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Wired News: Top Stories

The Democratic and Republican National Convention Speeches, as Seen Through Wordle

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 1:46pm CDT by Sarah Lai Stirland

The national conventions are over and done, and what remains are the words that the politicians spoke (or didn't). To re-cap those words, we thought we'd create a Wordle gallery of the most notable candidates', spouses', and supporters' speeches.
Metallica: Master of YouTube?

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 12:52pm CDT by Eliot Van Buskirk

Over eight years after Metallica raised the ire of fans by delivering a list of unauthorized file sharers to Napster's headquarters, the band has launched a YouTube promotion featuring fans covering its songs as part of its ongoing repentance.
Cassini Detects Partial Rings With Saturn's Moons

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 11:35am CDT by Associated Press

The latest images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show faint, partial rings orbiting with two of Saturn's small inner moons.
Google Reigns as World's Most Powerful 10-Year-Old

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 12:23am CDT by Associated Press

Ten years ago, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc., the internet powerhouse was little more than a pipe dream. But, today, Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.
Mashup DJ Girl Talk Deconstructs Samples From Feed the Animals

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Angela Watercutter

Pittsburgh-based computer maestro Girl Talk (aka, Gregg Gillis) turns the cut-and-paste process of mashups into a jams-packed jigsaw puzzle. His latest release samples 300 songs.
Jobs E-Mails: Are They Real?

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 8:00pm CDT by Brian X. Chen

A close look at e-mails supposedly sent by Steve Jobs to customers shows inconsistencies that make it likely that some are fakes.
Meet the Latest Copyright Scofflaw -- the GOP

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 6:40pm CDT by David Kravets

As the Republican Party seeks to control the Oval Office, it has become a copyright scofflaw along the way. On Friday, the publishers for the Seattle rock "Heart" sent the party a cease-and-desist order to stop it from using the band's hit song "Baracuda," which was blaring at the Republican National Convention late Thursday. That marks the third time in as many months the GOP has been accused of hijacking intellectual property.
Teach Your Kids the Basics of Hydro Power By Building a Waterwheel

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 5:30pm CDT by How-To Wiki

Water wheels have been powering factories and mills for centuries, and now they can power your kids' weekend activities. Follow our guide to build a water wheel out of cups and picnic plates. It's a simple enough project for kids of all ages; more ambitious minds can modify the design to generate electricity or power more complex machines.
Weekend of Web Apps, Tech Talks Awaits at DjangoCon

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 5:15pm CDT by Scott Gilbertson

The open source Django web framework gets its very own coming out party this weekend at the first-ever DjangoCon. More than 200 web developers will converge on Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Saturday and Sunday to mingle and discuss the future of the fast, flexible web app framework with the funny name.
Code JavaScript Shortcuts With JQuery

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 4:00pm CDT by Webmonkey

Coding animated selection tools and text effects can be a nice but time consuming task. Why reinvent the wheel? JQuery is a library of code which sits on top of JavaScript to quickly and easily insert useful functions into your web site. Blow your mind with JQuery shortcuts with Adam Duvander's tutorial.
Crowdsourcing Book Excerpt: The Canary in the Coal Mine

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 4:00pm CDT by Jeff Howe

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few.

Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education and job history no longer matter, where the quality of work is all that counts and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent employed, research conducted and products made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.

When the original article was published, crowdsourcing still constituted a nascent business model. A few small companies had achieved limited successes with it, and large companies had only begun to test the waters. In this excerpt, Howe argues that in just two years crowdsourcing has revolutionized an entire industry -- stock photography -- and may well be poised to create disruption in other fields as well.

- - -

Adapted from Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe.

More at Howe's Crowdsourcing Blog.

Chapter 7: The Canary in the Coal Mine

There's a story people like to tell about Bruce Livingstone. In late 2005, Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, was looking to acquire Livingstone's company, iStockphoto, the world's most successful crowdsourcing company. Long before the contracts were drawn up, Livingstone, to show his commitment to the deal, tattooed the word "Getty" in cursive across the tender flesh on his inner wrist. Then he e-mailed Getty CEO Jonathan Klein photos of the tattoo under the message: "Don't make me write another word after this!" It's just the kind of tale -- emblematic of determination and just the right amount of quirky eccentricity -- that tends to burnish the reputation of its subject. In Livingstone's case, it has the added benefit of being demonstrably true.

With his penchant for muscle cars, rockabilly haircuts and, yes, tattoos, it's tempting to call Livingstone an unlikely CEO. But I prefer to think of Livingstone as a perfectly reasonable chief for some corporation from, say, the year 2020. A company not unlike iStockphoto. Located in a single, cavernous room inside a former factory in downtown Calgary (Alberta, Canada), iStockphoto houses a tiny fraction of its actual workforce. And Livingstone, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, occupies a desk -- chosen, it would seem, at random -- in the middle of the floor. The corner office clearly loses significance in a company that thrives on decentralization.

