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Domain: uh.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to uh.edu.
Stories · 22
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Eye Problems From Space Affect At Least 21 NASA Astronauts
SternisheFan sends this report from Universe Today: How does microgravity affect your health? One of the chief concerns of NASA astronauts these days is changes to eyesight. Some people come back from long-duration stays in space with what appears to be permanent changes, such as requiring glasses when previously they did not. And the numbers are interesting. A few months after NASA [said] 20% of astronauts may face this problem, a new study points out that 21 U.S. astronauts that have flown on the International Space Station for long flights (which tend to be five to six months) face visual problems. These include "hyperopic shift, scotoma and choroidal folds to cotton wool spots, optic nerve sheath distension, globe flattening and edema of the optic nerve," states the University of Houston, which is collaborating with NASA on a long-term study of astronauts while they're in orbit. -
The Human Body May Not Be Cut Out For Space
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The human body did not evolve to live in space, and the longest any human has been off Earth is 437 days. Some problems, like the brittling of bone, may have been overcome already. Others have been identified — for example, astronauts have trouble eating and sleeping enough — and NASA is working to understand and solve them. But Kenneth Chang reports in the NY Times that there are some health problems that still elude doctors more than 50 years after the first spaceflight. The biggest hurdle remains radiation. Without the protective cocoon of Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere, astronauts receive substantially higher doses of radiation, heightening the chances that they will die of cancer. Another problem identified just five years ago is that the eyeballs of at least some astronauts became somewhat squashed. 'It is now a recognized occupational hazard of spaceflight,' says Dr. Barratt. 'We uncovered something that has been right under our noses forever.' NASA officials often talk about the 'unknown unknowns,' the unforeseen problems that catch them by surprise. The eye issue caught them by surprise, and they are happy it did not happen in the middle of a mission to Mars. Another problem is the lack of gravity jumbles the body's neurovestibular system (PDF) that tells people which way is up. When returning to the pull of gravity, astronauts can become dizzy, something that Mark Kelly took note of as he piloted the space shuttle to a landing. 'If you tilt your head a little left or right, it feels like you're going end over end.' Beyond the body, there is also the mind. The first six months of Scott Kelly's one-year mission are expected to be no different from his first trip to the space station. Dr. Gary E. Beven, a NASA psychiatrist, says he is interested in whether anything changes in the next six months. 'We're going to be looking for any significant changes in mood, in sleep, in irritability, in cognition.' In a Russian experiment in 2010 and 2011, six men agreed to be sealed up in a mock spaceship simulating a 17-month Mars mission. Four of the six developed disorders, and the crew became less active as the experiment progressed. 'I think that's just an example of what could potentially happen during a Mars mission, but with much greater consequence,' says Dr. Beven. 'Those subtle changes in group cohesion could cause major problems.'" -
Shutdown Illustrates How Fast US Gov't Can Update Its Websites
An anonymous reader writes "Despite what we hear about how much the U.S. government is struggling with a website, it is reassuring that most of government entities can update their websites within a day after they are asked to. This conclusion is the result of research done by the Networking Systems Laboratory at the Computer Science Department of the University of Houston. The research team tracked government websites and their update times, and found that 96% of the websites were updated within 24 hours after President Obama signed HR 2775 into law, ending the Government shutdown. Worth noting that two websites took 8 days to update. It is interesting that the team was able to use the shutdown as an opportunity to study the efficiency of the IT departments of various parts of Government." -
FWD.us Remixes the Statue of Liberty Greeting
theodp writes "In the days leading up to the Senate's passage of the landmark immigration bill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new ad from FWD.us, his pro-immigration reform PAC. The ad, 'Emma', contains an altered version of Emma Lazarus' famous 1883 poem 'The New Colossus' ('Give me your tired, your poor...'), which is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. 'In doing so,' notes the Latin Times, 'it [the ad] departs radically from the meaning of Lazarus' original — which exalted the Statue of Liberty as a "mother of exiles" and redeemer of the world's rootless poor — to accommodate the PAC's call for more high-skilled workers from abroad be allowed to work and live legally in the United States.' Instead of the original's call for 'the wretched refuse of your teeming shore' and 'the homeless, tempest-tossed', the FWD.us remix asks for 'the influencers and the dreamers...talent that is searching for purpose...those dedicated to the doing'. Here's a YouTube Doubler of readings of both versions — pick your fave, kids!" -
