cremeglace writes 'It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields. But a new paper by sociologists at the Urban Institute and Rutgers University contradicts the notion of a shrinking supply of native-born talent in the United States. In fact, the supply has actually remained steady over the past 30 years, the researchers conclude, while the highest-performing students in the pipeline are opting out of science and engineering in greater numbers than in the past, suggesting that the threat to American economic competitiveness comes not from inadequate science training in school and college but from a lack of incentives that would make science and technology careers attractive. Cranking out even more science graduates, according to the researchers, does not give corporations any incentive to boost wages for science/tech jobs, which would be one way to retain the highest-performing students.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're always interested in cool "reasons to buy" that different content creators are coming up with, so thanks to TW for alerting us to AC/DC's latest effort, involving a special box set that is packaged inside a working guitar amp. The box set is $200, but beyond just the music (rarities, memorabilia, etc.) the casing itself is a 1-watt guitar amp, one foot wide by one foot high and four inches deep: One of the fun things we've noticed in talking to various content creators about ways to better structure their own tiered "reasons to buy" is that it really helps to come up with some ideas that fit the content creator directly, and how they currently interact with fans. That is, you can't just copy what everyone else has done, but need to find that special unique thing that matches the content creator. This seems like a perfect example.

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Worst and weirdest Beatles cover ever. A choir of ventriloquistic monstrosity, from Hungary. Nabbed from Robert Popper's newfangled webble-site.

Is it too late to order up one of these for Halloween? But it'd be kind of lonely bounding around in the parking lot while the party rages inside. How do you say: "Hey everybody, come outside and watch me kick Ultraman's butt" in Kaiju?

Gomora Giant Animatronic Monster Costume

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Matt_dk writes "The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos has developed a design for a piloted spacecraft powered by a nuclear engine, the head of the agency said on Wednesday. 'The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs,' Anatoly Perminov said at a meeting of the commission on the modernization of the Russian economy. He added that the development of Megawatt-class nuclear space power systems (MCNSPS) for manned spacecraft was crucial for Russia if the country wanted to maintain a competitive edge in the space race, including the exploration of the Moon and Mars."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting thread on FriendFeed about the next evolutionary step for C. I wrote a comment that I felt deserved to be elevated to a blog post.

Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious competition in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems.

The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo tool and some nice libraries, and lets go!

We're still totally amazed at the Thru You album that Kutiman came up with earlier this year by mixing together a bunch of totally separate YouTube videos into a rather complete album of amazingly good songs that had never been heard before. Kutiman had to do lots of work to find the right videos playing the right music for what he wanted, but the next person looking to do something similar have a bit of help. Daniel alerts us to a new project that he's created on YouTube, called Instrumentube, which is basically a series of simple videos of a single instrument being played in a specific way, matching up with a chart on the bottom, which perfectly aligns with the YouTube slider. Once you let the full videos load, you can just start clicking on the slider in the appropriate place to get the note you want. I was going to embed a few below, but for some reason I'm having trouble getting the embeds to be at the right size so that the notes line up with where the slider is, so if you want to check out a few individually, here's a piano, electric guitar, standup bass and shaker.

Of course, by themselves they might not be anything special, but start mixing them together... and maybe with some work (and some others) you can start to get something like this:

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Flickr toolbox refurbisher extraordinaire txinkman got ahold of this awesome Black & Decker box and had no idea what it originally held. He posted a query on Toolmonger and soon found out: a valve seat grinding set. About the box itself, he writes:

Just for giggles I shot it next to my orbital sander's box. Somehow I think we've lost some packaging elan over the years.

Boy, howdy.

txinkman's photostream

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Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been some talk lately about how come not as many students are taking computer science in school, and someone over at Information Management online is suggesting that it's all your parents fault for encouraging you to be a baseball star or a CEO or the next American Idol. This seems to be based on nothing more than a hunch, and the whole thing makes no sense to me. My guess is that most people who don't go into computer science don't do it because they're not interested in it. I don't think the answer is to tell your little slugger to put down the baseball bat and spend more time learning BASIC.

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snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite it's title, I don't think that this Happiness Hat by Lauren McCarthy is very jolly at all. Intended to help one train themselves to smile, it uses a bend sensor to detect if it's wearer is smiling, and then stabs them with a meta spike (!) if they aren't. I could easily imagine this being part of the official dress code in some creepy dystopian society. Interesting take on a personal augmentation device, though. [via core77]

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GOOD reports on the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization that hires out goats to people who want to clear brush on their property.

[R]ather than spending tons of money and time on diesel-powered machines, filing the proper permits, and administering dangerous herbicides, the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization will loan your a team of 100 goats for all your brush-clearing needs--all at a very modest rates. As Serious Eats explains, the benefits of goats are numerous: they eat just about anything, they can work on uneven ground, you don't need permits to use them, and they can clear a quarter-acre in about three days.

Rental Goats Clear Brush Better, Beat Cosmonauts in Space Race

Cat Ladies is a one-hour long documentary about women who are living examples of the "crazy cat lady" stereotype. It was directed by Christie Callan-Jones, and just showed at the San Francisco documentary film festival, which ends tomorrow.

A college couple in Nevada miraculously survived with minor injuries when a drunk driver drove a car right through the wall of their house and onto their bed last week. They lay pinned to their mattress for about an hour until emergency workers showed up with chainsaws and released them. The accused, Eric Cross, had mistaken their house for one belonging to his ex-girlfriend and her new mate. An excerpt from CNN:

Initially, Woods struggled to comprehend what had happened to him after being abruptly torn from his slumber. "I thought the roof caved in from an earthquake because it's an old house," Woods said. Then, his girlfriend began screaming and parts of the car came into focus, helping Woods to groggily piece the scene together, "I could see the tire to the right side and I was like, there's a car on top of me right now," he said. "That was really hard to get through my head."

Couple alive after car pins them to bed for almost an hour Image: Sparks Fire Department

Trossen Robotics forum member WGhost9 says they designed, built and programmed this creepy candy crawler in just 3 weeks.

It runs C on an Axon microcontroller. It uses all digital servos and can lift over twice its body weight. The software (soon to be given out open source) allows for 6 synchronous degrees of motion. Future additions will include foot sensors and a remote control option.

[ via DIY Drones ]

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

As a young entrepreneur years ago, I found this interview with Julie Aigner-Clark (founder of Baby Einstein, who sold her $20 million enterprise to Disney in 2001) to be pretty inspiring, but it's turned funny in light of last week's news about the big Baby Einstein refund -- what The New York Times says is "a tacit admission that [Baby Einstein products] did not increase infant intellect." No kidding. Here's a bit of that old Aigner-Clark interview:

"I didn't have a video background, but my husband and I borrowed video equipment and started to shoot scenes on a tabletop in my basement. I put a puppet on my hand and plopped my cat down in front of the camera. My husband and I used our home computer to edit our first video... Everything I did in the first videos was based on my experience as a mom. I didn't do any research. I knew my baby. I knew what she liked to look at. I assumed that what my baby liked to look at, most other babies would, too."

It's pretty clear that Baby Einstein was not rooted in cognitive research as they had boldly claimed and many parents believed. Worse yet, scientists at the University of Washington concluded that these videos actually hindered language development in infants. Lucky for me, I came across the interview before I my daughter was born so every time a friend offered us hand-me-down Baby Einstein products, I would immediately picture this woman wagging puppets in front of a Handycam in her basement and would politely decline.

We've discussed in the past how reporters often contribute to misconceptions about the patent system and patent disputes. They commonly report that those sued for infringement are accused of "copying" or "taking" an invention from another company, when it's much more common for infringement lawsuits to involve independent invention. Now we've got another example. Red Bend Software is the latest in a long list of companies suing Google for patent infringement, claiming that Google violates its patent 6,546,552 on "difference extraction between two versions of data-tables containing intra-references."

Specifically, Red Bend claims that Google's Chrome browser violates this patent by including an algorithm, called Courgette, that lets Google push compressed software updates. Of course, plenty of companies have come up with various ways to push compressed software updates over the years, so I'm at a loss as to why it requires a patent... but that's a different issue. The problem here is the reporting on this lawsuit by Mass High Tech and reporter Galen Moore. First, he claims that this lawsuit suggests Google's "open-source Chrome browser isn't so open source after all." Huh? I've read that sentence over and over again and I can't figure out how a patent dispute would mean that Chrome isn't open source. This kind of reporting suggests that a patent simply wipes out the type of license covering a software.

