alphadogg writes "Windows 7 contains a 'SoftAP' feature, also called 'virtual Wi-Fi,' that allows a PC to function simultaneously as a Wi-Fi client and as an access point to which other Wi-Fi-capable devices can connect. The capability is handy when users want to share music and play interactive games. But it also can allow on-site visitors and parking-lot hackers to piggyback onto the user's laptop and 'ghost ride' into a corporate network unnoticed." While this means a bit more policing for networks meant to be locked down, it sounds like a good thing overall. Linux users, meanwhile, have had kernel support (since 2.6.26) for 802.11s mesh networking, as well as Host AP support for certain chipsets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More details are coming out about the case we wrote about yesterday concerning the school district that could (and did) turn on webcams on student laptops. The district is now claiming that, yes, it had the ability to do so, and in fact did so 42 times (though, it never told students or parents it could do this). However, the district claims that it only did so to try to track down lost or stolen laptops. That doesn't explain how this resulted in a student being reprimanded for "improper behavior in his home" though.

Either way, it looks like this is going beyond a civil case of the families suing the school district. The FBI is now investigating the case as well, to see if the district violated either wiretapping or computer-intrusion laws. Now, it's not unheard of to have capabilities like this turned on to find lost or stolen laptops -- so perhaps that is understandable. But the fact that this kid was reprimanded for stuff he did in the privacy of his home while caught on camera definitely seems questionable. No one seems willing to say if this particular laptop was ever reported "lost or stolen," so perhaps the district's argument is that the student had taken the laptop. But if that's the case, you would think they would have come out and said so, rather than the vaguely worded denials put forth already.

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Former Boing Boing guest blogger and Howtoons co-creator Saul Griffith says:

We just finished a huge project in collaboration with Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams - Seeing the Future: A Visual Communication Guide - which is a 20 drawing/inventing guide that teaches kids/adults how to get those big ideas down on paper.  Please pass it along; we would love this to get to as many kids (and big kids) as possible.  

About the guide | Seeing the Future! the Howtoons Visual Communication guide | PDF version

Space Shuttle Atlantis and the ISS fly across the night sky shortly after undocking back on November 25, 2009. Photo by Ethan Tweedie of Pottsboro, Texas via SpaceWeather.com.

Catching flyovers of the International Space Station is one of my favorite hobbies. There is something about being able to watch that gleaming vehicle glide across the sky like a super-bright star, knowing there are people living and working up there at this very moment. Even better is catching a flyover just before or just after the Shuttle has docked or undocked from the ISS. The vehicles appear to almost chase each other across the sky -- it's quite a sight. You'll have the chance to catch this special view this weekend. From SpaceWeather.com:

Space shuttle Endeavour's two-week mission to the ISS is almost finished. The two spaceships are scheduled to undock tonight, Feb. 19th, at 7:54 p.m. EST. This is good news for sky watchers, because there's nothing prettier than two bright spaceships traveling side-by-side through the night sky:

The Hayden Planetarium web site has great information on what parts of the country will have the best viewing opportunities and how to spot the vehicles in the sky. I highly recommend checking it out. You can also check out various phone apps that track sighting opportunities based on your location. I check our listings often, and love running out into the street for the brief encounters with the ISS in the sky. Though I think my neighbors are starting to wonder about me ....

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Simmeh writes "Microsoft have posted screenshots and details on their upcoming 'web browser choice screen.' Requirements include being in Europe, and having Internet Explorer set as your default browser. It comes with a few surprises, as the software automatically unpins Internet Explorer from your taskbar, and offers 11 alternative browsers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Simmeh writes "Microsoft have posted screenshots and details on their upcoming 'web browser choice screen.' Requirements include being in Europe, and having Internet Explorer set as your default browser. It comes with a few surprises, as the software automatically unpins Internet Explorer from your taskbar, and offers 11 alternative browsers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, here's a fun one sent in by ChurchHatesTucker. You may have heard the somewhat troubling story of the guy found guilty of child pornography for downloading images of the cartoon Simpsons performing sexual acts. It does seem a bit ridiculous to claim that naked versions of famous cartoon characters represent actual child porn, but... so sayeth the court. But, here's the potential problem: That is the logo for the 2012 Olympics in London. My first reaction to it was that it's just hideous from a design standpoint, but others quickly noticed something worse. You can look at that logo and... um... see what appears to be Lisa Simpson... doing something she shouldn't be doing. Yeah. Once you see it, it never goes away. So, as CHT notes, given that ruling of child porn for having an image of a Simpsons cartoon child performing sex acts... is looking at the 2012 Olympic logo going to be classified as viewing child porn now?

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babieswithlasereyes.com, via Dangerous Minds (thanks, Tara McGinley).

"Not all is worth cheering about as Adobe turns 20," writes reader adeelarshad82, who excerpts from a story at PC Magazine's Security Watch: "Researcher Aviv Raff has found a problem in ADM (Adobe Download Manager) and the method through which it is delivered from adobe.com. The net effect of the problem is that a user can be tricked into downloading and installing software using ADM without actual consent. Tonight Adobe acknowledged the report and said they were working on the issue with Raff and NOS Microsystems, the company that wrote ADM."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you think the Environmental Protection Agency needs to be paying attention to? How should they make data more transparent? Who could they collaborate with? Now you can take your ideas to the people who matter. As part of the Agency's Open Government plan, they're soliciting input from the public through March 19th. Not only can you offer ideas, you can vote, and comment, on other people's.

Barence writes "How good — or bad — are fake iPhones? PC Pro blogger Steve Cassidy has a friend who paid £25 ($40) for an 'iPhone' in a bar, and he's got the photos and full lowdown of what's inside this not-so smartphone. The phone looks convincing enough from the outside, with a genuine-looking backplate, but things start to go wrong when you switch it on. What's a "Java" and "WLAN" App button doing on the screen? And how about that Internet Explorer icon? It's like you're handling an artefact from an alternate history, dropped in via a spacetime wormhole. It has dual SIM handling, too, and came with a bizarre auxiliary battery festooned with warnings about not pressing a button mounted on the front of the top-up device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NYC's Butch Bakery (founded by a lawyer) makes "manly cupcakes" like the B-52, shown here, "not a frilly pink-frosted sprinkles and unicorns kind of cupcake." These baked goods have become so popular that the company has suspended telephone orders.

Butch Bakery (via Sociological Images)

Update: Pipenta's got my vote for comment of the year, for #20, below, which opens "Why stop here? They aren't even making the shift from red velvet to black leather cupcakes! These aren't nearly butch enough! What about shaving stubble cream filling? Pigskin, jockstrap, cigar butt cupcakes. At the very least, there should be a Guinness option, a beer belly cupcake. Wasabi might be too dainty, but kimchee and a hot chili icing option would be on the money." It gets ruder and better from there.

"You seldom find them so cute and so animated... a real charmer."

Garth Johnson of Extreme Craft has extensive coverage about this wheeled and squeaking toy pig being appraised on Antiques Roadshow.

I agree with Jesse Thorn that this segment is quite possibly the greatest segment in the history of Antiques Roadshow.  A rather smug gentleman shows off his rare "animated" pull pig toy.  The fellow doesn't get his comeuppance, though.  His confidence in the awesomeness of his pig toy is rewarded by a $2000-$2500 appraisal for his $200 investment.

Animated Pig Pull Toy

I have lots of hare-brained projects involving chemiluminescence that are currently back-burnered because the chemical that causes the bright chemiluminescence of commercial glowsticks, i.e. trichlorophenyl oxalate (TCPO, shown below), is relatively hard for hobbyists to acquire. I've even gone to the trouble of setting up a business account with a major chemical supplier, establishing business credit references, and getting my residential address approved to receive chemical shipments from them. Just so I could log onto their website and order 100g of TCPO. Which I did many months ago. It's been back-ordered with their supplier since then. Who knows when or if I'll ever actually get it.

This video from YouTuber NurdRage comes with a lot of caveats: the synthesis of TCPO from trichlorophenol and oxalyl chloride is relatively straightforward as syntheses go, and the starting materials are much easier to acquire than TCPO itself, but they're still not at all grocery-store type compounds. And it's not a thing to attempt without the expertise, equipment, and facilities to do it safely. Plus the creepy "Jigsaw" voice effect that the narrator uses to disguise his identity doesn't exactly inspire confidence. There's nothing illegal about this procedure, as far as I know, but I think he wants to remain anonymous so nobody can sue him if they try to play along at home and end up burning it down.

Nonetheless, I was grateful to find this video in the tubes, and will probably attempt it myself at some point. Famous last words, anyone?

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Rogier van der Weyden: The Last Judgment (large size image here), 1446-52. From this livejournal treasure trove of historical engravings and prints depicting people who have totally lost it. (Thanks, Miss Calpernia!)

As regular readers of this blog know, I travel with some regularity to West Africa, and there's a soft spot in my heart for Benin. I was listening to Garth Trinidad's Moja Moja podcast this week, and heard this track (Amazon MP3 album link) from a psychedelic band out of Cotonou (Benin's capital) in the early 70s. I then tracked down this YouTube clip of the same band from Analog Africa, who released this compilation album packed with afrofunky goodness from those early years. They have a very informative post up on their blog about this particular band. Shown at left, one of the Orchestre's album covers, featuring the band's super-dapper lead singer Vincent Ahehehinnou. His cheeks are adorned with the "serpent mark" tribal facial scars common in Benin. So beautiful. And the man can out-scream any punk band I ever slamdanced to in the eighties, that's for damn sure. Watch and listen.

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey - Gbeti Madjro (Analog Africa)

jasper_amsterdam writes "The Daily Mail has a story about a study looking into women's preference for men. More specifically, about how women say they want one kind of man, but really want another. From the article: 'Most women claim to be attracted to tall, dark and handsome men, but a new study has revealed that facial stubble and a geeky personality are their biggest secret turn-ons. Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women. A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology. A hairy chest was voted third, followed by a man who loves to read or cries at a soppy film.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, the town of Tracy, California (a bit east of the Bay Area) has decided to turn 911 emergency calls into a profit center. Karl Bode points us to the news that the town now wants people to pay $300 for every 911 call. Of course, if you think you might be a frequent 911 caller, they've got a plan for that. For the low, low, low price of just $48 per year, you can call 911 as many times as you want. Yes, that's right folks, there's a special deal for those of you who regularly have emergencies. Make sure to order now!

This has to be one of the more ridiculous things I've heard in a while. Does the town really want to discourage people from calling in the event of an emergency? In my life, I think I've called 911 four times -- and three of those were after witnessing car crashes by other people. With this rule in place, I would have much less incentive to call to get the police if I witness something bad happening, whether it's a car crash, or someone getting mugged. 911 is a public service. You shouldn't have to pay for a 911 call.

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Jeremy sez, "Shareable.net and the consultancy Latitude are co-launching a study to understand how new connectivity--improved accessibility, transparency, organization, and socialization of information--alters our desires and decisions around food and food-purchasing. The study will remain open for participation for 1-2 weeks, and results will be posted to Shareable and life-connected.com by mid-March. And when the study reaches 50 participants, we will donate $500 to The Hunger Project, a global non-profit committed to the sustainable end of world hunger."

