BREAKING SURF
| Art by Mob |
| Spy on Your AIM Buddies with IMWatching |
| If You're Working in Linux, Turn up the Electronica |
| Underground New York City |
| Roadgeek Heaven |
| Audubon's Bird Art Meets Music, and More |
| Commercial-Sign Art of Mexico |
| Internet Archive Indexes Live Concert Recordings |
| Classical Music Tutorial |
| Web App Mods Doodles |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Captain Haddock Curses from the Tintin Stories |
| Old Car Manuals |
| Does 1895 Test Really Indicate Lesser Education? |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
"The 9/11 Commission Report" is so widely covered in the media that we can't really add much, other than to offer you a few convenient links both to the online version and to the trade paperbacks you can buy through Amazon. We've read it, and we think the Commission got it right when it signled out the cultural issues which foster Isalmic extremism as a central problem. More proximately, the tragedy can be laid at the feet of poor security theory and practice stemming from complacency and lack of coordination. A few of the hijackers set off metal detectors on the way to their gates and about half were flagged by the CAPPS security software, but none of this was integrated into the larger picture. Read the report for more.9-11 Commission Reports: http://www.9-11commission.gov/
Final Report Book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393326713/netsurferdigest
9-11 Investigations Book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1586482793/netsurferdigest
Empirical Analysis of Political Weblogs
In addition to being an election year in the US, 2004 can also be fairly called the year of the political weblog. "The Power and Politics of Blogs", an academic study of the nature of such blogs, addresses such topics as the distribution of links to and among political blogs, the amount of attention blogs garner in the media, and blogs' impact on the nature of political debate. One somewhat surprising result from the study is that the distribution of links to political weblogs follows a lognormal curve instead of the power-law distribution known to hold for blogs in general. The paper also quantifies the media's attention to political weblogs by recording how many reporters regularly read which blogs. The paper concludes that political blogs, despite their recent appearance on the scene, already frame political debate and effectively focus media attention. This is a must read for anybody interested in political science and blog culture.http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/blogpaperfinal.pdf
One of the many things the Net is good at is helping us find often inexpensive out-of-print books. As a result, sales of second-hand books have surged in the last few years, spurred by online venues like eBay, Advanced Book Exchange, and Amazon.com. As the volume of used book sales grows, however, some publishers express concern that it might eat into sales of new books. Some think the situation resembles that of Napster and the music industry. Such comparisons are silly. A book purchase constitutes a physical transfer of property and no intellectual-property conundrums are involved. Still, opinion is divided on whether the expanding market for used books is good or bad for publishers. Some suggest the market stimulates reading and book buying. With the price of a new book soaring and typically short print runs, the ability to find used books easily is a boon to consumers but may pose a threat to small trade publishers, which rely on backlist sales much more than mainstream publishers. Sooner or later, some experts believe, the industry will address the popularity of used-book searches and sales. Let's hope any solution doesn't involve lawyers. ABS-CBN has a reprint of a New York Times piece on this emerging challenge.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=INFOTECH&oid=55327
Visibility of The New York Times on the Web
The New York Times is a heavyweight newspaper, widely quoted and with an enviable international reputation. On the Internet, however, it is practically invisible. Wired looks at why. Run a Web search of just about any hot news topic you can think of and you'll find the few Times articles way down the list behind a host of rival news outlets, blogs, and advocacy sites. One reason for this is that the Times, like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, requires readers to register, which foils search-engine spiders. As well, the Times shifts items older than a week into a commercial archive, primarily to avoid competing with full-text access to the paper through professional online databases such as LexisNexis which brings in some $20 million annually. Regardless, these policies restrict search spiders from indexing the Times' content. Since the newspaper aspires to be a big deal online as well as off, its poor showing on the Web must concern its publishers. If the Times wants to be an online newspaper of record, something will have to change.http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64110,00.html
