RJ sez, "Very few people have heard of John Heartfield, the German born artist whose photomontages in the late nineteen thirties outraged Adolf Hitler. However, as part of the resistance against the inexorable rise of Nazism, he contributed some of the most biting satirical photographic mashups of the day - and all without the aid of Photoshop. Nice."

The Extraordinary Anti-Nazi Photomontages of John Heartfield

Remember the revelation that pharma giant Merck had paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal that promoted its products? Turns out Elsevier has an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals for money:

Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."

More Fake Journals From Elsevier

bsharma writes to let us know about a little goodie that we will be able to buy starting May 17: a battery-powered, rechargeable, cellular, Wi-Fi hot spot that you cna put in your pocket. "What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go? Incredibly, there is such a thing. It's the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It's a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot. ... If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don't travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270." The device has its Wi-Fi password printed on the bottom, so you can invite someone to join your network simply by showing it to them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on the CRAFT Blog we saw:

The CRAFT Video this week shows you how to make a color changing LED brooch,

(Subscribe to the CRAFT Podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v video)

whip up this industrial light cover condiment caddy,

Check out Sam Maloof's masterful woodwork,

and enjoy this hand-appliqued Morrissey blanket. Oh, and happy Mother's Day!

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Based upon a quick examination of the records in PACER, I detected 62 new cases brought by the RIAA against individuals in the month of April alone. In December, 2008, the RIAA had represented to Congress that they had 'discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August [2008].'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SolarAid - 100 People - Brave Mhouie from Solar Aid on Vimeo.

Solar Aid is a Non Government Organization dedicated to bringing the power of the sun to people living in places that are just simply beyond the reach of such modern technologies as the electrical grid. Their website has a wealth of information about solar energy, and the work that they are doing.

SolarAid aims to enable the world's poorest people to have clean, renewable power. Solar power leads to better education, health, safety and income by allowing poor communities to cook, pump water, run fridges, store vaccines, light homes, schools, clinics and businesses, power computers and homes, farm more effectively, and much more.

SolarAid carries out DIY solar projects - training local communities how to build small scale solar devices such as solar powered radios and lanterns - and installs small solar systems for community centres, medical clinics, schools and other such communal infrastructure.

In reading through some of their materials and watching videos on the project, I see some connections to the Lighting Africa initiative by the World Bank, but do not see that the organizations have a formal relationship.

Microsolar, a ground-breaking model

Our microsolar approach is pioneering. We identify entrepreneurs in developing countries, who we then train in business planning, market research and solar skills. We help them set up their solar microbusinesses so that they can build and sell solar lanterns and solar chargers for radios and mobile phones. This came out of research that we carried out that showed that the average household in a developing country spends between 10-20% of its income on kerosene for lighting, single use batteries for their radios, and charging their mobile phones. That's a lot of money, plus kerosene smoke is toxic, single use batteries are polluting, and mobile phone chargers need access to the electric grid, which most rural areas in developing countries do not have and probably will never have.

Airbone pollutants are a major cause of childhood respiratory illnesses, and helping people to convert their lighting fuel from unsustainable kerosene to renewable solar or hand cranked lanterns can make an enormous change in the lives of many people worldwide.

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: $10 Pseudoscope . You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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T-1000, appropriately enough, lets us know about a California initiative to compile open source science and math textbooks for the state, in the hopes of saving money. The effort is spearheaded by Gov. Schwarzenegger. "The effort seems very promising, but the state's complex standards and arduous textbook evaluation process will pose major challenges. ... The governator will surely be able to stop the digital textbooks from gaining sentience and subjugating humanity, but there are trickier challenges that will be even tougher to defeat than the impending Skynet apocalypse. Textbooks are a surprisingly controversial issue in California and there is a lot of political baggage and bureaucratic red tape that will make an open source textbook plan especially troublesome. ... [T]he traditional wiki approach is untenable for California teaching material. Individual changes to textbooks can become a source of fierce debate and there are a multitude of special interest groups battling over what the textbooks should say and how they should say it. It would take the concept of Wikipedia edit wars to a whole new level."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've gotten lots of angry emails from mainstream journalists about things I've written here or on Twitter, esp in the last couple of years, as things have spiraled down in newspaper-land. I understand, somebody's got to be to blame for what's happening, and I'm convenient.