Jeff Howe explains crowdsourcing, which activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all.
Video: Courtesy of Jeff Howe
Westeel Rosco built the factory in 1925 to manufacture nails, screws and other bits of hardware. Unlike Westeel Rosco, iStock's products -- stock photos, illustrations and videos -- aren't manufactured on-site. They're created by a global, fluid workforce of 60,000 part-time photographers and artists, only a fraction of whom make a living from the work they sell on iStock. Yet they have a devotion to the company matched by few traditional firms. The full-time staffers who spend their days in the old Westeel Rosco plant play a support role for the community -- and community is the only applicable word -- that is making the product iStock brings to market every day. And that community has been very, very good to Livingstone and his investors. In the course of several years iStock has grown from a hobby to the third-largest purveyor of stock images in the world. When Getty purchased iStock in early 2006, Livingstone took home more than half of the $50 million Getty paid for the company.

The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th century the industry was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few photographers tried to make a living off the market in preexisting images alone. This changed after the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s led to a rapid growth in the publishing industry, and to a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six figures a year selling photos they'd already been paid to shoot. It was like minting money. Stock photography is, in relative terms, a tiny industry. The annual global gross for the entire business is estimated to be around $2 billion, which makes it a bit bigger than the market for gift baskets, but a little smaller than the annual sales of orchids. But this little industry has undergone big changes, and could well be a case study in how the crowd will impact much larger businesses.

In just the last few years the influx of talented amateurs armed with inexpensive, high-resolution digital cameras has upended the economics of stock photography. Five years ago, a professional-quality image was still a scarce resource. No more. This isn't to say the market for high-end photographs has disappeared. A gifted photographer will always find work. But the professional no longer has a lock on the middle and lower ends of the stock photo business. With a modicum of training, just about anyone can take a decent shot. Sophisticated cameras and photo-editing software do the rest. iStock exploits this fact. Design firms and other small companies working on a budget quickly embraced what became known as the "microstock" model. One graphic designer told me he went from paying hundreds of dollars an image to less than $10. "I pass on some of the savings to my clients and keep the rest. We're both delighted."

iStock might be great for buyers, but it's caused all sorts of headaches for professional stock photographers. In my original Wired article about crowdsourcing I quoted a Los Angeles-based photographer, Mark Harmel, saying that this influx of cheap images had caused a slight decline in his income from stock photo sales, which had dropped to $60,000. But in the two years since that decline has fallen off a cliff, to $35,000 in 2007. "If I look at the trend line, it just keeps going down. I'm really concentrating on getting assignments now," says Harmel. "I recently came back from London with 70 really wonderful shots. I'll probably use them on my website, but it's not worth my time to bother submitting them to a stock agency. They won't sell."

Harmel's far from alone. In fact, Getty's other businesses have struggled in the crowdsourced era. In the year I spent writing this book the company's stock slid 60 percent, falling to just under $22 by February 2008. That month Getty was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion, a considerably lower figure than the company had originally sought. According to a report released at the time of the sale, Goldman Sachs estimates that Getty's core business -- the sale of rights-managed, professionally produced images -- will continue to suffer an irreversible decline, falling to just 29 percent of its revenues by 2012. In the same period the investment bank projects iStock to continue its rapid rate of growth. iStock sold $72 million worth of images in 2007, a figure expected to jump to $262 million by 2012.

In this light, paying $50 million for a crowdsourced photo company looks like the smartest decision Getty ever made. The company is in the midst of transforming its business, from one reliant exclusively on professionals to one that is at least equally reliant on amateurs. As the Goliath of the industry, where Getty goes its competitors are sure to follow, which is to say, stock photography itself has been utterly transformed through crowdsourcing, in which a once-scarce commodity has become abundant. The question to ask is whether the upheaval roiling stock photography is only a leading indicator, like the minor volcanic eruptions that can precede a catastrophic earthquake.

Already the trend is migrating to other fields. Most immediately, the same dynamics that made the stock photo ubiquitous -- affordable digital SLR cameras and burgeoning communities of enthusiastic amateurs -- are affecting other markets for visual images. So-called "citizen paparazzi" use cellphone cameras to snap impromptu shots of stars and then sell them to new photo agencies such as Scoopt, which specialize in buying up and marketing their work. Amateurs can beat professional paparazzi for the simple reason that they vastly outnumber them. It's a question of probability: The throng of pedestrians in Greenwich Village, for instance, have a much better chance of catching an unkempt Gwyneth Paltrow than a single paparazzo.

