hansamurai writes "Over one hundred cars equipped with a Webtech Plus blackbox were remotely disabled when a former employee of dealership Texas Auto Center got hold of his employer's database of users. Webtech Plus is repossession software that allows the dealership to disable a car's ignition or trigger the horn to honk when a payment is due. Owners had to remove the battery to stop the incessant honking. After the dealership began fielding an unusually high number of calls from upset car owners, they changed the passwords to the Webtech Plus software and then traced the IP address used to access the client to its former employee."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the title of this Victorian science book it's not out of line to assume that there might be at least a few diy methods for accidentally electrocuting yourself, but that's just the beginning.

The tome in its entirety is supposed to be available for free as a hi-res e-book sometime this month, but for now you can see a full list of some actually really beautiful sounding demonstrations, (like how to make phosphorescent displays using oyster shells), and some other cool heirloom science excerpts at Lateral Science.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the link.

And here's a lawsuit that's going nowhere fast. Alex points us to the news of a NY accountant, Leo Kehoe, who is suing Craigslist for $1 million because someone insulted him on the site. He is also suing the anonymous user, who called him a "fraudulent scumbag" who "will botch up your tax returns and forget to submit them." However, it sounds like he got some very bad advice from his lawyer, who he claims told him: "Craigslist should have known the posting was false and untrue and would subject Kehoe to 'ridicule, disgrace and prejudice.'" It sounds like his lawyer is unfamiliar with Section 230 and the long list of caselaw that makes Craigslist not liable for the content created by users on the website. The individual person who wrote the post may have some liability (and even that may be a stretch), but Craigslist should be able to get out of this case pretty quickly. At some point, though, you would think that courts should start sanctioning lawyers who file lawsuits that clearly will be dismissed under Section 230. In the meantime, though, it would seem that a lot more people are now aware that someone out there was quite upset with the service he or she got from Mr. Kehoe than if he'd just let the Craigslist post go away. Also, isn't filing a questionable lawsuit even more likely to result in ridicule, disgrace or prejudice?

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In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.

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In 1994, I wrote a book called Mosaic Quick Tour: Accessing and Navigating the World Wide Web. It was, arguably, the first book dedicated the the World Wide Web. The publisher, Ventana, wanted it to be the first, so they wanted it fast, really fast. I wrote it in 30 days. I did literally nothing but eat, sleep, and write that book for a month, all in a very crappy, bottomed-out, office store "task chair." I like to tell people that I sacrificed my right hip to that book. I have bad arthritis and my hip was already shot, but I had a hip before the book, and it was pretty much history by the time I was done. I had to have a replacement. It was stupid to not get a better chair during the writing marathon, but I had tight deadlines every day and didn't feel like I ever had the time to go shopping. But literally the day the book was finished, I went to a "bed and back" story and blew about $1300 of my book advance on an amazing chair with crazy amounts of adjustability and lumbar and neck support. From then on, I've never skimped on my seating. And neither should you.

We asked a bunch of our readers and staff, through mailing lists and our Facebook page, for input on chairs and work stools. Here's some of what they had to say. Hands down, the chair-of-note is still the Herman Miller Aeron. But there were a few others. And one suggestion for no sitting at all.

Chairs

For the past ten years or so, I've had a Herman Miller Aeron Chair ($920) for desk work and I love it. I'm not alone. Lots of people responded with enthusiastic thumbs-up for the Aeron. Andrew Righter, of Q Labs, said: "I'm a simple man. And there's nothing better than this chair." ChopSey, of HacDC, adds: "it's all about the air flow, configurability, and easing of any pressure points." Dorkbot DC Overlord Alberto Gaitán says: I concur. I've used an Aeron for almost 15 years and wouldn't buy another chair that isn't fully and adjustable, with lumbar support, and a mesh seat so one doesn't eventually end up bottoming out." MAKE contributor Alden Hart writes: "In the tech bubble days, we used an "Aeron Count" as a predictive indicator of startup failure. The more Aerons, the greater the likelihood of failure. That said, I love my Aeron, and so does my wife. Got cheap from a failed startup!" HacDC member Ben Stanfield writes: "As the token fat geek, it might be good to include a couple of options for those of us who are, euphemistically speaking, "big boned." Of course, that would require actually finding a decent chair for us, something I've yet to come across. The Aeron is probably the closest in terms of comfort."

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A sane, hype-free guide to natural food certifications. Which labels can you trust? Which are marketing hooey? And how much do we really know about "Certified Organic"?

Downhill skiing is a team sport in the Paralympics. Visually impaired skiers hurtle down the mountain at highway speeds, guided by another skier, who goes a few seconds ahead and calls back changes in direction and terrain via radio headset.

Visually impaired ski racer Danelle D'Aquanni Umstead says:

It is a "visually impaired team," not an athlete and their guide. Guiding is not something just anyone can do. As a guide you have to be just as committed, ski faster and also be able to turn around at any given moment to look behind you at the other athlete when at high speeds. This is not an easy task, and takes a lot of training as a team. Finding the right guide is definitely the hardest part for a visually impaired skier. To be able to trust in that person one hundred percent, and find a guide who has the same goals as you.

After reading of my troubles with a new Canon scanner, Kellie Miller sent a link to a review of a Fujitsu scanner. Except for Apple hype, I can't remember reading a review so glowing.

What's been bothering me about all the awful scanners and software I've tried over the years: A scanner is just a camera. It seems you could make a really elegant Mac-like camera that was fun to use. Instead they all suck. But maybe not the Fujitsu ScanSnap? Maybe!



The Amazon reviews corroborate the CoolTools review.

It's only $249.

I posted a tweet: "Fujitsu scanner sounds fantastic. I might buy one just to see what a well-designed scanner can do."

Hmmm.

PS: I'm still waiting for my HTTP-based scanner.

Lanxon writes "The guy behind Ultima Online once bought an old Russian rover, despite it being lost on the moon somewhere. And now, using images released by NASA, it has been located on the moon's surface after nearly four decades of being MIA, reports Wired. Richard Garriott, who created the Ultima Online multiplayer game, bought the Lunokhod 2 in a Sotheby's auction in New York in 1998. And so new was the discovery of his lost possession, he hadn't even heard that the craft had been discovered when Wired spoke to him." (Richard Garriott is also well known as Lord British.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image: S2-P2-P6, by sculptor Roxy Paine.

About a year ago I was wandering around Maker Faire Bay Area thinking about polymerization. Collin had recently posted his now-world-famous cymatics video, and I was standing around talking to the TAP plastics folks about whether it might be possible to "freeze" cymatic forms by applying the sound waves to some kind of polymer resin that could then be solidifed, almost instantaneously, by adding a drop or two of catalyst. I had, you will not be surprised to learn, been drinking heroic amounts of coffee.

But in the subsequent process of researching fast polymerization reactions, I came across an intriguing term: Explosive polymerization. Visions of exploding goo bombs pushed schemes for freezing cymatics to the back-burner, and I started Googling around excitedly, seeking the inevitable YouTube video that would show me exactly what an "explosive polymerization" looked like, and if it was as exciting as it sounded.

As far as I can tell, they're aren't any.

Moreover, textual information in the tubes is scanty. The phrase appears in the abstracts of a few articles in polymer science journals, and in safety warnings associated with certain chemicals that are prone to explosively polymerize and with those that are prone to initiate the process. (Including some safety nightmares that are in both categories.) Inevitably it's considered as, you know, a bad thing. An uncontrolled, useless, and probably dangerous process to be avoided if at all possible.

And I'm sure that's all true. But it sounds really neat. And I want to see it.

I mean, taking proper precautions, I can set off a firecracker or other small conventional explosive, film it, show it off to others, and generally have a good time learning something about the natural world. And even though I've got a graduate degree in organic chemistry, I know comparatively little about polymers, and I'm not about to start experimenting without advice from somebody who knows what from what-not.

So I'm crowd-sourcing the problem. Is there a specialist in the house who knows something about explosive polymerization? And if so, can you tell me: What is the polymerization analog of a small firecracker? Some kind of diminutive goo-bomb that will go off impressively but without injuring bystanders or spraying horrible toxins everywhere? I mean theoretically, of course. I can't promise to actually do anything unless I can satisfy myself it's really safe, but maybe somebody can point me in the right direction?

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My documentarian friend Andrea Dunlap over at the Seedling Project pointed out this great footage of a 'scissor dancing' contest in Peru, something she saw when she was living and filming there a few years ago. It happens a few times a year to mark Easter, Christmas, and Yacu Raymi (an annual water festival).

