Afrojack Ft. Eva Simons - Take Over Control (Extended Mix)

Dialogue on Climate Stifled by Political Two-Step.

I hereby propose a new television show. It will be a hit in the current election season: Dancing with the Stories... A Two-Step Flow of (mis)Information.

When it comes to accepting scientific information as fact, even facing decades of peer-reviewed and publicly available data, top political leaders can still sway the "debate" toward head-in-the-sand willful-ignorance. Case in point: Dick Cheney and other top Republicans who deny the existence of human-caused climate change.

By stating that there is not enough solid data (total rubbish), these "leaders" are influencing a two-step flow of (mis)information to the detriment of all. Why would certain politicians find it beneficial to perpetuate such views? How does the role of corporate money come influence what politicians view as pertinent or relevant issues?

Save the Whales, Save the Poop

Gross, but interesting.

From Discovery News

Chances are, you've heard a multitude of arguments against the killing of whales.

It's cruel. It has decimated whale populations. Whale meat is full of pollutants. Continued whaling will prompt preventive measures by 23rd century time travelers.

To which, we may now add another.

The ocean needs whale poop.

It wasn't long ago that researchers first confirmed that whales contributed to ocean ecology even after death, their carcasses landing on the seabed and forming the basis for unique communities known as "whale falls". Now, two whale scientists have found that, as well as seeding the seabed, whales also stimulate biological production at the ocean's surface, thanks to their nutrient-rich feces.

Continue reading...

A free press in China? Not yet.

The invisible hand of state-controlled censorship looms large in China's growing flirtation with Western concepts of intellectual expression and freedom.

A group of retired Communist Party officials, along with members of the tightly controlled state media, issued several public demands recently. The core of these call for China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, to dismantle censorship procedures “in favor of a system of legal responsibility” for items that are freely published.

Would you risk personal safety and professional status to stand up for a free press? Has censorship every affected your intellectual life? If so, how?

Google has self-driving cars!!

Google! You wiley minx you! Been sitting on something pretty spectacular, huh? A car that drives itself???!? Jeez! C'mon, you know that's exactly the kind of thing I want to own...I thought we were friends man...

Anyway, check it out...super cool! They even have an Audi TT edition. I call dibbs!





By MG Siegler

It all makes sense now.
At our TechCrunch Disrupt event a couple weeks ago in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give an impressive speech across a wide range of topics. But the most interesting thing he had to say what about automobiles. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” he said. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense.”
Well guess what? Surprise, surprise: Google has been working on a secret project to enable cars to do just that.
As they’ve revealed on their blog today, Google has developed a technology for cars to drive themselves. And they haven’t done it on a computer, or in some controlled lab, they’ve been out on California roads testing this out. “Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research,” Google engineer Sebastian Thrun (the brainchild of the project who also heads the Stanford AI lab and co-invented Street View as well) writes.
Further, The New York Times, which has a bit more, says a total of seven cars have driven 1,000 miles without any human intervention (the 140,000 mile number includes occasional human control, apparently). These cars are a modified version of the Toyota Prius — and there is one Audi TT, as well.
So how does this work? The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder to locate everything around them (these are mounted on the roof). And, of course, they use Google’s own maps. But the key?

This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

Google says it gathered the best engineers from the DARPA Challenges (an autonomous vehicle race that the government puts on) to work on this project. They also note that these cars never drive around unmanned in the interest of safety. A driver is always on hand to take over in case something goes wrong, and an engineer is always on hand in the car to monitor the software. Google also says they’ve notified local police about the project.
So has it worked? Apparently, yes. There has been one accident so far, but it was when someone else rear-ended one of these Google cars.
Google notes that 1.2 million people are killed every year in road accidents — they think they can cut this number in half with the tech. It will also cut energy consumption and save people a lot of time.
I want this yesterday. This is all kinds of awesome.
But don’t get too excited just yet. “Even the most optimistic predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away,” according to NYT.

A Vanishing Journalistic Divide

The stallion of free-range journalism has broken free and is rounding up its herd. The Wild West of Ye Olde Interweb has not been reigned in by any metaphorical barbed-wire fence, yet. It just keeps moving forward.

New York Times reporter David Carr writes that, "more and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle."

The question is, is print dead or is print-ONLY dead?

Avatar 3-D Imaging to Improve Athletes' Form?

From ‘Avatar’ Playbook, Athletes Use 3-D Imaging

The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ and ALAN SCHWARZ

In the endless quest for athletic advantage, a handful of major league baseball teams are engaged in an elaborate, largely clandestine race to master an advanced imaging technology that some baseball officials think could influence the way athletes of all ages train, perform and recover from injuries.

Read more...