Monthly Archives: December 2005

French Parliament Votes to Legalize Web File Sharing

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The French Parliament voted last night to allow free sharing of music and movies on the Internet, setting up a conflict with both the French government and with media companies.

If the amendment survives, France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal counsel to the Association of Audionautes, a French group that defends people accused of improperly sharing music files.

The law would be a blow to media companies that increasingly use the courts worldwide to sue people for downloading or sharing music and movie files. Entertainment companies such as Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and News Corp.’s Fox say free downloading of unauthorized copies of TV shows and movies before they are released on DVD will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year.

``The deputies used this vote to show their independence from the government, but they don’t know what they are doing,’’ Nicolas Seydoux, chief executive of French cinema company Gaumont SA, said in an interview on France Inter radio. ``We are not trying to ban anything, just to make sure the work of others isn’t stolen.’’

The government can overturn the amendment, either by re- opening debate or if the Senate votes it down when the bill moves to the upper house. French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has asked that parliament re-open debate on the amendment today, Agence France Presse reported.

Bloomberg

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Self-aware robot

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A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it.

This so-called mirror image cognition is based on artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot’s computer brain that give it the ability to recognize itself and acknowledge others.

The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions.

Under development by Junichi Takeno and a team of researchers at Meiji University in Japan, the robot represents a big step toward developing self-aware robots and in understanding and modeling human self-consciousness.

Discovery

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Microsoft to be Fined 2.4mil per day for Staying in the Closet

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The BBC is reporting on a European Union threat to fine Microsoft up to $2.4m a day for their non-compliance with the European Commission’s demand that Windows be opened up. Back in March 2004 Microsoft was ordered to open up its Windows operating system by way of making documentation available that would assist work on interoperability with other systems, specifically: ‘non-Microsoft work group servers [should be able to] achieve full interoperability with Windows PCs and servers’. According to the article, Brussels has found MS to have not complied with the ruling, and, sounding somewhat exasperated, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has given MS a 5 week deadline before the $2.4m/a day fines begin.

/. < BBC

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E-Paper Gets Annoying

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The cereal aisle at your local supermarket may soon resemble the Las Vegas strip. Electronics maker Siemens is readying a paper-thin electronic-display technology so cheap it could replace conventional labels on disposable packaging, from milk cartons to boxes of Cheerios.

In less than two years, Siemens says, the technology could transform consumer-goods packaging from the fixed, ink-printed images of today to a digital medium of flashing graphics and text that displays prices, special offers or alluring photos, all blinking on miniature flat screens.

Wired

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MorphoTower by Sachiko Kodama

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MorphoTower, by Sachiko Kodama, is a kind of a dynamic sclupture made of mysterious black fluid. It’s conceptualized as an “organic tower” and its surface is dynamically morphed into varieties of textures ranging from spiky or hairy to goose bumps.

morpho tower

The black substance is called magnetic fluid (see also: “Breathing Chaos”) It was first developed by NASA early 1960’s as part of their space program and today used as a seal agent for hard disk drives and semiconductor manufacturing devices. It rests in a pool until it is stimulated by electro-magnetic fields, the ferrofluid then assumes various shapes depending on the field.

Here’s a catalog of Kodama’s works using this substance. Don’t miss the video clips [Pulsate, Protrude, Flow, Waves and Sea Urchins, Breathing Chaos, Pulsate – Melting Time, Dissolving Time]

via wmmna < Magnetic Fluid Art Project “Protrude, Flow” and Digital Stadium < DAF 2005

Meet the creatures of the deep

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The Census of Marine Life, a global partnership of 1,700 scientists from 73 countries, contains more than 40,000 of an estimated 230,000 marine species described by science – perhaps only a tenth of the actual number of animals living in the sea. Of these 40,000 known species, 78 are marine fish that were added this year. The total number of marine fish species now included in the census database comes to 15,717.

physconect siphonophore

Indipendent.uk & CSMonitor

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You Are What You Think

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Use it or lose it. We know that about our bodies.

But a growing line of research now shows that the same is true for our brains. How we live, and what we do, can actually have a profound impact on the physical structure of the brain.

If we are what we eat, as the old saying goes, we may also be what we think. Or how we think, as well as how much we think.

One treatment for some of our mental ills may well lie in the practice of meditation, an awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind.

ABC

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Nasa tries to figure out real-life Rain Man’s brain

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It took Kim Peek just over an hour to read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. Four months later, when asked to give the name of the book’s Russian radio operator, Peek quoted the entire relevant passage.

