… to the youngest home office denizen.

The birthday boy!

And here’s a virtual steak to celebrate with …

A birthday steak, instead of a cake

A new ranking system from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Indiana University will ferret out providers run by cybercriminals.

From the link (goes to Oak Ridge National Laboratory story tips for March 2010):

Cybercrime—Exposing hackers . . .

Unscrupulous Internet service providers will have no place to hide because of a ranking system conceived by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Indiana University. “Criminal enterprises have created entire Internet service providers dedicated to sending spam, phishing messages or spreading viruses,” said Craig Shue of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. While some have been caught by the Federal Trade Commission or other Internet service providers unwilling to do business with them, many are able to escape detection. “These other Internet service providers have customers whose machines become infected and can be used to launch attacks or steal the customer’s data,” Shue said. This work, which creates a ranking system Shue likened to grading systems for comparing school districts, is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Indiana University.

Looking for a market-ready application for graphene? Well, look no further …

From the second link:

This conductive ink is one of the first products on the market to incorporate graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. Applying the ink with standard techniques can print wiring for RFID antennas, keypads, and display backplanes directly onto paper or cardboard stock. Unlike metallic conductive inks, the graphene ink does not have to be heated after printing.

Courtesy of Vorbeck Materials

… the unemployed regain jobless benefits and the GOP heaves a great sigh of relief. And Bunning’s next opponent has a goldmine of opposition ad material.

From the link:

The Senate headed reached a resolution of an impasse over unemployment pay on Tuesday night after Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, dropped his objection to extending jobless benefits in exchange for a largely symbolic vote on paying for the aid.

Mr. Bunning’s agreement to relent essentially short-circuited an intensifying political battle that had already resulted in 2,000 workers at the Department of Transportation being furloughed without pay and in the temporary cutoff of benefits to thousands of out-of-work Americans.

It came after Mr. Bunning’s fellow Republicans began to air their own concerns about how the Senate blockade had the potential to damage their political brand while also having a direct impact on their constituents. The Senate later voted 78 to 19 to renew the programs.

It’s either spinelessness or hypocrisy from the Democrats. Both shoes probably fit.

From the link:

Caught in a swirl of ethics inquiries, Representative Charles B. Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation, appeared to be losing his grip on his powerful post as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday night as Republicans planned to force a vote insisting that he step aside.

The House ethics committee last week admonished Mr. Rangel, an ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for violating Congressional gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean in 2007 and 2008.

The ethics panel is still investigating more serious allegations regarding Mr. Rangel’s fund-raising, his failure to pay federal taxes on rental income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic and his use of four rent-stabilized apartments provided by a Manhattan real estate developer.

Does he not understand the rule of law within the United State’s judicial system, or is he just trying to score very cheap and dirty political points? I’m guessing the latter is the case, but arguing lawyers for terrorism defendants are somehow terrorist sympathizers goes against everything our excellent judicial system stands for. If Grassley, and others, want to pervert our system when it comes up against terrorism suspects, the terrorists were clearly successful against Grassley and his other pantywaisted cohorts. I’m pretty sure the rest of us true Americans have faith in a process that has served us well for two hundred-plus years.

Here’s the “quote for the day” from the Daily Dish courtesy of an Air Force Colonel and former military commission prosecutor during the Bush 43 administration. Someone who has a bit more skin in this game and understanding of what is at stake legally than the cowardly Grassley and Liz Cheney:

“It is absolutely outrageous for the Cheney-Grassley crowd to try to tar and feather Neal [Katyal] and Jennifer [Daskal] and insinuate they are al-Qaeda supporters. You don’t hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing the Brits in the Boston Massacre trial,” – retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who served as a chief prosecutor for the military commissions under Cheney.

And here is the odious video from Liz Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, that spawned all the blogging today on this topic and brought Grassley’s comments from last November back into the light:

Very serious.  A solar thermal plant pumping out electricity at 5 cents/kWh (or less!?!) would be pretty amazing. This advance in efficiency is coming through a redesign of the mirrors with new material on both the reflective surface and the substrate.

From the link:

Google announced last year that they were working on new technology that would make solar thermal energy cheaper than coal.  Just a few months later, they have a prototype and expect a product to be ready in as little as a year.

And:

The prototype is being internally tested before more rigorous external testing, but two solar companies, BrightSource and eSolar, are already interested in the technology.  Google is a major investor in both companies and has said if the prototype works, the companies would use the technology.

