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Perempuan Bangkit dari Mati

2012-03-05T11:02:00.000+07:00

Li Xiufeng, perempuan Cina berusia 95 tahun ini, telah membuat para tetangganya tertegun. Enam hari lalu Xiufeng ditemukan meninggal dunia, lalu jenazahnya diletakkan di dalam peti mati.
Xiufeng ditemukan dalam keadaan sudah tidak bergerak dan tidak bernapas di tempat tidurnya, dua minggu setelah lansia ini tersandung dan menderita cedera kepala di rumahnya di Beiliu, Provinsi Guangxi. Tetangga yang menemukannya dalam keadaan demikian pun memikirkan hal terburuk telah terjadi: Xiufeng telah meninggal dunia.

Peti mati pun disiapkan. Tubuh Xiufeng yang telah tak bernyawa ditidurkan di dalam peti mati di rumahnya dalam keadaan tak bersegel, sesuai dengan tradisi Cina, supaya para teman dan kerabat bisa memberi penghormatan terakhir.
Tapi sehari sebelum pemakaman, tetangganya melihat peti mati itu dalam keadaan kosong. Setelah mencari-cari, mereka menemukan lansia itu sedang memasak di dapur.

Chen Qingwang, 60 tahun, adalah tetangga yang menemukan Xiufeng sudah tak bernyawa. Menurut Qingwang, saat melihat tubuh Xiufeng tak bergerak dan tak bernapas, ia telah mencoba membuat lansia itu bangun. Ia memanggil-manggil nama Xiufeng dan mengguncang-guncang tubuhnya. Qingwang juga sempat memberi pernapasan buatan, tapi Xiufeng tak bereaksi.
"Saya pikir dia sudah meninggal, tapi memang tubuhnya tidak dingin dan kaku," kata Qingwang.
Xiufeng tinggal sendirian di rumahnya. Jadi, Qingwang dan anaknyalah yang menyiapkan upacara pemakaman. Xiufeng telah berada di peti mati selama dua hari sebelum "bangkit".
"Kami sangat terkejut dan segera minta tetangga-tetangga lain untuk minta tolong," kata Qingwang.
Apa kata Xiufeng, yang "bangkit" dari peti mati kemudian memasak di dapurnya? "Sepertinya saya tidur dalam waktu yang lama. Waktu bangun, saya merasa sangat lapar. Makanya saya memasak sesuatu untuk makan," ujarnya.
Menurut ahli medis, Xiufeng mengalami kematian yang tak nyata, yaitu ketika seseorang telah tak bernapas, tapi tubuh mereka masih hangat.
"Syukurlah ada tradisi penghormatan jenazah beberapa hari sebelum pemakaman, Xiufeng bisa diselamatkan," katanya.

How Does Siri Knockoff Evi Compare to the iPhone's Original Assistant?

2012-03-02T04:39:00.000+07:00

Evi, the Siri knockoff that got attention last week for looking too much like Siri, has been downloaded over 200,000 times, leading us to believe that this one might be worth it for those iPhone users on pre-4s iPhones. The artificial intelligence knock off is so popular that it can't handle the server overload, but, popularity doesn't mean usefulness. How does Evi stack up to Siri in head-to-head competition?

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

How to Transmit News Photos by Wire—in 1937

2012-03-02T01:54:00.000+07:00

Telephotography was a thrilling new technology in the 1930s, allowing newspapers to send images across the country at lightning speed. Photographs were scanned from a rotating cylinder and transmitted electronically via telephone lines. Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, this informative film was produced by Chevrolet, and shamelessly includes a highly entertaining stunt in which a small airplane takes off from the roof of a car. The event, of course, is the subject of the news photograph that must be rushed to the paper via wire.

For more films from the Prelinger Archive, visit http://www.archive.org/details/prelinge r.

Why Other Electronics Companies Aren't Following Apple's Lead on Factory Audits

2012-03-01T22:58:00.000+07:00

Apple's labor solution isn't perfect, but it's more than other tech companies are willing to do to improve factory workers' lives.

The electronics industry copies everything Apple does from its products' features to its marketing's feel. So, more than a month after Apple announced that it would tie-up with the controversial, corporation-friendly Fair Labor Association, it's a little bit surprising that not one other electronics-maker has even tried to sign on with the FLA. What gives? Bloomberg's Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows dug in to see if they could find out.

The answers to their quest should not surprise you. The companies do not want to give any even quasi-independent authority access to their supply chains. For all the real and legitimate criticism of the FLA, the reality is that they are a rock of something in a sea of nothing when it comes to labor protections for overseas workers. And gadget-makers want to maintain their freedom to operate in those open waters.

Some companies' spokespeople claimed that electronics companies didn't need the FLA because they have the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, which carries out some of the duties that the FLA is supposed to.

The EICC, however, is not exactly a real regulator. Instead, as Infiniera's CEO Tom Fallon put it, the EICC is "absolutely toothless." Fallon said, "I don't think they do meaningful work," and gave his reason why. There is no record of any manufacturing facility "losing business, permanentlyor temporarily, for failing to live up to the group's code ofconduct."

Other companies say that they do their own internal audits, though nothing they turn up is ever made public and few look further down the supply chain at where the parts for their products come from. Microsoft, Dell, and Samsung all said they had internal procedures to check up on suppliers. HP's internal audits found "excessive working hours" at more than half of the factories the corporate social responsibility team sampled.

The last excuse Bloomberg found for electronics' firms not following Apple's lead was simply that Chinese workers do not want to not be exploited. Some executives claimed that young workers wanted to work extra-long weeks. A former head of Flextronics said that, particularly in the past decade, "Most Chinese workers at that point in time wanted as muchovertime as they could get."

As usual, though, only the labor camp could say what is obvious to everyone who looks at the situation. Until the companies are willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of profit margin for better working conditions, nothing is going to happen.

And audits and factory inspections can only go so far. Iftechnology companies are serious about improving conditions,they need to accept lower profit margins and slower productiontimes, Worker Rights Consortium's [Scott] Nova said.
"As long as the company is not willing to demand changefrom suppliers, and adjust prices and delivery deadlines toimplement that change, we're not going to see it," he said.

And right now, only Apple may feel that it has some profit margin to spare.

Image: Reuters. This photograph has been digitally manipulated.

How One Ship's Anchor Disrupted Internet Access in 6 Countries

2012-03-01T21:13:00.000+07:00

In a reminder of just how fragile this web we've weaved across the globe is, a ship dropped anchor outside the Kenyan port of Mombasa and happened to hit a bundle of undersea fiber optic cables connecting east Africa to the Internet. Now, the BBC reports, six countries -- Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and a piece of South Sudan -- are going to experience Internet slowdowns as less pipe is available to carry the same amount of traffic.

The slowdown, which could take two weeks to repair, could be particularly tough for Kenya's burgeoning tech scene, which locals felt was going to be at its strongest yet in 2012.

As much as Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was mocked for calling the Internet "a series of tubes," the Internet's physical manifestation looks a lot like (surprise!) a series of tubes.

