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The vast majority of the earthquakes are located underneath the oceans where they are not recorded because of a lack of instruments. This is why the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has developed a new kind of ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) to record both small and large earthquakes on the sea floor. Forty of them will be deployed at the beginning of 2007 in an area of the Eastern Pacific Ocean known to have large earthquakes. One goal of this one-year mission is to better understand earthquake processes, but this technology could soon be used to better monitor other parts of the oceans.

Originally from Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends on February 27, 2006, 11:35am

bonch writes “Apple has noticed the high amount of Mac usage in the Ruby on Rails community and has posted an illustrated Ruby on Rails tutorial. The document goes into more concise detail in getting new users up to speed, from database schema to moving beyond scaffolding, all done with the favored Rails editor, Textmate.”

Originally by ScuttleMonkey from Slashdot on February 28, 2006, 5:22am

deeptrace writes “Tentatively scheduled for a spacewalk this summer, a Russian cosmonaut will take his trusty six iron and a special weightless-friendly tee and put a golf ball into orbit from outside the International Space Station. The golf ball has an embedded transmitter so that it can be tracked as it orbits. It is expected to orbit for 3 to 4 years before burning up on re-entry. The golf shot is the result of promotional fees paid to the Russian space agency by a Canadian golf club manufacturer.”

Originally by CmdrTaco from Slashdot on February 28, 2006, 8:50am

On Thursday we read a rather late review of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking novel “The Jungle” in the Wall Street Journal. We were intrigued by this paragraph: “Yet it’s nice to think that if he had lived a little longer, Sinclair might have had some second thoughts about the ideas he expressed in “The Jungle.” Capitalism has served the huddled masses rather well. The descendents of Sinclair’s exploited workers don’t toil on the kill floors of meatpacking factories. Instead, they occupy better jobs as fully assimilated Americans. They also eat safe meat, processed for them by a new generation of immigrant laborers from Latin America and Southeast Asia — people whose lives are no doubt challenging, but also full of the realistic optimism that one day they will be no longer tired, no longer poor, and breathing free. Sinclair’s problem was that, unlike them, he couldn’t see the jungle for the trees. ”

On the same day we read Grist’s article on chicken farming “In rural America, the poultry companies can get workers for a song, and the workers are so grateful to get the jobs,” says Jackie Nowell of the United Food and Commercial Workers. These workers — usually poor, and often African American or Hispanic — “are exposed to feces [and] any disease the chicken has,” Nowell says. “There are also horrible levels of dust and dander inside these houses…. Workers in poultry processing plants also face serious dangers from machinery, carpal tunnel syndrome, and health hazards such as contaminated microorganisms and dust. “There are huge health and safety violations in every plant.”

We suspect that in exactly 100 years, exactly nothing has changed. We wonder- which to you think is a more accurate representation?

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on February 27, 2006, 5:49am

Over at the BBC’s Green Room, Dr. Matt Prescott has a bright idea: ban traditional incandescent light bulbs. Their replacements would be TreeHugger-friendly compact fluorescents, which, Dr. Prescott notes, “produce[s] the same amount of light as an incandescent light bulb whilst being responsible for the emission of 70% less carbon dioxide. It also saves money; about £7 ($12) per year in the UK, more or less in other countries depending on electricity prices. They waste so much energy that if [incandescents] were invented today, it is highly unlikely they would be allowed onto the market.” Further, “It has been estimated that if every household in the US replaced just three of its incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving designs and used them for five hours per day, it would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 23 million tonnes, reduce electricity demand by the equivalent of 11 coal-fired power stations and save $1.8bn.” Sounds pretty good to us; how are we going to achieve this?

