New Answer from IBM's Watson: A Recipe for Swiss-Thai Fusion Quiche. Here’s a taste of what IBM’s Watson supercomputer now can do: it can devise a recipe for a Swiss-Thai fusion asparagus quiche, or a cayenne-infused papaya custard with orange juice reduction. During a day of demonstrations and talks Wednesday about the future of cognitive computing at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, the computational feat of building recipes in response to custom requests–and drawing on recipe databases and knowledge of human taste and smell preferences to do so–was clearly a light moment. But it also spoke to the challenges the company faces in finding killer applications for the question-and-answer technology. IBM’s Watson made big headlines two and a half years ago when it won the Jeopardy game show against two human competitors. That was the culmination of a long effort at customizing the system to amass the right databases, process language, and act fast in a question-answer format.
Then there was the quiche. Origins of 10X – How Valid is the Underlying Research?-10x Software Development | Construx. I recently contributed a chapter to Making Software (Oram and Wilson, eds., O'Reilly, 2011). The purpose of this edited collection of essays is to pull together research-based writing on software engineering. In essence, the purpose is to say, "What do we really know (quantitatively based), and what do we only kind of think we know (subjectively based)?
" My chapter, "What Does 10X Mean" is an edited version of my 2008 blog entry "Productivity Variations Among Developers and Teams: The Origin of 10x. " The chapter focuses on the research that supports the claim of 10-fold differences in productivity among programmers. Laurent Bossavit published a critique of my blog entry on his company's website in French. The critique (or its English translation, anyway) is quite critical of the claim that programmer productivity varies by 10x, quite critical of the research foundation for that claim, and quite critical of me personally.
The State of Software Engineering Research Figure 1 Curtis 1981. The 10x developer is NOT a myth. Last night, I tweeted the following: I'm confused by the claim that "10x" or "rockstar developers" are a myth. Are star athletes, artists, writers, and, uh, rock stars, a myth? — Yevgeniy Brikman (@brikis98) September 29, 2013 I got tons of replies and questions, but Twitter is an awful medium for discussion, so I'm writing this blog post as a follow-up. There have been a bunch of articles that claim that 10x developer doesn't exist.
The arguments against it generally fall into 3 buckets: The original 10x number came from a single study (Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968)) that was flawed.Productivity is a fuzzy thing that's very hard to measure, so we can't make any claims like 10x.There is a distribution of talent, but there is no way a single engineer could do the work of 10. I disagree with all of these.
It's not one study ...The original study that found huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). China announces 50% tax breaks for solar manufacturers. Chinese manufacturers will be bale to claim back half of the 17% they pay on value added tax. Source: JA Solar Chinese solar manufacturers will receive a 50% tax rebate, the Ministry of Finance has confirmed.
Companies will be able to immediately claim back half of the value-added taxes they pay. Value added tax of 17% is charged on gross sales for companies and individuals in China selling goods or services. The ministry said the policy would be implemented from 1 October 2013 till 31 December 2015. The move, which the government claims will encourage the take-up of renewable energy, will also ease the burden on the country’s solar manufacturers. Ongoing oversupply problems have not been helped with by the EU-China trade dispute and the ongoing row over polysilicon with the US. A number of Chinese manufacturers are currently struggling as the shakeout continues. LDK Solar, which has debts of US$2.75 billion, was recently only able to repay 10% of a US$23.8 million bond.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory - Researchers Demonstrate 'Accelerator on a Chip' Menlo Park, Calif. — In an advance that could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine, researchers used a laser to accelerate electrons at a rate 10 times higher than conventional technology in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice. The achievement was reported today in Nature by a team including scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces,” said Joel England, the SLAC physicist who led the experiments.
“It could also help enable compact accelerators and X-ray devices for security scanning, medical therapy and imaging, and research in biology and materials science.” How It Works Multi-Use Accelerators. Monsanto v. Bowman: Stocktaking After Supreme Court Hearings. The United States Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in the case opposing a US farmer to agro-industry giant Monsanto on the issue of patent exhaustion in patented seeds. Lead lawyers in the case and others offered comments on the heels of the hearing, while the Supreme Court Justices are considering the arguments and are expected to reach a decision sometime this spring.
The case pitting US farmer Vernon Bowman against agro-industry giant Monsanto revolves around patent exhaustion. The question [pdf] that the US Supreme Court has to consider is, “Whether the Federal Circuit erred by (1) refusing to find patent exhaustion in patented seeds even after an authorized sale and by (2) creating an exception to the doctrine of patent exhaustion for self-replicating technologies?” An audio recording and a transcript of the hearing is available on the Supreme Court website. The Vernon Hugh Bowman v. Industry Perspective, Monsanto Argument Patent Proponent Discusses Impact of Decision. US Supreme Court Applies First Sale Doctrine Worldwide. IP-Watch Summer Interns IP-Watch interns talk about their Geneva experience in summer 2013. 2:42. Submit ideas to info [at] ip-watch [dot] ch! We welcome your participation in article and blog comment threads, and other discussion forums, where we encourage you to analyse and react to the content available on the Intellectual Property Watch website.