And photography may well be just the beginning. iStock itself is doing a burgeoning business in the sale of stock video footage, and the crowd is also making commercials, collaborating on TV scripts, and recording and distributing their own music. They're writing political analysis, creating their own video games, and making feature-length movies. For the time being, all this activity has taken place in something of a parallel universe, without causing any of the economic upheaval visited on the stock photo or pornography industries. But those universes are beginning to collide as more companies attempt to package all this outpouring of creativity into a marketable product.

While crowdsourcing has already emerged as a potent force in the media and entertainment industries, it's also profoundly influenced the way even Fortune 100 companies like Procter & Gamble do business. Once famous for its insular culture, Procter & Gamble now crowdsources much of its R&D process, using global networks of scientists such as InnoCentive and NineSigma, which boast a combined membership of 2 million professional and amateur researchers. Even companies operating in a conventional field such as mining have found crowdsourcing applications. The Canadian gold-mining group Goldcorp put geological survey data online and offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could identify likely areas for exploration. Goldcorp says the contest produced 110 targets that yielded $3 billion in gold. Following its lead, the mining giant Barrick Gold Corporation recently offered $10 million to anyone who could improve its silver-extraction process. The open call of crowdsourcing is also being used by companies such as Google (to develop applications for its Android mobile platform) and Netflix (to improve its recommendation system). The question is whether the iStock secret sauce can be applied to industries like television and journalism and, possibly, even beyond to any business that traffics in bits and bytes. To answer that question, it helps to know what's in the secret sauce.

The Community Is the Company

iStock has been compared to a cult, and the analogy isn't entirely unfair. It's no accident that the most successful companies in the web's second coming -- most of whom traffic in the crowd's creative output -- are led by outsize personalities. "Bruce is to iStock what Tom is to MySpace," notes Garth Johnson, iStock's VP of Business Development. (Johnson resigned his position after this book went to press.) For those readers over the age of 30, Tom is Tom Anderson, the president of the social networking behemoth MySpace and the first "friend" to greet any new user. Under this new archetype of a company -- in which the community, as much as the customer, comes first -- the cult of personality plays a crucial role in community building, and Livingstone has been as essential to the growth of the iStock community as Anderson has been to MySpace's. "Bruce has a really strong, extremely charismatic personality online," says Johnson. "And that's really helped us build the community."

It's safe to say that iStock has left the community-building phase behind: Sixty-thousand people have combined to create an enormous portfolio of over 3.5 million images and 100,000 videos. By contrast, Getty's other divisions combined only use 2,500 photographers. The iStockers offer the company their artwork, and in return iStock goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the iStockers happy. The site offers the budding photographer all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz -- at a rate of 38 posts per minute -- with questions about lens sizes, polarized filters and F-stop settings. iStock doesn't offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends and become a better photographer.

"We don't own anything, the community does" says Johnson. "Everything we do affects these people, whether they're just earning enough to pay for their equipment, or they're making mortgage payments from their photo sales. They all want a voice, and we have to give it to them, because really, the community is the company."

The upside to this state of affairs should be obvious -- a dedicated, efficient workforce with no expectation of receiving a living wage -- but there are downsides as well: Even the smallest changes can roil the fickle, passionate community of iStockers. In March 2006, iStock launched a new feature on its web forums, a "forometer" which measured an iStocker's popularity through "bafflingly complex scientific methods" including the date and number of posts to the forum. The forometer displayed its results through a set of red, yellow or green bars. It did not go over well. The community questioned the principles behind the feature, as well as its functionality. Not long after its launch, the feature had been removed. Employees may be hell on overhead, but they're paid to accept all but the most draconian policies with a polite nod. Communities, on the other hand, aren't paid to stick around, and nothing stops them from selling their photos to one of iStock's many competitors. "They don't work for us," Livingstone laughs. "We work for them." If the iStocker feels a sense of ownership over the site, that's understandable: The iStock community predates iStock the company.

Livingstone didn't set out to revolutionize an industry, he just wanted to fill a personal need and help a few friends at the same time. In 2000 Livingstone was running a small graphic design and web-hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years he had developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an e-mail address. Livingstone's friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public, too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else.

It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside the internet. During iStock's early years, everyone took something and gave something in turn. "The feeders and the eaters were the same people," as Livingstone puts it. Everyone profited by acquiring new images, though no one made (or spent) a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about Bruce's nifty idea and started uploading their images, too. Then around 2002 a wider public got wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of hosting, but he felt that would violate the spirit of the site. "The focus was on the community, and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site," says Livingstone.

