An anonymous reader writes"In 2008, the Seattle Police illegally arrested security consultant Eric Rachner for refusing to show ID. After Rachner filed a formal complaint, he was prosecuted for obstructing, and the police claimed that videos of the arrest were unavailable — until Rachner's research uncovered proof that the police had the videos all along."It's an interesting story of how he figured out how the system in use by Seattle police automatically tracks deletion, copying, or other uses of the recorded stream.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
'Ancestral Eve' Crystal May Explain Origin of Life's Left-Handedness
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — Scientists are reporting discovery of what may be the "ancestral Eve" crystal that billions of years ago gave life on Earth its curious and exclusive preference for so-called left-handed amino acids. Those building blocks of proteins come in two forms -- left- and right-handed -- that mirror each other like a pair of hands.
New Speed Cameras Catch You From Space
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 21, @10:11AM
from the no-place-to-run-or-speed dept.
space
A new kind of speed camera that uses satellites to measure average speed over long distances is being tested in Britain. The "Speedspike" system combines plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver to calculate average speed between any two points in the area being monitored. From the article: "Details of the trials are contained in a House of Commons report. The company said in its evidence that the cameras enabled 'number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day.' It also referred to the system's 'low cost' and ease of installation." I can't wait to see the episode of MythBusters where they try to avoid getting a speeding ticket from a satellite.
from the no-place-to-run-or-speed dept.
space
A new kind of speed camera that uses satellites to measure average speed over long distances is being tested in Britain. The "Speedspike" system combines plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver to calculate average speed between any two points in the area being monitored. From the article: "Details of the trials are contained in a House of Commons report. The company said in its evidence that the cameras enabled 'number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day.' It also referred to the system's 'low cost' and ease of installation." I can't wait to see the episode of MythBusters where they try to avoid getting a speeding ticket from a satellite.
Being Naughty or Nice May Boost Willpower, Physical Endurance
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2010) — New research from Harvard University suggests that moral actions may increase our capacity for willpower and physical endurance. Study participants who did good deeds -- or even just imagined themselves helping others -- were better able to perform a subsequent task of physical endurance.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Environmental Engineers Use Algae To Capture Carbon Dioxide
April 1, 2007 — Engineers have designed a simple, sustainable and natural carbon sequestration solution using algae. A team at Ohio University created a photo bioreactor that uses photosynthesis to grow algae, passing carbon dioxide over large membranes, placed vertically to save space. The carbon dioxide produced by the algae is harvested by dissolving into the surrounding water. The algae can be harvested and made into biodiesel fuel and feed for animals. A reactor with 1.25 million square meters of algae screens could be up and running by 2010.
US House Passes Ban On Caller ID Spoofing
smarek writes"The 'Truth in Caller ID Act' passed the US House of Representatives on Wednesday. The legislation is trying to outlaw caller ID spoofing. In some cases, this spoofing has led to individuals giving out information that has led to identity theft. Last year the NYPD discovered over 6,000 victims of caller ID spoofing, who together lost a total of $15 million. A companion bill has already been passed by the Senate, and the two are on their way to 'informal conference to reconcile any differences.' The bill that results will most likely pass."PCWorld's coverage notes that callers will still be able to block their information entirely, and that the bill may have negative consequences for legitimate phone-related services, like Google Voice.
