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Medicine

Submission + - Should Medical Apps Be Regulated? (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by maximus1
maximus1 writes: There's a tidal wave of medical-related apps coming to smartphones and tablets that will be used by doctors and patients alike. But how should the medical establishment deal with them? Neurologist Steven Levine, currently working on an app for stroke victims, thinks they should be treated like new medicines: developed using scientific peer review and subject to regulation by the government or professional associations. Obstetrician Kurian Thott, developer of an app called iRounds that helps communication between doctors, thinks they should be released quickly and the market should decide which take off. What do you think?
Space

Submission + - Earth's Corner of the Galaxy Just Got a Little Lonelier

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Only 4 stars, including Barnard's Star, are within 6 light years of the Sun, and only 11 are within 10 light years. That's why Barnard's star, popularized in Robert Forward's hard-sf novel, "Flight of the Dragonfly," is often short-listed as a target for humanity's first interstellar probe. Astronomers have long hoped to find a habitable planet around it, an alien Earth that might someday bear the boot prints of a future Neil Armstrong, or the tire tracks of a souped-up 25th-century Curiosity rover. But now Ross Anderson reports that a group of researchers led by UC Berkeley's Jieun Choi have delivered the fatal blow to Barnard's Star when they revealed the results of 248 precise Doppler measurements that were designed to examine the star for wobbles indicative of planets around it. The measurements, taken over a period of 25 years, led to a depressing conclusion: "the habitable zone around Barnard's star appears to be devoid of roughly Earth-mass planets or larger . . . [p]revious claims of planets around the star by van de Kamp are strongly refuted." NASA's Kepler space telescope, which studies a group of distant Milky Way stars, has found more than 2,000 exoplanet candidates in just the past two years, leading many to suspect that our galaxy is home to billions of planets, a sizable portion of which could be habitable. "This non-detection of nearly Earth-mass planets around Barnard’s Star is surely unfortunate, as its distance of only 1.8 parsecs would render any Earth-size planets valuable targets for imaging and spectroscopy, as well as compelling destinations for robotic probes by the end of the century.""

Submission + - The Verge interviews Neal Stephenson (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: You all like Stephenson, right? "In a sprawling interview with The Verge, the author offered up some of his many plans and thoughts, including a new “research-heavy” novel, his trouble with Twitter, and why Kickstarter might be superior to venture capital."
Google

Submission + - Google, Oracle Deny Direct Payments to Media (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Earlier this month, the judge in the Oracle v. Google trial ordered the companies to disclose the names of bloggers and reporters who had taken payments from them. Not surprisingly, both companies have denied making direct payments to writers (with the exception of Florian Mueller of FOSSPatents whose relationship to Google was disclosed in April). But Oracle has tattled on Google regarding some indirect connections. In particular, Google called out Ed Black for an article he wrote about the case for Forbes. And Jonathan Band, co-author of the book, 'Interfaces on Trial 2.0,' which Google cited in its April 3, 2012 copyright brief."
Android

Submission + - Google Play Gets An Upgrade (itworld.com)

Submitted by maximus1
maximus1 writes: Google's Play Store got an upgrade on Friday, mostly incremental changes designed to help you more easily part with your money. But one of the big unannounced changes, as Android Police points out, is 'smart app updates' — incremental app updates so that the only data pushed to your phone is the code that changed.
Open Source

Submission + - MySQL slowly turning closed source? (mariadb.org)

Submitted by
mpol
mpol writes: "Sergei from MariaDB speculated on some changes within MySQL 5.5.27. It seems new testcases aren't included with MySQL anymore, which leaves developers depending on it in the cold.
"Does this mean that test cases are no longer open source? Oracle did not reply to my question. But indeed, there is evidence that this guess is true. For example, this commit mail shows that new test cases, indeed, go in this “internal” directory, which is not included in the MySQL source distribution."
On a similar note, updates for the version history on Launchpad are not being updated anymore.
What is Oracle's plan here? And is alienating the developer community just not seen as a problem at Oracle?"
Apple

Submission + - Judge Koh suggests Apple is "smoking crack" in Samsung case (slashgear.com)

Submitted by infodragon
infodragon writes: Today in the ongoing Apple vs Samsung court case Judge Lucy Koh’s patience wore thin as Apple presented a 75-page document highlighting 22 witnesses it would like to call in for rebuttal testimony, provided the court had the time. As those following the case closely know quite well, the case has a set number of hours which are already wearing quite thin. As quoted by The Verge as they sat in the courtroom listening in, Koh wondered aloud why Apple would offer the list “when unless you’re smoking crack you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called!”
Google

Submission + - Dremel-Based Project Accepted as Apache Incubator (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "The technology behind Google's BigQuery analytics as a service is based on the company's in-house ad hoc query system called Dremel that can store and search trillion-row datasets without the complexity and batch limitations of Hadoop. Today, Hadoop vendor MapR announced a new open source iteration of Dremel called Drill, which is now an incubation project with the Apache Softare Foundation. First up for the Apache Drill project: getting a consensus on Drill's APIs so that other vendors can work with it, says project leader Tomer Shiran."
Social Networks

