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Juxi Leitner

How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...foursquare

tech technology INF fun privacy geo location social networks

shared by Juxi Leitner on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Foursquare is now being widely touted as the app which will, after years of anticipation and prediction, mark the beginning of "life as a game" computing. Whatever you do, wherever you go, you will be scoring points, earning "medals", and be in, at the very least, social competition with other users around you.
  • Privacy seems to be very low down their priorities. In theory, if every user knows the risks, this is fine. But they just don't. It's being targeted at 18 to 25-year-olds. Facebook was forced in the end to change its default privacy settings due to public concerns. Foursquare should do the same. Some people are even checking in when they're at home. Think of the implications. It's crazy
  • Recruitment is a form of stalking, I suppose. But I can now see the negative implications of Foursquare in the real world.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ten days ago Foursquare reached the two-million-users landmark, just three months after it had reached the one-million mark. A week earlier, the company received $20m in venture capital from a who's who of Silicon Valley luminaries. It appears the trajectory for Foursquare is only upwards. But as the critical mass of Foursquare users swells and intensifies over the coming months and years, the concerns over privacy are likely to magnify. In June, Webroot, a Denver-based internet security firm, surveyed 1,645 users of "geo-location-ready mobile devices", including 624 in the UK: 29% said they shared their location with people other than their friends; 31% said they accepted a friend request from a stranger; and, yet, 55% still said they were worried about their loss of privacy.
  • Juxi Leitner on 23 Jul 10
     
    anybody here using Foursquare already? Location is supposed to be "the future" (this time)
  • LeopoldS on 24 Jul 10
     
    this is worse than having a mobile ... !
Francesco Biscani

Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...finding-protein-structures.ars

inf

shared by Francesco Biscani on 04 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Foldit takes a hybrid approach. The Rosetta algorithm is used to create some potential starting structures, but users are then given a set of controls that let them poke and prod the protein's structure in three dimensions; displays provide live feedback on the energy of a configuration. 
  • By tracing the actions of the best players, the authors were able to figure out how the humans' excellent pattern recognition abilities gave them an edge over the computer.
  • Humans turn out to be really bad at starting from a simple linear chain of proteins; they need a rough idea of what the protein might look like before they can recognize patterns to optimize. Given a set of 10 potential structures produced by Rosetta, however, the best players were very adept at picking the one closest to the optimal configuration.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The authors also note that different players tended to have different strengths. Some were better at making the big adjustments needed to get near an energy minimum, while others enjoyed the fine-scale tweaking needed to fully optimize the structure. That's where Foldit's ability to enable team competitions, where different team members could handle the parts of the task most suited to their interests and abilities, really paid off.
  • Francesco Biscani on 04 Aug 10
     
    Some interesting ideas for our crowdsourcing game in here.
Juxi Leitner

robots.net - Neuron Interface Chips Advancing - 1 views

robots.net/3042.html

neuroscience chip brain interface bio INF technology

shared by Juxi Leitner on 08 Sep 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • this advancement could ultimately lead to the use of biological neurons in the central or sub-processing units of computers and automated machinery.
LeopoldS

BBC News - Stuxnet worm 'targeted high-value Iranian assets' - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-11388018

computer virus defence

shared by LeopoldS on 25 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 25 Sep 10
     
    fascinating ....
  • Ma Ru on 25 Sep 10
     
    Nice... enter cyber-warfare...
santecarloni

Towards an explanatory and computational theory of scientific discovery - 8 views

arxiv.org/0904.1439

social science scientific discoveries

shared by santecarloni on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • santecarloni on 15 Oct 10
     
    Something to think about...
  • ...1 more comment...
  • LeopoldS on 18 Oct 10
     
    nice ....
  • Ma Ru on 18 Oct 10
     
    I love the fact that the journal in which the paper was published has a typo in the name...
  • LeopoldS on 20 Oct 10
     
    what typo? there is no typo that I can spot!
Luzi Bergamin

YouTube - Aircraft Maker to Make A Test Run - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

technology aircraft aerospace

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 29 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 29 Oct 10
     
    A computer technician from Nairobi builds his own aircraft from scratch, using information on aerospace engineering available on internet... Idea for African spachteln programs??
LeopoldS

Surfaces that Keep the Ice Away - Technology Review - 1 views

www.technologyreview.com/...26720

technology phy nan NRG

shared by LeopoldS on 18 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 18 Nov 10
     
    probably not of much use for space but still ....
pacome delva

A Phase Transition for Light | Physical Review Focus - 3 views

focus.aps.org/st19

phy liquid_light electromagnetism

shared by pacome delva on 22 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • A computer simulation shows the transition from "fermionic" to "liquid" light.
  • The possibility of sending this type of "self-focused" light pulse long distances could be important for remote sensing applications, such as LIDAR, which uses laser light the way radar uses radio waves.
  • LeopoldS on 23 Nov 10
     
    what the heck is this?? sounds really strange but highly interesting to me ....
  • LeopoldS on 23 Nov 10
     
    can we use this for energy transmission?
  • LeopoldS on 23 Nov 10
     
    read it now more carefully and the answer is probably no ...
Dario Izzo

If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too!!! - 3 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ce-climate-emails-code-release

open science

shared by Dario Izzo on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
pacome delva liked it
  • Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies.
  • pacome delva on 09 Feb 10
     
    haha. this guy won't have any new friends with this article! I kind of agree but making your code public doesn't mean you are doing good science...and inversely! He takes experimental physics as a counter example but even there, some teams keep their little secrets on the details of the experiment to have a bit of advance on other labs. Research is competitive in its current state, and I think only collaborations can overcome this fact.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Juxi Leitner on 10 Feb 10
     
    well sure competitiveness is good but to verify (and that should be the case for scientific experiments) the code should be public, it would be nice to have something like bibtex for code libraries or versions used.... :) btw I fully agree that the code should go public, I had lots of trouble reproducing (reprogramming) some papers in the past ... grr
  • Francesco Biscani on 10 Feb 10
     
