Follow Jeff Bezos' Two Pizza Rule to Avoid the Dangers of "Groupthink"

You may have heard the joke that asserts a camel is just a horse designed by a committee. The truth behind the humor is that groups suffer from something called "groupthink," which means they tend to lose the benefits of independent thought and just agree with each other. Everyone ends up patting themselves on the back rather than creating something great. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos solves that problem with a two-pizza rule.

According to productivity and ideas blog the 99u, Bezos uses pizza as a metric for choosing the size of his teams. Basically, if a team can't be fed be two pizzas alone that team is too large. The brain can't handle a lot of people, so it's not a surprise that smaller teams tend to work better. If you find independent ideas are suffering in your organization, it might be time to suggest instituting the two pizza rule. At the very least, you might get a free meal out of it.

The Jeff Bezos School of Long-Term Thinking | The 99u

Photo by Fanfo (Shutterstock).

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/BKnXYRuMD4M/follow-jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-to-avoid-the-dangers-of-groupthink

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Video: Creating Jobs For Texas

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/cnbc/50068866/

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Get Your Finances in Order: a Few Tips | Personal Finance Blog ...

Posted by admin in Uncategorized | 3 comments

As we linger in the midst of post-recession and mild austerity, making and saving money may seem a tough task for many. However, there are a few canny little tricks that can be used to our advantages to make this task somewhat easier for many. Here?s some advice on getting your finances in order.

Say No to Payday Loans!

Due to the current economic climate and of course, the individual and personal throes of life, many Brits are struggling to make ends meet. Jobs are scarce, even many of those lucky enough to be working feel as if they?re being underpaid. Furthermore, rising living costs make most wages hard to survive off in the United Kingdom. In fact, recent reports have highlighted that more and more children are being forced to go to school hungry, due to a lack of resources at home.

To make things even worse, bank lending has somewhat subsisted since the recession and so, many Brits are unable to borrow off banks.

In such a climate, payday loans may seem to be an enticing option. However, a combination of immoral practices and extortionately high interest rates render payday loans as the worst option someone in financial difficulty could turn to. Payday loans may put food on the table and alleviate some of your financial distress for a moment, but this will only be a fleeting moment, which will end with you having even more money problems than prior to taking out the loan.

Say no to payday loans.

Tax Refunds

It may come as somewhat of a surprise, but a significant amount of business people miss out on thousands of pounds owed to them by the HMRC each year. In cases where the tax liability is less than the amount paid, money is likely to be owed to the payer in the form of tax refunds.

This can happen through a wide variety of circumstances and it may be best for you to hire expert assistance to discern whether or not you?re owed anything. However, rather than going for an expensive accountant, opt for one of the cheaper specialist firms that can be found online, such as RIFT at www.RIFTCapitalAllowances.com.

Work Harder, Earn More Money

The harder you work the more money you?ll earn. It really is as simple as that. Of course, the current situation in Britain at the moment is one of mass unemployment and a lack of job opportunities. However, working harder also applies to the unemployed, who have a responsibility to work harder in finding work.

After all, the more time you spend looking for a job, the more chances there?ll be of finding one.

Source: http://www.personal-finance-blog.com/2012/12/02/get-your-finances-in-order-a-few-tips/

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Mars Rover Finds Complex Chemicals But No Organic Compounds

techtech writes in with the results from the first soil samples tested by the Curiosity rover. "Although NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars, it's already seeing that the Red Planet's soil contains complex chemicals ? including signs of an intriguing compound called perchlorate. The first soil sample analysis from Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars lab, or SAM, was the leadoff topic today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. The findings were eagerly awaited because of rumors that the Curiosity team was on the verge of announcing major findings ? and although NASA tamped down expectations, the scientists said they were overjoyed with the first round of analysis."

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/gIuzuWSw5OU/story01.htm

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The five family holiday shows you don't want to miss: Lively theater ...

What is your favorite childhood memory of the holidays? Playing with cousins while waiting for Santa? Singing carols with friends at school? Sipping hot chocolate with parents while reading holiday books?

