Budcaddell

The Worldport, the once-famous "flying saucer" terminal at New York's JFK airport, will likely soon be gone. Built in 1960 by now-defunct airline Pan American, it sent off its final flight in March of 2013 and was slated to be demolished not long after. Although some ramps have already been knocked down, though, a group of supporters is still fighting to save the Worldport. "It represents a very important time in US history — a time when things were optimistic. It was the cradle of the jet age," preservationist Anthony Stramaglia told the New York Daily News in June. Fans of the terminal believe that although equipment is already being moved into place for the building's final destruction, it could still be saved: they're nearing the...

Continue reading…

via http://thelukee.com/post/44192382451/deadfix

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/7/54035479823

There's no such thing as a free download. Jay-Z announced he was leaking his new album, "Magna Carta Holy Grail," five days early via an app, which seemed like a generous and innovative move. However, he didn't note that fans would be forced to give him access to their location and phone status. The permissions request was enough to stop the rapper Killer Mike from downloading the album. In addition, the app required fans to post an update to Twitter or Facebook in order to get lyrics for each track. "On some level, Jay-Z knows better," writes Jon Pareles, a music critic for The New York Times. "'Feds still lurking / They see I’m still putting work in,' he raps in a new song, 'Somewhere in America.' Yet now, it’s Jay-Z who’s...

Continue reading…

What Lee would have been able to see, based on the terrain, on July 3, 1863, when he decided to launch his doomed assault, Pickett's Charge. According to a new project, "Half or more of the Federal forces [blue] were completely hidden from view." (Anne Kelly Knowles/Smithsonian)

When Robert E. Lee looked out over the land at Gettysburg, 150 years ago this week, what could he see?

Not much, says Middlebury professor of geography Anne Kelly Knowles. That is her conclusion based on a nearly decade-long project to visualize the Battle of Gettysburg using advanced digital mapping techniques, available for your exploration at Smithsonian.com.

"What our visual terrain analysis shows is that Lee, at no point in the battle, could see how many federal forces kept arriving at the field," she told me. "He really had no idea how big the force was that he was attacking on day two and day three."

The idea of using GIS to map the historical battle first came to Knowles one morning 12 years ago. "I was literally brushing my teeth one morning and I thought, gosh, what could Lee see at Gettysburg?" she said.

Because surveillance technology at the time of the Civil War lacked aerial capabilities, intelligence about troop movements was limited to what generals and their scouts could actually see. Based on that visual information, generals had to make quick decisions about whether to attack and where to deploy troops. "I knew that GIS could help a person answer that question, because you can use it to analyze terrain three dimensionally," she explained.

The lay of the land on the first day of the battle, 150 years ago today. (Knowles/Smithsonian)

Her project got a boost when she came across a map stored in the National Archives' Treasure Vault created in the late 1860s and early 1870s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Knowles describes the map with enthusiasm. "It is enormous," she says It measures 12 by 13 feet, with each foot on the map measuring 1,200 feet on the ground, with a contour interval indicating every four feet of elevation change. It shows the buildings, the topography, the land cover, where the hardwood trees were, where the pines were, where the orchards were, whether fences were made of wood or stone. "The famous peach orchard that figures so importantly in the battle on the second day is labeled on the map and is shown by little tiny peach trees."

According to Knowles, "This was better than any modern data and it was historically accurate."

"It is one of the most beautiful maps ever made. It is a stunning visual memorial to the battle," says Knowles. (Used by permission of the National Archives and Records Administration)

Information about the whereabouts and movements of the troops came from another source, the reporting of John B. Bachelder "a sort of mediocre landscape artist and cartographer from New Hampshire," as Knowles describes him. Bachelder, she says, "saw an opportunity in this incredibly important battle, rushed to the battlefield almost immediately after the battle, and started interviewing veterans of the battle -- foot soldiers, generals." He eventually secured $10,000 from Congress to complete his work and published 23 maps documenting the battle's play-by-play, sometimes showing the changing troop configurations at an increment of only half an hour. Knowles and her team digitzed Bachelder's work onto their map, checking them against other sources, she says, because his data isn't perfectly accurate.

