The easiest way to spot a supermassive black hole (SMBH) is when it expels a huge jet of matter in one of the most energetic displays in the Universe. While astronomers have spotted these huge black holes at the centers of most galaxies, not all are active—meaning the jet isn't there, and the SMBH is hiding. However, even inactive black holes may give themselves away if we can spot them eating stars: the disruption of a star by gravitational forces can produce a burst of light.

As reported in Nature, the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) galaxy survey spotted a burst of intense ultraviolet and visible light from the center of a galaxy with no known SMBH. S. Gezari et al. performed a spectral analysis on the flare, and determined it to be consistent with the destruction of a red giant star with a helium-rich core. The likely culprit for the star's disruption is a black hole with a mass between 2.7 and 2.9 million times that of our Sun.







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Google is moving the goalpost significantly in the market for big data tools, at least for organizations that can work with its canned tools and are willing to trust the search giant with their data. After some time in a limited preview, Google has unveiled Google BigQuery for public consumption. Google is giving developers the ability to query up to 100GB of data per month for free, or up to 2TB of data stored without having to contact sales at all, which provides a very low bar for working with big data.



Google's BigQuery is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for working with "massive datasets" that can be in the billions of rows. It has a SQL-like query language, and promises to analyze large data sets "in seconds." Note that organizations that want a Google-hosted SQL database can tap the Cloud SQL offering.

Commodity Big Data
What's most interesting about BigQuery is the fact that it provides big-data analytics in a completely hosted offering. Organization's don't have to build out the hardware for a big-data infrastructure. They don't need to worry about setting up Hadoop or any other software. It's big data available instantly, and at a fairly affordable price.

Google is charging by storage and by the queries processed. The storage is priced at $0.12 per GB per month, up to 2TB. This is, more or less, the same as you get from Google Cloud Storage, except there's no drop in price after the 1TB tier.

Queries are priced at $0.035/GB processed, with a limit of 1,000 queries per day and 20TB of data processed per day. Note that this is after the 100GB/month free tier. And you're charged only for the data processed in a column of the data, not for the entire table.

To work with data, you have three options: a browser-based query tool, a Python command-line tool, and a REST API.

As an off-the-shelf service, it's going to be a bit less flexible than what developers could get out of a tool built with Hadoop, Hive, etc. However, it is likely to be effective for quite a few organizations and developers who need big-data tools quickly and can work within the limitations of BigQuery. Data journalists, for example, might find BigQuery quite useful in working with home-grown data sets rather than having to build out their own query tools.

There's also the matter of data privacy. The Terms of Service (ToS) give each party full control of their own intellectual property - so Google should have no rights to the data being studied using BigQuery. Nevertheless, any organization that wants to keep its data private is going to think twice before putting it into Google's BigQuery.

Flexibility and privacy aside, this is going to fill a niche very handily. There's a lot of nonsensitive data that developers might want to crunch, without having to create their own big-data toolset. BigQuery looks like a decent solution for situations when a commodity tool will fit the bill.

Recent changes in the Earth's climate are primarily being driven by the burning of fossil fuels—that is, taking carbon from deep in the Earth, and dumping it into the atmosphere at breakneck speed. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just sort of… put it back?

That’s roughly the idea behind carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Carbon dioxide is captured from the effluent of a large generator, like a coal power plant, and compressed into a supercritical liquid. That liquid is then transported via pipeline to an injection station where it’s pumped deep underground.

But the technique requires some very specific rock formations if we expect the carbon to stay there. Two new studies have looked at how much CO2 we could hope to store, and how that storage may be affected by another process that's booming: fracking.






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More than three months after releasing software for Windows-users to send documents to a Kindle, Amazon has now released the Mac version. Announced on Tuesday afternoon, the "Send to Kindle for Mac" application allows Mac users to wirelessly send personal documents to their Kindles via drag-and-drop in the Dock or within the app itself. Users can also send documents to the Kindle by printing from any Mac application.

As we wrote in January when the Windows version was released, each Kindle already comes with its own e-mail address so users can send files to themselves. (There's also an Instapaper mechanism for sending documents to Kindle.) The desktop software aims to make that process easier, however, by eliminating the need to involve an e-mail client (especially convoluted in the case of printing from an app, which would involve printing to PDF and then sending that PDF to your Kindle). Users don't have to be sending documents to a hardware Kindle either—files can be sent to a Kindle app on a mobile device, too (such as the iPad or an Android phone).

According to Amazon, users can also use the Mac software to archive documents in your Kindle library for download later if you don't want those files to show up and take up space on your device right away. "Your last page read along with bookmarks, notes, and highlights are automatically synchronized for your documents (with the exception of PDFs) across your Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Android," the company said in a statement.




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A South African man, whose name has not been published, was carjacked, robbed, and stuffed into the trunk of his car near Johannesburg on Sunday. The robbers, however, had overlooked his mobile phone, which he used to text his girlfriend, Lynn Peters. From there, Twitter took over.

Two armed men grabbed the driver and his Volkswagen Golf in the Honeydew area northwest of Johannesburg at about 9:00pm local time. Carjacking is a crime that is common in the country—over 10,000 such incidents occurred last year.






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As record temperatures swept through the Midwest and trees bloomed early across the Northeast, lots of talk focused on what an unusually warm start spring was having. The folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have now crunched the numbers, and found that it wasn't just unusually warm—March was bizarrely hot. With 15,000 record high temperatures set in the US, it was far and away the warmest March in the nation's history, and only a single month—January of 2006—was as far off from the monthly average.

Only one of the 48 contiguous states (Washington) was below normal, and a huge slice down the center of the country was bathed in bright red in NOAA's map, indicative of record high temperatures. The heatwave was partly responsible for moving the first quarter of the year into the top slot of the US record books. The high temperatures also kicked off an unusually early spring cluster of tornadoes in the Midwest.

Neither NASA nor NOAA have managed to do the global monthly averages yet, so it's not clear if our experience was shared by much of the rest of the planet (the US occupies a relatively small fraction of its surface). So far this year, the global means have been pretty mundane. They're above last century's average, but not by a lot, and every month has been above that average since early 1994.

NOAA indicates that it was a specific weather pattern that pushed heat into the central US. One of the key drivers of global temperature, the tropical Pacific's surface temperatures, remain in a cooler, La Niña state, so it's unlikely the rest of the world shared in our warmth.





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This morning the Big Data online marketplace vendor Infochimps announces a new analytics dashboard for their services called Dashpot.

Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show.

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Here is a short video that explains the service:



Dashpot is part of the overall Infochimps platform, which starts off at $5,000 monthly, and specific pricing depends on the options selected for subscription and the hosting environment: public or private cloud. We have written about the company before, including here when we saw them at the 2011 SXSW show. The platform is quite powerful and has been used by a number of commercial vendors for cloud-based Big Data projects.

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Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems. A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign.

Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day.







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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.

MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

MAAS is intended to complement Juju, Canonical's service orchestration framework. Juju works a little bit like a package management system: administrators use Juju recipes (which are called Charms) to automatically deploy and configure various server software stacks. Juju integrates with MAAS, making it possible to centrally deploy software to the nodes in a MAAS cluster.

Using MAAS and Juju together can significantly reduce the difficulty of bringing up an Ubuntu-based private cloud. A system administrator can use MAAS to provision nodes and then use Juju to populate those nodes with complete software configurations for things like OpenStack or Hadoop.

Canonical is best known for its desktop Linux product, but the company has worked hard to convince potential adopters that Ubuntu is also a credible choice for servers. The availability of updates at no cost has helped to drive Ubuntu server growth over the past few years, but it still faces an uphill battle competing with Red Hat's highly successful Linux distribution. Canonical's strong focus on the cloud is one way that the company is working to differentiate Ubuntu as a Linux server platform.

For more details about MAAS, you can refer to Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post about the new project. The source code is available from Canonical's Launchpad project hosting service. MAAS is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04, an upcoming long-term support release that will arrive at the end of the month.





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It was a genuine small-town mystery that briefly put Clintonville, Wisconsin in the national spotlight. Late on March 18, folks in the city of 4,700 just west of Green Bay (and a couple hours north of my current base of operations) suddenly flooded 911 with reports of unsettling booms and shaking. Callers described the noises as being similar to jackhammers, rattling pipes, rumbling thunder, or slamming doors. Authorities scrambled to identify the source. Gas lines were checked for signs of leaks or other anomalies, the same for sewers and water mains. Planes surveyed the county for plumes of smoke. The landfill was checked for signs of a methane explosion. The dam was inspected for structural damage. The military was asked about exercises. Everything checked out, and there were no reports of industrial accidents, either.

Thoughts naturally turned to earthquakes, even though Wisconsin is about as seismically active as a sloth is fast. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) wasn’t reporting any events in the region, so that route of inquiry didn't go far. The reports stopped coming around in 10:00 am, but the booms returned with nightfall like the mysterious assailants in The 13th Warrior.







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What do you get when you have Silicon Valley’s best and brightest sitting before you, elbow-to-elbow with Hollywood moguls, New York elite, and some incredibly cool Bostonians (along with a thousand other inspirational souls from around the world)? If you’re Rob Reid, you multiply wit with cynicism, divide by 5 minutes, and express it in a hilarity set normalized to π+1. Behold, ©opyright MathTM, the best short talk at TED 2012 as determined by yours truly. Video of his talk is now available thanks to our friends at TED. So you can fully appreciate it, allow us to give you some background.


Rob Reid understands copyright math because he has the compass cuts and rubber eraser burns of an experienced mathematical optimist grappling with a five-headed label hydra. "The music industry became a frustration for me on October 8, 1998," he told me, "the day that the RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia for releasing the first true mass-market MP3 player, the Rio." Pondering the late '90s, Reid noted, "Their goal was to make open MP3 players completely illegal in this country. So, assault weapons, yes; iPods, no."






