Slashdot Mirror

Watch along with courses at actual University. CS and other subjects.
Berkely Webcast

OpenCourseWare MIT
MIT OCW

Skimmed the CS parts of both programs back in the day. I have a BS in CS from a state college. Found both programs interesting and appreciate the very different approaches to the same subject.

Yes, science requires faith in its axioms.

"Things are what they are"

"Sensory data is reliable"

"Reality exists outside the mind"

A few more

These are not provable. They are presumed, or taken on faith.

"Coding is easy"

It is, if you learn from proper books.

While their specific research may be new, the results are hardly new. Its been nearly 11 years since more original research was released with similar results. Looks like this may be the first time Slashdot has reported this though.

Something like this not posted to slashdot? Nevahhh!

From Thursday May 13, 2004:

The Security Risk of Keyboard Clicks

While their specific research may be new, the results are hardly new. Its been nearly 11 years since more original research was released with similar results. Looks like this may be the first time Slashdot has reported this though.

Doesn't look like Marissa and term understand the concept of material disclosure in contract law.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-ency...

Excerpt:

Misrepresentation
If fraud or misrepresentation occurred during the negotiation process, any resulting contract will probably be held unenforceable. The idea here is to encourage honest, good faith bargaining and transactions. Misrepresentations commonly occur when a party says something false (telling a potential buyer that a house is termite-free when it is not) or, in some other way, conceals or misrepresents a state of affairs (concealing evidence of structural damage in a house's foundation with paint or a particular placement of furniture).

Nondisclosure
Nondisclosure is essentially misrepresentation through silence -- when someone neglects to disclose an important fact about the deal. Courts look at various issues to decide whether a party had a duty to disclose the information, but courts will also consider whether the other party could or should have easily been able to access the same information. It should be noted that parties have a duty to disclose only material facts. But if Party A specifically asks Party B about a fact (material or non-material), then Party B has a duty to disclose the truth.

A more extensive discussion of the topic:
http://scholarship.law.berkele...

Perhaps you're right http://setiathome.berkeley.edu... employee member of SETI team Microsoft APK (aka AlecStaar https://slashdot.org/comments.... )?

https://seti.berkeley.edu/HD16...

The Miocene Epoch, 23.03 to 5.3 million years ago,* was a time of warmer global climates than those in the preceeding Oligocene or the following Pliocene and it's notable in that two major ecosystems made their first appearances: kelp forests and grasslands. The expansion of grasslands is correlated to a drying of continental interiors as the global climate first warmed and then cooled.

That's just a bit confusing - is it a "first appearance" of grasslands, an "expansion of grasslands, or possibly an appearance followed by an expansion. Also note that they're careful to talk of the ecosystem "grassland" rather than specific grass species.

A book on palaeopedology (the science of studying ancient soil deposits ; do I need to point out that changing from (say) open forest to grassland will affect soil structure in ways that will be detectable?) talks on the changes in spore abundance, with diagrams. See particularly fig 20.3 on p.303.

Ah, I'd forgotten about that. C3 versus C4 plants. The Neogene transition from C3 to C4 grasslands in North America: assemblage analysis of fossil phytoliths I'd forgotten bout the C3-C4 transition. (I'm not a plants or fossils person - more high grade metamorphics for me. Plus shit-bagging for pay.)

The rapid ecological expansion of grasses with C4 photosynthesis at the end of the Neogene (8-2 Ma) is well documented in the fossil record of stable carbon isotopes. As one of the most profound vegetation changes to occur in recent geologic time, it paved the way for modern tropical grassland ecosystems.

This was a major change. There was discussion a couple of years ago about using genetic engineering to copy the C4 carbon fixation path from grasses into other crop plants for IIRC a 20% improvement in efficiency. Worth considering, but a lot of work, and not popular with the Greens.

... this broadly synchronous change, long after the evolutionary origin of the C4 pathway in grasses. To date, these hypotheses have suffered from a lack of direct evidence for floral composition and structure during this important transition.

And the paper I'm quoting then provides evidence of the change. The paper is open access, so you cn sweat it as much as you like, but the clearest indicator of change I can see is a decline in tree cover in their study area through the time interval - fig 4-A

The increase in abundance of grasslands in the Miocene is well established, even if the actual families of grasses evolved much earlier. Which does rather raise the question of why it took so long between evolution of the grasses and the development and increase of the grassland ecoystems of the world. That's a good question.

Except of course, there is no history of raising minimum wage resulting in lower employment LONG TERM

Actually, there is.

