Apr 4, 2010 0
With the announcement of the Apple iPad in February and its launch yesterday, the industry’s copying machines have been busy. Apple competitors are preparing to launch an army of iPad imitators, clones, and ugly step children.
Mar 31, 2010 0
“This is a national park and a Unesco World Heritage Site and you’re not allowed to touch it. The local people rely on the fishing and the income from tourism, and here they were taking Krakatoa away.” And Krakatoa is just one case among thousands.
With more than 17,000 islands — from the jungly immensities of Borneo and Sumatra to unnamed rocks jutting out of the sea — you might think that Indonesia would not mind if a few of them went missing. But the South-East Asian nation is fighting a losing battle against black marketeers who are, literally, making off with its territory by the boat-load…
Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 30, 2010 0
Fortune recounts the story of Terralliance, an oil exploration firm with high profile investors like Kleiner-Perkins and Goldman Sachs, that claimed to have found an algorithm that enabled it to accurately forecast where oil could be found. A taste:
Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 29, 2010 0
There’s been a (huge) backlog in my feedreader. And Firefox is currently loaded down with dozens of open tabs. A level of disorganization I probably shouldn’t ever admit to. But there it is. Presented with interesting stories, my eyes are always bigger than my stomach.
If you’ve every wondered how someone invents informercial products, how much money there is in the business, really, and whether those people are even real, a now six week old interview in the Wall Street Journal provides some clues.
Read the rest of this entry »Mar 28, 2010 0
Mar 27, 2010 0
Another reason I’d rather be a hedgehog:
“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”
Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. But no. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 26, 2010 0
You know how in the movies and on television crime shows you’ll see a detective or intelligence officer in a lab looking at a blurry digital picture? And they’ll issue a command to “enhance it” or just “zoom in” or “resolve the image?”
That’s been science fiction. You can’t resolve detail that wasn’t captured in the first place. Zoom in closer and closer and you get … bigger pixels, not clearer pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »Mar 24, 2010 0
You may remember reading about or watching the documentary “The Cove” in which former dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry tells a story of watching the former star of Flipper kill herself by drowning. For some, the story is unremarkable: of course animals can commit suicide. To others, the story is impossible, with the only relevant question being: “Why is Richard O’Barry lying?”
Time Magazine this week recaps a paper in Endeavors that explores the history of animal suicide.
Read the rest of this entry »Mar 23, 2010 0
Mar 23, 2010 0
Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter Recently Delicious Recently