(I have a draft post on “teaching to the test” rattling around somewhere, hence the title of this one.)
The gadget shown here was displayed at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Cnet reported:
The device, called the Airnergy, uses an antenna and circuitry to harvest the energy and an internal battery to store the electrical charge. A [...]
As I was listening to a friend discuss the early days of digital computer design, and how much things had changed, it struck me that there is one common technology of similar age that would be instantly recognizable to its inventor: the Edison incandescent light bulb.
Edison was only one of many, of course, but [...]
Bruce Schneier. Emphasis mine.
U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google
… China’s hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won’t be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it [...]
I most sincerely hope that it’s possible to get a look at this system. I’m completely fascinated.
Gone with the wind: Tubes are whisking samples across hospital
Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest [...]
Wow.
A new approach to China
… These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring [...]
The trouble with fMRI.
Science News: Trawling The Brain
The 18-inch-long Atlantic salmon lay perfectly still for its brain scan. Emotional pictures—a triumphant young girl just out of a somersault, a distressed waiter who had just dropped a plate—flashed in front of the fish as a scientist read the standard instruction script aloud. The hulking machine [...]
Scale model of the Earth and the Moon, with a beam of light travelling between them at the speed of light. It takes approximately 1.26 seconds.
Wikipedia, via Jorn Barger.
Eventually.
Caltrain to offer real-time delay data
Caltrain commuters accustomed to facing long delays without warning will finally be able to check ahead and see if their train is running on schedule.
Caltrain officials said this week they have reached a deal with a private vendor to install global positioning system trackers in their locomotives, and use the [...]
The water-policy debate in California, more often than not, ignores the fact that the lion’s share of water (hmm, that doesn’t really make sense, but…) goes to agriculture, and in particular to crops such as rice and cotton that really shouldn’t be grown in an arid state.
This is a good move, though the acreage is [...]
The Condorcet voting paradox, in voting theory, says that it’s possible to have (for example) three candidates A, S & V such that the voters collectively prefer A to S, S to V and V to A. It sounds impossible, but that’s why it’s called a paradox.
There seems to be something like that for cellphone [...]
Well, maybe…
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will [...]
xkcd is particularly profound:
Geoff Pullum at Language Log. He’s right, I suppose, but this is one of those cases in which any apology at all must be too little, too late. Too late not just for the obvious reason that any apology for this sorry series of events would have been too late after the fact, but also [...]
Ars Technica: “Anonymized” data really isn’t—and here’s why not
The Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission had a bright idea back in the mid-1990s—it decided to release “anonymized” data on state employees that showed every single hospital visit. The goal was to help researchers, and the state spent time removing all obvious identifiers such as name, address, [...]
Bruce Schneier points to a paper on the statistics of coin-tossing. Summary of the summary: not random. One item:
If the coin is tossed and caught, it has about a 51% chance of landing on the same face it was launched. (If it starts out as heads, there’s a 51% chance it will end as heads).
In [...]
Most days, I ride Caltrain to work. Setting aside its insane policy (not entirely its fault) of cutting service and raising fares as a means of dealing with just about any problem, my main gripe is that it’s really hard to get any prompt information about service and schedule problems. This despite the installation a [...]
You can generally trust xkcd to feed you the straight scoop. This piece is more than usually helpful. Listen, people: this is how we geeks do it. Really. Try this at home.
click it for a larger image
Too good not to pass along.
Brian via Liberman
Listen to this fine NPR story on crows recognizing individual people. There’s a video on the page as well, but the original story is better than the video.
Aside from the inherent interest of the immediate story, it’s a nice example of science at work in the wild, where unexpected observations are investigated, complete with controls [...]
BETELGEUSE SHRINKS
Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars visible to the naked eye, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.
…
In 1921, Betelgeuse became the first star for which astronomers measured a size. Over the years, different interferometers, observing Betelgeuse over a wide range of wavelengths, have recorded diameters for the star [...]