In our hearts we carry a range of remembrances from the simplest pleasures to the most lavish spectacles. This holiday season, Houston?s performance halls are offering shows that can delight the whole family and leave indelible impressions of the holiday spirit.

Here are five favorite choices:

A Little House Christmas

When: Through Dec. 22; Saturdays at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Where: Main Street Theater, Chelsea Market, 4617 Montrose Blvd., 713-524-6706, www.mainstreettheater.com

Storyline:? This play is based on the cherished Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Bad weather hampers the Ingalls family?s Christmas Day celebration. Sisters Laura and Mary are disappointed that they are stranded at home and Santa may not make it after all. In this holiday classic, the girls learn the true meaning of the Christmas spirit.

"The Little House books are timeless, and A Little House Christmas is such a warm, genuine portrayal of family and friendship. It illustrates the joys and struggles of life in the early pioneer days on the prairie,? says Vivienne M. St. John, Theater for Youth?s producing director.??I think especially during the whirlwind of the holidays, A Little House Christmas helps us to refocus and appreciate the simpler things and remember what is truly important."

Length:?One hour and 15 minutes with intermission?

Ticket price: $12- $16; recommended for pre-kindergarten and up

?

A Christmas Carol ? A Ghost Story of Christmas

When: Through Dec. 24, various times.

Where:? Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Ave., 713-220-5700, www.alleytheatre.org??

Storyline:? Three spirits visit Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve ? the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. This production, Michael Wilson?s adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, offers unusual twists and spectacular sets.

?What?s interesting to me about this tale is that we meet the indifferent and miserly Scrooge," says director James Black, "and he is shown by the Spirits that, ultimately, he has little power or affect on the people in his life and the world around him.

"He wants and needs the rest of humanity to be as miserable as he is. But the people endure and find joy and happiness and love in the simplest things and in the worst of times. Conversely, as we watch Scrooge?s transformation, he is shown that the tiniest act of kindness, compassion and charity can have ripples and reverberations that change lives. Love and generosity win. Every time."

Length: One?hour and 47 minutes with intermission

Ticket price:?Starts at $25; recommended for general audiences, children 6 and older

?

Sanders Family Christmas

When: Through Dec. 31, various times.

Where: A.D. Players, 2710 W. Alabama, 713-526-2721, www.adplayers.org??

Storyline:? The show spreads holiday cheer through more than 20 Christmas carols and yuletide stories. The Sanders family gathers for Christmas Eve 1941 in Mount Pleasant, N.C. It?s just before American soldiers, including a member of their own family, leave for World War II.

?The show is really all about family. Everyone can relate with at least one member of the Sanders family; the uncle who is a bit of a black sheep, the mother who embarrasses her children, the sister who has to be the center of attention,? says Sarah Cooksey, A.D. Players public relations manager.

?What makes the show even better is the great music and the chance for the families of Houston to enjoy a show together for the holidays. Sanders Family Christmas celebrates the things that mean the most in life: family, faith, and the joy that comes from experiencing them together with the people you love.?

Length: Two hours and 15 minutes including intermission

Ticket price: $32- $41

?

Houston Ballet?s The Nutcracker

When:?Through Dec. 30, Various times

Where: Wortham Theater Center, Brown Theater, 501 Texas Avenue, 713-227-2787, www.houstonballet.org

Storyline:?This is the beloved ballet with music composed by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It tells the story of little Clara who receives a magical nutcracker doll on Christmas Eve. After everyone goes to bed, she travels on a fantastic journey through the Land of Sweets, encountering the Mouse King and the Sugar Plum Fairy.

More than one million people have seen this Ben Stevenson production since its Houston Ballet premiere 25 years ago.?

?In keeping with traditions, The Nutcracker signifies the start of the holidays,? says principal dancer Mireille Hassenboehler, ?Seeing The Nutcracker is such a magical experience for families, from the growing Christmas tree to the snowy snow scene. What better way to elevate the holiday? The Nutcracker brings such beautiful set designs, amazing costumes, music by Tchaikovsky, and spectacular dancing.?

