"It wasn't even unusual. Storms like Sany shaped the Eastern Seaboard. Why the continued moronic assumptions history began with European settlers?"
Two thumbs up.
We're supposed to believe that before Europeans arrived, the Americas were an idyllic paradise, that suffered no storms, no earthquakes, no wars, no famine. Ehhh - Europeans brought all those evils here, along with smallpox and polio.
Geocaching has a type of cache called Earthcache, where to log a find the geocacher must read about some feature, observe and report back to the cache owner. These really are some great eye openers in what is present, but in getting the mind working on how a feature came to be, what time was involved, how climate changed during the creation of the feature.
The Branch Davidian compound outside Waco explodes in a burst of flames April 19, 1993 (Shelly Katz/Getty Imag??
WEST, Texas?Wednesday?s deadly blast at a fertilizer plant here that left at least 14 dead and injured more than 160 came just days before the anniversary of another fiery explosion in Central Texas that captivated the world.
Twenty years ago this week, on April 19, 1993, a federal raid on a cult compound in nearby Waco ended when the building exploded into a massive fireball that left nearly 80 people dead, including more than a dozen children.
Federal agents had raided the site known as Mount Carmel after a 51-day standoff with a religious group called the Branch Davidians. The group was headed by a charismatic leader, David Koresh, whom federal officials believed was illegally stockpiling guns and other weapons.
For some, Wednesday?s plant explosion just 20 miles north of Waco immediately brought back memories of the raid deadly fire, which still traumatizes the community two decades later.
?Of course, people thought about it,? a man named Mike, who declined to give his last name, said Friday as he wandered past a boarded-up storefront in downtown West, where the fertilizer blast was so intense it shattered windows. ?You don?t see crazy things like fire and explosions happen around here very often. Of course, that would come to mind.?
But many in the Waco vicinity have tried to put the Branch Davidian raid well out of their memory?in part because the date of the fatal fire?April 19?has become something of an unofficial holiday for people with anti-government sentiments.
Two years after the Waco raid, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children.
McVeigh, who was executed for the attack in 2001, has said he was seeking to avenge what happened in Waco. He had been among the people who had gathered outside Mount Carmel in support of the Davidians during the standoff in 1993.
Investigators have explored links between other deadly attacks and the Waco raid, including the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School outside Denver, Colo., which killed 13 people and injured more than 20 more. That attack seemed to inspire the April 16, 2007, shooting at Virginia Tech University, in which a student shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others.
And now added to that week of deadly anniversaries will be Monday?s bombings at the Boston Marathon, which killed 3 people and injured more than 180 others.
Not every attack can be traced back to what happened in Waco in 1993. But that doesn?t matter to people in this community, who don?t like talking about what happened at Mount Carmel.
No public official in the region would even discuss the Waco attacks or the anniversary when contacted by Yahoo News. Their refusal to talk came as survivors of the attack reportedly gathered Friday to hold a memorial service for those who died two decades ago.
Still, the site of the raid is something of an underground tourist attraction in Waco. While the city makes no mention of the incident in any of its tourist materials, clerks at hotels around town have been known to hand out maps of how to get to the remote spot, located the rural farmland a few miles out of town.
?Just be careful,? a hotel employee said Friday.
There, visitors find a new chapel and a cluster of mobile homes, occupied by members of the sect?who still live and farm on the Davidian site. The only reminder of the raid is a broken down school bus that was once used by Koresh to transport his members, and a memorial gravestone that lists the names of the Davidian's killed during the 51-day standoff.
On Friday afternoon, the actual day of the 20th anniversary, a member of the sect waved off this reporter. But the group reportedly operates under a new name, The Branch, as they continue to await the end times.
Contact: Steve Koppes skoppes@uchicago.edu 773-702-8366 University of Chicago
University of Chicago researchers have created a synthetic compound that mimics the complex quantum dynamics observed in photosynthesis and may enable fundamentally new routes to creating solar-energy technologies. Engineering quantum effects into synthetic light-harvesting devices is not only possible, but also easier than anyone expected, the researchers report in the April 18 edition of Science Express.
The researchers have engineered small molecules that support long-lived quantum coherences. Coherences are the macroscopically observable behavior of quantum superpositions. Superpositions are a fundamental quantum mechanical concept, exemplified by the classic Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, in which a single quantum particle such as an electron occupies more than one state simultaneously.
