Zonk - Slashdot User

Submission + - SPAM: Cellphones to monitor highway traffic

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Friday February 01, 2008 @01:39PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "On February 8, 2008, about 100 UC Berkeley students will participate in the Mobile Century experiment, using GPS mobile phones as traffic sensors. During the whole day, these students carrying the GPS-equipped Nokia N95 will drive along a 10-mile stretch of I-880 between Hayward and Fremont, California. 'The phones will store the vehicles' speed and position information every 3 seconds. These measurements will be sent wirelessly to a server for real-time processing.' As more and more cellphones are GPS-equipped, the traffic engineering community, which currently monitors traffic using mostly fixed sensors such as cameras and loop detectors, is tempted to use our phones to get real-time information about traffic. But read more for many other details and a map of the Hayward-Fremont loop where this traffic monitoring study will be done."

Submission + - SPAM: Use your cellphone as a 3-D mouse 1

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Saturday January 19, 2008 @01:49PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "In recent years, we've started to use our cellphones not only for placing calls or exchanging messages. Now, we take pictures, read our e-mails, listen to music or watch TV. But, according to New Scientist, UK researchers are going further with a prototype software that turns your cellphone into a 3-D mouse. The phone is connected to your computer via Bluetooth. And you control the image on the screen by rotating or moving your phone. As says one of the researchers, "it feels like a much more natural way to interact and exchange data." The technology might first be used in shopping malls to buy movie tickets or to interact with advertising displays. But read more for additional details and a picture showing how a researcher is using his cellphone to control what appears on his screen."

Submission + - SPAM: New mapping tool can save lives

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Thursday January 17, 2008 @02:01PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "It is obvious that knowing the location and availability of resources such as hospitals, transportation equipment and water during an emergency situation can save lives. Researchers at Georgia Tech started in 2000 to develop a collaborative mapping tool named GTVC (short for Geographic Tool for Visualization and Collaboration). Even if it was intended to support military applications at the beginning, the mapping tool can now be used by the emergency management community. It has already been deployed in Florida which plans to use it in all its counties and in Dakota County, Minnesota. According to Georgia Tech researchers, it could soon be used by more than 100 other cities, counties and local agencies. But read more for many additional details and some screenshots of this mapping tool."

Submission + - SPAM: State of US science report shows disturbing trends 1

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Thursday January 17, 2008 @12:44PM

coondoggie writes: "The National Science Board this week said leading science and engineering indicators tell a mixed story regarding the achievement of the US in science, research and development, and math in international comparisons. For example, US schools continue to lag behind internationally in science and math education. On the other hand, the US is the largest, single, R&D-performing nation in the world pumping some $340 billion into future-related technologies. The US also leads the world in patent development. The board's conclusions and Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 are contained in the group's biennial report on the state of science and engineering research and education in the United States sent to the President and Congress this week. [spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source

Submission + - What is Fair Use in the Digital Age?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Wednesday January 16, 2008 @02:15PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBC, and Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law school, continue their debate about copyright issues and technology on Saul Hansell's blog at the New York Times discussing Fair Use of commercial music and video as the raw materials for new creations. Cotton says that content protection on the broadband internet is really not a debate about fair use The fact that users can "take three or four movies and splice together their favorite action scenes and post them online does not mean that these uses are fair. There needs to be something more — something that truly injects some degree of original contribution from the maker other than just the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works." Wu's position is that "it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web." This is a continuation of the previous discussion on copy protection."

Submission + - SPAM: Online cartoonist breaks publishing record?

Submitted by

destinyland

on Saturday January 05, 2008 @11:36PM

destinyland writes: "The first collection of "Perry Bible Fellowship" comics racked up pre-sales of $300,000 due to its huge online following, and within seven weeks required a third printing. Ironically, the 25-year-old cartoonist speculates people would rather read his arty comics in a book than on a computer screen, and warns that "There's something wonderful, and soon-to-be mythic, about the printed page..." He also explains the strange anti-censorship crusade in high school that earned him an FBI record!"
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Google Algorithm to Search Out Hospital Superbugs 1

Submitted by

Googling Yourself

on Friday January 04, 2008 @10:45AM

Googling Yourself writes: "Researchers in the UK plan to use Google's PageRank algorithm to find how super-bugs like MRSA spread in a hospital setting. Previous studies have discovered how particular objects, like doctors' neckties, can harbor infection, but little is known about the network routes by which bugs spread. Mathematician Simon Shepherd plans to build a matrix describing all interactions between people and objects in a hospital ward, based on observing normal daily activity. "Obviously nurses move among patients and that can spread infection, but they also touch light switches and lots of other surfaces too," says Shepard., "If you observe a network of all those interactions you can build a matrix of which nodes in the network are in contact with which other nodes." Combining that information with the strength of different interactions within a ward makes it possible to calculate which ties to cut — by, perhaps, tougher cleaning — to maximally disrupt the network and cut infections. "Ultimately, we would like to produce a software tool so managers of wards can carry out the analysis for themselves," says Shepherd."

