Archive for the ‘the column’ Category

Turns out having a tripod mount and stand combo is what many iPhone 4 owners have been yearning for a a Kickstarter funding project for a new mount raised more than ten times what the creators planned to raise. Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost originally intended to raise $10,000 over the course of a month to manufacture the Glif, a new tripod mount and stand for the iPhone 4, but ended up collecting over $135,000 from more than 5,000 backers who want such an accessory.

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 5:21pm by Koookiecrumbles


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"I am certainly not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks, but we are extremely excited by the potential of our findings," said Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford. "We’ve shown before that we can temporarily induce dyscalculia [with another method of brain stimulation], and now it seems we might also be able to make someone better at maths. Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but if we’re successful, it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths."

.:sciencedaily.com->

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 5:17pm by Koookiecrumbles


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If anyone still wondered whether the 311 concept was here to stay, New York's 100 millionth call should have dispelled all doubts. So, for that matter, should the other 300-plus public call centers now in operation across the US. For millions of Americans, dialing 311 has become almost as automatic as 411 or 911. Butaas New York learned in the maple syrup incidentathe hundreds of millions of calls also represent a huge pool of data to be collected, parsed, and transformed into usable intelligence. Perhaps even more exciting is the new ecosystem of startups, inspired by New York's success and empowered by 21st-century technology, that has emerged to create innovative ways for residents to document their problems. All this meticulous urban analysis points the way toward a larger, and potentially revolutionary, development: the city built of data, the crowdsourced metropolis.

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 5:02pm by Koookiecrumbles


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The "Wayback Machine" is one of the more important services in the history of the Internet (and happens to be named after a great gag on the old Rocky & Bullwinkle show). From about 2001 through 2005 it could be counted on it to give you a reasonable snapshot of many of the home pages that existed on the Web as were archived by the old Alexa webcrawler going back to as early as 1996. Likely due to legal complaints or expensive maintenance costs the regular snapshots petered out around 2005.

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 4:43pm by Koookiecrumbles


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While taking stock of the Ph.D. dance phenomenon, I also did some historical research. Scientists have been interpreting their research with dance for much longer than you might think. To find the origin, you have to go all the way back to 1971 on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In an era of free love and violent protests, about 100 people danced on the grass, enacting one of the greatest discoveries of the century: how the ribosome translates genes from DNA into proteins. I interviewed one of the scientists who sponsored the event, Nobel Prize-winner Paul Berg, as well as David Thomas, one of the Ph.D. students who took part. "Nobody who participated in that dance remembers anything about it, due to pharmacological events out of our control," says Thomas, now a biophysics professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. "It’s a good thing they recorded it.

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 4:26pm by Koookiecrumbles


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The beginning of the book is basically a casual conversation between the author and the reader - master and apprentice -, showing the reader around, introducing computer science terminology, and most of all, taking away the fear of the seemingly steep learning curve. Glassner shows a lot of empathy towards someone new to programming, acknowledging that itAwill look overwhelmingly complex at first and be hard work, but that, just like learning to ride a bike or playing chords on a piano, the complexity will soon fade away, allowing even a novice programmer to create exciting work. He has three pieces of advice: there is no way you can break your computer with your program, type every code listing by hand (so it'll sink in), and don't be afraid of errors. In fact, Glassner left the errorsAhe made when creating the example code right there in the book, so that, as the reader follows him along, he will see where and why an error was made and how it was fixed.

.:datavisualization.ch->

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 4:11pm by Koookiecrumbles


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The keyboard and mouse combo is often the superior input method, giving greater speed, precision, and customizability. Sometimes, however, there are applications, games, and emulators simply better suited for use with a console-style controller. I sense a thousand PC gaming fanboys just cried out in nerdrage, but thankfully you're sensible enough to realize the world isn't black and white. Furthermore, most people have some sort of gaming console in the house, and thus have access to perfectly good controllers. If you've got a bluetooth capable Mac, it's quite simple to connect and play with any of the Big 3 console controllers.

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Posted: November 4th, 2010
at 4:04pm by Koookiecrumbles


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From 220 miles above Earth, one of the Expedition 25 crew members on the International Space Station took this night time photo featuring the bright lights of Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt on the Mediterranean coast. The Nile River and its delta stand out clearly as well. On the horizon, the airglow of the atmosphere is seen across the Mediterranean. The Sinai Peninsula, at right, is outlined with lights highlighting the Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba.

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Posted: November 3rd, 2010
at 2:38pm by Koookiecrumbles


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Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube, has stepped down from his position as CEO of the company, which he sold to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, to work full-time on his menswear label, Hlaska. Founded by his business partner Anthony Mazzei in 1994, Hlaska is mostly stuff that a young Silicon Valley employee would wear to work: there’s a lot of short-sleeved collared button-downs (perfect for crumpling into a ball at the foot of your futon after a long night of coding) as well as laptop covers and leather messenger bags. But despite the tech-friendly designs, doesn’t Hurley’s switch from web mogul to fashion retailer seem kind of random?

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Posted: November 2nd, 2010
at 5:23pm by Koookiecrumbles


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