A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

One Doctor’s Legacy
The Wall Street Journal explores the history of psychosurgery.
—Antonio Regalado, senior editor, business

Cereal Killers

Jonathan Lawrence, Kindy Diallo, Suhail Sikka, Kamau Lillard

GSA annually funds more than 300 UMBC graduate students’ research and travel with an average of $140,000 expended. This graduate assistantship is the project manager for GSA Research & Travel (R&T) including upkeep of the R&T database, coordinating R&T processes, analyzing R&T data, and producing monthly, semester and annual reports which assist the GSA Executive Board’s strategic planning and budgeting processes.

This graduate assistantship requires knowledge of computer databases, website management, project management and systems processes. The position requires design, trouble-shooting, research, and analysis as well as the ability to work alone and on a team. Duties include database management and research on GSA R&T funding.

This position chairs the GSA Senate Travel & Research Committee, working in collaboration with GSA Senators and Executive Board members to create more efficient processes and effective reports. The GA will have a sense of project management to assist with events and long-term projects. The GA in this position should have a background in the following topics: database implementation, project management, decision technology, information management, emerging technologies.

Responsibilities: 65% database and R&T project management; 25% website management; 10% recruitment.

This is a 20-hour/week assistantship including tuition remission, stipend & GA health insurance. Stipends http://www.umbc.edu/gradschool/funding/minimum_stipend_levels.html

Send an application letter, CV, a copy of your UMBC unofficial transcripts, and contact information for 2-3 faculty/UMBC references to Dr. Jenness E. Hall hall@umbc.edu with the subject “R&T GA Position.”

Interviews will commence immediately. Position available January 6. 2014.

On October 28th, I tweeted that I was looking to hire a freelance front-end web developer for Uncover:

I’ve got a quick frontend freelance gig for someone. Please @ message me or email me if interested.

— Spencer Fry (@spencerfry) October 28, 2013

I thought I would give it a shot, now knowing what to expect. While I may have more Twitter followers than some (5,250+), I didn’t think I’d get more than a lead or two. What I definitely didn’t expect was to interview five competent people the next day: four over Skype and one in person in New York City.

Within minutes, I had several people reply to my tweet that they’d be interested in the job. I responded to them with my email address and we set up a chance to talk the following day. By the end of the day I had five scheduled meetings in my calendar for the following day. Two of the people were local in NYC, one was in the UK, one was in Belgium, and the fifth was in San Francisco. The following morning before I started the interviews I tweeted:

I'll have interviewed 5 frontend developers for a quick gig by the end of today. All thanks to intros via Twitter.

— Spencer Fry (@spencerfry) October 29, 2013

I was giddy at the thought that a single tweet could land me a freelancer.

The interviews proceeded on schedule and I talked to each of the candidates for between fifteen and twenty minutes. I emailed each of them three PNG files that represented the PSDs that needed to be converted into HTML and CSS. I then explained that Uncover is written in Ruby on Rails and asked what their experience was with implementing HTML/CSS in that environment. They all had experience with RoR. We also use a rather obscure views and templates engine called Mustache and I wanted to find out whether anyone had used it. One had heard of it, but nobody had used it. I then asked them a series of short questions to gauge their experience and to find out how they would complete the actual work. What was their process? Where would they start?

After interviewing all the candidates, I had a sense of who would be the best person for the job, but I needed to wait for quotes before making my decision. I gave each candidate until the following morning to get back to me with a quote. Only one of the five sent a proposal right after we’d talked. The quotes ranged from as little as $750 to as much as $1650 with the average being at just over $1,000. I could tell from speaking with the $750 person that he was the least experienced of the group. Four of the five quotes were hourly and one was project based. I ended up negotiating down the $1,650 guy, the one who had given the project based quote, to $1,200 after another Skype call with him.

I explained to him that $1,650 was $550 higher than the next highest quote, but that I’d be willing to pay a premium because of his experience and that he was located in New York. While I’m all for remote workers, I’m willing to pay slightly more knowing that we could grab coffee or meet briefly at our office if it was necessary. At this time, we haven’t needed to.

