Yves's planet

While we certainly don't expect you'll begin planning your days around the new feature, Google has added a new layer to Google Earth that makes it feel even more like you're taking a live, real-time look at the earth from a satellite above - real-time weather.

Just added to the latest version of Google Earth, the feature offers a live view of the weather, from radar to raindrops.

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Weather has been available in Google Earth since 2007, but now "the latest version projects images of rain and snow over the areas with those weather patterns as it's actually happening".

On a macro level, the weather layers offer a way to get a bird's eye view of weather events like hurricanes. When you zoom in, Google takes it one step further and offers an animated view of the rain or snow for that area. The precipitation data currently only covers some areas in North America and Europe

The added layer is available in the latest version of Google Earth, which was released in early June with enhanced functionality for both free and pro users.

Discuss

"Then there’s the fact that so much of our data is entrusted to third-party sites. There’s no guarantee that those third-party sites give a rat’s ass about the long-term future of our data. Quite the opposite. The callous destruction of Geocities by Yahoo is a testament to how little our hopes and dreams mean to a company concerned with the bottom line."

An anonymous reader writes "Programmers who design and code algorithms for investment banking are unhappy with their salaries. Many of them receive a low 6-figure salary whereas their bosses — who manipulate these algorithms and execute the trades — often earn millions. One such anonymous programmer points out that he was paid $150,000 per year, whereas the software he wrote was generating $100,000 per day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://scotgovcamp.eventbrite.com/

Identifying local landmarks and uncovering hidden coupons are fun augmented reality applications, but "Programming iPhone Sensors" author Alasdair Allan has a loftier AR goal.

"I'm terrible with faces and names," he said during a recent interview at OSCON. "So, I want those little glasses where you see someone and it's like: 'This is Gary. You met him in 2005. His wife is called Mary. He's got three kids. His birthday is ...'. That sort of thing. That's my ultimate goal."

Allan's ideal is based on facial recognition, which is a step above facial detection. But you can't have identification without detection, and detection is something we're close to seeing in real-time. Allan himself successfully built a real-time face detection demo on the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4's improved hardware makes the same functionality easier to implement. (Not trivial ... just easier.)

Allan touched on a number of additional topics during our OSCON chat, including:

• How (theoretically) a geolocation database -- like SimpleGeo -- could be matched up with a cloud-based facial recognition database.
• How iPhoto's Faces tool could influence FaceTime and other real-time video applications.
• He closed with a brief rundown on the types of sensors commonly found in many smartphones ... and why the introduction of gyroscopes in Android phones is now a near inevitability.

The full interview is available in the following video:

Related:

• Mobile accelerometers and gyroscopes explained
• Augmented reality and the ultimate user manual
• Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide
• Programming iPhone Sensors: Rough Cuts Version

theodp writes "For show-and-tell at SIGGRAPH 2010, Microsoft Research brought Street Slide, 'a multi-perspective street slide panorama with navigational aides and mini-map.' Very slick (demo video). Technology Review explains that Street Slide stitches together slices from multiple panoramas, making it possible to see all the shops on a street at once. Someone using Street Slide's panoramic view can slide along the facades looking for places of interest (perhaps guided by logos or ads at the bottom), and zoom back in to a classic Bing Streetside bubble view at any time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iTunes Smart Playlists allow for very flexible creation of dynamic playlists based on a whole boat-load of parameters.  But I wonder how often people use this feature. Is it too complicated?  Let’s find out.  I’ve created a poll that will take you about 20 seconds to complete.   Go to iTunes, count up how many smart playlists you have.  You can tell which playlists are smart playlists because they have the little gear icon:

Don’t count the pre-fab smart playlists that come with iTunes (like 90′s music, Recently Added, My Top Rated, etc.).   Once you’ve counted up your playlists, take the poll:

View This Poll
online surveys

The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has been all over the news in recent months. The lawyer group sued thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly file-shared motion pictures belonging to their clients, including the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. However, it turns out that USCG are not copyright purists either, as they have blatantly copied the website of a competitor without permission.

During May this year the makers of The Hurt Locker filed a complaint against the first 5,000 ‘John Does’. Helped by the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), the film makers are requesting the personal details of individuals behind the IP-addresses that allegedly shared the film on BitTorrent.

With these personal details in hand, USCG is planning to send out a batch of settlement requests asking the alleged file-sharers to pay amounts up to $2,500, or risk a full trial and a heftier fine instead. In recent months USCG has already sent out similar ‘speculative invoices’ to downloaders of other films, including the indie movie Far Cry.

It’s needless to say that the administrative process to handle thousands of settlements will involve quite a bit of work. To make this easier for themselves and the alleged downloaders, USCG recently put up a settlement website where visitors to their main website Copyrightsettlements.info are redirected to.

By itself the mere existence of this settlement portal wouldn’t really be newsworthy, but this changed when we realized that they had copied it from a competitor.

Six weeks ago a TorrentFreak reader alerted us that USCG was setting up a new website to deal with the settlements. Instead of coding the site themselves, they had simply copied the code (including the copyright statement) and images from a company in the same line of work. The images below show how both sites looked at the time.

Because the USCG site was hosted on a force.com subdomain, we weren’t able to verify the legitimacy of this site to find out if there was indeed a direct connection to USCG. To be honest, we simply couldn’t believe that USCG would be stupid enough to blatantly rip-off a website like this, so we assumed that someone had tried to pull off a prank.

A month after the email, however, the same site popped up again when we tried to access the website of USCG. Although the original layout was stripped down significantly over the past weeks, the website still uses code and images from the Copyright Enforcement Group.

Initially, USCG even listed their competitor’s phone number on their site, but they were wise enough to remove this and other texts that refer to the Copyright Enforcement Group. That said, there is no doubt that USCG’s website is ‘stolen’.

Both the source code and the copied image names clearly reveal that the code was blatantly copied from their competitors. Armed with this knowledge we decided to contact the victims of this apparent violation to ask if they had perhaps authorized this use. The answer we got was clear.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are not associated with the US Copyright Group and they are not authorized to use Copyright Enforcement Group materials,” a representative of the Copyright Enforcement Group told TorrentFreak in a response.

Another representative told the reader who tipped us off that the US Copyright Group and Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver will be receiving a cease and desist from Copyright Enforcement Group.

Of course, we’ve seen this type of behavior before. The UK’s ACS:Law, also writing to thousands of file-sharers demanding cash payments for alleged infringements, aren’t whiter than whiter either. They took sections of several news articles and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass them off as their own content on their company website.

So there we have it once again. An outfit that targets copyright infringers is actively infringing copyright themselves. They are so incompetent and probably blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, that they can’t even put a website together without breaking the law themselves – copyright law.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

scurtis writes "An insider has told eWEEK Europe that some Internet service providers in the UK only sign-up customers who can be guaranteed a good service, in order to improve average speed claims. The revelation comes after the regulator Ofcom criticised broadband service providers earlier this week for not delivering the speeds promised to consumers. Meanwhile, TalkTalk's chairman Charles Dunstone has argued that Ofcom could be doing a lot more to push BT — as the operator of the copper infrastructure — to improve maintenance of the lines and its communication with fellow service providers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A simple Hpricot Clone for nodejs"

From Cool Start Phone Forums (NR)

From BBC iPlayer message boards (NR)

From currybetnet (NR)

1. The No-Twinkie Database -- These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of "don't do this" for app designers. (via waxy)
2. Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) -- a map showing the degree of legal support for privacy and data protection across various jurisdictions. (via azaaza on Twitter)
3. Wesabe on GitHub -- Wesabe has closed, but is open sourcing its code.
4. Laurie Santos TED Talk -- monkeys make similar irrational decisions as we do. "The errors we make are predictable and immune to evidence." Sound like you? Watch this excellent talk.

(2010-07-30 08:57)

There is this concept of virtual currency in the cloud that we explored back in May. It came from IBM and its use of tokens as a virtual currency for customers to use software in the cloud.

The concept draws on the fundamental belief communities work in a social manner. Each member of the community participates through the exchange of currency that has a specific unit of value.

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Now, according to IEEE Spectrum, a group of researchers is advancing the concept of a "social cloud" which would ease the sharing of information, hardware, and services by using the computing resources of a person's online community. A person's friends would be the basis for a social cloud that would consist of storage and computational capabilities.

The researchers contend that social networks like Facebook may prove to be a framework for resource sharing. But it's the market dynamics in the equation which gives the concept a certain degree of meaning. According to the researchers, the model only works when the social networking component is combined with market factors such as financial payments, social ranking or credit that can be traded.

That gives it some similarity to the concept of tokens, being advanced by the IBM Rational software group. Under that system, tokens are purchased and can be traded to use different tools in the Rational software framework that is available through the IBM cloud.

E.T.