Quantum effects are generally negligible in large, hot, disordered systems. Nevertheless, the recent ultrafast spectroscopy experiments in UChicago chemistry Prof. Greg Engel's laboratory have shown that quantum superpositions may play a role in the near perfect quantum efficiency of photosynthetic light harvesting, even at physiological temperatures.
Photosynthetic antennae the proteins that organize chlorophylls and other light-absorbing molecules in plants and bacteria support superpositions that survive for anomalously long times. Many researchers have proposed that organisms have evolved a means of protecting these superpositions. The result: improved efficiency in transferring energy from absorbed sunlight to the parts of the cell that convert solar energy to chemical energy. The newly reported results demonstrate that his particular manifestation of quantum mechanics can be engineered into man-made compounds.
The researchers modified fluorescein the same molecule once used to dye the Chicago River green for St. Patrick's Day and then linked different pairs of these dyes together using a rigid bridging structure. The resulting molecules were able to recreate the important properties of chlorophyll molecules in photosynthetic systems that cause coherences to persist for tens of femtoseconds at room temperature.
"That may not sound like a very long time - a femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second," said study co-author Dugan Hayes, a UChicago graduate student in chemistry. "But the movement of excitations through these systems also occurs on this ultrafast timescale, meaning that these quantum superpositions can play an important role in energy transfer."
To detect evidence of long-lived superpositions, the researchers created a movie of energy flow in the molecules using highly engineered laboratories and state-of-the-art femtosecond laser systems. Three precisely controlled laser pulses are directed into the sample, causing it to emit an optical signal that is captured and directed into a camera.
By scanning the time delays between the arriving laser pulses, the researchers create a movie of energy flow in the system, encoded as a series two-dimensional spectra. Each two-dimensional spectrum is a single frame of the movie, and contains information about where energy resides in the system and what pathways it has followed to get there.
These movies show relaxation from high energy states toward lower energy states as time proceeds, as well as oscillating signals in very specific regions of the signal, or quantum beats. "Quantum beats are the signature of quantum coherence, arising from the interference between the different energetic states in the superposition, similar to the beating heard when two instruments that are slightly out of tune with each other try to play the same note," Hayes explained.
Computer simulations have shown that quantum coherences work in photosynthetic antennae to prevent excitations from getting trapped on their way to the reaction center, where the conversion to chemical energy begins. In one interpretation, as the excitation moves through the antenna, it remains in a superposition of all possible paths at once, making it inevitable that it proceeds down the proper path. "Until these coherences were observed in synthetic systems, it remained dubious that such a complex phenomenon could be recreated outside of nature," Hayes said.
###
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Contact: Steve Koppes skoppes@uchicago.edu 773-702-8366 University of Chicago
University of Chicago researchers have created a synthetic compound that mimics the complex quantum dynamics observed in photosynthesis and may enable fundamentally new routes to creating solar-energy technologies. Engineering quantum effects into synthetic light-harvesting devices is not only possible, but also easier than anyone expected, the researchers report in the April 18 edition of Science Express.
The researchers have engineered small molecules that support long-lived quantum coherences. Coherences are the macroscopically observable behavior of quantum superpositions. Superpositions are a fundamental quantum mechanical concept, exemplified by the classic Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, in which a single quantum particle such as an electron occupies more than one state simultaneously.
Quantum effects are generally negligible in large, hot, disordered systems. Nevertheless, the recent ultrafast spectroscopy experiments in UChicago chemistry Prof. Greg Engel's laboratory have shown that quantum superpositions may play a role in the near perfect quantum efficiency of photosynthetic light harvesting, even at physiological temperatures.
Photosynthetic antennae the proteins that organize chlorophylls and other light-absorbing molecules in plants and bacteria support superpositions that survive for anomalously long times. Many researchers have proposed that organisms have evolved a means of protecting these superpositions. The result: improved efficiency in transferring energy from absorbed sunlight to the parts of the cell that convert solar energy to chemical energy. The newly reported results demonstrate that his particular manifestation of quantum mechanics can be engineered into man-made compounds.
The researchers modified fluorescein the same molecule once used to dye the Chicago River green for St. Patrick's Day and then linked different pairs of these dyes together using a rigid bridging structure. The resulting molecules were able to recreate the important properties of chlorophyll molecules in photosynthetic systems that cause coherences to persist for tens of femtoseconds at room temperature.
