Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
FW: [IP] Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind
From the IP list. Spooky.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber
To: ip
Sent: 9/24/2008 3:31 AM
Subject: [IP] Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,426485,00.html
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Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Vincent LaForet shows off Canon's game changer
FW: [IP] Nice reading -- Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
A must read
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber
To: ip
Sent: 9/20/2008 6:29 AM
Subject: [IP] Nice reading -- Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/diamond-and-kashyap-on-
the-recent-financial-upheavals/?em
September 18, 2008, 10:04 am
By STEVEN D. LEVITT
As an economist, I am supposed to have something intelligent to say
about the current financial crisis. To be honest, however, I haven't
got the foggiest idea what this all means. So I did what I always do
when something related to banking arises: I knocked on the doors of my
colleagues Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap, and asked them for the
answers. What they told me was so interesting and insightful that I
begged them to write their explanations down for a broader audience.
They were kind enough to take the time to do so. In what follows, they
discuss what has happened in the financial sector in the last few
days, why it happened, and what it means for everyday people.
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Friday, September 19, 2008
EFF Sues the USA, Wall Street Meltdown and IT, New E-Readers, more
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Journalism student barred from liveblogging and twittering in Web 2.0 Journalism class
Palin's email hacked, Microsoft dumps seinfeld, more
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Binary Math
Monday, September 15, 2008
ROBOTIC ARMS!!!! More on open source textbooks, Rockband2, more
Investigators looking into whether text messaging played a role in this weekends train disaster
Thursday, September 11, 2008
MUST READ. Frequently asked questions about CERN and the LHC, why does it matter to Infotech?
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Yeah let me know how that works out for you... More
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Updates from "Let's Rock"
-NBC is back on iTunes. Heros, Monk, Battlestar etc
-iTunes 8 official - "Genius"=smart playlists on steroids. Grid view.
-160gb ipod classic killed, 120 is the new classic, $249. ONLY ONE Classic now, not two.
-New nano confirmed. All as suspected. Thin, aluminum, tall, with accelerometer and curved screen. Genius function built in, calendar, stopwatch and voice recorder. Shake to shuffle. Worse battery life, 24 hours music 4h video. $149 for the 8GB model, $199 for the 16GB model 8 in stock today, 16 next week. Green manufacturing. Black, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, violet, red
-New $79 headphones with built in mic and back/forward buttons. Engadget photos make em very Sennheiser like, looks good.
-New form factor for touch, similar to iPhone. Volume controls, speaker and Genius features. Nike+ integration built right in, get transmitter for your shoes. New UI.
-100,000,000 apps downloaded on app store. New games coming. Spore and Soccer zzzzz. D-Pad overlay could be a nightmare. Need for Speed.
-iPod Touch works with the new headphones. 36 hours for music, 6 for video. Environmental conscience. No size bumps. 8GB $229, 16GB $299 and 32GB $399. Weak. All starting today.
-"Funnest iPod ever." Double weaksauce.
-iPod software 2.1, inc Nike+ and Genius playlists. 2.0 Touch owners get a free update to 2.1, $9.95 to go to 2.1 from 1.x. Available today.
-Lots of bug fixes in 2.1 "Fewer dropped calls, big battery life improvements. No crashes with Apps. Backing up is faster"
-Jack Johnson performed, so thats it for one of the weakest Apple events ever
-Per Slashgear "Considering how "rock" the event started out, an acoustic performance by Jack Johnson seems a big strange ". Seriously.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Google's sat able to track your shadow? +more
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/06/google-launches-sate.html
The history of Wired:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/05/kevin-kelly-on-the-h.html
Have you consider the possibility that you might suck at photoshop?
(If you haven’t seen it before, You Suck is actually a REALLY good tutorial site about Photoshop wrapped up in a ball of drama and ironic humor. May contain NSFW (Not Safe for Work / School) language, so check that one out at your own risk! This is this week’s episode which is part of Season 2, you might be best to start at Season 1 if you really have never used Ps)
Crypto wedding ring
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/05/help-design-a-cipher.html
We’ll talk a LOT about Cryptology and Encryption this semester!
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Monday morning nuggets
Thursday, September 04, 2008
FW: [IP] Summary One of your readers...My memory
There's a recipe for revolution for you, make a product 6 orders of magnitude (so if your initial version is 10, it would be 10^9 or 10,000,000 times) bigger for 6 orders of magnitude (10,000,000,000) cheaper.
If you can do that you've got something...
I like to give my own personal example. The first hard disk I bought held 33 megabytes and cost me $888, and that was a LOT for a college student in 1988. Today you can get a 1GB disk for $200. So for 1/4 the price you get 30,303 times more storage. I now have single pictures that are larger than my first hard disk could hold.
My first 'real' computer, a Texas Instruments 99-4/a circa 1982ish, held 16 kilobytes of memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
I expect my next computer will have between 4 and 16 GB of RAM but lets be conservative and call it 4. That is a 250,000 fold increase in RAM.
