Not many days ago, we mentioned ZDNet's interview with Nicholas Negroponte, in which Negroponte had some harsh things to say about Sugar and its connection to the slower-than-hoped uptake of the XO. Ivan Krstic (formerly head of the OLPC's security innovative subsystem) responded to Negroponte's claims, which he says are "nonsense." Among other things, he mentions that Sugar "was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jccq writes "Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better looking, more functional 'page snippets.' But how would it look if you could get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources to combine together when answering a user query. Also comes in API mode to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. The screencast and a (blog post, with semantic-web-geek details)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some day the novelty will wear off, but not yet.



Flying from SFO to JFK on AA 178. The picture was taken somewhere over Wyoming according to FlightTracker.

InfiniteZero writes "According to this WSJ story, 'Two teams of Chinese researchers working separately have reprogrammed mature skin cells of mice to an embryonic-like state and used the resulting cells to create live mouse offspring. The reprogramming may bring scientists one step closer to creating medically useful stem-cell lines for treating human disease without having to resort to controversial laboratory techniques. However, the advance poses fresh ethical challenges because the results could make it easier to create human clones and babies with specific genetic traits.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Julie188 writes "Opera Software is, as expected, preening over the forthcoming browser ballot box feature in Windows 7. It will put the Opera name in front of millions of users who probably never heard of it. But that's not the only reason Opera is gloating. CTO, Håkon Wium Lie, feels that today's decision will force Microsoft to make Internet Explorer do a better job of supporting standards, particularly the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Lie would also like to see Apple and Linux makers follow suit with browser ballot boxes of their own."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Art show takes over hardware store[above, top-left]

Deluxe LCD hacking board [above, top-right]

Quick fix for a stripped lens mount

Apollo 11's touchdown indicator [above, bottom-left]

DIY Arduino LCD backpack

Anamorphic pinhole camera of sturdiness [above, bottom-right]

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theodp writes "Back in 1942, Chicago mail-order house Spiegel's looked to handwriting analysis to identify inconsistent, unreliable, poorly adjusted people. Ah, those were the days. TIME reports we are witnessing the death of handwriting, noting that Gen Y struggles with cursive and the group following them has even less of a need for good penmanship. And while the knee-jerk explanation is that computers are to blame for our increasingly illegible scrawl, literacy prof Steve Graham explains that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. 'Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore,' he says. So much for 100 Years of Handwriting Success!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I originally scanned these images from yet another old 1970s Popular Science from my big stack purely for aesthetic reasons: these illustrations, out of context, are baffling and oddly appealing.

But then I read the article, about the Zephinie Escape Chute-- a sort of flexible nylon and fiberglass tube used to rescue people from emergencies in skyscrapers and other situations where the big problem is the distance between the people and the hard, unforgiving ground. There also seems to be a story behind this all-- a bitter, determined story, as Zephinie never seemed to have gotten certification in the US, and feels that sinister, unfair forces were at play.

The website has a bit of that Dr.Bronnerish rambling quality, but the idea certainly seems sound, and is in place in Europe and Asia. Plus, the site references some fascinating metrics like "90 teenagers evacuation per minute." I think the "x teenager evacuation/min" standard is one that probably has lots more use than we think.

For something that I thought was just a funny visual image, I stumbled upon a very interesting device and a compelling story. Not a bad deal from a 32-year old magazine.

When I started DaveNet in 1994 I had a bunch of ideas for products that I hoped one day to develop. But I had been waiting so long -- it was becoming apparent that I would never get to develop them. So I wrote emails about them, and sent them to all the people I knew from various industry events. What came back often were ideas that built on them. And eventually some of the products did get built. So the idea of dumping ideas publicly, ones that aren't doing you any good, is solid.

In that spirit, here's another -- I call it Two-way Search.

Here's the idea -- if the search engine knew a little about me, it could give more relevant answers. But it's too much trouble to enter demographic info, and I might not want to share that with the search engine company. But... There's a single piece of data that unlocks a vast trove of preference information -- the address of my weblog. From that it would be obvious that I live in the Bay Area and am involved in tech. So when I ask about New York style pizza, you might include places in Berkeley in the search results. When I search for a driver, I'm probably not looking for someone who drives a car. It goes on and on.

I call it two-way because like most things that show up on the Internet, at first search was a one-way thing. I ask questions, the search engine provides answers. By using information on my weblog to provide context, now data flows both ways.