"It's combining this historical terrain with the changing position of the troops and then digital technology -- of course is the other crucial element here -- that enables us to put ourselves on that recreated terrain and show, either in the panorama views or the viewsheds, what commanders could and could not see," Knowles told me. By exploring the map from Lee's perspective, she was able to see how "blind" he was -- how, when he decided on the battle's third day to launch his doomed assault, he could not have known the full extent or formation of the Union troops. "That really changed my view of the battle. It makes it look all the more hopeless and bold -- I guess, or foolish -- for Lee."

Of course, understanding the mechanics of the battle is not the same as understanding the war and its aftermath. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote for The Atlantic's commemorative Civil War issue about the Cyclorama another, earlier visualization of the Gettysburg battle:

The cyclorama re-created the Battle of Gettysburg in stunning realism, with impeccable attention to the smallest minutiae. Yet it offered not a single clue as to why the battle had been fought. No matter how hard they looked, or how long they stared, no visitor would find in the painting any trace of the cause of the war. There was carnage. There was valor. But there was no purpose.

Battles are not fought in isolation. At Gettysburg, two armies clashed. The North fought to ensure that a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, would long endure. Its victory secured a new birth of freedom, which increased and flourished during Reconstruction. But over the ensuing decades, the promise of Gettysburg faltered. Emancipation brought greater liberty, but for black Americans, there was no equality. The revolutionary changes wrought by Reconstruction were rolled slowly backward. The work that the Union dead had so nobly advanced was left unfinished; the great task remained.

Data visualization or mapping technologies do not themselves explain history -- that is why we have narrative non-fiction, documentaries, even, in some instances, movies -- but seeing how Gettysburg played out on a map can help us understand why, in the end, it turned out as it did.

A new webapp called "Face to gif" could change the world of reaction GIFs forever. Created by developer Horia Dragomir, the app uses a relatively-new HTML5 specification called GetUserMedia to take video directly from your webcam and loop it into a short GIF. After creating your masterpiece you can either download it for editing or quickly upload it to Imgur with a single click. Give it a spin and show us your best efforts in the comments below.

Continue reading…

via http://www.youngandferal.com/

NASA

For months, space enthusiasts have been sitting on the edges of their seats, ready for the Voyager 1 spacecraft to become the first emissary of human civilization to cross from our solar system into interstellar space. Last August, two of the three instruments on Voyager 1 started sending back signals that something was -- suddenly, dramatically -- different. Particles from our sun fell way off, and cosmic rays from outside our system shot up. Was this the moment we'd all been waiting for?

Well, not quite yet. That third indicator -- the magnetic field data -- has turned out to be a bit, well, stubborn, showing month after month that Voyager is still in our sun's magnetic field. Two out of three ain't bad, as they say, but scientists need all three boxes checked before they will officially say that Voyager has crossed over, NASA explained in a release today.

Now scientists are giving Voyager's current home a new name -- the heliosheath depletion region. As Kelly Oakes writes in a terrific explanation in Scientific American:

Yep, what Voyager's instruments are now showing us is so odd we need a new name for it. Voyager is, almost literally, pushing the boundaries of our knowledge about the solar system.

Which, if you think about it, is hardly surprising. As Stamatios Krimigis of John Hopkins University, Maryland, and his colleagues write in one of the three papers out today, our ideas about the size and shape of the bubble of plasma we call the heliosphere, created by the solar wind that continuously flows from the sun, are older than the space age.

A trio of papers published in Science today details what scientists know about this new region, including two temporary shifts in the magnetic field data that occurred on May 29 and September 26 of last year, both times reverting to the data associated with our heliosphere (the bubble of solar winds emanating from our sun).

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 and has been traveling at astounding speeds for nearly 36 years (around 38,000 miles per hour currently). It is now more than 11 billion miles away from the sun. As we wait for it to reach its next and perhaps final frontier, scientists don't have a clear idea of what to expect. "I mean this is the first time any spacecraft has been there," Voyager project scientist Ed Stone of Caltech said to me last year.

We didn't know that the "heliosheath depletion region" was going to be there, or that it was going to be this big, but now that Voyager's been there for a while, we may as well give it a name. And while Voyager's departure from our solar system might not be the sort of clean, sudden that many of us would find satisfying, the new region is, well, a new region -- a piece of our little home in the universe that we didn't know about before, and now, thanks to Voyager, we do.

