About six months ago, I was invited by the North American Serials Interest Group NASIG to keynote their annual conference. After admitting that I didn t know what serials were think periodicals, journals and other similar things , I realized that this was a perfect opportunity to address a unique group, so I jumped at the opportunity. Serials librarians, and publishers of serialized works, have been at the forefront of understanding the relationship between physical objects, digital objects and how the two relate to each other. The music industry, as we know, tried to fight the conversion to digital of the physical objects with which they had traditionally made their money . As soon as Internet search engines appeared, and I suspect as soon as Google started indexing PDFs, the serials world realized that digitization of their content made it simultaneously more visible since now the most obscure journal could now be found and cited and possibly less valuable since it could not be copied easily . Moreover, libraries quickly realized that online access changed their understanding of what it means to the products of their subscriptions. Most people no longer look at the physical journal in the library, which the library clearly owns outright, but look at articles through online services. The questions then become: how is that paid for? What is owned? What happens to the owned content when publication goes out of business?

These are profound questions at the core of nearly all modern digital products, and instead of hiding from the problem, the serials world has quietly and methodically tried to articulate the questions and negotiate answers. Publishers, libraries and information brokers all participate in the NASIG conferences and discussions, and they've collectively come up with a range of fascinating solutions ranging from license models to technologies that preserve access to owned resources when the original provider disappears. In short, they've spent years trying to answer questions that are only starting to occur to folks in other disciplines.

My presentation, called Information Shadows: How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things (1.2MB PDF) is my attempt at showing how ubiquitous computing technology is, in essence, turning whole classes of everyday objects into serials, or services, by creating pervasive digital access to the objects' metainformation, their information shadows. In the process, I talk about blenders, timeshares, Cuddle Chimps, City Carshare, and Exactitudes. I think it's a fun talk, and I'm really happy to have had the opportunity to articulate these ideas in this forum.

How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things

Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear".

The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.

The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people.

The findings, by scientists led by Xiang Zhang, were published in the journals Nature and Science.

The new system works like water flowing around a rock, the researchers said.

Because light is not absorbed or reflected by the object, a person only sees the light from behind it - rendering the object invisible.

The new material produces has "negative refractive" properties. It has a multi-layered "fishnet" structure which is transparent over a wide range of light wavelengths.

The research, funded by the US government, could one day be used in military stealth operations - with tanks made to disappear from the enemies' sight.

Invisibility cloak 'step closer'

In recent months, I have been made aware of two such instances of this scientific rumor mill. In May of this year, I received an e-mail from someone describing himself as a cancer researcher who wanted to know why I was ignoring the proven danger of cell phones: My colleagues in Sweden and Japan tell me that exposure to microwave radiation from cell phones are potentially dangerous -- and that this should be acknowledged by the phone companies which they don t bother acknowledging . He went on to describe his colleagues experiments with mice in RF fields that had increased incidence of brain tumors. I found the description of this research to be surprising, since no such research has appeared recently in the scientific literature.

In July of this year, a more extreme example of the same type of underground science hit the news. Dr Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, circulated a memo to 3000 faculty and staff members at his Institute, warning them that children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing. He also said that everyone should keep the phone away from their heads and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset. He even warned against using cell phones in public places because it exposes others.

On what does Dr. Herberman base this warning? Early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science. Really, at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe, rather than sorry later, he stated.

Hijacking Science

They are accused of stealing more than 40m credit and debit card numbers before selling the information.

They allegedly hacked into shop and bank computer systems using a technique known as "wardriving" and installed software to access the data.

Prosecutors said the alleged fraud was an "international conspiracy".

'Increasing vulnerability'

Three of those charged are US citizens. The others come from Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and China.

The 11 suspects are alleged to have illegally obtained card numbers, account information and password details by driving around neighbourhoods and hacking into wireless equipment.

They are said to have then concealed the information in computer servers both in the US and Europe.

US cracks 'biggest ID fraud case'

Crashing right after launch is, apparently, a startup rite of passage. If, however, you ve touted your new search engine as a Google killer, you might want to make sure crashes can t happen. Google never goes down, and quite simply, can t be killed with overloaded servers.

After Powerset s sudden sale to Microsoft, the blogosphere needed a new contender. A former Google search architect and her Stanford professor husband, along with other former Googlers operating under the protective wing of the anti-noncompete laws of California a law, ironically, Google likes to leverage when it can , thought for sure they could provide that new challenger.

And then all went blank at Cuil cool , which was touted to have thrice the index of Google, scanning 121 billion web pages. Servers today couldn t keep up with demand, illustrating what Powerset foresaw as their biggest hurdle: scalability. Microsoft provided that, along with enough cash to see it through. Even if you could get a query to return something today, though, reviews of the results have been mixed.

The results are supposed to be an alternative to Google s ranking system, which is often criticized for being more of a popularity contest among a myriad other criticisms in the search results. Hence all the Wikipedia and YouTube returns.

Cuil is said to operate differently from Google s distributed server, load-balancing concept—which incidently handles about a trillion URLs several times daily and manages to stay online—and has its servers divided according to category. If one searches for a sports-related query, for example, there are designated sports servers to handle that. One issue, as we re seeing today: If a spike in sports queries knocks the sports servers offline, other non-specialized servers specializing in, say, cooking, will handle the results instead.