By participating in discussions or reader forums, or by submitting opinion pieces or comments to articles, blogs, reviews or multimedia features, you are consenting to these rules. 1. You agree that you are fully responsible for the content that you post. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Ten Questions About Internet Governance On April 23 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the “Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance,” also known as “NETmundial” in an allusion to the global football event that will occur later in that country, will be convened.
For IPW Subscribers A directory of IP delegates in Geneva. Monthly Reporter. Box. China will unblock Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times to boost its new free trade zone. China’s ambitious Shanghai Free Trade Zone is designed to welcome foreign investment and open up an attractive yuan-denominated financial sector to the rest of the world.
But it’s hard to boast about free trade credentials behind the Great Firewall of China, so media outlets and social networks that are banned elsewhere in China will be available in the zone, the South China Morning post reported today, citing unnamed government sources. In addition, the government will consider bids from foreign telecommunications companies to provide internet service in the zone.
“In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home,” one source told the South China Morning Post. “If they can’t get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China.”
China just bought 5% of Ukraine. How many seconds have there been since January 1, 1972? While that number is extremely large, it is pretty simply calculated. Multiply the number of years (and don’t forget leap years!) By the number of days in a year by the number of hours in a day by the number of minutes in an hour by the number of seconds in a minute and voilà: 1,371,513,600 seconds as of midnight on June 29, 2015. Except that that’s not right. We’re leaving out leap seconds. Leap seconds, you ask? The leap second is a near paradox. What is a second? To understand the leap second you first have to understand what a normal second is. We know there are 24 hours in a day, and 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. In most parts of the world, it’s pretty easy to know the difference between yesterday and today. Increasing the precision of this measurement isn’t too hard either. Dividing up the time from noon to noon gets tricker. So we calibrate it to tick off every hour from noon yesterday to noon today.
In secret, Fisa court contradicted US supreme court on constitutional rights | Yochai Benkler. On Tuesday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) declassified an opinion in which it explained why the government's collection of records of all Americans' phone calls is constitutional, and that if there is a problem with the program, it is a matter of political judgment, not constitutional law. So, should Americans just keep calm and carry on phoning? Not really. Instead, we should worry about a court that, lacking a real adversarial process to inform it, failed while taking its best shot at explaining its position to the public to address the most basic, widely-known counter-argument to its position.
The opinion does not even mention last year's unanimous US supreme court decision on the fourth amendment and GPS tracking, a decision in which all three opinions include strong language that may render the NSA's phone records collection program unconstitutional. Standing on its own, this logic may seem persuasive. 500 Retweets Will Now Get You Three Years in Prison in China. China has stepped up its crackdown on online rumors by issuing [zh] a judicial framework for prosecuting offenders. Internet users who share false information that is defamatory or harms the national interest face up to three years in prison if their posts are viewed 5,000 times or forwarded 500 times, according to a judicial interpretation released on September 9, 2013. The new guideline, issued by the Supreme People's Court, defines the criteria for convicting and sentencing offenders.
This includes causing a mass incident, disturbing public order, inciting ethnic and religious conflicts, and damaging the state's image. According to Xinhua news, Shen Yang, a professor from Wuhan University specializing in microblogging cases, welcomed the judicial interpretation, saying it will help clean up the Internet. Over the past month, China has detained a number of suspects. “Dunan Guandian“ [zh] wrote: 一个人的同一个行为，他是不是个罪犯，决定权掌握在其他网民手中，别人不转他就是良民，别人转多了他就是个罪犯。 “Shen biji“ [zh] joked: New Funding for Foresight Modeling Under PIM | Policies, Institutions and Markets. Medical condition & symptom search - Search Help. You can find information about medications, medical conditions, and symptoms right on the search results page. Types of medical searches you can do When you do a search for the name of a disease like [asthma], you may see information on the right side of the page about that condition.
These results may not appear for all conditions. Information you may see A brief description of the condition Links to pages about the condition’s causes, symptoms, tests, treatment, prognosis, and prevention Related searches from other people Where the information comes from Information comes from a number of places, including: When you do a search that seems to be about medical symptoms, like [cough at night], you’ll see health conditions that may be related to the symptoms.