The other component consists of volunteer computing. An infrastructure would be in place that would consist of methods for pooling storage and computational capabilities, similar to that used by SETI@home. SETI as you may know is the scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). People may participate by running a free program they download. By pooling resources, scientists can use it to look for signals from outer space. In the social cloud, volunteer computing would be the foundation for how resources are distributed.

Virtual Credits and the Social Cloud

In the preliminary model, the user accesses the social cloud through a service like Facebook. The resources are made available in online marketplaces. According to IEEE Spectrum, users acquire resources by exchanging virtual credits.

Here's the catch. The researchers say for it to work you cannot buy additional credits. They can only be earned through participation. It's a virtual economy and it acts as an internal control. The goal being to share resources and prevent overuse.

Skeptical?

Plenty of skepticism to go around on this concept. As one scientist said, the goal for many is to get as many friends as possible on social networks. That would throw a wrench in the model.

From IEEE Spectrum:

"...."the more friends you have, the better," says Maik Lindner, who studies cloud computing at SAP Research CEC Belfast, in Northern Ireland, with funding from the European Union. This the-more-the-merrier mind-set is "contradictory to having trust derived from social networks," he says. Also, Lindner says, the fact that the social cloud operates on the premise of mixing business with pleasure could spoil the friend network, a possibility that may detract from its appeal to potential users."

Researchers counter that this is a preliminary model and filters exist for these kinds of issues:

"However, in response to skeptics who argue that most online friendships do not translate into trusting relationships, Kris Bubendorfer, professor of computer science at Victoria University, has an answer. "We don't assume that all members within a social network have the same level of trust," he says. Rather, the social cloud relies on existing Facebook friend-sorting mechanisms, which group people according to the type of association they have with one another and could be used to assess different levels of trust between users, says Bubendorfer. Social cloud users would also be able to define the limits of their resource sharing, choosing to make their documents and services available to different groups depending on the perceived level of trust.' "

The concept of shared computing gives even more credence to the idea of an open cloud. A place that is truly fueled through participation. But a picture emerges if you consider some basic outcomes.

For instance, the idea of the private cloud could evolve into exclusive, social clouds that provide more to the wealthy, giving disproportional resources to the few, not the many.

But what a cool look into the future of the cloud. The concept of market forces has to play into the future of cloud computing. Currencies we now use to drive economies may have no meaning in the decades ahead. It is conceivable we will use new forms of currency or credit to purchase the storage, compute and services we need to manage our lives.

What this also means is an advancement in the concept of the interface culture. The desktop is a metaphor we used to give some meaning to computing. The cloud defines the concept of services we access through the Internet. In the future, virtual currencies may be a basis for how we define our culture and how social interactions correlate to market forces.

Discuss

schliz writes "Physicists have observed 'bizarre' behaviour in graphene electrons that they say could make the material even more suitable to replace silicon in future electronic devices. When strained in a particular manner, nanobubbles formed on a sheet of graphene, within which electrons came to occupy particular, quantum energy levels rather than the usual, continuous range of energies in unstrained graphene. By controlling electrons' energy levels, researchers could control how easily they moved through graphene — in effect, controlling their conductivity, optical, or microwave properties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We are researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London. In collaboration with BBC 6 Music and the British Academy, we are conducting research to find out about the music in people’s heads...An earworm is a short part of a tune that comes randomly into your head and then repeats for a while, for anything from a few minutes to hours."

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They're companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

Sponsor

I spoke to Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, to find out what its strategy is and what he thinks of Demand Media and other competitors.

How Howcast Works

As the name suggests, Howcast is all about how-to videos. As with other 'content farm' companies, Howcast has identified a big opportunity to provide so-called "evergreen" informational content on the Web across hundreds of thousands of categories. The rationale being that people search, mostly on Google, for instructional content. How To Shuck an Oyster, How to Save Water in Your Garden, How to Avoid Dropped Calls on the iPhone 4, and so on.

Howcast is betting that how-to videos will have more relevance to searchers in the near future, than textual how-to articles. And given that YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world, behind only Google, that seems a solid business assumption.

Distribution

Howcast launched in February 2008 and now has nearly 200,000 instructional videos. It streams 25 million videos each month on both its own web site and across a network that includes web portals like AOL and Yahoo, and online TV or video sites like Hulu and Dailymotion. Its biggest distribution platform though is YouTube, where it has over 150,000 channel subscribers. Raman said that around 80% of its videos are viewed offsite, with 20% being viewed on Howcast's web site.

It also has a strong mobile presence, which Raman said was key to Howcast's future growth. He noted that Howcast has had over 2 million app downloads across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry devices. The Howcast for iPad app alone has been installed by 150,000 iPad users (approximately 5% of global iPad users) and was for a time the number 2 free iPad app in Apple's App Store.

Raman noted that user engagement is very good on mobile - for example users watch videos on average twice a day and watch two videos per session. Perhaps for this reason, Raman said that the value of users on mobile is much higher than on other platforms.

The Quality Question

In my discussion with Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, the word "quality" came up a number of times.

Every time I talk to 'content farm' companies, they insist that the aim is to produce quality content. That's because the most common criticism of content farms is that they clog up search engines with poor quality content.

In Howcast's case, the content appears to be professionally produced. It outputs about 400 how-to videos each month, most of which flows through its Emerging Filmmakers Program. Raman said that the program attracts wanna-be filmmakers, who are looking for a place to prove their skills. Howcast pays between $50-$300 per video.

Raman told me that Howcast wants to keep the content bar high. He claimed that Howcast has a much higher ratio of subscribers per video than Demand Media. Howcast is "not necessarily playing the volume game," he added.

Comparison to Demand Media

Who is the top YouTube provider, measured by views? You guessed it, Demand Media. This is because it produces far more video content per month than Howcast (Demand competes directly with Howcast with its property eHow). While Sanjay Raman didn't have exact figures, he estimated that Demand Media produces about 10 times more videos every month than Howcast. However he implied that this resulted in lower quality videos.

"Demand Media takes tasks and makes them smaller than they need to be," said Raman.

He also claimed that Howcast's playbacks per video are higher than Demand Media's. Howcast averages 44-50,000 playbacks per video, he told me, whereas Demand is around 7,000 per video.

Despite Demand Media Threat, Howcast Well Positioned

Many questions about content farms seem to center around whether other companies can compete with Demand Media, which operates on a much larger scale than its competitors. Perhaps the only company capable of stopping Demand's relentless growth is Google, which is reportedly tweaking its algorithms to better account for quality over quantity.

Howcast is hoping that its focus on professional video-making, via its filmmakers program, will lead to high search results. That remains to be seen. One thing that Howcast definitely has going for it is its positioning in the mobile space, which is increasingly where video content is consumed.

Discuss

As our professional lives increasingly happen in the cloud and on the go, one decidedly old school aspect of networking that remains prevalent is the paper-based business card. Dozens of Web and mobile apps have attempted to recreate the business card for a digital world, some more effectively than others. Here are three that look promising.

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ScanBizCards

Rather than try to replace paper business cards all together, ScanBizCards simply digitizes them and makes them a bit more useful. Using an iPhone 3GS or higher, simply take a picture of that business card your new contact just handed to you. The app recognizes text on the card, like the person's name, phone number and email address, and then imports that information directly into your contacts.

Once the new contact info is saved, you have the option of sending a following up email, not unlike the one you were going to eventually get around to sending after you get back to your desk later. The app saves all of the business card images, which can be flipped through in a Cover Flow-style interface. Each card's contact info is clickable so you can get in touch instantly and adding your new contact to your LinkedIn connections is a matter of a tapping a single button.

SnapDat

SnapDat is another iPhone app, but instead of tolerating a world in which paper business cards still exist, it aims to bring the entire exchange into the cloud. Design and build your digital business card, or SnapCard, and then easily exchange it with any other contact who has the SnapDat app. Since this is a bit too limiting to be useful in all networking situations, the same contact info can alternatively be sent as a vCard attached to an email. SnapDat also integrates with the iPhone address book and popular social networking sites. If it's important to remember where you met somebody and recieved their contact info, you can use the GeoStamp mapping feature to geo-tag the exchange.

TwtBizCard

For those inclined to network professionally via Twitter, there's TwtBizCard. Fill out your contact info to create a business card hosted on TwtBizCard's site, a link to which you can then include in tweets to people you'd like to stay in touch with. Since the mobile version is Web-based, it can be used on any Web-enabled phone. While this solution may not be for everyone, it does make exchanging professional contact info over Twitter rather easy.

TwtBizCard Demo from Felipe Coimbra on Vimeo.

Have you used any other digital business card apps, or are you still trading paper cards? Let us know in the comments.

