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Cellphones

Submission + - Wikipedia Will Soon Be Available Via Text Messages (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Even as we all love to debate the scholarly merits of Wikipedia, there's no denying that it's an immensely powerful research and learning tool. That goes doubly so in poor nations, where access to education materials can be limited to nonexistent.

To that end, Wikimedia started the Wikipedia Zero project, which aims to partner with mobile service providers to bring Wikipedia to poor regions free of charge. It's a killer strategy, because while computer and internet access is still fleeting for much of the world, cell phones are far more ubiquitous. Wikimedia claims that four mobile partnerships signed since 2012 brings free Wiki service to 330 million cell subscribers in 35 countries, a huge boon for folks whose phones have web capability but who can't afford data charges."
Robotics

Submission + - Robots, Apparently, Are Botching Surgeries All Over the Place (vice.com) 1

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: ""We are committed to helping victims of robot surgery receive the medical care and compensation they deserve As both a lawyer and a licensed medical doctor, Dr. Francois Blaudeau has made it his mission to fight for the victims of traumatic complications as a result of botched robot surgery."

That's the opening salve from the medical malpractice lawyers who run the slick fear factory of a website, BadRobotSurgery.com. According to the doctor-lawyers behind it—doctor-lawyers like Francois Blaudeau, MD, JD, FACHE, FCLM—“thousands of people have suffered severe and critical complications at the hands of surgical robots.” In fact, “robotic surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.”"
News

Submission + - Ironically, a Man's Face Can Tell You If He's Likely to Act Racist (vice.com) 3

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "What can we tell about a person from his or her face? Quite a bit, it seems. Psychological experiments since the turn of the millennium have indicated we do a good job judging people's sexual orientation, reproductive fitness, criminal proclivities, and even whether they're Mormon or not, all based on their faces. A new study suggests there’s another trait we can add to the list: a man’s willingness to express racist beliefs.

There’s an obvious irony to a study that says we can tell if a man will act bigoted based on the shape of his face. But the logic underpinning the study, conducted by researchers at the University of Delaware and soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science, is a circuitous and unexpected one, and makes a persuasive case."
Businesses

Submission + - Will Internet Poker Make a Comeback by Going Brick-and-Mortar? (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "It's the most modern lament in retail: Brick-and-mortar shopping has gone the way of the dodo as everyone buys their junk online. But for the once-booming online gambling market, salvation may require a reversal of that trend. For one online gaming giant, buying a casino in Atlantic City is the first step to bring Internet poker back to the US.

In 2006, playing online poker for real cash was deemed illegal. While that didn't stop more serious players from playing, especially once the big hosts started funneling cash offshore, the FBI and DoJ's crackdown on April 15, 2011 did. The big trio of online poker–PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker–were all shut down, domains seized, and executives arrested on charges related to fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. While PokerStars and others continued operations in foreign, legal markets, the U.S. poker craze pretty much collapsed.

That doesn't mean the lucrative market has gone away. Now, the Rational Group, which owns both PokerStars and Full Tilt, may be hinting at a workaround: the company is looking to buy a struggling casino in Atlantic City. Rational faces a rather large mess of regulatory hurdles, but if it does end up acquiring the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, it would have a huge foothold in New Jersey's young market for internet gambling."
Space

Submission + - The Flaming Meteor that Terrified Russia as Seen on Dash Cam Videos (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "While the world waits for an asteroid large enough to destroy a city to graze the orbits of our television satellites, citizens of Central Russia were greeted early Friday morning by a more mortality-shaking kind of astronomical event: a giant meteorite exploding across the atmosphere in a spectacular fireball, brighter than the still-rising sun, blowing out windows and injuring as many as 400 people.

‘‘A serious meteor fell,’’ Sergey Galitskiy, the billionaire CEO of OAO Magnit, Russia’s biggest food retailer, wrote on Twitter. ‘‘At our hypermarket in Emanzhelinsk, windows were blown out, the roof shook, there was a strong shock wave.’’

According to state-sponsored radio station The Voice of Russia, the meteor was allegedly intercepted by a missile salvo fired from an air defense facility at Urzhumka village near Chelyabinsk, "at an altitude of 20 kilometers." "Witnesses reported a sudden change in atmospheric pressure upon the impact that made their ears pop. The space object hit the ground with a tremendous crash that resembled thunder and earthquake, damaging houses in Chelyabinsk and cutting off communications, witnesses say."
The Military

Submission + - America Won't Float Its Giant Terrifying Spy Blimp Over Afghanistan After All (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Apologies Afghanistan, it appears that you will not have the pleasure of a 100-meter spy blimp floating over you, observing in detail the minutia of your citizens’ daily lives. Too bad.

