December 9, 2011

H&M Puts Real Model Heads On Fake Bodies


The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and "completely virtual," the company has admitted. H&M designs a body that can better display clothes made for humans than humans can, then "dresses" it by drawing on its clothes, and digitally pastes on the heads of real women in post-production. For now — in the future, even models' faces won't be considered perfect enough for online fast fashion, and we'll buy all of our clothing from cyborgs. (This news sort of explains this.) But man, isn't looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny? Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can't say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn't racially diverse.

Jezebel

September 26, 2011

From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later

One year ago a malicious software program called Stuxnet exploded onto the world stage as the first publicly confirmed cyber superweapon – a digital guided missile that could emerge from cyber space to destroy a physical target in the real world.
It took Ralph Langner about a month to figure that out.

While Symantec, the big antivirus company, and other experts pored over Stuxnet's inner workings, it was Mr. Langner, an industrial control systems security expert in Hamburg, who deciphered and tested pieces of Stuxnet's "payload" code in his lab and declared it a military-grade cyberweapon aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities.
Days later, he and other experts refined that assessment, agreeing Stuxnet was specifically after Iran's gas centrifuge nuclear fuel-enrichment program at Natanz.

After infiltrating Natanz's industrial-control systems, Stuxnet automatically ordered subsystems operating the centrifuge motors to spin too fast and make them fly apart, Langner says. At the same time, Stuxnet made it appear random breakdowns were responsible so plant operators would not realize a nasty software weapon was behind it.


Christian Science Monitor

August 22, 2011

Nuns, a ‘Dying Breed,’ Fade From Leadership Roles at Catholic Hospitals

When Sister Mary Jean Ryan entered the convent as a young nurse in 1960, virtually every department of every Catholic hospital was run by a nun, from pediatrics to dietary to billing. After her retirement on July 31 as the chief executive of one of the country’s largest networks of Catholic hospitals, only 11 nuns remained among her company’s more than 22,000 employees, and none were administrators.

NY Times

August 17, 2011

The Annotated Toffler

Think you've heard it all about the global financial crisis, the Internet distracting us into stupidity, dysfunctional and self-destructive politics, the demise of the nuclear family, and degenerating cities? Well imagine having predicted, written about, and imagined the consequences of all of these postmodern maladies -- before they ever happened. Meet Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the accidental futurists who have lived to see so many of their foresights become our daily reality.

Foreign Policy

The Modular Man would like to tell you that we told you so.

July 7, 2011

Lab-made organ implanted for first time


For the first time, a patient has received a synthetic windpipe that was created in a lab with the patient's own stem cells and without using human donor tissue, researchers said Thursday.
Previous lab-generated transplants either used a segment of donor windpipe or involved tissue only, not an organ.

CNN

June 21, 2011

Japan scientist synthesizes meat from human feces

Somehow this feels like a Vonnegut plotline: population boom equals food shortage. Solution? Synthesize food from human waste matter. Absurd yes, but Japanese scientists have actually discovered a way to create edible steaks from human feces.

Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, has developed steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached the scientist because of an overabundance of sewage mud. They asked him to explore the possible uses of the sewage and Ikeda found that the mud contained a great deal of protein because of all the bacteria.

The researchers then extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer and put it in an exploder which created the artificial steak. The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. The researchers color the poop meat red with food coloring and enhance the flavor with soy protein. Initial tests have people saying it even tastes like beef.

Digital Trends

New graphic cigarette warnings unveiled

The federal government Tuesday unveiled nine graphic images that will be required on all cigarette packs and advertising as part of a powerful new warning strategy.

The images include a picture of a man smoking through a tracheotomy hole in his throat, a horribly diseased lung, mottled teeth and gums, a man breathing with an oxygen mask and a man’s body with a large scar running down the chest. They will be accompanied by messages such as, “Warning: Cigarettes are addictive,” “Warning: Cigarettes cause cancer” and “Warning: Smoking can kill you.”

Washington Post

June 14, 2011

U.S. Students Remain Poor at History, Tests Show

American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.

