Several Large Tech Companies Colluded to Cap Worker Salaries
October 28th, 2013Wouldn’t it be neat if there really was a Hell and Steve Jobs had to go cruising along in his ridiculous superyacht through great oceans of fiery, bubbling lava for all eternity?
Via: San Jose Mercury News:
More than 60,000 tech workers can seek monetary damages from Apple (AAPL), Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG) and Adobe Systems (ADBE) because of a federal judge’s ruling in a suit claiming that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs conspired with other local executives to limit the workers’ pay by barring them from moving from one company to another.
In granting class-action status to the suit Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose cited what she termed “considerable, compelling common proof” that the Silicon Valley companies engaged in antitrust behavior by agreeing not to try to lure away each others’ employees.
Koh’s decision makes it much easier for the workers to win compensation — potentially tens of millions of dollars — because without class-action status, each of them would have to file costly lawsuits on their own. The ruling also is likely to put pressure on the companies to reach a financial settlement with the workers, as three other companies — Pixar, Lucasfilm and Intuit (INTU) — did in July, said Stephen Hirschfeld, CEO of the Employment Law Alliance, a network of labor and employment lawyers.
Although a trial in the case has been set for May 27, companies in class-action cases often try to avoid getting that far, he said, because “there is an assumption that if they actually get in front of a jury and there are thousands of plaintiffs, a jury will think, ‘Well, if there’s smoke, there must be fire.’ “
High-Frequency Trading and Exchange Technology
October 28th, 2013Via: ACM:
I remember coming home late one night, and my mother, a math teacher, asked why I was so depressed and exhausted. I said, “Imagine every day you have to figure out a small part of the world. You develop fantastic machines, which can measure everything, and you deploy them to track an object falling. You analyze a million occurrences of this falling event, and along with some of the greatest minds you know, you discover gravity. It’s perfect: you can model it, define it, measure it, and predict it. You test it with your colleagues and say, ‘I will drop this apple from my hand, and it will hit the ground in 3.2 seconds,’ and it does. Then two weeks later, you go to a large conference. You drop the apple in front of the crowd…and it floats up and flies out the window. Gravity is no longer true; it was, but it isn’t now. That’s HFT. As soon as you discover it, you have only a few weeks to capitalize on it; then you have to start all over.”
Research Credit: afterhours
Science Has Lost Its Way, At a Big Cost to Humanity
October 27th, 2013I’ve posted about this before, but it’s worth repeating.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
In today’s world, brimful as it is with opinion and falsehoods masquerading as facts, you’d think the one place you can depend on for verifiable facts is science.
You’d be wrong. Many billions of dollars’ worth of wrong.
A few years ago, scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark papers in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.
The idea was to make sure that research on which Amgen was spending millions of development dollars still held up. They figured that a few of the studies would fail the test — that the original results couldn’t be reproduced because the findings were especially novel or described fresh therapeutic approaches.
But what they found was startling: Of the 53 landmark papers, only six could be proved valid.
“Even knowing the limitations of preclinical research,” observed C. Glenn Begley, then Amgen’s head of global cancer research, “this was a shocking result.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t unique. A group at Bayer HealthCare in Germany similarly found that only 25% of published papers on which it was basing R&D projects could be validated, suggesting that projects in which the firm had sunk huge resources should be abandoned. Whole fields of research, including some in which patients were already participating in clinical trials, are based on science that hasn’t been, and possibly can’t be, validated.
“The thing that should scare people is that so many of these important published studies turn out to be wrong when they’re investigated further,” says Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Economist recently estimated spending on biomedical R&D in industrialized countries at $59 billion a year. That’s how much could be at risk from faulty fundamental research.
Eisen says the more important flaw in the publication model is that the drive to land a paper in a top journal — Nature and Science lead the list — encourages researchers to hype their results, especially in the life sciences. Peer review, in which a paper is checked out by eminent scientists before publication, isn’t a safeguard. Eisen says the unpaid reviewers seldom have the time or inclination to examine a study enough to unearth errors or flaws.
“The journals want the papers that make the sexiest claims,” he says. “And scientists believe that the way you succeed is having splashy papers in Science or Nature — it’s not bad for them if a paper turns out to be wrong, if it’s gotten a lot of attention.”
Some Florida Police Are Using Data to Predict Crime
October 27th, 2013Via: FastCompany:
Well, the Fort Lauderdale Police Department isn’t using an oracle yet, but it is getting one step closer to Minority Report-style crime predicting. The department has become the latest agency to use big data analytics and data mining to prevent crime by staying one step ahead of criminals. According to IBM, the company has entered into a partnership with the Fort Lauderdale PD to integrate new data and analytics tools into everyday crime fighting. The new projects will use pattern recognition and anomaly detection tech on existing records like 911 calls, crime records, and building permit activity.
