Sun, 13 May 2007 10:42:17 GMT

See You in the Virtual World

I love traveling through virtual worlds. The first one I remember online was a haunted house that you had to find your way through. Very cool! Now you can join a virtual world where you can connect and even chat with other people in the virtual world.

They are a lot like the real world in that you can buy and sell things and meet people. You can go shopping and play dress up. Visit friends in their virtual homes and go do things together, virtually.

Some virtual worlds you can joiIMVU, SecondSecond Life and Cyworld. Posted by: Linda Roeder      Read more     Source

Sun, 13 May 2007 00:11:30 GMT

The value of Social Networks

There are so many social networks out there these days that it is getting impossible to use them all without having to quit your job or close your office, unleMichael Arrington, of course. Social networks can be divided in two main categories : the general ones and the ones with a specific purpose or topic. The general ones are myspace, hyves and such. The ones about a specific topic are everywhhelping out good causes, to religions, finding the better you to music, dating, hobbiesreligions falls in the latter category.



So what is so special about last.fm ? That all depends. I think it is safe to say that about 90% of us likes to listen to music, which makes last.fm an interesting target to a lot of people. If you are like me, you already know what music you look for an like, but last.fm still gives you that little extra - it enables users to form groups with a radio station. And there is more :Just listen to your music with your computer's music player or your iPod and Last.fm will "scrobble" your playlists. This means that every song you listen to with Last.fm will become part of your music profile.


Your music profile is the key to the world of Last.fm. Once you've started scrobbling, you can:

• Create personal music charts automatically
• Find your musical soulmates
• Discover and explore new music
• Generate your own personal radio station
• See what your friends are listening to

I think last.fm is awesome ! Posted by: S.M. Schrama      Read more     Source

April 25, 2007, 9:25 PM CT

Length of Latest Carbon Nanotube Arrays

UC engineering researchers have developed a novel composite catalyst and optimal synthesis conditions for oriented growth of multi-wall CNT arrays. And right now they lead the world in synthesis of extremely long aligned carbon nanotube arrays.

UC's carbon nanotube arrays stack up.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are of great interest because of their outstanding mechanical, electrical and optical properties. Intense research has been undertaken to synthesize long aligned CNTs because of their potential applications in nanomedicine, aerospace, electronics and many other areas.

Especially important is that long CNT arrays can be spun into fibers that are - in theory - significantly stronger and lighter than any existing fibers and are electrically conductive. Nanotube fibers are expected to engender revolutionary advances in the development of lightweight, high-strength materials and could potentially replace copper wire.

Years of effort by UC researchers Vesselin Shanov and Mark Schulz, co-directors of the University of Cincinnati Smart Materials Nanotechnology Laboratory, along with Yun YeoHeung and students, led to the invention of the method for growing long nanotube arrays. Employing this invention, the UC researchers (in conjunction with First Nano, a division of CVD Equipment Corporation of Ronkonkoma, New York) have produced extremely long CNT arrays (18 mm) on their EasyTube System using a Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) process......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 02:50:11 GMT

New ways of fighting spam

Fighting spam in not a chore for the slow-thinkers. As spammers adapt swiftly, so must the fighters, and HexView says there could be a good statistical chance to significantly lower amount of spam.

I love it when people are being intelligent, and best of all, I love it when they use it to make something good anHexView recently published a paper explaining how good old statistics can help us 'dramatically reduce spam'. The technique is known as Source Trust Prediction (STP):
"There are only two properties that spammers cannot forge: IP addresses of both ends of the TCP channel that is used to emit junk messages, this is our key to contain spam traffic. Before accepting a message, an MTA connects to the STP server and sends just one variable: source IP address of the client requesting SMTP session. STP also knows the IP address of the MTA. Other properties may be used for correlation (size of the message, count and sizes of attached files), but it will significantly impact performance of the STP server, so let's focus on just source and destination IPs. Another important parameter is the time of the request. STP server correlates this information with the data received from other MTAs and replies with a number that reflects how likely the sender is a junk mail source. The MTA then decides whether to drop or accept the message, or take other appropriate action."
In simpler words: spammers send spam in a rather predictable way, when we think in statistical and mathematical correlations. Patterns, which can be devised from this known behavior, can be used to effectively stop spam email traffic from getting sent in the first place.

If this sounds too good to be true to you, don't worry, there are some problems with the STP anti-spam technique. First, spammers can try to fight it, and second, it could be difficult to implement. The bright thinkers of HexView took this into consideration too, and you can read aboutpaper. Posted by: Ivy      Read more     Source

April 23, 2007, 10:20 PM CT

Theory predicts aging process in DVDs

Polymer glasses are versatile plastics widely used in applications ranging from aircraft windshields to DVDs. Scientists at the University of Illinois have developed a theory that predicts how these materials age. The theory also explains why motions at the molecular level can have macroscopic consequences.

"Glasses, including polymer glasses, are essentially frozen liquids," said Kenneth S. Schweizer, the G. Ronald and Margaret H. Morris Professor of Materials Science at the University of Illinois. "They appear solid, but because they are frozen liquids, the molecules continually undergo small motions that lead to a time dependence of properties".

Three years ago, Schweizer and graduate student Erica Saltzman developed a theory that described the transition upon cooling of a polymeric material from a liquid to an amorphous solid or glass. The theory explained how the viscosity of a polymer glass changes dramatically over a narrow temperature range. The scientists reported that work in the July 22, 2004, issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics.