But I'm not the problem -- my writing about this stuff may be a symptom, when viewed from the top of the journalist ladder. If so, then what's the problem? The same thing that's happening to all other centralized knowledge-based professions, where there used to be gatekeepers earning a living based on the high cost of distributing information. As the cost has come down, the jobs have disappeared. Journalists are not the first to be hit by this, and as I've said many times, my own short-lived profession, developing shrink-wrap software for PCs, was devastated by this a long time ago. I was lucky to have saved some money, and also have shifted what I do, so I've continued to make money over the years, even though today no one earns a living the way I did at the beginning of my career.

Today I said that journalism needs a cleansing, and I seriously believe it. I've been part of the journalism system for my entire career. When I launched products in the 80s, I did it through that system. I did reasonably well at first, because the journos understood my product. It was designed for people like them. Later I developed products that weren't so easy for a liberal arts major to understand and they didn't fare as well. But by that time I had the ability to write publicly without going through the journalism system, so even though that door was largely closed, I was still able to get the word out -- and in so doing, defined a new kind of writing which came to be known as blogging.

Today's journalists are already an anachronism, and I think they know it, and that's why there's so much anger. For many years they could pretend, like American homeowners, that their value was based on something permanent. I own a home myself, it's worth a lot less than I paid for it. I'm not happy about that, but as an adult I accept it. The same kind of acceptance is required of everyone who earns a living in journalism. And the higher up the ladder you climbed in your career, the harder that must be to accept. I get it.

But I can't help you avoid the truth. My goal actually is to work with everyone else, who has been subject to the journalism system, even victimized by it. I've watched them sell us out over and over to the huge corporations that run the tech business. There's not much love lost here for the journos. If they did the job they say they do, following the truth where ever it leads, we would have avoided a lot of problems. But they don't do that. They avoid risks, like most people. They aren't the swashbuckling and courageous investigators portrayed in the movies. They're gray, average people who feel superior to the rest of us. And that veneer is disappearing now.

When I pushed RSS, my hope was to create a level playing field, so that if journalists wanted to do excellent work and stick their necks out, it could be seen, but not with any advantage over the amateurs, the bloggers, who would have full access to the same distribution system. RSS was a total subversion of the way information used to flow, but only tapped into the power that the Internet gave us, in itself it wasn't revolutionary -- that came from the inexorable lowering of the cost of publishing and the simplification of the process, and the ease of the tools. All of these things together are what is undermining the journalism business.

Some people say I don't understand the economics of journalism, but I think I do. It's the old economics that I don't understand,. No one can understand that, because it no longer works.

Village Idiot sends word of a patent granted to MIT researchers for a cone of silence a la Maxwell Smart. This one doesn't use plastic, but rather active and networked sensors and speakers embedded in a (probably indoor) space such as an open-plan office. "In "Get Smart" secret agents wanting a private conversation would deploy the 'cone of silence,' a clear plastic contraption lowered over the agents' heads. It never worked — they couldn't hear each other, while eavesdroppers could pick up every word. Now a modern cone of silence that we are assured will work is being patented by engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Instead of plastic domes, they use a sensor network to work out where potential eavesdroppers are, and speakers to generate a subtle masking sound at just the right level. ... The array of speakers... aims a mix of white noise and randomized office hubbub at the eavesdroppers. The subtle, confusing sound makes the conversation unintelligible." One comment thread on the article wonders about the propriety of tracking people around an office in order to preserve privacy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PL/SQL Guy writes "A Wisconsin appeals court ruled Thursday that police can attach GPS trackers to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants. As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights — even if the drivers aren't suspects. Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, wrote Madison Judge Paul Lundsten."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Worldbike Slideshow: Bicycles as a tool for Development from Ross Evans on Vimeo.

