"According to the World Health Organisation, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the number one cause of death globally: more people die annually from CVDs than from any other cause. An estimated 17.1 million people died from CVDs in 2004, representing 29% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, an estimated 7.2 million were due to coronary heart disease. Any method which can help to detect signs of heart disease could therefore have a significant impact on world health. This challenge is to produce methods to do exactly that. Specifically, we are interested in creating the first level of screening of cardiac pathologies both in a Hospital environment by a doctor (using a digital stethoscope) and at home by the patient (using a mobile device).

The problem is of particular interest to machine learning researchers as it involves classification of audio sample data, where distinguishing between classes of interest is non-trivial. Data is gathered in real-world situations and frequently contains background noise of every conceivable type. The differences between heart sounds corresponding to different heart symptoms can also be extremely subtle and challenging to separate. Success in classifying this form of data requires extremely robust classifiers. Despite its medical significance, to date this is a relatively unexplored application for machine learning."

"Local Motors, a revolutionary crowd-sourced car company, is holding a concept design competition for a transcontinental race vehicle with a support ship."

"Netflix has been a business partner to the movie and television studios through licensing deals, but increasingly it is seen as a partner with its hands far deeper in the pockets of the media companies than anyone thought. Through its success, the company has positioned itself at the center of the media universe — at the nexus of technology and content — and is now finding it a place increasingly under attack."

"At first, the collaboration struck many scientists as worrisome — they would be giving up ownership of data, and anyone could use it, publish papers, maybe even misinterpret it and publish information that was wrong.

But Alzheimer’s researchers and drug companies realized they had little choice.

“Companies were caught in a prisoner’s dilemma,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “They all wanted to move the field forward, but no one wanted to take the risks of doing it.”"

"In this paper, a simple Neural controller has been used to achieve stable walking in a NAO biped robot, with 22 degrees of freedom that implemented in a virtual physics-based simulation environment of Robocup soccer simulation environment. The algorithm uses a Matsuoka base neural oscillator to generate control signal for the biped robot. To find the best angular trajectory and optimize network parameters, a new population-based search algorithm, called the Harmony Search (HS) algorithm, has been used. The algorithm conceptualized a group of musicians together trying to search for better state of harmony. Simulation results demonstrate that the modification of the step period and the walking motion due to the sensory feedback signals improves the stability of the walking motion."

"In the old world, Russia was the King Kong of conventional gas. It was like the U.S. on military spending: basically the equal of the ROW (rest of world).

But when you look at the unconventional gas reserves, it's Asia-Pac first, NorthAm second, and the former USSR a middling third. In short, rising Asia and the U.S. can suddenly cover themselves a whole lot more, making both Russia and the Gulf pretty minor by comparison. Remember that last Nov Obama and Hu announced a "US-China shale gas initiative" that promised a swap of US technology for investment opportunities in China. That's gotta spook the would-be "OPEC of gas.""

"What does this mean to you?

If you currently receive Time Inc. or Forbes periodical content electronically from Gale or any provider other than EBSCO, you and your patrons will lose access to that content over the next year. While there will remain alternative, high-quality titles in all information providers' products, there will be an impact on users, especially those who access content through long-term statewide subscriptions."

"And for those who keep looking to biology for an answer, the fundamental yet rarely asked question is why natural selection designed our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings and feel distress at their distress, and pleasure at their pleasure. If the exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have got into the empathy business. But it did, and the political and economic elites had better grasp that in a hurry."

"We continue this protocol until the future date (1 May 2010) at which time we upload our final version of the master document. For this final version, we include the URL of a web site where the .pdf documents of all of our past forecasts can be downloaded and independently checked for consistent MD5 and SHA-2 hashes. For convenience, we will include a summary of all of our forecasts in this final document."

"What we do know is that the credible competition from AMD certainly seems to have lit a fire of innovation under Intel’s ass in the early to mid-2000s, and Intel later countered AMD with superior Intel products from roughly 2006 to today. That part of the competition played out as it should in organic fashion, but the part where AMD grabbed market share during its own period of superiority obviously never happened … and it’s pretty clear to many people why it didn’t."

"This page reports the result of the iGEM competition for 2009. You can visit the team's wiki by clicking on the team's name. You can see what medal the team won and view the slides from their presentation, a video of their presentation, and their poster using the other icons."

"In conjunction with the API release, Collecta is launching a developer’s challenge with ChallengePost.com.