Length: One?hour and 55 minutes with intermission

Ticket price: $25-$110, recommended for children 2 and older.

?
?

Hip Hoppin? Nutcracker

When: Dec. 8; two shows 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

Where: Jones Hall, presented by Houston Symphony, 713-224-7575, www.houstonsymphony.org

Storyline: Conductor Robert Franz and the Houston Symphony orchestra join forces with Westside High School?s Inertia Dance Company in this musical holiday celebration with a playful twist.?Inertia is an elite performing ensemble that combines different dance elements from ballet to modern jazz to break dancing.

The concert song list includes "Suites from The Nutcracker" and "The Snow Maiden" as well as "Caribbean Sleigh Ride," "Brazilian Sleigh Bells," even the theme from The Pink Panther. Children can chime in during the Christmas Pops Sing-Along. All the wonderful holiday music may just draw Santa away from the North Pole for a break - he?s scheduled to make an appearance on stage! ? ? ??

Families can arrive early before the 10 a.m. concert or stay late after the 11:30 a.m. concert to participate in activities including an instrument petting zoo and arts and crafts.

Length:?One hour

Ticket price: $18 for children, $26 for adults

Bernadette Versoza is founder of?ParentsPost.com,?a website that covers new and exciting things for families to do in the Houston area.

Source: http://houston.culturemap.com/newsdetail/12-01-12-the-five-family-holiday-shows-you-dont-want-to-miss-lively-theater-for-lively-children/

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Obama: Don't hold middle-class tax cuts hostage

President Barack Obama greets the crowd after speaking at The Rodon Group manufacturing facility, Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, in Hatfield, Pa. Obama spoke at the toy company about how middle class Americans would see their taxes go up if Congress fails to act to extend the middle class tax cuts. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

President Barack Obama greets the crowd after speaking at The Rodon Group manufacturing facility, Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, in Hatfield, Pa. Obama spoke at the toy company about how middle class Americans would see their taxes go up if Congress fails to act to extend the middle class tax cuts. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama says it's unacceptable for some congressional Republicans to "hold middle-class tax cuts hostage" because they don't want tax rates to rise on the wealthy.

In his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, Obama says the average middle-class family of four could pay $2,200 more in taxes next year after the fiscal cliff. He says Republicans could give families "a sense of security going into the New Year" by extending tax cuts for the middle class.

In the Republican address, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch accuses Obama of a "classic bait-and-switch on the American people" amounting to a tax increase twice the size of what he campaigned on.

Hatch says Democrats are pushing what he calls a disastrous strategy.

___

Online:

Obama address: www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: www.youtube.com/gopweeklyaddress

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-12-01-Obama/id-1d10b5f9f10046eba9cecaa3995ba684

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How, in the animal world, a daughter avoids mating with her father: Paternal 'voice' recognition

How, in the animal world, a daughter avoids mating with her father: Paternal 'voice' recognition

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Paternal recognition ? being able to identify males from your father's line ? is important for the avoidance of inbreeding, and one way that mammals can do this is through recognizing the calls of paternal kin. This was thought to occur only in large-brained animals with complex social groups, but a new study published today in the open access journal BMC Ecology provides evidence in a tiny, solitary primate that challenges this theory.

The study, led by Sharon E Kessler, finds that the grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) ? a small-brained, solitary foraging mammal endemic to Madagascar ? is able to recognize paternal relatives via vocalizations, thus providing evidence that this is not dependent upon having a large brain and a high social complexity, as previously suggested.

Because grey mouse lemurs are nocturnal solitary-foragers living in dense forests, vocal communication is important for regulating social interactions across distances where visibility is poor and communication via smell is limited. Though the mouse lemur shares sleeping sites with other mouse lemurs, it forages alone for fruit and insects. It is a particularly interesting species with which to study vocal paternal recognition because, in the wild, females remain in the same area of birth and cooperatively raise young with other female kin. Males do not co-nest with their mates or young and provide no paternal care, which limits opportunities for familiarity-based social interactions. Thus, vocalizations are likely to be important ? particularly for avoiding inbreeding.

