Wilkerson's M21 Flat-Panel TV looks like a two-dimensional version of the huge console TV I grew up watching in my grandparents' basement rec-room. All it needs is one of those ancient Zenith acoustic remotes that used a bunch of buttons poised over miniature tuning forks, which emitted inaudible sounds that caused the channel to change (you could mute the TV by sneezing and turn it off by jingling your keys!). No price yet, but I'm guessing not cheap. What shall we call this 1950s-meets-today design aesthetic? Beaverpunk?
Link
Reuters - Nokia Corp (NOK1V.HE) is buying out
other shareholders of handset software firm Symbian Ltd and
will make the software royalty-free to respond to new rivals
such as Google .
Design Heure's lovely lamps include simple slide projectors that allow them to bounce the image of your choice off a nearby wall. They also do some handsome projection clocks. I love the all-analog technology here -- just some mirrors, lenses and transparencies.
Link
(Thanks, Herveline!)
The Rogues are a collection of Creative Commons licensed, downloadable papercraft dolls who wear fearsome masks that flip up to reveal their true, gentle nature. They're really delightful -- designed by 24lemons.
Link
(via Paperforest)
Instructables user Britsteiner has posted a great HOWTO for making your own gigantic reusablke vinyl wall-stickers. As the instructions point out, this is perfect for rental places like dormitories or apartments, since you don't need landlord permission and you can take it with when you move.
I tested my sticky stuff on an interior closet wall, and found that my ConTact paper was about as sticky as a Post-It note, if not slightly less. It was almost un-sticky to a fault, which is fine by me, since I don't want to pay for damages on my walls when I move out!) My tape also came up very easily, so I was good to go.
AFP - Email communication in the Marshall Islands was paralysed Tuesday after hackers launched a "zombie" computer attack on the western Pacific nation's only Internet service provider, officials said.
Craftster user Umbrolly cooked this magnificent Tardis cake for her sister's birthday. Apparently the eerie Martian planetscape beneath the tardis was meant to be a nice smooth rectangular cake but went wrong -- I think it makes the whole thing just perfect. Lots of documentation on Craftster if you want to try your hand at it.
It looks really wobbily in these pictures, I used a different cake recepie to usual and it was a bit too moist, so what started out nice and rectangular went sort of squishy.
If you had any question of what browsers would play nice with Apple’s upcoming MobileMe service, a slip-up by the company earlier today pretty much answers the question. Until pointed out by my... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 10:31 am
Neave's Television applet ("Telly without context") turns your browser into a fast-cutting video screen that embarks on a directionless tour through a bewildering array of really awful, funny, and inexplicable video clips, interspersed with test-patterns. It's like skiing the upper slopes of mount cable while stranded in a foreign land at three in the morning.
Flash Link
(via JWZ)
PC World - ECS has already signed up European 3G operators to sell its netbook, which will be out in September or October. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jun 2008 | 10:30 am
Scott Amron's "Cash Money Clip" is an interesting take on money clips: a dollar bill with a steel plates stuck to it, one over a neodymium disc magnet. I'm a big fan of carrying cash in a clip (I gave up fat wallets in the back pocket and lower-back pain in favor of a small card-wallet and a cash-clip years ago) but I've never really trusted magnetic clips. It's cool to be able to stick teaspoons, small change and bits of metal to your front pocket, but your coins get stuck to 'em and you run the risk of demagnetizing your credit-cards if you absently stick your cash in the same pocket as your card-wallet.
Still, this is just to much fun -- and Amron will also sell you a kit so you can convert your own currency to a money clip (you could probably do this without the kit just by shopping around for metal and magnets, too!).
Link
(via Make!)
Today would have been the 96th birthday of cryptologist, mathematician and father of almost everything digital Alan Turing. That he was persecuted for his homosexuality to the point of suicide is a crime and a tragedy.
Remember today the man who, more than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, is the reason you are now sitting at a computer, reading this very sentence.
My wife Svetlana and I run the only project helping blind students in Russia. She is from Leningrad where her grandfather was a physics professor for 57 years and was blind from age 2. He was on the last train out before the Siege -- with the staff of the Mariinsky Theater, where his father played in the orchestra. She now works at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
We have sent or taken 100 folding graphite reflective white canes to St. Petersburg. I have this fantasy of hundreds of blind people out walking, their canes glowing -- in a city where Svetlana never saw a blind person on the streets in 30 years, although we know of 150 blind university students.