An anonymous reader writes "Will pico-projectors become standard equipment on mobile phones, the same way that digital cameras have become? The jury is still out on user acceptance--after all only four mobile phones use pico-projectors today — but if they get small and cheap enough, mobile phone makers are going to install them. There are four vendors today--Microvision, National Semiconductor, 3M and Texas Instruments, but only TI has design wins in cell phones already on the market. And at the recent Mobile World Congress, TI showed a smaller digital light processor (DLP) chip that fits inside even the slimmest mobile phones, and which it claims is cheap enough to become standard equipment. A lot of us never use the camera in our phones now — would you use a pico-projector if it was built into your phone?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an exciting challenge from Workshop 88, called Hackerspaces in Space. It's an inter-hackerspace challenge to send a weather balloon into space, capture some amazing data, and retrieve it. This could be a great team project for an established space, or even a good way to motivate a group of people to get together and form a space!

I can't help but notice that it also seems a timely and appropriate response to Martin Gittins, who recently noted that "The horizon of our vision for technology is no longer interplanetary travel but multi-touch user interface designs." While there are certainly great reasons to improve the usability and reach of technology, we shouldn't forget that there is a huge universe out there to explore, and that you don't need to be NASA to get a glimpse of it.

Of course, weather balloon won't technically make it into outer space (more like the stratosphere), but are certainly an accessible way to get pretty far up with backyard technology. From their press release:

NAPERVILLE, Illinois - February 16, 2009 - Workshop 88, Chicago's only suburban hackerspace, has announced a new competition. Hackerspaces from around the world will participate to send weather balloons, with payloads, into near space hoping to capture pictures of the Earth's horizon. Inspired by many recent amateur weather balloon endeavors across the country, Hackerspaces in Space aims to turn this phenomenon into a full- fledged competition.

Launches will begin in June and run till the end of August. At the end of competition teams will post their results and pictures on the web where they will be judged on a variety of criteria like: retrieval time, weight of payload, and total cost of the project.

Motivated by the excitement of the challenge, or in some cases a personal vendetta, nine hacker spaces have already signed up for the challenge. So don't delay, check out the competition website for the official rules and to register. See you... in space!

Image courtesy HeatSync labs

More:

• DIY SPACE - Make: Video Podcast
• Hydrogen balloon camera project
• Successful High Altitude Balloon!
• Spanish students beat NASA
• How many balloons does it take to lift a person?

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Justin Perricone sez, "This is a poster I designed using all of the ingredients in a Ham & Cheese Hot Pocket. First in a series."

Hot Pockets Ingredients (Thanks, Justin!)

An anonymous reader writes "Restoring hearing with cochlea implants that replace the inner ear with an electronic version has become standard procedure for many types of deafness. Now it looks like the same thing might happen for many types of blindness. With five national labs funded by the Department of Energy, this third-generation artificial retina promises to enable the blind to see again soon. Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept. However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a point we've tried to make over and over again: you don't compete with "piracy" by offering a product that's a lot worse. And yet, so many people do. A bunch of you have sent over the following image that highlights this in the DVD world (tragically, no one seems to know who made this image -- but if anyone knows, please tell us in the comments and we'll add it to the post). It shows how an unauthorized downloaded copy of The Matrix lets you start watching it immediately. But if you purchase the legitimate DVD, it forces you to sit through multiple FBI warnings and multiple trailers for other movies, with no ability to skip past them. It's humorous, but the point it makes is really important. When your product is less valuable (and yes, that includes being more annoying) than the unauthorized alternatives, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to agree to pay you for your product.
Click for larger version.

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This whole-house "mousetrap" contraption proves that opening the curtains in the least efficient way possible is often also the most awesome way possible. Best part of the video: The cellphone call.

When Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms offered a class titled "How to Make (almost) Anything" he was surprised to find himself inundated by students. In particular, Gershenfeld was taken aback by the fact that these students weren't taking the class for some sort of abstract research, or to fulfill an academic requirement, but rather to build things they'd always dreamed of. They brought with them ideas for all sorts of outlandish projects to make in the center's Fab Lab. One student wanted to build an alarm clock that needed to be wrestled to make it turn off. Another wanted to make a way for a parrot to browse the Web. A third wanted a way to store her screams of frustration.

That passion, which Gershenfeld ultimately found mirrored all around the world, forms the core of Fab. People want to design and make the things they need, an eons-old urge in humanity that has to one degree or another been suppressed by factories which can make widgets more efficiently and consistently than craftspeople can. Unfortunately, these efficient operations really can't do a good job of addressing their customer's individual wants and needs -- to a degree, customers are expected to make do with a limited number of configurations. As the yen to make resufaces, personal fabrication machines have allowed would-be designers to build things that previously, only those factories could.

After a brief but important historical retrospective, Gershenfeld plunges into the core of the book: a collection of many different projects which highlight a person or organization's ability to affect the world around them using personal fabrication tools.

Gershenfeld tells the story of Ken Paul, who used Lego Mindstorms to prototype a better way for the USPS to handle mail. Mel King created a fab lab to engage inner-city Boston kids. Kyei Amponsah is a Ghanaian village chief who wanted to use a fab lab to create tools for his impoverished village, like Tesla turbines to generate electricity and and vortex tubes to cool the air. Interspersed with these stories, the author describes the technologies used for personal fabrication -- waterjets, laser cutters, CNC routers, 3D printers, and so on. He illustrates each technique with "Hello World" examples, highlighting the devices' strengths and limitations.

Fab was written five years ago, pre Cupcake and almost even pre-Darwin. This begs the question, how relevant is the book given that it was written so long ago? Very relevant -- the topic is still super current. In fact, as I write this, the most recent versions of MAKE and WIRED both feature the subject as their respective cover stories.

The reason the tech aspect doesn't matter is much is that the fabbing movement isn't really a technological initiative as much as it's a societal shift. At its essence, Fab describes a blacklash of sorts against the mindset that we must look to big companies to provide us solutions, rather than coming up with them ourselves. That concept will always be bigger than the latest gadgetry.

FAB, by Neil Gershenfeld
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465027458

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For home theater buffs who want (or already have) a high-def system using component-video connections, time may be growing short. Audiofan writes with this story, which begins: "Digital HD (high definition), like that enabled through HDMI and Blu-ray, is awesome. It offers amazing picture and audio quality. It allows you to conveniently connect one single cable to provide both picture and sound. It is royally going to screw up a lot of homes next year. Wait, what was that last part? After December 31, 2010, manufacturers will not be 'allowed' [to] introduce new hardware with component video outputs supplying more than an SD resolution (480i or 576i). Should this go through as planned, it's going to disable or throw a wrench in a lot of existing custom installations as soon as the end of this year." The AACS in the headline stands for Advanced Access Content System, the industry scheme to block "the analog hole" by controlling content from storage media to eyeballs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seibei, based in Poughkeepsie, NY, is selling these handsome MINIBOSS shirts in the Boing Boing Bazaar. Sizes range from ladies small to unisex XXX large.

Miniboss T-shirt

mernil writes with this snippet from Reuters: "According to a draft regulation drawn up by the European Commission and seen by Reuters, suppliers may be allowed to require that distributors have a 'brick-and-mortar' shop before they can sell online. The proposed rules would replace existing guidelines exempting companies from strict EU competition rules under certain circumstances. Those rules expire at the end of May."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mernil writes with this snippet from Reuters: "According to a draft regulation drawn up by the European Commission and seen by Reuters, suppliers may be allowed to require that distributors have a 'brick-and-mortar' shop before they can sell online. The proposed rules would replace existing guidelines exempting companies from strict EU competition rules under certain circumstances. Those rules expire at the end of May."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney's launching a line of girl-goth merch to tie in with the release of Alice in Wonderland, whose soundtrack features Cure frontman Robert Smith performing a track from the 1951 Alice movie: "Walt Disney Co.'s consumer-products division is aiming its marketing firepower at young women and teenage girls, particularly those who gravitate to darkly romantic entertainment like the 'Twilight' series." (Thanks, @keithabramson!)

Martin Bosworth has written up a longish post discussing what he calls "The Creative Class War." It's an interesting read that hits on a lot of different points, many of which I agree with, and a few I don't agree with, but it's worth reading anyway, if only to be horrified by the news of a novel that apparently spends a few chapters following an "intellectual-property enforcer who literally tortures and dissects copyright infringers to death." Yikes.

There's too much in the post to respond to each of the points -- either the ones I agree with or disagree with -- but there was one concept that is part of the root of the argument which I simply don't believe is true, even though I've heard others say it as well. It's the idea that the views held by many people criticizing rights holders for being overly aggressive in enforcing their rights comes from some sort of "resentment" of content creators. Bosworth notes:

There's a long-simmering resentment of people that actually make art, and the Internet has brought it to the surface in a way we've never seen before.

I have to say that I just don't see this. It's an argument we've seen thrown out by various people who disagree with us at times ("you just say that because you've never created anything of value in your life!") but it doesn't ring true at all. First of all, many of us who fall on the side of often being critical of overly aggressive copyright enforcement are critical because we think that it will backfire and harm those that the law is supposed to "protect." The point of highlighting why it's a bad idea isn't that we resent those who did something creative, but because we want to see them succeed and making an anti-fan, anti-consumer decision will make that more difficult. It's not resentment at all.

Coming at the same question from the other direction, again, I have trouble seeing "resentment" as the issue at all. When we look at the success stories, the one thing that comes through loud and clear is that respecting fans results in those fans becoming incredibly loyal. They're loyal to a fault, in fact. There's no resentment there at all. If anything, at times, it seems to border on hero worship.

I'm not denying that there is some resentment out there of successful people. There are always some people who are resentful of others, but I just don't see that as a driving force in the criticism of content creators who choose a path that is anti-fan.

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Scoop Snookems writes "Will there be a day where we earn achievement points simply by brushing our teeth or high-fiving a friend? There could be, according to Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell. In this video from the annual DICE summit,Schell comments on recent evolutions in gaming before fixating on a concept where our futures evolve into one big RPG. Fascinating stuff, and I hope writing this post nets me 10 points."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leafcutter John shares the steps he took to build a phantom-powered underwater mic from a steel can (looks pretty classy!) -

I decided to house the pre-amp in the same enclosure as piezo elements (to avoid noise entering the circuit). The challenge here is to find a decent enclosure. As the piezo’s and the pre-amp will be underwater they need to be inside something water-tight.
[…]
After a few experiments, I found you can quite easily solder steel food cans together using a regular soldering iron and electrical solder. It works for water pipes so It should be water-tight in this case.  NOTE: aluminum cans will not work at all well!!! Get out your magnet and find some steel ones!

The resulting audio samples sound quite good, justifying the gobs hotglue sealer and onboard preamp. Get started building your own over at Leafcutter's site. [via Hack a Day]

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Image: Mollena, with the Race Card she created to respond to the annoying expression of the same name. "Every once in a while some fooligan will roll to you talkin' some trash about how you discussing your racial background in a broader social context is a 'back-handed maneuver," she says. "They may even accuse you of 'playing the Race Card' because you mention that life is different for you because you are different. Next time that shit goes down, be prepared." (Incidentally, she's also Miss SF Leather 2009 / photo: Colm McCarthy.)

