I'm in Iowa, and MediaCom has been on and off the air more times than Paris Hilton. I heard last week that it was out in most of Iowa, and parts of illinois and indiana. It was off just now for two hours, and is back up--long enough, I hope, for me to get this question off.
Anybody know what's
Sure, Google's Superbowl ad was cute and left us giggling, but how would a French romance powered by Google really go? [UCB—Thanks, Mackenzie!]
Hi All
I want to design an Infrared Oven in which about 10 IR bulbs having 150W power each will be used .The problem is that the objects are hand formers made of porcelain. The hand formers are considered as complicated dimensionally .
How can I distribute IR energy uniformly on many forme
Dear Friends,
Thank you for earlier reply, Please give me technical details, genereal spect., & functioning of TNC switch ( Trip-Neutral0close) switch.
Regards,
sanjay
If you're a huge space buff, you might not be surprised by anything in this video tour of the International Space Station. But it's still great to just get a simple walkthrough of this incredible project and all its corners.
Anyone else get a bit bit light-headed watching all those twists and turns? [CrunchGear]
Apple's hiring again and this time they're looking for "Performance QA Engineers" in their "iPad Media" department. Based on the description for the job, we might be seeing an increase in iPad camera rumors:
The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.
Based on the demand for someone to work on video capture frameworks for a device which can't even capture video we could presume that Apple's exploring some future options. As if we didn't already think that. [Apple via MacRumors]
ASME / AIAA Hudson-Mohawk Distinguished Speaker Joint Dinner Meeting (RSVP required) - Celebrating Engineers' Week 2010 in New York's Capital Region
Speaker: Dr. Roger D. Launius, senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in W
I hate spiders, I hate horror movies, and I hate gimmicky computer cases. But I love the commercial for the Lian Li Mini-atx case. Maybe it's just because it reminded me of Steve Irwin.
There aren't details on availability and pricing for this case, but who cares when the promo video alone is fun. [CrunchGear]
Some folks decided to study the calling habits of 5.3 million people over an 18-month period. 350 million phone calls later, they came to an almost obvious conclusion: Prepaid cellphone users make and return fewer calls than their postpaid counterparts.
You can click on the image to take a closer look at the graphs.
Initially the study done at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland, was intended to analyze reciprocity—the likelihood of an individual receiving as many calls in return as he or she makes. But during the course of the research, a clear difference was discovered in the calling habits of prepaid and postpaid users:
Postpaid users tend to be more prolific, having on average 5.41 people they call. Prepaid users, by contrast, have only 3.41 contacts on average (although the notion of "average" is a little strange here since there is a very long tail on these distributions).
Postpaid users also made about 10 times as many calls as prepaid users while 25 percent of prepaid users had odd relationships in which "one participant makes more than 80 percent of all calls."
Technology Review suggests that the differences in calling habits could be explained by the fact that prepaid users are more likely to be younger individuals, but I'd go as far as considering that the unlimited mobile-to-mobile or weekend benefits of postpaid plans may play a role as well. [Technology Review via NY Times Bits]
A "libertarian Rocky Mountain western-type of Republican" City
Colorado Springs, the second largest city in Colorado, with a population of 380,000 has taken a radical step towards privatization of many municipal services.
The progressive-controlled city council and government became increasingly out-of-touch with Colorado Springs constituents. The council proposed one property tax hike after another.
Republican State Rep. Douglas Bruce, author of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) described the situation. From the Canadian Globe & Mail, Feb. 7::
“In a super-conservative community,” he says, “they have amassed a socialist empire.”
The tax, which would have added $27.6-million to city coffers, was rejected by more than 65 per cent of voters.
“We called their bluff,” resident Douglas Bruce says. “They need to downsize. It's a good thing.”
Now the city has drastically cut back. Continuing:
Tired of indiscriminate spending, questionable officials and unnecessary expenditures, the residents of one Colorado city have decided to end the era of big government in their municipality, even if it means mowing the grass at the local park themselves... one-third of the city's 24,000 streetlights will remain dark. Two police helicopters are listed for sale on the government website. Trash cans have been removed from city streets, replaced with signs asking residents to dispose of their trash at home.