"That may not sound like a very long time - a femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second," said study co-author Dugan Hayes, a UChicago graduate student in chemistry. "But the movement of excitations through these systems also occurs on this ultrafast timescale, meaning that these quantum superpositions can play an important role in energy transfer."
To detect evidence of long-lived superpositions, the researchers created a movie of energy flow in the molecules using highly engineered laboratories and state-of-the-art femtosecond laser systems. Three precisely controlled laser pulses are directed into the sample, causing it to emit an optical signal that is captured and directed into a camera.
By scanning the time delays between the arriving laser pulses, the researchers create a movie of energy flow in the system, encoded as a series two-dimensional spectra. Each two-dimensional spectrum is a single frame of the movie, and contains information about where energy resides in the system and what pathways it has followed to get there.
These movies show relaxation from high energy states toward lower energy states as time proceeds, as well as oscillating signals in very specific regions of the signal, or quantum beats. "Quantum beats are the signature of quantum coherence, arising from the interference between the different energetic states in the superposition, similar to the beating heard when two instruments that are slightly out of tune with each other try to play the same note," Hayes explained.
Computer simulations have shown that quantum coherences work in photosynthetic antennae to prevent excitations from getting trapped on their way to the reaction center, where the conversion to chemical energy begins. In one interpretation, as the excitation moves through the antenna, it remains in a superposition of all possible paths at once, making it inevitable that it proceeds down the proper path. "Until these coherences were observed in synthetic systems, it remained dubious that such a complex phenomenon could be recreated outside of nature," Hayes said.
###
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?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Long before the era of iPads and Snapchats and holographic Tupacs, some of the greatest minds in tech and science spent their life trying to understand weather patterns. Since, we’ve evolved to have an almost overwhelming amount of data on what today’s weather will be like, and it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone overboard with the notion of being ready for a little rain. That’s exactly the premise that Poncho, a new startup launching out of betaworks, operates under. Sure, you could download apps or log in to weather sites and get all kinds of hourly forecasts for the whole country, Doppler radar readouts, weather news (which is usually the most boring type of news), and a host of other types of information. Or you could see a daily breakdown of the weather in a way that’s meaningful to you, and only to you. Poncho works by first learning about your daily routine. When you sign up to the service, you’re asked a series of easy questions about the flow of your day: when do you wake up? Do you have any pets you need to walk? When do you head into work? What time do you take lunch? When do you leave work? How do you commute? After you’ve answered, you can choose to receive your daily weather updates by SMS or email. “The core objective is to have Poncho become a default part of your routine,” said co-founder Kuan Huang. “We want to take you away from the noise of other apps and clients and give you the weather in a simple way.” Updates from Poncho are clean and easy to understand. You get a general outline of the day, along with specific temperatures for the times Poncho knows you’ll be out and about in the world. Huang is part of the hacker in residence program at betaworks, which is led by Paul Murphy and aims to pull talented engineers into the betaworks family in order to co-found and develop great ideas into full-fledged service. Unlike traditional accelerators, there is no application process and there really aren’t any strict curricula either. In fact, betaworks isn’t really an accelerator at all. Rather, betaworks seeks out the most talented and creative entrepreneurs to supply them with everything they need to turn an idea into a business, at no up-front cost to the engineer (or Hacker in residence, as betaworks calls
Athenaeum Electronica: The woes of standardized testing
The woes of standardized testing
I've been extremely busy lately and haven't had much time to write. But, this week's discussion question in my Psych 8760 - Ed Psych class proved to be worthy of a post here. This week we're talking about standardized testing and their role in the school system.?Honestly, I've sort of been waiting for this discussion to come up. I have rather strong opinions about this topic as I've witnessed this phenomenon firsthand.? One must understand the potential benefits of standardized tests, of which there are many. First, standardized tests can be used effectively in the formation of summative assessments that can potentially be used as a guide to determine how much information a student has?retained?(note: this does not prove, necessarily, what they have?understood). To this end summative assessments and standardized testing can also be used to uncover flaws in the curriculum itself (a technique I employ frequently). If 80% of the students of a given class miss the exact same question on the test there are only two logical possibilities; the question is poorly written and confusing,?or?the information pertaining to that question was not effectively delivered.?Standardized testing can also be used in a secondary capacity to measure the teaching ability of a teacher; all things being equal (classes made up of the same demographic, teachers with access to the same curriculum and same resources), then the scores of multiple classes should be within a few points of each other, in theory. Any deviation above or below the median scores by a significant amount would warrant a closer look to determine what's going on.?