Photo from Flickr CC:Carlos Varela

Discuss

astroengine writes "Sure, we're looking 172 years into the future, but an international collaboration of scientists have developed two mathematical models to help predict when a potentially hazardous asteroid (or PHA) may hit us, not in this century, but the next. The rationale is that to stand any hope in deflecting a civilization-ending or extinction-level impact, we need as much time as possible to deal with the threatening space rock. (Asteroid deflection can be a time-consuming venture, after all.) Enter '(101955) 1999 RQ36' — an Apollo class, Earth-crossing, 500 meter-wide space rock. The prediction is that 1999 RQ36 has a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting us in the future, and according to one of the study's scientists, María Eugenia Sansaturio, half of those odds fall squarely on the year 2182."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few months ago we wrote about how big-name companies are starting to talk about the Internet of Things - a term for the network formed by real-world objects connected to the Internet - indicating that the idea is picking up speed.

Today Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems Dave Evans appeared on the company's netcast, Talk2Cisco, to answer questions about the next 50 years and beyond via email and Twitter. Turns out one of the world's biggest technology companies is betting the Internet of Things is going to be big.

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There are already about 35 billion devices connected to the Internet, Evans said, far outnumbering the number of human users. And there are well over a trillion devices with network potential, he said, including cars, home appliances and tags for livestock and pets. This will make for a "thinking planet" of objects and computers with access to real-time data, Evans said.

One imminent use would be making home energy use more efficient by eliminating power used by devices when they are idle, he said.

Cisco designs and sells electronics, networking and communications technology and services. The company is currently working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to place sensors all over the planet that collect real-time information about climate change.

Evans also mentioned HP's Central Nervous System for the Planet, or CeNSE, a project to place a trillion push pin-sized sensors all over the planet as infrastructure for the Internet of Things.

Other predictions from Cisco's Chief Futurist, who doubles as Chief Technologist, Internet Business Solutions Group:

• by 2012, 90% of data will be video
• by 2050, a computer with the computing power of nine billion brains will be available for $1,000
• we currently only know about 5% of what we will know in 50 years

Evans said humans generated more data in 2009 than in the previous 5,000 years combined, although a lot of it is useless - comparable to saving all 2,000 photos from your weekend trip to the beach.

Therefore, filtering and sorting the exponential proliferation of data will become more and more important for computers, Evans said. And it will be even more important and possible for computers to interpret rich media such as photos and video. Google Goggles, an app that can recognize text, art and landmarks from images, is an early example.

The Internet of Things holds many possibilities for a network systems manufacturer like Cisco. It also looks like we may be needing a lot of those "50 thousand trillion trillion addresses per person" created by switching to IPv6, the next generation Internet Protocol which uses a 128-bit address, after all.

Photo from flickr cc:darynbarry

Discuss

Smart DIYer Tluweyen details how to mount storage containers to the ceiling of your garage—a perfect project for households desperate for more storage space that don't have a lot of extra room in the garage. You'll need some 2x4s and other boards, a bit of hardware, and a few hours on your hands. Tluweyen's instructions are pretty detailed, and the clever result, as you can see in the photo above, looks pretty good: Lots of extra storage space and plenty of room for a car underneath.

There are tons of great reasons to root your Android phone, but once you do, you'll likely be overwhelmed with all the custom ROM options out there. Here's how to go about finding—and installing—the one that fits your needs.

Oven-fresh bread is one of life’s simple joys. Ciabatta, a crisp-crusted Italian bread with hints of sourdough and loads of crannies longing for butter, is one of the easiest breads to make at home.

Baking bread at home saves hundreds of dollars on groceries every year. With this easy method, each deliciously crusty-on-the-outside, moist-and-chewy-on-the-inside loaf will only cost you about 50 cents and 5 minutes a day. We’re not kidding!

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world and both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Every other ISP trails dramatically. Japan's NTT comes in third with 17 million subscribers, and all US providers are smaller still. 'The gap between the top two operators and the world's remaining broadband service providers will continue to grow rapidly,' said TeleGeography Research Director Tania Harvey. 'Aside from the two Chinese companies, all of the top ten broadband ISPs operate in mature markets, with high levels of broadband penetration and rapidly slowing subscriber growth.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has begun opening up access to a new Application Programming Interface (API) called the Places API. Developers building apps that include a "check in at this place" feature can use the Places API to search across all the places users might check in for basic information like business name, address, phone number and other descriptive information. That information will be editable by the businesses listed and no caching of data is allowed, so apps will have to ping Places regularly for real-time data.

Making this data as free and easy to use as Google Maps is today could create a foundation for new location-savvy apps to bloom throughout the mobile web, with far less overhead than such apps have to wrestle with today in order to provide a rich user experience. One catch? All these apps will have to be integrated with Google's Adsense.

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Also available: rating information from the same business review sites that appear in Google Maps search results. So show me the best-rated coffee shop within a mile of me that's described as dog-friendly in user reviews. That would be awesome.

How it Might Be Used

When Google first began discussing the Places API in April, we discussed as an example a pizza restaurant that edited its delivery area on Google and then made that information available to apps that pinged the API for information.

Those kinds of examples are less likely to be implemented at first, since the first developers being allowed access to the API are people building check-in apps. But the possibilities beyond checking in are many and diverse.

Just as Google Maps made it easy for any developer to add a map and display location, the Places API could make it easy for any developer to search up to date information about any location for their application. At least that's what seems to be possible. The Terms of Service favoring search and prohibiting caching may prove frustratingly prohibitive.

That data may be free, but it will come at the expense of integrating with Google's Adsense platform. "Note that in order to be issued credentials for this service," the API documentation reads, "you must provide a valid Adsense publisher id that matches the Google account with which you are currently logged in." That's pretty smart of Google and maybe a little nefarious, but someone's got to pay the bills.

Why is Location so Hot?

Why is location becoming such a hot commodity? From one perspective, the proliferation of smartphones and the development of easy-to-use, compelling applications like Foursquare and MyTown are making it easier than ever for consumers to publish and leverage information about their location. Consumers want to do that for a variety of reasons, from recording their travel history to letting family know where they are to bragging about the hip places they hang out.

For developers, location data is a whole new world to pivot on when looking at feeds of user activity data. Our online activity has to date gone on in the placeless ether. Applications could offer features, highlight content or make recommendations based on things like our interests and social connections - but now any of that and more can be sorted by location. That's a very potent column to add to any spreadsheet, too. We're just beginning to see what all the recombinations of these types of data can look like.

It's an exciting new location-based world, and much of it may be powered by the Google Places API.

Discuss

Beautiful hand-made metal puzzle cubes. Some are absolutely terrifying to consider assembling.

In this paper, an efficiently DWT-based watermarking technique is proposed to embed signatures in images to attest the owner identification and discourage the unauthorized copying. This paper deals with a fuzzy inference filter to choose the larger entropy of coefficients to embed watermarks. Unlike most previous watermarking frameworks which embedded watermarks in the larger coefficients of inner coarser subbands, the proposed technique is based on utilizing a context model and fuzzy inference filter by embedding watermarks in the larger-entropy coefficients of coarser DWT subbands. The proposed approaches allow us to embed adaptive casting degree of watermarks for transparency and robustness to the general image-processing attacks such as smoothing, sharpening, and JPEG compression. The approach has no need the original host image to extract watermarks. Our schemes have been shown to provide very good results in both image transparency and robustness.

In this work we have compared two indexing algorithms that have been used to index and retrieve Carnatic music songs. We have compared a modified algorithm of the Dual ternary indexing algorithm for music indexing and retrieval with the multi-key hashing indexing algorithm proposed by us. The modification in the dual ternary algorithm was essential to handle variable length query phrase and to accommodate features specific to Carnatic music. The dual ternary indexing algorithm is adapted for Carnatic music by segmenting using the segmentation technique for Carnatic music. The dual ternary algorithm is compared with the multi-key hashing algorithm designed by us for indexing and retrieval in which features like MFCC, spectral flux, melody string and spectral centroid are used as features for indexing data into a hash table. The way in which collision resolution was handled by this hash table is different than the normal hash table approaches. It was observed that multi-key hashing based retrieval had a lesser time complexity than dual-ternary based indexing The algorithms were also compared for their precision and recall in which multi-key hashing had a better recall than modified dual ternary indexing for the sample data considered.

Throughout the spring, we covered the financial reform legislation as it wound its way through committee and Congress. The final version - Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act - was signed into effect by President Obama on July 21. And while some of the provisions that were most troubling in earlier versions were axed before the final bill was passed, there is still a sense that the repercussions from the legislation might dampen investment, particularly at the early stage and particularly from angel investors.

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Liz Fries, a partner at Goodwin Proctor explained to ReadWriteWeb today what some of the implications of the financial reform bill might be.

Income Requirements for Accredited Investors

When the Senate Banking Committee approved an early version of the bill, it increased the income thresholds for "accredited investors" would have required the SEC to revisit these regularly "to reflect the percentage increase in the cost of living." These numbers - $1 million in net worth or an annual income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years - were adopted in the early Eighties, and adjusting these for inflation would have changed that dollar figure dramatically. Many experts estimated that these changes could have eliminated over half of current angel investors. The National Venture Capital Association, the Angel Capital Association, and others voiced their protest.

