In a recent literacy study it was found that more than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers. The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analysing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips
The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don’t glue ourselves together when we cut ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibres in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft’s skin with hollow fibres containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility
The IEEE Task Group N
voted to confirm the proposal for the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. Submitted by the Joint Proposal team, this specification was developed by the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) and included several elements developed within the Joint Proposal team
After a burglar broke into caricaturist Bill Weg
Green’s Heathmont home, it took the 82-year-old just seconds to draw his attacker. Fifteen minutes later, patrolling police caught a suspect — and Mr Green’s drawing proved they had the right man
A 5m northern bottle-nosed whale that became stranded in the River Thames has died after a massive rescue attempt to save its life
A huge beached whale has been dumped outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin in a Greenpeace anti-whaling protest. The environmental activists hauled the fin whale to Berlin from the Baltic coast after finding it beached on a sandbank. The dead whale measured 17m long and weighed 20 tonnes. Activists are trying to demonstrate that there is no need to kill the mammals for research — as Japan does — because cadavers can be found — via Darren Barefoot
Google has been subpoenaed by the US Justice Department to turn over a database of search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography. Google is resisting the demand
William Shatner sold a kidney stone for $25,000 to GoldenPalace.com. Shatner’s donating the dough to Habitat For Humanity. GoldenPalace.com originally offered $15,000 for the stone but Shatner turned it down, noting that his Star Trek
tunics have commanded more than $100,000 — via Boing Boing
The first magnetic levitation elevators could hit the market as soon as 2008. The Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corporation has stated that the same technology used to develop high speed trains will soon be available in their elevators
Like most creatives who prefer working on Apples, I’ve been hanging out for some sort of concrete evidnece that the Adobe CS2 suite will run well/much better on the new Intel-based Macs under the Rosetta emulator, or that Adobe will release a Universal Binary update. Well I need a new mac within the next week, and decided to just go ahead and place an order for a 17-inch PowerBook any ways. I’ve also managed to find a two-tone purple laptop bag over at the Crumpler site named, The Dreadful Embarrassment.
However, it’d still be nice to know when Adobe are going to make that Universal move. I have no concrete evidence, but the guys over at Photoshop TV have this for us to mull over: No Intel-based OS X version of CS until CS3?
And on another tangent, you can now get a diploma in advanced studies in character animation over at Animation Mentor.com.
The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses ping attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a ping
attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new feature
allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it
eBay plans to offer an instant-purchase service to supplement its bid-and-wait online auctions, pitting the company directly against conventional e-commerce retailers
Just days after Microsoft announced its online advertising entry, Google has announced their entry into the radio industry. Google has signed a deal to purchase dMarc Broadcasting for US$102 million. The deal will allow Google to enhance its presence in the advertising industry over to the radio industry. Google says it plans to integrate its highly successful AdSense programme with those from dMarc
A group of Papuans who arrived on Queensland’s Cape York yesterday have accused the Indonesian Government of genocide. The group of 30 Papuan men, six women and seven children displayed a banner on their 25-metre canoe, asking for help to save West Papua
Optus has begun shifting its 200,000+ DSL customers across to its new copper wire based broadband network in a move that could help wipe more than $1 billion a year from Telstra’s revenues
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plan to introduce national identity cards has suffered a setback, with the House of Lords voting to force the government to provide more details on the cost of the controversial scheme
Sony BMG has finally jumped on the iTunes bandwagon, with the music giant today confirming it had added its roster of artists to Apple’s Australian on-line music store
Security experts and privacy advocates unanimously agree that ID cards will not protect Australia from terrorist attacks, despite Attorney-General Philip Ruddock saying the key reason
for an Australian ID card would be national security
Police may charge a BASE jumper who was rescued from a cliff face in national park in south-east Queensland. The man’s parachute failed seconds after he jumped, sending him crashing into the cliff at Christmas Creek near Beaudesert. His parachute tangled on a rock ledge about 50 metres from the top of the cliff and an SES volunteer was lowered to the man, before five men waiting at the top pulled them to safety
It seems likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft
— via Warren Ellis
RSS – Posts