Saturday, February 25, 2006
Black Box Voting : 2-23-06: Someone accessed 40 Palm Beach County voting machines Nov 2004
Black Box Voting : 2-23-06: Someone accessed 40 Palm Beach County voting machines Nov 2004
The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.
After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.
SPACE.com -- NASA Detects 'Totally New' Mystery Explosion Nearby
SPACE.com -- NASA Detects 'Totally New' Mystery Explosion Nearby
Astronomers have detected a new type of cosmic outburst that they can't yet explain. The event was very close to our galaxy, they said.The eruption might portend an even brighter event to come, a supernova.
It was spotted by NASA's Swift telescope and is being monitored by other telescopes around the world as scientists wait to see what will happen.
Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for the Swift mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, called the event "totally new, totally unexpected."
If the eruption indeed precedes a supernova, then it would reach peak brightness in about a week, scientists said.
The event, detected Feb. 18, looks something like a gamma-ray burst (GRB), scientists said. But it is much closer—about 440 million light-years away—than others. And it lasted about 33 minutes. Most GRBs are billions of light-years away and last less than a second or just a few seconds.
What's up with Microsoft's Origami project?
"Rumors are running around the web about a new Microsoft gadget codenamed 'Origami' that will unfold on March 2nd. Interestingly, in 2001 National Semiconductor showcased a concept prototype device called Origami, which it said could morph into eight different types of gadgets by folding and pivoting."
Friday, February 24, 2006
Why America Has to Be Fat
"Why America Has to Be Fat
A Side Effect of Economic Expansion Shows Up in Front
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 22, 2006; Page F01"
Some historians in the UK just found A 520-page handwritten manuscript (see photo, left) written by Robert Hooke, one of the most important scientists of the 17th century.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Pharyngula
"We hypothesize that the loss of teeth in birds was due to the loss of direct apposition between an epithelial signaling center at the oral/aboral boundary and the underlying mesenchyme of the oral cavity competent to form integumentary appendages. Our model provides a unique developmental mechanism for understanding how specific structures are lost and reinitiated and goes beyond contemporary models of selective gene loss or loss of signaling capability during tooth ontogeny in evolution."
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
NCBI HomePage
"Established in 1988 as a national resource for molecular biology information, NCBI creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information"
Scienists find chicken with naturally formed crocodile teeth | Science Blog
Scienists find chicken with naturally formed crocodile teeth | Science Blog:
"the researchers say they have found a naturally occurring mutant chicken called Talpid that has a complete set of ivories.
The team, based at the Universities of Manchester and Wisconsin, have also managed to induce teeth growth in normal chickens – activating genes that have lain dormant for 80 million years."
Slashdot | Teenager Wins Email Suit Against City of Kokomo
Slashdot | Teenager Wins Email Suit Against City of Kokomo:
"Ask Microsoft. They are constantly suing and being sued regardless of their guilt or innocence or even the law. They have all the money and the people suing them usually don't. They can hold out for years until their opponent's money runs out. If they lose in court, they simply appeal and in the end, when and if an appeal goes against them, they simply ignore it. Then the whole process starts all over again. Meanwhile, they keep raking in their ill gotten gains."
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
The Click That Broke a Government's Grip
The Click That Broke a Government's Grip:
"Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials."
Monday, February 20, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Captain Kirk's clone and the eavesdropper | Science Blog
Captain Kirk's clone | Science Blog:
"'Quantum mechanics allows us to do things which we previously thought were impossible. In 1998, I was involved in an experiment in America which was one of the first for quantum teleportation in which we transmitted a beam of light without it crossing the physical medium in between."
Friday, February 17, 2006
The Segway creator's next entrepreneurial spin - Feb. 16, 2006
The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung. Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to light 70 energy-efficient bulbs. As Kamen puts it, "If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime.
The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water – even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine's waste heat.
Richard Dreyfuss says Impeaching Bush Is "Cause Worth Fighting For"
Richard Dreyfuss, "told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday that
"there are causes worth fighting for," and one of those is the
impeachment of President George W. Bush. ...
