Technology

Are 'smart' objects the future? People certainly like so-called smart phones, and almost every home in America has a computer, and making everything 'smart' might be a future trend, say humanities scholars at Penn State University.  As sensors and computers increasingly become smaller and cheaper, smart objects will appear in more homes and offices and not be hidden or shielded from interacting with people, according to the researchers. For example, smart refrigerators could talk or send tweets to signal when certain food items are almost out, or when expiration dates are nearing. The…

Elsevier and the Integrated Earth Data Applications facility at Columbia University have announced a competition to improve preservation of and access to research data in the earth sciences.  Members of the international geosciences community who have worked on preservation and improved access of research data, particularly dark data, can share their work and advise on ways that these data are being processed, stored and used.  They are hoping to improve disclosure of research data, promote recognition of those efforts and to encourage new developments. They also want to increase…

The following is a reply to Patrick Lockerby's "AC, DC: What's The Difference ?" Direct current (DC) In a DC (direct current) circuit where the electricity flows in one direction, we can think of a battery as a storage tank like the water tower in your neighborhood. If nobody turned on their faucet, the water in the tower would just sit there. Forever. Physicists like to think of this as "potential energy." Like a boulder at the top of a hill, it will just sit there, forever, until someone pushes it over the hill or an earthquake shakes it from the top of the hill or erosion undermines it…

Second-hand stores like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local mom&pop shops are treasure troves of things to hack or repurpose. When you hack something you’re probably using it in a way in which it was never intended to be used so, there is always a risk that things might not go the way you planned. But since you can get items from second-hand stores on the cheap, you don’t care too much if you are disappointed with the results. Luckily, this "MacGyverism" was successful. I'll demonstrate how I converted an olive oil bottle into an alcohol lamp. This build includes, glass, a flammable…

Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, is used by millions of people to show photos of their wedding cakes and pictures of themselves they took in the mirror with their cell phones.  Or maybe it has a much deeper level, if you look hard enough. And want to take advantage of its popularity and need to talk about something at a conference.  An IT group at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden goes second and third order to rationalize its benefits, saying a lot of effort often goes into a picture before it is shared.  Well, that's true, though nothing compared to the…

When we say "off the grid," we often mean off the power grid. "Off the grid," however, can also mean off of any interconnected network including the Internet. Back in the day before the World Wide Web, many people communicated using what was called FidoNet . You set up a home computer with a dialup modem and the FidoNet software. The FidoNet software was a lot like a modern day discussion forum (back then called "bulletin boards") where you could exchange discussion posts, emails, and even files. You used your computer to dial up the remote computer with your modem, logged in to the…

With 25,000 journals in existence today, thanks in large part to the open access movement which charges a fee to print a study, keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting task. Hundreds to thousands of papers are published each day. Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a text-mining algorithm to prioritize research papers to read and include in their Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a public database that manually curates and codes data from the scientific literature describing how environmental chemicals interact with genes to affect…

Some people just don't know how to put patterns and colors together. Or anything about style. Some of that is cultural, of course. No one really wears corsets any more, for example, and good luck finding anyone outside the Mid-East who knows what a caftan is. Some new technology may herald a future for fashion, its creator claims; computerized fabrics that change their color and their shape in response to movement. Joanna Berzowska, professor and chair of the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, has developed a prototype for an interactive electronic fabric…

If you're not a researcher, you probably don't use Mendeley a lot, I don't have an account there even though I have written lots of pieces about their stuff.  But it's popular among researchers and in the early days of Science 2.0, when I had the Science 2.0 name itself reserved for a collaboration tool, I always assumed we would buy something like Mendeley or something like Mendeley would buy us, depending on who got biggest first. Other than a few emails with the CEO when he had something interesting to share, I have no involvement with the company. But despite having no friends there…

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding the correct combination of resistors to achieve the elusive 440Hz. I had to come up with a kludge. I inserted an adjustable resistor (potentiometer) and was able to turn the knob on the potentiometer to tune the circuit to 440Hz to my electronic keyboard. The problem is mostly likely to do with the tolerance of the resistor. The resistors I used had gold bands and that means they have a tolerance…