Mick Darling's posterousAll my blogging in one spot. (mostly)Filed under: readerPERFECT ORGANISM: Nordling At Last Dives Into ALIEN!
Sun, 08 Jul 2012 16:43:31 PM CDT
from AintItCool Articles http://www.aintitcool.com/node/56846
Meet the Volocopter, an 18-Blade Chopper [VIDEO]Now here's something you don't see everyday: a helicopter with 18 rotors. It's called the "Volocopter." It was created by the inventor and physicist Thomas Senkel. It's described by its creator as resembling a blender. And it's attracting major attention in the aviation world for innovation and sustainability. Last October, Senkel released a popular video of himself test-flying the Multicopter, a Volocopter predecessor with a piddling 16 rotors. That video had been viewed more than 3.5 million times on YouTube and gained Senkel and his Multicopter widespread notoriety among techies and futurists. The Volocopter, however, is bigger, better… More About: Startups, Tech, Video High-performance graphene transistors made using sticky tape![]() Peel and stick fabrication of graphene transistors.
Nathan Weiss and Xiangfeng Duan
Graphene could be a useful material for high-performance transistors because it carries electrons faster than silicon. Since graphene transistors can’t be turned off, they’re more useful for RF applications than logic circuits. Now researchers in California have boosted the performance, while simplifying the production, of graphene RF transistors. A traditional transistor has a silicon or metal semiconductor channel sandwiched between source and drain electrodes. Applying voltage between a gate electrode on top of the channel and the source electrode allows current to flow through the channel. Adding a small RF signal to the gate electrode while the transistor is carrying current amplifies that signal as it comes out of the drain. Since graphene carries electrons faster than silicon, filling channels with the carbon sheet could speed signals running through the transistor. But high-performance graphene transistors can’t be made using standard fabrication techniques. Building a gate electrode atop graphene damages the carbon sheet and reduces its electron-carrying ability. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/07/high-performance-graphene-transistors-...QuicklyChat Is Push-To-Talk Video Chat [Downloads]
Windows and OS X: One of the more cumbersome elements of video chatting is that it isn't always as simple as connecting with another person and talking to them. It can fail to connect and you can often try to reach someone without knowing if they're available since many people just leave their normal status as "away." QuicklyChat aims to solve those problems with a simple push-to-talk process. More »
Is Python a Legitimate Data Analysis Tool?
Back in May we discussed using Python, R, and Octave as data analysis tools, and compared the relative strength of each. One point of contention was whether Python could be considered a legitimate tool for such work. Now, Bei Lu writes while Python on its own may be lacking, Python with packages is very much up to the task: "My passion with Python started with its natural language processing capability when paired with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Considering the growing need for text mining to extract content themes and reader sentiments (just to name a few functions), I believe Python+packages will serve as more mainstream analytical tools beyond the academic arena." She also discusses an emerging set of solutions for R which let it better handle big data.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Book Review: Head First Python
Michael J. Ross writes "Veteran computer programmers — adept with languages such as PHP, Perl, and JavaScript — typically have no trouble learning an additional language, often just by reading online tutorials and stepping through sample code. But for those new to programming, that approach can prove difficult and frustrating. Yet nowadays there appears to be growing interest among such people for learning how to write programs in Python, especially as it is seeing increasing use by Google and other organizations, and is often chosen as the primary teaching language in schools. For such budding programmers, one possible starting point is the book Head First Python." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Twitter brings search autocomplete to the web, helps find Biebs tweets in record timeTwitter had been hinting at a big search update today, and that's just what it delivered. Instead of the (quite frankly clunky) search results page, a search box at top now provides autocompleting search results that split into keywords and people. The system is smart enough to check for spelling gaffes and related searches, and results can drill down just to followed users rather than the entire social network. Autocompleting has been a mainstay of the Android and iOS apps for some time, but we're glad to hear that web users can now track down their favorite recently graduated teen pop stars faster than ever. Twitter brings search autocomplete to the web, helps find Biebs tweets in record time originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Jul 2012 15:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Twitter | Email this | Comments
from Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/06/twitter-brings-search-autocomplete-to-the-...