Andrea says participants travel everywhere with an entourage of harpists and violinists, doing intricate, rhythmic, often acrobatic dances using pieces of metal shaped like broken scissor halves as percussion, "eventually degenerating into stunts like dancing with cactus stuck all over the dancer's body, breathing fire, throwing firecrackers, etc...They make their own costumes and they have fierce names like Terror of Puquio, and The Lion." And you thought you were rebel for running with scissors!

Andrea has some scissor dance footage of her own and more photos from her time in Peru on her site. In addition to her focus on the food movement in California, she's currently working on a documentary about the incredible Cusichaca Trust, a group of archaeologists who are studying ancient Incan agricultural techniques and trying to revive them for modern farmers.

By now you should know this -- as DRM'd music service after DRM'd music service has screwed over their customers by shutting off the servers on the music they were supposed to be able to access -- but it's yet another reminder that if you buy into DRM'd products, you're going to end up screwed over. The latest, sent in by a bunch of you, is that Australian ISP, Bigpond (from Telstra), is shutting off its DRM servers that were used to support Windows Media Audio. Once again, the DRM did nothing to stop file sharing, but is making life difficult and annoying for legitimate customers.

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Chroniton writes "NASA ice scientists have found a shrimp-like creature and a possible jellyfish 'frolicking' beneath 600 feet of solid Antarctic ice, where only microbes were expected to live. The odds of finding two complex lifeforms after drilling only an 8-inch-wide hole suggests there may be much more. And if such life is possible beneath Earth's oceans, why not elsewhere, like Europa?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fine specimens they are.

Last weekend, I had the great fortune to visit All Hands Active, an up-and-coming hackerspace in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When I arrived, they were just wrapping up a planning meeting for the upcoming Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire. They have some excellent plans in the works, but made me promise not to spill the beans. Afterwards, they showed me some of their current projects, including:

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David Desandro created a typeface created entirely in the browser using spans, background colors, border-radius and other wizardry. Truly impressive.

Watch above in delight as a Wilford Brimleyesque feline named Cooper demonstrates the fine art of BANG DEAD. It's the fisheye lens what makes it magic. MOAR at sweetfurr.blogspot.com. (thanks, Susannah!)

Curtis CSS Typeface:

David Desandro created a typeface created entirely in the browser using spans, background colors, border-radius and other wizardry. Truly impressive.

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia, asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles. (Good, encyclopedia-style videos only!) Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles (good, encyclopedia style videos only!). Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about some Fourth Amendment questions when it came to information stored in the cloud -- and a recent legal ruling provides some new troubling views on this matter. Slashdot points us to Orin Kerr's excellent analysis of a recent 11th Circuit decision, that basically says once an email is delivered, there's no Fourth Amendment protections of that email. But, as Kerr notes, the real problem here (as with so many issues in the digital world) is that the court seems to be confusing copies of digital content with the original:

For a real-world example, imagine you write a letter and photocopy it before you put it in the mail. You file the copy in your closet and send the original. During the course of delivery, the original is protected by the Fourth Amendment; when it arrives, you lose Fourth Amendment protection. But the fact that you lose Fourth Amendment protection in the original does not mean that the Government can break into your house and read the copy you made. Conversely, the fact that the recipient of the mail does not have Fourth Amendment rights in the copy does not mean that the government can break into the recipient’s house to read the original.

For these reasons, the court should have analyzed access to the e-mails stored with the ISP based on whether there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in that remotely stored copy accessed, independently of delivery of another copy....

We see this over and over again when it comes to the digital world. People try to automatically equate it to the physical world, not recognizing that they're dealing with independent copies, not the original (hence the argument that "file sharing is the same as theft.") Unfortunately, in this case the ruling could do some serious damage to how the government and law enforcement views your expectation of privacy with regards to your emails.

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"Says one person who's worked with [photographer Terry] Richardson: 'It's just impossible for me to see him as a sexual predator. What he does is completely out in the open.'

marklyon writes "HB 872, recently signed into law by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, makes Caller ID spoofing illegal. The law covers alterations to the caller's name, telephone number, or name and telephone number that is shown to a recipient of a call or otherwise presented to the network. The law applies to PSTN, wireless and VoIP calls. Penalties for each violation can be up to $1,000 and one year in jail. Blocking of caller identification information is still permitted."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've been a huge fan of Robbie Conal ever since Mark asked me to profile him for The Happy Mutant Handbook back in 1995. Conal is the Los Angeles-based artist who creates unflattering portraits of (mostly white, male, right-leaning) political and other public figures -- think Reagan, Bush I and II, and their cronies -- and prints them on 2-by-3-foot posters. Then in the dead of night, he and his posse paste 'em up, guerrilla-style, in U.S. cities, in bus shelters and construction sites where, in the morning, folks on their way to work get an eyeful of funny, gritty, cheeky political satire.  I first went "postering" with Robbie in San Francisco, and can testify it's some of the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. I've done it several times since, and still have a gloop of dried wheat paste in the trunk of my Honda. 

It's hard to pick a favorite from among Robbie's 20-plus-year portfolio, but a couple come to mind: Kenneth Starr, at the zenith of his power, smiling smugly from inside the caption STARR F**KER. Or the late Jessie Helms, the self-designated arbiter of artistic taste, portrayed on an artist's paintboard as an ARTIFICIAL ART OFFICIAL (thumb-hole centered on his forehead, of course).

Conal draws from a long history of political satirists going back as far as...well, as long as there's been politics to satirize, and a couple of great books
have chronicled his work in this context. But as you'd expect, now and then Robbie needs to cleanse his, er, palette, and he does so by painting wildlife: cats, mostly, and frogs, dogs, and more. His excellent new book, Not Your Typical Political Animal, co-created with his wife, Deborah Ross -- a powerhouse in her own right -- collects all these critters from over the years into one bestiary, tracing the history of their role as muses for the artist and his own background as a latchkey kid raised, as he says, "by Manhattan museums and Siamese cats."

The beasts are definitely not all cute. Robbie's work is as unflinching as it is funny, though the presence of animals leavens some of his political gut-punch. Like most of us who work at home, Robbie serves his felines, who get top billing here. But frogs, who first appeared in a two-sided poster designed to raise awareness for the endangered Ballona Wetlands in L.A., and bunnies (remember A BOMBIN' NATION?) make a stand, too. And lest he disappoint his fans, the book also includes a series of diptychs featuring politicians and their pets. (And yes, J. Edgar Hoover did look like his Boston Terrier.)

Besides fine art, there's plenty to read, here, too. If you've ever heard Robbie speak, you know how much he loves wordplay (he's the master of puns) and Political Animal deftly captures the artist's original voice. Compassionate, whip-smart, playful -- turns out this political animal can purr as well as snarl, and the essays in the new book perfectly complement its images -- loveable yin to the yang of Conal's biting visual commentary.

If you live in L.A., don't miss Robbie's appearance at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 5:00pm.

Selected images from Robbie Conal's Not Your Typical Political Animal (click for bigger):

The open source washing machine project aims to rethink the way we wash clothes around the world, in accordance with economical, sociological, cultural and environemental aspects. Most of the people in this planet, mostly women, wash clothes by hand in harsh conditions related to poverty, lack of sanitation, water or energy.

The OSWash project seeks to develop different technologies for different climates and societal contexts. For instance, one country might have plentiful fresh water but less sunlight, whereas another environment might put water recycling at the top of the list of needs. Part of the problem is that many solutions that are cheap by our standards (for instance, using a Freeduino-based controller) still make the system too expensive for areas that could truly use a DIY washing machine. [via openMaterials]

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An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Tokyo University researchers have developed a superfast book scanner that uses lasers and a high-speed camera to achieve a capture rate of 200 pages per minute. You just quickly flip the book pages in front of the system and it digitizes the pages, building a 3D model of each and reconstructing it as a normal flat page. The prototype is large and bulky, but if this thing could be made smaller, one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone." The article mentions Google's similar dewarping system; the difference here is speed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an adorable, tricky and clever video on the future of publishing, courtesy of the Penguin folks, who produced it for an internal presentation and then released it into the wild after everyone loved it. Be sure to watch to at least halfway, when the clever gets visible.

The Future of Publishing - created by DK (UK) (Thanks, Miguel!)

