Rafa Spoladore Ψ

Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study.

O Brasil não é mais um dos líderes mundiais em envio de spams: a quantidade de e-mails indesejados enviados por aqui caiu 88% e agora ocupamos a 12º posição no ranking da Composite Blocking List (CBL) – ranking que lideramos em 2009.

O CGI.br credita a queda impressionante à adesão da Gerência de Porta 25 – uma campanha que visa bloquear uma das principais saídas de spams de computadores. O programa foi iniciado em 2005 e chegou à sua última fase no fim de 2012, e os resultados já são bem visíveis.

Em 2009, o Brasil era o líder mundial no envio de spams. No quarto trimestre daquele ano, mais de 1 milhão de endereços de IP brasileiros eram listados entre os responsáveis pelo envio de spams. No primeiro trimestre de 2013, o número caiu para menos de 200 mil. O Brasil, que era responsável por 17% dos spams mundiais, agora representa menos de 2%. Um belo avanço, e o CGI.br acredita que a tendência é que os números caiam ainda mais. [CGI.br via Folha]

necro81 writes "The cooling system at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, responsible for keeping the spent fuel pools at an appropriate temperature, lost power early on March 18th. During the blackout, the temperature in the spent fuel pools gradually increased, although TEPCO officials indicated the pools could warm for four days without risking radiation release. Power was restored earlier this morning, and the pools should be back to normal temperature in a few days. During the repairs, the charred remains of a rat were found in a critical area of wiring, leading some to believe that this rodent was the cause of this latest problem. At least it wasn't a mynock — then we'd really be in trouble."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have found a layer of liquefied molten rock in Earth's mantle that may be acting as a lubricant for the sliding motions of the planet's massive tectonic plates. The discovery may carry far-reaching implications, from solving basic geological functions of the planet to a better understanding of volcanism and earthquakes.

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How to identify cowboy hat styles, big pic...(Read...)

Ceiling designed by Kulyev..(Read...)

Icons that fuck up your day...(Read...)

Iniciativa engloba diferentes ministérios, com participação da Finep em 40% dos recursos

(Phys.org) —Researchers from North Carolina State University have come up with a low-cost way to enhance a polymer called MEH-PPV's ability to confine light, advancing efforts to use the material to convert electricity into laser light for use in photonic devices.

A quantum algorithm has been devised that could help work out how prime numbers are distributed, a problem worth $1 million in prize money

A new Lockheed Martin project promises to cheaply and easily turn seawater into drinking water.

It's surprisingly hard to find safe drinking water on Earth--this on a planet covered in water. A new project by Lockheed Martin hopes to change that, and do it cheaply. Using a graphene filter, Lockheed hopes to transform salt water into drinking water by the end of the year.

The timing couldn't be better. Ending water scarcity is one of the United Nations's millenium development goals. But it is a daunting task: while there’s enough freshwater for everyone on earth, it isn’t very evenly distributed, and untangling that distribution is a Herculean feat. For the 44 percent of the world’s population that lives within a hundred miles of coasts, technology that can convert salt water into fresh water is an important alternative.

Desalination--that process of removing salt from water to make it drinkable--has been used for thousands of years. One problem: Removing salt from seawater is less efficient than starting from freshwater, and significantly more expensive. When a country relies on desalination to get most of its water, it’s usually because it has a tremendous amount of oil money and no other good options. Costs are coming down, but gradually, and major desalination attempts remain prohibitively costly for much of the world. One of the grander attempts in recent history is the Beijiang Power and Desalination Plant, which has a price tag of $4.1 billion.

Ancient methods of desalination involved crude filters and capturing steam from boiling water, a practice which today has been improved on an industrial scale. But, again, the energy costs are enormous--it's one thing for ancient sailors to boil water on a ship at sea to get them through the day, it's another thing entirely to provide for the daily water needs of hundreds of thousands of city-dwelling people. Some desalination plants still start by boiling saltwater in a large chamber. Once that steam has lifted away from the salt, it is cooled at the top of the chamber and condenses, draining out into tanks for further filtration. Energy is required to both boil and cool the same water, making the whole process pretty inefficient. An alternative and more popular method for large-scale operations is reverse osmosis. In reverse osmosis, water is sent through filter after filter after filter at high pressure, hoping to remove more and more salt each time. Getting water through these filters is the most energy-intensive part of the process, and the thinner the filter, the less pressure you need.

