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 eFluxMedia | Netflix Roku Draws Mixed Reactions eFluxMedia - By Dee Chisamera The first impressions on Netflix’s Roku were, as expected, contradictory in every way. While some see it as a cheap invention, definitely not worth to stand beside’s Apple TV, others believe it to be the greatest little black box ... Melissa J. Perenson Roku Netflix Player Hands-On, First Impressions |
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 TopNews | Space Exploration Quiz New York Times - By John Tierney This won’t be on the space exploration quiz: The newest explorer, NASA’s Phoenix, in an artist’s concept of its scheduled landing on Mars. NASA preps for '7 minutes of terror' on Mars Back to Mars: After '99 failure, NASA sets sights on lander ... |
 Spaceflight Now | Hot-Springs In Mars’s Past, A Premise For Life In The Future? eFluxMedia - By Dee Chisamera NASA’s Spirit mission may hold the key to proving that life on Mars is not just wishful thinking. The patch of silica-rich soil accidentally uncovered by the rover last year had a major impact on the scientific community, ... Hot Springs — and Life? — on Mars Vents on Mars could have supported life |
 Washington Post | Casual Friday: Wii Fitness and Gaming Rehab Washington Post - We're all about being healthy this week. Break a sweat with Wii Fit, learn about some other games designed to overcome your lazy streak, and check out a couple of characters that we placed in a 12-step program. Working out with the Wii Fit Game Theory New From Wii: Not Much to Get Worked Up About |
 PhysOrg.com | New York wants open documents Inquirer - By Mark Ballard: Friday, 23 May 2008, 12:16 PM NEW YORK'S chief techie has called for the state's archives and records to be kept in an open document format. Critics unconvinced about Microsoft's interoperability drive Many Skeptical On Msft. ODF Support |
 Business Wire (press release) | HP Makes Strong Environmental Move eFluxMedia - By Michael Todd Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday its plans to aid its customers who are looking for an environmentally friendly imaging and printing product. HP Puts Green Labels on Black-and-white Printers HP Launches Green Initiative For Printing |
 AlaskaReport | NOAA: Above Normal Hurricane Season Ready To Set In eFluxMedia - By Dee Chisamera The upcoming hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin will be above normal this year, and residents in areas usually affected by them should be prepared. NOAA issues cautious hurricane forecast Long-Range Hurricane Forecasting |
 The Money Times | UK Shippin' Out May 23: Rock Band GameSpot - Blighty finally gets Harmonix' multi-peripheral rhythm game--but only on the 360; PS3s get Haze'd, and Age of Conan storms onto PCs. Guitar Hero World Tour Brings Downloads to Wii Owners Guitar Hero Franchise Grows With Mic, Drums, And Bass |
 dBTechno | Google co-founder pushes TV "white space" plan Reuters - By Peter Kaplan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google co-founder Larry Page was in Washington on Thursday to promote the company's proposal for a new generation of wireless devices to operate on soon-to-be-vacant television airwaves. Google co-founder holds court Broadcasters Oppose Google’s Plea For White Spaces |
 Canada.com | Hubble Space Telescope Mission Postponed eFluxMedia - By Michael Todd National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials announced yesterday a delay of over a month for their mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, caused by the slow building progress of the fuel tanks needed for the mission. Hubble Mission Is Moved Back NASA Delays Final Hubble Space Telescope Mission |
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BB co-founder and Make editor in chief Mark Frauenfelder talks to robot builder Daniel O'Connell about his experiment in the uncanny valley, a tricycle-riding mini-me he calls "My Dummy." Shot at Maker Faire Bay Area 2008.
Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.
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Link (via MeFi)
On May 22, 2008, Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He had been in good spirits and working on several new projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very weekend. He is survived by his mother, his sister, his daughter and his son, and his cat, Princess, not to mention countless friends and fans and numerous legendary fictional characters.He will be greatly missed.
1962: A team of 12 doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston reattach the severed arm of an injured boy. It is the first successful reattachment of a human limb.
Freckle-faced Everett "Red" Knowles had been trying to hop a freight train in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was thrown against a stone wall that ripped his right arm off cleanly at the shoulder. Knowles walked away from the tracks, using his left hand to hold his right arm inside a bloody sleeve. A police ambulance rushed the 12-year-old across the Charles River to Boston, where emergency-room staff discovered the extent of his injury.
Surgeons had successfully attached partly severed limbs before, but never had the ideal candidate for a complete reimplantation, or replantation. Mass General's 30-year-old chief surgical resident, Dr. Ronald Malt, had Knowles' arm put on ice, and he assembled the team of experts he needed. All of the techniques they used that day had been used before, but never in the complete combination that saved an entire limb.
