It used to be that you needed a huge cellphone network to start mapping changes in air currents, but now these guys have developed a sensor that can measure the movement and displacement of air particles using a sensor smaller than a matchstick head!

The Microflown

The Microflown is the worlds first and only MEMS technology based sensor that can measure the acoustic particle velocity. By measuring the temperature difference in the cross section of two extremely thin platinum wires placed in parallel, this extremely fast mass flow sensor is capable of monitoring the movement of air particles. Any sound field is described completely by both the (scalar) value sound pressure and the (vector) value acoustic particle velocity. Understandably, acoustic testing becomes much easier if both acoustic quantities can be measured. But the Microflown sensor platform can also be used to measure:

*

structural velocity

*

sound pressure

*

temperature

*

DC flow

*

acceleration

via Microflown Technologies – Home.

This wiki has guides showing you how to get OSX Snow Leopard installed on a PC using Intel or AMD chips.

Main Page – OSx86.

This article is a general primer on how to get players to continuously play your game, which in the world of the MMPORG is a very important element, using a behavioural model.

Gamasutra – Features – Behavioral Game Design.

This article is a bit more cynical and compares the above techniques to addiction creation and illustrates the theory with specific examples from World of Warcraft.

Cracked – 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

Using Google search technology you can now browse through the entire archive of Popular Science magazine and read the old issues online.

New! Browse the Complete PopSci Archive | Popular Science.

Yup, this is what happens to DRM servers: they go down and you can’t play your game, listen to your music, or really do anything with the product you bought.

Ubisoft’s game servers have been down for longer than 10 hours, well done!

The Escapist : News : Ubisoft DRM Authentication Servers Go Down.

This guy will dump your girlfriend or boyfriend for a small fee  by phone. He records the call and then puts it on YouTube for the world to hear.

IDUMP4U the website where we do all the dirty work for you!.

Showing that the LibDems in the UK are now the lapdogs of major industry, they have proposed an amendment allowing copyright owners to force ISPs to take content offline without any proof that the copyright belongs to them.

“During today's debate in the UK's House of Lords on the much-criticized Digital Economy Bill the unpopular Clause 17 (that would have allowed the government to alter copyright law much more easily than it currently can) was voted out in favor of a DMCA-style take-down system for websites and ISPs. The new amendment known as 120A sets up a system whereby a copyright owner could force an ISP to block certain websites who allegedly host or link to infringing material or face being taken before the High Court and made to pay the copyright owner's legal fees. This amendment was tabled by the Liberal Democrat party who had so far been seen as the defenders of the internet and with the Conservative party supporting them. The UK's Pirate Party and Open Rights Group have both strongly criticized this new amendment.”

via Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | DMCA Amendment Proposed For UK.

And we’ve known this since the 1890s. Experiments repeatedly show that multitasking basically makes you perform badly at any of the tasks you’re performing. Now, however, it turns out that not only do you do badly at the tasks, but it also destroys your capacity for reasoning.

This article walks quickly through the history of the research on multitasking and brings you up to date with methods to practically use single tasking, from the extreme in classrooms to the more mundane.

Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The system beams a keyboard or menu onto the user's forearm and hand from a projector housed in an armband. An acoustic detector, also in the armband, then calculates which part of the display you want to activate.

via Body acoustics can turn your arm into a touchscreen – tech – 01 March 2010 – New Scientist.

And then puts them into a database accessible by… who? and why? This started in 2002 and has been going on without your knowledge ever since…

Newborns’ blood used to build secret DNA database – Short Sharp Science – New Scientist.

3RVX shows you the PC volume level on your screen in a skinnable format.

matt.malensek.

The RIAA, the PRS, BUMA/STEMRA – all organisations claiming to exist for the benefit of musicians (who never see the money collected) are now showing – yet again – how self serving they are: The STEMRA decided they wanted to grant a pan-European musical license to beatport.com, so they wouldn’t have to go through each individual country. The PRS (British RIAA) went ballistic and sued STEMRA. Higher courts have denied the STEMRA. So instead of being able to easily pay for the rights of the artists so that they could be heard all over Europe on the web, the PRS has shot its’ artists in the foot and told them NO WAY do they want people to listen to them all over Europe… Unless, of course, the PRS gets some of the action. Instead of the artists, through another organisation.

Does that sound like mafia to you?

Emerce – Business nieuws: Voorlopig geen Pan-Europese muzieklicentie.

The Italians will sue your sorry arse for things you never did, didn’t know of and tried to fix as soon as you did know of them!

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that's where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes who left the company in 2008. The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed.

via Official Google Blog: Serious threat to the web in Italy.

well well well, not that we didn’t expect it – it’s now delayed by a year and development costs are $100m over budget allready.