In the final version of the bill, the net worth threshold has been raised, and while the dollar figures for income stay the same, the value of the investor's primary residence is now excluded from the calculations. Fries contends that this will likely disqualify some angel investors, but "only at the margins."

Focus Shifts from Legislation to Regulation

Fries calls this "Stage 2" of the financial reform efforts, and says that the focus will shift now from Capitol Hill to regulatory agencies. The SEC in particular will be tasked with writing and reviewing some 95 new rules and conducting over 70 studies. In particular, the agency will be revisiting the definitions and requirements, both for investors and for funds.

While Fries seemed optimistic that these definitions are out of the hands of legislators, the verdict is still out on how the changes introduced in the Dodd-Frank bill will impact investors and entrepreneurs - as well as the overall economy.

Discuss

"PhotoWalk will use your current location to show you Flickr pictures taken in your area. Once you've selected the ones you like the most, it will then plot a walking course for you that takes in all the sights"

mischat: Is facebook tracking you "passively", if you have a cookie in your browser, and you turn up at a site which has a "like" button, facebook CAN technically track you, the question is are they ?

(2010-07-30 00:09)

Death threats aimed at Iranian atheist blogger, Fariboz Shamshiri.

"One electronic threat was that someone would 'cut his throat.' In another message they wrote 'the death is coming to you soon soon.' He says he still doesn't know who send these messages (they're all anonymous), but he suspects -- based on past experience -- range from Basij militia, Revolutionary Guards Corps Cyber Affairs Division and/or some mullahs or students of seminary schools."

His main blog is Rotten Gods and he is the editor of Stop Torturing Us. Iran's lucky to have him. And seriously. Maybe he'll have to explain himself before G-d, but he sure as hell shouldn't have to do so before a mob of sloe-eyed nitwits.

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Singapore bans critical YouTube video.The Asian city-state of Singapore has "banned a YouTube video of ex-political detainee Dr Lim Hock Siew delivering a speech, shot by local filmmaker Martyn See, claiming it was 'against the public interest.'" The ban has made his harassment a cause célèbre and directed huge amounts of attention to it via alternative video sharing sites. How you like Dr. Lim Hock Siew now?

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez buys TV station. Not contented with censoring others, throwing people who disagree with him in prison, and talking on Twitter, he has now announced the government would be buying a majority stake in Globovisión. That's the station that has been consistently critical of him. ¡Qué sorpresa! The leadership of the station vows to fight him.

Using https to frustrate censorship. CPJ has a great post on using https to frustrate censorship efforts. It makes it more difficult, though not by any means impossible, to eavesdrop on a site. Additionally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has worked with the Tor group to produce an easily-downloadable plugin called HTTP Everywhere that will help protect your search queries from a lot of eavesdropping.

Uighur blogger sentenced to 15 years in prison. Uighur blogger and journalist Gheyret Niyaz has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for "endangering national security" In reality granting an interview to foreign media last year about the riots in the area is the more likely reason behind this rubbish ruling.

Iranian photoblogger arrested. Hamed Saber was arrested this week for no announced reason, but was probably his photographs. Truth is the enemy of the government, especially of Iran. Although it could have been Access Flickr, the plugin he developed to circumvent Iran's blocking of the photosharing site.

Friends and colleagues aren't sitting still, and that's heartening. There's a Free Hamed Saber blog and a Flickr discussion forum. These are both in Persian so if you don't speak it, you'll have to use a translation service.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act takes a hit. Or two. A recent U.S. district court "fair use" ruling has made it legal to jailbreak a phone. That's if the ruling holds up against future court cases. A separate court case has ruled that DMCA takedown notices have to be spot-on. If they are not complete, and in a form that's usable to the target (in this case Google) they are liable to be ignored, and legally so. DMCA has been at the center of a number of copyright disputes, one side arguing that pointing is the same as publishing (and search engines, for instance, are culpable if a site they include in results is breaking the law) and the other side arguing that, well, it's not.

Censorship graphic by Andréia Bohner

Discuss

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Extraneous" - originally published 7/28/2010

thecarchik writes "The Porsche 918 Spyder hybrid supercar, first shown as a concept at this spring's Geneva Motor Show, got official approval as a production model today from the company's board of directors. Just consider the specs: a 500-horsepower, 3.6-liter V-8 engine with a 9200-rpm redline, 0-to-62-mph acceleration of 3.2 seconds, and top speed of 198 miles per hour. Oh, and did we mention it gets 78 miles per gallon on the European cycle? The astounding fuel efficiency comes courtesy of an E-Drive mode that lets the 918 Spyder drive up to 16 miles on pure electric power, though [ahem] not at 198 mph."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dajobe: finally, the semweb killer use case
dajobe: via Richard Cyganiak
dajobe: in short url form http://bit.ly/9W5jUs

(2010-07-29 22:40)

In a recent survey by Evans Data, Google gets accolades for its public cloud. IBM gets top marks from developers for its private cloud.

But what do developers want the most? They want the cloud to be simple to use. They want it to be as as easy to get your data in as easy it is to get the data out. And they want it to be secure.

Evans Data survey took a look at the whole gamut of issues related to cloud computing in an annual survey, and its conclusions focus on the dichotomies between private and public clouds.

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Google and IBM share a common denominator. Both apply the basic principles of open source to their cloud computing efforts. That makes it easy for developers to work with the platforms.

This brings up a certain issue we have with the terms used for cloud computing. It does not matter if one cloud is public and another is private. It's about getting the most developers. To do that you need to open up. Period.

ReadWriteWeb views cloud computing as a network of platforms that serve as individual ecosystems. In the Future of the Cloud, we discard the notion of public and private clouds to focus more on emerging platforms.

From the report by Mike Kirkwood:

"As an industry, we are emerging from a phase of infrastructure cloud computing that has been driven by server virtualization and scaling compute. Now we are moving to the next phase of cloud platforms where higher order jobs such as collaboration and communication services are the drivers. In this phase the action will be in how the cloud scales the work done by people, and in how an always-on, always-available infrastructure supports applications that both cut expense and generate revenue.

It's in this phase that we'll discard our previous categorization of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, and private, hybrid, and public types of clouds, and instead focus on platforms that extend end-to-end and enable emerging ecosystems. The foundation of the emerging ecosystem is based upon the following.."

Google is attracting developers as well as any cloud provider. The proof is in the API calls it gets. According to Programmable Web, Google is tops in the API billionaire's club.

IBM is developing an ecosystem that includes RightScale and Kaavo for deploying applications and workloads. Navajo Systems provides an additional layer of security. Silanis is used for e-signatures. VMLogix allows for manual, functional, and compatibility testing. AppFirst provides performance monitoring. And SOASTA CloudTest helps deliver load and performance testing.

Forget the technical terms. They will go away. The ideas are what matters, and those ideas will drive the innovation. Ideas are what excites developers.

What also matters are the people: attract developers through what you provide them, not by bandying about terms that in the long run no one really cares about.

But not everyone agrees. We asked on Twitter what people thought of technical terms like IaaS and PaaS.

Eric Delattre said cloud is actually the term that needs to go:

"@alexwilliams @rww the opposite, use IaaS, PaaS, SaaS instead of Cloud!"

Discuss

A Google Web site that monitors access in China is reporting that Google Web search, which was fully or mostly accessible yesterday in mainland China is being completely blocked. But the company is now saying that service is fine.

The company's stock had slipped nearly 2% in after-hours trading as of 6 p.m. EST.

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Google.cn has been blocked multiple times in China, most recently a month ago, before China chose to renew the company's Internet Content Provider license.

Google had been automatically redirecting google.cn to google.hk, its uncensored site in Hong Kong, but stopped that practice earlier this month and simply included a link to google.hk on the google.cn site in order to pacify Chinese lawmakers.

Shares of the state-supported Chinese search competitor Baidu jumped 3% after the news.

Google Mobile and Ads were fully blocked, and News and Images were partially blocked today, according to Google.

The Chinese information ministry purposefully makes it difficult to tell if access is being blocked from the top. But the Chinese government's history of blocking the search engine suggests this is a deliberate move.

UPDATE: Some Twitter users in China are reporting they have full access to google.cn, Rebecca MacKinnon and others reported. However, the service may still be blocked for others, or even for most individuals in China. At the least, it appears that it is blocked for the computers distributed around the country that Google uses to monitor availability.

From the page where Google monitors access in China: "The status is assessed by geographically diverse servers that are used to monitor connection capability. Note that service status in China has a fluctuating nature. This assessment may not reflect small-scale blocking that frequently occurs or individual experiences with issues such as keyword blocking that may affect access to services temporarily."

LATE UPDATE: At least 10 Twitter users in China have said that google.cn is working. Google's stock still down 1.59% at 7:40 p.m. EST. Google's China access monitoring site still says services are blocked; no statement yet from the company.