@engadget mentions that a new project dubbed "Flyfire" at MIT is looking to launch a fleet of LED-equipped micro-helicopters and coordinate them in synchrony to create massive floating images. "By using LED-equipped drones the project pledges to build free-floating 3D displays, endowing them with enough smarts and positional awareness to organize themselves into an airborne canvas. It sounds deliciously exciting and challenging."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a screw up so big it could only be brought to you by the government or a famous athlete, 243 guns were lost by Homeland Security agencies between 2006 and 2008. 179 guns, were lost "because officers did not properly secure them," an inspector general report said. One of the worst examples of carelessness sites a customs officer who left a firearm in an idling vehicle in the parking lot of a convenience store. The vehicle was stolen while the officer was inside. "A local law enforcement officer later recovered the firearm from a suspected gang member and drug smuggler," the report said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ah, for the love of puffery. A few years ago, we were among those who noticed that pretty much every mobile operator in the US had commercials making some sort of claim about how they were the "best" network out there, whether it was "most reliable," "most powerful," or "fewest dropped calls." The whole thing is a joke and I doubt anyone takes those sorts of claims very seriously. But soon afterwards, the lawyers got involved, and lawsuits were filed over who could claim what about their networks in commercials. Even the Better Business Bureau felt the need to weigh in.

Now, it looks like a similar battle is playing out up north. Rob Hyndman points us to the news that there are a series of lawsuits in Canada over similar claims concerning broadband internet access, with one company being upset that another company has commercials claiming to have the "fastest and most reliable" broadband offering.

Here's an idea: rather than wasting money suing each other over these sorts of claims, why not invest some money into actually improving the network?

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Inspired by Mitch Altman to learn how to solder, Andie Nordgren wanted to pass on the knowledge of his newfound skill, so he captured the lesson in a cartoon. Fun stuff! [via jprodgers]

More:

• Super learn-to-solder roundup
• Soldering Tutorial - Make Video Podcast
• Toolbox: Soldering essentials, Part 1

In the Maker Shed:

Learn to solder kit

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Andy Updegrove writes "A short while ago the parties to one of the most closely watched FOSS cases filed a settlement agreement with the US Federal District Court for the Northern District of California ending one of the most important F/OSS legal cases to date. That case is Jacobsen vs. Katzer, and the settlement marks a complete victory for Jacobsen, a member of the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) Project. Jacobsen's victory establishes several important rights for the first time in the US: the right to prevent their copyright and authorship acknowledgments from being removed from their code, and the right to collect damages if the terms of the licenses they choose are violated. Until now, those rights had never been tested in court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of a legion of Chinese engineers/joke-fabricators, it's now possible to a own a Dwight Schrute-like office cubicle where every single item in sight, from the stapler to the desk clock to the computer mouse to the can of soda, is engineered to provide a hysterically comical high voltage shock when touched.

Who would want to do that? Man, that would be so cool; who wouldn't? I added up the total price for all items listed below and the whole bill comes somewhere around $50.

Partial listing of Shocking Gag Devices available at just one online merchant and no doubt I'm just scratching the surface of the entire shocking gag gift industry:

Shocking gag lighter
Shocking pen (numerous models and manufacturers)
Shocking chewing gum
Shocking tape measure
Shocking lipstick
Shocking hand shaker
Shocking USB drive
Shocking pack of novelty quarters
Shocking calculator
Shocking flashlight
Shocking laser pointer
Shocking digital camera
Shocking MP3 player
Shocking computer mouse
Shocking car key remote
Shocking desk stapler
Shocking slot machine
Shocking dice set
Shocking Alarm Clock
Shocking razor
Shocking Compass
Shocking chocolate Bar
Shocking Soda can
Shocking joke Book
Shocking candy Jar
Shocking playing Cards

So maybe I'll do that. Or would that would just be immature?

If you're in LA tomorrow, don't miss Otomatone inventor Maywa Denki's rare US performance at the Giant Robot store in Sawtelle. Details here.

Bill Bumgarner had the same experience as I did with Disney's Fast Play option on DVDs. I watched Sleeping Beauty with my daughter last week and was tricked by choosing Fast Play.

How could anyone not be irritated by this stupid anti-feature?

We received Chicken Little from Netflix today and I noticed that it features “Disney’s Fast Play Technology.” When inserted, you get the choice between “Fast Play” and “Main Menu.'

If you make the mistake of hitting “Fast Play”, you get upwards of 10 minutes of promo crap before the movie starts — just like before.

If you hit “main menu” you get, well, the main menu from which you can actually play the movie directly. That’s right. Fast Play is the slow way to the feature.

Disney’s Fast Play (Or Marketing of a Flipped Bit)

Smivs writes "The BBC is carrying a report on how people confused and frustrated by computers can now turn to a laptop called Alex built just for them. Based on Linux, the laptop comes with simplified e-mail, web browsing, image editing and office software. Those who sign up for Alex pay £39.95 a month for telephone support, software updates and broadband access. The Newcastle-Based Broadband Computer Company who developed Alex has been working on this project for three years, and didn't immediately adopt a Linux solution — in fact, the first big trial was based on Windows. The company's Chief Technology Officer Barney Morrison-Lyons says that was never going to be the right route: 'The biggest problem with Microsoft is badly-written software — the operating system allows you to write software badly unlike Mac or Linux.' Mr. Hudson, one of the company's founders, said the company also intends to launch an application store for Alex for customers who want to add more features and functions to their computer. 'People who love Linux will be keen to develop for this,' he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Wednesday morning, Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie posted about MIT's Flyfire system. The idea behind the system is simple and very exciting: Swarms of tiny LED-carrying robot helicopters arrange themselves in the air to make 2D or 3D displays in which each bot serves as a single pixel. Evan linked to the project's homepage on MIT's SENSEable City Lab server and embedded a video posted by the group to YouTube showing the individual prototype swarmbots, which already exist, and some computer renderings of what the working displays would look like. Exciting, eh?

Within an hour of Evan's post going live, MIT took down the FlyFire page and the YouTube video. Or at least password-protected them. I can imagine why they might not want the traffic surge bogging down their own servers, but why yank the YouTube video? Why wouldn't they want people paying attention to this project?

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For a while now, we've been discussing how the pricing on ebooks doesn't make much sense, and almost certainly needs to fall. Like many industries, the book business could learn a lot from other businesses that have realized that drastically lowering the price on digital goods can massively increase sales, and better maximize profits. But, instead, book publishers seem to be pushing in the opposite direction, and trying to push the price of digital books up. We recently wrote about a NY Times article that suggested consumers might revolt if the publishers keep moving in this direction, which is actually supported by reports of how consumers are reacting to publishers' anti-consumer activities with regards to ebooks.

Given all that, I was amused when a friend "in the business" forwarded me an email message sent to a mailing list of book publishers in response to that NY Times article about consumers' potential revolt, that encourages publishers to get out there and fight back against such perceptions. The email contains a list of "myths and potential talking points." Some of which are amusing. It starts out by saying $9.99 doesn't need to be the price for ebooks, which is true, but they don't even seem to consider the notion that the price could be less (or even free), focusing only on examples of people paying more for ebooks. It then suggests that publishers start blaming the ebook device makers for "the implicit, false promise" that ebooks can be cheap. That's ridiculous. The idea isn't "false," it's just basic economics, and we've already seen it playing out in music. Why wouldn't the same economics play in the ebook space as well?

The talking points also tries to attack the claim that Amazon is losing money on every ebook sold by not actually responding to that (mostly accurate) claim, but instead directing your attention elsewhere, by pointing out that Amazon has a $50 billion market cap and can sell products like ebooks at a loss and still make massive profits. Yes, this is true. And it's true because Amazon seems to understand the basic economics of where the money is made: which is in scarce goods, not in infinite ones.

Among the other talking points is the claim that people who buy ebook readers for hundreds of dollars shouldn't bitch about ebook prices, because they're obviously rich enough to afford whatever publishers think the books should be priced at (again, ignoring basic economics). Also there's a claim that publishers are really lowering the prices on ebooks even as consumers see higher prices. While this is technically true in cases like Macmillan, where the company is lowering its wholesale price in order to get Amazon to raise its retail price, it misses the fact that this doesn't matter to consumers. Consumers don't care about the wholesale price. The talking points also included one about how publishers' deals with Apple might actually price books lower anyways -- and it seems like that particular talking point has been "anonymously" pushed into a NY Times article already.

The list goes on in this nature, but it's worrisome that publishers are thinking this way. Just as we were recently discussing, they're acting like the recording industry ten years ago: hunkering down for a "war" of words, rather than actually focusing on new business models or figuring out what consumers actually want. Instead, they're trying to dictate what consumers want and hoping for some sort of magic bullet in the form of ebook readers. This is a dangerous move by publishers that can only come back to haunt them. Instead of focusing on "countering" what consumers are saying, why not actually listen to them, and look for ways to provide what they want?

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Good looking Nebula Awards ballot this year! Congrats to all the nominees -- this is as fine a reading list as you're apt to find. Start with the novels: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak, Flesh and Fire by Laura Anne Gilman, The City & The City by China Miéville, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, and Finch by Jeff VanderMeer.

ShadyURL: "Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening."

The shady URL for ShadyURL is http://5z8.info/--INITIATE-CREDIT-CARD-XFER--_r8a4a_dogfights (Via Neatorama)

Here's Bill Gates' Zero Carbon presentation from TED2010. It was one of my favorite talks at the event.

From my report last week on Gates' talk:

"A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal." He and Nathan "Mosquito Zapper" Myrhvold are backing a nuclear approach. It's called Terrapower, and it's different from a standard nuclear reactor. Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today's reactors as fuel. "In terms of fuel this really solves the problem." He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky -- the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

TED Talk: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero

Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Google has acquired a popular iPhone application called reMail that provides 'lightning fast' full-text search of your Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts. The app downloads copies of all your e-mail which can then be searched with various Boolean options. reMail has only been in the application store for about six months — with a free version limited to one Gmail account and a premium version which can connect to multiple accounts. 'Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store,' writes company founder Gabor Cselle, who will be returning to Google as a Product Manager on the Gmail team. Google isn't saying what the fate of reMail might be. Some are suggesting reMail could be integrated into Gmail search or live on in some form as a part of Android, Google's mobile platform. Another possibility is that Google may have snapped up reMail just to kill it, not because reMail was a competitor to anything Google had, but because reMail made the iPhone better or the acquisition may have more to do with keeping good search technology away from the competition, as opposed to an attempt to undercut the iPhone. 'Perhaps Google is just planning to buy up all the iPhone developers, one at a time, until Android is the only game in town,' writes Bill Ray at the Register."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or "ad hoc" networks of consumers and the harsh reality is that advertisers completely fail to understand the process whereby a content is redistributed over the web. Thus, and in sharp contrast with what they claim, advertisers are completely clueless about how to build a viral marketing campaign and completely ignore what metrics should be deployed to measure their viral campaigns effectiveness. Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh Nevertheless, advertisers are so fascinated by the "concept" of viral marketing, that they are planning to spend increasingly greater budgets to start online viral marketing campaigns (eMarketer reports an estimated $1.4 billion in 2011 that advertisers will spend to place ads on social networking sites).

[...] the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist - is a problematic way to understand cultural practices.

At the root of this, there are two major misconceptions about viral marketing:

1. Viral content is something that gets published on the Internet and then spreads spontaneously like a virus.
2. People that find content interesting and meaningful for them or their social circle, proactively redistribute it using the Internet.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication - that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.

So, what makes a campaign really "viral" is not so much its ability to "be shared and re-transmitted" by as many people as possible, but the potential it has of being "repurposed", "re-adapted" by the largest number of people in the largest number of new contexts.

Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of "memes", a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use.

