Ways To Support The Relief Effort In Haiti (UPDATED) | The Intersection

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The 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti yesterday is devastating. We will continue to update this post with ways to support relief efforts and encourage our readers to add additional legitimate initiatives in comments. We ask that those with blogs repost these links on their sites.

American Red Cross International Response Fund
AmeriCares Help For Haiti
Direct Relief International
Doctors without Borders
HaitiArise
Haiti Emergency Relief Fund
Mercy Corps
Oxfam
UNICEF
Yele Haiti

@wyclef on twitter:

‘Haiti is in need of immediate AID please text Yele to 510 510 and donate $5 toward earthquake relief.’ ~Wyclef Jean, founder of Yele Haiti

@nytimes/haiti-earthquake

‘Reports from individuals, news orgs, relief agencies in Haiti.’ ~NYTimes Haiti earthquake twitter list


JPEG Wierdness

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I decided that we needed some nice posters for our offices and lab. I went to the NASA website and downloaded some very high resolution jpgs, and printed them out on our brand new HP T610 plotter, in C size. On some of the posters, there are fine lines spaced two inches apart across the image. Th

Why a Blu-ray Player Might Become Your Only Set-Top Box [Blu-Ray]

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My love for Blu-ray players grows whenever companies add another feature that has nothing to do with Blu-ray. Now any worthwhile player is a home-entertainment hub, replacing cable box and Apple TV alike. How soon till they handle everything?

We looked at the four newly announced flagship players from the four biggest Blu-ray companies, LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony. Any self-respecting Blu-ray player today has Pandora and Picasa, and of course Netflix subscription streaming video. They also have some form of pay-per-view movie download service, from Vudu, Amazon or Roxio's CinemaNow and Blockbuster apps.

This year, though, the companies turned up the juice. LG added a built-in hard drive; Sony surprisingly built a remote-control iPhone app. And now all top Blu-ray players will go 3D. Integrated Wi-Fi was a stand-out feature last year; this year it's par.

These won't be out till the summer, and there's no pricing announced yet, but already we're excited. See, putting everything but the the kitchen sink into a firmware upgradeable $200-to-$300 box is way smarter than jamming it all inside a $1500 TV, where picture quality should be the chief concern.

What Do Blu-ray Players Still Need? Video File Support

If you want to know who will soon be putting HD media players out of business, look no further than these connected Blu-ray players. Samsung and LG won't let smaller companies steal their spot on the TV stand; my guess is that they will have amazing file compatibility at launch or slightly after. I mean, LG put in a hard drive, for God's sake. If that isn't for dumping crazy video files, I don't know what is.

The hard drive sounds nice, but it's not even necessary. With Wi-Fi connectivity and DLNA compatibility, these players should technically be able to play all your home videos, wherever they are. But they absolutely need 1080p DivX, H.264 and AVC (TS) compatibility—and the ability to read DVD disc images—in order to be considered viable HD video players.

I don't list reported file compatibilities here because I have learned that spec sheets can easily lie when it comes to supported video, especially when the combination of codec, wrapper, resolution and file size all affect readability. Until the players are shipping, their true file support is a mystery. Still, I have hope for these.

The $100 Roku is already on the ropes thanks to current Blu-ray players, since they give you what Roku does plus disc playback. The $120 Roku HD-XR hasn't yet taken advantage of its USB jack, and the company didn't announce anything at CES. If they wait too long before providing wide HD video file compatibility, that product, too, will be hurting.

If the makers of Blu-ray players get with the program, and address the need for true universal home-video playback, they will easily shove aside Asus O!Play and everything else too.

OK, not everything else. Game consoles, already bestsellers, have been actively converting non-gamers by adding streaming video services, and developing natural interfaces like the Wii's popular motion controls and the more ambitious forthcoming Xbox 360 Natal project.

