External Brain

Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive — via Slashdot

Facebook has agreed to shut down a program that sparked a lawsuit alleging privacy violations, and set up a $9.5 million fund for a nonprofit foundation that will support online privacy, safety and security. The lawsuit centers around Facebook’s Beacon program, which let third-party web sites distribute stories about users to Facebook. Beacon was launched in November 2007 and less than a year later plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Facebook and its affiliates did not give users adequate notice and choice about Beacon and the collection and use of users’ personal information. In addition to Facebook, the lawsuit’s defendants include Blockbuster, Fandango, Hotwire, STA Travel, Overstock.Com, Zappos.com and Gamefly

Google has introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the living stories project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry

Seagate’s new Pulsar solid-state drive for enterprise servers incorporates technology to protect data in transit in the event of a power failure. The Pulsar is the first offering in a product line Seagate expects to expand and comes in 50GB and 200GB capacities. SSD vendors like Seagate are expecting exceptionally strong growth in 2010 and 2011

Google has announced the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results. Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. We are here today to announce Google real-time search, Singhal said, calling it Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web. Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time

Amazon has no plans to open stores anywhere in the world, it said on Sunday, in response to a report it was planning to open high street shops in Britain. A spokesman for the group said it had no plans to open physical stores after the Sunday Times reported the group was looking to cash in on the rising customer demand for so-called click and collect services, where customers buy goods online and pick them up from a shop

Imagine a world where your contact lenses double as a personal computer display, superimposing information in front of you. That virtual-reality dream, a staple of sci-fi movies, is a step closer thanks to the work of Seattle scientists who have been developing a prototype to generate images inside a contact lens. The information would appear about 50 centimetres from the user’s eye. The technology is some years off, but a researcher, Babak Parviz, and his colleagues at the University of Washington last week unveiled a prototype at a Beijing biomedical conference. My group works on building nano-scale electronic, optical, and biomedical devices, Professor Parviz said. We also work on integrating these devices into unconventional substrates — for example glass, plastic, paper. Since I put contact lenses on pretty much every morning, I guess it was just a matter of time putting the two together and wondering what we can do if we start putting these … tiny devices on a contact lens

What does googling mean? Google can tell you. The search giant has quietly rolled out Google Dictionary, which presents definitions and synonyms. Exactly what you’d expect from a dictionary. In addition to Google’s own database of definitions, looking up a word on the Dictionary website provides a list of definitions pulled from a variety of academically authoritative sources (oh, and Wikipedia). It has a few cool features. You can mark words with the star button and come back to them later, see a list of recent searches and switch to translator resources or dictionaries for other languages — not to be confused with Google Translate. Dictionary companies have expected Google would saunter into their realm any day

Usage of the open-source MySQL database is set to decline if Oracle succeeds in buying the software’s owner, Sun Microsystems, according to new data released by analyst firm The 451 Group on Friday. The firm polled 347 open-source software users. While 82.1 percent of respondents use MySQL today, that figure will drop to 72.3 percent by 2014. Fifteen percent said that if Oracle buys Sun, they would be less inclined to use MySQL. Only 6.3 percent indicated they would be more likely to use the database under Oracle’s stewardship

Roughly a week ago, Mininova was still the largest torrent site on the Internet, but this quickly changed after the site’s founders removed of millions of torrents to avoid having to pay millions of dollars in fines. In the days that followed, traffic to the site dropped 66%, while the number of daily downloads are less than 4% of what they used to be

Google is being unfairly scapegoated by newspaper publishers, and wants to help the troubled industry build online revenue, the chief executive of the internet giant said. With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an opinion column published on Thursday in The Wall Street Journal

Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers