Posts 31–35 of 54

  • Delete anyone's eBay listing

    Monday, Feb 18, 2013
    RANTS
    Cover

    I was just the victim of an eBay fraud attack which resulted not only in my eBay listing being canceled but also of the entire listing being deleted with no way for eBay to recover it.

    I had listed my old iPhone and was happy to see people bid over $200 for it. The listing was eventually won by a certain shahid.quraishi. However, within 45 minutes of the auction ending, I received an email from eBay saying,

    Unfortunately, we had to cancel bids and purchases for the following buyer because they're no longer registered on eBay: shahid.quraishi

    What eBay didn’t mention is that they completely deleted my listing. It no longer shows up in the Selling section of My eBay and when I called eBay Support they said it was completely removed from the system with no way to get it back.

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  • Let's Teach Kids to Code

    Monday, Feb 11, 2013
    VIDEOSRANTS

    When kids first enter primary school, they spend their time doing creative things like drawing, painting, building, and experimenting. But after those first years, the creativity stops. Dr. Resnick is working to change that. He and his team have developed new ways to help older students engage with technology in order to encourage them to create and experiment the way they did in kindergarten.

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  • Researchers Identify the Cause of Stop-and-Go Traffic

    Wednesday, Jan 30, 2013
    VIDEOSRANTS

    When I commuted to Tysons from DC, I would have lots of time stuck in stop-and-go traffic to consider the reasons and causes for traffic slowdowns. It seemed that often, we’d all be slowing down and then speeding up again for no reason. I always speculated that sudden braking could cause a wave of slowdowns that would propagate backwards for hours/miles, leading to the annoying slow-down-speed-up cycle.

    A team of Japanese researchers recently created an experiment to show that the effect of breaking can easily create traffic jams. It’s all just physics. Their experiment shows that when the density of cars on the road passes a certain threshold, traffic jams will be caused simply by the multi-particle interactions of the system. In layman’s terms, drivers inconsistently hitting their breaks will cause a wave of stop-and-go backups behind them.

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  • Snow!

    Thursday, Jan 24, 2013
    PHOTOS
    Cover

    We finally got some frozen precipitation. It was only an inch of snow, but given where we live, it was enough to delay school for two hours. So the boys got to enjoy playing in the snow, albeit only briefly.

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