We have sent or taken 30 computers and 40 digital voice recorders for blind students to record lectures.
For less than the cost of one tank of gas, you can help a blind person
get around for several years--with a cane. We have a list of 47 blind
people who want a folding graphite cane--they are $30 each.
snydeq writes "The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an antitrust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network. The case, originally brought to US District Court in 2003, had been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But AT&T requested the case be heard by the Supreme Court on the grounds that prior conflicting appeals court decisions in this area should be resolved at that level. As part of the case, the Supreme Court will likely also ascertain whether AT&T could be held to violate antitrust law without setting its retail prices below its own cost."
We figured we’d put two of our favorite netbooks together for a quick head-to-head, just to show the size differences between the HP Mini-Note and the Asus Eee PC. We’ve put together a... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 10:05 am
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At least 11 species of African frogs carry a built-in concealed weapon -- they can sprout claws on demand to fight off attackers, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 10:02 am
First viral action sports Mash-up Widget allows community members to create mashups, get featured, and publish across the web SAN DIEGO, June 24 /PRNewswire/ --... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 9:45 am
Nokia have today announced that they will be acquiring the remaining 52% of Symbian they don’t own and will be releasing the complete Symbian platform under the Eclipse open source license. Nokia... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 9:30 am
It's not often that Wall Street strategists notice the tiny semi-asset class otherwise known as venture capital. But that's what happened today as Merrill's Richard Bernstein wrote in a contrarian strategies... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 9:21 am
Agreements Struck With ExtendMedia, Qumu and Stratacache to Deliver Rich Video, Web Content New Exec Named to Head AT&T's Enterprise Digital Media Efforts SAN... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 9:00 am
Auto Insurance Executives Attending Influential Annual Forum Urged To Implement Electronic Bill / Payment Solutions Before Minnesota's 2009 Penalty Deadline SAN DIEGO... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 9:00 am
BEIJING, June 24 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- China Digital TV Holding Co., Ltd. (NYSE: STV) the leading provider of conditional access (CA) systems to mainland China's... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 9:00 am
I found this spectacular, sepia-toned image in Eves' Koinup profile; Eves came across the docked airship in the Steam Forge of FairChang Lost Isle (direct SLURL teleport at this link) "looking like a relict... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:54 am
Nokia isn't finished with its acquisition spree just yet. Tonight the Finnish company announced a plan to acquire the 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn't already own and make the platform open source. Nokia... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:49 am
STS GROUP delivers an iBOLT enhanced legal records retention solution to the Banque Populaire group OR YEHUDA, Israel, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Magic Software Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:19 am
By Ferreira, Fernando J Guo, Cathy; Coleman, John R Carbonic anhydrase (CA; EC 4.2.1.1) catalyzes the interconversion of CO^sub 2^ and HCO^sub 3^^sup -^ and is a major protein constituent of the C^sub 3^ higher plant chloroplast where it is presumed to play a role in photosynthetic carbon assimilation. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:02 am
By Ribot, Cecile Zimmerli, Celine; Farmer, Edward E; Reymond, Philippe; Poirier, Yves Expression of AtPHO1;H10, a member of the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) PHO1 gene family, is strongly induced following numerous abiotic and biotic stresses, including wounding, dehydration, cold, salt, and pathogen attack. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:02 am
By Matringe, Michel Ksas, Brigitte; Rey, Pascal; Havaux, Michel Vitamin E is a generic term for a group of lipid-soluble antioxidant compounds, the tocopherols and tocotrienols. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:02 am
By Anonymous NANOTECHNOLOGY Federal agencies are addressing SH&E questions related to nanotechnology in a sound manner, according to a report issued by the National Nanotechnology Advisory Panel established under the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:02 am
By Carr, Herman Axelsson, Lennart When Zostera marina was irradiated after a period of darkness, initiation of photosynthetic O2 evolution occurred in two phases. During a lag phase, lasting 4 to 5 min, photosynthesis was supported by a diffusive entry of CO2. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:02 am
By Anonymous ONLINE RESOURCE EPA recently launched the Environmental Indicators Gateway website to provide enhanced public access to environmental and health information generated by EPA. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:01 am
By Anonymous Worcestershire-based wholesale nursery Bransford Webbs has achieved a British Standard accreditation after having worked since last May to develop a better environmental approach to its operations. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:01 am