In that event, you get either no results or bad ones, which is likely the cause of all the subsequent, to put it lightly, disappointment following initial launch hype. I thought an ego-search would be sufficiently simple for it—there couldn t be that many sources to pull from. After a few minutes, Cuil did bring back several instances where my articles have appeared on TechMeme, and once from the New York Times Blogrunner. A few images accompany the results, none of which are of me, one of which appears to be a female.

There s an interesting Explore by Category section currently more than a few minutes later unclickable to see where they lead, categorizing me, interestingly, under Critics of Scientology, Investigative Journalists, American Bloggers, Scottish Premiere League Players, Villages in Illinois, and Black and White Films.

Cuil Crashes And Burns At Launch

Forrester Research has unleashed a bit of ire from Microsoft Nasdaq: MSFT Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft with an analyst report suggesting large corporations might do well to sit out the Vista era of Windows.

Analyst Thomas Mendel s July 23 report on enterprise Rackspace now offers green hosting solutions at the same cost without sacrificing performance. Make the eco-friendly choice. trends contained a brief mention of Vista, comparing it to New Coke -- Coca-Cola s NYSE: KO Latest News about Coca-Cola disastrous reformulation of its NAMEsake product in 1985. Public outcry forced the company to backtrack and reintroduce the old drink.

Here s a tip, Mendel wrote. Consider following the lead of Microsoft s most important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case for Vista.

Only 8.8 percent of enterprise computers were running Vista as of June, up from 6.2 percent in January, according to the report. XP was the most prevalent OS, running on 87.1 percent of the 50,000 desktops included in the survey.

If it aint broke dont fix it, or atleast dont replace it with just more issues....

MS Blasts Forrester's Sensational Anti-Vista Report

About a week ago, Phil T. & I finished and released our first video! Its called Citizen Engineer. We finally fixed a lingering audio codec problem and so I invite you to watch it.

Citizen Engineer is an online video series about OPEN source hardware,
electronics, art and hacking by Limor Ladyada Fried of Adafruit
Industries & Phillip pt Torrone of MAKE magazine. The first video
debuts at “The Last HOPE” conference in New York City.

Volume 01 - Phones: SIM card & payphone hacking
Learn how a SIM card works the small card inside GSM cell phones
make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and
clone/crack a SIM card.

Modify a “retired” payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and
for VoIP Skype . Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it
accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make “free phone” calls
from the modified coin-accepting payphone.

Basically its me messing around with electronics. I liked making these videos because I got to play around more than I normally do. Not having to design a ‘payphone kit’ means more time spent learning all about payphones. I’m already planning the next video :

Good video! Check it out...

Citizen Engineer Vol. 1 : Phones... SIM card & payphone hacking

When I was a kid my parents got this six-LP set of science-themed folk songs for my sister and me. They were produced in the late 1950s / early 1960s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer. Zaret s main claim to fame is writing the lyrics to the classic Unchained >Melody for the 1955 movie Unchained , later recorded by the Righteous Brothers and more recently used in Ghost . Three of the albums the best three in my opinion were performed by Tom Glazer, semi-famous 1940s folk musician and somewhat of a lyricist himself he wrote On Top of Spaghetti .

The Singing Science lyrics were very Atomic Age, while the tunes were generally riffs on popular or genre music of the time. We played them incessantly.

In February 1998 I found the LPs in my parents basement. I cleaned them up, played them one last time on an old turntable, and burned them onto a set of three CD-R discs. In December 1999 I read the songs back off the CDs and encoded them into MP3, so now you can hear them on the web. They are available at either 32 Kbps about half a megabyte each or 160 Kbps about two megabytes each . The higher-quality MP3 versions were encoded by Ron Hipschman.

OMFG! These are great... Science Anyone?

Singing Science Records....

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

Our press release is up regarding Free Part Day on August 6, 2008.

Some details:

* We will have two stock materials/thicknesses available for making your part on Free Part Day: waterjet cut aluminum 6061 1/8 (0.125) inches thick and laser cut acrylic plastic, 0.118 inches thick.
* There is a limit of one design (DXF/PNG/GIF or Big Blue Saw Designer file) per customer.
* Designs are limited in size to 9" x 9".
* We reserve the right to reject designs that are too complex or can't be made on the waterjet or the laser.
* You must pay the packaging and shipping costs.
* All orders must be completed through the online ordering process.

Start designing your parts now!

This is cool... I think I am going to order a custom fin for a water ski!

Big Blue Saw Free Part Day!

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian man's dare went horribly wrong when he tried to play chicken with cars on a freeway wearing only his underwear. The 18 year old was critically injured after being hit by a four-wheel drive on a freeway in the southern city of Melbourne in the early hours of Wednesday, police said in a statement.

"Police are dismayed at the utter stupidity of a man who decided to play chicken on the Tullamarine Freeway," the statement said.

"It was lucky nobody was killed as a result and police couldn't believe anybody would be foolish enough to take such grave risks with their personal safety and that of other road users." The driver and passenger in the car were unhurt, though the vehicle was a write-off

Who the hell is this guy... Worth the ticket to fly there so I can finish where "un-natural" selection did not succeed...

Underwear chicken dare puts man in hospital