Intresting
Things I’ve read, starred, and shared on Google Reader.
- Google TalkPublished: August 25, 2010Source: Cosmic VarianceI gave a tech talk at Google headquarters on the arrow of time, which was a lot of fun. Must be what all of Silicon Valley was like back in the boom days — pool tables, free food, volleyball, and lots of smart people everywhere. Rather than a lecture hall, the talks are held in a big lobby space where people are regularly walking through, so that passers-by can become intrigued and start listening. Also, it became clear during the questions that at least one Google employee is concerned about how to preserve intelligent life past the 10100 year mark when our universe will be nothing but empty space. Glad they’re thinking long-term! Here is the talk, which is basically at a popular level, although I felt empowered to use the word “logarithm” without explanation. I’ve also tried to collect other talks by me onto one page, for those who just can’t get enough. (Hi, Mom!)
- The smell of freshly-cut grass is actually a plant distress call [Mad Science]Published: August 26, 2010Source: io9The lovely scent of cut grass is the reek of plant anguish: When attacked, plants release airborne chemical compounds. Now scientists say plants can use these compounds almost like language, notifying nearby creatures who can "rescue" them from insect attacks. More »
- Inception Movie Plot Explained Through Mac OS X's Folder HierarchyPublished: August 24, 2010Source: Mac|Life allHere's a piece of silliness that should definitely put a smile on your face, though we warn you that there are spoilers ahead.
If you've seen Inception, you know the ridiculousness that is idea of a meta dream world. But if you can't seem to wrap that concept around your head, then perhaps this explanation will lay it out for you in laymen's terms. Jonah Ray, host of the Web Soup, posted a nifty graphic in his Tumblr explaining the many levels of Inception's dream hierarchy using Mac OS X folders. It's a pretty clever way to unravel the mystery behind the movie. Check it out for yourself.
Follow this article's author, Florence Ion, on Twitter. - How to Use Illustrations to Spice Up Your Web Design WorkPublished: August 26, 2010Source: Six RevisionsGraphic illustrations have become commonplace in today’s web design. They can add a unique branding element into an otherwise bland world of templates and corporate logos. Although just 5 years ago you would be hard-pressed to find many websites looking for illustrators, times have changed, and we’re on the brink of many new and exciting web design trends. Illustrations that come in the form of beautiful background scenery, animals and mascots for branding, or even cartoon versions of authors and designers can be found all over web design portfolios spanning the globe. Web illustrators and branding gurus have become a staple and have come to be high in demand in the web design industry. I’ll be touching upon a few tips for incorporating illustrations in your web designs by looking through a handful of websites that use illustrations effectively. I’m talking about digging deeper into the bedrock of design; truly searching for what makes illustrations "click" in the mind of our website visitors. Why Branding is So Important When you build a website, you want the look and feel of the design to be an extension of your business. Whether this means incorporating an already existing logo into the design or creating a memorable experience, the site needs to fit your brand. When visitors fall into your site, you also want to make sure it leaves a lasting impact. By this, I mean that you want them to remember your site. Illustrations help a lot with making a site memorable because with an eye-catching graphic scene or vector artwork, the page jumps out and has a visual element that’s unique just to that site. This is what helps your brand stick like fresh sap out of a maple tree! Users eat creativity up; it shows that you really care about your brand and your site to go through the trouble of incorporating illustrations, which are difficult to conceptualize and pull off effectively in the context of websites. Let’s take a look at a good example of how illustrations can be used effectively to establish a brand identity: an SEO company called ten24 Media. Their site uses a background of a circus tent with a beautiful skyline and open grassy fields to entice readers into the upper area of the web design. The concept of using circus tents as a central illustrative element is from creative wordplay: their name spelled out is "tentwentyfour media." The web layout includes a brief description of what they do, as well as a link to their Services page ("Enter the Show"). The branding is consistent throughout the site; continuing onto other pages, you’ll see the circus tent outline near the top navigation links. In addition, the site’s footer contains more grassy hills. All these illustrative elements keep the whole site feeling very innovative and fun — the perfect positive emotions you want to create, especially to dispel negative misconceptions some people have about the SEO profession. Simple Illustrations Work Well Never underestimate the power of a simple illustration. Adding too much to your design will overwhelm your readers and have the opposite effects you are looking for. Fatburgr is an interesting web application. Many would classify their design into the realm of new age "Web 2.0" gradients and fluff, but the concept actually stands for itself. Just browsing the site is appealing and you can enjoy the cartoony aspects of each area. The footer is good for a few laughs as well. Imagining the detail put into such a web design is breathtaking. You can recognize each piece and understand how it ties into the overall site brand. Even the buttons and text areas have additional creative effects added to them. Keeping content where it belongs will help your readers decipher what you’re trying to say a lot faster. Easy-to-read paragraphs with large enough font sizes and plenty of spacing is essential — simplicity at it’s best. Another concept to take away from this example is the importance of typography. Typography should match your illustration design concepts; they should be big, and almost pop out to your visitors — something illustrations and simpler structures can complement. Implementing Your Illustrations into the Site’s User Interface The next point I want to discuss is creating harmony with the site’s functions and the illustrations you use. You can see this happening with Forrst, a new community for designers and developers for sharing code snippets and snapshots. Although currently in private beta, you can check out their homepage with a flourishing background of trees and wooded areas. In the foreground, you can see a park ranger parading around with a Forrst badge attached to his uniform. You can also see a brief description of the site and informative signs transposed on wooded backgrounds. This all adds to the ambiance of the site, including the clever "log in" log floating on what appears to be some sort of cloud. And if that were all, you could consider Forrst quite the visual inspiration. However, they push the use of illustrations further. You can go beneath the ground into the dirt below to see a sign up form. You can apply for membership quickly with just a few details, and the web form looks great. A design like this can get complicated and will require plenty of skills. To produce this level of illustrative work could take years of practice in software like Adobe Illustrator to master, but they can be just the perfect touch in boosting your site design into the big leagues. Never Use Illustrations Just for Aesthetics Looking good is important. But adding design elements just to fancy up your site is the wrong attitude because a web design is a functional product. All elements of your design should hold a purpose and have importance, including the addition