By Anonymous Housing association Peabody Trust is looking to sign a framework agreement for open-space contract works with around four operators for a nineyear contract worth Pounds 40m0 -Pounds 50m. Deadline is 16 June. Contact matthew.frith@peabody.org.uk or call 020 70214422. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:01 am
By Sarah Vos, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky. Jun. 24--Joseph Toy, president and CEO of the Bluegrass Mental Health-Mental Retardation Board, is retiring. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:01 am
By Anonymous A new 24/7 service from ChaCha allows cell phone users on the go to ask a wide range of reference questions in conversational English and get answers free of charge. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:01 am
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Members of this community may want to venture out of the basement more often, because Dr. Harald Dobnig and his team have found that vitamin D deficiency leads to increased mortality. These results still hold when they take into account such factors as exercise and heart disease. Low vitamin D status has 'other significant negative effects in terms of incidence of cancer, stroke, sudden cardiac death and death of heart failure,' Dr. Dobnig said. The evidence of ill effects from low vitamin D 'is just becoming overwhelming at this point.' Vitamin D3 is usually produced by exposure to the UV-B in sunlight, but in high latitudes, especially in the fall and winter, insufficient UV-B gets through the atmosphere to produce enough vitamin D3, even with hours of exposure. The researchers are recommending that people at risk for deficiency take 800 IU of vitamin D3 daily. Just don't go overboard — as a fat-soluble vitamin, D3 is more capable of causing adverse effects at unnaturally high dosages. The human body tops out at producing about 10,000 IU per day."
By Anonymous Amid general praise from the blogsphere, version 4.3 of Google Earth is now available for downloading. On his independent Google Earth blog, Frank Taylor identifies the more notable new features as: * A street-view layer, like Google Maps. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:00 am
By Qin, Xiaoqiong Yang, Seung Hwan; Kepsel, Andrea C; Schwartz, Steven H; Zeevaart, Jan A D Abscisic acid (ABA) is a plant hormone found in all higher plants; it plays an important role in seed dormancy, embryo development, and adaptation to environmental stresses, most notably drought. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:00 am
By Bob Fernandez, The Philadelphia Inquirer Jun. 24--Verizon Communications Inc. has been fighting cable companies' encroachment into the phone business, and yesterday one of its prime counterattacks was deemed illegal. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:00 am
STERLING, Va., June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NeuStar, Inc. (NYSE: NSR) today announced that the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), a not-for-profit... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 8:00 am
SAN FRANCISCO, June 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- TechWeb's InformationWeek, the leading business technology brand, today announced the distinguished keynote lineup for InformationWeek's New Age of Innovation Think Tank Road Shows. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:30 am
BURNABY, BC, June 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Icron Technologies Corporation (TSX Venture: IT), the developers of ExtremeUSB, announced today Savant Systems, LLC. have integrated ExtremeUSB technology into Savant's next generation ROSIE Multimedia AV control platform. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:30 am
Technology Solutions Company to Design and Test Armored Amphibious Vehicle Structure and Performance Alion Science and Technology Peter J. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:30 am
Texas Instruments has said that Cezzer Multimedia Technologies has selected its TMS320DM644x digital media processor based on DaVinci technology, to launch a high-definition video-on-demand terminal, the Cezzer videoclub, which can provide VoD to internet subscribers who have an unlimited internet connection. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:30 am
Company Contacts: GlassHouse Technologies Natalie Hahn O'Flaherty, 508-663-0507 Natalie.oflaherty@glasshouse.com or UK: GlassHouse Technologies Debralee Donovan, +44 (0) 1932-428-985 Debralee.donovan@glasshouse.com or Media Contact: Racepoint Group for GlassHouse Danielle Stead, 781-487-4615 dstead@racepointgroup.com GlassHouse Technologies, a global provider of independent IT infrastructure consulting services, is clarifying any confusion over a recent article concerning GlassHouse Systems and a pending lawsuit with IBM, an IBM Business Partner based in Ontario, Canada. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:30 am
Yoono, the social network browser plugin that relaunched in May, has entered public beta. The company has also announced a $4 million extension to their Series A funding round led by AGF Private Equity... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:06 am
Yoono, the social network browser plugin that relaunched in May, has entered public beta. The company has also announced a $4 million extension to their Series A funding round led by AGF Private Equity... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 7:06 am
Foundation to be Established to Provide Royalty-Free Open Platform and Accelerate Innovation LONDON, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nokia (NYSE:NOK), Sony ... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 6:55 am
