Technology as it applies to me.
This is why I have a strong dislike of government and our system of lobbyists. Many people in the tech community are becoming increasingly skeptical of Google’s motives in partially pulling out of the Chinese markets and starting to suggest a certain level of hypocrisy.
[From Congress On China: Google Gets A Big Wet Kiss. Microsoft Is “Enabling Tyranny”]
The explosive spread of electromagnetic fields across the world has undeniably spawned at least one disorder: electrosensitivity syndrome. Millions of people — most of them in Europe — say they suffer headaches, depression, nausea, rashes and other problems when they’re too close to cellphones or other sources of EMFs. They’ve formed their own support groups, started their own newsletters and taken drastic steps to avoid EMFs, with some even wearing metallic clothing. A band of EMF “refugees” has moved to a valley in southern France to avoid radiation.
[From Victims of electrosensitivity syndrome say EMFs cause symptoms – latimes.com]
Scientists have isolated a gene sequence that appears to determine how fast our bodies age, the first time a link between DNA and human lifespan has been found.
The discovery could have a profound impact on public health and raises the best hope yet for drugs that prevent the biological wear and tear behind common age-related conditions such as heart disease and certain cancers.
[From Living fast? Scientists show lifespan is linked to DNA | Science | guardian.co.uk]
(PhysOrg.com) — Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.
[From Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything]
These days, a number of architects and designers are exploring humanitarian design for people hit by a natural disaster or any other emergency. Under the brand Urban Nomads, all the projects by Winfried Baumann cater to instant housing for urban nomads and the homeless. The Instant Housing by Winfried Baumann comprises small mobile homes, which are designed for the special living circumstances and are manageable by one person. An emergency assistance to homeless people and victims of disasters, the Instant Housing Shelter is equipped with a retractable padded bed, first aid kit, mirror, whistle, multi tool, flashlight and plastic hood with viewing window. The residential portable container can provide all the basic necessities in a disaster-struck area, efficiently and affordably. Last but not the least, these Instant Housing shelters can be easily transported from one place to the other.
[From Urban Nomads’ Instant Housing Shelters For The Homeless – The Design blog]
Cheers To Finger Power!
Mind you, this is not a “Green” concept and neither does it claim to be “Eco Friendly”. It’s just a helpful solution for a tricky situation. The situation being: you running out of juice on your mobile phone. So what do you do? Remove the battery from the back of the phone; give it a few good turns around your index finger and its gathered enough power to last you a conversation or a safe trip to your charger and electric point.
[From Swing Your Energy – Mobile Phone Battery Charger System by Song Teaho & Hyejin Lee » Yanko Design]
designer jamie o’shea must have really wanted a nap when he created his vertical bed design. the vertical
allows the user to sleeping standing up right in the middle of the street. not satisfied without testing his
creation, o’shea slept for 40 minutes in downtown new york. the bed design can be collapsed into a small
suitcase and is attached to a subway vent when in use. the help the user gets a peaceful rest, the bed comes
with noise canceling headphones, opaque sunglasses and a free-standing umbrella for napping in the rain.
next time you walking down the street and feeling tired, simply set up the vertical bed and take a nap.[From vertical bed]
Verizon is terminating internet service to an unknown number of repeat copyright scofflaws, a year after suggesting it was not adopting a so-called graduated-response policy.
While it was not immediately clear whether other internet service providers were following suit, the move comes as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are lobbying ISPs and Congress to support terminating internet access for repeat, online copyright offenders.
All the while, the United States has been privately lobbying the European Union to “encourage” so-called three strikes policies, according to leaked documents surrounding a proposed international intellectual property accord.
Verizon was not immediately prepared to comment in detail on the developments, first reported by CNET, or to detail how many of its more than 8 million broadband subscribers it has terminated — although CNET said the number was “small.” The RIAA declined comment.
“We reserve the right to do that,” Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson said in a telephone interview regarding the terminations.
The RIAA announced a year ago it was ending its litigation campaign against individual file sharers, about 30,000 lawsuits in all. Instead, the music industry’s lobbying and litigation arm said it would rely on a series of accords it had reached with “leading” internet service providers, in which ISPs have agreed “on principle” to shut off internet access to customers the RIAA catches file sharing repeatedly.
