Despite coups, corruption and kidnappings, mobile phone maverick Denis O’Brien keeps pouring money into the world’s poorest, most violent countries. His bet: Give phones to the masses and they’ll fight your enemies for you
The National Centre for State Courts, a nonprofit organisation, has sent file-sharing propaganda [PDF] to thousands of students. The supposedly educational
materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more) — via Slashdot
You wouldn’t begrudge the creators of what is probably the most perfectly flat mirror ever a moment of vanity. But rather than studying their own reflections, the Spanish scientists hope to use it to create a new type of microscope
Middle-class families in Mexico are having tiny transmitters implanted under their skin so that satellites can track them if they are kidnapped. Sales of the device have jumped by 13 per cent this year after kidnappings surged by almost 40 per cent in the country between 2004 and 2007
The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world’s poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don’t have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10
Even as more and more information goes digital, there is currently no sure-fire way to ensure that such data will be accessible in the future. But today, scientists are working on a solution. Pergamum uses individual building blocks consisting of a hard drive, a small, low-power processor similar to the kind used in an iPod, a flash memory card, and an Ethernet port. These units, called tomes
, are connected using relatively inexpensive Ethernet switches. Each tome is like a minicomputer, but with very low power demands
The Quicktime version is also available.
Acknowledging that most online shoppers cannot be bothered with auctions, eBay announced changes to its fee structure Wednesday that emphasised fixed prices over bidding. The move is intended to help eBay compete more effectively with Amazon.com and other big online retailers
Pool is a social media project developed by ABC Radio National. It’s a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers — upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It’s a collaborative space where audiences become makers — via Boing Boing
Magpies can recognise themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don’t have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways
Dr Richard Harrington thought he was buying just an interesting curio when he paid £20 for the fossilised insect encased in amber. But it turned out to be a long extinct type of aphid which became trapped in the resin as it seeped from a tree millions of years ago. It has now been named after Dr Harrington, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Entomological Society, who specialises in aphids. He bought the fossil on the internet auction site from a man in Lithuania
Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see. Here’s the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a higher cognitive
producer, like the brain’s superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences
Tough conditions in its New Zealand and China operations haven’t deterred accounting software developer MYOB from splashing out $7 million to acquire Australian web hosting company SmartyHost. The buy is part of MYOB’s plan to expand its web hosting and internet marketing services
Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine’s clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program
It’s full moon? He’s off his meds? I’m just special this week? Who knows, but Bill felt the need to spam me again this morning:
Dear Red Wolf, I would like to know to whom I may address, in order that I may
personally crusadein order that theX Filesis much more than just David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, but a Cadre of Extremely talented Writers,GIFTED, Directors,and Producers! The Creator Chris Carter left His Series with an episode, that even I an untalented,naive, andlocal yokelcould continue with The Birth of William holds so much! Please respond, [Bill’s full name and address removed] ps. I figure, ifthirteen productionshas folded…if one can’t have more;Why not make moreChris Carter left a WONDERFUL SHOW to be left is a sin!
He seems to be having trouble with his space bar today.
Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive may no longer be the exclusive domain of science fiction writers, with two physicists from Baylor devising a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. Associate Professor Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy have come up with a novel idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. A starship could warp
space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it. By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds
An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen — touted as the clean, green fuel of the future — cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale
A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet. The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel by pixel search across the internet, flagging up all instances of that image even if it’s been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way
If you have any form of online presence sooner or later you’ll get odd email.
I have an interesting regular missive sender with an X-Files fetish and a seriously dodgy grip on reality. I figure it’s about time to share Bill’s emails with the world. Plus it should serve as a warning that if you feel the need to send me insane email, I may well feel the urge to share it with a wider audience.
Dear Red Wolf, Would it be feasible to personally
fly out to Los Angeles, the former site of thirteen productions, to rally or promote the cause of continuing Chris Carter’s BRAINCHILD deeply imbedded into hisX FilesNever has a series leftthe stagewith such an easy or simple to return to the original plot formation…Okay Mulder has left in a rather earth shaking event; But he left behindLittle Williamand Scully…AND SUCH A CADRE OF WRITERS! I know I can speak for millions who would rather sit on their duffs lamenting! Please respond and I wil submit the Hows And Wherefores, [Bill’s full name and address removed]
He’s got the uppercase shouting, the weird title casing of unrelated words, peculiar quoting and interesting spelling down, but email forms do limit you in your ability to change the font to Comic Sans, switch the colours to clown vomit and add blink tags, so it could have looked even more wacky.
Critics of the Harper government’s proposed changes to the Copyright Act have launched a cyber crusade to fight the controversial bill. They’re using everything from Facebook to YouTube to Wikipedia to blogs to get their message out. They want the government to either scrap or make serious amendments to Bill C-61 when Parliament resumes next month. At the helm of the digital movement is Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specialises in Internet and e-commerce law. In addition to his own blog, Geist runs a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members
RSS – Posts