of beautiful intricate illustrations. Do you really need illustrations? How do they help meet your site’s objectives? These are a couple of questions you should be answering constantly as you conceptualize and execute your illustration ideas. Sit down with a pen and paper to draft up ideas before even stepping into the digital world. This will help hash out a lot more ideas at once without locking yourself into the medium you use to design websites with. Using similar ideas for inspiration can help a lot. CSS and graphic design galleries can be found everywhere. Go through a few and take notes on how their designs play out. Do they go a bit overboard compared to what you want? Maybe they don’t use color correctly? How does their content mesh with their illustrations? Asking these questions will help get you on track. It’s always a long process when designing for the web. Keeping your designs in line with check and balances is a very handy skill to master. The examples above are just simple ideas, but larger concepts can be implemented to realizing amazing results. Not everybody is an illustrator; I certainly don’t claim to be anywhere near an expert in creating illustrations like Brad Colbow or the guy over at Behind the websites. But with the power of Twitter and other networking tools, it’s not very difficult to meet very creative and talented designers from all over the world. Your website’s design is a very important piece of the puzzle. It’s the part of a website your users can actually see. Further Reading Here are a few articles and resources on the topic of illustrations in web design. How to Create an Illustrative Web Design in Photoshop This step-by-step web design tutorial goes over the creation of a web design that has an illustrative landscape baked right in. 30 Creative Illustrative Website Headers Here is a showcase of website headers that have illustrative design elements. 30 Beautiful Photoshop Illustration Tutorials Not comfortable with Adobe Illustrator? This is a roundup of Photoshop tutorials to help you become a better illustrator. 30 Creative Examples of Illustrations in Web Design Here is another showcase of web designs that feature illustrations. Getting Comical with Brad Colbow For inspiration, this is an interview of Brad Colbow who is both a web designer and an illustrator. By the way, check out his The Brads comic series, a comical look at the life of web designers. Related Content How to Use Retro Colors in Your Designs Make High-Impact Backgrounds for Your Designs with Photoshop 50 Stylish Navigation Menus for Design Inspiration Related categories: Web Design and Graphic Design About the Author Jake Rocheleau is a social media enthusiast and an Internet entrepreneur. Having spent over 4 years working freelance web design, he frequently writes articles involving new-age design concepts and personal motivation. You can find him all around the web via Google Profile or on Twitter as @jakerocheleau.
- Install a local email SMTP Server with MercuryPublished: August 23, 2010Source: BurlesonTech.com RSS FeedPage edited by Ben Shoemate Step by step instructions to install a local email server. What it does
At the end of these steps you will have an email server running on your computer. That is an email account that people can send email to and you can check it or send email to other people. It will be running on port 25 which is not secure, but good for development and other tasks (like migrating email). Why? Test sever to send email in local development Set up local email box to upload old email to Gmail or other cloud based email services Steps 1) Download the software for windows - http://download-us.pmail.com/m32-472.exe (or go to - http://www.pmail.com/downloads_s3_t.htm and get the one marked - Mercury/32 Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v4.72) 2) Run it 3) Go through the steps of the wizard, here are the screen shots. 4) Launch it - go to start, Program Files, Mercury for Win 32
(you may want to rearrange your windows) go to windows > Tile 5) Configure to route mail sent locally to the web. Your going to use gmail to send mail. 6) Create some user mailboxes: Configuration > Manage Local Users 7) Congrats - you now have an email server running at localhost, on port 25 and an email address test@localhost
8) to test it View Online | Add Comment - Corporate Website Design: Creative and Beautiful SolutionsPublished: August 25, 2010Source: Smashing Magazine Feed
What do corporate websites have in common with other people’s children? Three things: they have their charm, like finger-paintings on the refrigerator; they can be useful, if infrequently; they are usually admired only by the people who created them.While designers know that a user’s experience on a website has a large impact on the way that customer will interact with them, impressing that concept on the corporate establishment has taken a very long time. Trends in design are making their way into corporate web, albeit slowly; with patience and a little luck, businesses will soon start to consider carefully coded and appropriately functional design as important as their mission statement and recent sustainability reports.One unfortunate fact is evident above all else: despite having plenty of money at their disposal, many corporations are lost in sterile MS Word-esque designs that are more stagnant than a museum exhibit… though at least museums have dinosaurs and mummies and stuff. Here’s hoping we all will get new corporate clients soon.Below, we present some interesting corporate websites, although the insight they offer may not be immediately apparent. This review is not about aesthetics or visual appeal, but rather about the design solutions the sites exhibit. In fact, corporate websites aren’t as visually arresting as you might think, so if the appeal isn’t immediately apparent in the previews below, take a moment to visit and interact with each of them.[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the Smashing Book?]Beautiful Corporate WebsitesLevi Strauss & Co
With its website, Levis demonstrates that it has not only a strong flair for style and interactivity, but a rich sense of history. Hover over or click the photographs to see some of the company’s defining moments; ever known for its sense of identity, Levis draws you into its past, present and future, excellently breaking through to customers and inviting them to stay.McDonald’s
By simplifying and softening the navigation, McDonald’s opens the entire screen up to use as canvas for their product. Harmonious colors in the typography complement the food (and exploit the visual association with hamburgers), while the vivid photography does not obscure surrounding elements.Starbucks
Gentle colors and careful hierarchy of elements aside, Starbucks’ strength is in the details. The navigation exhibits an attention to hierarchy not often seen on corporate websites, while offering alternative destination links, should you find yourself in the wrong section. Such consideration for the user would be a welcome trend in design going into 2011.Sony
You’ll see that this is a link to Sony Canada’s website. While the navigation and theme is the same as its American counterpart, the experience here is different: here you can see short films in which people relate their experiences of how Sony technology has enriched their lives. Best of all, a floating meter lets you sort stories into categories, giving you control of the content. Brilliantly executed.The Ones You Would ExpectAdidas
Few websites employ a grid design that is at once so rigid and flexible. Individual modules expand and contract to allow for dynamic exploration—a lot of fun, particularly because the website has so many parts to explore. The only thing to note is that images do not obviously reflects the content they open to display, necessitating the standard top-menu — an important point in usability.Citroen
