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Comment Tinker Bell is an Engineer Now (Score 1) 298

by JLavezzo (#34699170) Attached to: Can Movies Inspire Kids To Be Future Scientists?

In Disney's 2008 "Tinker Bell" Tinker Bell is an engineer. She spends much of the movie fighting "her destiny" because, basically, the "tinkers" are not cool. The general theme though is that she has a powerful gift for engineering and that she should recognize that. The climax of the film is Tinker Bell frantically producing blueprints while schematics and equations float around her head. She saves the day, wins the admiration and respect of the community, her friends and her self. She also earns the privilege of participating in a group activity she though the was going to be excluded from because she wasn't cool.

Personally, it chokes me up a little bit to imagine 6 year old girls saying, "When I grow up I want to be an engineer just like Tinker Bell."
Firefox

Firefox Lorentz Keeps Plugin Crashes Under Control 115

Posted by timothy from the pleasant-fantasy dept.
pastababa writes "A beta of the Firefox Lorentz project is now available for download and public testing. Eming reports Firefox 'Lorentz' provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in plugins. Plugins run in a separate process from the browser. If a plugin crashes it will not crash the browser, and unresponsive plugins are automatically restarted. The process-isolation feature has been in Google's Chrome from the beginning. Chrome sandboxes individual tabs, and the crash of one tab does not affect the running of the rest of Chrome browser. Firefox currently isolates only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page. Mozilla encourages users to test Firefox 'Lorentz' on their favorite websites. Users who install Firefox 'Lorentz' will eventually be automatically updated to a future version of Firefox 3.6 in which this feature is included."
Biotech

Doctors Skirt FDA To Heal Patients With Stem Cells 394

Posted by kdawson from the self-supplied dept.
kkleiner writes "For many years countless individuals in the US have had to watch with envy as dogs and horses with joint and bone injuries have been cured with stem cell procedures that the FDA has refused to approve for humans. Now, in an exciting development, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Colorado has found a way to skirt the FDA and provide these same stem cell treatments to humans. The results have been stunning, allowing many patients to walk or run who have not been able to do so for years. There's no surgery required, just a needle to extract and then re-inject the cells where they are needed. There has always been a lot of hype around stem cells, but this is the real deal. Real humans are getting real treatment that works, and we should all hope that more companies will begin offering this procedure in other states soon."
Google

Google Attack On the Mobile Market Rumored 324

Posted by kdawson from the first-the-itablet-and-now-this dept.
xchg writes in with a somewhat speculative, though plausible, piece from WiseAndroid claiming that Google is gearing up for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market that will include a new, Google-branded handset and the first comprehensive Google phone service with unlimited free calls. "The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Googlephone to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile. International calls start from... just over a penny a minute. Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging. Google sounded its intentions two weeks ago when it purchased a small company called Gizmo5... [E]xperts are predicting that the Googlephone will be launched in the US early next year."
The Military

Iraq Swears By Dowsing Rod Bomb Detector 652

Posted by samzenpus from the one-man's-junk-is-another-man's-junk-science dept.
jggimi writes "According to the New York Times, more than fifteen hundred remote sensing devices have been sold to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior, at prices ranging from $16,500 to $60,000 each. The devices are used for bomb and weapon detection at checkpoints, and have no battery or other power source. Sounds great, but according to a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, they work on the same principle as a Ouija board — the power of suggestion. He described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod. Even though the device has been debunked by the US Military, the US Department of Justice, and even Sandia National Laboratories, the Iraqis are thrilled with the devices. 'Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,' said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives."

Comment Good ol' false dichotomy (Score 1) 239

by JLavezzo (#29849897) Attached to: Developing Nations Crippled By Broadband Costs

Why can't we have all of that?

Development is not homogeneous. Some people may still be subsistence farmers with little access to clean water. 150 miles away, someone in a city may have running water, electricity and an office job. But her business is hampered by astronomical communication costs. Her business profits provide tax revenue to the government. If tax revenues go up, the government can do things like improve the roads to the farmer's town so he can get more crops to market and not be a subsistence farmer anymore an just be a farmer who can afford school fees for his children.

Submission + - Twitter survey causes tweet-alanche (skepticblog.org)

Submitted by JLavezzo
JLavezzo writes: Brian Dunning, host of the Skeptoid podcast, decided to combine a survey he needed data for with an experiement into the dynamics of Twitter's social networking. Did it work?
'The good parts worked better than I hoped,' he says 'and unfortunately, undesired side effects ... which rendered your Twitter account nearly useless on September 14 and 15, if you follow me or anyone else who follows me ... were just as potent. Now, before I describe what happened, let me state outright that it was shockingly naive of me not to foresee what would happen. It was dumb, it annoyed a lot of people, and I have no excuse other than failure to think it through very well. So, my apologies, and I offer no defense of what turned out to be a giant mess.'
Read on so you'll be prepared when your marketing director asks you to set up the same thing.

Submission + - How Not To Do A Twitter Survey (skepticblog.org)

Submitted by JLavezzo
JLavezzo writes: Brian Dunning posted an article on what he calls his 'greatest clusterfuck of the year: the Skeptoid Twitter Experiment, which rendered your Twitter account nearly useless on September 14 and 15, if you follow me or anyone else who follows me.
I have an upcoming Skeptoid podcast episode for which I want to include some informal survey data. I've also been thinking a lot about Twitter for its potential to virally spread information. So I thought it would be a clever idea to combine my survey with Twitter, which (I thought) would be a lot of fun for everyone and would accomplish two goals:
1. Virally spread awareness of my podcast, Skeptoid
2. Get a huge number of respondents to my survey
Well, it worked. The good parts worked better than I hoped, and unfortunately, undesired side effects were just as potent.'
As one commenter put it:
'Turning Twitter's echo chamber into a denial-of-service attack. How fiendishly clever.'

Submission + - Lawyer demands jury stops Googling (itwire.com) 1

Submitted by coomaria
coomaria writes: So lawyers want to get juries to sign, on threat of prison, that they won't Google the case they are hearing. Apparently it could influence their decision, and only lawyers are allowed to do that, right?
Space

Submission + - Planck Satellite Releases First Images (wordpress.com)

Submitted by davecl
davecl writes: The Planck Satellite has released its first images. These are from the 'First Look Survey' and show a strip of the sky scanned at a range of radio and submillimetre wavelengths. The results are already better than what was seen by the previous microwave background satellite, WMAP. ESA's coverage of the results can be found here, with more details and images available in English and French. The Planck Mission Blog contains more details of the project and continuing coverage. I maintain the mission blog but even I am impressed with these first images!

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