Following up on our earlier discussion, here's more detail on Geoffrey Nunberg's argument that Google Books could prove detrimental to academics and other scholars. Recently Nunberg gave a talk at a conference claiming that the metadata in Google Books is riddled with errors and is classified in a scheme unfit for scholarly use. This blog post was fleshed out somewhat a few days later in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Quoting from the latter: "Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, [and] Stephen King's Christine... A search on 'internet' in books written before 1950 and turns up 527 hits. ... [Google blames some errors on the originating libraries.] ...the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves. ... In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore." The head of metadata for Google Books, Jon Orwant, has responded in detail to Numberg's complaints in a comment on the original blog post — and says his team has already fixed the errors that Nunberg so helpfully pointed out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The other day Jimmie was making throwies at the Pawtucket Arts Festival. He had a neat little jig that helped make the process quicker and more effective. After his roll of tape ran out, he was able to help people keep on making festive blinky tricolor LED throwies. He helped people make a LOT of them.

Jimmie will be helping facilitate soldering and circuit bending workshops at Maker Faire Rhode Island.

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please ignore

twitter writes "Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft's euphemistically named digital restrictions scheme, is the target of another spyware and false advertising lawsuit. 'Microsoft this week was sued in a Washington district court for allegedly violating privacy laws through Windows XP's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) copy protection scheme. Similar to cases filed in 2006, the new class action case accuses Microsoft of falsely representing what information WGA would send to verify the authenticity of Windows and that it would send back information [daily IP address and other details that could be used to trace information back to a home or user]. The complaint further argued that Microsoft portrayed WGA as a necessary security update rather than acknowledge its copy protection nature in the update. WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.' There were at least two other lawsuits launched in 2006 over WGA. According to the Wikipedia article, none of them have been resolved. The system is built into Vista and Windows 7."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tor Books has made the first chapter of the latest Wheel of Time book available to readers for free via their website. This is the first book to have work from Robert Jordan's replacement, Brandon Sanderson, since Jordan died in September of 2007. The Gathering Storm is complete and will be released on October 27th of this year. In addition, the prologue to this book will be available in e-book format on October 17th for $2.99. The whole of the Wheel of Time series will also be released as e-books with several of the books receiving new cover art as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Full Spectrum Engineering is selling a parts kit for printing circuit board etching resists. The kit includes -

Stainless Steel PCB CD Stencil

Special Inkjet PCB Resist Prefilled Inside a Black Refill Cartridge for Epson Artisan 50, Stylus RX580, RX595, RX680, R260, R280, R285, R290, R380

10x Double Sided 3.5"x2.5"x1/32" Copper Clad

Hmm, looks tempting. Be sure to leave a comment if you used it or know of other ways to simplify the process.

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MBCook writes "The New York Times published an article on Saturday profiling Lego, and how tie-ins with movies have helped save the company. 'Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn't recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund.' The article also mentions coming Lego Stores, a Lego board game, how Lego now allows sets with violence (like a gun for Indiana Jones), and how since 2004 Lego has cut part count nearly in half by encouraging re-use of parts and stopping one-off pieces."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is one of many millions of blogs on wordpress.com.

Here is its RSS feed.

View source on that.

Notice anything interesting?

ReadWriteWeb: "All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon."

Apparently for some people this is the first time they're hearing about the <cloud> element in RSS. It first appeared in January 2001 and was part of RSS 0.92, and of course RSS 2.0.. It was fully supported in Radio UserLand 8.0 and Manila.

Gi0 writes "After a couple of months of rejection, the C64 Emulator has finally been approved for the iPhone (and is available at the app store now). 'BASIC has been removed for this release; however, we hope that working with Apple further will allow us to re-enable it. Despite its absence, BASIC is not our focus; ultimately, fans of the C64 want games.' It comes with 5 bundled games and will certainly give you that retro fix for your iPhone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tomas on Flickr took this amazing shot of a video-arcade in Congo.