UK consumer groups have lodged an official complaint over the high charges prisoners are paying to make phone calls, reports Ananova. "The "super complaint" to regulator Ofcom says a 30-minute phone... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 6:51 am
AP - Virgin Mobile USA is introducing a plan with unlimited calling for $79.99 per month, helping feed the price-cutting frenzy that has washed over the cellular carriers this year. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jun 2008 | 6:45 am
AP - Facebook Inc.'s quest to lure more advertisers to its popular online hangout is getting an assist from Visa Inc.'s marketing machine. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jun 2008 | 6:43 am
Visionary Move Embraces Openness and Accelerates Innovation ESPOO, Finland, June 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nokia (NYSE: NOK) today announced it has launched a cash Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 6:37 am
LONDON (Reuters) - A pig's delight is three square meals each day, according to a Swedish study on Tuesday showing swine raised in conventional indoor pens are healthier and grow fatter... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 6:33 am
snydeq writes "The Linux kernel development community has released a statement emphasizing the need for open source drivers. The statement, signed by 135 developers, is aimed at preventing future vendors from following the closed source path. One holdout cited is Nvidia. The Linux Foundation has also released a statement in support: 'The Linux Foundation recommends that hardware manufacturers provide open source kernel modules. The open source nature of Linux is intrinsic to its success. We encourage manufacturers to work with the kernel community to provide open source kernel modules in order to enable their users and themselves to take advantage of the considerable benefits that Linux makes possible.'"
Facebook Inc.'s quest to lure more advertisers to its popular online hangout is getting an assist from Visa Inc.'s marketing machine. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 4:09 am
High-tech companies are rapidly adding jobs and paying workers more than other industries in metropolitan areas stretching from New York to Seattle, according to a new study looking at the nation's top... Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 4:09 am
Virgin Mobile USA is introducing a plan with unlimited calling for $79.99 per month, helping feed the price-cutting frenzy that has washed over the cellular carriers this year. Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 24 Jun 2008 | 4:09 am
Farmer's Almanac is finally obsolete. Last October, agricultural consultancy Lanworth not only correctly projected that the US Department of Agriculture had overestimated the nation's corn crop, it nailed the margin: roughly 200 million bushels. That's just 1.5 percent fewer kernels but still a significant shortfall for tight markets, causing a 13 percent price hike and jitters in the emerging ethanol industry. When the USDA downgraded expectations a month after Lanworth's prediction, the little Illinois-based company was hailed as a new oracle among soft-commodity traders — who now pay the firm more than $100,000 a year for a timely heads-up on fluctuations in wheat, corn, and soybean supplies.
The USDA bases its estimates on questionnaires and surveys — the agency calls a sample of farmers and asks what's what. Lanworth uses satellite images, digital soil maps, and weather forecasts to project harvests at the scale of individual fields. It even looks at crop conditions and rotation patterns — combining all the numbers to determine future yields.
Founded in 2000, Lanworth started by mapping forests for land managers and timber interests. Tracking trends in sleepy woodlands required just a few outer-space snapshots a year. But food crops are a fast-moving target. Now the company sorts 100 gigs of intel every day, adding to a database of 50 terabytes and counting. It's also moving into world production-prediction — wheat fields in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are already in the data set, as are corn and soy plots in Brazil and Argentina. The firm expects to reach petabyte scale in five years. "There are questions about how big the total human food supply is and whether we as a country are exposed to risk," says Lanworth's director of information services, Nick Kouchoukos. "We're going after the global balance sheet."
In 1930, a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto. He did it with a high tech marvel called a blink comparator; he put two photographs of the same patch of sky taken on different nights into the contraption and flipped back and forth between them. Stars would stay fixed, but objects like comets, asteroids, and planets moved.
Astronomers have since traded photographic plates for massive digital images. But Tombaugh's method — take a picture of the sky, take another one, compare — is still used to detect fast-changing stellar phenomena, like supernovae or asteroids headed toward Earth.
True, imaging the entire sky, and understanding those images, won't be easy. The first telescope that will be able to collect all that data, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, won't be finished until 2014. Perched atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile, the LSST will have a 27.5-foot mirror and a field of view 50 times the size of the full moon seen from Earth. Its digital camera will suck down 3.5 gigapixels of imagery every 17 seconds. "At that rate," says Michael Strauss, a Princeton astrophysicist, "the numbers get very big very fast."