While the technique of using tiny images to fill a shape has been done a million ways, Citroen takes an old technique to the next level. Draw your cursor across the world to see the photos dance around it, beckoning you to select a region. An excellent use of a landing page, effectively drawing in users without information inundation.Fender Guitars
While you may need to be a guitar player to fully appreciate the beautiful lines and tones of Fender products, you need only a pair of eyes to appreciate the simplicity and functionality of Fender’s website. Unobtrusive navigation at the top and hot links lower down make way for a large stage on which Fender can showcase the stars of its website: its beautiful instruments.Heinz
One of the most recognizable brands in the world, Heinz has intelligently focused its website on its consumers. Rotate the globe by clicking on photos to see simple recipes from around the world. A design brilliantly suited to users of any skill level, Heinz has found a new means to engage their customers and entice them to visit more.Prologue Films
Any company that designs opening credits and effects for movies needs a keen aesthetic sense, and Prologue Films’ visual dynamic is evident on its website. A clean grid with gray tones puts the company’s custom type and effects (an impressive collection) front and center, the same technique made famous by artists and photographers. Using a pop-up window for the content, though, is ill-advised.Rolex
The beauty of this website is in Rolex’ masterful attention to detail. With the gorgeous products on display, the eye almost misses the clever tricks contained therein, such as the clock face that adjusts to your time zone. The intuitive user experience reinforces the notion that great design blends together. When it works right, it’s seamless.Steinway & Sons
Lucky for us, Steinway invests as much effort into its website as it does into its pianos. Elegant type and warm subtle imagery grace this design and project an image of quality, undoubtedly the intended effect.The Ones You Should Have Thought OfAflac
While a blue and white palette is nothing new, Aflac has mastered the use of subtle gradients to enhance type. Smartly assembled, this site is intuitive and easily digestible. The clever part is the horizontal scrolling frame, a visual hook aptly used here to display customer testimonials.American Standard
A gorgeous website; American Standard exemplifies grid design, employing the majority of frame as a news scroller. Intelligent use of color, elegant type and thoughtful spacing make this website particularly easy on the eyes.Avery Dennison
At first glance, this might look like the website of any old manufacturer of office supplies. At second glance, though, brilliant little touches leap out:: the subtle grid, the attention to readability, the side-scrolling frame that harmonizes type, color and imagery. Oddly dissonant, the side and top navigations make this website looks almost as if it were a composite of different designs over time, a curiosity.Con Edison
While the Con Edison website doesn’t have much to look at, the section for the annual report has been capably executed. Great attention to space, clean type and subtle movement are all used to great effect in this section where Con Edison addresses its corporate responsibility.Grow Interactive
Most interactive firms don’t have exciting websites, which makes Grow stand out all the more. Grow demonstrates an expert use of type and illustration, moving your eye in perfect circles over the page, and nuances like the small interactive animals along the footer make it stand out among its peers.PGI (formerly Premiere Global)
Here is another rare instance of a Canadian version surpassing its regional siblings. A playful take on the boxed blog/corporate theme, the website for PGI puts an interactive panel into the fold, an attractive way to draw users further into the website. The layout and color elements are evidence of authentic design acumen.Rohm and Haas
This Fortune 500 company knows how to engage visitors online, with interactive features coming from every angle. The innovation in its products is reflected in the playfulness of the website, which encourages users to explore. Careful, effective use of otherwise familiar textures and themes support an engaging concept, to good effect.Society for Environmental Graphic Design
While the inclusion of an organization of graphic designers in this showcase is no surprise, SEGD shines in its presentation of simple yet powerful elements. As any designer can attest, bold colorful shapes can easily run a design off course, but that isn’t the case here. SEGD has married vivid color with effective usability, creating a website that is smooth and wonderfully user-friendly.Virb
Recently rebranded and redesigned, Virb demonstrates a capable grasp of visual elements even in this placeholder page: good typography, ample white space, soft shapes and forms — akin more to social media than standard corporate toadery, excellently indicative of the target demographic.The Ones You Might Not Know AboutAcro Media
A Web development firm that knows exactly when to stick to the grid and when to break boundaries. The most impressive parts of this website are the way certain elements react to hovering, such as the company name in yellow at the top left. Mousing over it flips the logo around to display a toll-free number. Clever.AgencyNet Interactive
The spirit of AgencyNet is clearly the team of creatives behind its work. Showing the team at work (and play) behind the scenes in the office is refreshing, well executed and a great way to engage viewers to learn about the company.AmoebaCorp
A small creative firm, AmoebaCorp shows expert use of type on its website. The type establishes a strong hierarchy, enabling the content and navigation to coexist on the left without confusing the user about functionality.Imaginary Forces
Less is more with Imaginary Forces, which displays its brilliant work as prominently as possible by cluttering the screen as little as possible. Even without the showcased work, the website would stand out: take away the grand images, and you’d still have a clever arrangement of type and navigation, which is more than can be said of most websites.Kurylowicz & Associates
This Polish architecture firm has produced a website that bleeds inspiration from every pixel. Elegant in its use of gray tones, this website combines line, shape and space in a way no other website does. Perhaps it took an engineer to think abstractly enough to design with such abandon, but the result is brilliance online, from start to finish.Vancouver Convention Centre
Aside from the harmonious colors and subtle grid that frames the content, the Vancouver Convention Centre succeeds by going the extra mile to make its website visitors feel local: the “Cheers!” factor in action. Not many websites impart a sense of belonging with their welcome; that this one does makes a strong case for using heart as a design tool as much as shape, color and texture.What Have We Learned Today, Bobby?Finding beautiful corporate websites proved to be quite a challenge, and we had to make a number of unusual choices along the way. We sought regional versions of international websites, for instance, because multi-national companies present a number of differences among their sister websites. Bizarrely, did you know that many Fortune 500 companies don’t even have websites? Or worse, have non-working ones?Admittedly, the word “corporate” is pretty loose in definition here. For the sake of impartiality, we did not discriminate by industry or field. We were more interested in collecting websites that employ interesting techniques. Because innovative and fresh stand out on the Web whatever the industry, putting aside traditional definitions is crucial.For further reading on corporate websites and design, you may be interested in Corporate Blog Design: Trends and Examples, published August 2009.Would you like to see more similar showcases on SM?