Via KurzweilAI.net — Just wow …

Data, data everywhere

The Economist, Feb. 25, 2010 The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years, says The Economist in a special report on managing information. According to IDG, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. (IDC) By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco. Read Original Article>>

The upward trend has reached 16 straight months. I am a huge Chrome fan and highly recommend this nimble and very fast browser for netizens at all levels of tech savvy.

From the link:

As Firefox slid, Google’s (GOOG) Chrome again boosted its share, although the increase was smaller than in the two months before. Chrome ended February with a 5.6% share, up 0.4 of a percentage point. Chrome has doubled its share in the last six months.

Here’s the browser breakdown according to the web measurement vendor NetApplications.com:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer   61.2%
• Firefox                                              24.2%
• Google Chrome                                5.6%
• Apple Safari                                      4.4%

Looks like it. Here’s a solid analysis from Jonathan Bernstein guest-blogging at the Daily Dish.

From the link:

Item: Ten House Dems who voted against the bill the first time around are telling the AP (via Jonathan Chait) that they might vote yes this time around.  Chait is right about the incentives here as far as public statements are concerned.  I’d put it this way: there’s an easily understandable story of going from no, to maybe, to yes…but it makes no sense at all to go from no, to maybe, to no.

I should emphasize here that it is very, very rare for the majority to lose a high-stakes vote on final passage on the House floor.  You just don’t bring a bill to the floor unless you know you’re going to win.  I can’t imagine a reason that Nancy Pelosi and the White House would bring this to the floor knowing that they were going to lose, for some sort of spin advantage.  They either know that they have the votes, or it’s the biggest bluff in who knows how long.  Keep watching: does the president really announce the schedule tomorrow that was leaked today?  Does the Speaker really keep to that schedule, or do leaks start appearing about pushing it back a few days?  I don’t think so, however.  I think they have the votes.

This would also qualify as a beautiful Olympics image …

The Coast Mountains of British Columbia are bathed in morning light as they are viewed from Cypress Mountain in Vancouver, British Columbia on Sunday Feb. 21, 2010, prior to the during the men’s ski cross. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Sean Kilpatrick) #

This image is part of the series linked in the previous post on the laser turning 50, but it deserves highlighting as a very cool nanotechnology image.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created the smallest semiconducting laser, which could eventually be used for optical computing. A cadmium sulfide wire 50 nanometers in diameter generates visible light and holds it in a five-nanometer space.

Credit: Xiang Zhang Lab/UC Berkeley

Lasers are just cool, and now they have been for fifty years. Hit the link for photos and a thorough Technology Review history on controlling excited photons.

From the link:

This year is the 50th anniversary of the laser, a device used in applications from performing precise surgical procedures to measuring gravitational waves. In 1917, Albert Einstein proposed that a photon hitting an atom in a high energy state would cause the atom to release a second photon identical in frequency and direction to the first. In the 1950s, scientists searched for a way to achieve this stimulated emission and amplify it so that a group of excited atoms would release photons in a chain reaction. In 1959, American physicist Gordon Gould publicly used the term “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation” for the first time. A year later, scientists demonstrated the first working optical laser.

Credit: HRL Laboratories

I’ve been a longtime supporter of SETI’s efforts, but I also welcome any new ideas in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. These ideas from Paul Davies sound worthwhile.

The release

Widening the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been dominated for its first half century by a hunt for unusual radio signals. But as he prepares for the publication of his new book The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone?, Paul Davies tells Physics World readers why bold new innovations are required if we are ever to hear from our cosmic neighbours.

Writing exclusively in March’s Physics World, Davies, director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in the US, explains why the search for radio signals is limited and how we might progress.

As Davies writes, “speculation about SETI is bedevilled by the trap of anthropocentrism – a tendency to use 21st-century human civilisation as a model for what an extraterrestrial civilisation would be like… After 50 years of traditional SETI, the time has come to widen the search from radio signals.”

Questioning the idea of an alien civilisation beaming radio signals towards Earth, Davies explains that even if the aliens were, say, 500 light years away (close by SETI standards), the aliens would be communicating with Earth in 1510 – long before we were equipped to pick up radio signals.

While SETI activity has been concentrated in radio astronomy, from Frank Drake’s early telescope to the more recent Allen Telescope Array, astronomers have only ever been met with an (almost) eerie silence.

Davies suggests that there may be more convincing signs of intelligent alien life, either here on Earth in the form of bizarre microorganisms that somehow found their way to Earth, or in space, through spotting the anomalous absence of, for example, energy-generating particles that an alien life form might have harvested.