    My view is that the only proper way to do scientific communication is full transparency: methodologies, tests, codes, etc. Everything else should be unacceptable. This should hold both for publicly funded science (for which there is the additional moral requirement to give back to the public domain what was produced with taxpayers' money) and privately-funded science (where the need to turn a profit should be of lesser importance than the proper application of the scientifc method).
  • Dario Izzo on 08 Nov 10
     
    Same battle we are fighting since a few years....
Juxi Leitner

The BCI X PRIZE: This Time It's Inner Space | h+ Magazine - 3 views

hplusmagazine.com/...-x-prize-time-it's-inner-space

tech bmi

shared by Juxi Leitner on 10 Feb 10 - Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • The Brain-Computer Interface X PRIZE will reward a team that provides vision to the blind, new bodies to disabled people...
  • LeopoldS on 11 Feb 10
     
    nice! are they studying our website?
Juxi Leitner

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy - 4 views

www.technologyreview.com/...24759

tech phy quantum entanglement nrg

shared by Juxi Leitner on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
pacome delva liked it
  • He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn't travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space.
  • Juxi Leitner on 09 Feb 10
     
    wonder if we can use that to power a moon base .... or on-board a SBSP satellite
  • ...1 more comment...
  • LeopoldS on 09 Feb 10
     
    will still have to read the actual article but am a bit sceptic if this interpretation really will hold ... what are our fundamental physicists saying about this?
  • Juxi Leitner on 10 Feb 10
     
    I am not the physicist but I thought it might be interesting, from a space security point-of-view
  • pacome delva on 11 Feb 10
     
    Yes it seems really interesting and opens new possibilities. However this technology review article is not very good and the guy uses terms which have a precise meaning (like teleportation), which is different from the word we know... Quantum teleportation is what we use for designing quantum computers, but we are quite far from any practical applications. This energy teleportation will allow new scheme involving energy (if it is experimentally confirmed) which is very nice. However it seems this occurs in an entangled many-body system, which the only macroscopic one I know is a bose-eintein condensate (BEC). So it would mean infuse energy in the BEC by doing a measurement on one of the atom and extract it few millimeters away by doing a measurement on another atom. very far from any long distance power transmission...
LeopoldS

Why Can't PCs Work More Like iPhones? - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...ant-pcs-work-more-like-iphones

computing

shared by LeopoldS on 27 Feb 10 - Cached
  • LeopoldS on 27 Feb 10
     
    bye bye Francesco to your beloved command line ....
  • Francesco Biscani on 27 Feb 10
     
    I would love to see people working on touchscreens all day, orthopedics would have a field day :) Anyway, the answer to the original question is: because the JesusPhone is an appliance, a PC is not.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 01 Mar 10
     
    Luckily there is open source, so neither Steve Jobs nor NY Times decide for us what sort of OS we have to like! I'll join the "Jihad for the command line" troop!!
Francesco Biscani

BBC News - Q&A: Europa and Jupiter mission - 1 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8537992.stm

jupiter planetology

shared by Francesco Biscani on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Francesco Biscani on 09 Mar 10
     
    Informative Q&A.
  • Ma Ru on 09 Mar 10
     
    I could come up with a name for the onboard computer of the spacecraft...
Ian Carnelli

Visualizing science - 2 views

vimeo.com/6644720

fun inf

shared by Ian Carnelli on 16 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Ian Carnelli on 16 Feb 10
     
    toxiclibs is an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing
pacome delva

Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence - 1 views

sciencenow.sciencemag.org/...1

war power_law

shared by pacome delva on 18 Dec 09 - Cached
  • To try to explain the mechanism behind these patterns, the team borrowed a simple computer model from economics. The model treated all insurgencies like a marketplace--groups of people constantly deciding whether to act. Rather than coordinating, the groups simply watch the news. The size of the carnage reported at any given time determines the probability that a group of a given size will strike next. Like clockwork, the attacks over the course of the conflict--from the smallest to the most deadly--have the same distribution.
Francesco Biscani

Official Google Blog: Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards - 0 views

googleblog.blogspot.com/...-googles-focused-research.html

inf

shared by Francesco Biscani on 02 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.
  • Francesco Biscani on 02 Feb 10
     
    Might be of some interest to Christos?
pacome delva

Landmarks: Teleportation is not Science Fiction - 0 views

focus.aps.org/st1

phy quantum_computation quantum_physics quantum_cryptography

shared by pacome delva on 11 Jan 10 - Cached
  • If a practical quantum computer is ever built, he says, it will have to make use of different kinds of quantum bits, perhaps atoms for storage and photons for transmission. So teleportation would be a natural way to connect these components, he says.
Juxi Leitner

InfoQ: A Crash Course in Modern Hardware - 3 views

www.infoq.com/...k-crash-course-modern-hardware

technology computer architectures programming

shared by Juxi Leitner on 23 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Juxi Leitner on 23 Jan 10
     
    for francesco ;) though i guess he knows it all already so for the others who wanna know too
  • Francesco Biscani on 25 Jan 10
     
    Cool, lots of useful info in there. Though, never having programmed in Java before, I wonder if one can go that low-level in Java?
  • Juxi Leitner on 25 Jan 10
     
    oh I don't think so but it is interesting for the JVM I guess
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