We could build an open Twitter, but would anyone use it?Amid the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s future — which some say is aimed at restricting what developers can do with the real-time information network, in an attempt to monetize it more easily — a number of critics have proposed duplicating the network using open-source tools and principles. This idea, which has also been proposed in the past by blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer, seems to have a lot of merit: after all, if a short-messaging utility like Twitter is a useful service for society to have, then why not recreate it as an open-source project? The only problem is that others have tried to do exactly that, and have mostly failed to achieve any traction. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with Twitter. The latest kerfuffle started with a blog post from Twitter’s director of consumer product Michael Sippey, who said that the service plans to tighten the restrictions on use of its API by third-party developers — an announcement that came on the same day that Twitter shut down a partnership with LinkedIn that allowed users of that service to cross-post tweets to their LinkedIn feed. This led to a number of critical comments from outside developers about the company’s treatment of them, a relationship that has been somewhat strained in the past, as Twitter has tried to control more and more of its ecosystem. Would an open Twitter be feasible?Among those complaints was a proposal from developer Brent Simmons, the creator of a popular RSS news-reader called NetNewsWire and a co-founder of Sepia Labs, creator of an app called Glassboard. Although Simmons said he hasn’t been involved in developing a Twitter app, he said the increasing restrictions and tone that the company was taking would make him think twice about doing so — and if he did have one, he would try to get other Twitter app developers together to come up with a way of duplicating the company’s network so they could replace it with an open one:
Simmons points out that the technical elements required for a short-messaging service like Twitter, in which users can “follow” each other to get updates pushed to them, aren’t all that complicated (although the company might argue that it’s a lot more complicated when you get to hundreds of millions of users and have to handle billions of simultaneous tweets every few days). A service that did this wouldn’t be all that different from the way that RSS operates as a news-distribution format, Simmons said, and a simple OPML file could be used to handle subscribing or unsubscribing from different people. It’s no coincidence that Simmons mentions RSS and OPML as solutions to this problem: Dave Winer, who pioneered both technologies in the early days of the web, has been building a system that is based on those protocols for some time. Winer has written often about the need to reclaim the ability to publish short messages from Twitter’s corporate control — both because it would be better as an open service, and because it would be less likely to suffer from the kind of outages that took the network down in the early years of its life, when Winer proposed a kind of “emergency broadcast system.” Twitter’s network effects are pretty powerfulBut would an open Twitter have a hope of actually becoming an alternative to the real thing? Maybe two or three years ago something like that could have worked, but Twitter is now a massive network with over 100 million active users, and that’s a pretty powerful reason why people would tend to keep using the existing service. Not only that, but Twitter can and likely would do whatever it could to stop a competitor from emerging, just as it tried to stifle entrepreneur Bill Gross’s attempt to build a competing network through his company UberMedia. In addition to Winer’s efforts, one company already tried to build an open-source version of Twitter: Status.net developed a client and service called Identi.ca, which was based on a model similar to that of the blogging platform WordPress (see disclosure below) — users could run the software on their own servers and connect to the network that way, or they could use a hosted version run by Identi.ca. After a lack of uptake, apart from some die-hard programmers and the occasional celebrity, the company wound up pivoting to focus on a corporate information service similar to Yammer. Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook that was funded through a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2010, has suffered a somewhat similar fate: it has been criticized for not developing quickly enough, and seems to be used primarily by hobbyists, and others for whom the principle of an open network is more important than whether anyone else uses it or not. In the end, many users don’t really seem to care whether a system or network is open or not — or at least not enough of them to make a difference. Disclosure: Automattic (maker of WordPress.com) is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True. Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Why censoring social media might mean more-violent protests
The authors, Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro, detail their findings in a paper titled “Social Media Censorship in Times of Political Unrest – A Social Simulation Experiment with the UK Riots,” which appears in the July issue of the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology (it’s not yet available online, but an advance version is available here). The research is especially timely given the attention social media has received during the revolutions and violent protests that have occurred worldwide over the past couple years. As the authors note when discussing the U.K. government’s response to riots in August 2011, “[T]he same information technologies that had been presented as tools of liberation in the height of the Arab Spring, have been portrayed as threats to the very values of freedom and peace that Western governments allegedly stand for.” The authors attribute their findings (albeit computer-generated) largely to the idea of “vision,” which plays a pivotal role in sociological experiments trying to determine how individuals act during times of protest or rioting. Put simply, less censorship means more vision, so citizens (called “agents” in the computer model) know what’s going on around them and can act in more uniform and rational manners. More censorship means less vision, so citizens are less aware of their surroundings and tend to act randomly. Overstating the importance of social media?However, while this research is both interesting and important, it might not tell the whole story about patterns of violence during times of unrest. As the authors note, factors such as economic hardship and a loss of government legitimacy may also determine whether uprising become violent — perhaps much more so than whether protestors have the ability to coordinate via Twitter. A Guardian analysis of individuals arrested during the U.K. riots in August, for example, found that rioters were overwhelmingly “young, poor and unemployed” (read “more disenfranchised than ordinary citizens”). And even before the advent of social media, non-violent protests have been the norm in the relatively stable and rich United States for decades, with only minimal violence breaking out during the Occupy protests that took hold in dozens of cities nationwide during 2011. Another factor, the authors mention, is that keeping the web open also keeps it open to law-enforcement agencies, which can keep an eye on social media channels to gain intelligence into what protestors are planning. In Syria’s revolution, it’s worth noting, deciding to engage in social media efforts against the government can have life-or-death consequences. Certainly, there’s room for more research to determine the factors that lead to individual protests shaping up as they do. The advent of big data techniques will make it easier than ever to analyze the mountains of web, socio-economic and geo-political data that might help uncover more answers. But Casilli, Tubaro and their computer model present a good case for not underestimating the role of access to social media. “In the absence of robust indicators as to the rebelliousness of a given society,” their paper concludes, “the choice of not restricting social communication turns out to be a judicious one for avoiding the surrender of democratic values and freedom of expression for an illusory sense of security.” Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user JustASC. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Google+ Hangouts get live captions
Hangout Captions were announced by Google’s Technical Program Manager for Accessibility Engineering Naomi Black, who wrote on Google+ that users can either use in live captions from a professional transcription service, or simply do it themselves and type the spoken word into a text box within the Hangout app. “This is an early look at the app so you can tell us what you think,” she added. Black illustrated the functionality with the following video:
This isn’t the first time Google has addressed issues of accessibility for Google+. The Google+ team did some tests to better support sign language for the video chat service a year ago, and the company added captions for Google+ videos last month. Google has also been adding a number of captioning features to YouTube. The site is now supporting machine captioning in multiple languages, and added captioning for live events a year ago. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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