In this highly comprehensive and in-depth guide, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins and his team illustrate in simple terms how and what makes something "viral" as well as explain the dynamics that govern the social redistribution of your content across the web. Here all the details:

If It Does Not Spread, It Is Dead: Media Viruses and Memes

by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf with Joshua Green

Media Viruses and Memes

Use of the terms "viral" and "memes" by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers. Definitions of 'viral' media suffer from being both too limiting and too all-encompassing. The term 'viral' has been used to describe so many related but ultimately distinct practices - ranging from Word-of-Mouth marketing to video mash-ups and remixes posted to YouTube - that just what counts as viral is unclear. It is invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerrilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors. Needless, the concept of viral distribution is useful for understanding the emergence of a spreadable media landscape. Ultimately, however, viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or "ad hoc" networks of consumers. Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication - that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry.

The Spreadable Media Model

A close look at particular examples of Internet "memes" or "viruses" highlight the ways they have mutated as they have traveled through an increasingly participatory culture. Given these limitations, we are proposing an alternative model which we think better accounts for how and why media content circulates at the present time, the idea of spreadable media. A spreadable model emphasizes the activity of consumers - or what Grant McCracken calls "multipliers" - in shaping the circulation of media content, often expanding potential meanings and opening up brands to unanticipated new markets. Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of "memes", a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain 'purity' of message. In this article, we will explore the roots of the concept of viral media, looking at the concept of the "media viruses" and its ties to the theory of the "meme".

Limits of The Biological Metaphor

The reliance on a potent biological metaphor to describe the process of communication reflects a particular set of assumptions about the power relations between producers, texts, and consumers which may obscure the realities these terms seek to explain. The metaphor of "infection" reduces consumers to the involuntary "hosts" of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream". While attractive, such a notion does not reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes. A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations. In the following, we will outline the limits of these two analogies as part of making the case for the importance of adopting a new model for thinking about the grassroots circulation of content in the current media landscape. In the end, we are going to propose that these concepts be retired in favor of a new framework - spreadable media.

The Concept of Viral Media

Consider what happened when a group of advertising executives sat down to discuss the concept of viral media, a conversation which demonstrates the confusion about what viral media might be, about what it is good for, and why it is worth thinking about. One panelist began by suggesting viral media referred to situations "where the marketing messaging was powerful enough that it spread through the population like a virus", a suggestion the properties of viral media lie in the message itself, or perhaps in those who crafted that message. The second, on the other hand, described viral media in terms of the activity of consumers: "Anything you think is cool enough to send to your friends, that is viral". Later in the same exchange, he suggested "Viral, just by definition, is something that gets passed around by people". As the discussion continued, it became clearer and clearer that viral media, like art and pornography, lies in the eye of the beholder. No one knew for sure why any given message "turned viral", though there was lots of talk about "designing the DNA" of viral properties and being "organic" to the communities through which messages circulated. To some degree, it seemed the strength of a viral message depends on "how easy is it to pass", suggesting viralness has something to do with the technical properties of the medium, yet quickly we were also told that it had to do with whether the message fit into the ongoing conversations of the community: "If you are getting a ton of negative comments, maybe you are not talking about it in the right place." By the end of the exchange, no one could sort out what was meant by "viral media" or what metrics should be deployed to measure its success. This kind of definitional fuzziness makes it increasingly difficult to approach the process analytically. Without certainty about what set of practices the term refers to, it is impossible to attempt to understand how and why such practices work. As already noted, the reliance on a biological metaphor to explain the way communication takes place - through practices of 'infection' - represents the first difficulty with the notion of viral media. The attraction of the infection metaphor is two-fold:

1. It reduces consumers, often the most unpredictable variable in the sender-message-receiver frame, to involuntary "hosts" of media viruses;
2. While holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream".

The Media Virus

Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book Media Virus may not have invented the term "viral media", but his ideas eloquently describe the way these texts are popularly held to behave. The media virus, Rushkoff argues, is a Trojan horse, that surreptitiously brings messages into our homes - messages can be encoded into a form people are compelled to pass along and share, allowing the embedded meanings, buried inside like DNA, to "infect" and spread, like a pathogen. There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that this spread of ideas and messages can occur not only without the user's consent, but perhaps actively against it, requiring that people be duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content. Douglas Rushkoff insists he is not using the term "as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses... (such as) the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS" (Rushkoff, 9, emphasis his).

"Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The "protein shell" of a media virus might be an

• event,
• invention,
• technology,
• system of thought,
• musical riff,
• visual image,
• scientific theory,
• sex scandal,
• clothing style or even a
• pop hero - as long as it can catch our attention.

Anyone of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the data stream in the form of ideological code - not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call "memes" " (Rushkoff, p. 9-10).

The "hidden agenda" and "embedded meanings" Rushkoff mentions are the brand messages buried at the heart of viral videos, the promotional elements in videos featuring Mentos exploding out of soda bottles, or Gorillas playing the drum line of In the Air Tonight.

Memes Are Like Genes

The media virus proposition is that these marketing messages - messages consumers may normally avoid, approach skeptically, or disregard altogether - are hidden by the "protein shell" of compelling media properties. Nestled within interesting bits of content, these messages are snuck into the heads of consumers, or wilfully passed between them. These messages, Rushkoff and others suggest, constitute "memes", conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a sort of cultural version of the gene. Dawkins was looking for a way to explain cultural evolution, imagining it as a biological system. What genes are to genetics, he suggested, memes would be to culture. Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics:

1. Fidelity - memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;
2. Fecundity - memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;
3. Longevity - memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.

The meme, then, is "a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds" (Brodie, 1996, p. 32). They are the ideas at the center of virally spread events, some coherent, self-replicating idea which moves from person-to-person, from mind-to-mind, duplicating itself as it goes.

"Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation" (Dawkins, 1976, p.189)

Dawkins remained vague about the granularity of this concept, seeing it as an all-purpose unit which could explain everything from politics to fashion. Each of these fields are comprised of good ideas, good ideas which, in order to survive, attach themselves to media virii - funny, catchy, compelling bits of content - as a vehicle to infect new minds with copies of themselves.

The Pull of Viral Ideas

"We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information." (Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992, p. 399)

Though imagined long before the rise of the Internet and the Web, the idea of the meme has been widely embraced as a way of talking about the rapid dispersion of information and the widespread circulation of concepts which characterize the digital era.

Media Snacks

It has been a particularly attractive way to think about the rise of Internet fads like the LOLcats or Soulja Boy, fads considered seemingly trivial or meangingless. The content which circulates in such a fashion is seen as simplistic, fragmentary, and essentially meaningless, though it may shape our beliefs and actions in significant ways. Wired magazine (Miller, 2007) recently summed it up as a culture of "media snacks":

"We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive)."

This description of snacks implies that they are without nutritional value, trivial or meaningless aspect of our culture, a time waste. And if this meaningless content is self-replicating then consumers are "irrational," and unable to escape their infection. Yet these models - the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist - is a problematic way to understand cultural practices. We want to suggest that these materials travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them. At the most fundamental level, such an approach misunderstands the way content spreads, which is namely, through the active practices of people. As such, we would like to suggest:

1. That "memes" do not self-replicate;
2. That people are not "susceptible" to this viral media;
3. That viral media and Internet memes are not nutritionally bereft, meaningless 'snacks'.

Culture As a Metaphor For Memes

Central to the difficulties of both the meme and the media virus models is a particular confusion about the role people play in passing along media content. From the start, memetics has suffered from a confusion about the nature of agency. Unlike genetic features, culture is not in any meaningful sense self-replicating - it relies on people to propel, develop and sustain it. The term 'culture' originates from metaphors of agriculture: the analogy was of cultivating the human mind much as one cultivates the land. Culture thus represents the assertion of human will and agency upon nature. As such, cultures are not something that happen to us, cultures are something we collectively create. Certainly any individual can be influenced by the culture which surrounds them, by the fashion, media, speech and ideas that fill their daily life, but individuals make their own contributions to their cultures through the choices which they make. The language of memetics, however, strips aside the concept of human agency.

How Ideas Acquire People

Processes of cultural adaptation are more complex than the notion of meme circulation makes out. Indeed, theories for understanding cultural uptake must consider two factors not closely considered by memetics: human choice and the medium through which these ideas are circulated. Dawkins writes not about how "people acquire ideas" but about how "ideas acquire people." Every day humans create and circulate many more ideas than are actually likely to gain any deep traction within a culture. Over time, only a much smaller number of phrases, concepts, images, or stories survive. This winnowing down of cultural options is the product not of the strength of particular ideas but of many, many individual choices as people decide what ideas to reference, which to share with each other, decisions based on a range of different agendas and interests far beyond how compelling individual ideas may be. Few of the ideas get transmitted in anything like their original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs. Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process reveals little about the spread of these concepts. By the same token, ideas circulate differently in and through different media.

How Ideas Circulate Differently In and Through Different Media

Some media allow for the more or less direct transmission of these ideas in something close to their original form - as when a video gets replayed many times - while others necessarily encourage much more rapid transformations - as occurs when we play a game of "telephone" and each person passing along a message changes it in some way. So, it makes little sense to talk about "memes" as an all-purpose unit of thought without regard to the medium and processes of cultural transmission being described. Indeed, discussing the emergence of Internet memes, education researchers Michael Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2007) suggest Dawkins' notion of memetic 'fidelity' needs to be done away with altogether. Defining the Internet meme as the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea, presented as a written text, image, language, 'move' or some unit of cultural "stuff", Knobel and Lankshear suggest adaptation is central to the propagation of memes:

"Many of the online memes in this study were not passed on entirely 'intact' in that the meme 'vehicle' was changed, modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by participants... A concept like 'replicability' therefore needs to include remixing as an important practice associated with many successful online memes, where remixing includes modifying, bricolaging, splicing, reordering, superimposing, etc., original and other images, sounds, films, music, talk, and so on. (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, p. 208-209)"

Their argument is particularly revealing as a way to think about just what comprises the object at the heart of the Internet meme.

The "LOLcat" Internet Meme

The recent "LOLcat" Internet meme, built so heavily upon remixing and appropriation, is a good case study to illustrate the role of remixing in Internet memes. "LOLcats" are pictures of animals, most commonly cats, with digitally superimposed text for humorous effect. Officially referred to as "image macros", the pictures often feature "LOLspeak", a type of broken English that enhances the amusing tone of the juxtaposition. On websites such as icanhascheezburger.com, users are invited to upload their own "LOLcats" which are then shared throughout the web. Over time, different contributors have stretched the "LOLcat" idea in many different directions which would not have been anticipated by the original posters - including

• a whole strand of images centering around Walruses and buckets,
<li>the use of "LOLspeak" to translate religious texts (LOLbible) or represent complex theoretical arguments, <li>the use of similar image macros to engage with Emo culture,
• philosophy (loltheorists), and
• dogs (LOLdogs, see: Ihasahotdog.com).

The Internet Structure Meme

So just what is the "meme" at the centre of this Internet meme? What is the idea that is replicated? More than the content of the pictures, the "meme" at the heart of this Internet phenomenon is the structure of the picture itself - the juxtaposition, broken English, and particularly the use of irreverent humor. Given the meme lies in the structure, however - how to throw the pot rather than the pot itself - then the very viability of the meme is dependent on the ability for the idea to be adapted in a variety of different ways. In this sense, then, it is somewhat hard to see how contained within this structure is a "message" waiting to occupy unsuspecting minds.