Now, in the April 20 issue of Physical Review Letters, Schweizer and postdoctoral research associate Kang Chen present a theory to describe the aging process in polymer glasses. The new theory predicts not only how polymer molecules move, but also the material properties, at a wide variety of times and temperatures......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 11, 2007, 10:25 PM CT

Virus-size 'Nanolamps'

To help light up the nanoworld, a Cornell interdisciplinary team of researchers has produced microscopic "nanolamps" -- light-emitting nanofibers about the size of a virus or the tiniest of bacteria.

In a collaboration of experts in organic materials and nanofabrication, researchers have created one of the smallest organic light-emitting devices to date, made up of synthetic fibers just 200 nanometers wide (1 nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). The potential applications are in flexible electronic products, which are being made increasingly smaller.

The fibers, made of a compound based on the metallic element ruthenium, are so small that they are less than the wavelength of the light they emit. Such a localized light source could prove beneficial in applications ranging from sensing to microscopy to flat-panel displays.

The work, published in the recent issue of Nano Letters, was a collaboration of nine Cornell researchers, including first author Jose M. Moran-Mirabal, an applied physics Ph.D. student; Hector Abruña, the E.M. Chamot Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology; George Malliaras, associate professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Cornell NanoScale Facility; and Harold Craighead, the C.W. Lake Jr. Professor of Engineering and director of the National Science Foundation-funded Nanobiotechnology Center......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 10, 2007, 7:42 PM CT

Faster Music, Movie Downloads

Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist says transferring large data files, such as movies and music, over the Internet could be sped up significantly if peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services were configured to share not only identical files, but also similar files.

David G. Andersen, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research Pittsburgh have designed such a system, called Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET). By identifying relevant chunks of files similar to a desired file, SET greatly increases the number of potential sources for downloads. And boosting the number of sources commonly translates into faster P2P downloads, Andersen explains.

How much SET could speed up downloads varies based on many factors, including the size and popularity of a given file. In some cases, SET might speed transfers by just 5 percent; in others, it might make downloads five times faster.

The researchers, along with graduate student Himabindu Pucha of Purdue University, will present a paper describing SET and release the system code at the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, April 11 in Cambridge, Mass.

"This is a technique that I would like people to steal," Andersen said. Though he and colleagues hope to implement SET in a service for sharing software or academic papers, they have no intention of applying it themselves to movie- or music-sharing services. "But it would make P2P transfers faster and more efficient," he added, "and developers should just take the idea and use it in their own systems"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 2, 2007, 9:58 PM CT

Why the Rich Get Richer

A new theory shows how wealth, in different forms, can stick to some but not to others. The findings have implications ranging from the design of the Internet to economics.

Real-world data -- whether distributions of wealth, size of earthquakes or number of connections on a computer network -- often follow power-law distributions rather than the familiar bell-shaped curve. In a power-law distribution, large events are reasonably common in comparison to smaller events.

Networks often show power laws. They can be caused by the "rich get richer" effect, also known as "preferential attachment," where nodes gain new connections in proportion to how a number of they already have. That means some nodes end up with a number of more connections than others. The phenomenon is well known, but had been assumed to be just a fundamental property of networks.

Raissa D'Souza, an assistant professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering at UC Davis, together with colleagues at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., UCLA and Cornell University, looked at how "preferential attachment" can arise in networks.

"'The rich get richer' makes sense for wealth, but why would it happen for Internet routers?" she said......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:26:44 GMT

Google Starts Experimenting Pay-Per-Action Ads

Google has recently announced that it would start testing a new advertising strategy that would enable advertisers to pay only when consumers take action following the click, such as completing an online purchase. However, experts have said that actions that Google could be compensated for range from signing up for a newsletter to making a purchase. The latest aGoogle, experiment is clearly in contrast with cost-per-click ads, where advertisers pay when a consumer clicks on an ad and is delivered to an advertiser’s site.

Announcing the new program experiment, the company has said that it would expand a test of a system that allows advertisers to pay only when an ad spurs a consumer to take an action, be it purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter or signing up to receive a quote from a mortgage broker or car dealer.

For many advertisers the latest ad program, cost-per-action is quite appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, as they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. On the other side, critics of this new program have extended that the push to make consumers take action could end up backfiring.

Read
Posted by: Balendu      Read more     Source

March 22, 2007, 5:04 AM CT

Key science Web sites lost in the information highway

As more and more people are turning to the Internet to find information, important science websites are in danger of becoming buried in the sheer avalanche of facts now available online. Key science sites are failing to register in the top 30 Google search results.

New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) clearly shows that anyone using the Web to make their information available must now pay attention not only to the quality of their sites but also how easy they are to find.

Dr Ralph Schroeder, Dr Alexandre Caldas, Professor William Dutton, and Dr. Jenny Fry of the Oxford Internet Institute have investigated how the Internet is changing the way in which people seek out sources of scientific expertise.

Traditionally publishers have held a central position because of the importance of academic articles, but this is changing with increasing uses of the Internet and Web.

The study focuses on how academic researchers in particular interact with the Web on topics including HIV/AIDS, climate change, terrorism, the Internet and society. These subjects are highly topical in today's society, but the findings of this study will apply much more widely to the uses of the Internet and Web for searching for information on a variety of topics......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source