Brian links

"It's a giant beard fashion shoot. Watch as Fili, Kili and all the other dwarves from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit give it up hard for the camera. Work those braided beards, boys! Plus, one dashing new picture of Gandalf."

"Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has spoken out against the Draft Communications Bill, the UK government plans to monitor and store all digital communications, dubbed the "Snooper's Charter". In case Draft Communications Data Bill becomes the law, the US entrepreneur has promised to encrypt all connections between Wikipedia servers and the UK, effectively reducing the government's ability to snoop on use of Wikipedia. Wales was speaking to a  joint committee tasked with scrutinising the proposed Communications Bill before it is debated in the House of Commons."

" It is, Julio Vildosola concedes, a very big bet. Enlarge This Image Warrick Page for The New York Times Julio and Eva Vildosola and one of their two children. Mr. Vildosola will join a small software company in Cambridge. Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (269) » After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks."

What if you could replicate President Obama's famous cool, Lady Gaga's style and Michael Phelps's athleticism? An experimental philosopher is attempting to do just that. Sort of.  Jonathan Keats, a "poet of ideas" whose exploits include opening a photosynthetic restaurant for plants and a celestial observatory for cyanobacteria, is now introducing "the first trouble-free human cloning technique." 

So, after my post on ground-truth documents, one of my commenters argued eloquently that I ought to clean it up and submit it to a journal read by people who manage programming projects. He suggested Software Practice and Experience. This seemed like a pretty good idea, until I read SP&E's submission procedures and was reminded that (like most journals) they want me to assign the copyright of my submission to the publisher. My instant reaction was this: Fuck. That. Noise. I'm certainly willing to cede publication rights when I want to be published, but copyright assignment ain't going to happen. Ever. Nobody gets to own my work but me. (Yes, I insist on this with my book publishers too.) I have a message to all you technical journal publishers out there…

This is an army of 'Chef Cui' noodle-shaving robots designed and manufactured by Cui Runquan. The robots were designed to cut noodles from a block of dough cheaper and more efficiently than humans can. Plus today's youth don't want to work as noodle cutters. Kids! I spent two summers as a teen peeling potatoes at summer camp, and do you hear me complaining? Hell no, I got that out of my system a long time ago. It really did suck though.

I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing" In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this: * Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them. * We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body. * This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too-and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this: "Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race" "Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds" Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out."

Reproducibility is a key part of science, even though almost nobody does the same experiment twice. A lab will generally repeat an experiment several times and look for results before they get published. But, once that paper is published, people tend to look for reproducibility in other ways, testing the consequences of a finding, extending it to new contexts or different populations. Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that's already been published, though. But maybe they should. At least that's the thinking behind a new effort called the Reproducibility Initiative, a project hosted by the Science Exchange and supported by Nature, PLoS, and the Rockefeller University Press.

"Academia.edu, a social network for scholars, is unveiling a new feature today that its founder Richard Price hopes will help address part of the "credit gap" for research. Academia.edu allows users to upload and share their research papers, and the site is launching its Analytics Dashboard for Scientists today that Price says will let scholars see the "real-time impact" of their work. Academic publishing has long been a black-box in terms of both who's reading and who's citing. Publishing in journals may be expected (required, even), but the delays in the publishing process can make it challenging to ascertain how much influence work has. "It typically takes about 3 to 5 years for citations to actually appear back in the process," argues Price, pointing to the lengthy time between researching, writing, peer-reviewing, and publishing."

Data doesn't invade people's lives. Lack of control over how it's used does. What's really driving so-called big data isn't the volume of information. It turns out big data doesn't have to be all that big. Rather, it's about a reconsideration of the fundamental economics of analyzing data. For decades, there's been a fundamental tension between three attributes of databases. You can have the data fast; you can have it big; or you can have it varied. The catch is, you can't have all three at once. O'Reilly Radar (http://s.tt/1kHKE)

Inquire is an iPad app that combines the popular Campbell Biology textbook with a knowledge representation and reasoning system that answers questions. The transition to digital textbooks should be more than a superficial change in medium, and Inquire is an example of how AI technology can help ensure the transition to digital textbooks leads to improved learning for students.

After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.

Developer kit for the Oculus Rift - the first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games.

What could be better than the solar system set to music in a near-perpetual homage to Bach? Little, but a three-movement choral suite inspired by Carl Sagan might be it - a magnificent mashup of Sagan's timeless words set to harmonizing voices and an awe-inspiring montage of space exploration footage. Here's to cosmic goosebumps, courtesy of Canadian composer and teacher Kenley Kristofferson.

Over the last 10 years, the U.S. government has made significant investments in science and technology in order to enhance its ability to understand and shape public opinion and behavior abroad-a domain of activity referred to in this report as "shaping," "influencing," or "communication and persuasion." Because this effort is taking place across a vast government bureaucracy, the policy-makers and practitioners engaged in communication and persuasion do not always know what tools are at their disposal and what tools need to be invented.

Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.

PopFab is a multi-tool for the 21st century. At its heart is a computer-controlled motion platform and a means of attaching various toolheads. These enable PopFab to make objects from a digital plan in a variety of ways: current capabilities include 3D printing (as you are about to see), milling, vinyl cutting, and drawing - with more on the way. PopFab has traveled the world as a carry-on item of luggage to Saudi Arabia and Germany, and within the USA to Aspen in Colorado. We hope that this is only the beginning.

The Tor Project is considering paying operators to host exit relays in efforts to increase the speed and security of its global anonymity network. Under early consideration is a suggestion by Tor founder Rodger Dingledine that operators receive $100 a month to cover bandwidth costs. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has already donated an undisclosed amount of funds over 12 months to provide for at least 125 fast exit relays which would provide extra capacity for Tor users.