Would you like to see more similar showcases on Smashing Magazine?online survey
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Post tags: showcases
- 300,000 Largest Websites Visualized with FaviconsPublished: August 25, 2010Source: Mashable!
An interesting visualization over at Nmap.org shows the favicons of the 300,000 biggest websites on the Internet (according to Alexa), with the size of the favicons corresponding to sites with the most traffic.The data has been gathered through a “large-scale scan of the top million websites,” performed in “early 2010″ using the Nmap Security Scanner, a powerful network scanning tool used by many online security professionals.The smallest icons, explain the folks from Nmap, correspond to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach, and rescaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon belongs to Google, and it’s 11,936 x 11,936 pixels large; for comparison, Mashable’s favicon (located below and to the left of Facebook) is 640 × 640 pixels large. Of course, to explain Google’s icon in its full size, you need to check out the zoom-enabled, interactive version.The visualization is also available as a humongous poster, available here.[via Gizmodo]Reviews: Facebook, Google, Internet, MashableMore About: Alexa, favicon, visualization, websiteFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for iPhone and iPad - The bizarre limestone spires of Madagascar [Photography]Published: August 23, 2010Source: io9Photographer Stephen Alvarez has captured the beauty of Madagascar's limestone "tsingy" towers, which house lemurs and vegetation within their crevasses. You can find a full gallery of Alvarez's photos from this unearthly landscape at his site. More »
- Planets Weighed Using Pulsar FlashesPublished: August 23, 2010Source: Wired: Wired ScienceThe rotating corpses of massive stars can help scientists weigh the planets in the solar system. By carefully timing radio blips from spinning stellar leftovers called pulsars, astronomers have measured the masses of all the planets from Mercury to Saturn, plus all their moons and rings. Until now, the only way to figure out the mass of a planet was to send a spacecraft past it. The spacecraft’s orbit is determined by the gravitational oomph of the planet (plus whatever moons lay within the spacecraft’s orbit), which in turn depends on the planet’s mass. The new method is the first to let astronomers weigh planets from the comfort of Earthbound observatories. “That’s what’s remarkable about this technique,” said space technologist William Folkner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a co-author of a study in the upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal. “I can’t think of any other way to measure masses of planets from the Earth.” The new method relies on the clock-like regularity of a class of neutron stars called pulsars, the rapidly spinning remains of massive stars that died in supernova explosions. Pulsars shoot tight beams of radio waves into space that sweep across the sky like a lighthouse, so from Earth they appear to blink or pulse. Because the Earth is always moving around the sun, the time it takes for these radio blips to reach us is always changing. To get rid of this effect, astronomers calculate when the pulse should reach the solar system’s center of mass, or barycenter — the point around which all the mass in the solar system moves. But because the planets’ arrangement around the sun is constantly changing, the barycenter moves around with respect to the sun, too. To pin down the center of mass at a given time, astronomers use a special table of where all the planets are, called an ephemeris, plus values for the masses of the planets taken from previous space missions. If the masses are slightly wrong, then a regular, repeating pattern of timing errors appears in the pulsar data. For instance, if Jupiter’s mass is a bit off, then an error appears every twelve years, once for every time Jupiter orbits the sun. Correcting the value for Jupiter’s mass makes the error disappear. “You can see that 12 year wiggle in timing of neutron stars,” Folkner said. “That tells you how far the sun is from the solar system barycenter, which tells you what the mass of Jupiter is.” An international team of scientists used three different radio telescopes, the 1000-foot-wide Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the 210-foot Parkes telescope in Australia and the 328-foot Effelsberg telescope in Germany to time the blips from four different pulsars over a period of 5 to 22 years. They then used computer models to use the pulsars’ times to calculate the masses of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The masses the team found are not as accurate as the best measurements from spacecraft flybys, but they’re close. The measurement for Jupiter, for instance, was found to be 0.0009547921 times the mass of the sun. This value is more accurate than the mass determined from the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, and less accurate than, but consistent with, the value from the later Galileo spacecraft, which includes more decimal places. “Our error bars are larger than those of these spacecraft measurements,” said study co-author Andrea Lommen of Franklin & Marshall College. “We are admitting freely that you should still use the mass of Jupiter measured from the spacecraft, but it’s comforting to know that our measurement agrees with that.” The new method is also the first that can measure the masses of everything in a planetary system, including moons and rings. “Spacecraft flybys don’t tell us the mass of everything in the Jupiter system, only the parts inside the spacecraft orbit,” Folkner said. “With this pulsar timing mechanism, we’re sensitive to the entire system, including the moons that are outside the orbit of any spacecraft that have flown by.” The technique is actually a stepping stone to studying something even more exotic: ripples in space-time called gravitational waves that were predicted by Einstein but have never been observed. The timing of pulsar blips should change slightly whenever a gravitational wave goes by, but in order to see these changes, astronomers have to subtract out all the other noise that could alter the pulsar’s clock. This study is “a graphic demonstration that you really have to understand the solar system really well if you’re going to be able to confidently detect gravitational radiation,” commented astronomer Scott Tremaine of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who was not involved in the new work. “If they can continue to develop these techniques to the point where they can detect gravitational waves, that will be a dramatically important event.” Image: The sun, Earth and Jupiter orbit a common center of mass. David Champion, MPIfR See Also: Missing Link in Pulsar Evolution Is a Cannibal Pulsar’s Explosion May Show Rare Stellar Evolution Elusive Supermassive-Black-Hole Mergers Finally Found Black Hole Found in Unexpected Place Citizen Scientists Make First Deep Space Discovery With Einstein@Home Follow us on Twitter @astrolisa and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