BTW, it's conceivable that Google knows where my blog is, but I don't think they incorporate that knowledge in search results.

PS: Of course this is the solution to the Suggested Users List problem as well, if the new user has a blog. You don't need to know anything but the address of the blog to make intelligent non-random recommendations of people to follow. For one, you'd know what language the user speaks, so you wouldn't recommend 20 English-speaking celebs if they only know Portuguese. For example.

An anonymous reader writes "Techcrunch is running a story that shows some pretty significant differences in the clicking habits of users of Yahoo, Google, and Bing. As it turns out, folks who arrive at websites via Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google (data based on the Chitika network). Essentially, people who use Bing are far more susceptible to advertising. Bing has acquired a decent market share in such a short time, but could it just be that they've reaped the low hanging fruit of those particularly persuaded by advertising? When their huge marketing campaign winds down, what kind of staying power will it have?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "The news report begins with shots of a tense space shuttle launch. Engineers hunch over computer banks and techno music pounds in the background. There is a countdown, a lift-off, and then you see a young man in a black T-shirt and sunglasses, apparently reporting from 'space.' This is the Hacker News Network, and after a decade offline it is lifting off again, this time with a quirky brand of video reports about security. Hacker News Network is one of the side projects of the Boston-based hacker collective known as L0pht Heavy Industries. They're the guys who famously told the US Congress that they could take down the Internet in about 30 minutes, and who helped invent the way that security bugs are reported to computer companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "After months of waiting, the Google Latitude social maps service finally arrived for the iPhone ... but thanks to an Apple rejection of the natively developed app, it's a web app. Says Google on their blog, 'We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone.' But it gets worse for iPhone users: 'Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based web apps as well), we're not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile.' Latitude has been sprouting new features lately and is an interesting take on social networking, but it looks like Apple is determined to ensure its users only get a seriously crippled implementation compared to the Android and WinMo versions. PC World put it less politely than Google did, saying, 'Google's new Latitude Web app for iPhone is so hamstrung that Apple customers may be wishing they had a BlackBerry or Android handset instead.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week we continued our series of Dog days of summer sales. This time I was able to finally get some answers out of my dog by using the Truth Wrist Band kit. You can read more about that little incident here. The Truth Wristband kit normally sells for $44.95, but for the next week, it's only $33, that's 25% off!

Earlier in the week we added another new bundle in the Maker Shed. This time it's a great collection of blinky LED kits, a Maker's Notebook, and Make, Volume 01. Check out all the details about the MAKEcation learn to solder bundle here, and more about our MAKEcation: "Teach Your Family to Solder" week here.

The MAKEcation Learn to solder bundle Features:

• MAKE Volume 01 $14.99 value
• tinyCylon $10 value
• Wee Blinky $8 value
• Lux Spectralis $10 value
• Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

More about The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle

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Hugh Pickens writes "Last Sunday, an object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into Jupiter's colorful cloud tops, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean — the second time in 15 years that this had happened, after Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year. 'Better Jupiter than Earth,' say astronomers who think that part of what makes Earth such a nice place to live is that Jupiter acts as a gravitational shield, deflecting incoming space junk away from the inner solar system where it could do to humans what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 'If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us,' says Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, who first noticed the mark on Jupiter. But others say the warm and fuzzy image of the King of Planets as father-protector may not be entirely accurate. In 1770, Comet Lexell whizzed by the earth, missing us by a cosmic whisker after passing close to Jupiter. The comet made two passes around the Sun and in 1779 again passed very close to Jupiter, which then threw it back out of the solar system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

brajesh writes "Netflix Prize, an algorithm competition to improve the Netflix Cinematch recommendation system by more than 10%, has a new leader — The Ensemble — just one day before the competition ends. The 30-day race to the end was kicked off after BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted the first entry to break the 10% barrier, with the results showing a 10.08% improvement. The Ensemble, made up of three teams who chose to join forces ('Grand Prize Team,' 'Opera Solutions' and 'Vandelay United), has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. From the article on Techcrunch: 'The competition will end [today], so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeffrey sez, "Take a look at this map of London with a Warcraft II theme; I used GSS/Geographic Stylesheets and Cartagen to create a custom map style that displays the entire world as if it were a Warcraft II level. This was done to showcase the abilities of the dynamic mapping framework Cartagen, which is open-source and runs in HTML5's Canvas element. No Java or Flash!"

