“Over at the Communications of the ACM, a new article — Computing’s Narrow Focus May Hinder Women’s Participation — suggests that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should shoulder some of the blame for the dearth of women at Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and other tech companies. From the article: “Valerie Barr, chair of ACM’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W), believes the retreat [of women from CS programs] was caused partly by the growth of personal computers”

“ACM continued its efforts to reshape the U.S. education system to see real computer science exist and count as a core graduation credit in U.S. high schools”

Researchers found that using media after a tiring day can make you feel less relaxed and recovered

You had such good intentions for when you got home from work: go to the gym, call a friend and sort out that paperwork.

But after a hard day in the office you ended up slumped on the sofa in front of the television instead.

If you feel bad about it you’re not alone – scientists have discovered that watching television at the end of a long day can make you feel guilty and like a failure.

They found that those who were especially fatigued were more inclined to feel that they were procrastinating by watching TV or playing games instead of doing more important tasks.

This led them to feeling guilty, which in turn made them feel less recovered and revitalised, diminishing the positive effects of using media.

By contrast, at the Incubator School in Los Angeles, becoming a billionaire is the goal for many kids.

In class, they combine the jargon of corporate America with the language of video games. Instead of graduating, they “level up”. They discuss profit-sharing strategies for the school lemonade stand.

And at this school, starting a business is not only encouraged, it will soon become a mandatory part of the curriculum.

“It’s an entrepreneurship-themed school that focuses on innovation. It wants kids to launch start-ups and we think of ourselves as a start-up, so we’re constantly refining, experimenting, iterating our product, which is trying to create an education that kids actually want,” says Sujata Bhatt, the school’s founder and head teacher.

The school looks like a Silicon Valley start-up, with motivational posters on the walls and laptops and tablets on the desks. Only the people using and creating the technology here are children aged 11 to 13.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Sujata Bhatt

We want kids to look at the world and say, ‘These are problems that need to be solved.”

Sujata Bhatt Founder, The Incubator School

When you ask the kids at this school what they want to do when they grow up, nearly all of them say they want to run their own companies.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28129967

The components are commoditised and OEMs cannot differentiate on software, so they are entering a race to the bottom of cheaper and cheaper and more and more commoditised products, much like the PC industry.

The funny thing about this is that part of the original promise of Android was that it would allow OEMs to avoid this.

Every now and then a scholarly journal retracts an article because of errors or outright fraud. In academic circles, and sometimes beyond, each retraction is a big deal.

Now comes word of a journal retracting 60 articles at once.

The reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: A “peer review and citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published.

You’ve heard of prostitution rings, gambling rings and extortion rings. Now there’s a “peer review ring.”

After a 14-month investigation, JVC determined the ring involved “aliases” and fake e-mail addresses of reviewers — up to 130 of them — in an apparently successful effort to get friendly reviews of submissions and as many articles published as possible by Chen and his friends.

Snap out of it. Those who find themselves daydreaming when they’re supposed to be reading a report may soon find a device is telling them to pay attention. A detector can now figure out when a person’s attention shifts from their task and get them to focus on it again.

People are thought to zone out about 20-40 per cent of the time; these instances have been found to result in performance failures, poor memory recall and low reading comprehension

To combat the issue, Sidney D’Mello and Robert Bixler at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana hit on the idea of making interfaces intelligent enough to spot a user’s waning attention and take action.

Their software tracks a person’s eye movements with a commercial eye tracker.

If it thinks the user is no longer concentrating, the system can pause the session, notify the reader,