It doesn’t seem like an ideal place to promote solar energy, but foggy San Francisco has come up with an ambitious plan to encourage businesses and homeowners to tap the sun’s power for their energy needs. The program announced Tuesday would offer companies and residents government-funded loans and rebates to offset the costs of installing solar panels
Google appears to be reinventing Wikipedia with their new product that they call knol (not yet publicly available). In an attempt to gather human knowledge, Google will accept articles from users who will be credited with the article by name. If they want, they can allow ads to appear alongside the content and they will be getting a share of the profits if that’s the case. Other users will be allowed to rate, edit or comment on the articles. The content does not have to be exclusive to Google but no mention is made on any license for it — via Slashdot
Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose
A Tasmanian cat has used up at least one life learning that it’s not all right to attack native wildlife. Usually, Jelly the cat kills birds. But when Jelly bit a snake, the snake bit back, twisting itself around the cat’s neck like a necklace
Opera Software has filed a complaint in Europe against Microsoft, alleging that the software giant is unfairly abusing its dominant market position by tying Windows to Internet Explorer
KnitML is a community standards effort aimed at defining a universal, machine- and human-readable system for describing knitting patterns
Voters at Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007 poll have chosen w00t
as 2007’s most iconic word. Merriam-Webster says that the word is a gamer’s acronym for we own the other team
, but I’d have to agree with Cory Doctorow that it’s a backronym, a back-formed acronym created to explain a word already in use #&8212; via Boing Boing
A screen shot posted to the web over the weekend seems to show that Canada’s largest provider of high-speed internet access is exploring a controversial data substitution technique that lets it add its own content to the web pages customers visit. Expect this development to become Exhibit A in the case for net neutrality legislation. Lauren Weinstein, a technology consultant in Los Angeles and a long-time Internet activist, posted a screen-shot of a Rogers-modified Google search page this past Saturday on his blog. Rogers vice president of communications Taanta Gupta confirmed that Rogers is experimenting with this technique as a way to communicate with its customers
Litroenergy is a new type of material that emits light for 12 years without needing electricity or sun exposure. The self-luminous micro-particles are called Litrospheres and are said to be non-toxic, inexpensive and equivalent to a 20 watt incandescent bulb. The Litrospheres give off a continuous illumination, and can be designed to glow in any colour. In addition, they are not affected by heat or cold and are 5,000-pound crush resistant. They can be injection molded or added to paint. The fill rate of Litroenergy micro particles in plastic injection molding material or paint is about 20%
New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman’s voice right in her ear asking, Who’s there? Who’s there?
She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, It’s not your imagination.
Indeed it isn’t. It’s an ad for Paranormal State
, a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an audio spotlight
from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it’s another story — via Warren Ellis
One of the potentially useful things that a living cell can do is pump ions across its membrane. Simon Levinson, a biophysicist at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, US, says this generates a potential difference and so could be exploited to make a biobattery. Levinson believes that kidney cells, which are particularly good at transporting ions, could be well suited to making a miniature battery. This would be formed by stacking up large numbers of cell layers to boost the voltage and current they can produce
IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip. In research published on Thursday in the journal Optics Express, IBM said it had produced electro-optic modulators 100 to 1,000 times smaller than comparable silicon photonics modulators and small enough to fit on a processor chip. By connecting processing cores on a chip by light instead of with wires, the problems of high energy consumption and heat generated by multi-core chips could be bypassed, enabling leaps in computing power
Every year about 1,500 people in the US have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery, according to medical studies. To prevent this potentially deadly problem, Loyola University Medical Centre is utilising a new technology that is helping its surgical teams keep track of all sponges used during a surgical procedure. Each sponge has a unique bar code affixed to it that is scanned by a high-tech device to obtain a count. Before a procedure begins, the identification number of the patient and the badge of the surgical team member maintaining the count are scanned into the counter. When a sponge is removed from a patient, it is scanned back into the system. A surgical procedure cannot end until all sponges are accounted for — via Slashdot
Two engineers at the University of California, Riverside are part of a binational team that has found semiconducting nanotubes produced by living bacteria — a discovery that could help in the creation of a new generation of nanoelectronic devices. The research team believes this is the first time nanotubes have been shown to be produced by biological rather than chemical means. It opens the door to the possibility of cheaper and more environmentally friendly manufacture of electronic materials
An English court has banned a teenage boy from posting abusive or insulting comments on a social networking web site after judging his participation in the network to be anti-social. Norwich Youth Court in eastern England issued an Anti-Social Behavior Order (Asbo) against a local 17-year-old implicated in petty criminal boasting on the online community Bebo
You know you’ve really made it as an online entity when an entire country bans your site. In terms of a rite of passage, it’s just after the wide-spread adoption and critical mass stages (which of course is followed by random companies banning you, and mainstream newspapers writing about studies on how inefficient the economy has become since your company’s existence). Twitter now joins the lauded halls of the sites banned for presumably speaking too freely; the United Arab Emirates has decided that its residents shall tweet no more
The Seven Network is putting its digital house in order with plans to beef up its high-definition channel next week and early testing under way for its TiVo personal video recorder. Seven is expected to start broadcasting at least 50 hours of programming on its high-definition digital channel, Seven HD, from Monday and has advertising booked to begin the following Saturday
Facebook is allowing its 55 million users to permanently turn off its Beacon
advertising program, which tracks their activities
The Hunter’s rapidly-growing boutique brewery, Bluetongue, has been snapped up by the giant global drinks company Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA). The Bluetongue brewery was launched in 2003, with assistance from the New South Wales Government’s Hunter Advantage Fund. The Cameron Park facility now employs 47 people. CCA spokeswoman Sally Loane says the local workforce can be assured there are only plans to grow the business
Flickr members now can edit pictures online using Picnik’s online tools, a significant change in the ability and focus of the photo-sharing site. A new edit this
option on each photo’s page takes Flickr members to a powered by Picnik
screen that permits them to change exposure, colors, sharpness, and other attributes, as well as add text, whiten teeth, fix red-eye, crop, and resize. The features duplicate those already available on Picnik’s site
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