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PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives.

Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc). It’s open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor or software developer can use.

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White House Launches Data.gov and Seeks Advice on Transparency: Via Threat Level.

The Obama administration launched its anticipated Data.gov web site today where federal agencies will publish raw data. The data is being made available to programmers to allow them to develop applications to make the data more accessible to the public.

The site�s catalog currently contains fewer than 100 datasets, but will grow as agencies translate more data into raw digital formats. The data is available in XML, Text/CSV, Keyhole Markup Language and Compressed Keyhole Markup Language, Feeds, XLS, or ESRI Shapefile formats. The site also provides links to widgets and data mining and extraction tools to help cull through data from specific agencies.

To encourage the development of applications for the data, the Sunlight Foundation, in conjunction with others, has launched a competition, Apps for America 2: the Data.gov Challenge.

The winner of the best application will receive $10,000. The runner-up and third place winners will receive $5,000 and $2,500 respectively. All three will receive a trip to Washington, D.C. to the awards ceremony in September. A special $2,500 prize will go to the person who creates the best visualization of data.gov data. Deadline for submissions is August 7.

In addition to its Data.gov site, the Obama administration is also asking the public for advice on how it can become more transparent. Comments, ideas and proposals can be submitted between now and June 3 to opengov@ostp.gov or through the White House Open Government Initiative web site.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

Read Original Article:(Via Threat Level.)

Does Your House Need a Tail?: Via Freedom to Tinker

Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure. These proposals include municipal-owned networks and a variety of subsidies and mandates at the federal level for incumbents to deploy faster broadband.

Tim Wu and Derek Slater have a great new paper out that approaches the problem from a different perspective: that broadband deployments could be planned and financed not by government or private industry, but by consumers themselves. That might sound like a crazy idea at first blush, but Wu and Slater do a great job of explaining how it might work. The key idea is “condominium fiber,” an arrangement in which a number of neighboring households pool their resources to install fiber to all the homes in their neighborhoods. Once constructed, each home would own its own fiber strand, while the shared costs of maintaining the “trunk” cable from the individual homes to a central switching location would be managed in the same way that condominium and homeowners' associations currently manage the shared areas of condos and gated communities. Indeed, in many cases the developer of a new condominium tower or planned community could lay fiber along with water and power lines, and the fiber would be just one of the shared resources that would be managed collectively by the homeowners.

If that sounds strange, it's important to remember that there are plenty of examples where things that were formerly rented became owned. For example, fifty years ago in the United States no one owned a telephone. The phone was owned by Ma Bell and if yours broke they'd come and install a new one. But that changed, and now people own their phones and the wiring inside their homes, with your phone company owning the cable outside the home. One way to think about Slater and Wu's “homes with tails” concept is that it's just shifting that line of demarcation again. Under their proposal, you'd own the wiring inside your home and the line from you to your broadband provider.

Why would someone want to do such a thing? The biggest advantage, from my perspective, is that it could solve the thorny problem of limited competition in the “last mile” of broadband deployment. Right now, most customers have two options for high-speed Internet access. Getting more options using the traditional, centralized investment model is going to be extremely difficult because it costs a lot to deploy new infrastructure all the way to customers' homes. But if customers “brought their own” fiber, then the barrier to entry would be much lower. New providers would simply need to bring a single strand of fiber to a neighborhood's centralized point of presence in order to offer service to all customers in that neighborhood. So it would be much easier to imagine a world in which customers had numerous options to choose from.

The challenge is solving the chicken-and-egg problem: customer owned fiber won't be attractive until there are several providers to choose from, but it doesn't make sense for new firms to enter this market until there are a significant number of neighborhoods with customer-owned fiber. Wu and Slater suggest several ways this chicken-and-egg problem might be overcome, but I think it will remain a formidable challenge. My guess is that at least at the outset, the customer-owned model will work best in new residential construction projects, where the costs of deploying fiber will be very low (because they'll already be digging trenches for power and water).

But the beauty of their model is that unlike a lot of other plans to encourage broadband deployment, this isn't an all-or-nothing choice. We don't have to convince an entire nation, state, or even city to sign onto a concept like this. All you need is a neighborhood with a few dozen early-adopting consumers and an ISP willing to serve them. Virtually every cutting-edge technology is taken up by a small number of early adopters (who pay high prices for the privilege of being the first with a new technology) before it spreads to the general public, and the same model is likely to apply to customer-owned fiber. If the concept is viable, someone will figure out how to make it work, and their example will be duplicated elsewhere. So I don't know if customer-owned fiber is the wave of the future, but I do hope that people start experimenting with it.

You can check out their paper here. You can also check out an article I wrote for Ars Technica this summer that is based on conversations with Slater, Wu, and other pioneers in this area.

