Yes is a very fair answer. Last week it got into, and lost, a scrap with Macmillan, one of the largest English  language publishers. Possibly because of Apple’s iPad announcement and demo.

From the second link:

It all started last week when Apple CEO Steve Jobs trotted out the iPad, dubbed by some as a Kindle killer. Major publishers voiced their support for the iPad, including Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Group, and Macmillan.

Then Jobs showed off one of the iPad’s critical apps, the iBook e-reader, and flashed prices for e-books at around $15. It was a swipe at Amazon.com because publishers (Macmillan being one of them) had been trying to get Amazon.com to raise its e-book price from $10.

And:

On Friday, Amazon.com stunned the publishing world by pulling Macmillan books, both Kindle editions and printed books, from its shelves in an apparent strong-arm tactic to show Macmillan that Amazon.com continues to set the rules. At the very least, Amazon.com wanted to show that Macmillan, which is among the biggest publishers in the U.S., still needs Amazon.com.

One would have hoped that Amazon.com had spent considerable time weighing this decision. Instead, it looked like a giant company suddenly deciding to play chicken with another giant company—and Amazon.com flinched. On Sunday, only two days after pulling Macmillan books, Amazon.com relented.

Now there’s this news from the seemingly flailing e-tailer:

Is Amazon Building a Superkindle?

New York Times, Feb. 3, 2010 Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York start-up that was developing flexible, transparent, force-sensitive multitouch panels. The acquisition indicates what Amazon might try to do next in response to Apple’s iPad announcement: a future full-color, more-rugged multitouch Kindle. Read Original Article>>

… and it seems to be for, and about, mature people in the age of texting and Twitter. Looks like blogging is too long-form for youthful expression and communication.

Wonder what that says about serious long-form journalism, novels and feature-length cinema? Maybe short-short fiction will become a hot commodity. That’s a format I’ve deeply explored.

From the first link:

A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.

“Remember when ‘You’ve got mail!’ used to produce a moment of enthusiasm and not dread?” asks Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Now when it comes to blogs, she says, “people focus on using them for what they’re good for and turning to other channels for more exciting things.”

I’ll let the image do the talking here:

SO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent “local” analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed” so far.

Hit the link above for more on this gorgeous space image.

A lesson on applying technology across entire disciplines. Usually the cutting edge of imaging tech is found in medicine for obvious reasons, but that same tech can be applied in other fields to sometimes startling effect.

The release:

Imaging method for eye disease used to eye art forgeries

		IMAGE: The oil painting on the left fluoresces to reveal hidden details (right) when exposed to a new noninvasive imaging technique that uses ultraviolet light. Click here for more information.

Scientists in Poland are describing how a medical imaging technique has taken on a second life in revealing forgery of an artist’s signature and changes in inscriptions on paintings that are hundreds of years old. A report on the technique, called optical coherence tomography (OCT), is in ACS’ Accounts of Chemical Research, a monthly journal.

Piotr Targowski notes that easel paintings prepared according to traditional techniques consist of multiple layers. The artist, for instance, first applies a glue sizing over the canvas to ensure proper adhesion of later layers. Those layers may include an outline of the painting, the painting itself, layers of semitransparent glazes, and finally transparent varnish. Art conservators and other experts resort to a variety of technologies to see below the surface and detect changes, including forged signatures and other alterations in a painting. But those approaches may damage artistic treasures or not be sensitive enough to detect finer details.

The scientists describe how OCT, used to produce three-dimensional images of the layers of the retina of the eye, overcomes those difficulties. They used OCT to analyze two oil paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries. In one, “Saint Leonard of Porto Maurizio,” OCT revealed evidence that the inscription “St. Leonard” was added approximately fifty years after completion of the painting. In the other, “Portrait of an unknown woman,” OCT found evidence of the possible of forgery of the artist’s signature.

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ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“Structural Examination of Easel Paintings with Optical Coherence Tomography”

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ar900195d

As much as I think the deficit is a significant issue, the ongoing credit crunch for small business is a much more pressing issue for the economy. Recycling money that bailed out Wall Street to give Main Street a leg up is probably good politics, but more importantly, it is good policy.

From the link:

President Obama called on Congress Tuesday to recycle $30 billion of the remaining Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds into a new government lending program offering super-cheap capital to community banks that boost their small business lending this year.

