By Sean Hollister 
posted Apr 19th 2010 7:21AM
Thursday, April 15, 2010
With 'Ping' clothing, status updates literally tap you on the shoulder
By Sean Hollister
Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010 makes Caller ID spoofing a crime
By Joseph L. Flatley posted Apr 15th 2010 3:41PM
Caller ID spoofers, your days are numbered! The "Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010" has just passed the House. The bill -- which has been kickin' around in one form or another since 2007, and which only passed the Senate as recently as this February -- makes it illegal "to cause any caller ID service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information." As Ars Technica points out, there are some exceptions, including blocking your own outgoing caller ID info, and law enforcement is exempt. This bad boy is aimed at any and all real-time voice service, "regardless of the technology or network utilized," ensuring that VoIP is included. Look for the punitive measures (including flogging) to kick in about six months from now. [Warning: PDF read link]
Stanford researchers harvest electricity from algae, unkempt pools become gold mines
By Joseph L. Flatley posted Apr 15th 2010 12:49PM
While we've seen plenty of stabs at viable green energy, from underwater turbines to the Bloom Box, we're always up for another. Running along the same lines as Uppsala University's algae-based batteries, researchers at Stanford are generating electrical current by tapping into the electron activity of individual algae cells. The team designed a gold electrode that can be pushed through a cell membrane, which then seals around it. The cell, still alive, does what it does best (photosynthesis), at which point scientists harvest chemical energy in the form of electrons. According to Stanford University News, this results in "electricity production that doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere. The only byproducts of photosynthesis are protons and oxygen." Of course, the team has a long way to go before this is economically feasible, but who knows? Maybe there's an algae-powered OPhone in your future...
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Intel's experimental sensor analyzes appliance power consumption from single outlet
By Sean Hollister posted Apr 15th 2010 8:27AM
How Chat And Youth Are Killing The Meeting
From Forbes
Dan Woods, 04.13.10, 06:00 AM EDT
A friend who is a chief technology officer at a successful Internet startup reported a fascinating change. When he worked for a 50-something chief executive, his schedule was crammed with meetings, taking up as many as 30 hours a week. When a new 20-something CEO arrived, meeting time shrank to about 2 hours a week.
The company began to be run through unstructured collaboration. A never-ending management stream-of-consciousness based on e-mail, instant messaging and internal social media became the center of the action. This style of working is taking hold at many young companies.
Can you run a company through e-mail and chat without meetings, without ever getting together in the same room or at the same time? At first, the answer seems to be yes. But there is a lot more going on here.
Meetings have long been known to waste time. Wal-Mart ( WMT -news - people ) has people stand up in meetings to keep them short.
In addition, for more than a decade we have lived in e-mail and engaged in time-shifted communication among ad hoc groups. President Obama refused to give up his Blackberry because this sort of communication is so vital and valuable. Instant messaging and chat systems keep us in touch with close colleagues so that we can have quick interactions. Social media have extended this radically, enabling collaboration to include a much larger number of people. Andy Mulholland, the chief technology officer of Capgemini, calls this "strong collaboration" in his book Mesh Collaboration.
The roots of this working style come from the operations staff. During a Web site launch, for example, the ops team opens an Internet Relay Chat (or IRC) channel and people report in about what they are doing, ask questions and describe problems. The CTO or vice president of ops monitors the channel and makes decisions on the fly as the issues come up, instead of waiting for a meeting to be called. The increase in communication and time savings is dramatic.
The cost: Everyone must be monitoring the IRC channel. Usually, the ops team would make such a channel active and required at moments of intense activity. After the Web site gets launched, the IRC channel goes back to being used only by the ops staff.
Certain 20-something CEOs are happy to be online in a number of instant messaging groups all day in a way that most 50-something CEOs are not. It's not surprising that young executives like IM and older ones don't. But there are some crucial issues that digital natives may ignore at their peril.
The positive part of meetingless management is that it assumes everyone is doing his or her job and checking in if they need help. It is an empowered, management-by-exception model. The meetings that the 50-something CEO held were a way to enforce control, to keep people from working on their own. The digital native CEO says implicitly, "I trust you. Take care of it, and let me know if you need help."
In my friend's startup, this works well because the focus is a Web site, the roles are clear, and there are few competing priorities. The CEO sets the product vision, and the company makes it happen. Google ( GOOG - news - people ), I'm told by insiders, solves conflicts by looking at the data. If a certain change will help one division in France but hurt another in America, they look at the traffic and revenue involved and someone makes the call quickly. The data is king.