Lockheed’s proposed desalination project filters through graphene, a material already touted as a modern marvel. A thousand times stronger than steel, it's also just one atom thick. Last July, Popular Science covered its potential use in water filtration. Passing seawater over tiny pores, just one nanometer wide, the filter will let water molecules through, while blocking out the atoms that make salt. These filters are a much less energy-intensive option, and much better at filtration. Lockheed expects to have a prototype filter available by the end of 2013.

It can climb ladders, open doors, and it's coming to rescue you.

Chimpanzees? Cool. Tanks? Cool. Robots? Also cool. Combine them, and you have either the best transformer ever, or Carnegie Mellon’s new human-sized robot chimp tank.

Named the CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform (CHIMP, because clever), the four-limbed robot is designed to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The challenge seeks robots that can wander into places where it'd be unsafe to send a human, like a failed nuclear reactor or houses after an earthquake. The challenge also solicits robots that can use human tools to do everything from open doorknobs to drive cars. There are several proposed designs, ranging from the humanoid to the spidery.

But CHIMP is the most, well, chimp-like. Similar to a chimpanzee, it has hands--complete with opposable thumbs--at the end of each limb that can grasp objects.

Most of the time, though, CHIMP resembles and acts more like a LEGO tank. Each of those four limbs has a section of tractor-like treads, which move easier over uneven terrain than most bipedal robots.

A shiny robot chimp tank is nothing without good software. Internal intelligence software helps it avoid collisions, stay balanced, and avoid harm. CHIMP is piloted remotely, by an operator using a large monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and the operator can take a more or less active role, depending on the need. (Normally the robot chimp tank can navigate fine by itself, but if it gets stuck the operator can take over, controlling each individual joint if it has to in order to free CHIMP from whatever obstacle has it pinned down, say, if its leg fell through an earthquake-damaged floorboard.) All of that is great, inventive and functional.

And, let me just repeat, it’s housed in a robot chimp tank.

[Time]

Albert Einstein (born in Ulm on March 14th, 1879) is such a formidable personality that I gave up the idea to write a biography. The problem is that I know too many things about him and other people know even more things about Einstein etc. Ohm is an easier task.

George Simon Ohm was born in Erlangen, Holy Roman Empire (100 km from the Czech border) on March 16th, 1789. He died in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria (200 km from the Czech border) at the age of 65. When he was just four months old, he could have stormed the Bastille but he decided not to.

His father was officially uneducated but he was actually one of the most widely respected autodidacts. Georg's mother died when he was ten years old. Among seven siblings, only three survived to adulthood: sister Elizabeth Barbara, Georg Simon, and his younger brother Martin Ohm who would become a famous mathematician (during their lifetime, maybe more famous than Georg Ohm). Martin Ohm figured out what \(a^b\) was for \(a,b\in\CC\); I loved this problem when I was 8 years old or so.




Imagine that it's just 200 years ago – and 4/7 of the children were dying before they reached adulthood. Medicine and related fields have made an amazing progress since Ohm's time. On the other hand, one could be worried that this cruel fate of the children was still imposing some "creative" natural selection on the mankind that became absent sometime in the 20th century. So far, things look fine but who knows what the people will think about this issue in 2100.




Georg Simon Ohm most famously worked as a high school teacher – that's when he discovered his Ohm's law\[

U = RI.

\] I can't forget the joke about the three Ohm's laws: \(U=RI\), \(I=U/R\), \(R=U/I\). I guess that many people, especially among the girls, wouldn't view this as a joke.

Note that the unit "one ohm" of resistance is denoted by the capital Omega, \(\rm\Omega\), because the letters starts almost like Ohm's name. Ohm made the discovery in 1827, when he was 39 and when he was playing with the electrochemical cell invented by Alessandro Volta. Ohm's law is clearly paramount for all electric circuits but sadly enough, electric circuits only began to be a hot topic more than 50 years later. Imagine how rich he would be if he could collect royalties from Ohm's law patents today.

Ohm's career involved various teaching jobs – including those at universities (not the most famous ones) – that were paying so little that he almost starved to death. And that's true despite the fact that he was hired by no one else than the Prussian king at one moment. The king loved Ohm's book and work. Some low-brow colleges that used to employ Ohm didn't so they fired him, and so on.

Johann Dirichlet was among Ohm's students.

There's another law that Ohm proposed, the so-called Ohm's other law or Ohm's acoustic law. Using a modern language, it says that the human ear is a Fourier analyzer that measures \(|\tilde f(\omega)|^2\) for all accessible frequencies \(\omega\).

This statement, known to be partly false, is pretty fascinating. For example, it implicitly says that the relative phases don't matter. For example, look at the graphs of the functions \(\sin(x)+\sin(2x)\) and \(\sin(x)+\cos(2x)\). The graphs of the position of the speaker as a function of time look very different (the second graph is time-reversal-symmetric but the first one is far from it, for example) but because the amplitudes have the same absolute values, we can't hear the difference between these two sounds.

When I was a kid, I played the piano and I was very confused by certain basic things. For example, when I was 7, I was convinced that if you play "C" and "E" at the same moment, the ear must hear the tone in between, "D", if I pick a prominent example. That's of course rubbish – each frequency has its independent "account" – as I understood a year later (even though I surely had to "hear" this fact – hear chords – a long time earlier). But it was still confusing to me why we can't hear the differences between the functions above, for example, and why interference never cancels the same tone coming from two sources etc. You're welcome to offer your opinion.

Ohm's acoustic law answers most of these questions. Nevertheless, musicians have generally hated this law from the beginning – it became a major reason why musicians distrust physicists. It has to be wrong, they feel and hear (?). Well, I am sure that the law "ears are Fourier analyzers" can't be quite true. On the other hand, I haven't found any coherent description by the musicians that would clarify what they really dislike about the law.

Well, I would say that the ear only hears some frequencies, from \(20\) to \(20,000\,{\rm Hz}\) or so; frequencies outside this interval are simply eliminated (gradually). Moreover, it must be able to partly determine the phase of the cycle for low enough frequencies. And it must suffer from limitations of the resolution with which the frequencies may be distinguished; good musicians generally have a more precise sense of hearing. And the brain of course can't remember too much information about the function \(|\tilde f(\omega)|^2\) so it compresses it in some way – determines the loudest components (frequencies) and/or describes the remaining sound as "some sort of noise" etc. Otherwise I am not really able to think about other limitations that the law could have.

Can you help me? My guess is that the dissatisfied musicians must misunderstand some Fourier maths even if their ear is subconsciously doing a good job in the Fourier analysis. And artists may always hate science for "making things dull" (not true!). So I would guess that the opposition is ultimately irrational but I am ready to be proved wrong.

Mozilla has announced the 1.0 release of Open Badges, an open framework for deploying verifiable digital recognition of achievements and awards. As the announcement explains, "With Open Badges, every badge has important data built in that links back to who issued it, how it was earned, and even the projects a user completed to earn it. Employers and others can dig into this rich data and see the full story of each user’s skills and achievements." Mozilla says there are more than 600 organizations using the Open Badges infrastructure, and they have issued more than 62,000 badges.

Leitores de Douglas Adams (que faria 62 anos hoje) talvez se lembrem de que, em Até Mais, Valeu o Peixe, ao final de uma longa jornada pelos recônditos do cosmo, seus protagonistas encontram a Mensagem Final de Deus para Sua Criação. Não vou dar spoiler aqui -- quem quiser saber qual a mensagem sem ler o livro só precisa de um pouco de paciência com o Google -- mas uma imagem de 2000, feita pelo Telescópio Espacial Hubble, parece ter matado a charada.