Corporate Behemoth Keeps Ripping "Real"
Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has written in with a tale of media rippers and corporate giants "In 2001 RealNetworks sued and blocked Streambox from distributing the Ripper, a program that let users rip and save RealAudio and RealVideo streams even if the stream contained a proprietary "do not copy" flag. Then one year ago this month, RealNetworks caused a stir by releasing a beta of RealPlayer 11 that similarly let the user record and save streams from sites like YouTube and Pandora. YouTube rippers and the like had existed before, but this was the first time a major company had included a stream ripper in its media player. And while RealPlayer 11 didn't explicitly ignore any copy protection flags, the release still provoked legal rumblings: in a Variety article by Scott Kirsner, an anonymous network exec said accused RealNetworks of 'aiding and abetting piracy' and said that they would 'more likely than not' take action against RealNetworks. But now that the feature has stayed in RealPlayer for a year, its real impact will be not on piracy but on the perceived legitimacy of ripping programs. The corporate behemoth, raked over the coals in the past for privacy violations and nuisance-ware, strikes a blow for free-culture hackers." The rest of Bennett's essay is available by following that magical link right below these words.First, the reasons I don't think that RealPlayer has much effect on actual piracy. Yes, if a pirate has uploaded your favorite song to YouTube, you can save a copy of the video file to hear the song over and over, but you can do the same thing on YouTube itself as long as you're connected to the Internet. The anonymous network exec in the Variety article points out that RealPlayer "allows you to own [content] forever on your hard drive, even if the Web site that distributed that content illegally has taken it down in because we've complained." But regardless of what complaints they've been sending, almost all popular songs are currently available for listening on YouTube so that anyone with a Net connection can get them on demand, and that's a separate issue, with or without RealPlayer.
So then it becomes a question of whether RealPlayer enables the user to do more interesting things with the song or video, like take it with them on an iPod. RealPlayer only lets you save YouTube videos as an FLV file. But as long as doing things like playing an FLV file on an iPod requires an outside hack, that option is only available to people who are resourceful enough to go out and find tools like that (admittedly not a very high bar, but too hard for many people). So, suppose you define a "resourceful" person as someone smart enough to figure out how to convert an FLV file into an iPod-viewable format. Then there are two possibilities: (a) either a person is not that "resourceful", in which case if they want content to take with them, they'll still have to get it through legitimate channels like the iTunes store, or (b) if the person is "resourceful", they would have known about tools for ripping YouTube videos to MP3, long before RealPlayer 11 came out (in fact, most sites that come up in a search for "flv to mp3 converter" are just rippers specifically for YouTube). In either case, RealPlayer's ability to save FLV files has no impact on the market for the song.
I haven't talked about some outlier cases where RealPlayer could perhaps help a novice user avoid paying for content (if a novice pirate didn't know enough to download a movie from a BitTorrent network, they could perhaps save up enough interesting videos from YouTube for a long plane ride where they won't have Internet access). But there's an easy way to get a verdict on RealPlayer's impact on piracy: How much have you heard teenagers talking about it? You heard teens through the years buzzing about Napster, KaZaA, and BitTorrent, but... RealPlayer? The cliche among teenagers today is to go "find something on YouTube", but "and then grab it with RealPlayer" has yet to prove useful enough to enter the vernacular.
Similarly, RealPlayer can be used to rip streams from Pandora, but it's just hard enough to do it that most people are likely to give up. Before going into details, I should say that I'm against anyone trying to circumvent paying for music. Most of the time when you read that on the Web, it carries this nudge-wink subtext right before the author launches into a detailed description about how, exactly, to circumvent paying for music. But I really do believe that there is a vast untapped potential of unwritten good music out there, and that it could be tapped if there were only lower barriers of entry for musicians, better channels to distribute music to users, and a guarantee that users would pay instead of stealing it -- all of which is helped by services like Pandora. On the other hand, I also believe that if a copying scheme can be circumvented, and especially if it can be circumvented in a way that's fairly easy to discover, there's no point in keeping it secret: We might as well push things forward by acknowledging that the scheme is beatable, and deciding what to do about it.