Arcade (via Wonderland)

An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory claim to have come up with a better tool for underwater acoustics. The new system uses laser light to create sound underwater from a distance. This technology could allow planes a much easier method of communicating with submarines without the need for a floating buoy. "Efficient conversion of light into sound can be achieved by concentrating the light sufficiently to ionize a small amount of water, which then absorbs laser energy and superheats. The result is a small explosion of steam, which can generate a 220 decibel pulse of sound. Optical properties of water can be manipulated with very intense laser light to act like a focusing lens, allowing nonlinear self-focusing (NSF) to take place. In addition, the slightly different colors of the laser, which travel at different speeds in water due to group velocity dispersion (GVD), can be arranged so that the pulse also compresses in time as it travels through water, further concentrating the light. By using a combination of GVD and NSF, controlled underwater compression of optical pulses can be attained."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory claim to have come up with a better tool for underwater acoustics. The new system uses laser light to create sound underwater from a distance. This technology could allow planes a much easier method of communicating with submarines without the need for a floating buoy. "Efficient conversion of light into sound can be achieved by concentrating the light sufficiently to ionize a small amount of water, which then absorbs laser energy and superheats. The result is a small explosion of steam, which can generate a 220 decibel pulse of sound. Optical properties of water can be manipulated with very intense laser light to act like a focusing lens, allowing nonlinear self-focusing (NSF) to take place. In addition, the slightly different colors of the laser, which travel at different speeds in water due to group velocity dispersion (GVD), can be arranged so that the pulse also compresses in time as it travels through water, further concentrating the light. By using a combination of GVD and NSF, controlled underwater compression of optical pulses can be attained."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You know that "child-safety" software that monitors your kids' every click and sends it to some spyware creep whose main profit-center is running national firewalls for totalitarian states who use the same service to figure out whom to hood, kidnap and torture?

Turns out that these same sleazeballs also monitor your kids' IM sessions and sell the info to market-research companies that want to fine-tune how they sell sugar and explosions to kids.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

"This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology," said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. "You don't put children's personal information at risk..."

EchoMetrix, formerly known as SearchHelp, said companies that have tested the chat data using Pulse include News Corp.'s Fox Broadcasting and Dreamworks SKG Inc. Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures recently signed on.

Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats (via /.)

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that disgruntled lovers and spouses considering divorce are flocking to services like YourHackerz.com that boast they have little trouble hacking into Web-based e-mail systems like AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook and Hotmail. The services advertise openly, and there doesn't appear to be much anyone can do about it because while federal law prohibits hacking into e-mail, without further illegal activity, it's only a misdemeanor, says Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. 'The feds usually don't have the resources to investigate and prosecute misdemeanors,' says Kerr. 'And part of the reason is that normally it's hard to know when an account has been compromised, because e-mail snooping doesn't leave a trace.' It's not clear where YourHackerz.com is located, but experts suspect that most password hacking businesses are based overseas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mathematics, as presented by Clifford Pickover, is a palace filled with awe-inspiring curiosities. His Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics is a 500-page, full-color tour of mathematical highlights from 150 Million B.C. to 2007.

Each two-page spread has a fascinating story about a mathematical principle, discovery, puzzle, artifact, or person. It would make a great gift for people who dislike math because they "don't have a head for numbers."

Pickover does a excellent job of clearly explaining each topic, whether it's Aristotle's Wheel Paradox, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, the death of Hypatia (a mathematician "torn to shreds by a Christian mob" in 415 A.D., "partly because she did not adhere to strict Christian principles"), the Fibonacci series, the Goldbach Conjecture, Benford's Law, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Newcomb's Paradox, Tokarsky's Unilluminable Room, or any of other 250 topics in the book.

I have to get rid of most of the books that come in my door (I get several a day sent to me). This is one I plan to keep.

