After more than two years and 1127 posts, the technology blog is moving home. We’re merging with Short Sharp Science, a blog for everything New Scientist covers in the world of science, technology and ideas.
You can view that new, super-blog here, and see only the technology posts at this link.
For those of you viewing in RSS, please update your readers to subscribe to this new feed.
Tom Simonite, online technology editor
After more than two years and 1127 posts, the technology blog is moving home. We’re merging with Short Sharp Science, a blog for everything New Scientist covers in the world of science, technology and ideas.
You can view that new, super-blog here, and see only the technology posts at this link.
For those of you viewing in RSS, please update your readers to subscribe to this new feed.
Tom Simonite, online technology editor
After more than two years and 362 posts, the space blog is moving home. We’re merging with Short Sharp Science, a blog for everything New Scientist covers in the world of science, technology and ideas.
You can view that new, super-blog here, and see only the space posts at this link.
For those of you viewing in RSS, please update your readers to subscribe to this new feed.
Maggie McKee, space editor
After more than two years and 362 posts, the space blog is moving home. We’re merging with Short Sharp Science, a blog for everything New Scientist covers in the world of science, technology and ideas.
You can view that new, super-blog here, and see only the space posts at this link.
For those of you viewing in RSS, please update your readers to subscribe to this new feed.
Maggie McKee, space editor
After more than two years and 769 posts, the Short Sharp Science blog is changing.
All the blogs are merging to become one super-blog, a blog for everything New Scientist covers in the world of science, technology, environment, and ideas.
The changes also incorporate a new URL, so visit the new, Short Sharp Science blog here.
For those of you viewing in RSS, please update your readers to subscribe to this new feed.
Tom Simonite, online technology editor
Paint-based graffiti can usually be removed relatively easily from buildings, bus shelters and other street furniture. But graffiti that is scratched into surfaces such as Perspex is much more difficult to cope with and usually requires the entire surface to be replaced at great cost.
So Seng Chu Tan and colleagues at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia, have developed a device that can hear when graffiti is being carved into surfaces.
A set of microphones attached to the surface is connected to a computer program that has been trained to distinguish background noise from the tell-tale signature of graffiti scratches.
When the computer picks up signs of vandalism in action, it triggers an alarm to scare off the perpetrators and call the authorities to investigate.
Read the full graffiti detector patent application.
Justin Mullins, New Scientist consultant
Photo: orangeacid
Every hurricane is different, and a key difference between this year’s Ike and Katrina three years ago was in the area it hit. With large areas below sea level and weak levees, New Orleans was far more vulnerable to damage from Katrina than Houston and Galveston were to Ike.
Galveston is among the US coastal cities best-prepared to face a hurricane. It learned the hard way in 1900 when a hurricane hit the low-lying island without warning, killing more than 8000 people.
The city rebuilt, raising land level as much as 5 metres and armouring the coast with a five-metre seawall that now stretches along the eastern 16 kilometers of the island.
Houston is flat and vulnerable to flooding in heavy rains, but only the edge of the city lies on Galveston Bay, which means the heart of the city is protected from storm surges.
Ike’s storm surge failed to reach the 6 to 7.5 metres predicted, saving much of Galveston. But coastal areas lacking seawalls, including the western part of Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula to the east, were devastated, with many houses demolished. Ike was a huge storm, nearly 1000 kilometers across, so its flooding reached east into western Louisiana.
Reports are spotty from the damaged area, most of which remains without power. Many people cannot return to their homes, and people who weathered the storm on Galveston are being evacuated. There are reports of problems in delivering emergency supplies.
Although the New York Times had one chilling on-the-scene report from post-storm Galveston, it is now focusing on the weekend’s financial meltdown.
NOLA.com (New Orleans Times-Picayune) reports that parts of Galveston are “all a memory now“; while the Houston Chronicle: says the return to Galveston could take weeks.
Meanwhile the Port Arthur Texas News had a macabre report of caskets from grave sites being floated by Ike’s floodwaters. The Galveston County News site is down at the moment, presumably because of damage.
Jeff Hecht, New Scientist correspondent
The creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has made an odd request: for a kind of rating system to help people distinguish sites that can be trusted to tell the truth, and those that can’t.
Berners-Lee was speaking at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, which aims to ensure that everyone in the world benefits as the web evolves.
In his speech he referred to the way fears that the LHC could destroy the world spread like wildfire online. As the BBC puts it, he explained that “there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.”
He went on to say that he didn’t think “a simple number like an IQ rating” is a good idea: “I’d be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways”. Whatever process is used to hand out the labels, it sounds like a bad idea to me.
Berners-Lee himself directed us towards some of the its biggest problems:
“On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable…A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging.”
There are plenty of arguments online already about whether Scientology is a cult. I find it unlikely anyone will be keen to step in and label sites on either side as not to be trusted. Others might reasonably argue that all religions - whether established or not - should come with a warning message.
As for wading in to put a stop to conspiracy theories, I can’t image anything their proponents could benefit from more.
Berners-Lee also mentioned the system would help people find out the real science behind, for example, the LHC’s risks. You might think handing out rating for sites about science would be easier, with publishers of peer-reviewed science, for example, receiving a top rating without problems.
But there will be papers in the archives of any journal that have been entirely superseded. And a whole lot more that present results that are valid, but can be misleading to some readers. Web licences to ensure that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step.
Fortunately it’s much more likely that the whole idea will quietly be forgotten, which will at least prevent Berners-Lee receiving one of the first “potentially misleading” badges for thinking it up in the first place.