The outing commences: if you save a stream from Pandora, RealPlayer will give you an error if you try to play the stream back from your RealPlayer library. But if you find the "mp4" file in your RealPlayer downloads, you can play it in WinAmp. However, the file as saved will not play in Windows Media Player, iTunes, or RealPlayer itself. Plus, since Pandora does not let you pick which song you want to listen to on demand, your stream might contain all the songs that you had to skip past to get the one you wanted, and you'd have to find a utility to edit the mp4 file to get rid of that cruft at the beginnig. At some point, the effort probably exceeds the dollar you'd have to pay to get the song on iTunes (or, if you're a pirate, the effort to find it on a p2p network).
Again, the "teenager buzz test" is instructive. You do hear kids these days talking about listening to songs on Pandora, but not about ripping them with RealPlayer.
Where I think RealPlayer will make the most difference in the long run is in its political and legal impact, by legitimizing stream-ripping as something that "real" companies, so to speak, are allowed to do. In 2006, Google sent a cease-and-desist letter to TechCrunch for hosting a tool that lets users save YouTube videos to their hard drives. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch blogged at the time, "I am likely to remove the tool to preserve my relationship with the company [Google/YouTube]", but the tool is still up, and I don't know whether it was ever taken down at all (TechCrunch did not respond to an inquiry). Today, there are more YouTube rippers than ever, several of them even running AdSense ads. (I'm not sure if that's within Google's rules, but I mentioned those sites while e-mailing back and forth with Google for this article, and they're all still running AdSense ads a week later.) Certainly Google would look pretty silly trying to force TechCrunch to take their ripper down today, now that Google itself is distributing RealPlayer as part of the Google Pack.
RealNetworks could argue that the main difference between RealPlayer 11, and the Streambox Ripper that they sued to have outlawed in 2001, was that the Streambox Ripper ignored the "do not copy" flag present in some RealAudio and RealVideo streams, and thus violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. RealNetworks says the do-not-copy flag is no longer used, having been supplanted by more sophisticated Digital Rights Management, and RealPlayer 11 will honor any DRM-protected streams and refuse to save them. But how much difference is there between "ignoring" the do-not-copy flag and "ignoring" the Terms of Service for sites like YouTube (which the program may not be aware of, but which its makers certainly are)?
We've all heard about the First Amendment implications of DeCSS code, the code for decrypting the copy-protection scheme on DVDs, being outlawed in the U.S. But the Streambox case set the bar for "violating the DMCA" considerably lower -- the Streambox Ripper didn't actively decrypt anything, it just ignored a flag set in the streaming media. What are the implications if "ignoring" a flag counts as "breaking" copy protection? Suppose Behemoth Corp releases Version 1 of some media format, and I release a third-party player that plays Version 1. Then Behemoth Corp releases the specs for Version 2 of the format, which is similar enough that it works in Version 1 players, except Version 2 now contains a "do-not-copy" flag, which my player doesn't know about. Is my player now illegal? (Well, in this case Behemoth Corp would just make sure that Version 2 doesn't play in Version 1 players. But what about general-purpose programs like Total Recorder that can record any sound playing through your computer to an MP3 file? Does that program become illegal if a company releases a new sound file format that they don't want to be copyable?) So I think the acceptance of RealPlayer has nudged us closer to legal acceptance of software that can interact with third-party sites and programs in a way that their makers don't like. That's good. It should not be against the law to make a program that interacts with third-party web sites in a way that they haven't given permission for, something I literally grew up saying.
It's brave of Google especially to be distributing RealPlayer along with the Google Pack, at the same time that YouTube is constantly attacked for enabling copyright violations. A content owner mounting a lawsuit against Google, would be foolish not to say something like, "Your Honor, not only does YouTube host thousands of videos violating the intellectual property rights of my clients, they even distribute a tool called RealPlayer that lets people violate YouTube's own Terms of Service by saving the videos to their hard drive!" Logically, of course, it's a weak argument -- RealPlayer is universally available whether Google distributes it or not -- but rhetorically the argument is golden.
On the other hand, since that hasn't happened, and RealPlayer 11 is pretty well entrenched after being out for a year, the result has probably been an expansion of our rights. Anyone else who got sued or threatened for releasing a ripping program would be able to point to RealNetworks. "Look at them, Your Honor, their Web site even tells people, 'Grab videos from thousands of Web sites with just one click', something that those 'thousands of Web sites' would probably not be thrilled with. If it's legal for RealNetworks to tell people that, how can it be illegal for me just to have a ripping program on my site?"