Hopefully this will be the year they see the light on video support, too. The PS3 could have been the ultimate set-top box, but Sony's inability to see the commercial value of openness killed the PS3's non-gamer appeal. The Xbox is a lot closer to the ideal, but it doesn't yet support all files, and betting on HD DVD—and then not jumping to Blu despite Ballmer's frequent (and justifiable) promises—means no HD disc support, also a mistake.

Look, some of these Blu-ray players won't go all the way with file support, either. Speaking of Sony, can you imagine the king of patent royalties and DRM embrace file formats it doesn't get cash payoffs from, or could possibly be used in the service of piracy? Still, at least one great Blu-ray player will rise here. Am I dreaming? A year ago I would have thought so, but from what we all now regularly get from our cheap HD media players, my dreams are likely to come true—and soon, too.



The Indifference of Data [Image Cache]

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Pundits, humanitarian organizations, and even the Haitian government haven't fully assessed the devastation on the earthquake-shattered half-island. Seen through machine eyes, yesterday is a blip; through human eyes, it defies description.

If you'd like to donate to an organization that can help, here are some places to start:

• MSF/Doctors Without Borders
• The American Red Cross International Response Fund, or text "HAITI" to 90999, which donates $10 to the same—Thanks, Complexified!

Additionally, online tech store SmallDog is matching any MSF/DWB donations up to $200. [The Big Picture]



Robot Flower Girl Looks Adorable In Pink [Robots]

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When Allegra Fullerton got married last November, her niece was the flower girl. Like most her niece was a bit awkward going down the aisle, but Allegra's sister stood in the wings and encouraged her on. What a sweet robot.

Allegra's sister Laurel is "into robots", we're told, and decided to built the flower-blowing bot for her sister's wedding to Andy Fischer. From the pictures it looks like the bot was a hit.

The Flower Girl even took a turn on the dancefloor.

I spoke to Allegra just moments ago. She explained why she had a robot in her wedding:

I have always, always loved robots and have a collection of books, toys, and now an actual robot! How can you compete with a robot crusing down the aisle spitting out flowers on the ground? I wanted my wedding to have a playful feel and pay tribute to my upbringing (Dad and sister are both engineers) and really give a San Francisco feel to the event.

My sister built the robot and has been building robots since she was in high school. The ah ha moment for having a robot flower girl was one sunny afternoon at brunch with my fiance. I had a vision, thankfully he shared it and after a chat with my sister (who was a Mechanical Engineer Grad Student at Stanford at the time) she said she would make it happen and we went from there.

Update! Engineering Sister Laurel writes in with details of the build:

WeddingBot (or so I call it) was built for my sister, Allegra, since she didn't know any young children to act as flower child or ring bearer. I had recently finished building a water-squirting remote-controlled duck boat for a class (details at: http://www.stanford.edu/~laurelf/duck/ ) so she asked me to make her a remote-control robot that would spew flowers.

WeddingBot was mostly designed and built during my internship at Pocobor ( http://www.pocobor.com/ ) a small mechatronics consulting company in San Francisco. When I wasn't working on projects for them they were happy to let me to use their software and tools to design the circuit boards and program the bot.

The chassis of WeddingBot was pretty simple, two boxes from Daiso, some wooden columns, and a motor kit with wheels. A large computer fan with plastic ducting was used to blow flowers out of the top. The bot was powered by RC car batteries (purchased at a hobby shop) and had a circuit board I designed for translating wireless commands from the controller (sent via an xBee Pro) into motor/fan responses.

The controller was based on an old Microsoft Sidewinder joystick I've had since middle school. I took it apart and connected the button and stick position outputs to another circuit board to translate the joystick inputs into wireless commands the robot could understand.

Both the joystick and robot circuit boards had microcontrollers that I programmed in C.

Driving WeddingBot was pretty straightforward. The amount the stick was tilted forward or back determined the overall speed and the left/right position determined how much it would veer left or right at that speed. Holding the trigger button would turn on the fan so that flowers would launch out. The back button would switch left/right turn commands to make driving the robot towards you more intuitive (since your left and the robot's left are opposite in that situation). I added an extra red button that could be used to re-center the joystick if the default position somehow became skewed.