- Self-dusting solar panels to make life a whole lot easierPublished: August 23, 2010Source: Ubergizmo
It makes perfect sense to build a solar power plant in the middle of the desert - after all, that place gets a whole lot of sun throughout the day (even better if someone could come up with the technology to convert heat into electricity). After all, land is really cheap, but the downside to this would be the insane amounts of dust, dirt and wind which could result in dirty solar panels faster than you can clean them, reducing the efficiency by a pretty large margin. Of course, having someone clean those panels in the sweltering heat is definitely not a job most people would be willing to do, which is why the next best thing would be self-dusting solar panels. These are made possible thanks courtesy of an electric charge that is provided by the solar panels themselves. Who says that space travel to Mars have yielded nothing? Such technology was derived from the self-dusting solar panels used on the rovers which were sent to Mars. It takes just two minutes to remove around 90% of the dust deposited on the panels. Permalink: Self-dusting solar panels to make life a whole lot easier from Ubergizmo | Hot: iPhone 4 Review, Droid X Review, BlackBerry Torch Review - What’s the point of the semantic web?Published: August 20, 2010Source: Sciencebase Science BlogI was scanning journal tables of contents as usual this week and it occurred to me that there must be a better way to find relevant and timely research information that would be of interest to Sciencebase readers…and, of course, out pops the following title: Technically approaching the semantic web bottleneck Sounded, perfect…kind of…but what’s the semantic web, why’s there a bottleneck and what can be done to lube the tube? Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the semantic web was that information would be just as readable (and understandable) to a person or to a machine. Digital objects, whether web page, image, video, or some other file, would have embedded within them meta data that would provide context to the content and allow software to extract meaning from the file. Some software currently has a limited understanding of simple meta data, although any SEO will tell you that Google largely ignores web page meta data these days. That point aside, there is so much
that
might be
done if the
web were
effectively self-awareso much that might be done if the web were effectively self-aware (not talking notions of the singularity here, just making it all more useful and easier to use). So, I asked the paper’s author, Nikolaos Konstantinou, for a few examples of how the semantic web, often referred to as Web 3.0 (although you might call it Web 2.1 or Web 2.0++), might benefit us. The first benefit would be more intelligent searches he told me, either across the web or in large-scale data repositories where intelligence is referred to in contrast to the conventional keyword-based search methods employed by the search engines. “For instance, performing a search in Google for e.g. ‘renaissance paintings’ you will notice that among the first pages of the results returned, the vast majority contains the keywords ‘renaissance paintings’ in the respective page text (or image HTML image ‘alt’ tag),” he says. “That is because the search engine does not process the content available semantically and therefore, the results although they will be accurate, will be far from being complete. This will cause an arts student, for instance, to spend too much time finding relevant content. She would probably have to visit certain museum pages and collect the results on her own.” This is where the semantic web would come into play, Konstantinou adds. “The vision is to get a list of what you asked for even in the case when your keyword does not exist in the web page. In the example above, a page with Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings will not be considered relevant if the words ‘renaissance paintings’ do not exist in the page. In the semantic web world the system would ‘know’ that Leonardo da Vinci is an artist of the Renaissance and therefore his works would be returned to the user performing the query.” A second benefit would be knowledge inferred by the existing one. A system built using semantic web technologies, with the support of reasoning procedures could logically deduce informationreasoning procedures could logically deduce information, explains Konstantinou. “The most classic example about inference is that from the statements ‘all men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man’, we can deduce that ‘socrates is mortal’. This property (transitive property) in combination with a wider set of properties can augment the knowledge inserted in a system, without requiring human insertion of each and every fact, which avoids errors and reduces the workload.” Simply, by stating 5 facts to a system, using an ontology (a glossary) and a reasoner, the system will be able to deduce 15 facts by applying logic rules (reasoning). This is in fact what allows the intelligent queries mentioned in the Renaissance example. Such a system, when asked “is socrates mortal”? will return a YES, while without reasoning the answer would be NO (or UNKNOWN in other cases). Similarly, socrates would be included in a search like “tell me all the mortals in the system”. “This is, in fact, what is meant by ‘machine understandable’ information, the ability for a machine to process information,” adds Konstantinou. Now…how do I apply that logic to scanning tables of contents for worthy news items? Nikolaos Konstantinou, Dimitrios-Emmanuel Spanos, Periklis Stavrou, & Nikolas Mitrou (2010). Technically approaching the semantic web bottleneck Int. J. Web Engineering and Technology, 6 (1), 83-111 Related Posts:Chemistry with meaningThe hidden, invisible, and private webLifelong learning is about connecting peopleHeadhunting goes automatic for the peopleStaying in with Friends on a Wireless MeshWhat’s the point of the semantic web? is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog - August is always hot, but this heat is unprecedentedPublished: August 20, 2010Source: SciGuyIt's been so hot this month that ... • The average monthly temperature of 88.3 degrees is eight tenths of a degree warmer than any previous August on Houston record. • This month is on pace to become the warmest...
