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LOOKING AHEAD
FYI: How Long-Running Is the Longest-Running Lab Experiment? 24-Jan-12 Pitch-Drop Experiment John Mainstone/University of Queensland Eighty-five years so far. The pitch-drop experiment-really more of a demonstration-began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a derivative of coal so brittle that it can be smashed to pieces with a hammer, is in fact a highly viscous fluid. It flows at room temperature, albeit extremely slowly. Parnell melted the pitch, poured it into a glass funnel, let it cool (for three years), hung the funnel over a beaker, and waited.Eight years later, a dollop of the pitch fell from the funnel's stem. Nine years after that, another long black glob broke into the beaker. Parnell recorded the second drop but did not live to see the third, 
PLACES & CASES
The Weigh-In: What's The Best Way To Motivate Your Employees? 24-Jan-12 Motivation is a hot topic year-round, but particularly in January, the month of fresh starts, checklists, and lofty goals. It's the time of year we try to figure out how to prod our employees to excel, to hit and surpass ambitious targets. Happy, motivated employees are, simply, good for business. "Research shows that when people work with a positive mind-set, performance on nearly every level-productivity, creativity, engagement-improves," Harvard Business Review reported in its January/February 2012 story "Positive Intelligence.""Happy employees have, on average, 31% higher productivity; their sales are 37% higher; their creativity is three times higher."--Harvard Business ReviewSo what's the best way to get it done? Pay up. Money, of course, is a key motivator for many employees. And 
HERE & HOW
Hackers Step Up Attacks After Megaupload Shutdown 24-Jan-12 Hackers associated with the loose collective Anonymous took down the Federal Trade Commission's OnGuardOnline.gov site, and attacked other government and industry Web sites. 
IT & THE CLOUD
Microsoft cloud service lets citizen developers crunch big data 24-Jan-12 Microsoft?s Data Explorer cloud service puts coding power into the hands of the citizen developer. It remains to be seen how deep into big data these users can get. Add to digg Add to StumbleUpon Add to del.icio.us Add to Google 
HERE & HOW
Million views for fans' Star Wars 24-Jan-12 Star Wars Uncut, a crowdsourced version of the sci-fi classic, passes a million views on YouTube. 
IT & THE CLOUD
Cloud Computing: An Enterprise Cloud for Business-Critical Applications 24-Jan-12 For enterprise class cloud services, companies need a broad, comprehensive and flexible platform for their applications. Oracle recently announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which offers a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that are elastic, secure and manageable, offering organizations choice in development and deployment of business critical applications. In his opening keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Tyler Jewell, VP, Product Management & Strategy, Oracle Public Cloud, discussed how the new services can speed your application development and deployment time, while maintaining a low cost infrastructure and the ease with which you can access, use and manage them. |
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