The second questionable bit is in talking about how Red Bend (like plenty of patent holders putting forth lawsuits) is claiming willful infringement, which gives a company triple damages if found to be true. So what's the evidence of "willful infringement." A claim that "Google has known about the conflicting patent since September 7." September 7th? That's a month and a half ago. The patent was issued in 2003. And Courgette was first used in July. It's difficult to see how anyone could claim with a straight face willful infringement when you just informed them of your patent, and that happened after the software was already in use. You don't even need to know much about patents to at least point these facts out.

But, of course, you wouldn't know any of that from the article. Instead, your average reader would likely read this, thinking that Google somehow "took" this invention from Red Bend and that somehow negates Google's "open source" license on Chrome.

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cecille writes "Voting machine maker Sequoia announced on Tuesday that they plan to release the source code for their new optical-scan voting machine. The source code will be released in November for public review. The company claims the announcement is unrelated to the recent release of the source code for a prototype voting machine by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. According to a VP quoted in the press release, 'Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

Civil war enthusiast William Maser, 54, accidentally fired a cannonball into his neighbor's house and is now being charged with a felony count of discharging a firearm into an occupied structure. That's in addition to the charges of reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct that he was already facing for this incident. What I'm really curious about is Mr. Maser's first reaction to the effectiveness of his homemade cannon. Was it jubilation ("Holy sh*t, I did it!") or dismay ("Holy sh*t, now I've done it.")?

Cannonball through House (via WinkNews). In other essential news: Ice skating bear kills Russian circus hand and Wheelchair user, 92, arrested for smuggling coke.

Image courtesy of chadh via Flickr / CC 2.0

From instructables user depotdevoid comes this awesome Ghostbusters costume tutorial. Besides the proton pack, he made a trap, a pair of "ecto goggles," and the obligatory jumpsuit. "Aim for the flattop!"

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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Laughing Squid has photos of the "Candy Corn Cones" that street artist diabetik is plopping around in Washington, DC.

CWmike writes "Intel has pulled a firmware upgrade it released on Monday for its X25-M consumer solid-state drives after users complained that the software caused crashes. The company on Monday made available a software package called SSD Toolbox to monitor and manage the performance and health of X25-M SSDs on systems running Windows 7. The package included a firmware upgrade and software called SSD Optimizer that included diagnostic tools to help keep the Intel SSD running at high performance. 'We have been contacted by users with issues with the 34-nanometer Intel SSD firmware upgrade and are investigating. We take all sightings and issues seriously and are working toward resolution. We have temporarily taken down the firmware link while we investigate,' an Intel spokesman said in an e-mail. The spokesman declined to comment on when the company would issue updated firmware."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bradley Novicoff of Dangerous Minds writes about Collapse, a new documentary by Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) about impending global doom, which Variety called "an intellectual horror movie" that's "unnervingly persuasive much of the time, and merely riveting when it's not."

From Apple's Trailer site:

Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new President will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil, and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight.  American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and to hope for the best.  But is anyone prepared for the worst?  Michael Ruppert is a different kind of American.  He predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter "From the Wilderness" at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial.

Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead.  He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation.  He is especially passionate over the issue of "peak oil," the concern raised by scientists since the 1970s that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel.  While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesn't hold back at sounding an alarm.  He portrays a future that resembles apocalyptic science fiction.  Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded; and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism.  Smith lets viewers form their own judgments.

The Coming Collapse With Michael Ruppert

Our Fascination video series features interviews with notable scientists and technologists, sponsored by Dow Chemical. All the videos are up now, and they're worth watching. How often do you get to hear these brilliant folks describe why they're fascinated with what they do? Here's the lineup:

• Larry Weiss
• Bruce Hood
  
• Lynn Rothschild
  
• Fiorenzo Omenetto
  
• Heather Lang
  
• Adam Summers
• Theodore Gray
  
• Mackenzie Cowell
• Louise Leakey
• John Mighton

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This should come as no surprise -- as it was pretty clearly a foregone conclusion after his dinner with David Geffen, but UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson (who prior to that dinner didn't seem to care about this issue at all) has decided to totally ignore the Digital Britain report, as well as the widespread outcry from individuals and ISPs, and will implement a plan to kick file sharers offline using a "three strikes" system. While he says there will be an appeals process, there's no indication that there will be a due process system that allows for innocence before guilt. Instead, it sounds like the other way around. It's pretty clear, of course, that Mandelson was simply blowing smoke when he claimed he was merely asking for feedback around such an idea, rather than definitely endorsing it.

In defending the new proposal, Mandelson continues to state things that just don't make sense. He claims that he was "shocked" to learn that only one in twenty downloads were authorized, but fails to note that stat has little basis in reality. Meanwhile, he again insists that downloading is "economically unsustainable," ignoring two recent studies (one from Harvard and one from the UK's own PRS) showing that the overall music industry is growing. How is that economically unsustainable?

But, honestly, the biggest issue is that he fails to address the huge question that I keep asking, and which no one wants to answer:

How will kicking people off the internet get them to buy more product?

That's because there is no answer. Will it make some people participate less in file sharing? Perhaps -- though, it's likely to just drive more people further underground. But just because they stop file sharing it doesn't mean that people will buy any more. In fact, continuing this war on music fans is only going to make people less interested in buying. This is exactly the opposite of what the music industry needs right now. Taking the war against consumers up a notch only ensures that they're even less interested in giving any money to the entertainment industry. Instead, they'll find those who treat them right and actually give them a reason to buy (rather than trying to limit them) to give their money to.

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Becky Stern of Make online says:

The buildings in the town of Vercorin in the Swiss Alps contribute to an impressive piece by Felice Varini, called Cercle et suite d'éclats. The pattern was projected on the town from the vantage point, then traced and painted. Photographs from the same spot in daylight make the town look flat, almost like a postcard.

Felice Varini's town-sized illusion

This one looks quite ripe for a remake - Heatstick's wearable hummingbird feeder gives a very close-up view of a fascinating animal. If the $79.95 asking price is a bit outside of your current birdwatching budget - do consider painting up a face shield, drilling a hole, and mounting a nectar-filled bulb within - just be sure to give the little guys some alone time to grow acquainted with the feeder before attempting to 'interface'. [via Boing Boing]

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An anonymous reader writes "The MiFi Mobile Router has been a lot of positive reviews these days, for combining a cellular modem, wifi radio and battery pack in a portable device. But playing with a beta release of a software based wireless router for Windows 7 has me wondering if there's any future to these dedicated, multiradio routers. Is the future that every PC should be a router? Or is that a job best left to a cell phone?" I just drove across the country and back with a MiFi (using Verizon's service, which was not zippy but very reliable); it strikes me that being nicely cross-platform and not requiring a laptop with its own cell-network connection is a serious advantage for the MiFi or any similar device.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Score one for Britain in its contest with the United States to create the stupidest fear-based society. The Watford Borough Council took the lead by banning parents from supervising their own kids in public playgrounds, "because they have not undergone criminal record checks."

The only adults allowed to monitor the kids are idiocracy-vetted "play rangers." The children's parents must "watch from outside a perimeter fence."

A council notice to parents explains that: "Safeguarding the children and young people who use the site is one of our top priorities.

"Due to Ofsted regulations we have a responsibility to ensure that every authorised adult who enters our site is properly vetted and given a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check by Watford Borough Council."

Council Mayor Dorothy Thornhill argued they are merely enforcing government policy at the play areas, in Vicarage Road and Leggatts Way.

She said: "Sadly, in today's climate, you can't have adults walking around unchecked in a children's playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults.

Right pillocks at Watford Borough Council ban parents from hanging out with kids at park (Thanks, Fee!)

Tim says: "Governator Arnold hides a colorful response in a carefully worded veto."

Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Aaron McLear, insisted Tuesday it was simply a "weird coincidence."

Can a statistician gives us the odds of this happening, please?

Did Schwarzenegger drop 4-letter bomb in veto?

