Piper Lets Kids Design Circuits Using Minecraft And Electricity | TechCrunch

Piper Lets Kids Design Circuits Using Minecraft And Electricity | TechCrunch: "There is a disease destroying our young people. It is silent, malignant, and fatal. It is called Minecraft and something must be done. If you have children of a certain age chances are they have made a giant Pikachu out of yellow blocks or put up a signpost that says “Poop Here” next to a chicken pen. It is truly terrible. But there is hope. With Piper, we can turn Minecraft into something more exciting. The kit lets kids create circuits in real life and then see how they interact in Minecraft. It lets you, for example, add a battery and a button to a breadboard and see those parts pop up on the screen. Electricity flowing through virtual wires simulates what is happening in real life. In short, what you make on screen happens in real life and vice versa – sort of. Watch the video to really understand it."

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John Boehner to resign as House speaker

John Boehner to resign as House speaker: "John Boehner will resign as House speaker and from his Ohio congressional seat at the end of October, according to a statement from his office. His resignation will take effect on Oct. 30."

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Landmark and Palantir Solutions form strategic alliance

Landmark and Palantir Solutions form strategic alliance: "Landmark, a Halliburton business line, and Palantir Solutions have formed an alliance to develop a fully integrated economics, planning and decision support framework. The joint solutions will be aimed at helping E&P companies respond more effectively to changes in technical data and market conditions. This responsiveness, in the face of uncertainty, will help enable companies to more effectively manage economic risk and increase the returns on their portfolio of investments. The current market outlook for the oil and gas industry indicates the need for a more efficient decision support system to improve petroleum investment lifecycle management. Connecting Landmark's DecisionSpace software directly to the Palantir PlanningSpace will create end-to-end petro technical and economic workflows. Operators will be able to continuously calibrate surface and subsurface risks with economics to implement planning workflows that are integrated, collaborative and dynamic."

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Study: Are we shifting to fewer, weaker Atlantic hurricanes? - FOX 8 WVUE New Orleans News, Weather, Sports, Social

Study: Are we shifting to fewer, weaker Atlantic hurricanes? - FOX 8 WVUE New Orleans News, Weather, Sports, Social: "A new but controversial study asks if an end is coming to the busy Atlantic hurricane seasons of recent decades. The Atlantic looks like it is entering in to a new quieter cycle of storm activity, like in the 1970s and 1980s, two prominent hurricane researchers wrote Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. Scientists at Colorado State University, including the professor who pioneered hurricane seasonal prognostication, say they are seeing a localized cooling and salinity level drop in the North Atlantic near Greenland. Those conditions, they theorize, change local weather and ocean patterns and form an on-again, off-again cycle in hurricane activity that they trace back to the late 1800s. Warmer saltier produces periods of more and stronger storms followed by cooler less salty water triggering a similar period of fewer and weaker hurricanes, the scientists say. The periods last about 25 years, sometimes more, sometimes less. The busy cycle that just ended was one of the shorter ones, perhaps because it was so strong that it ran out of energy, said study lead author Phil Klotzbach. Klotzbach said since about 2012 there's been more localized cooling in the key area and less salt, suggesting a new, quieter period. But Klotzbach said it is too soon to be certain that one has begun. "We're just asking the question," he said."

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Acer’s Arduino-based Cloud Professor wants to get kids into the IoT | Ars Technica

Acer’s Arduino-based Cloud Professor wants to get kids into the IoT | Ars Technica: "How do you get a younger generation, one raised on a seemingly endless supply of smartphones, tablets, and PCs, into not just using such devices, but finding out how they work too? Small development boards like the Raspberry Pi have done wonders for getting kids (and curious adults) into creating all manner of interesting hardware and software. The upcoming BBC Micro:bit promises to go a stage further, too, by giving every Year 7 student in the UK—about a million kids aged 11 to 12—their own Micro:bit board to play with. But there's another take on the development board, and it's come from the unlikeliest of places: electronics giant Acer. Buried deep within its stand at IFA 2015 in Berlin is a unique development kit called Cloud Professor. It contains the obligatory Arduino board, as well as a variety of accessories, including a USB to GPIO adaptor, a control LED, and even a dust sensor. But rather than just offer yet another way to program things on an Arduino board, the Acer kit also contains a separate module that allows the board to talk to other devices over the Internet. Essentially, it's an Internet of Things development kit that links into Acer's cloud platform, allowing tinkerers to control various aspects of their connected device via a smartphone or tablet. Because that's often a complex task (particularly for the younger age group the kit is aimed at), Acer is providing a set of apps that automatically communicate with the Cloud Professor module. This lets users concentrate on creating cool stuff, rather than mucking about with cloud protocols."

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Louisiana School-To-Prison Pipeline Breaks, Spilling Hopeless Kids Into Swamp | THE PUSH POLE

Louisiana School-To-Prison Pipeline Breaks, Spilling Hopeless Kids Into Swamp | THE PUSH POLE: "America’s crumbling infrastructure took another hit today when the pipeline connecting Louisiana’s schools to its prison industrial complex busted, sending poor, under-educated teens sprawling into empty swampland in Avoyelles Parish."

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