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After catching a note about the wiki for SXSW being edited with Hackpad, I thought it might be worth a look. Then I caught the tagline, "best wiki ever." Well, that's a bold statement. Then I noticed that Tomboy creator Alex Graveley was part of the team behind it and thought maybe it really is. After a short test drive, I'm even more impressed. Hackpad combines the simplicity of Tomboy with real-time collaboration features that make it a great lightweight tool for teams.

Tomboy, for folks who haven't spent much time on Linux, is a wiki-like desktop note-taking application written in Mono. It's been ported to other platforms, but has been most widely used on Linux. For many years, Tomboy was one of my go-to apps. As I've used more and more Web-based software, I've gotten out of the habit of using Tomboy.

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Trying Hackpad

Hackpad is open for sign-ups. You can register with your email address, Facebook or Google accounts. I was going to use my Google account, but Hackpad wanted access to my Google Contacts info too.

Once you're signed up, you can start creating new pads. Hackpad provides most of the features you'd expect from wikis, and a number of features that you wouldn't expect.

The collaboration features allow you to invite users to your "pads" and edit documents in real time. There's a very slight lag when another user is editing the same pad, but it's negligible.

If you're working on code of some sort, Hackpad offers syntax highlighting for HTML, JavaScript, C, SQL, Java, CoffeeScript, and a number of other languages and markup syntaxes.

You can create a new pad while you're editing another one by using "@" symbol. This makes it really easy to create new pads and you don't have to use the normal annoying wiki syntax for pages. You can also "notify" people who have Hackpad accounts with the @username syntax, which will send them an email.

Hackpad also supports to-do lists, just by dropping in a "[]" you can add a checklist item. This makes it dead easy to create a checklist for a team, or just for yourself.

Hackpad supports rich media, if you drop in links from supported sites. For instance, drop in a link to a YouTube video and you'll get a preview of the video. This also works with Vimeo, SoundCloud, Flickr, Slideshare, Google Maps, TED, and a number of other sites.

The privacy settings are pretty straightforward. You can have private pads, pads that are open to anyone with the link, or public pads. It is possible to un-invite folks, so if you have a team member leave the company, they can be removed from each pad.

You can also create collections of pads, which makes it easy to collect and share documentation or other materials without having to slap everything into one pad.

Want to bail on Hackpad? Unlike Tomboy, Hackpad is not open source. But they do allow you to grab all of your pads as a zip file. Unzipped, you get pretty standard (if unpleasantly formatted) HTML. So there's not too much concern about lock-in, since it shouldn't be ridiculously difficult to import Hackpads into a different wiki.

Evolution of Hackpad

The Dropbox integration is an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work flawlessly just yet. You're supposed to be able to attach a file from Dropbox by typing "@filename," but in my testing of Hackpad it didn't find many of the files I wanted to attach. With any luck, this is a feature that they'll have worked out before too long.

I like Hackpad enough that I'd be more than happy to pay for an account, if only I could. Right now they have a sign-up to get into a limited test for Pro accounts, but you can't just sign up for one and offer the company some money. Here's hoping they'll have that bug fixed pretty soon. The Pro accounts should allow companies to sign up with their own address (like "yourcompany.hackpad.com") and import MediaWiki and Google Sites Wikis. The Pro accounts will also come with admin tools and 24/7 support.

If you need a lightweight collaboration tool, or just a personal wiki, I'd recommend checking it out. The tour of Hackpad is the best place to start.

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In 1961 Rolf Landauer linked information and thermodynamic entropy by showing that erasing or combining bits of memory must be accompanied by an increase in entropy. For the first time since then, a team of physicists have experimentally verified this principle.

According to Landauer’s principle, any logically irreversible transformation of information results in, at best, some small dissipation of heat. The specific amount depends on the operating temperature—per bit, it amounts to around 3×10-21 joules at room temperature. This energy is the Landauer limit, and controls the maximum energy efficiency of computers (it's similar to the Carnot efficiency in heat engines, both of which are related to entropy).

Measuring such a tiny amount of energy in a memory storage devices is, to say the least, challenging. But now, a team from École Normale Supérieure, the University of Kaiserslautern, and the University of Augsburg has managed to do so.






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Tim Cook announced an updated version of the Apple TV today, able to support 1080p HD video and coming with increased compatibility for a variety of Apple offerings. The new Apple TV will be released next week on March 16 and is available for pre-order starting today at the same $99 price point as its predecessor.

Cook demonstrated the device's new interface and showed its picture improvement through a clip from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (The Artist must not have been available). While the interface still isn't iOS, it appears to be an upgrade over what was previously offered. The interface is now easier to navigate through an icon-based design, and it supports many of the familiar video options (YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo etc.).

The new Apple TV has gained compatibility with iTunes Match and AirPlay. Earlier in the event, Cook announced that iTunes would support 1080p and movies would be supported in iCloud. Now all those purchases are accessible across Apple devices (iPad, iPhone, TV, etc.) no matter what venue you purchase them from. Upload time between devices appeared rather quick in a demonstration that took place during the keynote. Additionally, with Apple TV working with AirPlay, iPhone 4S and iPad users can rely on its mirroring ability to stream Web content or any work done on these devices.

Among other features worth noting, Apple TV's work with Photostream was demoed. Photos from your iPhone will automatically become accessible via Apple TV (a characteristic available on the previous incarnation of Apple TV). The new interface also has a Genius button, so Apple can recommend content to you based on TV or movies you've watched. Cook eagerly showed off the new features before closing with the option to pre-order today, saying, "and I would encourage you to do that."


Despite rumors about an updated processor for the device, that was a noticeable absence from the Apple TV announcement. Updates: With the product page now live, the updated Apple TV runs on Apple's A5 processor as opposed to the A4 (thanks to Ars user, Bolero, for the tip). When Ars received some hands-on time later in the day, we learned this isn't the same A5 as the new iPad.

A reminder: Apple TV requires an 802.11g/n Wi-Fi or Ethernet network, a broadband Internet connection, an HD TV capable of 1080p or 720p, and an HDMI cable (which, naturally, is sold separately).






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It takes a lot of confidence to label a project "awesome," but after looking over the Font Awesome collection, I'm inclined to agree.

Font Awesome is a set of glyph icons meant to work with Bootstrap, the Web App toolkit released by Twitter last year. The project is courtesy of Dave Gandy, co-founder of Lemonwise.

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The project includes a set of base icons similar to the Glyphicons included with Bootstrap, plus a set of extended icons that include pictograms for external links, thumbs up/down, comments, cogs and more.

The GitHub Readme also includes full instructions for using Font Awesome with or without Bootstrap.

Font Awesome is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). Developers can use and remix the fonts as much as they want, even for commercial projects, but do need to provide attribution as specified by the project. In this case, Gandy asks for a mention of the project and URL in "human-readable source code," so dropping a mention in a project's CSS should be acceptable.

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Long Beach, California—Harvard's Atul Gawande says that the solution to our expensive (and growing) healthcare problems is simple. What we need, he told the TED audience, is a system—a real system that emphasizes the importance of simplicity. How could the complexities of our healthcare system possibly be handled by increased simplicity?

Gawande, who specializes in reducing risks in medical contexts, is in a position to appreciate the advantages of simplicity. A big challenge in medicine today starts at the doors of medical school. While we may be eager to blame governments or insurers, the cause of our health care troubles is the complexity that science has given us, which in turn dictates how we train our doctors. We end up with doctors that take on specializations, nurses that take on specializations, and drugs that are increasingly specialized as well.


This produces doctors that are trained to be cavalier and strongly individualist—cowboys of a sort. And thanks to movies and television, we idealize the arrogant cowboys, doctors who are capable of spotting the 1-in-1,000 exception to a standard diagnosis. But that, according to Gawande, is the wrong model to idealize.  "We have trained, hired, and rewarded people to be cowboys," he said. "But it’s pit crews that we need."






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Those of you who know my writing will know that I don't use many analogies. Analogies have a very useful place in helping people understand difficult concepts, but they also have a tendency to be a end up strained beyond their limits. Now, imagine how I would react to a whole new field of physics that might be best described as "physics by analogy."

The whole field is based on the premise that, when two physically very different situations can be described using the same mathematical model, the conclusions drawn from one situation can be applied to the other. Unfortunately, this is usually applied in situations where the physics in one situation—black holes, for instance—are so extreme that it is difficult, if not impossible, to test any of the conclusions.

It appears I must adjust my attitude and admit that the field as a whole is not useless. I reached this conclusion after reading a paper that uses sound propagation in Bose Einstein condensates (BEC) to throw light on the origin of the largest discrepancy between two calculations ever seen.







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A decade ago, Linux developer Red Hat faced a decision that would make or break the company: whether to stop producing the very product that gave Red Hat its name. The company was built on Red Hat Linux, but when Paul Cormier—now the head of Red Hat's technologies and products group—joined the company as vice president of engineering in 2001, he knew Red Hat's devotion to open source alone couldn't create a business model capable of standing up to the Microsofts and Oracles of the world. He pushed for drastic action.

To move from small player to big-time enterprise software competitor, Cormier argued that Red Hat had to ditch the freely downloadable Red Hat Linux. Instead, it should replace Red Hat Linux with a more robust enterprise software package that maintained the principles of free (as in freedom) software without actually being free (as in price) to customers.







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FXI is preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

It has a USB plug on one side, which is used to power the system, and an HDMI plug on the other side, which allows it to be plugged into a display. It also has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth radios for connectivity and supporting input devices. The system can boot standalone and operate as a complete computer when plugged into a display. It's also possible to plug the Cotton Candy into a conventional computer and boot from it like you would from a regular USB mass storage device.

FXI announced today that the Cotton Candy is available for preorder. The standard retail price is $199 plus tax and shipping. The product is expected to ship in March. The small form factor and relatively high specs make the product seem like a compelling choice for enthusiasts who are looking for an ultra-compact Linux system.