Proffer alerts us to the bizarre story of how IMAX (last seen suing competitors and misleading people about what an IMAX film really is) is now threatening the folks behind the Sandy3D open source 3D flash engine. Apparently, IMAX has some sort of 3D drawing system called SANDDE. So, maybe, if you squint, you could see how IMAX might be complaining about a trademark issue. But the letter from IMAX is quite odd. It doesn't mention trademark at all. Instead, it mentions a French patent.

This is quite odd, considering that there's clearly no patent issue here (beyond the fact that Sandy3D isn't in France and the products are entirely different). So why isn't IMAX talking trademark? Well, perhaps because IMAX's trademark on SANDDE was considered abandoned as of March 8, 2000. Yes, more than ten years ago. There's also the fact that this open source project is not a commercial endeavor at all, meaning that IMAX might have a lot of trouble proving "use in commerce" even if it actually had a trademark. Perhaps IMAX could get away with claiming a common law trademark, but even then, its ability to do anything to Sandy3D would be quite limited, and it's difficult to see anyone finding a likelihood of confusion existing between the two.

In the end, it looks like some IMAX lawyers decided to just threaten these open source developers, hoping that by spewing some totally unrelated info about a patent, it might scare the developers into changing the name on a product, even though the patent has nothing at all to do with the issue, and the company has no registered trademark on the name in question.

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The world's shortest walking man, 21-year old He Pingping from Inner Mongolia, died this past weekend from heart complications. Sadly, we do not know much about his life aside from the fact that he was a 27-inch tall chain smoker who spent much of the last few years traveling to Japan, the US, and Italy after being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. I wish people focused more on what kind of person he was and how he coped with the constant stares and media attention instead of just displaying him as a freak show. He's pictured here with the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is also from Inner Mongolia.

Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's on YouTube now.

Last year I was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. -- people who literally convene to design the next phases of the Internet itself -- to deliver the closing keynote.  The subject?  The future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics.

Naturally, my take on it was illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee made from civet poop.  

I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing ovation.

And now you can see the whole talk online here.

It's broken into bite-size pieces, organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song.

The first chunk is above.

Bob Harris' Keynote Talk on the Web, Global Culture, and Monumental Screw-ups

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Liege in Belgium have been able to perform real-time video analysis on regular Canon digicam (video link) without any hardware modification. The results are shown directly on the digicam's screen. They use a hacked version of a popular open-source alternative firmware for Canon cameras: CHDK. This is a proof-of-concept that computer vision algorithms can now be embedded on regular Canon digicams with little effort (CHDK is coded in C). What other popular vision algorithms could be implemented? For what purpose?" You can get some idea about ViBe from this abstract at IEEE; basically, it allows background extraction in moving images.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MrSmith0011000100110 writes "The lovely people over at AndroidCentral have broken the announcement that Android 2.1 is finally coming to the Motorola Droid, with actual proof on Verizon's droid support page (PDF). I don't know about my Droid brethren, but I'm pretty excited to see the new series of Android ROMs for the Droid phone that are based on a stock Android 2.1. As most of us know, the existing 2.1 ROMs can be buggy as hell and either running vanilla 2.1 or a custom ROM, this phone is still a tinkerer's best friend."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They let me loose in the Maker Shed, so I grabbed a tinyCylon kit, built it, and embedded it in a busted Nerf gun! Please enjoy the video, and watch out for the noisy lamp.

To modify the kit for flexibility, I soldered the LEDs in at full height; you could extend things further by adding some wire between the switch and board, or make an extension for the battery pack. I'd love to hear about other kit modifications people have done.

These kits are great for adding effects to props and costumes. For more details on building the kit, check out Marc de Vinck's excellent build notes here.

tinyCylon kit in the Maker Shed

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For many years, we've pointed to the fashion industry as a perfect example of how a creative industry can be incredibly innovative and fruitful, even without copyright protections. It's a great story, and studies have shown, in fact, that the lack of copyright protection for fashion designs has been key to the success of the industry. There are a few reasons for this: (1) Brand recognition still matters, so people still want the originator's work -- and thus the copies tend to spread the concept further, and actually increase desire for the "real" version. (2) Copying of designs helps better segment the market, and actually allows top designers to increase their prices. (3) Most importantly, the fact that copiers so quickly copy the works of top designers means that those designers can't rest on their laurels and have to quickly move on to next season's design. In other words, as we've seen in many other industries, as you remove monopoly protections, the incentives to innovate actually increase.

And there should be no question that things work fine in the fashion industry, as it is highly competitive, with many different players, and new designs hitting the market all the time. Considering that copyright's sole purpose is to create incentives to promote such innovation, it's hard to see how anyone would be justified in suggesting we need a new copyright over fashion.

And yet, as with other types of intellectual property, what happens is the incumbents all realize that with such monopoly rights, they would be able to block competitors, slow down their rate of innovation, and capture greater monopoly rents. So they push for them. And, tragically, politicians have been listening. Back in 2007, a bill was introduced to add copyrights to fashion. That bill went nowhere, but similar efforts were made in 2008 and 2009 (when designers tried to enlist Michelle Obama to help their cause).

This year, it looks like the plan is to hide behind an economically questionable law review article put out by a Harvard law professor, Jeannie Suk, and a Columbia law profesor, C. Scott Hemphill (who actually appears to have a degree in economics). A bunch of folks have sent over a Boston Globe article that focuses on how Suk is helping to craft this latest attempt at adding copyright to fashion design, using the law review article as economic proof that such a law is needed. This is troubling, as the economics in the paper are severely lacking.

Given the success of the industry today, combined with the studies showing how it benefits from a lack of copyright, I wanted to read the analysis to see why Suk felt so strongly about this, and I have to say that it makes highly questionable economic arguments with no basis in fact at all. Instead, almost every economic argument is a random assumption about things -- with provably false statements like "Obviously, people always want to purchase inexpensive copies of creative works or have them for free."

No, that's not obvious and it's not right. Studies have shown that people are more than willing to pay for scarce quality -- and recent studies proving that a huge number of buyers of counterfeit goods later buy the real goods suggest that people have no problem paying for the authentic versions when they can. The myth that "people just want stuff for free" has been debunked so many times, it destroys the credibility of this paper.

But, even worse, Suk seems to base her entire argument on one simple economically-illiterate pretense: that competition is bad, and without monopolies, people innovate less:

The reduced profits can be expected to have a negative effect on the amount of innovation; this is a standard result of economic theory.

No. No, it is not a standard result of economic theory. It is only the result in a market that is static, in which no additional innovation can occur. But in the real world, in a dynamic market, this is called competition and has been a part of every "standard" economic theory since Adam Smith, who he noted that if someone is making a profit, it will bring in competition. But this doesn't have a negative effect on the amount of innovation. Quite the opposite. Competition drives innovation by encouraging people to come up with something new. Monopolies decrease innovation by taking away competition and slowing down market innovation. That is what economic theory (and reality) says.

Basically, Suk's whole position is based on the fact that the monopoly rents of designers is decreased by a lack of copyright, but she fails to consider that this leads to greater and more frequent innovation (which we see all the time in the market). What's even stranger is that she flip-flops her argument in the middle of the paper. She talks repeatedly about how designers need big profits to have the incentive to innovate, but then says that big designers aren't the ones really threatened. Instead, she claims, it's the smaller designers. But, those designers didn't have those big profits to protect in the first place. They're out there trying to make a name for themselves by designing something new and cool -- so they have plenty of incentive to innovate. And if their design this year is copied, that's great for them because it gives them greater recognition and means the demand for their original products will be even greater the following season.

Now, we see bad economic reasoning all the time -- but it's troubling when it comes from a Harvard professor (law, not economics), whose mixed up work is being used as the basis of changing the law that could seriously harm an innovative creative industry that is currently thriving.

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Samsung has released a firmware update for its NX10 mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. The firmware, available from the company's website doesn't acknowledge any additional changes beyond those made in version 1.04. These include getting long-exposure noise reduction to engage for exposures longer than 1 sec (rather than 4sec), and changing the default focus point selection method in P,A,S and M modes.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a lot of things wrong with 3D movies. Avatar's 3D was well executed, but Alice's 3D was really bad, like all 2D-to-3D conversions. And yet, studios are reconverting 2D movies—including classics—into 3D to milk this fad. On top of that, the theaters are not prepared for 3D, with bad eyeglasses optics and dark projections. In this article, a top CG supervisor in a prominent visual effects studio in Los Angeles calls it as it is: it's all a big scam by the movie studios."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a fun thing to do with an older robot that you aren't sure what to do with: turn it into a musical instrument! Using a motor to make music is nothing new, however this approach by LMR user RobotFreak is nice because you can try it without building any new hardware. This technique works because you can turn a motor on and off very quickly, causing it to act like a speaker.