If a small-time programmer had made themselves a legal test case before RealPlayer 11 came out, things might have gone differently; it is an unfortunate truth that courts are probably more likely to consider something legal when it is done by a large and legitimate-looking company like RealNetworks. Big companies do well in court partly because their lawyers are paid to make good arguments, but they almost certainly also get more benefit of the doubt just by virtue of being big companies. I think the time is long overdue for using controlled experiments to measure the bias and objectivity of judges -- for example, having different actors, one white and one black, go into different courtrooms for "mock trials" (which the judges think are real), where both actors are standing trial for exactly identical crimes and their lawyers say exactly identical things, and repeat this experiment enough times to see how differently black and white defendants are treated. (We already see this, for example, in the disparity of sentences for powder cocaine vs. crack, but skeptics may have a point when they say that's not a controlled experiment, because the effects of crack and cocaine are different.) Similarly, have mock trials where a small-time "activist" and a large company are sued for doing exactly the same thing. I would bet that the disparity in the outcomes of those cases would far exceed any bias due to race or gender.
But since it was RealNetworks, with their lawyers and their NASDAQ listing and their former exec in the U.S. Senate, that brought ripping to the masses, that probably makes it OK for you and me. It's not fair, but in this case, it's a good thing.
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Corporate Behemoth Keeps Ripping "Real"
Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has written in with a tale of media rippers and corporate giants "In 2001 RealNetworks sued and blocked Streambox from distributing the Ripper, a program that let users rip and save RealAudio and RealVideo streams even if the stream contained a proprietary "do not copy" flag. Then one year ago this month, RealNetworks caused a stir by releasing a beta of RealPlayer 11 that similarly let the user record and save streams from sites like YouTube and Pandora. YouTube rippers and the like had existed before, but this was the first time a major company had included a stream ripper in its media player. And while RealPlayer 11 didn't explicitly ignore any copy protection flags, the release still provoked legal rumblings: in a Variety article by Scott Kirsner, an anonymous network exec said accused RealNetworks of 'aiding and abetting piracy' and said that they would 'more likely than not' take action against RealNetworks. But now that the feature has stayed in RealPlayer for a year, its real impact will be not on piracy but on the perceived legitimacy of ripping programs. The corporate behemoth, raked over the coals in the past for privacy violations and nuisance-ware, strikes a blow for free-culture hackers." The rest of Bennett's essay is available by following that magical link right below these words.First, the reasons I don't think that RealPlayer has much effect on actual piracy. Yes, if a pirate has uploaded your favorite song to YouTube, you can save a copy of the video file to hear the song over and over, but you can do the same thing on YouTube itself as long as you're connected to the Internet. The anonymous network exec in the Variety article points out that RealPlayer "allows you to own [content] forever on your hard drive, even if the Web site that distributed that content illegally has taken it down in because we've complained." But regardless of what complaints they've been sending, almost all popular songs are currently available for listening on YouTube so that anyone with a Net connection can get them on demand, and that's a separate issue, with or without RealPlayer.
So then it becomes a question of whether RealPlayer enables the user to do more interesting things with the song or video, like take it with them on an iPod. RealPlayer only lets you save YouTube videos as an FLV file. But as long as doing things like playing an FLV file on an iPod requires an outside hack, that option is only available to people who are resourceful enough to go out and find tools like that (admittedly not a very high bar, but too hard for many people). So, suppose you define a "resourceful" person as someone smart enough to figure out how to convert an FLV file into an iPod-viewable format. Then there are two possibilities: (a) either a person is not that "resourceful", in which case if they want content to take with them, they'll still have to get it through legitimate channels like the iTunes store, or (b) if the person is "resourceful", they would have known about tools for ripping YouTube videos to MP3, long before RealPlayer 11 came out (in fact, most sites that come up in a search for "flv to mp3 converter" are just rippers specifically for YouTube). In either case, RealPlayer's ability to save FLV files has no impact on the market for the song.
