Journal Journal: Ironic numbers
Anyone noticed that Apple's market cap is approaching double that of Dell? Apple won't buy them out - it would just be to close them down....
Feed Mac Word: An Apple TV wish list (macworld.com)
Feed The 8-Core Apple MacBook Pro (pheedo.com)
Apple gets its hands on a special Clovertown processor for its Mac Pro systems.
Feed Magnetar Does A Gigantic Stellar 'Hiccup' (sciencedaily.com)
Astronomers using data from several X-ray satellites have caught a magnetar -- the remnant of a massive star with an incredibly strong magnetic field -- in a sort of giant cosmic blench.
Feed Biofuels: More Than Just Ethanol (sciencedaily.com)
As the United States looks to alternate fuel sources, ethanol has become one of the front runners. Scientists studied the greenhouse gas emissions and bioenergy of corn, hybrid poplar, switchgrass and other crops to determine the efficiency of various biocrops in terms of energy consumption and energy output.
Feed Behavioral Ecology: Late Breeding Female Birds Surprisingly Had More Offspring (sciencedaily.com)
Starting to breed late in life is a bad idea if you want to maximize the number of offspring that you produce -- or so the theory goes. But doubt has now been cast on this hypothesis -- one of the biggest assumptions in behavioral ecology -- by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Cape Town and published in Current Biology.
Feed Cell Biology: New Connection Between Cancer and Sugars (sciencedaily.com)
Scientists have discovered a new role for sugars on proteins that may lead to new drugs or improvements on current medications.
Feed Photos: Green comet captured by digital camera (com.com)
Terry Lovejoy became the first digital photographer to have a comet named after him. Comet Lovejoy can be seen with the help of binoculars this month.
Submission + - Solar power-cell breakthrough
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from the Nanomaterials Research Centre at Massey University in New Zeeland have developed synthetic dyes that can be used to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. These photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light conditions and can be cheaply incorporated into window-panes and building materials, thereby turning them into generators of electricity.
Feed Say what? 'Vista's cover is blown' (com.com)
Blog: Call it the curse of the cursor. Microsoft this week had to jump the gun on its monthly release of software patches to because...
Feed Anarchist blog boy freed (theregister.com)
Emma Goldman 2.0
After the longest stretch ever served in the joint for refusing to disclose a source, blogger/activist Josh Wolf is a free man.
Feed UK boffins are going on an alien hunt (theregister.com)
Going to catch a big one...
Physicists have been hearing this afternoon about attempts by UK astronomers to find evidence of alien life - buried in over 2000 hours of archived telescope data.
Submission + - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS
Lord Satri writes: "This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!'s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for KML, Google Earth's file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website: "This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.""
Feed Microsoft criticized for Open XML petition (com.com)
Company urges fast-track standardization of Office Open XML; open-source advocates say Microsoft is worried rivals will gain too much ground.
Submission + - Are College Students Techno Idiots?
ict_geek writes: "Are college students techno idiots? Despite the inflammatory headline, Inside Higher Ed at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/15/info lit asks an interesting question. The article refers to a recent study by ETS, which analyzed results from 6,300 students who took its ICT Literacy Assessment. Check out the demo: http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy/demo.html. The findings, at http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy/prelimfindings.html , show that students don't know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can't narrow down an overly broad search, and can't tailor a message to a particular audience. Yikes.
According to the article, "when asked to select a research statement for a class assignment, only 44 percent identified a statement that captured the assignment's demands. And when asked to evaluate several Web sites, 52 percent correctly assessed the objectivity of the sites, 65 percent correctly judged for authority, and 72 percent for timeliness. Overall, 49 percent correctly identified the site that satisfied all three criteria.""
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"If John Madden steps outside on February 2, looks down, and doesn't see his feet, we'll have 6 more weeks of Pro football." -- Chuck Newcombe