My first PC was a Radio Shack / Tandy 1000tx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000
It had 640k of memory. This was 40x more than my TI but only 1/6240th of what a new 4GB machine will have. Again, this was in 1988, only 20 years ago.
This phenomenon isn't slowing down either, we are still living in the age of Moore's Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
We're getting to the edge of what physics will allow tho!
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber
To: ip
Sent: 9/4/2008 5:00 AM
Subject: [IP] Summary One of your readers...My memory
Begin forwarded message:
From: Gene Spafford <spaf@cerias.purdue.edu>
Date: September 4, 2008 1:31:51 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: One of your readers...My memory
So, to summarize what I got:
There were several one-off fully transistorized computers built by
various groups in the mid-1950s.
The first commercial system that was offered for general sale that was
completely transistors was the 608, announced by IBM in April of
1955. It had 3000 transistors. In current dollars it was possible to
buy a base model for a modest $700,000.
The price for transistors used by IBM in their machines circa 1958 was
approximately $2 each (or $20 current), as cited in Thomas Watson's
autobiography, Father, Son, & Co., on page 296 (thanks P. Capek and DV
Henkel-Wallace).
I wanted to verify a calculation I had used in a magazine article (to
come out in October) that in 50 years of semiconductor computing,
we've seen almost a nine order of magnitude drop in per-transistor
cost in current dollars (although we've also seen an increase in
transistors per system use, by a factor of about 6 orders), and about
7 orders of magnitude drop in per-byte cost in secondary memory (about
$.10 per byte of drum in 1958). Of course, other costs, including
main memory have also dropped in a similar fashion. Total system cost
has dropped by a factor of about 500, but capabilities have grown
tremendously as well (I don't have a measure of that, but in the
millions of times faster, I believe).
This all goes to points I've been making in invited lectures over the
last year, but I wanted to reverify my numbers for the print article.
(And I am going to let the magazine have priority on the essay, so I
won't expand further until October...unless I end up speaking at your
institution. :-)
My thanks to everyone who responded. It was fascinating, and I
greatly appreciate your willingness to respond!
--spaf
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Lets talk about using Macs in IT100/102
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Happy birthday to GNU, cheaper iPods, more Chrome, more
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
iPod event confirmed for next week
FW: [IP] Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown - NYTimes.com
Another nugget from IP
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave@farber.net]
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2008 5:25 AM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/technology/01estrin.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
September 1, 2008
Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
MENLO PARK, Calif. - Judy Estrin, 53, has spent her entire career in
Silicon Valley, a region that thrives on constant innovation. Ms.
Estrin, the former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, has
founded four technology companies.
Yet she is deeply worried that Silicon Valley - and the United States
as a whole - no longer foster the kind of innovation necessary to
develop groundbreaking technologies and sustain economic growth.
"I am generally not an alarmist, but I have become more and more
concerned about the state of our country and its innovation," she said
last week, explaining why she wrote her book, "Closing the Innovation
Gap," which arrives in bookstores Tuesday. "We have a national
innovation deficit."
Ms. Estrin's book is the latest call to action during the last several
years by scientists, technologists and political leaders worried about
the country's future competitiveness in technology.
In 2005, the National Academies published "Rising Above the Gathering
Storm," a report requested by Congress, which found that federal
financing of research in the physical sciences was 45 percent less in
2004 than in 1976 and that 93 percent of students in grades five
through eight learn science from teachers who do not hold degrees or
certifications in the topics. In 2007, the book "Innovation Nation" by
John Kao, a business consultant, revived the debate.
And this year, both presidential candidates have made government
support of innovation and technology a central part of their campaign
platforms.
Still, not all technology watchers agree with Ms. Estrin about the
extent of the innovation problem - or whether there is a problem at all.
"The whole innovation crisis thing is a bit overblown," said Paul
Saffo, a technology forecaster. Innovation in the natural world, in
the form of mutation, is lethal, so species do it only when they are
under dire stress, he said. "What makes Silicon Valley unique is that
this place has stumbled onto a way to sustain innovation even when the
place is doing well," he said.
Ms. Estrin argues that short-term thinking and a reluctance to take
risks are causing a noticeable lag in innovation. She cites a variety
of contributing factors. A decline in federal and university financing
for research has dried up new ideas, she said. When research does
produce new technologies, entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists
who back them have been too cautious to make big bets - especially
after the costly failures of the dot-com bust. If start-up companies
do find financing, she said, new regulations make it hard for them to
grow, and the focus of investors on short-term performance discourages
companies from taking risks.
Ms. Estrin's suggestions for bolstering innovation range from the
vague, like advising venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to take
more risks, to the specific, like mandating that schools pay teachers
higher salaries.
Some of her prescriptions are unlikely to become reality, like her
idea for a new government body modeled after the Federal Reserve that
sets science policy without Congressional input.
Some thinkers on innovation agree with Ms. Estrin's assessment. "There
is a remarkable telescoping in of vision and an unwillingness to make
long-term bets," said Vinton G. Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist at
Google.