LATEST: Google says service is working in China. A Google spokesman sent this statement:

"Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it's possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.

"Please also note that the dashboard is not a real time tool."

Google's stock was still down more than 1% at the time of this update but appears to be recovering.

Below: Google's chart tracking availability of services in China. Discuss

In September I will be presenting the paper entitled "Towards Fully Distributed and Privacy-preserving Recommendations via Expert Collaborative Filtering and RESTful Linked Data" in the 2010 International Conference on Web Intelligence in Toronto. You can read the full paper here, but in this post I will try to give you a taste of what is hidden behind such a long title.

This paper should be understood as a continuation of my research on Expert Based Collaborative Filtering -- the so-called Wisdom of the Few. I recommend you take a look at my previous post on this issue before moving on.

So the basic idea from our previous work was to use domain experts as the only asset for creating neighborhood and predicting item utility in a similar way as is done in standard kNN collaborative filtering. We made some claims of how that method provided many practical advantages over standard approaches. We also claimed that the approach was scalable and flexible enough to be used in many domains. Unfortunately, at that point, we did not have time to implement and prove all that.

The current work presents a practical full-fledged implementation of the approach in the music domain. Our goal is to prove some of the previous claims as well as to stablish an architectural framework for expert collaborative filtering providing, among other things, 100% privacy protection.

The following screenshot will give you an idea of the application. In the client side, it is a Flex/Air stand-alone application that can work in most operating systems. You can rate music albums, see the ratings from the experts, and get personalized recommendations based on that. We also provide access to extended information for albums via links to lastfm as well as access to Linked Data resources from MusicBrainz and others.


The key architectural differences between standard and expert Collaborative Filtering are illustrated in the figure below. Note that in our expert CF, user ratings are kept in the client machine. On the other hand, expert ratings are downloaded into the local machine and the computation for the predictions is performed there avoiding any privacy breach.


The next figure gives some more details of how we implemented the solution in our case. Again, note that the server is only used to crawl and store expert ratings publically available on the web. Those ratings are then queried from the client through a REST-style web api. The computation of neighbors and predictions is then performed in the local machine.


You might be wondering where we got our expert ratings from. If in our previous work, we crawled our movie ratings from rottetomatoes, we now turned to metacritics. The figure below illustrates the number of ratings per critic. In the top positions, we can see AllMusicGuide with over 3500 ratings, or Pitchfork, Uncut, and Mojo, with over 3000.


I believe that expert collaborative filtering is a very flexible and valid paradigm in many domains. It can offer better results than other kinds of recommendations while solving many of the shortcomings such as scalability, privacy, or cold-start. We are currently working in other deployments in the mobile space, for example. But I will explain that in a future post.

Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing?

To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings¹ to detect recent hiring². Zynga and Playdom put out the most job postings over the last three months, with Watercooler, a Redwood City startup, finishing a distant third³:

While I focused on online social gaming companies, I checked to see which companies were showing interest in games for smartphones, and found not too many were mentioning the iPhone or Android platforms on their job posts. Outside of Zynga, Playdom and Popcap Games, none of the other companies had (many) job postings that mentioned the iPhone/iPad or Android platforms⁴:

---

(1) Data for this post is for U.S. online job postings through 7/25/2010 and is maintained in partnership with SimplyHired.com. We use algorithms to dedup job posts: a single job posting can contain multiple jobs and appear on multiple job sites.

(2) Online job postings are from thousands of sources, and there are no standardized data formats (e.g., a field for company name). I quickly normalized company names for this post, but the results remain at best approximations.

(3) Our data is for U.S. online job postings, so it does not reflect hiring for overseas subsidiaries (e.g., Playfish/EA is based in London). Moreover, we did not include social gaming companies based outside the U.S. In the Facebook ecosystem, some of the top gaming companies have headquarters in East Asia and South America.

(4) iPhone does seem to be the (smartphone) platform of choice for these companies. Of the Jan-to-Jul 2010 job posts placed by the companies listed above, 23% mentioned the iPhone/iPad and only 2% mentioned Android.

We labor under two major misperceptions about technology: Technology from one point in time is better than one further in the past and anything new displaces what came before. When we actively think about these ideas, we may dismiss them. But it's my contention that these are in fact our unconscious, default positions. (These notions would no doubt be scoffed at by medieval Europeans who spent years desperately dreaming of copping a squat inside like the Romans did. But they are operant in the here-and-now.)

As people who live in and among the very latest of technology, I think it's a necessary corrective to examine how we use legacy technologies. So, I asked the most first-adopty people I could find, my fellow ReadWriteWeb staffers. What "old fashioned" technology did they employ every day? Some of them did not respond, as they were immersed in a virtual reality safari or traveling in time. But here's some backtalk from those who did.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Editor and VP of Content Development

Fireplace; bicycle; iPhone 3G (just kidding, kinda); shovel instead of tiller and gardening at home instead of Food Inc.; text editor instead of word processor; Wi-Fi instead of wireless card; printed newspapers and magazines because they are cool; books; dirty scowl instead of brain-piercing laser beam

I'm not going to say anything about the chickens.

Adrianne Jeffries, Evening News Writer

The most prominent example that comes to mind is handwriting. Pens, pencils and paper are still often more efficient for me than laptops, computers or mobile devices. Examples: grocery lists, writing while field reporting, writing passive-aggressive notes to roommates, sometimes directions to a place. It's possible to write up to 300 words per minute using shorthand, which I am studying.

So cool I think I'm going to pass out. The world record for shorthand is 350 words per minute and the world record for typing only 212.

Abraham Hyatt, Production Editor

If you go into a hardware store, most hand tools have a sexy, modern version. (Just check out the framing hammers.) But it's frippery added on to something that hasn't changed in hundreds of years. I own my great x 4 grandfather's homemade woodworking plane. It's identical to wooden planes available today. Same goes for hand saws. I have my great x 2 grandfather's hand saw - you could have bought it in a store today. It's technology that has reached a kind of perfection. There's no way to improve on it; it's functionality in its purest form.

That's a powerful idea, the perfection of a technology.

Klint Finley, News Writer

I have a lot of cognitive dissonance about paper vs. digital readers. I wrote a little about it. "The best reason to read books and magazines on paper is because they are not on computers...I did spend the better part of today reading off of screens, and I doubt I'll ever be able to get away from screen reading. But I've got to say, at least at this point in space-time, print is looking better than ever."

Although the functionality of e-readers is undeniable and the possibilities are interesting, today I picked up "Listen to the Warm" at St. Vinnie's and it smelled like...victory.

Audrey Waters, News Writer, Startup and Cloud Channels

The Post-it. Also, I prefer a fountain pen.

If you have a beer with Audrey, you will eventually hear about Post-its.

Sarah Perez, News Writer

I still prefer a bar of soap to those body wash/poof combos. Ha!

If you have a beer with Sarah, you will eventually hear about soap bars. No, I don't know. We live on different oceans. But I like to think when she's hammered she goes on a rant about the "poof" as a sign of the End Times.

Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief

I still use a paper notebook most of the time. I have a paper diary to complement Google Calendar and probably use the former more. I read paper books. I go to the library (it's a big building with books in it).

Always a smart-ass this guy. A building is a building with... Wait, what now?

It should surprise no one that a bunch of people who, whatever else they do or seem to be, are in the final analysis writers, would, when it comes to legacy tech, trend heavily toward pens and paper. Technology is not electronics (although electronics is technology.) Technology is us, doing and it has as much of a foundation in our lives as language, religion, philosophy or music.

That connection is so important, in every part of our lives. A connection to what we do, to another person, to family, to a community, to the great men and women of the past who inspire us. We recognize that technology didn't start with AOL, or with Amiga, or even with the Babbage engine. It started when the first hairbag picked up a rock and broke the end off a coconut or twisted a stick off a sapling and dug out some termites. And it won't end until we do.

Pantheon photo by Andrew Wales
Photo of weirdies by Marshall
Second photo of weirdies by Abraham

Discuss

Our test server ( http://test.musicbrainz.org ) will be offline from Saturday 6am PDT until early afternoon on Sunday PDT. The server will be going for a nice leisurely drive up the California coast as it moves from southern california to the bustling bay area.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

spidweb writes "One Indie developer has written a nuanced article on a how software piracy affects him, approaching the issue from the opposite direction. He lists the ways in which the widespread piracy of PC games helps him. From the article: 'You don't get everything you want in this world. You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both. Most of the time. Because, when I'm being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I'm the one being ripped off.' The article also tries to find a middle ground between the Piracy-Is-Always-Bad and Piracy-Is-Just-Fine sides of the argument that might enable single-player PC games to continue to exist."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We posted yesterday about the price war that's currently raging between Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Sony, makers of some of the top-selling e-readers in the U.S.