Clarification: Technically, Voyager 1 is on the boundary between interstellar space and the helisophere, not the solar system, because the solar system extends far beyond the heliosphere (the bubble of the solar winds) to include all objects influenced by the sun's gravity, which includes the Oort cloud, approximately a light year away -- much, much farther than Voyager 1 is now. Thanks to Tom Standage for bringing this up on Twitter.

Dropbox today announced the launch the Dropbox Partner Network, a program for organizations to resell, manage, and support Dropbox for Business. The debut also includes a Reseller Portal where Dropbox partners can get training, sales, and marketing materials and manage teams on behalf of their clients.

Furthermore, organizations are able to customize the service to meet their clients’ needs. Dropbox will also have dedicated Partner Account Managers available to support its resellers “every step of the way.”

Here’s Dropbox’s pitch:

• 100 million users: Partner with the brand that users trust for file sharing and collaboration. Your clients will tell you: Dropbox just works.
• 2 million businesses: Millions of organizations already use Dropbox. Help them take their productivity to the next level.
• Let’s do this together: We see our partners as an extension of our team, and we’re dedicated to helping you grow your business.

Dropbox says the launch today is in response to the demand for Dropbox for Business it has seen over the last few months from companies around the world as well as “thousands” of IT service providers that are inquiring on behalf of their clients. As such, Dropbox says it has been working closely with a few resellers to make sure its partner network is “an offering that fits their business and gives them the tools necessary to bring their clients an amazing Dropbox experience.”

In fact, the company already has 150 Managed Service Providers, IT Consultants, and Value-Added Resellers in its reseller program. These are the firms that have been working to bring Dropbox for Business to their clients in the early days of the program.

The tough part for Dropbox now will be to convince others that aren’t already excited about Dropbox for Business to do the same. We’ll be watching closely to see how the network grows.

See also – Dropbox debuts single sign-on to give companies streamlined management, increased security, and fewer logins and Dropbox for Business now lets administrators create team folders, accessible to all current and new members

Top Image Credit: Johan Larsson

Reddit users' favorite image host knows its market. On Wednesday, the popular image hosting site Imgur launched a meme generator aimed straight at taking over as Reddit users' go-to creation service. All of your favorite (and least favorite) memes are preloaded into the new generator, and a built-in gallery collects all of the most popular memes created that day on Imgur itself. While the web is hardly short on meme builders, Imgur's service comes at a timely juncture. The frequently used generator Quickmeme was banned from Reddit earlier this week following allegations that it had employed bots to vote images created on other website off of certain sections of Reddit. As Imgur is already a fan favorite, the site's generator is sure to...

Continue reading…

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/11/2195742374

In today’s world of non-stop information, it’s hard to find a good space to concentrate. While Melon aims to help users calm their mind through quantifying and analyzing their brain patterns, the foc.us headset is offering a different approach, using small electric currents to stimulate the brain of gamers to improve their performance.

The headset uses a method called transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, or tDCS – which has been clinically trialled and shown to improve cognitive processing. The foc.us team is currently marketing its device at gamers who want to get a step ahead their opponents through quicker reaction times and greater problem solving abilities. They can achieve this through the four electrodes located at the front of the headset, which – when soaked in saline solution and placed onto the forehead – deliver between 0.8 and 2.0 mA of electricity into the brain. The device is connected via Bluetooth to an accompanying app from which users can control the timing and amount of dosage they’re receiving. The foc.us is on sale in both red and black styles at USD 249 for US customers and GBP 179 for those in the UK.

While the science behind tDCS seems to be backed up by peer-reviewed research, the headset isn’t suitable for under-18s or those with conditions such as epilepsy. However, if it proves effective, the foc.us could be a safe way for healthy adults to improve their mental performance in any field.

Website: www.foc.us
Contact: support@foc.us

Spotted by: Murray Orange

We’ve already seen how businesses can implement a fair turn-taking policy to help consumers avoid queues with the Qminder app. Now Waitbot wants to aggregate crowdsourced data to give consumers information about any waiting times for any business.