A foto é definida pela Nasa como "detalhe de uma estrutura complexa no interior da Nebulosa de Carina". A foto inteira é esta aqui, bela e majestosa como quase tudo o que o Hubble faz:


Mas o detalhe relevante para o título da postagem encontra-se no canto superior esquerdo, devidamente embalado numa auréola beatífica:


O fato de a foto ter sido divulgada no ano 2000 só faz aumentar a convicção de que ela tem um significado especial. Como o monolito alienígena do filme 2001: Uma Odisseia no Espaço, a mensagem foi deixada lá para que a descobríssemos quando nossa tecnologia fosse capaz -- e, ao contrário dos astutos protagonistas de Arthur C. Clarke, passamos batidos por ela.

Não duvido nada de que as últimas guerras, enchentes, furacões, o sertanejo universitário, a renúncia do papa e o Marcos Feliciano só aconteceram para chamar nossa atenção para o fato que insistimos em ignorar.

The habit of being easily persuaded by mass media

The habit of doing it right instead of doing it over

The habit of responding to nastiness with nastiness

The habit of failing to trust people who care

The habit of wasting time in meetings

The habit of being on time

The habit of avoiding things that cause fear

The habit of reading ahead

The habit of doing more than promised

The habit of expanding personal knowledge and experience

The habit of skepticism

The habit of close talking

The habit of generosity...

There's a million habits out there, some good, some bad, all learned. Every habit (your market, your family, your organization has) was formed because people got rewarded for it, at least in the short run.

The thing is, every habit is changeable with effort.

Turns out these mammal-devouring spiders are spread throughout the world.

jfruh writes "At a Brazilian hospital, doctors were required to check in with a fingerprint scanner to show that they've showed up for work. Naturally, they developed a system to bypass this requirement, creating fake fingers so that they could cover for one another when they took unauthorized time off. Another good example of how supposedly foolproof security tech can in fact be fooled pretty easily."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google said Wednesday that it has bought a Canadian startup specializing in getting machines to understand what people are trying to say.

We recently wrote about the truly stupid idea of building DRM into HTML5. At SXSW this week, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee was asked about this, and he surprisingly defended the decision, claiming that it was necessary to get companies to use HTML5:

During a post-talk Q&A, he defended proposals to add support for "digital rights management" usage restrictions to HTML5 as necessary to get more content on the open Web: "If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in, people will just go back to using Flash," he claimed.

Berners-Lee is so good on so many issues (most of his talk seemed to be about the importance of openness) that this response really stands out as not fitting with his general view of the world. Cory Doctorow has responded eloquently to TBL, explaining why he should be against the DRM proposal.

What's more, DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying. I suspect Berners-Lee knows this. When geeks downplay fears over DRM, they often say things like: "Well, I can get around it, and anyway, they'll come to their senses soon enough, since it doesn't work, right?" Whenever Berners-Lee tells the story of the Web's inception, he stresses that he was able to invent the Web without getting any permission. He uses this as a parable to explain the importance of an open and neutral Internet. But what he fails to understand is that DRM's entire purpose is to require permission to innovate.

For limiting copying is only the superficial reason for adding DRM to a technology. DRM fails completely at preventing copying, but it is brilliant at preventing innovation. That's because DRM is backstopped by anti-circumvention laws like the notorious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) and the EU Copyright Directive of 2002 (EUCD), both of which make it a crime to compromise DRM, even if you're not breaking any other laws. Effectively, this means that you have to get permission from a DRM licensing authority to add any features, since all new features require removing DRM, and the DRM license terms prohibit adding any features not in the original agreement, and omitting any of the mandatory restrictions featured in that agreement.

Doctorow makes two other key points in this: (1) that the W3C (the standards setting body for HTML5) has an enormous role in keeping the web free and open -- and imposing DRM is abusing the trust it has built up and will backfire badly and (2) that the big content players who insist they "need" DRM are bluffing.

