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Monday, December 18, 2006 |
New Cognitive Daily podcast!. Starting today, each week's CogDaily Research articles will be available in podcast form! We're working on making them available directly from iTunes, but for now, you can download them from the CogDaily blog.
Click here to download the December 2 Cognitive Daily podcast (AAC format)
Click here to download the December 2 Cognitive Daily podcast (MP3 format)
We're committed to podcasting the reports on peer reviewed research we've covered each week (they'll appear here each Saturday), so if you don't have time to read them online, you can listen while you exercise or commute to work.
In the future, if there's sufficient interest, we'll add interviews with the experts who conducted the studies themselves, so make sure to let us know if you like this new feature. We'd also like to hear your other ideas on how to improve the podcast, so we'll keep the comments open. As always, feel free to email us (remove dashes) with suggestions or comments, too. Read the comments on this post... [Cognitive Daily's Weekly Podcast]
11:44:17 PM  Google It!.
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Material With Negative Refractive Index Created. holy_calamity writes "The race to build a material with a negative index of refraction for visible light has been won by researchers in Germany. The advance could lead to super-lenses able to see details finer then the wavelength of visible light, or the previously predicted invisibility cloak for visible light." From the article: "[The researcher] determined the refractive index of the material by measuring the 'phase velocity' of light as it passed through. His measurements show the structure has a negative refractive index of -0.6 for light with a wavelength of 780 nm [the far red end of the visible light spectrum]. This value drops to zero at 760 nm and 800 nm, and becomes positive at longer and shorter wavelengths."[Slashdot]
2:54:53 PM .
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Help CC's new Chairman meet our $100k goal!. My retirement plaque, presented by Jimmy Wales. (click to enlarge) Last week, culminating Friday night, in parties around the world, Creative Commons celebrated its fourth birthday. Hundreds of people helped mark this event. My 3 year old son, Willem, and I cut the first cake at the party in Portugal. Five hours later, in the Creative Commons party in the virtual world of Second Life, I made (for me an announcement. As I removed the CC torch from my bag of objects, I told those in world, and in San Francisco, that Joi Ito, a venture capitalist from Japan and a key driver in the "sharing economy," would be replacing me as Chairman of Creative Commons. I will remain on the board, and as CEO. But from the moment I handed him the torch, he is CC's new Chairman. This is a very happy moment for CC. I'm not going anywhere -- CC will continue to get everything I can give. But we are movement, not a cult. And it is important that movements have leaders. I have had enormous respect for Joi sin Lessig Blog, December 18, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
2:47:31 PM Google It!.
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Trailing-edge requirements for a community app.
One of the projects I[base ']m tackling on sabbatical is a community version of LibraryLookup. The service I wanted to create is described here: an RSS feed that[base ']s updated when a book on your Amazon wishlist becomes available in your local library. Originally I planned to build a simple web application that would register Amazon wishlist IDs and produce custom RSS feeds for each registrant. But as I thought about what would make this service palatable to a community, I saw two problems with that approach:
- Familiarity. Most folks will not be familiar with RSS. If the primary goal is to get people using the service, rather than to evangelize RSS, it should use the more familiar style of email notification.
- Deployability. A web application needs to be hosted somewhere. In most communities, the library won[base ']t be able to host the service on its own infrastructure. But if it[base ']s hosted elsewhere, there will be a (rational) reluctance to take a dependency on that provider.
To address the first concern, I[base ']m doing this as an old-fashioned email-based app. You subscribe or unsubscribe by sending email with a command and a wishlist ID in the Subject: header. And you receive notifications about book availability by way of email.
To address the second concern, I[base ']m doing it as a client-side Python script, so that the only dependency is some version of Python and an Internet connection.
Because a library might not even be able to dedicate an email address for this purpose, I[base ']m exploring the use of Gmail as the communication engine. In order for that to work, Python has to be able to make secure and authenticated POP and SMTP connections. Happily, it can.
The recipe for connecting Python to Gmail[base ']s POP service is trivial:
import poplib
p = poplib.POP3_SSL([base ']pop.gmail.com[base '])
p.user([base ']USERNAME[base '])
p.pass_([base ']PASSWORD[base '])
The recipe for connecting Python to Gmail[base ']s SMTP service is less obvious:
import smtplib,
s = smtplib.SMTP([per thou]smtp.gmail.com[per thou])
s.starttls()
auth = [OE]x00USERNAMEx00PASSWORD[base ']
eauth = base64.b64encode(auth)
s.putcmd([per thou]AUTH PLAIN[per thou])
s.putcmd(eauth)
This won[base ']t work with no authentication, but neither will it work with the SMTP module[base ']s login() which uses the wrong authentication type (i.e., LOGIN rather than PLAIN, I think).
Any POP/SMTP servers can be used, of course, so there[base ']s no dependency on Gmail here, but it[base ']s nice to see that Gmail can easily be pressed into service if need be.
It feels retro and trailing-edge to do an email-based app but, in order to make it familiar and deployable that seems like the right approach.
[Jon Udell]
2:44:18 PM Google It!.
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David Pogue Takes On Vista. guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.[Slashdot]
12:41:32 PM Google It!.
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Web now exceeds newspaper use in U.S.. We spend a ton of time with the media. An average of more than 3,500 hours a year,in fact. A report from the Census Bureau breaks down those 3,518 hours for us and finds that in 2007, for the first time, Americans will spend more time on the web than they do with their newspapers. Here's the breakdown: TV: 1,555 hours (up from 1,467 in the year 2000); Radio: 975 hours (up from 942 in 2000); Internet: 195 hours (up from 104); Newspapers: 175 hours (down from 201); Magazines: 122 hours (down from 135); Books: 106 hours (down only an hour); Video Games: 86 hours (up from 64). Good perspective there. But how/why will we continue to break apart these numbers in a world of broadband TV, online gaming, audiobooks, newspapers that successfully produce video, radio podcasts, etc.? Web time usage has nearly doubled since 2000 and every other medium is moving toward it. Lost Remote, December 18, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
8:03:30 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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