Today a public relations representative sent us a statement on behalf of Sony that suggests the company may be pulling out of the race to the bottom.

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"Pricing is one consideration in the dedicated reading device marketplace, but Sony won't sacrifice the quality and design we're bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader," said Phil Lubell, VP of digital reading at Sony Electronics. "Our global customers expect to get the best digital book reading experience and we're concentrated on delivering that by investing in Sony's award-winning design and original digital reading enhancements, such as eBook library borrowing and the only full touch screen on the market."

Image from Sony's e-book website

Amazon announced the Kindle Wi-Fi, which has a 6" display, will retail for $139 in August, making it the cheapest e-reader yet. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that a lesser-known manufacturer is coming out with a 5" screen e-reader for $99 later this year. Sony's least-expensive e-reader, the 5" screen Sony Reader Pocket Edition, was $149.99 at the time of this post.

So does this mean Sony won't lower the price of the Sony Reader anytime soon? It would seem so, but the company isn't ready to box itself in.

"Nothing to announce at this time regarding a price move," said Leanne Drown of Racepoint Group, which represents Sony. "The quote reflects broader thinking around strategy moving forward."

Discuss

myshadows writes "Tech Review has an interesting article on how Tokyo Metropolitan University researchers have been able to give a sensory addition to gaming peripherals — namely, temperature. 'As the range of interactions with digital environments expands, it's logical to ask what's next: Smell-o-vision has been on the horizon for something like 50 years, but there's a dark horse stalking this race: thermoelectrics. Based on the Peltier effect, these solid-state devices are easy to incorporate into objects of reasonable size, i.e. video game controllers. In this configuration, just announced at the 2010 SIGGRAPH conference, a pair of thermoelectric surfaces on either side of a controller rapidly heat up or cool down in order to simulate appropriate conditions in a virtual environment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a 3 hour bug triage session with the team we’ve managed to sort out the bugs and come up with a schedule for the next release. After looking at the number of bugs for us to tackle before the release, we felt that we really needed to have one more beta release before we are ready to call it a release candidate. Given that, we’re going to do yet one more more beta release on 7 September.

I know, another beta release? Yes, we’re sorry that this is stretching out longer than it should have, but we’re dedicated to releasing the software when its ready and not before. We’ve done our best to cut out unnecessary features, but we still have about 8 weeks of work to do. Fortunately, both Oliver and Warp are now working full time and and fully focused on this release. Re-writing a 10 year old codebase isn’t an easy thing to do and so far it looks like NGS will become stable before perl6 does.

The release candidate 1 will be 100% feature complete with no new features or tweaks being added. All we will do to the release candidate is fix bugs! For this reason we are not creating an NGS release milestone in Jira. That way, no one can postpone any tickets into the final release.

To see what we have planned for the upcoming releases, please take a look at the bug list for beta 3 and the bug list for release candidate 1. Currently we expect release candidate 1 (and hopefully only 1) about 4 weeks after beta 3. We hope to then release NGS onto the servers 2-4 weeks after that.

An anonymous reader writes "KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perl 6 may have been "finally coming within reach" in 2004, but now it's even closer. Reader rnddim writes "The Perl 6 implementation Rakudo Star has been released today for 'early adopters.' This release of Rakudo is different from the normal monthly compiler releases in that is it bundled with a draft of a Perl 6 book, and several modules. It's not complete, and it's not as fast as it should be, but Rakudo in its current state is proving to be usable and useful. Rakudo Star releases will come monthly or as major features or bugfixes are made. It is available for download at github.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(2010-07-29 21:00)

After adding support for the iPhone last month, BitTorrent Inc. has now made the remote access 'Web' feature of its uTorrent Falcon client compatible with the iPad and Android devices. uTorrent users can now remotely control their downloads from wherever they are on their favorite mobile device.

This year BitTorrent Inc. has been very active with the development of uTorrent. The company pushed out two experimental clients, codenamed Falcon and Griffin, which are bundled in the latest uTorrent 3.0 alpha release.

Both projects add several new features to uTorrent. The Griffin branch of uTorrent adds Apps for uTorrent support, allowing users to easily install extensions and add custom features. The Falcon project enables users to stream torrent video files and access their client remotely through a secure web-interface.

With uTorrent ‘Web’, users can access torrents running on their PC from anywhere in the world, on any computer they have access to. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.

Initially, uTorrent ‘Web’ was only available on standard PC browsers, but last month iPhone support was added. Now, after many requests from uTorrent users, the remote control feature is now compatible with the iPad and Android devices.

“Since launching µTorrent Web for iPhone, users have been clamoring for something similar on other devices,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris announced. “So, today we are very excited to announce support for the iPad and Android platform – including the Nexus One and Google Ion devices. Now you can control torrents via your web browser on a PC, iPhone, iPad and Android.”

The response from users of the remote control feature has been quite positive thus far, but there’s also a group of people who are reluctant to try the service because of privacy concerns. The ‘agreement’ between the MPAA and BitTorrent Inc. is still not forgotten by everyone, even though that only applied to BitTorrent Inc’s now defunct search engine. Morris, however, ensures that users’ privacy is in good hands with BitTorrent Inc.

“Just like with µTorrent Web for iPhone, we continue to take users’ privacy very seriously – all your private data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your browser right to the client on the other end. So, as before, users can rest assured that the private details of their µTorrent usage are never exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties,” he says.

In order to use the web interface, users will first have to download and install the latest Falcon release or uTorrent 3.0 alpha. In the client users can set a username and password that they can use to access their torrents remotely. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the mobile compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

While not the political capital of Canada, Toronto is certainly the cultural and financial capital of the country. With over 5 million residents, Toronto is the largest city in Canada, sitting in a densely populated part of Southern Ontario. With over 200 ethnic groups speaking over 130 languages, Toronto's cosmopolitan population makes it one of the world's most diverse cities. Toronto also boasts a clean environment, low crime rates, a high standard of living, and incredibly nice folks who live there, all helping make it one of the world's most livable cities and according to a recent Huffington Post article, "the capital of cool."

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It's also by all accounts a thriving startup hub, with both strong investor presence - the National Angel Capital Organization and Extreme Venture Partners are headquartered there, for example - and with a lot of entrepreneurial talent and activities.

Events and Education for Entrepreneurs

"Obviously it's no Silicon Valley," says Sprouter Community Manager Erin Bury, "but it's definitely a thriving community with a ton of tech entrepreneurs, some great funding opportunities, and a hopping event scene." A Toronto-based startup itself, Sprouter helps facilitate networking and collaboration between entrepreneurs globally, but also sponsors regular meetup events.

MaRS, located in Toronto's Discovery District also holds numerous events as part of its mission to help early stage science and technology ventures grow in the Greater Toronto area. MaRS offers entrepreneurs a variety of services, including mentorship and strategic planning guidance. MaRS also has an Investment Accelerator Fund, a fund with an investment strategy to provide early stage seed capital for emerging science and technology companies.

A Culture of Entrepreneurship

Communitech, located in the neighboring city of Waterloo, in another organization helping to promote regional entrepreneurship through mentorship, training, networking and promotion. And while there are multiple universities in the area and strong government support for startup endeavors, Communitech CEO Iain Klugman attributes the vibrancy of the region to a "culture of entrepreneurship." The region has a long, long history of fostering entrepreneurs (the Seagrams distillery was founded there in 1857, for example), and encouraging entrepreneurship happens not just at the business level, but with targeted school programs as well.

Joseph Puopolo, Director of Marketing and Community for the Toronto-based startup, OPENapps points to the important role that this supportive culture has played in helping OPENapps move forward. According to Puopolo, company has "benefited greatly from the technology community in Toronto and surrounding areas like Waterloo, due to the access to regular technology networking events and strong talent pool. Toronto and Waterloo truly foster a climate of innovation."

Discuss

CodePwned writes "I recently took over a position at a rather large company where I discovered my group was paying $30 per gigabyte per month! That's $360 per year per gigabyte to our own IT department. While I understand costs are different depending on the scale, redundancy, backup and support methods, there doesn't seem to be any good papers on what range you should expect your costs to be. So far, my research shows an average of $1 per gigabyte or less for internally hosted space. What do you pay?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, Google added clickable phone numbers to its mobile ad offerings, making it easier for smartphone owners to connect with businesses when performing local searches. Today, the company has extended this feature by adding inline maps to business listings on mobile websites and apps in the Google Display Network.

So now, when you're looking for the nearest pizza place and you don't feel like waiting for delivery, you're just one click away from getting directions from your current location in Google Maps.

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According to Dai Pham, a member of the Google Mobile Ads marketing team, a benefit of this feature for advertisers is that it's value added without costing anything more for the advertiser.

Advertising with location extensions on mobile devices is also great value because you're only charged when a user clicks to call the business or clicks to visit your website. You are not charged when users click to expand the map or gets directions. The cost of a click to call your business will be the same as the cost of a click to visit your website.