Inside Defense reports that the Army’s Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) has been terminated for cost and schedule-related reasons:

The reason likely has to do with the program being behind schedule and over budget ... LEMV's fate — particularly its intended deployment to Afghanistan — has been in question since earlier last year. The window to send the airship to the battlefield is closing as U.S. troops prepare for a withdrawal in 2014. The airship was once scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in December 2011.

And now it’s been deflated. Just after it had logged its first successful test-float, too."
News

Submission + - Scanning the Future of 3D-Printed Sex Toys (NSFW) (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Noah Kaplan is here to get his penis scanned. He gestures wildly, his bathrobe peeking open as he rapidly recounts why he's doing this, going on and off the record about his sexual preferences. I can barely keep up. We’re in a room at the Eventi Hotel in Chelsea, where Kaplan is sitting in front of an impressive camera that can scan in three dimensions and create a virtual model of any object. Today, that camera is going to be used to scan Kaplan’s penis from several angles. Experts will then composite those scans into one image that will be printed out using a 3D printer, resulting in an exact, three-dimensional replica of the 26-year-old's, erm, member. This is the very beginning of the 3D-printed sex toy-industry, though you can scarcely call it an industry yet."
Education

Submission + - Ten Radically Futuristic Ideas in Obama's State of the Union Address (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Obama's first State of the Union Address since his reelection was largely and predictably dedicated to nearsighted deficit talk and weary calls to overcome Congressional dysfunction. But amidst the boilerplate—and the comparatively impassioned calls for action on gun control and, to a lesser extent, climate change—Obama snuck in some radical, forward-looking ideas. Some are downright utopian. SOTUs are notorious for being lofty wish-lists, so consider these proposals as Obama's wildest political fantasies.

Here's how the president wants us to win the future this time:

1. Transform Declining Towns into 3D Printing Hubs

2. Spend Money on Science Like We're in a Space Race

3. Use Oil and Gas Money to Fund Cleantech Research

4. Amp Up Wind Power

5. Go All-In On Solar

6. Build High Speed Rail to Attract Foreign Investment

7. Get Self-Healing Power Grids

8. Acheive Universal Preschool

9. Turn High Schools Into High Tech Incubators

10. Peg the Minimum Wage to the Cost of Living

Of course, Obama had plenty of backwards and incoherent ideas, too—ramping up oil drilling while trying to fight climate change, signing a cyber-security executive order that somehow promotes both "information-sharing" and privacy, and referring to his "transparent" war on terror without mentioning drones, for instance. But this is a difficult time for the U.S. and for Washington, and even as he pointed out huge challenges, Obama did his job as President tonight, pointing at America's opportunities, and the kind of changes that, you know, you want to believe in."
News

Submission + - Listen to Baby Ants Talking (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Complex, socially-tiered societies require complex communication. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that eusocial animals like ants are also incredibly communicative—more so than we previously understood, according to a new study in Current Biology. Many ants begin communicating acoustically from a very young age, in fact, in such a way that scientists suggest may be very important to their survival.

As explained in an article by Carrie Arnold at ScienceNow, scientists believed until only recently that ants communicated only through pheromones, leaving, for example, scent trails behind them for other ants to follow—hence the phenomenon of single-file marching ants. (They can also, newer research suggests, use magnetic and vibrational landmarks to guide themselves around.)"
Apple

Submission + - Apple's Rumored iWatch Could Be Your Own Personal Surveillance Machine (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "If you're going to listen to anybody about the future of Apple products, you should listen to the dude that used to build them. Bruce Tognazzini worked at Apple for 14 years, where "he designed Apple’s first human interface and wrote eight editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines," according to his website. Now, he's a blogger (of course) and a consultant (oh God) and a performer (what?) and an "expert witness" (usually not a good sign) and a pilot and, like, six other things. He also invented the viewfinder that you probably have you your digital camera. You get it. This guy's accomplished, an original Apple guy and probably comes equipped with a monster-sized ego. Nevertheless, when he talks about Apple products, I'm actually inclined to believe him.

A lot of the fanboys mentioned above are kind of obsessed with this iWatch idea. It's a good idea! The rumors that've been floating around cyber space include everything from a watch that's a glorified iPod Nano to a watch that comes with a built-in projector. Tognazzini blogged about his own ideas about this so-called iWatch project this week. In addition to his Apple insider knowledge—which is admittedly out-of-date since he hasn't worked there in two decades—it seems like he's actually talked to some current Apple employees about this. This is all to say that even if his ideas don't make it into the iWatch, they could end up in another smartwatch. Some of them are a little creepy.

