Alright! Here is a definite must have for me: smart armour! As most of you know, I am not only a geek who likes to sit in front of his computer. I really love extreme sports like snow- and skateboarding, surfing, bmxing, parcourse, martial arts and the like - the general high-adrenaline, possibly high-impact sports. Now here is an invention that would make my mom - “you really need to lower your guts, give some to your sis” - happy and protect me for fractures and internal bleedings. I’ve just been in the hospital too many times. The new smart armour promises to be flexible in use but when it gets an impact it’ll harden, thereby protecting your body. Finally i can start practising my backflips, butterfly kicks and insane jumps again

new scientist article about US and Canadian wintersporters using this smart armour.

The material: d3o

China has reportedly developed a system called “night crawlerâ€? that can “locate and blockâ€? websites located in China (by IP address range) that have not registered with the Ministry of Information Industry (MII). Nart Villenueve of Citizenlab explains what this system really is about. Of course we already knew for a long time that they have the great Chinese firewall and that they shutdown internet cafes, weblogs, and fora that are not in lign with current Chinese policies. For more information on internet in China read this in depth article: “China: The Net Effect” by Steven Cherry.

But not only communist and dictatorial countries use filtering software. More and more companies and countries use software like smartfilter to deny people from accessing certain sites. See smartfilters promotional flash movie, which explains how it works. And yes, also European companies use netfilters more and more (dutch article about netfilters in companies).

As a result of reading articles like this wired article on internet censorship, Richard Rogers and Auke Touwslager are mapping routes to avoid internet censorship as well as mapping the countries which have most censorship. I’m interested in their findings and will give a link to their research later on.

To be able to monitor which sites are blocked by which countries, I wrote a script that first got a list of public proxy servers, and then queried a whole bunch of sites through those proxies (see wikipedia on proxies if you don’t know what they are). The problem is that I don’t know which rules are enforced on those proxies. Each proxy can specify which sites it blocks and I don’t know if the proxies I found are the government controlled proxies. Therefore I cannot do good empirical research. I guess citizenlab’s current approach is the only way to go: put your own proxyservers in all countries through which you query sites. This way you know you will be routed through the countries’ proxy servers and not through a proxy with different rules. Bummer for my research

For more information on internet censorship see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/, the open net intiative, and wikipedia on internet censorship.

Update:

Users of Microsoft’s new China-based Internet portal have been blocked from using the words “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights” in an apparent move by the US software giant to appease Beijing. … Microsoft is not the only international tech company to comply with China’s stringent Internet rules. Yahoo! and Google — the two most popular Internet search engines — have already been criticized for cooperating with the Chinese government to censor the Internet. (link)

Graph related del.icio.us tags. Double click on a tag to refresh.

CiteULike:

CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software.

Better still, it organizes everything with tags, very cool!

Tagwebs:

What if we could tag not just photos, but also other tags? We could start to build a tagweb. When a tagweb is created from your tags, that tagweb works perfectly within the realm of what makes sense to you. The reason nobody came up with this before Flickr was because we didn’t have Flickr as a visible reference point. You can’t just imagine something out of the blue without first thinking about related things.

* A tagweb is a network of ideas that can be graphed on a computer or on paper.
* A tagweb is not built deliberately; it emerges naturally as users contribute to a system.
* A tagweb requires no external information.
* A tagweb emulates its creator’s brain.
* As a tagweb grows, it becomes more useful.
* A tagweb does not “understand” its contents; rather, it understands the relationships of its contents.

I need to think about how this relates to what Tim Berners-Lee is doing with the Semantic Web.

Matt Biddulf has an animated screen capture of what del.icio.us would look like embedded in the BBC 3’s page.

The Creative Commons is launching a new initiative, the Science Commons:

Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons and will launch on January 1, 2005.

The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.

There’s an interview with Science Commons director John Wilbanks on Open Access Now.

Biomimicry
is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g., a solar cell inspired by a leaf. [It] uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.

–
I don’t think it is a new way of science, but one of the only ways to do science. Where else but in nature do people find their inspiration? Life has proven to be a great ‘problem solver’. Especially in my field, artificial intelligence’ a lot of applications are mimicked from nature, e.g. neural networks, genetic algorithms, …

PNAS — Table of Contents (Apr 6 2004, 101 (Suppl. 1))

Specual issue: Mapping Knowledge Domains: The World Wide Web provides a unprecedented opportunity to automatically analyze a large sample of interests and activity in the world. We discuss methods for extracting knowledge from the web by randomly sampling and analyzing hosts and pages, and by analyzing the link structure of the web and how links accumulate over time. A variety of interesting and valuable information can be extracted, such as the distribution of web pages over domains, the distribution of interest in different areas, communities related to different topics, the nature of competition in different categories of sites, and the degree of communication between different communities or countries.

from: Buergerwelle.de - one of the biggest information sources concerning mobile phones, mobile radiocommunictions and electrosmog.

Omega-News - Possible Deleterious Effects of Physiologically Significant Radiation Pressure Exposures: Portable communication devices that have become globally utilized during the past decade are principally electromagnetic field emitters: that is, photon emitters. Although commonly neglected for consideration, due to its inconsequential magnitude for most circumstances, the radiation pressure associated with some of these portable communication devices provides forces on the order of magnitude of piconewtons, which is identically the magnitude of force that has been demonstrated to deform and initiate dissociation (melting) of the DNA molecule. No similar comparison of radiation pressure experienced from our sun may be made due to the spectral content of solar radiation which reaches a maximum in the visible light region of the electromagnetic spectrum and diminishes rapidly with increasing wavelength. However, portable hand-held radiating devices, virtually unknown prior to the 1990s, motivate us to make a calculated scrutiny of a force, radiation pressure, previously held to be of no consequence to life on earth. (…)

other articles:
(more…)

Networks, Netwars, and the Fight for the Future
Nog niet gelezen, maar ziet er wel interessant uit.

Mediamatic: Mediamatic: Mediamatic.net
new media, art, culture and theory

Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science | Online

for u flix