What if Jessus Born Today..??? MUST SEE..!

The Antikythera Mechanism... Built With LEGO

I'll be honest, I had little clue about what the "Antikythera Mechanism" was. Although I'd heard of it, I didn't know who built it, when it was built or why it was built.
As it turns out, in 1901, divers off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera found a device on board a shipwreck dating back over 2,000 years. Not much was known about the "device" until, in 2006, scientists carried out X-ray tomography on what remained of the complex artifact.

According to the recent Nature article Ancient astronomy: Mechanical inspiration, by Jo Marchant:

"The device, which dates from the second or early first century BC, was enclosed in a wooden box roughly 30 centimetres high by 20 centimetres wide, contained more than 30 bronze gearwheels and was covered with Greek inscriptions. On the front was a large circular dial with two concentric scales. One, inscribed with names of the months, was divided into the 365 days of the year; the other, divided into 360 degrees, was marked with the 12 signs of the zodiac."

The device -- which sounds like something that belongs in a Dan Brown novel -- is an ancient celestial computer, driven by gears to carry out the calculations and dials to accurately predict heavenly events, such as solar eclipses. The technology used to construct the device wasn't thought to be available for another 1,000 years.
According to Adam Rutherford, editor of Nature, the science journal has a long standing relationship with the Antikythera Mechanism. In a recent email, Rutherford pointed to a video he had commissioned in the spirit of continuing Nature coverage of this fascinating device. But he hadn't commissioned a bland documentary about the history of the Antikythera Mechanism, he'd commissioned an engineer to build the thing out of LEGO!
The result is an engrossing stop animation production of a LEGO replica of this ancient celestial calculator. For me, this video really put the device in perspective. The Greeks, over 2,000 years ago, built a means of predicting the positions of the known planets, the sun, even the elliptical motions of planetary orbits. They'd drawn inspiration from the Babylonians (according to new research reported on by Nature) and re-written the history of what we understand of the ancient civilization's technical prowess.
Sadly for the ancient Greeks, the Antikythera Mechanism was lost for 2,000 years at the bottom of the ocean and only now are we beginning to understand just how advanced this fascinating piece of technology truly is.

Watch this video, it's awesome:




Source

Bacteria cells used as secure information storage device

Cambridge - A technique for encryption/ compression/decryption of data and the use of bacteria as a secure storage device was successfully produced by a team of Chinese biochemistry students as an alternative solution for storing electronic data.

A team of instructors and students of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have managed to store enormous amounts of data in bacteria. The system is based on a novel cryptographic system for data encoding and the application of a compression algorithm which reduces its size dramatically. Following the reduction in size, the researchers were able to enter the information into bacteria in the form of modified DNA sequences. They used the DH5-alpha strain of Escherichia coli, a bacterium normally found in the intestines of most animals. This bacterium is often used as a model organism in microbiology and biotechnology. Modified E. coli has also been used in bioengineering for the development of vaccines, bio-remediation and the production of certain enzymes. Two research groups have already conducted unsuccessful experiments in 2001 and 2007 aiming to the use of biological systems as data storage devices. The researchers of the Chinese University of Hong Kong used encoded E. coli plasmid DNA (a molecule of DNA usually present in bacteria that replicate independently of chromosomal DNA) to encrypt the data and store it in the bacteria. Then, by using a novel information processing system they were able to reconstruct and recover the data with error checking. Another advantage of the system is that the bacteria cells abundantly replicate the data storage units thereby ensuring the integrity and permanence of the data by redundancy. Based on the procedures tested, they estimate the ability to store about 900000 gigabytes (GB) in one gram of bacteria cells. That is the equivalent of 450 hard drives, each with the capacity of 2 terabytes (2000 GB).

As an example of the potential for storage they explain that the text of the Declaration of Independence of the United States (8047 characters) could be stored in just 18 bacteria cells. One gram of bacteria cells contains approximately 10 million cells.

"We believe this could be an industry standard for large-scale manipulation of data storage in living cells"

said the researchers responsible for the project on their website where they describe the potential of data bio-encryption and storage. The researchers envision a wide range of applications for this technology. The capabilities of what they describe as a “bio-hard-disk” include the storage of text, images, music and even movies, or the insertion of barcodes into synthetic organisms as part of security protocols to discriminate between synthetic and natural organisms. The team of researchers was integrated by 3 instructors and 10 undergraduate biochemistry students of CUHK. They carried out their study as part of a worldwide Synthetic Biology competition called The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the USA. The CUHK team obtained a gold award in the iGEM competition.