The "Crank Dat" Song Meme

The re-use, remixing and adaptation of the LOLcat idea instead suggest that the spread and replication of this form of cultural production is not due to the especially compelling nature of the LOLcat idea but the fact it can be used to make meaning. A similar situation can be seen in the case of the "Crank Dat" song by Soulja Boy, which some have described as one of the most succesful Internet memes of 2007. Soulja Boy, originally an obscure amateur performer in Atlanta, produced a music video for his first song "Crank Dat", which he uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube. Soulja Boy then encouraged his fans to appropriate, remix, and reperform the song, spreading it through social networks, YouTube, and the blogosphere, in the hopes of gaining greater visibility for himself and his music. Along the way, Crank Dat got performed countless times by very different communities - from white suburban kids to black ballet dancers, from football teams to MIT graduate students. The video was used as the basis for "mash up" videos featuring characters as diverse as Winnie the Pooh and Dora the Explorer. People added their own steps, lyrics, themes, and images to the videos they made. As the song circulated, Soulja Boy's reputation grew - he scored a record contract, and emerged as a top recording artist. - in part as a consequence of his understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural content circulates within a participatory culture. The success of "Crank Dat" cannot be explained as the slavish emulation of the dance by fans, as the self-replication of a "compelling" idea. Rather, "Crank Dat" spread the way dance crazes have always spread - through the processes of learning and adaptation by which people learn to dance. As CMS student Kevin Driscoll discusses, watching others dance to learn steps and refining these steps so they express local experience or variation are crucial to dance itself. Similarly, the adaptation of the LOLcat form to different situations - theory, puppies, politicians - constitute processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them.

Originally written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf with Joshua Green for the Convergence Culture Consortium, and first published on February 11th, 2009 as If It Does Not Spread, It Is Dead: Media Viruses and Memes

About Henry Jenkins Henry Jenkins is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Previously, he was Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. He is also author of several books, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

About Xiaochang Li Xiaochang Li recently graduated with a Masters of Science from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, where she was a researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium and was heavily involved in planning the annual Futures of Entertainment conference.

About Ana Domb Krauskopf Ana Domb Krauskopf is a journalist and a film and music producer. She is also a researcher and graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where she works with the Convergence Culture Consortium. In her native Costa Rica, she co-founded Cinergiaa project to valorize and promote Center-American movies. In the past, Ana worked with the Papaya Music label where she co-produced the Papaya Fest.

About Joshua Green Joshua Green is a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Media Studies Program working with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. He is co-author of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Joshua is also an affiliate of the ARC Center of Excellence For Creative Industries and Innovation in Australia, and a member of the Advisory Board for the PBS social media project PBS Engage.

Photo credits: Media Viruses and Memes - Geopaul Spreadable Media Model - Nikolay Kropachev Limits of The Biological Metaphor - Henrik Jonsson The Concept of Viral Media - Peepo The Media Virus - Alwyncooper Memes Are Like Genes - Fotohunter The Pull of Viral Media - SchulteProductions Media Snacks - JLV Image Works Culture As a Metaphor For Memes - ManoAfrica How Ideas Acquire People - How Ideas Circulate Differently In and Through Different Media - Subrat Nayak The "LOLcat" Internet Meme - Karindalziel The Internet Structure Meme - Andrew Johnson

Ever wanted to make Lego soap? Rachel @ CRAFT writes:

We are a big Lego-fanatic family, and it's fun to find ways to work Lego into all aspects of our lives (not just playtime). This tutorial from Roots and Wings shows how to create a mold from Lego blocks that you can then use to create these fun Lego soaps. These would make great favors for a Lego birthday party and would be a great way to get kids to get excited about washing their hands... though they might just end up playing with them...

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As a contributing editor at Make Magazine, I know how important a good magazine cover is for single copy sales. A pretty girl is good for sales, and a guy dissecting a house plant is not so good.

This is my favorite cover of all time - it has it all. (But I just can't imagine how the scenario depicted could possibly take place. Maybe these people are models on a photo shoot gone bad, or maybe this is the top floor of a parking garage.)

Sure made me want to buy the mag. So I went on eBay and bought it.

We had an interesting meetup at NYU last night, the first in what may become a series of Thursday night meetups patterened after the meetups we had at Berkman in 2003 and on.

The meeting was supposed to follow the BloggerCon rules of moderation, but most people don't know about these, so it takes a while before it feels normal. I had that experience trying to boot up BloggerCon-style meetings in Nashville and Palo Alto. If the people don't know how it works, it just doesn't work.

So about half-way through the meeting I stopped moderating and let the discussion go where it would naturally go. And I learned something from this. I guess that's not surprising.

In Silicon Valley, if you let a discussion wander, it ends up centered on the point of view of the technology industry. You have users and they generate content. Everything revolves around that model. It's pretty inhuman, because the people who do the generating are sometimes "experts" who invest their whole lives in understanding stuff, and then want to share it with others because that's what humans like to do, even if they aren't being paid. Of course the tech companies are all about being paid, for doing what they do. The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don't think so!

Okay, everyone says NY is where the future is. I'm afraid this might become hype just like the story you hear about Silicon Valley. It's a way of saying the rest of the world doesn't count. Of course people like to think that they live in the one place that makes a difference, it's simpler that way. The world is so complex, who wouldn't want it to be simpler. But who would be happy if they thought the center of the world was somewhere else? So the battle is constant. And for a while people believed the center was in Silicon Valley. I think the worst thing in the world is to live in the center. There's no where to go but down from there. Upside is better. So I choose to think where I live is somewhere off-center. It's also more interesting.

So when the New York conversation drifts, it doesn't end up where the Silicon Valley conversation ends. I guess this is no surprise, right? Where it ends up is with the (forgive me I don't know the terminology) the guy writing the story that informs everyone else. Who is everyone else? It's the hamsters again! This time the hamsters, instead of generating content, are generating revenue! They're clicking on the tip jar, causing micropayments to flow to the author (and his or her editors) so they can earn a living while informing all the other hamsters who are happily paying for all this good stuff. But what happens if the knowledge that everyone wants isn't in the reporters' heads but rather resides with the hamsters? What then?

In the past there was a simple answer. No sale. The information just doesn't get there. But that answer is no longer good enough.

Two cases in point. One, the prototype -- This American Life did a special called Giant Pool of Money -- which should win a Pulitzer for explaining the financial crisis of 2008 in terms anyone with a mind could understand. Everyone who heard it probably remembers exactly where they were when they did. I was walking on Marin Ave in Berkeley. It was great. Before I heard it I had no clue what the financial crisis was about. After hearing it, I got it. And everyone agrees -- we need more of this. But, I found out last night, much to my chagrin, that it took months to produce this episode. And there's the rub, and why the people who are invested in the NY-based system are so enamored of this example, because it proves that You Need Us. Without heavily and expensively produced content, they say, you won't be informed.

So I provide a counter-example. One that fits my model, which I proudly think of as being neither Silicon Valley-centered or New York-centered. I (of course) think my model is reality-centered. (Yes, I am arrogant, I cop to it.)

The counter-example is this. A fantastic FreshAir episode, one hour in duration, recorded live, with almost no production, that completely explained the options for universal health care in the US just as the debate was beginning. It was timely, complete, wonderful and super-inexpensive. Why? Because an individual did all the work. It was paid for by a publisher of course, and he is a professional writer, so while it was expensive, it's part of a reservoir of value that thinkers on both coasts tend to ignore, and in doing so, I think -- miss where the answer is going to come from. The question is -- how will we satisfy the enormous thirst people have for information when the economics of information no longer support vast budgets, or vast amounts of time, to produce expensive wonderful programming like Pool of Money. The answer: From the sources. The people who know what's up.

Sure, This American Life produced something sexier, with great production value, and FreshAir is a talk show. But it was still riveting. I remember where I was when I listened to it (driving from Santa Cruz between Los Gatos and Fremont). I found, last night, when explaining it, I could name each of the models the author described, and it's been six months since the program aired. It obviously made as much of an impression as Pool of Money did.

So the moral of the story is that neither coast has the answer, but the answer is out there all the same. Let's not gravitate to an assumption that the cursor has moved 3000 miles to the east and bring all our sloppy thinking habits with us. We have minds, let's use them, and our minds have information, and let's distribute it, to whoever wants it, no matter where it comes from.

netux writes to mention that Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug, as an open source project under the BSD license. The release features a complete architectural overhaul using a modern version of the Scope Protocol (STP-1), a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and a Wiki to get the ball rolling. "This is Opera’s first full open source project, so there will be a learning curve. We ask you to bear with us while we get everything up and running and policies in place. Coming from a closed source background there are some hurdles to overcome, such as the current bug tracking system being on a closed server. We hope to migrate to an open bug tracking system as the project gets on its feet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We just received a fresh supply of MintyBoost USB Charger kits v2.0 that are all ready to be soldered up taken on a road trip. What's a MintyBoost? It's a small and simple USB charger for your iPod or other MP3 player, camera, cellphone, or almost any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge. Please note, mint tin is not included.

Building the MintyBoost is really easy, and the kit is a great first time soldering project. You can read more about making the RuntyBoost (pictured above) here. It's the same MintyBoost electronics inside a larger candy tin. This allows you to store your charging cable too!

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Well, this is interesting. Despite the various biased, one-sided, "education programs" designed by the entertainment industry for schools, it seems that plenty of students are smart enough to make ethical decisions in a more nuanced and understanding fashion. Michael Geist points us to the rather surprising news that the winner of a high school ethics essay contest wrote his essay explaining why file sharing may be illegal, but it's not ethically wrong.

He argues that there are a variety of reasons why kids still engage in unauthorized file trading, but one of them is that they just don't think copyright laws are morally justified. Instead, they see the benefit and the opportunities presented in easier sharing and distribution of works, allowing more people to hear and discover new artists, while opening up lots of new potential business models. All good stuff.

But what's most surprising is that this essay actually won the contest. While there are plenty of us who understand the views expressed in the paper, you would think that most folks who haven't thought too much about these issues will quickly resort to the "but.. but... infringement is bad!" arguments, and refuse to even consider an essay arguing that copyright infringement can be morally justified. So, kudos to the judges for at least having an open mind on this one.

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2010 marks the centenary of a number of great events, including the first air to ground radio message.

Exactly 100 years ago, a gray tabby named Kiddo became the first cat to cross the Atlantic Ocean by dirigible. Kiddo belonged to one of the crew members of American explorer Walter Wellman's airship America. In 1910 Wellman attempted to cross the ocean, leaving from Atlantic City, New Jersey on 15 October that year. Kiddo stowed away in one of the lifeboats, and was after his discovery turned out to be as big a pain as only an angry, claustrophobic cat can be, scratching, mewing, and howling and generally bugging the heck out of everybody on board. The America carried radio equipment -- the first aircraft so equipped -- and apparently the historic first, in-flight radio message, to a secretary back on land, read: 'Roy, come and get this goddamn cat'

More information on this momentous event is here.

I am getting ready for my first NYC runway show, the Fairytale Fashion Show, on Feb. 24th at Eyebeam. I am writing about some of the preparations, on CRAFT and Make: Online. This show will be of the technology fashion collection developed at FairytaleFashion.org, where technology is used to turn make-believe into reality.