Instead, he started charging a quarter for each image, and he opened the system up to the public. This proved to be a momentous decision. Word quickly spread among publishers that there was a site offering cheap, usable images, and photographers began flocking to iStock to upload their portfolios. Traffic to the site skyrocketed, and soon Livingstone raised the price to $1 per image. "I thought it might become a sideline business," he says. It quickly became much more than that. The quality of the images wasn't always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock agency's, but the differences were indiscernible to the general consumer, and after all, you couldn't beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called "micro-stocks" had sprung up with strategies similar to iStock's. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were flooding the market with subpar images. At first, the industry aligned itself against iStockphoto and other microstock agencies such as ShutterStock and Dreamstime.

Then in early 2006, Getty announced it would buy iStockphoto for $50 million. "If someone's going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses," Getty CEO Jonathan Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, nonprofit organizations, and all manner of websites have continued to flock to iStock's high-volume, low-cost model. As of February 2008, iStockphoto had 2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations and animations. "Bruce's brilliance," Jonathan Klein once told me, "is that he turned community into commerce." Livingstone uses a slightly different formulation: "I turned commerce into community,"

iStockphoto has perfected the Jedi Mind Trick that's at the heart of crowdsourcing. It's an incredibly cost-effective strategy -- iStock boasts a 55 percent profit margin. And yet, Livingstone stumbled into this business model by creating a context -- a community of like-minded enthusiasts -- in which financial measures take a backseat to considerably less tangible concerns. Ask someone in the office, and they'll tell you: It's not about the money. Ask an iStocker and they'll tell you the same thing. In fact -- would-be crowdsources take note: If it is about the money, it won't work. It will fizzle, not sizzle, as one of iStock's designers put it. "What's funny is, the money people, they pretty quickly get pulled aside in the forums by the core people. Or they just don't have a voice. People will ignore them, like 'Oh, that's just so and so, they're just here to make money.'"

That doesn't mean the iStockers are unmotivated by self-interest. The more a photographer's images are downloaded, the more recognition they receive in the community, and the more credits they earn to download other people's photos to use in their own designs. And the additional income is also welcome, of course. Unlike other cases in which large corporations have attempted to monetize community, iStock does reward its contributors. It paid out $21 million in 2007. It's significant that people in online communities like iStock's react with great hostility to the idea that crowdsourcing is a form of cheap labor -- despite the fact it demonstrably is. After all, no one wants to feel exploited. In the end, what iStock provides is an invaluable if impossible-to-measure currency: meaning. The crowd will give away their time -- their excess capacity -- enthusiastically, but not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange.
Fears Swirl Over Whether FCC Will Enforce Comcast Throttling Decision

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 3:51pm CDT by David Kravets

Fears abound whether the Federal Communications Commission will enforce its Aug. 1 order demanding Comcast stop throttling BitTorrent traffic. The non-profit law firm Media Access Project is asking three federal appellate courts to enforce the decision now. The FCC gave Comcast, which denies any throttling, until year's end to comply.
Phoenix Lander Searches for Martian Microbial Oases

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 1:20pm CDT by Alexis Madrigal

The Phoenix Lander confirmed the presence of water ice on Mars a few weeks ago. Now the lander searches for a bigger prize: thin films unfrozen water buried underground that could support microbial life.
'History Hacker' Brings DIY Science From Web to TV

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 12:58pm CDT by Jenna Wortham

A shoestring experimenter takes his homemade Tesla coil and other amazing technological re-creations from YouTube to the History Channel.
Nokia Warns 3Q Market Share Will Fall; Shares Dive

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 7:39am CDT by Associated Press

Nokia warns that its 3Q global market share will decline from 2Q levels, sending its U.S. shares tumbling more than 11 percent in premarket electronic trading. Nokia gave no figures, but in July had predicted that "its mobile device market share in the third quarter of 2008 would be approximately at the same level sequentially" as the second quarter.
Explore 'Puzzle Quest' Designer's New 'Kingdoms'

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 11:43pm CDT by Chris Kohler

A first look at Puzzle Kingdoms shows expanded gameplay that's both familiar and promising.
Sept. 5, 1885: Pay at the Pump

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Randy Alfred

1885: Sylvanus F. Bowser delivers the first gasoline pump. It improves safety, but can't guarantee low prices.

The automobile was yet to be invented, and gasoline was a byproduct of refining kerosene for stoves and lamps. Some of that equipment could use gasoline, but it wasn't much in demand.

You bought fuel in a general, hardware or grocery store. You had to bring your own gallon (or whatever) can, and the storekeeper would ladle the flammable fluid from a barrel. Wasteful. Messy. Dangerous.