“Biology students learn engineering approaches and tools to organize, model, and assemble complex systems, while engineering students are able to immerse themselves in applied molecular biology.”

declared iGEM organizers. The iGEM competition started in 2003. The 2010 version included over 1,900 participants in 138 teams from around the world. They were required to specify, design, build, and test simple biological systems made from standard, interchangeable biological parts. The achievements of the iGEM research teams often lead to important advances in medicine, energy, biotechnology and the environment.

Read more

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/300831#ixzz17vtSNfGM

 http://www.scribd.com/doc/44687672/Bacterial-based-storage-and-encryption-device

Cyber war will hit all web users - BBC

The conflict between Wikileaks supporters and the companies withdrawing their services from the whistle-blowing website has been dubbed a "cyber war".
Activists have targeted firms such as PayPal, Mastercard and Visa for their opposition to the site's publication of thousands of secret US diplomatic messages.
But there are fears the online battle could lead to everyday internet use becoming much more heavily regulated.
Source - BBC

Who’s to Blame for the Linux Kernel?

Finger-pointing time! Let’s see who’s responsible for kernel development in the last year. Once again, the Linux foundation has released its report on who wrote Linux. As always, it has some interesting insight into who did what when it comes to kernel development, and the direction of the kernel. Unsurprisingly, embedded/mobile is becoming a major factor in kernel development.
The Linux Foundation publishes an annual Linux report that shows (approximately) who has written and contributed to the Linux kernel. The report is put together by LWN’s Jon Corbet (also a kernel contributor) and kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, with additional contributions from the Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson.

The Top 5

Everybody wants to know, who’s at the top of the list. Consistently at the top is “none,” which is to say that nearly 20% of the kernel development is done by people who aren’t affiliated with a company — at least as far as their kernel contributions go. Yes, Virginia, independent kernel contributions still exist.
The report provides two lists — contributions since 2.6.12, when Git logs became available, and since the last report (2.6.30). Red Hat tops both lists, with 12.4% of kernel changes since 2.6.12, and 12.0% since 2.6.30. A tiny decline, but remember that the number of developers participating in each release cycle grows by about 10%. Meaning that the proverbial pond keeps getting bigger, and the Red Hat fish isn’t getting much smaller in comparison.
The red fish keeps growing, but the green fish isn’t keeping up quite as well. Novell had 7.0% of kernel contributions since 2.6.12, but only 5.0% since 2.6.30. It’s dropped from second to third in kernel contributions, after Intel, which had 7.8% of kernel contributions since 2.6.30. Some of that may be that more X.org is being moved into the kernel, and a lot of X.org development is being done by Intel, and Intel is also doing more with its work on MeeGo.
Intel comes in second on most recent contributions, bumping Novell to its third place spot. IBM is also displaced by Intel, landing at fourth (Intel’s old slot). Who’s in fifth (sorry Abbot, Costello)? Nokia. Yep, Nokia — who were behind SGI, Parallels, and Fujitsu in 2009.
If you’re looking for individuals, the top five since 2.6.30 are Paul Mundt, Johannes Berg, Peter Zijlstra, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz, Greg Kroah-Hartman. Mundt explains Renesas’ place in the list — he’s working for them, after a stint at the CE Linux Forum (CELF). Berg is on Intel’s payroll, working on wireless, Zijlstra works for Red Hat, and Zolnierkiewicz is a student at Warsaw University of Technology. Kroah-Hartman, of course, is at Novell.
Linus Torvalds doesn’t make the list not because he’s not doing anything, but because the list doesn’t measure what Torvalds does very well. That is to say, Torvalds spends much of his time merging commits from others and not so much writing his own code. Still quite important, but not as easily measured.
I beat Oracle up pretty heavily lately because of their antagonism towards Google and open source Java, as well as their mishandling of OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org, and virtually all of the properties they got from Sun. Nothing that’s related to open source has gotten better since Oracle took it over. Still, the company turns in a respectable — if somewhat reduced — showing in kernel development. Oracle clocks in with 1.9% of kernel changes since 2.6.30, and 2.3% since 2.6.12.
Then there’s Canonical. Or rather, there Canonical isn’t. Once again, the most popular Linux desktop vendor and would-be enterprise Linux player doesn’t rank highly enough in kernel development to show up — even in the past year. I might get flamed for mentioning this, but I do think it’s worth pointing out. Yes, Canonical makes valuable contributions to Linux in other areas — even if the seem ashamed or reluctant to mention that Ubuntu is Linux underneath. Does Canonical need to contribute to the kernel to be successful? Apparently not. Should Canonical be contributing more given its standing and dependency on the Linux kernel? I believe so.

