Views from the Solar System (8)

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SPACE WATCH

Orion seen from the Rover
NASA – The Apollo 16 Lunar Module “Orion” is photographed from a distance by astronaut Chares M. Duke Jr., Lunar Module pilot, aboard the moving Lunar Roving Vehicle. Astronauts Duke and Commander John W. Young, were returing from the third Apollo 16 extravehicular activity (EVA-2). The RCA color television camera mounted on the LRV is in the foreground. A portion of the LRV’s high-gain antenna is at top left. Image Credit: NASA and Chares M. Duke Jr.

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What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral.

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By Barry Ritholtz – A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault. more> http://tinyurl.com/7h6p8bm

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Financial crisis: Punishment Europe

Image via Wikipedia

Editorial – Despite its vain attempt to push the begging bowl towards Beijing, this remains a relatively highly prosperous part of the planet. Indeed – when considered as a single entity – the euro-zone has what ought to be an entirely sustainable burden of public debt, and, in trading terms, it enjoys a modest current account surplus with the rest of the world.

The real problem is not so much that Europe is bust, but rather that Europe’s political structures have not proved able to co-ordinate the deployment of the financial power of the continent’s north on behalf of its south. more> http://tinyurl.com/c6nm4p4

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Military Radar Comes to Home Security Market

By Kristin Lewotsky – The SPEXER 1000 brings military-class performance to security applications, allowing facilities to monitor a 120° field of view economically across a range as long as 17km (10.6 miles). The complete system is designed for easy installation and integration with command and control systems on stationary and mobile platforms monitoring land, sea, or air.

Conventional radar systems often rotate to cover 360°, but that’s not always necessary in security applications. Often, perimeters can be secured by monitoring specific areas of vulnerability, which speeds up the process while reducing power demand and avoiding the acquisition and processing of unnecessary data. An airport system, for example, could ignore passenger entry points but would need to cover regions at the ends of runways or around the fuel depot. more> http://tinyurl.com/cfwg9xc

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How IBM started grading its developers’ productivity

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By Ann Bednarz – Pat Howard, led application development at IBM, where he was responsible for delivering applications across all of Big Blue’s brands and overseeing its global development teams. On the talent front, he helped implement a system for analyzing individual application developers based on the volume and quality of their work.

The core of the system is a commercial software product from Cast. The French vendor’s automated software analysis and measurement platform provides metrics around the structural quality of application code and the performance of development teams. more> http://tinyurl.com/7h7gtxk

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