I haven't talked about some outlier cases where RealPlayer could perhaps help a novice user avoid paying for content (if a novice pirate didn't know enough to download a movie from a BitTorrent network, they could perhaps save up enough interesting videos from YouTube for a long plane ride where they won't have Internet access). But there's an easy way to get a verdict on RealPlayer's impact on piracy: How much have you heard teenagers talking about it? You heard teens through the years buzzing about Napster, KaZaA, and BitTorrent, but... RealPlayer? The cliche among teenagers today is to go "find something on YouTube", but "and then grab it with RealPlayer" has yet to prove useful enough to enter the vernacular.
Similarly, RealPlayer can be used to rip streams from Pandora, but it's just hard enough to do it that most people are likely to give up. Before going into details, I should say that I'm against anyone trying to circumvent paying for music. Most of the time when you read that on the Web, it carries this nudge-wink subtext right before the author launches into a detailed description about how, exactly, to circumvent paying for music. But I really do believe that there is a vast untapped potential of unwritten good music out there, and that it could be tapped if there were only lower barriers of entry for musicians, better channels to distribute music to users, and a guarantee that users would pay instead of stealing it -- all of which is helped by services like Pandora. On the other hand, I also believe that if a copying scheme can be circumvented, and especially if it can be circumvented in a way that's fairly easy to discover, there's no point in keeping it secret: We might as well push things forward by acknowledging that the scheme is beatable, and deciding what to do about it.
The outing commences: if you save a stream from Pandora, RealPlayer will give you an error if you try to play the stream back from your RealPlayer library. But if you find the "mp4" file in your RealPlayer downloads, you can play it in WinAmp. However, the file as saved will not play in Windows Media Player, iTunes, or RealPlayer itself. Plus, since Pandora does not let you pick which song you want to listen to on demand, your stream might contain all the songs that you had to skip past to get the one you wanted, and you'd have to find a utility to edit the mp4 file to get rid of that cruft at the beginnig. At some point, the effort probably exceeds the dollar you'd have to pay to get the song on iTunes (or, if you're a pirate, the effort to find it on a p2p network).
Again, the "teenager buzz test" is instructive. You do hear kids these days talking about listening to songs on Pandora, but not about ripping them with RealPlayer.
Where I think RealPlayer will make the most difference in the long run is in its political and legal impact, by legitimizing stream-ripping as something that "real" companies, so to speak, are allowed to do. In 2006, Google sent a cease-and-desist letter to TechCrunch for hosting a tool that lets users save YouTube videos to their hard drives. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch blogged at the time, "I am likely to remove the tool to preserve my relationship with the company [Google/YouTube]", but the tool is still up, and I don't know whether it was ever taken down at all (TechCrunch did not respond to an inquiry). Today, there are more YouTube rippers than ever, several of them even running AdSense ads. (I'm not sure if that's within Google's rules, but I mentioned those sites while e-mailing back and forth with Google for this article, and they're all still running AdSense ads a week later.) Certainly Google would look pretty silly trying to force TechCrunch to take their ripper down today, now that Google itself is distributing RealPlayer as part of the Google Pack.
RealNetworks could argue that the main difference between RealPlayer 11, and the Streambox Ripper that they sued to have outlawed in 2001, was that the Streambox Ripper ignored the "do not copy" flag present in some RealAudio and RealVideo streams, and thus violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. RealNetworks says the do-not-copy flag is no longer used, having been supplanted by more sophisticated Digital Rights Management, and RealPlayer 11 will honor any DRM-protected streams and refuse to save them. But how much difference is there between "ignoring" the do-not-copy flag and "ignoring" the Terms of Service for sites like YouTube (which the program may not be aware of, but which its makers certainly are)?
We've all heard about the First Amendment implications of DeCSS code, the code for decrypting the copy-protection scheme on DVDs, being outlawed in the U.S. But the Streambox case set the bar for "violating the DMCA" considerably lower -- the Streambox Ripper didn't actively decrypt anything, it just ignored a flag set in the streaming media. What are the implications if "ignoring" a flag counts as "breaking" copy protection? Suppose Behemoth Corp releases Version 1 of some media format, and I release a third-party player that plays Version 1. Then Behemoth Corp releases the specs for Version 2 of the format, which is similar enough that it works in Version 1 players, except Version 2 now contains a "do-not-copy" flag, which my player doesn't know about. Is my player now illegal? (Well, in this case Behemoth Corp would just make sure that Version 2 doesn't play in Version 1 players. But what about general-purpose programs like Total Recorder that can record any sound playing through your computer to an MP3 file? Does that program become illegal if a company releases a new sound file format that they don't want to be copyable?) So I think the acceptance of RealPlayer has nudged us closer to legal acceptance of software that can interact with third-party sites and programs in a way that their makers don't like. That's good. It should not be against the law to make a program that interacts with third-party web sites in a way that they haven't given permission for, something I literally grew up saying.