Embedded

Nokia’s placement on the list shows that much more development is being driven by mobile and embedded Linux. In the past, server Linux was the big money behind the kernel. Still is, but it’s making room for embedded Linux.
Nokia has jumped up in the standings and has doubled its percentage of contribution. Wolfson Microelectronics and Renesas Technology appear in the top 20 for the first time. Both companies are working with embedded Linux. Texas Instruments also makes the list — Linux on a calculator, anyone?
Broadcom and Atheros also make the top 20 since 2.6.30 — which is good, we might see fewer and fewer chipsets that aren’t supported in Linux.
What’s disappointing is that Google isn’t higher in the ranks here. Actually — Google has dropped off the top 20 altogether since 2.6.30. The search giant had less than a percent (0.8%) of kernel changes since 2.6.12, and only 0.7% since 2.6.30. Google is behind Pengutronix, for goodness sakes. Have you heard of Pengutronix? Nope, me either. For a company that is arguably using more Linux than anybody — pushing two Linux-based OSes and likely to have more Linux servers in use than any other entity — Google’s kernel contributions are actually quite paltry.

Summary

2011 should be interesting. If Google finally merges Android’s changes into the mainline kernel, that should bump Google up in the standings. I suspect, and hope, SUSE/Novell will move past Intel in 2011, now that its future is a bit more clear. As MeeGo continues to gather steam, I suspect Nokia will also show up a bit higher in the standings.
In all, Linux kernel development is as healthy as ever. I’d be curious to see a similar report for other major system utilities and such (GCC, the GNU utilities, X.org, Apache Web server). The kernel is very important, but just a part of the overall ecosystem. There’s plenty of userspace goodies that companies should get credit for as well.
Make sure to check out the full report PDF too. It makes for good reading, and it’s short and well-written.

Source

Daniel Roth and the future of money

Daniel Roth and the future of money

Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight

Building a “Hello World” Windows Phone 7 Application

First make sure you’ve installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – this includes the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone development tool (which will be free forever and is the only thing you need to develop and build Windows Phone 7 applications) as well as an add-on to the VS 2010 RC that enables phone development within the full VS 2010 as well.
After you’ve downloaded and installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, launch the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone that it installs or launch the VS 2010 RC (if you have it already installed), and then choose “File”->”New Project.”  Here, you’ll find the usual list of project template types along with a new category: “Silverlight for Windows Phone”. The first CTP offers two application project templates. The first is the “Windows Phone Application” template - this is what we’ll use for this example. The second is the “Windows Phone List Application” template - which provides the basic layout for a master‑details phone application:

After creating a new project, you’ll get a view of the design surface and markup. Notice that the design surface shows the phone UI, letting you easily see how your application will look while you develop. For those familiar with Visual Studio, you’ll also find the familiar ToolBox, Solution Explorer and Properties pane.
For our HelloWorld application, we’ll start out by adding a TextBox and a Button from the Toolbox. Notice that you get the same design experience as you do for Silverlight on the web or desktop. You can easily resize, position and align your controls on the design surface. Changing properties is easy with the Properties pane. We’ll change the name of the TextBox that we added to username and change the page title text to “Hello world.”

We’ll then write some code by double‑clicking on the button and create an event handler in the code-behind file (MainPage.xaml.cs).

