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Tuesday, February 18, 2003 |
Terrorist Bio-Attack?. Terrorist Bio-Attack? - The entire Northeastern Corridor of the US was paralyzed when they were attacked with tons of frozen water, causing several states to declare an emergency, and placing confused citizens in the streets with plastic sheeting and duct tape, wondering what to do with them in the snow...... (58 words, 0 comments) 10:09 PM, February 17, 2003 [PhotoDude's Web Log]
7:31:08 PM 
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IPCC Climate Report Gets Blown Away. In 100 years, will Libya have a larger economy than the United States? How about Lithuania and Tunisia? Would you be willing to place a multi-billion dollar bet that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will have a higher GDP than the United States by 2100? Will Gabon's GDP race ahead of Australia's by 2100? If not Gabon, perhaps from the sands of Algeria an economic miracle will blossom, growing Algeria's economy larger than those of many first world nations? Would you be willing to bet Swaziland will overtake Australia by 2100? Vanuatu? New Caledonia? Care to wager a few hundred billion dollars on it? According to Statistics/Economics Professors Ian Castles and David Henderson, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made all of those assumptions, and more, in their seminal IPCC reports on global warming, and the world is contemplating its bets at the casino called the Kyoto Protocol, the multibillion dollar treaty that flowed from the IPCC reports. The reports have vastly overstated the growth rates for developing countries, linked the GDP of these developing countries to greenhouse emissions, and consequently greatly overestimated the magnitude of global warming over the next 100 years. According to these two professors, using the IPCC's most conservative estimate of GDP growth rate of developing countries, all of the above instances will happen. [kuro5hin.org]
7:30:38 PM
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Brainwave Receivers Tune in, Turn on, More. In Switzerland, scientists at the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence (IDIAP) have developed a new technology which can roughly tell what a person is thinking about. The hope is that this technology will be able to help quadriplegics activate robotic devices, offering them "unprecedented" new autonomy. [kuro5hin.org]
7:29:53 PM
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World-Wide Walkie-talkie
"Fastmobile today announced that it has successfully conducted the first 'around the world' push-to-talk mobile phone conversation. Using standard Nokia 7650 and 3650 handsets, they talked to participants in Chicago, USA, Kent, UK and Henan Province, China, in a 'walkie-talkie' mode.
Push-to-Talk is suddenly hot.
Sprint and Verizon are on a race to be first with 'push to talk' (after Nextel). SprintPCS is trialing a push-to-talk solution by an Israeli company, Mobile Tornado. Their Push-To-Talk service uses 'IPRS' (IP Radio Service) which delivers two-way VoIP sessions conducted over any packet-based network such as GPRS, CDMA1x, CDPD, wireless LAN and satellite." [Daily Wireless]
What's more instant than cell phones? Walkie-talkie cellphones. [The Shifted Librarian]
7:29:24 PM
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The Mathematics of Recommendation?. Thomas Bayes, one of the leading mathematical lights in computing today, differs from most of his colleagues: He has argued that the existence of God can be derived from equations. His most important paper was published by someone else. And he's been dead for 241 years.
Yet the 18th-century clergyman's theories on probability have become a major part of the mathematical foundations of application development.
Search giant Google and Autonomy, a company that sells information retrieval tools, both employ Bayesian principles to provide likely (but technically never exact) results to data searches. Researchers are also using Bayesian models to determine correlations between specific symptoms and diseases, create personal robots, and develop artificially intelligent devices that "think" by doing what data and experience tell them to do.
Despite the esoteric symbols, the idea--roughly speaking--is simple: The likelihood that something will happen can be plausibly estimated by how often it occurred in the past. Researchers are applying the idea to everything from gene studies to filtering e-mail.
A detailed mathematical rundown can be found on the University of Minnesota's Web site. And a Bayes Rule Applet on Gametheory.net lets you answer questions such as "How worried should you be if you test positive for some disease?" One of the more vocal Bayesian advocates is Microsoft. The company is employing ideas based on probability--or "probabilistic" principles--in its Notification Platform. The technology will be embedded in future Microsoft software and is intended to let computers and cell phones automatically filter messages, schedule meetings without their owners' help and derive strategies for getting in touch with other people.
If successful, the technology will give rise to "context servers"--electronic butlers that will interpret people's daily habits and organize their lives under constantly shifting circumstances. [Smart Mobs]
7:17:10 PM
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Germans Cover-Up Smallpox Stockpile. Andrew Sullivan reports: Astonishing piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung today. Just before the German elections last year, German intelligence found very serious evidence of Iraq's stockpiling of smallpox bioweapons. The report came with a "high degree of confidence." The piece alleges that Schroder helped bury the report, so as not to get him off-message during his anti-American campaign. Gotta love those Germans!... [Useful Fools]
7:15:03 PM
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FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF UNFORTUNATE HEADLINES: "Body Cavity Search Reveals Crack"... [Instapundit.com]
6:42:07 PM
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MSFT unveils Groove-for-teens. MSFT has shipped a kiddee-Groove, a file-sharing/IM/collaboration tech aimed at teens, called Softie. The project sounds kind of neat, until you realize that it's got an assload of DRM built into it and, in the end, does less than Napster did.
Here's how the software works. You invite friends to form a posse of up to 10 participants. Representing the group on your desktop will be a colorful image, either one from a set provided by the software or something one of the group has produced. (It could even be a digital photo.) If you're online--and since threedegrees assumes you have broadband, you're probably online all the time--you give your friends a holler simply by sending the equivalent of an instant message. Everyone in the group will see it. If you want to send them a digital photo, you simply drag it over the icon and it shows up on everyone's computer. Then there are "winks": small animations that you trigger to run on everyone's screen. Some of the standards include big lips smacking a kiss or a heavyset cartoon character who drops trou and cuts the cheese. (Sending these to oldsters might cause a NetGen gap.)
The most ambitious feature is called musicmix, an online equivalent of a pajama party where people take turns playing deejay. Each group member contributes favorite tunes into a shared playlist, displayed on a dashboard with a customized "skin," and everyone listens together. A click from any participant can choose a new song. Then everyone chats about the tunes. Interestingly, men and women use this feature differently: guys will see it as a contest--who's brought the coolest tunes?--and do virtual chest-thumps introducing the hottest bands. Meanwhile, the girls use the music as background for their chats. Link Discuss (Thanks, Fred!) [Boing Boing Blog]
6:35:13 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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AUDIO: An archived audio stream of the "