Now if only the Netherlands had bought something like Eurofighter or Rafale.

F-​​35 Delayed Again | Defense Tech.

Looks like the Rafale provides a lot more bang for buck than the F-22, at least in close range…

In those six engagements, the F-22 scored one gun kill, but the other five dogfights ended in a draw, Air & Cosmos says. Another sources tells the magazine the F-22 scored two gun kills, with four nulls.

via UAE missile demands and more Rafale v. Raptor rumors – The DEW Line.

CWE – 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out I created a “luck school” – a simple experiment that examined whether people s luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities listen to their intuition expect to be lucky and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic 80 per cent of people were now happier more satisfied with their lives and perhaps most important of all luckier. While lucky people became luckier the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from “luck school” she has passed her driving test after three years of trying was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

via Be lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn – Telegraph.

Barcelona, Spain (February 15, 2010) – Face.com has powered the first-ever “Social Augmented Reality” app, developed by Comverse,

Harnessing Face.com’s superior facial recognition algorithms and its enormous database of faces, the “Social Augmented Reality” app functions in multiple capacities:

* Friends: When two friends are together and one wants to see the other’s photos, the software will recognize the friend and offer direct links to his or her profile and pictures.

* Business: At the office, a colleague might request that you remind him or her about a report that is due. A quick scan and the app will identify the individual, allowing you to message him or her without ever looking through your address book.

* Acquaintances: The app has the potential to connect people before they even know each other’s names. If you bump into someone who you met before and he or she looks familiar but you can’t remember why, the app will locate that person’s online profile to put a name to the face.

“Augmented reality was the first step to bridging the gap between on- and off-line worlds; now our technology takes it further,” said Gil Hirsch, CEO, Face.com. “The Comverse app, utilizing Face.com facial recognition technology, closes the loop by merging face-to-face with virtual social communication.”

via The Facial Recognition Augmented Reality App That Could Revolutionize Stalking [Augmented Reality] | TechBlogs Today.

So it’s a little like having a name whisperer on your phone, then?

A team of US research scientists have made a startling breakthrough in solar-cell development, creating flexible wire-based cell substrates that use just one per cent of the silicon needed for brittle and comparatively heavy conventional cells.

Solar cells made from this material would not only be less expensive than current photovoltaics, but due to their low weight and bendable structure the could be used in a wide variety of applications.

The trick in this new method is to bundle one-micrometer-thick silicon wires and embed the resulting array vertically in a flexible polymer. Thus bundled, the paper claims, the array could capture and transmit up to 96 per cent of light in peak conditions while requiring only one per cent of the silicon needed by conventional cells.

via US lab births flexy, stingy solar cells • The Register.

Professor Jones [NB  the guy who sent all the wierd emails that were uncovered revealing that data was spurious and that he'd hammer into the ground all global warming sceptic scientists] also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

via Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online.

The Zeal Optics Transcend googles feature a head mounted display with GPS, speed, altitude, vertical odometer, stopwatch / countdown timer, temp, time, anti fog and a whole lot more and have 3 buttons on the side  to switch between the modes and functions in a coverflow type of fashion. Unfortunately either $350,- or $450,-.

Zeal Optics :: Transcend.

The US Navy had 2 flying aircraft carriers – zeppelins, which launched and recovered biplanes using a skyhook. The USS Akron and the USS Macon The Sparrowhawk aircraft had their landing gear removed and had to hit a hook that slung them in a corner in and out of the ship. No arrestor cable, no launch rail and a better safety record than current carriers. The end of the airship era ended the project, unfortunately.

Wreck of 1930s flying aircraft carrier dubbed ‘historic’ • The Register.

Cambridge University security researchers have demonstrated how it might be possible to trick the card into thinking it’s doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it’s authorised by chip-and-PIN. The flaw creates a means to make transactions that are “Verified by PIN” using a stolen uncancelled card without knowing the PIN number. Fraudsters would insert a “wedge” between the stolen card and terminal tricking the terminal into believing that the PIN was correctly verified

via Chip and PIN security busted • The Register.

Boeings airborne laser has had its’ first shootdown – a short range ballistic missle, which was destroyed in the boost phase: the earliest stage in flight a missle has been shot down to date.

Airborne Laser hits 16-year-old goal — extremely quietly [Updated w/video] – The DEW Line.

Aside from vegetarians killing more animals than meat eaters (sounds strange? Consider how much random killing a combine harvester does), they are also worse for the environment as they require more arable land and the processing of  the foods creates way more greenhouse gasses.

Being vegetarian does more harm to the environment than eating meat | Mail Online.