RSS Traffic Becoming a Burden for Publishers
One of the unanticipated side effects of the popularity of RSS feeds is the amount of traffic they generate at popular sites. Anybody with a suitable RSS reader can subscribe to these syndicated news summaries, making them a popular way to keep up with the news around the Web. The problem is that every reader that subscribes to an RSS feed polls the publisher's Web site as often as once an hour. A popular publisher like Infoworld probably has many thousands of RSS subscribers, and the coordinated flood of Net traffic to their Web site at the turn of every hour looks an awful lot like a distributed denial-of-service attack. Netcraft notes the phenomenon and has some quotes from an InfoWorld exec about the need to upgrade their back-end plumbing to deal with this issue. It's only a matter of time before the situation becomes untenable, so don't be surprised to see efforts to make the distribution of RSS feeds follow the peer-to-peer file-sharing model, perhaps based on the successful technology of BitTorrent file-sharing feeds.http://tinyurl.com/6bpz4
BugMeNot.com Seemingly No Threat to Big Publishers
BugMeNot.com has experienced rapid growth in its eight months of existence. We first wrote about BugMeNot.com in NSD 10.06. As you may recall, the site is a freely accessible collection of logins and passwords for sites that require free registration - mostly newspaper Web sites. The big media sites are starting to pay attention. Wired notes that BugMeNot.com now has some 14,000 sites in its database and gives examples of other tools, such as Mailinator and Spameater, that help you to avoid spreading your personal info across these bothersome forms. Wired's article also quotes representatives of the LA Times and the Knight Ridder publishing empire who say that the registration procedure works and that false data is not much of a problem for them. Apparently, most registrations check out when validated.NSD 10.06: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.06.html#SS10
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64270,00.html
Checklist for Building the Ideal News Site
The Web is aswarm with news sites, ranging from individual blogs to the mammoth offerings of international conglomerates. Over their fairly long history in Internet years, many news sites, big and small, have not learned the lessons of good presentation. Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher suggests how Web sites should use the technologies available on the modern Internet to present news in a professional manner. His suggestions range from look-and-feel design issues (magazine-like three-column format, large ads rather than many small banners, multimedia) to ideas about content (blog style, local content, breaking news bulletins, user participation/feedback). While no editor will agree with all of the suggestions, Outing's advice could make a good springboard for those considering a redesign and re-focus of their modern media site.http://tinyurl.com/6vmra
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2004 Results
It's always a pleasure to bring you the results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where purple prose mates with mangled grammar to deliver the requisite punchline to the gut of the brain, but maybe not your brain right now because you're really thinking about boobs at the moment. No, we didn't enter this year, but that's a fair representation of our own average thinking processes, which no doubt proves something, somewhere. Anyway, this year's winners are as funny as ever, possibly more so, particularly the one about the White Rabbit and Alice. Also look for gems by "authors" Tim Lafferty and Marx Prewett.http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2004.htm
What with all the recent emphasis on the Cassini-Huygens Saturn project, we felt it was about time to grab your belt and bring you back down to Mars. Yep, the Martian rovers are still roving the planet, still sending home great material. You just don't hear about it much, because the average human attention span appears to be converging with that of a cat. The images from the surface of Mars are at times breathtaking, at others mundane - until you consider that they all come from another planet, that is. We have machines rooting into the soil of another planet, and sending us photos. It's only a matter of time before the Mars First! ecology nuts file suit. Meanwhile, the rovers carry on despite minor mechanical problems.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/wir/
A Brief History of the Mysterious "AI" Game
