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POPSNSA to store yottabytes of surveillance data in Utah megarepository There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?
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POPSPerhaps the Coolest iPhone App Yet If you have an iPhone 3GS or Android device you can install the Layar app for free and then search for "recovery" or "sunlight" within Layar to find this layer. The layer works best near large cities where you are most likely to find recovery contracts, below is an example of what it looks like on the streets of Washington DC. This data is taken from the recovery.gov Where Is The Money Going? map which provides a KML file containing all recipient reported Contracts. As of October 30th this data will be updated with the final contract, grants, and loans. How We Made It If you're a developer you might be interested in how we made this. Fortunately Layar makes it quite easy and we've taken a further step to make it even easier if you're already using Django. http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/recoverygov-contracts-your-phone/
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POPSProduct Integration Symlabs Virtual Directory Server is a powerful utility that can help to resolve problems in environments that make use of a wide range of communications and authentication protocols, as well as a combination of different data storage systems.
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POPSPersonas In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
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POPS...2.3 gigapixel(s)... in real time!
Everyone knows that technology changes quickly. And most people have an adequate understanding of velocity and acceleration. So I'm always surprised when people ask about the next "new technology". After all, it's relatively easy to derive the "rate of change" in a technology's "position", over time and then compute its velocity and ecceleration. The attached article provides more than enough data that can be compared to the specifications of older equipment like the cameras used on the SR-71 "Blackbird" ("U2"). These two sets of data points can be used for a quick an dirty "linear" model. What is more interesting, however, is to acquire a few more intermediate data points and to then refine the "straight line" model's "rates of change". Anyone that wants an effective "shortcut" can simply use Moore's Law (capability doubles every 18 months) with the banker's "rule of 72" (72 divided by the annual rate = time to double). An even better approach is to go to any sales conv
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POPS Securing the Web (These types of security checks operate in the background: they don't require you, for instance, to reenter your user name and password.) Many web applications also "sanitize" data posted by their subscribers: if a friend posts something to your social-network page, the application probably won't show you the post without inspecting it for malicious code. "We've looked at a lot of these web applications, and there's literally hundreds of places where these checks happen," says Nickolai Zeldovich, an assistant professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Indeed, Zeldovich and his colleagues identified one popular web application that sanitized data in more than 1,400 places (but still had about 60 security holes). They also, however, identified a feature that web application security checks usually had in common: "Namely," Zeldovich says, "it's that the same data is being handled in all these hundreds of places."
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POPSCool Websites and Tools [October 11] BreathingEarth – Real-time simulation tool that shows stats like CO2 emissions, birth and death rates, and CO2 emitted per person. The stats are given both for each country and worldwide. All the data comes from reputable sources like CIA World Factbook and United Nations Statistics Division. Read more: BreathingEarth – CO2 Emissions, Birth & Death Rates by Country
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POPSThe Science Behind Global Warming Is Settled. Sadly, It's Also Been Incinerated
The Dog Ate Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels @NRO Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared. Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense. In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce . .
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POPSBREAKING: Obama Starts Acting Presidential, Declares War Against The Moon For Heldmann, she's prepared for impact day...ready to scan and span the spectrum of data to be gathered. "It has been a lot of work for four minutes of data...but it's a really important four minutes of data," Heldmann said. "Hopefully, we'll have a variety of data sets that we can combine and make a coherent story. That's the going-in plan." Video - Why Bomb the Moon? Images: Full Moon Fever How to Watch NASA's LCROSS Smack the Moon Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than four decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999. http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20091007/sc_space/targetingthemoonobservatoriesgearupforfridaylunarcrash
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POPS The Sordid Story Of A Global Con ~ (Warming) The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa. Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval period actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this claim depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the Polar Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber produced a much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very different story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from their climate reconstruction papers. In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated from tree ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced Hockey Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising in the 20th century. … But an even more disquieting discovery soon came t
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POPSData-mining medical records could predict domestic violence
More: Using the new system, the researchers were able to predict abuse an average of two years before the doctor made the diagnosis. Presumably, the computer is picking up signs of ongoing maltreatment the patient hasn’t yet revealed. The researchers also speculate that, in principle, some subtle signal could precede direct abuse. One surprise finding that could be relevant… is that infections turned out to be strongly linked to abuse. That might suggest worsening hygiene in the family or increased psychological stress, possible omens of abuse. But at this point, it is anybody’s guess whether true predictions are possible. Predictions or not, with the current model, fewer than 20 percent of the patients flagged as high-risk cases turned out to have a diagnosis of abuse. Part of the problem may be that the system is only as good as the data it was based on. And as Emory University’s Houry points out, that data isn’t up to speed when it comes to diagnosing abuse.
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POPSConnected by Threads Much of the explicit personal information that we deliberately keep private is still available implicitly in the public data trail.
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POPS The Sell-Phone Revolution Already, mobile services use area codes, Zip Codes, and even Global Positioning System (GPS) data to return results for nearby businesses in response to a search for, say, coffee shops. The next step is to serve an ad for a steaming cup of java on a mobile Web page just as the cell-phone Web surfer is passing a Starbucks (SBUX ). Within five years, online ad networks such as TACODA and Specific Media Inc. plan to apply behavioral techniques"using surfing data"to target ads to broadband-enabled digital television. It's not hard to imagine the day when multiple TVs tuned to the same channel in the same household will serve up different ads. "There is no question behavioral targeting will be a major component of television," says Dave Morgan, TACODA's founder and chairman. Read full article >>> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_17/b4031097.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories
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