The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

Wired is reporting that the well-known "placebo effect" seems to be increasing as time goes on. Fewer and fewer medications are actually making it past drug trials since they are unable to show benefits above and beyond a placebo. "It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sv_libertarian writes 'A panicked person in Kirkland, WA called local police on Wednesday, claiming they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47. It was actually a Bungie employee carrying an overgrown model of a Halo sniper rifle, which resembles an AK-47 as much as a Volkswagen resembles a Formula 1 racer.' Halo 3: ODST is set to launch on September 22nd, and fans got some new details and early looks at the game during PAX.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From all of us here at MAKE and CRAFT, enjoy this US federal holiday:

The holiday originated in Canada out of labor disputes ("Nine-Hour Movement") first in Hamilton, then in Toronto, Canada in the 1870s, which resulted in a Trade Union Act which legalized and protected union activity in 1872 in Canada. The parades held in support of the Nine-Hour Movement and the printers' strike led to an annual celebration in Canada. In 1882, American labor leader Peter J. McGuire witnessed one of these labor festivals in Toronto. Inspired from Canadian events in Toronto, he returned the USA, to New York and organized the first American "labor day" on September 5 of the same year.

The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City.[1] In the aftermath of the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the US military and US Marshals during the 1894 Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with Labor as a top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike.[2] Cleveland was also concerned that aligning a US labor holiday with existing international May Day celebrations would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair.[3] All 50 U.S. states have made Labor Day a state holiday.

So put away your white shoes, strike up the BBQ and if you MAKE anything cool over the Labor Day weekend, be sure to share with us buy suggesting a site or adding pictures to the MAKE Flickr pool!

Labor Day goodies:

• Blackberry pale ale (pictured above)
• Jig for grilling buns
• BBQ party trailer
  
• How-To: Basic Bar Essentials on CRAFT
  
• Ask MAKE: Siphon for homebrewing beer
  

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Recently on Offworld, this weekend's Penny Arcade Expo opening has brought with it a tidal wave of new game details and announcements: Ubisoft crosses Splinter Cell with Keyboard Cat, Grasshopper's No More Heroes 2 goes 8-bit (on purpose), 2K reveals BioShock 2's multiplayer in motion, Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert's DeathSpank gets its debut trailer, and Valve show off Left 4 Dead 2's undead clown-inhabited Dark Carnival. Elsewhere, we saw Vectorpark's brilliantly serene Flash toys Levers and Acrobots come to the iPhone, Crappy Cat creator VanBeater lend his talents for the iPhone's Bear on a Wire, Farbs (aka. the guy who quit his job via Super Mario Bros.) teases his fantastic space shooter Captain Forever, and Capcom/Clover's gorgeously ukiyo-e inspired Wii/PS2 game Okami get a new sequel for the DS. Finally, we got an accidental look into the sex lives of NES programmers via hidden messages in ROMs, covered our eyes for Kurt Cobain's shockingly awful/disrespectful appearance in Guitar Hero 5, and got a post-mortem on Guitar Hero typography, and our 'one shots': India gets Invaded, and Dance Dance American Revolution meets Dance Dance Industrial Revolution.

An AP report reveals that web-monitoring software from Sentry and FamilySafe, both developed by EchoMetrix Inc., is harvesting data from kids' online chats, trying to determine their opinions on games, movies, and music. The data is then sold to other companies for advertising purposes. "In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms. ... Parents who don't want the company to share their child's information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company's Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Google touts its partnership with the District of Columbia government, presenting it as quite the Google Apps success story. So as part of his coverage of last week's Gmail outage, nextgov's Gautham Nagesh called the DC government, but was told they hadn't heard of any reports of outages among city employees. Nagesh wrote this off to safeguards put in place for the government by Google, but readers tipped him off to another explanation: 'Despite all the press releases trumpeting Google in DC,' an anonymous commenter wrote, 'Exchange is still the city's primary email system.' Nagesh followed up, and was surprised to learn that there is indeed no Gmail in DC government. This all seemed rather strange to Nagesh, considering how much attention former DC CTO and current Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has received for implementing Google Apps for District employees. Reporting separately, CNET's Elinor Mills was told by a DC spokeswoman that while Google Apps is available to 38,000 DC city employees, only 4,000 are actively using it. The spokeswoman added that Gmail could potentially replace Microsoft Exchange, 'but this decision has not been made yet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jim Karter writes "In a three-way cage match, LifeHacker threw Chrome 4, Firefox 3.5, and Opera 10 into the ring and let the three browsers duke it out to see which would emerge as the fastest app for surfing the web. Quoting: 'Like all our previous speed tests, this one is unscientific, but thorough. We install the most current versions of each browser being tested — in this case, Opera 10, Chrome's development channel 4.0 version, and the final Firefox 3.5 with security fixes — in a system with a 2.0 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor and 2GB of RAM, running Windows XP.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Submitted by the Australian branch of Scientology to the local Human Rights Commission is a proposal to eliminate anonymity on the net and the removal of critical websites (MS Word document). The submission is listed as #1931 at this page at the Australian Human Rights Commission." (Read on below for some of the details of what the Scientologists propose.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Arduino based delta robot cost about $70, and took approximately 10 hours to build. Love it! Unfortunately, no code as of yet, hopefully it will be posted soon.

