Technology
drorzel | April 25, 2011Our home Internet has been out since Friday, which is, as you might imagine, somewhat vexing. The most likely cause is that our DSL modem is dying (it's nine years old), which raises a technical problem.
A few years ago, when we last had a problem requiring a service call, the tech who came out told us that the only reason our service has worked as well as it has is that we had an older modem. The nominal speed for the service is 1.5 Mbps (I believe), and we're actually getting something like 1.1 Mbps. This was attributed to our distance from the central office.
He said that the older modem…
gregladen | April 23, 2011iPhones know where they are, so they probably know where you are, and these data have been captured and maintained by the Apple devices and have been used by police in geoForensic investigations. Crushing civil liberties? There's an app for that!
Apple came to international attention in 1984 when the upstart computer company bought Superbowl Halftime ad space to show how they could destroy Big Brother. I'm not sure who Big Brother was at the time (it may have been a combination of IBM and Microsoft) but this was a direct reference to Orwell's book "Nineteen Eighty-Four".
Ironically,…
sa smith | April 21, 2011Are you kidding me?
Are you freaking kidding me??
Remember several months ago, the story about the PIs leaving their laptop in their car while they ate some Panera? And while they were NOMing someone broke into their car, stealing the laptop, and all their un-backed-up data?
And we are all like "OMFGWTF?"
"Who the hell leaves a laptop with that kind of information on it in their god damned car?? Who doesnt back up their data?? WAT??? ... Oh well, costly reminder for the rest of us."
YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE THIS.
Okla. health department laptop stolen
Nearly 133,000 people may have had personal…
drorzel | April 21, 2011After chasing a bunch of kids with cell phones off of his lawn, Kevin Drum has kicked off a discussion of "multitasking", specifically about whether it's merely a threat, or a positive menace. He points to an interview with Clifford Nass, a researcher who says his experiments show that nobody is any good at doing two things at once. John Holbo at Crooked Timber picks up the discussion and adds a few good points, and there are some others in the comments (CT's comment section being one of the most civilized and erudite in blogdom).
In particular, I think John's comment on satisficing is an…
gregladen | April 17, 2011Good news: The next version of Internet Explorer will only run on Windows 7. That should be the end of Internet Explorer.
Bad News: Google Video is done with. It will stop existing on April 29th. Well, I never used it so I don't really care personally, but this is why I once said that things like Amazon and Google should be taken over by the government and turned into utilities (you all hated me for saying that). This is exactly like having private companies build all the roads, then one company decides to unbuild its roads to use the asphalt for something else. If you happen to have…
cevans | April 11, 2011This is the first in a series of posts about art, the moon, and art on the moon. You would think this would be a fairly limited subject, but...
Art on the moon has been happening for a long time.
In 1969, a coterie of American contemporary artists devised a plan to put an art museum on the Moon. When NASA's official channels proved too dauntingly bureaucratic, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain weren't deterred. Instead, they managed to sneak their "museum" -- in reality a minuscule enamel wafer inscribed with six…
jtoney | April 7, 2011
Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Linux with us. Watch the Story of Linux to remember - or learn for the first time - how Linux disrupted a market and has begun to change the world. Do you see yourself in its story?
The computer operating system Linux was introduced in August 1991. It was made available freely but has fueled a number of businesses. How can this be?
I encourage to watch this brief video to appreciate Linux as an entrepreneurial success story.
From the video, Linux provides users with:
The freedom to use the software for any purpose.
The freedom to change the software to…
jtoney | April 6, 2011Source.
Bioephemera provided an excellent overview of the ongoing appeal to the "Myriad gene patent case."
Jessica Palmer wrote:
Myriad Genetics's patents on the breast cancer genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2) were invalid because genes are unpatentable products of nature.
Could Myriad Benefit If They Lose Their Case?
I believe that if Myriad and the biotechnology industry itself embraces open innovation, that ironically they could indeed benefit. Let me explain.
A review in Science stated (April 2010):
A legal bombshell hit the biotech world last week: A federal judge in New York City used…
mstorksdieck | April 1, 2011Within certain education and policy circles the acronym STEM (i.e., science, technology, engineering, math) has become a common term, used frequently to be inclusive when referring to a broad area of scholarship and enterprise we deem particularly connected, i.e., those listed four subjects. How, or even whether the acronym is understood and fashionable outside these education "insider" groups is not well know. What is known, though, is that the acronym and associated term is not well defined even within groups that make heavy use of it.
When we say STEM, do we simply mean any of the four…
pharyngula | March 22, 2011
the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia.