Park workers will only mow local green spaces sporadically, and flowers will go unwatered.
The city recreation centres, indoor and outdoor pools and several museums will close permanently on March 31 unless private donors step in. More than 63,000 hours of bus service have been slashed and law-enforcement jobs have been left unfilled.
Many are blaming it on the increasing libertarian attitude of local residents.
Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, says there is widespread distrust of government in the city, which has long been tax averse.
The city demographics are almost evenly divided between evangelical Christians, members of the armed forces stationed at the local Fort Carson, and “your more libertarian Rocky Mountain western-type of Republican,” he says.
The end result?
Many residents have said they will step forward to fill the void left by municipal services, opening recreation centres themselves, tending to the shared park land and disposing of their own garbage.
According to Rep. Bruce:
“The government should stick to its traditional municipal role, which is police and fire services, road repair and very little else."
The upcoming i5 MacBook Pro refresh might be closer than we thought, with TUAW discovering that Best Buy emptied their systems of the current version. Since they're not likely to go MacBook-less for long, that points to soon. [TUAW]
This concept scale that doubles as a decorative rug might—might—be the thing to finally get me taking better care of myself.
Designer Kwan Sunman's Rug With Scale project does away with the cold, judgmental form factors of your average bathroom scale, ensconcing it instead in a warm and inviting rug. The readout from the scale shows up on a small red tag that illuminates its user's current weight, previous weight, and goal weight to help chart progress.
The rug portion is also removable (for washing) and interchangeable (for personal style preference). That is, it will be, if this ever becomes an actual, buyable product. Fill in your own "worth the weight" pun here, if so inclined. [Red Dot via Yanko]
From Eric Dondero:
We just received word from our source in D.C. that three libertarian-leaning Republicans, and a number of other friends of liberty, have been chosen as targetted campaigns by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
As described by an NRCC release:
Originally founded in the 2007-2008 election cycle by Reps. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) as a member-driven organization, the Young Guns program has become an official NRCC effort dedicated to electing open-seat and challenger candidates nationwide.
A total of 15 candidates qualified for "Contender" status, while another 13 are officially "On the Radar."
Of special note for Libertarian Republicans, three candidates who are libertarian-leaners qualified as Contenders: Adam Kinzinger IL-11 (photo-left), Ryan Frazier CO-7 (photo-right), and Sean Duffy WI-7. All three are affiliated with the Tea Party movement. Kinzinger is an Iraq War Vet, Air Force Special Ops. Illinois Libertarian activist Jeff Wartman is involved with his campaign. Frazier is a self-described "libertarian," and is closely associated with the Colorado Independence Inst. Duffy, a staunch economic conservative and "social libertarian," is best known for having been a regular on MTV's Real World. He's challening entrenched incumbent Democrat Rep. David Obey.
A fourth who made the Contender list, not quite a libertarian Republican, but a definite Tea Party-oriented Friend of Liberty is Charles Djou of Hawaii's 1st CD.
Contribute: NRCC.org
Google's two new announcements: integrating a Twitter-like service into Gmail and a goal of a real-time speech translation service shows what direction they're taking the company: Into the space between you and every other human being on the planet.
To be fair, these two developments are really far apart in their delivery dates. The Gmail status update could come as soon as tomorrow, whereas the the speech-to-text-to-speech translation system is still a ways out. You can definitely see just how much work Google needs to do by trying to read your Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. (Voice search works better on Android 2.1 because you're talking slower and enunciating.) But both these features point in the same direction many of the company's other products have been hinting at. Here's a list of Google's major products, in case you forgot, and which sector of communication they want to dominate.
• Google Voice: This is a big one, and it'll be the most natural interface for Google to slot in the voice-translation into. If you're using it the way Google wants you to use it, you're already piping all your voice calls and SMS through Google's tubes. And refining speech to text gives them a good idea of your interests and what you're talking about, allowing them to better serve up the relevant ads to you during calls.