At that time, in a Jan. 5, 2009 interview, Verizon spokeswoman Ellen Yu said that, in reference to the RIAA announcement: “We are not working with them on this.”
Cara Duckworth, an RIAA spokeswoman, said the same day that “We have an agreement on principle with several leading ISPs but not all, and the agreement on principle is confidential.”
Other than Verizon, none of the leading ISPs have acknowledged practicing what the content industry is calling “graduated response.” Under Verizon’s plan, the ISP notifies customers that unlawful file sharing allegedly is taking place on their accounts — file sharing discovered by the RIAA or other intellectual property holders who actively police networks and IP addresses. Internet service could be terminated perhaps after several warnings.
[From Verizon Terminating Copyright Infringers’ Internet Access | Threat Level | Wired.com]
As the cost of display technology comes down and the size of displays increases the popularity of public video billboards has also increased. Such displays allow for TV-like adverts to be displayed in shopping malls, at the side of the road, and generally anywhere there is a lot of faces to look at them.
In Moscow video billboards are positioned alongside some of the busiest highways showing advertising
and information 24 hours a day. But on Thursday night the video being played on two of these displays wasn’t an advert and it brought traffic to a halt; blocking the roads while drivers stopped to watch in amazement.Some enterprising hacker/s had managed to take control of these two billboards located on Moscow’s Garden Ring Road. The video they chose to upload or stream was X-rated pornography.
The owner of the hacked displays is an advertising company
called Panno.ru. It was notified of the “problem” three minutes after the porn had started playing, but it took them a further fifteen minutes to co-ordinate and switch off the displays.Pennu.ru do not know who or how the display was accessed and aren’t ruling out a competing advertising company being involved in this eye-opening event.
(updated below – Update II – Update III)
Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.” In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-“independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.
[From Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]
First Tech Credit Union reports:
We recently learned that a fraudster developed a rogue Android Smartphone app. It creates a shell of mobile banking apps that tries to gain access to a consumer’s financial information.
Droid09 launched this phishing attack from the Android Marketplace and it’s since been removed. It’s called phishing because scammers go fishing for information about you or your financial account that may be used for identity theft.
Please note that this attack didn’t target First Tech accounts. Accessing your First Tech account from your phone’s web browser is completely secure.
If you did download the Droid09 app, please remove it from your phone and take it to your mobile provider to ensure it’s completely removed.
[From MacDailyNews – Malware designed to steal bank information pops up in Google’s Android app store]
“Light-emitting wallpaper may begin to replace light bulbs from 2012, according to a government body that supports low-carbon technology.
A chemical coating on the walls will illuminate all parts of the room with an even glow, which mimics sunlight and avoids the shadows and glare of conventional bulbs.
Although an electrical current will be used to stimulate the chemicals to produce light, the voltage will be very low and the walls will be safe to touch. Dimmer switches will control brightness, as with traditional lighting.
The Carbon Trust has awarded a £454,000 grant to Lomox, a Welsh company that is developing the organic light-emitting diode technology. The trust said it would be two and a half times more efficient than energy-saving bulbs and could make a big contribution to meeting Britain’s target of cutting carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020. Indoor lighting accounts for a sixth of total electricity use.
[From Glowing Walls Technology Could Make the Light Bulb Obsolete | Best Of StumbleUpon]
Hackers have released an application designed to thwart a Microsoft-packaged forensic toolkit used by law enforcement agencies to examine a suspect’s hard drive during a raid.
The hacker tool, dubbed DECAF, is designed to counteract the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, aka COFEE. The latter is a suite of 150 bundled, off-the-shelf forensic tools that run from a script. Microsoft combined the programs into a portable tool that can be used by law enforcement agents in the field before they bring a computer back to their forensic lab. The script runs on a USB stick that agents plug into the machine.
The tools scan files and gather information about activities performed on the machine, such as where the user surfed on the internet or what files were downloaded.
[From Hackers Brew Self-Destruct Code to Counter Police Forensics | Threat Level | Wired.com]
This is so brilliant! An anti-rape female condom invented by Sonette Ehlers… A South African women working as a blood technician with the South African Blood Transfusion Service, during which time she met and treated many rape victims.