Thiago Teixeira made this Coin Sequencer, which allows you to lay down tracks using spare change. It's an older project (from before 2005?), but is new to me. As the turntable spins, the coins go under a row of infrared sensors, which send on/off signals to a computer to turn the music on and off. I like the simplicity of using a turntable and IR sensors- I recently made a project like this, but used a computer vision system and some custom hardware to achieve basically the same effect. Nice work! [Thanks, Stuart!]

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According to the SPGRA Design Blog, a Japanese artist named Kazuma Takahashi made these amazing sculptures out of things like cigarette boxes, gum wrappers, and packaged food containers. Oddly, I wasn't able to find any information about the artist on the Japanese or English web, but many of the packaging used are from common Japanese supermarket snacks.

SPRGA via NotCot

Recreation of Louis Slotin's deadly hands-on experiment. Public domain government image, taken from Wikipedia.

They might know the name, but nobody ever says, "I want to be like Louis Slotin when I grow up." And with good reason. Despite being fiercely intelligent, quick thinking and brave, Slotin is famous for something that nobody really wants to be famous for---namely, dying horribly. In May 1946, Slotin, a researcher on the Manhattan Project, became the second person in history to be killed by a criticality accident, the unintentional triggering of a nuclear chain reaction.

Slotin's story made it to Hollywood, fictionalized in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy". Not everyone got such a public legacy. As the cold war neared an end in the 1980s, scientists in the USSR began to share information with their American counterparts, and, for the first time, we learned about the Soviet Slotins. Now, their legacy will shape the way emergency personnel respond to nuclear accidents and terrorism and, hopefully, make it easier to save lives...

"Criticality accident" is just a fancy way of saying "nuclear reaction happening where and when you don't want it to". It starts with fissile material--atoms whose nuclei have a tendency to split apart. Get these materials in the way of free neutrons and a neutron can enter the nucleus of an atom and rupture it. That fission releases energy, and neutrons, which cause more nuclear fissions in nearby atoms. The chain reaction keeps going and going. It will stop on its own, but only when it's good and ready---which is, to say, when a release of energy forces the fissile material apart (think: explosion), when enough of the material has been used up so that what's left no longer throws off enough neutrons to keep the reaction going, or when heat energy produced by the reaction builds up enough that it makes the atoms--which are most unstable at room temperature--less likely to split.

It's a little scary, but these accidents are extremely rare. The Los Alamos National Laboratory Review of Criticality Accidents lists only 60, worldwide, since we started playing with this stuff in the 1940s. Most didn't kill anyone. And 38 of the 60 can't even be called completely unexpected, as they occurred in research reactors and during experiments where scientists were bringing fissile materials together to gauge the point at which criticality happens.

In fact, that's what Louis Slotin was doing, slowly lowering the top half of a neutron-reflecting shell over a sphere of fissile plutonium. Today, nobody would attempt that experiment except from a safe distance. Slotin, however, was using his bare hands to hold the shell, and had a screwdriver propped in there to keep the two halves from touching. A crowd of seven colleagues was watching him work when the screwdriver slipped out, sealing the shell and launching a reaction. I call Slotin brave and quick-thinking because, instead of freaking and running, he pulled the shell apart, probably saving his coworkers' lives. He, however, died nine days later.

Slotin's story is pretty well-known. But, in Russia, similar accidents were happening that nobody knew about for decades. Like Slotin's, some these stemmed from both unfortunate chance, and decisions by the researchers that, with 20/20 hindsight, look a little silly. Why would depend on a precariously placed screwdriver to save you from certain death? Why would you try to run through a criticality experiment after normal work hours, without key safety measures in place, and with the goal of trying to be done in time to make it to the theater that evening...as two unfortunate Russian scientists did in 1968.

Other Russian accidents, though, had little to do with the people hurt--except in that those people simply didn't have enough training for the jobs they had. In 1953, two workers at Mayak, a factory that processed fissile material for experimental and military use, were exposed to a criticality accident. But neither knew enough about nuclear fission to realize that. They knew something weird had gone down, but didn't think it was a big deal. Instead, they fixed the problem and went back to work. They finished their shift and, because Mayak had no automatic criticality alarms, nobody knew anything had gone wrong at all until two days later when one of the men collapsed at work. He survived, but only after a long illness that involved the amputation of both his legs.

Neil Wald, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh's department of Environmental and Occupational Health, was one of the first Americans to learn about this, and other accidents at Mayak. He studies the impact of radiation on human health and was part of a team that began working with Soviet counterparts in the 1980s to research the accidents and use them to better understand how to help people who've been exposed.

"They actually did quite a good job of keeping the medical records," he told me. "They made the accidents state secrets, so they never threw anything away. Everything we saw, all the documents, were stamped on the back with a great big seal that said, 'State secret.'"

The goal of this collaboration is to develop a way of quickly diagnosing radiation exposure, so that emergency personnel can show up at the scene of an accident and be able to tell who needs the most medical attention the fastest. Dr. Wald says the system could be used both at nuclear facilities, and by regular EMTs responding to situations where a dirty bomb has exploded, or some other intentional nuclear exposure might have happened.

Coming Friday: Criticality Accidents Part II--The Blue Flash and the Origin of Super Hero Origins!

Brooks writes "For once it looks like the NFL isn't the bad guy in an intellectual property dispute, and actually are the ones trying to explain some of the issues with copyright maximalism to colleges. The problem is that the company who records scouting tapes for eight major conferences has convinced colleges that the NFL should pay for the right to use those tapes to scout players, in particular juniors who are trying to decide whether to enter the draft.

From the NFL's point of view, the junior scouting program exists to help keep kids in school if they're unlikely to succeed in the draft in their junior year (it's certainly in the NFL's interest to have those kids continue to develop their talent for one more year). The colleges, of course, see the "value" the tapes bring to the NFL and want a piece of that pie. So far, the NFL seems to be sticking to its guns and basically saying "fine, we just won't scout your players." The dispute has escalated to the point where some colleges aren't even letting NFL scouts look at tape on campus.

There's a bit of a sweet good-for-the-gander element to the story, since the NFL has been on the other side of the content value argument pretty much forever. It does kind of suck, though, that some college juniors will be entering the draft based on overoptimistic expectations. And it can't be good for a college's football program if it becomes known that it doesn't allow NFL scouting."

Yes, you read that right. It seems that the in this era of copyright maximalism, a company is trying to claim copyright on scouting tapes that are helpful to everyone (teams get better scouting info to make decisions, players are more accurately ranked, etc.). A friend who follows minor league baseball mentioned this week that Major League Baseball just took down its own scouting videos that had been online, so I'm wondering if baseball is now facing a similar problem as well.

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eldavojohn writes "Game Politics makes note of criticism over leaked footage from the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 release. (Spoiler warning.) Footage shows the player engaged in killing civilians with terrorists (relevant video begins at about 1:50, second source in case of DMCA). Several game sites are asking if this is taking things too far. Probably just advertising at work, but the footage is indeed controversial — the question remains whether or not it is out of context."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Schmidt says he can search real-time stuff, but how to do ranking?

Good question. Would have been easier had Twitter not polluted the follower-count measure of authority. But you can still do it by making it relevant on a personal level. Someone I follow is a lot more relevant than someone I don't. After that people who are followed by people I follow. That immediately cuts down the power of the super-elites with millions of followers (they tend not to follow many).

Google is onto it with their social search. I've been asking for that, but in a different form. I want to tell them that I'm the author of this blog. Now they know a lot more about what my interests are.

7/26/09: Two-way search.

So it would be nice if ranking were a personal thing. Keep going the way you're going Eric.

The host of NPR's awesome news quiz/comedy extravaganza, "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!", has put up his annual Halloween display. It is a nativity scene of evil. I heart it. Image via Peter Sagal's Twitter account. Which you should be following.

coondoggie writes "With a hiss and roar, NASA's Ares I-X rocket blasted into the atmosphere this morning at about 11:33 am EST, taking with it a variety of test equipment and sensors but also high hopes for the future of the US space agency. The short test flight — about 2 minutes — will provide NASA an early opportunity to look at hardware, models, facilities and ground operations associated with the mostly new Ares I launch vehicle. The mission went off without a hitch — 'frickin' fantastic' was how one NASA executive classified it on NASA TV — as the upper stage simulator and first stage separated at approximately 130,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The unpowered simulator splashed down in the ocean."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gale Banks (legendary Southern California hotrodder and auto engineer) shares this photograph of the old Los Angeles Subway Terminal. This image of unknown date and origin is remarkable to me, as an LA resident, in part because our city is not thought of as a "subway city." Throughout the 20th century, the growth emphasis here was all about freeways and cars, and public transportation sucks.