"There are causes worth
fighting for even if you know that you will lose," Dreyfuss said during
a speech at the National Press Club. "Unless you are willing to accept
torture as part of a normal American political lexicon, unless you are
willing to accept that leaving the Geneva Convention is fine and dandy,
if you accept the expansion of wiretapping as business as usual, the
only way to express this now is to embrace the difficult and perhaps
embarrassing process of impeachment." See Video
Labels:
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Impeachment,
Richard Dreyfuss
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wikiCalc Alpha Test Home
"The wikiCalc program is a web authoring tool for pages that include data that is more than just unformatted prose. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet. It can be easily set up to publish to basic web server space accessed by FTP and there is no need to set up server-side programs like CGI. It can, though, run on a server and be used with nothing more than a browser on the client."
Software pioneer Bricklin tackles wikis | Tech News on ZDNet
Software pioneer Bricklin tackles wikis | Tech News on ZDNet
In 1979, Bricklin released VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers. Now he's close to finishing the beta for WikiCalc, an open-source, browser-based collaboration tool that mimics the functionality of a spreadsheet while leveraging the technology of wikis, which let anyone, anywhere manipulate data across the Web.
Diabetes
Starting a written journal was one of the best things I've done for my diabetes. I record when I take my meds what they are; when I exercise with the number of reps. and the time it took. Plus how I feel, if there is any pain during or after the workout. I record when and what I eat, I'm trying to eat small portions 6 times a day. And of course I record my glucose levels, noting the level in mg/dl; the time, if it is before or after a meal and before or after working out. Plus I make note of the other things going on in my life.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Breakfast
Just had breakfast, about a cup of rice and beans and an ounce of chicken. Glucose was 125 mg/dl. Not good.
Pharyngula
I wonder if it now feels terrible to have one's stupidity and ignorance a matter of public record ("theory" does not mean what he thinks it means), and to have so thoroughly overreached one's intellectual capacity that it will be emblematic of the Republican corruption of science policy for years to come? Or perhaps (and perhaps more likely) Mr Deutsch is basking in the high regard of his know-nothing peers in this administration, who probably think smacking a scientist with a Bible is a clever retort.If there were justice, Deutsch's political career would be dead now, and he'd have to make a living selling aluminum siding in Topeka. I fear he's just improved his standing in the Republican party.
I also don't think Deutsch is the exception. The rot runs deep.There's more at Bad Astronomy and Stranger Fruit.
Add Cosmic Variance to the list. I think you're going to see a growing righteous fury among scientists on this.
Labels:
Astronomy,
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Oversite,
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The Panda's Thumb
"Ohio is no longer on the Disco Institute’s list of favorite states for pilgrimages. Late this afternoon, by an 11-4 vote, the Ohio State Board of Education stripped out the intelligent-design creationist “critical analysis of evolution” benchmark, indicator, and lesson plan from the 10th Grade Biology curriculum."
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Introduction to OpenBinder and Interview with Dianne Hackborn - OSNews.com
Introduction to OpenBinder and Interview with Dianne Hackborn - OSNews.com
OpenBinder is a new approach to operating system design, in the same vein as a lot of other attempts at introducing a modern object oriented approach to operating system design. Usually, however, when this is done it is at the kernel level: creating an "object oriented kernel," which is significantly different than our current modern kernels. The Binder, in contrast, provides a rich object-oriented operating system environment that is designed to be hosted by today's traditional kernels.
Microsoft deletes Norton
"Microsoft, has released a product which detects one of its rivals as spyware and then deletes them.
A recent update to Microsoft's anti-spyware application flags Norton as a password-stealing program and prompts users to remove it.
For some reason, known only to the Vole, the latest spyware definitions file from Microsoft '(version 5805, 5807) detects Symantec Antivirus files as PWS.Bancos.A (Password Stealer).'
If anyone tried to remove the flagged file, Norton gets hopelessly corrupted, throws its toys out of the pram and refuses to work."
Politician avoids Can-Spam
"A US politician who championed anti-spam laws is apparently getting around his own law when it comes to campaigning.
According to the St. Petersburg Times, the Republican Charlie Crist, attorney general of Florida and gubernatorial candidate has been spamming Democrats and Republicans alike with his email electioneering."
Bell Atlantic Selects Supplier for Full Service Network
Bell Atlantic Selects Supplier for Full Service Network Does not look like they kept their commitment.