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Last week, several documents that purportedly came from the Heartland Institute appeared on the Web, laying out the organization's financial efforts to undercut the mainstream understanding of climate science. Although the Heartland admitted that most of the materials were genuine, it claims they had been obtained via deception, and that one of the documents (the most inflammatory) was a fake. Now, a prominent environmental researcher has admitted that he impersonated a Heartland board member in order to obtain the documents, but claims they are all genuine.

Peter Gleick is the founder and current president of the Pacific Institute, where he specializes in research on the water cycle. His research can be provocative—some of it suggested that the US has already passed peak water—but has been considered important enough to get him elected to the National Academies of Science.







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One of the key concepts in physics is that of a phase transition. Ice melting to form water is one example; another is the transition between magnetic and non-magnetic forms of iron. The underlying physics of these transitions is a story about correlations. Understanding a phase transition and, indeed, a phase of matter, is all about understanding the growth of correlations.

You would think that one of the cleanest and best understood physical systems wouldn't have a lot to offer physicists in terms of understanding correlations that develop through a phase transition. However, physicists got a bit of a surprise when they looked at particular correlations that arise as a dilute gas is cooled down until it forms a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC).






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During the middle of the 19th century, a star system known as Eta Carinae
suddenly became the second-brightest star in the night sky, then
gradually faded again. Known as the Great Eruption, this event
released about 10 percent of the energy that would have been liberated if the star had gone
supernova, and caused the star to shed approximately 10 Suns' worth of mass. Yet somehow, Eta Carinae
survives to this day. Understanding the behavior of Eta Carinae (which is
estimated to still hold at least 100 times the mass of our Sun) will provide
astronomers with knowledge of the end-stages of very
massive stars, and allow them to distinguish between
eruptions and supernova explosions.

Even though the Great Eruption first became visible in 1838,
astronomers are still able to observe its effects today
through light echoes: light that has bounced off particles inside the
nebula surrounding Eta Carinae for a while, and has reached Earth long after the
initial eruption has faded. A new study of the light echoes, performed by
A. Rest et al., reveals that
Eta Carinae was relatively cool at the time of its brightening. While eruptions observed in other galaxies seem to be driven by thick, opaque clouds
of matter being driven away from their progenitor star, the analysis published in
the February 16 edition of Nature seems to show that the
Great Eruption may actually have been triggered by a blast
wave emanating from the surface of Eta Carinae.







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Last week, the Iranian government apparently started a new censorship program that blocks encrypted Internet traffic. Even Iranians who had taken steps to evade government firewalls were being stymied—and the immediate impact can be seen in usage of the Tor network.

Tor anonymizes Internet activity with client software that routs traffic through the Tor network, a worldwide network of relays and bridges set up by volunteers. Iran is second only to the US in Tor usage, with roughly 50,000 Iranians anonymizing their Internet traffic each day by routing it through the Tor network. Yet between Feb. 8 and Feb. 9, connections dropped from about 50,000 to fewer than 20,000, and plummeted to nearly zero by Friday, Feb. 10.







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An essential part of science involves finding correlations between two sets of measurements and seeking explanations for those correlations. However, relationships can be suggested by data even when they don't actually exist, and correlations may occur due to random fluctuations rather than a deep underlying principle (as the infamous "correlation does not equal causation" cliché suggests). These errors are easy to make, and the scientific literature is full of them.

So how can researchers establish if a correlation is both real and meaningful? In a Perspective in the February 10 issue
of Science, Michael P.H. Stumpf and Mason A. Porter
examine the type of correlation known as a power law, where one set of measurements is related to a second via an exponent. They argue that two things must be in place for a power law
to be valid as a predictive model: it must hold over a wide range of data to eliminate chance associations, and it must have a plausible mechanism to explain why the correlation showed up in the data.






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Understanding dunes is important, since he who controls the Spice controls the Universe… That’s the last Dune joke, I promise.

Understanding the mechanisms behind desert sand dune formation and evolution actually is useful, since migrating dune fields threaten agricultural areas and human habitats. At the edges of dune fields, habitats can transition from lifeless deserts to areas covered in vegetation over fairly short distances. Various factors, such as the supply and transport rates of sand and groundwater, along with vegetation density, have all been proposed as key influences on this transition point, but nobody has come up with a model describing the evolution of dune fields.

Until now, that is. A team led by Douglas Jerolmack, joined by others at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Temple University, published a paper in a recent issue of Nature Geoscience that focused on the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument, New Mexico. The team came up with a model describing both the transport of the sand that forms the dunes and the changes in vegetation, relating to the levels of groundwater underneath the sand.






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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the "fused architecture" emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.






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Weather Underground's interactive WunderMap now enables users to go back and forth in time. WunderMap overlays a Google map with all kinds of weather information, including temperatures, radar, webcams, ski reports, dedicated services for fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and more.

The map now displays a clock icon that lets users scroll through the past and future to view historical and forecast data. Most data go back to around 2000. It can also display forecasts for several days ahead. It's amazing to go back to historic storms and watch them happen all over again.

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August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina

Google has built casual weather tools for its own Maps service, and we worried about WunderMap when it launched. With so many people already using Google Maps, the ability to check the weather there makes it all the more convenient at WunderMap's expense.

Even Google Earth has weather, displaying real-time animations of clouds, rain and snow. But Weather Underground offers so much more information. Even for casual weather-watchers, there's much to learn here.

The layers that include time control features are radar, weather stations, photos, tornadoes, webcams, fire and storm reports. Satellite images can project forecasts but not past data. Check it out at wunderground.com/wundermap.

Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock

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Apple updated iBooks Author to version 1.0.1 on Friday afternoon, the only change being an update to the software's controversial end user license agreement. The updated EULA now specifically only applies distribution restrictions to the interactive .ibooks format files generated by the app.






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Anonymous has begun taunting its police pursuers in ever-more aggressive ways, upping the ante today by releasing an internal FBI conference call in which agents from across the country and police in the UK share status updates on their investigations of the group—and reveal that major new action is coming soon.

Much of the call is taken up by a UK investigator from the Metropolitan Police who comes across as eager to curry favor with the FBI. The biggest way this is being done? UK investigators are intentionally trying to delay the court cases against Ryan Cleary and Jake "Topiary" Davis, two UK Anons arrested last year, for up to eight weeks as a favor to the FBI's New York field office.







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ActiveState has released a major new version of the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE). The update, which is called Komodo 7, introduces several useful new features and support for additional programming languages.

Komodo is a high-end commercial development tool for programmers who work with scripting languages such as Python and Ruby. It's especially well-suited for developing large-scale Web applications. It supports code completion and breakpoint debugging for a relatively broad number of programming languages.







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Once upon a time, the default stack for a lot of developers consisted of the LAMP stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL and one of the P triumvirate: PHP, Python or Perl. Those days, however, are over. Sure, Linux is still powering a lot of servers. But above that, almost everything is up for grabs. Today at the Monki Gras conference in London, Simon Willison of held forth on the new Web stack.

Willison was part of the day's last talk, a conversation with Matt Biddulph, formerly Nokia's head of data strategy for location and commerce applications.

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Willison and Biddulph talked a lot about the history of Lanyrd and how technology choices could give developers or a project an enormous lead on competition. What was particularly interesting, though, was the list of tools that Willison recommends for building new Web-based applications.

The New Tools

The biggest decision used to be which Web framework to choose. While that's still important, Willison said that infrastructure is much more important.

First, Willison says that you need a message queue and workers. He suggests the Python-based Celery distributed task queue. "Once you have it," says Willison "all sorts of things become super-easy."

Next, you need a full-text search engine. Here, Willison suggests Solr.

Willison also talked glowingly about the Redis key-value store. Redis, he says "is in a category all its own." Not a database, exactly, Willison calls it a "data structure server" that is "so screamingly fast, things you thought of doing that would have a performance impact, you don't have to think about" at all.

Finally, Willison recommends Varnish, which is billed as a Web-application accelerator on the front end.

Of course, things are changing rapidly. What's crucial today may not be that relevant tomorrow. The important thing is to keep an eye on open source projects and evaluate them for use in your work. Willison says "any tech advantage means you can iterate faster."

How does Willison evaluate tools? He says he typically gives them 30 minutes. If he can't have a tool up and running within 30 minutes, it goes by the wayside. Sometimes this is a mistake. He cited Puppet as a tool that Lanyrd finally embraced after incurring "a huge technical debt" because it couldn't be set up easily in 30 minutes. Note that the 30-minute rule is not to put something into production, but simply to have working and see what a tool is capable of.

By necessity, Willison and Biddulph's talk was a bit breezy and not in great depth. However, it does provide some insight into what some of the more cutting-edge developers are using. What's your suggested Web stack?

(Update: Willison's name was misspelled as Willinson on the conference agenda, and I carried the error to the original text of the story. Willison's name has been corrected. Apologies for the error.)

Discuss

If managing your to-do lists is taking up more time and effort than you spend actually getting things done, a new iPhone app coming from developers Phill Ryu and Milen Dzhumerov, designer David Lanham, and publisher Realmac Software might be the perfect solution. Tossing most iPhone UI conventions out the window along with any religious adherence to GTD principles, the upcoming Clear app is designed to eliminate the friction and complexity of adhering to systems like GTD and be as easy to use as a paper list. We were able to meet up with the team at the 2012 Macworld|iWorld to check out the offerings.

Clear has no standard navigation bar at the top or tab bar at the bottom—common iPhone UI elements. Instead, the app is stripped down to the bare minimum, with a rectangular strip for each list item. Pull the list down from the top to add another item. Swipe right to mark the item completed. Swipe left to delete the item from your list. Pinch to access a list of lists—you could keep a shopping list, a list of errands, and a list of projects, for example.