Modest increases in the minimum wage tend to modestly increase wages (while doing little to reduce poverty). But big jumps tend to price a lot of unskilled and entry level workers out of the labor market.

Most people claiming that minimum wage hikes don't cause job losses point to the Card-Krueger study of fast food workers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But there were a lot of issues with that study. The raise was minor, and they only looked at same-site employment. They didn't look at the long term effect of whether higher wages reduced the number of new establishments.

https://cltc.berkeley.edu/file...

Mother of fuck. Why can't we just get to the meat of things?

RTFA: from gills, not from fins.

Furthermore, IIRC, the developing human foetus has gills in addition to limbs.

So the gill that developed into a limb was *duplicated* in subsequent evolutionary models.

I dunno - a feature morphing into another feature by natural selection seems reasonable, but a feature duplicated sounds like a stretch.

Any evolution experts care to comment?

Most scientific journals are out there, published and free(ish). Don't cast stones unless you're willing to do the research yourself.

The reason young people care about the environment:
1. Young people are generally less wealthy and so are more concerned about 'social' issues -- http://matrix.berkeley.edu/res...
2. They'll actually be alive long enough to see climate change cause serious ecological and lifestyle damages (and they know it)

I must say though, in terms of lifestyle changes, I've seen people (at least in my city) abandoning car travel in much larger numbers than my generation in the (Gen-X-ish) crowd. Even for people in my age range, I see a heck of a lot more bike riders than I ever did before (All subjective IMHO).
Although, if you look at air travel: http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
Air travel rates are more pegged to economic conditions than anything else, and they seem like we're at historical highs...

BOINC

This?

specifically, when a side solar panel is not installed, the C3038 Octopus harness must be connected.

It's not like this news is new anyways. It took me about a whole minute to find these.

It's not like I should expect much better.

Also here's a question for everyone. Why is 1800K "warm" while 5000K is "cool". We should really work on the way we talk about colors. Blue is hotter than red, yet for some reason people associate blue with cold and red with hot. Why haven't we fixed this?

FWIW, if you want to learn some interesting things about how humans name colors, the results of the World Color Survey back in the 1970's are the primary source of information used by researchers the study any color language association theories.

Outside this basic information, several subsequent associated studies of people and language, "warm" colors are associated with fire and heat, "cool" colors are associated with water, sky, and shadow. Several studies also correlate the so-called "cool" color with "dark" and association with lower temperatures. Many researcher believe that because we don't have experience with the colors emitted black body radiators at high temperatures and those colors only appear in "cooler" context within the experience of those people that created our languages that is why we associate those colors with "cool" and not "warm".

On the other hand, blackbody radiation correlated temperature is really a bogus thing to measure anyhow. Forcing it to further correlate with "warm" and "cool" and "hotter" doesn't generally make sense in many contexts.

You can have a "warm" greeting and a "cool" greeting and it has nothing to do with any temperature.
You can perceive color from a reflective object or a transmissive object that is not a black body radiators, so there is no "hotter" in that case.

On the other hand, if it simply bothers you that 5000K is "higher" than 1800K, then just measure your color "temperature" in Mireds...

The market price for homes is determined almost entirely by how much people are willing to pay,

Housing prices are determined like all other market prices, by supply and demand.

Supply is artificially reduced with land-use regulation.

This study suggests that reducing land-use restrictions in New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the US median city would expand their labor forces, boosting US GDP by 9.5%.

San Francisco is the city that seems the most crazy. Unlike Dubai and Hong Kong with plenty of 50+ story apartment buildings built recently, San Francisco has a 40-foot height limit on most of its housing stock, much of which was built before 1960 and not up to modern seismic standards.

I think if history judges the presence of this wind farm unfavorably, they can, you know, just tear it down.

Structures built in/on the ocean aren't typically torn down. The metal superstructure would either be dismanntled and sold for scrap, or just dumped into the nearby sea if the scrap value isn't high enough. The concrete foundations would either remain, or if they're judged to be a hazard to shipping they'd be blasted into small pieces and left in the sea. I'm not sure what would happen to the fiberglass blades. They're not typically recyclable, but aren't heavy enough to sink and form an artificial reef. So they'd probably have to be transported back to shore and buried in a landfill.

It seems much easier to undo the damage of a wind farm than it does, say, a coal plant.

Yes the damage from the coal ash and exhaust makes it pretty much the worst possible choice for power. However, for an equivalent MWe of generation capacity, the amount of steel and concrete needed to construct wind turbines is about 5x more than for a coal plant, an order of magnitude more than for a nuclear plant, and two orders of magnitude more than needed for a gas plant.