Mr. Cerf led the development of the networking protocols that form the
basic architecture of the Internet, a project to which Ms. Estrin
contributed as a graduate student. He points to the Internet as an
example of the need for long-term research and financing, since
development of the technology used to transmit data online required
two decades of government support.
Robert Compton, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, said that the
United States is losing its innovation edge to China and India.
Chinese and Indian children are required to take more science courses
than students in the United States, said Mr. Compton, who recently
produced a documentary comparing high school education in the three
countries. Of college graduates, 30 percent to 45 percent in India and
China have engineering degrees, compared with 5 percent in the United
States. Venture financing and patent applications are falling in
Europe and the United States and rising in China and India, he said.
Most alarming to Mr. Compton is that 60 percent of engineering
doctorates from American universities are granted to foreign
nationals, but they are no longer staying here to work. "The American
economy is not as exciting as China and India, and a lot of them are
going back home," he said.
Ms. Estrin and others acknowledge that the recent surge in financing
for alternative energy companies is a sign that innovation is alive
and well in some sectors. Still, she is concerned that investors will
not have the patience to build these companies.
"If they treat these companies the same way they treated others - a
couple years in, they need to see returns or cut the burn rate or
start cutting people - they are not going to get to where we need to
go," she said.
Some who track innovation in the United States say the alarm bells are
unnecessary and sound like a repeat of similar fears in past decades
that turned out to be unfounded.
A June study from the RAND Corporation found that 40 percent of the
world's spending on scientific research and development comes from the
United States. The country employs 70 percent of the world's Nobel
Prize winners and is home to 75 percent of the top 40 universities.
"The United States is still the world leader in science and
technology," said the study's co-author, James Hosek.
But Ms. Estrin said that the technologies at the root of new products
like Apple's iPod or the Facebook social networking service were
actually developed several decades ago. If a new round of fundamental
innovation isn't seeded now, the country will suffer in the next decade.
She compared the situation to a tree that appears to be growing well,
but whose roots are rotting underground.
"Too much of it is short-term, incremental innovation, and the roots
of the tree aren't happy," she said.
-------------------------------------------
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FW: [IP] OSHA (Uncensored)
Regardless of your view on unions this is a pretty cool use of the internet!
Sam
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave@farber.net]
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 5:13 PM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] OSHA (Uncensored)
Here's a nice Labor Day story.
In 1980, the last year of Jimmy Carter's administration, the
Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) commissioned a
series of three 30-minute films about worker safety. These were real
pro productions, with Studs Terkel as narrator on two of the
productions. In 1981, Reagan appointed 36-year old Florida
construction executive Thorne G. Auchter, who proceeded to
systematically dismantle the agency. Evidently, the 3 films disturbed
Thorne greatly, because OSHA issued a recall, threatening to withold
OSHA funds from any organization that did not return their copies of
the films, which were promptly destroyed.
But, a few union officials defied the ban and "stole" copies so they
weren't able to be returned. Over the years, they would occasionally
show them to their troops, using the fact they banned as a way to get
them to watch the films, which have important messages about worker
rights and workplace safety. But, aside from these bootleg showings,
the video disappeared.
Public.Resource.Org got a note recently from Mark Catlan, a health and
safety expert for one of the unions for the last 28 years (he actually
started working for the union the year the film came out, and
remembers his education director stealing a copy out of his office so
it wouldn't get returned). A year ago, Mark decided the world needed
to see these films, so he found 16-mm cannisters and made them
available to us to transfer to DVCAM and then disk.
Making their public debut after 30 years are "Worker to Worker,"
"Can't Take No More," and "The Story of OSHA."
Link to YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=31E75CE43C7B93B5
Link to the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22public.resource.org%22%20AND%20subject%3A%22osha.gov%22%20AND%20mediatype%3Amovies
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Follow up email with more details for class tonight
Hello again IT 102-50 students.
Please be sure to check the class blog frequently at http://infotechbuzz.blogspot.com/
Our classes official web site at MU is: http://zorak.monmouth.edu/~posten
Also be sure to log in to see the details and drop-boxes at: http://ecampus.monmouth.edu
My email should you need to get me fastest is: sposten@gmail.com
Make sure you have the following bookmarked:
http://infotechbuzz.blogspot.com
http://zorak.monmouth.edu/~posten
Besides the ones I asked you about earlier, the question you should be thinking about when you enter class tonight is this: "What is a computer". I know what your BOOK says it is, what do YOU think of a computer as being and doing?
Continue thinking about what you hope to learn from this class! We have a wide variety of experience with Computers every semester, and it is my goal to help ALL of you grow and be ready for more in the IT minor program should you choose to continue down that route. Other than this being a required class, why do you want to learn more about computers, what do you currently use computers for, and what is stopping you from learning how to better use computers in all of the other things you are REALLY interested in studying?
Let me know if you have any questions!
Sam