Dubbed “The AppMaster Challenge,” the contest will help drive the development of creative and powerful applications. From now through October 8th, developers can submit their Collecta-powered plug-in, webapp or application and the Collecta team will select the one that best exemplifies what real-time results can do. The winner will be announced on October 15th, and will receive both a featured spot as AppMaster Champion and a new 15″ MacBook Pro. There will be weekly prizes as well, and developers are encouraged to submit early and often."

"Section Eight Design was selected as the winner for their partnership with Teton Valley Community School, a non-profit, independent school in Victor, Idaho. The proposal, pictured above, focuses on scalability and a connection to the outdoors, taking advantage of the school's location at the base of the Teton Mountain Range. In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces that the school will build incrementally as they raise funds, gardens, farm animals, and local, drought-resistant flora will be integrated into the school's fabric to promote community, environmental responsibility and a "sense of place.""

"I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post."

"They love to make it sound like making articles available free online is what killed newspapers. After all, then the problem is freeloading readers, news aggregators, and blogs. But in the case of classifieds, newspapers are getting trounced by a product that’s pretty much better and more efficient in every way, which casts them in a much less sympathetic light. Which just underscores the point that the industry needs to redouble its efforts to find a new model, rather than preserving an old one that was bloated and inefficient in many ways."

"Entries should be functional designs that reveal the beauty of the wood.

Eligible entries are limited to one sheet of plywood.

Entries must be flat-pack designs, either using no hardware, or with the use of up to 20 pieces of EcoSystems: Alpha hardware. For PDF instructions and 3D files of the Alpha hardware, please visit Design Green Now.

EcoSystems will provide CNC (computer numerically controlled) routing manufacturing of the winning entry. The wood used is 1” Appleply, a 17 ply panel that has a rotary-cut White Maple face. In addition to being FSC wood, the panels are NAUF (No Added Urea Formaldehyde) and come with a no VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) clear finish."

"Standards create opportunities to do stuff. These opportunities may well be patent worthy. So if you want to grow out the thicket around the emerging standard you just lock some smart guys in a room and start them brain storming. Some of what they come up with will be obvious, but that hardly means you won’t be able to capture a patent for it. Just to add to fire to the shit storm it appears that Redhat’s patent is for the mind bogglingly obvious idea of transfering XML data over AMQP. Of course any patent worth it’s lawyering starts with some broad claim and then get’s more focused."

"This experience has also altered my view of blogging and research. On one hand, I’m very enthusiastic about research in general, and my research in particular, where we are regularly cracking conventionally impossible problems. On the other hand, it seems that some small number of people viewing a discussion silently decide they don’t like it, and veto it given the opportunity. It only takes one to turn strong paper into a years-long odyssey, so public discussion of research directions and topics in a vetocracy is akin to voluntarily wearing a “kick me” sign. While this a problem for me, I expect it to be even worse for the members of a vetocracy in the long term."

"The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise. We are kind because it makes us feel good about ourselves: kindly people are self-approbation junkies. Encountering this argument in the 1730s, the philosopher Francis Hutcheson dispatched it briskly: "If this is self-love, be it so ... Nothing can be better than this self-love, nothing more generous.""

"Pyflix is a small package written in Python that provides an easy entry point for getting up and running in the Netflix Prize competition. It combines an efficient storage scheme with an intuitive high-level API that allows contestants to focus on the real problem, the recommendation system algorithm. To get started with Pyflix, keep reading."

"...Here, however, Apple has gone too far. Rejecting an application because it might compete with Apple is simply indefensible. There's so much wrong with it that I'm not even sure where to start. There are legal issues to consider, in terms of anti-competitive behavior. There's the fact that Apple isn't actually offering this functionality on the iPhone, so it's not really competing at all. And hey, doesn't Apple already allow plenty of competing functionality, with apps that ship on the iPhone? One need only look at PCalc, WeatherBug, or Big Clock to see obvious examples of duplicated functionality. Yet each was allowed in the App Store without incident."

"... If the bus company has to meet labor, environmental, and equipment standards to cart passengers around for a fee, it could easily be undercut by unlicensed shared-ride operations, it says. Whether that turns out to be true or not, Trentway finds itself in the same basic situation that existing business like Encyclopedia Britannica faced when free or low-cost upstarts like Wikipedia threatened to crowd-source their core product into oblivion"

"We invite proposals for an economically viable way to recover silver from silica-encapsulated ore."