Category Archives: Read It

Stuff you might want to read.

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Game Your Way to a Nobel Prize

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We’ve all heard the stories about young doctors, with plenty of computer-gaming hours behind them, wielding laparoscopic surgical tools with skill far beyond older, game-deficient peers. And the military adaptations of gaming engines to develop software-based training exercises. But this is about the most accessible game-to-real-world stuff I’ve heard of. Foldit purports to turn protein folding into a competitive sport. This Univeristy of Washington article compares Foldit to Tetris, a dinosaur fart of a game that my son’s discovered lately and seems to play quite well. Maybe he can get famous. Maybe you can, too.

Computer game’s high score could earn the Nobel Prize in medicine

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College Acceptance Rates at an All-Time Low

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This, at a time when the tech industry is polarized into two factions – those that say America is simply does not have enough talent to go around and the others that say that corporations are focused only on saving money by using lower-paid foreign talent. In this Information Week article, MIT Turns Down Record 11,842, Richard Martin discusses the increased competition for entrance into our best schools. [The link died.]

What caught my eye is this:

The increased competition for undergraduate slots at MIT comes at a time when fewer Americans are earning graduate degrees from the top math and science programs in the United States. MIT says that 35% of its students come from overseas, and many of the foreigners speak languages not taught at the school.

Next year my son enters high school. Topics like this are coming up in conversation at our house with increasing frequency. Ah, the future.

“America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
-Hunter S. Thompson

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Multiple H1-B Visa Petitions

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Some accuse me of not having enough faith in my fellow man, but I think they’re wrong. I mean, it just never occurred to me that there would be multiple H-1B applications for the same worker! It figures. So the government’s stepping in.

Check this article, Employers Prohibited From Filing Multiple H-1B Visa Petitions For Same Worker, from Information Week. [You can’t, the link died.]

Sort of related, my business has been receiving an increasing number of calls lately from firms interested in helping me with my “H-1B issues”. The callers invariably have heavy Indian accents. My toll-free number reports ANI, and sometimes I’ll reverse lookup the telephone numbers of the callers. It’s interesting how many come from high-density residential housing, according to Google Earth. Hmmm.

Anyway, as a rule, the offers are politely declined…