Last week, we looked at the Twinkle Pad circuit board that was developed for my sound reactive clothing. During the runway show, there will be a live circuit bending orchestra creating custom tunes for the sound reactive clothing. The orchestra consists of Peter Kirn, Lara Grant, Sarah Grant, and Matt Ganicheau. They will be making tunes from a hacked sewing machine and felted origami.

Sarah will be playing a felted origami "fortune teller" device. As she opens and closes the different segments, she will change the resistance across the felt. This will alter the playback speed of the sample. Lara will be playing the sewing machine pictured above. Two switches are created by wiring the needle and sewing through conductive fabric, each of the two switches triggering different sounds. These switches are connected to an Arduino Diecimila talking to Max/MSP on a computer, via the serial object. The knobs and buttons on the machine control the music loop played, the speed, and the frequency. Matt will process these sounds using a Monome, an open source controller, and the software Max/MSP to build textures and rhythms into the music. Peter will be spinning electronic beats to keep the models stepping, syncing to computers and sewing machines, and incorporating sounds synthesized from scratch and sampled from lo-fi electronics, into an electronic, synthetic fairy tale soundtrack. Using custom software he wrote from his phone, he'll be commanding the ensemble wirelessly from his hand.

About the Musicians
Sarah and Lara Grant are a sisterly team with interests in physical computing, electronic textiles, and signal processing working under the name Felted Signal Processing. Peter Kirn is a composer/musician and media artist/visualist, an electronic producer, and the editor of leading tech blogs createdigitalmusic.com and createdigitalmotion.com. Matt Ganicheau is a composer, designer and educator with a passion for exploring the boundaries of interactive audio.

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BeardedChimp writes "I, like many others here, have learned to program by myself. Starting at a young age and learning through fiddling I have taught myself C++, Java, python, PHP, etc., but what I want to know is what I haven't learned that is important when taught in a traditional computer science curriculum. I have a degree in physics, so I'm not averse to math. What books, websites, or resources would you recommend to fill in the gaps?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guy sez, "This is my fractal generator and zoomer. The basic premise is I wrote a php program which will generate a fractal based on parameters passed to it and return it as an image to the browser. By calling this program with specific parameters a fractal can be generated that can be zoomed in on infinitely. The other link is a demonstration of the relationships between the Mandelbrot and Julia Set versions of the fractals. If you view the Mandelbrot fractal and then tile the Julia version you will begin to see the outline of the Mandelbrot version in the tiled Julia. This has been a lot of fun to write, I would love to take it a bit further and write some explanations and teaching tools. Please keep in mind that all the images are generated on the fly so if you do post this my server may go BOING!"

Welcome to the Fractal Generator (Thanks, Guy!)

The Superintendant of the Lower Merion School District -- where parents have initiated a class action suit over the covert use of students' laptops to surveil them in school and at home -- has sent a letter to parents with more information about the spying. The school admits that there was spyware installed on students laptops that allowed for remote, covert activation of their webcams, but maintains that the measure was only to be used in the event of theft of the machine (some had speculated that the school was only able to surveil students' hard drives, and that the images of a student engaged in "misconduct" in his home that a vice-principal confronted the student with had been taken by the student, intentionally, and stored on the laptop's hard-drive, from which it was retrieved by the school administration -- this now seems not to have been the case). The school also claims that the system can only capture still images, not audio or video. They have disabled the system for now and deny that it was misused.

As a result of our preliminary review of security procedures today, I directed the following actions:
· Immediate disabling of the security-tracking program.
· A thorough review of the existing policies for student laptop use.
· A review of security procedures to help safeguard the protection of privacy; including a review of the instances in which the security software was activated. We want to ensure that any affected students and families are made aware of the outcome of laptop recovery investigations.
· A review of any other technology areas in which the intersection of privacy and security may come into play.

School Sued For Spying On Students With Laptop Cameras Says It Was A Security Feature, Turns It Off (Thanks, Dan!)

(Image: IMG_6395, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from bionicteaching's photostream)

andylim writes to share that according to a recent interview, Toei Animation, producers of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball z, think that mobile phones and tablets could help save the anime industry, which is being heavily damaged by piracy. Unfortunately the difficulty is getting all of the players to move in the same direction. "We think it's an incredibly exciting opportunity. Manufacturers and networks are going to need more than touchscreens and Twitter to shift phones in the future — content such as Toei's will hopefully add that extra value. Unfortunately, Ebato and Song haven't been inundated with requests for information. 'There's no convergence... the tech people and the content people aren't talking,' adds Song. In fact Song's last statement to us is much more than an anecdotal truth, it's the heart of the matter. It's not enough that Apple and Amazon are talking to content creators, everyone should be doing it. Of course, a good start would be to not hide people like Ebato and Song in distant exhibition halls, where only we can find them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The International Olympics Committee's abuse of intellectual property law continues to go to ridiculous lengths. Slashdot points out that apparently UVEX, makers of popular skiing gear such as goggles and helmets (I own a pair of their goggles, actually) had happily mentioned somewhere that gold medal winner Lindsey Vonn had worn some of their gear on their website... and the IOC sent them some sort of nastygram. Amusingly, UVEX responded in verse, with a blog post entitled Blonde we like wins Downhill (Last name rhymes with "Bonn"). Here's a snippet:

There once was a lawyer from the IOC,
who called us to protect "intellectual property."

"During the Olympics", she said with a sneer
"your site can't use an Olympian's name even if they use your gear."

"No pictures, no video, no blog posts can be used..."
Even if they are old? "No!", she enthused.

While Olympians chase gold the IOC pursues green.
Cough up millions, or your logo cannot be seen.

I can't see how such a claim could stand up in court. Accurately reporting that an Olympian wore your gear seems like it would fall under a perfectly legitimate fair use claim. But who has time to battle the IOC? In the meantime, did you know that Lindsey Vonn wore UVEX gear even though (*gasp*!) UVEX didn't sponsor the Olympics?

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Watch the video. This is one of those things you kind of have to see happen to understand.

A so-called "stick bomb," "frame bomb," or (worst of all) "xyloexplosive device" (Wikipedia) is an arrangement of flat flexible beams, like popsicle sticks or tongue depressors, that are woven together under tension such that they can be "set off" at one point and sort of explosively disassemble starting at that point, with the reaction propagating away along the structure. Like domino toppling, but flashier.

The problem is all of the common names for this trick would probably get you strip-searched if you used them at the airport.

TSA AGENT: "What are you doing with all these popsicle sticks?"

STICKBOMBER: "I'm going to a stick-bomb convention. I mean, I use them to build frame bombs. Haven't you ever heard of a xyloexplosive device?"

TSA AGENT: "Kindly put your hands in the air and step over here with me, sir. Don't make any sudden moves."

I'm not sure I have any better suggestions. But perhaps we can all brainstorm. "Poptomata?" "Spring-frames?" Anyone?

[via Boing Boing]

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An anonymous reader writes "After going through all kinds of grief, including being shut down by the Washington State Ecology Department, classifying them as an 'incinerator,' it looks like Green Power Inc is finally ready to shine. The Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marines, in a joint effort, validated their technology in November, and the results are now being published for the first time. For every 100 tons of municipal solid waste feedstock processed each day, the plant produces 1240 gallons of Naphtha, 3700 gallons of Kerosene, 6900 gallons of Diesel and 3000 gallons of Fuel Oil. And even the ash can be used for cement or asphalt. They generate 1 MW of electricity to sell to the grid 24/7, running three shifts per day to keep the plant going, employing approximately five people per shift. Sticker price is $25 million. ROI, 3.5 years. Maybe with this announcement, the trend of no sales in the US will change, compared to the 72 foreign contracts backed by letters of credit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A steampunk style lighter in the form of a retro raygun. Thanks go to Molly Friedrich for the original article in MAKE Volume 17.

To download The "Discreet Companion" Ladies' Raygun video click here and subscribe in iTunes. Check out the complete "Discreet Companion" Ladies' Raygun article in MAKE Volume 17 and you can see that in our Digital Edition. Here is the pattern for the Raygun body.

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A steampunk style lighter in the form of a retro raygun. Thanks go to Molly Friedrich for the original article in MAKE Volume 17. View the PDF of this project. And then subscribe to MAKE magazine for other great projects you can do over the weekend.

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RobotRunAmok writes "Ryan Tate, at Gawker, describes the 'heated turf war' waging at the New York Times. The print and digital divisions have differing views over how much a subscription to the Gray Lady (iPad edition) should cost. The print troops believe $20-$30 monthly is the proper price point (fearing that setting the mark any lower will jeopardize print distribution), while the digital soldiers are digging in their heels at $10 a month. The Kindle version is already managed by the Print Army, so don't count on logic necessarily driving any decisions here. It's complicated: the Web version of the paper is still free through 2011, and the computer 'Times Reader' has already been released and priced at $14.95 monthly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we wrote about an odd antitrust lawsuit against Google by a company named TradeComet. The lawsuit was a joke. Basically, the company was an arbitrage player that tried to create spam-like pages that people would find on Google searches, and would make money by then getting people to click on pay-per-click ad links to get where they really wanted to go. Google properly classifies sites like this as spam, and its ranking methodology punished the site accordingly. It had nothing to do with being "anti-competitive," it was just Google making sure its search results were better for users. That lawsuit is basically in a holding pattern right now, as the judge considers Google's motion to dismiss.

However, a similar lawsuit has popped up, and it's a bit strange. Eric Goldman has all the murky details, of how a shopping search engine named myTriggers apparently got a line of credit from Google and used it to buy a bunch of AdWords search ads to drive traffic to its site (and then raised money based on the resulting traffic). Once again, Google rejiggered its algorithm, and suddenly the ads for myTriggers were a lot more expensive (by one to two orders of magnitude). The company couldn't pay its bill to Google, so Google hired a local lawyer (in Ohio) and went to court to try to get myTriggers to pay the $335,000 it owed. Simple enough.

Except that myTriggers returned fire by claiming antitrust violations by Google, and even went out and hired three separate lawfirms, including (conspiracy theory time) the same law firm that represented TradeComet and which is closely connected to Microsoft. As Goldman notes:

I am struggling to make sense of myTriggers' litigation choices. Assuming myTriggers even has the money, writing a $335k check to Google (and I bet Google would have taken less!) is almost assuredly cheaper than paying three law firms to mount an antitrust assault on a $20B/year behemoth. Assuming that myTriggers wants to maximize profits, then either (1) myTriggers thinks its odds are good enough that it will win AND make enough money to pay the 7 lawyers on the counterclaim's signature page plus their teams, or (2) the law firms struck an unbelievably sweet deal on fees.

Goldman also notes that Google probably wishes it hadn't filed a claim in a local Ohio state court, as the antitrust battle might now need to be fought there, rather than in a friendlier federal court closer to home:

Whatever the case, I suspect the antitrust claims caught Google flat-footed. A simple and low-stakes collections matter has blown up into a potentially significant lawsuit in an undesirable forum. Google chose Ohio state court for the collections matter despite its AdWords contract, so now it will have a tough time extricating itself from that court. But I suspect it would rather have an antitrust case in federal court, not state court--often (but not always) federal judges are more sophisticated than state judges and less susceptible to hometown bias. And I'm sure Google would rather fight antitrust claims on one of the coasts than in the Rust Belt, especially if myTriggers argues that Googleâ??s evilness cost Ohioans jobs. Google probably didnâ??t mean to offer battle in this venue, but someone did a really good job of seizing the opportunity and forcing Google to fight the battle in a suboptimal setting.

