Friday, February 24, 2006

Iran Is Said to Start Enriching Fuel, on Very Small Scale [New York Times: International News] 9:32:55 PM    comment []

Instant carnivorous plant collection. David Pescovitz: Edmund Scientifics sells this, er, killer collection of carniverous plants for $21. For ages 3 and up, the say! From the Carniverous Creations product description: This deluxe Carnivorous Creations kit has seeds from over 10 varieties of carnivorous plants, including the Cobra Plant, Venus Fly Trap, Pitcher Plant, Trumpet Plant and more. You'll make your won authentic bog with the included peat planting mix, blue Swamp Rocks, three Bog Buddies and colorful decals! This rare and unusual collection of plants will flourish for years in the specially designed terrarium with proper care and stratification. Link (via MAKE: Blog) [Boing Boing] 9:32:48 PM    comment []

Sangeeta Bhatia Looks at Life's Architecture, by Steve Nadis, the Scientist. Although her research interests run the gamut from cell and molecular biology to nanotechnology and biomedical engineering, one organ attracts the bulk of Sangeeta Bhatia’s attention: the liver. Her mother, who grew up in Bombay, told her that the philosophers of ancient Greece and India considered the liver the “center of everything.” Now the director of the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bhatia shares that view. Bhatia is working on engineering healthy, implantable liver tissue as an alternative for the tens of thousands of people currently awaiting liver transplants. The first challenge is to culture liver cells outside the body while preserving their functionality. “Architecture is critical,” she says. “If you arrange the cells properly, surrounding them with the right neighbors, you can create an environment and community that functions better.” Borrowing techniques such as photolithography from the microchip industry, Bhatia and her colleagues have affixed different liver cells, laced with polymer, onto a semiconductor surface. They build the tissue one layer at a time, emulating the organ’s natural structure. 1:25:29 PM    comment []

These two from BNA News: MSFT POSTS ITS DEFENCE ONLINE AGAINST EU ANTITRUST CHARGES Microsoft took the unusual step yesterday of making public its formal response to EU charges that it was failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust ruling. A Microsoft spokesman said the company released the non-confidential version of the report out of concerns the entire regulatory process has not been sufficiently transparent. YAHOO ANNOUNCES PLANS TO MODIFY TRADEMARK KEYWORD POLICY Yahoo! Search Marketing has begun notifying U.S. advertisers that they will no longer be allowed to bid on competitors' trademarked keywords beginning next week. In the past, advertisers were allowed to bid on competitors' keywords if their site provided detailed information comparing the trademarked item to its own, in order to help consumers make a decision. 1:25:24 PM    comment []

Two Benton Headlines: NEUTRALITY AND MUNICIPALITIES [SOURCE: Telephony, AUTHOR: Ed Gubbins] Inflamed by countless bloggers and sizzling beneath the spotlight of congressional hearings, debate over network neutrality reached a boiling point this month as no less an authority than Vinton Cerf -- one of the Internet's founding fathers and a current employee of net neutrality advocate Google -- warned the Senate's Commerce Committee that incumbent carrier control of broadband networks could ^?fundamentally undermine^? the Internet as we know it. With this dramatic stride upstage, the net neutrality debate -- and its attendant fears about censorship, prices and consumer choice -- could fuel interest in municipally owned broadband networks as an alternative to privately owned pipes. However, net neutrality proponents may find public networks to be fraught with plenty of their own problems as well. "[The] network neutrality [debate] is not a fuel for the municipal broadband movement in the U.S.," said Pam Baker, and analyst for visiongain. "It's a stumbling block. Cities and communities need technology companies' expertise, experience and money to build, operate and maintain [municipal broadband networks], but they cannot afford to give those companies total, or even majority, control. To do so would be perceived as governmental favoritism, which is seen as equally destructive as government competition with private companies. Yet cities repeatedly fail when they attempt to provide [muni broadband networks] themselves." In addition, even wholesale municipal network models don't necessitate net neutrality. It's conceivable, at least in theory, that municipalities could seek to defray part of the cost of their broadband networks by following AT&T's lead, charging content providers for premium use of networks. It's unknown how Congress will ultimately handle the net neutrality issue as it embarks on a rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act. Whatever actions legislators take are unlikely to completely resolve the issue. In the meantime, muni broadband may be motivated to act now before the rules change again. More commentary -- * Network neutrality? Hush! * Network Neutrality AMERICANS' HOME NET ADOPTION SLOWING [SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Daniel Terdiman] New research from Parks Associates finds that about 64 percent of Americans had some form of Internet access at home in 2005 -- up from 62 percent in 2004. But the firm predicts that Internet adoption will grow only 3 percentage points by 2009. The Parks Associates report said that 42 percent of Americans now have some form of broadband access at home, while 22 percent more have dial-up. An additional 13 percent get Internet access only outside of the home -- at work or a library, for example -- and 23 percent don't use the Internet at all. John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates, says that there are large pockets of Americans for whom modern technology means fancy televisions and home entertainment systems and not computers. And thus, he suggested, the only way to convince such people to get online would be to bundle computers and Internet service with televisions. See the Park Associates press release 10:24:55 AM    comment []