Originally by Collin Dunn from Treehugger on February 27, 2006, 9:28am

Britain’s National Trust “protects and opens to the public over 300 historic houses and gardens and 49 industrial monuments and mills.” but it also “looks after forests, woods, fens, beaches, farmland, downs, moorland, islands, archaeological remains, castles, nature reserves, and villages”, many of which are under threat from changing weather and rising waters. Says Director Fiona Reynolds: “Climate change has implications for just about everything the National Trust does. We have to learn from our recent experiences of floods, storm damage and seasonal change and recognise that the ways in which we look after our properties will increasingly be led by the impacts of a changing climate. Climate change is a here and now issue and we need to adapt to it fast”

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on February 28, 2006, 5:32am

The Smashing Pumpkins said “no thanks,” the Talking Heads gracefully declined, electronic rockers Trans Am told them to hit the road - and my guess is that if they were still around, the Beatles would have said no too. It seems as though Hummer is in the rather unusual position of being unable to pay artists to abandon their values to endorse a product that pretty much represents all that is f*cked in the modern world.

Originally by erin from Treehugger on February 28, 2006, 9:00am

The discoveries include goods from the “lost” land of Punt, a fabled Red Sea trading center, according to archaeologists.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on February 27, 2006, 5:42pm

Scientists’ reactions have ranged from deep doubt to curiosity over last week’s report of a mutation whose victims walk on all fours.

Originally from WORLD SCIENCE on February 27, 2006, 4:11am

New implantable devices called neuromodulators — tiny machines that stimulate the central nervous system — could help treat a host of disorders, including Parkinson’s. They may be the next big thing, but they’re pricey and involve complex surgery.

Originally from Wired News: Technology on February 27, 2006, 9:53am

"China’s economic boom has dazzled investors and captivated the world. But beyond the new high-rises and churning factories lie rampant corruption, vast waste, and an elite with little interest in making things better. Forget political reform. China’s future will be decay, not democracy."

Minxin Pei in Foreign Policy:

Upon close examination, China’s record loses some of its luster. China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking system, which costs Beijing about 30 percent of annual GDP in bailouts, is saddled with nonperforming loans and is probably the most fragile in Asia. The comparison with India is especially striking. In six major industrial sectors (ranging from autos to telecom), from 1999 to 2003, Indian companies delivered rates of return on investment that were 80 to 200 percent higher than their Chinese counterparts. The often breathless conventional wisdom on China’s economic reform overlooks major flaws that render many predictions about China’s trajectory misleading, if not downright hazardous.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on February 26, 2006, 10:51pm

In my last column I noted how Political Science, along with most social sciences, has a bigger problem with prediction than seems to be generally acknowledged. This is of course hardly unique to members of this particular tribe; the media are even worse. Take for example the US media’s treatment of Bode Miller in the Winter Olympics. For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past month, Miller was the ‘sure thing’ for the US ski team. After all, he had his own set of sponsored ads, videos, and an interactive website from Nike. Miller was competing in five events and was, according to the US media, the front runner to lift possibly all five gold medals. Quite why this was the case was a mystery to me. Sure, he’s a damn good skier, but if you looked at his world cup results you would see that he was hardly head-and-shoulders above the competition, and in particular events he was well below the top rank.

Now, consider that each event Miller participated in at the Olympics was hardly an independent event due to the psychological impact of each result on the next, and that he is fully entitled (like the rest of us) to have a bad day at the office. Well, he did. He missed in all five events. Needless to say the media are now picking his corpse clean for defying their predictions. As the New York Times put it after his first ‘failure’ – “He is paying the price for misplacing career priorities.” Quite how the writer of this piece knows exactly where Miller left his priorities is unclear. The fact that he did not win is insufficient evidence, and you can bet your last dollar that had he won his next event such concerns would have been completely erased. Moreover, the last time anyone won five gold medals at a Winter Olympics was Eric Heiden in 1980 for speed skating. As far as I am aware, no one has ever won five medals in an Alpine event. Why Miller didn’t win could be a surprise only if one was deliberately ignoring much relevant information. Indeed, taking a select few data points and projecting them forward as an inevitability almost always produces disappointing results.

