2006 August

Education can play a fundamental role in reducing poverty, but high-quality and up-to-date textbooks are often too expensive for most people in developing countries.
To make education more accessible, a professor in the University of Georgia Terry College of Business is spearheading an effort to produce free online textbooks using a modified version of the Wiki […]

A new Web site at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute will serve as a clearinghouse for all available STRI scientific data. In addition, the site offers a range of tools including: a GIS make-your-own-map service, and a Google-style species search engine. A Map Library offers maps, satellite images and aerial photographs of Panama and the […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Despite the fact that the New York Times felt it not only had valid, but legal reasons to exclude a story from British online readers, legal and media experts are concerned there are new questions being raised by this action. While the Times blocked the story from its site, British newspapers […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
I wrote earlier about a UK worker being fired by text message. It was a body piercing studio, not necessarily a big company, so I might be able to forgive (somewhat) that offense. But a company as large as Radio Shack delivering pink slips in email?

Reading a good magazine can be a great way to pass the time, especially while you’re waiting in the doctor’s or dentist’s office. More and more magazines are going electronic, and the only way to view them is with a computer or other gizmo. Thanks to the increase in Wi-Fi networks around the country, it […]

Scientists at Schepens Eye Research Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, say a visual aid they invented promises to improve the visual abilities of people with tunnel vision. In the first study to evaluate this small high tech device, the research team saw a significant increase in the effectiveness and speed with which visually […]

Citizens and legal practitioners in New Jersey and around the world now may access key New Jersey and federal documents online, thanks to a free service provided by the Rutgers University School of Law at Camden.
The Law Library at the Rutgers-Camden law school now offers the decisions of the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Attorney Disciplinary […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
I’m starting to think I should just create a Web site with all my personal information on it and just show it to the world. After all, it seems like every other day there’s a new laptop lost, some Web site exposed, or some data hacked. In this case, hackers broke […]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
OK, nice tagline, but it doesn’t really have new meaning… unless the meaning is that the fork will eventually degrade. Frederic Scheer, CEO of Santa Monica, California-based Cereplast, has developed a line of disposable forks, knives, etc. made out of cornstarch instead of plastics.

Every time you go to the store, it is a good idea to have a shopping list. Otherwise, you might just bring back the whole store, instead of the gallon of milk and loaf of bread you needed. But, believe it or not, there is a science to shopping, and putting together that all important […]

There’s a school of thought in the blogosphere that suggests once a Weblog article is written and published for the world to see, it’s done, cast in stone, and never to be touched or modified again. You can produce more recent updates or corrections, but there’s a sense that the “historical archive” is more important […]

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have conducted successful test flights of a hydrogen-powered unmanned aircraft believed to be the largest to fly on a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell using compressed hydrogen.
The fuel-cell system that powers the 22-foot wingspan aircraft generates only 500 watts. “That raises a lot of eyebrows,” said Adam Broughton, a […]

A joint collaboration between Northwestern University and BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., has led to the first demonstration of a truly quantum cryptographic data network. By integrating quantum noise protected data encryption (quantum data encryption or QDE for short) with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), the researchers have developed a complete data communication system with extraordinary […]

Since IE 7 went to RC-1 yesterday, I’ve been hard at work seeing if it made any particular difference in the errors I outlined in my last post about IE 7 Beta 3 (Bye Bye IE 7). And it DID make differences.

I have always known that San Francisco is an interesting city. Unique is another way to describe it. But as today’s Warped site shows, there are parts of the town that are just downright weird, even by California standards.
The site is called Dr. Weirde’s Guide to Mysterious San Francisco. Here he tells you about places […]

[Editor’s note: This kind of looks like something you’d see in The Onion, doesn’t it?]
Fuel ethanol could be cheaply and quickly converted into the purer, cleaner alcohol that goes into alcoholic drinks, cough medicines, mouth washes and other products requiring food-grade alcohol, say Iowa State University researchers.
But there’s still a lot of purifying and studying […]

An upgrade to the Cray XT3 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has increased the system’s computing power to 54 teraflops, or 54 trillion mathematical calculations per second, making the Cray among the most powerful open scientific systems in the world.
The computer, dubbed Jaguar, is the largest in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science […]

In a particularly Microsoft-ish move, Amir Majidimehr (VP of Consumer Media Technology Group at Microsoft) managed to try to deny an earlier report that another feature had been cut from Vista, yet admit that consumers may not get the feature that is supposed to be there. This is according to an article from The Inquirer […]

Such is the mindset at Microsoft these days or so it appears. This time, though, the feature axed is not another feature of Vista lost in its inexorable efforts to push the box out the door in time for the Christmas rush. At least, it won’t be a major loss.

It is the time of year when everyone starts thinking about taking time off and heading for a vacation site for relaxation. Since not everyone is interested in heading to the beach or the mountains, we thought if we could find a site that gave travelers other options, that it would be a good site […]