Wind is even worse if you compare based on the actual amount of electricity generated, since wind has about half the capacity factor of coal and gas, and nearly 1/4th that of nuclear. (Capacity factor is what fraction of the plant's generating capacity is actually fulfilled on average over a year of operation. Wind is around 0.25, coal and gas about 0.4-0.6, nuclear around 0.9.)

Note: I don't oppose wind. I actually support it, as its cost has come down enough that it's starting to become cost-competitive with nuclear and coal. I just try to counter the misinformation put out there by the unicorn and rainbows crowd who've convinced the public that wind, solar, and hydro have no drawbacks. Every power source has drawbacks, and picking the right one requires an honest and thorough comparison of all the real advantages and drawbacks.

How many of these degrees look like they will lead to a job? To be sure there are many, that are good degrees, and if it weren't considered a microagression to point it out, most sane people can also point out those degrees that one should probably not go into debt to acquire. Or certainly not complain about it if that is one's choice.

For fuck's sake, university is not supposed to be a job training programme. People who graduate in Medieval fine art, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian philosophy or whatever do not expect to be working in those fields once they leave college, except for the few who go into academia.

If this seems hard to understand, consider someone who does a degree in Pure Maths or Theoretical Physics: they are just as likely to end up as a lawyer or banker as any sort of scientist.

How many of these degrees look like they will lead to a job? To be sure there are many, that are good degrees, and if it weren't considered a microagression to point it out, most sane people can also point out those degrees that one should probably not go into debt to acquire. Or certainly not complain about it if that is one's choice.

Speciation in a vertebrate. You may also find this website educational.

The Black-Scholes Model is about one risky asset, (such as stock), and one riskless asset (such as cash). It also depends on asset returns to be normally distributed.

I don't know what model LTCM was using in their Fixed Income Arbitrage, but it was unlikely to be the Black-Scholes Model, and anyway also a big part of the LTCM downturn was when Russian government defaulted on their domestic local currency bonds, more of a "Black Swan" than a "Normal Distribution."

It has been written "Despite the presence of Nobel laureates closely identified with option theory it seems LTCM relied too much on theoretical market-risk models and not enough on stress-testing, gap risk and liquidity risk. There was an assumption that the portfolio was sufficiently diversified across world markets to produce low correlation. But in most markets LTCM was replicating basically the same credit spread trade. In August and September 1998 credit spreads widened in practically every market at the same time."

Maybe not... http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wk... http://www.phusewiki.org/docs/...

UCMP has an online exhibit that I find to be more browsable and complete than the other sites I've tried.

UCMP has an online exhibit that I find to be more browsable and complete than the other sites I've tried.

During the Great Depression, people picked up and moved into "Hooverville" shanty towns built from scrap wood and trash. Can you imagine a city allowing you to do that in 2010? Cops would be there to tase the shit out of you within the hour if you tried.

During the Great Recession, people (largely banks) demonstrated that they can stay irrational longer than the market can stay depressed. Rather than sell houses at a loss, entire subdivisions were razed or simply left unoccupied. With credit frozen and mortgages hard to come by, inventory was either destroyed or simply sat on, rather than lowering prices to a level that people could afford to move in to.

This is an interesting although convoluted method to determine what is being typed. It has already been demonstrated that the acoustics from typing can be used to identify what is being typed. Most smart watches have microphones. It makes more sense to use the microphone right next to the keyboard to capture very high quality audio so close to the source and then analyze it acoustically to determine what was typed (which captures data from BOTH hands). It will also work if the user takes off their watch and lays it nearby.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ty...

I have trouble understanding how anyone in a technologically advanced culture can think science is decided by vote.

You have the causality exactly backwards.

O'Rly ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/h...

Everyone of those are examples of "CONSENSUS" that are totally disproven.

Consensus is about as relevant to scientific progress as potholes are to commuting.

Not to mention pushing Microsoft development tools and technologies.

No, it is about teaching computer science and pretty much anybody in the industry can volunteer to be a part of it. But you saw "Microsoft" and immediately projected your own bias rather than actually doing any research or educating yourself about it didn't you. So from the TEALS site:

What’s the curriculum?
Our partner schools select from two TEALS courses: Intro CS (“Introduction to Computer Science Principles”) and AP CS A (“Introduction to Java Programming”).

Intro to CS uses Berkeley's Snap! visual programming language to teach CS fundamentals, not Microsoft tools.