The rest of the article is an interesting analysis of what makes Angry Birds addictive. I found it persuasive, anyway: I've never played it, and now I never will, just like I'll never try that first taste of cocaine.
gregladen | March 5, 2011The other day, Julia and I decided to install SimCity 4 Deluxe for Windows on one of our Linux boxes. Using Wine, the install went fine, but the program would not run. It would kind of start up but then die with no obvious explanation. With a bit of work I can probably find the reason and fix it, but first I went to the Wine site to see what it said there, and I found, do my disappointment, mostly Geeksnarkese blithering among the amateur IT experts who had been playing around getting the once-popular city-simulation game running with the Linux program that stands for Wine Is Not an…
jtoney | March 5, 2011
SUPPLEMENTARY FIGURE 22. Three-color multi-harmonic SI mode rendering of nuclear histones (blue), the nuclear membrane (red), and the actin cytoskeleton (green) in a fixed LLC-PK1 cell. Histones are labeled with mNeptune / H2B; the nuclear envelope is labeled with mEmerald / lamin B1; and the actin cytoskeleton is labeled with Alexa 568 / phalloidin. Scale bar: 10 micrometers.
I live in the Northeast region of the US, and around this time of year am yearning for the sight of a blossum - any sign of impending Spring. And this morning - pop! - one reveals itself in a surprising place - the…
jtoney | March 4, 2011
SAF Troop Deployments on the volatile North/South Border.
Of all of the research that scientists do, this is an example of how we can make a difference. In this case, actor and activist George Clooney facilitates data collection on an important human rights issue in Darfur.
From Nicholas D. Kristof, reporter from The New York Times:
My old traveling buddy George Clooney took an unusual approach to his humanitarian work in Sudan: he invested in a monitoring capability with satellite photos. Now the resulting sat photos show villages that appear to have been burned near Abyei, the…
jtoney | March 4, 2011 Source.
"Undergrads have their pick of jobs, and companies are desperate to hire."
NPR, "Want A Job? You Ought To Be A Tech Geek" (Mar. 4, 2011)
The MIT motto, "Mens et Manus" {"Mind and Hand"}, embellished with the pronouncement "Nerd Pride" was all over campus when I was a postdoctoral there in the late eighties. In the dark days of this recession with unemployment rates remaining at about 9%, a ray of hope has emerged in the technology sector. Nurture the nerd within, and you could have multiple job offers.
According to NRP, it could be "opposite day" - a time when companies are…
milhayser | March 2, 2011
On Universe, Claire L. Evans takes us all the way back to 1966, when an event called 9 Evenings happened in New York City. This "epic art salon" brought together ten artists with a bevy of engineers from Bell Laboratories, who "helped the artists with complex technical components to their pieces." FM transmitters, infrared cameras, amplifiers and photoelectric cells contributed to "performances, installations, and dances that blended technology with fine art to somewhat legendary effect." Claire has pictures and video of the event on Universe. And on Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer shows us…
pharyngula | March 1, 2011I agreed with Doctorow that the recent shutdown of the Westboro loons was a stunt by WBC itself. Now Anonymous has spoken out in an interview with Shirley Phelps-Roper denying any involvement. Here's the hilarious bit, though: midway through the interview, after Phelps-Roper's prolonged ranting and raving, the Anonymous spokesman calmly announces that they were going to shut down one of her sites, right then and there. And he did.
In the immortal lines of Ash: "Good, bad, I'm the one with the gun." Do not tease the guys with the high tech weapon when all you've got to defend yourself is a…
milhayser | February 28, 2011
On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Franck Marchis shares the latest results from Kepler, a telescope in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit which keeps a distant eye on 156,453 stars. Kepler watches for tell-tale reductions in brightness, which "could be due to the transit of an exoplanet passing between its star and us." As of Tuesday, Kepler has identified 1202 likely new exoplanets, tripling the number of known worlds beyond our solar system. These results suggest that out of the 200 billion stars in our galaxy, "several hundred million of them could have an exoplanet with a surface…
jtoney | February 25, 2011
Source. Second place winning design, from Kayla Rivera at Valencia CC, Wiley Student Advertising Design Challenge: Texting & Driving Don't Mix
Any driver knows the dangers of texting. Yet this practice has become commonplace. Dr. Robin Landa recently challenged students to design an ad campaign about the dangers of texting and driving; the design above is one of my favorites.
But texting can also save lives, even for the illiterate. Let me explain.
There are emerging open source technologies, based on network science and crowd sourcing that promise to transform how we respond to…
jtoney | February 23, 2011
Anyone with a young daughter knows about "bedazzled." When I first saw these images of intact, single neurons capable of generating electrical signals, "bedazzled" came to mind.
The figure above was kindly provided by Dr. Bruno Pichler at The National Institute for Medical Research in London.
According to the paper in Nature Neuroscience:
Single-cell genetic manipulation is expected to substantially advance the field of systems neuroscience. However, existing gene delivery techniques do not allow researchers to electrophysiologically characterize cells and to thereby establish an…
milhayser | February 23, 2011
If the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, then what of the hand that rocks the world? Dr. Jeffrey Toney reports that Google recently showed its revolutionary colors with speak2tweet, a service that enabled netless Egyptians to access Twitter over the phone. After breaking with China over censorship issues last year, Google's political conscience is becoming clear. Their Android operating system powers smartphones around the world, their driverless cars turn heads in California, and the new information services just keep on coming. Jessica Palmer shares the Google Art Project,…