Technology
clock | October 3, 2009Crossing the Line? Biomedical Technology in Sports
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, 833-7795
In the end, it was a split second rather than an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruling that kept double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius from competing in the Beijing Summer Olympics. He didn't hit the 400-meter qualifying time of 45.55 seconds, despite running a personal best 46.25 on his carbon-fiber prosthetic legs at a track meet in Lucerne, Switzerland. In…
gregladen | October 2, 2009I have mixed feelings about automatic updates of one or more social networking sites from another social networking site. Like when you twitter something and your Facebook status gets the same string of words, or visa versa. I know a few people who do this on a regular basis, and it seems to work very differently depending on what the person tends to write and how the connection between her or his social networking sites is set up.
As background to this discussion I should tell you how I interface with the various intertubual entities.
Posts on Greg Laden's Blog are automatically tweeted,…
edyong | October 1, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
At Harvard University, a group of creative scientists have turned the brains of mice into beautiful tangles of colour. By mixing together a palette of fluorescent proteins, they have painted individual neurons with up to 90 different colours. Their technique, dubbed 'Brainbow', gives them an unprecedented vision of how the brain's cells are connected to each other.
The art of looking at neurons had much…
gregladen | September 30, 2009These two OpenSource operating versions, to become available over the next several weeks, demonstrated improvements over prior versions and compare well to each other.
I woul like to tell you that my preferred operating system, Ubuntu, came out on top .... and it did! But if you are selecting an operating system where speed is essential and there is a limited range of tasks to be performed regularly, you should compare the two more closely by looking at the review. While Ubuntu rocked, FreeBSD kicked butt in a few areas., especially pertaining to SQL related tasks.
Actually, there is…
gregladen | September 30, 2009According to Google, this is what wave (which is OpenSource) is:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.
And here's the…
hrynyshyn | September 29, 2009The arguments against carbon capture and sequestration are legion and the list of reasons not to invest more resources in the technology just keeps getting longer. Here's a new analysis from Canadian journalist Graham Thomson. Some of his figures-- on global carbon emissions, for example -- are less than accurate, and this isn't peer-reviewed science, just a journalist's compendium commissioned by the Munk Centre for International Studies University of Toronto. But even allowing for that, Thompson manages to hit the proverbial nail on the head:
The very promise of CCS, whether delivered or…
clock | September 28, 2009This is awesome - Botanicalls. See one of the developer's amazing Ignite talk:
hrynyshyn | September 28, 2009U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is all about saving the coal industry. In the latest issue of Science, which includes a feature series on carbon capture and sequestration, he writes optimistically about the challenges and opportunities such technologies pose and why it could save us all from catastrophic climate change.
At least, that's what I take away from his short essay. I don't doubt Chu's sincerity, or his ability to synthesize data. He is, after all, a holder of Nobel Prize for physics. But I'm afraid he hasn't got a good grip on the economics of the matter.
In his essay, Chu writes…
gregladen | September 27, 2009Unlikely, but it could happen. A judge recently ordered a person's Gmail account to be shut down. Why? Because that person received an email from a bank. The email was not supposed to be sent to that person, and it contained account information that person was not supposed to see.
The order, issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware in the northern district of California, also requires Google to disclose the Gmail account holder's identity and contact information. The Gmail user hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing.
The Rocky Mountain Bank, in Wilson, Wyoming, sent…
gregladen | September 26, 2009Cobol is the opposite of a modern computer langauge, in some ways. But it is the language that a lot of business systems are written in, so chances are you "use" Cobol almost as much as you "use" Linux, even if you never heard of either.
COBOL is used to power almost all global ATM transactions and runs almost three quarters of the world's business applications. It helps book hundreds of holidays every single day.
And, according to enterprise application management company, Micro Focus, more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence, with hundreds more being created every single day…
gregladen | September 25, 2009This is not a parody. I think.
Hey, wait, is that the Apple guy on the left?
OK, let's do an activity. Let's list all the things that could GO WRONG at this party! OK?