The New York Times

June 1, 2011

Rocket Man

WHO declares cellphones "possibly carcinogenic"

Those who are worried about the possible health risks of cellphones just received some backing from a significant source: the World Health Organization. A group within the organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, has announced it is listing the electromagnetic radiation produced by cell phones as "possibly carcinogenic." The IARC's use of the term "possibly" is key to the decision, as its expert panel determined that the information available is too limited to say anything with a greater degree of certainty, but is sufficient to warrant careful monitoring.

ars technica

US Pentagon to treat cyber-attacks as 'acts of war'

In future, a US president could consider economic sanctions, cyber-retaliation or a military strike if key US computer systems were attacked, officials have said recently.

The planning was given added urgency by a cyber-attack last month on the defence contractor, Lockheed Martin.

A new report from the Pentagon is due out in a matter of weeks.

"A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.

Mr Lapan confirmed the Pentagon was drawing up a cyber defence strategy, which would be ready in two to three weeks.

Cyber-attacks from foreign nations that threaten widespread US civilian casualties, like cutting off power supplies or shutting down emergency-responder networks, could be treated as an act of aggression under the new policy.

BBC

May 25, 2011

Largest-Ever Survey of Cosmic History Confirms That Dark Energy Exists, Is Tearing the Universe Apart

After a five-year study of 200,000 galaxies, scientists are more certain than ever that dark energy acts as a repulsive force, tearing the universe apart at an accelerating rate. The research confirms the idea that dark energy dominates gravity throughout the cosmos. But no one has any idea what dark energy actually is or how it works.

popsci

May 3, 2011

How a Fake MLK Jr. Quote Took the Internet by Storm

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everything but the first sentence is indeed by King and can be found in Strength to Love. That first sentence, though, is a complete fake.

...

Retractions and corrections on real-time social services like Twitter are nearly impossible. As is so often the case, the great Internet fact-checking machine is already in full swing, with discussions on Reddit and numerous blogs. That, however, will do little to reach all of those who retweeted this fake quote today. Indeed, this fake quote will likely become part of the MLK Jr. canon soon. While many will post about how this quote is fake, these stories will only reach a minority of those who read it today. Instead, it’s still being retweeted a few times per minute and continues to appear on new blog posts and Facebook status updates.

April 21, 2011

Your iPhone's watching you. Should you care?

Researchers announced today that they found what look like secret files on the iPhone that track user location and store it on the device, without the permission of the device owner. It's unclear what the data is used for and why Apple has been collecting it in iOS products that carry a 3G antenna for nearly a year now.

Alasdair Allan, senior research fellow in astronomy at the University of Exeter, and writer Pete Warden, who discovered the log file and created a tool that lets users see a visualization of that data, say there's no evidence of that information being sent to Apple or anybody else. Even so, the pair note that the data is unencrypted, giving anyone with access to your phone or computer where backups may be stored a way to grab the data and extrapolate a person's whereabouts and routines.

To help users understand more about the data that's being collected, what the risks are, and what they can do about it, CNET has put together this FAQ.

CNET

25-story Seattle apartment tower to be demolished

Demolition is scheduled to start next month on a 25-story apartment tower in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood. The 10-year-old McGuire building has to come down because of construction defects.

The Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce reports crews have started salvaging washers, dryers, refrigerators and stoves. It will take more than a year to remove the highrise. Builders plan to reuse 95 percent of the concrete.

Seattle Times

April 18, 2011

The New Wedding Guest

Gone are the days of capturing a sea of guests with genuine emotion on their faces. Now you have to give an elbow to Aunt Clair who’s blocking the aisle with her Digital Rebel in hand as the bride makes her grand entrance. I used to love capturing guests emotion during the first dance, parent dance, even the toasts. But now my subjects are a handful of guests with point and shoots held up blocking their faces, or the tops of everyones head because they are looking down at the back of the camera to check the photo they just took. My favorite moment so far was a photo of the bride going down the aisle from behind. Everyone in front of the bride has their cameras up, everyone that the bride has past is still facing the back of the church with the heads down looking at the back of their camera. Very few people stopped to enjoy the moment of a father walking his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day.



Tiffinbox

Thx, AJ

April 14, 2011

RIP Comics Code



Wikipedia

Soaps Dissed: ABC Kills 'Life,' Abandons 'Children'

ABC pulled the plug on the classic soap operas All My Children and One Life To Live on Thursday.