- Newly Discovered Chlorophyll Catches Infrared LightPublished: August 20, 2010Source: Wired: Wired ScienceA new kind of chlorophyll that catches sunlight from just beyond the red end of the visible light spectrum has been discovered. The new pigment extends the known range of light that is usable by most photosynthetic organisms. Harnessing this pigment’s power could lead to biofuel-generating algae that are super-efficient, using a greater spread of sunlight than thought possible. “This is a very important new development, and is the first new type of chlorophyll discovered in an oxygenic organism in 60 years,” says biological chemist Robert Blankenship of Washington University in St. Louis. The newfound pigment, dubbed chlorophyll f, absorbs light most efficiently at a wavelength around 706 nanometers, just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, researchers report online August 19 in Science. This unique absorbance appears to occur thanks to a chemical decoration known as a formyl group on the chlorophyll’s carbon number two. That chemical tweak probably allows the algaelike organism that makes chlorophyll f to conduct photosynthesis while living beneath other photosynthesizers that capture all the other usable light. “In nature this very small modification of the pigment happens, and then the organism can use this unique light,” says molecular biologist Min Chen of the University of Sydney in Australia. Chen and her colleagues identified the new pigment in extracts from ground-up stromatolites, the knobby chunks of rock and algae that can form in shallow waters. The samples were collected in the Hamelin pool in western Australia’s Shark Bay, the world’s most diverse stromatolite trove. Previously there were four known chlorophylls made by plants and other photosynthesizing organisms that generate oxygen: a, b, c and d. Chlorophyll a, the standard green type, is found in photosynthesizers from algae to higher plants. It absorbs mostly blue light around 465 nanometers and red light around 665 nanometers (it reflects green light, hence plants look green). Chlorophylls b and c are found in fewer organisms and absorb light in a similar range as chlorophyll a does, but shifted a bit. Chlorophyll d, found in a specific group of cyanobacteria, absorbs the most light at roughly 697 nanometers, a slightly shorter wavelength than the absorption of the new chlorophyll. While some bacteria make chlorophyll-like pigments that absorb even longer wavelengths of light, these creatures aren’t harnessing light to split water, the step in photosynthesis that generates oxygen. Scientists didn’t think that wavelengths absorbed by chlorophyll f would have enough oomph to split water either, but it turns out they do, says Chen. “This challenges our conception of the limit of oxygenic photosynthesis,” she says. The find may also enable scientists to engineer algae that are more efficient producers of oil for biofuels, says algae biologist Krishna Niyogi of the University of California, Berkeley. Microbes bearing the new chlorophyll could soak up rays that most microbes can’t make use of. There is still much to be learned about the new type of chlorophyll and the organisms that make it, Niyogi says. Chlorophyll f was extracted from the ground-up stromatolites along with a lot of chlorophyll a. It isn’t clear what creature was making chlorophyll f, but evidence points to a filamentous cyanobacterium. This cyanobacterium might use both chlorophylls, or perhaps just f. Images: 1) Red-shifting cyanobacteria./Science. 2) Shark Bay stromatolites./Wikimedia Commons. See Also: Perforated Blobs May Be Earliest Known Animals Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant Everywhere in a Flash: The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis Leafy Green Coherence: Quantum Physics Fuels Photosynthesis …
- Beat It + epic Crazy Chinese Omnipotent China red armyPublished: August 21, 2010Source: YouTubeOmnipotent China red army rules the world. epic crazy chinese. Beat It
- Fly Anywhere and As Often As You Like for a Month with JetBlue's All You Can Jet [Deals]Published: August 17, 2010Source: LifehackerIf you've got an open schedule and a few hundred bucks to burn, airline JetBlue's running an "All You Can Jet" program from September 7 to October 6 that allows you to fly anywhere JetBlue does as often as you want for a flat rate. $699 will buy you travel anywhere you want, as often as you want, seven days a week. $500 will get you the same, but excluding travel on Fridays and Sundays. For more details, hit up the offer page. [JetBlue All You Can Jet via Gizmodo] More »
- MESSENGER Looks Back at the Earth and MoonPublished: August 19, 2010Source: Universe TodayEarth and Moon from 183 Million kilometers. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of WashingtonA new image to add to the family photo album! The MESSENGER spacecraft is working its way to enter orbit around Mercury in March of 2011, and while wending its way, took this image of the Earth and Moon, visible in the lower left. When the image was taken in May 2010, MESSENGER was 183 million kilometers (114 million miles) away from Earth. For context, the average separation between the Earth and the Sun is about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles). It’s a thought provoking image (every one of us is in that image!), just like other Earth-Moon photos — Fraser put together a gallery of Earth-Moon images from other worlds, and this one will have to be added. But this image was taken not just for the aesthetics.
(...)
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Post tags: Astrophotos, Earth, Earth Observation, Mercury, MESSENGER, Moon
Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh - Facebook HistoryPublished: August 20, 2010Source: this isn't happiness.
- How the Bible can be like a software licensePublished: August 18, 2010Source: TYWKIWDBIVia Cynical-C.
- 3500 Year Old Tree The SenatorPublished: August 20, 2010Source: NeatoramaImagine a tree, 3500 years old, and the history and knowledge it must possess. The Senator is a species of Bald Cypress situated at Big Tree Park in Longwood, Florida. For year, travelers flocked to the tree, jumping log to log in the swamps, to catch a glimpse of this world wonder.
The Senator Bald Cypress tree measures close 18 feet in diameter and stands 118 feet high. The Senator’s age is estimated between 3,400-3,500 years old, the 5th oldest tree in the world.