Long Exposure Animation Brings "Magic Forest" to Rhapsodic Life [Photography]

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From Russia's Freezelight comes one of the most beautiful uses of long exposure I've ever seen (that is, aside from all of your slow shutter shooting challenge submissions). It's honestly just wow.

All it took was a Canon 5D, about 300 photos, and I'm guessing loads of patience to put this incredible work together. The follow-up, below, features everything I look for in a piece of art: a ghost, a giant chicken, and slow shutter flower blooming out of nothing.

[Vimeo via Random Good Stuff]



Clapper Circuit

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Has anyone made a really simple clapper circuit with only flipflops, and LED and a microphone? I want to see if mine really is simpler than all of the other designs I have found

$100,000 for Evidence of Apple Tablet [Bounty]

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Valleywag is offering up to $100,000—yes, One Hundred Thousand United States Dollars—to anyone who can provide them with pictures or video or one hour of touching and licking with the Apple Tablet. Here's the juicy menu:

• $10,000 for bona fide pictures.
• $20,000 for video of one in action.
• $50,000 for pictures or video of Steve Jobs holding one.
• $100,000 to let us play with one for an hour.

The money will be paid after the tablet is revealed and the material is proven to be the real McCoy.

I've to say that we are all pretty excited at the idea of any Bothan spy breaking the Cupertino blockade and running away with one of the prototypes. [Valleywag]



Savagely Beating Cellphones Into Silent Mode: A Proposal [Cellphones]

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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs have developed a system of "whack gestures" that could allow any phone with an accelerometer to be silenced with a punch. This is brilliant.

Tap gestures as a concept aren't totally new, but the new software promises a much lower error rate than previous solutions, as well as a much simpler philosophy. Chris Harrison, developer:

I think for whack gestures to be commercially viable only two gestures might be desired: one to silence the phone, and a second to postpone an alert, ask the caller to try again in 5 minutes or snooze an alarm.

The potential here, in you haven't noticed, is huge. Imagine the time you'll save, with this shortened call-killing routine! Not to mention the instant, visceral gratification. It would take this process:

1.) Receive call during funeral
2.) Panic, violently strike outer thigh
3.) Calm down, internalize shame
4.) Remove phone from pocket, interrupting somber moment further
5.) Switch off phone in conspicuous way, as if to apologize
6.) Sit through the shutdown jingle you totally forgot about, because who switches off their phones anymore?
7.) Continue mourning, now tinged with embarrassment

and condense it into this process:

1.) Receive call during funeral
2.) Don't panic, violently strike outer thigh.

Perfect. The project is still in research and presentation stages for the time being, though any company run by people who've owned a cellphone, ever, will license this technology. Obviously. [New Scientist]



The Faulty iMac Saga: Chapter 1 [Broken]

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By now, we're all painfully familiar with my repeated, personal problems with new, yellow-tinged iMacs—but luckily, our readers have taken the cause beyond one man's whining. Today is the first of (hopefully not too many) weekly iMac updates.

Can You Safely Purchase an iMac Yet?

In a word, nope.

We've received at least 15 tips to our submissionsATgizmodo.com line, all users who've received yellow-tinged iMacs since January 1st and documented the problem with photos. (And I've received twice that many personally from irate customers with whom I'm extremely sympathetic.)

It seems that, despite the extremely well-documented problem(s), Apple refuses to do the right thing and simply stop shipping these faulty iMacs out. Last I checked, the public's view of the iMac's "ultimate display" was not one with pee-like stains at the bottom. Then again, I haven't run a focus group on the matter.

And you should note, yellow screens are just one element of production problems. According to readers, firmware updates have not completely fixed other screen problems, like black outs or flickering.

Replace or Repair or Return?

