Comment Ann Arbor (Score 5, Informative) 560
42.31124, -83.67578
Thought it was a particularly large person stomping around near my cube. The floor shimmied slightly. It was cool.
Comment Re:Security and Privacy (Score 1) 160
I'd like to offer another view. It's not what you post that you need to be worried about. It's the increasing specificity with which Facebook "knows" you through the metadata of your relationships with your friends, friends-of-friends, their likes, dislikes, purchases, status updates, and their posts about you and your family. None of which you can control, and all of which becomes increasingly invasive over time.
Comment We need to start dealing with this problem (Score 1) 128
This is fast becoming a huge issue, and not just for Britain. There are legal and permissions and privacy problems that have to be addressed or nearly all of our digital works will simply vanish, in the not too distant future. The wayback machine doesn't even begin to address the issue. Dynamic and web2.0 sites often have metadata and links that are only valid if the site is working as intended - a snapshot will not work to capture it. A lot of valuable information not available elsewhere is already lost as people stop paying for various freemium accounts or hosting fees or as companies go out of business. Sometimes that data gets saved (Netscape's javascript development site, saved by Mozilla.org, UseNet groups saved by Google) but many more times it does not.
I've attempted to write up some of the issues here:
Proposal: Advance Directives for our digital legacies
http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000743.html
Comment It's not just a technical problem (Score 1) 287
It's a legal and social issue as well. Unlike something written on paper, works on the web are prone to disappear when payments to the service involved stop.
Proposal: Advance Directives for our digital legacies
Israeli Scientists Freeze Water By Warming It 165
ccktech writes "As reported by NPR and Chemistry world, the journal Science has a paper by David Ehre, Etay Lavert, Meir Lahav, and Igor Lubomirsky [note: abstract online; payment required to read the full paper] of Israel's Weizmann Institute, who have figured out a way to freeze pure water by warming it up. The trick is that pure water has different freezing points depending on the electrical charge of the surface it resides on. They found out that a negatively charged surface causes water to freeze at a lower temperature than a positively charged surface. By putting water on the pyroelectric material Lithium Tantalate, which has a negative charge when cooler but a positive change when warmer; water would remain a liquid down to -17 degrees C., and then freeze when the substrate and water were warmed up and the charge changed to positive, where water freezes at -7 degrees C."
Comment Re:We got hit by this (Score 1) 144
I'll add your post to the end of my article (with credit!), very helpful. Thanks!
Comment What the * is a Cyber Warrior? (Score 1) 170
Just saying it does not make it mean something. We need a new congress.
Comment Re:We got hit by this (Score 5, Informative) 144
If you run insecure web apps, they can use http injection to write to your .htaccess file. See my post on how I fixed my own site after one of these attacks.
http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000505.html
Comment Try dimdim? (Score 2, Informative) 170
We used it the other day and were very happy with it - it's free to try for small groups.
Comment Read this a few days ago and had to laugh (Score 1) 398
About 5 years ago I attended a dinner in Michigan where Senator Debbie Stabenow gave a speech on how we would save the auto industry by switching to electronic medical records. The theory was that that would reduce the 1200 or more per car that GM was spending on health insurance and pensions for retirees.
Comment I'm not sure I believe those numbers (Score 5, Interesting) 514
When I look at AWstats for my site:
Google 18020 pages (linked to from Google)
Google (Images) 976 pages
Bing 226 pages
And from Google Analytics:
Top traffic sources:
Google 26,738 visits 85.24%
Yahoo 676 visits 2.16%
Bing 346 visits 1.10%
Admittedly the site is not about shopping or entertainment - it's mainly about technical topics which maybe colors the results.
Google 18020 pages (linked to from Google)
Google (Images) 976 pages
Bing 226 pages
And from Google Analytics:
Top traffic sources:
Google 26,738 visits 85.24%
Yahoo 676 visits 2.16%
Bing 346 visits 1.10%
Admittedly the site is not about shopping or entertainment - it's mainly about technical topics which maybe colors the results.
Comment You change the things that matter (Score 1) 549
You change the things that matter, not the resolution. Change the font size, icon size, and widget sizes where possible.
I wrote a post on making OS X usable for my father, but the same types of mods and more are possible on Windows. You just have to locate them all. For my own vision problems, I just insisted on a 30" monitor, set at its native HIGH resolution, and increase fonts and icon sizes as necessary. Get a pair of glasses set to the correct distance - in my case 26" from my face to the monitor.
Making OS X more usable for seniors
Submission + - Dogs as Intelligent as Average Two-Year-Old Child
Ponca City, We love you writes: "The Telegraph reports that researchers using tests originally designed to demonstrate the development of language, pre-language and basic arithmetic in human children have found that dogs are capable of understanding up to 250 words and gestures, can count up to five and can perform simple mathematical calculations putting them on par with the average two-year-old child. While most dogs understand simple commands such as sit, fetch and stay, a border collie tested by Professor Coren showed a knowledge of 200 spoken words. "Obviously we are not going to be able to sit down and have a conversation with a dog, but like a two-year-old, they show that they can understand words and gestures," says Professor Stanley Coren, a leading expert on canine intelligence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Coren has also found that dogs can count using established tests developed for young children. and when something unexpected happens with an object, children and dogs will stare at it for a longer period of time. "Dogs can tell that one plus one should equal two and not one or three.," says Coren adding that dogs "can also deliberately deceive, which is something that young children only start developing later in their life." Coren believes centuries of selective breeding and living alongside humans has helped to hone the intelligence of dogs. "They may not be Einsteins, but are sure closer to humans than we thought.""
Prehistoric Gene Reawakened To Battle HIV 360
Linuss points out research published in PLoS Biology that demonstrates the reawakening of latent human cells' ability to manufacture an HIV defense. A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman began with the knowledge that Old World monkeys have a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein that can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. They examined the human genome for any evidence of a latent gene that could manufacture such a protein, and found the capability in a stretch of what has been dismissively termed "junk DNA." "In this work, we reveal that, upon correction of the premature termination codon in theta-defensin pseudogenes, human myeloid cells produce cyclic, antiviral peptides (which we have termed 'retrocyclins'), indicating that the cells retain the intact machinery to make cyclic peptides. Furthermore, we exploited the ability of aminoglycoside antibiotics to read-through the premature termination codon within retrocyclin transcripts to produce functional peptides that are active against HIV-1. Given that the endogenous production of retrocyclins could also be restored in human cervicovaginal tissues, we propose that aminoglycoside-based topical microbicides might be useful in preventing sexual transmission of HIV-1."
Submission + - Nicotine improves brain function in schizophrenics (cosmosmagazine.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: Nicotine enhances attention and memory in schizophrenics, says a study that supports the development of new treatments which could relieve symptoms and prevent smoking-related deaths.
A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link.
Researchers led by Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set out to find if the nicotine in cigarettes was helping patients to overcome their difficulties with cognitive function, such as planning and memory in social and work settings.
A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link.
Researchers led by Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set out to find if the nicotine in cigarettes was helping patients to overcome their difficulties with cognitive function, such as planning and memory in social and work settings.
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The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once. -- Jane Bryant Quinn