Link From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96. - Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animationsPublished: August 14, 2010Source: World Of TechnologyRadial Engines Radial engines are used in aircrafts having propeller connected to the shaft delivering power in order to produce thrust its basic mechanism is as follows Steam engine Principle Steam engine once used in locomotives was based on the reciprocating principle as shown below Sewing Machine Maltese Cross Mechanism this type of mechanism is used in clocks to power the second hand movement. Manual Transmission Mechanism The mechanism also called as “stick shift” is used in cars to change gears mannually Constant Velocity Joint This mechanism is used in the front wheel drive cars Torpedo-Boat destroyer System This system is used to destroy fleet in naval military operations. Rotary Engine Also called as Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine has a unique design that converts pressure into rotating motion instead of reciprocating pistons
- Translate Business Jargon into Real Speech [APPS]Published: August 13, 2010Source: Mashable!
“Ninja,” “Guru,” “Team Player,” “Personal Brand” — if this litany of terms gets your skin crawling, you might want to check out this novelty app: Unsuck It.Brought to you by Mule Design, Unsuck It basically does just that: When you enter a term like, say, “Ninja” into the search bar, the app translates it into normal person language (see below).You then have the option of sharing it on Twitter, or “e-mailing the douchebag who used it” — said e-mail contains the subject line, “Hey, douchebag! Stop torturing the English language!” and a link to the term and translation in the body.The site also features the option “I’m Feeling Douchey,” which unearths a random term, and a “Browse” tab by which you can sift through other gems.All right, ye of the office-bound variety — future fighters of the weekend wars — tell us in the comments, what’s the worst jargon-y term you’ve heard (or used…) all day?[via Boing Boing]
[img credit: R'eyes]Reviews: TwitterMore About: humor, pop culture, software, web appFor more Tech coverage:Follow Mashable Tech on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for iPhone and iPad - Opinions vs. DataPublished: August 13, 2010Source: ignorethecode.netGmail’s recent update brought us a strange new UI element:1 Clicking on the checkbox selects all emails. The arrow, on the other hand, allows you to make more specific selections: This is a pretty unusual UI element. Gmail may be the only application using anything like it. This has caused a lot of people to question its usability. Gmail lead UI designer Michael Leggett eventually chimed in, writing:
[The new widget] is odd. And yet, both the checkbox and the menu part tested very well in the lab. The people who hated the widget outside the lab also understood how to use it but promised others wouldn’t because it was so «weird.» There were some optimizations I wanted that didn’t make it in (highlight the current selection state in the menu, show keyboard shortcuts, etc). But it tested fine without those things.
What Leggett described is exactly how I felt about the widget when I first saw it. I immediately figured out how to use it, but my gut reaction was «most people are not going to get how this works.» It seems I was wrong. This is one of the reasons why I don’t put too much trust into opinion-based usability reviews: There’s a lot of guesswork involved, and guessing how humans behave is an endeavor fraught with peril.2 Expert reviews can be helpful, but they are no substitute for actual testing. Jakob Nielsen has written about this:In my two examples, the probability of making the right design decision was vastly improved when given the tiniest amount of empirical data.
If there’s one thing we should all take to heart, it’s that humans are strange: They rarely behave the way we expect (or want) them to. Testing often reveals issues we would never have found out by merely thinking about a design. Conversely, something that looks wrong might actually work perfectly well. It’s to the left of the «Archive» button in Gmail’s new UI, if you want to see it in context. This is not to say that you should keep a UI element if people are able to use it, but consistently dislike it. The point is merely that you should not discard anything based on an untested assumption that people won’t be able to use it, and that you should not avoid testing something if it seems obvious that people will be able to use it. If a sizable portion of your users consistently dislikes a UI element, by all means get rid of it even if it is perfectly usable.
If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/323 - A toothpaste-like gel that can heal wounds six times faster than normal [Medical Breakthroughs]Published: August 13, 2010Source: io9A gene therapy in the form of a thick gel is about to revolutionize wound treatment. The gel is called Nexagon, and when you apply it to a wound, it reprograms the cells to heal more quickly and efficiently. More »
- Seafood: What is Safe to Eat and What is NotPublished: August 13, 2010Source: stephmodo
Real Simple consulted a marine scientist who works for a non-profit regarding seafood safety and I use this often when meal planning. To read more details on the matter and to print out a pocket-size guide, click here. Very enlightening! - Limbaugh sarcastically suggests that we build a Hindu Temple next to Pearl Harbor and a Mosque next to the Pentagon... without realizing that Shinto, not Hinduism, is the most common religion in Japan, and there is already a Mosque inside the Pentagon and a Shinto temple next to Pearl Harbor.Published: August 16, 2010Source: reddit.com: what's new online!
- A More Royal Royal Opera HousePublished: August 18, 2010Source: Brand NewNestled in bustling Covent Garden, the Royal Opera House is home to The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. In its third structural incarnation since 1732 — two previous buildings were burned in fires in 1808 and 1856 — the Royal Opera House is a preeminent international performing arts venue but, unfortunately, the same couldn't be said of its crest, which looks like it has survived its own set of fires. Old crest. New crest. The new identity has been designed by London-based SomeOne, who worked with master engraver Christopher Wormell to update the crest. Simon Manchipp, founder of SomeOne explains the challenges of the project:
1) The old royal crest was not digitally adept, it struggled to be clear at smaller sizes and wasn't elegant when employed on large scale applications.
The bottom-right image, if you are wondering (as I was), is the woodblock itself with ink and ready to print. It goes without saying that the new crest is simply fantastic and I'm not one to easily compliment crests. The previous lion and unicorn looked as if Bambi had eaten their families and had nothing but droopy, sad eyes to show for it. The updated versions are proud and strong. And probably ate Bambi. My favorite aspect of it is that they created two versions, positive and negative, to use on light and dark backgrounds — instead of just inverting the positive version, as the old one did. As striking as the new crest is, it would have been easy to screw it up with bad typography or poor use, but SomeOne has created a really sophisticated and contemporary identity that gives more prominence to the name of the venue and provides solid ground to build on the striking imagery of the performers. Set in one of the lighter versions of Gotham this is one of those instances where you forget you are looking at Gotham, because its use is subtle in the role of supporting actor, giving a new-fashioned twist to the old-fashioned crest. As whole, the identity is a very successful evolution of a centuries-old institution. Plus, the Queen agrees:
2) The word mark typography only reflected the more classical side of the organization.