In January 2001, a small team at Microsoft's Game Group met to discuss the creation of a new type of game to be created as part of the promotion for Steven Spielberg's movie, "Artificial Intelligence: AI". The team came up with a concept for a mystery whose narrative would be broken into small fragments distributed across many different media - the Web, SMS messages, e-mail, TV spots, phone calls. To make it cooler, the origin of the content would be kept secret so that players would never know where any of it came from, nor would the game ever admit that it was a game. Sean Stewart was tapped to be one of the writers of the game, and was charged with creating some of the complex content, sometimes in a matter of only hours. This is his account of that experience, of "feeding the beast", as he calls it. Though few remember the game, it remains one of the most ambitious and complex attempts to engage modern communications channels in the service of subliminal entertainment, which makes this account worth reading.http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/intro/
Graphs of Multiplayer Game Subscriber Numbers
For anybody in the game industry, or for anybody interested in the evolution of multiplayer games, data on subscription numbers to the various massively multiplayer online games is vital to know but hard to come by. Publishers regard precise player-subscription numbers as corporate secrets, and tend to inflate them when they do choose to release the info to look good. Bruce Woodcock has gleaned and compiled the best available data on the subject from often imprecise press releases and private conversations with game-publisher insiders. He charts the growth and decline of subscribers to 20 different online games and draws some conclusions about the life cycle of multiplayer games as subscriptions grow, peak, and decline over time. What's most shocking is how low the numbers are, even for seemingly popular games. For example, a well known game like The Sims Online appears to have fewer than 100,000 active users. Everquest seems to be the long-term champ (about 425,000), but its numbers seem to be in decline and it has fallen into second place behind the rocketing Final Fantasy XI.http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce2/Subscriptions.html
Odeon Doesn't Appreciate User's Site Redesign
Have you ever visited a Web site with a design so bad that you were tempted to look up the designers and slap them upside the head with a week-old herring? Most of us have been there - us here at NSD probably more than most of you. Some users don't take bad site design sitting down; they go ahead and redesign an offensive site's look themselves. One particularly extreme case involves the UK's Odeon cinema chain. Its Web site is limited to certain browsers and platforms, so Matthew Somerville redesigned it and launched his own version, which apparently proved more popular with users than the original. Odeon looked the other way for a while, but recently forced him to take his site down. Somerville's foray into site redesign is not an isolated incident. Disgruntled users have made over other famous sites, including such stellar names as Slashdot, the Internet Movie Database, and Fleshbot. Sometimes, the sites contest such redesigns, and go beyond strongly worded legal notes to the point where the well-meaning redesigners get fired. Wired has a story with examples.Odeon: http://www.odeon.co.uk/
Accessible OdeoN: http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64253,00.html
Prof Rewrites Cisco Training Manuals
Matt Basham, an information-technology professor, identified problems in the Cisco's training documentation, and set off to address it. The Cisco curriculum runs around $100 and assumes a certain level of computer literacy that in Basham's experience simply does not exist. "About half the people in this program barely know how to turn on a computer, so we need to start with the very basics," Basham says. He literally rewrote the book, and upon learning that Cisco wasn't interested in publishing his effort, he turned the 800-page volume loose. On the Internet. For free. Netsurfers downloaded more than 2,000 copies during the first few days following release. In the interest of making program improvements based upon customer needs, Cisco has grudgingly decided that it might be a good idea to meet with the professor. ZDNet has the story, and you can drop by Lulu to get the book.ZDNet: http://zdnet.com.com/Professor+gives+Cisco+manual+away+for+free/2100-1103_2-5255083.html
Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/content/59202
Searching, Sorting, and (Lack of) Innovation in E-Mail Clients
Do you dread opening up your e-mail every morning? Are there just too many legitimate messages, excluding spam, to deal with? Welcome to a world that may soon include most of us. This insightful Salon article discusses the problem of innovation in e-mail sorting and prioritizing and comes to some surprising conclusions. Among the most interesting is that Gmail, Google's free e-mail service, may be more to our liking than Outlook or Eudora because it does away with folders. Folders are apparently not an efficient way to organize e-mail; instead, a powerful search engine is the e-mail user's best friend. The best point of all is that few vendors are willing to recognize that we live within our e-mail programs; they aren't mere tools anymore.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/07/16/e_mail/index.html