“Using the full array of scientific methods from genomics to neutrino astrophysics,” Davies writes, “we should begin to scrutinise the solar system and our region of the galaxy for any hint of past or present cosmic company.”

Following the publication of his book, The Eerie Silence, Davies will be giving a Physics World webinar at 4pm (BST) on Wednesday 31 March. You can view the webinar live at www.physicsworld.com or download it afterwards.

###

Also in the March edition:

• Getting intimate with Mars – robotic rovers are starting to unravel the secrets of the red planet but, according to one NASA expert, we would discover so much more if we brought samples back to Earth.
• The Hollywood actor Alan Alda, star of M*A*S*H and The West Wing, who has a deep and passionate interest in science, is now part of an innovative US project to help scientists to communicate.

:

Via KurzweilAI.net — This research is not surprising in the least. If your avatar looks like you it stands to reason you’d act something akin to how you normally would. If your avatar has a dramatically different look than you, or is a different gender, species or even an alien life form it also stands to reason you’d be more likely to role-play the actions you think that character would exhibit.

Can avatars change the way we think and act?

Physorg.com, Feb. 25, 2010 You are more likely to imitate the behavior of an avatar in real life if it looks like you, Jesse Fox, a researcher at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, found in a study that used digital photographs of participants to create personalized avatar bodies. Read Original Article>>

Here’s the YouTube clip found at the link:

So-so at best. By all, or a least most, accounts the national recession is over and recovery, however slow, is going on right now. Break that national figure down a bit and the picture changes dramatically. Two-thirds of all states are still in a recession. That’s a lot of people who just get frustrated and angry when told things have hit bottom and are now getting better. For a lot of Americans things are not getting any better just yet. And Nevada is alone as the the state with a still-shrinking economy.

From the link:

The national recession may be over, but not everyone feels the change. Some industries and regions continue to suffer. The tepid 3% pace of growth in this recovery means no rising tide lifting all boats.

And here’s a handy chart outlining who’s still feeling the pain:

Food for thought …

What is the “Spy Guide”?

The Global Criminal Compliance Handbook is a quasi-comprehensive explanatory document meant for law enforcement officials seeking access to Microsoft’s stored user information. It also provides sample language for subpoenas and diagrams on how to understand server logs.

I call it “quasi-comprehensive” because, at a mere 22 pages, it doesn’t explore the nitty-gritty of Microsoft’s systems; it’s more like a data-hunting guide for dummies.

Which of My Microsoft Services are Affected?

All sorts. Microsoft keeps user information related to its online services. The data ranges from past e-mails to credit card numbers. The information is kept for a designated period of time, sometimes forever.

The sites referenced are:

• Windows Live
• Windows Live ID
• Microsoft Office Live
• Xbox Live
• MSN
• Windows Live Spaces
• Windows Live Messenger
• Hotmail
• MSN Groups

As a self-employed freelance writer, I completely understand the pain of the odd taxes and hoops of red tape the IRS has put in front of the self-employed sole proprietor. Too bad none of the reform ideas floating around include helping those smallest of businesses.

From the link:

By a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers who buy their own health insurance essentially pay an extra tax on their premiums. They’re the only taxpayers in the system who pay taxes on premiums, which count as a business expense for corporations and pretax income for employees. Because self-employed workers have no corporate employers to match their payroll tax contributions to Social Security and Medicare, they pay double the rate of wage and salary workers in a levy known as the self-employment tax equal to 15.3% of their net earnings. That’s on top of regular state and federal income taxes, and the income they spend on health premiums is not exempt.

The nation’s 9 million self-employed—sole proprietors with few or no employees, contract workers, and freelancers—constitute about 8% of the total U.S. labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The Census Bureau counts 22 million sole-proprietors, but it’s not clear how many of those may be payroll workers as well.) “You correct this, think of the widespread health benefit you would give to so many people,” says Kristie Arslan, executive director of the lobbying group National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), which represents the self-employed in Washington.

… of the pot calling the kettle black?

RedState’s Erick Erickson on ridding the GOP of its extremist elements:

The attempt “to clean up our own house,” as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary “because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they’re a large part of this tea party movement. And I don’t think they are.”

The all-stars just barely beat the kids. What an incredible gold medal hockey game to end the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. It took everything Canada’s all-star studded team could muster to eke out a victory over the extremely youthful team USA.