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Submission + - New Experience with Toshiba Excite 13 (worldstechnonews.com)

Submitted by
internetcode
internetcode writes: "When is a tablet no longer a tablet? One might ask that question when looking at the Toshiba Excite 13, even though it is clearly a tablet given its lack of an integrated keyboard. The largest of any tablet announced or shipping, this slate is all about its generous display. But does a 13-inch display make a tablet too unwieldy?At CES 2012, when news of Toshiba’s 13.3-inch tablet prototype hit, I heard many snickers from colleagues who said that it was too big to be useful as a tablet. Make no mistake, it is indeed big: It measures 13.5 by 8.3 by 0.4 inches, and weighs 2.2 pounds. It is the antithesis of the svelte, smaller Toshiba Excite 7.7. But although it is noticeably heavier than most tablets, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Excite 13 felt balanced in the hand. Using it is mostly a two-handed, landscape affair, but it still works well.Undeterred by the Excite 13s size, I dove right in with this tablet and began using it for a variety of tasks: viewing images, browsing the Web, playing games, and writing documents. The big screen served me well when I had a surface to rest the tablet on, but it felt a bit awkward in my lap. For the most part, the large screen captivated me, drawing me into the content and navigation in a way that other tablets have not. My touch typing was more accurate on the soft Android keyboard, too. I found myself caught up in using the Excite 13, to the point that I had to remind myself to switch my attention away from the tablet and back to the tasks at hand–such as writing this article."
Privacy

Submission + - NSA claims it would violate Americans' privacy to say how many of us it spied on (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Would you believe the Inspector General from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it would violate the privacy of Americans for the IG office to tell us how many people in the United States had their privacy violated via the NSA warrantless wiretap powers which were granted under the FISA Amendment Act of 2008?

The annual Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) report [PDF] showed that electronic surveillance increased yet again in 2011. Applications for what the government calls "business records," but also includes the production of tangible things, swelled from 96 in 2010 to 205 in 2011. The EFF said those business records are one in the same as the government using the notorious Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) is up for a five-year extension, but Senator Ron Wyden said he'd block FAA renewal until Congress received an answer from the NSA about how many "people in the United States have their communications reviewed by the government" under FAA powers.
Education

Submission + - U.S. Students Struggle with Reasoning Skills (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The first-ever use of interactive computer tasks on a national science assessment suggests that most U.S. students struggle with the reasoning skills needed to investigate multiple variables, make strategic decisions, and explain experimental results. The results are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress that was given in 2009 to a representative sample of students in grades four, eight, and 12.
NASA

Submission + - Crowdfunding the story of the Space Shuttle program... (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of filmmakers, at their own expense, has been capturing the final missions of the Shuttles, and the new pioneers (e.g. SpaceX). Now they're working on getting the film completed and into homes, and (at no charge) to educators, to get young people excited about science & technology
Music

Submission + - Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Slashfart
Slashfart writes: Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Cracker founder David Lowery presents a fascinating countervailing viewpoint.
Education

Submission + - Wall Street Journal: Student Aid Increases Tuition (wsj.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "Wall Street Journal makes the case that when the federal government offers tuition assistance, students apply to more expensive colleges, giving the institutions an incentive to raise tuition and a disincentive to lower it. This reminds me of the debate over President Reagan's cuts to the Pell Grant program in the 1980s. MIT's Campus Paper "The Tech" quoted the MIT administration as saying it had "no idea what really will occur" when Reagan's proposal to cut Pell came to Washington. So the question is, 25 years later, do we know now? Did cuts to federal tuition assistance hurt the education of the lower income students? Did increases to Pell grants create more opportunity? Or is federal money the milkshake, and students are just the straw?"
Android

Submission + - Google's Nexus tablet to be unveiled next week (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: Google chairman Eric Schmidt revealed in December that the company was working on its first own-brand tablet, and the “Nexus 7” slate will finally be unveiled next week during the Google I/O developer conference, according to multiple reports. The last reaffirmation comes from DigiTimes, which has reported a number of details surrounding Google’s upcoming tablet that will seemingly prove accurate...
Cloud

Submission + - David Lowery on the Ethics of the Cloud (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
Mystakaphoros
Mystakaphoros writes: "Musician David Lowery (of Cracker fame) takes NPR intern Emily White to task for her stance on paying for (or failing to pay for) music. While he makes some cogent moral points about failing to support artists, I still have some issues with conflating the "cloud" and other (peer-to-peer) file-sharing methods."

Submission + - New Medical Research Article Format Created: Integrates Print & Video

Submitted by
docinthemachine
docinthemachine writes: "Medical Journal Fertility and Sterility and its publisher Elsevier have just announced a new multimedia article format integrating video and traditional print research which is also being adopted by other medical research journals.

Online video and traditional print were previously two separate and unrelated worlds in scientific research. The new mechanism allows videos to be cited the same way as a traditional print article and seamlessly unifies online multimedia content and print journals. Researchers can watch footage of innovations and techniques while still being able to find this information through traditional medical print sources.

The new media initiative uniquely allows an article to exist simultaneously online and in the traditional journal and enables videos to be citable publications. An open access link is embedded in the article appearing in PubMed and the Journal's table of contents. Video articles undergo full peer review

"For the last 200 years, medical publishing remained unchanged. Our solution accommodates non-print work through fully integrated multimedia and has bridged the gap separating the digital and traditional medical literature” says Dr. Steven Palter, the Video and New Media Editor of Fertility and Sterility who developed the concept and spearheaded the project.

