Creative New

Exploiting social and mobile ad hoc networking to achieve ubiquitous connectivity.

Via developer.symbian

Via brockport.edu

This essay examines a particular example of what is known as a ‘Mobile Ad hoc Network’ (MANET) involving smartphones. This MANET would address the following problem:

‘A million and a half people annually ride the New York City subway system, which comprises 468 stations to form the largest subway complex in the world. The diverse human conglomerate of cultures and lifestyles that inhabit NYC’s subway though, share at least one common trend: a lack of mobile coverage - a rather serious, both economical and social, issue. Thus, a daily influx of 5,042,263 potential customers is practically lost for mobile companies. Not to mention the irritating circumstance that in a world of otherwise global communications one is forced to spend significant periods of time without a connection signal.’

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Via zeitgeistmovie

Via physorg

This undated photo provided by the Onassis Cultural Center shows a 2nd century A.D. marble statuette of Athena, sometime worshiped as a goddess of war, wearing a breastplate made up of coiled snakes. A woman’s place has never been just in the home - not even in ancient Greece. The proof is in an exhibit titled “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens,” a collection of artifacts at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York that corrects the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children. (AP Photo/Onassis Cultural Center)

 A woman’s place has never been just in the home - not even in ancient Greece. The proof is in an exhibit titled “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens” - a collection of artifacts that correct the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children.

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Via financialsense

The intent of this article is to compare the net wealth of selected nations. The net wealth figures (actually labeled as ‘Net Debt’) for the G-7 nations (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Canada) can be found on the International Monetary Fund website here. It should be noted that all of the G-7 countries have greater government liabilities than assets.

* Net debt comprises the stock (at year-end) of all government gross liabilities (both to residents and non-residents) minus all government assets (domestic as well as foreign). To avoid double counting, the data are based on a consolidated account (eliminating liabilities and assets between components of the government, such as budgetary units and social security funds). General government should reflect a consolidated account of central government plus state, provincial, or local governments. Debt data are not always comparable across countries.

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Via web-strategist

This slideshare presentation by French consulting firm faberNovel dissects Google’s business model, analyzes strength and weakness in each of the markets they are involved with and brings clarity to how some services are loss leaders and how monetization happens from it’s connected product suite. Do take time to look at the page rank formula.

Via plosone.org

image source

The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person’s body or an artificial body was one’s own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person’s body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one’s body.

Via discovermagazine

A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I’ve come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough. Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde’s office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and—in this universe, anyway—life as we know it would not exist.

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.

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Via sciencedaily

 Physicists in the USA and at the London Centre for Nanotechnology have found a way to extend the quantum lifetime of electrons by more than 5,000 per cent, as reported recently in Physical Review Letters. Electrons exhibit a property called ‘spin’ and work like tiny magnets which can point up, down or a quantum superposition of both.

The state of the spin can be used to store information and so by extending their life the research provides a significant step towards building a usable quantum computer.

“Silicon has dominated the computing industry for decades,” says Dr Gavin Morley, lead author of the paper. “The most sensitive way to see the quantum behaviour of electrons held in silicon chips uses electrical currents. Unfortunately, the problem has always been that these currents damage the quantum features under study, degrading their usefulness.”

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Via physorg

Since their development in the 1940s, transistors have been at the heart of computers and other modern electronic devices. Transistors – whose job is to start, stop, or amplify electric current – come in all shapes, sizes and materials, depending on the application. Recently, scientists have fabricated a new variation: a micro-sized plasma transistor.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the microplasma transistor by integrating a conventional microcavity plasma device with an electron emitter. Kuo-Feng (Kevin) Chen and Professor J. Gary Eden, Director of the Laboratory for Optical Physics and Engineering, published their study in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. As Eden explained, a plasma transistor could one day have certain advantages compared with conventional transistors. 

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