Two things stand out for me from this nonsense. First, why is anyone surprised that Miller did not win any gold medals, let alone five, when no one has ever done so? Second, and more interestingly for the non-skiers out there, why do people have a tendency to take two or three data points and project them into the future as an inevitable trend? Beyond the hype associated with US contenders, and the sheer myopia of the US media to the possibility of ‘foreigners’ actually beating the home-grown talent, such a tendency has consequences far beyond the Winter Olympics.

Consider Condoleezza Rice and Hamas’ electoral victory. The Secretary of State noted after Hamas’ victory at the polls that “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.” In fact, me, my wife, my cat, and The Economist Newspaper all knew this was coming down the track. Why then didn’t the Secretary of State, with all the resources at her disposal, not have an inkling that such a thing was going on? Perhaps what might be called ‘the Bode Miller problem’ was at work here too?

Consider that on issues as disparate as the invasion of Iraq, Social Security privatization, and energy policy, the Bush administration has never been one to let mere facts get in the way of a good ideology. Disconfirming evidence is screened out and only confirming evidence is admitted. A few supporting data points are projected as a trend while everything else is ignored.

In the case of the election of Hamas, while Fatah had recently done what the US has wanted in terms of halting suicide attacks, holding elections, and playing nice with Israel (all of which was acknowledged (trended) by the US), what Israel had done to Fatah over the past few years, in particular, bombing the PLO’s governing infrastructure into the ground thus cutting off their all important patronage network, was, like the totality of Miller’s results, totally ignored. The trend-line predicting Fatah’s victory was projected forward since only confirmatory data were being examined, and everything that didn’t fit the trend was ignored. Consequently, when a Palestinian voter said at an exit poll “Fatah hasn’t done anything for us,” this seemed to come as surprise; despite it being manifestly obvious to anyone who wanted to look at the totality of the data. Simply ignoring data because it does not fit with a preconceived model can be justified if the data is randomly distributed and constitutes clear ‘outliers’ from the observed trend. But to ignore a clear trend in the data and simply focus on what you want to see is pretty much guaranteed to end up producing a nasty surprise, pace Hamas.

Now this tendency to see trends, ignore data, and pointlessly project into the future is not only sadly common among the media and the political classes, (remember the US government not so long ago predicting budget surpluses into infinity on the basis of three data points?) it has determinate effects on likely future outcomes. When Hamas won the election the reaction of the US, Israel, and even the normally placid Europeans, was swift and condemnatory, and who could be surprised by this? After all, the Hamas Charter of 1988 does call for the destruction of Israel and cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the current “Nazi-Tartar” invasion by the West as reason enough. Indeed, there are undeniably a lot of data points out there pointing to actions by Hamas consistent with that interpretation and those ends. But even here there may be a ‘Bode Miller problem’ at work in that even here the past may prove no real guide to the future.

Consider that until into the 1990s the main body of the Irish Republican Army believed and proclaimed (quite seriously) that the UK government was holding the six counties of the North hostage as part of a colonial struggle, despite the exercise costing the rest of the UK millions of pounds each month with nothing in return except mainland bombings and death. Indeed, some breakaway Republican groups still adhere to the same beliefs. Yet, in order to believe such things one has to filter out massive amounts of data and project the few points that fit the preferred theory into the eternal and unchanging future. But when is the future ever eternal and unchanging? I am sure that much of Hamas is quite capable of continuing to believe in the forgery of the Protocols and act violently towards Israel, but let’s remember that one could have made the same projections about the IRA a decade ago, and yet they changed fundamentally, and quite unexpectedly.

Filtering the data to see only one trend negates potential futures. Seeing Hamas as a trend that cannot be stopped inevitably leads one to conclude that isolation and punishment is the only way forward. But Hamas has only ever known isolation and punishment. As such, proposals to cut-off aid in order to encourage capitulation is to fundamentally misread the data. True, there has been no IRA-like change yet, but to address the situation as an inevitable conflict preordained in the data will surely bring about such a conflict since we are blind to other possibilities.