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As part of Google's continuing quest to dole out Web pages ever more quickly, the search giant has proposed a number of changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the ubiquitous Internet protocol used to reliably deliver HTTP and HTTPS data (and much more besides) over the 'net.

Google's focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledged is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.







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JavaScript has come a long way since its inception in the 1990s. The odd language, which was once confined to simplistic tasks like form validation, has expanded beyond the browser and now powers all kinds of applications from mobile devices to server rooms.

The evolution of the language standard and the introduction of heavily optimized implementations have made JavaScript a respectable choice for building serious applications. Although the language is still burdened by some idiosyncrasies, its intrinsic flexibility is proving to be valuable.







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Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning "revolution" enabled by Apple's new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn't fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author's end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

iBooks created by iBooks Author use ePub 2 along with certain HTML5 and JavaScript-based extensions that Apple uses to enable multimedia and interactive features. Those interactive features will only work with Apple's iBooks app, not with other e-reader software or hardware, because only Apple supports those extensions.

Still, there shouldn't be any technical limitation to exporting a strictly ePub 2-compliant ePub document if none of the interactive features are used. Unfortunately, iBooks Author only exports PDFs and text.






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Experimental support for WebRTC has landed in the Chrome developer channel. The feature is available for testing when users launch the browser with the --enable-media-stream flag. We did some hands-on testing and used some of the new JavaScript APIs to make an HTML5 photo booth.

WebRTC is a proposed set of Web standards for real-time communication. It is intended to eventually enable native standards-based audio and video conferencing in Web applications. It is based on technology that Google obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions and subsequently released under a permissive open source software license.






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Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the "GarageBand for e-books," so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.

Along with the details we were able to gather from our sources, we also spoke to two experts in the field of digital publishing to get a clearer picture of the significance of what Apple is planning to announce.






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Welcome to 2012! If you're a consumer, you're likely getting ready for another year full of new products, drama, and intrigue from the tech world. If you're a journalist, you're cowering in fear of the upcoming CES trade show. And if you're a Mac or iOS developer—well, as always, you're wishing for bigger and better things out of Apple and its community.

While the iOS and Mac App Stores exploded in popularity in 2011, there's still plenty of room for improvement on the developer side. When we spoke with a number of iOS and Mac developers about their wish list for 2012, they didn't hesitate to let us know about changes they would like to see.






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Apple may be poised to announce changes coming to iBooks, and perhaps eBook publishing, sometime this month. In particular, we believe the announcement may have important reverberations for textbook publishers and buyers.

According to a report by All Things Digital published Monday, the company is planning a media event in New York to make a "media-related," not hardware-related announcement. Further, sources for TechCrunch claimed the announcement will focus on "improvements to the iBooks platform," and the event will supposedly be more geared towards the publishing industry (not necessarily consumers).

Apple has recently highlighted the ability of its iBooks platform to include sound, video, and other features by offering a free eBook of The Yellow Submarine. And based on information from our own sources, we believe the announcement could likely involve support for the EPUB 3 standard, which enables a wider variety of multimedia and interaction features. Amazon recently announced its own similarly improved eBook standard using HTML5 and CSS3.

Several authors have also told Ars that they long for tools to help transform book text into standards-compliant eBooks. The opportunity certainly seems ripe for Apple to offer such a tool. If Apple created software that could generate standards-compliant EPUB files, it could be a boon to both the publishing industry and independent authors alike.

Incidentally, one source who has worked with Apple to integrate technology in education recently suggested that Apple may have important changes coming to its iBooks platform directed specifically toward the academic set. Digital textbooks represent another nascent market that Apple could potentially upend as it did with music and mobile apps.




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A pair of enterprising iOS developers have created
a hack that allows iPhone and iPad apps, including Facebook and
YouTube, to run on the
Apple TV.

The second-generation media hub is essentially an iOS device,
with an iPad-style A4 chip under the hood and a modified version of

iOS 5 for its operating system. You can use AirPlay to stream
video from a nearby iPhone or iPad but it doesn't have its own
apps (yet).






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"Can you pick me up at my place in 15 minutes? Text me when you get here." No, this isn't a text message to a friend or a call to a car service—it's a direct message sent through Twitter to a driver of a Chicago cab. Rashid Temuri, who goes by "Chicago Cabbie" online (@ChicagoCabbie on Twitter) has taken what would otherwise be considered a traditional taxi business and integrated it with social media in a way that is still exceedingly rare in the service industry. How much better can it be interacting your clients through Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook, or Google Latitude? Apparently a lot—Temuri is not only seeing success from his social media strategy, he's building a loyal repeat customer base because of it.







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Computers keep getting closer and closer to making people obsolete. The latest step towards human obsolescence? Dropbox Automator, a Web-based tool for setting up actions that happen as soon as you put a file in a Dropbox folder. It’s not flawless just yet, but it might provide a useful service for many Dropbox users.

The service is powered by Wappwolf, an online “action store” that features a set of Web actions that can process files. For example, it has ready made actions to encrypt and decrypt files, extract text from PDFs, convert documents to PDF, generate QR codes and manipulate images.

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Dropbox Automator

The Dropbox Automator works by connecting to your Dropbox account and then defining actions based on which folder you place files into. For example, I connected my Dropbox account and created a folder called Appwolf. Then I defined actions to convert files placed into that folder into PDFs.

You can also do things like upload files to Slideshare, sign PDFs, scrape PDFs to text files and even translate files automatically using Bing Translator. It looks like much of Automator’s functionality just comes from tapping into Web-based services.

You can also automatically upload photos to Facebook or Flickr, add a bug (stamp) to a photo, resize or rotate photos and much more.

A Few Glitches

I found that the service isn’t entirely glitch free. It says that it can covert HTML files to PDF, which it does… but it just converts the text to PDF, so the tags are presented in the document instead of used for formatting. It might be that you need the header information before the service (conf2pdf) properly recognizes the file as HTML instead of plain text.

When Dropbox Automator zips files, it uses a format that doesn’t seem to be recognized on Mac OS X as a zip file. At least not by the Archive Utility that comes with OS X Lion.

Converting Files Using Dropbox Automator

It does convert OpenDocument Format (ODF) files OK, when it actually converts them. Of two ODF files I placed in the Appwolf directory, only one was converted. The other was placed in the processed folder that Dropbox Automator creates, but no PDF ever materialized.

But it’s a brand new service and I suspect they’re still shaking the bugs out. The service, at least for now, is free. How will they make their money? It’s unclear, but some of the actions you set up for files may cost money. So it’s possible that the developers will add premium services or charge a fee to other services for connecting users. If it catches on, I do hope that they start providing paid accounts so users can support the service.

Discuss

Computers keep getting closer and closer to making people obsolete. The latest step towards human obsolescence? Dropbox Automator, a Web-based tool for setting up actions that happen as soon as you put a file in a Dropbox folder. It’s not flawless just yet, but it might provide a useful service for many Dropbox users.

The service is powered by Wappwolf, an online “action store” that features a set of Web actions that can process files. For example, it has ready made actions to encrypt and decrypt files, extract text from PDFs, convert documents to PDF, generate QR codes and manipulate images.

Sponsor

Dropbox Automator

The Dropbox Automator works by connecting to your Dropbox account and then defining actions based on which folder you place files into. For example, I connected my Dropbox account and created a folder called Appwolf. Then I defined actions to convert files placed into that folder into PDFs.

You can also do things like upload files to Slideshare, sign PDFs, scrape PDFs to text files and even translate files automatically using Bing Translator. It looks like much of Automator’s functionality just comes from tapping into Web-based services.

You can also automatically upload photos to Facebook or Flickr, add a bug (stamp) to a photo, resize or rotate photos and much more.

A Few Glitches

I found that the service isn’t entirely glitch free. It says that it can covert HTML files to PDF, which it does… but it just converts the text to PDF, so the tags are presented in the document instead of used for formatting. It might be that you need the header information before the service (conf2pdf) properly recognizes the file as HTML instead of plain text.

When Dropbox Automator zips files, it uses a format that doesn’t seem to be recognized on Mac OS X as a zip file. At least not by the Archive Utility that comes with OS X Lion.

Converting Files Using Dropbox Automator

It does convert OpenDocument Format (ODF) files OK, when it actually converts them. Of two ODF files I placed in the Appwolf directory, only one was converted. The other was placed in the processed folder that Dropbox Automator creates, but no PDF ever materialized.

But it’s a brand new service and I suspect they’re still shaking the bugs out. The service, at least for now, is free. How will they make their money? It’s unclear, but some of the actions you set up for files may cost money. So it’s possible that the developers will add premium services or charge a fee to other services for connecting users. If it catches on, I do hope that they start providing paid accounts so users can support the service.

Discuss

iOS: Previously mentioned collaboration tool Asana made waves when it launched, but at the time it was missing support for mobile devices. Now, anyone with an iOS device can log in to their Asana account on the go, check in on their projects and activities, comment on tasks, and more. More »

African naked mole rats never cease to amaze. Not only are they exceedingly ugly, but they are the longest living rodents. Moreover, none have ever been observed to get cancer. And they are the only known vertebrates that are not bothered by acid. A report in this week’s Science explains the molecular basis underlying this acid insensitivity, and suggests that it might be an adaptation to their oxygen-poor living conditions..

Acid causes pain by activating nociceptors, proton-triggered ion channels that activate neurons. This recent study compared acid receptors from naked mole rats and mice, and found that they were not all that different. Similar numbers of each receptor were found in the respective animals, and acid evoked similar levels of current through them.







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Were I to tell my most perpetually indignant friend that his tablet’s 3G radio is prone to regular performance drops of up to 75 percent, he would likely enter apoplectic rage.

