The gender balance is equal for law/medicine mostly at the school level[1].
And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles."
And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning.
Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently.
And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ?
With all the fake electronic parts coming from china, are those companies a trustworthy long term source for such companies ? Not sure.
One common advice is to buy from authorized sources, and looking through octopart[1], arrow is the only distributor of anadgim, with 1000 units minimum quantities.
Bill Gurley's post is very interesting and in-depth. One thing he doesn't mention is the potential of UberPool(combining multiple passenger trips into a single car) to further increase demand. I wonder why is that ?
Have you tried something like f.lux ? it can remove the black spectrum of colors from computer/tablet displays ,and they claims there's research that this is the spectrum most critical for messing up with sleep.
With regards to eink web-apps, don't forget you'll also have to fight the keyboard if you'll even get one. So it's hard to design to that medium. On that note, there's the onyx eink phones/tablets that have a version of the play store, but their only unique apps are rss reader and google calender. But maybe sniffing around onyx and their users will let you discover usable apps.
Maybe with UberPool(sharing rides with other people on the same route) they'll have more access ? and if you combine that with Uber's SUV service, which enables sharing rides between up to 6 people, you'll get to something more accessible to poor people.
The big difference is that this is a runtime at the same time for html5/nodejs based apps, allowing developers to just distribute some html + js + assets instead of having to wrap it in node-webkit themselves (which is the same code you're downloading every time basically)
Of course those are factors , but qbotix has raised investment, has managed to get some commitments for solar projects, and there's even a company using their system in the UK offering to finance projects on a long term electricity purchase basis, claiming it's much cheaper than current providers:
So qbotix might have good solutions for the issues you mention. And that is of course without having concentrated solar power, which makes a qbotix a more attractive offer.
Raising investment is not typically a sign of technological excellence. It could be but it's certainly not a reliable indicator. Long term reliability of such systems can only be determined in the long term. So far the score does not look good for trackers.
I'm not sure it would take the long term to determine reliability: there are engineers who specialize in that,and there are software tools to simulate the reliability of a mechanical systems.
Whether this company did this or not is unknown, if they are offering this system on a per month basis, it makes sense they did some reasonable level of analysis of costs, because it would reduce their risk greatly.
Yes, it's not very nice to collude. On the other hand, were programmers get very good salaries. To some, maybe even Sergey, it might not seem like an urjent and critical moral issue,in the way that saving lives is.
If it's not an urgent and critical issue, then he would have just let it be, and would have let the free market for wages sort itself out. Instead, he actively sought to impair the ability of his own employees, the people he can most directly impact in life, to earn a living that was consistent with the intellectual capital they had spent years gaining, and all for the sake of his own personal gain. You guys can put as much lipstick on this pig as you want to, but what he did was truly shitty and not the action of a good person. Maybe he's changed, but I haven't heard an apology or anything (not that I'd expect to given the legal liability that would expose him to).
I think good understanding of conciousness comes from the meditative tradition, and their definition for it is "the part of the brain that observes the other parts".
BTW we've already implemented consciousness in a robot: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/automaton-robots-b... and it's useful. But AFAIK, i don't think it's used in any commercial system, although that's the kind of thing a commercial company won't advertise.
>Droids met the challenge of perceiving their self-image and reflecting on their own thoughts as part an effort to develop robots that are more adaptable in unpredictable situations
Who exactly is this entity doing the reflecting? .Isn't this a fundamental misunderstanding of what 'consciousness' means?
As a practical matter, especially for the robot ,it might not matter who is observing. The fact that one can observe oneself enables further capabilities like better feedback.
And by the way i think this observing robot has(or can have) an internal definition of self, and an observer beyond the self. It seems possible.
But there's this:
http://firespotting.com/