Smartwatches actually already exist. There's the Pebble smartwatch, a Kickstarter phenomenon that just started shipping. Something called the Cookoo, something else called the Martianthat you can talk to. Tognazzini says they all stink, basically. The real "killer applications" of a smartwatch should and would change the world. The first thing he mentions is straight out of a spy movie. In effect, it could work like a personal identification chip that you wear on your wrist."
Books

Submission + - Used Ebooks, the Ridiculous Idea that Could Also Destroy the Publishing Industry (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Amazon has a patent to sell used ebooks. When I first scanned the headline, I thought it must be some Onion-esque gag, and I'm sure I wasn't alone. Used e-books? As in, rumpled up, dog-eared pdfs? Faded black-and-white kindle cover art, Calibri notes typed in the margins that you can't erase?

Barely-amusing image aside, used ebooks are for real. Or at least have a very real potential to become real. See, Amazon just cleared a patent for technology that would allow it to create an online marketplace for used ebooks--essentially, if you own an ebook, you would theoretically be able to put it up for sale on a secondary market.

The approved patent describes the process:

Digital objects including e-books, audio, video, computer applications, etc., purchased from an original vendor by a user are stored in a user's personalized data store ... When the user no longer desires to retain the right to access the now-used digital content, the user may move the used digital content to another user's personalized data store when permissible and the used digital content is deleted from the originating user's personalized data store."
China

Submission + - Beijing's Hacker Bike Pumps Clean Air Into Your Lungs as You Ride (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Beijing is a smog-infested hellhole, everybody knows that. Pollution level are off the charts, but a man's gotta eat, so millions of people are out and about moving through the muck every day, lining their blackening lungs with toxic air. And millions of them are riding bikes. If only, then, those bikes came equipped with a clean supply of oxygen, so the good people of China might shield their lungs from airborne decay.

So here's Beijing resident Matt Hope with their ticket: a bike that actually purifies that black air for them, through a filtration system on the back and feeds it through a gas mask nozzle up front. It's called the Breathing Bike."
Math

Submission + - How Your Ears Do Math Better Than Mathematicians (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "The assumption was that ears use something akin to a Fourier transformation. A Fourier transform, named after the French mathematician who also identified the Greenhouse Effect, is essentially when a sound wave is stretched way out until its details are revealed. In more mathy terms, you take a signal, which is a mathematical function of time--a mechanical thing of air molecules traveling through space--and turn it into an array, or series of different frequencies. The Fourier transform is found all over science, and not just sound.

The transformation is done through what's called an "integration" of the original, mechanical function of time. (If you've taken calculus, you should remember integration.) Basically, this is taking that function and recovering information from it by mathematically slicing it up into tiny bits. It's pretty neat. This, it turns out, is how we get meaning (words, music, whatever) from sound (that big wave in the ocean). Or so scientists have thought.

Turns out this might not be quite the case. Researchers at Rockefeller University devised an experiment to test the limit of this kind of analysis via Fourier transformation.

Rockefeller researchers, Jacob Oppenheim and Marcelo Magnasco, took a group of 12 composers and musicians and tested them to see if they could analyze a sound beyond the uncertainty limit of Fourier analysis. And guess what? They busted it down. "Our subjects often exceeded the uncertainty limit, sometimes by more than tenfold, mostly through remarkable timing acuity," the authors write in Physical Review Letters."
Japan

Submission + - This Year, More Japanese Tsunami Debris Will Wash Up on U.S. Shores Than Ever (vice.com) 1

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "When the tragedy-bearing tsunami slammed into Japan in 2011 the fallout was felt all around the world, both figuratively and literally. The crisis that unfolded at Fukushima led to a globe-spanning conversation about the merits and pitfalls of nuclear power, and to nations like Germany and Japan taking their reactors offline. But a less momentous and oft-overlooked result of the earthquake is that for two years now, it has lined the oceans and the west coast of North America with an impressive amount of debris.

The detritus—everything from Styrofoam trash to whole refrigerators—has washed ashore everywhere from Hawaii to California to British Columbia to Alaska. Especially Alaska. Chris Pallister, the president of an environmental NGO in Alaska recently told NPR it’s gotten so bad on some of Alaska’s shores that it’s like “standing in landfill out here.”"
News

Submission + - The Moth-Driven Robot Is a Step Towards Automatons That Mimic Life (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "a team from the University of Tokyo developed a small robot and gave it to silkmoth a to drive.

Essentially, the team was able to develop a scent-detecting robot that is directed by a silkmoth, and which actually was able to tracks scents even better than the silkmoth could on its own. All 14 silkmoths tested in the rig were successful in driving it towards the goal."

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