Dev.SN

AnonTechie writes:

Glassdoor Employment Confidence Survey(Q1 2014):

According to Glassdoor's Q1 2014 Employment Confidence Survey, the average U.S. employee (of those who receive vacation/paid time off) only takes half (51%) of his or her eligible vacation time/paid time off. In addition, when employees do take paid time off, three in five (61%) admit doing some work. Each quarter, the Glassdoor Employment Confidence Survey monitors four key indicators of employment confidence: salary expectations, job security, the job market and company outlook. This quarter's survey also took a look at employee vacation time, including the percentage of eligible vacation time/paid time off employees actually take, how much they work and why while on vacation, among other realities.

So why are employees not taking their vacation? Does this happen in other countries too?

---

Original Submission

In a Harvard Business Review article (free access) based on multiple case studies, the authors explain that big data often does not live up to its hype. Through a series of examples sourced from their data, they nuance some of the most commonly purported benefits of big data, highlighting some of the biggest challenges companies face when trying to rely on evidence-based decision making.

The biggest reason that investments in big data fail to pay off, though, is that most companies don’t do a good job with the information they already have. They don’t know how to manage it, analyze it in ways that enhance their understanding, and then make changes in response to new insights

While big data is often studied from a technological standpoint, their observations and recommendations focus on the "softer" side of technology when it is actually implemented in an organization.

Much of the hype around big data focuses on getting more information and more people to analyze it. But the opportunity presented by the information economy is best tapped by getting all [emphasis original] people to use data more effectively

AnonTechie writes:

If you thought you were protecting your country, you may justifiably feel betrayed.

For the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world's largest employers of mathematicians. These organizations stand accused of law-breaking on an industrial scale and are now the object of widespread outrage. How has the mathematics community responded? Largely by ignoring it.

Those employers-the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters-have been systematically monitoring as much of our lives as they can, including our emails, texts, phone and Skype calls, Web browsing, bank transactions, and location data. They have tapped Internet trunk cables, bugged charities and political leaders, conducted economic espionage, hacked cloud servers, and disrupted lawful activist groups, all under the banner of national security. The goal, to quote former NSA director Keith Alexander, is to "collect all the signals, all the time."

Slate article

---

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

Some guy in his blog writes:

Blog post

Do you use it? Does it work or not?

---

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Mosquitoes bred with suicide genes to combat disease:

With the World Cup just six weeks away, Brazilian authorities have approved the widespread, commercial release of a strain of mosquito that has been genetically reprogrammed to wipe out its own species. These Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are a major carrier of dengue fever, and bed nets are useless against them because they bite during the day. While some have experimented with using lasers and other techniques to wipe out the disease-carrying bugs, Brazil's preferred solution begins in the lab: Male mosquitoes are given a deliberately flawed gene and then released into the wild so that they can reproduce, at which point the implanted gene rears its head and causes any offspring to die before they reach sexual maturity.

Brazilians welcome genetically-modified mosquito to help fight dengue fever

Oxitec's press-release

---

Original Submission

Ethanol-fueled writes:

From the article, paraphrased:

When Steven Wise, a 63-year-old legal scholar in the field of animal law, decided to poke around Circle L Trailer Sales to assess the living conditions of the Reindeer living on the company grounds, he was horrified to discover that a former circus chimpanzee named Tommy was forced to live in inhumane conditions:

" A rancid milk-musk odor wafted forth and with it the sight of an adult chimpanzee, crouched inside a small steel-mesh cell. Some plastic toys and bits of soiled bedding were strewn behind him. The only visible light emanated from a small portable TV on a stand outside his bars, tuned to what appeared to be a nature show. "

Being sufficiently moved by witnessing that heinous crime, Wise and a few cohorts strolled into the Fulton County Courthouse wielding a legal document the likes of which had never been seen in any of the world's courts — a legal package including a detailed account of the "petitioner's" cruel and unusual solitary confinement along with nine affidavits gathered from leading primatologists, underscoring the physical and psychological damages such living conditions endured by a being with such cognitive capability. Tommy would not, however, have anticipated that he was about to make legal history as the first nonhuman primate to ever sue a human captor in an attempt to gain his own freedom.

---

Original Submission

Papas Fritas writes:

The Boston Globe reports that two MIT students have raised half a million dollars for a project to distribute $100 in bitcoin to every undergraduate student at MIT this fall aimed at creating an ecosystem for digital currencies at MIT. "Right now there is not a geographic place that you can go to and assume that people have relatively broad access to bitcoin," says Daniel Elitzer, suggesting that that could change with their experiment, which might make for an interesting case study. "What might the world look like if bitcoin, or something like bitcoin, were widely accepted?" The bulk of funding for the project is being provided by MIT alumni who plan to distribute the $500,000 already pledged to all 4,528 undergraduates.