Gale's personal story about this "internet-found" photo follows...

I actually broke into this terminal many floors below the Subway Terminal Building on Hill Street south of 4th, in 1962. The entry hall was boarded-up with plywood so it took a little covert effort. At the time this area was full of Civil Defense Jeeps and 6 by 6 trucks plus drums of water and crates of K-rations. Every thing was lit by a single overhead light bulb (probably signed by Thomas Edison) and the tires were flat on the vehicles.

I walked all the way to the end of the tunnel (used as a set for the movie "MacArthur") near Belmont High, lots of vermin and dripping water...real nasty and quite a challenge for my 2 cell non Mag-lite. All the rails had been removed. When I was a kid I rode the street car out of this place to my uncles shop on Glendale Blvd. Check out the hi-tech control tower.

I have no idea of the photo's origin, but it was probably shot in 1925-'26, as this is (I believe) when the whole thing was built. There are high rise building foundations now blocking the tunnel. The last train was in 1955.

There's a ridiculous amount of hype in science today, and in an area as sexy as cancer research it is perhaps even worse. In writing this post, I am mindful of the "sharks don't get cancer" trope that's been used irresponsibly to sell shark cartilage as snake oil, very often to people who are in a desperate situation. Consider that a disclaimer.

There is, reportedly, a very low incidence of cancerous tumors in naked mole rats. Statements like "there has never been a tumor found in a naked mole rat" may be misleading unless they also explain to us just who is looking for tumors in naked mole rats, how long they've been doing so, how hard they're looking, who's paying for it, and why. Still, I think this paragraph is interesting:

The findings, presented in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells "claustrophobic," stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

Of course, there's all kinds of reasons why it might work for naked mole rats and not for people, but the idea that a mechanism as simple as cellular "claustrophobia" might go so far to eliminating tumors is pretty interesting. Here's the original abstract at PNAS.

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Ah, remember Michael Lynton? The Sony Pictures CEO who earlier this year insisted that nothing good had come from the internet at all. When everyone started mocking him for this statement, rather than back off, he doubled down and insisted it was true, using examples that were easily debunked. Apparently, he hasn't learned his lesson. He's back at it, pushing for the UK (and others) to pass laws kicking people off the internet (so-called "three strikes" laws) while insisting that due to piracy there's less money to make movies and fewer movies being made. Of course, those are things that can be fact checked, and the folks over at TorrentFreak did exactly that, pointing out that more movies are coming out each year and more money is being made. Oops.

The way Lynton tries to get around this is by not actually talking about how many movies are coming out, but just counting the number of movies that came out of "the leading studios." I find this quite amusing, because in the podcast we discussed last week involving Paramount's Scott Martin, part of his argument was that while the big studios were fine, the independents were all suffering and fewer movies were coming out because of it -- and, as a "fan" of independent movies, he found that sad. I didn't bother to check the numbers, but it appears that Martin was simply wrong. More movies are being made, and it looks like an increasing percentage of them are coming from smaller independent shops.

The problem, again, seems to be that the folks at the movie studios (just like those at the record labels) only like to count the big hits as successes -- rather than the smaller projects that actually make money and make up the majority of the actual market. It's the same sort of thinking that makes movie studio people insist that we need to explain to them how they can keep making $200 million movies. That's the wrong question. The question is how do you make profitable movies. The technology has advanced such that it's cheaper and cheaper to make movies (which is why we have more of them). But notice that the studios never focus on ways to make movies in a more economical way, but how can they keep spending. Perhaps that's a bigger problem than "online piracy."

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Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

Here's how it works: this page has instructions for profs, librarians and similar worthies to list themselves as potential recipients for Makers (please pass this URL around to people who might want a copy!). If you've read the electronic text of Makers and want to reimburse me, but don't want a copy of the print book for yourself, you can buy a copy for the institution of your choice. Everybody wins: you get to settle your karma while supporting your favorite bookseller, a library or university gets a copy of the book without having to divert its budget, my publisher gets the sale and I get the royalty and the sales-figure. I've facilitated the donation of hundreds of books this way, and it works great.

I'm launching Makers in the UK at Forbidden Planet in London tomorrow (Thursday) night at 6PM, and I'll be having the Toronto launch with Bakka Books at the Merril Collection on November 12. You can pre-order inscribed copies from either event, and they'll be shipped after I sign. (There's also a great indie bookseller near my office in London, Clerkenwell Tales, which will take your inscription mail-orders; I'll stop in a couple times a week to sign them for the duration).

There's also a US east-coast tour with stops in NYC, New Jersey, Boston and Philly, but the details are still being finalized. If you think you can make it to any of those places and want to get an email once the details are fixed, drop me an email and I'll send you a note once I have them in hand.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, this kick-ass Publishers Weekly starred review:

In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.

Mighty is my w00t!

Makers

stoolpigeon writes "The Android 2.0 SDK is now available from Google. This puts to bed concerns about Google not releasing the SDK or perhaps being in some kind of exclusivity deal with Verizon around 2.0. The release notes give a nice overview of what is there. Those who already have the SDK can grab the updated tools as SDK components; everyone else will pick up everything when downloading the new SDK." Relatedly, reader riffzifnab reports that Google has also announced Google Maps Navigation, a GPS application for Android 2.0 that takes voice input and integrates with internet searches and Street View.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of random notes on returing from the #140conf in Los Angeles.

Next time I go to a conference I'm taking the Asus, not the MacBook. You're always looking for a power outlet with the Mac and that sucks. I'm also going to actively look for a replacement for the Sprint MiFi and my AT&T iPhone, both of which have terribly spotty coverage. I couldn't get online in LAX last night, even though my iPhone can tether and I had the Sprint. If you can't get online in one of the largest airports in the world, what is the point of carrying this thing with you. SFO wasn't much better. And I couldn't use either of them in my hotel room in the biggest hotel in Hollywood in the middle of a shopping mall and convention center. These are places that by now these cell providers should have the best coverage in. The question is -- is Verizon any better?

Great Rebooting The News with Jeff Jarvis as the guest. Lovely rapport betw Jay and Jeff.

At the conference yesterday they explained the vague announcement made by YCombinator and Twitter over the weekend -- YCombinator startups will have access to Twitter's firehose. The audience heard "startups get help from Twitter" which they reacted to as if they said "Twitter feeds stray puppies." I hate to spoil the party, but not all speculative investigations are done by "entrepreneurs" -- and not all entrepreneurs are part of YCombinator. This is just more of the lunacy that comes from building an industry around a company instead of an open format or protocol. Paul Graham hypes it as Twitter having discovered a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. That's pure bunk. When there's a protocol, no one will own the firehose, and no one will be granted access (and no one will not be granted access).

I'm continuing to love my linkblog. I've gotten nothing but complaints from readers. Eventually you all will love it too. I'm sure of it. In the meantime, my work is 100 percent more valuable to me, and my incentive to remember a link by pushing it through Twitter (and my linkblog) is greater than ever. So I'll do more work for you, you'll be better informed, and happier and more productive. I can't promise you'll live longer. We'll feed some stray puppies too.

Reminder to subscribe to this feed not the one that WordPress provides. (Note to Matt and the WP community and company, as I use WP more and more I'm hitting limits we never had in Radio or Manila. You guys should seriously look at stealing some ideas from those products. I'll help you find them, because I'm starting to depend on this software.)

I started to watch the video of my presentation at 140conf, which everyone says went well (it was widely quoted on Twitter, of course). That's good, cause I couldn't stand to watch it because I'm frowning too much because there's a light shining in my eyes. We have to come up with a better way to do this, so it doesn't feel so much like "I'm up here and you're out there." I have to be able to at least abstract the audience when I'm speaking. That's why I much prefer the interview format, because I can talk to another person. It's part of the theme of my talk, we're just people, I'm not Mike Wallace and you're not really an audience. It's a brave new world and we should have the courage to accept it for what it is. And please believe me that I'm smiling as I write this. I wish I had been smiling more while I gave the talk.

And don't forget to feed the stray puppies.