I have yet to hear from someone who has successfully replaced a yellow iMac with one that's perfectly functional. That's a bad, bad, bad sign for Apple's current yield. (Hopefully, a few of you will keep attempting, so we can see if Apple gets their act together.) However, it seems that Apple has been pushing more users toward repairing their systems rather than getting them replaced. I didn't settle for getting a new product (that should be in mint condition) repaired, and imho, neither should you—in which case, some of you will be stuck only with the option to return.

As for My iMac

After being refused a replacement, my iMac stopped booting altogether. It just went dead. Unsure that I could get the inevitable next (broken) version replaced, I simply returned it.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As long as you keep demanding exchanges, checking on new iMacs, I'll keep posting about them. You can test your iMac here.

Quote of the Week

I'll also be including bitchtastic quotes of the week in these updates. This one, from Laura:
"I want the imac purchasers, who have already paid their money AND spent countless hours being fruitless with their machine set-ups and troubleshooting attempts, to be put on the top of the list for receiving brand new WORKING machines. An added bonus would be for Apple to do this kindly, respectfully, and without any attitude. We should not be out of pocket, taking time off work and energy to lug these heavy ibeasts across town looking for a repair; it's a lemon, Apple — you made it, so please replace it. And please do it kindly, respectfully, and communicate to us the process, so that we can all stay in love with all things Apple. "

The Faulty iMac Saga will run every Wednesday on Gizmodo. That is, until Apple fixes and/or admits the problem.



Kolelinia Lets You Ride Your Bicycle Over the Air [Bikes]

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Kolelinia—a system that allows you to ride your bike above the traffic—looks like a crazy idea until you check out the engineering behind it. Then you will realize that it's not only cool, but it can work too.

Here's how it works.

Kolelinia has two elements, a half-pipe—this is where your bike's wheels run—and a cable above that pipe. The cable is at the same height as your bike's handles, and it provides stability and safety while you fly over the cars. The cable connects to the bike's handle using a special hooking device. This divoce also has a hole for a carabiner, so you can use a harness and safety line for extra safety.

On first sight, it looks like the props for a circus act. But unlike in the circus, Kolelinia doesn't involve any risk thanks to the safety cable system. It may seem convoluted, but it's actually quite simple, and a much better and safer option than having to deal with the dangers of traffic, or flying with stranded extra-terrestrial beings. [Kolelinia via ArchDaily]



Galaxies So Near, Yet So Far | Cosmic Variance

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You might have heard the news out of last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, that the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence for the most distant galaxies yet discovered. Using the newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, HST did a close-up examination of some likely candidates in the Ultra Deep Field, and found galaxies at redshifts of 7 or 8 (meaning the universe is now 8 or 9 times bigger than it was when the light was emitted). That corresponds to about 600 million years after the Big Bang, which pushes back the era of galaxy formation quite a bit.

But wait! Over at Science News, Ron Cowen points out that a team led by Rychard Bouwens and Garth Illingworth of UC Santa Cruz already has a paper on the arxiv that uses similar techniques to identify three galaxies with a redshift of 10, corresponding to only 450 million years after the Big Bang. And, as Cowen mentions in a blog post, the paper was available since last month.

Constraints on the First Galaxies: z~10 Galaxy Candidates from HST WFC3/IR
Authors: R.J. Bouwens, G.D. Illingworth, I. Labbe, P.A. Oesch, M. Carollo, M. Trenti, P.G. van Dokkum, M. Franx, M. Stiavelli, V. Gonzalez, D. Magee

Abstract: The first galaxies likely formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Until recently, it has not been possible to detect galaxies earlier than ~750 million years after the Big Bang. The new HST WFC3/IR camera changed this when the deepest-ever, near-IR image of the universe was obtained with the HUDF09 program. Here we use this image to identify three redshift z~10 galaxy candidates in the heart of the reionization epoch when the universe was just 500 million years old. These would be the highest redshift galaxies yet detected, higher than the recent detection of a GRB at z~8.2. The HUDF09 data previously revealed galaxies at z~7 and z~8… [snipped]

So why are galaxies at redshift 8 considered news, if galaxies at redshift 10 have already been discovered? As Charlie Petit talks about at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the difference seems to be that the former were announced at a press briefing, while the latter just appeared on arxiv.