We’ll start out by changing the title text of the application. The project template included this title as a TextBlock with the name textBlockListTitle (note that the current name incorrectly includes the word “list”; that will be fixed for the final release.)  As we write code against it we get intellisense showing the members available.  Below we’ll set the Text property of the title TextBlock to “Hello “ + the Text property of the TextBox username:

We now have all the code necessary for a Hello World application.  We have two choices when it comes to deploying and running the application. We can either deploy to an actual device itself or use the built‑in phone emulator:

Because the phone emulator is actually the phone operating system running in a virtual machine, we’ll get the same experience developing in the emulator as on the device. For this sample, we’ll just press F5 to start the application with debugging using the emulator.  Once the phone operating system loads, the emulator will run the new “Hello world” application exactly as it would on the device:

Notice that we can change several settings of the emulator experience with the emulator toolbar – which is a floating toolbar on the top right.  This includes the ability to re-size/zoom the emulator and two rotate buttons.  Zoom lets us zoom into even the smallest detail of the application:

The orientation buttons allow us easily see what the application looks like in landscape mode (orientation change support is just built into the default template):

Note that the emulator can be reused across F5 debug sessions - that means that we don’t have to start the emulator for every deployment. We’ve added a dialog that will help you from accidentally shutting down the emulator if you want to reuse it.  Launching an application on an already running emulator should only take ~3 seconds to deploy and run.
Within our Hello World application we’ll click the “username” textbox to give it focus.  This will cause the software input panel (SIP) to open up automatically.  We can either type a message or – since we are using the emulator – just type in text.  Note that the emulator works with Windows 7 multi-touch so, if you have a touchscreen, you can see how interaction will feel on a device just by pressing the screen.

We’ll enter “MIX 10” in the textbox and then click the button – this will cause the title to update to be “Hello MIX 10”:

We provide the same Visual Studio experience when developing for the phone as other .NET applications. This means that we can set a breakpoint within the button event handler, press the button again and have it break within the debugger:

Building a “Twitter” Windows Phone 7 Application using Silverlight

Rather than just stop with “Hello World” let’s keep going and evolve it to be a basic Twitter client application.
We’ll return to the design surface and add a ListBox, using the snaplines within the designer to fit it to the device screen and make the best use of phone screen real estate.  We’ll also rename the Button “Lookup”:

We’ll then return to the Button event handler in Main.xaml.cs, and remove the original “Hello World” line of code and take advantage of the WebClient networking class to asynchronously download a Twitter feed. This takes three lines of code in total: (1) declaring and creating the WebClient, (2) attaching an event handler and then (3) calling the asynchronous DownloadStringAsync method.
In the DownloadStringAsync call, we’ll pass a Twitter Uri plus a query string which pulls the text from the “username” TextBox. This feed will pull down the respective user’s most frequent posts in an XML format. When the call completes, the DownloadStringCompleted event is fired and our generated event handler twitter_DownloadStringCompleted will be called:

The result returned from the Twitter call will come back in an XML based format.  To parse this we’ll use LINQ to XML. LINQ to XML lets us create simple queries for accessing data in an xml feed. To use this library, we’ll first need to add a reference to the assembly (right click on the References folder in the solution explorer and choose “Add Reference):

We’ll then add a “using System.Xml.Linq” namespace reference at the top of the code-behind file at the top of Main.xaml.cs file:

We’ll then add a simple helper class called TwitterItem to our project. TwitterItem has three string members – UserName, Message and ImageSource:

We’ll then implement the twitter_DownloadStringCompleted event handler and use LINQ to XML to parse the returned XML string from Twitter.  What the query is doing is pulling out the three key pieces of information for each Twitter post from the username we passed as the query string. These are the ImageSource for their profile image, the Message of their tweet and their UserName. For each Tweet in the XML, we are creating a new TwitterItem in the IEnumerable<XElement> returned by the Linq query. 
We then assign the generated TwitterItem sequence to the ListBox’s ItemsSource property:

We’ll then do one more step to complete the application. In the Main.xaml file, we’ll add an ItemTemplate to the ListBox. For the demo, I used a simple template that uses databinding to show the user’s profile image, their tweet and their username.

<ListBox Height="521" HorizonalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,131,0,0" Name="listBox1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="476">

<ListBox.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
           <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Height="132">
              <Image Source="{Binding ImageSource}" Height="73" Width="73" VerticalAlignment="Top" Margin="0,10,8,0"/>
              <StackPanel Width="370">
                 <TextBlock Text="{Binding UserName}" Foreground="#FFC8AB14" FontSize="28" />
                 <TextBlock Text="{Binding Message}" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="24" />
              </StackPanel>
           </StackPanel>
        </DataTemplate>
     </ListBox.ItemTemplate>

</ListBox>

Now, pressing F5 again, we are able to reuse the emulator and re-run the application. Once the application has launched, we can type in a Twitter username and press the  Button to see the results. Try my Twitter user name (scottgu) and you’ll get back a result of TwitterItems in the Listbox:

Try using the mouse (or if you have a touchscreen device your finger) to scroll the items in the Listbox – you should find that they move very fast within the emulator.  This is because the emulator is hardware accelerated – and so gives you the same fast performance that you get on the actual phone hardware.