Introduction to Java Programming? That doesn't sound very Microsoft does it. It's actually based on a text from Washington University.

Seriously it's all on the website, instead of being an ignorant naysayer spreading FUD you could actually contribute.

Another search turned up an old California Law Review article detailing many of the problems of criminal conspiracy laws. Apparently these statutes have been used to punish things like draft protesters, labor organizers, communist party members, etc.... among other things. Apparently there is a long history of using "conspiracy" as an end run around the first amendment to punish politically unpopular speech.

It also points out the absurdity of a law that allows for a felony conviction for conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. So if we agreed to be a part of a flash mob that streaks through Times Square, we could be convicted of a felony conspiracy under Federal law for planning to commit a misdemeanor disorderly conduct violation in New York, even if we never actually boarded the plane to join the performance. Nice.

Enjoy!

• Secrecy, flagging, and paranoia: adoption criteria in encrypted email
• How to make secure email easier to use
• Why Johnny Can't Encrypt and Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt
• Views, reactions, and impact of digitally-signed mail in e-commerce
• Usability of security: a case study

Here is a list of math journals and their submission price. It is a bit old but I doubt they are all free now.

"If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century, like during the Medieval period and the middle Holocene [the current geological epoch, which began about 11,000 years ago]. The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.

If you look at the archaeological record, you see that the Native American population in the West expanded in the wet years that preceded those long droughts in the Medieval period. Then during the droughts, they were pretty much wiped out. There was the so-called Anasazi collapse in the Southwest about 800 years ago. In some ways, I see that as an analogy to us today."

http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/...

Anyone who wasn't expecting a multi year drought in California obviously didn't study history.

WH visitor records indicate MassCAN Executive Director Jim Stanton was at the White House on the day Code.org 'taught President Obama to code' last December, and that he joined Google, Microsoft, and Code.org execs in a sit-down immediately afterwards with the head of the National Science Foundation. Stanton is also a Sr. Project Manager at Education Development Center (EDC leads MassCAN), which announced in March it had received a $6.5 million NSF grant to bring Berkeley’s Snap!-based The Beauty and Joy of Computing course to New York City high schools.

I can't argue with what happened in your personal experience but from this paper I found your experience was the exception, not the rule:

for blacks, school desegregation significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status; desegregation had no effects on whites across each of these outcomes.

Or perhaps because women who have wanted to work in health or flight have been historically relegated to secondary roles.

Even with a cursory Google search you could read up and inform yourself about actual examples and why anti-discrimination laws we created (from 1971 no less!): http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2664&context=californialawreview

The fact is, as you've pointed out, that people naturally have different preferences. However, those preferences are at the same time shaped by one's cultural surrounding -- nature versus nurture. If one's culture explicitly discriminates who can do what based on traits that are unrelated to natural preference and competence, then the participation rates you claim to be evidence of preference are fundamentally unnatural.

This is not hard to understand.

Many people do in fact experience such discrimination. The effect of this discrimination is unknown, but that is the whole point of being open to understanding these issues. While there is no such thing as solving discrimination (because of the imperfect nature of humans), investigating these issues may in fact lead to better matching of individuals to productive and preferred roles in society.

That would be a net gain for society.

Yeah, but The harder I work, the luckier I get.

Or perhaps: The luckier you got, the harder you think you worked, which could be considered a "Just World" fallacy.

Maybe the press reports on the people who are more famous (who tend not to be AI researchers). But Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley AI researcher and co-author of the best selling AI textbook of the last two decades, has concerns about the matter, too.

In any case, when you're close to the project you can tend to lose sight of the big picture. Probably few scientists at Los Alamos thought of the long-term consequences of the weapons they were designing.

Another thing to keep in mind is that hardly anyone believes that we're close to creating human-level artificial intelligence, particularly AI researchers.

I don't know about those times scales, but femto-second pulsed lasers are damn useful for imaging. Briefly, say the experimenter images green fluorescence. Normally, to get green fluorescence you need to excite with blue light of, say, 450 nm. However, if you can pack enough photons into a short packet then you can also get green fluorescence at about double the wavelength. It's called "two photon absorption" and won a Nobel prize. So you pump in 900 nm light and get back green. The advantage is that longer wavelengths are scattered less by biological tissue and, crucially, the depth of field is much better so there is very little out of focus emitted green light (see image in link). Because the laser scans over the specimen relatively slowly (e.g. a few times a second), you can collect scattered green photons and still assign them back to where they came from. So it's very efficient. Maybe this new laser will all for the process to work efficiently with 3 or even 4 photons.

