Technology
gregladen | April 10, 2009There are a lot of ways to do this, but I just ran across one that may be just what some people need. This is an Open Access book called The Linux Starter Pack produced by Linux Format (which is an over-priced but entertaining Linux magazine).
The "starter pack" is a giant PDF file, 130 pages, which tells you how to install and use a common Linux distribution known as Ubuntu. You've probably heard of it.
Here is where you download the PDF file and learn more about it.
bioephemera | April 7, 2009There are two interdisciplinary science meetings coming up that you should consider attending, in NYC and DC. Strangely enough, the ubiquitous Chris Mooney is speaking at both of them. Hmmm.
From April 30-May 1 in DC will be the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy, which is a somewhat wonky look at federal science policy and government affairs. The agenda highlight? A plenary session on the future of science journalism, to which I'm looking forward with both enthusiasm and curiosity, given the wide range of opinions on the blogosphere. I'm sure there will also be lots of discussion…
pontiff | April 6, 2009The survey of abused words in quantum computing shows the word "exponential" as having an, um, exponential, lead over its competitors. My own personal choice for the most abused word was "scalable," a word that is, in my opinion, the least debated, but most important, concept in quantum computing today. A word which everyone uses but whose definition is strangely missing from all almost all papers that use the word. Here are some thoughts on this word, what it means to particular groups, and what I, in my own pomposity, think the word really should mean.
Note the title of this post is…
clock | April 5, 2009Jay Rosen tweets:
New method: slow blogging at PressThink, daily mindcasting at Twitter, work room at FriendFeed. Example: post in gestation http://is.gd/okca
This is how I understand that:
Step 1 is mindcasting on Twitter (often misunderstood for time-wasting lifecasting, e.g., this), Step 2 is aggregation of a number of imported tweets and digestion of them on FriendFeed, Step 3 is aggregation of several FF threads into a more coherent blog post.
The next step, Step 4, could potentially be to aggregate the ideas and knowledge from several blog posts and publish as an article in the…
amillikan | April 5, 2009While the rumor that Google is in "late stage negotiations" to acquire Twitter, the social networking website based on text message-style entries of 140 characters, hasn't been confirmed, the feasibility of such a notion says volumes about Twitter's massive rise in popularity over the past years. Now the third-largest social networking website (behind facebook and myspace), Twitter has revolutionized the way information is generated and communicated. Naturally, ScienceBloggers are no stranger to this micro-blogging phenomenon. Bora from A Blog Around the Clock reflects on how social…
gregladen | April 4, 2009Contrary to what some have suggested, the worm did, in fact, do what it was expected to do -- it activated, giving the worm-masters full administrator-level control over some five million infected PCs, and making itself much more difficult to detect and fight. The worm generates URLs by which the master computer communicates with infected machines, constantly staying ahead of the efforts of security experts to shut them down. Beginning yesterday, the botnet began communicating over 50,000 domain names in 116 countries -- a dramatic increase over the 250 URLs used by previous versions of the…
amillikan | April 3, 2009While the robotic title character in WALL-E inhabited an Earth of the future, robots are here now, in our labs, factories, and even art galleries. At Aberystwyth University in Wales, a robot named Adam is designing and carrying out genetic tests on yeast, modifying the experiments on its own as it records and processes data. At the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, robots methodically analyze frozen slices of the brain to create a genetic map of the entire organ. And in art galleries across Europe and North America, artist Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca" machines mimic natural human waste…
hrynyshyn | April 3, 2009
Why would I care what you're doing?
The 140-character limit.
Just another opportunity to interrupt real-world social interactions.
Enabling attention-deficit disorder sufferers doesn't seem a like a particularly good idea these days.
Gives NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon an excuse to let listeners do his job for him by tweeting suggested interview questions.
Created to give Starbucks a way to send us all today's list of special coffees.
I have enough media to monitor, thank you very much.
What part of "trivial" don't you understand?
Maybe if we weren't paying so much attention to our…
edyong | April 2, 2009In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way. Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. He carries them out, records and evaluates the results, and comes up with new questions. All of this is part and parcel of a typical scientist's life but there is one important difference that sets Adam apart - he's a robot.