To reduce spillage, Bowser built a pump in his Fort Wayne, Indiana, barn. He sold and delivered the first one to Fort Wayne merchant Jake Gumper 123 years ago today.

The self-contained unit included a wooden storage barrel, marble valves, a wooden plunger, a hand lever and an upright faucet lever. It was a success. Bowser formed the S.F. Bowser Company and patented his pump in 1887.

The Bowser pump soon became known as a "filling station," and Bowser started selling an improved model to the first automobile-repair garages in 1893.

Most places that sold fuel to motorists used the "drum and measure" method. Gasoline was gravity-fed from a large steel drum into a five-gallon measuring can. The motorist then carried the can over to his automobile and poured the fuel into the car's tank through a funnel that was lined with a chamois filter to remove grit and impurities. A big bother all around, and not awfully safe, either.

Bowser came up with a big improvement in 1905: He enclosed a square, metal tank in a wooden cabinet equipped with a forced-suction pump. A hand-stroke lever pumped the gas. This pump featured air vents for safety, stops that you could set to deliver a predetermined quantity and -- wonder of wonders -- a hose to dispense the gasoline directly into the vehicle's fuel tank. He called it the Bowser Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump. (Rival John J. Tokheim of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had fitted a pump with a direct-delivery hose in 1903.)

The word bowser soon became a generic term for a vertical gasoline pump. That usage has dropped away in the United States, but lingers in Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Canada. A bowser is also a tank truck that delivers fuel to airplanes on the tarmac, and in Britain the term applies as well to self-propelled tanks carrying any fluid that is delivered directly to the end user -- for instance, water after a disaster.

Bowser's later career was quirky and litigious. He invented and personally marketed a backscratcher and a sit-down enema. He also sold postcards of himself next to the "Stone of Scone," part of the coronation throne on which British monarchs sit while being crowned in Westminster Abbey.
Source: Petroleum Collectibles Monthly, others
Gallery: Distilling 2.0 -- Bye-Bye Boiling, Hello Health Care

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Dave Bullock

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
PASADENA, California – For all you moonshine makers who thought your hobby was just a guilty pleasure, a new spin on distilling may actually help save lives. Using ancient technology reduced to a microscopic scale, scientists at Caltech have created new tools to detect disease and purify water using tiny stills.

The creation of the still around A.D. 500 was one of humanity's earliest, and still quite popular, technological advancements. Traditionally, a still boils liquids in order to vaporize and separate them. Now, using nanoparticles and lasers, liquids no longer need to be boiled to be separated.

Removing the heat requirement from distillation means the process could be used to separate living cells without killing them, which could lead to advanced disease detection. Other applications include extracting water cheaply and efficiently from sea water in low-energy saltwater distillation plants.

How do they do it? Take a tour through professor David Boyd's lab and go behind the scenes of this revolutionary process.

Left: A green laser evaporates the water from a liquid. This is the final stage of nano distillation.
:
Here is a diagram of the basic nano still technique. At top is the initial setup with gold nanoparticles sitting on top of a glass slide. The fluid waiting to be distilled is enclosed from above by a silicone rubber chip.

In the bottom diagram, a green laser operating near the resonant frequency of the gold particles is applied. The laser heats the gold nanoparticles, which then transfer the heat to the surrounding fluid. This small amount of heat is just enough to cause controlled evaporation over the gas bubble barrier, leaving pure water on the right-hand side of the diagram.

Click through to the next photo to take a closer look at each of these steps.