1-The only people making an in depth examination of the issue are those who make a lot of money if the answer comes back "safe".

Demonstrably not true. Certainly a lot of the studies are industry funded but there are plenty that are not. Not to mention that we've been eating the stuff for decades now as a sort of in-vivo test without any evidence of problems attributable to GMO crops or animals. If people want to be paranoid that's their problem - don't make it mine.

2-Is it ok to put pork in sausages shipped to the middle east and not lebel it?

Nice strawman. Saying something is GMO without any further details is nearly meaningless. GMO by what technique, using what genes, with what evidence of harm? If I tell you something is GMO and you make a decision based on that information alone with no further details then you are not making any sort of meaningfully informed decision based on actual evidence. You are simply being scared of something you don't fully understand.

As a parallel, there is basically no evidence that organic foods are more nutritious and it is not clear that they are better for the environment. The argument for organics is more one of logic than of actual evidence. It sounds good in principle but sounding good doesn't make it true. They require more inputs to get the same yield, the "organic" pesticides used (and they are used) are often more toxic than the synthetic options, etc. If someone wants organic food that is fine but you label what is different, not what is standard. You have the person who wants the specialty good pay extra for it.

Most food is non-organic just like for many types of food GMO has become standard. If there is a market for non-GMO food (like there is for organic) then that is fine. It might not mean much but let those who care pay extra for it. Personally I don't care but until there is some actual evidence of harm I don't care to pay for labeling that I think is unscientific and pointless and frankly amounts to scare-mongering.

This is cool stuff. Here's some other stuff I found recently for anyone interested in messing with bitstreams, creating an open-source FPGA, or doing hardware more easily. Hardware designers feedback is appreciated.

Open Source Bitstream Generation without R.E. or license violations: http://www.isi.edu/~nsteiner/p...

Archipelago - an open-source FPGA with toolflow support: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/P...

Cx, open-source, hardware & synthesis language: http://cx-lang.org/

QFlow Open-source Flow from behavioral synthesis to detail routing: http://opencircuitdesign.com/q...

Have fun people! Especially building on the first two. I'd appreciate experienced people telling me how good the Cx system is for (a) people doing FPGA with high-level synthesis tools and/or (b) beginners using behavioral verilog wanting something better.

"You mean an oil spill which was the result of engineering, judgement and training errors of the operators and had absolutely nothing to do with time pressures"

Uhhh... nope.

I'm talking about oil spills that even the government comission in charge said that were due to cost-cutting malpractices, i.e. "Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money)": http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin.... While the report itself can't be so clear-cut on that, it's very easy to read between lines that conflicting interests (time and money versus security) just as stated. http://ccrm.berkeley.edu/pdfs_...

"Or the nuclear power plant which survived the tsunami just fine [...] and only went under due to the engineering error of putting emergency power in the basement?"

Uhhh... nope again.

I'm talking about nuclear power plants that were positively known not to be properly maintained and where whistleblowers were systematically shut down because hearing them would cost money, i.e. "It is important to remember that in February 2011, shortly before the meltdowns, NISA extended the operating license of Fukushima Daiichi despite expressing reservations about a dubious maintenance record and eerily prescient concerns about stress cracks in the back-up diesel generators that left them vulnerable to inundation." or "Telltale warnings began accumulating over the decade prior to 3/11[...] In 2009 NISA and TEPCO discussed the possibility of a 9.2 meter tsunami based on new simulations and archaeological evidence, but NISA did not press TEPCO to take countermeasures. Clearly, there is no basis to TEPCO's claim that the scale of the 3/11 tsunami was inconceivable [...] In terms of tsunami-related risk management, it turns out that TEPCO and two other utilities actually lobbied the government's Earthquake Research Committee on March 3, 2011 to water down wording in a report warning that a massive tsunami could hit the Tohoku coast". http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jef...

"Please if you're going cite major disasters to support your case for management attempting to maximise profit at the expense of safety then at least cite some correct ones."

I did.

Thank you!

BiPolar Disorder (manic depression is slang) is a very serious condition. Roughly 4% of the world's population is affected by BPD and Schizophrenia (Source).

My mother suffered from BPD. When she was off her lithium, the manic and depressive phases nearly tore our family apart multiple times. Personally, I've struggled with Depression a few times in my life even though financially, I'm very comfortable. Much of the last depressive episode was tied to the implosion of my last start-up. It's been a couple years since I exited that project and I'm only now reaching a point where I'm building my next new business. Fortunately, I have a fantastic support network and I'm not shy about seeking therapeutic help when needed because of my mother's experiences.

