codename given by US intelligence agencies since 2002.[6][7][8][9] The attacks documented in the summer of 2011 represent a fragment of the Comment group's attacks, which go back at least to 2002, according to incident reports and investigators. Chinese government denial[edit] See also[edit] Coordinates: Automation Makes Us Dumb. Jerusalem's 800-year-old Indian hospice. 22 November 2014Last updated at 19:04 ET By Daniel Silas Adamson Jerusalem There is a little corner of Jerusalem that is forever India. At least, it has been for more than 800 years and its current custodian has plans for his family to keep the Indian flag flying for generations to come.
Around the year 1200, little more than a decade after the armies of Saladin had forced the Crusaders out of the city, an Indian dervish walked into Jerusalem. Hazrat Farid ud-Din Ganj Shakar (or Baba Farid, as he is better known) belonged to the Chisti order of Sufis, a mystical brotherhood that still flourishes today across India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Later accounts of his life said that he spent his days sweeping the stone floors around al-Aqsa mosque, or fasting in the silence of a cave inside the city walls. No-one knows how long Baba Farid stayed in the city. More than eight centuries later, that lodge still exists. "All the residents were Indian. Sheikh Muhammad Munir Ansari as a boy. Asshole CEOs, startup founders and success. Flickr/FortuneLiveMediaUber CEO Travis Kalanick There's a notion that some people become successful company founders because they have the right "Startup DNA. " The DNA is comprised of characteristics like "resilience" and "ability to accept risk.
" Another characteristic many top entrepreneurs share is arrogance. Or worse, just being a huge jerk. While reporting a long profile of Travis Kalanick last winter, Business Insider found a lot of people who thought Kalanick was a legendary CEO. Friends compared him to Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. But some who were in awe of Kalanick also said he was a jerk. "Sometimes," one acquaintance said of Kalanick, "a--holes create great businesses. " Inside Silicon Valley, arrogance runs rampant and investors seem to reward ruthless behavior with piles of cash. There are numerous examples of founders who have had moments of terrible behavior that later became infamous.
Even Steve Jobs, one of the world's most-praised entrepreneurs, was said to have two sides. Let's Play NSA! The Hackers Open-Sourcing Top Secret Spy Tools. Last August, at Defcon, the hacker conference in As quiet descended over an eager audience of hundreds of hackers, Ossmann stopped and issued a warning. “If you don't want to hear about leaked classified information, you can leave now,” he told the crowd. Ossmann was acknowledging a legal barrier: if you're a government employee, you're prevented by law from reading or hearing about leaked classified information. And leaked classified information, it turned out, was precisely the basis of his research.
Ossmann paused to see if anyone was getting out of their seats. Then, with the patience and attention to detail of a likeable college science professor, he explained to the audience just how he had engineered the kind of surveillance devices that, six months earlier, only a select group of spies had even known were possible. The ANT farm It all began just after Christmas 2013, when a peculiar 48-page gadget catalog appeared on the website of Der Spiegel. And they were surprising. LittleBits' Smart Home Kit Makes Home Automation Easy. Online.wsj. 24 Pictures That Perfectly Capture How Insane The Snow Is Near Buffalo, New York.
Why It's So Hard for Millennials to Find a Place to Live and Work. The paradox of the American Dream: The best cities to get ahead are often the most expensive places to live, and the most affordable places to live can be the worst cities to get ahead. Salt Lake City, pictured, is the one of the rare cities that scores highly on two separate measures of housing affordability and upward mobility. (Wikimedia Commons) So what'll it be: Dayton or San Francisco? Alright, so that's not the most common choice for young people getting ready to start their lives. But it's an instructive question. Dayton is the most affordable housing market in the United States, according to Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko, while San Francisco is the least affordable place to live in America. The Dayton-SF dilemma isn't about Ohio vs. In 2013, Chetty and a phalanx of economists produced a one-of-a-kind study on intergenerational mobility—that is, the odds that low-income households can work their way into the middle class and above.