Adam is the brainchild of…
pontiff | April 1, 2009Wow, this is a very cool result:
Researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today's computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they've made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will…
bcohen | April 1, 2009Add this to the list from my prior post: a Locavore app from Enjoymentland, available at the iTunes store. Local agricultural advocates are already using social networking and building virtual marketplaces and identifying market and farm sites nationwide. This feature extends the connection between on-line consumer practices and local food advocacy. Two of my students bought it and are giving it a test run. I'll try to get an update a few weeks into this Spring season.
According to the guy at Enjoymentland who made the app, the iPhone feature does this:
* Automatically detects which…
razib | March 30, 2009A follow up to my earlier post on information technology, In The Age Of Facebook, Researcher Plumbs Shifting Online Relationships:
"You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30 or 40 or 50,' " said Baym. "But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn't otherwise have. Because we do tend to cluster in relationships with strong ties to people that are pretty similar to ourselves. So they don't necessarily know a whole lot that we don't know. They haven't…
edyong | March 29, 2009Anyone who has played video games for too long is probably familiar with the sore, tired and dry eyes that accompany extended bouts of shooting things with rocket launchers. So it might come as a surprise that playing games could actually improve a key aspect of our eyesight.
Renjie Li from the University of Rochester found that intensive practice at shoot-em-ups like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2 improved a person's ability to spot the difference between subtly contrasting shades of grey. In the real world, this "contrast sensitivity function" is reflected in the crispness of…
razib | March 29, 2009Portfolio & Wired have a one-two punch on the future of broadband up. I've read that it takes 3-4 months for a salary increase to be "discounted" so that individuals move up the consumption ladder and no longer feel flush. With internet speed the latency seems far more attenuated; there's always a new application around the corner. The Portfolio piece notes:
Spurred by a new wave of Skype-linked families, Hulu-watching flash mobs, and HD-video downloaders, global internet traffic is likely to quadruple by 2012. That's an internet 75 times larger than it was just five years ago. It will…
drorzel | March 29, 2009I'm putting the finishing touches on Monday's lecture notes when the dog comes into the library, looking concerned.
"Shouldn't I be doing something to promote the book?" she asks.
"Since it won't be out for another nine months, I don't think it's that urgent."
"But aren't there more Internetty things I could be doing?"
"Well, you make regular appearances on the blog, and you've got plenty of friends on Facebook. I suppose you could Twitter."
She draws herself up very haughtily. "I am a dog. I do not twitter."
"Beg pardon?"
"I'm not some stupid bird, fluttering around twittering all the time…
evolvingthoughts | March 28, 2009A dozen or so years ago, or maybe more, I was heading up the communications section of The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, when I employed a young biology graduate as a graphics guy to do medical graphics. This he did for a while, until he started playing with three-dimensional graphics software. He did some animations of cell surface signalling molecules, and of malaria parasites, and cancer cells, and took them to the director, and suggested that we set up an animation unit within the department.
This we did, and within a short while, Drew Berry had managed…
clock | March 27, 2009Kim is excited:
It's official!
The Medbloggers are now a part of BlogWorld/New Media Expo 09!
Thanks to sponsorship from Johnson & Johnson and MedPage Today, the "Medlblogger Meet-Up" is now a reality.
But it is so much more than "just" a meet-up.
A full day of topics, voted on by the medical bloggers themselves, will be presented, with plenty of time to mix and mingle with our blogging colleagues.
Blog World/New Media Expo 09 will take place at the Las Vegas Convention Center the weekend of October 15-17.
New blogger, established blogger, podcaster or internet broadcaster, there is a…
revere | March 27, 2009I may be one of the few people in the world of TV watchers who has never seen a single episode of CSI: Whatever, a show featuring (I am told) "scientific" forensics work. Mrs. R., however, is fond of watching another show, Bones, which features a forensic anthropologist who works with a team that routinely accomlishes astounding feats of scientific detection (example: "That bug we found on the corpse is found only in a parking lot across from a school in Arlington, Virginia. Let's go. The new kidnap victim is probably there.") They can also reconstruct faces from fragments of skull bone and…
razib | March 26, 2009New Nail in Google Cloud Coffin:
Here's what Google fears: If its cloud-computing system crashes, or inadvertently lets companies view their rivals' confidential documents all over the world, the entire system of cloud-based business-information processing collapses. Companies' most precious secrets are leaked, as are government files; suddenly, your tax history is available for anyone to read. The world's governments and businesses panic and come fleeing back to software that is embedded in individual computers, but not before incalculable damage is done to the modern economy and the privacy…