Click on any conditions to learn more about it. When you do a search for the name of a medication, like a prescription drug, you can see an overview of the drug on the right side of the page. U.S. How to use the information you see. Drone could deliver defibrillators to heart attack victims. A German technology non-profit has put together an autonomous octocopter that can carry a defibrillator, aiming to get to patients faster than an ambulance. Fredrich Nölle from Definetz presented the system in the town of Halle in North Rhine Westphalia. It's optimised for remote areas, and allows emergency services or the public to call a defibrillator in though a smartphone app that automatically sends GPS coordinates. The drone has a range of 10km, and can fly at up to 70 kilometres per hour towards its destination in all weather conditions. It has a diameter of one metre and parachutes its payload when it arrives at the patient. It was developed by Height Tech, a company that employs drones for many tasks including movie production, surveying, aerial photography and signal mast inspection.
German emergency services praised the invention but warned people not to get their hopes up. Researcher controls colleague’s motions in 1st human brain-to-brain interface. University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.
High resolutionClick to expand University of Washington University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao, left, plays a computer game with his mind. Across campus, researcher Andrea Stocco, right, wears a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain. Stocco’s right index finger moved involuntarily to hit the “fire” button as part of the first human brain-to-brain interface demonstration. Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.
“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. High resolutionClick to expand. Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld. The closely watched case, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is the first ruling that squarely addresses the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers. Ruling 2 to 1, the court said a warrantless search was “not per se unconstitutional” because location data was “clearly a business record” and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The ruling is likely to intensify legislative efforts, already bubbling in Congress and in the states, to consider measures to require warrants based on probable cause to obtain cellphone location data.
The appeals court ruling sharply contrasts with a New Jersey State Supreme Court opinion in mid-July that said the police required a warrant to track a suspect’s whereabouts in real time. That decision relied on the New Jersey Constitution, whereas the ruling Tuesday in the Fifth Circuit was made on the basis of the federal Constitution. Ding skills help geeks get top tables. Light completely stopped for a record-breaking minute - physics-math - 25 July 2013. If You Can’t Hide From Big Brother, Adapt. Robotic Skin Lights Up When Touched - Wired Science. November 24, 2012 - In a Flap about Flight * Fish Swims With The Current * Wax-work Micro-Muscles * Using DNA to Save the World * Question of the Week: Herbivores | Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald | CBC Radio. The Robot-Readable World. Mouse cloned from drop of blood. Obama Has New Plan for Climate Change, Carbon Reduction.
Step Inside MoMA's Rain Room | Video. The physics of magnets can model how Supreme Court judges vote. Now You Can Control Video Games With Your Thoughts Alone. Malaria drug made in yeast causes market ferment. Printing tiny batteries | Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Why the war on drugs has been made redundant | Science | The Observer. Supreme Court Rules Human Genes May Not Be Patented. Untitled. Charged by GSK investment, battery of electroceuticals advance : Nature Medicine. Pew: over half of all Americans now own a smartphone. Cell phone ownership hits 91% of adults. Lrainie. The gaming headset that (literally) shocks your brain to attention. After Hyping Solyndra, TV News Ignores Tesla's Loan Repayment | Blog. Audio. Europe Pushes to Shed Stigma of Tax Haven With End to Bank Secrecy. Rickross10 : Quadcopter Drone Network To...
Viruses in the gut protect from infection. On trust, truth and transparency. Laser Scanner Can Detect Someone Watching You A Kilometer Away. Human stem cells created by cloning. Enable cheap silicon to perform better than current best for solar power. 3D printing just got a lot more colorful with the ProDesk3D. MIT tech turns any surface into a user interface, but it’s useless without Google Glass. The nudge unit – has it worked so far? | Politics. Cubic Millimeter Micromotes which wirelessly monitor tumors and buildings are a big step to Smart Dust. Is Nursing Still an Attractive Career Choice? - Real Time Economics. This 16-Year-Old Has a Bionic Hand Almost as Good as Luke Skywalker’s. This Cute Little Liver Might be the Future of Drug Testing.
Sun-powered plane completes California test flight. New LED streetlight design curbs light pollution. Bringing people back from the dead. Samsung Is Working on Mind-Control for Its Tablets. Printed sensor can sense cracks in bridges. Carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis – report | Environment. uBiome | Sequencing the Human Microbiome. Hamburg Unveils World's First Algae-Powered Building | Wired Design. Nanoscale MRI being developed. Videos for Spaun simulations | Nengo.
Jessa Gamble – Life without sleep. 3-D Printer Makes Synthetic Tissues from Watery Drops. Huge survey reveals seven social classes in UK. The comic book that can explain synthetic biology to anyone. Brain mapping and public goods. World database of large urban areas, 1950-2050. Biologists Make a Computer From a Living Cell That Can Detect Cancer, DARPA developing sensor tattoos for monitoring vital signs. 3D printing infographic - from auto parts to sex toys - Tech News. Scientists just made bacteria that love coffee as much as you do. The software defined supply chain. Midnightwriter will edit and critique your non fiction document up to 3,000 words or about 10 pages for $5, only on fiverr.com.
Srep01376. How the Maker of TurboTax Fought Free, Simple Tax Filing. Scenarios_newdoc.pdf.