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Business Education Finance History Innovation Life Social Technology

The Sad Truth About the Facebook Movie

The Valley used to be a place run by scientists and engineers, people like Robert Noyce, the Ph.D. physicist who helped invent the integrated circuit and cofounded Intel. The Valley, in those days, was focused on hard science and making things. At first there were semiconductors, which is how Silicon Valley got its name; then came computers and software. But now the Valley has become a casino, a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old-guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Apple.

Read the article: The Sad Truth About the Facebook Movie – Newsweek

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Education Finance Health History Life Social

Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

Many older cities rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, as workers flocked to the urban centers. As the towns and cities expanded, the residential areas for the workers tended to be in the east, with the middle and upper-classes in the west.

Read the article: Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

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Education History Life Meta Politics Social Technology

The Millenials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials – the American teens and twenty-somethings currently making the passage into adulthood – have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and receptive to new ideas and ways of living. [pewsocialtrends.org]

Comment: Personally, I think being around 75% Millenial is good any above that may actually be deteriorating, but that’s just a perspective, take the quiz yourself to know how ‘Millenial’ you are.

Read the article:
Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next – Pew Research Center

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Business China Finance History India Legal Life Politics Technology

A Deeper Look Into Google’s 800-Pound Panda Problem

Now, to the heart of the issue: China. You can think of China as a foxy young girl who knows she’s smokin’ hot. She’s happy to hang out at the club and lure people over to buy her drinks, and even though she’d chat and humor him a bit just to keep him talking and buying drinks, she’d never dream of putting out. Instead, once her suitor had fulfilled his usefulness or she became bored, she’d feign indignation, throw a fit, and then freeze him out. Yes, in spite of her charm and confidence in her looks, there’s something bothering her on the inside: even though others compliment her beauty and tell her she’s special, she looks over to the VIP table and her gut sinks. Why don’t those other people accept her? That’s all she wants!

Read the article: Censor? I barely know her!

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Business China Education Finance History India Innovation Life Politics Social

The New Untouchables

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia. A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

Read the article: The New Untouchables

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Education History Life Politics Science Technology Travel

0° 0′ 00″

The imaginary line now known as the Greenwich Prime Meridian not only allows us to navigate the globe but also keeps the world ticking to the same symbolic 24-hour clock. But it has not always been so. Until the 19th Century, many countries and even individual towns kept their own local time based on the sun’s passage across the sky and there were no international rules governing when the day would start or finish.

How did Britain get to be the centre of all time and space? The real reason the meridian is at Greenwich is that the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich was the first – indeed, really the only – person to have done the research required to calculate navigational tables. He naturally took his own telescope as the baseline, and once the nautical almanacs which resulted were published no-one could be bothered to do the research all over again merely to establish a different base. It’s important to note that the meridian is at Greenwich, not Charing Cross: so it honours a great scientist rather than Britain. And who was that scientist? None other than Nevil Maskelyne, the villain of Dava Sobel’s popular book Longitude, but arguably the real solver of the longitude problem.

Read the article: At the centre of time

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Education History Science

New work by Archimedes discovered

A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus. The top layer of writing in this 700-year-old book describes Christian prayers. But underneath, almost obliterated, are the only surviving copies of many of the works of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Two of the texts hiding in the prayer book have not appeared in any other copy of Archimedes’s work; one of them, titled The Method, has special historical significance. It could be considered the earliest known work on calculus. Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s.

Read the article: A Prayer For Archimedes

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Education History Politics Science Technology

Moon landing tapes got erased, not lost

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

“The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed — magnetically erased — and re-used to save money.”

Read the article: NewsDaily: Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits

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Business Education History Innovation Productivity Technology

Proprietary software vs. Open-source software vs. Cloud + SaaS

Open-source software has won the argument. Now a new threat to openness looms with the advent of “Cloud computing” — the delivery of software as a service (SaaS). Moving from one service provider to another could be even more difficult than switching between software packages in the old days. For a foretaste of this problem, try moving your Orkut profile to Facebook without manually retyping everything. The obvious answer is to establish agreed standards for moving data between clouds.

Read the article: Unlocking the cloud

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Business Education History Innovation Social Technology

Precision hacking ‘The 2009 TIME 100 Poll’

A fascinating description of how the current 2009 Time 100 poll of “the world’s most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts” has been precision hacked to include a message from the folks, and to vote 4chan.org founder moot at the top!

Please note that this article assumes computer knowledge!

Read the article: Inside the precision hack