Summary

Silverlight and the VS 2010 Tools for Windows Phone (and the corresponding Expression Blend Tools for Windows Phone) make building Windows Phone applications both really easy and fun. 
At MIX this week a number of great partners (including Netflix, FourSquare, Seesmic, Shazaam, Major League Soccer, Graphic.ly, Associated Press, Jackson Fish and more) showed off some killer application prototypes they’ve built over the last few weeks.  You can watch my full day 1 keynote to see them in action. I think they start to show some of the promise and potential of using Silverlight with Windows Phone 7.  I’ll be doing more blog posts in the weeks and months ahead that cover that more.

Source: weblogs.asp.net

15 Awesome Google Services You Never Knew Existed

Whether you're sending an email in Gmail, finding directions to that fancy restaurant using Google Maps, or pretending to be a part of the latest microblogging craze with Google Buzz, the G-word is everywhere. Well, it turns out that there is also a whole library of Google web applications and services stacked up behind the everyday services you may have come to take for granted.

Most of the mega company's services are either full blown web applications readily available to the public, or secretly tucked away behind a door in the Google Labs. However, even those wearing their Public Beta scrubs are readily available to play with. We've gone and picked through fifteen Google services you may not have heard of before, but can definitely benefit from. Try them out, and if you have any suggestions of ones we may have missed, leave a note in the comments.

Never miss another important headline

News Timeline

If you're tired of missing out on the week’s most important headlines, set Google News Timeline as your browser’s home page and you’ll never be out of the loop again. This distinct search engine scours various news outlets, Wikipedia, and even Twitter. Just enter in search term and News Timeline will retrieve the most recent headlines from the web containing the word. You can even specify what publications you’d like News Timeline to search, including your local paper. Sadly, Mac|Life wasn’t among the choices.

 

Patent your invention



Patents

Got a crazy robot that does all sorts of cool, crazy robot things? Well, before you start working on the actual mechanical implementation of that idea, mosey on over to Google Patents to make sure your product hasn’t already been invented. This specified search engine sifts through indexed patents registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The search engine uses optical character recognition (OCR) to sift through patents based on words and terms embedded in the image scans.

We took a few minutes to glance at some of the random patents that popped up on the front page. For instance, this apple case for use in preserving apples and this kid-friendly inhaler that looks like a panda.  See if you can find any of Apple’s patents.

 

Let's get political, political

In Quotes
Yeah, the presidential election meme is totally passé, but voting is an American right and should be utilized to the fullest extent. That’s why Google’s still got the reigns on a nifty service dubbed In Quotes, which displays side-by-side comparisons of noteworthy quotes from major politicians on a variety of hot topics. 

Type in a search topic or choose a political issue from the drop-down box, then choose your politicians and a year; the generator offers speeches and opinions from a wide selection of politicians, beginning from 2003 to present. There’s also a U.K., India, and Canada edition for international expats.

Quotes are generated automatically, depending on the topic. In Quotes is a great tool for students preparing a paper on a recent politician or political matter, but if you’re looking for anything George Washington-era, get ready to crack open a book.

 

You’ve got questions? They’ve got the answers

Google Moderator

Google Moderator offers an open forum for users to post their questions, offer suggestions, concoct ideas, and receive answers in return. You can scour topics and vote on other people’s opinions, or contribute your own.

Each question has its own list of topics, while a list of Google's featured services offer up alternative sites that are a bit more specific, like Take a Tip, Share a Tip--an open forum for users to share their experiences on how to be frugal in all areas of your life. 



Google Moderator is a great way to get an objective opinion from the many anonymous internet users trolling the web, or waste a little bit of time without having to get yourself extensively involved in a social network. If you like this web service, check out the most recent addition to the Google family: Aardvark. 



