Google Social Circle Results
Posted on April 13, 2010 Comments (1)
I haven’t paid much attention to this before: Google showing results based on your social network. In genera,l I think Google is doing great stuff. Their approach to profiles, buzz, search wiki, and social stuff in general however, I find poor (extremely poorly when I see how well they do so much else). They are too borg-like in their insistence you do things exactly as proscribed by them. They opt you in far to often, in the way they want – completely and with few, if any, options. They don’t provide good tools to let you manage your profile and connections. The Google profile itself is extremely lame.
It is very silly that they don’t let you create personas you want to use and let you use them as you want. They force you to use the Google account you are logged in as to access Google services as the profile used in Google searches. I don’t want or need the 2 tied together. And I would much prefer a way to switch between my personas by search (or buzz [though I dropped it because it was so inflexible] or whatever). I know which persona I want for a specific search. This seems like a very obvious thing lots of people would want to do. Google’s whole monolithic, one-very-rigid-size-fits-all social solutions don’t allow this. It is a fundamental flaw. Without fixing the flexibility of social services from Google I see them having trouble succeeding in that area. On the other hand much else of what they do is fantastic.
The way their search wiki stuff works is very similar: inflexible. They seem focused on do it how we want which is not, I think, the way most people want. Their social solutions are very all or nothing. They want people to behave how Google wants. For that reason after short attempts to try Google’s social efforts I give up. I keep hoping they will become more flexible and user friendly but keep being disappointed.
This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following:
- Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (5)
- Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile (0) such as Twitter and FriendFeed
- Secondary connections (252) that are publicly associated with your direct connections
- In addition to web pages from your social circle, posts from your Google Reader subscriptions may also appear in your social search results.
Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.
Related: Ideas for Improving Google (2006) – Web search improvement (2005) – Google Wave Developer Preview Webcast – Gmail Failure – Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices – post about Google, focused on management practices
See video on Google social search:
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Critter Cam: Sea Lion versus Octopus
Posted on April 13, 2010 Comments (0)
Octopus vs. Sea Lion – First Ever Video
The Crittercams were deployed at Dangerous Reef in Spencer Gulf, a rocky island the size of a football field, and home to the biggest Australian sea lion colony.
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Dr. Page says, “One important discovery is that the sea lions always feed on the sea floor” and they don’t eat open ocean fish, known as pelagic. “This is critical information because the marine parks are being set up to protect sea floor habitats,” a move that the scientists can now confirm will protect critical sea lion resources.
In one of the more spectacular pieces of Crittercam video so far, we can see this female working hard to handle a challenging prey item – a large octopus. Too big to swallow in one gulp, she drags it to the surface where she can breathe while she works at breaking it down into bite-size pieces.
Related: Orcas Create Wave to Push Seal Off Ice – Octopus Juggling Fellow Aquarium Occupants – Water Buffaloes, Lions and Crocodiles Oh My – Cat and Crow Friends
Tags: animals,Australia,National Geographic,nature,ocean,octopus,science webcasts,seafood,Students,water
Solar-Powered Desalination
Posted on April 12, 2010 Comments (0)
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KACST’s main goal is to reduce the cost of desalinating water. Half of the operating cost of a desalination plant currently comes from energy use, and most current plants run on fossil fuels.
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Reducing cost isn’t the only reason that people have dreamed of coupling renewable energy with desalination for decades, says Lisa Henthorne, a director at the International Desalination Association. “Anything we can do to lower this cost over time or reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that power is a good thing,” Henthorne says. “This is truly a demonstration in order to work out the bugs, to see if the technologies can work well together.”
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Saudi Arabia, the top desalinated water producer in the world, uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per day at its plants, according to Arab News.
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In a concentrated PV system, lenses or mirrors focus sunlight on ultra-efficient solar cells that convert the light into electricity. The idea is to cut costs by using fewer semiconductor solar cell materials. But multiplying the sun’s power by hundreds of times creates a lot of heat. “If you don’t cool [the device], you end up overheating the circuits and killing them,” says Sharon Nunes, vice president of IBM Big Green Innovations. IBM’s solution is to use a highly conducting liquid metal–an indium gallium alloy–on the underside of silicon computer chips to ferry heat away. Using this liquid metal, the researchers have been able to concentrate 2,300 times the sun’s power onto a one-square-centimeter solar device. That is three times higher than what’s possible with current concentrator systems, says Nunes.
Finding good desalination solution could help many other locations (including southern California). But there is still a long way to go.
Related: Agricultural Irrigation with Salt Water – Cheap Drinking Water From Seawater
Tags: Engineering,food,green,MIT,Products,Texas,university research,water
Cat Fun: Rocky the Standing Cat
Posted on April 11, 2010 Comments (0)
This cat can stand straight up for a long time. And it is a real cat not a Meerkat 
Vidéo du chat qui se tient debout: “Il s’appelle Rocky et il sait aussi s’asseoir” (as translated by Google):
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“He started doing this about a year,” says Daisy. “Now it does more too because I rearranged the furniture, but when I made the video last fall, he could not see out the window if it did not make sense . But the window overlooking the rooftops, where there are often birds. So he gets up. ”
[why does Rocky move his arms in the middle of the video]?
