By Soulskill from
Slashdot's from-all-the-knife-fights-i-bet department:
An anonymous reader writes:
Professional e-sports have been slowly but steadily gaining a following in the U.S. over the past couple of decades, but in South Korea, it's already arrived as a popular form of entertainment. An article at the BBC takes a look at the e-sports scene there, which is generating huge salaries for the top players, but also injuries and insular lifestyles. It's growing more similar to traditional pro sports all the time. From the article: "A scar, half an inch wide, stretched from just above the elbow and up over his shoulder. 'Our company paid for full medical expenses, so he had an operation,' explained his coach, Kang Doh Kyung. [He] is the best player in StarCraft and has won everything in this field and is still going strong.' Repetitive strain had injured Mr Lee's muscles, deforming them and making surgery the only option to save his illustrious career."Read Replies (0)
By Soulskill from
Slashdot's jack-of-all-trades,-master-of-something-something department:
An anonymous reader writes:
Several outlets are reporting that Amazon is preparing to dip its toes in yet another market: PC video games. They're specifically hiring for this purpose now, though they seem to have had plans for some time: "In addition to acquiring Killer Instinct developer Double Helix last year, Amazon has also hired notable developers like Kim Swift, designer of Portal, as well as Clint Hocking, who previously worked on franchises like Far Cry and Splinter Cell. Meanwhile, according to a report from Kotaku, Amazon has spent a lot of cash licensing the CryEngine, the same one used to make high-end PC games like Crysis 3. Outside of development, Amazon also acquired game streaming service Twitch last August for $970 million, and made gaming a big focus for its Fire TV media box."Read Replies (0)
By timothy from
Slashdot's send-it-to-the-irs department:
Whiteox writes with Fast Company's article about Robert Grass and his team, which is exploring how to use DNA as a data storage mechanism, along with others working on
truly long-term storage. Both commercial interests and academic researchers are interested in protecting data not just for years or decades, but for multi-century stretches, right out into the millions. From the article:
The idea of storing information on DNA traces back to a Soviet lab in the 1960s, but the first successful implementation wasn't achieved until 2012, when biologist George Church and his colleagues announced in the journal Science that they had encoded one of Church's books in DNA. More recently, reports the New Yorker, the artist Joe Davis, now in residence at Church's lab, has announced plans to encode bits of Wikipedia into a particularly old strain of apple, so that he can create "a living, literal tree of knowledge. "Impressive," writes Whiteox, "but I wonder if our future selves can make life from our archived data?"
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By Soulskill from
Slashdot's bad-work-if-you-can-get-it department:
An anonymous reader points out an investigation from NPR and Propublica into
how the Red Cross spent the $500 million in relief funds they gathered to help Haiti after the country was devastated by an earthquake in 2010. They found "a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success." While the organization claims to have built homes for 130,000 people,
investigators only found six permanent homes they could attribute to the charity. The Red Cross admitted afterward that the 130,000 number included people who had attended a seminar on how to fix their own homes.
"Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget." The Red Cross raised far more money for Haiti than any other charity, but is unwilling to provide details on where the money went. In one case, a brochure that extolled the virtues of one project claimed $24 million had been spent on a particular area — but residents of that area haven't seen any improvement in living conditions, and are unable to get information from the Red Cross. The former director of the Red Cross's shelter program said charity officials had no idea how to spend the money they'd accumulated.
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