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Friday, May 24, 2013

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Syria Briefly Deletes Itself From The Internet, Because That Worked So Well In Egypt Libya

As various uprisings have occurred in the middle east, we've seen the regimes in Egypt and Libya try disconnecting the entire country from the internet, after realizing that opposition forces were making use of the internet to coordinate. In neither case did it prevent regime change soon afterwards. Soon after the situation with Egypt, we noted that Syria was actually trying to go in the opposite direction , trying to make use of the internet to communicate its own story... and to keep track of protestors. Of course, in the year plus since then, the situation in Syria has obviously gotten significantly worse and more contentious. And... late last week, it was noted that Syria appeared to remove itself from the internet for about 40 minutes . It was brief, but it at least suggests that someone in the government is toying with the idea...

iRobot's Robot Doc Is Ready To Heal You

SkinnyGuy tips news that patients may soon be getting diagnosed with the help of a 5'4", 140lb assistant going by the name of RP-VITA. The 'Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant' was unveiled this week by iRobot (the company behind the Roomba vacuum bot) and InTouch Health, and it allows doctors a way to remotely gather data. "It may be controlled via joystick, but RP-Vita does have some awareness of its environment. It employs a dazzling array of sensors that include PrimeSense Sensors (the same ones you find in the Kinect for Xbox 360), two cameras that together approximate normal human vision, sonar and a laser range finder. It also creates a map of the hospital and knows the location, for example, of its roll-into charging base." RP-VITA is currently waiting on FDA approval for use inside a hospital, which its creators expect by the end of the year.

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Making Your Kickstarter Even More Fun: Marian Call Turns Kickstarter Into European Adventure Quest

A little over two years ago, we wrote about singer Marian Call and the fact that she did a bunch of experiments that helped her connect with fans and give them a reason to buy . As we noted, what she demonstrated is that it takes a lot of experiments to figure out what "works" for a particular creator and their fans. Some ideas will fail, and some will succeed. Since that time, I've checked in here and there on her career and it seems to be going great. I'd missed, however, that she launched a Kickstarter campaign last month, and thankfully Aaron deOliveira clued me in, thanks to a blogpost on Popehat about Marian Call's Kickstarter campaign , which has a few really cool features. So many artists are doing Kickstarter campaigns these days, that there's usually not that much to write about with...

Would You Trust an 80-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor?

the_newsbeagle writes "The worst nuclear near-disaster that you've never heard of came to light in 2002, when inspectors at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power station discovered that a slow leak had been corroding a spot on the reactor vessel's lid for years (PDF). When they found the cavity, only 1 cm of metal was left to protect the nuclear core. That kind of slow and steady degradation is a major concern as the US's 104 reactors get older and grayer, says nuclear researcher Leonard Bond. U.S. reactors were originally licensed for 40 years of operation, but the majority have already received extensions to keep them going until the age of 60. Industry researchers like Bond are now determining whether it would be safe and economically feasible to keep them active until the age of 80. Bond describes the monitoring techniques that could be used to watch over aging reactors, and argues...

App Developer: Android Designed For Piracy

Following news this week of a game developer who turned the Android version of a game free because of piracy concerns, software developer Matt Gemmell has written a lengthy post explaining why he thinks Android apps are laboring under a broken business model. "People have to get paid. There has to be a revenue stream. You can’t reliably have that revenue stream if the platform itself and the damaged philosophy behind it actively sabotages commerce. If you want a platform to be commercially viable for third-party software developers, you have to lock it down. Just like in real life, closing the door and locking it helps make sure that your money remains yours. Bad behaviour has to be more difficult than good behaviour - and good behaviour means paying for your software." He also has some harsh arguments about some of the assumptions and philosophies underpinning the an industry built...

Two-Cent Doughnuts Breed Decades Of Bad Blood: It's Not So Easy Going From Free To Paid

One of the things we regularly hear from people who are apparently allergic to any business model that leverages free to make more money elsewhere, is that content creators have to change their business model, stop giving stuff away for free, and start charging. This is seen in lots of places, including the mad dash by many newspapers to try putting up paywalls on their news. We've long argued that doing so can really piss off readers, not just because of the cost, but because taking something that was once free and making it now cost money often changes how people look at the product itself.
The folks over at Planet Money have yet another brilliant podcast where they give an amazing example of this, showing how the impact can be incredibly long lasting as well. It's the story of why so many US veterans hate the...

Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back

theodp writes "With his Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality screed in the Washington Post, Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani — a former middle school teacher and math coach — throws some cold water on the Summer of Khan Love hippies, starting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. From the article: 'When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it's because they're jealous. "It'd piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world's teacher." Of course, teachers aren't "pissed off" because Sal Khan is the world's teacher. They're concerned that he's a bad teacher who people think is great; that the guy who's delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world openly brags about being unprepared and considers the precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be...