As the leading standards-setting body for the Web, the W3C has an enormous, sacred and significant trust. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we'll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its "content" in Flash if it doesn't get a veto over Web-innovation. That threat is a familiar one: the big studios promised to boycott US digital TV unless it got mandatory DRM. The US courts denied them this boon, and yet, digital TV continues (if only Ofcom and the BBC had heeded this example before they sold Britain out to the US studios on our own high-def digital TV standards).

Flash is already an also-ran. As Berners-Lee himself will tell you, the presence of open platforms where innovation requires no permission is the best way to entice the world to your door. The open Web creates and supplies so much value that everyone has come to it – leaving behind the controlled, Flash-like environs of AOL and other failed systems. The big studios need the Web more than the Web needs big studios.

The Big Content guys have been seeking to remake the web in their image (i.e., "TV") for over a decade now, still believing that they're the main reason people get online. They're not. There's room for them within the ecosystem, but professional broadcast-quality content is just a part of the system, not the whole thing. If the world moves to HTML5 without DRM, the content guys will whine about it... and then follow. Especially as the more knowledgeable and forward-looking content creators jump in and succeed.

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As others have noted, the European Court of Human Rights has rejected appeals from two founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij, of their conviction under Swedish law. The decision is worth reading in its entirety, in that it tries to lay out a "balanced" approach concerning freedom of expression against other rights, such as copyright, and appears to come down on the side of saying copyright is more important than freedom of expression. That seems like a dangerous outcome in a variety of ways.

The court quite readily admits that forcing Sunde and Neij to block content from being exchanged via TPB violates their free expression rights, but says that this is a legitimate restriction on such rights:

In the present case, the applicants put in place the means for others to impart and receive information within the meaning of Article 10 of the Convention. The Court considers that the actions taken by the applicants are afforded protection under Article 10 § 1 of the Convention and, consequently, the applicants' convictions interfered with their right to freedom of expression. Such interference breaches Article 10 unless it was "prescribed by law", pursued one or more of the legitimate aims referred to in Article 10 § 2 and was "necessary in a democratic society" to attain such aim or aims.

They then look at whether or not the restriction of free expression was "prescribed by law" and conclude that it was, because it happened under the Copyright Act, and there was a "legitimate aim" behind the convictions. That's pretty broad, of course. It also looks at whether or not this restriction was "necessary in a democratic society," which is where it spends the most of its time.

The court seems heavily influenced by the fact that TPB did not remove torrents when asked to do so, despite no law requiring such actions. Furthermore, that sets a bizarre and dangerous precedent that just because someone "urges" you to remove content from an internet website or service, that you must do so or be held liable for it.

The part that troubles me most, however, is that the court more or less completely sidesteps the questions of secondary liability. While it mentions, a few times, that both Sunde and Neij have pointed out that TPB was just the service provider, and any actual infringement was done by users, it never properly addresses this issue, other than to suggest that secondary liability is perfectly reasonable. For those of us who have studied just how important protections for secondary liability are in promoting innovation, this suggests a very dangerous precedent for innovation in Europe. When service providers -- or even those who just worked on the platform -- are held directly liable for actions of their users, you create a very big chilling effect on other companies and services. While it may be more understandable for Neij, who worked directly on building and maintaining the site, Sunde's connection to the actual operations has always been remote. The EHCR reiterates the silly point that, among other things, Sunde "configured a load balancing service for TPB" as if that has anything to do with the overall operations of the site. While it does also talk about his minimal work in working with advertisers on the site, setting up a load balancer and advertising relationships are perfectly legitimate activities, and have nothing to do with any infringement that may have occurred on the site.

Having recently watched the documentary on the TPB trial, TPB AFK (and recognizing that it likely does not tell the full story in the short time frame allowed in a documentary flick), you begin to recognize that there is something of a language and technology literacy gap between those prosecuting the TPB founders and the founders themselves, and, if anything, I think that contributes to the situation the founders are in now. Many of their explanations make perfect sense from a technology standpoint, and are completely obvious, normal things that any online service would do. But, the founders seem to think that these things are so obvious and so non-troublesome that they don't appear to do a very good job of explaining them in ways that the court would understand. It's for that reason that I think the case has not gone that well for the founders. It often appears that they assume that those who are judging them (and prosecuting them) have a level of technological literacy and sophistication that they do not have. There would be ways to dumb down the arguments for why they should be protected under secondary liability theories, but it almost appears that the founders believe that it is the responsibility of those in the court to understand the more sophisticated arguments. I can certainly understand where such a position comes from -- and it makes sense in an ideal world. But in the real world, where that sophistication is lacking, the TPB founders glib explanations for the actions taken come off as semantics and rationalizations, rather than a compelling judicial argument. That is unfortunate, because the end result is a decision like the one today.

