Technology

Think science is a close community?  Indeed it is, but video game aficionados are not as shallow as they are portrayed either. Relic Entertainment developer Brian Wood, aged 33, was driving his Subaru Outback with his pregnant wife in the passenger seat when a Chevy Blazer veered into their lane.   At the last moment before impact, Wood hit the brakes and turned to place himself in the path of the SUV and shield his wife.  The other driver is alleged to have been under the influence of drugs, two passengers in the back seat of her Blazer were killed ... and so was Wood.…

Yesterday, I complained about the new Kindle’s handling of PDF files, which, despite my complaints, is better than what the earlier software does. Well, I have discovered that Amazon has a PDF conversion service, which will let me email PDFs to it, convert them to AZW files for the Kindle, and push them to the Kindle through WiFi (it emails them back to me, as well). The pretty formatting is lost in the process, but it retains any images, and for almost all the PDFs I want to read the result is just what I need. Having them converted to Kindle format means that I control their display as…

Human vision is very advanced.  While a human child can look at a cartoon picture of a chicken and know that's a chicken, computers cannot.   We can also recognize cars, people, trees and lampposts instantaneously on a busy street without much thought and decide what to do. That's an enormous number of computations and just one reason that coming up with a computer-driven system that can mimic the human brain in visually recognizing objects has been difficult.  Eugenio Culurciello of Yale's School of Engineering&Applied Science has developed a machine dubbed Neuflow,…

I decided to try out one of the new Kindle e-readers. Only, I’m not planning to use it for the purpose that most buyers do — purchasing and reading books. I want to use it to read academic papers, articles, and IETF documents, which I will put on the device myself. These will generally be either plain text files or PDFs, and I decided to try the Kindle because it will read those types of files. First, I’ll note that the new device is all it’s advertised to be: it’s small, it’s light, it’s crisp and easy to read, and it’s sleek and comfortable. I imagine it’s a really great device to read…

It’s long been a peeve of mine that some computer programs are programmed to try to sound friendly, cheerful, or just colloquial. It seems out of place to me, forced, overly artificial. I don’t mean that I want all the output from computers to sound like the stilted science-fiction stuff, saying “affirmative” instead of “yes”, and the like. But neither do I ever want to see (or hear) things like “Oops!”, “Hurray!”, nor even “I’m sorry,” coming from my laptop, mobile phone, car, or washing machine. Some examples: It’s common when you’ve finished installing new software on your computer for the…

Digg founder Kevin Rose cheerfully responds to the mountains of criticism around the newly launched Digg 4. His overall theme is that users need to deal with it. But VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, as the big advocate behind alpha-type Cassandra database stuff replacing MYSQL.   Obviously a distributed database that is scalable and fast is perfect but when you have tens of millions of users and take a flier on something untested, your job is on the line.   Do I care? No, but readers here might. Digg's internal auto-bury scandal a few years ago - which boosted paying sites…

http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2010/08/05/wvu-research-to-reduce-information-... tjmenzies@mail.wvu.eduhttp://www.cs.wayne.edu/~amarcus/

Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff have written in Wired magazine that, in their words, “the web is dead.” The web, as opposed to the Internet. Michael Wolff was recently on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, our local public radio station, talking about the article. Here’s Brian Lehrer’s introduction: At its peak around the year 2000, the web accounted for more than 50% of all Internet traffic in the United States. With the explosion of online video and peer-to-peer communication software, that number has shrunk to around 23% of total Internet use, prompting Wired magazine reporters Chris Anderson…

The sharing, preservation and reuse of data has become an increasingly important element of modern scientific research, but even though granting agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) naturally embrace data sharing, resistance from parts of the scientific community has continued to block scientific progress and valuable research data over the world is kept under lock and key or hidden away in lab drawers, forcing time and cost of unnecessary duplication.  BMC Research Notes is commissioning a large, ongoing collection of educational…

I love technology. Some people like it because it allows us to do incredibly complicated things that otherwise would not have been possible. I like it because it allows us to do incredibly normal things with almost no effort whatsoever.On that note, I set out to try and create a Podcast, using as little effort as humanly possible. Most decent podcasters will plan out their show, invite guests, and basically treat it like a well structured radio show without specific advertisement breaks. They plan, record, edit, then post. While that works well for most folks, I'm already juggling…