Category: Interesting Reads

Browse the original issues of Scientific American

sciam-scan-brake_crop.gif

I wish more resources like this were available. You can read the original 20 years of volumes of Scientific American (except, for some reason, the very first year) online at Cornell’s Library web site. The above image is merely a cropped image from the 2nd of the 2nd volume, published October 3rd, 1846.

Explanation. — This engraving represents a section of an orginary railroad truck, with the brake and its appendages connected. — The above must not be mistaken for a sideview elevation, but a sectional view of the inside of the truck, the beam DD, being the side beam, passing outside of the wheels. The two brake-blocks, A A, are supported by two short hanging rods, E E, which are connected by picots to the side beam: the toggle levelrs, B B, are connected to the blocks by pivots, and are both together connected to the bottom of the toggle-post, C, and the head of this post is connected by a feather-spring to a horizon-tal ratchet shaft, D.

Well, it could use an editting pass or two to clean up the sentence structure, but otherwise this is a fascinating look back at leading technology from 150 years ago. Also available in every issue I have looked at is a list of patents granted in the period covering a few months before the printing of each issue. Very interesting indeed.

[tags]Early Scientific American scans available online[/tags]

Just another reason government agencies should require all software to be open source

Sometimes, the best techie reading is the quick read things about what goes wrong with hardware and software. In this case, I’m thinking about things like the Daily Shark or Ed Foster’s Gripeline. So while perusing recent gripes at Infoworld, I found this case of vendor lock-in, and my first thought was that this could have been avoided if government agencies were to require vendors to use open source software or open interfaces for all future projects. Because this requirement wasn’t in place, we taxpayers had to fork out an additional $20 million to pay for the Air Force to keep maintenance available for $80 million worth of uninterruptible power sources.

In 2003 the U.S. Air Force held an open bidding for a post-warranty service contract on about $80 million worth of Powerware uninterruptible power supply (UPS) equipment it had purchased in 2001. At that meeting, Air Force officials and the other bidders were surprised when Powerware informed them that proprietary service software is required to fully maintain the UPS equipment and that Powerware would not provide that software to any of the third-party bidders or to the Air Force itself. As a result, the Air Force had no choice but to award the contract to Powerware, costing U.S. taxpayers more than $20 million over what some of the other firms said they were prepared to bid.

. . .

What makes some customers even madder than Powerware’s refusal to provide the software is the total lack of information about it when they purchased the equipment. “Even now you don’t see a word about it in their sales literature or on their website,” says one reader who encountered the Powerware lockout surprise while working for a financial institution. “How can it be legal for them to hide the fact that they will not let you have this tool that is needed to properly use and maintain the equipment you’re buying?”

Require all software interfaces to be either fully open via open source software included with the equipment or require all software interfaces to be freely accessible via fully documented open interface specifications or APIs. This isn’t an easily solved problem, but this is something our government needs to start doing now so we don’t find ourselves as taxpayers paying this exhorbitant support bills for years and years after the original contracts expire. It would take time to get contracts properly created and written to cover this, but it is something that we need to see happen. This is especially important if vendors go out of business and proprietary interface information is lost to the ether.

[tags]Infoworld Gripeline (with Ed Foster), Our governmental agencies need to write open software interfaces into all hardware and software contracts[/tags]

Documentary on documentor Moore? You had me at “question his ethics”

Way back in time, when I first started caring about politics, policitians, and all the things the government does to screw us, I decided I should watch some documentaries from this Michael Moore guy. Some of the liberal folks I worked with said they were good. The conservatives I spoke to had nothing valid to say about them, because they hadn’t watched them (criticism after watching them would carry weight with me, but such commentary based on “I heard XYZ said…” did not). After Moore said he wanted people to download his movie Fahrenheit 9/11 if they wanted to see it, I decided that is where I’d start.

About 5 or 10 minutes into the movie, I was already fed up with the movie, as I heard a number of things I just didn’t believe, so I put the movie away. I tried several times to come back, but I found the movie more and more annoying each attempt to watch, even just selecting random areas of the movie to watch. Now I understood why the conservatives didn’t bother watching the movie. I can’t recall now the problems I had with the movie, but I could probably try again to watch this fictitious historical account of the days following the 9/11 attacks if someone disagreed with my belief that a lot of the movie is just made – sensationalism done at history.

I’ve tried watching a couple other Moore “documentaries” since then, but just can’t stomach them now. So given my personal background with Moore’s displays of his reality, I found this mention of others’ attempts to make a documentary on Moore turning into a tale of displeasure.

Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine unveiled their newest documentary entitled Manufacturing Dissent about legendary filmmaker Michael Moore at Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival on March 10 2007.

According to a report from the Associated Press, the filmmakers are huge fans of Michael Moore who initially set out to make a biography of their hero. However as they learned more facts about Moore they began to question his ethics and his tactics and began to make a more hard-hitting film while chronicling the filmmaker on his 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 and Slacker Uprising tours.

. . .

His career was launched by the documentary Roger and Me, released in 1989 and detailing his unsuccessful efforts to talk with Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors. The only problem was, as Manufacturing Dissent points out, Moore did successfully meet with Smith. He decided to leave out the footage for the final cut in an editorial decision.

Now it remains to be seen when we can see this and get a better look at how Moore works, from former fans.

[tags]Documentary on Michael Moore, Manufacturing Dissent – former fans of Michael Moore look at how he works[/tags]

The Restaurant Game – using artificial intelligence to develop human-like game responses

A neat gaming project is going on thanks to the folks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. The plan is to get people to play a game based on a restaurant interaction, then by processing the collected gameplay data and processing it through some magic-like algorithm, come up with game behavior that will better mimic human response.

Contribute to the first collaboratively authored computer game and earn Game Designer credit! customer_waitress_small.jpg

. . .

The Restaurant Game takes about 10 minutes to play. It is a two-player game that will automatically find partners for players once you join a server. You are welcome encouraged to play multiple times. In order for this project to be at all successful, we will need to collect a lot of data — data from over 1,000 10,000 gameplay sessions. Play early, play often, and please spread the word!

This project attempts to address two frustrations I experienced as a professional game developer. 1) Convincing human social behavior is difficult to model with existing hand crafted AI systems. 2) Play testing by people outside of the development team typically comes too late to have a major impact on the final product. This experiment aims to generate AI behaviors that conform to the way players actually choose to interact with other characters and the environment; behaviors that are convincingly human because they capture the nuances of real human behavior and language.


I’ll be downloading and installing this little gem tonight after work. There’s even a desktop widget available so you can get notification of when there is an available restaurant gamer waiting for a partner. (via DubiousQuality)

[tags]Artificial Intelligence used for improving human-like game interactions, Gaming with the MIT AI lab[/tags]

The greatest mobile phone review?

Catching up on so much recent miscellany brought me to this British journalist reviewing his new mobile (we call them cell phones, by the way). He titles his write-up My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots, so you know just by the name that I have to read and share it.

The trouble started the afternoon someone from Orange rang me up to say, “Hey, valued customer – do you want a free phone?” At first I wasn’t interested, but he went on and on about how popular and great the Samsung E900 was, then promised me free texts at weekends for life if I said yes. So I gave in.

Continue reading “The greatest mobile phone review?”

Helpful tips to avoid tax problems

Straight from the evil-overlord’s mouth, here are the “dirty dozen” tax frauds that you should strive to avoid. The IRS will be watching for these especially carefully. Here’s a sample:

3. Phishing is a technique used by identity thieves to acquire personal financial data in order to gain access to the financial accounts of unsuspecting consumers, run up charges on their credit cards or apply for loans in their names. These Internet-based criminals pose as representatives of a financial institution — or sometimes the IRS itself — and send out fictitious e-mail correspondence in an attempt to trick consumers into disclosing private information. A typical e-mail notifies a taxpayer of an outstanding refund and urges the taxpayer to click on a hyperlink and visit an official-looking Web site. The Web site then solicits a social security and credit card number. It is important to note the IRS does not use e-mail to initiate contact with taxpayers about issues related to their accounts. If a taxpayer has any doubt whether a contact from the IRS is authentic, the taxpayer should call 1-800-829-1040 to confirm it.

12. Frivolous Arguments: Promoters have been known to make the following outlandish claims: the Sixteenth Amendment concerning congressional power to lay and collect income taxes was never ratified; wages are not income; filing a return and paying taxes are merely voluntary; and being required to file Form 1040 violates the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Don’t believe these or other similar claims. These arguments are false and have been thrown out of court. While taxpayers have the right to contest their tax liabilities in court, no one has the right to disobey the law.

If you don’t do your taxes yourself and want to try to avoid unethical tax preparers that might suck you into these or other tax abuses which will lead to trouble, I’ve been a fan of Consumerist for finding reliable consumer help on practically anything. Searching the site for “Tax preparation” yielded a few potentially helpful threads.