So is expecting Bode Miller to win five gold medals the same as expecting Hamas to never change? Yes, but with one difference. Whereas Miller ‘failed’ on his own terms given the competition and the randomness of the day (after all, he might win six world cup races in a row in 2007), Hamas may only really ‘fail’ in the eyes of the Palestinians if the West and Israel are seen to make them fail. Key to the West and Israel doing this is to pick the data points they want to see (Hamas as unchanging and violent due to the trend line of the data) and project it forward.

Now, I freely admit that I know more about skiing than I know about the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics, but it does seem to me that, as the millions of people who read their astrology every day attest, humans like patterns and can see them in almost anything. Add to this ‘the Bode Miller problem’ that we can ignore much of importance in order to see much of irrelevance since it reinforces the patterns that we want to see, and perhaps it is better to let Hamas run the schools’ budget rather than deprive them of it. After all, something new in the data might be the start of a new trend, both for Bode Miller and Hamas.

Originally by mblyth from 3quarksdaily on February 26, 2006, 11:10pm

"They have 32,000 major parts, 750,000 rivets, 23 miles of wiring and, when assembled, a pair will have a span wider than a football pitch. But if the wings of the Airbus A380, the biggest passenger plane ever built, are unprecedented in scale, it is the journey they take from north Wales to the company’s HQ in southern France that is truly astonishing. Aida Edemariam follows one wing on its epic voyage, and traces an extraordinary tale of engineering."

From The Guardian:

When the A380 finally goes into service at the end of this year, it will carry about 550 people, making it the largest passenger aircraft ever to take to the skies. It is not the largest aircraft ever built (the Russian Antonov, a freighter, holds that honour), but at up to 35% greater capacity, it can claim to represent as titanic a revolution in commercial flying as Boeing’s jumbo - the 747-400 - was 36 years ago. Partly because of the unique challenges of its size (73m in length, the equivalent of seven London Routemasters queued nose to tail, and with a wingspan of 79.8m) and partly because of demands from airlines that planes should be quieter, less polluting and above all cheaper to fly per passenger, it has not been enough simply to tinker with designs for previous aircraft. Airbus went back to the drawing board and designed the A380 from scratch, which means it is also as major a technological achievement as Concorde. Being manufactured at 16 different European sites, however, using the skills of 1,500 suppliers in 30 countries, this singular aeroplane demands a level of international cooperation that the Concorde project did not even hint at.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on February 28, 2006, 12:56am

Roger Dobson and Abul Taher in the London Times:

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on February 28, 2006, 2:12am

(All images come from the laboratory of Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of the Tel-Aviv University, specifically here, as part of a collaboration with Prof. Herbert Levine of UCSD’s National Science Foundation Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics.)

In the Archives:
Gardens-in-a-Petri
Winter Scenes

Originally from Pruned on February 28, 2006, 12:57am

Lynn Geesaman, Hidcote Manor Garden, England, 1997. (Source)

On blogs discovered recently or otherwise.

Critical Spatial Practice, from the co-organizer of walking as knowing as making and urban / rural / wild (and a former classmate)

Bricoleurbanism, on urbanism, landscape, ideas, theory, and whimsy

Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, Kicheriana et al.

StrangeWeather.info, “a resource hub about climage change for artists, writers and activists”

New Scientist Technology Blog

Times Online Gardening Blog

(More blogs to your right, in the sidebar, and also be sure to look through my bloglines subscriptions where new additions made during the current and previous months are archived seperately.)

Originally from Pruned on February 25, 2006, 1:24am

Robin posted this and then this a couple of days ago about a puzzling advance in quantum computing. Both posts confused most people who read them (even the writers at Nature seemed quite unsure of what exactly they were reporting, taking refuge in vague but dramatic language), so I turned to the smartest physicist I happen to be friends with, Sean Carrol, of Cosmic Variance for clarification. He has obliged (thanks Sean!) in a tour de force of scientific exposition. It is still not trivial (please, we are talking advanced quantum theory here!) to understand, but if you pay careful attention, you should get the basic idea. This is how he explains it:

Quantum mechanics, as we all know, is weird. It’s weird enough in its own right, but when some determined experimenters do tricks that really bring out the weirdness in all its glory, and the results are conveyed to us by well-intentioned but occasionally murky vulgarizations in the popular press, it can seem even weirder than usual.