It's difficult to find great photos or descriptions of laying undersea cable (i.e. tubes), but Alcatel-Lucent released a video of one of its ships being loaded up with cable to an epic soundtrack. The most mindblowing shot comes about 1:45 into the video in which we get to look at the GIGANTIC spool off which the cable is pulled. It's 20 feet tall and wound many feet deep.

The art and science of laying underwater cable have been around since the days of the telegraph, when Americans tried desperately to connect themselves to Europe via an underwater link. Here's what the old apparatus used to look like.

Since then, cables running under the ocean have been improved and better armored and -- like all cables -- made to carry far more data. The ships carrying them are much larger and carry a lot more cable. Nonetheless, as you can see in the video below, some things haven't changed much in the century and a half we've been sending messages under the sea. In essence, cable is fed onto a spool and dropped into the water. Nowadays, the cables are buried under the ocean bed. But still, everyone has to hope that nothing heavy enough to damage the cables falls into the depths. And these undersea cables are still one of the most vulnerable pieces of our information infrastructure, as millions of east Africans just found out.

The Abysmal Google+ Numbers: Users Spending 3 Minutes per Month on the Site

2012-03-01T18:38:00.000+07:00

For many months now, the specter of Google+'s eventual failure has grown as a real possibility. It certainly *seemed* that the site was not catching on, but any real data to confirm that intuition was hard to come by. Certainly, when Google's own numbers turned out to be a flimsy charade, that seemed to be an ominous indication. An Instagram photo of "social media explained through donuts" went viral earlier this month, providing a few chuckles by confirming what everyone seemed to suspect: Google+ is an abandoned shell, a place once flooded by the curious and the speculators, only to have been abandoned by everybody but a few Google employees still trying to drum up interest.

Perception leads, data confirmation follows: A Wall Street Journal report out this morning contains numbers from the research firm comScore that show what has long been suspected:

Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period.

Why has Google+ failed to catch on? There was so much excitement upon its release, but it has not stuck. Here are a two mistakes Google has made, and a theory on what to do now:

Google released a half-finished product.

Perhaps the first sign that Google hadn't thought things all the way through was a seemingly minor dust-up immediately after Google+'s launch: Google asked businesses and organizations not to create Google+ pages after many tried to do so, asking them to wait until official business pages were ready. Why not have these pages ready at launch? Why be so controlling over how people use your new network? By asking companies to shut down their pages, Google killed off an early source of content that could have brought people to the site. Why? This sort of fumbling is no big deal on its own, but it's surprising that on a product of this degree of importance, Google had failed to foresee such an obvious and inevitable chain of events. Google+ pages finally launched at the end of last year, but even then they were flawed, not allowing for basic functionality such as multiple administrators.

Google+ pages was not the only indication that the site was half-baked upon release. It took months before Google+ added a function that would allow users to "adjust the volume" on their different circles -- meaning that for months when I logged in, my stream was flooded with posts from acquaintances and professional contacts, and the friends and family I wanted to see were buried. This made the whole site experience unpleasant. Google+ was great for sharing -- I could share with very specific people -- but it was a terrible place for consuming information. It was as though Google only thought through half of the social networking experience.

Google shot itself in the foot by doing more "evil" -- aka questionable privacy practices -- squandering its biggest comparative advantage that it had over Facebook, its main competitor.

Unquestionably, the best thing Google+ had going for it was that it could be a place for people who had become distrustful of Facebook after years of that network's repeated privacy missteps. But as Nick Bilton chronicled in The New York Times, Google has recently found itself at the center of its own string of privacy controversies. He writes:

In 2000, when Google could count its employees by the dozen, it adopted its now famous mantra: Don't be evil.
Google considered it such a cornerstone of its operating philosophy that it was included in the S-1 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 when it went public.
Now, 12 years later, Google has more than 30,000 employees with annual revenue of $38 billion and growing, and although it still sees itself as a company doing good, its latest actions raise the question: Is Google too big not to be evil?
This month alone Google has been caught up in more privacy debates than I've eaten hot meals. There was the mobile apps problem -- which also snagged Apple -- in which data from mobile phones was being sucked into the hands of just about any developer. Then it was discovered that Google was circumventing privacy settings on Web browsers to track the behavior of consumers.

Bilton goes on to detail several of the other flare-ups, including Google's new Search Plus Your World which will integrate search and Google+. Bilton attributes Google's new privacy tune to its size, but its also the result of trying to make social more at the core of what it does, all, presumably, to feed its lucrative ad sales. Doing so seems to require gaining and keeping more of your information, meaning that Google+'s core advantage over Facebook -- user control -- is in the crosshairs of Google's business model. If that's the case, Google+ is doomed.

Stop: Save what you can. Abandon the rest.

It's a shame Google+ is a social-networking site because, underneath the social layer that no one seems to be using, there are some great tools. Hangouts (Google+'s video conferencing tool) may not be something you want to visit every day, but their utility is obvious (if only for virtually streaming grandparents in to a baby-naming ceremony, as some friends recently did). Google+'s photo tools are fantastic -- easy sharing, great appearance, and simple uploading from Android phones. Similarly, Google Reader's great sharing functions were wonderful as part of Google Reader, and fail miserably on the Google+ site, away from the content you're reading.

Unfortunately, Google seems intent on doing more of the same: Its photo-editing site Picnik will disappear in April, destined to live under the Google+ umbrella.

As it is, these tools get lost in the sea that is Google+. They would be so much more appealing if they were set free from the site. Google should make more of these tools, give them the homes they deserve, and forget its empty shell of a social network.

Image: douglaswray/Instagram.

At $500 Billion, Apple Is Worth as Much as Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Honda, Ford, Nissan, and GM Combined

2012-03-01T15:54:00.000+07:00

With the revenue and profit generating success of its iOS products, Apple's market value has passed half a trillion dollars in after hours trading. This is truly astonishing. Look at just a few of these comparisons:

Car companies used to be the pillar of national economies. Now, Apple is worth as much as Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Honda, Ford, Nissan, GM, Renault, Peugeot, Renault, and Tesla combined.
Or take media. If you add up Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Viacom, Time Warner, Time Warner Cable, CBS, Liberty Global, Dish Network, Charter, and Cablevision, you can only get to $350 billion of market capitalization.
Apple is worth more than Google ($200 billion) and Microsoft ($267 billion) combined.
Apple is worth 16 times more than Dell ($31 billion) and almost 6 times as much as HP ($51 billion).
Apple makes more profit in two weeks than AOL's entire market cap.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Adobe, HP, Dell, and Lenovo are worth almost $600 billion to Apple's $500 billion.

With a run like this, it's difficult to do much more than wait and watch. It's hard to compare their success with any technology company, including Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Image: Google.

Gorgeous Camera Obscura Time-Lapse Footage of Paris

2012-03-01T14:04:00.000+07:00

Filtering through a pinhole in a window shade, the urban landscape of Paris is reproduced on the walls of a darkened apartment. The camera obscura technique is centuries old, and when combined with long-exposure time-lapse photography, makes for an eerie effect. The project, called stenop.es, is a collaboration between Romain Alary and Antoine Levi, who plan to do a whole series of pinhole movies.