As with the TradeComet case, the antitrust claim from myTriggers sounds incredibly weak, and it probably should be thrown out, but given the uncertainties of it being filed in the local court, Google may have to take it a bit more seriously. And, of course, the possibility of a secret Microsoft connection makes this even more interesting. Still, I can't see this getting that far in the long run. I hope that the judge recognizes the basic weaknesses of the case: here's a company that relied entirely on a single supplier who had every right to change its policies if it felt it didn't deliver a good customer experience, and it did so. myTriggers now seems to be suing as some sort of sour grapes for its own business failings.

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Using a shoebox, some convex lenses of varying focal length, and a bit of poster board maker manish15 has assembled an inexpensive DIY art enlarger on the cheap. Similar to an epidioscope, the device projects an image onto a drawing surface.

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BanjoTed writes "In a move to counter sales of pre-owned games, EA recently revealed DLC perks for those who buy new copies of Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Now, PlayStation platform holder Sony has jumped on the bandwagon with similar plans for the PSP's SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3. '[Players] will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title. UMD copies will use a redeemable code while the digital version will authenticate automatically in the background. Furthermore ... anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bibble Labs has posted another update to its Bibble 5 Pro software just three weeks after posting the previous version. v5.0.2 fixes bugs and extends RAW support to additional cameras including Leica M9 and Ricoh GXR. It also adds a Soft Proofing option that enables users to check previews of prints for color accuracy, amongst other improvements. The latest version is currently available as a free upgrade for existing v5 customers from Bibble's support forum.

Wired has a story written by journalist Paige Williams about her experience putting up a long form feature story about the pseudonymously named Dolly Freed, who had written a rather successful book as a teenager called Possum Living: How to Live Well Without A Job and (Almost) No Money -- but following the publication, Dolly decided to effectively disappear. Williams tracked her down and wrote a feature article about her, but couldn't find anyone willing to publish it. The NY Times was going to, but backed out when Williams refused to reveal Freed's real name. So, instead, she put the article on her own site and put up a Paypal donation button, hoping to recover her expenses. She calls it "Radiohead journalism" after Radiohead's famed "name your own price" experiment.

Then, with little direct publicity -- beyond mentioning it on Facebook and Twitter -- the story got a bit of attention. Not a ton, mind you, but a few thousand views, which resulted in about 160 people donating a bit over $1,500. Combined with the kill fee from the NY Times for backing out on publishing the feature, her expenses were covered.

There are some interesting things here, but I'm afraid that the catchy name "Radiohead journalism" is not really accurate or a very good way of thinking about this particular experiment. Radiohead had a variety of other income streams, and from the very beginning, the band admitted that the "name your own price" offering for digital files was part of a way to get more attention for the fancy "discbox" tangible version of the album. In other words, Radiohead always had an additional reason to buy, which Williams didn't really have. Her model was more of a "give it away and pray" for donations, which can work in some cases, but isn't really sustainable.

Still, it does show that there are some creative ways (and this is but one of many) to fund longer form journalism -- and, contrary to the opinion of some, if there's real demand for such things, business models will begin to develop. Williams, for her part, seems interested in further experimenting and improving on the model, and I'm hopeful that she'll look at some more involved business models that go beyond a straight donation model.

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From robots that study the seas, to the surprising connection between dolphins and diabetes: The American Association for the Advancement of Science conference hasn't even started yet, and I'm already learning about some wonderful things. Technically, AAAS opens Friday morning, but I got to San Diego on Wednesday so I could get in on some laboratory tours at the University of California San Diego, and a few press briefings Thursday.

Eric Vance, another journalist here, compared it to speed-dating—15 minute sprints through what a scientist is working on and why they think it's important. And, by that standard, there were definitely a few researchers I'd have shaved my legs for.

Robots Under the Sea

We know that the oceans are changing along with the climate, and the Argo program is one of the ways scientists collect that data. Made up of more than 3200 unassuming, little Army green floats, the array collects information on ocean temperature and salinity from all around the world and radios it back to researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In the past year alone, information collected by Argo has found its way into more than 100 scientific papers.

Argo is important because it can measure temperature and salinity at different depths, from lots and lots of places. Over the course of 10 days, the floats sink down 1000 meters, drift for days, then go down even further—another 1000 meters—before returning the surface and sending home the bacon. Each float can take 150 of these profiles over 4-5 years of life.

The downside to Argo is that you can't control where the floats travel—they just drift on the current. Their cousin, an underwater glider called "Spray", takes directions a little better. The neat thing about Spray is that the gliders can travel without a propeller, by simply changing buoyancy—up and down—they slowly move forward. Pitch and roll are adjusted, via remote control, by shifting the position of heavy battery packs inside the glider.

Tracking Tumors

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have come up with a way to tell whether a cancer patient has beaten their disease—and keep track of any recurrence—with just a blood test.

The test works a lot like viral load tests for HIV. Cancer cells carry altered DNA, where large chunks of the sequence have been flip-flopped. It's a kind of alteration that doesn't occur in healthy tissue. The more cancer cells in the body, the more of this altered DNA that can be found in the blood stream, and vice versa.

The catch: This is all very personal. No two individuals have the same alterations, so to find the cancer fingerprint, you first have to sequence each patient's healthy genes, and genes from a biopsy of their tumor. It's an expensive process—about $5000 per patient right now—and it can't be used without an initial cancer diagnosis.

But even with those limitations, there's a lot of potential. The blood tests could help doctors determine whether surgery to remove a tumor was successful—if the patient's blood is free of altered cancer DNA, then the cancer is gone, and they could avoid post-op chemotherapy. The tests could also be used to monitor cancer survivors over long periods of time, and make sure their tumors don't grow back.

Dolphins and Diabetes

Dolphins could serve as an important model for Type 2 diabetes in humans, according to researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. Like humans, dolphins have a brain that is very large for their body size and needs a lot of glucose (fancy word for sugar) to function properly. Since the early 1990s scientists have thought that this need for glucose was key to the evolution of diabetes.

The basic idea works like this: When you eat a high-protein diet, you aren't getting a lot of sugars. Humans had very high-protein diets during the Ice Age, which set the stage for diabetes. A chance mutation might have made some people more resistant to insulin—and thus, more likely to keep the sugars they did get in their bloodstream longer. Given the circumstances, that mutation would have been beneficial. But in a world where carbs are cheap and Twinkies are plentiful, the same mutation works against you—too much sugar builds up and you get diabetes.

Dolphins, meanwhile, also have a high-protein, low-sugar/carb diet. And they've also developed insulin resistance that helps them retain sugars. In fact, when dolphins are fed sugar, they end up with high blood glucose levels that last for hours, the same as diabetic humans. The difference: Dolphins seem to be able to turn their insulin resistance on and off, depending on how much and how often they're able to eat. There have already been some indications that humans have a similar switch. So studying dolphins could help us learn to turn off insulin resistance, and effectively cure Type 2 diabetes.

Coming tomorrow: Coverage from more in-depth lectures on alternative energy, food allergies and more.

Image courtesy Flickr user krister462, via CC

An anonymous reader writes "The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday granted Google the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis. Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. 'We made this filing so we can have more flexibility in procuring power for Google's own operations, including our data centers,' Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said via e-mail. But the authorization also raises the prospect that Google may start to buy and sell energy as a business." Reader angry_tapir supplies a link to the approval document itself (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Niki Raapana designed a DIY shelter called a Gertee.

Gertees are round houses made of sticks and poles tied together with zipties and covered with cloth or other materials. Each one is as unique as the owner who builds it.

All ger/yurts can be tailor made to fit any kind of budget. Many builders world-wide offer varieties of the yurt at prices ranging from 2 to 25K. My variations, based on the original Mongolian Ger design, expand the concept to include more people who don't have the 2K.

American made, high end yurts are so well constructed and modern they are getting HUD approval. In English towns residents are overturning municipal codes prohibiting odd looking tent homes. Yurts are a growing option for camping in National Parks and Wilderness areas. They also have an emerging fan base in the sustainable development-green community.

These may be perfect for creative people who want to try something new or they may be an optional shelter for homeless disaster victims in areas full of scrap lumber and salvageable materials. People from all backgrounds and income brackets can build these very comfortable little round home for themselves, and even the lowest end ones are very cute and sturdy.

Read the instructable to learn how to make your own. [via Beyond the Beyond]

More:

• Tent camping for the city dweller
• When tents take flight

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wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of "business model" (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid's DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that's such an attractive nuisance, it's bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product. (Be sure to click below for the whole thing)

If you are a pirate, this is what you get (via Making Light)

BanjoTed writes "We hear lots about the issues facing violent games in Australia, but the anti-games bandwagon is gathering pace closer to home — in Switzerland, to be precise. The Swiss government is gearing up to consider a total ban on mature games in the country."

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With the news coming out that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has agreed to investigate both RIM and Apple over patent claims brought by Kodak, it makes you wonder if we'll soon be able to have any smartphones at all. As you hopefully know the ITC process is a sneaky loophole used by patent holders to get two totally unrelated shots at putting the same company on trial for infringing on the same patents. There's the regular court process, and then there's the ITC, who can't fine companies, but can issue injunctions barring the import of the products. This process is regularly abused for anti-competitive purposes. Of course, there are other, similar charges that the ITC is reviewing as well, and it begins to make you wonder if any smartphone can actually "survive" this process.

Pretty much all smartphones are made outside of the US, so they can all be barred by the ITC, and with the technology in your average smartphone being covered by hundreds of patents, it's almost certain that every smartphone infringes on a slew of patents. Obviously, it's unlikely that anything will ever result in a full import ban on any particular phone -- the second that happened, the company would just give up and pay a ton of cash to make the complaining company go away -- but it does highlight what a wasteful process this is, and how it's taking good money away from actual innovation in smartphones and having it go towards stunts like this.

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A VIMBY video about hackerspaces, featuring Philadelphia's Hive 76 and Mr. Johnny Hackerspace himself, Mitch Altman.

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PopSci has a good vide round of the 2010 ToyFair... I like the laser-harp-type thing...

Say the word "toy" to a techie, and his mind will think one thing: robots. But all infrared-loving, artificially-intelligent smart-toy-ogling tech-savvy aside, new toys can instill as much "ooh! shiny!" as even the hottest cellphone. And we're not just talking about robots: This week, the International Toy Fair hit NYC, and PopSci.com found 20 funky new toys with a few tricks up their sleeves.

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Former FCC chair Michael Powell really, really, really wants to believe that there's viable competition in the broadband market, but he seems to have a history of using tiny experiments (that may go nowhere) as if they prove that there's real competition. You may recall that when he was in charge of the FCC he declared broadband-over-powerlines "the great broadband hope" despite years and years of failed trials. Following his pronouncements on how BPL would present a viable "third" entrant into the competitive space, the prospects for BPL have continued to dwindle.

Now he's claiming that Google's latest decision to offer high speed broadband in very limited trials, shows that the market is generating competition just fine without unnecessary interference from the government via any sort of broadband stimulus plan.

Of course, there are a few problems with this. First, Google has only announced stuff, it hasn't done anything yet, and even if it does, it appears the trials will be quite limited. But the bigger issue is this myth that the current market is this free and open market unencumbered by bad gov't regulation. The history of the broadband market is the history of government's subsidizing and favoring large incumbent telcos. The idea that suddenly everyone wants to "protect the free market" for internet access, when the market has never been a free market is pretty silly. What they mean is actually to protect the market for incumbents. Unless, of course, the incumbents are willing to pay back all the subsidies and preferential treatment they've received from the government over the years?