 

Explore the world on foot

City Tours
Traveling is already an extravagant endeavor. It’s a better idea to pocket the money you’d spend on travel books that will inevitably become outdated by the time you return from vacation, and simply invest some time in Google’s City Tours. City Tours generates a list of important traveling hot spots based on your destination of choice. For example, if you’re on your way to visit Berlin, Germany, type in a starting location (like the address of where you're staying) and City Tours will map out a route for a walking tour around the area you’re stationed.

Each landmark contains important information, like hours of operation and the address of the location--in case you decide to take a taxi or public transportation. You can also add other areas to your walking tour either manually or from a predetermined list provided by Google Maps. 



City Tours still has a few kinks to work out, though it’s gotten better since we used it for last summer’s trip to Lund, Sweden. For instance, walking tours no longer take 53 minutes between each stopping point, and have been significantly cut down to less than 20 minutes. Regardless, we have to keep in mind that most Google Labs applications are a work in progress. And even so, this is one feature we plan on using for all of our future traveling destinations. 



 

See politics in motion

Audio Indexing
Using YouTube to search for that political speech you've been looking for is an extreme pain in the derriere--almost as annoying as rewinding and fast-forwarding a VHS on a VCR (remember those things?). Google’s Audio Indexing simplifies this grueling task by aggregating it all for you in an easy-to-use search engine.

Type in a popular word, like “clean technology” or “California," and Audio Indexing will fetch a comprehensive list of videos with any mention of your search term in the definition. You can also share videos on Facebook, Twitter, et al. or copy and paste the direct link provided for you. Unfortunately, there is no generated embed code available. 



This service is great if you’re on the search for visual aids for a presentation in your Political Science class, or just looking to catch up on all those missed hours of C-SPAN.

 

Learn HTML all over again

Code Search

For the web coder with frequent bouts of brain freeze, Google’s Code Search is truly a lifesaver. If you’re writing CSS or attempting to bypass Flash with a very concise HTML 5 tag, you can cross reference any line of code by copying and pasting it into the search engine.

Find exactly what you're looking for

Similar Images
Google Labs' Similar Images is basically a harder-working version of the search engine’s already massive Image Search. If you’re looking for very specific image, like a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the south end, search for "Golden Gate Bridge", then select the image that most resembles the one you're looking for. Each click refines your search down to eventually what you're looking for.

 

Watch as your image search dances around you

Image Swirl

Similar Images may eventually get you the photo you want, but what if the image you’re really looking for can only be sought out using a phonetics algorithm? Image Swirl organizes image search results into groups and sub-groups based on their visual and semantic similarities--kind of like how mind-mapping works.

Type in three search terms and you’ll be amazed at how the internal script behind the engine works to match an image with each of your descriptions. You can select the photo of each individual cluster for closer review, or the images surrounding it. We should note that Image Swirl is the newest addition to the Beta family, and is greatly limited in its search capabilities.

 

Peruse news on the web a dozen pages at a time

Fast Flip

If you’re always on the go and out of the loop, a visit to Google's Fast Flip should do the trick. It does exactly as it advertises: view screenshots of the most important news outlets on the web all at once. Or for a more refined selection of news based on topic, type in a search term and Fast Flip will retrieve a number of the most relevant sources from a predefined list of sources. You can also cycle through the news based on the most popular, recent, viewed and recommended headlines around the internet, or categorize the news by section and most discussed topics. There’s also a mobile version for iPhone users.

Refine your bibliography

Scholar

Writing a term paper is already a grueling task, so why make it more difficult by trolling the Internet for unreliable sources? Google’s got you covered with Scholar, which searches the works of academic scholars who have chosen to openly share their published writings online.

Of course, as with all academic and published works, don’t forget to cite what you use!



Find the best deals

Product Search
You may remember it as Froogle, but Google Product Search has since evolved into something quite extraordinary, even if it is still in beta. Type in a product query, and this search engine will return a list of sites offering the product of your choice, at the price of your choice. Perhaps the best thing about Product Search is that it makes absolutely no commission off of what you buy, so you can rest assured it’s just a clean, simple search engine for the best deals on the web.

 

Discover what’s trending on the web

Trends
No, we're not talking about Twitter. Google Trends is like the popularity gauge for the Internet. For example, if you're curious to see how certain car companies fare against each other in terms of search frequency, type in two search terms separated by commas and Google will retrieve a graph detailing the statistical difference between the two search terms. The graph also shows regions, cities, and languages with which the search term is most popular, and the recent stories that picked up the most traffic from Google.

