Technology
edyong | March 16, 2009The effect that violent films and games have on our minds, and the implications for their place in society, has been a source of much heated debate. Now, a new study looks set to fan the flames even further. Several studies have found that violent media can desensitise people to real acts of violence, but Brad Bushman from the University of Michigan and Craig Anderson from Iowa State University have produced the first evidence that this can actually change a person's behaviour, affecting their decisions to help others in need.
Using professional actors, they found that after 20 minutes of…
clock | March 15, 2009 20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
clock | March 15, 2009Dave Winer called up Jay Rosen and interviewed him about the potential of twitter-like platforms to become a news/journalistic medium. Listen to the podcast here. Join the discussion here.
Related: What does twitter mean for breaking news stories?
On Thursday morning (US Pacific Time), March 12, 2009, a piece of debris came close enough the International Space Station to require the astronauts to take refuge in the Soyez module, just in case there was a collision. In the end, the debris passed by without incident.
I experienced this event almost entirely through twitter. This essay is to…
clock | March 15, 2009Andrew Blum in WIRED:
...More than 2 million flights pass over the city every year, most traveling to and from the metropolitan area's three busiest airports: John F. Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia. And all that traffic squeezes through a network of aerial routes first laid out for the mail planes of the 1920s. Aircraft are tracked by antiquated, ground-based radar and guided by verbal instructions issued over simplex radios, technology that predates the pocket calculator. The system is extremely safe--no commercial flight has been in a midair collision over the US in 22 years--but, because…
clock | March 14, 2009
Help scientists track plant and animal cycles:
The USA-National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) -- a University of Arizona, Tucson-based group of scientists and citizens that monitors the seasonal cycles of plants and animals -- is calling for volunteers to help track the effect of climate change on the environment.
The group is launching a national program encouraging citizen volunteers to observe seasonal changes among plants and animals, like flowering, migration and egg-laying. They can then log in and record their observations online at the USA-NPN website.
"The program is designed for…
revere | March 14, 2009As regular readers know, Albert Einstein was my culture hero when I was a youth (and he still is, although I am no longer a youth). But it's all relative.). Anyway, today is the 130th anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, here's another peek at what's happening in the world of robotics (see here for a previous foray into the world of robots). This one has an Einstein theme:
gregladen | March 13, 2009.... Not to pick on Norm's physical appearance or anything, but those of use who find his continued existence in Minnesota politics both enigmatic and unconscionable (for us, for allowing it) are starting to see him like that. Anyway, somebody who is too busy to blog sent me this interesting item: Wikileaks comes back at Coleman on donor database exposure. The long and the short of it: Norm Coleman's campaign donor database, including such interesting items as name and credit card number, became internet-visible a couple of months back. Since that time, this error was exposed, and Norm…
razib | March 12, 2009
Have any of my Canadian readers gotten their hands on the All-In-One Pomegranate Smartphone? I've heard the "hand-warmer" feature was designed specifically for customers in the Great North.
clock | March 12, 2009Sorry, Nina, but I think I need to copy and paste the entire thing here:
Spring is here and it's time to talk to strangers. On Sunday April 5, I'll be conducting a collaborative experiment with 15 intrepid University of Washington graduate students, and I'd like to invite you to join in from your own hometown. April 5 is the first day of a class I'm teaching called Social Technology, in which we are focusing on designing an exhibition that features social objects, that is, exhibits or artifacts that inspire interpersonal dialogue.
To kick off the course, we're doing a simple exercise at the…
clock | March 12, 2009Joshua Davis wrote an amazing article for Wired - The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist - about the biggest successful bank robbery in history: how was it accomplished, why the perpetrators got caught in the end, and how come nobody still knows all the details (including the Big Question: where on Earth is all that loot today?). He interviews some of the key people in the story as well, with proper caveats about their trustworthiness. A masterful example of good journalism and a riveting read. The Obligatory Reading Of The Day.
clock | March 12, 2009On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting:
Even a few years ago the word "blog" inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they're proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he mistook for interesting ones, to be read by a handful of friends or strangers if they were read at all.
That blogs have now become a fixture of media and culture might, you'd think, give critics pause before indulging in another round of new media ridicule. But it ain't so.
Twitter, the micro-messaging…
edyong | March 11, 2009Tigers can no more change their stripes than leopards can change their spots. That's a good thing too, for their unchanging patterns, as individually distinct as a human fingerprint, make it easier to track any single tiger over time.
That process is about to become even simpler with a computer programme that creates a three-dimensional model of a tiger's skin and can compare different shots of an animal taken at different times or angles. The programme is the brainchild of Lex Hilby from an organisation called Conservation Research and it could allow conservationists to track surviving…
revere | March 11, 2009We've all heard stories about how emergency workers (aka first responders) have had trouble communicating at disaster sites because their equipment was not "interoperable," that is, operated at different frequencies or use incompatible methods. But disasters in big cities have other problems, even when the interoperability one is solved. There are so many physical obstacles -- buildings, steel girders, possibly rubble or wreckage -- that create barriers or echoes or other problems that prevent workers from speaking to each other even when they are close by. An article, still in press at IEEE…
jlynch | March 10, 2009It's Day 5 of my transition to using OS X and all is well. Once I got used to the different ways of doing things, things have been running remarkably smoothly. The trackpad on the Macbook has taken a bit of getting used to, but I now find myself pawing impotently at the pad on my Dell when I need to use it. Go figure. I don't think I'll be going back to a non-Apple product.
Some things I like:
Software installation & deletion is a breeze.
Sleep mode - being able to put the machine in a sleeve for a few hours, carry it around, and reawaken it in a flash without it overheating is a dream.…
clock | March 10, 2009Five tips for citizen journalism from ProPublica's new "crowdsorcerer":
On Thursday, the non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica named Amanda Michel its first "editor of distributed reporting." Her title alone suggests the future of news gathering, and so does her background: Michel was director of The Huffington Post's citizen-journalism effort, Off the Bus, which enlisted 12,000 volunteers to cover the 2008 presidential campaign.
Michel wrote a must-read account of the project for Columbia Journalism Review, and she expounded on the experience in an hour-long interview with me…
clock | March 10, 2009Gunnar Engblom has another hit: Twitter for birders - Part 1. An introduction - which starts introductory enough, but I am intrigued by the last sentence:
In part 2 of "Twitter for birders" I will tell you how something called hashtags will revolutionize birding and make all bird alert services obsolete in a near future.
Can't wait to see what it really means....
revere | March 10, 2009Way back on New Year's Eve of 2005, when we were still hosted over at Blogger, I did one of my more popular posts about how a toilet works. Most people don't know. I'm guessing they have some kind of vague mental image that when you push the toilet handle a trapdoor opens up somewhere and the contents of the toilet bowl fall through to the abyss. But that's not what happens and I felt compelled to explain it. The pretext was a long article from the Wall Street Journal about how toilets are tested. The official testing material is . . . miso (a Japanese fermented soybean paste). I thought of…
thusspakezuska | March 9, 2009Ironing is women's work. And women's work, we know, has nothing to do with engineering or technology. Irons are not technology; they are domestic appliances.
Collect a bunch of them, though, and they start looking like technological art objects. Then you can write a book about them.
Which is exactly what Jay Raymond has done. For the past 25 years, he's been collecting vintage electric irons.
But not just any old electric irons. Raymond had a thing for streamlined irons, whose sleek, curvy designs make them look more like an art object than a domestic appliance.
Raymond, it turns out,…