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From Washington Post: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt is "teaming up with Columbia University lecturer David Eisenbach to write "One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents and First Ladies Shaped America," due in 2011 from Palgrave."

swandives writes "Australian gamers will dress as zombies to raise awareness about the lack of an R18+ rating for video games in the country. The protest will begin at Hyde Park Fountain on March 27 and lumber through Sydney, raising awareness of the need for a higher classification rating and hopefully causing a bit of havoc at the same time! Computerworld Australia has pictures of previous zombie protests in the lead-up to the event. Australia has a long history of lobbying for an R18+ games classification but, even after a decade, video games are banned from sale if they exceed the maximum M15+ classification. So far, the list of banned titles includes 7 Sins, Risen, Left 4 Dead 2 and Dark Sector. Others, like Alien vs. Predator, were initially banned but appealed the rating and are now MA15+."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Have you always wanted to build a robot but didn't know how? Have you always wanted to turn those old Debbie Gibson CDs into something useful? Got a use for a $500 gift card? For all these reasons and more, you should check out The Make: Robot Build Contest. As we announced last week, the contest will officially start on March 27th, but we'll send out the first Make: Robot Build Newsletter this Friday, and each Wednesday after that. The contest will run through May 7th. We'll be running robot build tutorials here on the site (and in the newsletter) until the contest ends. The build and the contest are designed to appeal to robot enthusiasts of any skill level, so even if you haven't built a bot before, don't hesitate to join in! We're even going to give points to those who seem to improve/learn the most during the build process.

You can sign up for the newsletter right here:

Name:

Email:

My original post about the contest is here.
The official landing page for the contest is here.
A convenient parts bundle, put together by contest sponsors Jameco, can be purchased here.

A "CoasterBot" I built for my 2003 book, Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Just posted! Our in-depth review of the Ricoh GXR with the S10 24-72mm F2.5-4.4 VC lens module. After we reviewed Ricoh's A12 50mm APS-C module a couple of weeks ago it's now the more compact S10's turn. It's got a smaller 1/1.7 sensor and comes with a 3x zoom wide angle lens. Find out how the A12's sidekick performed in our comprehensive review after the link...

Most countries have national colors, but many are shared. As a result, Britain chose a deep, rich shade of green to distinguish itself in competitive endeavors from rivals who had already claimed red, white and blue. The association is now so close (especially in motorsports) that the shade is often called British Racing Green. But did you know it was originally selected as a mark of respect for the Irish?

Parallel Lines is a project by from Ridley Scott Associates that will be released April 8. It's a neat premise!

Five directors were each challenged to create short films in different genres using the same dialogue. The five 5 beautifully diverse films are by Greg Fay, Jake Scott, Johnny Hardstaff, Carl Erik Rinsch and animators Hi-Sim and their genres range from drama, animation, action, to sci-fi and thriller.

Trailer for Parallel Lines

In a Twitter exchange, Anil Dash just reminded me that the word "avatar" comes from from the Sanskrit word Avatãra. The word means, more or less, "descent." More, from a related blog post at Heritage Key:

But while the modern day meaning implies gaming and interaction, the original definition has a very different meaning. In Hinduism, avatars act as manifestations of deities. This occurs when a god has decided to come to our world by taking a human or animal form.

The most well-known avatars were associated with the god Vishnu, who often appeared in our world to restore good in the world when evil threatened to corrupt it. The deity would do so by fighting off demons as a fish or a boar. At other times, Vishnu would lead armies to victory as an eventual king (Sounds a little similar to the plot of the movie Avatar?).

What is an Avatar? Creators Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer Trace the Ancient Roots of the Latest Buzzword

(Heritage Key, thanks, @xlent1 / Image: "Vishnu Dreaming," a Creative Commons licensed image from the Flickr stream of Vaticanus)

Shakrai writes "Time Magazine has published an article about the impact of Cisco's new CRS-3 router on the business practices of the MAFIAA. This new router was previously mentioned here on Slashdot and is expected to alleviate internet bottlenecks that currently impede steaming video-on-demand services. Some of the highlights from the article: 'The ability to download albums and films in a matter of seconds is a harbinger of deep trouble for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which would prefer to turn the clock back, way back. ... The hard fact is that the latest developments at Cisco, Google and elsewhere may do more than kill the DVD and CD and further upset entertainment-business models that have changed little since the Mesozoic Era. With superfast streaming and downloading, indie filmmakers will soon be able to effectively distribute feature films online and promote them using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. ... Meanwhile, both the MPAA and the RIAA continue to fight emerging technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing with costly court battles rather than figuring out how to appeal to the next generation of movie enthusiasts and still make a buck."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Buckman from the excellent CC-friendly label Magnatune has great news: "The good-to-artists, DRM-free, Creative-Commons friendly music service said that their 'no-limits membership' offering now accounts for 3/4rds of their revenue, and so they are switching to that as their main business. As part of the move, Magnatune stops selling CDs, stops offering a streaming music membership, in favor of a simple $15/month membership which offers unlimited downloads and online listening. Magnatune is known as a pioneer music service, coining the term 'open music' and thumbing their nose at the industry with their strapline: 'We are not evil'."

Unless you've bee living under a rock lately, you've heard about the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court, which reiterated corporate personhood in certain circumstances -- specifically with regards to political campaign funding -- effectively freeing up companies to spend as much money as they wanted to support (or not support) political candidates. The ruling was quite controversial, and it's not at all surprising that a Facebook group popped up with the creative name "Citizens United Against Citizens United." Turns out that the Citizens United organization was none too happy about the criticism. Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the news that the new bastion of "free speech" is claiming that the Facebook group violates its trademark and is demanding the destruction of all documents bearing its mark.

Although we haven't seen this issue litigated in the context of Facebook, Citizens United's demand flies in the face of the many decisions holding that an Internet gripe site (or fan site) may use the trademark of the subject of the discussion as its domain name. Under Lamparello v. Falwell, 420 F.3d 309 (4th Cir. 2005), that's even the rule in the Fourth Circuit, where Citizens United is located. How can they possibly hope to win a case like that?

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign's argument would seem to be even stronger, because it is using "Citizens United" in its descriptive sense, and not as a mark. It seems doubtful that Citizens United the conservative group can prevent a group of citizens who are united to support or oppose a particular proposition from referring to their effort as Citizens United For X or Citizens United Against Y. (Otherwise, many groups that would have to change their names). It is especially hard to understand how any confusion about source could be expected to result from labeling a campaign "Citizens United Against Citizens United."

Interestingly, Citizens United asks Wisconsin Democracy Campaign to destroy all documents bearing the Citizens United trademark. If that demand were extended to the Supreme Court, could it succeed in wiping the Citizens United decision off the books?

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Hydrogen peroxide, H₂O₂, is not something most people normally think of as "fuel." After all, it's got no carbon in it. Most people know that, as an oxidizer, it can enhance the burning rate of fuels, but the familiar "fire triangle" teaches us that combustion requires both an oxidizer and a fuel, plus a source of ignition, to get started. Turns out, depending on how concentrated it is, hydrogen peroxide can, under the right conditions, explode all on its own. The 3% aqueous solution in your medicine cabinet is completely safe, but the hazards increase rapidly as the amount of H₂O₂ goes up and the amount of H₂O goes down. Up around 85% peroxide, the stuff is literally rocket fuel, and its spontaneous decomposition in the presence of a catalyst like, say, metallic silver or manganese dioxide, happens incredibly fast. The rocket motor in Wendell Moore's famous Bell Rocket Belt (Wikipedia) operated on this principle.

Shown above is a video of the Dragonfly DF1, an experimental aircraft under development by Swisscopter US. Instead of a traditional gasoline engine, the Dragonfly has peroxide-powered rocket engines on the tips of its main blades, with a mechanical take-off to drive the tail-rotor. Large tanks of high-test peroxide supposedly provide 50 minutes of flight at 40 mph.

So why would anyone want a helicopter that works this way? Turns out an H₂O₂ rocket motor is vastly simpler than a gasoline engine, mechanically, and thus (at least theoretically) less failure-prone, and therefore safer. All you need to make an H₂O₂ rocket is a tank of high-test peroxide, another tank of inert gas to pressurize it, and a nozzle with a silver-coated screen to spray the stuff through. [via DVICE]

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The opening night reception for the BLAB! art retrospective in NYC is Friday, March 26th, 6-9 PM. There will be 100 pieces in the show!