A 17th-century illustration of camera obscura, courtesy of Wikipedia

The Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti (470 BC to 390 BC) is credited with the first description of a camera obscura setup, and Aristotle used the pinholes in a sieve to project the image of a solar eclipse onto the ground. Johannes Kepler coined the term "camera obscura" in 1604.

Paris is the second pinhole movie in the series -- the first, below, was shot in Pushkar, India. On their site, the filmmakers invite viewers to contribute, if they have an apartment with an interesting view "in Paris or anywhere."

For more information about stenop.es, visit http://stenop.es/

Via Vimeo Staff Picks.

The Many Ways You Can Pretend to Be an Astronaut

2012-03-01T12:59:00.000+07:00

We can't all be Buzz Aldrin, but nothing can keep you from being an astronaut in the solar system of your mind!

Is one mustache representative too much to ask from our space program?

NASA needs a few good volunteers to hole up in Hawaii for 180 days and try out the food that prospective travelers to Mars might eat.

It may sound crazy, but it's one of many "analog" experiments that NASA and our Russian counterparts run to get a handle on the impacts of space travel. Before we go zipping off across the solar system, we need to know how our bodies and minds might fare under the stresses of strange food and zero-gravity.

Luckily, there is no shortage of people willing to pretend to be astronauts for a little while, subjecting themselves to experiments that come with real physical risks and that make equally real contributions to off-world science. And there are even more people who want to help NASA out in other ways, too. Here's a list of the many ways you can pretend to be an astronaut without ever actually heading into space.

Option 1: Lay in Bed for Months at a Time to Simulate Microgravity

I first ran across analog studies reporting a story for Wired Science in which participants were paid $5,000 a month to lie in bed with for 90 days. To simulate the effects of microgravity on muscles and bones, NASA scientists have discovered they can tilt people slightly head down and keep them that way for a few months. People can do whatever they'd like as long as they retain that posture, but that doesn't make it easy.

"When they first put me head down that first day -- part of it is mental -- I had a little bit of a moment right before they put the head at minus six degrees. I thought, 'Oh my god, my feet aren't going to touch the floor for 90 days,'" one participant told me. "But I had committed to it. Once I was head down, what's immediate is the blood rush. All the blood rushes up to your face and you get a little headachey, nauseous."

If you'd like to participate in said studies, they are actively recruiting for two right now.

Hard at work for space science. (Note: this is a lunar analog study, so the subject's body is actually in a different configuration than that used to study microgravity.)

Option 2: Cook and eat food designed for trips to Mars in a simulated Martian environment.

Turns out that planetary missions would encounter an unexpected problem: cooking. For short space missions, dehydrated food is fine, but researchers at Cornell and the University of Hawaii are raising serious questions about whether that strategy would work for Martian missions. For one, dehydrated food doesn't usually have the three to five year shelf life that such a mission would need. And can you imagine eating that stuff for years? So, they are running an experiment to see if cooking on Mars makes more sense than sending astronauts with a bunch of food packets.

On a planetary surface mission, the presence of gravity makes cooking possible. Properly packaged food ingredients typically last longer and require less packaging mass than individual rehydratable meals. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence indicates that menu fatigue may be less significant when food is cooked fresh on site rather than simply rehydrated. With the right ingredient set and some skill and creativity in the kitchen, an almost infinite variety of foods can be produced, providing planetary explorers with a nutritionally balanced diet customized to their evolving needs and likes. Moreover, preparation of food is an important part of every human culture, with psychological value for both the crew and the cook.

They'll be rigging people up in spacesuits and sticking them in a mocked-up Mars analog environment with only delayed electronic communication to the outside world. They'll be piloting the experiment with a two-week version this year and then extending that to 120 days in 2013.

Option 3: Hang Out in a Mock Martian Craft at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Biomedical Problems for 520 Days

This one was a bit of a commitment, we must admit. But beginning in June 2010 and ending in November 2011, six people spent 520 days together in a simulated Martian environment. The citizens of Russia, China, Italy, and France apparently came out of the endeavor in fine mental and physical health, which ~~one can only attribute to the development of Netflix streaming~~ is surprising.

Astronauts? More like asbronauts.

Option 4: Take on a Citizen Science Project for NASA

Popular love for NASA has made the agency a hotbed for citizen science projects in which thousands of cosmophiles do hard science for free. The menu of projects is always changing, but right now you can spot lunar impact craters and/or help improve Martian maps.

Option 5: Purchase a $5,000 Ride on a 'Vomit Comet'

If you have more spare cash than free time, perhaps you could direct some of it to the Zero G Corporation, which offers special flights that allow people to experience weightlessness because they fly in big parabolic arcs. NASA has had a similar research plane for quite some time -- popularly nicknamed the Vomit Comet -- but Zero G makes it easy for anyone to see what it feels like to be weightless. To be clear, these flights don't go to space, but they simulate the feeling of zero gravity.

When I go to space, I'm going to play with bubbles, too.

Option 6: Dress Up in a Homemade Astronaut Suit

And if all else fails, and you do not end up in any of the official pretending sessions, you can always sew your own suit and walk around England. That's what David Wilson did for the video below, and it really seemed to work out for him.

Option 7: Spend an Hour Photoshopping Your Head onto an Astronaut's Body

See photo at the top of this post. The key is to play with the color balance (particularly in the shadows) to match the tone of the photograph of your head with the tone of NASA's old film stocks. Trust me: it works.

Facebook IPO May Be Worth $2.45 Billion to the State of California

2012-03-01T10:34:00.000+07:00

You know who is happy about Facebook's IPO, aside from its investors and fanboys? The state of California. The Golden State has been plagued by bad news about its budget, but a new estimate from the state of California's Legislative Analyst's Office suggests that the Palo Alto company's move to public markets could drop an extra $2.5 billion into the state's coffers, including a whopping $1.5 billion in 2012-2013.

The LAO made sure to caveat its estimate with all detailed notations of the uncertainties in their model. "As we discussed in the Overview of the Governor's Budget, the Facebook impact on state revenues cannot be predicted in advance and will never be known retrospectively with any degree of precision," they wrote. "Yet, given that an IPO clearly would benefit state revenues, we believe it is appropriate for policymakers to incorporate this into their budgetary discussions."

Even if it will be hard to quantify the impact of a Facebook IPO, the bottom line is clear to the LAO: Facebook going public will be great for a state that needs to close a multi-billion dollar budget gap over the next couple of years.

Via Paul Kedrosky

After 4 Years, Checking Up on The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

2012-03-01T07:56:00.000+07:00

For its birthday, Svalbard will receive seeds from war-torn Syria and celebrate years of success preserving our inheritance from Neolithic times.

The world's agricultural hard drive, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, turns four years old today. The vault was a media sensation when it first opened in 2008, but it hasn't been in the news much since. I figured it was time to check in and see how these first four years have gone. An awesome technology by any measure, the vault is a steely compound tunneled five hundred feet into an icy mountain in the Norwegian Arctic, just 600 miles from the North Pole. It is designed to last a thousand years, and to withstand a wide range of global disasters, including climate change, nuclear war, and even an asteroid strike. Over the past four years the vault has amassed some 740,000 seed samples and eventually it may house every crop seed ever used by a human being.