The LSST builds on the most ambitious attempt to catalog the heavens so far, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Operating from a New Mexico mountaintop, the SDSS has returned about 25 terabytes of data since 1998, most of that in images. It has measured the precise distance to a million galaxies and has discovered about 500,000 quasars. But the Sloan's mirror is just one-tenth the power of the mirror planned for LSST, and its usable field of view just one-seventh the size. Sloan has been a workhorse, but it simply doesn't have the oomph to image the entire night sky, over and over, to look for things that change.
The LSST will cover the sky every three days. And within the petabytes of information it collects may lurk things nobody has even imagined — assuming astronomers can figure out how to teach their computers to look for objects no one has ever seen. It's the first attempt to sort astronomical data on this scale, says Princeton astrophysicist Robert Lupton, who oversaw data processing for the SDSS and is helping design the LSST. But the new images may allow him and his colleagues to watch supernovae explode, find undiscovered comets, and maybe even spot that killer asteroid.
Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different.
So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.
Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.
Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.
But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.
Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.
In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.
If the words "discover a new species" call to mind Darwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn't even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.
This sequence may correlate with other sequences that resemble those of species we do know more about. In that case, Venter can make some guesses about the animals — that they convert sunlight into energy in a particular way, or that they descended from a common ancestor. But besides that, he has no better model of this species than Google has of your MySpace page. It's just data. By analyzing it with Google-quality computing resources, though, Venter has advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation.
This kind of thinking is poised to go mainstream. In February, the National Science Foundation announced the Cluster Exploratory, a program that funds research designed to run on a large-scale distributed computing platform developed by Google and IBM in conjunction with six pilot universities. The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including Google File System, IBM's Tivoli, and an open source version of Google's MapReduce. Early CluE projects will include simulations of the brain and the nervous system and other biological research that lies somewhere between wetware and software.
Learning to use a "computer" of this scale may be challenging. But the opportunity is great: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.
There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?
grrlscientist writes "In response to what appears to be a growing problem of scientific misconduct, a group of people at the Institute of Medical Science at University of Toronto in Canada wrote a scientist's version of the Hippocratic oath. This oath (which is cited in the story) was recited by all graduate students in the biological sciences at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year." This blogger argues that merely reciting an oath is not going to help much when "...the corruption in 'science' is systemic. It is due to corporate science being run according to a business model instead of in accordance to an educational paradigm. It is due to unrestrained corporate greed combined with a tremendous disparity in power and income..."
AP - Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry Samueli pleaded guilty Monday to lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission as it probed stock option backdating at the chip maker.
Xeth writes "I'm a consultant with DARPA, and I'm working on an initiative to push the boundaries of neuromorphic computing (i.e. artificial intelligence). The project is designed to advance ideas all fronts, including measuring and understanding biological brains, creating AI systems, and investigating the fundamental nature of intelligence. I'm conducting a wide search of these fields, but I wanted to know if any in this community know of neat projects along those lines that I might overlook. Maybe you're working on a project like that and want to talk it up? No promises (seriously), but interesting work will be brought to the attention of the project manager I'm working with. If you want to start up a dialog, send me an email, and we'll see where it goes. I'll also be reading the comments for the story."
AP - The PlayStation Portable has been around for three years, but the machine you might buy today is far different from the one you'd get in 2005. Sony is continually tinkering with the thing in big ways (introducing a lighter, slimmer model in 2007) and small (any number of regularly issued firmware updates). Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 24 Jun 2008 | 1:48 am
Thanks to all you keyboard art experts, we got dozens of entries that blew our minds. To help us judge the contest, we solicited the help of two ASCII art experts from Japan, entrepreneur Osamu Higuchi and online media expert Ichiroo Kiyota.
The votes are in, and the winner is John AuCoin of Texas, who submitted this drawing of the Creation of Adam. Congrats John -- we'll have some Wired.com swag headed your way momentarily. Click through to see other geeky ASCII creations, from pop culture stars to robots.
Creation of Adam
By John AuCoin of Houston
The judges said: "This is an orthodox piece of work with a Japanese manga-esque touch." AuCoin claims this was the first time he ever tried ASCII art. Apparently he's a natural.
:
Astral Apple
By Maija Haavisto of Helsinki, Finland
Haavisto says: "In 2004 I got interested in surrealism in ASCII art and ever since I've drawn several surreal ASCII pieces. This is one of my own favorites. It was drawn for an Apple-themed demo party in 2006. I wanted to show that ASCII art was not just about animals and cartoon characters."