In hours of surgery, doctors reconnected the blood vessels, pinned the arm bone together, and grafted skin and muscle together, but they decided to wait to reattach the nerves. To their delight, Knowles' hand turned pink and a pulse returned to the wrist.
Malt became a celebrity. Knowles became a celebrity. The Little Leaguer got souvenirs and letters from Major Leaguers.
In September, doctors reattached four major nerve trunks. Within weeks, Knowles was complaining of severe pain in the arm, which in the unusual circumstances was a good sign.
A year after the surgery Knowles' arm and fingers were sensitive to heat, cold and touch, and he could move his fingers and bend his wrist. He could also play first base -- but only with his one good hand. The year after that, he was playing tennis and baseball. After four years of recovery, Knowles had the same use of his right arm and hand as a natural lefty. He eventually drove a six-wheel truck and lifted sides of beef at his job.
By 1966, surgeons had performed dozens of similar operations, failing at least half the time. That led to a editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that limb replantation be performed only if the patient is under 30 with no other major injury, with the severed limb in good shape, and is in a hospital with top-flight medical facilities. For all other cases, JAMA wrote, an artificial limb might be the better solution.
Source: Various
SAN DIEGO -- Forget everything you've seen on CSI. In the information age, crime scene forensics are beginning to take a back seat to the science of recovering and sifting through evidence hidden on computers, cellphones and thumb drives.
Nowhere is that shift clearer than at the FBI's Regional Forensic Computer Lab here, which once lifted traces of incriminating Google searches from a suspect's hard drive to help convict him of murder. This week the lab became the sixth computer forensic lab in the nation to be accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, in another sign that computer forensics is no longer just about investigating hacker attacks.
"We've found video of gangsters rapping a song about a murder they committed," RCFL examiner John Leamons says.
The growth of law enforcement computer labs is an indication of how technology is increasingly involved in, or on the periphery of, criminal activity. San Diego-area law enforcement agencies founded the first regional forensic lab in 1998; there are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year the labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.
In its early days, the RFCL examiners not only recovered the data, they analyzed it for evidentiary value based on the particulars of the case. But with exponentially growing data and caseloads, the 22 examiners here now focus on collecting and preserving data in a manner that will hold up in court, then hand that data back to the police agency for analysis.
Not surprisingly, the most valuable information comes from the files that suspects thought they had deleted, but which remained hidden in the nooks and crannies of their hard drives. "The key to computer forensics is unallocated space," says Leamons, who is on loan to the lab from the San Diego Police Department.
No one can remember a case being kicked because the lab made an error, but they can remember cases where they found evidence that exonerated people charged with crimes, Leamons says.
Cellphones pose a particular challenge, says Rebecca Adimari, one of the five examiners who work on them.
"Each has its own operating system and frequency -- there's probably over 500 makes and models and not many of them are the same," she explains. "There can be so much evidence on there."
From the unique ringtone caught on camera during a holdup -- to the accidentally recorded conversations on voice notes, to the Israeli thug keeping notes of extortion visits on his PDA -- the way people use their phones can be pretty incriminating.
"When they arrested the Arellano Felix people (a gang of Mexican drug lords later convicted of murder and drug crimes in 2007), they recovered 14 phones including one with a photo of a machine gun," Adimari says.
She has hundreds of power and data cables, since they're all peculiar to individual phones. And she has a special box that blocks signals on the phones in the lab, so no information is lost or compromised.
Examiner Patrick Lim, from the Naval Criminal Investigative Services, says he recently recovered data from a hard drive that had been burnt to a crisp. Asked if it was from an arson or a murder, Lim says he can't reveal the details.
"It was burned. That's all I can say."
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comThe experts at the FBI's newly accredited Regional Computer Forensics Lab in San Diego have already helped solve murders, child porn cases and robberies. They're among the best in the nation at pulling evidence from hard drives, cellphones and memory cards.
There are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year, the FBI labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.
Wired.com got a rare look at the inner workings of the San Diego lab this week, and we snapped some photos of the toys inside.
Left: Darrell Foxworth greets members of the media in the entrance of the San Diego Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comJeff Cable, assistant director of RCFL, opens the door in to the lab to start the tour. Cable notes that it is very rare that they ever allow anyone but FBI agents through this door.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comThis device copies the data off the hard drives and makes sure it can't be overwritten.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comFBI agent Dan Dandridge plugs a hard drive into a "lunch box," which clones the data off the drive as the first step of a noninvasive examination.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comCellphones can be a treasure-trove of forensic evidence. In one case, a man was robbing a store when his cellphone rang. Captured by a security camera, and studied by the lab, the robber's unique ringtone eventually led to his conviction.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comThis set of equipment is the AVID video processing system at the San Diego Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comForensic examiner Tim Hamon shows off the inside of the RCFL mobile unit.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comLacking in subtlety, the rolling lab is not used in covert surveillance missions.