Such is the emotional fabric of the modern tech enthusiast. We’re already concerned about overloaded data networks that can’t handle too many simultaneous user requests, and Apple’s iPhone 4 "antennagate" imbroglio, rightly or wrongly, has left conspiracy-minded consumers wary of self-sabotaging hardware.






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If being a successful jailbreak developer can get you hired at Apple, apparently so can redesigning the oft-criticized Notification Center. Apple has hired Jan-Michael Cart, perhaps best known for creating demos of proposed Notification Center tweaks, to intern with the company for the next seven months. Cart's internship follows two other recent hires known for notification work, suggesting the company is aware that iOS notifications still need some work.

Cart, currently a junior majoring in Mass Media Arts at the Univeristy of Georgia (go Bulldogs!), specializes in video and graphic design. He has recently begun experimenting with Xcode and learning about iOS development, according to his website. With the release of iOS 5, Cart began creating videos to demonstrate his ideas for improving its Notification Center feature.






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Hydraulic fracturing (more commonly referred to as “fracking”) involves the injection of fluid at high pressure into a well, opening or widening fractures in the rock below that free up the flow of natural gas. Domestic natural gas production has been booming as a result, but opponents claim the technique contaminates drinking water, causing serious health effects.

Rigorous studies on fracking have been sparse, and the impassioned debate has raged on. A new investigation by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at a site in Wyoming is one of the first to look thoroughly at the potential link between fracking operations and groundwater contamination. The agency's report was released yesterday—and it provides a clear link between fracking and water supply problems.







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Anybody who follows basketball has seen it before: a player hits a momentum-changing three point shot. His team gets the ball back and tears down the court. Will the same player feel he (or she) has a hot hand and try another long-distance shot? Chances are he will. And chances are he'll miss. And chances are he'll do the same exact thing the next game.

That's the conclusion of a statistical analysis of a few hundred professional basketball players (291 from the NBA, 41 from the WNBA). The goal was not only to find out whether the frequently discussed "hot hand"—a shooter who's connecting on most of the shots he takes—exists, but also to find out whether players could identify when they're more likely to be hot, and adjust their behavior accordingly. The answer to both appears to be no, but there may be some other learning going on on the court.







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In March, the platform-agnostic research management tool, Mendeley, announced an API Battle, held in conjunction with the Public Library of Science. The goal was to spur the community into developing neat apps that use the database that powers Mendeley. Apps were judged by a panel that included Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, based on the following criteria: API key usage, whether or not it goes viral, how much the app contributes to collaboration and transparency, and general coolness.

Late last week (December 1st) the winners were announced, and 1st place went to openSNP, a community-driven project for publicly sharing personal genetic data (such as an individual's 23andMe results). You can read an interview with the winners over at Mendeley's blog. PaperCritic and rOpenSci were the runners-up.




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Node.js is not only attracting a lot of developer interest, it's also proving interesting to entrepreneurial types. Case in point, NodeSocket, a Node.js hosting business that's in development. NodeSocket bills itself as a "hosting platform and community for developers." Currently in private beta, NodeSocket is a hybrid service play that will offer pre-configured VPSes with Node.js set up for easy application deployment.

Founder Justin Keller says that NodeSocket isn't a PaaS play. NodeSocket gives users the ability to create one or more VPSes with full root access to modify and install packages. Node.js Package Manager (NPM) is installed by default.

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"This allows the flexibility to install things like MongoDB or Redis locally on the same server that is running their node.js applications, but at the same time, utilize our software platform and API's to abstract away the pains of setting up blank VM's on say Amazon EC2," says Keller.

NodeSocket, says Keller, is a "mash-up of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and a Platform-as-a-Service." Users get a VPS with root access, but also "the nice soft and fluffy layer of abstraction that users demand. Users have the keys to the kingdom, they can stay abstracted and use the control panel and API's, or if they choose, get their hands a bit dirty, SSH into machines, and have full control over their environment."

The service, says Keller, will have an "amazing" control panel to take the pain out of provisioning. The company is also planning an integrated logging solution for Node.js apps.

Keller says that it's currently "a very personal interaction where we set them up, one-on-one via a Web chat sessions" so expect that invites will be slow in coming for a while. But Keller did say that they'll be launching an automated system "shortly" with "a really slick tutorial system."

Pricing and general availability for NodeSocket is still up in the air. He did note that the VPSes will not be one-size-fits all, and eventually users will be able to choose from different instances (much like AWS EC2 instances). Keller says that launch is "at least a few months away" so don't expect to be putting apps into production on NodeSocket in 2011.

Between IaaS and PaaS, GitHub and Going Alone

Note that NodeSocket isn't going to be the only game in town for Node.js application deployment. Engine Yard introduced Node.js support through its Labs program in November, and there's also Nodejitsu which is also in "extended private beta."

The NodeSocket infrastructure is based in San Francisco, and NodeSocket is managing its own hardware and infrastructure rather than building on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace or another IaaS provider. Keller says that this is to provide better performance and pricing than they'd get with an IaaS provider.

Keller is also promising a "community" aspect to NodeSocket, saying that users will be able to share Node.js applications with one another "simply and powerfully." This includes sharing custom images of servers that have Node.js applications pre-installed.

There's plenty of room in the growing Node.js market to support multiple Node.js services. I do wonder whether NodeSocket will be able to hit a critical mass of Node.js users, and whether it might make more sense to integrate more closely with GitHub rather than trying to build its own island of Node fans. Keller says that NodeSocket will support remote git repos and GitHub, to be clear. But trying to build community from scratch is a tough nut to crack.

Look for more from NodeSocket next year. If you're a Node.js developer, does this sound like a service that'd meet your needs?

Discuss

Beating Coppersmith-Winograd

Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist who has worked on a number of problems, including a very neat question about cheating in the setup of tournaments, and a bunch of novel papers exemplified by this one on graph and matrix problems with runtime exponents of that have long been begging to be improved.

Today Ken and I want to discuss her latest breakthrough in improving our understanding of the matrix multiplication problem.

Of course Volker Strassen first showed in his famous paper in 1969 that the obvious cubic algorithm was suboptimal. Ever since then progress has been measured with one parameter : if your algorithm runs in time , then you are known by this one number. Strassen got , and the race was off. A long series of improvements started to happen, which for a while seemed to be stuck above . Then, Don Coppersmith and Shmuel Winograd (CW) got and everything changed. After a contribution by Strassen himself, CW finally obtained in 1987, with full details here. This has been the best known for decades.

This has all changed now. Virginia has proved that she can beat the “barrier” of CW and get a new lower value for . Currently her paper gives , an improvement of “only” , but there is promise of more. This is also another case of proofs coming in twos, as a theorem in PhD thesis work by Andrew Stothers was circulated to some in June 2010 but not very widely. All this is extremely exciting, and is one of the best results proved in years in all of theory. While these algorithms are unlikely to be usable in practice, they help shed light on one of the basic questions of complexity theory: how fast can we multiply matrices? What could be more fundamental than that?

The Basic Idea

Matrix multiplication is bi-linear: the formula for the entry of is . The first step in simplifying the problem is to make it more complicated: Let us have indicator variables and compute instead the tri-linear form

This is a special case of a general tri-linear form

where and we have re-mapped the indices. It looks like we have made order-of work for ourselves. The key, however, is to try to fit a representation of the form:

where . The point is, suppose we can compute these products in total time . Then we can compute (the coefficients for) all the desired entries

in steps. Thus what we have are separate handles on the time for the products and the time for the . The way to manage and balance these times involves recursion.

The Basis Idea

The recursion idea is nice to picture for matrices, though its implementation for the way we have unrolled matrices into vectors is not so nice. Picture and as each being matrices. We can regard instead as a matrix of four matrices , and do the same for . Then the product can be written via products , and we can picture ourselves recursing on these products.

The reason why the vector case does not look so nice is that the tri-linear form is so general—indeed we cannot expect to fit a general tri-linear form into a small number of products . What CW did, building on work by Arnold Schönhage, is relax the tri-linear form by introducing more than -many variables, supplying appropriate coefficients to set up the recursion, and most of all framing a strategy for setting variables to zero so that three goals are met: the recursion is furthered, the values of “” at each level stay relatively small, and the matrix product can be extracted from the variables left over. This involved a hashing scheme which used subsets of integers that are free of arithmetical progressions.

The final step by CW was to choose a starting algorithm for the basis case of the recursion. They devised one and got . Then they noticed that if they bumped up the base case by manually expanding their algorithm to an handling the next-higher case, they got a better analysis and their famous result . By their way of thinking, bumping the basis up once more to was the way to do better, but they left analyzing this as a problem. Others attempted the analysis and…found it gave worse not better results. So , actually , stood.

The insight for breaking through was to make a bigger jump in the basis. Vassilevska Williams was actually anticipated in this without her knowledge by Andrew Stothers, in his 2010 PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Stothers used and showed this method capable of achieving , though there has been some doubt in whether all details were worked out. Vassilevska Williams, however, used and brought some powerful computing software to bear on a more-extensive framework for the plan. It is not clear whether there is anything necessary about jumping by a power of —in any event her program and framework work for any exponent.

The Proof

We cannot yet really give a good summary of the proof—further details are in her paper. One quick observation about her work is in order. She used the CW method, but extended it into a general schema can be used to find good matrix product algorithms, perhaps even better than the one in the paper. The algorithms themselves can be generated and examined, but as usual the task of analyzing them is very hard. The brilliant insight that she has is this task can be laid out automatically by a certain computer program. This allows her to do the analysis where previous others failed.

For example here is a sample of the overview of her main program, in pseudo-code:

The details are not as important as the fact that this program allows one to work on much larger schemas than anyone could previously.

What Does the Bound Mean?

Note that she has improved the bound of Stothers by . For what threshold value of does an additive improvement of in the exponent halve the running time? The answer is , which in this case is . This value is far above the Bekenstein Bound for the number of particles that could be fit into a volume the size of the observable universe without collapsing it into a black hole. In this sense the algorithm itself is even beyond galactic.