I'll start:
OH, and I love the fact that at the end the Apple Guy (the one on the left) gives us the South American guy-to-guy symbol for "I just slept with your wife, loser!"
Hat tip: Somebody from a different OS company.
clock | September 24, 2009On Tuesday night I went to the RTP headquarters for Techie Tuesday, an occasional event when people who work in various companies in the Park come over, after work, and have some good food, a beer, and get to relax and chat and meet new people. It is quite a lot of fun. Pictures under the fold (better quality on Twitpic):
neurophilosophy | September 23, 2009
REMOTE-CONTROLLED insects may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but they have already been under development for some time now. In 2006, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the Pentagon's research and development branch) launched the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems program, whose ultimate aim is to turn insects into unmanned aerial vehicles.
Such projects provide proof of principle, but have met with limited success. Until now, that is. In the open access journal Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, a team of electrical engineers led by…
hrynyshyn | September 18, 2009It's a surprisingly complicated question. There are few reliable sources of data on just how much energy and resources are involved in extracting petroleum from the bitumen-laden sands of northern Alberta. But the inertia that comes with the tens of billions of dollars that have been invested in the tar sands so far means that it's an important question that needs to be answered as we plan our future energy portfolios. Keeping the planet's temperature to a habitable range depends on which fuels we use.
All of which means it's critical to carefully evaluate claims about the greenhouse-gas…
pharyngula | September 16, 2009It turns out that there are a few simple rules to follow when submitting your computer dating form.
Around 42 per cent of messages which included the word "atheist" achieved replies, significantly higher than the average response rate of 32 per cent.
References to "Christian", "Jewish" and "Muslim" boosted a message's success rate only marginally, while mentioning "god" in a first approach actually discouraged people from replying.
So just maybe, being godless will increase your fitness in this next generation. Although, given the growing reputation of Christianity, it might just be a…
gregladen | September 14, 200926 years ago, more or less, I was a graduate student and beginning a teaching career, but short of cash. I remember an opportunity arose for me to make some money programming. I thought, "OK, I can make some money in this computer biz, and use that to cover doing what I really want to do, research and teaching."
[A repost: Check out the comments on last year's post.]
Just around that time, as I remember, I saw a long haired bearded guy from MIT being interviewed on TV, talking about free software, and how coding software was his art, his love, is vocation, and that he did things like…
hrynyshyn | September 14, 2009One of Canada's best journalists, Andrew Nikiforuk, is the author of a just-released report on Canada's tar sands from Greenpeace. "Dirty Oil: How the tar sands are fueling the global climate crisis" is not a peer-reviewed paper, it was commissioned by environmental activists, and it relies heavily on other non-peer-reviewed reports by non-objective organizations. Despite all that, it's still a solid, reliable read that every Canadian and American with an interest in energy policy should download promptly.
There isn't a lot new in the report for anyone who's been following the massive…
clock | September 10, 2009Best Slideshow About Social Media:
What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
View more documents from Marta Kagan.
The follow-up to this., from Berci
ejohnson | September 8, 2009
Labor Day marks the traditional transition into fall. It also boasts some of the busiest days for moviegoers, and ScienceBloggers have early reviews of two of the season's films. The Primate Diaries takes a critical look at Peter Jackson's blockbuster film District 9 through the eyes of an anthropologist, citing its "eerily familiar" messages about race politics and colonialism: "District 9 is an exciting, action-packed thriller but it would be missing the point to simply enjoy the spectacle without looking at what the filmmakers had intended to reveal." And on SciencePunk, Frank Swain…
hrynyshyn | September 8, 2009The typical western post-industrial human being has two roles to play in society: citizen and consumer. Both offer the opportunity to exert power and influence, and whether we like it or not, neglecting one over the other invariably gives competing interests an opening. On matter climatological, most campaigners have been focused in recent times on the political sphere, and understandably so: legislation and regulatory proposals are on the table in the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. But there are those who are keeping an eye on the marketplace, where it may also be possible to effect…