On the whole, I do agree with Powell's position that we should be careful how we implement any national broadband plan, and that the focus should be on more competition -- but I wouldn't take Google's announcement alone to be any sort of "evidence" of a free market in internet access.

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CWmike writes "Microsoft and Yahoo announced Thursday morning that the US DOJ and the European Commission have approved an agreement between the two firms to have the Bing search engine power Yahoo's sites. The companies said that engineers will begin adapting Bing for the Yahoo site 'in the coming days' and that they hope work is completed, at least the US, by the end of this year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott says:

"The much anticipated 4th volume of Image Comics' Harvey Award-winning anthology, POPGUN, hits stores next week, and features new work by an eclectic mix of artists sure to please both fanboys and Juxtapozers: Ben Templesmith, Erik Larsen, Jeffrey Brown, Mark Andrew Smith, Jeremy Tinder, Brian Winkeler, Jess Fink, D.J. Kirkbride, Jock, Thomas Scioli, Dave Curd and many more. To celebrate, Meltdown Comics in Hollywood and Jim Hanley's Universe in NYC are throwing release parties on February 24th! Drop by to meet the creators, eat, drink and and listen to groovy music."

Hollywood, NYC.

Pre-order Popgun, Vol 4. on Amazon

From the MAKE Forums:

Forum user thetanktheory built this Glove Mouse to help improve his FPS game skills:

Built from an old laser mouse and some random parts i had lying around. This is a first version and I have quite a few improvements in mind (already working on the next one) but, it functions a lot like I hoped it would. It makes those quick, twitch-reactions in FPS' much easier. Currently I need to move the buttons over a bit and center the laser a bit more. I plan to add a few more mappable buttons, figure out how to implement a scroll-wheel, lower the laser assembly's profile, and cover all the functional parts.

More:

• AirMouse, a cyberpunk-styled, hand-mounted mouse
• PowerGlove mouse mod continued
• DIY Mouse Modding
• Moldable mouse
• Augmented glove points you in the right direction

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Last month, we wrote a bit about Ubisoft's bizarre anti-consumer policy of using DRM on games that requires an internet connection to check in (even if you're just playing locally). But, it gets worse. As a whole bunch of you sent in (but compgeek was first), apparently it doesn't just check once to see if you have an internet connection, but regularly checks, and if you've lost that internet connection, it will boot you out of the game and you'll lose everything that you've done since your last checkpoint or save. This is a serious problem for anyone who has even slightly flakey WiFi or an internet connection that goes down frequently (all too common these days). Ubisoft's history with DRM is filled with similar missteps, and it's really amazing that the company seems to be so oblivious to why treating fans badly is such a bad idea.

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Barence writes with some news to interest those with netbooks running Windows: "Netbooks aren't famed for their high-definition video playing prowess, but if you've got about $10 and a few minutes going spare, there is a way to enjoy high-definition trailers and videos on your Atom-powered portable. You need three things: a copy of Media Player Classic Home Cinema, CoreCodec's CoreAVC codec, and some HD videos encoded in AVC or h.264 formats. This blog takes you through the process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In January, I spent two weeks with the kids at Ama Ghar, a home for underprivileged children* in Kathmandu Valley. It's a narrow four-story red brick building off of a busy two-lane road, and it houses 38 children whose parents are dead or debilitated from physical and mental illness. Many of them come from remote villages that are a full day's walk from the nearest road; communities without electricity that have high illiteracy rates.

Materially, the kids at Ama Ghar have little beyond bare necessities. Their toys are soccer balls made of rubber bands and old car tires. In the mornings they wash their hair and brush their teeth at a cold water tap outdoors, and after school they play with their half-exploded imitation Mizuno volleyball near the neighbor's pigsty until the sun goes down. Most nights, they do their homework under a single solar-powered backup lightbulb because of scheduled electrical outages, before going to sleep in tiny rooms crammed with second-hand bunk beds.

The most surprising thing about these kids, though, is not their living conditions. It's their attitude. These are really good kids. Generally speaking, they don't cheat, steal, complain, sneak off, or flake on their chores. During an eight-hour field trip to a Hindu temple on the other side of the Valley, the children kept tabs on each other without being told to do so, waiting patiently for the adults as they bargained for potatoes on the side of the street. Not one child complained about being hungry or needing to use the bathroom. Like a tight-knit family, they hugged each other often and shared everything without selfishness. The children all studied hard at school, like their lives depended on it — probably because their lives really do depend on it. As Bonnie Ellison, the resident manager, told me: "It's not easy out there." Hers is the epitome of tough love; an American who herself grew up in Kathmandu, she is arming them with the skills and attitude they need to survive and thrive in Nepali society. I left Ama Ghar with the strong conviction that these spirited, bilingual, ambitious kids could very well shape the future of this beautiful, struggling nation.

On my way home to San Francisco, I stopped through Tokyo to visit my parents. They were moving out of the property our family lived on for 22 years and had a lot of furniture they needed to get rid of. My mother was delighted when a nearby orphanage agreed to take the fridge and kitchen cabinet as donations. We made plans to visit the home and meet the director, who offered to give us a short tour.

We were immediately struck by how large the building was — by Tokyo standards, these 40 kids are living in a palace. The space, the meals, and the children's allowances ($30 a month for each junior high school kid and $55 once they reach high school) are all funded by the ward. These kids come here most often as a result of domestic violence, not poverty or the death of a parent. Currently, there are 30,000 children living in 550 homes like this one across the country, with 3,000 in Tokyo alone. It's a big, growing societal problem.

It was late in the afternoon when we visited the facilities, but none of the kids were around. School uniforms and manga were strewn across the floors of the oversized bedrooms shared by pairs of teenagers. The director, a gentle, large man with thick glasses, told us apologetically that the kids had dropped off their books and gone back out. I asked him if they got along with each other, and he sighed.

"All our children have severe social issues," he said. "They can't stay in the same room together for more than a few minutes before a fight erupts. I've been here for 25 years. Back in the day, it was indeed like a big family; the kids used to go on outings together and take care of each other. But these days, that's not the case at all."

I didn't meet many people at the Japanese children's home. I saw a couple of teenaged boys sitting around a table playing Nintendo DS, and introduced myself to one chubby 13-year old boy who wandered up to the director, imitated him for a few sentences, and then told us he couldn't wait until he was in high school so he could get a bigger monthly allowance.

One might expect the children in the Tokyo orphanage to be happier than the children in Nepal. After all, they have cash, video games, washing machines for laundry, and a huge urban playground to goof around in (the Nepali kids carry no cash, can't afford electronics, and wash their own clothes by hand). But the kids in Tokyo aren't happier. They can't get along with each other, never mind anyone else. There is no semblance of family life at the Tokyo orphanage. It felt like a repository for unwanted children.

In many ways, Nepali culture of today closely resembles pre-tech revolution Japan. The way the aunties at Ama Ghar prepared food in the kitchen or washed clothes in buckets of cold water reminded me of the way my Japanese grandmother went about her daily chores — it's something about the pacing and the commitment to what may seem like the most menial tasks that made me nostalgic for my childhood. I see many similarities between Japanese and Nepali culture. They're both traditionally patriarchal societies, with heavy Buddhist influences; children are taught to respect and care for elders, and society as a whole values community over individualism. But an unfortunate side effect of economic growth was that some of these cultural values have been compromised — if not ignored outright, they have at the very least become marginalized.

At Ama Ghar, the aunties live and sleep in the same rooms as the children. This type of setup is common in Nepali homes today and was also common in Japanese homes not too many generations ago. At the orphanage in Tokyo, all staff members go home in the evening, except one night a week when they're required to supervise the children on rotation. I believe this makes a big difference in how home-like each of these two places feels to the kids who live there. (An expert in otaku culture once told me that the reason the imouto — little sister — fetish exists is because some men still crave the type of closeness that used to bond Japanese families together.) I believe the disintegration of these kinds of long-held values has something to do with the unhappiness the Tokyo orphanage was sheltering.**

I may never know what created the problematic conditions at the Japanese children's home, but the director's words about the orphanage being a much brighter place a quarter of a century ago made me sad. Maybe the Tokyo orphanage could use a values lesson from its own history or from its counterpart in the developing world.

You can make a donation to Ama Ghar, the children's home in Kathmandu, on the Ama Foundation web site.

*Structurally, it's a lot like an orphanage, but the Ama Foundation doesn't call it that because many of the children still had one or both living parents, and the kids here are not up for adoption.

**After our visit, my mother got a phone call from the director saying that he didn't want our used furniture after all; they were going to get a charity organization to buy them all-new appliances.

(Thanks, Lee Nima Mam Ajq'ij Dr. M.X. Quetzalkanbalam, for your insights!)

American rock band Camper Van Beethoven is traveling to South by SouthWest this year without the support of a record label, so in order to raise funds, they're selling off the right to choose the songs that go on to their setlist for the 2 shows that they're going to play. The first 35 fans to pony up $102 get:

• A Santa Cruz Roller Derby Girl will walk/skate across the stage carrying a placard announcing your sponsorship of the song, within full view of the audience or cameras, to have the moment captured on film or video for all of eternity!
• You can have up to 4 names or one business on each placard.

Sounds like an excellent leveraging of a few of the scarcities that we've mentioned here before, in this case, attention, exclusivity and patronage. With the "Santa Cruz Roller Derby Girl," CVB's personality definitely shines through in this unique offer that should resonate nicely with their fans (in fact, I learned of this promotion via a friend sharing it through Google Buzz). So, once again, it's great to see yet another label-free band (who once was on Virgin, years ago, actually), explore new and creative ways to give their fans a reason to buy.

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Tim Lillis, a fantastic illustrator for MAKE, wrote to me about a neat project he's working on: "I'm speaking at SXSW Interactive on the subject of Indirect Collaboration and Collective Creativity. My fellow panelists and I have put together a blog where we're collecting lots of thoughts on the subject, and my esteemed colleague Joe Alterio has just posted a Q&A with Charles Burns and Gary Panter where they discuss their collaborations with each other."

CB: For me doing a collaboration is taking "time out" from my usual work. It's actually fun to do and I think part of the reason is there are different expectations and less control. It's like letting go of the tight control I always maintain on my writing and drawing and allowing myself to work on something with no "rules". For it to work there has to be a mutual respect, but you also need to be aggressive enough to alter (fuck-up?) the other persons drawing.

GP: Projects do need leaders or cheerleaders. Often one person will push the project harder. There is the danger of people getting too knitted together. We have to learn to easily move from isolated creative vision and consensual ideation and work. I am interested in the strength of little things and little things as prototypes for bigger things, so a team of one or two or three appeals to me. Vermeer would've done one t-shirt in his whole career and he would've known it was the best t-shirt Threadless ever had.

Q & A: Charles Burns and Gary Panter

Phillip covered this awesome homebrewed CPU before, but there's now more info on the builder's site and a series of videos showing it in action. Visitors to the 2007 Maker Faire Bay Area may remember seeing the Magic-1 and meeting its builder, Google engineer Bill Buzbee. The project is incredibly well documented on the site. You can even telnet into the Magic-1, running 16-bit Minix at a scorching 4.09Mhz, to play the original Adventure game, or run classic apps like Eliza and Conway's Life. Retro-geeky good times!

Homebrew CPU

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