Technology
Using graphene, Swedish and American researchers say they have succeeded in producing a new type of lighting component which they claim will be inexpensive to produce and can be fully recycled.
The invention was published in ACS Nano by scientists at Linköping University and Umeå University, in Sweden, and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
According to the lede in a recent New Scientist article:
Spammers’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer scientists claims.
While not really a law in the same sense as Newton's laws or the laws of thermodynamics, Moore's "law" (which states that the density at which transistors can be packed on integrated circuits with the technology existing at the time doubles approximately every two years) has held for the past forty years, and is likely to continue over the next ten years before hitting fundamental obstacles (which it eventually must do, since a transistor cannot possibly be smaller that a single atom, and even before that limit is reached, the technological nature of the transistors and the manufacturing processes involved would have to change radically).
Recently, the New York Times came out with yet another article about how people consistently pick bad passwords. It’s a hackneyed subject by now, but I shouldn’t complain: I cover this sort of old ground repeatedly, myself. But what makes this article remarkable — or, at least, what makes me want to remark on it — is their attempt to explain why.
A palm-sized device invented at Cornell that uses water surface tension as an adhesive bond just might make walking on walls possible for humans. The rapid adhesion mechanism could lead to such applications as shoes or gloves that stick and unstick to walls, or Post-it-like notes that can bear loads, researchers say.
The device is the result of inspiration drawn from a beetle native to Florida, which can adhere to a leaf with a force 100 times its own weight, yet also instantly unstick itself. Research behind the device is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
My latest online project:
Hackademe!
Hack: A clever use of technology, software, or modified items to solve a problem or increase efficiency.
Academe: The community of scholars and students engaged in higher education and research; also known as academia or acadème.
Hackademe: A website devoted to sharing clever uses of technology, software, or modified items to solve problems related to information overload, time management, organization, productivity, and other challenges faced by academics on a daily basis.
In a recent post on my personal blog, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is another option for content delivery (besides cable/fiber and satellite): one can get the content online, through a service such as Hulu or Apple TV.
Newsday.com : Paywall Ain't Working
The internet is a very powerful tool for education and for research. At a click of a mouse button I can escape my parochial world-view and embark on a fascinating journey of discovery that knows no boundaries. Except for paywalls.
In theory, the payment of a fee to view web content will generate revenues for web sites such as those set up by the news media. In practice, that theory is badly flawed. There are no news-story reporting police: anyone can report news. Well, in any country that has any pretentions of being a democracy.
The attack was first named "Operation Aurora" by the McAfee company back in mid-December of 2009. It is believed to have originated out of Bejing, China and was aimed at dozens of organizations including, Adobe Systems, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical.
On January 12, 2010, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton issued a brief statement condemning the attacks and requesting a response from China.
Since January 14, 2010 the most recent attacks have been aimed at Internet Explorer 6, IE 7, and IE 8 on Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 R2, as well as IE
6 Service Pack 1 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4.
New technology developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany may soon help consumers save energy by allowing them to track which devices in their homes are using the most energy. The basis for the technology is the "Hydra" middleware,
which is extended by an energy protocol. A middleware reduces the workload of programmers: in Hydra's case, by administering the communication between devices.
Each device in the home is given a power plogg, which is a small adapter located between the power plug and the power outlet. It reports the power consumption at any given time to a PC via a radio signal. People can tell which device is guzzling the most energy by taking a look at the computer monitor.