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We've been pointing out for years that all the talk about "cyberattacks" and "cybersecurity" appear to be FUD, mostly designed to scare up money for "defense" contractors looking for a new digital angle. And yet, we keep seeing fear-mongering report after fear mongering report insisting that we're facing imminent threats of such a dire nature that multiple people keep referring to this ridiculous concept of the "cyber Pearl Harbor" which is going to happen any day now if we don't pass vaguely worded bills that will surely ramp up huge contracts. And yet, every time we'd hear these cinematic scare stories, we'd point out that no one has yet died from a "cyber attack" and ask: where was the actual evidence of real harm? Yes, we've seen hack attacks that are disruptive or really about espionage. But that "big threat" coming down to get us all? There's been nothing to support it.

And perhaps that's because it doesn't exist. Amazingly, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, actually admitted in a Senate hearing that there's little risk of any "cyber Pearl Harbor" in the foreseeable future:

“We judge that there is a remote chance of a major cyber attack against U.S. critical infrastructure systems during the next two years that would result in long-term, wide-scale disruption of services, such as a regional power outage,” Clapper said in his statement to the committee. “The level of technical expertise and operational sophistication required for such an attack — including the ability to create physical damage or overcome mitigation factors like manual overrides — will be out of reach for most actors during this time frame. Advanced cyber actors — such as Russia and China — are unlikely to launch such a devastating attack against the United States outside of a military conflict or crisis that they believe threatens their vital interests.”

He later admitted that some others -- who weren't as knowledgeable -- might be able to sneak in some attacks here or there, but that the impact would likely be minimal:

“These less advanced but highly motivated actors could access some poorly protected US networks that control core functions, such as power generation, during the next two years, although their ability to leverage that access to cause high-impact, systemic disruptions will probably be limited. At the same time, there is a risk that unsophisticated attacks would have significant outcomes due to unexpected system configurations and mistakes, or that vulnerability at one node might spill over and contaminate other parts of a networked system,” he said.

Of course, at the very same hearing, the NSA's General Keith Alexander kept up the propaganda about threats. Alexander has been among those who have been spreading FUD about the "threats" -- including ridiculous claims about Anonymous shutting down the power grid -- so sticking to that line is hardly much of a surprise. This time around he focused on an increasing rate of attacks on Wall Street banks.

He also pulled out the old "the Chinese are stealing our business secrets!" claim. That always sounds good for Congress, but it is unclear how much real impact it has had.

But the Cyber Command chief stressed that the U.S. needs to clamp down on this intellectual property theft, warning it will ultimately "hurt our nation significantly."

"For the nation as a whole, this is our future. This intellectual property, from an economic perspective, represents future wealth and we're losing that," Alexander said.

It doesn't appear he has any real basis for saying that. There are all sorts of ways to compete and to innovate, and falling back on relying intellectual property laws may be the least useful and least efficient manner for doing so.

It would be nice if we could stop all the blatant fear mongering and focus on any actual problems, such as highlighting what important information isn't being shared today, since we keep getting told that it's our lack of information sharing that will lead to a cyber pearl harbor. Now that we know the threat isn't imminent, can we sit back and look at the actual evidence, understand what the real problem is, and see if there's a way to solve it that doesn't involve giving up everyone's privacy rights?

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(Phys.org) —The precise methodology of Richard Feynman's famous double-slit thought-experiment – a cornerstone of quantum mechanics that showed how electrons behave as both a particle and a wave – has been followed in full for the very first time.