Technology
drorzel | April 26, 2009I've had an article called How to Set Up a Blog (For the Long Run) open in a browser tab for long enough that I no longer remember what first sent me to it. Which is probably a good thing, because it's irritating as hell:
Life-saving market research tip #2: Use Google. If you do a search for the biggest keyword for your potential blog topic, you want to see lots of organic results and sponsored sponsored results. You especially want to see sponsored results if you want to have any hope of making money with your blog.
The presence of sponsored results means there's action in the marketplace…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2009Follow this, if you will.
A couple of week back I wrote a mostly tongue-in-cheek post titled "Why Twitter is Evil," in the form of a parody of "25 random things about me." Each of the 25 reasons was less than 140 characters long. It was not meant to be taken seriously, although as a subsequent post, "The problem with Twitter" laid out, I do have serious objections to the medium. Here's what happened:
That second post (the one where I explore the sociological consequences of tweeting and following tweets), included a reference to another blogger's disdain for the tweets of writers he otherwise…
gregladen | April 23, 2009With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday.
Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists.
source
But what are the alternatives?
jlynch | April 22, 2009OK, quick question! As regular reader will know, I have migrated to a Mac. I have tons of presentations in Powerpoint which, while written on a PC, open seamlessly on the new machine. However, when I open them in Keynote, some stuff (often charts) get screwed up and I have to regenerate the slide. Question is this: why should I use Keynote over Powerpoint? What do I get in the former that don't get in the latter? Why should I spend my summer converting the presentations? Thanks.
cevans | April 21, 2009
In 1976, NASA Administrator James Fletcher noted that "The question, 'What is feasible?' can be finally answered only by future historians." He was talking about the elaborate plans for space habitats the agency had spent a summer noodling over, but the same remark could have been made to the incredulous before the first moon landing, for example -- or before the birth of transoceanic voyages in the 14th and 15th Centuries.
So begins of one of my favorite pieces of utopist NASA detritus, a document called Space Settlements: A Design Study, made over the course of a 10-week workshop at the…
drorzel | April 21, 2009The book-in-production will be released eight months from tomorrow, which means that I'm thinking of ways to promote it on-line. One obvious possibility would be some sort of YouTube video type thing, showing a conversation with the dog about physics. This runs into problems, though, given that the dog is, well, a dog, and thus doesn't take direction very well. It'd be really difficult to get the right sort of video of her.
One solution to this would be to get some really basic video of me talking to her as a frame for the conversation, and do some sort of animation to fill in the rest. So,…
gregladen | April 20, 2009"Hey, look! I've located my first love! Cool, maybe we can go have dinner or something!" ... precisely the words a newlywed husband was hoping to hear from his wife ...
Amanda was sitting on the couch discovering Facebook, a place on the internet she had been assiduously avoiding until only a day or two earlier. Finally, she became convinced that she could do this and keep it under control ... keep her professional life (as a teacher) separate from it (if any of her students are reading this, don't even try to friend her!). It was fun watching her learn the ins and outs, and to reconnect…
clock | April 19, 2009
I know it's been a couple of months now since the ScienceOnline'09 and I have reviewed only a couple of sessions I myself attended and did not do the others. I don't know if I will ever make it to reviewing them one by one, but other people's reviews on them are under the fold here. For my previous reviews of individual sessions, see this, this, this, this and this.
What I'd like to do today is pick up on a vibe I felt throughout the meeting. And that is the question of Power. The word has a number of dictionary meanings, but they are all related. I'll try to relate them here and hope you…
clock | April 18, 2009Today (yes, I know, it was leaked last night), President Obama announced that the first nations' Chief Technology Officer will be Aneesh Paul Chopra.
The Silicon Valley folks are not pleased. Tim O'Reilly thinks he is an excellent choice. What do you think?
clock | April 17, 2009In today's PLoS Computational Biology: Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article:
Scientific innovation depends on finding, integrating, and re-using the products of previous research. Here we explore how recent developments in Web technology, particularly those related to the publication of data and metadata, might assist that process by providing semantic enhancements to journal articles within the mainstream process of scholarly journal publishing. We exemplify this by describing semantic enhancements we have made to a recent biomedical…
clock | April 16, 2009Ask the pilot:
Ask yourself this: Whom would you prefer at the controls of your plane on a stormy night, a pilot who smoked a joint three days ago, or one who had six hours of sleep prior to a 13-hour workday in which he's performed half a dozen takeoffs and landings? The first pilot has indulged in a career-ending toke; the second is in full compliance with the rules. I have to assume that the FAA realizes the foolery of such enforcement policies, but it nonetheless chooses to put its resources into drug testing and other politically expedient issues. Meanwhile it procrastinates, performing…
gregladen | April 15, 2009If you carry out illegal on line activities and do so using a proxy to anonomize your activities, the crime could be considered "sophisticated" and thus a higher form of felony.
A key vote Wednesday on new federal sentencing guidelines would classify the use of proxies as evidence of "sophistication," increasing sentences by about 25 percent - which could mean years or even decades longer behind bars, depending on the crime. It's akin to judges handing down stiffer sentences when a gun is used in a robbery.
Yet digital-rights advocates are worried. Although they aren't absolving criminals,…
pontiff | April 15, 2009Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he's stress? The answer to that question is available on the iTunes app store today: arXiview. What better way to take out stress and at the same time learn objective C and write an iPhone app that at least one person (yourself) will use?
What is arXiview? It is yet another arXiv viewer (there are two others available, last I…
gregladen | April 15, 2009Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users, according to a survey of college students who also ironically said the social networking site does not interfere with studying.
source
clock | April 14, 2009I have received, from a friend, a draft of an intra-institutional guideline for employee blogging and online behavior. The employer has been anonymized. The document has been written by non-scientist non-bloggers at the institution and is making the rounds prior to formal review and approval.
We have talked about this at ScienceOnline'09 in the session Hey, You Can't Say That!. Here are some of the bloggy responses to that session to get you up to speed:
Deep Thoughts and Silliness: Semi-live Blogging Scienceonline09: Day 2
Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 2: generalised ramblings…
gregladen | April 13, 2009"Yell For Help With Stewie Bronson."
Yell for Help! With Stewie Bronson: UNIX trouble - watch more funny videos
Hat Tip: LUM
gregladen | April 13, 2009A couple of days ago I told you about a "getting started" guide for Linux. Here is another free PDF file that you may find interesting. This is a 170 page Ubuntu reference guide. It predates the current version of Ubuntu, but the vast majority of the contents are 100% useful.
You need to go here to down load it.
jlynch | April 13, 2009Janet has some extensive thoughts about the shenanigans over at Amazon.com. Do wander over and have a read. Suffice it to say, I agree with her and will be withholding any business until all of this has been cleared up to my satisfaction.
pontiff | April 12, 2009
Can quantum computers efficiently compute factorials?
BaconCamp?
Day Took Er Silicon Valley Jrbs?
I wonder how I'd do on a RQ test?