Touted last week in Obama’s State of the Union address, the plan is the latest incarnation of a proposal the president first floated in October. While credit conditions for large businesses have improved over the past year, small companies are still widely reporting problems finding the capital they need to fund their operations.

A very necessary — and belated for the Obama administration — move to start to wean the U.S. off foreign petroleum-based energy.

From the link:

President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget could provide a significant boost to the U.S. nuclear power industry, which has been stalled for decades. If approved by Congress, the budget would provide $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, opening the way for around seven new nuclear power plants, depending on the final cost of each. The new guarantees are in addition to $18.5 billion in guarantees provided for in a 2005 energy bill.

The increased support for nuclear power marks a change for the Obama administration, which has opposed similar increases in the past. Some policy experts say it is part of a strategy to win Republican votes for a comprehensive climate and energy bill.

Via KurzweilAI.net — Like almost all announcements of this type of product, I’ll  be much more interested when this is available on the open market with practical applications. Of course, it’s still pretty cool to contemplate.

Multitouch ‘Skin’ Transforms Surfaces Into Interactive Screens

Physorg.com, Feb. 2, 2010 A new large-format multi-touch technology launched today by DISPLAX will transform any non-conductive flat or curved surface, such as glass, plastic or wood, into a multitouch screen. DISPLAX Multitouch Technology uses a controller that works by processing multiple input signals it receives from a grid of nanowires embedded in the film attached to the enabled surface. Each time a finger is placed on the screen or a user blows on the surface, a small electrical disturbance is caused. The microprocessor controller analyzes this data and decodes the location of each input on that grid to track the finger and air-flow movements. Read Original Article>>

Looks like malware purveyors have added affiliate programs to the business model. The upside of this activity is the longer the chain of unrelated participants — particularly with the paper trail of payments added to the mix — the more likely the chain breaks down somewhere and the legal system catches up with the entire bunch.

From the link:

Sites like Amazon offer affiliate programs that pay users for sending them new customers. And now, malware authors, always quick to adopt tactics that work elsewhere, have developed their own affiliate program, which was described in a talk given today at the Black Hat DC computer security conference in Washington, DC.

Kevin Stevens, an analyst at Atlanta-based security consulting company SecureWorks, says sites with names like “Earnings4U” offer to pay users for each file they can install on someone else’s PC; the practice is called “pay per install.” Stevens found sites offering rates ranging from $180 per 1,000 installs on PCs based in the U.S. to $6 per 1,000 installs on PCs based in Asian countries.

As he researched the practice, Stevens says he discovered a number of companies engaged in pay per install. These companies periodically change their names to dodge the authorities. He also found forums where users shared tips for making more money, and a variety of sophisticated tools developed to make it easier for them to install malware. “It’s almost like a real, legitimate business,” he said.

Sounds pretty amazing at first glance. Just read the lead graf below.

From the link:

Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from hazards such as water, UV radiation, dirt, heat, and bacterial infections. The coating is also flexible and breathable, which makes it suitable for use on an enormous array of products.

The liquid glass spray (technically termed “SiO₂ ultra-thin layering”) consists of almost pure silicon dioxide (silica, the normal compound in glass) extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on the type of surface to be coated. There are no additives, and the nano-scale glass coating bonds to the surface because of the quantum forces involved. According to the manufacturers, liquid glass has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily.

Liquid glass was invented in Turkey and the patent is held by Nanopool, a family-owned German company. Research on the product was carried out at the Saarbrücken Institute for New Materials. Nanopool is already in negotiations in the UK with a number of companies and with the National Health Service, with a view to its widespread adoption.

The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.

Via KurzweilAI.net – It’s not nearly as easy as it might seem at first blush. Do still have any of those floppy discs a little over five inches and were actually “floppy” laying around? Do have a working drive that can read them handy? If the answers are, “yes I have a few of those discs, and no, I don’t have a drive handy,” then the knowledge on those discs is currently lost to you. Think about how much human knowledge is stored on various media or on computer servers and how utterly inaccessible that knowledge becomes if technology is pushed back to a point all those devices become inoperable. Anyone else interested in retaining physical books?

This bit of interesting news is from this morning’s inbox. Very cool image

Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Trailing Debris

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

(Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)

Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.

“This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets,” said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. “The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.”

Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.