The vault stores duplicates of the holdings of local seed banks all over the world, insuring against seed loss in the event of a local or global catastrophe. It functions like a safety deposit box; samples can be accessed by their depositing seed banks, but if researchers or plant breeders wish to access the seeds, they must request samples directly from those banks.

Security at the facility is state of the art and fully automated---there is no full-time staff and no single person has all the codes necessary for entrance. Nor is there much traffic inside, for new seeds are only accepted a few days a year. Today's fourth anniversary will bring several new seed shipments to the vault, including an ancient grain called amaranth, a favorite of the Aztecs and Incas, and a malting barley from the Pacific Northwest called "Klages," which is used in many craft beers.

Cary Fowler is the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which maintains the vault in partnership with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resources Center. I talked to Cary about the vault's anniversary, its importance, and the future of agriculture.

When I think aboutthe seed vault, the first thing that stands out to me is that it'sreally a technology of deep time, a way of coping with the kinds of events thathappen on very broad time scales. Do you see any other technologies orinstitutions outside the world of agriculture as playing a similar role asyours?

Fowler: I haven'tgiven it a lot of thought, so I guess I would say no. We tried to design thisfacility to last as far as we could see into the future. We didn't actuallyplan this to be what some in the media have called it, which is a doomsdayvault. We're not people who run around with signs saying "repent the endis near." In fact we realized that unfortunately thevault was probably going to be used sooner rather than later. Just a couple of weeks ago,for example, there was a fire in the national gene bank in the Philippines andtwo years before that they experienced a flood, so you don't have to have somekind of global catastrophe for this thing to be useful. We're losingbiodiversity right now, and it isn't necessarily because of some globalcatastrophe.

But of course I have to acknowledge that even though weweren't planning for doomsday, the facility is such that it would provide a lotof protection for many large catastrophes depending on where they occurred, butthat wasn't the original impetus for the project.

The main tunnel down to the vault.

You first opened forseeds in 2008, which means you've been at this for four years now. What's themost surprising thing you've learned in that time?

Fowler: Thingshave moved a lot faster than I expected. I think most people thought that theday we opened we would have every seed that we wanted or needed, or that itwould come shortly thereafter, but those of us in the field know that that'snot the way it happens. The seed banks themselves are typically not sitting onsuch large quantities of seeds that they can just immediately divide them and sendthem up to the vault in Norway. Even though it's for safety purposes, theystill have to multiply the seeds and clean them and package them up and sendthem, and that takes time, and so it's been a nice surprise to see how quicklythings are moving.

The other surprise is that we've had no bad surprises. Whenyou plan something this complicated you figure something is going to go wrong.During these past four years we've had seeds come from all over the world andit's been a gigantic coordination process to try to get seed boxes from all ofthese locations, a lot of which are in developing countries---Africa, Asia andLatin America---and to try to get them up to Oslo and then up to Svalbard on roughly the same day, so you don't have them sitting out on some tarmac in the hot sun. It's also surprising that we haven't lost a single box of seeds in transit. It's a miracle.

Where does the seedvault rank on the list of agricultural innovations, from the first crude stonesickles to the more sophisticated technologies of industrial farming?

Fowler: It's hardto say. What we hope to do is to provide robust and secure conservation forwhat's left of agricultural diversity. This is the inheritance of the Neolithictimes and our time and everything in between, and so I guess I see it as alibrary, a library of life, that gives the history and culture of agriculture and protects it, butit's also a resource for the future. And so I'm not sure where it ranks, but Ido think it's extremely important given the challenges that agriculture isfacing right now, but it's not in and of itself a solution to those problemsand it's not the only thing we should be doing.

As you see it whatare the biggest challenges agriculture is facing right now?

Fowler: Climatechange is obviously the big one, but there are others; water availability is abig problem, so is nutrient availability, particularly phosphorous. And all ofthis is in the context of growing demand, both from increased population andfrom development pressures. As people get wealthier they tend to gravitatetowards more meat-based diets, and it requires a lot more agricultural cropproduction to produce that meat. So we have all of those things happening andat the same time we don't have huge increases in agricultural investments, andso in a way we're really behind the game in terms of producing new crop varietiesthat are going to be adapted to these conditions. We need our crops to producemore on less land, with less water and less nutrients, and in a changingclimate. Any one of those problems could be extremely daunting, but we'refacing all of them at the same time.

Cary Fowler is the Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Reuters.

Are there scenariosyou can envision that would render the earth's environments entirelyinhospitable to seeds?

Fowler: No. Ifthe projections are correct it's certainly going to get more inhospitable, butnot entirely inhospitable. The issues that I mentioned before---nutrient andwater availability and climate change---are going to cause some fairly radicalreadjustments in agriculture if you look down the road any distance. And that'sone of the things that differentiates us, the people involved in the seedvault from others, we do tend to have a long view of what's goingto happen and we're trying to plan for that.

We expect that agriculture would even survive something likean asteroid strike; after all, plants survived the last one. What we're reallytrying to do up in Svalbard is preserve options. We're not saying that we havea crystal ball and that we know what's going to happen and we know what'sneeded, but we do know that the diversity we have represents an immense numberof untapped options, and what we're trying to do is keep all of those options.I think it was Paul Ehrlich who said "the first rule of intelligenttinkering is to save all the parts," and that's what we're trying to do.

Earlier you mentionedthat these seeds represent an inheritance from Neolithic Age, and it got methinking about a different sort of inheritance. At the seed vault do you alsostore the intellectual and cultural capital of agriculture?

Fowler: In asense we do. We don't have archives at the seed vault, but we do have a recordof what is there, and even though in a sense the seed vault is a kind of safetybackup for existing seed banks and their collections, you could also look at itthe opposite way, which is to say that the seed banks that contribute to theseed vault are actually performing backup for the seed vault. There isredundancy in our system. Everything that's in Svalbard can be found somewhereelse, and that somewhere else is the main manager of that particular portion ofdiversity, and those institutions maintain extensive databases that describeeverything they know about the traits and characteristics of every singlesample. We link back to those and in that sense we have a very good record.

Also, at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, we're working withsome other partners to put together a large international database calledGenesys which will essentially unite all of these seed banks around the worldso that researchers or plant experts who, for instance, may want to take a lookat the whole diversity of rice or wheat can go onto one website and see what'savailable and where it is and how to get samples of it and things like that. Alot of that information, characteristics and the history and so forth, ismissing in some of the seed samples, but for the samples that do have it, it'squite valuable and we try to maintain it.

Why is it that Norwaywas chosen for this project? Is it just the geography or is there somethingparticular about Scandinavian culture reflected in the seed vault?

Fowler: I thinkit's both. There are a lot of reasons for that particular location. One of themwas historical; the Nordic countries, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland,Sweden, were storing backup copies of some of their seeds in an abandoned mine shaft up there, so there was a precedent.

