Solar Home Competition Puts a New Spin on Energy-Efficient Style: “Twenty college and university teams from around the world recently competed in the Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in Washington D.C. with one mission: To design and build a modern, energy-efficient, solar-powered house.”
(Read Original Article - Via NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Podcast | PBS.)
Editor: OK this has nothing to do with privacy, but I wanted to let those of you located in the New York City area know that a charity I work with is having a benefit on Thursday September 27,2007. It is being held at The Capitale (in Manhattan) Come join us and help some children.
Save the Date: Thursday, September 27,2007
Sunflower’s Global Fund - Sunflower Children Heroes Benefit
Presenting Sponsor: Paul Touradji, Touradji Capital Managementc
Special Guests: Helena Houdova, Model & Founder of Sunflower Children and Russell Simmons, Chairman & CEO, Rush Communications
Place: Capitale New York, 130 Bowery, New York, NY
Attire Cocktail
Tickets On Sale NOW!100% of all public contributions directly benefit a Sunflower child. This policy is made possible through the generosity of private benefactors who directly fund Sunflower Children’s administrative, fund-raising and staffing expenses.
Sunflower Children is a humanitarian aid organization providing survival and development care for the forgotten children of the world. Sunflower’s efforts encompass medical, nutritional, psychological, educational, adoption and other humanitarian support that nurtures survival, health, growth and hope for orphaned, disabled, abandoned, refugee and impoverished children.
New York City Puts Hospital Error Data Online: “The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation is to begin publicly releasing data on infection and death rates at its 11 hospitals.”
(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Health.)
Senators Seek Public Listing of Payments to Doctors: “Makers of drugs and medical devices would be required to report publicly nearly all payments and gifts to doctors under legislation introduced Thursday in the Senate.”
(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Health.)
Appealing Industries: Animated History Of NYC Subway: “An animated GIF starts with a blank subway map and draws each line in the sequence in which it was built”
Decades of NASA photos, video coming to the Web: “
With the space shuttle Endeavour safely back on the ground, NASA is working on showing the world its photo album.
The space agency and the Internet Archive said Tuesday that they plan to scan and archive more than 12 million NASA photographs and 100,000 hours of film and video footage for free access online, under an five-year agreement. As part of the deal, the Internet Archive will host the media album on a new Web site, Nasaimages.org.
The two organizations didn’t say when the site will officially launch, but the project will presumably be well underway and public before NASA’s 50th anniversary next year. (The anniversary of space flight is next month.) They did say that the archive will feature more than 50 years of NASA history, including audio files, computer animations and images on experimental rocketry dating from as early as 1915. Archiving all of that might take a while.
The project is novel because it will finally give people a central outlet for viewing stellar photos and videos from NASA. That the space agency chose the Internet Archive as its partner is also remarkable, given that NASA has been working with Google in various capacities for more than a year. NASA has teamed with the search giant to develop Google Mars, for example.
After all, the Internet Archive, a site that offers access to digitized books and other media, has roughly the same mission as Google: making “all human knowledge” available digitally.
NASA representative David Steitz said that the project was no small endeavor, one best suited to the Internet Archive.
(Read Original Article - Via News.blog: Media (CNET News.com).)
reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books: A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive.
(Read Original Article - Via .)
Identify Galaxies Using Spare Wetware Cycles: “hazem invites us to have fun, learn about galaxies, and actually help astronomers by looking at pictures of galaxies and identifying the type. Warning: it’s more addictive than Tetris. From the site: ‘GalaxyZoo… harnesses the power of the internet — and your brain — to classify a million galaxies. By taking part, you’ll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky. Why do we need you? The simple answer is that the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns than a computer can ever be. Any computer program we write to sort our galaxies into categories would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful. To rescue these interesting systems which have a story to tell, we need you.’
(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)
iPhone Researchers Gain a Shell: “SkiifGeek writes ‘A team of researchers dedicated to finding means to fully control and interact with the new Apple iPhone claim to have successfully gained an interactive shell on the device. In order to achieve this feat physical access to the phone is required, as it relies on some minor electronics to be created and connected to the phone’s serial port. It is believed that general control over the iPhone will be available to the enterprising researchers within a week (after all, it has only just been a week since the iPhone was released), with the promise of enough control to allow for self-propagating code not very far away.’
(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)
Papers Reveal Pentagon Funding of Boeing’s Psychic Research: “ESP, meditation, parapsychology … nothing’s too paranormal for a military contract.
[…]
Boeing researchers don’t just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks. They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late ’60s.
This study, New Correlation Between a
Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator, conducted in 1967, "tentatively conclude[s]" that people can basically will particular numbers to appear.
According to the Boeing-ites, there "exists a weak but significant
correlation" between the experiment’s "statistical processes" (that would be the generation of random numbers, "connected to four lamps and four corresponding pushbuttons") and "the experimenter who initiates the processes" ("the human subjects, asked to press the buttons… with the objective in mind of obtaining a high number of coincidences").
There’s no mention of follow-up studies. But this Boeing experiment is one of a number of fringe and alternative science projects we found after a quick dig through the online archives of the Defense Technical Information Center. You’ll get a kick out of the others. So keep reading…
(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)