Read Original Article (Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Can everyone be an Einstein? - Times Online: Via Times Online(UK)

Science is getting ever closer to solving the complex puzzle that is the human brain. And it’s beginning to look as if there’s genius in all of us

Time to buff up your brain, to send your synapses to the spa. How about a couple of hours of sudoku? No? Well, fire up your Nintendo DS and pump up your neurons with Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training games — “Keep your brain sharp and in shape.” Nicole Kidman says she does it and she’s always right about everything. Or go on the net and test your brain out at brainmetrix.com before going for a real synapse sauna at braingle.com . Stave off senility by signing up at happy-neuron.com , massage the grey matter between your ears by joining lumosity.com (the “fast, fun and effective way to take care of your brain”), or go to sharpbrains.com to get “high-quality, research-based information and guidance to navigate the brain-training and cognitive-fitness market.” Or, better still, read a good book.

“There’s no empirical evidence that these games produce improvements,” says Nancy Andreasen, one of the world’s most distinguished neuroscientists and author of The Creative Brain. “Saying you spend half an hour a day playing sudoku and you won’t get Alzheimer’s, or playing any of these brain games and you’ll lose less grey matter than somebody who doesn’t — well, nobody has ever done that study.”

“These games definitely work because you get better at playing them,” says Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The big question is: do these skills generalise to normal everyday thoughts? That hasn’t been studied.”

But don’t despair: Susanne Jaeggi, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, may be able to help. She has devised a brain-training game that actually works. It’s a strange, complex game involving sequences of squares on a computer screen, and it definitely improves “fluid intelligence” — the part of your mind that deals directly with the raw newness of experience or, as defined by Jaeggi, “the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge”.

And there is some evidence that the games in MindFit (mindweavers.com ) do work. Baroness (Susan) Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, says it does. Short-term memory and basic reaction time are said to be improved by 20 minutes’ play three times a week.

The brain is not, as the brain trainers like to say, a muscle. It is a 1.3-kilogram crème caramel-like mix of fat, water and proteins driven by electricity and chemicals called neurotransmitters. As far as we know, it is, unless it belongs to Kerry Katona, the most complex thing in the universe. It’s made to last, at best, about 100 years. It shrinks and deteriorates with age. By the time you’re 30 you’re probably past your intellectual peak. This is a problem, as we’re living longer and longer, and the danger is that we’ll just get stupider and stupider.

It’s a particular problem for baby-boomers, the large, rich, spoilt generation born after the second world war. They’ve had everything, they run the world, but now they’re in their fifties and sixties. They love themselves to bits. But the selves they love are just so many crème caramels soon to pass their sell-by date. Already they can see the signs. Why did you leave your phone in the freezer? Why do you lose your glasses six times a day? These are symptoms of age-associated memory impairment (AAMI). It happens to everybody, but the boomers didn’t think it would happen to them. If brain- enhancing tactics are suddenly fashionable, it’s because of boomer self-love.

Perhaps, in desperation, they’ll take supplements said to improve brain function — co-enzyme Q10, ginseng, bacopa. Or perhaps they’ll look on the bright side: the brain, though unquestionably mortal, is surprisingly resilient. We’ve known this since 4.30pm on September 13, 1848. It was at that moment than an iron rod an inch-and-a-quarter thick and 3ft 8in long was blasted through the head of an American railroad worker called Phineas P Gage. Large parts of his brain were destroyed, but his recovery was almost complete. Much about this story is controversial. But what is clear is that it inspired all subsequent investigations of the brain, from surgery to neuroscience. Gage’s survival, more or less intact, also shows the brain’s staggering ability to work around problems.

There’s one more bright spot. If we work the brain, we can grow new brain cells.

“There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects,” says Dr Gene Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University. “Every time you challenge your brain, it will actually modify the brain. We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it’s impossible.”

Read Original Article (Via Times Online(UK) .)

Hack Turns iPhone Camera Into HD Camcorder - Via Slashdot:

An anonymous reader writes “Monsters and Friends has just released the beta of Drunknbass, a new iPhone hack that allows the unit’s camera to capture video. ‘While the iPhone’s 2.0 megapixel camera resolution may be mediocre for a still camera, it is excellent resolution for a consumer video camera.’ A standard definition Canon digital camcorder uses a 680K pixel sensor chip (because a standard definition TV’s resolution is only 520 x 360), while one of Canon’s HD camcorders uses a 2.9 megapixel sensor. The beta presently allows 5 second clips at 10 frames per second, but the finished version will soon allow infinite recording at 45 frames per second. Video of Drunknbass in action can be found on YouTube.”

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)