Let’s hope the World Wide Web Foundation and its laudable goals have a rosier future.
Tom Simonite, online technology editor
Did you live a coddled childhood filled with unbridled playtime and few reminders of the harsh real world? You might have been dumber as a result.
Children coaxed into a jovial mood performed worse on a simple test of geometric shape recognition than kids put in a dourer mood, report Simone Schnall, of the University of Plymouth, UK and colleagues in a recent issue of Developmental Science.
You may wonder whether these psychologists hate happy kids or just fun, but their conclusion is supported by other research. For instance, adults in good spirits do worse than sad adults on similar tests.
To uncover the same effect in children, the researchers, thankfully, didn’t resort to insults or mind-altering drugs.
Instead they played one of two classical tunes to 10- and 11-year olds. Fifteen kids heard Mozart’s jolly ditty Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, while the other 15 had to suffer through Mahler’s doleful Adagietto. Previous research suggested these songs put kids in happy and sad moods, respectively, and Schnall’s team confirmed that by surveying the kids.
While listening to the tunes the children played a game where they hunted for a specific geometric shape – a triangle joined to a rectangle, for instance – within a picture. The merry Mozart kids took noticeably longer finding the shapes than the children who were forced to listen to Mahler.
Not content with proving that happy pre-teens are daft, the researchers aimed their hypothesis at 61 six and seven-year olds. Instead of hearing classical music, the kids watched three movie scenes.
One, from Disney’s Jungle Book, features the singing and dancing of an ebullient bear. A neutral scene from The Last Unicorn shows a knight reaching a castle. The sad scene comes from The Lion King, another Disney cartoon. Even this reporter, who watched the movie as a teen, shed a tear when Simba mourns his father’s death.
In the same shape recognition test administered after the movie scene, the happy kids proved slower at picking out shapes than those who watched the neutral Last Unicorn or the lugubrious Lion King scenes.
Schnall’s team offers several explanations for their results. Mood could directly alter cognitive thinking, and in a happy state people have little desire to question what they see, while “sadness indicates something is amiss, triggering detail-oriented analytical processing,” they write.
Alternatively, happy people could be so caught up in their personal high that they ignore details or they distract themselves from the task at hand.
This could be hand-waving - it seems just as likely that Mozart and The Jungle Book are more distracting than Mahler and The Lion King. Because the kids tended to ignore the music played before the test, the researchers dismiss this possibility, but anyone who’s taken a six-year old to a Disney film knows that the catchy songs don’t vanish from their brains in just a few minutes.
But there’s some encouraging news, at least, for cheerful kids and their parents. Children in a good mood perform better on tasks that demand creative and flexible thinking, previous studies show.
So the take-home message may be - contrary to popular opinion - that happy kids end up as artists and poets, while sad and angry children become accountants.
The paper’s last sentence seems directed toward parents of these future artists: “Artificially inflating a child’s mood may have unintended and possibly undesirable cognitive consequences.”
Ewen Callaway, online reporter
(Image: Kaeli/Photobucket)
Someone, please, clarify something for me: what happens when a president and his vice-president “agree to disagree”?
At least the George W Bush administration was consistent within itself. But with the new Republican ticket, we are faced with the prospect of a US president who is against drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge paired to a VP who staunchly supports it, and says the two will just have to “agree to disagree”.
What does that mean? And will she be equally conciliatory about their opposite views regarding the causes of climate change? It’s difficult to follow McCain’s mercurial views, but he backs the scientific consensus that industrial activities are causing climate change and has supported cap and trade. Palin, on the other hand acknowledges that global warming is happening, but is “not one who would attribute it to being man-made”.
When couples agree to disagree, it’s generally a way of closing a discussion, shelving it, putting it away, forgetting about it entirely. But this is crunch-time for the climate. In Copenhagen in 2009, world leaders will have to make arguably the most important environmental decision of their respective terms in office.
For the new US government, it will be their first great foray into international climate negotiations. After years of supreme isolationism, finally broken by the Bush administration’s astonishing performance at UN climate talks last December, the world will be looking to the US. What - what - will happen if the country’s leaders have “agreed to disagree”?
“When it comes to environmental issues, the only difference between George W Bush and Sarah Palin is lipstick,” said Kate Troll, executive director of Alaska Conservation Voters, a local green group.
I disagree. Bush may have had his arm twisted, but he did concede that humans are causing climate change. It may have taken many a sleepless night in Bali, but his representatives did agree to draw up a post-Kyoto treaty by 2009. It may have caused him to shun UN discussions on climate change, but his world’s biggest emitters committee did create a forum for China and the US to meet and discuss their positions on climate at the highest possible level.
The difference between Bush and Palin is not lipstick. It’s much more than that. Palin makes Bush look like a forward-thinking tree-hugger. To elect her would be to take four steps back after it took Bush eight years to take two steps forward.
Yes, in the short term, the world is going to have to burn more fossil fuels. But we desperately need leaders - not just US leaders, mind - who can look beyond the short-term, and far beyond their terms in office. Climate agreements span decades. The leaders who sign them are working on long-term legacy, not short-term glory.
The vacancy at the White House requires someone who can deal with short-term crises and has the ideals to form a realistic long-term vision. With all due respect, Palin does not fit the bill. “Agreeing to disagree” probably makes her a very pleasant person to spend time with. It does not make her a vice-president.
Catherine Brahic, environment reporter
