Technology

No matter what their profession, all the letter writers behaved the same way. They adhered to a circadian cycle; they tended to write a number of letters at one sitting, which is more efficient; and when they wrote had more to do with chance and circumstances than a rational approach of writing the most important letter first. "We are interested in identifying and understanding patterns of human behavior, in learning how we make choices," said Luís Amaral, professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Amaral led the research. "…

You may feel like you're not in the same league as Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin (note: statistically, you are not)  but you probably share one thing if you are reading this article; patterns of correspondence. A new Northwestern University study of human behavior says that people who wrote letters in olden days using pen and paper did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today.  The study in Science seeks to find the similarity of these two seemingly different activities, with the underlying pattern of human activity linking letters and e-mails. The researchers…

A few years ago, I was spending a good bit of my time on context-based services. User context — also called “presence” — is information, which changes over time, about the current state of a user or other thing (it could be a car, say, or a sensor, or a computer system; the presence people call it a “presentity”).Location is the most obvious piece of context information. Other examples are ambient temperature and sound level; heart rate, blood pressure, and other medical information; number of people nearby; “busy” state (how busy are you right now, and are you interruptible). One’s calendar…

The moon has no has no atmosphere like Earth's but oxygen which can be used for people, growing food, creating water and even burning rocket fuel is trapped in its soil.Scientists from NASA and Case Western Reserve are designing and testing components of an oxygen generator that would extract the element from silicon dioxide and metal oxides in the ground. They have designed sifters needed to produce a consistent supply of oxides. But, how would the sifters work in the moon's gravity, which is about one-sixth as strong as the Earth's? To find out, Katie Fromwiller, a senior civil…

As much as our 'Project Calliope' satellite is a science project, it's also a music experiment.  We are, after all, flying scientific instruments on a picosatellite specifically to make music.  So it's worth pointing out another group that is doing neat things with music invention, in this report on Berlin Hackday Their tag line is "take a weekend, and make something".  Quoth the article: Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even…

Microbloggers are having trouble being interesting, a new study says.    So they write more often, just to have something to say.  The top 5 most frequent postings on microblogging sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Mobile Facebook are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping”.  Hardly the stuff that would seem enchanting to most - and it isn't.   Most newcomers drop out soon after registering. Like in any form of media, microbloggers want to keep their audience interested so anything that will lead to a comment is worth a try.  Volume matters,  …

Private military firms and the Department of Defense are the United States military technology complex. Here's a look at virtual modeling and simulation environment, cybersecurity, and robotics contracts between US DoD and private military firms in July 2009, and also one study done between a private military firm and one Harvard professor. July 13, 2009 - publicintelligence.netBooz Allen Hamilton, Herndon, Va., was awarded $16,424,272 contract to provide Defense Logistics Agency with logistics enterprise security, cyber situational awareness of emerging cyber threats and network intrusions…

Hi there, I'm Patrick and I'm one of the principal developers on ScientificBlogging.com - that means if the site mysteriously crashed, I likely did it. This column is around to help introduce / discuss new features, and talk about what Science 2.0 looks like from a functional perspective. On the plate today is the new editor features we've uploaded to the site, allowing for more embedded media in your articles, and I'm going to cover some of the important details of what's changed. ButtonsIcon Source: http://www.pinvoke.com/As you can see, we've updated the appearance of the buttons on the…

Some time ago, I posted about my search for a new reference management program for Windows that would be the rough equivalent of Papers for Mac (which is the rough equivalent of iTunes for PDFs). I played around with Zotero, but I prefer something standalone rather than embedded within a browser. You may like it, though, so feel free to check it out. Instead, I have decided to make the switch to Mendeley, a desktop application with an optional online sync function. It is still in beta, but is coming along nicely and soon should be able to do all the things I want. Specifically, allowing PDFs…

What major communication technology will come next?  Around the middle nineteenth century, the television was starting to get big. As its hardware became more advanced, and more affordable it became a populist necessity. But the television plateaued. As the decades passed, primitive cell phone and internet technologies were released. During 1995 and 1996, America Online LLC (AOL) had hit it big with the PC's transition to Windows 95.  Suddenly communication was interesting, convenient, and competitive. Very quickly, school districts across the United States started going digital…