Enrolling in the programming involves a simple three-step process for advertisers, which is detailed in the blog post.

Now that a phone call or driving directions are only a click away, there's just one thing left to consider - who's going to go pick up the pizza.

Discuss

Ever since NikeID started 10 years ago, I’d always fancied giving this a whirl. I finally treated myself:

The base shoe is a NikeFree 5.0 v4 running shoe.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has become the first author to sell more than one million e-books on Amazon. The Swedish noir thrillers features Lisbeth Salander, an asocial and extremely intelligent hacker and researcher, specialized in investigations of persons, and investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist. Quercus has sold 3.3M copies of Larsson's books in the UK, and estimates that worldwide sales of the three novels are somewhere between 35-40M copies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mischat: '"It's really weird watching the government watch me," he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.'

(2010-07-29 18:42)

mischat: similar to the digital economy bill in the UK? I was happy to see section 44 dropped recently which stopped the whole "am going to violate your human rights, because the neo-cons have us all sufficiently scared thing"

(2010-07-29 18:37)

As part of its annual Financial Analyst Meeting today, Microsoft is touting its cloud momentum and announcing several new high-profile customers who've selected the company's cloud computing services: Dow Chemical, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts and the University of Georgia. Dow Chemical and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts have adopted Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite and the University of Georgia has selected Microsoft's Live@edu service.

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The 85,000 students, faculty and staff at University of Georgia join the over 11 million students and educators worldwide who have adopted Live@edu, a strong indication that despite the common concerns about privacy and security in the cloud, that many schools and universities are making the transition.

Upgrading to the Cloud

Shawn Ellis, University of Georgia's Director of Client Services and System Administration, says the university has been assessing upgrades to its calendar and messaging system for some time. Prior to the move to Live@edu, the university had a very low email storage quota, a separate calendar system, and no online collaboration software. Live@edu addresses these gaps, providing faculty and staff with a hosted Exchanged solution, 25 GB of online storage with SkyDrive, and online collaboration and document sharing via Office Web Apps.

While the University of Georgia felt pressured to upgrade its antiquated messaging and calendaring options, it was, like most educational organizations, financially constrained in doing so. The costs of building and maintaining an internal solution are cost prohibitive, says Ellis, who now envisions that IT staff and resources can be better utilized by moving the university to Live@edu.

Meeting IT Requirements, Meeting Teachers' and Students' Expectations

While Exchange hosting is by no means new, Cameron Evans, Microsoft's National and Chief Technology Officer, agrees that moving email management off-premise is still a relevant and pressing concern for many schools and universities. In addition to the pressure to save money, schools also have to address questions of security and privacy (including CIPA requirements at the K-12 level), the management and support of multiple devices - both the school's and student and faculty's, and the increasing expectation and demand that work can be undertaken collaboratively.

There's also the expectation among university students that student government play some role in these sorts of decisions.

Microsoft's announcement today follows on the heels of Google's announcement last month that Iowa and Colorado join Oregon in adopting Google Apps for Education, Google's cloud-based service for schools. And while Microsoft and Google continue to vie for contracts with school districts and universities, this growing interest from more and more educational institutions in both company's services demonstrates that the schools are recognizing the major benefits - in terms of cost, infrastructure, and pedagogy - of moving to the cloud.

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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired about another entry in the ongoing quest for low-tech-high-tech educational tools to take advantage of distributed knowledge: "The Humane Reader, a device designed by computer consultant Braddock Gaskill, takes two 8-bit microcontrollers and packages them in a 'classic style console' that connects to a TV. The device includes an optional keyboard, a micro-SD Card reader and a composite video output. It uses a standard micro-USB cellphone charger for power. In all, it can hold the equivalent of 5,000 books, including an offline version of Wikipedia, and requires no internet connection. The Reader will cost $20 when 10,000 or more of it are manufactured. Without that kind of volume, each Reader will cost about $35."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the technology allows users to zoom out from the fish-eye pannable photos you see on standard street view options and instead see a series of flat panoramic photos stitched together like a timeline.

It's a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.

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Doesn't that just make you feel like a whole new world of possibilities are opened up? There's no word whether or when this feature will be added to Bing, but if it is - I'm going to try to train myself to use Bing Maps instead of Google Maps.

Blogger Keir Clarke hacked together some proof of concept demos similar to this yesterday, using Google Maps, photoshop and jQuery. They're not bad for a few hours of work!

From these sorts of experiments to the work of Open Heat Map and Tableau that we've highlighted here, it's exciting to think about where all this malleability of maps could lead.

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In many real applications, graph data is subject to uncertainties due to incompleteness and imprecision of data. Mining such uncertain graph data is semantically different from and computationally more challenging than mining conventional exact graph data. This paper investigates the problem of mining uncertain graph data and especially focuses on mining frequent subgraph patterns on an uncertain graph database. A novel model of uncertain graphs is presented, and the frequent subgraph pattern mining problem is formalized by introducing a new measure, called expected support. This problem is proved to be NP-hard. An approximate mining algorithm is proposed to find a set of approximately frequent subgraph patterns by allowing an error tolerance on expected supports of discovered subgraph patterns. The algorithm uses efficient methods to determine whether a subgraph pattern can be output or not and a new pruning method to reduce the complexity of examining subgraph patterns. Analytical and experimental results show that the algorithm is very efficient, accurate, and scalable for large uncertain graph databases. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one to investigate the problem of mining frequent subgraph patterns from uncertain graph data.

We study the problem of clustering uncertain objects whose locations are described by probability density functions (pdfs). We show that the UK-means algorithm, which generalizes the k-means algorithm to handle uncertain objects, is very inefficient. The inefficiency comes from the fact that UK-means computes expected distances (EDs) between objects and cluster representatives. For arbitrary pdfs, expected distances are computed by numerical integrations, which are costly operations. We propose pruning techniques that are based on Voronoi diagrams to reduce the number of expected distance calculations. These techniques are analytically proven to be more effective than the basic bounding-box-based technique previously known in the literature. We then introduce an R-tree index to organize the uncertain objects so as to reduce pruning overheads. We conduct experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our novel techniques. We show that our techniques are additive and, when used in combination, significantly outperform previously known methods.

This paper introduces a scalable approach for probabilistic top-k similarity ranking on uncertain vector data. Each uncertain object is represented by a set of vector instances that is assumed to be mutually exclusive. The objective is to rank the uncertain data according to their distance to a reference object. We propose a framework that incrementally computes for each object instance and ranking position, the probability of the object falling at that ranking position. The resulting rank probability distribution can serve as input for several state-of-the-art probabilistic ranking models. Existing approaches compute this probability distribution by applying the Poisson binomial recurrence technique of quadratic complexity. In this paper, we theoretically as well as experimentally show that our framework reduces this to a linear-time complexity while having the same memory requirements, facilitated by incremental accessing of the uncertain vector instances in increasing order of their distance to the reference object. Furthermore, we show how the output of our method can be used to apply probabilistic top-k ranking for the objects, according to different state-of-the-art definitions. We conduct an experimental evaluation on synthetic and real data, which demonstrates the efficiency of our approach.

With the rapid development of various optical, infrared, and radar sensors and GPS techniques, there are a huge amount of multidimensional uncertain data collected and accumulated everyday. Recently, considerable research efforts have been made in the field of indexing, analyzing, and mining uncertain data. As shown in a recent book [CHECK END OF SENTENCE] on uncertain data, in order to efficiently manage and mine uncertain data, effective indexing techniques are highly desirable. Based on the observation that the existing index structures for multidimensional data are sensitive to the size or shape of uncertain regions of uncertain objects and the queries, in this paper, we introduce a novel R-Tree-based inverted index structure, named UI-Tree, to efficiently support various queries including range queries, similarity joins, and their size estimation, as well as top-k range query, over multidimensional uncertain objects against continuous or discrete cases. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on both real data and synthetic data to demonstrate the efficiency of our techniques.

Hitherto, it has not been easy to interpret the meaning of the amount of discrimination information conveyed in a term rationally and explicitly within practical application contexts; it has not been simple to introduce the concept of the extent of semantic relatedness between two terms meaningfully and successfully into scientific discussions. This study is part of an attempt to do this. We attempt to answer two important questions: 1) What is the discrimination information conveyed by a term and how to measure it? 2) What is the relatedness between two terms and how to estimate it? We focus on the first question and present an in-depth investigation into the discrimination measures based on several information measures, which are widely used in a variety of applications. The relatedness measures are then naturally defined according to the individual discrimination measures. Some key points are made for clarifying potential problems arising from using the relatedness measures, and solutions are suggested. Two example applications in the contexts of text mining and information retrieval are provided. The aim of this study, of which this paper forms part, is to establish a unified theoretical framework, with measurement of discrimination information (MDI) at the core, for achieving effective measurement of semantic relatedness (MSR). Due to its generality, our method can be expected to be a useful tool with a wide range of application areas.

