Technology
clock | November 30, 2009TECHIE TUESDAY
"Celebration of Life"
Research Triangle Global Health Excellence & World AIDS Day
Date: December 1, 2009
Time: 4:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Location: RTP Headquarters - 12 Davis Drive
Catering By: Nantucket Café & Neomonde
Did you know the Triangle region is a center of excellence in global health?
Help celebrate World AIDS Day and find out how RTP companies and stakeholders are making an impact on HIV/AIDS and other important global health concerns.
Global health organizations in the Park are helping people live longer, more productive lives by working to address HIV/AIDS and…
clock | November 29, 2009
The nicest post about ScienceOnline2010 to date was penned yesterday by Arikia Millikan, the former Overlord of Seed Scienceblogs.com (the image above is by her as well).
At the conference, Arikia will co-moderate the session on Web Science and I already introduced her here.
In her awesome post she compared the meeting to the Bonnaroo concerts. w00t! She writes:
For those on the forefront of the development of the Web, the World Wide Web conference was an event that educated, inspired and forged partnerships by connecting people whose paths would otherwise never cross…
drorzel | November 27, 2009Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be more profitable for authors to self-publish on the Kindle than to go through a traditional publisher. I'm a little dubious about this, but it's at least an attempt at a quantitative foundation, rather than the usual boundless techno-optimism.
The first comment to the…
milhayser | November 23, 2009
Good science takes time, but good science fiction hinges on impatience. Why wait for the invention of real technological marvels when you can imagine them yourself or see them on TV? On The Quantum Pontiff, Dave Bacon ponders the formative links between fantasy and reality, spurred by an Intel talk on the possibilities of "fictional prototyping." He writes, "the creative act of telling a story shares many similarities with the creative act of developing a new research idea or inventing a new technology." On Built on Facts, Matt Springer compares phasers with lasers, writing "it's a nice job…
pontiff | November 18, 2009Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a…
milhayser | November 15, 2009
In Ethan Siegel's ongoing treatment of dark energy on Starts With A Bang!, he considers a number of alternative explanations for the dimming of redshifted supernovae. Could photon-axion oscillations be to blame, or does a "grey dust" pervade our universe? In another post, Siegel appreciates that our galaxy smells like raspberries and rum, and not, for example, Uranus. His diss to Andromedans: "I bet you stink compared to us!" For more things unseen, Greg Laden on Collective Imagination points us to Kameraflage, a technology that writes secret messages and draw pictures only visible to a…
clock | November 12, 2009From Sigma Xi and SCONC:
American Scientist Pizza Lunch convenes again at noon, Tuesday, Nov. 24 at Sigma Xi's headquarters in Research Triangle Park.
The speaker will be Alex Huang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State University. Prof. Huang is directly engaged with trying to reduce this country's dependence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels. He directs a national research center working on a redesign of the nation's power grid to better integrate alternative energy sources and new storage methods.
American Scientist Pizza Lunch is free and open to science…
drorzel | November 12, 2009The always interesting Timothy Burke has a good post about PowerPoint in classes, spinning off a student complaint. I've been lecturing with PowerPoint-- my own slides, not something sent to me by a textbook company-- since day one, so of course I have opinions on the topic.
For the most part, Burke's points on the pros and cons of PowerPoint are excellent. There's one motive for using PowerPoint that he leaves out, though, and it's slightly at odds with the rest of the advice.
One of the nice things about PowerPoint is that it can be used to provide a record of the lecture, for the sake of…
razib | November 10, 2009I notice more people have Google Wave now. What do you think? I keep leaving blank messages by mistake. Am I the only one?
gregladen | November 9, 2009Just when you thought it was time to abandon the mouse altogether and start using only the command line, the OpenSource world has come up with a mouse with one zillion buttons that allows one-handed use of OpenOffice apps and plays World of Warcraft.
Orvieto, Italy, November 6, 2009 - In partnership with the OpenOffice.org community, WarMouse
announced the release of the OpenOfficeMouse, the first multi-button application mouse designed for
the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. With a revolutionary and patented design
featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and…
drorzel | November 8, 2009Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir:
The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts.
This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler…
gregladen | November 7, 2009I don't mean blog posts or emails. For blog posts I use souped up gedit, and for emails I use pico. (There was a time when I thought I'd be using emacs for both of those, but emacs suffers from a deep philosophical dysfunction.) I'm talking about longer documents that have sections with headings, bibliographies, etc. I may well make this transition with the never-ending paper I'm writing with Lizzie.
It is hard to describe the difference between what are called markup systems and, say Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, or AbiWord to people, especially to some of the newer people who…
drorzel | November 6, 2009Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.
There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as…
gregladen | November 4, 2009Huh?
...The person I was talking to responded (quite seriously) that WYSIWYG means "What You See Is What You Get", not "What They Get", that Word actually renders the document on screen based on the capabilities of the default printer on that computer, so that you should expect the same document to print differently on different computer+printer configurations.
Funny. Not long ago I printed something out that was composed on Word on Windows but was printing out no my Linux computer using Openoffice.org. It came out different (slightly longer, as I recall, than the original). Someone at the…
gregladen | November 2, 2009Google is great, and yes, I know all those tricks that make it greater. But I still want to use REGEX in some cases. So, I figured out a way to do that, in theory, all I need now is the code...
Briefly, the software I need, which I shall call googlereg for now, feeds the harvest from a google search through a regex filter and produces a list of hits.
There are three streams of data that could be fed through the regex filter: The basic output of the Google search (what you see as results on a Google search page), the actual pages found by the Google search, and the entire site at the domain…
clock | October 30, 2009An awesome experiment in Stockholm, Sweden where students changed stairs in a subway station into a piano:
And? More people started using the stairs than the escalator! It's just more fun!
gregladen | October 29, 2009I've stopped paying attention to John Stewart and that other guy what's his name at Comedy Central because over the last month or so every single video form that source I've looked at produces this error:
I've checked for this on three different linux machines running two different Ubuntu distros, all with Firefox and Flash, across one service upgrade for Firefox and Flash. So it is not just a unique strange thing with one computer. Rather, it seems to be a conspiracy against Linux.
Did Microsoft buy Comedy Central or something?
drorzel | October 27, 2009FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet's The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded lectures of Salman Khan are the beginning of the end for bad teachers:
Even assuming, conservatively, that Khan's calculus videos are only slightly above average, roughly half the students taking calculus this semester would save time and pain by watching his lessons instead of paying attention to the mediocre teaching happening in front of them…
ejohnson | October 26, 2009How do we remember, collect, and recognize faces, and do sex and race have any role in how we process and treat faces, and ultimately people? On Collective Imagination, Peter Tu writes about how researchers can use differing theories of facial recognition to further developments in digital security technologies, citing that "this knowledge captured from this domain is so ancient and convoluted that it may not readily yield the practical insights that we seek." Over on Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger discusses a study looking at how we process masculine versus feminine faces, reporting that "sex…
gregladen | October 24, 2009Earlier today a pending non-provisional utility patent application assigned to Apple Computer published. This application, US Patent Application 20090265214, is titled Advertisement in Operating System, and covers exactly what the title implies; namely an operating system that is capable of displaying a variety of advertisements to users. You are likely to have heard of the first listed inventor, Steven Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. While it is difficult to know the purpose and strategy behind a patent application, the attorneys at Fish & Richardson in Minneapolis…