It's brave of Google especially to be distributing RealPlayer along with the Google Pack, at the same time that YouTube is constantly attacked for enabling copyright violations. A content owner mounting a lawsuit against Google, would be foolish not to say something like, "Your Honor, not only does YouTube host thousands of videos violating the intellectual property rights of my clients, they even distribute a tool called RealPlayer that lets people violate YouTube's own Terms of Service by saving the videos to their hard drive!" Logically, of course, it's a weak argument -- RealPlayer is universally available whether Google distributes it or not -- but rhetorically the argument is golden.
On the other hand, since that hasn't happened, and RealPlayer 11 is pretty well entrenched after being out for a year, the result has probably been an expansion of our rights. Anyone else who got sued or threatened for releasing a ripping program would be able to point to RealNetworks. "Look at them, Your Honor, their Web site even tells people, 'Grab videos from thousands of Web sites with just one click', something that those 'thousands of Web sites' would probably not be thrilled with. If it's legal for RealNetworks to tell people that, how can it be illegal for me just to have a ripping program on my site?"
If a small-time programmer had made themselves a legal test case before RealPlayer 11 came out, things might have gone differently; it is an unfortunate truth that courts are probably more likely to consider something legal when it is done by a large and legitimate-looking company like RealNetworks. Big companies do well in court partly because their lawyers are paid to make good arguments, but they almost certainly also get more benefit of the doubt just by virtue of being big companies. I think the time is long overdue for using controlled experiments to measure the bias and objectivity of judges -- for example, having different actors, one white and one black, go into different courtrooms for "mock trials" (which the judges think are real), where both actors are standing trial for exactly identical crimes and their lawyers say exactly identical things, and repeat this experiment enough times to see how differently black and white defendants are treated. (We already see this, for example, in the disparity of sentences for powder cocaine vs. crack, but skeptics may have a point when they say that's not a controlled experiment, because the effects of crack and cocaine are different.) Similarly, have mock trials where a small-time "activist" and a large company are sued for doing exactly the same thing. I would bet that the disparity in the outcomes of those cases would far exceed any bias due to race or gender.
But since it was RealNetworks, with their lawyers and their NASDAQ listing and their former exec in the U.S. Senate, that brought ripping to the masses, that probably makes it OK for you and me. It's not fair, but in this case, it's a good thing.
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New Catalyst May Be a Boost For Fuel Cells
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at the University of Houston (UH) have developed a new platinum-based catalyst for fuel cells that is at least four times more efficient and cheaper than existing catalysts. This discovery in fuel cell research may ease reliance on gasoline. According to the researchers, the active phase of the catalyst consists of nanoparticles with a platinum-rich shell and a core made of an alloy of copper, cobalt, and platinum. But it's not enough for this new catalyst to be more efficient and cheaper than a pure platinum one. It also needs to work for a long time — say, the life of a car. So far, the preliminary results look promising, but longer-term testing is needed before this kind of fuel cells can be used to power your car." -
Sensor Webs Unwire Ecology
jonbrewer writes "Pioneered by CENS, Sensor Networks are rapidly becoming a mainstream environmental monitoring tool. The NY Times has an article today with a quick tech overview and info on RiverNet, EarthScope, NEON, and Neptune. The Times reports 'scientists want to deploy millions of these kinds of devices over large tracts for long periods, opening new windows on nature.'" -
Yahoo! Maps to Support Realtime Traffic
squidfrog writes "Yahoo is set to support realtime traffic overlays for its existing Yahoo! Maps program. 'Yahoo's dynamic maps draw on real-time traffic information from metropolitan transportation departments and private providers, including embedded road sensors, traffic cameras, police scanners, and traffic helicopters. Yahoo declined to identify the exact sources of its traffic data... Roadways are colored green, yellow and red, to highlight the normal movement of traffic, minor delays or severe road congestion. A user can hover over a stretch of road to view details of impediments.'" -
Early Blindness Sharpens Sense of Sound
