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The Internet

Submission + - Athletes Can Blog at Olympics - with Restrictions

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Let the blogging begin. The IOC has given athletes the right to blog at the Beijing Games this summer, a first for the Olympics, as long as they follow the many rules it set to protect copyright agreements, confidential information and security. The IOC said blogs by athletes "should take the form of a diary or journal" and should not contain any interviews with other competitors at the games. They also should not write about other athletes. Still pictures are allowed as long as they do not show Olympic events. Athletes must obtain the consent of their competitors if they wish to photograph them. Also, athletes cannot use their blogs for commercial gain. The IOC said accredited participants in the Olympics also "should not disclose any information ... which may compromise the security, staging and organization of the games." Domain names for blogs should not include any word similar to "Olympic" or "Olympics." Bloggers are, however, urged to link their blogs to official Olympic Web sites."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - SPAM: Q&A: Nitty-gritty of Bluetooth/Wi-Fi union

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The Bluetooth Special Interest Group this week announced a plan to let the Bluetooth software stack run over high-bandwidth 802.11 Wi-Fi radios, in addition to the short-range, 1M to 3Mbps Bluetooth radios in use today. Michael Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, gets into the details here.
Link to Original Source
Wii

Submission + - Older Demographic is Playing Video Games 1

Submitted by
Reservoir Hill
Reservoir Hill writes: "The NY Times had an interesting article last week about the new mass audience for gaming among families, women and older people. The importance of the mass audience in gaming's spectacular growth is seen most clearly in the success of Nintendo's Wii, which is far outselling its more technically advanced hardware competitors, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and PlayStation 3 from Sony. Wii Play was the No. 2-selling game of last year even though it received an abysmal score of 58 out of 100 at Metacritic, which aggregates reviews. The Times says that as video games become more popular hard-core gamers are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience. "Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together.""
Education

Submission + - Toddlers Learn Language by Data Mining? 1

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Toddlers' brains can effortlessly do what the most powerful computers with the most sophisticated software cannot, learn language simply by hearing it used and a ground-breaking new theory postulates that young children are able to learn large groups of words rapidly by data-mining. Cognitive Science researchers Linda Smith and Chen Yu attempted to teach 28 12- to 14-month-olds six words by showing them two objects at a time on a computer monitor while two pre-recorded words were read to them. No information was given regarding which word went with which image. After viewing various combinations of words and images, however, the children were surprisingly successful at figuring out which word went with which picture. Yu and Smith say it's possible that the more words tots hear, and the more information available for any individual word, the better their brains can begin simultaneously ruling out and putting together word-object pairings, thus learning what's what. Yu says if they can identify key factors involved in this form of learning and how it can be manipulated, they might be able to make learning languages easier for children and adults, through training DVDs and other means. The learning mechanisms used by the children could also be used to further machine learning."
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: Time-Warner slaps $10 surcharge on iTunes movies? 4

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "Time-Warner wants to charge a per-gigabyte fee. A leaked memo reveals they're now watching how many gigabytes customers use in a "consumption-based" pricing experiment in Texas. "As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network," Time-Warner complains, mulling plans to cap usage at 5-gigabytes, with more expensive pricing plans granting 10-, 20-, and 40-gigabyte quotas. Steven Levy suggests Time-Warner's real aim is to hobble iTunes, raising the cost of a movie download by $10 (or $30 for a high-definition movie). Eyeing Time-Warner's experiment, Comcast cable also says they're evaluating a pay-per-gigabyte model."
Link to Original Source
Wireless Networking

Submission + - SPAM: Cellphones to monitor highway traffic

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
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."
Input Devices

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

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
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."
Software

Submission + - SPAM: New mapping tool can save lives

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
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."
United States

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

Submitted by
coondoggie
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
The Internet

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

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
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."
Books

Submission + - SPAM: Online cartoonist breaks publishing record?

Submitted by
destinyland
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
Google

Submission + - Google Algorithm to Search Out Hospital Superbugs 1

Submitted by
Googling Yourself
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."
Puzzle Games (Games)

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

Submitted by holy_calamity
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.
Biotech

Submission + - Did Insects Kill the Dinosaurs?

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
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."

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