The research team from Arizona State University and the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover in Germany found that two of the most frequent calls of the mouse lemur were the mate advertisement call and the alarm call. Using multi-parametric analyses of the call's acoustic parameters, they could see that both call types contained individual signatures. Through this, they discovered that only male grey mouse lemur advertisement calls, but not alarm calls, contained acoustic paternal signatures. Furthermore, females paid more attention to advertisement calls from unrelated males than from their fathers.

The findings from the study suggest that the discrimination between mate advertisement calls and alarm calls may be an important mechanism for inbreeding avoidance. This is likely to be highly important in the grey mouse lemur species because males are likely to remain in an area for several years and they can expand their ranges to more than twice that of the female's range, making it likely that adult males' ranges will overlap with those of their daughters from previous mating seasons.

The team also proposed that the mouse lemur's ultrasonic calls above the hearing range of owls could be an anti-predator strategy, especially since the species suffers from high predation.

Lead author Kessler commented, "Given that more complex forms of sociality with cohesive foraging groups are thought to have evolved from an ancestral solitary forager much like the mouse lemur, this suggests that the mechanisms for kin recognition like those seen here may be the foundation from which more complex forms of kin-based sociality evolved."

She continued, "Future analyses will determine which acoustic parameters make this kin recognition possible by artificially manipulating acoustic parameters in the calls and then using the modified calls in playback experiments."

###

Paternal kin recognition in the high frequency / ultrasonic range in a solitary foraging mammal
Sharon E Kessler, Marina Scheumann, Leanne T Nash and Elke Zimmermann
BMC Ecology (in press)

BioMed Central: http://www.biomedcentral.com

Thanks to BioMed Central for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125623/How__in_the_animal_world__a_daughter_avoids_mating_with_her_father__Paternal__voice__recognition

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ISLAND HOUSE TO ?ELIMINATE DOGS?? ? Pet City

Island House will soon need a Dogs NOT Welcome sign.

Island House is a small condo complex on Hilton Head Island, SC. In a recent letter to homeowners from ASSOCIA, Association Services Management, Inc.,?signed by Marv DeGraw, ?President?? of what the letter doesn?t say?they are asking homeowners to agree to the ?ELIMINATION? (my emphasis) of all dogs except Seeing Eye dogs. Despite the violation of the ADA which allows ALL SERVICE DOGS ANYWHERE, not just seeing eye dogs,? as a dog lover, and animal rights defender, I?DETEST the use of the word ELIMINATION. Mr. DeGraw and this organization are not only out of touch with the reality of how dogs are an integral and essential part of family life and society, but could use a good thesaurus as their?word choice is draconian and demeaning to all pet parents at Island House and everywhere. GET WITH IT? pet travel?is increasing greatly, the recession didn?t?even make a slight decrease in the amount of money spent on pets as?shown in the statistics below. Don?t you realize a dog is a family member? These??certainly aren?t people I?d want in charge of my HOA.

After talking to some residents,? I found out that the majority of Island House Units are owned by off- property owners. These people rent out their condos?for long or short term periods. Taking kids to the beach more than ever includes the family pet and more luxurious locations on Hilton Head and elsewhere WELCOME PETS. How about the Hilton Head Westin Hotel? They have a fantastic Pet WELCOME policy even providing Heavenly Beds for? the dogs, food and water bowls, and treats. An owner?s investment in a rental property at Island House will diminish if they?re not able to offer their unit as Pet Friendly. What about people who rent out a unit at Island House as a transition to a home purchase when transferred there by their employment?? Do Island House owners want their property removed from every real estate list on the island for relocation? Is Rover to be left in a kennel for months while a suitable home for purchase is found?