Worldbike designs higher-strength, longer-wheelbase bicycles with integrated cargo capacity. We conduct trial markets to determine the ideal price levels, work with the bike industry to get the best quality parts and frames at the lowest cost, and partner with international development organizations like Kickstart International to sell and distribute the bicycles.

Worldbike was included in the Design for the other 90% exhibition by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

[Image from worldbike]

The impacts of the Open Source Bike project will be principally felt in identifying and solving the key design challenges in using bikes in the developing world. Through the distributed brains of the worldbike bike community, we'll be able to mobilize talent that otherwise wouldn't be able to participate in this effort.

[Image from worldbike]

Bikes from Worldbike are actually designed to be used to carry the heavy loads demanded of them by developing world users. The durable frame extending racks provide a stable platform and make the bicycle more appropriate for the applications of carrying cargo. Having a properly designed bicycle makes it less likely that the bike will fail from being used outside its' intended use.

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An anonymous reader writes with a report about programs revealed in the Department of Justice's 2010 budget request, which includes $233.9 million in funding for an "Advanced Electronic Surveillance" project, and $97.6 million to establish the Biometric Technology Center. The surveillance project is designed to help the FBI "deal with changing technology and ways to intercept phone calls such as those used by VOIP phones or technology such as Skype. The program is also conducting research on ways to conduct automated analysis to look for links between subjects of surveillance and other investigative suspects." The Center for Democracy and Technology's Jim Dempsey warns, "It is appropriate for the FBI to develop more and more powerful interception tools, but the privacy laws that are supposed to guide and limit the use of those tools have not kept pace." The biometrics plan lays groundwork for a "vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification," a system we have discussed in the past.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

stephen.schaubach writes "Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed until now. 'They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford's law. ... Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis. ... Benford's law (BL), named after physicist Frank Benford in 1938, describes the distribution of the leading digits of the numbers in a wide variety of data sets and mathematical sequences. Somewhat unexpectedly, the leading digits aren't randomly or uniformly distributed, but instead their distribution is logarithmic. That is, 1 as a first digit appears about 30% of the time, and the following digits appear with lower and lower frequency, with 9 appearing the least often.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not-A-Microsoft-Fan writes with this excerpt from The Coffee Desk: "Netbooks are making huge waves within the hardware and software industries today, but not many would believe that the whole Netbook craze actually started back around 1996 with the Toshiba Libretto 70CT. Termed technically as a subnotebook because of its small dimensions, the computer is the first that fits all of the qualifications of being what we would term a netbook today, due in part to its built-in Infrared and PCMCIA hardware, and its (albeit early) web browsing software. The hardware includes the two (potentially) wireless PCMCIA and infrared network connections, Windows 95 OSR 2 with Internet Explorer 2.0, a whole 16MB of RAM and a 120Mhz Intel Pentium processor (we're flying now!)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Rushkoff - author of the book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - is a guest blogger.

Here's another great cartoon we found on archive.org when we were researching corporatism propaganda for Life Inc. In Destination Earth, sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry in 1956, Martian dissidents learn that oil and competition are the two things that make America great.

In spite of its unfaltering market bias (or maybe because of it) the film is still quite an entertainingly assembled piece of work.

neurone333 sends along the cause célèbre of the moment in France: a Web executive working for TF1, Europe's largest TV network, sends an email to his Member of Parliament opposing the government's "three strikes and you're out" proposal, known as Hadopi. His MP forwards the email to the minister backing Hadopi, who forwards it to TF1. The author of the email, Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, is called into his boss's office and shown an exact copy of his email. Soon he receives a letter saying he is fired for "strong differences with the [company's] strategy" — in a private email sent from a private (gmail) address. French corporations and government are entangled in ways that Americans might find unfamiliar. Hit the link below for some background on the ties between TF1 and the Sarkozy government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a workshop on Lighting Africa at last year's Solarfest, the argument for renewable low voltage lighting made an impression on me. One of the slides really stuck with me, showing how people adopted cell phones in Kenya, demonstrating that if a new technology becomes obviously essential, people will adopt it in huge crowds. Lighting Africa is hoping to create the awareness and markets for people to be able to make the shift away from non sustainable lighting sources like kerosene lamps and towards more sustainable illumination.