Last week was a classic example: the computer that could figure out the answer without actually doing a calculation! (See Uncertain Principles, Crooked Timber, 3 Quarks Daily.) The articles refer to an experiment performed by Onur Hosten and collaborators in Paul Kwiat’s group at Urbana-Champaign, involving an ingenious series of quantum-mechanical miracles. On the surface, these results seem nearly impossible to make sense of. (Indeed, Brad DeLong has nearly given up hope.) How can you get an answer without doing a calculation? Half of the problem is that imprecise language makes the experiment seem even more fantastical than it really is — the other half is that it really is quite astonishing.

Let me make a stab at explaining, perhaps not the entire exercise in quantum computation, but at least the most surprising part of the whole story — how you can detect something without actually looking at it. The substance of everything that I will say is simply a translation of the nice explanation of quantum interrogation at Kwiat’s page, with the exception that I will forgo the typically violent metaphors of blowing up bombs and killing cats in favor of a discussion of cute little puppies.

So here is our problem: a large box lies before us, and we would like to know whether there is a sleeping puppy inside. Except that, sensitive souls that we are, it’s really important that we don’t wake up the puppy. Furthermore, due to circumstances too complicated to get into right now, we only have one technique at our disposal: the ability to pass an item of food into a small flap in the box. If the food is something uninteresting to puppies, like a salad, we will get no reaction — the puppy will just keep slumbering peacefully, oblivious to the food. But if the food is something delicious (from the canine point of view), like a nice juicy steak, the aromas will awaken the puppy, which will begin to bark like mad.

It would seem that we are stuck. If we stick a salad into the box, we don’t learn anything, as from the outside we can’t tell the difference between a sleeping puppy and no puppy at all. If we stick a steak into the box, we will definitely learn whether there is a puppy in there, but only because it will wake up and start barking if it’s there, and that would break our over-sensitive hearts. Puppies need their sleep, after all.

Fortunately, we are not only very considerate, we are also excellent experimental physicists with a keen grasp of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, according to the conventional interpretations that are good enough for our purposes here, says three crucial and amazing things…

More here.  [Photo shows Sean Carroll.]

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on February 27, 2006, 11:30pm

infosthetics is proud to announce that, for the very first time, the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization will organize an ‘Infovis Art Exhibition’. this exhibit aims to examine the merging of artistic intention & visualization technique, & is looking for artwork that reveals data patterns in aesthetic, innovative ways. works can consist of interactive CD/DVD-ROM, interactive web-based or printed artwork, which should be submitted before Friday, June 30, 2006.
for all those infosthetically minded developers out there: participate! [computer.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on February 24, 2006, 5:07pm

Before I post something more extensive about the “recent” grungy, stencilated and mashed-up aesthetics in fine arts, let me introduce you to the Goldmine Shithouse collective. They started off as a fairly loose group of artist friends, who would meet once a week to stir things up, which they then proceed to do. One of them would start a painting, and then pass it on to others. Each work was a chain creation. Out of this group, three people remained: David Hochbaum, Travis Lindquist and Colin Burns. They liked the way it worked for them so much, they started exhibiting their works. It worked. And it is still working three years later.

Originally from New Art on February 28, 2006, 7:58am

3 parallel 8’ high by 3.5 ’ wide panes of mirrored glass placed side by side, each displaying rear-projected content from a high-lumen projector. content was designed in 3 dimensions, using scale, motion & depth perspective to make the user feel like she is immersed in & moving through the communication.
a user standing in front of the mirrors has the unusual sensation of seeing their reflection & the projected content simultaneously. sensors embedded in the structure above each pane register when a user reaches out to a “hot spot,” allowing users to navigate the projected content without ever needing to touch the “screen” or press a “button.” see also menu vista & bloomberg smart space.
[interactivemirror.net|via interactivearchitecture.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on February 26, 2006, 6:59pm