“IBM and researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a piece of flood prediction technology that can accurately warn of impending disaster at up to a hundred times faster than other flood prediction models.” Read more…
(source: Fast Company)
“A week ago, Fox changed its licensing rules so that non-paying users of Hulu would be unable to watch new episodes of their shows until eight days after their air date. Put on your analyst hat and think about what effect this might have on, say, piracy of those shows. Did you determine that it would increase piracy? Congratulations, you are a better judge of consequences than Fox. Because piracy of Fox shows went up by a huge amount during this last week.” Read more…
(source: TechCrunch)
“While the TSA can’t explain why invasive patdowns without probable cause are legal, that isn’t stopping TSA from future plans to track all your daily travels, anywhere you go, from work, to stores, or even when you go out to play.” Read more…
(source: Network World)
“True or false: Your HTC EVO records a log of every keystroke, reads every number you press in the dialer, and can track which applications you use. Answer: True. But why? Why does it do this and why don’t most people know about it?” Read more…
(source: Good and EVO)
“[A] Narcissist is a human being acting in a particular way and should not be treated like a monster, or worse, as an ‘it’ rather than a person. As unfair and damaging as a relationship with this type of person may be, it’s more useful (and healthy for your own self-esteem and self-worth) to use straightforward descriptive words about their bad behaviour, rather than relying on this term generally to describe them. It would be more correct and useful in most situations for instance to say “Lucy lied to me” rather than “Lucy is a narcissist”.” Read more…
(source: Science 2.0)
“Kandula, a seven year old Asian elephant living in Washington D.C.’s National Zoo, has proven that elephants are as smart as those that spend a lot of time around them have believed. In an experiment carried out by researchers at the zoo, the little elephant figured out all on his own, without resorting to trial and error, how to go get a cube to use as a footstool to help him reach some food that was just out of reach.” Read more…
(source: physorg.com)
“For decades, scientists have been predicting that, one day, the same process that powers the sun will give us virtually unlimited cheap, clean electricity. Are they wrong?” Read more…
(source: The Guardian, via Current)
“One in five graduates earns less than a person who left school with as little as one A-level. The official figures raise doubts that thousands of students have wasted their time with ‘useless’ degrees.” Read more…
(source: Daily Mail)
“According to McAfee’s second quarter report (PDF), the Android OS ranked as the most popular target for mobile malware developers in the second quarter. The increase in attacks have been steadily climbing, not only in recent months, but dating back to the beginning of 2009.” Read more…
(source: Maximum Tech)
Mission accomplished. More Steve Jobs quotes…
(source: Gizmodo)
“Looks like we can chalk up the surge in online food photos to good ol’ narcissism. Digital marketing agency 360i recently conducted a study of food pictures posted to Flickr and broke down the distribution of photo types as well as pervasive trends. The most common type of photo? “Food diaries,” photographs with no other use than to catalog a day’s meals. The second most common? “Documenting self-creation: showing off a finished product, or the process of creation.” Almost half the photos studied fell within these two categories.” Read more…
(source: LA Weekly)
“Amazon’s data centers are positively packed with hard drives — thousands of them — and every single one of them is incredibly sensitive to vibrations. Generally, though, the only time a rack of servers moves is during an earthquake — and when this happens, the read/write heads are instantly thrown out of position, and accelerometers then kick in to prevent data loss. As a result, it suddenly becomes very hard to access data on the disk, and with Amazon AWS this means that page load/response times ballooned.” Read more…
(source: Extreme Tech)
“On Sunday, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, [Jon] Huntsman found himself in a virtual love-in with Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann over, of all things, taxes. The paper asked Huntsman if ‘the half of American households no longer paying income tax—mainly working poor families and seniors—should be brought onto the income tax rolls.’ He agreed, crediting the GOP’s current front-runner for vice president, Sen. Marco Rubio, with the insight that ‘we don’t have enough people paying taxes in this country.’” Read more…
(source: Slate)
“Alongside food poisoning and jetlag, taking photographs is an essential part of the holiday experience. But airlines’ less-than-generous luggage allowance means you may have to make difficult decisions about which camera to take.” Read more…
(source: BBC)
“Of particular concern to couch potatoes, gamers, and anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time sitting and staring at a screen is how little exercise can I do and still receive a benefit. A new study entitled ‘Minimum amount of physical activity for reduced mortality and extended life expectancy,’ answers this important question. The conclusion: 92 minutes of moderate activity a week can extend your life by three years.” Read more…
(source: The Lancet, via Slashdot)
“Whether they believe in God, evolutionary biologists may need to pay closer mind to religion. That’s because religious beliefs can shape key behaviors in ways that evolutionary theory would not predict, particularly when it comes to dealing with disease, says David Hughes, an evolutionary biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park.” Read more…
“It looks like the [Google Fiber Project] beta service has gone live in the Palo Alto area, according to a lucky Reddit user who claims to be using it.” Read more…
(source: Engadget)
“To borrow a phrase from the modren vernacular, maybe we should all ‘just get over ourselves.’ That may be the best lesson to take away from University of Georgia psychologist Keith Campbell’s research into narcissism, as reported in Saturday’s edition of this newspaper.” Read more…
(source: OnlineAthens)
“The former vice president [Dick Cheney] has said his memoir [due out next week] will have “heads exploding” all over Washington, D.C.” Read more…
(source: The Daily Beast)
“The nation’s third largest carrier will reportedly offer Apple’s beloved smartphone this fall, potentially attracting new customers — and new problems.” Read more…
(source: The Week)
Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs resigned Wednesday. Read his resignation letter here.