The final episode of All My Children will air in September, and One Life To Live will end in January, the network announced.

NPR

April 11, 2011

Why more and more women are using pornography

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.

Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.

I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.

Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Of course a side benefit for the natural contrarian is it frequently leads to things like headlines and money.

Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. Thiel was one of the few who saw in coming. There’s a famous story about PayPal’s March 2000 venture capital round. The offer was “only” at a $500 million-or-so valuation. Nearly everyone on the board and the management team balked, except Thiel who calmly told the room that this was a bubble at its peak, and the company needed to take every dime it could right now. That’s how close PayPal came to being dot com roadkill a la WebVan or Pets.com.

And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right.

So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Not surprisingly, another Internet bubble seemed the farthest thing from his mind. But, he argued, America is under the spell of a bubble of a very different kind. Is it an emerging markets bubble? You could argue that, Thiel says, but he also notes that with half of the world’s population surging to modernity, it’s hard to argue the emerging world is overvalued.

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Tech Crunch

March 29, 2011

Top 10 Dying Industries

A new analysis by research firm IBIS World looks at 10 industries that appear to be dying. The list isn’t exactly shocking, but it represents a mix of sectors that are being left behind by technology or have been hurt by cheaper overseas competition.

The biggest industry profiled by IBISWorld is wired telecom carriers, largely being supplanted by cellphones and the Internet. The dominance of the Web and digital media also puts Newspaper publishers, record stores and video-rental companies on the list. Meanwhile, photofinishing also takes its place among the top 10 dying industries thanks to the growing influence of digital photography.

Cheap imports are blamed for a decline in mills and apparel manufacturers. Companies that rent formal wear are also counted among dying industries amid both competition from abroad and lower prices making owning your own formal wear a more attractive option than renting.

The only clear recession casualty that makes the list is manufactured home dealers. The housing boom led to a surge in the industry, but now years after the bubble burst the sector has continued to struggle.

The full list is below:

The Wall Street Journal

March 28, 2011

Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84

Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84.

In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.”

New York Times

Wikipedia

March 15, 2011

Japan quake shortened length of days on Earth: NASA

The massive earthquake that struck Japan last Friday was so powerful that it accelerated the Earth's rotation speed, shortening the length of the day by 1.8 microseconds, a new analysis by NASA has claimed.

According to scientists at the US space agency, the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the way the Earth's mass is distributed, which made the planet spin a little faster, cutting the 24-hour day by an estimated 1.8 microseconds. That is less than two millionths of one second.

The initial data suggested that the quake moved Japan's main island about eight feet and shifted the Earth's figure axis, around which the Earth's mass is balanced, by about 17 centimetres, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Earlier, scientists have estimated that the quake has shortened the day by 1.6 microseconds.

IndianExpress.com

March 7, 2011

Too Much Information Makes You Make Bad Choices

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

Newsweek

February 24, 2011

Where Have The Good Men Gone?

Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.
"We are sick of hooking up with guys," writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated." What Ms. Klausner means by "guys" is males who are not boys or men but something in between. "Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends.... They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home." One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner's book wrote, "I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?"

WSJ

February 18, 2011

Is the internet killing empathy?

A TV news reporter for a Los Angeles station was doing an on-camera report on the Grammy Awards Sunday night, and suddenly her speech became garbled. Was she having a stroke on the air?

The newscast quickly cut away when it became apparent that she was in trouble. But by the next morning, televised news reports were making it part of their Grammy coverage. (One AOL.com page featured the incident at the top of its five "memorable moments" from the Grammys.)

The video went viral on the internet. At the UK Telegraph website, where we caught up with the video showing her sudden slurred speech, 9,388 people noted they "liked" the video with a thumbs up signal and 6,027 recommended it to Facebook friends.

People couldn't turn away. They were drawn to it, watching the images over and over with the same kind of grim curiosity that compels drivers to slow down and gaze at a fatal car crash -- drawn often by a subconscious fear that the same thing could happen to us. By observing it in other people, we have our own experience of it, but at an emotional distance. The more we observe terrifying events happening to other people, the more they reinforce our sense of denial and detachment: It can't happen to us.