Teletruthresponseverizon.htm
"Teletruth's complaint in Pennsylvania is simple --- In 1994, in exchange for massive financial incentives, tax deductions and other perks, Verizon promised to rewire the state with a fiber-optic based, two-directional 45mps service. By 2004, half of the states' rural, urban and suburban areas should have been wired for this fiber-optic based network that was supposed to extend to customer’s homes and offices. As we and other independent researchers have pointed out, Verizon collected an estimated $3.9 billion in excess profits and tax benefits --- About $1135 a household.
More to the point, statements made by Verizon in 2003-2004 clearly show Verizon entered into a contractual agreement with the states' customers for a network they couldn't build in 1994, and are only now doing fiber optic 'test' deployments.
Here’s what they said --- and here’s the truth.
Lie 1 (misdirection) _--Fiber, fiber everywhere, but not where it counts
* 'The truth is that Verizon Pennsylvania has consistently delivered on its promises to deploy a broadband network for its customers under Pennsylvania’s alternative regulation law, Chapter 30'
* 'Verizon Pennsylvania has…deployed nearly 1.2 million miles of fiber optics in its network over the past nine years while under alternative regulation.'
First, let’s make something clear ---Verizon was supposed to deliver a fiber-optic service directly to the homes and offices. Who cares if there’s 1.2 million miles of fiber in the network if none of it connects the house or office directly or can deliver what was promised."
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Physicist to Present New Exact Solution of Einstein's Gravitational Field Equation
Physicist to Present New Exact Solution of Einstein's Gravitational Field Equation:
"Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration.
'Dr. Felber's research will revolutionize space flight mechanics by offering an entirely new way to send spacecraft into flight,' said Dr. Eric Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin and STAIF peer reviewer of Felber's work. 'His rigorously tested and truly unique thinking has taken us a huge step forward in making near-speed-of-light space travel safe, possible, and much less costly.'
"
Saturday, February 11, 2006
news @ nature.com?-?Tyrannosaurs get a father figure?-?Fossil hunters find the first Jurassic specimen of this fearsome family.
"The new species, found in Xinjiang province in northwestern China, lived around 160 million years ago. This makes it more than twice as old as T. rex, and the most primitive known member of the family.
At just 3 metres long, the creature is a small relative of T. rex, which could reach a mighty 13 metres. But its gaping, beak-like face armed with teeth, and its powerful legs, show that it too would have been a ferocious killer."
Friday, February 10, 2006
The Timeshare Beat: Palace Resorts Group, Sunset Group and Royal Holiday Club timeshare fraud
The Timeshare Beat: Palace Resorts Group, Sunset Group and Royal Holiday Club timeshare fraud: "The company we specifically hear about most often is Vacation Network Inc, aka: the Vacation Network Advertising Corporation, aka: Global Resort Services, aka: VNAC, etc. The names of the people associated with this company that we hear most often are Peter Dunne and Laurie Peck."
Free Software Magazine - Free software liberates Venezuela
Free Software Magazine - Free software liberates Venezuela:
"The term intellectual property itself is of course a new-speak propaganda word that didn’t even exist 20 years ago. First, the topic it covers varies from Copyrights, Patents, Trade Secrets and Trademarks, to a variety of other things, all of which are in reality all very different and unrelated. Second, it’s based on the premise that you can give something intangible to someone else, and yet control it and decide what other people do with it, as if it or they (and even the ideas they may have about it) were your physical property. Intellectual property amounts in part to thought control through legal fiction. Some even say it amounts to Intellectual Slavery.
The consequence of treating ideas and thoughts as if they are tangible property is the very destruction of science and education and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms. Science is in part built upon the idea that new knowledge is created by incrementally improving ideas. Education is based on the idea that one can learn from existing things and then use that knowledge to create new works. The idea behind “Intellectual Property” interferes with both. It is barbarism, and could well lead to a new “dark ages”, where only a privileged few are allowed to learn, under the exclusive control of greedy intellectual monopolies.
Since “Intellectual Property” involves exclusive licensing, when public universities do this and then let others license their discoveries, the public is made to fund research that only benefits a small number of people. Even worse, those companies which receive such funding can then use this exclusive grant to sell back to society the fruits of what society already paid for. This can be thought of as paying for something twice. This could also be thought of as public welfare for private corporations, or more simply: exploitation."