• Gmail: Having access to at least one end of everyone's email conversations, outside of business emails, gives Google the ability to be a gateway for most of your written communications. But that's not enough for Google, which is why they developed...
• Google Wave: It's email, message boards, chat rooms and collaboration software all in one, except every participant needs a Google account. This closes that "openness" loophole that email has, and forces everyone into Google's biosphere. So this, and Gmail, should make sure that every medium-length communique passes through Google's maw for analysis. But what about shorter and longer forms? Update: Thanks commenters, for reminding me that Google made Wave open, so people can create their own Wave servers to talk to each other with the Wave protocol. The point still remains, that if you were going to use a service, wouldn't you rather use the service from the company that created the protocol, for performance and feature reasons?
• Google Docs: For longer documents.
• Google Talk: For short blasts of instant messaging, video chats and some audio chatting.
• Picasa and YouTube: Communication doesn't have to be all text-based, you putting your photos and videos online count too.
• Android and Chrome OS: By getting you down at the operating system level, Google can theoretically know every kind of communication you perform. It knows who you talk to, how you do it and when you do it. It can even shape the how by delivering the experience themselves.
• Everything else. There's Checkout, Finance, Maps, Reader, News and other apps, which fill in the other forms of communication or expression that aren't quite covered by the major products above. One major missing piece is social networking, where Google basically failed before with its Orkut service (except for Brazil), so this new Twitter/Gmail hybrid might be their next entrance into the space.
But why do they want these things? Why would Google want to be the middleman between you and the world? To sell you ads, of course. And don't think Google is going to stop at just helping you talk over the internet or over the phone, they're going to reach into meatspace as well. How? One step is making that speech-to-speech translation portable, so you can do a sort of near-field communication with someone else with the same device while at the same time being able to look them in the face. Then, blast you two with the appropriate ads on the billboard next to you.
You may have learned of the line of cells known as the HeLa strain in a biology class, where a teacher explained the “virtually immortal” nature of these rapidly multiplying cells, and how they played a defining role in science. Over the last six decades, the prolific HeLa cells have been used to develop the first polio vaccines, test chemotherapy drugs, and develop techniques for in vitro fertilization. With their amazing capacity to multiply, the cells are an endless bounty to scientists. HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers [The New York Times].
But for all that research, little was known about the origin of the cells or about the unwitting donor who supplied them–Henrietta Lacks (The “He” in HeLa stands for Henrietta and “La,” for Lacks). Lacks was a 30-year old black tobacco worker who died of cervical cancer nearly 60 years ago. She died in a public ward for “coloreds” at the then-segregated Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore.
In a new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, author Rebecca Skloot explores Henrietta Lacks’s impoverished background and raises troubling ethical questions. She notes that Lacks’s cells are still used to this day, but the family never received a penny and was largely unaware of the fate of the cells. Over the course of 10 years, Skloot worked with Lacks’s daughter Deborah to uncover the real story behind the HeLa cells.
Henrietta had no idea when she died that her tissue was being used for research, still less that it had such miraculous properties; indeed, only in 1973 was she publicly confirmed as the source of the wonder-cells [The Independent]. Bu the cells taken from her cancerous cervix were special: Unlike the human cells that researchers had worked with until then, HeLa cells divided easily and multiplied rapidly, meaning that the self-perpetuating cells essentially became immortal. Since then, thousands of scientists have used Lacks’s cells for research and some biotech companies have reportedly made millions of dollars off them, raising important questions about tissue culture.
In the 1980s a doctor who had removed the cancer-ridden spleen of a man named John Moore patented some of the cells to create a cell line then valued at more than $3 billion, without Moore’s knowledge. Moore sued, and on appeal the court ruled that patients had the right to control their tissues, but soon that was struck down by the California Supreme Court, which said that tissue removed from the body had been abandoned as medical waste. The cell line created by the doctor had been “transformed” via his “inventive effort,” and to say otherwise would “destroy the economic incentive to conduct important medical research” [The New York Times].