The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators presents “BLAB!: A Retrospective,” a periodic anthology of works from leading contemporary illustrators, painters, sequential artists and printmakers worldwide. Founded by acclaimed Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp in 1986, BLAB! invites more than twenty-five visual artists each year from the fields of sequential art, graphic design, illustration, painting, and printmaking to contribute to BLAB!, a selection informed by Beauchamp’s distinctive vision and aesthetic. The anthology will be on display March 24-May 1, 2010 in the museum’s galleries in New York City’s Upper East Side.

From its roots as an exposition of comic illustration, the original BLAB! anthology format has evolved and diversified, with recent editions incorporating the work and vision of renowned illustrators and artists including Chris Ware, Gary Baseman, Sue Coe, Camille Rose Garcia, The Clayton Brothers, Owen Smith, SHAG!, Joe Sorren, Ron English, and Mark Ryden. BLAB! also features selections of vintage "found" graphics, such as Depression-era matchbook covers, obscure Valmor cosmetic labels and pre-1920 European Krampus postcards.

BLAB!: A Retrospective

via Yanko Design

"Perez Hilton may have violated a federal obscenity law when he posted an explicit adult video clip to his widely-read site earlier this week," writes Susannah Breslin at True/Slant. The perezhilton.com post included what was believed to be a hardcore porn video clip featuring Chuy Bravo, a man with dwarfism whose day job is performing as Chelsea Handler's sidekick on her late-night E! talk show, Chelsea Lately. "In doing so, Hilton may have run afoul of obscenity laws that strictly dictate the terms under which pornographic content can appear online."

davecl writes "The Planck satellite has released its first new science images, showing the large scale filamentary structure of cold dust in our own galaxy. This release coincides with the completion of its first survey of the entire sky a couple of weeks ago. There's lots more work to be done, and more observations to be made, before results are ready on the Big Bang, but these images demonstrate Planck's performance and capability. More information is available on the Planck mission blog (which I maintain)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A wonderful blog post from David Byrne on the process of creative collaboration (which he's doing a lot of these days). Includes photos of his gloriously untidy home studio.

IEEE's Erico Guizzo visited the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and videotaped this demo of his machine that scans the text and images of a book as you flip through its pages.

Ishikawa is well known in robotics circles for his Matrix bullet time-style amazing demos -- like a robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with superhuman dexterity. How he does it? A Super Vision Chip (that's what he calls it) that can "see" events too fast for the eye.

Ishikawa and his colleagues are already working on several applications -- including a microscope that can track individual bacteria and a video game motion-capture system (similar to Microsoft's Project Natal) for gesture playing. Late last year when I visited the lab, they showed me their latest creation: a superfast book scanner.

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages

eldavojohn writes "A couple of years ago it was announced that the Boeing-built virtual fence at the US-Mexico border didn't work. Started in 2006, SBInet has been labeled a miserable failure and finally halted. A soon-to-be-released GAO report is expected to be overwhelmingly critical of SBInet, causing DHS Chief Janet Napolitano to announce yesterday that funding for the project has been frozen. It's sad that $1.4 billion had to be spent on the project before the discovery that this poorly conceived idea would not work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The big cheese of Apple as a big cheese. The Cooks Den has the recipe.

Steve Jobs Cheese Head

The new episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis on Funny or Die features special guest Ben Stickler. No, Stiffler. Stiller.

Artist Diem Chau usually works in porcelain, but she sometimes steps it up and uses crayons as her medium. This post has lots of photos showing her carvings of the 12 symbols of the Chinese zodiac. They're on exhibit at the Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago. My favorite is the rat.

Diem Chau's crayons carved as the 12 symbols of the Chinese zodiac (Thanks, Robert!)

LA Times: Local TV news isn't meeting FCC standards of operating in the public interest. USC study shows just 22 seconds of local gov coverage for every 30 minutes. Humpback whale sightings, celebrity perfume lawsuits cited by stations as examples of "significant treatment of issues facing the community." Nothing particularly earth-shattering here, but interesting to see blatant disregard for public interest quantified and publicly talked about.

Alexander Kobulnicky has been painting molecules since 2007. Pictured above are heme and chlorophyll, but over at his site you'll find many many more, such as capsaicin, serotonin, prozac, pentobarbital, and LSD.

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The man who brought us "cyberspace," and much else of enduring beauty, celebrates a birthday today. Happy Birthday, William Gibson. Above, a video snip from No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about Gibson and his work.

Google Books has scans of every issue of Spin, the music magazine Bob Guccione Jr. founded in 1985 with a loan from his father, Bob Guccione Sr., the publisher of Penthouse. It's interesting to see how awfully dated the design of the magazine is.

Every issue of SPIN magazine available on Google Books (Thanks, EdA!)

Last year a very important lawsuit was filed, challenging whether or not it was legal to patent genes. While that trial is still (slowly) moving forward, a study has come out pointing out that one of the genes that's at the center of that trial, BRCA1, from Myriad Genetics, is incredibly broad and could be used to stifle all sorts of important research:

For instance, BRCA1 is on chromosome 17. But long stretches of DNA on chromosome 1 are identical to stretches in the Myriad patent, the researchers said.

"This claim and others like it turn out, on examination, to be surprisingly broad, and if enforced would have substantial implications for medical practice and scientific research," they wrote.

In the meantime, we're still waiting for someone to explain how it possibly makes sense to patent genes.

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MacAndrew writes "The ACLU has sued the United States Government to enforce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for 'the release of records relating to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles — commonly known as "drones" — for the purpose of targeting and killing individuals since September 11, 2001." (Complaint.) The information sought includes the legal basis for use of the drones, how the program is managed, and the number of civilian deaths in areas of operation such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The ACLU further claims that 'Recent reports, including public statements from the director of national intelligence, indicate that US citizens have been placed on the list of targets who can be hunted and killed with drones.' Aside from one's view of the wisdom, effectiveness, and morality of these military operations, the inclusion of US citizens suggests that summary remote-control executions are becoming routine. Especially given the difficulty in locating and targeting individuals from aircraft, risks of human and machine error are obvious, and these likely increase as the robots become increasingly autonomous (please no Skynet jokes). This must give pause to anyone who's ever spent time coding or debugging or even driving certain willful late model automobiles, and the US government evidently doesn't want to discuss it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

telomerewhythere writes "A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander. 'Unlike typical mammals, which heal wounds by forming a scar, these mice begin by forming a blastema, a structure associated with rapid cell growth and de-differentiation as seen in amphibians. According to the Wistar researchers, the loss of p21 causes the cells of these mice to behave more like embryonic stem cells than adult mammalian cells, and their findings provide solid evidence to link tissue regeneration to the control of cell division. "Much like a newt that has lost a limb, these mice will replace missing or damaged tissue with healthy tissue that lacks any sign of scarring," said the project's lead scientist.' Here is the academic paper for those with PNAS access."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seller Moonlight Bindery offers these cool hand-stitched books with upcycled green Lego baseplate covers in three different sizes. Shown here is the small version.

This funky book is made from two 5" (16 X 16 dot in geek speak) square green LEGO® base plates. The paper is 70 lb. 100% recycled white paper suitable for writing or drawing. There are 10 signatures with 8 pages a signature for a total of 80 pages (or 160 if you count front and back sides.) Also included are 20 flat LEGO® pieces (the pieces may differ from the picture) AND a LEGO® separator so you can create the cover of your choice! ...All of my books and albums are made by hand in my home-based studio. So my creations will last I use acid free paper, cloth, and glue.

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So, the music press has been busy talking about the accusations from Eddy Grant that the band Gorillaz copied his old tune with one of their recent hits. You can compare the two songs here. There appear to be some similarities, but they're pretty different songs: The timing on this is a bit interesting. Gorillaz is a band from Damon Albarn, and just a couple months ago, the manager of Albarn's musical acts (Blur, Gorillaz) was screaming about how he wanted to give "pirates" who leaked the Gorillaz album a "good kicking." Perhaps he ought to stay away from Eddy Grant for a bit.

Of course, it's a bit silly for Grant to be upset too. He wrote a song that was popular years ago, and now he wants free cash because some other band made a song that has some vague similarities?