But what about the owners that do live there? While the letter says the new regulation won?t affect current dogs in residence, will?the pet parent?be able to get another dog should their dog die? The letter doesn?t say they will and usually when a pet is ?grandfathered? in, a replacement is not allowed.?This is unconscionable, in particular to owners who are elderly. Dogs provide companionship, comfort, enhance the health of their owners by getting them out to exercise, and most of all make a house?whether it?s a small condominium or a mansion?a home. Where does Island House get the right to deny these property owners of ever having a canine companion in the future?

According to the 2011-2012 APPA National Pet Owners Survey, 72.9 million dogs are owned in the United States which equates to 46.2 U.S. households having a dog. Obviously in time, none of them will be a Island house. Dogs are not only family members, they are big business. According to Forbes Magazine, 92% of pet owners spent as much or more on their pets from 2010-2012. http://www.zoomroomonline.com/pet-services.html

Marv?s letter goes on to delineate what seems to be his personal dislike for dogs, and maybe life in general. He accuses owners of ?sneaking two dogs into a unit.? Does he make a habit of personally observing this? Where is the evidence that two dogs cause excessive damage? Quite the contrary as they keep each other company and ease anxiety of being alone. He takes offense that ?some dog owners even allow their dogs to pee on the white stones under the stairwells? and that ?poop on the grass is a constant problem.? Really? Ever think of putting up a container of bags for dog owners to use for cleaning up after their dog like every civilized city has visible everywhere and? Hilton Head Beach as well? How would you know a dog ?peed? on a stone unless you were on ready alert at all times watching them?

Marv goes on to say ?Dog abuses are hard to monitor.? Really? What do you mean here? Do you forget that this is where people LIVE?.this is their home. Does privacy end with?a purchase or lease at Island House? And again, you need someone to proof read your letter. I assume you don?t mean beating and maiming of dogs which is what ?dog abuse?? unfortunately means, but you must mean violations of your rules which appear completely without merit.

Marv goes on to say that ?most condo complexes no longer?allow dogs?? Do you have any statistics to prove this, because I have them to prove you WRONG. The trend in the United States today is toward?allowing more privileges for dogs like our neighbor to the North, Canada and most European Cities. There are restaurants that allow you to dine with your dog, airlines devoted to just pet travel, and most hotel chains allow dogs.

Service dogs perform many valuable services today and Island House will definitely face lawsuits if they only allow ?seeing eye dogs.? Dogs assist paralyzed individuals, there are hearing assistance dogs, dogs that are trained to retreive items from store shelves for people in wheelchairs,?or recognize the onset of a seizure. Dogs help kids become better readers, comfort people in nursing homes,?calm the distraught in hospitals at the bedside of a loved one in critical condition and?dozens of other services. Will police officers who have? a K-9 dog be barred from residence at Island House??Discrimination against these individuals is a serious problem for this company and Mr. DeGraw. Take a look at this website for more information: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101124134608AAWVtPK

I urge the owners and tenants of?Island House to confront Mr. DeGraw on this issue and to attend their HOA meeting on January 19, 2012?conveniently scheduled for?9:00 a.m. when many people are at work and the?only people available will be Marv?who?obviously is available to monitor dog behavior at any time and others who also have plenty of leisure time.? Contact the Humane Society of the United States, PETA, the SPCA and other animal rights groups to help you.Find a way to make your vote count and vote for decency, kindness, tolerance, and the right of people to have their best friend by their side. Oh, you might want to think about electing a new President of whatever he is in charge of and a new?Board of Directors that actually live on the premises and have a sense of the value of dogs.

Tags: pets welcome

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30, 2012 at 11:36 am and is filed under Dogs, Patti Lawson, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://blogs.dailymail.com/petcity/2012/11/30/island-house-to-eliminate-dogs/

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Why your next game console ought to be Watson | TechDiem.com

A few years ago, the gaming world was thrilled by the premise that the cloud (the Cloud!) could be harnessed to power games, too ? any game you wanted, anytime, on any device, served from data centers to you. Services like OnLive and Gaikai promised freedom from your hardware, the end of the lockout of exclusive games only available on one platform or another.