In Henrietta’s case, however, the ethical dilemma wasn’t just about using tissue without consent; it also brings to mind the shameful history of using African Americans for medical research. During slavery, doctors tested drugs and operated on black people to develop new treatments and surgical techniques. In the 1900s, black corpses were routinely exhumed and shipped to medical schools for research. Black men died unnecessary deaths in Alabama so scientists could study the effects of their untreated disease in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study [The Chicago Tribune].
Skloot’s book has been described as a thriller combined with Erin Brockovich, but ultimately it pays tribute to the incredible life and death of an unknown African-American woman, and throws light on cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty [The New York Times]. Henrietta Lacks was not just a collection of cells. She was a walnut-eyed, square-jawed beauty who favored polished red fingernails and toenails. And sadly, she lived a hard, short life [The Chicago Tribune].
Related Content:
DISCOVER: No Longer Human
The Intersection: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Loom: Henrietta Lacks and the Future of Science Books
Image: Random House
JUST BREAKING...
Guevara's Party gains Four seats in Congress
From Eric Dondero:
Final totals from Costa Rica are now starting to come in. And although the Libertarian Party (Movimiento Libertario) lost the Presidential race, with a vote total less than expected, 21% to winner Laura Chinchilla's 47%, they now appear to be the biggest winners in Deputy races for the Costa Rican Congress.
Already there's talk that President Chincilla of a center-right party, will have to "deal with the rightist" Libertarians to form a working majority in the congress.
From Raw Story:
Chinchilla... won 47 percent of the votes counted late Sunday... However, deputies from her ruling National Liberation Party (PLN) won barely 38 percent, as voting here increasingly favors political minorities.
Otton Solis [leftist party] lagged more than 20 points behind Chinchilla.
Chinchilla's other main opponent, Otto Guevara, only reached third place but his pro-business Libertarian Movement Party was set to increase its seats from six to 10.
And a Costa Rica blog that covers the elections Partidos Politicos confirms that Movimiento Libertario has indeed gained seats, but gives a slightly different figure saying that they actually went up from 5 seats to 10.
Dos partidos de oposición aumentaron su presencia parlamentaria: el derechista Movimiento Libertario, que tendría diez representantes, el doble de los que logró elegir en las elecciones de 2006...
Translation: Two opposition parties raised their presence in parliament: The rightist Libertarian Movement, who will have 10 representatives, double that of what they gained in the elections of 2006.
I was pleasantly surprised to see my old friend Kevin Grazier — planetary scientist with Cassini, and science advisor for Battlestar Galactica and Eureka — highlighted in a Eureka Unscripted blog post. It’s a two-parter, with the second one going up sometimes soon.
At the same time, it was cool to see another friend, Jennifer Ouellette, talking about the science of Eureka as well! I like the show, and while the science is sometimes warped a bit (or a lot) for story-telling, I know for a fact the executive producer and writers try to get as much right as they can. The EP, Jaime Paglia, is a smart and funny guy; I was on a panel with him at Comic Con a couple of years ago (with Kevin, too!) and moderated one that he was on as well. His role is not that of a science teacher, but a story teller. But even so, he and his team, strive to base what they do on solid science.
Plus? It’s just a fun show. That’s why I like Fringe, too. Look: I am the biggest hard case you’ll find when it comes to accuracy in science fiction, but even I know when to hang it up if the story is fun. That way I can actually sit back and enjoy stuff like Doctor Who and Star Trek without getting all twisted up into a pseudo-Riemannian 11-dimensional manifold.
See what I did there? Yeah, if you did, you’re a dork too.
100 gigahertz of processing power—not bad for a single sheet of atoms.
In a paper in Science, researchers at IBM say they have created the fastest-ever graphene transistor, with a cut-off frequency (the highest it can go without significant signal degradation) that at 100 GHz is nearly four times higher than their previous attempt. Similar silicon-based transistors have only been able to reach a turtle-like clock rate of about 40 GHz, or 40 billion cycles per second.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, and electrons move through it extremely fast. This is because they behave like relativistic particles with no rest mass. This, and other unusual physical and mechanical properties, means that the “wonder material” could replace silicon as the electronic material of choice and might be used to make faster transistors than any that exist today [Physics World]. But there are down sides for application: Graphene lacks what’s called a “band gap,” which conventional semiconductors need to turn on and off. And it tends to degrade rather easily during production.