(source: Wall Street Journal)
“There are all kinds of jerks and jerkettes out there. But have you ever been involved with one who was certifiable?” Read more…
(source: Chicago Sun-Times)
(source: Ars Technica)
“Although already available on some HTC EVO 4Gs since yesterday, a new OTA update (version 4.53.651.1) is scheduled for widespread deployment over the next two weeks. This is a maintenance release that fixes issues with Picasa, Voice Recognition, and contact transfers over Bluetooth, along with some contact sorting and texting issues.” Read more…
(source: Good and EVO)
“You know, in the old days, when you won a war, to the victor go the spoils,” Trump said, “why don’t we take the oil?” … “All those rebels are going to be richer than the people of this country because they’re going to take all the oil!”
(source: Think Progress, via Gawker)
“Sprint Nextel will begin selling the iPhone 5 in October, sources told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday.” Read more…
Well, now, that’s a shame. I enjoyed being on a network without iPhone users! ;-( —drego
source: Wall Street Journal, via The Daily Beast)
“You’d think that with all their Googling to find the Spark Notes of the novels they didn’t read, today’s students would understand how the search engine works. Wrong: They are completely clueless! In a detailed study of 30 college students by anthropologists at Illinois Wesleyan, only seven were able to do a ‘reasonably well-executed search.” Read more…
(source: Gawker)
“Though our perception of time can be stunningly precise — given a beat to keep, professional drummers are accurate within milliseconds — it can also be curiously plastic. Some moments seem to last longer than others, and scientists don’t know why.” Read more…
(source: Wired)
“Electric cars, which have come and gone at least twice since the dawn of the automobile era, are back. The first mass-market EVs are here and more are rolling silently over the horizon. The Obama administration loves cars with cords and wants 1 million on the road by 2015. … So where will we plug them in?” Read more…
(source: Wired)
“When the average American thinks of military spending on religion, they probably think only of the money spent on chaplains and chapels. And, yes, the Department of Defense (DoD) does spend a hell of a lot of money on these basic religious accommodations to provide our troops with the opportunity to exercise their religion while serving our country. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the DoD’s funding of religion. Also paid for with taxpayer dollars are a plethora of events, programs, and schemes that violate not only the Constitution, but, in many cases, the regulations on federal government contractors, specifically the regulation prohibiting federal government contractors receiving over $10,000 in contracts a year from discriminating based on religion in their hiring practices.” Read more…
(source: AlterNet)
(via BuzzFeed)
“Researchers from the University of Louisville in Kentucky analyzed 90 past studies on the subject, and found that men who stay single may die eight to 17 years before married men, while women who stay single may die seven to 15 years before married women, according to the study.” Read more…
(source: American Journal of Epidemiology, via Huffington Post)
“Ironic considering, you know, their leaving the hardware game and everything. But back in 1968—before they were the biggest computer manufacturer in the world—Hewlett Packard released the HP 9100A, the first mass-market PC ever.” Read more…
(source: Gizmodo)
“A new type of Internet-connected television, due out before the end of the year, has built-in software and hardware that send data about what is on-screen to an Internet server that can identify the content. Web pages being viewed using the same Internet connection as the TV set can then tap into that information. The system can identify any content onscreen, whatever the source, whether live TV, DVDs or movie files playing from a computer….”
“Flingo, the San Francisco-based startup that developed the technology, known as Sync Apps, says the new set is already being mass-produced by one of the top five television brands in the U.S. and will retail for less than $500.” Read more…
I’m not so sure I think this is such a good thing. Seems like there would be a lot of potential for mischief and invasion of privacy by those collecting and sharing this data. —drego
(source: Technology Review, via Slashdot)
“Sarah Palin has released a new video that features moments from her recent visit to the Iowa State Fair. It is exceptionally well done: the production value is high, the former Alaska governor is cast in her best light, and it concludes with a grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs and roaring…”
“[The] video is a perfectly normal thing to produce and release if you’re running for president of the United States. But if you’re just a private citizen touring around Iowa, playing up the notion that you’re just a regular person, it’s perhaps the most extreme act of narcissism I’ve ever seen. And I’ve watched more episodes of The Celebrity Apprentice than I care to admit.” Read more…
(source: The Atlantic)
“All of the smart-guys in the country who spent their time trying to make solar power more efficient were just outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old and a tree. You can read Aiden’s extremely well-written full-report here. Aiden just won the Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History. It’s kids like this that make me think that just maaaaaybe this country isn’t so screwed after all.” Read more…
(source: American Museum of Natural History, via Gizmodo)
“As back-to-school season approaches, incoming freshmen nationwide eagerly anticipate their first semester of college…. But for too many would-be scholars, the dream of earning a post-secondary degree is short-lived. Roughly half of entering college students from low-income families drop out empty handed. Financial pressure is certainly a factor… but money and family obligations aren’t the only barriers to college completion.” Read more…
(source: Take Part)
“Every time that I’ve ever heard presidential hopeful and current governor Rick Perry talk about possible secession for Texas, I think one thing: How can I help?” Read more…
(source: PoliticusUSA)