But could the meetingless approach work in an organization that had competing priorities or where the data is less clear? Can budgets or financial performance be predicted with any reasonable degree of accuracy? The digital-native CEOs I know are long on guerrilla war bravado and short on process.
To succeed in the long term and at scale, stream-of-consciousness management must be supplemented in the following ways:
--Project managers must monitor the stream of activity and capture knowledge so that what is taking place can be reviewed and analyzed later.
--Checklists or defined processes must be in place so that the staff has guidance and a way to capture what they have learned about how to do their jobs better.
--A mechanism to provide clarity of plans and intentions must exist so that everyone can see what everyone else is doing and conflicts or contradictions can be identified early.
--Some form of conflict resolution must exist so that problems raised are certain to get attention.
--Resources consumed and progress toward defined goals must be monitored as closely as possible and reported frequently.
--There must be a forum for brainstorming and fellowship so that everyone can enjoy each other's company and learn from everyone else.
At my friend's company, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the tyranny of meetings ended. Will they be happy a year from now? Will the board of directors be happy? Empowerment needs some structure to avoid confusion and at worst chaos. Stream-of-consciousness management must take place within a defined context to succeed in the long term. It is the rare chief executive of any age that gets this balance right.
How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting
dominique_cimafranca writes"Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Food Combination Associated With Reduced Alzheimer's Disease Risk Identified in New Study
ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2010) — Individuals whose diet includes more salad dressing, nuts, fish, poultry and certain fruits and vegetables and fewer high-fat dairy products, red meats, organ meats and butter appear less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease, according to a report posted online that will appear in the June print issue of Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Patients With Amnesia Still Feel Emotions, Despite Memory Loss
ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2010) — A new University of Iowa study offers some good news for caregivers and loved ones of individuals with Alzheimer's disease. Patients might forget a joke or a meaningful conversation -- but even so, the warm feelings associated with the experience can stick around and boost their mood.
WarGames 'Shall we play a game?' computer for sale; credit cards at DEFCON 1 (video)
By Thomas Ricker posted Apr 13th 2010 4:43AM
You know what sells? Nostalgia. And while you might be from the Kin generation, you have undoubtedly heard the W.O.P.R. supercomputer utter the text-to-speech phrase, "Shall we play a game?" from the speaker resting atop David Lightman's IMSAI 8080. The 1983 film WarGames is the stuff of nerd legend, of geek folklore; a 1200 baud, acousticly-coupled, wardialing catalyst in a Hollywood blockbuster that gave phreakers mainstream cred and a real chance at Ally Sheedy. Appraised at $25,000, the perfectly preserved IMSAI 8080 and its associated peripherals will go sale to the general public soon. So embrace it, buy it, and then hand over your icon of computing to the Smithsonian where it can be admired for generations. See the 8080 after the break with a gratuitous WarGames trailer tossed in just for fun.
Monday, April 12, 2010
MIT Researchers Harness Viruses To Split Water
ByronScott writes"A team of researchers at MIT has just announced that they have successfully modified a virus to split apart molecules of water, paving the way for an efficient and non-energy-intensive method of producing hydrogen fuel. 'The team, led by Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins). The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules. Over time, however, the virus-wires would clump together and lose their effectiveness, so the researchers added an extra step: encapsulating them in a microgel matrix, so they maintained their uniform arrangement and kept their stability and efficiency.'"
Handling Money Brings Pain Relief
Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 12, @12:35PM
from the nothing-wrong-that-$50-wouldn't-fix dept.
from the nothing-wrong-that-$50-wouldn't-fix dept.
Psychologists at the University of Minnesota's Carleton School of Management have found that handling money can alleviate both physical and emotional pain. In one experiment, test subjects were found to feel less pain when their hands were dipped into scalding water after counting money. Lead author Kathleen Vohs said, "When people are reminded of money in a subtle manner by counting out hard currency, they experience painful situations as being not very painful. You could think about being able to charge yourself up before you encounter pain. When I used to run marathons, I would've maybe wanted to be reminded of money first."
Graphene Films Clear Major Fabrication Hurdle
ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2010) — Graphene, the two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, is a potential superstar for the electronics industry. With freakishly mobile electrons that can blaze through the material at nearly the speed of light -- 100 times faster than electrons can move through silicon -- graphene could be used to make superfast transistors or computer memory chips.
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