The meaning instead comes from this question: Is there a fundamental reason why could settle at a value strictly greater than ? Note that is not taken to mean the existence of a quadratic-time algorithm, but rather that for all there are algorithms that achieve time . There was some reason to think could be a natural barrier, but it was breached. Perhaps , since this is connected to the golden ratio? Her paper notes a recent draft by Noga Alon, Amir Shpilka, and Christopher Umans that speaks somewhat against the optimism shared by many that .

Open Problems

Can the current bounds be improved by more computer computations? Are we about to see the solution to this classic question? Or will it be struggling over increments of ?

In any event congratulate Virginia—and Andrew—for their brilliant work.

Update: Markus Bläser, who externally reviewed Stothers’ thesis, has contributed an important comment on the blog of Scott Aaronson here. It evaluates the significance of the work in-context, and also removes the doubt going back to 2010 that was expressed here.

From iOS and Android to BlackBerry and Windows Phone, the app store model has become the main way mobile device users find, download, and update their software. And with employees increasingly begging for access to corporate resources from smartphones and tablets, IT departments are starting to wonder whether they should jump into the app store business themselves.

"The public app store is kind of the wild, wild West," Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond tells Ars. Private app stores, hosted for the employees of a single business, are receiving “a lot of interest from the clients I talk to. Folks realize that self-provisioning is the long-term trend."







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The release of a series of e-mails apparently stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was timed so that they would hit the news immediately before the Copenhagen climate conference. They didn't seem to affect the conference itself (where deals appear to have collapsed under their own weight), but they did spawn over a half-dozen inquiries, all of which cleared the researchers of anything other than a cavalier attitude towards the UK's Freedom of Information Act. Nevertheless, whoever was behind that original release has loosed another batch in advance of this year's Durban climate meeting.

The last time out, only Saudi Arabia seemed to reference the contents of the e-mails at the Copenhagen meeting itself. And this time, indications are that a significant agreement is very unlikely, so it's not obvious that the e-mail release will even register. This is especially true because the e-mails have come from the same stash as the original batch. And, in the mean time, multiple inquiries have concluded that the e-mails didn't raise questions about the validity of climate science, although individual researchers displayed a cavalier attitude towards sharing data and Freedom of Information Act requests.







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It has been a busy week in the world of particle physics, with attention focused on the home of the LHC: CERN. This year, the LHC generated five inverse femtobarns worth of data—nearly half the amount generated during the entire lifetime of the Tevatron—before shutting down the proton program a few weeks ago. From now until its scheduled winter shutdown, the LHC will be doing lead ion collisions to examine the quark-gluon interactions that dominated the Universe immediately after the Big Bang.

In the mean time, analysis of the data has continued, and some significant news has come out this week. A further dissection of last year's data has placed tighter limits on where the Higgs boson, which provides mass to other particles, might be hiding (assuming it exists). Meanwhile, the LHCb detector, which studies particles that contain heavy quarks, has found an anomalous behavior that might hint at physics beyond the Standard Model. And the LHC accelerator chain has sent some more neutrinos to detectors at Italy's Gran Sasso, which has helped them eliminate some potential sources of error in their faster-than-light findings. We'll take a look at each of these in turn.







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There's no shortage of to-do managers and organizers on the web, but Sandglaz, a new webapp that combines the best things from a day planner and a calendar together into an easy-to-use webapp, really stands out. Adding to-dos, reordering them, and browsing your next actions are all easy operations that don't take a long tutorial to figure out. Sandglaz manages to be powerful and customizable without being difficult to use. More »

How high are we willing to let the temperature of the planet get? Many governments have signed on to international agreements that would limit greenhouse gas emissions to targets that will keep the Earth from exceeding a 2°C increase over preindustrial levels. However, two studies that came out in recent weeks suggest we're rapidly running out of time to do so. Both suggest we could be locked in to changes above 2°C before the decade is out, and perhaps in as little as five years.

Estimates of future warming are based on a term called the climate sensitivity, which is usually expressed in terms of the expected temperature rise caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. (The impact of each incremental increase goes down as the concentration rises, since there's a greater chance that some other CO2 molecule will have already absorbed a given infrared photon.) The IPCC's best estimate is that the climate sensitivity is about 3°C per doubling, with uncertainties of about a degree in either direction.







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The time to buy peanut butter is now, friends. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for Jif, Peter Pan, and other peanut butter jars will be going up as much as 40% starting in a couple of weeks. More »

Relativity is the reigning theory of gravity. In situations where we can measure it directly, such as binary neutron stars, its predictions match the real world with remarkable precision. And, when supplemented with inflation and dark matter, relativity nicely reproduces the large-scale structure of the Universe. But this reliance on other models like dark matter means that we don't have a direct, large-scale test of relativity. Now, scientists have measured the redshifting of light by galaxy clusters to give use the biggest test of relativity yet. Their results show that relativity passes muster, while modified forms of Newtownian gravity fall short.

Light emitted by distant objects rarely makes it to Earth at the same wavelength that it started out at. The fabric of the Universe is expanding, which causes a redshift. Most objects are also moving relative to the Earth, which adds a Doppler shift to the light. Finally, light that has to climb out of a large gravity well on its way to Earth also gets red-shifted.

In theory, it should be easy to account for the distance and Doppler shift; anything that's left over should be the effect of gravity. Unfortunately, even with something as massive as a galaxy cluster, the gravity-induced redshift is about two orders of magnitude smaller than a typical Doppler shift. On top of that, the motion of galaxies within clusters should be random relative to the Earth, creating a broad, Gaussian distribution of color shifts. Picking a gravitational signal out of that curve would require a large data set to help cut down on the statistical noise.







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There must be something in the air. Heroku and Engine Yard are beefing up their platforms today. Engine Yard put JRuby into general availability today after several months in testing and years of development.

Not to be left out, Heroku expanded its service to add Python and Django as part of its "polyglot platform."

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What About Focus?

For those not familiar, Heroku and Engine Yard offer Platforms as a Service (PaaS). Engine Yard started off focusing on Ruby on Rails, but recently acquired Orchestra and added PHP support, and announced support for MongoDB and PostgreSQL 9.

Heroku started as a PaaS for Rack compatible projects, but has added support for Java, Clojure, and Node.js applications.

You get the picture? Heroku and Engine Yard started with a pretty sharp focus on one area, and have been expanding pretty steadily as they've grown. As they expand, you have to wonder if it will dilute their focus.

Heroku founder Adam Wiggins says no. "Heroku is a true polyglot platform. Our general-purpose runtime is completely language-agonistic. Support for each new language is a very thin adapter that invokes the build process specific to that language's tool chain. This makes it trivially easy to add new languages (which is how we've been able to roll out five new languages in the last two months, with many more coming) without diluting our single, unified platform."

Mike Piech, vice president of product management and marketing for Engine Yard says that while the company is expanding its scope, it's keeping its focus on expertise. "Deep expertise in building a world-class platform as a service, deep expertise in helping developers use the platform, and deep expertise in the platform stack – initially Ruby, and now including PHP. Much of our platform orchestration technology is stack agnostic. The stacks we choose to support are ones where there is significant market opportunity and where we provide compelling value that is substantively backed by deep expertise."

The days of the single-language/single-focus PaaS seem to be drawing to a close, though. If you look at Heroku, Engine Yard and Red Hat's up-and-coming OpenShift, it's all about providing a huge toolset. Is this a good thing?

Discuss

One of the headline features of Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet is a completely new Web browser called Silk that is designed with a "split" architecture, allowing it to offload much of the heavy lifting to Amazon's cloud computing cluster for superior browsing performance.

When the user requests a webpage in Silk, the request will be routed to Amazon's servers in the cloud. Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaSript, CSS, and images—back to the device as a single stream of data.






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Wow. I love this new “social reader” from the Washington Post.

Don Graham, chairman of the Washington Post company (damn smart guy who has seen a TON in the publishing world) and I talk about this.

We talk about porn, too. “I wouldn’t use this app for that,” he says.

Really interesting insights into why these IDENTITY ENGINES are going to change everything.

And if you think that Google won’t do this I have a nice bridge to sell you in San Francisco (Google is working on a new reader like this code-named “Propeller.”)

You gotta be on Facebook to try this out! Join our Google+ discussion to share your thoughts on the direction traditional media companies should take to guide themselves into the future.

Amazon just sealed the deal on a partnership with 11,000 public libraries in the United States to allow Kindle owners to visit and check out books using their ereaders, straight from the library's web site. Just make sure to have your library card handy. More »

Amazon has finally announced its long-anticipated Kindle lending library, allowing Kindle and Kindle app users to borrow Amazon's e-books from thousands of libraries across the US. Users will be able to find the Kindle books on their participating public library's website and check them out through Amazon, which will send the book directly to users' devices over Whispersync.

"Libraries are a critical part of our communities and we're excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country," Amazon's Kindle director Jay Marine said in a statement. "We're even doing a little extra here—normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we're fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book."

The ability to make notes and highlights—and subsequently sync them back to the system for review later—is certainly a major plus. The downside, of course, is that the e-books have to be "returned" after a certain period of time, just like any other library book. Amazon doesn't specify on its site how long the books are borrow-able for, but when asked, Amazon spokesperson Kinley Campbell said that the expiration time varies by library and by the book.

"Generally [it will be] 7-14 days," Campbell told Ars. "We recommend checking with local libraries on questions related to availability and specific books."

Seven to 14 days isn't a lot of time to read an entire book for some people, but it's hard to argue with free, borrowed books. Our only complaint with this announcement is that there seems to be no comprehensive list of the 11,000 participating libraries—even Amazon's FAQ page about public library books remains vague on this question. The requirement is that the library offers e-books via third party service OverDrive, though, so it's safe to assume that most major libraries will be participating to some degree or another. (You Chicagoans out there get to be lazy, as I've already confirmed that Kindle books can be found via the CPL website).

Edit: Removed links to Amazon due to technical (CMS) problems on our end. See comments for proper links for now.




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Mark this day on your calendar: a major movie studio (Sony) has begun experimenting with some cool new technologies that make purchasing movies on iTunes more appealing to potential customers, instead of simply stomping their feet, threatening downloaders with lawsuits and being generally boring.

According to a report by Andrew Wallenstein at PaidContent tonight, Sony is experimenting with the following, when you buy one of three new movies on iTunes: "A search button allows you to input a word, and any mention of it in the script will be retrieved along with a link to the exact moment in the movie in which the line was uttered. A 'clip & share' function lets the viewer take select scenes and post them to social networks. There's also a playlist with songs from the film, which are linked to to places on iTunes where those songs can be purchased."

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According to Wallenstein, the features are unpromoted but included with purchased downloads for the Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg ("put a shirt on!") movie The Other Guys, and two movies starring neither Ferrell nor Wahlberg: Salt and Resident Evil: Afterlife.

I cannot imagine watching a Resident Evil movie, but perhaps one of my Facebook friends will shoot a clipping of the best part into my Newsfeed and change my mind.

May all old media industries find inspiration in these experimental new features and come up with ways to make their products exciting enough to purchase in a digital world filled with free content.

Discuss

About a year and a half ago, we reported on a Nature venture that was a bit far afield from its general focus on scientific publishing. Scitable aims to provide online, open access educational materials in the sciences. Anyone can browse the content or follow predefined courses, currently limited to the life sciences. But one thing that you won't generally spot is ads. Can a resource like this stay free indefinitely? It seems like a lot of scientific publishers are betting that it can, since a number of other free services have launched in the intervening time.

According to Scitable's Vikram Savkar, the answer is yes, although it's not there yet. Within the past year, the company has gotten some sponsors on board. Some of these are biotech and pharmaceutical companies, which are very focused on the current bioscience material (New England Biolabs, for example, has sponsored a series on the restriction enzymes they sell). Presumably, this roster will expand as Scitable grows into more subject areas. But a couple of existing sponsors—Intel and Tata Consultancy—are involved simply because they apparently think they're promoting a valuable resource.







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Although it's easy to calculate the impact of additional greenhouse gasses on the temperature, these simple calculations don't capture the potential for feedbacks in the system. The easiest feedback to understand is the ice-albedo response. As temperatures rise, ice melts; that ice normally reflects back most of the sunlight that hits it, so its loss leads to increased absorption of sunlight and hence, a further increase in temperature. Ice is hardly the only feedback, however, so researchers use climate models to try to incorporate as many of these feedbacks as possible.

Unfortunately, there's often disagreement and uncertainty as to how some of the feedbacks operate. In the past week, a couple of papers have come out that address these uncertainties. In one, an author analyzes the impact of clouds on climate, one of the largest uncertainties in current models. In the other paper, the authors argue that past attempts at figuring out the response of plants to climate change have gotten it all wrong.







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Although its copyright settlement with publishers is still in legal limbo, Google has announced that it will be starting to sell e-books through an online storefront early this summer. Like Apple and Amazon, Google's store would see it offer up in-print books obtained from publishers, which will retain their ability to set the prices for these works. But there's every reason to expect that the same storefront will be awash with out-of-print books the minute that Google can get a settlement for its ongoing lawsuit approved.

Google apparently dropped the news at a publishing industry event, sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group, and held in New York City. It has since been picked up by, well, just about everyone (many reports seem to be crediting a Wall Street Journal story for the announcement).






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Fans of Red Sweater Software's blog publishing tool MarsEdit got a surprise Tuesday morning with the release of MarsEdit 3. The most significant update to the software is the addition of a rich text editor, though those who fiddle with the HTML for their blog posts got an updated syntax highlighter. A new media manager rounds out this solid update, one that the company hopes will attract new users and get old ones writing again. 

According to Red Sweater founder and developer Daniel Jalkut, some of the features in MarsEdit 3 have been in the works for roughly 2.5 years—basically since MarsEdit 2 was released. Many of the enhancements in the new version respond to long-standing requests from users, Jalkut told Ars, particularly rich text editing. "Most of the [blog] Web interfaces and desktop competitors have a rich mode but, until now, MarsEdit has focused exclusively on HTML/markdown source," Jalkut said.





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Apple could be planning to expand its voice command capabilities on the iPhone thanks to the pending acquisition of Siri, which makes an iPhone app that lets users perform Web searches by voice command. News that the company was acquired first appeared in an FTC premerger notification (PDF) and was confirmed by Silicon Alley Insider and others.

For those who have already played around with Google's search app for the iPhone, Siri's voice search capabilities will appear quite similar, but it goes further than just showing search results. With the app running, users can speak what they're looking for ("What movies are playing nearby?" or "Make a reservation at Francesca Forno for two people at 6pm"). The app will then determine what service you need—a basic list of search results, a Yelp review page, a reservation through OpenTable, etc.—and list out your options along with maps and other data.

If Apple chooses to integrate Siri's technology into the iPhone OS, Google's Voice Search app would be redundant for many users—after all, if the OS can do it, why bother downloading an extra app that does less? That's probably the point. Considering that Apple may still have a Google Maps replacement in the wings, it certainly seems as if the company is making more of an effort to separate itself from Google, though both Apple and Google publicly insist that their relationship is still strong.



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On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code. The 2.7 release marks a major milestone for LLVM, as it's the first time that its C language compiler, Clang, has sufficient C++ support to self-host, meaning that it can compile a functional version of itself.

Although the C++ support is considered alpha-quality, LLVM considers Clang's C and Objective-C compiling to be ready for production use. The relatively high quality of Objective-C shouldn't be surprising, as Apple was one of the early commercial backers of the project. The influence of Apple may also be felt in the progress made in supporting ARM processors, which has been given a beta designation. New in this version are support for both the Linux and Darwin ARM ABIs, as well as improved code generation for the ARM vector instruction set, NEON.

But Apple isn't the only game in town. LLVM has been used by Google, for its Unladen Swallow Python project, and Adobe, which adopted it for its ill-fated attempt to get Flash applications running on the iPhone/Pad platform. With 2.7, Linux and Darwin support arrive in the same release, and the Objective-C compilation can now target non-Apple platforms thanks to use of the GNUstep runtime. There's also vastly improved support for VMKit, which allows static and JIT compilation that supports both Java and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure. 2.7 brings a new garbage collection architecture with significantly improved performance.

There are some other interesting tidbits scattered throughout the release notes. Significant progress has been made in developing a plugin that will replace GCC's standard optimizers and code generators with those derived from LLVM. There's also initial support for a soft-processor that operates on field-programmable gate arrays. 
The growing number of projects that rely on LLVM seems to indicate that the project is attracting much wider interest than it was just a few years back.




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One of the things that isn't widely advertised in science is that progress often looks a bit like this video—things get done, but the results are rarely quite what you expect. A recent example of this two steps forward, one step back progress may be the study of the recently observed excess positrons coming from the center of our galaxy.

Although there are many possible astrophysical explanations, none of them were that clean or appealing, leaving one alternative attractive: dark matter. Dark matter is thought to be made up of weakly interacting massive particles, which every now and again collide and annihilate. One particular pathway for the annihilation results in positrons with about the same energy of those seen coming from the core of the galaxy. Hey, presto! thought some scientists. We may have seen dark matter decays, which then allow us to pin down dark matter. Oh and incidentally, the medal should be pinned on my left—that's your right—lapel.

But, as a recent Physical Review Paper shows, the excess may be real, but if it comes from dark matter, we have some serious cosmological problems on the horizon.






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Since Facebook has become a pretty serious mainstay of social media, researchers have become interested in using it to find out which types of social interaction people prefer. A study done at the University of Missouri used physiological data to determine that Facebook users enjoy seeking out specific information and interactions, like Facebook wall posts, far more than more general and passive uses, like browsing the newsfeed or other aggregated sections.

In the experiment, 36 participants were tracked while they browsed Facebook from their own accounts. Researchers monitored physical outputs that correspond to emotional and motivational responses, such as skin conductance and eye movement; they also took screen shots and timed how long participants spend on each page. They broke down Facebook use into two categories: social browsing—looking at newsfeeds, invites pages, and so on—and social searching, such as seeking a friend's profile page or writing on a friends' wall.

The results showed that users spent the most time on activities that were classified as social searching, and had stronger responses to them. Ocular monitoring suggested they also experienced more "pleasantness" during those interactions. Over time, social searching remained more interesting, according to eye movements, while social browsing was a bit boring, and became more so as time elapsed.

The researchers say the data suggests that social searching, or interacting with an individual's more complete information rather than a sea of informational clips, stimulates an appetitive response. Appetitive responses are typically initiated when a person encounters something that promotes species survival, according to the authors. Taking steps to make friends contributes to survival, so this doesn't seem terribly surprising.

However, the results pose an interesting paradox for Facebook, as it seems the things we're most interested in are buried a level deep in searches or menus. Furthermore, the newsfeed, a flagship feature that's intended to combine Twitterlike aggregation and extensive content controls, is the one we care far less about than in-depth knowledge about our friends. It seems we'd rather use Facebook for its more unique feature—interactions and profiles that tell us where our friends work and what movies they like.

Researchers note that they did not study some secondary features of Facebook, such as games like Farmville or Facebook Marketplace, but that they might be worth looking into.




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Parsing real-time information that streams down a screen as a list of short text updates isn't easy. Thanks to two new visualization tools from PostRank, however, the company's users can now use PostRank's new entity extraction feature to see real-time updates in your stream on a map and through a tree map interface. These two new features will be available to developers through Postrank's real-time API. You can also find demos of PostRanks real-time geo and entity trends here and here.

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The tree map view gives news organizations the ability to quickly see which of topics and stories they are tracking are currently trending. PostRank analyzes the updates it receives in real-time and extracts proper names, places and things. The tree map, which updates in real-time, then displays these updates and ranks them according to "share of voice." PostRank also performs sentiment analysis on these updates and colors the updates accordingly.

The geo map works similarly, but instead of extracting proper names, places and things, this algorithm just focuses on places. Thanks to this, a PostRank customer can easily see which cities, countries and regions are currently being mentioned online.

The demos are now available in PostRank's new Labs section - which opened earlier this month.

Discuss

During today's F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com, Microsoft's FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles.

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Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends

With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn't working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running.

In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com's Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site.

Attacking Google

There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs. Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service's collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft's products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software.

It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren't using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution.

Discuss

On Friday, I received a press release pitching a new book on how to live like a liberal. The book offers helpful suggestions for:

Watching MSNBC instead of Fox News
Powering a laptop with a solar power-generating backpack
Progressive financial investment
Where and how to find a like-minded mate

... You get the idea. What really caught my eye was item number one: the idea that people of a particular political persuasion should stop watching news produced by those of another. This, it seems, might be a particular problem on the Internet, where the low barriers to publishing mean that anyone can find a viewpoint with which they totally agree, then read only that material.






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Epsilon Aurigae was first given serious, systematic, scientific
scrutiny in 1821. Early modern astronomers correctly classified it as
an eclipsing binary variable star, with an invisible partner that will periodically dim the
light as it eclipses the main star from the perspective of Earth. This happens every 27 years, and Epsilon Aurigae's apparent brightness drops for a period of more than a year. The
nature of this partner has remained a mystery, even though we've been observing the star for nearly two centuries.

Over the years, different ideas have come and gone. Early hypotheses as to the nature of Epsilon Aurigae was that it is a F-type supergiant star with a mass
of over 15 solar masses. For the darker companion, people have proposed that it is an infrared star, a black
hole complete with accretion disk, or (most recently) a disk of opaque
material orbiting the companion star. The difficulty with the most recent interpretation is the improbability
of the orbits. 
For the latter case to be correct, then the
orbit of the disk around the darker companion star would have to be in the same plane
as the orbit of the darker object (companion star) around Epsilon Aurigae,
which would in turn have to be the exact same plane as Earth's vantage
point in order to produce the sequence of events we observe here on
Earth. New, direct, observations show this is indeed the case—look at enough stars, and you'll apparently see the improbable.
(Insert something about a large number of monkeys randomly banging
away
on a large number of typewriters knocking out this exact Nobel Intent
article given enough time.)

New observations of the system are reported in a letter in last week's
edition of Nature
based on data collected using Georgia State University's Center for High
Angular Resolution Astronomy interferometer with the Michigan
Infra-Red Combiner. They've produced a series of direct images of the
2009 Epsilon Aurigae eclipse (along with a snapshot from 2008 to use as a baseline). 
Combining this data and some that is in press from
other research groups, the authors report that the main star has a mass
of 3.63±0.68 solar masses (much less massive than earlier estimates), its dark companion has a mass of
5.9±0.1 solar masses. The disk of dust that orbits around the companion has a
negligible mass, 0.07 time the mass of the Earth. From the images, they
are able to describe the disk, improbable orbit and all, as a cylinder with a radius of
3.81±0.01 AU (the distance from the Earth to the Sun) and a height
of 0.76±0.02 AU. The authors conclude that the disk is an
optically thick but geometrically thin, suggesting it is a debris
disk as opposed to a young stellar object.

Nature,
2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature08968
(About
DOIs).




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Soon after the first iPads started showing up on Princeton University's network earlier this month, the university's network admins noticed strange behavior from Apple's tablet computer: some iPads kept using an IP address after its DHCP lease ran out. That's part of the reason the university "banned" the iPad from its network. 
What's really going on here, and how can it be fixed?





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A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called XAuth and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses.

Facebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating.

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Consortium leader Meebo emphasized that it doesn't see this as competition with Facebook's system for letting users share links from around the web, but it's hard to see it any other way. Facebook desperately needs more competition. Either way, XAuth is a good move that people excited about online innovation should support.

What XAuth Delivers

It's like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network.The gist here is that XAuth will make it easier for sites around the web to find out what social networks you are using, let you log in to those easily, access your permitted information from those networks in order to better personalize your experience on their site and easily share their content back into your social network. It's like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network. Any website can register as an identity provider with XAuth, too.

What About OAuth?
If you're familiar with OAuth, you might be wondering what the difference is between that system of secure authentication and XAuth. Here's one way to explain it: XAuth tells a webpage "this is where the site visitor does social networking." Then, OAuth is the way the user logs in there, granting the site permission to access their info without seeing their password. In other words, XAuth tells you where to ask for OAuth from.

Google's Joseph Smarr, recently hired because of his high-profile work on distributed identity systems across the web, says that XAuth is a provisional solution to the limitations of the cookie system. If you visit ReadWriteWeb, for example, our servers aren't allowed to check the cookies left on your browser by the social networks you use because they are tied to URL domains other than ours.

XAuth will provide a single place that participating websites can ping to request information about you, the user. The social networks that are participating in XAuth will have reported to the central XAuth hub that you are using their service (Google, Yahoo, Meebo, Disqus, Gigya). If ReadWriteWeb is sporting XAuth, we would check in with the central hub, find out where you network and prompt you to log-in through that service and share your account information, social connections and more with us.

And yes, there are privacy implications to exposing where you network, even if your personal info beyond that isn't exposed until you log-in. "Broadcasting where you log-in," says online identity community leader Kaliya Hamlin, "gives away things about yourself you may not want to give away." Hopefully specialty networks will be selective about whether they participate in XAuth or not, but any time there is an opt-out model like this it's dangerous.

Think of all the things Facebook Connect lets you do. XAuth will enable to do that type of thing with any other participating social network, on any participating site.Once you're logged-in to your favorite social network, there are many things the website you are visiting could do. Think of all the things Facebook Connect lets you do. XAuth will enable to do that type of thing with any other participating social network, on any participating site. On the Huffington Post, you can see what your friends from Facebook are reading across that sprawling site. On CNN during the Presidential Inauguration, Facebook Connect let you comment on the live video with your real identity and see what your friends were saying about it at the same time.

It's really easy, Facebook Connect is, and the huge audience that can be shared with makes publishers salivate as they install Facebook Connect.

For Facebook, sharing and identity start and end with Facebook. The giant social network spreads its Connect system around the web with an imperial vision. Facebook is not participating in XAuth, though the companies behind it say they hope it will soon. That seems unlikely. For Facebook, sharing and identity start and end with Facebook. The giant social network spreads its Connect system around the web with an imperial vision. It might participate in XAuth later, as might Twitter (who calls another authentication system XAuth and generally communicates poorly with other companies), but only because they want to be everywhere. They won't be sending out invites to publishers to attend any XAuth parties though. They already own the most dominant cross-site authentication system the world has ever known.

Above: Robert Scoble interviews Meebo's Seth Sternberg about XAuth

Google's Smarr says that XAuth is just a work-around until the browser itself reports to websites what social networks a user uses. He says he's working with the Google Chrome team and Mozilla has been working on making Firefox a hub of identity for some time. Everyone has something to fear from Facebook.

Will Someone Please Stop Facebook?

You do too, as a user. Facebook is a fabulous service for communicating with friends and family, for sharing links, thoughts and feelings. It's also too big, too centralized and too susceptible to making drastic changes that have terrible consequences in the real lives of users (hello, privacy policy).

Facebook needs meaningful competition. XAuth could help breathe more life into a constellation of other social networks to provide that competition.

It's hard to say what will work against Facebook, though, because that's where the most precious resource in the online world is hoarded - your friendships. The prospect of a large number of people and websites coming together to use a technology that discovers social network use across everywhere but Facebook and Twitter isn't likely to excite very many publishers focused on their short-term interests.

Social networking is a huge part of the world we live in today. It's far too important to leave in the hands of a near-monopoly, even if that monopoly seems relatively benign today.It's a very frustrating situation. Facebook just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The experience there just keeps getting more and more compelling. No information gets out without flying the Facebook flag. Your friends probably don't use much else, so switching would come at a heavy social cost. And we grow more and more under Facebook's thumb every day. December's radical changes to Facebook's privacy policy are likely to be just the beginning.

Google's Smarr points out that just a few years ago it would have seemed inconceivable to people that MySpace would come tumbling down from the top of the social networking heap, that the future is still wide open and Facebook's total domination can't be presumed unstoppable. He would say that. Facebook is smarter and much, much better than MySpace ever was, though.

I love using Facebook, I use it every day, but something needs to be done. There needs to be a variety of interoperable, viable social networking options. Imagine if there was one super-dominant cell phone network provider and it didn't allow you to call people on other networks. It wouldn't matter how good that service was, that would be a bad situation. Social networking is a huge part of the world we live in today. It's far too important to leave in the hands of a near-monopoly, even if that monopoly seems relatively benign today.

I hope that XAuth today and browser-based identity management in the future can help other social networks gain more traction. This may be a part of the solution. It's a nice move, but we'll see how effective it is.

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The initial images of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption showed the sort of dramatic spires of molten rock that we associate with Hawaiian volcanoes. The next time it made the news, it was because air travel throughout Northern Europe had been shut down as a huge cloud of ash spread slowly across the UK and Scandinavia—very un-Hawaiian. To get a better sense of why this Icelandic volcano was showing such a split personality, we got in touch with the American Geophysical Union, which handed us on to Dr. Jeff Karson, who's chair of the Earth Sciences department at Syracuse University. Dr. Karson patiently explained what makes volcanism in Iceland distinct.






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