We signed the contract and began work the next day. Immediately after signing the contract, I reached out to the other four candidates and let them know that I appreciated their time but that I had gone with someone else. Everyone wrote back with nice emails. The worst thing you can do is to take your time making your decision when hiring someone as a freelancer, because it’s unfair to the people you don’t go with. They’re left waiting, not knowing what’s going to happen or whether their time has been booked.

Finding this freelancer through Twitter has been an amazing experience. I went from a single tweet asking for a freelance front-end developer to a signed contract in under 48 hours. I’ve hired dozens of freelancers, but nothing even close to that short a timeframe has ever happened to me before.

It’s amazing to see the value that being on Twitter can bring you. I would never have been able to find five developers to interview in such a short period of time in any other way. Emailing friends for recommendations would have required an email exchange. Posting on job boards would have cost money. Using Elance or oDesk would have been a pain in its own right. Only Twitter allowed me a direct one-to-one correspondence immediately with interested people whom I could quickly vet.

The post Hiring a Freelance Developer Via Twitter and Why This is So Powerful appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

For almost a decade, the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation (AWMF) has been telling the stories of inspiring women from American history with its Empowering America program. In 2008, AWMF expanded the Empowering America program to share the stories of these women with middle schools across the country.

In partnership with the Ford Motor Company Fund, the philanthropic arm of Ford Motor Company, AWMF developed educational collateral and put it in the hands of teachers to stimulate and enhance classroom conversations about these female icons, who have pioneered in fields such as science, social reform, public service, sports, journalism, music and aviation. Past subjects of Empowering America programs include Annie Easley, Gloria Estefan, Gabrielle Giffords, Barbara Jordan, Christa McAuliffe, Muriel Siebert, Sonia Sotomayor, and many more.

Submission Requirements: Please submit a proposed script for the video along with a sample of previous video work and letter of recommendation from a professor or media professional. The script must include and incorporate the competition theme, Blazing the Trail: Celebrating the Women of Empowering America, and feature at least four women from the 2013 Empowering America program (booklet available here). Here are some questions to consider:

In what ways have these women influenced the course of American history? What can we learn from them?

What positive qualities do these women possess that could speak to students or future leaders?

How do these women leaders and their legacies continue to impact us today?

We encourage you to look at the 2013 Empowering America booklet to get a sense of the featured women, their accomplishments and their journeys. You are not required to focus on all of the women featured in the booklet, but must include a representative sample.

You must be full‐time undergraduate or graduate student at an accredited college or university. Please include with your submission the following information in its entirety:

Name

College or University, Expected Year of Graduation

Contact Information (mailing address, phone, email)

Copy of a valid student ID

A proposed script/outline for the two to three‐minute video, as described above

A sample of previous video work

A letter of recommendation from a media professor or media professional

Prize: AWMF and Ford Motor Company Fund will select one student winner to receive $5,000, payable to the winning student’s educational institution upon completion of the video. All production expenses are incurred by the student.

Selection: The script, sample video and recommendation along with any collateral are due December 16, 2013. A panel consisting of representatives from AWMF and Ford Motor Company Fund will choose the winning student. The winning student will be notified by December 20, 2013 with production to occur in December 2013/January 2014. The final video must be completed and received by February 20, 2014 and must include an AWMF‐provided tag line. The video must be cleared for the uses noted below. We will launch the video as part of our Women’s History month initiative.

The winning video will be posted on the AWMF web site for use by middle schools across the country, as well as incorporated into the Empowering America program wherever possible.

The video will be prominently distributed and displayed on AWM’s and social media outlets.

Determinations of appropriateness will be made in the sole discretion of AWM and Ford Motor Company Fund.

Application materials will not be returned to the student.

Employees of Ford Motor Company (sponsor), their subsidiaries, affiliates, and immediate family members are not eligible for the contest. Void where prohibited.

Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.