Warcraft map stylesheet for London (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

Strudelkugel writes "The NY Times has an article about a conference during which the potential dangers of machine intelligence were discussed. 'Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone. Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.' The money quote: 'Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,' Dr. Horvitz said. 'Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

orzetto writes "I work at a research institute, and programming models of physical systems is what I do most of the time. One significant problem when modeling physical processes is finding thermodynamic data. There are some commercial solutions, but these can be quite expensive, and to the best of my knowledge there are no open source efforts in this direction. In my previous job, my company used NIST's Supertrapp, which is not really that expensive, but is written in Fortran, and an old-fashioned dialect at that. As a result, it is a bit difficult to integrate into other projects (praised be f2c), and the programming interface is simply horrible; worse, there are some Fortran-induced limitations such as a maximum of 20 species in a mixture. I was wondering whether it would be legal to buy a copy of such a database (they usually sell with source code, no one can read Fortran anyway); take the data, possibly reformatting it as XML; implement a new programming interface from scratch; and publish the package as free software. Thermodynamic data is not an intellectual creation but a mere measurement, which was most likely done not by the programmers but by scientists funded with our tax money. What are your experiences and opinions on the matter? For the record, I am based in Germany, so the EU database directive applies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At this year's Maker Faire, I met Dale Wheat. He was at a counter in the Maker Shed demonstrating his kits. I was impressed at how clever they were, and how inexpensive. We talked for a few minutes, and then I went off to explore. Before the weekend was over, I dropped a few of Dale's kits into my shopping bag. They seemed like they'd be fun to work with. This week, I finally got around to assembling the three kits I got.

The Wee Blinky is the simplest and easiest of the kits. With two transistors, two LEDs, two capacitors, and four resistors, it makes for a very quick build. Since the parts for stuffing the board are labeled on the silkscreen mask, you don't even need documentation. He does have some docs for the build, and they are worth reading through. They're written in a conversational tone with some of his personal perspective on choices you might make.

Lux Spectralis is a little more complex, but again, the mask on the board tells you where to put everything, and the online documentation steps you through it perfectly. This kit has two clever part features: a preprogrammed Atmel AVR ATtiny13, and a red-green-blue tricolor LED. The chip comes with a bunch of color combinations loaded which show some uses for each of the colors on the LED. If you pick up a programming cord and want to get into learning to program with it (or already know about programming AVRs), then have at it. Otherwise, the program on the chip should keep you happy. The RGB LED is a neat thing in itself. With the three colors, you can make it glow or blink in each of them, or it can cycle through the colors.

Tiny Cylon is the third kit I tried. It sports a row of five red LEDs that are controlled by an ATtiny chip. Already on the chip are a cycle of blink and glow patterns that make it useful as soon as you're done with a quick solder. HAL, KITT, and Cylons are a few of the cultural references in the lighting patterns.

These kits are great for beginnings. Why? Because they're inexpensive, have instructions embedded onto their physical surfaces (and easily located online), and because once you see how they work, you can customize them to suit your own purposes. The programmed ones use momentary buttons for selecting the settings. The button could be mounted off of the board to help fit it into another project. If you want to make a plushy doll with blinky eyes, you could add wires to the Wee Blinky's LED pads and move the illumination further away from the board. If you want to make a model car into KITT from Knight Rider, you could Dremel out the hood of a remote control car and pop the LEDs into the hole.

Once you start to see that you can solder a kit, and that it's fun to build and use, you'll want to see what else you can do with soldering and kits. Once you see how easy it is to make one, you'll feel confident in making chances on the next one. These kits have a low cost of entry and a high probability of success for the beginner. Once built, they can lead you into customizing your own circuits and programming for light and sensor control.

You can check out Dale's site for more information, downloads, build instructions and more.