Economic Opportunity, by Location. The game developer, the CIA, and the sculpture driving them crazy. This May Be the Most Dangerous — and Most Costly — Photo In Japan. A quick history of why Asians wear surgical masks in public. The Miraculous Benefits of Coconut Oil. The Unknowable - The New Yorker. Watch this dad crack up as he scolds his paint-covered kids. 5jJv43h. Gold Tanks, November 19. Joshua Engel's answer to What is so great about functional programming? Escape from Jonestown. The Future Of The Mobile Industry. Rooftop solar electricity on pace to beat coal, oil. Yonhapnews Agency - Mobile.
Bill Limiting NSA Surveillance Practices Fails In Senate. Iqh0QGX.jpg (JPEG Image, 3264 × 1840 pixels) - Scaled (31%) 100823_transcription_of_suppression_hearing_28unsealed_pages_11-2429. How Florida cops went door to door with fake cell device to find one man. The self-publicist whose medical text books caused a stir. The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis. VICTORY: Judge Releases Information about Police Use of Stingray Cell Phone Trackers. ELI5: Where do bugs go in the winter? How do they come back in the spring? : explainlikeimfive. yEZQxM4.jpg (JPEG Image, 2000 × 2272 pixels) - Scaled (44%) KSSFBBQ. Missouri man fired for posting pictures of DHS vans to Facebook. Prosecutors drop key evidence at trial to avoid explaining “stingray” use.
News - Churyumov-Gerasimenko – hard ice and organic molecules. How to Change Your Self-Perception to Leverage Your Hidden Strengths. How to Know When to Call it Quits in Your Relationship. ELI5: When you cut something in half, why can't you simply put it back together? What once held it together that no longer can? : explainlikeimfive. To Relax You, Devices Apply Pressure to Points on the Skull. A brief history of Hong Kong’s 30-year fight for democracy.
Cities Look to Technology for Answers to Growing Challenges. 185334409_bc35279071_o. Nikant Vohra's answer to What are a few unique pieces of career advice that nobody ever mentions? 6 Smart Moves to Make Your Money Last a Lifetime | Money.com. IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 16, No. 3 (Fall 2014) - Falling - Glogin?mobile=1&URI=http%3A%2F%2Fmobile.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F06%2F26%2Fupshot%2Fwhere-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us. Xu Beixi's answer to Why does the human race need money for survival while all other species don't? Ted Cruz Doubles Down On Misunderstanding The Internet & Net Neutrality, As Republican Engineers Call Him Out For Ignorance. This Map Ranks the Hardest Places to Live in the US. How to Determine Your Freelance Rate and Get Paid What You're Worth. Keeping Secrets — STANFORD magazine. Jon Davis's answer to What are some of the most memorable things your drill sergeant ever said?
In pictures: My toilet. Leonard Kim's answer to What is the best way to deal with disappointment? German village plays prank on neo-Nazis. The Coming Blackout Epidemic. Hudson River Park Gets $100 Million Launch - WSJ - WSJ. In case you needed another reason to promote diversity in tech… OIgTscE. S4D82dY. Apple and Google ask Congress to support the USA Freedom Act. GQ writer wins major writing award. The Programmer’s Price. In St. Louis, Protesters Plan an Orderly Response to Indictment News - WSJ. Putin’s Loss of German Trust Seals the West’s Isolation of Russia. Testing: How Much Is Too Much? : NPR Ed. Google’s secret NSA alliance: The terrifying deals between Silicon Valley and the security state.
Hi, I’m travelling to EVERY single country in the world in a single UNBROKEN JOURNEY, without airplanes. Ask me anything! : IAmA. These Are The Most Creative Techie Resumes We’ve Ever Seen. How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (And Silk Road 2) A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge — Backchannel. Born before 1985? Then you’re a ‘digital immigrant’ | Lauren Laverne. Ellen Vrana's answer to How do I deal with disillusionment as I grow older? 9 facts that explain why Obama is about to help millions of immigrants. Saudi Arabia Bulldozes Over Its Heritage. 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes. Sorting Algorithms. Rarely Seen Moments of World History. Six Questions You Should Ask to Learn About a Company's Culture. Sweden says has proof of foreign submarine intrusion in October.
The Case for Paying Ransoms by Simon Critchley. Why Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are so successful, in one word - Quartz. How Japan Helped Ease the Rice Crisis - Businessweek. Uk.businessinsider. How Tech is Ruining Dating.