Links for 17-11-2006
History of dark energy, 60-second virus detector, advanced custom search engines, bionic reporter, location-based mobile social networking…
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“Dark energy, which is apparently about 70% of the energy of the universe … is characterized by two features — it’s distributed smoothly throughout space, and maintains nearly-constant density as the universe expands.”
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“Using nanotechnology, a team of University of Georgia researchers has developed a diagnostic test that can detect viruses as diverse as influenza, HIV and RSV in 60 seconds or less.”
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“Between 2000 and 2005, emissions grew four times faster than in the preceding 10 years…” This is not good news.
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“When planning New Scientist’s 50th anniversary celebration, we settled on “Big Questions” as our theme.” Good round-up of articles and snippets.
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“… a theory which suggests that the ancient monument was a source and centre for healing and not a place for the dead as believed by many previous scholars.”
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“Find out who performed the original version of a particular song, or who covered that song. Unlike many related sites, we try to be as complete as possible…” Another tool for pub-quiz boffs.
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“It doesn’t take long, though, for the first-time CSE builder to want to exercise finer control over their search engine, and to begin pushing up against the boundaries of the simple CSE control panel.” So you know.
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“By any standard, Vista’s new DRM capabilities [...] hardly qualify as a selling point; after all, it’s hard to sing the praises of technology designed to make life harder for its users.” Word.
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9 – Bionic man“Every evening, before I switch off the bedside light, I take my right leg off and plug it into the mains.” We live in a science fiction story. Link via Warren Ellis.
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“A vast coalition backed by Yahoo and Microsoft is working to outpace internet juggernaut Google and be the first organisation to digitise the world’s books.” The sleeping giants awaken.
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“So it seems that John Sutherland wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend about the encroachment of bloggers and the online world on the literary establishment, which not-at-all predictably caused some upset…”
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“If the earliest days of Second Life resemble the first century of American history (and they do) then the most recent years of the world seem to be replicating the last couple decades of the Internet in miniature form.”
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“Labour-saving devices have created a generation of lardballs, and now brainwork-saving devices threaten to cripple us mentally too.” Rampantly technophobic opinion piece from Teh Grauniad.
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“Economics is not a moral issue. It doesn’t care about anyone’s “right” to make money from their creative output… and neither should you. The idea that anyone automatically has a right to make money from their creative output is wrong.”
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“…unlike other social location services, [it] automatically updates the location of everyone in a private network and displays that information directly on a map on the phone.” The future is already here, my friends.
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“Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions…”
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“The technologies of participatory culture can be catalysts for progress, expanding our capacity to understand the world and share that understanding with others. Such capabilities are sorely needed now.” Jamais Cascio presentation.
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Chris Partridge’s technophobic article is a joke. It’s just a variation on the old “things were better back in my day” thinking.
[...] Loincloths and laptops: Way ahead of Larry King, natives in the Amazon use Google Earth to save the rain forest. Stone age to Silicon age in one lifetime. Thanks, Armchair Anarchist. [...]