“Maybe he wanted to rest, but waived them, or perhaps there was a bird “, launched Daisy. “Sometimes when he sees a dog growls, so perhaps there was one.”
Related: fun with cats – Curious Cat Hat – Treadmill Cats: Friday Cat Fun #3 – Awesome Cat Cam
Poor Results on Evolution and Big Bang Questions Omitted From NSF Report
Posted on April 10, 2010 Comments (4)
Evolution, Big Bang Polls Omitted From NSF Report by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
The USA continues to lag far behind the rest of the world in this basic science understanding. Similar to how we lag in other science and mathematical education. Nearly Half of Adults in the USA Don’t Know How Long it Takes the Earth to Circle the Sun.
I completely agree. People have the right to their opinions. But those opinions which are related to scientific knowledge (whether it is about evolution, the origin of the universe, cancer, the speed of light, polio vaccinations, multi-factorial designed experiments, magnetic fields, chemical catalysts, the effectiveness of antibiotics against viral infections, electricity, optics, bioaccumulation, etc.) are part of their scientific literacy. You can certainly believe antibiotics are affective against viral infections but that is an indication you are scientifically illiterate on that topic.
2006 NSF chapter that included the results
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HP Makes Progress on Revolutionary Memristors
Posted on April 9, 2010 Comments (0)
H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip
“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”
In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.
That is a significant hurdle to overcome, indicating that it is now possible to consider memristor-based chips as an alternative to today’s transistor-based flash computer memories, which are widely used in consumer devices like MP3 players, portable computers and digital cameras.
“Not only do we think that in three years we can be better than the competitors,” Dr. Williams said. “The memristor technology really has the capacity to continue scaling for a very long time, and that’s really a big deal.”
Related: Demystifying the Memristor – How We Found the Missing Memristor – Self-assembling Nanotechnology in Chip Manufacturing
South African Fossils Could be New Hominid Species
Posted on April 8, 2010 Comments (0)
South African fossils could be new hominid species
Researchers tell the journal Science that the creatures fill an important gap between older hominids and the group of more modern species known as Homo, which includes our own kind. The team has assigned the name Australopithecus sediba to their finds.
“It’s at the point where we transition from an ape that walks on two legs to, effectively, us,” lead scientist Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand told BBC News.
“I think that probably everyone is aware that this period of time – that period between 1.8 and just over two million years [ago] – is one of the most poorly represented in the entire early hominid fossil record. You’re talking about a very small, very fragmentary record,” he explained.
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Their bones were laid down with the remains of other dead animals, including a sabre-toothed cat, antelope, mice and rabbits. The fact that none of the bodies appear to have been scavenged indicates that all died suddenly and were entombed rapidly.
“We think that there must have been some sort of calamity taking place at the time that caused all of these fossils to come down together into the cave where they got trapped and ultimately buried,” said team-member Professor Paul Dirks from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.
All were preserved in the hard calcified clastic sediment that formed at the bottom of a pool of water.
Related: ‘Hobbit’ human is a new species – Understanding the Evolution of Human Beings by Country – Evolution is Fundamental to Science – DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution
Spring Tulips
Posted on April 7, 2010 Comments (6)
photo of red and yellow tulips by John Hunter
Photo of red and yellow tulips in my yard. This is by far the most tulips that have flowered. The last several years I think there were 3-5 flowers. This year there are 20 in the front yard.
Related: Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly – Researchers Learn What Sparks Plant Growth – What Are Flowers For? – Antelope Island, Great Salt Lake Photos
University of Wisconsin-Stout Wins 2010 Rube Goldberg Contest
Posted on April 3, 2010 Comments (0)
University of Wisconsin-Stout wins 2010 Rube Goldberg contest
The task for the Rube Goldberg machines this year was to dispense sanitizer into a hand. Wisconsin-Stout’s machine dispensed the sanitizer into a mummy’s hand. The Rube Goldberg competition, sponsored by Phi Chapter of Theta Tau fraternity, rewards machines that most effectively combine creativity with inefficiency and complexity.
Machines must use at least 20 steps to complete the task in no more than two minutes. Teams have three tries to complete two runs. Points are deducted if students have to assist the machine once it has started. The Wisconsin-Stout machine has 120 steps. The team completed two perfect runs with no interventions in about a minute and a half each.
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St. Olaf’ College of Northfield, Minn., last year’s national winner, took second place with a medieval-themed machine. Pennsylvania State University placed third with an “Indiana Jones” theme.