For better or for worse, conventional science journalism has been cut back to the point where most reporters have no choice but to wait for press releases to appear to write a story. They don’t have the resources to scan through arxiv postings every day — and even if they did, the precious newsworthy nuggets are rather sparsely scattered through the mass of Kuhnian normal science. And let’s not even think about the idea that journalists should spend time (and money) going to lots of conferences and talks and chatting with scientists about what’s hot in their fields these days — the resources just aren’t there.

There is some room for blogs to help out here. A blog by a respectable scientist can point to interesting stories that didn’t appear in any press releases, and journalists can follow up. (I know it’s happened here before.) But the thing about blogs is that they’re remarkably non-systematic; bloggers mention things because they personally find them interesting, not because they feel a duty to the wider public. The nature of journalism is changing rapidly, and it’s not clear how things will eventually shake out. I certainly hope that we continue to enjoy the work of people like Cowen, who make the extra effort to find good science stories and spread them widely.

FARTHEST_AWAY


Shooting Challenge: Run From Your Camera! [Photography]

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There's a really funny blog named Running From Your Camera. For this week's Shooting Challenge, we're unabashedly stealing their idea.

The challenge: set the self-timer on your camera to 2 seconds, then get as far as you can away from it before the shot using any means you like—judging will be based as much on composition, creativity and general effect as mere distance.

The rules:

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.
5. Include 800px image AND something wallpaper sized in email.

Send your best entries by Sunday at 6PM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with "Running" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs at 800 pixels wide and larger, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email. [Photo]



Antivaxxers are *all about* the open dialogue | Bad Astronomy

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This seems to be the decade of "I don’t like what you say, so instead of refuting it with evidence I’ll sue you to shut you up!" for the alt-medders.

First, it was Simon Singh being sued by the British Chiropractic Association, and now it’s Barbara Loe Fischer from the ironically named National Vaccine Information Center, who is suing writer Amy Wallace and vaccine researcher Paul Offit about an article Wallace wrote in Wired magazine. The article is one of those rare ones that actually uses facts and evidence rather than anecdotes and hearsay, so of course shines a very ill-received spotlight on the antivaxxers, showing them for what they are: a public health menace.

As usual, Orac has the details. One thing that Orac notes is that Fischer chose to file her suit in Virginia which does not have SLAPP laws, designed to prevent lawsuits intended to silence critics. So it really really looks like she is suing simply to silence critics. Others think so too.

That is enough for an interesting story all by itself, of course. But the thing about people who deny reality, though, is that eventually they find themselves having to believe seven different things before breakfast, and at some point the irony meter can get pegged as they twist and spin. In this case, Ms. Fischer blows the gauge because she is asking for a "fearless" discussion about vaccines in 2010.

Yes, you read that correctly. She wants this because open and fearless conversation is so well-supported by libel lawsuits tossed around specifically to silence your opponents.

And people wonder why I think the mouthpieces for the antivax movement are so awful.

Skeptic Rebecca Watson agrees. Here’s what she has to say about this:

You can read Ms. Fischer’s complete statements on the NVIC website, but I’d make sure you clean your computer with bleach afterwards; who knows what you might catch from going there. You might want to protect your brain, too, since she somehow manages to link vaccines with terrorism and 9/11. When it comes to terrorism, I think the antivax movement fits better than vaccines, since fear is something they use all-too-well to scare parents into not vaccinating their kids.

Of course, if they used such things as evidence and scientific research, they’d have no movement at all.

The best thing we can do is keep shining this light on the hypocrisy and distortions of the antivax movement. They will continue to push garbage like this, and we have to make sure that the public sees it. The only alternative is to wait for kids to start dying from measles, pertussis, HiB, and other preventable illnesses in greater numbers than they already are… an event which, tragically, is already underway due in part to the antivaxxers.