The team behind Waitbot plan to use a number of technologies to glean their data from multiple sources – including social network updates, smartphone GPS positions and reports from its userbase and partner businesses. By developing an algorithm to automatically sort this data, determine how busy each location is and estimate a wait time, the startup hopes the app – expected to launch first in Chicago – will give users an idea of whether it’s worth heading to the bank right now, or if they should choose a different restaurant to go to that evening. Once up and running, Waitbot will also be able to track historical data for each venue and include that in its algorithm. It hopes that companies will want to partner with Waitbot in order to offer transparency to their customers and enable a more even spread of business throughout the day. The video below acts as a trailer for the app:

According to the company, Americans spend around 37 billion hours queuing for services each year, so an app such as this could help them make decisions that will save them time and boost their productivity. Are there other ways to determine queue size for remote locations?

Website: www.waitbot.com
Contact: www.twitter.com/waitbot

Spotted by: Murray Orange

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

Motion capture hardware and software company Leap Motion today announced a number of updates to its developer ecosystem, expanding the pool of people able to code for its hardware, and helping those who may want to write for it in the future.

Leap Motion’s motion tracking technology is one of the few pieces of physical technology that I’ve had the pleasure of testing in the past few years that not only lived up to my lofty, and incredulous, expectations, but made me sit back and rethink how computing might work in the future.

This week, Leap Motion is expanding access of a new “phase” of its beta program for developers to more than 10,000 individuals. However, not everyone will get in at once, so be patient.

Perhaps even more important, later in this week Leap Motion intends to open its developer portal to the general public. This will allow anyone curious to measure Leap Motion’s development tools, and see what they will offer them when their turn comes. Current developers are getting more, and the curious will get a taste. Ahead of its July 22 device launch date, Leap Motion wants to prime the developer pump as much as it can.

Does this matter? The expansion of a developer network for a product that hasn’t yet launched? Frankly, yes.

Speaking broadly, there are a few ways to interact with a computer. Keyboard and mouse is the most common, or perhaps we should say keyboard, and a second input function, either mouse or touchpad. Touch, on laptops and desktop machines – via touch enabled monitors – is a growing, but yet small part of the computing realm. Touch on tablets and smartphones – rising cohorts of the computer world – is quite popular. Voice, nascent, is also ascendant.

Leap Motion is a different way of talking to your machine, instead asking you to hold your hand over a small, pack-of-gum-sized device, which will track your every digit’s quiver. Simply put, you raise your hand, and your computer obeys.

The controls are nothing that you can’t master in a day, if not sooner. And, given how cheap the devices are – far south of $100 – the technology will be open to anyone; Leap is also baking its hardware into regular laptops and other devices, despite the fact that those partnerships won’t reach mass scale – in unit terms – for some time.

I had the good fortune of playing with Leap’s technology on both the Windows and Mac platforms last week, and through its own portal: Airspace. My short take is that once Leap Motion’s software and hardware are completely ironed, and its app marketplace stocked, there won’t be a technology-minded person without such a device either on their desk, or in their laptop.

A final note: What about Kinect for Windows? Wasn’t it to be the technology to bring motion control to our main computers? Well, what Leap Motion does is throw together a number of inexpensive sensors fused with great software, that can track your hands in near-perfect action. What Kinect does it a more full-body, holistic form of tracking; Leap Motion is all about your hands.

Also, Leap doesn’t accept voice input. However, Leap Motion has a marketplace with applications – I have used them – and operating system integration that makes Windows 8 truly sing. And it’s coming out next month. Thus, in a way, Kinect for Windows could be viewed as a future Tesla model: powerful, but not yet here. Leap Motion, however, is all but here.

Perhaps even more important: Leap Motion can be quickly integrated into OEM level computers. Will Kinect find a similar home inside the plastic of laptops popping off the line? Perhaps not, given the size of its physical bulk. Still, the two technologies are different enough that their comparison is more expectations-setting than anything else.

For now, Leap Motion is making strides to expand its developer pool; if the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that any new platform lives or dies by its quick third-party developer support.

Once Leap units ship, we’ll have a full run-through in massive detail, just for you.