Technology
drorzel | January 19, 2011We did a lab yesterday that asked students to measure the speed of a ball leaving a spring-loaded launcher in a few different ways. this is a great way to talk about the difference between systematic and random errors and how those are dealt with. As a way of starting that discussion, I asked the students to calculate the speeds last night, and then enter their values in an Excel sheet when they came to class this morning. Since generating a sensible plot in Excel 2007 is such a gigantic pain in the ass, I used an older data set to set up a template, and made a graph of the quantities we were…
gregladen | January 18, 2011The Linux command 'units' may or may not be installed on your system. If not, if you use synaptic or apt, type (at the prompt)
sudo apt-get install units
or equiviliant for other distributions. Then type in the word "units" and play around. Here are a few sample outputs:
The program is a little clunky. You have to know the specific codes for each type of measurement, though 'units' will figure out what you mean sometimes. To exit, type ctrl-D. There is a way to use this utility in a script. That and other details are found in the manual.
jtoney | January 18, 2011
Figure 2: Evidence for dopamine release during pleasurable music listening.
Listening to music invokes our emotions, ranging from pleasure to disdain. It is one of our most human experiences, sometimes so profound that words cannot convey the intensity. One of my closest friends, a professor of musicology, once asked me in a moment of self doubt, "You're a scientist, you do important things...what good is music?" Like many creative souls, he had no idea how important the contribution of art is to our very being.
Canadian scientists have documented in a study published in Nature…
jtoney | January 17, 2011OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
In Swahili, "ushahidi" means "testimony." I would like to share with you an emerging technology, Ushahidi, an open source platform that can be used by anyone anywhere to share information that can improve disaster response and perhaps someday influence public policy. I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would have appreciated this.
The 31 second video provides a dramatic example. Before the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, reliable road maps were scarce, particularly if you wanted to know which roads were open. Thanks to Ushahidi, this all changed…
jtoney | January 15, 2011
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned in 1964 about a growing disconnect between technological advances and ethical awareness.
Photo: Dick DeMarsico/New York World-Telegram, courtesy Library of Congress
In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day:
Let us consider his thoughts on science and technology, delivered December 11, 1964 in Oslo when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:
This eloquent speech is prescient of today's challenges.
Unfortunately, there is no lack of evidence of "man's ethical infantilism" today. Here's hoping for growth.
This evening I would like to use this lofty and…
gregladen | January 15, 2011Virgin Mobile's "unlimited broadband" will be limited, as the communication company goes back on its deal with customers. "Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices..." I don't see that as a difficult choice at all. Drop Virgin Mobile, or, if you don't use it, don't consider it. Details here.
The first computer that stored apps to run on itself, EDSAC, will be rebuilt at Bletchley Park. "The EDSAC was two metres high and its 3,000 vacuum tubes took up four metres of floor space. It could perform 650…
drorzel | January 15, 2011For one obvious example, I'm typing this on a plane-- Southwest has started doing wi-fi on some flights, and it is totally worth $5 to be able to web-surf in flight.It would be even better if the flight wren't packed, so I could type more comfortably, but I'm ok with just reading (once I post this).
Another example is the way that net access enabled me to have a far better time in Miami last night than I ordinarily would have. Everybody from the meeting I went there for took off, so I was on my own for the evening, and South Beach isn't my kind of scene, being neither rich nor famous nor fond…
gregladen | January 10, 2011There really aren't that many computer ads. Lately, they suck.
Annoying Computer Ad I:
Apple iPad. Not as annoying as other pad ads (maxiPads, etc) and Huxley likes to dance to the music (the tune that goes like this: da da da da da da da da da, you know the one), but... This ad shows a hand using the iPad to do all sorts of cool and amazing things. As with all Apple ads, it does not show the stopping, slowness, or hesitation that inevitable happens in real life. It does not show the dialog box popping up to tell you that you have to re-read a 92 page End User License Agreement document…
kbonham | January 2, 2011Like so many things, the problem is best explained with an analogy. Imagine a car parked in a dark garage (if you're a mechanic by hobby or trade, make it a computer). Someone hands you keys to the car, a flashlight and a piece of metal that she says belongs to a car similar to the one in the garage. Now, your task is to figure out what that the piece of metal is, and what it's for. Replace car with organism, piece of metal with gene and make the flashlight a whole lot smaller, and you have an idea of what biological research is like. For decades, those wanting to study human genes were like…
jtoney | December 31, 2010My previous postings on the fruit fly brain generated quite a bit of interest, and I wanted to share with you some more detail that I received from Terry C.-W. Yeh, researcher at the Applied Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for High-Performance Computing in Taiwan. Thank you, Terry, for being so gracious!
I hope you enjoy this decoded tour as much as I have.
Detail of 150 neurons.