Gareth's recent piece on Cheap Efficient LED Lighting in West Africa got me thinking of this initiative again. If people can spend the money they have budgeted for lighting rather than kerosene, they can make a lasting improvement on their night time lives.

Every year, African households and small businesses spend upwards of $17 billion on lighting, dominated by fuel-based sources such as kerosene, a costly an inefficient alternative. However, despite these huge expenditures - many households spend as much as 30% of their disposable income on fuel-based lighting - consumers receive little value in return. Fuel-based lighting is inefficient, provides limited and poor quality light, and exposes users to significant health and fire hazards. Exacerbating this problem, fuel-based lighting also produces Greenhouse Gases (GHGs), leads to increased indoor air pollution and associated health risks, inhibits productivity and jeopardizes human safety.

If you were going to buy a flashlight now, you would certainly think long and hard about buying a torch with an incandescent bulb if you could buy one with LEDs or a high efficiency flourescent tube. There is money in the marketplace for purchasing lighting. What can we makers do to help that market mature and grow in innovative ways?

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Roywanglu's mysterious EggDrawer automates creating designs on eggs. Put one of these in the kitchen and you'll be eatin' pretty.

The egg printer

My latest Locus Magazine column, "Extreme Geek," is online: it's a description of three geeky writing tools I use that are a) useful; b) too geeky for most people; c) ripe for being turned into something useful to less geeky people.

As I made these notes, I had a sense that, somewhere, there'd be a program that would parse through them, generating a tag-cloud [see picture] with clickable links to different hashtags' contents. Unfortunately, as this file grew longer, I realized that no such program existed.

I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud.

Now, as I write the novel, this has become an invaluable aid: for one thing, it lends itself to a kind of casual, clicky browsing in which one hashtag leads to another, to a search-query, to another tag, exploring my notes in a way that is both serendipitous and directed.

For another, the format is one that comes naturally to me, because of all the other services I use -- such as Twitter -- that employ this telegraphic, brief style.

Extreme Geek

Johannes from Monochrom sends us his essay on Hackerspaces, HACKING THE SPACES:

The history of the so-called hackerspaces expands back to when the counter culture movement was about to make a serious statement. In the decade after the hippies attempted to establish new ways of social, political, economical and ecological relationships, a lot of experiments were carried out concerning the construction of new spaces to live and to work in. Thus, the first hackerspaces fit best into a countercultural topography consisting of squat houses, alternative cafes, farming cooperatives, collectively run businesses, communes, non-authoritarian childcare centres, and so on. All of these established a tight network for an alternative lifestyle within the heart of bourgeois darkness. Hackerspaces provided room where people could go and work in laid-back, cool and non-repressive environments (well, as far as any kind of space or environment embedded into a capitalist society can be called laid-back, cool and non-repressive).

Sociological termed "third spaces" are spaces that break through the dualistic scheme of bourgeois spatial structure with places to live and places to work (plus places for spare time activities). They represent an integrative way that refuses to accept a lifestyle which is formed through such a structure. This means they can come to cooperative and non-repressive ways of working on e.g. technical problems that may result in new and innovative solutions. And that's exactly where Adorno's "Wrong Life" could slip in too...

HACKING THE SPACES (Thanks, Johannes!)

The Roomba's coverage algorithm looks maddeningly random and inefficient when watched with human eyes, but use a long-exposure camera to track it and you can see how thorough it really is:

Now here's something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it's thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it's cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!