:
Tiger
By Maija Haavisto of Helsinki, Finland
Haavisto says: "I spent weeks tweaking every little detail of this picture. I like combining line art and so-called 'solid style' in the same piece for more lively results."
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Scooter Girl
By Piller Gregerson of Norfolk, Virginia
Gregerson says: "It's a punk rock woman with a punk rock scooter!"
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Servbot
By Sadas Dasda, location unknown
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Dwight
By Sadas Dasda, location unknown
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Giant Robots
By Joseph Barrile of New York City
Barrile says: "This piece is part of a collection of four ASCII Battle-Bots and the mad scientist who created them."
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Battles show poster
By Michael Tabie of Orlando, Florida
Tabie says: "This is an ASCII art piece I created for a gig poster to promote a Battles show here in Orlando. It's actually screen-printed two colors (white and silver) on black French paper, 18x24. It's featured in this year's Graphis poster annual."
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Radiohead poster
By Todd Slater of Round Rock, Texas
Slater says: "I designed this hand-pulled silkscreen poster for Radiohead's show in Virginia a few weeks ago. The image is a comment on how the band distributed their newest album, In Rainbows."
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Captain Picard
By Andy Evelhoch of Thousand Oaks, California
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Stephen Colbert
By Taylor Handleton of Maryland
Handleton says: "This is everybody's favorite reporter, Stephen Colbert. I can't seem to find the source image, but I made it in a few hours in Metapad (for the transparency)."
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Marlboro poster
By Nozomu Wakabayashi of Kanagawa, Japan
Wakabayashi says: "Making ASCII art is a hobby. There's a lot of hype about the high price of cigarettes these days, so I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a cigarette poster like this one?'"
1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads the press to coin the term flying saucer.
Arnold was an experienced pilot with more than 9,000 hours of flying time. He had diverted from his flight plan -- Chehalis to Yakima, Washington -- to search for a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane reported down in the Cascades near the southwest slope of Mt. Rainier. A sweep of the area revealed nothing, and Arnold resumed his original course.
As Arnold recalled, the afternoon was crystal clear, and he was cruising at an altitude of 9,200 feet. A minute or two after noting a DC-4 about 15 miles behind and to the left of him, he was startled by something bright reflecting off his plane. At first he thought he had nearly hit another aircraft but as he looked off in the direction the light had come from, he saw nine "peculiar-looking" aircraft flying rapidly in formation toward Mt. Rainier.
As these strange, tailless craft flew between his plane and Mt. Rainier and then off toward distant Mt. Adams, Arnold noted their remarkable speed -- he later calculated that they were moving at around 1,700 mph -- and said he got a pretty good look at their black silhouettes outlined against Rainier's snowy peak. He later described them as saucer-like disks … something the gentlemen of the press glommed on to very quickly.
At the time, Arnold said, the appearance of these flying saucers didn't particularly alarm him, because he assumed they were some kind of experimental military aircraft. If they were, nobody in the War Department (soon to be merged into the Department of Defense) was saying.
In fact, the official Army Air Corps position was that Arnold had either seen a mirage or was hallucinating. He insisted he was perfectly alert and lucid, adding that he was not a publicity hound, either. He also invited both the Army and the FBI to investigate. The Army sent a couple of officers out to talk with Arnold. Even though they concluded that "a man of [his] character and apparent integrity" almost certainly saw what he claimed to have seen, the Army's initial verdict remained unchanged.
As Arnold's story leaked out, other people stepped forward to say they had seen the objects, too. The most-credible report may have come from a United Airlines crew, which reported seeing nine similar disk-like objects over Idaho only 10 days after Arnold's sighting.
Whether Arnold actually saw something or not, the resulting publicity touched off a worldwide spate of UFO sightings. Barely two weeks after Arnold's flight, the Roswell story broke, and UFO hysteria was on.
Was it the power of suggestion that led to all these sightings, or was 1947 a peak travel year for little green men? You decide.
Joe Barr writes "Bruce Byfield reports at Linux.com that a Swedish developer, Goran Fransson, has 'given a deposition in the Barracuda-Trend Micro case that appears to seriously undermine Trend Micro's patent on gateway virus scanning.' Gransson has resurrected a product (still in its shrinkwrap) sold by Ten Four, the company he worked for at the time, to prove that it provided gateway virus scanning in January 1995. Trend Micro's patent application was filed in September of that year. If you were — or worked for — a Ten Four customer during 1995, you might be able to help Barracuda prove that Trend Micro's patent omits prior art." We discussed this important patent case when it was filed in January. (Slashdot and Linux.com share a corporate overlord.)
