Technology
clock | May 11, 2010From the American Scientist:
If you can, join us at noon, Tuesday, May 25, here in Research Triangle Park for our final 2009-2010 American Scientist pizza lunch talk. (Don't worry, we'll start back up in the fall the way we always do.)
Our speaker will be Phaedra Boinodiris, a Serious Games Program Manager at IBM, where she helps craft IBM's serious games strategy in technical training, marketing and leadership development. She'll discuss: "Using Games to develop strategies and skills to thrive in a real-time world." Boinodiris is the founder of the INNOV8 program, a series of games focused…
clock | May 10, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Alex from Miss Baker's Biology class at Staten Island Academy to answer a few questions. You can read about Alex's experience at ScienceOnline2010 here.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about…
clock | May 10, 2010Last week I attended the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh. I posted my summary of the event over on Science In The Triangle blog so check it out.
clock | May 9, 2010Scott Huler (blog, Twitter), the author of 'Defining the Wind', has a new book coming out this Tuesday. 'On The Grid' (amazon.com) is the story of infrastructure. For this book, Scott started with his own house (unlike me, Scott did the work) and traced where all those pipes, drains, cables and wires were coming from and going to, how does it all work, does it work well, where does it all come from historically, and how its current state of (dis)repair portends to the future.
You can read a review in Raleigh News & Observer, as well as an article by Scott in the same paper and another one…
clock | May 9, 2010One difference between reading Open Laboratory anthologies and reading the original posts included in them is that the printed versions are slightly edited and polished. Another difference is that the Prefaces and Introductions can be found only in the books. They have never been placed online.
But now that four books are out and we are halfway through collecting entries for the fifth one, when only the 2009 book is still selling, I think it is perfectly OK to place Prefaces and Introductions that I wrote myself online. I wrote Prefaces for the 2006, 2007 and 2008 book, as well as the…
clock | May 9, 2010Get all the information about people and concepts mentioned in the video here:
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
drorzel | May 8, 2010While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture:
Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of Stanford, science writer Jeff Hecht, John Madey of Hawaii's FEL lab, and Eric Gustafson of Caltech and LIGO.-- about the current status of lasers in their areas of science, and the future prospects.
From ray-gun to Blu-Ray is a very nice survey of lasers and laser-like devices in…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2010tags: Hong Kong Architect Transforms Shoebox Apartment into 24 Rooms, efficient living, home life, architecture, technology, Gary Chang, streaming video
Life is cramped in Manhattan, but if you have enough money and imagination, you can convert your shoebox into a livable space, as this Hong Kong architect did. Find out how award-winning Hong Kong architect, Gary Chang, managed to squeeze 24 rooms -- including a home cinema and ''spa'' -- into 32 square meters (344 square feet) of apartment space.
gregladen | May 3, 2010Michele Bachmann might be the stupidest person who can still breathe.
Do you know what net neutrality is? It is...
...a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions by Internet Service Providers or governments on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed etc. etc.
-Teh Wiki
President Barack Obama once said of Net Neutrality that he is "a big believer in net neutrality. I campaigned on this. I continue to be a strong supporter of it." (source)
Therefor,…
drorzel | May 3, 2010Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The candidates in the traditional suspense-building reverse order:
Lunar laser ranging 22 votes
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show 41 votes
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics 46 votes
Holography 47 votes
Laser eye surgery 53 votes
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) 60 votes
Laser…
sciencepunk | May 2, 2010
On January 15, 1961, the US coastguard raced through the darkness toward a tiny point 84 miles southeast of New York City. There, 28 crew members of Texas Tower 4 were waiting desperately to be evacuated from their station. As huge swells and high winds pounded the hull of the ship, their radios picked up a frantic transmission from the tower: "We're breaking up". And with that, Texas Tower 4 and all of its occupants were pulled beneath the waves.
Built in 1957, the five Texas Towers were intended to become part of the USA's advanced early warning system against Soviet bombers. Named for…
gregladen | May 2, 2010Wouldn't that be great? Hey, there's an Ubuntu Christian Edition, an Ubuntu Muslim Edition, and another Ubuntu Christian Edition. Why not an Atheistubuntu? Or a Skeptibuntu? or, more usefully, I would think, Sciencebunutu with Atheistic tendencies?
(And for those of you who like to cross certain boundaries there could be a Science Fiction Edition. Called, of course ....
... Cthulhubuntu!)
LOL
Anyway, how would a science edition of Ubuntu be different than plain old Ubuntu?
Well, three things. First, it would have a LOT of software automatically included that at present us sciency types…
drorzel | May 2, 2010Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal):
Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it effectively -- as you know, a favorite topic of mine here on The Book Publicity Blog. I don't have time to summarize the entire panel here (and you don't have time to read a summary of the entire panel), but I did want to tackle the issue of timing, a common question among book publicists, authors,…
clock | May 1, 2010Dynamically Programmable Alarm Clock:
Though it ignores biology - the sleep cycles (which some alarm clocks now measure and use) - this is nifty nonetheless.
drorzel | April 30, 2010We're just over 600 votes in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, as of early Friday morning. I notice that it has moved off the front page of the blog, though, so here's another signal-boosting repost, just so we have as many votes as possible, to establish maximum scientific validity when we declare the winner the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Voting will remain open until next Sunday, May 2, just two days from now, with the ultimate winner announced on Monday…
revere | April 27, 2010Once, long ago, I used to be in a radiology department in a famous hospital. I liked radiology quite a bit and even before becoming a doctor I worked in them. Later I did research on the kinds of errors radiologists make when they read x-rays. One of the errors that was extremely well known even 40 plus years ago (although that didn't prevent it from being made with dismaying consistency up to and including today) was something called "satisfaction of search error." In essence, it meant that once one abnormality was found on an x-ray, there was an increased chance of missing a second,…
clock | April 26, 2010I first saw Hashtag Art (on Twitter) at #140conf last week. These guys start with a picture, as a canvass. Then, as people tweet using a particular hashtag, their avatars become pieces of the mosaic, gradually building the image as event is happening. It took about two days, the duration of the meeting, to fill the entire image up.
The image, as it was slowly developing, was occasionally projected on the screen behind the speakers. The Hashtag Art guys were also set up in the side room (where coffee and power-strips were), projecting the image onto a screen.
When I approached them and they…
drorzel | April 26, 2010As of 1:45 Monday, 217 people have cast votes in the Laser Smackdown poll. That's not bad, but it's currently being handily beaten by the 271 people who have voted for a favorite system of units.
The nice thing about using actual poll services for this sort of thing, though, is that I can re-post the poll to boost signal a little. So, here it is again, a list of the twelve most amazing laser applications suggested by my wise and worldly readers, with links to short explanations of the pros and cons of each:
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research…
clock | April 25, 2010WWW2010 is starting tonight. Interested to know more about it? Sure, here's the brief history:
The World Wide Web was first conceived in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The first conference of the series, WWW1, was held at CERN in 1994 and organized by Robert Cailliau. The IW3C2 was founded by Joseph Hardin and Robert Cailliau later in 1994 and has been responsible for the conference series ever since. Except for 1994 and 1995 when two conferences were held each year, WWWn became an annual event held in late April or early May. The location of the conference rotates…