Illustration: Chemical Separations by Bubble Assisted Interphase Mass-Transfer, David A. Boyd, James Adelman, David Goodwin, and Demetri Psaltis
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
This spin coater is used to spread out the thin layer of gold nanoparticles on the glass slide. A drop of the gold solution is placed on the slide and the coater spins extremely fast. This spinning spreads the solution evenly and coats the slide with a nearly uniform 15-nanometer layer of gold.
To get a controlled spacing of particles there needs to be a structure in place to hold them. To achieve this, scientists add a polymer to the gold solution. This polymer forms a uniform lattice to structure all the gold. But observant readers will notice there was no polymer in the previous diagram. Where does it go? Click to the next photo to find out.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
This is an oxygen etcher. Once the glass slide is covered with the polymer-and-gold solution, this etcher burns off the polymer, leaving just the gold behind.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
This is a sample slide covered with a matrix of gold nanoparticles. The purple streaks on the slide are the nanoparticles, visibly spreading out from the initial drop applied to the slide during the spin coating. For those readers expecting the entire slide to be purple, scientists actually need only a small portion of the slide to be covered uniformly by the gold, so these streaks will suffice.
The particles have a unique property of rapidly dissipating heat, which is a key factor in how the still works.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
In another part of the lab, the piece of silicone rubber is made. If you think back to the second image in this gallery, you'll recall that the silicone rubber encloses the fluid between itself and the glass slide. This piece of silicone is called the microfluidic chip because of the fluid channels carved into it.
The machine pictured at left is called a mask aligner. It creates a mold for the microfluidic chip. It does this by exposing an image (in this case, the shape and design of the chip) to a photosensitive material. The unexposed portion of the material is discarded, and the shape of the mold is all that's left. It's similar to a photo enlarger, but instead of a two-dimensional image, a fully formed nano structure is made. The final mold is then used to create fluid channels in a piece of silicone rubber. This silicone rubber ends up being the microfluidic chip.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
Here, the silicone rubber chip is drilled to create ports for the nano still. These ports will be used to inject solutions for distillation and to extract the distilled liquid.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
Tiny plugs of silicone are the doughnut holes of the micro-fabrication world. Sadly, these plugs will remain uneaten.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
After fabrication of the microfluidic chip, we're ready to put it all together. The chip is glued to the gold-coated slide that we made earlier (pictured at center-left inside petri dish). Now we have a nano still, which has an electronic sensor attached for measuring the conductivity of the fluid.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
Sometimes science is messy. This workbench is covered with a collection of syringes and gold nanoparticle-coated glass slides. The syringes are used to inject fluids through the ports into the channels in the still, which we'll see in the next photo.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
In this photo, blue "Smurf blood" food-grade dye is injected into the nano still through a syringe. The dye makes it easy to see when the liquid has been distilled. The distilled water will be clear and the remaining water will become darker due to the higher concentration of dye.
: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
A low-powered green diode laser shines down into the still. The laser is roughly the same strength as an off-the-shelf laser pointer. Very little energy is needed in the microdistilling process thanks to the heat-dissipating properties of the gold nanoparticles.

Professor Boyd, the lead researcher on the project, reveals that this process was largely discovered by accident. "We had this problem with [an] air bubble, so we started hitting it with a laser. Instead of getting rid of it, we saw that we were actually causing the distillation process to occur, which was completely unexpected," Boyd explains.
Michael Moore to Release Next Movie, Slacker Uprising, for Free Online

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 10:00pm CDT by Lewis Wallace

The Fahrenheit 9/11 director plays the Radiohead card with his new documentary about the 2004 election, Slacker Uprising.
Rain Clips Greenbird's Wings

Posted: September 4th, 2008, 6:04pm CDT by Chuck Squatriglia

You can't set a land-speed record on mud, so British engineer Richard Jenkins packs up his wind-powered land yacht and heads home.

Tweakers.net Mixed RSS Feed

Intel stelt Havendale-processors met geïntegreerde gpu uit tot 2010

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 7:10am CDT

Intel heeft besloten om de introductie van cpu's met geïntegreerde gpu uit te stellen. Volgens het bedrijf zijn zijn klanten nog niet klaar voor het nieuwe platform. De Auburndale- en Havendale-processors worden daarom pas in 2010 geïntroduceerd. Oorspronkelijk was het de bedoeling dat de Auburndale-processor voor mobiele computers en de Havendale-chip voor desktop-pc's in 2009 geïntroduceerd z...
Nokia verwacht dip in marktaandeel door uitstel midrange toestel

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 6:28am CDT

Nokia verwacht dat zijn marktaandeel dit kwartaal gaat zakken, zo heeft de mobieltjesfabrikant vrijdag bekendgemaakt. Dat komt volgens het bedrijf mede door de vertraging die de introductie van één bepaald toestel heeft opgelopen. Om welk toestel het concreet gaat, wil Nokia niet zeggen. "Het is een mid-rangetoestel waarvan we heel veel verwachten", aldus een voorlichter van Nokia's hoofdkantoo...
Belgacom en Sun stellen datacenter zonder koelinstallatie voor

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 5:44am CDT

De Belgische telecomoperator Belgacom en de hardwarefabrikanten Sun en Cisco hebben een datacenter ontworpen dat kan werken zonder airconditioning. Voor de koeling heeft het genoeg aan de buitenlucht. Datacenters verbruiken veel elektriciteit. Het grootste deel dient voor de voeding van de computers, maar een aanzienlijk deel, volgens een woordvoerder van Sun soms wel 47 procent, wordt gebruikt...
URC introduceert universele afstandsbediening met touchscreen

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 5:13am CDT

URC brengt een universele afstandsbediening op de markt die in staat is om metadata en internetcontent via een wifi-verbinding binnen te halen. Goedkoop is het apparaatje echter niet. De MX-6000, de opvolger van de MX-3000, beschikt over een 4,3"-touchscreen met een breedbeeldresolutie van 480 x 272 beeldpunten. Het ccfl-backlight past de helderheid van het display automatisch op de lichtomstan...
Ricoh GX200 1.14