But apart from that, Norway is special. Historically therehave been a number of controversies around these genetic resources, questions of ownership and access and so forth, and I think Norway was at thetop of the list in terms of the countries that everyone in the room trusted.They didn't have a commercial seed industry so there was no sense of a conflictof interest or of a private interest being involved. Norway is just an unusually generousand collaborative country. When I headed the committee that undertook thefeasibility study for the seed vault, and when we presented it to thegovernment, their attitude was "if this is a valuable natural resource andNorway is the place to safeguard it, how can we say no?" And they jumpedright in and built the facility at their cost.

Some of your methodsmake it clear that terrorism is a special concern for the Seed Vault. I knowthat new seed shipments are screened with an airport x-ray scanner to make surethat none contain bombs. Is that because you see terrorism as just one of themany contingencies that could occur overthe next thousand years, or do think the Vault might be a likely target forterrorism?

Fowler: I don'tthink it's a likely target, but of course one can never know. No political orreligious group is against what we're doing so I don't think it's a target inthat sense. When the vault was being built we performed a security assessment in order to assess the likelihood of it being a target, or the likelihood of itbeing under any kind of threat, and the Norwegian government deemed the threatto be extremely low. But, at the same time we thought that if we're going to goto all the trouble to build this place in the middle of a mountain in theArctic then we might as well go the whole distance, and we think that increasesthe trust and confidence in what we're doing, the fact that we have thoughtthrough all of these contingencies even though we don't think many of thesethings are ever going to happen.

I remember when we were constructing the facility and I wastalking to the local Governor in Svalbard who's responsible for security on theisland, and he said to me "Cary, if anyone so much as writes graffiti onthis thing we'll know who it is." After all it's just a small villagethere, and really what's neat is that the villagers are remarkably proudand protective of the vault. They know it's there, and they're proud of it andthat gives us an extra security blanket out there because the locals seeeverything that's going on---walking around up there I've had any number ofpeople stop me and say "we're protecting that vault of yours."

Television crews waiting outside the Seed Vault.

I know that you havesome interesting seed shipments coming in association with the anniversary. Areyou particularly excited about any of them?

Fowler: Two ofthem, actually. There is a very important, very historic dwarfing wheat varietycoming from the United States. The short stature of modern varieties of wheat is very important, because it allows the wheat to carry more grain on the topwithout falling over. That's a huge event in agricultural history that we'll beable to preserve.

The other one we haven't publicized too much, because wedidn't want to draw too much attention to what is a very sensitivesituation---we're getting a large shipment in from ICARDA, an internationalagricultural research center in Syria. It's not a Syrian governmentorganization, it's an international center and it's completely independent fromthe government. Obviously, there are a lot of troubles in that country rightnow and that center, ICARDA, has been safety duplicating its material allalong, as a good professional team will do, but the fact that this shipment iscoming up right now in some ways points to the utility and value of the seedvault. One would not expect a seed bank, even in Syria, to be a target, but unfortunately there is a recent precedent: seed banks in Iraq and Afghanistan were destroyed or severely damaged over the course of the wars there, notbecause they were blown up or anything but because in the context of chaos andthe breakdown of law and order, people have come in and looted them. So we're pretty happy to have that collection at the vault.

There seems to be areal cultural fascination with the vault. Have you had many interesting visitorsin the fours years it's been up and running?

Fowler: Oh yeah.The surprising thing about the visitors is how many artists we've had come upand try to take a look at it. I get the sense that the seed vault must be thesubject of many different art projects. Now it's not a tourist attraction; wedon't just open it up for people all the time. In fact there's no permanentstaff there; we only go up to put the seeds in a couple of times a year. We dohave a lot of monitoring there with people in the local community going up tocheck on it daily, but we monitor the facility remotely and they aren't authorized to take anyone in.

But, given enough advance notice and enough time to see whoa person is and if there's a real interest in them seeing it, we do havevisitors there. We've had a number of political leaders, including Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations. I think the most interesting tour,and it's one I gave myself, was to former President Jimmy Carter and a groupthat he brought along, which included Madeleine Albright and a few others. Ihave a lot of admiration for him after having done that tour. Carter is famousfor being a peanut farmer in Georgia, but not a lot of people know that his farmwas devoted not just to producing peanuts but for producing peanuts for seed,so he knew the seed business very well. As I was giving the tour people in his group were asking all of thesequestions, and he was answering half of them.

But as far as visitors go generally, when people go to thevault they seem to get very emotional; people feel something in there, andmaybe it's because they're standing in the room with the greatest amount ofbiodiversity in the world, and the rich human history associated with that, people can feelthat something important is happening. It has abig impact on people when they see it.

An artist's rendering of the vault.

Google-Trained Minds Can't Deal with Terrible Research Database UI

2012-03-01T05:24:00.000+07:00

Students of all ages can have a good deal of trouble doing research online. (And not just students, we'll admit, if we're honest.) The obvious answer to this problem is to train people to do better searches. But the most obvious answer may not be the best one.

College and university librarians are concerned about students' search skills, and no wonder:

At Illinois Wesleyan University, "The majority of students -- of all levels -- exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process," according to researchers there. They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited "a lack of understanding of search logic" that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.

The librarians quoted here understand most of the key problems, and are especially sharp about "the myth of the digital native" -- about which see also this deeply sobering Metafilter thread -- but there's one vital issue they're neglecting: research databases have the worst user interfaces in the whole world.

Librarians want students to specify their search terms, but that rarely happens: "Regardless of the advanced-search capabilities of the database they were querying, 'Students generally treated all search boxes as the equivalent of a Google search box,'" simply clicking into a text field and typing away. Problematic, yes -- but why shouldn't they be able to do that? Why shouldn't the software be able to help them out?

Not long ago I was using a research database to try to get a PDF of an article published in a journal to which my college's library has a digital subscription. I knew the title of the article, the author's name, the title of the journal, and the issue date. I plugged all those in to the appropriate text boxes, clicked "search" . . . and got hundreds of results. But the one that I wanted wasn't on the first several pages.

I sent an email to a reference librarian describing this event, and he wrote back saying, "Oh, see, you should have entered the journal's ISSN." Really? Exact title of article and journal, exact name of author, exact date of publication -- that's not enough?

There's no question that students' search skills are generally quite poor, and need to get better, but to some extent we've all had our search habits trained by Google's algorithms, which in most cases -- though by no means all -- are quite effective. And a Google search does some things that the research databases don't: for instance, when I'm searching for an article in the enormous JSTOR academic journal database, I don't use their search box, but instead go to Google using the "site" delimiter: site:jstor.org my-search-term. Why? Because if I spell a name wrong Google knows the correct spelling and asks me if I meant that. On JSTOR itself I just get inferior results.

So maybe our greater emphasis shouldn't be on training users to work with bad search tools, but to improve the search tools. Especially since serious research questions aren't as afflicted by spammy SEO as many other queries, by this point in the development of online life we ought to be doing a lot better than we are.

