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14 November 2002 |
KVA se -- A new Swedish telescope facility removes blurs and snaps astonishing views of the Sun. Some of these show inner structure, a dark core, in the hitherto unresolved filaments in sunspot penumbrae. The dark-cored filaments were an unexpected discovery, that is published as a Letter in Nature, "Dark cores in sunspot penumbral filaments" by Göran B. Scharmer, Boris V. Gudiksen, Dan Kiselman, Mats G. Löfdahl, and Luc H. M. Rouppe van der Voort.
[Slashdot with images courtesy of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.]
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IPDL WIPO int -- Part of the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the Intellectual Property Digital Library contains a wealth of information on the wide expanse of human creativity.
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Doc Searls -- Personal identity ought to belong to the person and not to a service provider or some other agency. You would think that this would be straightforward and obvious, but it's not, at least, not to industry. The response is to create a digital identity system for the rest of us. "If we create the protocols, APIs and other standards that let customers relate at full power with the companies they choose, consumer becomes an obsolete noun. The companies now in full charge of the identities they confer on each of us will no longer have full control, because now they will have to relate and not just distribute."
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NYT -- William Safire has major concerns about the giant federal database that John Poindexter gets USD 200m to set up under the Homeland Security Act. "Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the data-mining power to snoop on every public and private act of every American." Safire explains that most editorial writers and lawmakers either don't know what's in the bill or fail to understand what's about to happen. He claims that "every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a virtual, centralized grand database."
[Karlin Lillington and Thomas Greene in The Register]
Animated cartoon on TIA by Mark Fiore
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BBC -- Holiday spending habits revealed for Europe. Forrester Research thinks shoppers will almost double their online spending, with sales rising over the festive season EUR 7.6bn from just EUR 4bn last year.
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Open: PHP and OS-X OPEN -- Dermot McNally raises an interesting point on the Irish Open Mailing List regarding PHP and OS-X. "Given that OS-X is Unix and can actually run PHP, isn't is surprising that PHP wouldn't by now have been updated to know about Mac line ends? Or, if OS-X now uses standard Unix line ends, maybe an OS-X version of Filemaker would produce an export file for you that would be friendly for subseqent import."
But Jonathan Heron pointed out "different programs on OS-X will produce files with different line endings. I would expect that FMP, as a Carbon application (updated from the Classic Mac) would not use Unix line ends unless the developers decided to explicitly update it for that."
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Open: Bulk Mail through Eircom ANTIVIRUS ie ---Some bulk mailers are having problems sending their mail through mail1.eircom.net. They noticed they can send only up to 100 emails at a time. Ross Cooney pointed out, "it seems that they are using tarpitting to annoy spammers.
This means if you are a spammer and you want to use Eircom just send the good news in blocks of 99 or less.
Cooney believes "using an ISP's mail servers to send bulk mail is not a good idea. Other users have to wait until your email leaves the queue before they can send email." He points out that his bulk mail service sits on a 42Mb backbone and does not get in the way of other people's mail.
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FORBES -- Although the article is about America's congested radio spectrum, the same lesson applies to Ireland, where one of the country's most valuable resources sits underdeveloped, consigned to uses that time and technology have long since passed by. Old technologies are swamped with excess airwaves they don't use. Newer technologies gasp for airwaves they desperately need. And promising industries of the future are asphyxiated.
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Skillset: Remote Comms Assistant THE GUARDIAN -- The Remote Comms team behind The Guardian, The Observer and GuardianUnlimited seeks a specialist who can provide tech support over the phone. The technician needs an awareness of medems, GSM, GPRS, and ADSL."We recognise team diversity as a vital contributor to business performance."
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COMPUTERWORLD com -- A remarkably progressive group is bringing network access to remote places by running a 72-mile link in San Diego, using a 2.4 GHz connection to an island to handle telemetry from a variety of monitoring equipment. The devices use 2-foot parabolic dishes and the maximum 1 watt output.
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Peeter Marvet -- Here are some tasty examples of mobile blogging from Estonia. Peeter has developed a real-time SMS advertising and posting system that uses Frontier. People can place text ads on a media site and pay for them using an SMS equiped phone. He also built a site where people can report bad drivers from their phone. I also like his stuff involving a decentralized multimedia collection. He built a site using Frontier for a local Radio station that allowed them to send out reporters with cameraphones. Reporters snapped photos, then emailed them from the phones to a Frontier server which then automatically displayed the pictures on the station's site. This is what we plan to do in the Essential Web Journaling Course.
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HYPERGENE net -- Civic journalism is likely to transform newsrooms thanks to the efforts of Pew Center's J-Lab Institute and Jan Schaffer. Jan has always struck us as a kindred spirit when it comes to bringing fresh approaches to a traditional craft. Now, in her new role as executive director of J-Lab, she will have the resources to seek and develop new ways to engage and inform news audiences.
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SAMSONITE com -- Samsonite now offers a Bluetooth-enabled briefcase. It can be used for storage and backup while travelling, although the most immediate gain may be as security against theft or loss.
[Gizmodo]
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NEWS com -- Bill Gates plans to show a set of everyday devices, completely connected. They come with processors, IP addresses, and connectivity protocols. Just as more computers are getting connected, and processing power migrates down into ever-smaller devices, we're also seeing an increase in sensors (webcams, satellite data, GPS info) and effectors (appliances, motors, things which actually do something). In the middle we'll have an increased need for software-driven interfaces, often tailored to a particular sub-audience, so that you can do more with this increased information about the world.
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ECOMMERCE BASE com -- Sitepoint proffers 5 Steps to Relationship Marketing Success.
- Change your Perspective from "Here's what I do" to "What do you need?"
- Recognize your Vulnerability
- Keep in touch
- Position Yourself as an Expert
- Grow to Meet Client Needs
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HIPTOP NATION -- These Hiptop bloggers recently had a Halloween Scavenger Hunt. Howard Rheingold blogs about Hiptop and one of the members of one of the teams has written a paper about it. As Ireland moves into MMS, someone is going to figure out how to arrange teams using cameraphones in games that reward contestants for their photos. And some mobile bloggers are going to figure out how to incorporate all these things as part of a mobile swarm.
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AP -- The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments about whether
libraries can be forced to install Internet filters or risk losing
federal funds. The Children's Internet Protection Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, has come under intense pressure from library groups and free-speech advocates who say the filter requirement infringes on the First Amendment. A three-judge panel agreed, citing the inability of current filters to block objectionable material without also blocking content protected by the First Amendment. In writing the law, Congress indicated that after review by the three-judge panel, further appeals would go directly to the Supreme Court, and officials from Texas have filed such an appeal supporting the law.
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A WHOLE LOTTA NOTHING org -- Matt Haughey discussed how syndication makes the publisher. I’ve never personally found much use for a RSS reader. That all changed when a friend said she wasn’t reading my site anymore, or any sites for that matter that didn’t carry RSS feeds. Thanks to my aggregator, I read about a hundred sites a day. My worldwide reach extends much farther than I could ever follow in my browser. I visit my feeds when I see an interesting title. With RSS, webloggers can reach wider swaths of our networked world. RSS doesn't demean HTML. RSS avails HTML to wider readership.
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©2003 Bernie Goldbach, Tech Journo, Irish Examiner.
Weblog powered by Radio Userland running on IBM TransNote.
Some content from Nokia 9210i Communicator as mail-to-blog.
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