Ever wonder about the distribution of neurotransmitters throughout the brain? {Recall my recent posting about dopamine receptors and liberalism - OK, there's no such thing as a "liberal" fly…
drorzel | December 31, 2010Lookit the shiny:
That's a new Droid X smartphone, and it's mine. I got it yesterday after discovering the existence of a slightly cheaper "data only" plan that is so secret only about 10% of Verizon Wireless employees know it exists. As my previous phone was a freebie LG flip phone from about three years ago that didn't even have a camera, let alone any "apps," this is a big step.
I activated it late last night (early this morning, really), but haven't done anything more than really basic set-up on it. I am not allowed to play with it until after I finish the revisions to Chapter 5 of the…
jtoney | December 27, 2010If you thought the human genome project was impressive its scope and scale. think about the human connectome project.
I recently shared with you the fruit fly brain atlas, comprised of about 100,000 neurons, and compared it to the human brain with some 100 billion neurons.
The first high resolution images of the "connectedness" of the human brain are beginning to emerge:
According to the NIH-funded human connectome project, to be described in tomorrow's Science Times of The New York Times:
{My edits:}
Overview
Mapping of the human connectome offers a unique opportunity to understand the…
jtoney | December 26, 2010If you are fascinated with word usage, I suggest you try a powerful new tool, Google NGram Viewer. According to the website:
What's all this do?
When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years. Let's look at a sample graph:
You may have noticed the term "schadenfreude" appearing more and more, defined as the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. Its usage is, I believe, a telling by product of the explosion of…
jtoney | December 25, 2010
Jennifer Daniel and Sandi Daniel, The New York Times image
THERE you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll.
"Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt", Julie Zhou, product design manager at Facebook, The New York Times Op-Ed.
Many families are awakening today to the joy of sharing gifts for Christmas. A thought occurred to me: I wanted a Trollinator Nanobot for Christmas. But I…
jtoney | December 24, 2010
The IBM 705 Data Processing System, introduced in 1954.
The 705 would rarely run more than 3 or 4 hours without a major breakdown. It was not unusual to encounter a 705 that was ablaze." This should give all of us pause the next time our PC crashes!
What is your family's history? Have you ever reflected on what their lives was like, when life was seemingly simpler? What if we could take a snapshot of our lives, our families, just one, every ten years? What was your family doing 100 years ago?
Let me share some "snapshots" of our ordinary family {a personal and idiosyncratic point of…
gregladen | December 22, 2010Do you have a favorite podcast? A podcast that you tried and hated? An idea for a podcast that should exist but doesn't? And, do you know of a rating system for podcasts (and should there be one)? As a thought experiment, I propose a Podcast Quality index, or set of indexes. To start, let me propose a set of criteria to evaluate the negatives of a multi-person podcast involving a primary host and a number of co-hosts or guests.
Number of minutes (or percentage of show) before the first interesting thing is said.
Number of times the host indulges him or herself in displaying an…
jtoney | December 20, 2010In a stunning finding, scientists found evidence in northern Spain of cannibalism by Neanderthals. Some 1,800 bone fragments were used for DNA analysis to support their hypothesis. According to The New York Times report,
Spanish scientists who analyzed the bones and DNA report the gruesome answer. The victims were a dozen members of an extended family, slaughtered by cannibals.
It seems common knowledge that Neanderthals were lacking in refinement by modern standards, but this is a bit much. This is indeed "food for thought", since there is evidence that part of our genome is inherited…
gregladen | December 20, 2010Dropbox has reached version 1.0, which does not sound impressive, but is. Dropbox is a free or paid for file syncing service that totally kicks but. Try it out. The new version fixes various problems and significantly improves performance, but most importantly allows selective syncing, so you can have a subset of your files synced on a specific computer. (It was already true that you had a selective, as in file by file, syncing on mobile devices.) Seriously, of all the technologies out there, Dropbox is at the top of my list of software that made my life easier. Everything is always…
drorzel | December 18, 2010As has been mentioned in countless places over the last few days, Yahoo plans to shut down Delicious, the social bookmark service that lots of people use for lots of things. My interest in it is pretty narrow, but important for this blog: I use Delicious to generate the quasi-automatic daily Links Dump postings here. As I surf around during the odd free moment, I tag pages that strike me as interesting, and every morning, Delicious generates a blog post that I then copy and publish here.
I really like this feature, because it gives me a way to acknowledge the dozens of interesting things I…
jtoney | December 16, 2010As an antidote to recent postings about Christmas on Pharyngula, which have nothing to do with science or holiday cheer, I would like to share with you a wonderful innovative example of bridging science and technology with the arts: the Virtual Choir.
Composer Eric Whitacre embarked upon an experiment in online social media: he invited singers to post their performances on YouTube and then blended them into a single, integrated performance using Google Earth.
According to his website, the Virtual Choir -
"Featuring 185 voices from over 15 countries worldwide, The Virtual Choir began as a…