Technology

  Approximately 55  million people in Europe are living with diabetes and many require insulin to manage their condition. For people who use insulin, managing diabetes can often involve challenging calculations to determine an appropriate mealtime insulin dose. Individuals soemtimes have trouble with the calculations required for insulin dose adjustment, resulting in insulin dose calculation errors. Abbott today announced that it has received CE Mark (Conformite Europeenne) for its new FreeStyle InsuLinx Blood Glucose Monitoring System which includes a mealtime (bolus) insulin…

Mobile Make Out is is an iPhone app that claims to make it possible to make out with someone you are not supposed to be making out with and totally not be called unfaithful by your wife or girlfriend.   Why didn't the iPhone exist when Bill Clinton was president?  He could have saved us a whole impeachment trial.    It will completely redefine what the definition of 'is' is.  Mobile Make Out is this multiplayer thing that simulates two phones kissing each other but it's even creepier than that sounds.    Yes, you and a "make out partner" have to kiss your…

Facebook has always been plagued with privacy issues, such as revealing to third parties personal information which may be used to sell you goods and services.  Recently it was denounced by the founder of wikileaks for being a platform for domestic and foreign intelligence services.  While to some, this may seem like an invasion, I like it when people try to sell me things, and I have no problem saying no.  If i'm really important enough to be monitored, I must be doing something right, and it only encourages me to keep doing it.  However, there is a far more insidious…

I have once before put down some thoughts about computing devices and the situation for scientific use of computer technology, hoping to get some response and start some fruitful discussion. It remained with the hopes, some comments appeared there, but not really in the direction I think is important. I will try once more, now with a little history. The big computers of the sixties and seventies became the minicomputers of 70's and 80's, which made place for the personal computers of the 80's and finally the iDevices (iPhone, iPad) of the latest year(s) (and naturally the Androids). During…

Citing a lack of revenue, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California has shut down the Allen Telescope Array of radio dishes that have been scanning the skies for signals from extraterrestrial life for decades. And that's the problem, isn't it?   As optimistic as it sounds to laypeople, the success metric was that a civilization more than 400 years away - because we know there are none closer - would have to have sent low-tech radio signals to a planet that lacked the technology to receive radio signals when they sent them.   The aliens basically would have needed to know the…

I’ve talked about cloud computing before in these pages. It’s a model of networking that in some ways brings us back to the monolithic data center, but in other ways makes that data center distributed, rather than central. A data cloud, an application cloud, a services cloud. An everything cloud, and, indeed, when one reads about cloud computing one sees a load of “[X]aaS” acronyms, the “aaS” part meaning “as a service”: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on. I use email in the cloud. I keep my blog in the cloud. I post…

WASHINGTON D.C., April 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In Washington DC today, eight Supreme Court justices heard oral argument of the appeal for i4i v Microsoft. Microsoft has asked the Supreme Court to lower the standard of proof, for challenges to the validity of a properly issued patent, from clear and convincing evidence to a preponderance of evidence. Seth Waxman, of WilmerHale, who was Solicitor General in the Clinton Administration, argued on behalf of i4i. The United States argued in favor of i4i's position, and was represented by Malcolm L. Stewart, Deputy Solicitor General. Loudon…

COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) today introduced major enhancements to its SciFinder(R) research tool. One new feature is SciPlanner(TM), a ground-breaking interactive workspace that enables scientists to more quickly identify synthesis options for designing the best research pathways and approaches.   SciPlanner allows users to create customized reaction pathways as well as organize and manage SciFinder results in ways they find most useful. Users can integrate reactions, experimental procedures, substances, and references from…

Wikipedia is commonly derided as inaccurate and partisan but, at least when it comes to verifiable facts (rather than slant) that isn't the case, at least in political biographical information. Brigham Young University political scientist Adam Brown focused on past and present candidates for governor across the 50 states. Brown fact-checked biographical information and voting statistics and found very few inaccuracies.  When Brown conducted the study, Wikipedia contained articles for 230 of the 246 major-party candidates that ran for governor between 1998 and 2008. Brown found that all…

LONDON, April 5, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Publishers large and small struggle to make sure that search engines and social media sites find their stories and refer to them appropriately. They want to provide highly targeted adverts while dealing with users who are opposed to the privacy implication of sharing the personal data necessary to accomplish that. How can they build web pages with news stories where the components of the story are machine-readable, as well as human readable? The IPTC has taken a step to solving this problem with the release of the first draft of the rNews standard.…