Reality disappointed: What we actually got was a limited library of not-new games (Homefront, anyone?), many of which you already owned, but even laggier than on your own hardware. Turns out traditional retail, game publisher, and hardware platform companies made it difficult for cloud gaming services to get the best games on the day of release, and even then the gameplay quality was slightly inferior.

But the concept of gaming in the cloud is still an idea worth pursing for a far greater promise: the ability to deliver an entirely new kind of game experience.

Historically, in games as in any other media, new distribution technologies enable new creative experiences. Pong wouldn?t have been possible without a new device plugged in to your TV. Internet-connected computers meant you could play Duke Nukem and Quake with other people online. The evolution of server technology brought massively-multiplayer games. The iPhone brought Angry Birds, a game designed for a touch interface, and so forth.

So why should a cloud gaming service be used to deliver the same old games as before that were built for a $250 machine?

What we should be wondering, then, is what new kinds of games and gaming experiences cloud delivery could inspire? Compared to the gaming hardware you own, a cloud gaming service could access much more computing power?with a limitless capacity to add processing. Consider after all that the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Titan, is about 70,000 times more powerful than an Xbox 360. Granted the Titan costs a cool $100 million, which cuts out most households, but scaling back to basic and accessible data center prices would still offer many orders of magnitude more computing power than any current or near-future home console . (And this isn?t to say great gaming experiences are limited to powerful hardware?to the contrary mobile phones play compelling games, too. They?re just of a different sort.)

As for content itself, games purpose-built for the cloud do not yet exist ? ones that aren?t encumbered by the limits of processing power,?that would use the full advantage of many more, and more powerful, CPUs and GPUs. These ?supercomputer games? would open up creative possibilities far beyond what games of today are capable.

Imagine supercomputer games with vividly lifelike worlds and characters (and not the almost-real, uncanny valley of current-generation graphics), or a single battlefield with 50,000 other players playing at the same time ? or opponent AI on the level of IBM?s Jeopardy!-winning Watson. Supercomputer games could be dramatically different from anything you can play tonight at home.?I?m no game designer, but what if we could use real-time traffic data to fill the streets of the next Grand Theft Auto, or step into a computer-generated world that looks as compelling as the Lord of the Rings movies?

Now, there are many reasons, beyond the technological, that these games don?t yet exist: It would be prohibitively expensive to pay artists to create all those detailed graphics, and simple AI is good enough to defeat most any player at most any game. But the record of creative innovators is that eventually they find a way to stretch the available technology to its limit. And some gamemakers are already beginning to probe at the games you can create if you host some of the game in the cloud.

There is a nagging constraint to the cloud, of course ? bandwidth, which simply isn?t growing at the pace of Moore?s law. Network latency makes fast-twitch games, in which defeat is determined in microseconds (like with the top console genre, first-person shooters) hard to play over today?s internet. So, at least until the next engineering breakthrough, these supercomputer games might be designed around genres requiring slower player reflexes than, say,?Call of Duty or StarCraft.

Best of all, the only hardware you would need at home is a basic input device like a controller and a box to render the graphics, and it could be cross-platform so that you could play from a PC or Mac or any smartphone. As one for-instance, OUYA, the new open, Android-based console I back, could be great for a cloud-delivered game (hear me, developers?), and its notable that Sony bought up Gaikai and certainly has plans. ?(Full disclosure: ?OUYA also has an announced partnership with the relaunched?OnLive.)

Supercomputer games could be extraordinary. Now some intrepid game developers just have to make one.

Roy Bahat is Chairman of the open, Android-based game console company OUYA, and is former president of IGN. He is also on the faculty at UC Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter @roybahat

Article source: GigOM http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/VyA-Mafbvls/story01.htm

Tags: Tech

Source: http://techdiem.com/2012/12/01/why-your-next-game-console-ought-to-be-watson/

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Reeling Texas cancer agency OK'd faulty $11M award

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) ? Leaders of Texas' embattled $3 billion cancer-fighting effort approved an $11 million grant to a biomedical company even though the proposal wasn't reviewed, according to an internal audit that deepens the troubles of a state agency that has been denounced in recent months by some of the world's top scientists.