The buildings in the town of Vercorin in the Swiss Alps contribute to an impressive piece by Felice Varini, called Cercle et suite d'éclats. The pattern was projected on the town from the vantage point, then traced and painted. Photographs from the same spot in daylight make the town look flat, almost like a postcard. What I'd like to know is how he got the town to go along with it; I could see an easily-repainted suburb in the States being convinced, but this quaint (and much older) town in Switzerland seems like a much bigger challenge. Don't miss the panorama picture on Varini's site. [via Core77]

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Boing Boing reader Greg Zilm sent in this photograph of a fine pumpkin homage to William S. Burroughs.

Ian Lamont writes "Remember the report last year that the FBI was concerned about a 'vishing' exploit relating to the Asterisk IP PBX software? Digium played down the report, noting that it was based on a bug that had already been patched, but now the company's open-source community director says that attacks on Asterisk installations are 'endemic.' There have been dozens of reported vishing attacks in recent weeks, says the article: 'The victims typically bank with smaller regional institutions, which typically have fewer resources to detect scams. Scammers hack into phone systems and then call victims, playing prerecorded messages that say there has been a billing error or warn them that the bank account has been suspended because of suspicious activity. If the worried customer enters his account number and ATM password, the bad guys use that information to make fake debit cards and empty their victim's bank accounts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China, of course, is famous for massive censorship of the internet. Google, on the other hand, is well known for fighting censorship in many cases. Even in China, where it was required to block some searches, Google tried to take as permissive an approach as possible, even letting users know when a site was being blocked (yes, this was quite controversial, but the company did more than many other search engines). So, it does seem a bit surprising to see a headline claiming that China is accusing Google of censorship. Isn't that backwards?

It isn't "China" so much as it's the Chinese Communist Party's main newspaper (so, basically, the paper of record from the government) claiming that Google is not finding a report it put out suggesting that Google's book searching project might violate Chinese authors' copyrights. Of course, that claim is a bit amusing as well, given China's general attitude towards copyright over the last couple of decades... but that's another story.

Google claims that it did no censorship at all, and that there was an automated block put on the site via its StopBadware service, which makes sense. Google has long used StopBadware to try to protect users from malware sites, and the service does sometimes make errors. While it seems unlikely that Google would purposely block the report, that doesn't make it any less strange for a Chinese government publication to accuse Google of censorship. Given the government's happy embrace of censorship, how does it have any sort of moral claim here?

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This installment of EHX's Effectology series outlines a variety of methods for using their stompboxes to create some rather convincing spookiness. Clever work, but the real highlight is the simple schematic for light control seen @ the 3:45 mark.

A photocell soldered between the ground and tip/sleeve terminals of a 1/4" plug is then connected to the expression pedal input of a self-oscillating EQ effect - instant photo-theremin. nice.

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angryrice tips a blog post by John Resig, lead developer for jQuery, about the failure of Google Groups to manage spam, declaring attempts to use it as a public discussion system "completely futile." Quoting: "The final straw was placed upon my patience with the Google Groups system a few weeks ago. Spammers are now spoofing the email addresses of existing group participants to sneak their messages through. Previously you would've seen a delightful 'FREE MOVIE DOWNLOADS' spam from 'freemovies123@gmail.com' — but now you'll see it coming from existing group users — or even the group moderators themselves. This cheat completely bypasses the moderation system since the spammers are pretending to be pre-moderated users. The Google Groups system is completely fooled. The spam message comes in claiming to be from an existing group participant — and according to the Google Groups interface there is no difference. If you click the user's name you'll be taken to a full listing of that user's posts (with the spam messages delightfully interspersed)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Ware's incredible (and all-too-real) New Yorker cover. (Full size version). Make sure to read Ware's comic strip in the issue, too! (Via Why, That's Delightful!)

Lord Mandelson, Britain's business secretary, has promised to create a system of collective punishment without judicial review for people accused -- but not convicted -- of illegal file-sharing. Under Mandelson's proposal, anyone living in the same house as someone who has been accused of three acts of infringement will be denied access to the Internet (at the expense of their education, employment, and access to government, health information, distant relatives, etc) even though no judge has reviewed any evidence or wrongdoing, let alone entering a judgement.

Hilariously, Mandelson expects that this will work to reduce file-sharing. Similar measures -- removing websites without judicial oversight, mass lawsuits, even industry-wide prohibitions on whole classes of legitimate technology -- have totally failed to reduce infringement in the 14 years since the first WIPO Copyright Treaty. Indeed, these increasingly Draconian measures have merely deepened the alienation that the public feels from copyright -- to the detriment of all rightsholders.

But, for unspecified reasons, Mandelson believes that cutting whole families off from the information society on the strength of unsubstantiated accusations will cause them to embrace the copyright industries and buy their products.

"It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over," Mandelson said. "Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting."

The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year.

The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people's internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year.

Lord Mandelson sets date for blocking filesharers' internet connections (Thanks, Brady!)

David Gerard writes "Lord Peter Mandelson has carefully ignored the Gowers Report and the Carter Report, instead taking the advice of his good friend David Geffen and announcing that 'three strikes and you're out' will become law in Britain. The Open Rights Group has, of course, hit the roof. Oh, and never mind MI5 and the police pointing out that widespread encryption will become normal, hampering their efforts to keep up with little things like impending terrorist atrocities. Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast, easy tutorial from Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Labs. I wonder whether you might not use polystyrene beads as an aggregate to reduce weight?

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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Sequoia Voting Systems had been one of the "big three" e-voting providers, along with Diebold (Premiere) and ES&S. All three companies were notorious for massive amounts of secrecy and many, many, many reports of faulty machines with weak security. Sequoia's biggest problem -- which showed up in election after election after election after election -- was that it seemed to count the votes differently every time. That seems like a rather big flaw. The company also threatened computer security expert Ed Felten after the State of New Jersey asked him to look at Sequoia's code.

Just last week there were reports that Sequoia had accidentally revealed some of its source code -- but this week Sequoia has surprised a lot of people by announcing plans for a new e-voting system which will have open source e-voting software included. The code will be released to the public next month.

This is definitely a big (and surprising) step forward. The Wired link above tries to speculate why -- but I'd argue the most obvious reason (not mentioned in that article) is that Sequoia's two largest competitors, ES&S and Diebold/Premiere merged last month, suddenly making Sequoia a much smaller player in the space (I believe it was already the number three player...). Going open source isn't just a way to improve its code and improve trust in the machines, but also a way to stand out against a much larger competitor.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Charles is using an Arduino ethernet shield to send the rhythm of his heartbeat over a network in the form of OSC messages. Each beat is detected via a simple sensor comprised of an IR LED and phototransistor -

The idea is that when your heart beats you have a quick rush of blood into tiny blood vessels close to your skin which makes it less transparent. This effect is easiest to observe on your finger tips or earlobe. So the IR emitter and phototransistor are placed next to each other (not much light goes through the side of the emitter!) and I put my finger on top. Light from the IR emitter illuminates my skin and is reflected into the phototransistor.

The phototransistor is connected to the Arduino in a similar way to a potentiometer. One lead is connected to +5V and the other to ground. The +5V lead is also connected to an analogue input on the Arduino. When the phototransistor receives more IR light it becomes more resistive and a lower voltage is detected by the analogue input.

His sensor was built using Meng Li's instructions & schematic. Looks like a great input option for those interested in experimenting with biofeedback.

Related:

Heartbeat midi controller

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Ethernet Shield

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An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of an Australian ISP has driven his Tesla Roadster into the record books, completing 501km on a single electric charge in the 2009 Global Green Challenge — beating the Roadster's official specifications, which rate the all-electric sports car as being capable of a maximum of 390km per charge. The previous record was held by another Roadster in the 387km Rallye Monte Carlo d'Energies Alternatives in April this year. In a race specifically designed for alternative energy vehicles (such as hydrogen and electricity), the Roadster was the only vehicle to complete the entire course. Though to be fair, that race course was a mixture of twists, turns and hills."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports in this week's Science section that hardware and software trojan kill switches in military devices are an increasing concern, and may have already been used. 'A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected, partly-constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars. Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic's eighth annual online LUMIX Award digital photo competition is now open for entries. Participants can submit one image per month under this year's theme 'Visualize music'. Each month a winner will be chosen and awarded a DMC-ZX1 digital compact. The overall winner for the single best digital photo will receive a DMC-GF1 Micro Four-Thirds camera along with tickets to see the Blue Man Group performance theatre troupe, while two runner-ups will receive a DMC-FZ38 compact. Entries can be up to 1200x1600 pixels and must be smaller than 2MB. The competition runs until April 30 2010.

msevior writes "Just released today, the free software AbiWord word processor, employed by the One Laptop Per Child project, tightly integrates with a new collaboration Web site to enable easy real-time collaborative editing of documents. AbiCollab.net also enables documents to be stored online, allows format conversion on the fly, stores the history of the docs in svn, provides direct links to HTML-ized docs that update as you save them, and allows easy sharing of docs amongst friends and groups. All in all, new competition for Google Docs and Zoho Writer, but featuring a real word processor rather than an app in a browser."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out this cool Android-based head mounted display. Andrew Lim of recombu.com used an HTC Magic running Google Street View, safety goggles, and some cardboard to fashion one of the coolest HMD this side of Lawnmowerman. [Thanks, Andrew!]