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Newsweek sparked a conflagration among conservative Christians last week by pointing out that Christian dating site BigChurch.com is owned by Penthouse Media Group.
This wouldn't have been big news to BigChurch members who bothered to look under the site's hood. The Christian dating site has been operated by social networking giant Various, Inc. (which runs AdultFriendFinder.com, Bondage.com and Penthouse.com) for years. Penthouse Media Group acquired BigChurch, along with dozens of other niche social networking sites, when it purchased Various last December.
As a result of the purchase, Penthouse is now just one brand among many in a corporation that focuses on social networking, says Penthouse Media Group CEO Marc Bell.
Some people still think of Penthouse as Playboy's dirty cousin, even though Penthouse changed hands in 2004 and is now trying to be one step raunchier than Maxim rather than one step classier than Anal Sluts 13.
But when an old-guard porn kingpin like Penthouse becomes just another niche, you know that times have changed. This focus on social networking supports my ongoing argument that the fantasy of porn will continue to yield to the fantasy of sex, and that savvy adult companies will keep up with these changing consumer expectations.
I also think the fantasy of sex, served by both mainstream dating sites and adult social networks, will open our wallets in ways online porn hasn't for years.
Of course, social media does not guarantee sex any more than porn does. But it provides the anticipation of sex, the possibility of sex, the idea that you just might get lucky. It's the premise of porn, manifested in reality. Almost.
Social networking promises a new experience each time. And free porn can only be an advantage in an adults-only social networking context. Just ask YouPorn.
If customers find themselves flirting and even cybering on a regular basis, they return again and again, paying for premium memberships until disillusionment sets in (why am I not getting laid for real?). Those who hook up in person remain members as long as the nookie is more fun than the drama.
Old-style softcore simply can't compete with that. Not because we don't like to look at it, but because we don't like to pay for it -- especially when we can see the same thing on the social networking sites while chatting with the women in the pictures.
It's not like BigChurch isn't about sex. It's just more subtle than a site that's explicitly aimed at swingers. BigChurch's function is to connect people whose concepts of sex are tied so closely to faith and doctrine that it can be difficult to meet potential partners in more traditional settings.
Many people who identify as Christians have a fairly secular attitude toward premarital sex, while others believe in sexual pleasure within marriage. A handful still relegate sex to procreation, and God forbid that you (or at least, she) enjoy it.
With all this variation, it's possible that Christians benefit more from online dating than even kinky people do, in that they don't waste as much time chatting up people who don't share their particular beliefs. After all, with an online matchmaker, it's just a matter of checking the right boxes.
Whether BigChurch can survive the public link to Penthouse Media Group remains to be seen. I'm not sure Penthouse would miss BigChurch if a membership exodus killed the Christian dating site. BigChurch says it has a mere half-million members, while AdultFriendFinder alone claims about 24 million.
Even selling BigChurch might be a challenge now, as the URL will carry the taint of blatant sexuality, unless whoever buys it can pull off a "saving BigChurch from the devil" marketing campaign.
Given that Penthouse Media Group owns all of the FriendFinder and Spring Street Networks sites, as well as the legendary Danni.com and several webcam networks, it's hard to see how losing one small property would make much of a dent.
It's the corporate version of the Question of Our Age: "What if my day job learns about my sex blog?" Only this time, sex will win, either way.
See you in a fortnight,
Regina Lynn
- - -
Regina Lynn shows you how to have more fun with sex in her new book, Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier, available now.
Sometimes it seems like the members of ACM SIGGRAPH (Get ready for a long acronym: Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) don't know about the local Maker culture in Los Angeles and I'm not sure how much the local Makers around Los Angeles know about SIGGRAPH. As the Chair of the local Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH I'd like to bridge the gap and extend and invitation to interested folks to come on down to Santa Monica and participate in a sort of science fair social hour and maker night that I'm hosting at Bergamot Station on Tuesday, June 10th. If you've got a home brew electronics/robotics/whirring/buzzing/blinking/tactile art project/plaything you'd like to share then get in touch with me via makers@agentxray.com to reserve a space. Participants get free admission and we'll feed you.We've got an exciting evening planned. Boing Boing's own Mark Frauenfelder is giving a talk on "The Rise and Fall and Ride of Modern Making" and we're featuring a circuit bending performance by Jeff Boyton who's going to create an immersive audio environment honed from his hand crafted electronic instruments built from leftover consumer electronic detritus.