The discovery was uncovered during an internal review of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, and its grant to Peloton Therapeutics Inc. in 2010 was among the first it handed out. The Dallas-based company's commercialization award remains one of agency's largest taxpayer-funded grants to date.

The Associated Press on Thursday first reported the audit's findings, which were later announced by the agency.

Tim Kutzkey, Peloton's acting chief executive officer, declined comment and referred questions to CPRIT. In a statement, the agency said the company was unaware that "CPRIT processes had not been followed."

The cancer institute is home to the nation's second largest pot of cancer-research money, behind only the National Institutes of Health, and has awarded nearly $700 million. But it has come under intensifying scrutiny as several scientists, including two Nobel laureates, resigned in protest claiming the agency was charting a new politically driven path that put commercial interests before science.

CPRIT said the internal review did not uncover problems with any other commercialization awards.

The Peloton revelation is the latest blow to CPRIT, which launched in 2009 to widespread acclaim among scientists and cancer survivors but has spent the past year unraveling. Dozens of scientists have resigned from the agency's peer review panels en masse in recent weeks, some of whom criticized the fund for "hucksterism" and "suspicion of favoritism" on their way out the door.

Pelton's application would have been presented to the agency's oversight committee by Jerry Cobbs, the agency's chief commercialization officer. Cobbs announced his resignation this month, and his last day was set for Friday.

Members of the oversight committee are appointed by Gov. Rick Perry and other state elected leaders. The panel has the final say on whether an award is funded, but under agency rules, all applications must be reviewed by an outside panel of peer reviewers who evaluate the scientific and commercial merits of the proposal.

The agency's statement did not explain how Pelton's application made it through the process without anyone noticing that a review never took place. It only said that Cobbs "improperly included" the proposal in a slate of other recommendations to the oversight committee in 2010.

Attempts by the AP to reach Cobbs were not immediately successful Thursday evening.

Bill Gimson, the executive director of CPRIT who vowed that his reeling agency would recover from the growing onslaught of criticism at its annual conference in October, said in response to the audit's findings that the agency must have the state's trust.

"We proactively initiated this comprehensive review in the effort to be transparent and ensure good stewardship," Gimson said.

Peloton's funding has been halted and the company's application is undergoing a second review, the agency said.

According to Peloton's most recent annual report to the CPRIT, which was obtained by AP, the company has attracted $18 million in outside investments since it was founded in 2010 by Steven McKnight, chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

"Peloton Therapeutics aims to become a leading oncology company through the discovery and development of superior therapeutics, delivering extraordinary value to its employees, investors, and ultimately, cancer patients," according to the company's application summary.

CPRIT ? started behind a push led by cancer survivor Lance Armstrong and Perry ? spent most of its first five years basking in praise and industry awe of the unprecedented amount of taxpayer dollars committed to a state-run, cancer-fighting effort. But those plaudits abruptly gave way to rebukes starting in May, and the fissures came from within.

Dr. Alfred Gilman, the agency's chief scientific officer and a Nobel laureate, announced his resignation following a $20 million award that never received a full scientific review. The money was for a so-called incubator project at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of the country's top research institutes.

Gilman accused the agency's oversight board of ramrodding the project through the application process, despite the proposal being just six pages long. Gimson has said the type of proposal didn't require a full scientific review under agency rules but has since conceded missteps in how that award was handled.

In wake of the Peloton findings, CPRIT announced it would institute new rules that require independent third parties to make sure grant review policies are followed. The agency said it will install a compliance certification process that will accompany every recommended proposal given to the oversight committee.

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Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/reeling-texas-cancer-agency-okd-faulty-11m-award-020825760.html

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