About two week ago i saw a video of an industrial delta robot and i was intrigued by the simplicity of the principle but the complexity of the movements it could make. So i thought, I'm gonna make one.

In the Maker Shed:


Drum Kit Kit for Arduino

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puroresu writes "Astronomers in Ireland have appealed to the public to contact them with eyewitness accounts of a massive explosion in the sky over the country. From the BBC: 'Astronomy Ireland chairman David Moore said: "So far, reports have been registered by residents in west Cork, Kerry, Cavan and as far north as Donegal, thus suggesting that this spectacular event may have been witnessed by people all over the country. In the past two decades there have been two major explosions in the skies over Ireland. When we investigated these, we were able to conclude that one was a Russian military satellite that exploded over the country, and the other was a rock from space."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Etsy seller Giddygirlie makes these wonderful Haunted Mansion embroideries to order.

Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts CUSTOM embroidery (via Craft)

Here's some inspiring words from Bruce Sterling on how normal the future will be, taken from his Webstock address.

Well, let's consider some consensus notions for the future of glamorous Webland. I totally dote on these, for a host of good reason. There are zillions of 'em, stuff like mobile robots, 3d printers, online video, locative tech, quantum computing, social networks. With an almighty effort, maybe we can concentrate on five.

The Cloud! Web Squared! The Internet of Screens! The Internet of Things! Augmented Reality!...

Here's what it sounds like: 1+2+3+4+5. When it's not futuristic. When it's normal. When it's banal.

She poured a coffee, then touched the breakfast table. "Where are my shoes?" "Your sister borrowed them." "Again? Where is Susan?" "She's downtown now." "Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?" "Look at this dress." "Oooh, that dress is darling." "It would look even better on you." "You're right. Get it for me. You can't have it." "Trade you for these shoes." "Let me check that with Henry. Yeah, okay." Karen had another sip of fair-trade coffee. It tasted weird, but it was still hot.

They're all in that paragraph. All five. They're phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It's just: it doesn't look futuristic. It looks way too real.

Words for Webstock - Bruce Sterling (via Making Light)

innocent_white_lamb writes "The Canadian Private Copying Collective is pushing for the implementation of an iPod fee in Canada to compensate them for 'losses' when people copy music to their digital music players. They have collected a fee from every CDR sold in Canada since 1997 and now want to extend that to digital music players. From the article: 'Some have argued that once they buy a CD they shouldn't have to pay again and again to listen to those songs — which they already purchased — on a personal compilation CD or on their MP3 player. But for people like Milman and Basskin, it's about recognizing the value of those works. "There has to be some sort of way to compensate the artist for the hours and the sweat and the blood and the tears and the extreme, extreme expense that goes into making music," Milman said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom writes in...

I connected the tape counter from an old Pioneer cassette deck to an Arduino. I'd love it if one of your readers could think of something to do with it!

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angry tapir writes "Samsung has developed an outdoor digital advertising system that tailors ads based on its audience. There are three main components of the system: an LCD display panel, a dual lens camera and a processing computer, which runs the company's proprietary facial recognition software. if the technology identifies several female members in a group, then it can target advertisements at them, for example. Even if the group is mixed, the technology can identify whether onlookers are children or adults. If they're adults then maybe a wine ad could run whereas an advertisement for toys might play for kids."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.