In the Maker Shed:

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christian.einfeldt writes "The LinuxTech.net blog points out that Linux notebooks are currently selling quite well on Amazon's list in Germany. The blog includes screenshots showing the Linux Asus and Aspire notebooks in positions 2 and 4, respectively, on that list. These machines are not netbooks, but full notebooks, albeit on the moderate to low side regarding price and performance. That LinuxTech.net blog was dated 23 July 2009, and the Asus machine is still holding second place more than one day later, while the Acer machine slipped to fifth position, despite the volatile nature of Amazon bestseller lists. While these two data points are just snapshots in time, they are consistent with other data showing that Microsoft itself attributes some of its recent weak earnings to surging sales of low-end notebooks, as well as data showing that the Linux-powered and Unix-powered computers topped Amazon's sales charts in all categories for 2007. If there is to ever be a 'year of desktop (or laptop) Linux', it won't happen all at once, but will creep up in ways similar to what we are seeing now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just listened to the NPR Science Friday podcast on "The Science of Decision-Making" with Jennifer S. Lerner from the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory as well as others, discussing the way that behavioral- and neuro-economics are changing the orthodox views of rationality in the marketplace. Lerner mentioned a paper, "Portrait of The Angry Decision Maker: How Appraisal Tendencies Shape Anger's In?uence on Cognition" that I had to go and look up -- and I'm glad I did. It's a fascinating look at the role of irrationality on decision-making, and a damning rebuttal of the idea of rationality in the marketplace.

This paper reviews the impact of anger on judgment and decision making. Section I proposes that anger merits special attention in the study of judgment and decision mak- ing because the effects of anger often diverge from those of other negative emotions. Section II presents an Appraisal-Tendency Framework for predicting and organizing such effects. Section III reviews empirical evidence for the uniqueness of anger's rela- tions to judgment and decision making. Section IV connects the Appraisal-Tendency Framework to associated mechanisms and theories. Drawing on the evidence, Section V presents the question of whether anger should be considered a positive emotion. It also proposes the hypothesis that anger will be experienced as relatively unpleasant and unrewarding when reflecting back on the source of one's anger but experienced as rela- tively pleasant and rewarding when looking forward. Section VI synthesizes the evi- dence into a new portrait of the angry decision maker.

Portrait of The Angry Decision Maker: How Appraisal Tendencies Shape Anger's In?uence on Cognition (HTML)

Portrait of The Angry Decision Maker: How Appraisal Tendencies Shape Anger's In?uence on Cognition (PDF)

Rob writes "A team of US scientists has engineered bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon. The research, published today in the Journal of Biological Engineering (abstract and provisional PDF), proves that bacteria can be used to solve a puzzle known as the Hamiltonian Path Problem, a special case of the traveling salesman problem. The researchers say that this proof-of-concept experiment demonstrates that bacterial computing is a new way to address NP-complete problems using the inherent advantages of genetic systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

yergacheffe writes -

I had recently purchased a pair of 5V stepper motors and a motor driver shield from the fine folks at adafruit industries which seemed perfect for spinning the knobs. The question was how to connect the steppers to the knobs. As it happens I had also just bought a gear set from American Science & Surplus on a lark and they fit perfectly on the Etch A Sketch shafts and the stepper shafts. So I simply needed a way to line up the steppers over the knob gears.

There are few problems you’ll encounter in life that can’t be resolved with the judicious application of a laser beam. I drew up a set of parts in Corel Draw and popped in to TechShop to cut them out of acrylic with their Epilog laser cutter.

I cut most of the parts out of clear acrylic except for the side guides which you can see in blue acrylic. The side guides hold the Etch A Sketch in place so it doesn’t move around laterally.

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So, two Jokers walk into a Comic-Con...

More pics of toys and misc. Comic-Con collectibles over at BBG.

theodp writes "Chuck E. Cheese, meet Bill H. Gates. A leaked PowerPoint posted at Gizmodo provides a glimpse of what Microsoft's retail shops may look like, noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there. Some of the stores that were profiled for ideas were Nike, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and AT&T. Microsoft's take on the Genius Bar is the Answers Bar (aka Guru Bar, Windows Bar)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nate_in_ME writes "After getting a positive from the AVG virus detector while playing music on iTunes just a few minutes ago, I did a bit of research. It appears that AVG has recently pushed an update to the virus definitions that flags every iPod/iTunes related file as being infected with the 'Small.BOG' trojan. Interestingly enough, AVG does not have any information on this particular virus in their virus encyclopedia. Discussion on the Apple forum is up to 4 pages and climbing. One user there had an interesting thought: 'Maybe Palm has some shares in AVG...MUAHAAAA!!' (on page 3)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I was looking at this old video I made with my old comedy group, the Van Gogh-Goghs and thought, "you know who might get a kick out of this? The internet". So I hope you enjoy. Also, it's sorta NSFW, so I'm posting it on Saturday, the Day of No Rules. Thanks!