Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Education

Submission + - iPad a Game-Changer for Special Needs Kids 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The rise of mainstream tablets is proving to have unforeseen benefits for children with speech and communication problems and may disrupt a business where specialized devices can cost thousands of dollars. iPad apps like Proloquo2Go ($189) aim to help individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), cerebral palsy, down syndrome, developmental disabilities, ALS, traumatic brain injury, aphasia, apraxia, and more. Even Steve Jobs didn't see this one coming: 'We take no credit for this, and that's not our intention,' said Jobs, who's been touched by email he gets from parents of special needs kids for whom the iPad is proving to be a life-changer. 'Our intention is to say something is going on here,' Jobs added, suggesting that researchers should 'take a look at this.' Even though they might cost significantly less than dedicated devices, SUNY speech pathologist Andrea Abramovich explained Medicare doesn't cover consumer tablets because they could be used for nonmedical purposes.

Submission + - Android data stealing App downloaded by millions (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by wisebabo
wisebabo writes: Wallpaper utility (that presents purloined copyrighted material) "quietly collects personal information such as SIM card numbers, text messages, subscriber identification, and voicemail passwords. The data is then sent to www.imnet.us, a site that hails from Shenzen, China."

Unlike some previous flame baiting stories, this one surely is "news for nerds, stuff that matters".

Submission + - Plone 3 Multimedia

Submitted by Trevor James
Trevor James writes: Gross' excellent book is focused on adding multimedia including images, audio and video files to a Web site built using the Plone 3 CMS. Overall this book has a nice balance and mix of text, screenshots and code. I recommend the book for Plone power users including Plone developers and users who want to enhance and expand their core Plone multimedia arsenal. You'll get more out of this book if you already have a Plone site running but want to add more multimedia based capabilities to it.

Chapter 1 gives us an intro to the Plone, CMS and multimedia universe with concise definitions of terms such as CMS, Zope architecture, Buildout, and multimedia and tells us why we should be using the Plone CMS to host and store multimedia content. Chapter 1 concludes with a look at the Plone4Artists project which extends the core Plone CMS to add multimedia rich features for musicians and artists who need powerful Web sites for their audio and image based content. Plone4Artists adds modules for handling images, audio, video, events and calendars, and tags.

Chapter 2 gets things started by using the Plone 3 CMS to post image content. The author reviews how we can leverage the Plone core Image type to post image files. While reading Chapter 2 I followed along with my own Plone 3 local install so I could work on the tutorials and recipes hands-on as the author presented them. I started out by adding some images to my Plone site and followed the author's instructions on transforming and resizing the image. Gross gives code-based recipes for restricting image dimensions and file size to a specific user. He also shows us how to access images using code in our page templates, via a Python code method, and how to add images to custom content types using code. There's a lot of code and detailed analysis provided just in the first 25 pages of the book and you really get your money's worth just from this chapter on image manipulation. This chapter will interest developers and users of Plone who want to dive into the code and find out how images are being manipulated behind the scenes.

Gross moves on to show us how to organize our images into views which are essentially folders that contain images. The folders provide thumbnails of our images and are clickable to larger scales. We learn how to post a page and then use the Plone Kupu text editor to browse for an image from our folders and upload that image to our page. Gross points out that you can search for images by keyword (and by using wildcards) within the Kupu editor — a powerful feature if you have a ton of images. Then he tells us how to customize various elements of Kupu functionality using code, including tweaking CSS. Gross shows us how to take the tweaks we've made and make them easily persistent across our site's functionality by creating a boilerplate. There's a lot of code in this section of chapter 2 and developers will get a lot of expert tips and examples here.

Having an interest in Web services and how to get image content from Picasa and Flickr into Plone and other CMS-driven sites I was pleased to see Gross show us how to enhance our images using the p4a.ploneimage product; and how to build galleries of our images using the collective.plonetruegallery product. Gross installs the product, configures it and then accesses Flickr and Picasa data. He concludes the chapter looking at another gallery product called slideshowfolder. Gross shows that there are lots of methods for enhancing your Plone site using images and displaying the images as rich interactive galleries.

