Technology
clock | August 7, 2008Jeff Jarvis - The myth of the creative class:
Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don't lament that, not for a moment.
The…
neurophilosophy | August 7, 2008The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs, or roadside bombs) has led to an increase in the numbers of troops sustaining traumatic brain injury during military service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such injuries are caused by the high pressure shock waves generated by the explosions, which cause rapid head movements, such that the brain is sheared and torn as it comes into contact with the inside of the skull.
Whereas conventional traumatic brain injuries caused by penetrative head wounds are easily diagnosed, those who sustain this kind of closed head injury often exhibit no external wounds…
gregladen | August 7, 2008Remember the earlier discussion of the DNS bug? If the internet is the post office, the DNS is the collection of all of the addresses on all of the envelopes traveling around the system. It is secure, inherently. But caching is used as part of the system to make it more efficient, and the caches are NOT secure. So, this would be like an evil genius making the local postal deliver person always see the Evil Genius Address whenever s/he is about to deliver a check, and NEVER seeing it when s/he is about to deliver a bill. So the checks all go to the evil genius and the bills never do. Or…
laelaps | August 7, 2008Will of The Dragon's Tales is heading a group called Team Phoenicia, their aim being the construction of a lunar lander as part of the Lunar Lander Challenge and the Google Lunar X Prize. You can find out more about the project here, and the team certainly could use some donations to keep the project moving along. Keep checking their blog for updates, too, as I expect that we will hear great things from Will and his team as the challenge progresses.
gregladen | August 6, 2008Graphics software for Linux is superior to most other software for several reasons. Since the Linux system is inherently more efficient than other systems, memory-hungry graphics operations will always run faster, better, and more reliably on a Linux box than on, say, a Windows box, all else being equal. Day to day graphic needs can be met with a wider range of software on Linux than on other systems. Most of the available applications are OpenSource, so not only are they free and easier to install, but no puppies were mutilated during the production of the software.
The purpose of this…
gregladen | August 6, 2008On this day in 1945 ...
The first atomic bomb has been dropped by a United States aircraft on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
President Harry S Truman, announcing the news from the cruiser, USS Augusta, in the mid-Atlantic, said the device was more than 2,000 times more powerful than the largest bomb used to date.
An accurate assessment of the damage caused has so far been impossible due to a huge cloud of impenetrable dust covering the target. Hiroshima is one of the chief supply depots for the Japanese army.
The bomb was dropped from an American B-29 Superfortress, known as Enola Gay, at…
gregladen | August 5, 2008
So if you have a CD r/w machine in your computer, there is a LOT more than you had previously imagined going on inside there. Wow!
clock | August 5, 2008Today, I have everything I need on my computer, and so do most working scientists as well. Papers can be found online because journals are online (and more and more are Open Access). Protocols are online. Books are online. Writing and collaboration tools are online. Communication tools are online. Data collection and data analysis and data graphing and paper-writing tools are all on the computer. No need for having any paper in the office, right? Right.
But remember how new that all is. The pictures (under the fold, the t-shirt is of Acrocanthosaurus at the NC Museum of Natural…
clock | August 4, 2008Michael Shermer - Toward a Type 1 civilization. Ignore the nutty libertarianism - read only this sentence:
Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone.
clock | August 4, 2008The new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century - Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open - send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern.
The business of science - from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity - those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in analytic way than personal, if possible (i.e., not "I will…
clock | August 3, 2008Classroom 2.0:
...the social networking site for those interested in Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies in education.
NoodleTools: Basic Language Literacy:
Online Opportunities for Young Writers - Publications Which Accept Student Submissions
laelaps | August 3, 2008When I petsit for friends I get a chance to see what's on television. Most of the it is crap, but I did catch a NOVA special on "The Car of the Future" featuring the Tappet brothers from "Car Talk." It was a pretty interesting show, outlining a number of competing technologies that may (or may not) change the way we get from A to B. What I found most interesting, though, was the disparity between what independent researchers & companies are doing vs. big time auto makers.
I was first struck by this big difference while watching Who Killed the Electric Car? (and, to a lesser extent, one of…
drorzel | August 3, 2008Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning's New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up.
A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.
The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead.
On the one hand, I hate to see these things blow up. I'm no free-market zealot, but I'm all for cheap space…
drorzel | August 3, 2008Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion.
I'm not sure if this is an editorial mandate, but if it is, this week's feature article takes it to the logical conclusion of just profiling people who are irredeemably awful, and unapologetic about it. This week, they take a look at the culture of Internet trolls:
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing…
edyong | August 3, 2008With their latest film WALL-E, Pixar Studios have struck cinematic gold again, with a protagonist who may be the cutest thing to have ever been committed to celluloid. Despite being a blocky chunk of computer-generated metal, it's amazing how real, emotive and characterful WALL-E can be. In fact, the film's second act introduces a entire swarm of intelligent, subservient robots, brimming with personality.
Whether or not you buy into Pixar's particular vision of humanity's future, there's no denying that both robotics and artificial intelligence are becoming ever more advanced. Ever since…
clock | August 2, 2008CNN creates blogging policy, encourages employees to engage in sockpuppetry:
Chez Pazienza, a former CNN producer who was fired six months ago for having a personal blog, obtained a copy of the new blogging policy that his former employer sent out to all staff (I've also copy and pasted it below). While it allows employees to blog, they have to get it approved by a supervisor and it bars them from mentioning anything that CNN would cover -- in other words, it keeps them from talking about just about anything but their own belly lint. And even that would be ruled out if we all found out…
gregladen | August 1, 2008U can haz KDE 4.1 ~ Javascript ~ Would apple mess with your music? ~ When pseudonymous trolls get out of hand.
If you want KDE 4.1 and you want it now, have a look at this guide to installing it on your LInux Ubuntu 8.04 box ahead of its appearance in the Ubuntu repository.
For those who don't know what that means: A given distribution of LInux may use a particular method of installing software that in turn uses on line repositories. Individual software items may be added to this repository at the discretion of the maintainers of the distribution. Some distributions are fairly…
gregladen | August 1, 2008Remember bug? (We wants our BUGs.... yessss)Of Buglabs? Here's more:
From Linux Journal.
clock | July 31, 2008There is a new study out there - Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial - that some people liked, but Peter Suber and Stephan Harnad describe why the study is flawed (read Harnad's entire post for more):
To show that the OA advantage is an artefact of self-selection bias (or any other factor), you first have to produce the OA advantage and then show that it is eliminated by eliminating self-selection bias (or any other artefact).
This is not what Davis et al did. They simply showed that they could detect no OA advantage one year after publication…