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We were happy earlier this month to learn that the Osaka High Court had overturned a lower court ruling, against the creator of the popular Japanese file sharing service, Winny. The lower court had found the guy guilty of copyright infringement, despite having just developed the software, not having used it to infringe on copyrights. The higher court got it right, recognizing that just because the software could be used for copyright infringement does not mean that the developer is automatically guilty of copyright infringement. Unfortunately, Japanese prosecutors didn't recognize the common sense and basic logic of such a ruling and are now appealing the case to the Supreme Court in Japan. Hopefully, the Supreme Court agrees with the Osaka high court, but either way, this seems like a massive waste of time and resources.

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I'm speaking at London's Battle of Ideas this Saturday, Oct 31, on a panel called "Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing." The event goes 1:30-3:30 and there are still a few tickets left!

The increasing reach of information technology into all areas of life, from social networking websites to data sharing in public services, has thrown up a number of questions about privacy. Information about our medical records, financial circumstances and shopping habits is increasingly likely to be stored in electronic media that are out of our control. Some critics worry more about Tesco's data-gathering than any 'surveillance state'. The controversy about Google Maps' Street View function, which captured thousands of unwitting people walking or standing on the streets, is a reminder that new technology constantly raises new questions about our privacy. So how worried should we be? Does the convenience of easily accessed information outweigh the danger of abuse? How are our conceptions of privacy changing? And following the success of the Pirate Party in Sweden, can we expect privacy to move up the political agenda in the UK too.

Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing

NIK282000 writes "To cut down on accidents caused by drivers who aren't paying attention, in Ontario it is now a ticketable offense to text, email, or navigate with your GPS while driving. But it seems to me that they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, because it is now also a $500 fine to change your radio station, change songs on your MP3 player, or even drink your morning coffee. It can also be enforced to the point where changing the climate controls on your dash can get you fined because it requires you to take your hands off the wheel. Though this was a good idea, it seems to have been taken a little too far."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few people have asked me what I'll be making this year for Halloween, for Make: Online. In the past, I've been known to build honking pumpkins and creepy robots, but this year, I fell a bit short. OK, I fell a lot short! The sad truth is, I didn't make anything. But all is not lost!

I had some grand plans for completing my levitating baby head, and displaying it for the neighborhood trick-or-treaters, but I didn't get around to finishing it. I started on it about a month ago, but even with the early start, there just aren't enough hours in the day.

One day last week, my daughter heard me say how disappointed I was that I wouldn't have my project finished in time. Well, that just wasn't acceptable to her -- there had to be a creepy project for Make: Online!

Enter, Robot Zombie Cat! My daughter disappeared into her room, for what seemed like an hour, and emerged with this Frankensteininan creation. She exclaimed "I made something for MAKE!" She also declared: "It's green --not just green, but green!" I knew exactly what she meant, spotting the leftover yarn from a previous project and an old water bottle from her soccer game. Creative reuse and recycling. That's my girl!

I may not have anything to post about this Halloween, but my daughter does! And that's how Robot Zombie Cat saved Marc's Halloween. I'll display it proudly for all the trick-or-treaters that come a-knockin.

Did your kids make anything for Halloween this year? Was it green, or green? Tell us about it in the comments. Thanks! And Happy Halloween!

Oh yeah, while we're on the subject of Halloween, don't forget to enter our contest! Do it, or Robot Zombie Cat is going to come after you!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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With the new effort by newspaper folks who are unable to come up with a business model to blame news aggregators with big time executives from media companies insisting that aggregators "steal" from them by sending them traffic, it's time to brush away that myth. Take, for example, the excellent tech/social media blog ReadWriteWeb, who recently had an article about Eric Schmidt's predictions for what the web will look like in five years. Soon afterwards, the Huffington Post "aggregated" that story and posted the opening on its own site with a link to the full article. For over a year now, we've been hearing mainstream publications complain about this sort of thing by the HuffPo, with the NYTimes digital boss Martin Nisenholtz complaining about this activity just last week.

But, of course, all this sort of activity does is bring in tons of traffic. The Huffington Post gets an awful lot of traffic and a link from the site drives traffic. Marshall Kirkpatrick, from RWW, noted that the single HuffPo link drove 10,000 page views in just four hours, and basically begged HuffPo to "steal" more content like that. Indeed, it's still really difficult to understand why mainstream publications are so up in arms over other sites helping to promote their articles and send them traffic -- even to the point of looking to pass laws to stop such activity.

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With Phase One launching new versions of its Capture One software, we spoke to Claus Mølgaard, Vice President of Research and Development, to find out what's new and to get a better understanding of the work that goes into providing RAW support for the latest cameras.

Phase One has released Capture One 5 PRO, the latest version of its RAW workflow software. It extends RAW support for additional DSLRs and digital backs and includes a host of new features including Focus Tool and Focus Mask that allows users to instantly assess and make selections from the focused area in images. It also features a new Skin Tone enhancer for smoother skin tones. Furthermore, users can now add vignetting to images, adjust individual color channels and edit an expanded set of metadata fields. The software is currently available for US $399 and €299 from Phase One's website with reduced-price upgrades for version 4 users.

The Danger Shield kit is a shield for the Arduino micro controller. It's has a variety of fun, and useful components including: 3 linear sliders, pushbuttons, temperature and light sensors, 7 Segment LED, a piezo buzzer, a knock sensor, and more!

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In this video, Nick Valenza shows how he builds realistic replicas of Ash's infamous chainsaw prosthesis using parts from real chainsaws. Groovy!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Halloween | Digg this!

blackbearnh writes "Until recently, physicians prescribed drugs to patients with dosages based only on weight, and with no idea if the drug would be effective for that particular person. But as this article on Forbes.com highlights, the same advances in genomics that are letting people know about their likelihood of getting certain diseases can also let doctors know what drugs, and what dosages, will be likely to do the most good. 'Tamoxifen, the much-heralded cancer-fighting drug, has been shown to have little benefit for 7% to 10% of patients taking it. In the past, we would have just said that it works 90% of the time. But now, with our new genomic knowledge under our belt, we can say that it works nearly 100% of the time for people with the "right" version of the CYP2D6 gene, and 0% of the time for people with the "wrong" version, who make up roughly 7% to 10% of the population.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in July, we commented on the Significant Objects project where 100 authors are writing up 100 stories involving 100 various trinkets -- and then selling those stories along with the associated items on eBay for a tidy profit. (The project originally struck me as an experiment to see if the one red paperclip stunt could be mass produced in some way as a sustainable publishing business.) Now, just a few months later, Slate has teamed up with the Significant Objects folks with a contest for Slate readers to submit their own 500-word stories about a cheap tchotchke -- a BBQ sauce jar bought at a thrift store for $0.75. The contest attracted over 600 stories to be judged by Slate and the Significant Objects founders, and the winner gets the honor of being picked as well as the proceeds from its eBay auction -- which has a current bid (and profit) of about $20.