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Bad Astronomy Blog ? Blog Archive ? Outrage at attacks on NASA science
Bad Astronomy Blog ? Blog Archive ? Outrage at attacks on NASA science
You may have read the New York Times article on January 29 about a NASA scientist who was gagged by the government about his reports on global warming (the link requires a free registration). Dr. Jim Hansen, a top NASA scientist, had interview requests about his work with global warming denied by a NASA public affairs officer by the name of George Deutsch. While Deutsch works for NASA, he is actually a presidential appointee who worked for President Bush and Vice President Cheney during the 2004 elections.
Got this so far? Deutsch had this position as NASA public relations specialist given to him by the current administration, and according to Dr. Hansen he used it to suppress information about global warming. This issue was important enough to NASA officials that Mike Griffin, NASA’s Administrator, sent an email on Friday, Feb. 3 to all NASA employees (and which is now posted on the NASA website) saying that "It is not the job of public-affairs officers to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA’s technical staff."I agree wholeheartedly, of course, and I also want to make clear that I think that scientific suppression is not representative of the demeanor in general at NASA, nor of NASA’s Public Affairs Office as a whole. In fact, the NYT article makes this clear, stating "[Hansen] and intermediaries in the agency’s 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings [of "dire consequences" if they talked about global warming] came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters" (emphasis mine; in the article Dr. Hansen clearly also strongly disagrees with policy statements by the other PAO political appointee, Dean Acosta).
But now let’s get to the next part. In the February 4 issue of the NYT, the plot thickens (all the following quotations are from that article). Other scientists have come forward and talked about how political appointees have tried to suppress or alter other information from NASA in order to make it conform to the President’s party line.
Labels:
Astronomy,
Oversite,
Republican,
stupidity
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Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Hellbent Spitfire the best sports recumbent trike ever!!!
The Hellbent Spitfire the best sports recumbent trike ever!!! They offer plans for sale to build your own trike.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Biologists build better software, beat path to viral knowledge
Biologists build better software, beat path to viral knowledge:
"Developing the software package enabled the team to examine the Epsilon 15 virus, a 'bacteriophage' that infects the salmonella bacterium, and to resolve features as small as 9.5 angstroms across — less than a billionth of a meter. Until now, the high-resolution device, called a cryo-electron microscope, used to examine such objects could only examine the virus's outer shell."
reserach_Bekenstein.html
"Research interests Gravitational theory, black hole physics, relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, galactic dynamics, physical aspects of information theory, physics of the vacuum."
Sunday, February 05, 2006
ZeroC - Ice vs. CORBA
We decided to write this comparison because we expect that many people will rightfully ask us why they should use Ice instead of CORBA. Our general answer is, why not try out Ice for yourself? We are certain that once you've used Ice for some time, you won't ever want to go back to CORBA. Believe us, it's easy to fall in love with Ice, because of its beauty and simplicity, its architectural consistency, and last but not least its vast array of features and tools.
Spectroscopy - Wikipedia,
Wikipedia to the rescue.
Raman spectroscopy
Resonance Raman spectroscopy
Category:Spectroscopy
UCLA scientists analyze 650-million-year-old fossils inside r... 1/31/2006
UCLA scientists analyze 650-million-year-old fossils inside r... 1/31/2006: Very impressive, need to find out how it works.
"It's astounding to see an organically preserved, microscopic fossil inside a rock and see these microscopic fossils in three dimensions,' said Schopf, who is also a geologist, microbiologist and organic geochemist. 'It's very difficult to get any insight about the biochemistry of organisms that lived nearly a billion years ago, and this (confocal microscopy and Raman spectroscopy) gives it to you. You see the cells in the confocal microscopy, and the Raman spectroscopy gives you the chemistry.
'We can look underneath the fossil, see it from the top, from the sides, and rotate it around; we couldn't do that with any other technique, but now we can, because of confocal laser scanning microscopy. In addition, even though the fossils are exceedingly tiny, the images are sharp and crisp. So, we can see how the fossils have degraded over millions of years, and learn what are real biological features and what has been changed over time.'"
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Friday, February 03, 2006
Nichia makes breakthrough on white LED efficiency
Nichia makes breakthrough on white LED efficiency: "Nichia is well ahead of schedule and has already got to 113 lumens per watt."
Mental Health
Mental Health Forums, got here on a search about Focusfactor. Looks like a good open forum.