Chapter 3 covers adding audio content to your site in the same exhaustive detail as the image chapter. I like the discussion of how to choose the best audio format for your Web site. Gross shows us how to enhance our audio player widgets on the Plone site using the p4a.ploneaudio product. There's a lot of detail provided on setting up metadata for our audio libraries and collections. Building custom audio players and using the Flowplayer, a commonly used Flash-based player on open source driven CMS sites. Gross even shows us differences between embedding audio content using HTML 5 vs. HTML 4 and he concludes the chapter building a player using HTML 5. Another exhaustively detailed chapter.

Chapter 4 gives us tutorials on adding video content, including streaming and embedding videos on your Plone site. Gross gives us a tour of the p4a.plonevideo product and the embed version of the product which allows us to embed externally hosted videos (from YouTube, Yahoo! video, and blib.tv). Flowplayer for videos is also presented. The chapter follows the same outline and format as the audio chapter.

Chapter 5 covers adding Flash content to your Plone site and a lot of background discussion on Flash and how best to embed Flash using the Kupu text editor in Plone. Various Plone based Flash products are discussed. Gross also discusses using Silverlight and adding Silverlight content to a Plone site. This is a great topic to be included in this title. Being a Drupal developer I'm hoping that there is more discussion soon in print titles on how to integrate Silverlight content with Drupal sites. So it's nice to see this topic in a Plone book.

Chapter 6 and 7 deal with general content organization concepts and best practices, and syndication opportunities for your Plone site. Gross gives examples of using Dublin core metadata; and managing content using Plone based categories and keywords. Setting up glossaries of content, tagging content and integrating GoogleMaps is also discussed. RSS and Atom are given detailed attention as well here. These chapters should interest any Plone user or developer since it deals with more general Plone concepts and not just focusing on multimedia.

Chapter 8 looks at more advanced upload strategies. Gross spends time showing us how to create bulk uploads on our site using products such as collective.uploadify. Muliuploads is a huge plus and benefit for using Plone as your CMS and this chapter will interest anyone who wants to get large amounts of images into their Web site. Following on this topic Gross tells us how best to store our files and content in chapter 9. Again this topic will be of great interest to site managers and administrators who are in charge of keeping tabs on where content is being hosted and stored. System and server administrators may find some enlightenment in this chapter for dealing with hosting large amounts of CMS-driven multimedia content. Finally chapter 10 covers performance issues including server optimization and site caching mechanisms.

The Appendixes contain a wealth of information for developers including explanations of multimedia formats and licenses. I appreciated Gross' definitions of various codecs and the differences between various lossless codecs and comparisons with lossy codecs. Just the detail on the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 and Ogg Vorbis is encyclopedic and I'd most likely look here first before going to another resouces like Wikipedia. There's a ton of good information on licensing and the differences between Creative Commons Attribution licenses, Attribution Share Alike, No Derivatives, Non-commercial and more.

Appendix B contains details and explanation of syndication formats including RSS, RSS 2.0 and Atom. Example XML files for both Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds are given. MediaRSS is also explained in great detail. Finally Appendix C gives links to a large amount of resources and tutorials on how to use Plone for multimedia and links to various segments of the Plone support community including IRC chat.

Overall I'm pleased with this title. It's another great open source and CMS based resource from Packt Publishing and Tom Gross has added required reading to the expanding library of titles on Plone. If you're a Plone user or developer geared towards working with a lot of multimedia content this book belongs in your collection.
Apple

Submission + - Apple Implements the CalDAV Standard for MobileMe (catconventionshow.com)

Submitted by
Vermyndax
Vermyndax writes: "Apple announced the new MobileMe Calendar beta on July 6th. The press picked up the story and plugged the gorgeous new iPad-like interface for all devices. It would seem, however, that the mainstream press missed the real story. MobileMe's new Calendar application is an implementation of CalDAV, the proposed calendaring standard. This may be the same implementation that exists in Snow Leopard Server and is open-sourced. The hidden gem in all of this is that Apple plans to bring this CalDAV connectivity to Outlook users on MobileMe. Where might they take it next?"