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The MidiVox shield turns a basic Arduino board into a standalone MIDI synthesizer with parameters tweakable via MIDI CC messages. Hook up a MIDI keyboard controller via the onboard 5-pin DIN (aka MIDI) jack, upload a sketch and play. You may be surprised what sweet sounds can be generated by a single channel of 12-bit digital-to-analog conversion (I definitely was).

A test drive of the kit's example sketch can be seen synthing just below this sentence ...

MidiVox shield for Arduino

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Glyn Moody writes "Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, has just published a piece called 'Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones.' In it, he notes that today's smartphones are all about the 'software stack,' not the 'radio stack,' and that 'as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device. In the interim, though, we should expect continued activity.' That 'activity' obviously means lawsuits against those producing those software stacks, and Gutierrez seems to be hinting strongly that Microsoft intends to join in. So where does that leave all the Linux-based stacks such as the increasingly-popular Android? Is this just a clever way for Microsoft to start a patent war on Linux without appearing to do so?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Encyclopedia Dramatica, a bizarro-world Wikipedia that aims to amuse and offend, has few peers in the internet outrage game. With almost nothing off-limits, the content runs from parody to ax-grinding, and anyone can join in. No surprise, then, that it's at the top of authoritarian governments' censorship hit lists: accused of being a laundering shop for libel, racism, homophobia and other shitcockery, its moderator explains the idea. Says owner Joseph Evers: "Here's to the hidden costs of freedom." [Ninemsn. Thanks, Weev]

If you'll recall, there was a lot of industry flap when DVRs were becoming available because of the effect that automatic pre-recording of programming would have on TV advertising. Automatic commercial-skipping features introduced the possibility that viewers could watch TV for the rest of their lives and never have to see another ad. ReplayTV, an early and promising competitor to Tivo, was basically destroyed by industry legal action over its automatic commercial-skipping feature. The fact that you have to fast-forward through commercials on your Tivo today, using that clunky pop-goes-the-weasel scan routine, is basically a concession to TV advertisers who would not abide a system that didn't require you to at least watch the ads on fast-forward.

But there is an easier and better way. And while it may be old news to some of you, it was a revelation to me and all my Tivo-using friends when we discovered that there's an unadvertised instant-30-second-advance feature built into the Tivo that can be activated by a simple "cheat code" from the remote.

While playing a recorded show, press select-play-select-3-0-select. If you do it right, you'll hear three chimes from your Tivo indicating success. From then on until the Tivo reboots, your forward "chapter skip" button will instantly jump forward 30 seconds, which is the length of a single TV commercial. If the announcer says "we'll be back in 90 seconds," just punch it three times and they'll be back right now.

This article at Lifehacker describes the process, and includes similar tricks for Comcast and DirecTV DVRs. Thanks to Melody Klingler and Benjamin Bagnaschi for helping me verify that it works.

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angry tapir writes "Toshiba has stopped production of mass-market incandescent light bulbs, putting an end to a 120-year manufacturing history of the products. The company, which is one of Japan's largest makers of lighting products, had planned to halt production next year but brought up the date by a year. It will now focus on more energy efficient products, including LED (light-emitting diode) lights, which contain a handful of white LEDs and draw a fraction of the power of incandescent bulbs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the first things that President Obama did upon taking office was promise a much more open and transparent administration from what came before. He issued a "directive" to federal agencies to start with the assumption of openness and only back down from it with good reason. And yet, as we've seen over and over again, federal agencies have been anything but transparent -- and a new study supports that. The AP looked at Freedom of Information Act requests and found that agencies are turning down FOIA requests at a much greater rate than the last administration, and doing so using a "deliberative process" exemption -- which Obama specifically told agencies to avoid if possible. Amusingly, the AP notes that the administration still hasn't responded to its own FOIA request about the gov't's new transparency plans.

Along those lines, rather than waiting for the government to just be proactive in being transparent, why not help them along? You may recall last year that Jim Harper set up a system to crowdsource a comprehensive collection of earmark data that was required to be released -- but which was released in a variety of different and confusing ways. Now that the feds are finally moving towards standardizing how earmark data is released, Harper along with Jerry Brito are trying to make sure that the standardized format is as useful as possible. They've set up EarmarkData.org to try to help create a standardized format that will actually capture and present the data in the most useful way.

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vikingpower writes "Internet research firm Hitwise just broke the news: last week, Facebook attracted 7.07 percent of the internet traffic in the USA, compared to 7.03 percent for Google. This is the first time google.com has been out of the top spot since it surpassed MySpace in 2007, and reflects a change in the way people use internet. They tend to privilege social interaction sites above 'passive' search engines." Facebook still has a ways to go if you include Google's non-search properties, which bring the total up to 11.03% of traffic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

crazybilly writes "First Monday recently released a study about how college students actually use Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, they found, 'Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility.' The study offers some initial data to help settle the often heated controversy over Wikipedia's usefulness as a research tool and how it affects students' research."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Open Camera Control is a project from HDRLabs to build a custom cable to interface your DSLR with a DS.

The OCC project arose from our need to shoot HDR images for film production using Canon cameras. Canon has stubbornly chosen to stick to its standard 3-shot method for bracketing shots - one metered shot and two additional shots one or two stops above and below the metered shot. For texture shooting, it is sometimes necessary to shoot 5,7,9 or even 11 or more stops of bracketing around the metered exposure. We've since found that the OCC system can work with other brands like Olympus and Sigma cameras.

The project includes a full rundown including schematics, source code, and shooting guide. [via techchee]

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As was expected, Canadian MP Charlie Angus has introduced a bill that would expand Canada's "you must be a criminal" blank media tax (they prefer "levy," but it's a tax) to iPods and other media players. However, to "balance" that out, he's also proposing a change to copyright law that would make Canada's "fair dealing" laws more flexible. Expanding fair dealing is definitely a necessary and important move, but it seems unfortunate that it appears to be coupled with this idea of taxing people just because they might make use of unauthorized content.

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We've been impressed with the take-up of our galleries system, with over 120,000 images uploaded so far, but have been looking for ways to make it even more accessible to photographers. To this end, we have created an uploader plug-in for Adobe's Lightroom 2 raw processing and workflow tool. The plug-in adds to Lightroom's 'export' tab, letting you set your output specifications and configure the permissions for the images once on the site. The plug-in is a beta at present, with more functions to come.

The Guardian's Games blog explores the tendency of modern video games to suffer from poor voice acting, a flaw made all the more glaring by increasingly precise and impressive graphics. Quoting: "Due to the interactive nature of games, actors can't be given a standard film script from which they're able to gauge the throughline of their character and a feel for the dramatic development of the narrative. Instead, lines of dialogue need to be isolated into chunks so they can be accessed and triggered within the game in line with the actions of each individual player. Consequently, the performer will usually be presented with a spreadsheet jammed with hundreds of single lines of dialogue, with little sense of context or interaction. ... But according to David Sobolov, one of the most experienced videogame voice actors in the world (just check out his website), the significant time pressures mean that close, in-depth direction is not always possible. 'Often, there's a need to record a great number of lines, so to keep the session moving, once we've established the tone of the character we're performing, the director will silently direct us using the spreadsheet on the screen by simply moving the cursor down the page to indicate if he/she liked what we did. Or they'll make up a code, like typing an 'x' to ask us to give them another take.' It sounds, in effect, like a sort of acting battery farm, a grinding, dehumanizing production line of disembodied phrases, delivered for hours on end. Hardly conducive to Oscar-winning performances."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal's Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership has been at the top of my discretionary reading pile for months, now ever since the publisher, Yale, sent me a review copy. Unfortunately, it's been months since I've done any substantial discretionary reading and it'll be months still before I get to do so. So yesterday, I just carved out 45 minutes to give it a good, thorough skim, and while I don't have enough of the book in me to do an actual review, I can tell you that my suspicions were confirmed.

Property Outlaws is a great and deep read on how the violation of property rights -- from trespassing to sit-ins to copyright infringement -- have been critical to the evolution of "the law of ownership," establishing the principles that led to anti-discrimination laws (lunch-counter sit-ins), justice for indigenous people (Indian occupation of Alcatraz) and the many shifts and turns in copyright that accommodate speech, privacy, and free expression.

Katyal and Penalver go at the subject with academic thoroughness (both are academic lawyers), but without ever being dry. This is an important book -- important enough that I'm putting it back in the stack so that I get a chance to read it cover to cover someday.

We've featured Katyal's work here before, Copyright, Technology, and The New Surveillance is a great paper on privacy and copyright enforcement that's a must-read.

Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership

Phil from Don't Disconnect Us sez, "Commissioned by UK ISP TalkTalk, we've been campaigning against the British Government's anti-filesharing proposals which form part of the Digital Economy Bill. In a nutshell the music industry has been lobbying the UK government saying that filesharing is killing the music industry. That's why we teamed up with Dan Bull, the musician behind Dear Lily and Dear Mandy, to create our very own music video. 'Home Taping is Killing Music' is a tongue-in-cheek video that features 80s legends Madonna, George Michael and Adam Ant (well, actually it's just a trio of look-alikes) lip-synching to the song Top of the Pops style."

This is some extremely funny stuff -- especially by the time we get to the grand finale and all the other industries at risk ("Home sleeping is killing hotels"). Taking the apocalyptic claims of the record industry about the net at face value is so short-sighted and short-memoried. These Chicken Littles have been telling us that the sky is falling and that they must must must have business-friendly laws and enforcement or the world will end since 1908, when the piano roll was invented. Every time, it just turned out that some of the old guard were going to lose out, and a new guard, who saw how to make a living in the new world, were going to come along to take their place.

Yet here we are in Britain, ready to establish a China-style Great Firewall to block sites the record industry doesn't like, ready to shut whole families off from the information society if one member is accused of copyright violations, ready to sacrifice national technological competitiveness to shore up the doddering relics who don't want to make way for the next generation of entrepreneurs and artists who thrive in a networked world. And the dumbest part is that there's no way it will actually reduce infringement: we're just going to further criminalize and alienate young fans and creators.

It's not too late: write to your MP and ask for a full debate on the Digital Economy Bill. The British record industry admits that its legislation will only pass because Parliament isn't holding a debate on it. Demand that your elected representative do her job!

Home Taping is Killing Music (Thanks, Phil!)

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that engineers designing the world's fastest car, the Bloodhound SSC, built to smash the world land speed record of 763 mph set by the Thrust SuperSonic Car in 1997, believe they have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground at 1,000 mph after initial iterations of the car's aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle's rear. John Piper, Bloodhound's technical director, said: 'We've had lift as high as 12 tonnes, and when you consider the car is six-and-a-half tonnes at its heaviest — that amount of lift is enough to make the car fly.' The design effort has been aided by project sponsor Intel, who brought immense computing power to bear on the lift problem. Before Intel's intervention, the design team had worked through 11 different 'architectures' in 18 months. The latest modelling work run on Intel's network investigated 55 configurations in eight weeks. By playing with the position and shape of key elements of the car's rear end, the design team found the best way to manage the shockwave passing around and under the vehicle as it goes supersonic. 'At Mach 1.3, we've close to zero lift, which is where we wanted to be,' says Piper. In late 2011, the Bloodhound, powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine, will mount an assault on the land speed record, driving across a dried up lakebed known as Hakskeen Pan, in the Northern Cape of South Africa."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've pointed to numerous studies, at this point, that have all found that, when done right, free ebooks can greatly increase the sales of physical books (and, in some cases, even of ebooks). Here's another empirical example of that in action. Chris Anderson points us to a blog post by someone at a mid-list niche publisher, talking about how successful its experiments with "free" ebooks have been. In this case, the publisher would offer up the first book in a series as a free ebook, and found that it drove massive increases in sales:

One of our free titles was the #1 download on Amazon for the entire month of February. The subsequent sales of books 2 and 3 in the series increased by a rate of 20 to 1. For this series, digital sales are approaching 20% of the total product sales distribution and growing. With the visibility of the digital sales on Amazon, we have seen a substantial increase in print sales to the brick and mortar book chains. In this one instance, digital is driving print sales.

Basically, what this publisher realized is that with most books, obscurity is a greater threat than "piracy," and free helps deal with that:

Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the "browser" market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.

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Thingiverse user RustySpoon1121 uploaded the STL of a shamrock coin, perfect for printing in green ABS!

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dcollins writes "Researchers at Denison University in Ohio have shown that giving PlayStations to young boys leads to slower progress in reading and writing skills. Quoting: 'The study is the first controlled trial to look at the effects of playing video games on learning in young boys. That is to say, the findings aren't based on survey data of kids' game habits, but instead on a specific group of children that were randomly assigned to receive a PlayStation or not ... Those with PlayStations also spent less time engaged in educational activities after school and showed less advancement in their reading and writing skills over time than the control group, according to tests taken by the kids. While the game-system owners didn't show significant behavioral problems, their teachers did report delays in learning academic skills, including writing and spelling.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Kaminsky sez, "Digital: A Love Story is set 'five minutes into the future of 1988', and is one of the most fascinating games I've played in years. Set entirely within an Amiga Workbench desktop, the concept of the game is that you are just your average BBS user, when you meet someone...interesting."

Just played this for ten minutes and was overwhelmed with nostalgia for my Amiga 1000. Looks like LOADS of fun.

Digital: A Love Story (Thanks, Dan!)

Progress Wars is a pretty arch and funny critique of the way that video games are often more compelling/engrossing than fun. A variety of random missions are generated, one after another ("Hijack Silk Traders," "Attain warehouse") which you complete by repeatedly clicking a "Perform mission" button, which edges a progress bar toward completion. Once you finish a mission, you get another one. And another, and another. As Fipi Lele says, "The guy at the end is really hard."

Progress Wars (Thanks, Fipi!)

From The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man, an absolutely delightful "Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular." Some of my faves:

Anointing: A good beating. A case for the application of salve.

Blind Monkeys: An imaginary collection at the Zoological Gardens, which are supposed to receive care and attention from persons fitted by nature for such office and for little else. An idle and useless person is often told that he is only fit to lead the Blind Monkeys to evacuate. Another form this elegant conversation takes, is for one man to tell another that he knows of a suitable situation for him. "How much a week? and what to do?" are natural questions, and then comes the scathing and sarcastic reply, "Five bob a week at the doctor's-- you're to stand behind the door and make the patients sick. They won't want no physic when they sees your mug."

Cupboard Love. Pretended love to the cook, or any other person, for the sake of a meal. My guts cry cupboard; i.e. I am hungry.

Earth Bath. A grave.

Fimble-Famble. A lame, prevaricating excuse.

Gentleman of Four Outs. When a vulgar, blustering fellow asserts that he is a gentleman, the retort generally is, " Yes, a Gentleman Of Four Outs"--that is, without wit, without money, without credit, and without manners.

O'clock. "Like One O'clock," a favorite comparison with the lower orders, implying briskness; otherwise "like winkin'." "To know what's O'clock" is to be wide-awake, sharp, and experienced.

Rumbumptious. Haughty, pugilistic.

Snotter, or Wipe-hauler. A pickpocket whose chief fancy is for gentlemen's pocket-handkerchiefs.

Tune the Old Cow Died of. An epithet for any ill-played or discordant piece of music.

The Art of Manliness Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular

The folks at Shapeways surprised me in January with a 3D-printed version of the UK cover for my novel Makers, which had been designed by Shapeways community member Dmitry Kobzar. Mr Kobzar was good enough to release his 3D files under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license.

Now Shapeways is selling 3D prints of the cover for your delectation in a variety of materials (just in case you don't have a 3D printer of your own with which to run off a copy!). For the record, I don't get any of the proceeds from it -- I just think it's way cool.

Cory Doctorow Makers cover 3D print

kkleiner writes "Robotic surgery is experiencing explosive growth in America's operating rooms, and the unquestioned industry leader in this field is the DaVinci robot, made by Intuitive Surgical. Only 14% of prostate surgeries in the US last year took place not using the DaVinci. Installations have grown from 210 systems seven years ago to 1,395 today. Although typically used for smaller surgeries like prostate removal and hysterectomies, the system was recently used for a kidney transplant, and more complicated procedures are expected in the future. The DaVinci is really just the first wave of robotic surgery as technology continues to push clumsy human hands out of the operating room." The article mentions some of the downsides, or perhaps the growing pains, of DaVinci robotic surgery: "According to a large study of Medicare patients, robotic prostate surgery led to fewer in-hospital complications, but had worse results for impotence and incontinence ..." Another company makes a simulator to train surgeons on the DaVinci. Embedded in the article is a 2009 TED talk on DaVinci by a surgeon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the last few years, Microsoft has become a bigger and bigger supporter of patents, which is a bit ironic, given that Bill Gates once pointed out that the software industry never would have developed if there had been software patents back in the early days. But, proving that new companies innovate, while older companies litigate, Microsoft has become a big patent hoarder in recent years. But, to date, while it's used those patents to threaten lots of companies, it seems like Microsoft's decision to live by patents, is actually costing it quite a bit of money.