For a Chinese Drugmaker, Team Building Means Military-Style Drills

2012-03-01T04:23:00.000+07:00

We're all familiar with American team building. Perhaps you go on a ropes course or do some trust falls. Or everyone happily participates in an "icebreaker" during which you reveal what kind of kitchen utensil you would be, if you were, in fact, a sentient kitchen utensil. (I would be a microplane.) It all feels a little bit silly, but perhaps, at the end of the day, you know your coworkers a little better and that's fine.

Take a look at the video above, which Chemical and Engineering News posted this week. It takes you inside the Chinese drug R&D lab run by HEC Pharm just outside Hong Kong. At about the 1:30 mark, C&EN's reporter spies some HEC employees doing the kind of left-right-left drilling that we associate with the military. That's the HEC sales force, it turns out. Call it team building with Chinese characteristics.

More generally, this video is an unusual peek into yet another arena -- pharmaceuticals -- where Chinese companies are moving up the value chain from production to research and branding. 45 seconds in, there is a "forest" of high-pressure liquid chromatographs, which help scientists identify what's actually in a chemical mixture. The scale of the facility, which already employs 1200, is impressive.

Companies like Lenovo and ZTE have already shown that Chinese outfits can be competitive globally, even though pharma continues to be dominated by American and European concerns. What's fascinating is that as these companies compete on a technological level, they bring their cultural weight and norms with them. That is to say, just as European drug salesman had to get used to American companies' icebreakers, our sales people better polish up their boots if Chinese corporations end up dominating pharma.

A Beautiful Way to Back Up a Year of Links

2012-03-01T01:50:00.000+07:00

If you're at all like me, you gather a tremendous amount of information from online sources over the course of a year. As I have explained, I have a system for keeping track of all this stuff, but a game designer named Tom Armitage has created a wonderful addition to an online system. It looks like this:

Beautiful. Armitage has scraped all the data from his Pinboard and (for earlier years) Delicious accounts, given it a elegantly clean format, added QR codes (!) to avoid having to type in long URLs, and bound it all in neat codex form, complete with a table of contents and a tag index. I would say "I wish I had thought of that" except that if I had thought of it I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.

Picture of the Day: Snowfall Across Italy, From Space

2012-03-01T00:14:00.000+07:00

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA'a Aqua satellite captured this picture of Italy last week, shortly after recent snowstorms had blanketed much of the country. The Aqua satellite has been in orbit since 2002, collecting information about all aspects of the Earth's water cycle, including evaporation, clouds, soil moisture, and fluctuations in sea and land ice cover.

Below, recent Pictures of the Day:

Image: NASA.

'Oops, My Shirt's Out of Batteries': The New World of Wearable Tech

2012-02-29T22:39:00.000+07:00

Fashion's new frontier involves LED lights, fiberoptic fabrics, and electrified threads.

Things in the world that, at this point, don't run on batteries: love, laughter, unicorns. And that's pretty much it. We are, as a culture, increasingly battery-powered. Rather than simplifying our relationship to our objects -- and rather than conserving electricity -- we're getting more and more clever with what we bring to life with portable power: kids' toys, toothbrushes, razors, microwaves, even (!) candles.

So it's logical that our battery mania would extend, eventually, to ... our clothes. And not just to practical inventions like, say, the battery-heated parka. The new frontier of fashion, The New York Times reports, is wearable technology -- powered by LED lights, fiberoptic fabrics, and electrified threads. Which seems both inevitable and inevitably annoying. Ironing your shirt is one thing; imagine having to worry about recharging it.

Images 1 - 3: Adafruit Industries. Images 4-7: Moon Berlin.

Physical Interaction, Virtual Worlds: Microsoft Unveils 'IllumiShare'

2012-02-29T20:29:00.000+07:00

In his 2008 book The Physics of the Impossible, the physicist Michio Kaku predicted that teleportation -- along with telepathy and human invisibility -- will be among the scientific advances we can expect to see within the next 100 years.

And while a Star Trek-esque matter-Transporter humanity does not yet have, we're finding new ways of transferring elements of our physical environments nearly every day. Microsoft Research just unveiled a technology that is pretty much the visual version of the Transporter: IllumiShare, "a remote device that allows remote people to share arbitrary physical or digital objects on any surface."

It's virtual interaction brought to a newly physical -- well, "physical" -- level. IllumiShare (which looks, in its current proof-of-concept form, pretty much like an IKEA desk lamp) uses a linked camera-and-projector set-up to share video between remote workspaces, be they across the room or across the world. Place objects -- notes, drawings, toys, your hands -- in the device's field, and those objects' images will be instantly sent to your collaborator. You could use the system to co-create drawings, or take notes, or play cards (or, hey, as in the example below, tic tac toe) -- in other words, to improve the way we go about education, amusement, business, or artistic creation.

And you could do that, actually, very soon. "The IllumiShare project is a working research concept right now," The Verge's Tom Warren notes, "but it clearly shows the potential for physical interaction using relatively simple virtual technologies." As collaboration becomes an increasingly virtual affair, Microsoft's newest device could bring back some of the value of the analog.

Image: Microsoft Research/YouTube.

The New Math: What I Got From My Devices This Week

2012-02-29T18:25:00.000+07:00

New Math is an attempt to quantify the world using words and basic math.

Google and the News, Part 2,389: The Company Is Co-Hosting a Conference on Investigative Reporting and Tech

2012-02-29T16:00:00.001+07:00

An investigative reporter might spend weeks (or months, or years) working on a single story, guided by her sense that the facts she's uncovering will expose injustice and illuminate wrongs and otherwise make the world a better place. Whether her work has impact, though -- whether it actually, finally succeeds in its goal of world-bettering -- is a question that's to some extent out of her control. The work of investigative journalists, the contemporary counterparts of Woodward and Bernstein, struggles for attention -- against slideshows, against infographics, against Kim Kardashian -- in a Web-ified marketplace that teems with with competition. When you're a lengthy story about systemic corruption, you may well be incredibly important; you may not, however, be incredibly interesting.

Enter the Center for Investigative Reporting. And then: Enter Google. The two -- the former, the U.S.'s oldest investigative reporting nonprofit, and the latter, well, Google -- are teaming up with the Public Insight Network to host a new conference: TechRaking 2012, a summit that will be held at Google's Mountain View campus on April 12.

"This one-day gathering will bring together technologists and muckrakers to form a more perfect union," the summit's invitation declares.

Tackling topics of storytelling, engagement and sustainability, a diverse group of individuals and organizations from the Bay Area and across the country will share their collective knowledge, skills, and insights to invigorate a clearer vision of the intersections around journalism and technology.

What that translates to, says Robert Rosenthal, CIR's executive director, is an event that will explore the question of impact -- a paramount concern in a field that relies on public buy-in to achieve its ends -- within the context of technology. How, basically, can technology aid the cause of investigative reporting? And what might technology, on the other hand, learn from the principles and practices of public-interest journalism? CIR has been asking these questions on its own -- the California-based outlet just won a $1 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation for being a "creative and effective institution," the organizational equivalent of a genius -- and Rosenthal is hoping that, by way of a conference, CIR can both explore new strategies and share the wisdom it's already gleaned with fellow modern-day muckrakers.