Submission + - Students show dramatic drop in empathy (psychologytoday.com) 1

Submitted by MotorMachineMercenar
MotorMachineMercenar writes: Several news sources report that today's college students show a precipitous drop in empathy. The study of 14,000 students shows that students since year 2000 had 40% less empathy than those before them, and the article has a laundry list of culprits, from child rearing practices and self-help movement to free market economy and income inequality. There's also a link so you can test your very own level of narcissism. Let's hope slashdot crowd doesn't break the lack of empathy -counter.
Power

Submission + - UK students build electric car with 264 mile range

Submitted by da_how
da_how writes: A group of students and graduates at Imperial College London have built an electric car with a massive range — 264+ miles on one charge at 'reasonable' highway speeds (60 mph). They appear to have done this by filling the car to the absolute max with as many Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries as possible (56 kWh) and designing a very efficient direct drive powertrain (about 90% batteries to wheels at highway speeds from what I've read). The choice of vehicle is an interesting one, it's a converted Radical SR8 — a track racing car with speed record on the Nurburgring.Not an obvious contender for an endurance vehicle (no windscreen either!) — but then they claim it's lightweight to start with (steel space frame and glass fibre), plus Radical are based in the UK and presumably provided some help. You can read all about it in the Wired Magazine blog at http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/05/racing-green-endurance-srzero/ — personally I think it's pretty cool looking..
Science

Submission + - Matter-antimatter bias seen in Fermilab collisions (nytimes.com)

Submitted by ubermiester
ubermiester writes: The NYTimes is reporting that scientists Fermilab have found evidence of a very small (about 1%) average difference between the amount of matter/anti-matter produced in a series of particle collisions. FTA: "[T]he team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter." This offers a possible explanation for why there is so much more matter than anti-matter in the universe in spite of "Big Bang" theory suggesting that there should be equal amounts of both. (Here's a PDF version of the paper.)
Idle

Submission + - Google Stops Ads For Mature Women Sites (gizmodo.com) 2

Submitted by teh31337one
teh31337one writes: Google are refusing to advertise CougarLife, a dating site for mature women looking for younger men. However, they continue to accept sites for mature men seeking young women.According to the New York Times, CougarLife.com was paying Google $100,000 a month since October. The Mountain View company have now cancelled the contract, saying that the dating site is "nonfamily safe."
Biotech

Patient "Roused From Coma" By a Magnetic Therapy 123

Posted by timothy from the this-is-why-pole-reversal's-a-good-thing dept.
missb writes "Could the gentle currents from a fluctuating magnetic field be used to reverse the effects of traumatic brain injury? New Scientist reports on a patient in the US who was in a coma-like state, but can now speak very simple words after being given transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is the first time TMS has been used as a therapy to try and rouse a patient out of a coma."
Biotech

Submission + - Carbon nanotubes can treat cancer, are safe to eat (stanford.edu)

Submitted by iandoh
iandoh writes: A team of scientists at Stanford University has tracked the movement of carbon nanotubes through the digestive system of mice. They've determined that the nanotubes are expelled and do not exhibit any toxicity in the mice. As a result, the study paves the way toward future applications of nanotubes in the treatment of cancer and tumor. Previous research by the same team demonstrated that nanotubes can be used in cancer treatments. Nanotubes can be used to destroy cancer cells in two ways. One method involves shining light on the nanotubes, which activates the nanotubes and generates heat to destroy cancer cells. Another method involves attaching medicine to the nanotubes, which are able to accurately "find" cancerous cells without impacting healthy cells.

Feed Techdirt: News Outlets Decide Not To Give Rugby World Cup Free Publicity (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Just earlier today we had a post on how the NFL still thinks it can tell news organizations how they can do their job, in spite of fair use, and well, logic and reason. The Rugby World Cup kicks off Friday, and its organizers are involved in a similar spat with media groups covering the event. Back in April, organizers tried to put restrictions on the number of photos news outlets could publish online, and also how they were published (lest anything cover up a sponsor's logo). Major media outlets, including the AP, Reuters and AFP aren't playing ball, though, and are boycotting the event until the dispute is resolved. As much as the World Cup organizers would like to think they don't care, they depend on widespread media coverage and the free publicity it generates to drive their money machines. They say they're acting to protect companies that have paid for certain broadcasting rights, but what they're really trying to protect are the huge fees these companies have paid. They seem to think that letting news outlets print photos online threaten things like TV rights, but it would seem that the opposite is true. By reducing the amount of news coverage for the event -- which acts as publicity -- they're going to hurt the amount of interest people have in it. In turn, perhaps they won't be nearly as interested to follow it on TV or radio or anywhere else rightsholders have paid to deliver it. That's what really threatens their revenues, not the fact that people can go online and see photos from matches.

Slashdot Top Deals

I never cheated an honest man, only rascals. They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something. -- Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil

Close