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 4:31am CDT

Ricoh heeft voor zijn GX200-digitale camera's nieuwe firmware uitgebracht met 1.14 als het versienummer. Deze camera's hebben een 1/1,7"-ccd-beeldsensor met 12,4 megapixels aan boord en de ingebouwde lens heeft een bereik van 24-72 mm waardoor de optische zoom op 3,0 keer komt te liggen. De lijst met aanpassingen ziet er als volgt uit:Version 1.14:Modified the following phenomena:In the Auto shoot...
Tele2 sluit deal voor video on demand met Warner en Disney

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 4:31am CDT

De Nederlandse provider Tele2 heeft vrijdag bekendgemaakt een contract te hebben gesloten met Warner Bros. en Disney-ABC-Espn voor het beschikbaar stellen van films via video on demand. De films van Warner Bros. zullen meteen beschikbaar zijn zodra deze niet meer in de bioscoop draaien en de dvd-verhuur begint. Van beide studio's zullen ook de oudere films in het assortiment worden opgenomen. ...
Synology Disk Station Manager 2.0-0717 RC

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 4:31am CDT

Synology heeft een nieuwe bètaversie van Disk Station Manager uitgebracht, de beheersoftware die op de diverse nas-producten van het bedrijf draait. De Disk-, Cube- en Rackstations bieden meer dan alleen extra opslagruimte. Deze kunnen ook backups maken van alle clients op het netwerk en bestanden via http, ftp of bittorrent downloaden, zodat bijvoorbeeld de pc 's nachts uit kan terwijl de downlo...
Nieuwe wet in Michigan verplicht vergunning voor Mediasentry

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 4:01am CDT

In de Amerikaanse staat Michigan is de wet die privédetectives aan regels bindt recent gewijzigd. Uit de nieuwe wettekst blijkt dat Mediasentry, de onderzoekspoot van de Riaa, beslist een vergunning nodig heeft. In Michigan mogen, evenals in veel andere Amerikaanse staten, privédetectives alleen werken als zij hiervoor een vergunning van de overheid hebben. Mediasentry, het bedrijf dat voor de ...

Boing Boing

International day of protest against surveillance Oct 11

Posted: September 7th, 2008, 12:41am CDT by Cory Doctorow

Tom sez, "An international protest against undue surveillance is being held next month on the 11th of October. It is 'a broad movement of campaigners and organizations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses'. We need to get this on the radar for the elections in the USA this year, the EU parliamentary elections next year and many more."

Surveillance mania is spreading. Governments and businesses register, monitor and control our behaviour ever more thoroughly. No matter what we do, who we phone and talk to, where we go, whom we are friends with, what our interests are, which groups we participate in - "big brother" government and "little brothers" in business know it more and more thoroughly. The resulting lack of privacy and confidentiality is putting at risk the freedom of confession, the freedom of speech as well as the work of doctors, helplines, lawyers and journalists.
The manifold agenda of security sector reform encompasses the convergence of police, intelligence agencies and the military, threatening to melt down the division and balance of powers. Using methods of mass surveillance, the borderless cooperation of the military, intelligence services and police authorities is leading towards the construction of "Fortresses" in Europe and on other continents, directed against refugees and different-looking people but also affecting, for example, political activists, the poor and under-priviledged, and sports fans.
People who constantly feel watched and under surveillance cannot freely and courageously stand up for their rights and for a just society. Mass surveillance is thereby threatening the fabric of a democratic and open society. Mass surveillance is also endangering the work and commitment of civil society organizations.
International Action Day "Freedom not fear - Stop the surveillance mania!" on 11 October 2008 (Thanks, Tom!)
Genome quilts

Posted: September 7th, 2008, 12:37am CDT by Cory Doctorow

Artist Beverly St. Clair uses quilts to encode genetic information: it's beautiful and comfy!