The IBM team crafted a layer of polymer only 10 nanometers thick to protect the graphene from harm. And regarding the band gap issue, researcher Yu–Ming Lin suggested that graphene not be used for the discrete digital signals modern semiconductors deal with. Instead, graphene is better suited for making analog transistors, such as signal processors and amplifiers. Today, such circuitry is largely made from GaAs (gallium arsenide), though GaAs offers nowhere near the same electron mobility [PC World].
Then again, the same IBM research group may have very recently discovered how to create a band gap in graphene. So maybe silicon’s days are numbered, after all.
Related Content:
80beats: IBM’s Billion-Neuron Simulation Can Match a Cat’s Brainpower
80beats: Watson, an IBM Supercomputer, Could be the Next “Jeopardy!” Champion
80beats: To Cool Computer Chips, Tiny Water Pipes
DISCOVER: Life After Silicon—How Graphene Could Revolutionize Electronics
DISCOVER: The Graphene Revolution
Image: Jannik Meyer
There is no such thing as clean coal
President Obama is the country’s biggest champion of the myth of “clean coal”.  Carbon capture and storage is not yet operational and it’s unsure if it will ever be. Unfortunately, sinking all this money into CCS to use for coal is a big waste. CCS is not going to solve the problems with coal, such as toxic waste and mercury leaking into our air and water.  It’s probably necessary to have carbon capture and sequestration on hand in case climate change enters the runaway phase, but it should not be used on coal plants. Coal plants should be shut down and if CCS is used for anything it should be to remove CO2 from the air in case of an emergency. But the question remains: and put it where?
The problem of where to “sequester” or store carbon emissions is still a huge issue. We cannot put it on the ocean bed or into rock formations unless we know for sure it will stay there, and no one yet knows whether it will. Yet on February 3rd President Obama issued a memorandum declaring our use of coal as necessary, as a job creator and as a cheap form of energy.  It’s none of the above. There’s also a catch: as soon as the CCS is implemented, due to its huge cost, the cost of using coal will skyrocket. That makes ‘clean coal’ not only a myth, but a very expensive one and the costs will be passed on to consumers. (Yet Republicans are for this . . . why?)
The use of coal is environmentally devastating. Scientists at the journal Science recently recommended that mountaintop removal to get at coal should stop immediately. And carbon capture and storage won’t stop the pervasive emissions of mercury that get into our land and water, poisoning fish and the people who eat it. CCS would do nothing to prevent acid rain and mercury poisoning of our lakes and streams. From the White House, Feb. 3, 2010:
“SUBJECT:Â Â A Comprehensive Federal Strategy on Carbon Capture and Storage
For decades, the coal industry has supported quality high-paying jobs for American workers, and coal has provided an important domestic source of reliable, affordable energy. At the same time, coal-fired power plants are the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and coal accounts for 40 percent of global emissions. Charting a path toward clean coal is essential to achieving my Administration’s goals of providing clean energy, supporting American jobs, and reducing emissions of carbon pollution. Rapid commercial development and deployment of clean coal technologies, particularly carbon capture and storage (CCS), will help position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy race.
My Administration is already pursuing a set of concrete initiatives to speed the commercial development of safe, affordable, and broadly deployable CCS technologies. We have made the largest Government investment in carbon capture and storage of any nation in [...]
The Last Shuttle To Leave Earth at Night, SpaceRef
"An hour after the orange glow of Endeavour's liftoff lit the Kennedy Space Center press site on Feb. 8, NASA officials beamed at the bit of bright news illuminating an otherwise tough couple of weeks. The smooth countdown for STS-130 and the relatively few technical problems -- a bit of foam loss, but nothing judged too serious -- shifted the tone of the press conference to one that joked about workers missing the Super Bowl. "While I was getting evil glares for making them come in -- I don't know why it was my fault -- they were happy with the result," said Mike Moses, the shuttle program's launch integration manager, as journalists chuckled."
