Thursday, March 1, 2007

FCC Grants Internet Phone Access . Rural telephone companies must allow carriers such as Verizon Communications to use local lines to connect Internet-based calls, U.S. regulators said yesterday. By Molly Peterson. [washingtonpost.com - Technology - Industry News, Policy, and Reviews] 9:08:02 PM      Google It!.

VR Game Ties Depression To Brain Area. An anonymous reader writes "Science Daily is reporting that scientists are using a VR videogame that challenges spatial memory as a new tool to map out depression in the brain. 'Spatial memory' is how you orient yourself in space and remember how to get to places in the outside world. Researchers have found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared, suggesting that their hippocampi (where spatial memory is based) were not working properly."[Slashdot] 5:02:54 PM      Google It!.

Henry Jenkin[base ']s Youniversity. Tama[base ']s eLearning blog just pointed to an incredible article by Henry Jenkins titled from Youtube to YouNiversity. An absolute must read for anyone engaged in media, information, communications, education, sociology, [sigma] its a reasonably short and accessible read, but one that I think is so good I hardly know what to do with it! [Learn Online] 12:05:41 PM      Google It!.

Free Global Virtual Scientific Library. Several readers wrote in with news of the momentum gathering behind free access to government-funded research. A petition "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe" garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100 million towards support for open access journals and for the building of infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories able to store the millions of academic articles written each year. In the article Michael Geist discusses the open access movement and its critics.[Slashdot] 12:03:34 PM      Google It!.

Who Wrote, and Paid For, 2.6.20. Corbet writes "LWN.net did some data mining through the kernel source repository and put together an analysis of where the patches came from. It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work [~] but the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two." The article's conclusion: "The end result of all this is that a number of the widely-expressed opinions about kernel development turn out to be true. There really are thousands of developers [~] at least, almost 2,000 who put in at least one patch over the course of the last year. Linus Torvalds is directly responsible for a very small portion of the code which makes it into the kernel. Contemporary kernel development is spread out among a broad group of people, most of whom are paid for the work they do. Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community."[Slashdot] 12:02:10 PM      Google It!.

AMD Demonstrates "Teraflop In a Box". UncleFluffy writes "AMD gave a sneak preview of their upcoming R600 GPU. The demo system was a single PC with two R600 cards running streaming computing tasks at just over 1 Teraflop. Though a prototype, this beats Intel to ubiquitous Teraflop machines by approximately 5 years." Ars has an article exploring why it's hard to program such GPUs for anything other than graphics applications.[Slashdot] 12:00:31 PM      Google It!.

California Joins Open Document Bandwagon. Andy Updegrove writes "A legislator in California has decided that it's time for California to get on the open formats bandwagon. If all of the bills filed in the last few weeks pass, California, Texas, and Minnesota will all require, in near-identical language, that 'all documents, including, but not limited to, text, spreadsheets, and presentations, produced by any state agency shall be created, exchanged, and preserved in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format.' What type of formats will qualify? Again, the language is very uniform (the following is from the California statute): 'When deciding how to implement this section, the department in its evaluation of open, XML-based file formats shall consider all of the following features: (1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications; (2) Fully published and available royalty-free; (3) Implemented by multiple vendors; (4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.'"[Slashdot] 11:59:06 AM      Google It!.

Brain works more chaotically than previously thought. The brain appears to process information more chaotically than has long been assumed. This is demonstrated by a new study conducted by scientists at th... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 11:44:21 AM      Google It!.

First direct electric link between neurons and light-sensitive nanoparticle films created. The world's first direct electrical link between nerve cells and photovoltaic nanoparticle films has been achieved by researchers at the University of Tex... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 11:43:26 AM      Google It!.

Data Storing Bacteria Could Last Millennia. PetManimal writes "Computerworld has a story about a new technology developed by Keio University researchers that creates artificial bacterial DNA that can carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence. The researchers claimed that they encoded "e= mc2 1905!" on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis. The bacteria-based data storage method has backup and long-term archival functionality." The researchers say "While the technology would most likely first be used to track medication, it could also be used to store text and images for many millennia, thwarting the longevity issues associated with today's disk and tape storage systems ... The artificial DNA that carries the data to be preserved makes multiple copies of the DNA and inserts the original as well as identical copies into the bacterial genome sequence. The multiple copies work as backup files to counteract natural degradation of the preserved data, according to the newswire. Bacteria have particularly compact DNA, which is passed down from generation to generation. The information stored in that DNA can also be passed on for long-term preservation of large data files."[Slashdot] 11:40:05 AM      Google It!.