My idea for genome quilts grew from the juxtaposition of two experiences at Wesleyan University in November 2001. First I viewed an exhibit of work by Anni Albers, an artist I have admired for many years. The show included her serigraphs of triangles arranged in a grid. I was struck by their similarity to quilt patterns. The next day I attended a lecture about the Human Genome Project and was impressed by the beautiful shapes of the proteins illustrated and the interesting patterns made by the microarrays. I realized that I could use a simple quilt block to represent each of the four bases in DNA: cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. A square bisected into a light and dark triangle is rotated in four orientations to resemble the letters C, G, A, and T. These blocks are placed in sequences determined by the base sequence, so one can read the genetic code by looking at the quilt. The color and fabric choices influence the overall design. The quilts are visually pleasing, with their strong colors and seemingly traditional design, but they hide and reveal an entirely other construct of information.
Genome Quilts (Thanks, Marilyn!)
Furniture made out of used books

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 10:00pm CDT by Lisa Katayama

Designer Laura Cahill wanted to make art without wasting new material. She did a bunch of research, and found out that used books are the most common unwanted objects; they're also notoriously hard to recycle because of the kind of glue bookbinders used to use. So she took her second-hand book collection and turned it into beautiful pieces of furniture.
The bench is pretty self-explanatory, but for flower vases and lamp posts, Cahill uses a band saw to cut the books into desired shapes and sizes, and then wraps the spines around test tubes to make the cylindrical core. It's such a cool, eco-friendly concept.
via Dezeen
( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)
Satellite launches for Google hi-res imaging; can we track humans by shadows?

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 4:31pm CDT by Xeni Jardin

Google is really watching now. John Battelle blogs:
Not content to lease data from others who have satellites, Google today launched its own satellite into space. (Via BeetTv, thanks Andy.) Talk about web meets world....this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think could be the company's Waterloo - a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful. It may not be rational, but no one ever accused humans of being entirely rational.
And via the linked AP article:
A Delta 2 rocket carrying the GeoEye-1 satellite lifted off at 11:50 a.m. Saturday. Video on the GeoEye Web site showed the satellite separating from the rocket moments later on its way to an eventual polar orbit. The satellite makers say GeoEye-1 has the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system. It can collect images from orbit with enough detail to show home plate on a baseball diamond.
And snip from a related article by Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides on Wired News:
In a speech last month to a security conference in the UK, Stoica explained that by using shadows you can read the length and rhythm of someone's gait and do an identification, even from above. He has written software that isolates the shadow from video, and adjusts for time of day and camera angle to deal with elongated and foreshortened shadows. Stoica shot video from the top of a six story building to test out his software and was able to get usable gait data on his subjects.
Now going from six stories to satellites in low Earth orbit is probably a stretch. The best commercial low Earth orbit satellite (GeoEye- launching this Sunday to power better Google Maps) will have 41 cm resolution. The best known military spy sat can see at least down to 10 cm (though who knows what classified hardware can do). GeoEye is also only taking stills as it flies over, not the kinds of video footage that Stoica was using. To do that, you might need to go up to geostationary orbit which is much farther out and according to one expert, just wouldn't have the resolution. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying overhead, on the other hand, might work just fine for this.

Either way, you may want to practice skipping from place to place when it is sunny out.

Spy Software Could ID You By Your Shadow (Wired Science)
Clarification, 725pm PT: One anonymous BB commenter was among several who took issue with the implication that Google actually owned the satellite, the launch vehicle, or exclusive usage rights to all resulting data. That's not accurate. In the discussion thread for this BB post, "anonymous #27" said:

Google is the "exclusive online mapping site" customer for GeoEye-1 data; it is not the exclusive customer for the imagery. Many other customers, including and especially the NGA, will be using GeoEye-1 data. Also, the Google logo was on the launch vehicle, not the spacecraft, and Google did not pay for the placement.
This Reuters item released a few hours ago covers those ownership/exclusivity matters, and is a helpful read. Here's a press release from GeoEye about the launch, also released this afternoon.
And in related news, Google is evidently planning offshore data barges, to avoid property taxes and keep hard-workin' servers cool with the power of the ocean. (via Tim O'Reilly/Twitter)
Angry Tyra Banks Godzilla, Angry Tyra Banks Chipmunk.

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 2:11pm CDT by Xeni Jardin

I can't quite put into words why these two YouTube videos of a high-drama moment with Tyra Banks are so fun to watch over and over and over again. Maybe you can figure it out. Top: slow-mo rage-out. Bottom: Chipmunk version of same. Serving suggestion: watch them both at the same time and flip out. (via clayton cubitt)
NYT on "ambient awareness," ethereal intimacy, and internet ESP

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 1:58pm CDT by Xeni Jardin

I'm reading and re-reading a NYT Magazine piece that explores ambient telepresence, as made mundane by Twitter, Facebook, AIM, and the like. The writer, Clive Thompson, has riffed on this before in Wired. In both, he really nails a number of things I've been struggling to put into words for years. It's a terrific read.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy (NYT)
Mad Magazine on Sarah Palin

Posted: September 6th, 2008, 3:13am CDT by Cory Doctorow

Mad Magazine has leaked its satirical Sarah Palin spread to the HuffPo -- a good 'un, too. Exclusive: MAD Magazine's Election Coverage, Sarah Palin Edition

Gregarius

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