Technology
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2008
The Greens have sought explanations from Minister Against Broadband Stephen Conroy in the Senate. In particular Green senator Scott Ludlam asked Conroy to take back his claim that what the ALP wants is like what is done in Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand; in these cases the filtering is voluntary and restricted. Moreover, Conroy refused to say what "unwanted content" was defined as, and who would make that determination.
Michael Malone of iiNet called Conroy the "worst minister ever". In the meantime ISPs are being asked to trial the filtering. What effect a bad experience would…
pharyngula | November 11, 2008Darksyde has an interesting post up about the future of NASA. We've got a new president coming who has promised change — let's see if one of the changes he will make is to kick the space program out of its rut. I don't know if he can promise more money to every science program we've got, but he could at least put effective, principled administrators in place who will use their budgets more appropriately.
We do have a list of Obama's promises on science and technology. They do include more investment in the space program, as well as opening up stem cell research, more money for science…
clock | November 10, 2008The paranoid secrecy is one of the hallmarks of the Bush Administration. The signs are there that Obama will have the opposite approach. But how exactly?
Here, the staff of the Sunlight Foundation has posted a set of recommendations to Obama and his administration: Open Letter to the Obama Administration on How to Shine Sunlight:
Dear Mr. President-Elect,
In your acceptance speech, you rightfully called on Americans to get ready to work to address the challenges that tomorrow will bring. All of us at Sunlight affirm to pitch in and work harder, and agree that we all have to look after each…
evolvingthoughts | November 10, 2008
The internet filtering debacle raises some more general issues I have with my nation's governments' tendency to censor ideas it doesn't like. Sure, there's the "Won't somebody think of the children" justification, which is a Good Intention (suitable for paving roads), but surely the best bet is to go for the producers of child pornography through legal sanctions and encourage parents to take responsibility for their children's internet habits by using family clean feeds and monitoring their behaviour rather than penalise everybody to suit a few religious interests.
In a democracy, under…
cevans | November 10, 2008
For over six months, Veronica McGregor has been Twittering from Mars.
Of course, she's not living among the wind storms and dirt of the red planet herself, but she is the voice of MarsPhoenix, the strangely compelling, first-person, lonely robot Twitter feed that somehow became the official mouthpiece of NASA's Phoenix mission and has catalyzed an entirely new kind of public involvement in science.
MarsPhoenix is followed by over 37,000 people online, and provides daily updates on Martian weather conditions, scientific discoveries, as well as pithy observations about our role in the…
evolvingthoughts | November 9, 2008
Read this article by Mark Newton. This gets murkier and sillier by the day.
Late addition: From the comments at the linked site:
As a young person ( 22 ) who has been brought up on the internet and as a ALP member myself working for a Labor State Govt. I have told my boss the state MP that I will seriously think about resigning my memberhsiup to the ALP should this pass.
Used to be, the ALP was the party of liberalisation and freedom of expression...
Late late note:
From here, courtesy of Jason Grossman
Later note: It's picking up in the media at last... see ITWire, and now The Age.
gregladen | November 9, 2008You know how the right wing hates France? There was a time decades back when something really bad happened with Japan, and the right wing decided to extra-hate Japan. The right wing has always hated Japan and does now, but this was a nadir in this touchy relationship having to do with cars. Just at this time, we (the archeology team I was with) had a large contract that included expansive suburban neighborhoods. As we wandered between streets and rights-of-way behind people's homes, avoiding dogs and angry landowners who never check the junk that comes with their utility bills warning them…
gregladen | November 9, 2008My brother sent me this, thinking it would be cool to get one at the cabin:
Mini nuclear plant...
Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.
The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based…
clock | November 6, 2008Simon Owens just published a nice article on PBS' MediaShift about crashing internet polls. My SciBlings PZ Myers and Greg Laden were interviewed for the article and have said some smart things with which I agree.
pharyngula | November 6, 2008PBS has an article on poll crashing, which interviews yours truly and Greg Laden about our curious penchant for sending mobs out to vote on silly online polls. They also interview some of the recipients of the floods…and no one seems to mind.
edyong | November 6, 2008They say that a poor workman blames his tools but according to a new study, laboratory scientists may well have cause to. Reid Macdonald from the University of Alberta has found that some botched experiments may be due to chemicals leaching from the very plastic tubes that scientists use on an everyday basis.
Disposable plasticware like the ubiquitous Eppendorf tubes are a staple of laboratory research, as essential to a biologist as a mixing bowl is to a cook. They are always sterilised before use, which reassures researchers that they can run their experiments free of contamination. But…
drorzel | November 6, 2008Getting back to science, at least for the moment, I was puzzled by a press release from RPI, with the eye-catching headline Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect' absorption of sunlight, from all angles. The article describes work published in Optics Letters (that I haven't been able to put my hands on yet), developing new anti-reflection coatings to enhance the absorption of light by silicon solar panels:
An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it -- meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an…
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent…
drorzel | November 2, 2008Via FriendFeed, an interesting analysis of Internet traffic at compete.com. They set out to test the assertion that the "Long Tail" of low-traffic sites account for more traffic than they used to, and found exactly the opposite-- the share of all pageviews for the top ten domains increased from 29% to 40% between 2001 and 2008.
What's really interesting is the reason why:
The driver of this Top Domain growth can be summed up in two words "social networks". If you were to remove MySpace and Facebook from consideration in 2006 (also removing their pageviews from the total) top domains would…
drorzel | November 1, 2008So, I've recorded a bunch of video for the dance-like-a-monkey thing. I want to edit several of these clips together in order to form a longer clip. I did this once before with video recorded using Kate's camera, to make the Hoops With Moss video, using the Movie Maker program that came with Vista on the tablet PC.
Of course, because computers hate me, the webcam I used to record the monkey-dancing clips records in some DIVX format (video uses the DIVX 5.0 codec, audio is PCM audio, if that matters), and while downloading and installing the DIVX codec got Windows Media Player to recognize the…
pontiff | October 31, 2008Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor's algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the "post quantum world", i.e. for a world…
clock | October 31, 2008Duncan Hull and colleagues just published an excellent, must-read article - Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web:
Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational…
clock | October 30, 2008Ed Cone interviews the security guru Bruce Schneier about voting machines:
There are a couple of reasons that things like automatic teller machines and gas pumps are more secure. The first one is, there's money involved. If someone hacks an ATM, the bank loses money. The bank has a financial interest in making those ATMs secure. If someone hacks a voting machine, nobody loses money. In fact, half the country is happy with the result. So it's much harder to get the economic incentives aligned.
The other issue about voting machines is that ballots are secret. A lot of the security in…
drorzel | October 30, 2008Steinn responds to yesterday's post about his comments about science blogging. I'm going to continue the tradition of responding here, rather than in his comments, because, well, I need something to post today.
He concedes that outreach is a worthy purpose of blogging, but continues to be concerned about blogging as a tool for more traditional science:
Is blogging enabling collaborations?
Is blogging leading to new initiatives? New directions in research? Providing connectivity which would not otherwise have happened? Conveying information that is important to research and otherwise hard to…