Space-Time Coordinates to follow:
LA SIGGRAPH presents "Maker Night"
When:
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
5:30 pm - Makers Load In and Set up
6:30-7:30pm - Social Hour Science Fair
7:30-10:30pm - PresentationWhere:
The Writers Boot Camp at Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg #1
Santa Monica, CA, 90404Contact: makers@agentxray.com
Related Links:
LA SIGGRAPH (Yea, I know. We're working on it...)
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For decades, scientists have dreamed of computer chips that manipulate light rather than electricity. Unlike electrons, photons can cross paths without interfering with each other, so optical chips could compute in three dimensions rather than two, crunching data in seconds that now takes weeks to process.
For now, though, optical computing remains a dream. The chips require crystals that channel photons as nimbly as silicon channels electrons -- and though engineers have been able to imagine the ideal photonic crystal, they've been unable to build it.
Enter a beetle known as Lamprocyphus augustus. In a study published this week in Physical Review E, Purdue University researchers describe how the inch-long Brazilian beetle's iridescent green scales are composed of chitin arranged by evolution in precisely the molecular configuration that has confounded the would-be fabricators of optical computers.
By using the scales as a semiconductor mold, researchers hope to finally build the perfect photonic crystal.
"We haven't been able to manufacture materials at the nanometer resolution. We knew the ideal structure, but we couldn't make it," said study co-author Michael Bartl, a University of Utah material scientist.
Bartl's team stumbled across L. augustus by sheer luck. Study co-author Lauren Richey, now a Brigham Young University undergraduate, studied beetle iridescence for a high school science fair project. She asked BYU doctoral chemistry student Jeremy Galusha, also a co-author of the study, to examine L. augustus with his lab's electron microscope.
When the researchers scoped the scales, they noticed something strange: No matter the angle of viewing, the scales always appeared in the same shade of green.
That's unusual for iridescent surfaces, which derive their color from light refracted through semi-transparent layers. Further study revealed that the quality came from the scales' molecular arrangement, which had the same pattern as the atoms of carbon in a diamond.
Diamonds themselves are too dense to serve as photonic crystals, but researchers long ago identified their configuration as perfectly suited for manipulating light in a three-dimensional space.
"You can take the light, criss-cross it and it doesn't interfere. It allows you to build more complex and compact architectures," said Paul Braun, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign photonic crystal specialist. The crystals' transmission purity would also eliminate waste heat generated by traditional electron-based circuits. That heat is a limiting factor on traditional microchip capacities.
Laboratory attempts at mimicking diamonds have been largely unsuccessful. Braun said that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories came close, but each crystal took a painstaking month to build.
"They're almost impossible to fabricate," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Georgia Institute of Technology material scientist. Wang developed photonic crystals based on the scales of butterfly wings, but they didn't possess the elusive diamond form. "If this beetle has an arrangement like diamonds, that's truly unique."
Bartl said that optical computer chips won't actually run on beetle scales. Instead he plans to use the scales as a mold, replacing chitin with semiconductor material.
"This could motivate another round of serious science," said Braun. "If there's an easy way to create the diamond structure, that's going to expedite progress in the field."
"Optical computers could do in a second what now takes days or weeks," said Bartl. "And we're providing the materials."
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Many people's lives were touched by Steve; Steve is widely known and beloved across many communities around the world for his years of work worldwide, initially as leader of Apple's Library of Tomorrow, and later leading programs worldwide for a broad network of international groups helping people in developing communities understand and do practical and interesting things with computers, networks and the web.
We worked together during the 1980s and 1990s, and then over the last decade he and I traveled widely over different paths, but e-mailed or talked almost daily, and celebrated often in person with our families or friends whenever we could. For me he was simply a kind, generous friend, a fascinating character, a wonderful conversationalist, a great cook and a great gardener. We shared many wonderful times together talking about books, music, culture, over meals including wine, tortillas, and fresh foods he made himself. Even up until the very difficult end, Steve was always cheerful and intently interested in talking about the world. His passing leaves a great void in my life, that leaves me almost speechless.
Others on the web, have written more eloquent retrospectives than I could, including these:
• Steve Cisler - first Internet librarian
• Steve Cisler is gone
• Steve Cisler RIP
• Steve Cisler Passes
And this e-mail posted to the Nettime list by Ted Byfield, one of Steve's many dear friends around the globe. Link
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Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by SSRC Program Director Joe Karaganis, explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.Link (Thanks, danah!)
GlobalCompassion.com is featuring a gallery of photographs by award winning photographer Masaru Goto. The photos are portraits of Japanese people with a surprising twist. The subjects are Burakumin, a nearly invisible (yet identifiable) group of Japanese people. They are the remnant of a caste system that passed away long ago but remains in the cultural memory. Their ancestors were the untouchables -- people who worked with dead animals (tanners and butchers). Despite being racially and ethnically Japanese through and through, the "people of the buraku" still face discrimination today.Link
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