Mozilla Vulnerability Timeline
As we reported in NSD 10.27, the Mozilla suite was hit with a serious security bug July 7. BlogSac offers a timeline that tracks the identification of the bug, the notification of the public, and the fix. It's a remarkably short timeline, since a fix was developed, tested, and released within a day and a half. BlogSac posts the timeline to contrast the fast open-source response to a security threat with the often interminable delays in the fixing of bugs in commercial software, particularly those programs from a certain large software company whose name begins with M. Here's a kicker, though. Coders had known about the Mozilla bug for a couple of years, but had labeled it "WONTFIX" in the Mozilla project system because it was considered a Windows vulnerability (which it is) and thus out of the realm of the Mozilla team's responsibility (which is debatable).NSD 10.27: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.27.html#BS3
BlogSac: http://www.sacarny.com/blog/index.php?p=104
Beantown Brawl: The Democrats vs. Science Fiction Fans
In an understandable coincidence, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and the 62nd Worldcon science-fiction convention, both taking place in Boston this summer, registered similar domain names for their respective Web sites. If you have to be in Boston, it's perhaps some consolation to have two reasons for being there. The Worldcon folks have posted a funny list of ways to tell the conventions apart - some people have mixed up the similar domains in sent e-mail - and are looking for more, luring contributors by offering T-shirts for winning additions. Both conventions will involve thousands of volunteers and lots of tall tales. The DNC thing runs July 26-29, while the Worldcon shindig - "(Worldcon) will have lots more than one party to have fun with" - will be held Sept. 2-6. No guesses for figuring out which one we'd prefer to attend.DNC: http://boston04.com/home.asp
Worldcon: http://boston2004.com/
Presidential Campaign Sites Lack Security
Most political-campaign Web such sites are ephemeral, and therefore aren't coded with security uppermost in mind. Wired has a piece that points out the shortcomings of the Bush and Kerry campaign sites, with stats that should surprise no one. The humor in this comes from the nearly identical privacy policies, in which both camps note that their server is in a locked and securely guarded room. Yep, that guy sitting on the folding chair, with the coffee stains on his crotch? He's there to protect the integrity of the servers. While you're secure with the knowledge that the servers are thus protected, it's a good idea to bear in mind that both sites track users with Web bugs and other cool stuff. If you visit either, you might want to shower after.http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64036,00.html
ONLINE CULTURE
The Net greatly facilitates collaborative projects, as shown by wiki sites, file sharing and distributing, and, of course, the creation of open-source software. But what about collaboration in the realm of the aesthetic? A number of projects have sought to produce works of collaborative art through the medium of the Net - obviously, of digital art files. It's a little hard to send canvas over fiber-optic cable. Slate has a story with pointers to several innovative communal art projects that create art through the interaction of large numbers of participants - mob art, as it were. The article mentions Typophile, where thousands of people have created a font by voting on the shading of individual pixels, and MacJams, where participants banded together to come up with a jazz piece. Not all such collaborations work. Attempts to create pictures by mob of a face and a television failed, as did J.D. Lasica's attempt to cajole the teeming masses into editing his nearly complete book (see NSD 10.19). The rules of what works and what doesn't have yet to be codified, but rigorous structure seems to help.Slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/2104087
Typophile: http://www.typophile.com/smallerpicture/
MacJams: http://www.macjams.com/
NSD 10.19: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.19.html#BS9
Spy on Your AIM Buddies with IMWatching
You can learn a bit about the behavior of your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) buddies simply by watching their status change among sign on, sign off, idle, and away. It's even easier when you have a Web site that will graph this information for you and, based on the data, predict when your buddy is likely to be online. That's what IMWatching is all about. Sign up, enter the nicknames of your AIM buddies and the site will record all the information for you. IMWatching only tracks AIM users at the moment, but has plans to support other instant-messaging protocols. For privacy reasons, the site won't allow you to see who is collecting information about your own habits, but you can adjust your AIM preferences to prevent such information from leaking out (and you probably should). Credit Greg Harfst, a graduate student at MIT, for creating the site, which is free.http://www.imwatching.net/