Roomba, Economics and Long-Exposure Photography (via JWZ's Livejournal)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Ardiscofono from the MAKE Flickr pool [above, bottom-left]

• Make a day project [above, bottom-right]

• Mutant Thingamakit grows extra tentacles

• Serial - MIDI software for Arduino

• 3D-printed combination lock [above, top-right]

• DIY Bee Box

• Laser-cut LCD stand

• Peacock sampler instrument

• The elliptical Stella sequencer

• The RGB coffee table

• The egg printer [above, top-left]

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theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo feels the end of voice-mail is nigh, and it won't be missed. Since March, he's been using Google Voice to transcribe his voice-mail messages into text that he gets as skimmable e-mail. No more listening to at least a bit of each voice-mail message, hearing the same instructional prompts between each, and worrying about whether it's 9-to-archive and 7-to-skip (or vice versa). Goodbye and good riddance, says Manjoo, to an 'absurdly backward mode of human-computer interaction' that he half-jokes must violate the Geneva Conventions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader touts a blog posting up at PC World titled "Trademarks: The Hidden Menace." Keir Thomas asks why open source advocates are keen to suggest patent and copyright reform, yet completely ignore the issue of trademarks, which can be just as corrosive to the freedom that open source projects strive to embody. "Even within the Linux community, trademarking can be used as obstructively as copyright and patenting to further business ends. ... Is this how open source is supposed to work? Restricted redistribution? Tight control on who can compile software and still be able to call it by its proper name? ... Trademarking is almost totally incompatible with the essential freedom offered by open source. Trademarking is a way of severely limiting all activity on a particular product to that which you approve of. ... If an open source company embraces trademarks then it embraces this philosophy. On the one hand it advocates freedom, and [on] the other it takes it away."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gav caught the EV bug. he also caught the video bug, and made a bunch of great videos of his process to convert his glider to an EV.

During the next few months I'll be converting an old gas powered car to run on clean, cheap electricity. It's a serious learning curve for me but I'm up for the challenge - and hey, if I can do it then believe me, anyone can do it! After years of wanting to do this I thought, "hey, why not start now?" and started looking around for a cheap donor car. Ideally something that had a damaged engine but a good body and gearbox. I was looking for an 80's Mitsubishi (I've had a few) and found this one for sale locally within a few weeks of searching.

This segment shows the conversion process in a slimmed down version:

Gav mentions DIY Electric Car, which he credits as having excellent resources for people doing their own conversions. Their forums look active and polite. Here is a bit from electric motors section:

When searching for cores, look for insulation that is wine colored with yellow banding, brush leads that are still copper color and not scortched, and a commutator that isn't grooved or pitted. Don't be afraid to remove the cover band and have a look inside the motor (and while you're there take a pic to send me). I get a lot of "I wish I had wrote you before I bought this emails" and it's a bummer to read them honestly. I'd bet that almost half the motors I've built are still not up and running yet, so you might not need that motor as fast as you think you might. Sometimes looking to eager to buy not only drives the price up but might also cause you to buy something ill suited for your needs to boot.

Looking to do a conversion? Already driving an EV? Just looking? Check out how Electric Vehicles fit in to our future.

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unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica piece detailing the convoluted lengths to which the MPAA will go in order to keep anybody from ripping a DVD, ever. The organization showed a film to the US Copyright Office, in the triennial hearing to spell out exemptions to the DMCA, giving instructions for how a teacher could use a camcorder to record a low-quality clip of a DVD for educational use — even though such a purpose is solidly established in law as fair use. "Never mind that this solution results in video of questionable quality and requires teachers to learn even more tech in order to get the job done. It also requires schools (or, given the way most schools are run, the teachers themselves) to incur additional costs to purchase camcorders and videotapes if they don't have them already. Add in the extra time involved, and this 'solution' is a laughably convoluted alternative to simply ripping a clip from a DVD."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, farnea posted:

12 hard disk heads oscillating and controlled by a chromatic and tunable keyboard.

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Wired is running a piece on the big idea of Robin Chase — the founder of Zipcar — that we need to build our smart power grid on open standards and include cars as nodes in a mesh network. "'Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks,' said Chase. 'It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data.' And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. ... Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.