Submission + - A reverse engineer finds Kindle's hidden features

Submitted by bensafrickingenius on Friday January 04, 2008 @10:08AM

bensafrickingenius writes: CNET's Crave site has an interesting article on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9838934-1.html?tag=nl.e501

Submission + - Science "can prove the universe is a simulatio

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday January 04, 2008 @09:24AM

holy_calamity writes: A New Zealand physicist has written a paper saying that physicists should seriously explore the possibility the universe is a giant virtual reality simulation. He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation and also claims his VR hypothesis can explain relativity, the big bang and more. It should be possible to perform experiments to prove the hypothesis too. He reasons that if reality was to do something that information processing cannot, then it cannot be virtual.

Submission + - Did Insects Kill the Dinosaurs?

Submitted by

Ponca City, We Love You

on Friday January 04, 2008 @02:08AM

Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Asteroid impacts, massive volcanic flows, and now biting, disease-carrying insects have been put forward as an important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs. In the Late Cretaceous the world was covered with warm-temperate to tropical areas that swarmed with blood-sucking insects carrying leishmania, malaria, intestinal parasites, arboviruses and other pathogens, and caused repeated epidemics that slowly-but-surely wore down dinosaur populations while ticks, mites, lice and biting flies would have tormented and weakened them. "After many millions of years of evolution, mammals, birds and reptiles have evolved some resistance to these diseases," says Researcher George Poinar. "But back in the Cretaceous, these diseases were new and invasive, and vertebrates had little or no natural or acquired immunity to them." The confluence of new insect-spread diseases, loss of traditional food sources, and competition for plants by insect pests could all have provided a lingering, debilitating condition that dinosaurs were ultimately unable to overcome."

Submission + - Stern Measures Keep NASA's Kepler Mission on Track 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Thursday January 03, 2008 @12:39PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "NASA's new Space Science Division Director, Dr. S. Alan Stern, appears to be making headway in keeping in space projects like the Kepler Mission at their original budgeted cost creating anguish among researchers and contractors along the way. The New York Times reports that Stern's plan is to hold projects responsible for overruns forcing mission leaders to trim parts of their projects, streamline procedures or find other sources of financing. "The mission that makes the mess is responsible for cleaning it up," Stern says. Because of management problems, technical issues and other difficulties on the Kepler Mission, the price tag for Kepler went up 20% to $550 million and the launch slipped from the original 2006 target date to 2008. When the Kepler team asked for another $42 million, Stern's team threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take it over using the equipment that had already been built. The Kepler group came back with a solution that included cutting back the duration of the four-year mission by six months and scaling back preflight testing. "When they came to believe I was serious and had my boss's backing they took it seriously," says Stern. "They quickly found a way to erase that bill.""

Submission + - New Years Resolutions: An Engineering Approach

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @10:09AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Four out of five people who make New Year's resolutions will eventually break them and a third won't even make it to the end of January says the NY Times but experts say the real problem is that people make the wrong resolutions. The typical resolution often reflects a general desire. To engineer better behavior, it is more productive to focus on a specific goal. "Many clients make broad resolutions, but I advise them to focus the goals so that they are not overwhelmed,'' says Lisa R. Young. "Small and tangible one-day-at-a-time goals work best.'' Here are some resolutions that experts say can work: To lose weight, resolve to split an entree with your dining partner when dining out. To improve your fitness, wear a pedometer and monitor your daily activity. To improve family life, resolve to play with your kids at least one extra day a week. To improve your marriage, find a new activity you and your spouse both enjoy such as taking a pottery class. On a lighter note: What was Steve Jobs' New Year's Resolution?"

Submission + - GUI Design Book Recommendations? 8

Submitted by jetpack on Monday December 31, 2007 @07:39PM

jetpack writes: I've always hated writing user interfaces, and graphical user interfaces in particular. However, I suspect that is largely because I have no clue how to write a *good* one. By this, I don't mean the technical aspects, like using the APIs and so on. I mean what are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design?

To this end, I'd like to pick up a book or two (or three) and get my learn on. I'd appreciate some book suggestions from the UI experts in the Slashdot crowd.

Submission + - Google Products You Forgot All About

Submitted by

Googling Yourself

on Sunday December 30, 2007 @08:43PM

Googling Yourself writes: "Lifehacker has an interesting blog post on the "Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About" that includes stalwarts like Google Trends and Google Alerts and a few others that may not be quite so familiar like Google Personals, Google's WYSIWYG web site creation tool, and Flight Simulator for Google Earth. How many of the ten do you use regularly and what other Google products do you use that everybody else has forgotten all about?"

Journal SPAM: Digital Astrophotography - Review

Journal by stoolpigeon on Sunday December 30, 2007 @04:39PM

In the 80's there were a series of commercials for Reeses Peanut Butter Cups that revolved around the theme of accidental meetings between chocolate and peanut butter. The individuals would realize that the two tastes that they loved separately were even better together. Two great loves for many card carrying geeks are digital photography and astronomy. "

Slashdot Top Deals