If You're Working in Linux, Turn up the Electronica
The Register reports the results of a survey that tracked the musical preferences of various high-tech workers. The results are hilariously stereotypical. Microsoft-certified techs go in for mainstream pap - uh, pop, choosing Britney Spears above all others for their listening pleasure. Linux workers go for electronica, database admins like their alternative/indie tracks, and the CTOs and directors fallback on the finest in classical music. The article is good for a few chuckles and maybe even a slight expansion of your own musical tastes.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/20/musical_preference_survey/
ONLINE TRAVEL
At the Undercity site, the adjective "underground" sometimes refers to sights below ground level, but more often refers to the amazing parts of New York City that are generally unknown. The essays use photos and text, with the photography the strong point. The photographic quality ranges from very good to outstanding. The site currently features 11 photo galleries. All are worth visiting, but if you have time for only one, don't miss Gallery 8, the Tugboat Graveyard. You need not be a New Yorker to enjoy this site, but its real audience is New Yorkers - both those living in the city physically and the many spiritual residents spread worldwide.http://www.undercity.org/
Of course, there are highway geeks. Whyever not? Kurumi.com, despite the Japanese sounding name and Japanese lettering at the top of the page (read the About page for a translation) is an all-American site devoted mostly to the signs and trivia of Connecticut roads and three-digit interstates. Trip planning, road signage, absolutely useless and arcane trivia - it's all here. There's also a wonderful Java applet called SignMaker that lets you create a mock up of, or just mock, any state, federal, or interstate road sign. Wording is entirely up to you. There's also a nice virtual drive around Hartford, circa 1971, with the possibility of a virtual visit to New York City. The site also has a Java game that lets you create your own road system, complete with correct signage - sort of a SimCity for highway geeks.
http://www.kurumi.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Audubon's Bird Art Meets Music, and More
Quebec City's Musee de la civilisation has produced an exquisite multimedia introduction to a gallery of John James Audubon's famous ornithological portfolios. The Harmonie/Harmony exhibit is fully bilingual. Its beautiful images of birds and plants from Audubon's "Birds of America" are accompanied by soothing music and captioned with words of profound prose and poetry in English and French that capture the activity of the birds in the drawing. In the company of the eating blue jays, we read Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: "Morally, it is implicit resignation to the orders of God, who made us eat to live, invites us to do so by appetite, sustains us by flavor and rewards us with pleasure." What could sum up the attitude of the French towards eating better then that? After you've enjoyed the introduction, click on Catalogue/Catalog to view the index of all 435 bird drawings in Audubon's work, a brief page on the artist himself, and an expertly edited list of links to Audubon and ornithology Web sites. For lovers of birds, art, music, poetry, and beauty.http://www.mcq.org/audubon/menu.html
Commercial sign painting is an art you won't find in many museums. Mexican photographer Enrique Soto Eguibar is drawn to colorful signs that use humor, originality, or both to catch the eyes of passersby outside butcher shops, seafood restaurants, and other commercial establishments in his native land. This collection, Mexican Popular Imagery, is a selection from his personal stash of some 4,000 photographs taken since the 1970s. Eguibar has supplied only 28 of them, but we suspect many of them are favorites of his. His "Taco restaurant, Granjas del Sur, Puebla 2002" (photo 14) may not be great technical art, but you may find the anthropomorphized food more attractive than a plastic Taco Bell sign. "Sex carrousel, Puebla circa 1996" (photo 9) and "Beauty parlor, San Salvador el Seco, Puebla circa 1984" (photo 11) might raise more than an eyebrow. Your local supermarket probably doesn't advertise meat like a butcher in Puebla does (photo 19), and we always wondered what you'd get if you crossed a rotisserie with Foghorn Leghorn (photo 20). Eguibar maintains that his goal is preservation. Even so, many visitors will focus on economic and cultural differences rather than the documentary nature of his gallery.