But, as good as standardized tests are, there are also many drawbacks. One drawback is that they make poor formative assessments. Another drawback is that they?cannot?measure how much a studentunderstands?about a subject. They also do not necessarily translate well to cultures, languages, or ethnic groups that are non-English speaking (a critique also shared by the Stanford-Binet IQ tests). The biggest problem that I have, personally, with standardized testing is that they are over-hyped and over-emphasized by morons in politics. Bean counters in Washington and at the State and County levels wanted a way that they could easily track and compare data about how much a student has learned and make a determination if a school is being "effective" or not, which in turn directly affects the decision of how much money the school receives. Reading ?essay questions would take too much time and be impractical, so they forced the standardized testing down the school system's collective throat. People who have little to no background in education are dictating policy on how the education system should be run; a recipe for disaster. Now they are even beginning to tie teachers' annual pay raises (and even their continued employment) to how well their classes do on these tests! Is it any wonder that 50% of all new teachers quit within the first 5 years and that education is quickly becoming one of the professions with the highest turnover rates?? I say that I've seen what's going on first-hand because I have experienced it in other areas. In the IT Industry, which I have worked professionally for many years,?the certification?that everyone wants/needs is called the "A+ Cert". It is a standardized test consisting of about 120 questions. There are literally "boot camps" that you can attend for a nominal fee they will cram the test answers in your head through rote memorization long enough for you to pass the test. Hooray! Now you have your A+ certification on paper, but you quickly forget the material for the questions, and worse yet, you have no idea what any of it means. You know that the answer to question 27 is B, but you have no idea?why?the answer is B. Under those conditions, is that certification actually even worth the paper that it is printed on? I don't think so. But, that's all that matters to the companies who seek out such candidates. Our school systems are quickly emulating these behavior patterns with more and more teachers "teaching to the test" because they, and their districts, have a vested financial interest in how well the students do on them.? Because the very system that we use to measure our students is flawed, every decision that is based on that information is also flawed as a result. Our school systems are performing poorly you say? Well, let's just throw more money at the problem blindly, because clearly if we just push enough money at the problem it will simply go away. Yet, annual studies by the US Department of Education comparing students from the G8 countries of the same age and grade reveal that while the US has?the single most expensive?primary and secondary education system in the entire world, our test scores and student performance is only middle-of-the-pack. Other countries are performing better with less money. Clearly, a change in our methodology is required to bring about effective changes in our scores. In that regard, I propose that teaching is just as much an art form as it is a science. In much the same way that you could not adequately measure the ability of a painter with a standardized test, it should not be the end-all, be-all of educational measurements either. Which would you rather have; the?caricature?painter at the fair who can crack out 100 paintings in a day, or Leonardo DaVinci who only paints 1 painting in a week? The quality of the student's cognition should be of paramount importance, more so than the quantity of their recollection. I would rather see students who are taught how to think, to reason, to research, to experiment and explore rather than to see students blindly parrot back the same information that I told them verbatim, devoid of intellect, curiosity, or desire to learn.
With regards to what manner is best for measuring students, I think it has to be a mixed approach; one that utilizes both standardized testing?and?cognitive assessments of reasoning ability. This is the same solution that was posited by Sanders and Horn (1995).? References: Sanders, W., & Horn, S. (1995). Educational assessment reassessed: The usefulness of standardized and alternative measures of student achievement as indicators for the assessment of educational outcomes.?Education Policy Analysis Archives, 3(6). Retrieved fromhttp://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/649/771
CARACAS (Reuters) - Hundreds of protesters clashed with police in Venezuela's capital on Monday as the government rejected opposition demands for a vote recount after Sunday's contested election to replace the late Hugo Chavez.
Police fired tear gas to disperse young demonstrators who threw rocks in an upscale district of Caracas after opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles refused to recognize the narrow victory of Chavez's preferred successor, Nicolas Maduro, and called for peaceful demonstrations.
"What happened yesterday was fraud, a lie. The opposition won and they know it," said Briand Alvar, who was among the protesters involved in the battle with police.