There is definitely stigma in many industries for mental health issues, regardless of how many years ago they were or current therapeutic activity. I don't talk about my mental health history in any professional context. There's no way investors would have faith in me or my business if they knew about the suicide attempts or other depression related history. As a multi decade survivor, I've learned how to read myself and my environment in a way that will hopefully help me live well for me and mine. It's also given me a keen eye for the signs of mental health issues in countless colleagues, coworkers and friends.

Our society is fucked up and currently configured in very unhealthy ways with those in control being disproportionately narcissistic (Source and psychopathic (Source), I don't expect anything to get better any time soon. Honestly, I'm glad our careers led us not to have kids, because this world won't be a better place for anyone in the bottom 98%.

You were taught that abiogenesis exists as a hypothesis (note, not a theory, and that scientists are actively researching it.

If you want to convince me otherwise, I'm afraid you'll need to de-anonymize and specify the school and timeframe involved.

Yes, I'm sure the DARPA challenge is hard work, but I was much more impressed by how well they were able to apply deep learning for use with robots:
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu...

The fastest robot on the DARPA challenge took 45 minutes, look at how fast the robot is in the above video. It's much more close to how a human would do it.

5 years ago from the same lab they took hours to do things and they were still using very little machine learning in comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And more importantly how close they are to using demonstrations (how about YouTube videos or from other people or robots doing similar tasks) to get robots to learn faster and many more tasks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I was also very much impressed the first time I saw what Deepmind had done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Because the person doing the science is completely fucking wrong too.

Any fucking 'science' that ignores the fact Lactic Acid is produced TO FUEL MUSCLES is ALWAYS going to come to the wrong fucking conclusion.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/m...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05...

http://dailyburn.com/life/fitn...

Some idiot failed biology and suddenly this becomes news for Slashdot.

Or rather, news for the moronic and idiotic Hugh Pickens.

From TFA summary:

Dr Warren Booth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tulsa, who previously discovered an instance of parthenogenesis in snakes, said: "This is basically a very extreme form of inbreeding. Most people think of inbreeding as bad, but it could be helpful in purging deleterious mutations from a population."

Most people think of inbreeding as bad, because it almost always is bad. Inbreeding depression is a very well documented, and well understood, phenomenon that can increase the extinction risk of critically endangered species. The idea that inbreeding can somehow be "helpful in purging deleterious mutations" has been discussed before, but a recent study found that even if small (e.g., endangered) populations are actively managed to control both inbreeding and outbreeding, the negative effects of inbreeding depression generally outweigh the benefits of removing harmful alleles. And that is a best case scenario, with reproduction carefully controlled to produce an optimal genetic outcome, which obviously does not happen naturally.

For these sawfish, asexual reproduction is most likely a desperation strategy used when the population has gotten so small that it is difficult or impossible to find mates. It is extremely unlikely that it will somehow improve the population's genetic fitness; more likely, it will lead to further decreases in genetic diversity and a corresponding loss of overall fitness.

Arduinos can get by with as little as 5 uA in standby:

https://github.com/petervojtek...

Part of long battery life is also to have an OS that allows the system to sleep most of the time.

A Spec mote takes a few cubic millimeters of space. Those are the kinds of specs we're heading for, and a 1000x difference in memory and the nature of the OS matter a great deal. Android doesn't cut it.

That may show things like the only 3 IoT devices in my house being hard wired and thus no one could care less if they use 1uA or 320000 times more power.

You're confusing cause and effect: the reason they are all hardwired is that getting things to be low-powered is tricky.

I have dozens of IoT devices around my house, and they are almost all battery powered. They also last at least a year each. Even cameras are moving to battery power now, making installation much easier. Ideally, eventually, they will be lower power enough so that they can run on light or beamed power.

Here are the papers: http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeple...

I think you will find many colleges offering a course similar to AP CS Principles right now. In fact, the course curriculum is based on curricula from courses offered at several partner universities, including this course from Berkeley: http://bjc.berkeley.edu/websit...

It is intended for non-CS majors at the college level, but I think both Berkeley and many high schools (including mine) are hoping that it will be an accessible jumping-off point for students to realize they like CS more than they think. Or, just as importantly, begin to introduce concepts of computing to students who WON'T do it professionally but should know the basic ideas - like, in this age, almost everybody.