French IT School ’42’
October 26th, 2013The application process for 42 reminds me a bit of what happens to people who try to get into the French Foreign Legion.
The Legion doesn’t care about your background, they just want to know if you’re up to the job. If you don’t know about the French Foreign Legion, take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the application process and then read the piece below.
Via: NPR:
A new computer school in Paris has been overwhelmed by some 60,000 applicants.
The school, called 42, was founded by a telecom magnate who says the French education system is failing young people. His aim is to reduce France’s shortage in computer programmers while giving those who’ve fallen by the wayside a new chance.
In the hallways of 42, suitcases and sleeping bags are piled, and people are stretched out on mattresses in some of the corners. There are showers and dozens of colorful bath towels.
Living here for the next month are some of the 4,000 potential students who already made the first cut by passing cognitive skill tests online.
Now they have to clear another hurdle. They’re thrown together and challenged with computer problems for 15 hours a day. Only 800 students will get a place, says 42’s director, Nicolas Sadirac.
A Demand For Thinkers From Any Class
“It’s very, very intensive,” Sadirac says. “It’s a kind of selection, but [for] the long term. So we don’t just do an examination. We spend four weeks choosing each student.”
The only criteria for applying is to be between the ages of 18 and 30. Applicants don’t need money, or a particular level of academic achievement. A third don’t even have high school diplomas.
Sadirac says they’re not looking for how much students know, but how they think. One of the school’s main goals is to unearth talent in poor areas, where kids don’t fit into the traditional French academic mold.
Youth unemployment in France is at a 14-year high. At the same time, French companies cannot find enough IT specialists, and thousands of young computer enthusiasts can’t get training. That prompted 42’s founder Xavier Niel to invest $90 million of his own money in the school.
Niel, the creator of France’s third largest telecommunications company, Free, says the social elevator in France is broken.
“If you’re the son of a blue-collar worker, you’re going to be a blue collar worker,” Niel says. “Children of elites stay elite. We have 200,000 kids a year who drop out of the French school system and have no hope. They become a drag on society. We want to help these young people take control of their lives.”
‘Data Shows Google’s Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I’
October 26th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.
Chris Urmson made those claims today at a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California. He presented results from two studies of data from the hundreds of thousands of miles Google’s vehicles have logged on public roads in California and Nevada.
One of those analyses showed that when a human was behind the wheel, Google’s cars accelerated and braked significantly more sharply than they did when piloting themselves. Another showed that the cars’ software was much better at maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle ahead than the human drivers were.
“We’re spending less time in near-collision states,” said Urmson. “Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers.”
Related: IBM’s Watson Is Better at Diagnosing Cancer than Human Doctors
All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
October 26th, 2013Via: The Atlantic:
We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That’s all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
7.3 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast of Japan
October 26th, 2013Via: Independent:
The operators of Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant said there was no further damage caused to the wrecked plant early on Saturday, despite a magnitude 7.1 to 7.3 earthquake striking offshore and triggering a small tsunami.
An earthquake official with the Japan Meteorological Agency said the quake was an aftershock of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck the same area in 2011, killing about 19,000 people and devastating the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant.
Workers at the plant were told to leave waterfront areas and head to higher ground.
Japanese television reported a one foot tsunami had reached Japan’s east coast, but one-metre high tsunami advisory warnings were lifted approximately two hours later.
A spokesperson for the Fukushima plant reported no damage or abnormalities in radiation readings had been found, and the national Fire and Disaster Management Agency said only one minor injury was reported.
The epicenter of the 2.10am quake hit about 170 miles off Fukushima, and was felt as far as 300 miles away in Tokyo.
The PC is Not Dead, We Just Don’t Need New Ones
October 26th, 2013Unless you plan on playing Star Citizen. *chortle*
Via: Idiallo:
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing.
Filesharing Site Revealed to be Anti-Piracy ‘Honeypot’
October 26th, 2013Via: Guardian:
A high-profile file-sharing site has been revealed to be a year-long pirate “honeypot”, collecting data on users, file hosters and websites.
The revelation, which had users of the forum up in arms, accompanied the purchase of the UploaderTalk (UT) site by US-based anti-piracy company Nuke Piracy.
A honeypot is a facility, in this case a site, run under false pretences that encourages criminal behaviour in an effort to collect incriminating data.
“That’s right – the biggest swerve ever,” the operator of UT, known only as WDF, said in a statement about the purchase of the site. “I, WDF, work for the anti-piracy people!”