An Early Look At Next-Gen Shooter Bodycount
If you ask fans of first-person shooters what feature they'd like to see in a new game, their answers — now and for the past 15 years — probably involve destructible environments. Game developers have tried to satisfy this demand with scripted events, breakable objects, and more crates than you can shake a rocket launcher at. However, Bodycount, an upcoming game from Codemasters Guildford, is aiming to deliver what gamers have wanted for so long: the ability to blast apart whatever you please. Quoting the Guardian's games blog from their hands-on with the game:"... it's not just about effect, it's about access. In Bodycount, you can blow chunks out of thinner interior walls, allowing you to burst through and catch enemies by surprise. You can also brilliantly modify cover objects – if you're hiding behind a crate and want to take out enemies without popping up from behind it, shoot a hole in it. Bingo, you've got a comparatively safe firing vantage. The difference between this and say, Red Faction or Bad Company, is that the destruction isn't limited to pre-set building sections. It's everywhere. This should, of course, grind the processor to a halt, but the team has come up with a simple compromise to facilitate its vision. 'The trick is that we're not running full physics on everything,' explains lead coder, Jon Creighton. ... This is tied in with one of the best cover systems I've ever seen. While in a crouching position (gained by holding the left trigger down), you can use the left analogue stick to subtly look and aim around your cover object, ducking and peeking to gain that perfect view of the war zone. It's natural, it's comfortable and it's adaptive, and it will surely consign the whole 'locking on' mechanic to the graveyard of cover system history."
Monday, April 19, 2010
George Washington Racks Up 220 Years of Late Fees At Library
Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 19, @01:15PM
from the at-least-he-read dept.
from the at-least-he-read dept.
Everyone knows that George Washington couldn't tell a lie. What you probably didn't know is that he couldn't return a library book on time. From the article: "New York City's oldest library says one of its ledgers shows that the president has racked up 220 years' worth of late fees on two books he borrowed, but never returned. One of the books was the 'Law of Nations,' which deals with international relations. The other was a volume of debates from Britain's House of Commons. Both books were due on Nov. 2, 1789."
Cows On Treadmills Produce Clean Power For Farms
separsons writes"William Taylor, a farmer in Northern Ireland, recently developed the Livestock Power Mill, a treadmill for cows. Taylor uses the device to generate clean, renewable power for his farm. Cows are locked into a pen on top of a non-powered, inclined belt. The cows' walking turns the belt, which spins a gearbox to drive a generator. One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines. It may seem like a kooky idea, but Taylor could be onto something: According to his calculations, if the world's 1.3 billion cattle used treadmills for eight hours a day, they could provide six percent of the world's power!"
Thursday, April 15, 2010
With 'Ping' clothing, status updates literally tap you on the shoulder
By Sean Hollister 
posted Apr 19th 2010 7:21AM
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.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Bank Employee Plants Malware on ATMs
Wired's Threat Level has a piece on a Bank of America employee, Rodney Reed Caverly, who has been charged withinstalling malware on ATMs in North Carolina. Caverly, who worked on the bank's IT staff, allegedly withdrew cash untraceably from the ATMs over a period of 7 months last year."The charges were filed the same day that credit card company Visa warned the banking industry that Eastern European ATM malware recently showed up in America for the first time. That code, initially spotted last year on some 20 ATMs in Russia and Ukraine, was designed primarily to capture PINs and bank card magstripe data, but also allowed thieves to instruct the machine to eject whatever cash was still in it... At least 16 versions of the East European malware have been found so far and were designed to attack ATMs made by Diebold and NCR, according to the April 1 Visa alert. There is no information tying the malware found in Russia with the malware allegedly used by Caverly."
Netflix inks with Universal and Twentieth Century Fox: first TV streams, more films, and 28 day rental delay
By Thomas Ricker posted Apr 9th 2010 8:55AM
Everyone's streaming media darling, Netflix, has just reached terms with both Universal and Twentieth Century Fox. Both agreements beef up Netflix's streaming content while limiting Netflix to renting DVD and Blu-ray discs 28 days after the retail street date -- yup, just like with Warner Brothers. To put that into perspective, while Twentieth Century Fox's "Avatar" DVD/Blu-ray will hit shelves on April 22nd it won't be available for Netflix rental until the end of May. On the plus side we've got a first time, Netflix TV streaming agreement with TCF -- albeit, released in a window it decides. Content includes the complete prior seasons of shows like "24," "Bones," and "Lie to Me" in addition to older library titles like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Can't say we didn't see this one coming.
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