The device, known as The Rape-aXe, is a latex sheath embedded with shafts of sharp, inward-facing microscopic barbs that would be worn by a woman in her vagina like a tampon. If an attacker were to attempt vaginal rape, their penis would enter the latex sheath and be snagged by the barbs, causing the attacker pain during withdrawal and (ideally) giving the victim time to escape. The condom would remain attached to the attacker’s body when he withdrew and could only be removed surgically, which would alert hospital staff and police. This device could assist in the identification and prosecution of rapists.
Scientists have located a giant 13-billion year old galaxy at the edge of the observable universe. Detecting this huge galaxy was a challenge because of the massive quantities of light coming from the black hole, and if you think you spotted two problems in that sentence, read on.
The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.
“It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the sun. The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe,” said University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto who discovered the object.
[From Giant 13-Billion-Year-Old Galaxy Found at Very Edge of Universe]
When Apple revealed its documents and templates detailing the process of creating iTunes LP and Extras for small studios and indie artists to take advantage of, it also noted that for the time being, submission would be manual, but that automated electronic submission was on its way. A new report suggests the vehicle of delivery for that submission could be none other than Apple’s own iDVD media authoring program, part of the iLife suite.
[From Rumor Has It: iTunes LP Authoring and Submission Coming to iDVD ]
GENEVA — The world’s largest atom smasher on Monday broke the record for proton acceleration previously held by a U.S. lab, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts around the massive machine.
The Large Hadron Collider eclipsed the previous high of 0.98 1 TeV held by Fermilab, outside Chicago, since 2001, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, said.
The latest success, which came early in the morning, is part of the preparation to reach even higher levels of energy for significant experiments next year on the make-up of matter and the universe.
[From Hadron Collider: ‘Big Bang Machine’ Smashes World Record]
A leading astrophysicist who has worked on space missions claims that he and his colleagues are in contact with extraterrestrials who are “living among us.” And they don’t like what they see.
Latchezar Filipov, head of the Space Research Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, is causing global ripples after researching crop circles around the world.
“We sent (the aliens) 30 questions about global problems,” said Filipov, who was vague about how he actually conveyed the queries. “And now we have some answers.”
The “answers” came in the form of pictograms in crop circles.
Filipov says the aliens are here, observing us, but unobservable by us for some reason.
“I feel that … some kind of information is being taught, that they’d like to be in contact with us,” Filipov said Friday in halting English from his office in Sofia.
Filipov asked the aliens about the SETI, the broad umbrella project searching for alien life, and the supposed end of the world in 2012, when the Mayan calendar expires.
He told the Star that the aliens have told him SETI doesn’t work, owing to a confusion about communication through “magnetic fields.”
They also said there is some truth in the 2012 predictions, having something to do with volcanoes in Mexico.
Further, more prosaic revelations include that the aliens are angry about global warming, disagree with in-vitro fertilization and don’t like cosmetics. Apparently, Filipov’s aliens are grumpy Republicans.
This work is only beginning, Filipov cautioned, and he is still open to the fact that he could be mistaken – “I don’t yet believe that this is absolutely true information.”
Filipov is no garden-variety crank. He sports an impressive CV: graduate work at Moscow State University, a variety of high-level positions studying astrophysics, work on a MIR spacecraft mission.
However, his latest preoccupation has caught his international contemporaries by surprise.
“I’m not aware of this work,” said Ian Corbett, general secretary of the executive committee of the Paris-based International Astronomical Union. “But it is very hard to take seriously.”
The IAU website shows Filipov as an active member.
Filipov’s colleagues inside Bulgaria are more peevish. There is a move afoot to force his resignation from the Space Research Institute.
“In Bulgaria now, we have a very strange reaction to my research,” Filipov said. “The people in Bulgaria are frightened, they don’t understand this.
“You must understand that this is a very complicated situation.”
[From Respected scientist says aliens are among us – thestar.com]
DEADLY DRUG AND PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
The Global Drug and Pharmaceutical Industry as Part of the NWO Plan Has Killed Many Patients Who Took Prescription Drugs in the Hopes of Getting Better.
