Looks like bostonglobe.com is down, here's a live CBS feed that's still working http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/04/explosions-at-boston-marathon-finish-line/

Shameless plug time!

I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.

The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).

If you're interested, here's our public GitHub and YouTube

Which part of the country do you live in? In general it seems you're correct. However it's worth mentioning that out here in the frozen prairies much of the current economic strength, especially in Saskatchewan, has been coming from potash. You can't hear a discussion about potash and not hear China mentioned at least once, China is a huge buyer of the potash produced here. The price of potash has gone up significantly in recent years and they rely on it. Having China refuse to buy potash might not hurt people out in the east, but in the prairies we certainly would be impacted by it.

I have to second this post, privacy, free expression and rights are good here in Saskatchewan (Canada). But you had better be prepared to deal with the long -20 C to -40 C winter and the slow switch to +30 C to +40 C summer. Only a million people live in this province. I wonder why.. that said, if you don't mind the weather it's a good place to live. :)

You might be interested in Antonio Damasio's book "Descarte's Error" in which Damasio scientifically presents evidence that the majority of our reasoning is in fact mediated by emotion and "gut feeling" linked to situational stimulus. Damage to the pre-frontal cortex of the brain (see: Phineas Gage) impairs this "secondary" emotional system and causes quantifiable decision-making deficits. Gladwell is referring to just this system in Blink, and although he does occaisionally lapse into pop-sci there is a significant body of work that supports his main conclusions.

As another interesting aside, this is why teenagers have such a poor time making good long-term decisions. The pre-frontal cortex is one the last places in the brain to fully mylleinate (develop), and so their emotion-based reasoning system does not fully come on line until they are 18-22. As the insurance commercial goes: Why do teenagers driver like they're missing a part of their brain? Because they are.

That's exactly what I said, no fancy/expensive sport motorcycle option? My smaller bike gets amazing gas mileage & is 100 times more fun to drive any day. +1 to the smiles along the way, it's the truth.

http://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html/

Brandon Wiley proposed a scenario in which a future internet would be consumed by the warfare between several (black or white) worms that feature node-coordinated efforts to prevent detection and removal. For those too lazy to read the link, "Curious Yellow" is basically a modular worm in which zero-day exploits can be added as they are discovered allowing for unchecked growth across the 'net. The worm can then work with other nodes to attack targets by dropping all their traffic, or by subtly modified whatever they receive. The best way to fight such a worm is with fire, a similarly designed "white" worm that goes around patching hosts as quickly as it can.

IMO, remote exploits are rare enough that I don't see this ever happening. On the other hand, with enough infected bot nodes to work with the data mining potentials of some of the more sophisticated extant work networks does worry me...

I have been an IT Director for 5 years, and I came up through a more traditionally "female" way (no, not sleeping my way there, get your mind out of the gutter)--I worked in training and applications support before hitting the top role. I learned the networking side as well, because I followed around the network engineer when no one would show up to my training classes. (gosh, I was an ABYSMAL trainer--I dislike repeating myself.

Two years ago, I decided to get my pointy-haired-boss on and go to business school. I elected to go to the only all-female MBA program in the country. Why? Because the biggest weakness I had was that I did not know how to deal with *women* in the work environment, and my boss was (and still is) a woman.

It's not easy to be in IT regardless of your gender. If you dislike foul language, well, good luck--I've thrown my share of f-bombs around when firmwide printing dies or the HVAC springs a leak and pours water through my servers and switches. Do you hate being around people who are angry? Heaven forbid you ever answer a support call. Do you like a complete night's sleep every night? Well, don't take a job that touches a data center or users who work in different time zones (don't have kids, either).

Because of IT's difficulty, we behave differently. We have a harder edge, but we laugh more as well. The jokes might be off-color or at someone's expense, but without the laugh, there's no pressure valve. Most of us drink fairly heavily, because we don't have much downtime and enjoy the relaxant effect of EtOH. Now, I don't know if we behave differently because we are predominantly male, or if we have different pressures, but most of us do behave this way.

Now add in technology's complexity, and you have a complicated situation. Most folks are in IT because we think (or at least used to think!) that technology is really cool. Not everyone does so. And, frankly, little boys are socialized to think technology=cool much more than little girls are. We are a product of our upbringing to some extent.

So how do I make IT work for women? For anyone? It's a question of alignment. If who you want to be aligns with your work environment, then stay. If something has to change and you can change it, do so and stay. If not, leave your job, or leave the industry, if you have the freedom to do so. If you do not have the freedom? Well, have a drink...