squidfrog writes "Canadian researchers (articles here, here, and here) have released findings that 'compare the hearing perception of people who lost their sight by age 2, individuals who went blind between the ages 5 and 45, and people with normal vision. The test involved listening to a series of two tones. For each set of tones, subjects had to determine whether the pitch was rising or falling.' 'It has long been known that blind people are far better than their sighted counterparts at orientating themselves by sound... this latest research has found that blind people are also up to 10 times better at discerning pitch changes than the sighted, but only when they went blind before the age of two.'" -
Forward This Article And Get Paid $203.15
Iphtashu Fitz writes "We've all seen it. The e-mail forwarded to us from a friend who got it from a coworker whose sister's cousin's roommate's great aunt knows somebody at Microsoft. The one from Bill Gates himself offering you cash to forward the e-mail to others in order to test out their new e-mail tracking system. If you haven't received that one you've undoubtedly gotten other e-mail hoaxes offering anything from gift certificates to free computers to free airline tickets. How do these sorts of hoaxes start and who starts them? Well Jonathon Keats at Wired Magazine decided to track down the origin of the Bill Gates e-mail tracking hoax. After a few dead ends he finally located then-student Bryan Mack, who created the hoax on November 18, 1997 while at the University of Houston. In Mack's own words: 'It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand. One of his buddies had gotten a make-money-fast spam and Mack said 'I can come up with something better than that.' Three minutes later, Bill Gates' email-tracing program was born. At first he just sent it to a few friends, but those friends sent it to other friends (and so on), and it didn't take long for the e-mail to transform from a joke to a full-fledged hoax." -
Texas Using WiFi to Encourage Driving Breaks
squidfrog writes "An AP article reports: 'To encourage drivers to take more frequent breaks, the Texas Department of Transportation wants to set up free wireless Internet access at rest stops and travel information centers. TxDOT, which says Texas is the first state to provide such free access at rest areas, began experimenting with WiFi hotspots last fall... Andy Keith, manager of TxDOT's maintenance division, said the state hopes to reduce fatigue-related accidents by encouraging drivers to stop more often.' Is public WiFi becoming a trend?" We previously mentioned this scheme a couple of weeks back, although not the motivation behind it. -
Blackout Was Good News, For Pollution
squidfrog writes "In regard to the August blackout, University of Maryland researchers have announced the results of measurements indicating the level of pollution normally caused by power plants in the region of the blackout, which could be measured for the first time by comparing the idle power plants with those still operational. 'Aircraft sampling in the 24 hours following the blackout found a 90 percent drop in sulfur dioxide and a 50 percent cut in ozone levels, while visibility increased by more than 25 miles.'" MSNBC has a related story. -
When 8 Megapixels Just Isn't Enough
squidfrog writes "AP has an interesting article on a half photochemical, half digital process to produce 2.6-gigabyte photographs at 'more than a thousand times the size and resolution of those generated by a typical digital camera for consumers.' 'A vacuum pump ensures that the film is flat to within one-thousandth of an inch, and a dual-mirror device keeps the film parallel to the lens. Sand bags strapped to the camera and tripod prevent the machine from shifting, and a reinforced aluminum cradle maintains the parts of the camera in perfect alignment.' The images are apparently higher resolution than can be reproduced on available printing technology (5' by 10'), but the designer hopes to use an 18' by 36' digital display wall to reproduce the images at their best possible resolution in the future. The camera has apparently only been utilized for landscape photography thus far." -
Missing Matter... Still Missing
squidfrog writes "Nature.com, PhysicsWeb, and the BBC all report on the latest results from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. 'The most powerful search yet for the Universe's missing matter has come up empty handed, contradicting an earlier study that claimed to have seen new particles.' 'A favoured theory is that the dark matter consists of Wimps (weakly interacting massive particles) about a thousand times more massive than a proton, one of the particles found in an atom's nucleus... on the rare occasions a Wimp strikes an ordinary atom, the effect should be noticeable.' 'Writing in the Physical Review Letters, the team says that while a detection has yet to occur, there is now a better idea of how much dark matter must exist.' They 'hope to improve the sensitivity of the experiment by another factor of 20 over the next few years.' What's 20 times 0? And don't tell me zero!" -
Alan Kay Receives ACM Turing Award