Google, from its apart-from-and-yet-pervasive-in perspective on journalism, is hoping for a similar outcome. As James Fallows has reported, the company's relationship with the news industry has been by turns fraught and friendly, and, either way, about much more than Google News. The ire that many news executives have directed at the company ("digital vampire," "newspaper murderer," etc.) has been fading, of late, into something that more closely resembles grudging (and occasionally enthusiastic) acceptance. We're in this together, regardless. And Google -- though it will insist that it is, itself, not a media company -- has been building opportunities for more direct collaboration with journalists. Though the firm's infrastructure-and-narrative-oriented experiments like Fast Flip and Living Stories have ended, they live on in the broad form of ongoing strategic relationships between Google and individual newsrooms.

Fast Flip and Living Stories live on as ongoing strategic relationships between Google and individual newsrooms.

They also live on in the form of conferences like TechRaking. The April event won't be Google's first foray into the world of the journalism confab: For the past two years, the company has co-sponsored News Foo, the journalism-focused incarnation of the "Friends of O'Reilly" conference, along with O'Reilly Media and the Knight Foundation. News Foo, like an increasing number of ideas-based gatherings, takes the "unconference" approach to conferencing: It's premised on the idea that simply putting the right mix of people in a room together, with very little structure but a lot of opportunity for organic interaction, can be an effective way to share, and grow, knowledge. (The past year's News Foo included an impromptu session concerning "reporting the end of the world," a surprisingly revealing discussion about disaster coverage led by Twitter's Andrew Fitzgerald.)

TechRaking isn't just a niche-ier incarnation of News Foo; it's also a direct descendant of the conference. The idea for a tech-meets-investigative-journalism summit first took shape, CIR's Rosenthal told me, with a short presentation he gave to the News Foo crowd in December of 2010 (here's a version of it), which explored the life that public-interest investigations take in the world beyond the newsroom. How do you ensure that important stories a). get heard, and b). make change? In the audience for that talk was Sean Carlson, currently Google's manager of global communications and public affairs, and its ideas resonated -- to the extent that, during last year's News Foo, Carlson and Rosenthal followed up on them in a lunch conversation. The idea for another conference -- one dedicated to exploring tech as a function of public-interest reporting, and vice versa -- sprang, quickly, from that conversation, and grew to include American Public Media's Public Insight Network, which works closely with CIR and which has a special expertise in database reporting.

Though TechRaking's programming has yet to be determined -- and it might well be unconference-like, with ad-hoc events that are decided only during the conference itself -- it will likely focus, says APM's David Cohn, on the narrative possibilities of investigative reporting. This won't, in other words, be yet another conference about journalism's business models. What it will be, its planners say, is an exercise in collaboration, across fields that have traditionally been kept separate. TechRaking's guiding idea, says Google's Carlson, will be reciprocity -- of knowledge, of strategies, and of a recognition that the future, whatever it brings, will be shared.

Image: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

Pesawat UFO Meledak dan Jatuh di Carolina Selatan

2012-02-29T13:52:00.000+07:00

Objek minterius yang jatuh di South Carolina Warga di Carolina Selatan dihebohkan kejadian aneh pada Senin (13/02) dini hari. Dimana banyak dari mereka menyaksikan sebuah benda tak dikenal di langit yang kemudian meledak dan jatuh. Penduduk bagian utara dekat Greenville melaporkan bahwa ada cahaya yang sangat terang disertai dengan ledakan sesaat sebelum pukul 2 pagi, sementara yang lain merasakan getaran dari tempat yang dekat dengan kecelakaan objek misterius itu. Menurut kantor Berita setempat, objek tak dikenal tersebut berhasil terekam kamera keamanan, dan banyak penelepon di seluruh wilayah melaporkan penampakan di langit tersebut. “Aku melihat cahaya, besar terang yang membuat pasir hampir berkilauan, cahaya itu amat menyilaukan dan membuat saya takut..” tutur seorang warga Cindie Stubbs kepada Fox. Saat kamera menangkap obyek di langit itu jatuh menuju ke Bumi, pusat panggilan darurat 911 Spartanburg menerima lebih dari 30 panggilan dari orang yang melihat dan khawatir tentang suara ledakan keras yang dibuatnya. Namun, para ilmuwan menduga benda tersebut adalah semacam meteor Bolide. “Bolide adalah sebuah meteor yang masuk ke bumi, memanas dan pecah menjadi tiga atau empat bagian, dan bersinar dengan cahaya biru-putih yang terang,” kata Charles St Lucas, dari departemen astronomi di Pusat penelitian Sains Gunung Roper di Greenville kepada Fox Carolina. Sejauh ini, belum ada informasi lebih lanjut tentang apakah seseorang telah menemukan lokasi yang tepat di mana benda misterius tersebut jatuh.

Sorotan Cahaya Terlihat dari Puncak Piramid Suku Maya, Pertanda atau Hanya Masalah Kamera?

2012-02-29T11:51:00.000+07:00

Sorotan Cahaya Terlihat dari Puncak Piramid Suku Maya, Pertanda atau Hanya Masal Kamera iPhone seorang turis menangkap cahaya misterius yang menyorot ke langit dari puncak piramid suku Maya.

Apakah ini pertanda kiamat 2012 bakalan benar-benar datang? Atau pertanda teknisi Apple harus mengeluarkan update terbaru untuk firmware kamera iPhone-nya? foto: Hector Siliezar yang pasti foto tersebut sudah tersebar di berbagai situs dan komunitas yang membahas mengenai misteri kiamat 2012 kalendar suku Maya. Dan tentu saja komunitas tersebut merasa --ironisnya-- senang karena gambar ini adalah sebuah kejutan yang mendukung teori kiamat mereka lebih jauh.

Dari tiga foto berlatar belakang sama yang diambil oleh seorang turis bernama Hector Siliezar, hanya satu foto yang memperlihatkan adanya penampakan cahaya misterius itu. Ia menunjukan hasilnya kepada turis-turis yang lain. Dan dipastikan bahwa bahkan pemandu di tempat itu pun belum pernah melihat cahaya semacam itu sebelumnya. Bagi yang percaya atas mitos kiamat tanggal 21 Desember 2012 nanti, foto ini mungkin akan memperkuat motifasi kalian untuk menggali bunker sedalam-dalamnya, tapi bagi seorang peneliti NASA bernama Jonathon Hill, foto ini hanya menunjukan adanya error atau glitch pada kamera yang dimiliki oleh iPhone. Berdasarkan pengalaman Hill yang sudah kenyang akan pengalamannya menyaksikan segungung foto dari permukaan planet Mars, cahaya pada foto tersebut menurutnya timbul karena sensor CCD kamera tidak bekerja dengan semestinya. Hal ini dapat terlihat karena dari tiga foto sejenis, hanya foto tersebut yang memperlihatkan sumber cahaya lain dari latar belakang, yaitu petir. Cahaya dari petir dapat menyebabkan brightness ekstra pada kolom pixel tertentu yang terkena dampak cahaya secara langsung. Bukti lainnya yang mendukung teori versi error ini adalah ketika gambar tersebut dianalisa pada software pengolah gambar seperti Photoshop, sorotan cahaya itu terlihat lurus secara sempurna sesuai deretan pixel. Hal ini mencurigakan karena untuk menghasilkan gambar seperti itu, Hill harus memotret pemandangan tersebut dengan posisi iPhone paralel secara sempurna terhadap sorotan cahaya. Nah mau percaya teori mistis atau ilmiah, kami serahkan kesimpulan akhirnya pada diri kalian masing-masing.

