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Tuesday, November 21, 2006 |
London Police Equipped With 360-Degree Cams. OriginalArlen writes, "In a story so surreal I had to check the primary source, the Register reports that the (London, UK) Metropolitan Police are trying out the use of eight tiny cams, mounted in the police helmet, to provide 360-degree evidence gathering in the event that an officer witnesses a crime. The press release also gives more evidence of the stealth spread of ubiquitous ANPR systems across the country as a spin-off 'benefit' to the London car congestion-charging scheme, which is likely to be rolled out across the country in the next few years. Are we already living in a Panopticon Society?" According to this report from the information commissioner for Great Britain, yep. [Slashdot]
4:11:12 PM  Google It!.
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Wireless Industry Cozying Up To the Disruptors. PreacherTom writes, "As recently as a few months ago, the wireless industry showed little apparent interest in partnering with companies like Sling, Skype, and ISkoot. After all, they make products that threaten to compete with services that mobile-phone companies are eager to sell. Times are changing, at first in Europe and perhaps soon in the U.S. A few days ago, Sling Media's CEO sat down with execs from Hutchison Whampoa, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson for discussions. Skype isn't far behind, while ISkoot is in 'advanced discussions.' According to analyst Krishna Kanagarayer, 'This could turn the U.S. wireless industry on its head. The advent of mobile access to full-blown home PC and TV applications could lead to a revamp in pricing of wireless service providers' data plans, possibly to tiered pricing. And as applications such as mobile Skype take hold, data and voice use will become indistinguishable.'"[Slashdot]
4:08:54 PM Google It!.
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A Model for Open Source Science.
Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News for this reference to a model for open source science based on open source software development. The model was developed by Karim Lakhani at the Harvard Business School. ____JH
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Karim R. Lakhani: "Open source collaboration is a very different model for innovation and product development than most firms are used to. I began to wonder where we might see similar patterns occur outside the software domain. In open source communities we see a vast degree of openness in which everybody can participate, but also the practice of broadcasting your work to everybody else. People continually broadcast their problems, others broadcast solutions, and the person with the problem is not always the one with the solution. Oftentimes, somebody else can make sense of both what the problem has been and what people are proposing as solutions, and can come "
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Martha Lagace, Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation, Working Knowledge, November 20, 2006. An interview with Karim Lakhani, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School. (Thanks to John Russell.) Excerpt:
In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.
Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.
That's the view of Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School with an extensive research background in open source software communities and their innovation and product development strategies. His latest research analyzes how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists.
By noemail@noemail.org (Peter Suber). [Open Access News] [EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online]
4:07:16 PM Google It!.
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Stem Cells At The Core of Cancer?. davecb writes "The Globe and Mail reports that cancers have at their core a small number of stem cells, without which they cannot spread or reoccur. From the article: 'A spate of new discoveries about the basic biology of cancer is pushing researchers toward an astonishing conclusion: For decades, efforts to cure the disease may have targeted the wrong cells.' If true, the discoveries of Canadian and Italian research groups may give us a new path to selectively attack cancer."[Slashdot]
1:28:45 PM Google It!.
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Purdue Streams a Movie At 7.5Gb/sec. the_psilo writes, "My friend just got back from the Supercomputing conference in Tampa, FL where she and the rest of the Purdue Envision Center rocked the High Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge by streaming a 2-minute-long, 125-GB movie over a 10-Gb link at 7.5 Gb/sec. They used 6 Apple Xserve RAIDs connected to 12 clients projecting onto their tiled wall (that's 12 streams in all). Lots of accolades from the people who set up the challenge. More links to articles and reviews can be found at the Envision Center Bandwidth Challenge FAQ page." The two-minute video is a scientific visualization of a cell structure from a bacterium. The Envision Center site hosts a reduced version of the video.[Slashdot]
1:16:00 PM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Landon.
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