This contest is brilliant in that it not only highlights the concept that every product is a bundle of scarce and infinite goods, but it also demonstrates that content can be used to engage with an audience as a form of entertaining advertising. For the price of a bauble and some editorial judging, Slate connected with its fans and gathered a bit of demographic information on its readers who sent in a story (submissions had to be accompanied by an email address and location). Imagine if Slate had instead put a banner ad on its website with a form to fill out for personal information, the response rate for that would likely be much much lower. But with this contest, the cost of the BBQ jar was negligible, and Slate editors spent their time reading stories and got a peek into the creative minds of its readership. Okay, the drawback is that the submission judging process is actually not a trivial task, especially when there are more than a handful of entries (and more than a couple judges). Even Google hasn't exactly figured out how to judge its own Project 10¹⁰⁰ contest. However, the search giant opened up the judging to let anyone vote on winners to help narrow down the selection. (And there are other examples of crowdsourced judging processes like Threadless's tshirt designs.) So I envision the next generation of advertising contests reaching out to audiences, calling upon more volunteers, and trying more and more creative campaigns to produce scarce goods out of thin air.

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itwbennett writes "'There was a lot of talk yesterday about an article in the Japanese publication Nikkei which claimed that Nintendo was readying a new iteration of its DS line of handheld gaming systems,' writes blogger Peter Smith. 'The report claims the new unit will have 4" screens (the current unit has 3.25" screens) and is designed for older gamers who have trouble seeing the small screens of the current DSi. This new model is otherwise identical to the existing DSi and will ship by end of year in Japan.' As an 'older gamer' himself, Smith calls on Nintendo to stop this annual upgrade madness and do something truly innovative for a change, and he calls on gamers to put some pressure on Nintendo and not buy the new DS."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These vintage Sega console commemorative Zippos are swell, though possibly not ~$100 worth of swell.

?????????????????? (via Wonderland)

A Harvard psych study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology shows that when people are present during torture, they gradually come to believe the torture victim is guilty as a way of assuaging their consciences for their complicity in torture:

Participants in the study met a woman suspected of cheating to win money. The woman was then "tortured" by having her hand immersed in ice water while study participants listened to the session over an intercom. She never confessed to anything, but the more she suffered during the torture, the guiltier she was perceived to be...

"Our research suggests that torture may not uncover guilt so much as lead to its perception," says Gray. "It is as though people who know of the victim's pain must somehow convince themselves that it was a good idea -- and so come to believe that the person who was tortured deserved it."

Not all torture victims appear guilty, however. When participants in the study only listened to a recording of a previous torture session -- rather than taking part as witnesses of ongoing torture -- they saw the victim who expressed more pain as less guilty. Gray explains the different results as arising from different levels of complicity.

"Those who feel complicit with the torture have a need to justify the torture, and so link the victim's pain to blame," says Gray. "On the other hand, those distant from torture have no need to justify it and so can sympathize with the suffering of the victim, linking pain to innocence."

Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty

Ethorad was the first of a few to write in pointing to an article over at the BBC, highlighting how old songs are finding new life and new sales after showing up in a commercial -- or being used on TV during a popular event. In other words, getting your music more widely heard leads to more ways to make money. That, of course, should be obvious. And yet, why is it that so many in the industry are trying to make it so much harder to get music heard by putting up tollbooths at every stop? You have the RIAA/Soundexchange working overtime to put an additional tax on radio play and you have ASCAP/BMI trying to get fees for everything, from the 30 second previews online to ringtones. Of course, the more you put a toll on such things, the less the songs are used, the less they're promoted and the less opportunity there is to increase sales. It's really amazing sometimes that these big organizations don't seem to comprehend the basic idea of a "promotion" and how that helps sales.

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irving47 writes 'With the economy the way it is, it's a little iffy to even think about switching careers completely, but lately, I've gotten more and more fed up with trying to keep up with the technical demands of companies and customers that are financially and even verbally unappreciative. While I might be good at it, and the money is adequate, I'm curious to hear from Slashdotters who have gone cold-turkey from their IT/Networking careers to something once foreign to them. How did you deal with the income difference, if any? Do you find yourself dealing with people more, and if so, how did that work out?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thug life, Kabul-style, courtesy of American tax dollars. The New York Times reports that "Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials."

A related story out in tomorrow's paper covers the push for more US troops in Afghanistan's cities and agricultural areas, where the poppies that support the Taliban are cash crop numero uno.

Boing Boing readers: wonder what kind of cellphone he's using in the photo above? Better yet: your caption, please! A brick of CIA-funded heroin to the winner, but you'll have to fly to Bagram to pick it up. [ via Wired Danger Room on Twitter. ]

Update: Confirmed, the couple were captured. Their boat is believed to have been spotted.

A British couple in their mid-fifties who pretty much live their lives sailing around the world on their boat, "The Lynn Rival," are feared to have been captured by Somali pirates. Above, a screengrab from the blog Paul and Rachel Chandler maintained throughout their travels (blog.mailasail.com/lynnrival). The "thumbtack" icon shows the last spot they registered online before disappearing a few days ago while traveling waters off the coast of East Africa.

More on their story in the New York Times, and the UK Times.

"The Knocked Down Ace," by Alexander Deineka

Here's a gallery of astounding Soviet WWII-era paintings.

Alllie says:

These are amazing paintings. I can't think of anything in the west in the same time period that is as moving, as emotionally evocative, except Norman Rockwell. It surprises me that more people don't like them.

There's a book called The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders. Part of it deals with the CIA's efforts to destroy social realism, to make acceptable only art devoid of political or emotional content. I thought they had just succeeded in keeping it out of corporate media, out of the museums, but that they couldn't change how people reacted to it. But it may be that they won and that most of us can't react to such art anymore.

These pictures, to me, represent where art should have gone after the impressionists and the post-impressionists, that they are the heirs to Gauguin and Cezanne and of Van Gogh's "Potato Eaters", to Goya's "The Third of May, 1808, or The Executions on Principe Pio Hill." Instead, what do we have today? Sometimes art is pretty. Sometimes it is clever, but it is usually without any deeper significance, without any emotional or political content.

I find that very sad.

Soviet WWII-era paintings

Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic writes in with this update on the "Yes Men pwn the US Chamber of Commerce" story I blogged about last week, which Cory further updated here. Michael says,

Kate Sheppard [of Mother Jones] was at the fake US Chamber of Commerce press conference in DC where a Yes Man, posing as a Chamber rep, claimed the Chamber was reversing its draconian position on climate change, which has caused lots of big Chamber members -- Apple, Nike, Exelon, and others -- to quit the national business group. But then a REAL Chamber PR man arrived at the meeting to declare it a fraud. (And Sheppard ended up on Maddow that night).

Today, Sheppard reports that the Chamber is suing its impersonators: "The defendants are not merry pranksters tweaking the establishment," the Chamber said in a press release issued with the suit. "Instead, they deliberately broke the law in order to further commercial interest in their books, movies, and other merchandise."

Mother Jones stories on the US Chamber (here's an index):
* Chamber Sues Yes Men
* Chamber Uses Yes Men 'Attack' to Fundraise

Here's a related item in the New Yorker.

Image: by Wikimedia Commons user Tavis used under a CC License

Have some extra soda cans laying around the lab, that are taking up too much space? Instead of just smashing them with your boot, why not build an electromagnetic crushing machine to implode them, using a high voltage source and some large capacitors? That's exactly what Bob Davis has been doing with his can crushers.

Actually, I can think of a lot of reasons why one wouldn't want to do this, especially the big safety one. It looks cool though, and slightly less complicated than the coin shrinker. [via hacked gadgets]

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robotsrule writes "This article contains notes from a 1-hour phone call with Ugobe founder Derek Dotson, now CEO of Innvo Labs Corporation, the company that acquired the rights to Pleo at the recent bankruptcy auction. Dotson reveals the hidden story behind Pleo's rise, fall, and resurrection including intriguing facts about the money trail and what he feels caused Ugobe to fail, including how he had to save Pleo's future on more than one occasion. He also lays out in plain detail Innvo Labs's strategy to help owners of older Pleos and those whose units were swallowed up by Ugobe's bankruptcy." We've been following the Pleo saga for years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been some talk of having the government bail out newspapers or somehow fundamentally support newspapers. Of course, for good reason, that scares a lot of people who believe that news organizations (not just newspapers, mind you) play an important role in acting as a government corruption watchdog. So it's interesting to see a new study that found that the more government support the press gets, the less they covered government scandals. Of course, this is a correlation -- so it's entirely possible that governments that support the press are simply less corrupt and less prone to scandal. However, the study did look at the timing of gov't funding as compared to press coverage which suggests that there might be a causal relationship, as the lower incidence of press coverage for gov't scandals tended to lag funding slightly. There are still some questions, but this certainly suggests that if you believe news organizations are important in holding government accountable, pushing for gov't support may not be a good idea.