3) There were no firm rules for coherent design systems across the multiple messages given to their audiences.
We solved their issues with a re-cut royal crest designed to be equally elegant on both small and large applications. A new typographic approach based in the typeface 'Gotham' that updated the feel of the communications. Finally a series of design principles, grids and systems ensured that all the print, pixel and press applications join up in coherent and flexible branded applications.Naturally "The Palace" was consulted before anything went out, they very kindly granted the branding with Royal approval on the first proposal.
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- Earth's Overdraft NoticePublished: August 16, 2010Source: Worldchanging: Bright GreenThe Global Footprint Network has announced that Earth Overshoot Day is fast approaching:
This Saturday, we will reach Earth Overshoot Day: the day when human demand on nature surpasses what nature can renewably supply...as of August 21st, humanity will have demanded an amount of ecological resources equivalent to what it takes nature 12 months to produce. From now until the end of the year, we will meet our needs by liquidating stocks and accumulating greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
According to the Global Footprint Network humanity crossed a threshold three decades ago when we stopped being able to live off of nature's interest -- "consuming resources and producing carbon dioxide at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate and reabsorb each year" -- and started living beyond nature's capacity. They call this gap between human demand and nature's supply "ecological overshoot" (a concept that was devised by the UK-based new economics foundation). The pace of this overshoot has grown each year (see links for 2007 and 2008 in the Worldchanging archives). Now the most recent data shows that "it takes one year and five months to regenerate the ecological services (production of resources and absorption of CO2) that humanity requires in one year." While this year's overshoot day comes about a month earlier than last year's, this is not due to a sudden change in human demand, but rather to improvements in the calculation methodology that have enabled the Global Footprint Network to more adequately capture the extent of overshoot. As an example, they report that the world has less biocapacity available, primarily in the area of grazing land, than previously estimated.
2010 Global Ecological Deficit (via "Global Footprint Network, National Footprint Accounts, 2009 edition. Available at www.footprintnetwork.org)
To learn more about how the Earth Overshoot Day is calculated, click here. Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel had this to say of the calculations:"We would expect our estimates of overshoot to be, if anything, conservative. We know we are far from living within the means of one planet. The good news is, much of the technology we have to begin to address this problem is available and it is open source: things like compact urban design, energy-efficient housing, ecological tax reform, removal of resource subsidies, safe and affordable family planning, bicycles, low-meat diets, and life-cycle costing."
We couldn't agree more. Some strategies for addressing the problem in the archives:
My Other Car is a Bright Green City | Alex Steffen, 23 Jan 08
The Politics of Optimism | Alex Steffen, 25 Mar 08
Principle 14: Density, Compact Communities and Smart Growth | WorldChanging Team, 22 May 07
Al Gore, Clean Energy and A Better Nation | Alex Steffen, 21 Jul 08
Defusing The Population Bomb | Adam Stein, 11 Sep 09
Bike-frastructure 101: Sharrows, Street Parking, Superhighways and More | Sean Conroe, Sarah Kuck and Kamal Patel, 28 Aug 09
Cows Aren't Part of a Climate-Healthy Diet, Study Says | Clark Williams-Derry, 8 Jun 08
The Eco-Nutrition Label | Jeremy Faludi, 17 Sep 07 Related stories in the archives:
The Emergence of a Biosphere Economy | John Elkington and Alejandro Litovsky, 28 Jun 10
Ecological Footprint 2.0 | Alex Lowe, 17 Jun 07
Principle 2: Ecological Footprints and One Planet Thinking | WorldChanging Team, 8 May 07
The Future is Climate Neutral | Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich, 22 Jan 07
Europe 2005: The Ecological Footprint | Jon Lebkowsky, 2 Dec 05 Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Amanda Reed in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 4:30 PM) - Arthur C. Clarke predicted satellite TV and GPS in the 40s and 50sPublished: July 26, 2010Source: Boing BoingAbove, a letter written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1956 predicting, quite accurately, aspects of the future of communications. Link [via Letters of Note via dvice]
- Home-made life insurance, the Apollo wayPublished: July 27, 2010Source: Boing BoingOf all the places I never expected to learn anything cool about the Apollo astronauts, number one would have to be the blog run by ukinsurance.net. ("For many years we have provided buildings and contents insurance for home owners, landlords and business premises.") I mean, it doesn't exactly promise a light, zippy read, does it? But it delivers one, and this week's post on "The Apollo Astronauts' Fascinating Insurance Covers" actually is fascinating. It details the extraordinary measures taken to provide financial security for families of the Apollo crews, who were literally uninsurable: Before every flight, from 11 to 16, the crews would autograph and leave behind a number of commemorative post cards, the idea being that, should the flight end in an untimely fashion, the cards' value would skyrocket. ("No pun intended," ukinsurance.net notes brightly.) It's a weird, unexpected look into a neglected corner of our history in space. (Via Coudal.)
- Shark Knife will terrify your enemies with macho impracticalityPublished: July 27, 2010Source: Boing Boing
The shark knife isn't going to win any beauty contests, but that's OK, because shark knives aren't about looking good, they're about getting the job done. And the job here is looking insanely tough, but with a tender, whimsical side. The Klingons have a word for this, most often translated as "trying too hard." Shark Knife (via Making Light) Giant Swiss Army Knife Now on Sale Gadgets Klingon knife scares the crap out of dumb British scandal-sheet ... Knife-brandishing yob in a hoodie openly menaces public just steps ... Britain on alert for deadly new knife with exploding tip that ...
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