http://zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/soto/index.html
Internet Archive Indexes Live Concert Recordings
The Live Music Archive is a subset of the Internet Archive, for which Etree.org is contributing and accepting audio concert recordings for distribution, primarily through FTP and BitTorrent. Every bit of content is legally tradeable and/or burnable. While you may upload concerts for general consumption, the folks in charge will boot your sorry butt outta the place if you ever try to share tracks from a commercial artist who doesn't subscribe to the sharing policy. The list of artists who have agreed, though, is huge - and you can stream many of the offerings. We won't pretend that we were familiar with all the bands but you will recognize some artists, like Barenaked Ladies. If your tastes tend toward Yanni or Britney, don't bother. But the streams we auditioned from Global Funk and a couple of other bands came through in great stereo sound. No delays, no garbling - just good clean tunes. If you like what you pick out of the stream, you can download it, burn it to a CD, and give a copy to your girlfriend or boyfriend or dog.http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php
Specifically designed for the classical music novice, the Classical Music Navigator provides information on composers and their works, and organizes the data to aid the casual listener in identifying related music. The information is organized into five compilations: a Composers list, the Basic Library of Notable Works, a Geographical Roster, an index of musical styles, and a glossary. All of the notations are crosslinked and the site also offers handy feature explanations and abbreviation lists. About two-thirds of the some 440 composers listed in the Classical Music Navigator are linked to the Classical Music Archives and its hundreds of musical files for downloading and listening pleasure. All in all, this site is a fine introduction to the world of classical music.
http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/music/
Ze Frank, whom NSD has covered a couple of times, is a designer best known for his online dance lessons, probably - he's versatile and prolific and it's hard to choose a single example. His Scribbler online toy takes a simple line drawing and creates its own version of it based on a number of simple rules. Basically, you scribble, then watch the animated Scribbler create a copy of your drawing as if it were powered by a dozen spiders. This is the sort of work that modern abstract artists spent months doing back in the 20th century.
http://www.zefrank.com/scribbler/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda
Bicycling Science
Rift
Learning PHP 5Captain Haddock Curses from the Tintin Stories
Ever been the victim as a car drives through a puddle and splashes your brand new coat with muddy water? Usually we think of a fitting insult only after the vehicle moves away but thanks to Captain Haddock, of the Tintin stories, you can be armed with a veritable arsenal of curses of which any old seadog would be proud. Loyal fans of the comic have gathered as many of his barbs as possible here so you can regale your enemies with classics such as "Bagpipers!", "Dizzards!", and "Macrocephalic baboon!" Why not select just one per week and astound your friends with your new vocabulary of invective? The world needs more variety in curses and Captain Haddock is just the man to rise to the challenge. Now get to work before he calls you an "Anamorphic aardvark!"http://www3.sympatico.ca/brooksdr/haddock/main.htm
Hydramatic, Jetaway, and Synchromesh - what do these have in common? They're all automobile transmissions, and you can read about them and a host of other old car stuff in one easy stop. Whether it be owner's manuals or sevice manuals, if it involves cars from the 1920s on into the 1980s, you have a good shot at finding it here. Need an Apperson wiring diagram? Got ya covered. Maybe a 1930 Marvel carburetor manual is what you're looking for. It's here - all neatly scanned in and ready to go to work for you. If you're into auto restoration, you know how hard it can be to dig up the good technical specifications crucial to getting your job done right. The scans presented here should make your task a little easier.
http://www.tocmp.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
Eyewitnesses to Humanity's First Atomic Explosion
It might seem like forever, but it has been 59 years and a week since humanity entered the atomic age with the Trinity test. The Manhattan Project tested the first-ever atomic bomb July 16, 1945. Because of a shortage of uranium 235, the Trinity bomb used plutonium; the scientists, believing that a uranium bomb would work, never tested a uranium-based weapon of the kind that would soon demolish Hiroshima. The Manhattan Project leaders wanted to test their experimental implosion method with the new synthetic element 94, plutonium, that would fuel the second atomic bomb. Atomic Bomb: Decision has collected eyewitness accounts of the successful Trinity test from people such as Luis Alvarez and Phillip Morrison. The accounts capture some of the shock and awe that the bomb's builders felt that morning and, most remarkably, have a kind of innocence that has long since been lost.http://www.dannen.com/decision/trin-eye.html
Astronauts have taken photographs of Earth since the 1960s. The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth claims to host the best and most complete online collection of astronaut photography of Earth. It's an easy claim to accept once you start exploring this ever-growing collaborative collection by various NASA agencies, a multifaceted celebration of geography, technology, and curiosity. If database searches intimidate you, start with Image Quiz, a slideshow-style teaching tool that might surprise even cartographers who think they've seen everything. Else, grab a screensaver, check out the Weekly Top 10, or read the FAQ, especially if you're interested in image acquisition and manipulation. Find Photos is cool. Click on a map of Earth, drill through another grid, and a world of choices awaits you, including beauties such as "Chicago at Night" and "France Paris, Seine River, Louvre." You can pre-filter query results by date or time, camera or film, or other criteria. Teachers, in particular, may want to order slides, prints, transparencies or digital images (see the Information tab). It may be a while before you find the site map, but that, too, is a good place to start seeing the world in a new way.