Full details are at http://docinthemachine.com/medical-publishing-revolution/"
United Kingdom

Submission + - UK goes for gold in open access (nature.com)

Submitted by scibri
scibri writes: A report commissioned by the UK government has recommended that the country jump straight to "gold" open access: making all scientific papers open access from the start, with authors paying publishers up-front to make their work free to read.

But some advocates of the quicker, and cheaper, option, putting papers in open repositories a few months after publication (green open access) say the report's enthusiasm for gold shows that the authors are more concerned with protecting the profits of the publishing industry than promoting greater access to publicly funded research.
Books

Submission + - Capitalists Who Fear Change (lfb.org)

Submitted by
bill_mcgonigle
bill_mcgonigle writes: "In his essay, Capitalists Who Fear Change, author Jeffrey Tucker takes on "wimps who don’t want to improve." From DMCA take-downs on 3D printing files to the constant refrain that every new form of music recording will "kill music", Mr. Tucker observes: "Through our long history of improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired panic. The biggest panic typically comes from the producers themselves who resent the way the market process destabilizes their business model" and analyzes how the markets move the march of technology ever forward. He takes on patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism of entrenched interests in general, with guarded optimism: "The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don’t get their way.""
Google

Submission + - Google bars site that converts YouTube songs into MP3s (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google is apparently cracking down on a popular site that converts the music from YouTube videos into MP3s.
YouTube-MP3.org has received a letter from Google, YouTube's parent company, notifying the site operators that converting videos this way violates YouTube's terms of service, according to the blog TorrentFreak, which said it has seen the letter.
In addition, YouTube apparently has blocked YouTube-MP3.org's servers from accessing the site.
Cloud

Submission + - young listeners opt for streaming over owning (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNN reports that younger listeners are increasingly opting to stream music rather than own it. If their music is constantly available anywhere on any device, then "what's the difference?", ponders the article. The distinction between streaming music and owning music is starting to blur, and owning music is "a lot of work". From the article:

"But Van Buskirk also suggests another reason for streaming, not acquiring music. It's liberating. 'There is a certain relief with not having to own music. It is a lot of work,' he said.

"Porter says the way people own music is transforming. He believes the cloud model is where the state of music is heading, and for many people ownership is not essential. 'I think ownership is access, you don't have to have music on your local hard drive to own it,' he said."

Will the concept of ownership of music and software fade as cloud based services become the way people expect to access media and software?
Hardware

Submission + - A Lego Data Center, With Fiber Optics (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by miller60
miller60 writes: A Brazilian man has created a Lego data center that recreates all the major features of an IT facility, assembled from 5,772 pieces, 28 figures, and 1 meter of fiber optic cable. The builder, Tanaka, has uploaded details to the Lego Digital Designer Gallery so others can build and adapt their own.

Submission + - US Consumer Bureau Opens Online Credit Card Complaint DB (consumerfinance.gov)

Submitted by
chiguy
chiguy writes: "The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau begins releasing detailed information on Americans’ complaints about their credit cards online.

From The Washington Post:
"The CFPB said it will only publish complaints after it has verified the consumer’s relationship with the company. The new database will include not only the name of the company involved, but also the nature of the complaint and the consumer’s Zip code. It will also report whether the firm responded in a timely manner, how the matter was resolved and any disputes.

The CFPB said it has received more than 45,000 in the year since the bureau was launched."

Complaints about mortgages, student loans, and checking accounts will be added later. Financial institutions are complaining loudly, decrying the enforcement of one of the main tenants of the free market: transparency."

Submission + - Internet Access Negatively Correlated With Women's Enrollment in Computer Scienc (bethcodes.com)

Submitted by MoriT
MoriT writes: "There is currently a responsibility-dodging contest between industry and academia over who is to blame for the declining enrollment of women in Computer Science and declining employment of women in software development. I hear people in industry bemoan the "empty pipeline", while academics maintain that women aren't entering their programs because of perceptions of the industry. I have compiled some data that may help resolve the question by highlighting a third factor common to both: access to an Internet-based culture of computing."

Submission + - New LED puts out more power than it consumes (wired.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
Entropy98
Entropy98 writes: "MIT physicists have managed to build a light-emitting diode that has an electrical efficiency of more than 100 percent, without breaking the laws of physics. The LED produces 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, giving it an efficiency of 230 percent. That means it operates above "unity efficiency" — putting it into a category normally occupied by perpetual motion machines.

However, while MIT's diode puts out more than twice as much energy in photons as it's fed in electrons, it doesn't violate the conservation of energy because it appears to draw in heat energy from its surroundings instead. When it gets more than 100 percent electrically-efficient, it begins to cool down, stealing energy from its environment to convert into more photons."
Music

Submission + - Computer Program 'Evolves' Music From Noise (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have developed a program, called DarwinTunes, that produces 8-second sequences of randomly generated sounds, or loops, from a database of digital "genes." Now, with input from 7000 internet users who act as "natural selectors", the program has "evolved" these bits of noise into real music. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users' tastes exert their own kind of natural selection on popular music, nudging tunes to evolve out of cacophony.

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