Plans for the MIT Bitcoin Project involve a range of activities, including working with professors and researchers across the Institute to study how students use the bitcoin they receive, as well as spurring academic and entrepreneurial activity within the university in the field. "Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with internet access at the dawn of the internet era," says Jeremy Rubin, a sophomore studying computer science at MIT. When the distribution happens this fall, it will make the MIT campus the first place in the world where it will be possible to assume widespread access to Bitcoin. "Everybody has access to the Internet, right — so you want to launch a webapp? Everybody can do that. You want to launch a bitcoin or cryptocurrency app? That's a little bit harder. You can't test it in your immediate friend group. But hopefully [that's] what we'll enable."

---

Original Submission

Fluffeh writes:

Media distributor VODO recently packaged up a few items into an Otherworlds bundle and popped it up for sale. One of the places they advertised was The Pirate Bay, with the folks there being generous enough to replace their site banner with the link. There were several payment options (beat the average, pay what you want, be generous) and the bundle was advertised through a number of other sites as well as social media.

Interestingly, Pirate Bay users mostly picked the latter option. In total, 232 Pirate Bay visitors chose the most expensive "beat the premium" option, paying $18.11 on average. Another 72 visitors went for the cheapest option with an average payment of $10.61, and 67 people ended up in the middle with an $10.61 average.

Across all paying Pirate Bay visitors the average payment was $13.52. Interestingly enough, this is more than the average paid by people who came from other sites, or social media.

That said, TPB users weren't clicking through as heavily:

King notes that the ratio of incoming visitors to buying visitors was relatively low, about a tenth of that from other sites.

However, per user, they paid the most among all buyers.

---

Original Submission

BBC reports:

The remains of a man who died in a hot spring accident in Yellowstone National Park were dissolved before they could be recovered. [...]According to the incident report, Mr Scott and his sister, Sable Scott, left the defined boardwalk area in Norris Basin on 7 June.

The pair had been specifically looking for an area to soak in the thermal springs, despite the potential danger and warning signs. [...]Rescue teams later found his body in the pool but abandoned attempts to retrieve it due to the decreasing light available, the danger to themselves and an approaching lightning storm. [...]The following day, workers were unable to find any significant remains in the boiling water.

Yahoo News noted:

The official report states that the victim's sister told investigators that Colin Scott had reached down to test the water temperature of a thermal feature when he slipped, falling into the super-heated, acidic water. When first responders arrived back at the scene, they found the victim's body and personal effects in the hot spring, but were unable to proceed with their recovery efforts due to inclement weather.

When a recovery team came back the next day, all traces of the victim's remains were gone, presumably dissolved in the hot, churning, acidic water of the Yellowstone thermal feature.

MrPlow passes on this IRC submission from TheMightyBuzzard:

If you're a consumer, that piece of digital wordsmithery you purchased probably isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on. Like most digital media available for "purchase," ebooks are often "sold" as licenses that allow the publisher to control use of the product indefinitely, whether through DRM or by simply attaching EULAs no one will ever read to every download.

This works out great for publishers, who can make irrational, unilateral decisions to pull their catalogs from platforms as a "bargaining tool," leaving purchasers without access to their purchased goods. But publishers (including music publishers like UMG) only use the term "license" when it's most advantageous for them. When it comes to paying authors, the terminology suddenly changes. Now it's a "sale," with all the disadvantages for authors that entails.

"Sales" is a historical term, meant to reference physical sales and the additional costs (printing, packaging, shipping) built into the process. Licenses -- and the ebooks attached to them -- have none of these costs, hence the higher payout rate. But, according to a recently-filed lawsuit, Simon and Schuster is treating ebooks like physical sales in order to pay authors lower royalties.

The fine article digs deeper into the precedents and the pertinent wording in the various agreements for those who want to get their teeth into the details. Case-by-case lawsuits don't appear to be a particularly satisfying solution to what appears to be endemic in the industry. Is a solution instead for the content creators to stick their middle finger up at the traditional publishers, and find other ways of getting their creations into the market? Insight from content creators is most welcome.

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160522/14454734518/author-sues-publisher-portraying-ebook-licenses-as-sales-to-pay-out-fewer-royalties.shtml

---

Original Submission