Malware Honeypot Projects Merge, by Ryan Naraine, eweek. It's mwcollect and nepenthes getting together. 7:24:28 AM    comment []

U. of Saskatchewan Fires Tenured Professor Accused of Maligning Colleagues on RateMyProfessors.com, by Dan Carnevale, CHE. (Subscription required.) Stephen Berman was a math professor at the university for more than 30 years. According to an independent arbitration panel, he maligned colleagues in postings to the Web site over a seven-month period during 2002 and 2003. The site is designed for students to share their views of their professors with other students. Barbara Daigle, associate vice president for human resources at the university, said investigations had found that Mr. Berman had crossed the line of professionalism and had disrupted the institution's work environment. . . . Ms. Daigle said the university investigated after professors became suspicious that many comments listed on RateMyProfessors were not coming from students, and several said they suspected Mr. Berman was involved. A technology specialist found that some of the comments had been posted from Mr. Berman's office computer. Peter MacKinnon, president of the university, recommended in July 2003 that Mr. Berman be fired. . . . . . . . "In a university context, it is quite simply intolerable for a senior professor to pretend to be a student in order to anonymously attack his colleagues," the arbitration panel's decision read. "Professor Berman's activities over a sustained period struck at the heart of the trust necessary for the collegial system to operate." The committee attributed 80 postings to Mr. Berman, all of which were later removed from the Web site. "The committee determined that his actions were based on personal motives," Ms. Daigle said. "Those who were supportive of him were given positive ratings, and those who opposed him were given negative ratings." . . . "People believe that tenure protects you from everything," Ms. Daigle said. "But tenure doesn't protect you from acts of dishonesty." 7:24:24 AM    comment []

Google, Porn Images, Copyright Violations?. What's not to like? Well, to start with, the judge's ruling. OK, backing up for a second... Yesterday, US District Court Judge Howard Matz issued a partial preliminary injunction in the case brought by Perfect 10 - an online porn site - against Google and Amazon's A9, which uses Google technology. Matz's ruling agreed with Perfect 10 on one aspect of its claims, that thumbnail images used by Google Image Search are copyright violations. The judge declined to issue an injunction based on Perfect 10's other claim, which is that Google was responsible for providing links to third-party Web sites that, themselves, host images illegally copied from Perfect 10. So linking was OK, but caching was not. And therein lies the rub. Caching is used in a number of Internet technologies, including proxy servers, media services such as Akami, server farm and load balancing applications, and of course all search engines and services that run Web spiders. Matz is clearly trying to tread a line that both allows Google's indexing business and respects Perfect 10's copyrights. The problem is that I don't think there is any such line to be walked. Either what Google does is fair use and Perfect 10 can go away, or it isn't and we will have to fundamentally rethink Web search and indexing. [Copyfight] 7:18:58 AM    comment []

Perfect10 vs Google, and copyright aspects of nude women pictures. [Infothought] 7:18:56 AM    comment []

Xeni on NPR: Google Case Puts Focus on Web Thumbnail Photos. Xeni Jardin: For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on the recent ruling by a federal judge that Google violated the copyright of adult entertainment site perfect10.com by posting thumbnails of the site's photos. The ruling could have significant implications for Google and other search engines that index copies of photos and other files online, so people can find them. Link to archived audio for "Google Case Puts Focus on Web Thumbnail Photos," and Link to PDF of court ruling. Previously on Boing Boing: Judge rules against Google in court case over porn thumbnails [Boing Boing] 7:18:51 AM    comment []

