feed on feeds - 2013/10/13 - items 0 to 15

An anonymous reader writes "A citizens' group in Tokyo claims to have found elevated levels of radioactivity at 39 sporting venues earmarked for the 2020 Olympic Games. Expert and organizers are cautious about the findings but see no problem, as the levels do not pose an immediate threat to human health. From the article: '"It is difficult to have this debate unless we know for sure whether this radiation is from Fukushima or whether it is naturally occurring background radiation," said Pieter Franken, founder of the Japan office of the environmental monitoring organization Safecast."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Connie Guglielmo has a piece in Forbes where she explores the qualifications for board members of tech companies. She argues that a degree in French literature might be more important than a knowledge of programming.

Lise Buyer, a board member of several Silicon Valley companies was quoted. "I have never, not even once, been in a meeting where at any time, even for five minutes, any board member of any gender was asked to give a company directive in machine language, scratch out a decision policy in Ruby on Rails or, for that matter, code anything at all in any language."

I haven't been in as many board meetings, but I have seen companies make decisions that might have worked out better if they understood the technology their companies create.

Since Twitter is where the current discussion is centering, it's interesting that they basically tossed their developer community with executive-level decisions a couple of years ago. Was the board well enough informed to participate in or oversee these decisions? Were the shareholders well-served? I have no idea. But it seems they would want to understand the implications of the decisions they were making.

This is not a gender thing. I'm not arguing for or against having men or women on boards, just noting that tech boards are generally a void of technical knowledge, and that the tech industry might work better if they were better at tech. It's analogous to having knowledge of medicine among the decision-makers at a pharmaceuticals company. Or an understanding of music at an entertainment company.

Merparten av de boende på en rad orter utanför Simrishamn och Ystad som drabbades strömavbrottet i kväll har fått tillbaka strömmen, meddelar Eon.

Anser det inte nödvändigt att ange var djuret är fött.

Under kvällen har flera hushåll fått tillbaka strömmen efter avbrottet som drabbade boende på en rad orter utanför Simrishamn och Ystad.

Många twittrare skämtar med statsminister Fredrik Reinfeldt sedan han i en TT-intervju liknat sig själv vid en stridshingst.

An anonymous reader writes "People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. 'Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality,' spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown."