Yes, there may have been other motivations; Kennedy had great hair; so did the Beatles, fashion was changing wildly at the time, but if we are looking for a president to blame — and my father, whose business suffered in the 1960s and 1970s — wanted to blame someone, I'm going to stand with him: I blame Ike, because Ike built the highways that created the cars that lowered the roofs that crushed the hats that changed the fashion that ruined the business that supported the Krulwiches.

Anyway, we prepared two versions of our jelly waffles, one blueberry, and one classic (i.e., no blueberry). Both are based on the lovely cocktail from LA's Harvard & Stone. Here's a link to their fun video which showcases three fab cocktails. (I'm pitching the video because I'm really hoping that H&S' Raul will let me borrow his rad pink and white striped tank top. Check it out. It's awfully cute and I have just the outfit for it. BTW, I tested their cocktail out at home, and declare it delicious enough for any hour of the day ...)

Your shower head is prone to buildup of all sorts of nasty stuff, and it can be a pain to clean if you do it the hard way. As Redditor IT_Serpent points out, you can cure your shower head of its grimy blockage with a bag of vinegar. All you have to do is fill the bag, place it around the shower head so it's submerged in the liquid, and tie it to the neck with a twist tie (or anything else, really). Leave it there overnight and the cleaning will be handled for you.

Locus Magazine Science Fiction Photo and Ephemera Project

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CrossRef Labs is happy to announce the first public release of "pdf-extract" an open source set of tools and libraries for extracting citation references (and, eventually, other semantic metadata) from PDFs. We first demonstrated this tool to CrossRef members at our annual meeting last year. See the pdf-extract labs page for a detailed introduction to this new set of tools.

Then quickly cool off the eggs with ice and water and—here's the novel part—shake the pan so the eggs gently bump each other. For best results in peeling, use older eggs, and check out the full post for other tips and full details.

Of course, for single servings of boiled eggs you could just skip the peeling altogether and cut through the egg or blow on one end of an egg to get it out of its shell, but for a big batch this method can save you the effort of peeling each egg or having to invest in a pressure cooker for easy-to-peel boiled eggs.

The armpit stain removal trick requires mixing just one part dishwashing liquid (it says Dawn, but you can probably use any brand) with two parts hydrogen peroxide, then let the mixture sit on the stain for an hour. For the worst kinds of stains, add baking soda and scrub. In no time no one would guess you were exercising in those clothes!

Many people will tell you that dual booting is better than virtualization, or vice versa, but a lot of it comes down to personal preference. Before I got a powerful enough computer, I rarely if ever virtualized—just because I couldn't stand the slowness. A lot of people hate rebooting more than anything though, so they're willing to put up with a little lag rather than wait a few minutes to boot everything up from scratch. In the end, it comes down to what you're doing, what kind of computer you have, and your own pet peeves with each.

"A new study suggests people who had certain kinds of dental X-rays in the past may be at an increased risk for meningioma, the most commonly diagnosed brain tumor in the U.S. Dr. Elizabeth Klaus, the study's lead author and a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, discovered that dental X-rays are the most common source of exposure to ionizing radiation — which has been linked to meningiomas in the past — and that those diagnosed with meningiomas were more than twice as likely as a comparison group to report ever having had bitewing images taken. And regardless of the age when the bitewings were taken, those who had them yearly or more frequently were between 40 percent and 90 percent higher risk at all ages to be diagnosed with a brain tumor."

Last week, over 600,000 Macs were infected with a new trojan called the Flashback trojan, and even if you've updated your software, you could still be infected. Here's an app that will check your computer for the trojan, and how to remove it if you find you're infected.

English text is full of words that are used very frequently: THE, OF, AND, A, TO, IN, IS, YOU, THAT, IT …

A frequency table of letter usage based on English text is biased because of the substantial presence of these common words.

(About one-third of all printed English material is made up of the top 25 occurring words. The most popular 100 words make up approximately one-half of all printed English!).

Because we're trying to guess a naked word in isolation the above frequency distribution is not appropriate. It's distorted.

"According to a recently proposed abstract by the United States Geological Survey, hydraulic fracturing, or more specifically the disposal of fracking wastewater, may be directly correlated to the increase in seismic activity in the midwest. Results of the paper will be presented on April 18th, but the language of the abstract seems to imply that there is a connection. After years of controversy regarding hydrofracking including ground water contamination and disclosure of chemical solutions, the results of the study, if conclusive, could influence the cost of natural gas due to increased regulations on wastewater disposal." The actual language of the abstract leaves a fair amount of wiggle room: "While the seismicity rate changes described here are almost certainly manmade, it remains to be determined how they are related to either changes in extraction methodologies or the rate of oil and gas production."

The dish soap repellant will make your plants inhospitable to common pests like aphids, white flies, and the like, while the garlic chili spray is supposed to keep away beetles, slugs, and even larger animals. The baking soda spray on the other hand is great for treating plants suffering from fungal diseases. Of course, depending on what you're planting and your local climate, your mileage may vary with these tricks, but we've heard good things about the dish soap spray and the baking soda formula

Apartment Therapy recommends giving your vacuum cleaner, washer, dryer, and dishwasher a good cleaning to not just help them run better, but also to keep them lasting longer. For your vacuum you can stuff a dryer sheet in the bag to help it smell better. For you dishwasher it only takes a little white vinegar and baking soda. While you're at it, you might also want to clean out any reusable grocery tote bags you have as well, since fewer than 1 in 6 Americans washes them. Hit up the Apartment Therapy post for a few more cleaning ideas, and be sure to share any spots in your own home that you continually forget to clean.

Nevertheless, it is sometimes necessary to extract information from floppies. The University of Chicago Libraries, for example, wrote about efforts (PDF) to review “about 1,000″ floppy disks for preservation. Archives New Zealand and the University of Freiburg describe a data recovery project involving “a set of 5.25 inch floppy disks from the early 1990s that contained records of a public organization dating back to the mid 1980s.”

Working with floppies is part of digital forensics, a field of growing interest. One such project is Bitcurator, which aims to “create and analyze systems for archivists, librarians and other information professionals to incorporate digital forensics methods.” We have written several posts on this topic, including Digital Forensics and Digital Preservation and Bit By Bit: Recent Projects on Digital Forensics for Collecting Institutions.

After some sleuthing, Mr. Watt, who has a background in developing Web advertising tools, realized that the quirk was not confined to his site. The hotel’s Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page’s creator. (He did not actually see any such ads.)

Mr. Watt posted about the discovery on his blog, and that soon spawned a conversation on Hacker News, a discussion site for tech topics, about the ethics of this technique. One commenter described it as “icky,” and another asked, “Why aren’t they putting ads in my pillow?”

A test of the Courtyard Marriott’s wireless network on Friday verified Mr. Watt’s claims. The code was embedded in the pages of several Web sites visited, including Reddit, GigaOM and TechMeme.

The lines of code include references to “rxg,” which stands for Revenue eXtraction Gateway, a service aimed at generating money from Internet access points. On its Web site, a company called RG Nets, which makes Revenue eXtraction Gateway, explains that its system rewrites every Web page on the fly so that it can include a banner ad. “As you can see, the pervasive nature of the advertising banner on all Web pages guarantees banner advertising impression,” a narrator says in the video.

An online store selling the hardware to provide this service even lists “Web experience manipulation” as a feature. It is not clear whether the technology is in use at any other Marriott hotels.

MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. Although there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, none had quite the feature set I was looking for. Most were windows that sat in a corner or on the desktop, which are inevitably obscured by document windows on a laptop's small screen. Those monitors which used the menubar mostly used the NSStatusItem API, which has the annoying tendency to totally reorder my menubar on every login.

An ontology captures in a computer-processable language the important concepts in a particular domain and the relationships between these concepts. Ontologies are becoming increasingly pervasive in various fields of computer and information science. They are indispensable components of many complex information systems, especially systems in which communication among heterogeneous components is critical. I use the following definition of ontology, which captures the essence of the most widely adopted definitions in the field: an ontology is a specific, formal representation of a shared conceptualisation of a domain. The IO Branch of DSTO's C3ID Division is interested in the possibility of using one or more ontologies to describe computer networks and support automated reasoning about their properties (particularly security properties). This report provides a basic overview of research and development related to ontologies and their use in information systems. The primary goal of the report is to help readers to discover topics of interest and to conduct further investigation of the literature. To this end, besides information about ontologies in general, the report also includes some specific comments about the use of ontologies to model and reason about computer networks and their security.

This week at DrupalCon, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert gave the first keynote. In his talk, Buytaert set the tone for the week's events, which have a strong focus on mobile and the user experience. Buytaert says that Drupal 7, which was adopted faster than any previous Drupal release, has reached the maturity phase of its growth. Drupal 8 is planned to roll out in August next year, and according to Buytaert, we can expect great things from the next release. Buytaert wants to win hearts and minds, and to do that, Drupal needs to continue to be innovative, particularly when it comes to mobile.

The following post is crossposted from the OpenGLAM blog, and is about Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters Project – one of the finest examples of what can be done with cultural heritage data and open source tools. Mapping the Republic of Letters is a collaborative, interdisciplinary humanities research project looking at 17th and 18th century correspondence, travel, and publication to trace the exchange of ideas in the early modern period and the Age of Enlightenment.

The ur-number seems to come from a 1997 report written by Michael Lesk titled “How Much Information Is There In the World?” In that report he provides the proposed calculation for the “size” of a digitized book, and the guesstimate that the Library had 20 millions books. To be fair, this report also makes a guesstimate about the size of collections of photographs, video, and audio, and comes up with the figure of 3 petabytes worth of collections. For 1997, this was a very well-informed estimate.

But the numbers that caught the public’s imagination were the ones for books. And that 10 TB figure is everywhere.

LexisNexis is a giant company, part of the Reed Elsevier information empire, but when it comes to handling big data, it is in the unusual position of being the underdog. The leader of the pack is Hadoop, which has already amassed a large and rapidly-growing following for its ability to manage large databases — but Armando Escalante of LexisNexis told attendees at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York on Thursday that he believes the company has built what could be others might call a Hadoop killer. Originally developed to handle LexisNexis’ own internal data needs, the HPCC system was open-sourced nine months ago, and Escalante said it is already outperforming Hadoop in a number of ways.

Chrome: The New York Times is lowering its free article allowance from 20 articles per month to 10. Make those 10 page views more pleasant with Ochs, a Chrome extension that slims down the toolbars, brings high-res art out front, and puts the focus on the reading.

Ochs (named for the Times' first publisher) is a single-use extension that does a lot of subtle things to the Times' web site.

Intro to NDIIPP

All you need to do is cut it in half as normal, push out the center a bit, then just start whacking the back of it with a wooden spoon. If done correctly, all the seeds should fall right out into the bowl.

With the HTC One X and One S officially announced and with the Galaxy S III leaks looking very promising, it seems as if the next generation may actually be a huge bump in performance, battery life, and camera quality, not to mention being shipped with Ice Cream Sandwich. It's not just that it's going to be better—new tech always is—it's just that it's going to be, in BGR's opinion, a much bigger jump than we're used to.

RingDimmer is is $0.99 at Google Play, but the app works as advertised. The app contols both ringer volume and vibrate, and will automatically adjust notification volume as well if you have it paired to your phone's volume (the app doesn't manage notification volume directly, so you have to do this if you want both settings to match.) If the ambient noise level in your environment goes up, like you enter a bar full of people, for example, the app will turn your ringer all the way up so you hear it, and even turn the vibrate on so you'll feel it in your pocket.

Ars Technica summarizes that the libraries used in free Android apps to display the ads are a privacy and security threat and can be used by attackers to get past Android security. The apps themselves may be harmless, but the ads could be used to execute malicious code, since the ad libraries are granted the same permissions that the apps themselves are when they're downloaded. (Beyond that increased security risk, it's also obvious that ad-supported apps collect data about you.)

Inadequate technology, lack of education and a perceived dearth of value from QR codes are just three of the reasons mobile barcodes are not clicking with Americans. But it goes deeper than that.

Humans are visual animals. We have visceral reactions to images that a QR code can never evoke; what we see is directly linked to our moods, our purchasing habits and our behaviors. It makes sense, then, that a more visual alternative to QR codes would not only be preferable to consumers, but would most likely stimulate more positive responses to their presence.

Enter mobile visual search (MVS). With MVS, you simply point at a product or logo and shoot a picture with your smartphone’s built-in camera. Within seconds, the MVS application will provide product or company information, or even the option to make a purchase right then and there on your mobile device.

Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis [ONA].

To understand networks and their participants, we evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is finding the centrality of a node. These measures give us insight into the various roles and groupings in a network -- who are the connectors, mavens, leaders, bridges, isolates, where are the clusters and who is in them, who is in the core of the network, and who is on the periphery?

Whatever its faults, the seed company Monsanto does employ some very smart people, who have a keen understanding of plant genetics. Given that, I've long wondered why the company has been so blindsided by the fairly basic idea that weeds evolve. Did anyone really expect that, when faced with a pressure that threatened their existence, the weeds wouldn't adapt and become resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide?

Apparently, that's exactly what they expected, according to a story on NPR's website.

Daniel Charles interviewed several people who were employed by Monsanto at the time the company released Roundup-tolerant soybeans back in 1996. He found a single, coherent cause of this very strange oversight. Shorter version: Monsanto got so blinded by past performance and its own personal experience that, as an institution, it started to assume nothing would ever change.

First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted — soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project."

Personally, I find that first assumption particularly egregious. Weeds do best at building resistance to herbicides when the same herbicide is being liberally applied to the same land year after year after year. In order to assume that this behavior wouldn't be the outcome of combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, Monsanto would almost have to assume that those products wouldn't be terribly effective. After all, if you expect that combination to work (and work well) why would you then expect farmers to bother with using herbicide sparingly, or varying the type of herbicide they used?

Ever wished your house would greet you when you opened the front door, which unlocked automatically when you approached? Or your kitchen kept an inventory of everything inside it? The Jetsons may seem like they've got it all, but with a little patience and the right DIYs, the Jetson'll have nothing on you.

Now, before Google+, every single one of those services had its own set of policies, its own approach to identity management, and its own vast data silos. It was one big hot holy mess, from Google’s point of view. As customers, we saw Google as one brand, but the truth is, we used its various services as if each came from a different company.

And that meant Google couldn’t compete with Apple or Facebook when it came to any number of crucial factors. It had no single point of reference for communicating with its customers. It had no way to link its services and provide consistent updates, policy changes, or shared uses (would you like to integrate your Picasa photos into your Google search results? Sorry bud, I don’t know who you are, you’re out of luck!).

And this created one Very Big Problem for Larry Page & Co: Google couldn’t be elegant, or design driven, or easy to use. And we consumers have proven that we really, really want those things in our web services. That’s why Apple is winning. It’s why Facebook is winning. And it’s why Google was desperately afraid that it was about to lose.

So Google held its nose, built Google+ as its connective tissue, and plunged into a world of pain. It’s not over yet, but the game is afoot. Google is in the process of becoming Apple- and Facebook-like in its relationship to us.

There hasn't been a ground-breaking new vision of technological futures in at least 10 years, probably closer to 15; nearly all of the technological scenarios talked about at present derive in an incremental, evolutionary way from the scenarios of more than a decade ago. The closest thing to an emerging paradigm of technological futures concerns the role of sensors and mobile cameras in terms of privacy, surveillance, and power. It's still fairly evolutionary (again, I could cite examples from Transhuman Space), but more importantly, it's much more about the social uses of technologies than about the technologies themselves.

For me, that's an interesting signal. In many ways, we can argue that the major drivers of The Future, over the past decade and very likely to continue for some time, are primarily socio-cultural. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons futurists often are uncomfortable with this line of foresight thinking, and most do it rather poorly.

Editors have an idea, or the outline of an idea, for a particular issue, and we reach out to an experienced writer in our personal network to report and write it. If such a writer doesn't leap to mind, we'll survey the landscape. Which other journalists are writing about this stuff in our competing publications, in niche media, in slightly smaller venues? We ask other editors who they'd recommend for the assignment.

You know what we never do? Check a database. Especially a database for which the primary criteria is gender or race. Sorry.

“I’m excited about Byliner, which I see as part of the short fiction revival that’s taking place online,” said Atwood in a press release. “The inspiration for ‘I’m Starved for You’ is, as usual with my ‘speculative fictions,’ real life. This is a story that imagines what might happen if certain present-day trends continue.”

First, men — middle-class white men, to be specific — are far more likely to have been given access to a computer and encouraged to use it at a young age. I love that you learned BASIC at age ten. But please realize that this has not been the case for all of us.

Second, the “culture of code,” the inside jokes and joshing that you enjoy, may not be equally appealing to everyone who encounters it. This should be, but apparently isn’t, obvious.

But Miriam, you’re thinking, there are lots of examples of DH coders who started late and are now well-respected and proficient! This is true! And they inspire me all the time. But this is also why I wanted to talk a little bit about what it’s like for a woman to learn to program.

Doing something in an unconventional way, such as fixing breakfast in the “wrong” order, violates an expectation of how the world usually works and how actions usually unfold. When someone personally and actively experiences such unconventional events, she is presumably pushed outside her comfort zone and thus “learns” a lesson: “The world can be different. I can do things differently.” Therefore, when she encounters a new situation or problem, she is now able to take an unusual route to a more creative solution.