Capriles hopes protests will highlight the weakness of Maduro's mandate and stir up opposition outrage over accusations that the electoral authority is biased in favor of the ruling party.
Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver, called on his supporters to mobilize peacefully on Tuesday. He is due to be sworn in on Friday, likely leaving Capriles' call for demonstrations as a symbolic show of defiance.
Opposition sources told Reuters their count showed Capriles won by more than 300,000 votes. His team says it has evidence of some 3,200 election day irregularities, ranging from allegations of voters using fake IDs to intimidation of volunteers at polling centers.
Venezuela's electoral authority on Monday formally declared Maduro the winner of the election, saying he won 50.8 percent of the vote, against 49.0 percent for Capriles.
"The majority is the majority. Democracy must be respected," said Maduro, who was handpicked by Chavez to continue his self-declared socialist revolution just weeks before dying of cancer on March 5. "The opposition cannot launch an ambush to jeopardize the will of the people."
'NO RECOUNT'
In a sharply worded speech, the head of the National Electoral Council (CNE) shot down Capriles' call for a recount and excoriated him for being disrespectful of Venezuelan law and institutions.
"Threats and intimidation are not the path to appeal the decisions of the CNE," said Tibisay Lucena, who opposition critics call a stooge of the ruling Socialist Party.
She also accused the U.S. government and the Organization of American States of trying to interfere in Venezuelan affairs after they backed the idea of a recount.
Opposition sympathizers flooded Twitter with the hashtag #CaprilesWonTibisayLied, which in the afternoon was the micro-blogging site's third most popular topic worldwide.
The official results showed Maduro winning by 265,000 votes but Capriles says he is sure he won and that he will only concede defeat if there is a full recount.
"All we're asking is that our rights and the will of the people be respected, and that every single vote be counted, every little piece of paper. That paper isn't for recycling, it's proof," Capriles said, urging his supporters to keep protests peaceful.
"We went out yesterday to vote against violence," he said. "We can never put ourselves on the side of violence."
FUTURE OF CHAVISMO
The controversy around Venezuela's first presidential election without Chavez on the ballot in two decades ushered in new uncertainty in the OPEC nation of 29 million people.
It also raised doubts about the future of "Chavismo," Chavez's self-proclaimed socialist movement, without its charismatic founder.
In his last public speech, Chavez named his longtime protege Maduro as his preferred successor, giving him a huge boost heading into Sunday's election. But neither the endorsement nor the burst of sympathy following Chavez's death were enough to ensure an easy victory.
Maduro, who does not have Chavez's charm, saw his poll lead shrink in the final days of the campaign. Even then, the vote was a lot closer than most people expected.
Maduro's slim victory raises the possibility that he could face challenges from rivals within the disparate coalition that united around the towering figure of Chavez, who was an icon of the Latin American left.
Chavez comfortably beat Capriles by 11 percentage points and 1.6 million votes in October.
In this campaign, Capriles slammed Maduro as an incompetent and a poor copy of Chavez unable to fix the nation's many problems. He also offered a Brazilian-style mix of pro-business policies and strong welfare programs.
Maduro was unable to match his former boss's electrifying speeches but nevertheless benefited from a well-oiled party machine and poor Venezuelans' fears that the opposition might abolish Chavez's slum development projects.
(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea and Mario Naranjo; Writing by Todd Benson; Editing by Kieran Murray and Jim Loney)
Contact: Matt Shipman matt_shipman@ncsu.edu 919-515-6386 North Carolina State University
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have developed a new tool to help surgeons use X-rays to track devices used in "minimally invasive" surgical procedures while also limiting the patient's exposure to radiation from the X-rays.
Many surgical procedures now use long, thin devices such as "steerable needles" that can be inserted into a patient's body through a small incision and then steered to a target location. These "minimally invasive" procedures allow doctors to perform surgeries without having to make major incisions, which decreases the risk of infection and shortens the patient's recovery time.
However, these techniques pose a challenge to surgeons, because it is difficult for them to determine precisely where the surgical device is in the patient's body.
One solution to the problem is to use X-rays to track the progress of the surgical device in the patient. But doctors want to minimize the number of X-rays taken, in order to limit the patient's exposure to radiation.
"We have now developed an algorithm to determine the fewest number of X-rays that need to be taken, as well as what angles they need to be taken from, in order to give surgeons the information they need on a surgical device's location in the body," says Dr. Edgar Lobaton, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper on the research.