The recording industry and U.S. radio companies are squaring off over whether AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels. Billions of dollars are at stake. The recording industry is seeking new income avenues in the wake of wanton peer-to-peer piracy and declining CD sales in part due to the iPod and satellite radio. A U.S. House subcommittee could vote as early as Thursday on a royalty measure.
praps writes "A three-year trademark conflict has ended with Google withdrawing its use of the Gmail brand in Germany. On Friday, a plain-text message appeared, beginning 'We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany... Bummer.' But despite the climbdown, Google Germany's spokesman said on Monday that the action was being taken 'even though we believe we're not legally obliged to do so.'" We discussed the tussle in Germany when Google first lost in court a year ago.
Fry, Bender and the rest of the crew return with a surplus of intergalactic one-liners (and an extra ration of adult humor) in the franchise's second direct-to-DVD movie release. See an exclusive clip on Wired.com.
Sally Hurst lost her leg to cancer at the age of 27, and is suing her GP for failing to spot it sooner. Bob Chaundy discovers the traumas she faced Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 23 Jun 2008 | 11:10 pm
snydeq writes "JavaScript creator Brendan Eich talks at length about the future of JavaScript, ARAX, disputes with Microsoft, and the Screaming Monkey scripting engine for IE in an interview with InfoWorld's Paul Krill. JavaScript 2, which Mozilla's Eich expects to be available in some form by the end of the year, will 'address programming in the large.' To do that, Eich hopes to improve the integrity of the language without sacrificing flexibility and making JavaScript 'painfully static in a fixed way like Java does.' Eich does not expect Firefox support for JavaScript 2 until at least Version 3.1 of the browser. As for Internet Explorer, Eich explains how Screaming Monkey will help bring JavaScript 2 to IE should Microsoft drag its heels on providing meaningful support."
VindictivePantz writes to mention that scientists have discovered some bizarre properties of glass and are already applying that knowledge to create what is being called "metallic glass." "The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is. It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a 'jammed' state of matter — somewhere between liquid and solid — that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors. So even though glass is a hard substance, it never quite becomes a proper solid, according to chemists and materials scientists."
TechWeb - InformationWeek - Linux kernel developers issued a statement saying binary drivers cannot be viewed as an acceptable alternative to open source drivers. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jun 2008 | 9:30 pm
The regulatory battle over genetic testing has claimed its first victim in the state of California as HairDX shutters its direct-to-consumer Internet sales after being sent a cease-and-desist order from the state's public health department.
Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, in a classified national document, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.
lolococo writes to tell us that Laurent Cohen, founder of the open source project JPPF (Java Parallel Processing Framework), has decided to share what life is like for an open source contributor in general and little bit about what that means. "There came a time of coding, releasing, coding, releasing. The project started gathering some momentum, as a small community of users started to use it, but why was it not working in this case, or why did it not have this feature, or how could I do this, etc...? You get the drift. Oh my, now I had to start interacting with other folks! What was I to do? That started a (thankfully short) period of intense existential self-questioning. What was the purpose of this project? Why did I actually open-source it? I resolved this by deciding unilaterally that it would be a free contribution, for whomever would be interested enough to look into it. I also decided that it was my personal responsibility to support these brave folks into using the project, and to make it, as much as possible, a happy experience for them."
PC World - Managed Objects is adding social networking capabilities to make its configuration management database system more... Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jun 2008 | 9:20 pm
AP - Movie ticketing and entertainment site Fandango Inc. said Monday it has acquired Movies.com from Walt Disney Co. for an undisclosed amount. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jun 2008 | 6:16 pm
Reuters - Nokia Corp (NOK1V.HE) is buying out
other shareholders of handset software firm Symbian Ltd and
will make the software royalty-free to respond to new rivals
such as Google .
I tested my sticky stuff on an interior closet wall, and found that my ConTact paper was about as sticky as a Post-It note, if not slightly less. It was almost un-sticky to a fault, which is fine by me, since I don't want to pay for damages on my walls when I move out!) My tape also came up very easily, so I was good to go.
Today would have been the 96th birthday of cryptologist, mathematician and father of almost everything digital Alan Turing. That he was persecuted for his homosexuality to the point of suicide is a crime and a tragedy.
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