Scum call
Got a call from Jenifer Jones, (I don't think its her real name) trying to sell me insurance; her company name was Vererue they are at 1-800-313 1754. The sales pitch was as a benifit of my ****card I was entitled to a free one month membership in Premer Health Club for a cost of $1.00, (free?); after a month it would cost $24/month. This club reduces the cost of prescriptions by about 50%, as well as some other benifits which we did not go into. I informed Jenifer that I had a prescrption drug plan which covers most of my drug cost. I asked how her plan would work with mine, since she did not answer this question, giving a reply with no relation to my question I brushed her off at this point.
It seemed obvious that Jenifer was working from a script without any real understanding of what she was trying to sell.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Pharyngula
Pharyngula: Church of the Butt Propeller, ouch.
"Here's what really drives me crazy about these people: the fixation with parts of life that resemble mechanisms so simple that even we humans in our limited history have managed to duplicate. What is most impressive about living systems is how far they go beyond human technology. All evidence shows that evolution over long enough time spans has far more creative power than the human mind over the span of a human lifetime. But these IDers seem blind to anything that doesn't look like a human-designed machine. If evolution can produce a self-replicating cell capable of carrying genetic material and differentiating into a complex multicellular organism, than why should it surprise me that it can produce a little 'outboard motor'?
The ID movement ought rename itself the Church of the Butt Propeller, since this appears to be one unquestionable underpinning of their faith."
Philadelphia Daily News | 01/30/2006 | JUST ANOTHER CABLE CONSERVATIVE
Philadelphia Daily News | 01/30/2006 | JUST ANOTHER CABLE CONSERVATIVE:
"Olberman's show is the highest rated on MSNBC, although that might not do him much good - Phil Donahue had the network's highest rated show before he was canned in February 2003, right before the start of the Iraq war. Told by consultants that Donahue's show could become 'a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity,' MSNBC showed him the door."
Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Daily Kos: State of the Nation:
"But we apparently now have a country where the only ideas allowed to be expressed in our Nation's Capitol while the President is speaking are ones which glorify the Government and its Leader and where dissenting views are prohibited and will subject someone to arrest. Message cleansing of that sort belongs at a political rally in North Korea, not in Washington, DC [...]"
AlterNet: MediaCulture: Roasting the Post
AlterNet: MediaCulture: Roasting the Post
When Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell published the false claim on Jan. 15 that Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats, the paper got a loud, swift and public lesson in the new realities of online interactivity and instant accountability. It was like watching a woolly mammoth being hauled shrieking and dripping with ice-age detritus into the 21stt century.This lesson came in large part from the blogosphere, in the form of comments made on the newspaper's website and in posts made to political weblogs, such as DailyKos, Eschaton, and my own blog, Firedoglake. The collective daily readership of the largest political blogs now runs in the millions. We are news and politics junkies, instantly able to recite the last six jobs of Senate staffers and the names of reporters who cover every beat. We follow politics in real time and have zero tolerance for the kind of sloppy mistake Howell made. Hundreds of us swarmed to the site and immediately made our feelings known.
The paper's insistence on remaining silent in the wake of this was a clear indication that management did not understand that the days of one-way "we speak, you listen" information flow are over. It is no longer possible for a newspaper to simply publish erroneous information and then stonewall critics as they wait for everything to blow over.
In the face of Howell's continued silence, the paper's online readers stepped up their insistence that she post a retraction. After four days Howell wrote another article, but rather than apologize for her original mistake, she stated that she had intended to write that Jack Abramoff "directed" his clients -- the Indian tribes -- to give money to Democrats.
Labels:
Abramoff,
Politics,
Republican
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Attytood: 2,245 Dead — How Many More??
Attytood: 2,245 Dead — How Many More??
That's what Cindy Sheehan's T-shirt said. The picture above shows the response in the Capitol tonight.
Did you know that in 1971, the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional to arrest a man who wore a "F--- the Draft" T-shirt into the courthouse? (Cohen v. California, you can look it up.)
Somebody at Daily Kos suggested that every American ...wear a T-shirt that reads "2,245 Dead.....
BREITBART.COM - Activist Cindy Sheehan Arrested at Capitol
BREITBART.COM - Activist Cindy Sheehan Arrested at Capitol:
"Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.
Police handcuffed Sheehan and removed her from the gallery before Bush arrived. Sheehan was to be released on her own recognizance, Schneider said."
• Key Players in the Plame Affair
