Technology
grrlscientist | August 19, 2008tags: Who Blogs, blog writing and personality, Big Five personality inventory, social psychology, technology, computers, internet, researchblogging.org
You all read blogs, and many of you write them, too. But what sort of person writes a blog? Are there particular personality traits that make certain people more likely to write a blog? If so, what are those personality traits? Do you have them, too?
A team of scientists, led by psychologist Rosanna Guadagno from the University of Alabama, wondered what personality traits made some people more likely than others to write blogs. To answer…
neurophilosophy | August 17, 2008Last week, I wote about the robot controlled by a "brain" in a culture dish, and in that post, I mentioned that several other groups, including members of the Neuroengineering Lab at Georgia Tech, have been doing similar work.
Steve Potter, who leads one of the groups at Georgia Tech's NeuroLab (and whose work I wrote about back in 2006), has now left a comment on the post, saying that the claims made by the University of Reading researchers are exaggerated:
I am disappointed to see Kevin Warwick again overstating things, but am especially bothered when it is about things we are also doing in…
gregladen | August 17, 2008The beagle board, which costs only about 150 bucks, is a full blown Linux-capable computer that is so simplified and low powered that it does not need a fan. Its main method of communication (other than video output) is via USB (no ethernet). But that can work.
For a write-up about this cutie, go here. To just get it over with and buy one, go here.
edyong | August 16, 2008
Imagine reading the paper to find that a new wonder drug has been created that could save your life, if only you could afford it. Alternatively, put yourself in the shoes of the authorities that must decide not to offer powerful new drugs on the NHS because they simply aren't cost-effective enough. These situations are all too common-place and are often due to the extremely high costs of drug development. But a couple of years ago, scientists at Icon Genetics and Bayer Bioscience made an exciting step toward lowering these costs for some of the most promising new treatments.
The…
clock | August 16, 2008Downtown Revival:
The decline of downtown Gastonia, N.C., began long before Jennifer Harper was born, exacerbated by the collapse of the state's textiles manufacturing industry and the exodus of retailers to suburban shopping malls. But the young Gastonia native is lending her design skills to help restore the town center to its prime - and its roots.
Harper, who graduates in August with a master's degree in industrial design from North Carolina State University, walked into city hall a few months ago when she heard that city officials were planning a new convention center for the downtown…
clock | August 15, 2008Why Rage? Because Henry inspired me (though Mrs.Gee made him edit out the 'excessive' language). Why 2.0? Because I am all gung-ho about everything 2.0. So there!
So, like Henry, I will now proceed to rage about something....
Hotels
I've been traveling a lot lately, often staying in some very top-of-the-line hotels around the USA and Europe. Lovely hotels. Very comfortable. Very clean. Great service. Good food. Lots of cool amenities. More and more environmentally friendly. Nothing really to complain about. And I certainly do not want to single out Millennium UN Plaza hotel just…
gregladen | August 15, 2008
Assume for a moment that I've used this DNS exploit to take control of your email account. The most obvious effect is that I can now read your mail. Also, I can read your mail and continue forwarding it to you, so that you never realize there is a problem. I can add attachments to your messages, or infect existing attachments from people you trust with viruses or malware. When your best friend sends a link to you about that funny video on YouTube, well, I can rewrite that link to go anywhere I want.
Yes, folks, the DNS bug is for real and potentially serious. Here's a bit of information on…
clock | August 15, 2008Vedran has done it again: Aggregator of RSS feeds concerning web accessibility
clock | August 15, 2008First Line of Defense:
A new facility at North Carolina State University will help provide increased protection to first responders by testing their turnout gear against potentially harmful chemical and biological threats.
The Man-in-Simulant Test (MIST) laboratory, located in NC State's College of Textiles, will allow researchers to evaluate the capabilities of protective garments against non-toxic vapors that resemble chemical and biological agents. The new facility will give researchers the necessary technological advances to provide test results and analysis faster than similar facilities…
razib | August 14, 2008Pubmed + RSS + iGoogle = Easy Lit Updates:
...The idea is to use the combined power of Pubmed, RSS feeds and iGoogle to create a page of RSS feed boxes that will keep you continually updated on articles containing your keywords of interest, or from specific authors or journals. It is nice and simple, but I find it an incredibly powerful and fast method of literature scanning compared to email updates or browsing each journal individually.
clock | August 14, 2008My old neighbor, while I was living in Raleigh, is making some headlines now: Power to the People:
Within weeks of completing his master's degree in advanced analytics at North Carolina State University, Arren Fisher scored a job in data analysis at the Laboratory Corporation of America.
"It involves predictive modeling," Fisher explains. "In layperson's terms, super duper data mining."
Despite the tight national economy, Fisher and his classmates are getting lots of job offers because they're experienced users of the advanced software programs that marketing firms utilize to predict consumer…
jlynch | August 13, 2008I have a large digital music collection. Every file is correctly tagged and album art is both embedded in the file and available as a jpg in the album folder. All of that took about four straight days to do over the summer using MediaMonkey (which I now also use to sync my collection with my iPod Classic). Unfortunately, I have some DRMed music bought from the iTunes store and have to use iTunes to get them onto the iPod. But here's what gets me - every time I transfer the DRMed tracks over, iTunes not only screws up the album art on the DRMed tracks, but also screws with the album art of…
neurophilosophy | August 13, 2008
Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish.
The robot's "brain" consists of several hundred thousand neurons isolated from embryonic rat neocortex. The cortical tissue was first dissected out, then treated with enzymes which caused the cells to dissociate from one another. The resulting cell suspension was then added to a culture dish containing nutrients.
Rather than plating the cells onto a standard culture dish, the researchers instead grew them on one…
purepedantry | August 12, 2008Engineers at Penn State have developed a new method of running a refrigerator that doesn't require a compressor. Rather, it changes the level of organization in a solid to change the temperature. This change in entropy results in heat-transfer.
Conventional cooling systems -- refrigerators or air conditioners -- rely on the properties of gases to cool and most systems use the change in density of gases at changing pressures to cool. The coolants commonly used are either harmful to people or the environment. Freon, one of the fluorochlorocarbons banned because of the damage it did to the…
gregladen | August 10, 2008Myungwan Kim was beaten by the MoGo computer system by 1.5 points in a nine stone game.
"It played really well," said Kim, who estimated MoGo's current strength at "two or maybe three dan," though he noted that the program - which used 800 processors, at 4.7 Ghz, 15 Teraflops on borrowed supercomputers - "made some 5-dan moves,"
Read the horrific details here.
gregladen | August 10, 2008This is kinda cool. It is a flash (I presume) doohickey that presents a detailed interactive timeline of internet memes.
Click here. Pass it on. To everyone you know.
gregladen | August 9, 2008Two security researchers have developed a new technique that essentially bypasses all of the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system, an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks.
In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they've found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR),…
clock | August 9, 2008Aggregator of RSS Feeds about disability and special needs issues, another one made by Vedran. As always, you can contact him with suggestions for more feeds to add.
clock | August 8, 2008Aggregator of news about infectious diseases, another one made by Vedran. As always, you can contact him with suggestions for more feeds to add.
gregladen | August 7, 2008 Linux has powerful graphics tools For the average user or the professional image manipulator, there is a range of OpenSource software that will run on Linux as well as (in some cases) other platforms such as Windows. As discussed earlier, there are two basic kinds of image: Bit mapped and vector. Here we are looking at some of the bit mapped software.
There are many options in the OpenSource world, but in the end you are most likely to choose as your main graphics application Krita if you use KDE, or The Gimp if you use any other desktop (in particular Gnome). Both are slick and…