Coup d'Ecole. Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, writing in the Opinion Journal, notes that Harvard undergrads had been exceptionally supportive of Larry Summers. The day he announced his resignation, they were out in force in Harvard Yard, chanting "Five More Years!" The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, has been outspoken in its criticism of the faculty that demanded the president's ouster. "No Confidence in 'No Confidence' " ran the headline of an editorial demonstrating the spuriousness of the charges being brought against the president ... [Pajamas Media] 7:18:45 AM    comment []

In John They Trust. In John They Trust: interesting article on cargo cults [Too many topics, too little time.] 7:18:13 AM    comment []

Google To Become Portal. silly 2002 April Fool's article predicts the future   World of Warcraft teaches the wrong things. grinding and the time commitment are two big reasons why I can't get into current MMOs [via] I'm Your Biggest Fan. blogger flunks job interview because of daily fan letters to Star Jones [via]  [Waxy.org Links] 7:18:05 AM    comment []

Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In congue enim eget felis. Maecenas placerat. Nullam ante lacus, iaculis sed, porta ut, vehicula non, libero. Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that you've seen that dummy text before? In fact you probably have. It's called the 'Lorem Ipsum', and it is actually a real text with a real history. [Pajamas Media] 7:18:00 AM    comment []

Yester-quickie: Visualising calorie consumption (R .... Yester-quickie: Visualising calorie consumption (RWx-vshort) [robot wisdom weblog] 7:17:53 AM    comment []

Ahmadinejad's minister endorses blogs in Iran. Hossein Saffar-Harandi, the most fundamentalist minister of culture and Islamic guidance Iran has ever had, has not only publicly endorsed blogs, but also announced plans for including them, as well as websites, within the purview of a new government office that used to oversee only the press. Given Iran's strict new policies against cultural products that promote "western" ideas such as feminism, liberalism, nihilism and humanism, the recent endorsement of blogs seems contradictory. The flourishing of blogs, estimated at more than 700,000 worldwide, has created a new space for self-expression on political and social matters. In a speech during the... [Editor: Myself (English)] First, it shows blogs in Iran have become so mainstream and influential the government can no longer ignore them. The secular and the religious, women and men and pro-regime and opposition Iranians now use blogs to socialise, communicate with like-minded people and spread their messages. Second, it reflects the fundamentalist government's fear of an unregulated space within which public opinion might be influenced. That prospect seems increasingly likely given that the media have been banned from discussing an increasing number of topics, such as nuclear negotiations and the spread of the bird flu, elsewhere. However, the regime has good memories of particular occasions when the blogging community became politically engaged. The best example was when almost everyone in Weblogestan participated in a protest against an American magazine that had used the term "Arabian Gulf" rather than "Persian Gulf" - a very sensitive subject for Iranians. The government now expects bloggers to rally around Iran's attempt to improve its nuclear expertise. Third, the conservatives' new policy suggests they think that, by filtering a few hundred political blogs and sites, they can mould the "western" technologies into tools to promote Islamic revolutionary ideas and values. Such appropriation has been a common theme in the Shia tradition in Iran. New technologies, many imported from the west, are quickly embraced by the religious establishment, even though they appear to contradict traditional values. It was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, who imported PCs, databases and the internet into the clerical schools in the city of Qum. Now none of these tools is seen as evil. 7:17:43 AM    comment []

Simple rule - if you write, get a blog Today's flash of the bleedin' obvious was that blogs by writers tend to work well. On the face of it, this is a banal observation, but finding the blog by the Grey's Anatomy writers , and Malcolm Gladwell's new blog, reminded me that anyone who writes professionally, who writes because they love it, and can't help but write, should get themselves a blog, so we can all share in the flow of ideas. After all, just on my favorite's list I have Gaiman , Sessum , Scalzi , Charman , the Nielsen Haydens , Searls , Weinberger and Locke . It may seem that you lot have a bit of an unfair advantage, but us amateurs do appreciate your good writing and try to learn from you. Technorati Tags: auctorial , blink , blogs , writing [Epeus' epigone] 7:16:56 AM    comment []