Technology
The economic reasoning underlying network neutrality regulationadopted this week by the Federal Communications Commission is fundamentally flawed, according to Professors J. Gregory Sidak and David J. Teece in an article published in the Journal of Competition Law&Economics.
Sidak and Teece explain that the FCC's proposed regulations would have the effect of banning or restricting optional business-to-business transactions between broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers for enhanced delivery of packets over the Internet.
The proposed "nondiscrimination" rule…
What's on people's mind? Who or what is impacting us most? That is easy to decide: go to Google, put in the search field the n-gram (the sequence of n words) that describes the item you want to check,* and watch the number of hits.
So the bigram "John Lennon" (25 million hits) is apparently more talked about than "Elvis Presley" (20 million hits). But both get beaten by "Paris Hilton" (32 million hits), who in turn is dwarfed by "Michael Jackson" (98 million). And of course, "Lady Gaga" (140 mln) is the biggest.
That's pretty clear, right?
Not really. In fact, this statistics is…
Google is claiming that it has scanned 10% of the books ever published.
Google Ngram Viewer is a tool to see how often the phrases have occurred in the world's books over the years. Users can graph the occurrence of phrases up to five words in length from 1400 through the present day right in your browser.Follow the link below and try your combinations..Kewl!!
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com
While we’re on the joint subject of cars and security, I should dredge up this item that I’ve had hanging about for a few months. It’s from Ars Technica, and reports that researchers have hacked into the control systems of cars because those systems are often not secured:
The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing…
New Scientist tells us that the encryption between electronic key fobs and car ignition systems has been cracked in many cases. The reason is that most car manufacturers are using weak and/or home-grown encryption:
A device fitted within the key fob of a modern car broadcasts an encrypted radio signal to the car as the driver starts the vehicle. If the signal is recognised by the car’s receiver, it responds by sending an encrypted signal to the engine control unit (ECU), which allows the car to start. If the driver tries using the incorrect car key fob, the ECU locks down the engine.
For…
Hank |
When I was a lad, a fellow named Edward Packard came up with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, books where you read until an action point and you had to make a decision - your decision determined the plot of the book from there on out by sending you to a specific page where things continued.
Using real-time video coding procedures, a group of researchers have created a similar approach that is interactive for movie watchers, so if you're one of those annoying French nihilists and like movies that end with a crying clown or whatever, okay, it can happen, but if you're an outrageously…
Newswire |
NEW YORK, December 9, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Elsevier announced today that it is participating in the recently launched Google eBooks store by including a large selection of Elsevier's eBook titles.
Google eBooks covers more than three million ebook titles, and was officially launched on 7 December. Google eBooks users can access and read purchased book content via a web browser on their computer or mobile device as well as through native apps for devices such as the iPad. Individual publishers can decide which titles in their ebooks portfolios they choose to sell full access to through…
Hank |
My head was dizzy as the giant head loomed on the screen and told me things I knew could not be true. But all around me, people were smiling and nodding.
And they were close. Really close, their arms jammed up against mine. Am I dreaming about a Bertolt Brecht novel or something? My mother warned me about reading that stuff.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/liveblogging-singularity-summit.html
The Humanity + @ Caltech conference kicked off this morning in Pasadena with a dynamic group of speakers, discussing how humanity is being defined by technology, media, and by us, the active participants. People were inquiring about Twitter handles and web addresses, so I thought I would compile a list, and add to it as I find them.
(I'll be blogging about the content a bit later today.)
You can find me on Twitter @AndreaKuszewski and on facebook.
Follow Humanity + on Twitter @humanityplus (Official hashtag is #hplus)
From Session One: Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media, and Methods
Robert…
Want to kill about 8,000 hours of your life? Go to data.gov and start looking around. In the interest of transparency (well, sometimes - see Recovery Accountability and Transparency meeting not open to the public), the Obama Administration has posted over 270,000 sets of raw data from its departments, agencies, and offices on the World Wide Web.
Good luck figuring it out, right? The best place to hide stuff is in plain sight, skeptics will claim.
Nope, some folks at Rensselaer are here to make it simple. They figured out how to find relationships among the…