The new tool is a computer program that allows surgeons to enter what type of procedure they'll be performing and how precise they need the location data to be. Those variables are then plugged into the algorithm developed by the research team, which tells the surgeon how many X-rays will be needed and from which angles to produce the necessary location details.
For example, if a surgeon needs only a fairly general idea of where a device is located, only two or three X-rays may be needed whereas more X-rays would be required if the surgeon needs extremely precise location data.
###
The paper, "Continuous Shape Estimation of Continuum Robots Using X-ray Images," will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, being held in Karlsruhe, Germany, May 6-10. The paper was co-authored by Jingua Fu, a former graduate student at UNC; Luis Torres, a Ph.D. student at UNC; and Dr. Ron Alterovitz, an assistant professor of computer science at UNC. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Contact: Matt Shipman matt_shipman@ncsu.edu 919-515-6386 North Carolina State University
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have developed a new tool to help surgeons use X-rays to track devices used in "minimally invasive" surgical procedures while also limiting the patient's exposure to radiation from the X-rays.
Many surgical procedures now use long, thin devices such as "steerable needles" that can be inserted into a patient's body through a small incision and then steered to a target location. These "minimally invasive" procedures allow doctors to perform surgeries without having to make major incisions, which decreases the risk of infection and shortens the patient's recovery time.
However, these techniques pose a challenge to surgeons, because it is difficult for them to determine precisely where the surgical device is in the patient's body.
One solution to the problem is to use X-rays to track the progress of the surgical device in the patient. But doctors want to minimize the number of X-rays taken, in order to limit the patient's exposure to radiation.
"We have now developed an algorithm to determine the fewest number of X-rays that need to be taken, as well as what angles they need to be taken from, in order to give surgeons the information they need on a surgical device's location in the body," says Dr. Edgar Lobaton, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper on the research.
The new tool is a computer program that allows surgeons to enter what type of procedure they'll be performing and how precise they need the location data to be. Those variables are then plugged into the algorithm developed by the research team, which tells the surgeon how many X-rays will be needed and from which angles to produce the necessary location details.
For example, if a surgeon needs only a fairly general idea of where a device is located, only two or three X-rays may be needed whereas more X-rays would be required if the surgeon needs extremely precise location data.
###
The paper, "Continuous Shape Estimation of Continuum Robots Using X-ray Images," will be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, being held in Karlsruhe, Germany, May 6-10. The paper was co-authored by Jingua Fu, a former graduate student at UNC; Luis Torres, a Ph.D. student at UNC; and Dr. Ron Alterovitz, an assistant professor of computer science at UNC. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Long before the era of iPads and Snapchats and holographic Tupacs, some of the greatest minds in tech and science spent their life trying to understand weather patterns. Since, we’ve evolved to have an almost overwhelming amount of data on what today’s weather will be like, and it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone overboard with the notion of being ready for a little rain. That’s exactly the premise that Poncho, a new startup launching out of betaworks, operates under. Sure, you could download apps or log in to weather sites and get all kinds of hourly forecasts for the whole country, Doppler radar readouts, weather news (which is usually the most boring type of news), and a host of other types of information. Or you could see a daily breakdown of the weather in a way that’s meaningful to you, and only to you. Poncho works by first learning about your daily routine. When you sign up to the service, you’re asked a series of easy questions about the flow of your day: when do you wake up? Do you have any pets you need to walk? When do you head into work? What time do you take lunch? When do you leave work? How do you commute? After you’ve answered, you can choose to receive your daily weather updates by SMS or email. “The core objective is to have Poncho become a default part of your routine,” said co-founder Kuan Huang. “We want to take you away from the noise of other apps and clients and give you the weather in a simple way.” Updates from Poncho are clean and easy to understand. You get a general outline of the day, along with specific temperatures for the times Poncho knows you’ll be out and about in the world. Huang is part of the hacker in residence program at betaworks, which is led by Paul Murphy and aims to pull talented engineers into the betaworks family in order to co-found and develop great ideas into full-fledged service. Unlike traditional accelerators, there is no application process and there really aren’t any strict curricula either. In fact, betaworks isn’t really an accelerator at all. Rather, betaworks seeks out the most talented and creative entrepreneurs to supply them with everything they need to turn an idea into a business, at no up-front cost to the engineer (or Hacker in residence, as betaworks calls