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Look at this photograph and just try to tell me the answer is no.

This incredible image was shot for National Geographic by Monica Szczupider, and shows chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon. They're observing as the body of an elder troop member named Dorothy is taken to burial. She died at 40 years of age, which is pretty old for a chimpanzee.

The photo appears in the November issue of National Geographic Magazine, in the "Visions of Earth" section. [ Thanks, Marilyn Terrell ]

Think cement is just cement? Not so. These unlovely mugs are nonetheless very special. Prepared from special synthetic aluminosilicate materials called "geopolymers" (Wikipedia) by members of Dr. Waltraud M. Kriven's research group at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, these mugs were tested in a special "mug drop" event at the 2004 American Ceramic Society (ACeRS) conference, and supposedly "were impossible to break at even 50ft onto bare concrete" (although the photos clearly show an astroturf-covered floor). Danger Room's David Hambling recently posted a nice overview of geopolymer technology with an eye towards defense applications. These presentation slides by Dr. Kriven (.pdf) include some actual formulae.

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With so many organizations trying to use copyright and trademark law to take content offline, the EFF is announcing the launch of its new Takedown Hall Of Shame, highlighting "the most egregious examples of takedown abuse." You'll recognize the names on the list -- as every one of them we've written about here. Who knows if this will cause lawyers to think twice before issuing bogus takedowns (I doubt it), but at least it should shine some light on how widely copyright and trademark law are abused to stifle speech.

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Here's another awesome project by Vadim Ryazanov of Let's Make Robots. Called Mr. Wake, this robot has the duty of protecting it's alarm clock from any bleary-eyed, would-be assailants. Instead of running away after it's snooze button has been pressed, like the Clocky, this 'bot engages a homebrew IR sensor as soon as the alarm goes off, and takes off if it detects anything even trying to get near the button.

I love the choice of building materials, especially the frame made of heat-formed plastic pens. Nice work!

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This fascinating piece, from This American Life (animated by Chris Ware), tells the story of an elementary school where a couple of kids made a TV camera out of cardboard and tempera paint. Soon, the cardboard camera craze went viral and it seemed like every kid was either a camera operator, an anchor, or some other faux TV production person. Then things went positively post-modern.

Chris Ware animation of This American Life story

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anglico sends news of research out of the University of Rochester that has identified a gene that "cancer-proofs" cells in rodents. "Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind — and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why. The findings, presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat's cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells 'claustrophobic,' stopping the cells' proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells' growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I really like this homemade play kitchen build from dollar store shelving parts. It cost less than $20 and breaks down for storage. The felt fried eggs look delicious.

RoundAboutGirl's playkitchen

[Thanks, Luckymomma!]

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Harvard Medical School is beefing up lab security after six researchers got sick off poisoned coffee back in August. The toxicology reports came in recently, according to Bloomberg, and the chemical culprit was sodium azide, which turns into a toxic gas when it's mixed into water. The good news is that none of the six died. The bad news: Nobody seems to know how this stuff got into the communal coffee pot to begin with.

And while a whodunnit poisoning mystery is not exactly what Wired had in mind when it listed "Grad Student" as #6 on its top 10 list of Best, Most Dangerous Science Jobs, this incident certainly does nothing to bump that job off the list. Not to mention the fact that, given the lab environment, you have to wonder whether the poisoning was even intentional at all...or whether somebody simply didn't wash their hands well enough before making a fresh pot.

From Wired:

Grad student

Even the most mundane job in science is hazardous if you don't know what you're doing. Grad students in labs around the world are in constant danger of, well, screwing up. In 2004, a Texas A&M student, for example, was cleaning up a laboratory when a jar of chemicals he was handling suddenly exploded, leaving him with severe lacerations and burns.

Earlier this month, BBC Audiobooks America started an audiobook project based on Twitter messages where Neil Gaiman kicked off an exquisite corpse process of stringing together about 1,000 Tweets to forge a storyline. Dozens of Twitter users contributed tweets to be edited into a coherent plot that will be released as a free audiobook download. From this publicity stunt, an approximately 50-page book (or 2-hr audiobook, actually) has been created from Gaiman's fans. And presumably, the collection of tweets could also be remixed and edited -- and improved -- to possibly gain further participation from Gaiman (who contributed the first line of the story and will read aloud the completed audiobook) and the attention of any number of other authors. It's not exactly a brand-new idea to compose a story in this way, but it's a very interesting way to advertise and connect with fans to whet their appetites for more content to come (and even pay for).

However, the crowdsourcing aspect of this particular audiobook has been criticized in detail for exhibiting the worst of literary clichés as well as a meandering plot with too many characters and unresolved arcs. But generalizing this crowd's apparently unsatisfying result to all possible collaborative-author processes seems a bit disingenuous. Perhaps it's one of my pet peeves, but the schadenfreude surrounding crowdsourced works that aren't "as good as Shakespeare" seems to focus too much on some artificial failure, and not the potential or the realized successes. Maybe non-fiction isn't the best target for collaborative authorship, but the suggestion that collaborative writing won't ever work for good storytelling is far from proven. In fact, many popular stories (TV shows, etc) are written by teams of authors. (So the question could be posed: where does the optimal number of authors arise?) Conversely, the overwhelming number of unsuccessful stories written by single authors should not discourage writers from working alone, either. Bad stories happen.

The real triumph of this crowdwork is that this experiment engaged with its audience and promoted Gaiman and BBCAA for future works. From the BBC's perspective, a ton of content was generated largely for free, and a promotional audiobook was created in just a few days. Had the BBC commissioned a single author to compose a similar work, there wouldn't be any guarantees of a compelling book in the end. And working with a single author might require more complex licensing rights and royalties. So crowdsourcing this project sounds like an advertising coup -- generating a promotion appropriately disguised as free content. It's not Shakespeare, but it's a whole lot better than a banner ad, right?

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I've written about Machine Project on Boing Boing many times before. It's a Los Angeles art/technology space that holds amazing events and workshops. (See the write ups of the Picklefest 2008 and Krautfest 2009 workshops I co-conducted there).

My friend Mister Jalopy is also an ardent supporter of Machine Project. On November 7th, he is hosting a lavish benefit for Machine Project at his awe-inspiring Silverlake studio, which is almost never open to the public.

From Dinosaurs and Robots:

On November 7th, Mister Jalopy's personal 4000 square foot studio will be host to the first Machine Project benefit.

Proceeds from this once-a-year event will enable Machine Project to continue welcoming any and all to free Machine public events in 2010. Tickets start at $75 for members, or $100 for non-members, with a Benefactor level ticket available for $250, which includes entry to a special pre-event reception and more. 90% of the cost of all tickets is tax deductible.

Have you been curious about the Los Angeles heroes that call themselves Machine Project? With over 20 participating artists, technologists and musicians, the 2009 Benefit will pack a month's worth of events into a single intimate evening. What to expect? Opportunities to steal art from a laser-protected, action movie-style set, wager on microscopic slime mold races, try your hand at gold panning to prospect for real gold nuggets, stay late to huddle around the firepit to make 'smores, partake from the amply stocked wine and beer bar, have a wood-fired pizza from an on-site brick pizza oven, enjoy music from four different acts, replace your old Getty Museum fake ID, participate in head-to-head speed soldering contests and eat noodles supplied by Kwong Dynasty Noodle Cart.

A rare opportunity to enter the secret workshop of Mister Jalopy. This is a very uncommon event.

Tickets can be purchased at Machine Project, in person at Machine Project or Coco's Variety at 2427 Riverside Drive, Los Angeles. Alternatively, mail a check to Machine Project at 1200D North Alvarado, Los Angeles, CA 90026.

Machine Project Benefit! Colab with Mister Jalopy x Machine Project

One of our most searched-on and linked-to subjects is how to make a Gray-Hoverman DTV antenna. In this adorable little video, makers in the making, Naomi and Noah, show you how, proving that it's so easy, even a child can do it (with a little prompting from dad behind the camera). [Thanks, Paul!]

Making a Gray-Hoverman DTV Antenna with Naomi and Noah

More:
Make: television, Episode 04
DTV Antenna How-To [PDF]
How-To: Massive DTV antenna

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