tech@vedella

As much as 40 percent of the people who start out majoring in science and engineering end up switching to other degrees. Why? The answers are complex, and the people who drop out are often the best-of-the-best. The New York Times looks at why college students leave science majors and what can be done to [...]

Chuck Hogan is the co-author, with Guillermo Del Toro, of The Night Eternal, which concludes their best-selling Strain trilogy. He is also the author of Prince of Thieves, recently filmed as The Town. Q: Now that the Strain Trilogy is finished, is there anything that you would change about it if you were starting again? [...]

According to this Associated Press story, the tinfoil beanie hat crowd was right all along: "In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day. At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the 'vengeful librarians' also pores [...]

IEEE Spectrum has a big special feature online now about the Fukushima nuclear disaster and its after-effects. It includes an interactive map showing the impact that Fukushima has had on evacuation of residents, contamination of soil, and contamination of food and water supplies. It also includes a blow-by-blow account of what happened during the first [...]

William O. Stephens is Professor of Philosophy and of Classical & Near Eastern Studies at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He plays tennis and chess, is a vegetarian, and tries to be Stoic about being a big Chicago Cubs fan. Avi Solomon What drew you to studying the Stoic philosophers? William O. Stephens William O. [...]

There was some interesting research out of the Mayo Clinic announced this week. The study focused on a new method to combat aging, though not, significantly, one that could extend life. Instead of living forever, Darren Baker and colleagues would just like to help people enjoy the time they do have—by reducing the physical downsides [...]

For no real reason, here is a picture of a cute hedgehog. Image: Acorn is displeased after a bath., a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from justinandelise's photostream

Theresa May, the UK Home Secretary, has asked the OccupyLondon protesters to move away from St Paul's cathedral so that tourists won't get the wrong idea about the place.

These upstanding citizens noticed that an Oakland PD officer had hidden his badge, so they calmly, peacefully confronted him about this, escalating to his supervisor when he wouldn't respond. This how to properly engage with police when they do suspicious things. We were riding by on bikes and noticed hes hiding his name and has [...]

Hoxton Monster Supplies, my local outlet of the 826 Valencia literacy charity, has put some of its marvellous "monster supplies" online, including tins of Mortal Terror and Night Sweats, cubes of earwax, and fang floss. These folks do wonderful work, and they've got really cool package design. Hoxton Street Monster Supplies (via Super Punch)

Flickr user Leeloo's "Artoo Tutu" costume may be the single cutest thing I've seen this Hallowe'en. Artoo Tutu (via Neatorama)

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, made headlines this week by claiming that video games gave children dementia. She later partially retracted the statement, but it's the latest in a series of unsubstantiated claims about the effect of the Internet on children, including a claim linking autism to computers. She has compared her [...]

The Associated Press has a long followup on the story of Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams, whose daughter Hillary posted a seven-year-old video of her father viciously beating her for breaking a rule over using a computer at home. The judge has acknowledged that the video is real, and that he is the aggressor [...]

Ars Technica's Casey Johnston checks out a new Android handset designed to be good at playing music: "we're not sold"

Video game sprites posed together in such a way as to suggest romance. [via Auntie Pixelante]

Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in America, began life on August 28, 1845 as a 4-page, black and white newsletter. There were only a couple of illustrations. The cover model was one of the vastly improved railroad cars of the age, which could seat 60-80 passengers, "run with a steadiness hardly equalled by [...]

SOUND IT OUT #5. Things are not what they seem here. Phantogram sounds like a sexy, cosmopolitan collective, not a couple of childhood friends recording music in a barn outside tiny Saratoga Springs, New York. The song is called “Don’t Move”, but it compels you to get up and shake ass right from the start. [...]

Twenty years ago, the United States sent almost 700,000 soldiers to Kuwait and Iraq as part of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. The war was quick. Bombing began on January 17th and the whole thing was officially over by February 28th. If you started a semester of school just before the first Gulf [...]

[Video Link] Hurray! R. Crumb: The Complete Record Cover Collection is available. I've been waiting for this book for while. A landmark work that pays splendid homage to a forgotten era of seminal American music. Robert Crumb first began drawing record covers in 1968 when Janis Joplin, a fellow Haight Ashbury denizen, asked him to [...]

The Twin Rivers Police Association in California had been selling a T-shirt that showed a child behind bars along with the humorous text, "U Raise 'Em, We Cage 'Em." After it was pointed out to the association that such a shirt could "could validate feelings of mistrust" for the Twin Rivers Police force, the association [...]