 

Trace the genealogy of your friendships

People Hopper

You may share more similarities with your friends than you think. No, we don’t mean interests and hobbies; we’re talking about eye shapes, nose bumps, freckles and moles. Google’s People Hopper proves that everyone shares a little something by “morphing” your profile image with a friend’s and displaying the transformation breakdown, picture-by-picture, in a neat spectrum graph.



The service borrows its photos and user accounts from Orkut, so you’ll have to have an active account to use this service. Choose a friend who’s also on the social networking service and People Hopper will return with the facial breakdown between you and your comrade--and a bunch of other people floating around the web. The quality of the path between faces depends on how closely the two photos match. Even if it’s not a true-to-form match, it’s interesting to see as each photo descends from the primary match and morphs into another user. Plus, it’s a great way to meet new people, or find that long lost brother of yours.

Honestly, People Hopper is a little creepy, but incredibly enticing all at the same time. If you want to opt out of being a part of Google’s under-the-radar anthropological experiments, follow these instructions.

 

Meet some new people

Orkut
Orkut is a free-access social networking service designed to help you quell your Facebook addition. The service is incredibly popular in India and Brazil, but severely lagging behind Myspace and Facebook in the United States. 

If you use the service with People Hopper, maybe you'll run into someone who looks like you in India and Brazil. You never know.

FCC Aims to Free up 500MHz of Spectrum for Broadband

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's upcoming national broadband plan will ask the nation's television broadcasters to voluntarily give up unused wireless spectrum, in exchange for a share of the profits when that spectrum is sold, the agency's chairman said Wednesday.
The FCC's national broadband plan, due out next month, will focus on freeing up 500MHz of wireless spectrum over the next decade, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said during a speech at the New America Foundation. As part of that effort, Genachowski said the plan will propose a "mobile future auction," permitting existing spectrum licensees to give up spectrum.
Genachowski stressed that participation in the mobile future auctions would be voluntary. "While overwhelmingly -- roughly 90 percent -- of Americans receive their broadcast TV programming in most major markets through cable wires or satellite signals, there are still millions of Americans who receive TV through over-the-air antenna TV," he said. "Broadcasters would be able to continue to serve their communities with free over-the-air local news, information, and entertainment, and they would be able to experiment with mobile TV."
Unused broadcast spectrum could be worth up to US$50 billion, Genachowski said. About 300MHz of spectrum is set aside for broadcast TV, but in TV markets with less than 1 million people, about 36MHz are typically used for broadcasting, and even in the largest TV markets, only about half of the broadcast spectrum is used, he said.
Broadcast TV spectrum in most of the U.S. is "woefully underused," said Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs at CTIA, a mobile carrier trade group. Guttman-McCabe praised Genachowski's proposal, saying it would free up valuable spectrum for wireless broadband.
It's critical for the FCC to find more spectrum, Genachowski said. AT&T's mobile data traffic has increased by 5,000 percent in the past three years, he said.
In addition, the U.S. is falling behind other countries in broadband penetration and speeds, he said.
"With this plan, we have a special opportunity to lay a foundation for American leadership in the 21st century," he said. "If we get it right, broadband, and in particular mobile broadband, will be an enduring engine for creating jobs and growing our economy, for spreading knowledge and enhancing civic engagement, for advancing a healthier, sustainable way of life. This is our moment. Let's seize it."
One audience member questioned whether it's legal for the FCC to share auction proceeds with broadcasters. Genachowski's plan may take some changes in law for it to happen, answered Matt Wood, associate director of the Media Access Project, a media and communications reform group.
A representative of the National Association of Broadcasters wasn't immediately available to comment on Genachowski's speech. The NAB has generally resisted efforts to take away spectrum from broadcasters.
The national broadband plan will also recommend ways for spectrum licensees to share spectrum, and it will look for ways to eliminate government red tape for carriers that want to provide mobile broadband service, Genachowski said.
Ben Scott, policy director of media reform group Free Press, said Genachowski's speech is one of the few recent examples where a policymaker proposed concrete solutions for problems with broadband availability.
"For ages, we had this debate about the problems and the benefits [of broadband], but without any real meat on the bones about how we were going to get from point A to point B," he said.