TheAncientHacker writes "Alan Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk computer language (and a good deal of what we call Object Oriented Programming) is the winner of this year's Turing Award from the ACM. Kay is also the co-winner of this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize. For more, check out the website of Kay's latest project, Squeak - an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation go to the Squeak homepage or the page of the SqueakLand community which uses Squeak in schools. For more on Kay's Turing Award, see this article on the SqueakLand site." Couple of other awards to announce: bth writes "The Association for Computing Machinery announced that it has recognized Dr. Stuart I. Feldman for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as Make. Almost every software developer in the world has used Make, or one of its descendants, as a tool for maintaining computer software. Dr. Feldman will receive the 2003 ACM Software System Award." And finally, squidfrog writes "Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED, is being awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington. Edith Flanigen, 75, was also recognized, with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on a new generation of 'molecular sieves,' porous crystals that can separate molecules by size." -
Intel Launches DRM-Enabled CPUs for Phones and Handhelds
squidfrog writes "AP reports, 'The next generation of Intel Corp. microprocessors for cell phones and handheld computers will, for the first time, include hard-wired security features that can enforce copy protection and help prevent hackers from wreaking havoc on wireless networks.' Or more ominously, 'The same technology also can be used to ensure that content such as music or movies is used in a way dictated by the copyright holder. A purchased song, for instance, would not play unless it's sure that it's authorized and running on secure hardware.'" Intel has a press release. -
Simcity Microwave Power by 2050?
Politburo writes "The Drudge Report supplies this interesting Senate testimony. Dr. David Criswell, director of the University of Houston's Institute for Space Systems Operations, proposes that we develop robots to assist in the construction of a lunar solar array. The power from this array would be beamed to recievers on Earth, either directly or via relay satellites. Dr. Criswell predicts that with this project, "the average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person." He also attempts to put to rest the idea that microwave power is unsafe, saying, "Each power beam can be safely received, for example, in an industrially zoned area." I wonder if he's ever played SimCity 2000" And coming soon, Godzilla from a drop-down menu. -
The Case for the Moon
apsmith writes "Continuing the flurry of recent hearings on the future of humans in space, a Senate committee on Thursday heard testimony in favor of a return to the Moon. Former senator and moon-walker Harrison Schmitt and physicist David Criswell see the lunar surface as an immense energy resource, just waiting to be tapped. Astronomer Roger Angel sees the lunar south pole as the ideal astronomical observatory, with locations for telescopes 100 times better than anything we've done so far. And geologist Paul Spudis sees a lot of unfinished business on the Moon, to develop it as the "feedstock of an industrial space infrastructure." TransOrbital also sent written testimony." -
Eric Raymond's Homebrew SCO Poison
What Can You Expect From A University Named "UH?" writes "Eric S. Raymond responds to Darl McBride's charge that he's drinking IBM's Kool-Aid in SCO's fight against Linux. The main thrust: Yes, there is an alliance against SCO, but, like the Open Source movement itself, it arises from lots of folks spontaneously striving for a common goal. 'It's beyond me how [you] can have the gall to talk as though we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against you. IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!' " -
ADA Doesn't Apply to Web
djmoore writes "A federal judge has ruled that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) does not apply to the Web. U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz dismissed with prejudice a suit demanding that Southwest Airlines make its website more accessible to the blind, saying that the suit would create new rights for the disabled without setting appropriate standards. Judge Seitz also rejected plaintiffs' claim that the Web is a 'place of exhibition, display, and a sales establishment,' one of the twelve categories covered by the ADA, on the grounds that the law only covers physical places." Our original article has more details. -
Hitchhiker's Guide DVD to be released on January 28
hitchhacker writes "It looks like The BBC series version of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is being released on DVD January 28, 2002. 'disc set contains all six episodes from the classic BBC sci-fi comedy as well 10 minutes of additional footage which was cut to acheive the 30 minute run time. Also included are a few additional features - making of, deleted scenes, interviews and more.'" CD: Word has it that this is a region 2 dvd.