CNN

February 17, 2011

“I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."


Ken Jennings, contestant on Jeopardy! famous for winning 74 games in a row, borrowing a line from The Simpsons to congratulate his computer opponent, Watson, for handily winning a three-day competition.


New York Times

February 8, 2011

Payback: Upset Ex-Girlfriend Spams Boyfriend In Google Images

Upset boyfriends and girlfriends are nothing new. There are plenty of stories of girlfriends getting back at their ex-boyfriends for mistreatment and visa versa. But in the age where Google ranks supreme, you do not want to mess with a girl who knows how to manipulate Google.

One guy learned this the hard way.

Apparently, a disturbed ex-girlfriend took her ex-boyfriend's professional taken picture and polluted it all over Google Images for a search on his name. You can see the Google Image search spam yourself by clicking here or in the screen shot below:

Search Engine Roundtable

February 3, 2011

The internet has (kind of) run out of space

On Thursday, the internet as we know it ran out of space.

The nonprofit group that assigns addresses to service providers announced that, on Thursday morning, it allocated the last free internet addresses available from the current pool used for most of the internet's history.

"This is an historic day in the history of the internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time," said Raul Echeberria, chairman of the Number Resource Organization.

CNN

January 27, 2011

Sputnik Moment?

"This is our generation's Sputnik Moment," President Obama said during Tuesday's State of the Union.

...

So I couldn't help wondering: Could we ever have a Sputnik moment?

Frontiers? We live on them. In 1969, things were still analog. You didn't have to discard your devices after a few months because Steve Jobs had decided that light purple was the new purple. Now, if something is lasting, we look down on it. "The only thing that lasts these days are dead armadillos and those seasonal breads in the glass case at Starbucks," we point out. Ephemeral is the new permanent. We have the collective memory -- and persistent desire to mate with anything in sight -- of Viagra-addled mayflies.

This comes with many boons. Thanks to our insistence on living on the bubble of the present moment, our world is rife with unnatural wonders - iPhones, iPads, Clouds, memes, videos of cats in Japan stuffing themselves into boxes. When I have a sore throat, I can go online and describe my symptoms, and strangers from across the globe (or the part of the globe that follows me on Twitter, at any rate) can suggest that I drink blueberry syrup and hot toddies! This is the stuff!

Everyone admits that the world has shrunk. But this shrinkage has also closed the window for Sputnik moments.

Washington Post

Technology Loop

January 17, 2011

Excessive Video Gaming Not Just A Symptom

Spending hours with a PlayStation or an Xbox every day can lead to serious psychiatric problems in children -- but "pathological" video game playing may not be just a result of preexisting mental disorders, researchers reported.

A two-year prospective study of more than 3,000 children identified several baseline psychological factors such as impulsivity that predicted excessive video game playing, according to Douglas Gentile, PhD, of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and colleagues.

Nevertheless, such conditions as depression, social difficulties, and poor school performance "seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming," Gentile and co-authors wrote online in Pediatrics.

"Pathological gaming seems not to be simply secondary to other disorders but to predict poorer functioning longitudinally, and it can last for several years," they added.

For their study, the researchers gave questionnaires to 3,034 elementary and middle-school children in Singapore from 2007 to 2009. The survey, conducted in the students' classrooms, asked age-appropriate questions to elicit information on video gaming habits, social interactions, decision-making skills, affect, and other aspects of their psychiatric status as well as school performance.

Gentile and colleagues noted that response patterns indicated that causation could go in both directions for some factors.

"For example, although impulsivity is a risk factor for becoming a pathological gamer, impulsivity worsens after a youth becomes a pathological gamer," they wrote.

MedPage Today

January 12, 2011

Your BlackBerry or Your Wife

When you're out to dinner, does your BlackBerry occupy a seat at the table? Does your spouse ever check email before saying "good morning" to the kids? Does your son sleep with his laptop?

It may be time for a technology cleanse.

Like an extreme diet that cuts out all processed foods for a short period of time with the promise of lasting good health, a technology cleanse means you unplug for a short time with longer-term benefits for your relationships.

But be warned: As with any other diet, it isn't easy.

The Wall Street Journal