Related: Rube Goldberg Machine Contest (2005) – Goldbergian Flash Fits Rube Goldberg Web Site – Botball 2009 Finals – UW- Madison Wins 4th Concrete Canoe Competition
Tags: Awards,engineering education,fun,Universities,webcasts,Wisconsin
Why Wasn’t the Earth Covered in Ice 4 Billion Years Ago – When the Sun was Dimmer
Posted on April 2, 2010 Comments (1)
Climate scientists from all over the globe are now able to test their climate models under extreme conditions thanks to Professor Minik Rosing, University of Copenhagen. Rosing has solved one of the great mysteries and paradoxes of our geological past, namely, “Why the earth’s surface was not just one big lump of ice four billion years ago when the Sun’s radiation was much weaker than it is today.” Until now, scientists have presumed that the earth’s atmosphere back then consisted of 30% carbon dioxide (CO2) which ensconced the planet in a protective membrane, thereby trapping heat like a greenhouse.
The faint early sun paradox
In 1972, the late, world famous astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleague George Mullen formulated “The faint early sun paradox. ” The paradox consisted in that the earth’s climate has been fairly constant during almost four of the four and a half billion years that the planet has been in existence, and this despite the fact that radiation from the sun has increased by 25-30 percent.
The paradoxical question that arose for scientists in this connection was why the earth’s surface at its fragile beginning was not covered by ice, seeing that the sun’s rays were much fainter than they are today. Science found one probable answer in 1993, which was proffered by the American atmospheric scientist, Jim Kasting. He performed theoretical calculations that showed that 30% of the earth’s atmosphere four billion years ago consisted of CO2. This in turn entailed that the large amount of greenhouse gases layered themselves as a protective greenhouse around the planet, thereby preventing the oceans from freezing over.
Mystery solved
Now, however, Professor Minik Rosing, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and Christian Bjerrum, from the Department of Geography and Geology at University of Copenhagen, together with American colleagues from Stanford University in California have discovered the reason for “the missing ice age” back then, thereby solving the sun paradox, which has haunted scientific circles for more than forty years.
Professor Minik Rosing explains, “What prevented an ice age back then was not high CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, but the fact that the cloud layer was much thinner than it is today. In addition to this, the earth’s surface was covered by water. This meant that the sun’s rays could warm the oceans unobstructed, which in turn could layer the heat, thereby preventing the earth’s watery surface from freezing into ice. The reason for the lack of clouds back in earth’s childhood can be explained by the process by which clouds form. This process requires chemical substances that are produced by algae and plants, which did not exist at the time. These chemical processes would have been able to form a dense layer of clouds, which in turn would have reflected the sun’s rays, throwing them back into the cosmos and thereby preventing the warming of earth’s oceans. Scientists have formerly used the relationship between the radiation from the sun and earth’s surface temperature to calculate that earth ought to have been in a deep freeze during three billion of its four and a half billion years of existence. Sagan and Mullen brought attention to the paradox between these theoretical calculations and geological reality by the fact that the oceans had not frozen. This paradox of having a faint sun and ice-free oceans has now been solved.”
CO2 history iluminated
Minik Rosing and his team have by analyzing samples of 3.8-billion-year-old mountain rock from the world’s oldest bedrock, Isua, in western Greenland, solved the “paradox”.
But more importantly, the analyses also provided a finding for a highly important issue in today’s climate research – and climate debate, not least: whether the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration throughout earth’s history has fluctuated strongly or been fairly stable over the course of billions of years.
“The analyses of the CO2-content in the atmosphere, which can be deduced from the age-old Isua rock, show that the atmosphere at the time contained a maximum of one part per thousand of this greenhouse gas. This was three to four times more than the atmosphere’s CO2-content today. However, not anywhere in the range of the of the 30 percent share in early earth history, which has hitherto been the theoretical calculation. Hence we may conclude that the atmosphere’s CO2-content has not changed substantially through the billions of years of earth’s geological history. However, today the graph is turning upward. Not least due to the emissions from fossil fuels used by humans. Therefore it is vital to determine the geological and atmospheric premises for the prehistoric past in order to understand the present, not to mention the future, in what pertains to the design of climate models and calculations,” underscores Minik Rosing.
Full press release from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Related: Sun Missing It’s Spots – Solar Storms – Why is it Colder at Higher Elevations? – Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth
Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists
Posted on April 1, 2010 Comments (1)
Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists
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perhaps the most powerful idea to emerge from Verlinde’s approach is that gravity is essentially a phenomenon of information.
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Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe. Some physicists are convinced that the properties of information do not come from the behaviour of information carriers such as photons and electrons but the other way round. They think that information itself is the ghostly bedrock on which our universe is built.
Gravity has always been a fly in this ointment. But the growing realisation that information plays a fundamental role here too, could open the way to the kind of unification between the quantum mechanics and relativity that physicists have dreamed of.
This speculative physics is fascinating. Open access paper: Gravity from Quantum Information.
Related: Does Time Exist – Quantum Mechanics Made Relatively Simple Podcasts – Laws of Physics May Need a Revision – Open Science: Explaining Spontaneous Knotting
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