The drug and pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest killers in America today. The third leading cause of death, behind cancer and diabetes, is death from the side effects of prescription drugs.
An enormous part of the huge budget for the big drug companies is documented as going to research and development every year. The assumption on the part of the public when this shows up in print is a picture of millions of dedicated doctors, scientists and lab technicians, laboring doggedly for a cure for cancer or some rare killer.
[From The Drug and Pharmaceutical Industry – Drug and Pharmaceutical Industry Kills Many | Truth-It]
Until I tried Neuhaus Laboratories’ T-2 vacuum tube amp, I thought I had a pretty good speaker system hooked to my Mac. It was a three-piece ensemble with a pair of nice satellites and a honking big subwoofer. It pumped out 200-watts and I thought it sounded great.
But then I hooked up the T-2 Amplifier, and it’s literally night and day. I know this sounds like an old cliche — but it’s true. Even a half-deaf old punk like me (too many ear-piercing concerts) can hear the difference. It’s striking — and it’s absolutely glorious.
[From Review: Neuhaus Labs’ T-2 Tube Amp Transports You To Audio Heaven | Cult of Mac]
News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch has proven his massive appetite for risk, snapping up dead-tree newspapers during a digital boom. Now he’s vowing to take another risk, erecting pay walls around his content and shutting out Google (as well as Bing and Ask.com). Just what is Murdoch after? He shared his plans in a TV interview with Sky News Australia, which he owns. He suggests that content from News Corp. newspapers–which include the Wall Street Journal and New York Post–will no longer appear on Google or other search engine results. This builds on his overall strategy of making users pay to read online.
[From What Lies Behind Murdoch’s Move to Block Google? | The Atlantic Wire]
Microsoft: You’re not cool; you’re the opposite of cool; stop making your employees dance (w/ vid)
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 – 12:29 PM EST
Here’s a video of some Microsoft retail employees in their fake Apple Store in Mission Viejo, California, faking “spontaneity” via, of all things, some rendition of “The Electric Slide” gone horribly wrong and performed, of course, to the wrong song:
What’s better than a handful of sensors for determining if some hostile enemy has set off chemical weapons in a city? How about hundreds of thousands or millions of sensors? If research being done by NASA Ames Research Center under the Cell-All program in the US Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is taken into production, your next smartphone might contain chemical-sensing circuitry.
[From A new accessory for your iPhone: a NASA-developed chemical sensor]
Introducing Berna vintage electronic studio from Tobor Experiment on Vimeo.
Between the 1950s and the mid 1960s, long before
Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos injected electronics into pop-music (with a few exceptions like the Barrons and Raymond Scott), electroacoustic music was pioneered by european radio laboratories and US universities. Composing with tapes and electronics was a serious painstaking and expensive affair, prerogative of a restricted elite of contemporary music composers and adventurous sound engineers. At that time there wasn’t any electronic musical instruments market, as a matter of fact, most of the equipment was adapted from scientific tools belonging to radio engineering departments. Sometimes the equipment was built from scratch cannibalizing anything that had wires, tubes and pots, more rarely, the studios used the few commercial instruments available in those days, such as the Melchord, the Trautonium and the Theremin. Contrarily to what happens today, electronic music then was everything but fast and easy to create. A few minutes of electronic composition could take more than one year of work. Everything was handmade, from complex timbres with multiple sine oscillators bounces to tape editing with scissors and scotch-tape. Even sound envelopes were manually built by cutting tapes’ edgdes at different degrees of inclination. Ussachevsky’s ADSR was yet to be invented!Berna is a software simulation of a late 1950s electroacoustic music studio. Oscillators, filters, modulators, tape recorders, mixers, are all packed in a easy-to-use interface with historical accuracy.
Explore serial, concrete and tape music or create strange new sonic worlds with instruments inspired by the greatest studios of the early days of electronic music.
Are you ready to meet the grandfather of the synthesizer?
[From berna]
Right, I’m going to tell you the so called secrets of mastering eq. I know everybody thinks it’s the compression that makes that lovely stable full sound, but without balancing the tone, the compression wont make that happen alone.