CHARGE CONTROLLER

2012-02-28T20:18:00.003+07:00

Once our wind generators and solar panels were up and running, the next obvious requirement was some sort of charge controller, since continuous overcharging would boil the electrolyte dry and ruin the expensive battery bank. Several small controllers came bundled with the solar panels, but they were totally unsuitable for wind power use.

Charge controllers intended for solar panels work by monitoring the battery voltage, and once it reaches full charge, the controller simply shorts the solar panel leads together. This doesn't harm the solar panels, but it does waste whatever power they're generating. The energy ends up heating the transistors in the controller.

This type of controller is not ideal for a wind generator, since shorting the output of the genny while it's spinning at high speed will generate a huge current spike, possibly destroying the controller and perhaps even the generator in the process. On the other hand, simply unhooking the generator from the batteries is not a good idea either, since with no load on it, the generator might overspeed in a strong wind and destroy itself.

The ideal solution is to charge the batteries until they reach a full charge, then switch to an alternate load where the energy can be safely handled. While we're at it, this energy should be used for some useful purpose, such as supplementing a water heater or powering a peltier-junction refrigerator, but in a pinch, a bank of 12 volt light bulbs will do.

The above schematic shows the simple charge controller circuit. The incoming battery voltage is divided in half by a pair of 3.3K resistors, so the trip points are adjusted to one-half the desired levels. The actual trip points will depend on your particular batteries, but a good starting point is 14.5 volts for full-charge, and 11.8 volts for discharged. In this case, the trimpots should be adjusted to read 7.25 volts at TP-A and 5.9 volts at TP-B. You will probably need to monitor your battery voltage through several charge - discharge cycles to determine the perfect trip points for your system.

The outputs of the controller are latched, and drive a pair of IFR510 power FETs, which serve as relay drivers. If you use a double-throw relay, only one output is necessary, since the relay can switch the incoming power to either the batteries or the alternate load as required. The second output can be used to switch a small 12 volt DC muffin fan to vent hydrogen gas from the battery enclosure to prevent the danger of explosion when charging the batteries.

The two push-buttons provide a way to toggle the output manually when the battery voltage was in the "null zone" between the trip points. By momentarily pressing one of the buttons, the output state will reverse and latch. A 1K resistor prevents a dead short, just in case someone decides to press both buttons at once!

The charge controller is built on a small printed circuit board, as shown below. The diagram above shows the component layout. Be sure to install the I.C.s and capacitors correctly, as reversing them will most likely generate a puff of smoke. Terminal blocks are soldered to the board for the incoming 12 volts and for connections to the relay coil.

...(LEFT) COMPONENTS INSTALLED .... ....(RIGHT) BARE CIRCUIT BOARD...

Since the incoming power is produced by several different types of surplus solar panels and homebuilt wind generators each producing different voltages, they can't just all be hooked together... each has it's own blocking diode in series with the positive lead. When the battery is charging, each source is pulled down to the battery terminal voltage, so each source contributes whatever current it's capable of producing. Each blocking diode has to be sized for the current that source can generate. The negative lead from each source is connected to ground.

Here's the hookup as it's working here. As long as the batteries are charging I can see the red LED glowing. As soon as the trip voltage is reached, the red LED goes out and the green one comes on, and the power is shunted to the alternate load. This way, no power is wasted.

Liat Semut Di Mikroskop yuk

2012-02-28T18:00:00.002+07:00

Semut adalah serangga eusosial yang berasal dari keluarga Formisidae, dan semut termasuk dalam ordo Himenoptera bersama dengan lebah dan tawon. Semut terbagi atas lebih dari 12.000 kelompok, dengan perbandingan jumlah yang besar di kawasan tropis. Semut dikenal dengan koloni dan sarang-sarangnya yang teratur, yang terkadang terdiri dari ribuan semut per koloni. Jenis semut dibagi menjadi semut pekerja, semut pejantan, dan ratu semut. Satu koloni dapat menguasai dan memakai sebuah daerah luas untuk mendukung kegiatan mereka. Koloni semut kadangkala disebut superorganisme dikarenakan koloni-koloni mereka yang membentuk sebuah kesatuan.

Semut telah menguasai hampir seluruh bagian tanah di Bumi. Hanya di beberapa tempat seperti di Islandia,Greenland dan Hawaii, mereka tidak menguasai daerah tesebut.[1][2] Di saat jumlah mereka bertambah, mereka dapat membnetuk sekitar 15 - 20% jumlah biomassa hewan-hewan besar.[3]

Rayap, terkadang disebut semut putih, tidak memiliki hubungan yang erat dengan semut, walaupun mereka memiliki struktur sosial yang sama. Semut beludru, walaupun menyerupai semut besar, tapi mereka merupakan tawon betina yang tidak bersayap.

Semut adalah hewan terkuat didunia. Walaupun tubuhnya kecil, ia mampu menopang benda dengan beban 50 kali dari beban tubuhnya. Jika diadukan dengan hewan sangat besar seperti gajah atau gorilla, yang hanya mampu menopang benda maksimal sampai 3 kali dari beban tubuhnya.

sumber : k4skus

Potongan Tubuh Manusia Dijual untuk Disantap di Jepang

2012-02-28T17:35:00.000+07:00

Sebelumnya yakinkan dulu mentalnya gan klo bener2 pengen liat

Spoiler for Potongan tubuh manusia:

Spoiler for are u ready?:

nih pelanggan setianya nih gan

Spoiler for pelanggannya gan:

hehehe...gimana gan komenknya??

ohiya ad tambahannya nih gan

Spoiler for tambahan:

Spoiler for proses pembuatannya:

setelah dipanggang nih

hasil jadinya

TERNYATA HANYA ROTI GAN, BUKAN ASLINYA

Hydroelectric Generator

2012-02-28T13:31:00.000+07:00

Hydroelectric Generator

The Hydroelectric Generator (Pelton turbine with generator) enables students to see clearly how hydro electricity is produced.
If the unit is placed over the sink and a good flow of water is allowed to hit the black plastic turbine wheel enough energy is produced to light a filament lamp.
The generator is a 6V AC bicylce dynamo type.

Dimensions: height 195mm, width 170mm, depth 100mm.

Suggestion
To enable your students to work with the Generator at the sink you could take a piece of wood that spans your sink and cut a hole in it. The hole should be of a size that would allow the Generator to stand unsupported and the water to drain away down the sink.

Best Results
Best results were obtained using an LED mounted in our Component Holder. The LED flashes because the voltage produced by the hydroelectric generator model is AC.

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