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/
The Photon Rendering Project definitely took the hard route to digital imagery. Photoshop and digital cameras are child's play as they capture huge swaths of image at a time. Paint can? Ha! The tough slog is to build up an image photon by photon. The project rendered a 3-D space in six flat images, 4.5 billion photons in total. The image is complex in terms of how light plays but is essentially aesthetically dull. The rendering process tracked individual photons with a Java application and many donated computer cycles.
http://www.cpjava.net/photonproj.html
An Overview of Steganography for the Computer Forensics Examiner
There are many ways to hide data in other data - the art of doing this is called steganography. You shouldn't be shocked to learn that criminals have been known to encode fake sets of account books in seemingly harmless MP3 files, or stash contact info in the slack file space of their hard drives. Some of the people who have a keen interest in steganography are the computer forensics examiners who have to find evidence hidden in the seized files of criminals. Gary Kessler, a professor of computer forensics, has written a grand overview of the current state of steganography. It is chock full of references to most modern steganographic tools and techniques, though it does omit some cutting-edge research on using sophisticated statistical techniques for detecting hidden data. Anybody who needs to deal with hidden data needs to visit the page.http://www.garykessler.net/library/fsc_stego.html
Never Have to Parallel Park Again
Oh, this is sweet! Don't you just hate parallel parking? This engineering project could seriously impact the livelihoods of driving instructors across the world. Imagine a car that locates a potential parking spot then, once you drop into reverse gear, parks itself. Clearly, this is a concept whose time has come. Brought to you not by Toyota, not by Ford, not by MIT. Nope, this is a project by 17 students at Linkoping University in Sweden. Read about it here, but push the keyboard well back. Drool's really hard on the electronics.http://www.ikp.liu.se/evolve/
What Not to Do with a Kite and Camera
The KiteCam Disaster Fund Appeal is the result of a clear and rueful case of ingenuity trumping brains. As somebody (a free year of NSD to anyone who finds out who) once said, "What goes up, must come down." The problem is that the sudden acceleration from rest into a climb is often a lot easier on equipment than the sudden deceleration into rest from a fall. The few pictures the KiteCam snapped before its involuntary sudden deceleration into rest are quite interesting; so are the photos of the camera after landing. We're glad the experiment was run. The results are worth it. And we're glad it wasn't our camera.http://www.jibble.org/kitecam/
CORRECTIONS
Does 1895 Test Really Indicate Lesser Education?
A couple of readers took us to task for pointing them last issue to the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 and claiming that it proved that the standard of education has fallen. They say it is a myth, and sent us a link to a relevant discussion at the Urban Legends Reference Pages (ULRP). The ULRP, more commonly called Snopes, doesn't challenge the authenticity of the test, but argues that it doesn't represent a decline in the accepted level of general knowledge. Maybe. We today have more to learn - most of us can cobble together an explanation of how aircraft fly, for example. The 1895 exam focuses a lot more on spelling (orthography) and grammar than we do today. The URLB makes sense when it notes that you can't compare the test, which students specifically study for, to general knowledge, but that doesn't mean that this test doesn't contain stuff we should have learned - like not using three negatives in a sentence.NSD 10.28: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.28.html#SS6
ULRP: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.htm