Category: News and Views

Ice Age Mammoth Bones Discovered on Michigan Farm | Live Science

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Two Michigan farmers made an unexpected discovery in a wheat field last week: the ice-age bones of a mammoth that was likely slaughtered by ancient humans.

An excavation and analysis of the bones suggest they come from an adult male mammoth that had an unlucky end.

“We think that humans were here and may have butchered and stashed the meat [in a pond] so that they could come back later for it,” Daniel Fisher, a Universityof Michigan paleontologist who led the excavation, said in a statement. Once researchers date the bones, the discovery may help determine when early humans lived in the area, Fisher said.

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Dell Buys EMC For $67B In Largest Deal In Tech History | TechCrunch

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In  the largest tech deal in history by far, Dell and partners MSD Partners and Silver Lake agreed to buy EMC today for $67 billion or $33.15 a share.

This is way over the $27 price being rumored last week, and makes the deal far larger than the $37 billion that Avago paid for Broadcom just last May. What makes this deal even more interesting is that Dell with a valuation of around $25 billion was by far the smaller fish at approximately half the size of EMC.

The biggest part of EMC by far is VMware, which was included in the deal and will continue to be a separately publicly traded company, but EMC will go private and become part of Dell ending the company’s long history as a publicly traded company.

The two combined companies will make the Dell and EMC the world’s largest privately controlled, integrated technology company, according to a statement released by EMC.

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LinkedIn switching to ‘discretionary’ vacation policy | Cnn Money

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LinkedIn is the latest company to offer an open-ended time off policy to its employees.

The networking site is implementing a “discretionary time off,” or DTO policy, for its U.S.-based employees, LinkedIn (LNKD, Tech30) vice president Pat Wadors said in a blog post.

Starting November 1, the company will no longer offer a set number of days off each year. Instead, managers will work with employees to plan vacation time.

Under the new policy, LinkedIn employees will face “no set minimum or maximum amount of vacation time,” Wadors wrote.

“We are not alone in making this shift to DTO. It’s part of a growing movement to place more focus on results and empowerment, not hours worked,” Wadors wrote. “And it’s an important step to help employees recharge and keep engaged.”

The unlimited vacation model got its start at small tech firms, and a couple of major employers including Virgin (VA) and General Electric (GE) have adopted it over the past year.

The shift has caused bumps in some workplaces.

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Texas university students to protest gun law with dildos | BBC News

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Texas students are planning to hang sex toys from their bags in protest at a law allowing people to carry concealed weapons on university campuses.

“You’re carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I’m carrying a HUGE DILDO,” Jessica Jin, organizer of Campus (DILDO) Carry, wrote on Facebook.

About 3,000 people have signed up for the protest, which is planned for next year when the law takes effect.

Gun rights supporters have criticized the rally on the group’s Facebook page.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott enacted the campus carry law in June. Under the law, university presidents are permitted to create so-called “gun-free zones”.

“The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms, however it DOES have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence,” wrote Ms Jin, a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Solar & Wind Reach a Big Renewables Turning Point : BNEF | Bloomberg Business

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Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It’s the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy.

But that’s less interesting than what just happened in the U.S.

To appreciate what’s going on there, you need to understand the capacity factor. That’s the percentage of a power plant’s maximum potential that’s actually achieved over time.

Consider a solar project. The sun doesn’t shine at night and, even during the day, varies in brightness with the weather and the seasons. So a project that can crank out 100 megawatt hours of electricity during the sunniest part of the day might produce just 20 percent of that when averaged out over a year. That gives it a 20 percent capacity factor.

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Urban Outfitters wants full-time employees to work for free | Business Insider

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As the holiday season approaches, Urban Outfitters is hoping that its employees are in the giving spirit.

Gawker published an email asking the full-time employees at URBN, Urban Outfitters’ parent company based in Philadelphia, to work without pay during five weekend days in October.

The email explains that October is the busiest month of the year for URBN (which houses Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie), and therefore, URBN needs its employees’ help.

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Google Is Planning For A Zero-Waste, Circular Economy | Fast Company

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The current economy is built on waste—dig up some materials, turn that into a product, ship it to an “end user” who eventually tosses it in the trash. But that’s starting to change.

Google is one of the latest mega-corporations to commit to the principles of a circular economy—one that keeps “technical nutrients” like plastic and silicon out of the landfill, and trims out wasted water, energy, food, and land.

“Our goal is to embed circular economic principles into the fabric of Google’s infrastructure, operations, and culture,” says Kate Brandt, Google’s sustainability lead. “What that means is that we’ll be focusing on opportunities wherever possible to eradicate waste through smart design—at our data centers, in our kitchens, on our campuses, in all we do around the world.”

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So Long Blogging. Hello—Yep, We’re Going to Say It—Plogging | WIRED

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WE LOVE SHORT.

Concise 140-character limits. GIFs. Texts. Snaps. Vines. Photos. Summaries. Notifications. Emoji. Slang. Yo.

But some of Silicon Valley’s biggest, smartest tech companies and investors are going long on long. And not long videos, either. They seem to be doubling down on good old-fashioned words.

Last week, Facebook updated its little-known Notes feature to encourage users to write “more beautiful and customizable” posts separate from status updates. Medium announced a $57 million round of funding (on Medium, of course) and is holding a VIP event next week to reveal new features. Everyone’s favorite unicorn Slack relaunched its Posts feature to help users write longer at work. And Re/code reports that Twitter is building a product to allow users to share posts longer than the typical 140-character limit.

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Facebook Declines to Remove Page Vilifying Autistic People | Forbes

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Over the weekend, a Facebook page appeared that claimed it existed for families united against “autistic shooters.” It’s unclear whether or not the administrator of the page was attempting satire or parody or being serious or somewhere in between, but the entire page used a jocularly vicious tone in its extended series of false claims that could have had no other effect but to cause harm and damage to autistic people.

Given the glee that the administrator evinced over the negative response to the page, the intent could not be in doubt: to compound for the autism community the pain that we all feel over yet another national tragedy.

To my certain knowledge, within hours of the page’s appearance, there were hundreds of requests to Facebook to remove this page, in addition to a petition to request that it be removed, which had thousands of signatures. From what I understand–and from my own experience–for almost two days, Facebook’s repeated response was to assert, again and again, that the page did not violate Facebook’s community standards. ETA: Evidently, Facebook continues to think that because the page, taken down last night, is back up again.

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