Normal comets fall into the inner regions of the solar system from icy reservoirs in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. As comets near the sun and warm up, ice near the surface vaporizes and ejects material from the solid comet nucleus via jets. But P/2010 A2 may have a different origin. It orbits in the warm, inner regions of the asteroid belt where its nearest neighbors are dry rocky bodies lacking volatile materials.

This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies, rather than ice simply melting from a parent body.

“If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight,” Jewitt said.

The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 would be the surviving remnant of this so-called hypervelocity collision.

“The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process,” Jewitt said. An impact origin also would be consistent with the absence of gas in spectra recorded using ground-based telescopes.

The asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But, until now, no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught “in the act.”

At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles from the sun and 90 million miles from Earth. The Hubble images were recorded with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which is capable of detecting house-sized fragments at the distance of the asteroid belt.

For Hubble images and more information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO
AP Archive:  http://photoarchive.ap.org/
PRN Photo Desk [email protected]
Source: NASA

Web Site:  http://www.nasa.gov/

And to save a trip to the Hubble site, here’s the image:

Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (University of California, Los Angeles). Photo No. STScI-2010-07

Easier said than done if someone is hell-bent on trashing you. CIO.com ran two articles today on online reputation — the first covers the how-to in protecting yourself online and the second lists five tools to use to help track what’s being said about you and where it’s being said. With the current plethora of web 2.0 applications out there — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, YouTube, and many more — there’s a lot of online real estate to cover when searching for mentions of yourself or your company.

From the first link:

As social sites with user-generated content such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress continue to grow in popularity, and with Google’s announcement of real-time search, you must be aware of and manage your online reputation carefully now. “Social media has made our lives very transparent,” Laratro says. “If you maintain a professional persona, this can be something positive, but if you’re unaware of comments or pictures online that that you wouldn’t even want your mother to see, it can be terrible.”

Several free tools can help you keep tabs on what’s being said about you online. One of the most popular tools is a Google Alert for your name, which will automatically inform you when you’re referenced on a website.

… does whatever a spider can.

I’ll just let the release from yesterday finish this thought process for me:

New adhesive device could let humans walk on walls

Could humans one day walk on walls, like Spider-Man? A palm-sized device invented at Cornell that uses water surface tension as an adhesive bond just might make it possible.

The rapid adhesion mechanism could lead to such applications as shoes or gloves that stick and unstick to walls, or Post-it-like notes that can bear loads, according to Paul Steen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who invented the device with Michael Vogel, a former postdoctoral associate.

The device is the result of inspiration drawn from a beetle native to Florida, which can adhere to a leaf with a force 100 times its own weight, yet also instantly unstick itself. Research behind the device is published online Feb. 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The device consists of a flat plate patterned with holes, each on the order of microns (one-millionth of a meter). A bottom plate holds a liquid reservoir, and in the middle is another porous layer. An electric field applied by a common 9-volt battery pumps water through the device and causes droplets to squeeze through the top layer. The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface – much the way two wet glass slides stick together.

“In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak,” Steen said. “But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces.”

For example, one of the researchers’ prototypes was made with about 1,000 300-micron-sized holes, and it can hold about 30 grams – more than 70 paper clips. They found that as they scaled down the holes and packed more of them onto the device, the adhesion got stronger. They estimate, then, that a one-square-inch device with millions of 1-micron-sized holes could hold more than 15 pounds.

To turn the adhesion off, the electric field is simply reversed, and the water is pulled back through the pores, breaking the tiny “bridges” created between the device and the other surface by the individual droplets.

The research builds on previously published work that demonstrated the efficacy of what’s called electro-osmotic pumping between surface tension-held interfaces, first by using just two larger water droplets.

One of the biggest challenges in making these devices work, Steen said, was keeping the droplets from coalescing, as water droplets tend to do when they get close together. To solve this, they designed their pump to resist water flow while it’s turned off.

Steen envisions future prototypes on a grander scale, once the pump mechanism is perfected, and the adhesive bond can be made even stronger. He also imagines covering the droplets with thin membranes – thin enough to be controlled by the pump but thick enough to eliminate wetting. The encapsulated liquid could exert simultaneous forces, like tiny punches.

“You can think about making a credit card-sized device that you can put in a rock fissure or a door, and break it open with very little voltage,” Steen said. “It’s a fun thing to think about.”

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The research was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and also by the National Science Foundation.