Submission + - Training Cops To Use Social Media Information (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "Cynthia Navarro starts her sessions training police to mine social media in dramatic fashion: by quickly finding data about the officers themselves. She also provides information about who's where online — for instance, younger suspects will probably be focused on Twitter, while older folks are on Twitter or even MySpace. It's all part of a drive to teach even nontechinical police officers at small and midsized departments how to use social media to track suspects."
United States

Submission + - The U.S.'s Insane Attempt to Build a Harbor with a Two Megaton Nuclear Bomb

Submitted by pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: Its destructive force aside, the atomic bomb represented the pinnacle of American scientific development in the mid-20th century. And even as scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer seemed rather horrified at what they’d unleashed, others became more consumed by the scientific possibilities of the atomic age. The most famous proponent of nuclear was Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and one of the inspirations for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

As the world’s superpowers raced towards mutually-assured destruction, Teller became more enthusiastic about finding potential non-weapon uses for the phenomenal power of splitting or fusing the atom. Teller liked nuclear energy; his final paper, in 2006, would detail how to build an underground thorium reactor. But as the Cold War heated up, Teller became obsessed with using actual atomic bombs for civil engineering. Thanks to that type of numbers-driven thinking — if a bomb is as powerful as a million tons of TNT, why not use it to reshape the Panama Canal? — as well as Teller’s incessant prodding, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) created Project Chariot. The mission: to create a new port in northwestern Alaska using a series of underwater nuclear explosions.
Facebook

Submission + - The Long Arm of the Tweet (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "According to a recent Lexis-Nexis survey of 1200 law enforcement personnel, 80% use social media to conduct investigations. And it's easy to see why: While it helps that you share 'enormously detailed information' online, it's your social network that really does the talking, says Lee Altschuler, a Federal defense attorney. 'Cops will figure out who the associates of the suspect are,' Altschuler explained. 'The police will then friend or connect to the associates, working to gain their trust, and then will eventually friend the target directly, or be able to glean information about the target through the associates.' Of course, this is pretty much the same action they've always taken in the offline world, it's just far more efficient on social media (plus, there's the aforementioned willingness to share information online)."
SuSE

Submission + - SUSE Slowly Shows UEFI Secure Boot Plan (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "One blog post at a time, SUSE is revealing its plan for getting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) to boot on machines with UEFI Secure Boot. The short version: 'For now, it seems, SLES will implement an approach similar to that used by Fedora,' writes Brian Proffit. 'For whatever reason, SUSE seems to be taking a Saturday-morning-serial approach to their big reveal, taking their own sweet time to explain why they are choosing the path they are planning to implement,' writes Proffitt. '[Director of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Olaf] Kirch's first blog entry on Tuesday merely introduced the problem of UEFI Secure Boot. Today's blog only specified the use of the shim bootloader.' Just dying to know what's next? Tune in to the SUSE blog."
Android

Submission + - Paid Media Must Be Disclosed In Oracle v. Google (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "One of the odder moments during the Oracle v. Google trial over Java patents came when patent blogger Florian Mueller revealed that he had a "consulting relationship" with Oracle. Now it looks like we're going to find out which other tech bloggers and journalists were on the payroll of one of the two sides in this epic fight. Judge William Alsup has ordered that both parties disclose 'all authors, journalists, commentators or bloggers who have reported or commented on any issues in this case and who have received money (other than normal subscription fees) from the party or its counsel during the pendency of this action.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's Lost Decade (vanityfair.com)

Submitted by onetwentyone
onetwentyone writes: A very telling look into how Microsoft has stumbled along for the last ten years from Vanity Fair.

"Amid a dynamic and ever changing marketplace, Microsoft—which declined to comment for this article—became a high-tech equivalent of a Detroit car-maker, bringing flashier models of the same old thing off of the assembly line even as its competitors upended the world. Most of its innovations have been financial debacles or of little consequence to the bottom line. And the performance showed on Wall Street; despite booming sales and profits from its flagship products, in the last decade Microsoft’s stock barely budged from around $30, while Apple’s stock is worth more than 20 times what it was 10 years ago. In December 2000, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $510 billion, making it the world’s most valuable company. As of June it is No. 3, with a market cap of $249 billion. In December 2000, Apple had a market cap of $4.8 billion and didn’t even make the list. As of this June it is No. 1 in the world, with a market cap of $541 billion."
Television

Submission + - Is TV Over The 'Net Really Cheaper Than Cable? (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "More and more people are joining the ranks of "cord-cutters" — those who cancel their cable TV subscriptions and get their televisied entertainment either for free over the airwaves or over the Internet. But, assuming you're going to do things legally, is this really a cheaper option? Depends on what you watch. Brian Proffitt contemplated this move, and he walks you through the calculations he made to figure out the prices of cutting the cord. He weighed the costs of various a la carte and all-you-can-eat Internet streaming services, and took into account the fact that Internet service on its own is often pricier than it would be if bundled with cable TV."

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