[tags]IRS Dirty-Dozen tax schemes, Avoid these illegal or unethical tax frauds[/tags]

This day in history, 1959 – Barbie debuts

At the American Toy Fair in New York city, Barbie made her debut today in 1959.

Eleven inches tall, with a waterfall of blond hair, Barbie was the first mass-produced toy doll in the United States with adult features. The woman behind Barbie was Rith Handler, who co-founded Mattel, Inc. with her husband in 1945. After seeing her young dauther ignore her baby dolls to play make-believe with paper dolls of adult women, Handler realized there was an important niche in the market for a toy that allowed little girls to imagine the future.

Barbie’s appearance was modeled on a doll named Lilli, based on a German comic strip character. Originally marketed as a racy gag gift to adult men in tobacco shops, the Lilli doll later became extremely popular with children.

A brief video of Barbie’s beginning plus a lot more information on her origins at the link above.

[tags]Today in history 1959 – Barbie debuts, Barbie’s 1959 beginnings[/tags]

Leading governments are fueling terrorism

Slowly but surely, other countries’ governmental leaders are realizing that the secrecy and anti-Islamic behavior of many of the worlds leading governments are in part responsible for the growth of world-wide terrorism. From Canada’s Security Intelligence Service head:

Canada’s spy master, of all people, is warning that excessive government secrecy and draconian counterterrorism measures will only play into the hands of terrorists.

“The response to the terrorist threat, whether now or in the future, should follow the long-standing principle of ‘in all things moderation,’ ” Jim Judd, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said in a recent Toronto speech.

He admitted officials do not yet fully understand a crucial element in combating terrorism — the process of radicalization that can lead individuals, especially young Muslims raised in Canada and other democracies, to embrace terrorism.

Continue reading “Leading governments are fueling terrorism”

Anandtech forumites discuss freeware security products

I’ve been a reader of the Anandtech forums for far longer than is reasonable. I typically lose interest in such communities and move on to others way sooner than I have this forum. While browsing the forums last night, I ran across this thread on freeware security tools. Given that Anand’s site is so techie oriented, the forums are loaded with very knowledgeable techs. This thread shows that, and has a lot of great information on choosing and using anti-virus, firewall, anti-spyware, and other security tools. If you aren’t set up with malware protection on your system, consider choosing a recommended product from each category in this thread.

For even more security information and guidance from the Anandtech forums, look at this consolidated malware solution thread. It greatly expands on the information from the above-linked free security tools thread. In fact, this 2nd thread is the discussion responsible for the 1st thread. And these folks really know their stuff.

[tags]Anandtech forumites recommend freeware anti-malware[/tags]

Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” – free ebook via email

Several months back, I read the free version of Cory’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” and enjoyed it enough to buy the book. Since Cory is one of the strongest proponents of release-your-writings-for-free-and-people-will-buy-them publishing, I tend to support his crazy idea and buy his books after reading them. For those that are interested in this book and want to decide if try-and-buy works for you, a new method of reading the book, >serialized email distribution, is now available. Just click the word “Link” below.

The folks at DailyLit have just converted my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to an email-based serial. Sign up for the free service, specify how often you’d like a little chunk emailed to you, and then sit back and read by email, on your schedule. Link (Thanks, Albert!)

[tags]Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Commercial book readable via serialized email, Another way to get Cory Doctorow’s writings for free (legally!)[/tags]

Stem-cell research showing a real payback

In what is currently a one-of-a-kind stem-cell success story, doctors in an Indian hospital claim to have restored the ability to walk to a man paralyzed after a fall from the 4th floor of a building.

Chennai, Feb. 25 (PTI): Doctors at a hospital here have claimed they successfully used stem cell therapy to enable a 25-year-old man, who injured his spinal cord in a fall in July last year, to walk normally again.

This is the first time that Indian doctors have resorted to stem cell therapy to cure spinal cord problems, said J S Rajkumar, chief surgeon of the corporate Lifeline multi-speciality hospital.

. . .

Its doctors, in collaboration with the Indo-Japanese joint venture Nichi In Centre For Regenerative Medicine (NCRA), used autologous or “own body” stem therapy in December 2006 to treat Ali who started walking on his own, Rajkumar told reporters Saturday.

Note that this feat was accomplished with stem-cells from the man’s own body, so fetal stem-cells played no role in this. Also, it is worth pointing out that currently doctors don’t know if this is a repeatable event, or if the planets lined up just right to make this work. (via Wired’s Bodyhack blog)

[tags]Stem-cell success story, Walking ability restored to paralyzed man[/tags]