It was a prodigious feat. Yet for Peek – the real-life ‘savant’ on whom Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man is based – such recall only gives a glimpse of his powers. He knows 9,000 books off by heart; he can direct people around US cities from maps he has memorised years ago; and he has total recall of the dates of all major world events.

Now studies of Peek’s abilities are being used by scientists to shed intriguing light on the human mind, and to open the way for men and women to exploit far more of their intellectual potential, as the latest issue of Scientific American reveals.

‘Kim’s story tells us that the human brain is far more flexible than we had thought,’ said Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist and co-author of the Scientific American paper told The Observer. ‘Like many other savants, he has suffered disability in one area of his brain, but has compensated by acquiring remarkable new abilities in other areas. This shows we all have considerable hidden intellectual potential. By studying Kim and other savants, we can learn how to tap those powers.’

Guardian

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Improve Your Writing

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  • You Don’t Need Permission to Create from Ripples – some good, practical advice for getting started and getting better.
  • Writing Gooder at ProBlogger – some excellent advice for writing. Aimed at bloggers, but just as relevant if you’re writing articles or even a novel. “Once you have the mad writing skillz, nothing will stand in your way of taking over the blogosphere.”
  • Poynter Online – Fifty Writing Tools – an excellent series of articles on tips and tricks to improve your writing.
  • Writerisms and other Sins – a useful guide to overused and misused language.

PigPog

Stretchable silicon could be next wave in electronics

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed a fully stretchable form of single-crystal silicon with micron-sized, wave-like geometries that can be used to build high-performance electronic devices on rubber substrates.

Functional, stretchable and bendable electronics could be used in applications such as sensors and drive electronics for integration into artificial muscles or biological tissues, structural monitors wrapped around aircraft wings, and conformable skins for integrated robotic sensors, said professor John Rogers.

EurekAlert

At Stake: The Net as We Know It

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Leading Internet companies are gearing up for a clash with the phone and cable giants early next year as Congress begins to redraft the telecom laws for the broadband era, concerned that the network operators will soon be able to put a chokehold on the Web by blocking consumers from popular sites in favor of their own. Or they could degrade delivery of Web pages whose providers don’t pay extra.

That could result in an Internet of haves, who can afford to pay the network operators more to ensure smooth service, and have-nots.

KurzweilAI < Business Week

Food additive inhibits longevity enzyme

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A common additive in food and cosmetics inhibits the activity of enzymes called sirtuins that have been strongly linked with longevity in yeast and other organisms.

Reporting in Public Library of Science (PLoS) Genetics, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley say that lab tests of the additive, dihydrocoumarin (DHC), showed that it inhibited activity of the sirtuins Sir2p and SIRT1.

Increased sirtuin activity has been found to increase longevity in yeast, roundworms and fruit flies. Conversely, deleting or reducing the enzyme in yeast has been shown to reduce lifespan by as much as 30%.

“Although studies on sirtuins and longevity have not been done in humans, there is reason to suspect that sirtuins play a role in the aging process of human cells, so identifying sirtuin inhibitors becomes important,” says Martyn Smith, principal investigator of the study.

BetterHumans

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Library of Congress Launches Effort to Create World Digital Library

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Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the Library’s initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first.

The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University. The full text is available at www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches.

In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the World Digital Library would bring together online “rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa.”

library of congress

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Skulls in South America Tell New Migration Tale

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For decades it has been believed that the first peoples to populate North and South America crossed over from Siberia by way of the Bering Strait on a land-ice bridge.

However, a new study examining the largest collection of South American skulls ever assembled suggests that a different population may have crossed the bridge to the New World 3,000 years before those Siberians.

Scientists occasionally discover skulls in South America that look more like those belonging to indigenous Australians and Melanesians than Northern Asians, but researchers tend to regard these skulls as anomalies due to natural variation rather than a norm, mainly because there were too few to study.

Now scientists have compared 81 skulls from the Lagoa Santa region of Brazil to worldwide data on human variation.

While the skulls of Native Americans and Northern Asians—the descendents of the early Siberian settlers—generally feature short, wide crania, a broader face, and high, narrow eye sockets and noses, this collection was remarkably different.

The skulls belonging to the earliest known South Americans—or Paleo-Indians—had long, narrow crania, projecting jaws, and low, broad eye sockets and noses. Drastically different from American Indians, these skulls appear more similar to modern Australians, Melanesians, and Sub-Saharan Africans.

Yahoo

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