Local classifiers are sometimes called lazy learners because they do not train a classifier until presented with a test sample. However, such methods are generally not completely lazy because the neighborhood size k (or other locality parameter) is usually chosen by cross validation on the training set, which can require significant preprocessing and risks overfitting. We propose a simple alternative to cross validation of the neighborhood size that requires no preprocessing: instead of committing to one neighborhood size, average the discriminants for multiple neighborhoods. We show that this forms an expected estimated posterior that minimizes the expected Bregman loss with respect to the uncertainty about the neighborhood choice. We analyze this approach for six standard and state-of-the-art local classifiers, including discriminative adaptive metric kNN (DANN), a local support vector machine (SVM-KNN), hyperplane distance nearest neighbor (HKNN), and a new local Bayesian quadratic discriminant analysis (local BDA). The empirical effectiveness of this technique versus cross validation is confirmed with experiments on seven benchmark data sets, showing that similar classification performance can be attained without any training.

Usually, agents within multiagent systems represent different stakeholders that have their own distinct and sometimes conflicting interests and objectives. They would behave in such a way so as to achieve their own objectives, even at the cost of others. Therefore, there are risks in interacting with other agents. A number of computational trust models have been proposed to manage such risk. However, the performance of most computational trust models that rely on third-party recommendations as part of the mechanism to derive trust is easily deteriorated by the presence of unfair testimonies. There have been several attempts to combat the influence of unfair testimonies. Nevertheless, they are either not readily applicable since they require additional information which is not available in realistic settings, or ad hoc as they are tightly coupled with specific trust models. Against this background, a general credibility model is proposed in this paper. Empirical studies have shown that the proposed credibility model is more effective than related work in mitigating the adverse influence of unfair testimonies.

Most data mining algorithms and tools stop at the mining and delivery of patterns satisfying expected technical interestingness. There are often many patterns mined but business people either are not interested in them or do not know what follow-up actions to take to support their business decisions. This issue has seriously affected the widespread employment of advanced data mining techniques in greatly promoting enterprise operational quality and productivity. In this paper, we present a formal view of actionable knowledge discovery (AKD) from the system and decision-making perspectives. AKD is a closed optimization problem-solving process from problem definition, framework/model design to actionable pattern discovery, and is designed to deliver operable business rules that can be seamlessly associated or integrated with business processes and systems. To support such processes, we correspondingly propose, formalize, and illustrate four types of generic AKD frameworks: Postanalysis-based AKD, Unified-Interestingness-based AKD, Combined-Mining-based AKD, and Multisource Combined-Mining-based AKD (MSCM-AKD). A real-life case study of MSCM-based AKD is demonstrated to extract debt prevention patterns from social security data. Substantial experiments show that the proposed frameworks are sufficiently general, flexible, and practical to tackle many complex problems and applications by extracting actionable deliverables for instant decision making.

A P2P-based framework supporting the extraction of aggregates from historical multidimensional data is proposed, which provides efficient and robust query evaluation. When a data population is published, data are summarized in a synopsis, consisting of an index built on top of a set of subsynopses (storing compressed representations of distinct data portions). The index and the subsynopses are distributed across the network, and suitable replication mechanisms taking into account the query workload and network conditions are employed that provide the appropriate coverage for both the index and the subsynopses.

This paper presents a knowledge discovery framework for the construction of Community Web Directories, a concept that we introduced in our recent work, applying personalization to Web directories. In this context, the Web directory is viewed as a thematic hierarchy and personalization is realized by constructing user community models on the basis of usage data. In contrast to most of the work on Web usage mining, the usage data that are analyzed here correspond to user navigation throughout the Web, rather than a particular Web site, exhibiting as a result a high degree of thematic diversity. For modeling the user communities, we introduce a novel methodology that combines the users' browsing behavior with thematic information from the Web directories. Following this methodology, we enhance the clustering and probabilistic approaches presented in previous work and also present a new algorithm that combines these two approaches. The resulting community models take the form of Community Web Directories. The proposed personalization methodology is evaluated both on a specialized artificial and a general-purpose Web directory, indicating its potential value to the Web user. The experiments also assess the effectiveness of the different machine learning techniques on the task.

Stationary ergodic processes with finite alphabets are approximated by finite memory processes based on an $n$-length realization of the process. Under the assumptions of summable continuity rate and non-nullness, a rate of convergence in ${bar d}$-distance is obtained, with explicit constants. Asymptotically, as $nto infty $, the result is near the optimum.

In the matter of selection of sample time points for the estimation of the power spectral density of a continuous time stationary stochastic process, irregular sampling schemes such as Poisson sampling are often preferred over regular (uniform) sampling. A major reason for this preference is the well-known problem of inconsistency of estimators based on regular sampling, when the underlying power spectral density is not bandlimited. It is argued in this paper that, in consideration of a large sample property like consistency, it is natural to allow the sampling rate to go to infinity as the sample size goes to infinity. Through appropriate asymptotic calculations under this scenario, it is shown that the smoothed periodogram based on regularly spaced data is a consistent estimator of the spectral density, even when the latter is not band-limited. It transpires that, under similar assumptions, the estimators based on uniformly sampled and Poisson-sampled data have about the same rate of convergence. Apart from providing this reassuring message, the paper also gives a guideline for practitioners regarding appropriate choice of the sampling rate. Theoretical calculations for large samples and Monte-Carlo simulations for small samples indicate that the smoothed periodogram based on uniformly sampled data have less variance and more bias than its counterpart based on Poisson sampled data.

The theory of Markov set-chains is applied to derive upper and lower bounds on the capacity of finite-state channels that are tighter than the classic bounds by Gallager. The new bounds coincide and yield single-letter capacity characterizations for a class of channels with the state process known at the receiver, including channels whose long-term marginal state distribution is independent of the input process. Analogous results are established for finite-state multiple access channels.

The notion of a $1$-vertex transfer matrix for multidimensional codes is introduced. It is shown that the capacity of such codes, or the topological entropy, can be expressed as the limit of the logarithm of spectral radii of $1$-vertex transfer matrices. Storage and computations using the $1$-vertex transfer matrix are much smaller than storage and computations needed for the standard transfer matrix. The method is applied to estimate the first 15 digits of the entropy of the 2-D $(0,1)$ run length limited channel. A large-scale computation of eigenvalues for the $(0,1)$ run length limited channel in 2-D and 3-D have been carried out. This was done in order to be able to compare the computational cost of the new method with the standard transfer matrix and have rigorous bounds to compare the estimates with. This in turn leads to improvements on the best previous lower and upper bounds for these channels.

A multiple-antenna Gaussian wiretap channel in which the number of antennas at the source is not greater than that at the eavesdropper is considered. Without feedback, the secrecy capacity over such a channel generally converges to a constant at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A half-duplex secure protocol allowing the destination to actively transfer random keys in the form of known interference is proposed. It is shown that using multiple antennas at the destination is instrumental in achieving a secrecy rate that grows linearly with $log {rm SNR}$. The pre-log factor of the secrecy rate, i.e., the number of secure degrees of freedom, is characterized, revealing an interesting interplay between the numbers of antennas at the three communication nodes. The relationship of the achievable secure degrees of freedom to those obtained in the case without feedback is finally discussed.

A random variable with distribution $P$ is observed in Gaussian noise and is estimated by a mismatched minimum mean-square estimator that assumes that the distribution is $Q$, instead of $P$ . This paper shows that the integral over all signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the excess mean-square estimation error incurred by the mismatched estimator is twice the relative entropy $D(P Vert Q)$ (in nats). This representation of relative entropy can be generalized to nonreal-valued random variables, and can be particularized to give new general representations of mutual information in terms of conditional means. Inspired by the new representation, we also propose a definition of free relative entropy which fills a gap in, and is consistent with, the literature on free probability.

In Shannon theory, lossless source coding deals with the optimal compression of discrete sources. Compressed sensing is a lossless coding strategy for analog sources by means of multiplication by real-valued matrices. In this paper we study almost lossless analog compression for analog memoryless sources in an information-theoretic framework, in which the compressor or decompressor is constrained by various regularity conditions, in particular linearity of the compressor and Lipschitz continuity of the decompressor. The fundamental limit is shown to be the information dimension proposed by Rényi in 1959.

The generalized moment balancing templates for spectral null codes are investigated in this paper. A new approach based on the insertion of a determined number of vectors at determinate indices of a spectral null code word, is found to balance the moment of the code word. Moment balanced code words preserve the spectral null properties and can guarantee the correction of one insertion or one deletion error. As compared to the universal template for an uncoded sequence, the redundancy is determined by the structure of the original spectral null code, however, it can be kept small. The new approach involves the applications of the optimized moment balancing template and nonbinary enumeration of the balancing moment values.