We've already covered Microsoft's big loss to i4i at the end of last year, for which Microsoft was told to pay nearly $300 million. And, now, Microsoft has lost a patent lawsuit in East Texas (of course) from a company that appears to have been set up just to sue Microsoft -- claiming patents over VPN technology. In fact, the company's business plan basically admits that its business model is to win these sorts of lawsuits. Hard to see how that's promoting progress or innovation in any way. Oh well. Live by the patent, die by the patent, I guess...

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Peter Serafinowicz (Look Around You, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, and Paul McCartney in the upcoming Robert Zemeckis CGI remake of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine) directed this new music video for the British electropop band Hot Chip. Just went live a few minutes ago. Stay with it. Brilliant creepy hilarity. LAZERS.

Watch video on MySpace.

(I hate linking to MySpace but they have an exclusive on the video for the first few days, and I can't embed stuff from their crap platform. Sorry. I hate linking to "The Sun," too, but their review is hilarious).

Over on DIY Photography, photographer and artist William van der Steen, has a nice tutorial on creating sliced fruit photos. [Thanks, Udi!]

Create Wonderful Sliced Fruit Images

More:

• DIY light box
• PVC Light box / light tent
• Cheap $1 light tent/light box

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I really love the research that they're doing over at Yale's Haskins Laboratories: instead of studying speech perception and production in terms of faithfully replicating alllll of the sounds we make with our mouths, (like the minute clicks, pops, and hisses of consonants), the team is proposing that all we need to understand speech is to track and re-create a few select resonances of the vocal tract. I like to think of speech production in this context as a series of bottles with varying levels of water in them--the mouth is one bottle that changes pitch resonance when you move it to open it or close it, the nasal cavity another, and so on throughout the vocal tract. It ends up sounding like a bunch of complicated melodies that are then combined into a complex micro-tonal harmony, a.k.a., we're all better at perceiving and making music than we think we are!

The examples below break it down into isolated sine-wave patterns that you can combine yourself to build a sentence. What do you think? How easily can you hear words emerge?

Tone combinations

If you like this, you can go here for more interactive demonstrations, or check out this great sine-wave-synthesized Robert Frost poem.

Thanks to Robert E. Remez, as well as Phillip Rubin and Jennifer Pardo at Haskins Labs for allowing me to embed their work here.

Coming up, I'll be writing about a cool ethnographic example of a language that actually uses something like this in practice!

"Caffeine pills, self mutilation, a cold shower - what will you do to keep her awake? www.KeepHerAwake.com." That was the entirety of a promotional email I received from Warner Brothers this morning. Interactive marketing, in this case, means a Flash website where you get to make a young woman cut or burn herself. It's like the studio marketing team is either trying to make Freddy Krueger more Saw or more Xe. Maybe they picked up tips from American black ops torturers, waterboarding detainees and forcing "stress positions" to "keep them awake" in the name of liberty. It's odd that some producers of material intended to ring this particular psychological bell get federal obsenity charges, while others get theatrical distribution. The intersection of porn, torture, and horrorshow: this is America. / Update: Susannah Breslin's take on this is here, at True/Slant. / Update 2: The site doesn't seem to have any age-verification. (thanks, @propylae) / Update 3, 9pm PT: The interactive game is gone, replaced by the Nightmare on Elm Street movie trailer.

Photographs by Newley Purnell of "red shirt" protestors in Thailand as they gather human blood and store it in large bottles, to pour on the ground in front of the prime minister's residence in a shocking gesture of condemnation. "I have never seen anything quite like this," tweets Purnell, who has been covering the events in person over the past week.

SXSW: Bug Labs Says Content Will Drive Open-Source Hardware - Epicenter @ Wired.com...

The iPhone is a direct descendant of the Model T Ford -- you can get one in any color you want, so long as it's black (or white). That's the viewpoint of Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, whose modular, open-source hardware company aims to fix that shortcoming by making it easier for people and companies to create their own electronics products using a Linux processor module, a camera module, a touchscreen LCD module and so on.

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A few weeks back, we were a bit concerned about a judge's decision to force offline a satirical "news story" about a fake giraffe attack at the Global Wildlife Center in Louisiana. Just because GWC was worried that some people might take the story seriously, it doesn't remove the First Amendment rights of the creators of the satirical site. Thankfully, the judge now agrees and has removed the injunction and ordered GWC to pay the legal costs of the site's creators. The judge noted that while the center had some concerns about how the article was viewed, it doesn't change the fact that the content is protected free speech as satire.

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Is this "help wanted" ad for an astronaut the most awesome job post ever, or sad reminder that even the incredibly far-freakin-out can become sort of mundane under the right context? (Thanks, Andrew Grant!)

It's been a long time coming (2007, 2005, and 2002 respectively), but the project to harness wave energy off the Scots coast is finally coming together. Reader krou writes: "The BBC is reporting that ten sites on the seabed off Scotland in Pentland Firth and and around Orkney have been leased to energy companies with the hopes of generating wave and tidal energy. 'Six sites have been allocated for wave energy developments potentially generating 600 megawatts of power and four for tidal projects, also generating 600 MW.' The leases were awarded to SSE Renewables Developments, Aquamarine Power, ScottishPower Renewables, E.ON, Pelamis Wave Power, OpenHydro Site Developments, and Marine Current Turbines. Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond said that 'These waters have been described as the Saudi Arabia of marine power and the wave and tidal projects unveiled today — exceeding the initial 700MW target capacity — underline the rich natural resources of the waters off Scotland.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm not sure how to best sum up The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009. Is it a treasure trove of awesome science geekery that will prompt dozens of cool conversations on a wide variety of topics? A handy "Follow that Blogger" guide that should get its first spine-breaks while you use it to update your RSS feed and browser bookmarks? Or, maybe, it's a giant middle finger to all the nose-in-the-air naysayers who think real science journalism only happens on dead trees.

"All of the above" is such a nice phrase, isn't it?

This is actually the 4th annual edition of The Open Laboratory, which is the brainchild of Bora Zivkovic, a scientist, science blogger and kind of a den papa for science blogging worldwide. Besides The Open Laboratory, he also organizes the ScienceOnline conferences and is the online community manager at the Public Library of Science—which you probably know best as the publishers of the open-access science journal PLoS One.

In the New Media Wars, Zivkovic is decidedly a blogging partisan. But The Open Laboratory is more than just propaganda for the idea of turning science communication over to scientists, and science-oriented journalists, on the Web (though it works pretty damn well as that). It's also a fun, enlightening read that's bound to have a little something for everybody who loves science wrapped up in its 52 blog posts selected by editor, and science blogger, Scicurious.

Bonus: The segmented nature of the book makes it a great read for commuting. I read a decent chunk while riding the Minneapolis #6 bus.

Some of my favorite entries:

Cosmopithecus, in which astronaut physician Michael Barratt ponders the way weightlessness alters the human body. His particular focus is on the feet. In space, your seldom-used soles slough off their calluses and toes become tools for grasping and picking up objects. When astronauts return to Earth, they're accompanied by calluses on the tops of their feet—formed by constant contact with foot restraints—and faced with the prospect of walking on delicate, newborn skin, like a princess with a pea in her shoe.

Bittersweet: A heartwrenching story from the Whitecoat Tales blog about what happens when the mundane daily life of a medical student intersects with a family tragedy.

Betting on the Poor Boy—a great article by Mark Liberman, Ph.D., analyzing an Economist story about the way the stresses of poverty impact brain development. Liberman takes a typical news-article paraphrasing of study data—Group X is more likely to do something than Group Y—and explains why you have to look more sharply at the numbers to get the real story, and why linguistics is just as important as statistics. This is something I'll definitely be keeping in mind as I work.

Blood and Brains—can vampires survive a zombie apocalypse? This one kind of speaks for itself, but I was surprised to learn that the standard "Vampires are Impossible" proof—if they did exist, we'd all be vampires within two years—can be challenged simply by taking into account vampire death rates. In fact, Andrew of the Southern Fried Science blog points to a 2009 paper that figures a town of 36,000 humans could support a standing population of 18 vampires.

The Open Laboratory 2009 is available in print form, or as a Kindle-compatible PDF. Both versions are on Lulu.com.

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book from series editor Bora Zivkovic. That said, I receive a lot of free review copies of books. I only tell you about the ones I think you really need to read.

Image courtesy Flickr user Gene Hunt, via CC