One way to keep pictures secret is to disguise them with chaos, say computer scientists
It’s been more than ten years now since the idea emerged of using chaos to encrypt messages.
Tag Archives: Blog - Page 3
Blog – Encrypting Pictures Using Chaotic Cellular Automata
Posted by Gsurface
on January 4, 2012
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Blog – Cars and Ultrabooks: a CES Preview
Posted by Gsurface
on January 4, 2012
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Blog – BASF Funds Sugar-from-Wood Startup
Posted by Gsurface
on January 4, 2012
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Blog – Microphone Turns Any Surface into Touch Interface
Posted by Gsurface
on January 3, 2012
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Blog – That’s Sir Jonathan Ive, To You
Posted by Gsurface
on January 3, 2012
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Blog – Chasing the Elusive Energy Policy
Posted by Gsurface
on January 3, 2012
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Strong energy policy is needed now more than ever, but the chances that Congress will pass one in 2012 are slim.
Prospects for passing some sort of long-term energy policy were good just two years ago, but a lousy economy and some aggressive lobbying by opponents of climate change policy derailed those efforts, and there’s no reason to think things will get back on track in 2012.
Blog – Statisticians Reveal What Makes America Happy
Posted by Gsurface
on January 3, 2012
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A statistical analysis of attitudes in the US reveals the main determinants of happiness but also suggests that interpreting the data is fraught with danger
The pursuit of happiness is a right enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. So an increasingly important question for economists, psychologists and decision-makers is the role that happiness plays in society and how toincrease it.
Blog – Was WebOS Doomed from the Start?
Posted by Gsurface
on January 2, 2012
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Early mistakes may have led to the OS’s troubles.
When a product that appeared to hold promise fails, there come the post-mortems. WebOS isn’t dead yet, but it might be called moribund–HP’s recent decision to open-source it smacks of Hail Maryism–and the New York Times has managed to turn up a few former engineers on the software to tell us where it went wrong. “[I]t never could have executed,” says one.
Blog – Best of 2011: Faster-than-Light Neutrino Puzzle Claimed Solved by Special Relativity
Posted by Gsurface
on January 2, 2012
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Blog – Starts ‘n’ Stops
Posted by Gsurface
on December 31, 2011
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Highlights from the Physics arXiv this week
The Physical Basis Of Natural Units And Truly Fundamental Constants
Blog – Tout’s Analytics Hold Up a Mirror to Email Behaviors
Posted by Gsurface
on December 31, 2011
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Quantifying the daily crush of email will make you want to write fewer of them.
Thanks to email management startup Tout, I just got access to an analytics dashboard that includes an array of deftly visualized statistics covering my use of email in 2011. And you can too, right here. If you’re wondering what you’ll get in exchange for giving Tout access to every email you sent and received in the past year, here’s a sample dashboard, so you can get a feel for the results. (They promise they don’t read or store any of it.)
Blog – Mims’s Bits’s Greatest Hits for 2011
Posted by Gsurface
on December 30, 2011
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Eleven stories that enraged and enlightened
What follows are the Mims’s Bits stories from 2011 that received the most comments, attention, retweets, etc. Popularity is no measure of quality, but maybe it’s a window on the zeitgeist. And frankly, the best part about the pieces that follow are the discussions that followed in the comments.
Blog – Amazon Democratizes Supercomputing
Posted by Gsurface
on December 30, 2011
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Got a big question? Willing to spend $ 1,279 an hour?
It may be stretching the point a little to call it, as Wired‘s Cade Metz does, the “world’s fastest nonexistent supercomputer.” Amazon’s supercomputer–it built one recently atop its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)–exists alright, although it is virtual. Most salient, though, is the fact that Amazon promises to bring supercomputing power to, if not the masses, then at least to anyone with a big question a decently-sized grant.
Blog – Best of 2011: Atmosphere Above Japan Heated Rapidly Before M9 Earthquake
Posted by Gsurface
on December 30, 2011
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Blog – 3-D Tech Helps Runners Heal, Improve
Posted by Gsurface
on December 30, 2011
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Motion capture isn’t just for the movies anymore.
By now, those of us who follow entertainment technology are familiar the image: an actor covered with tiny biometric dots, which are used to transform the actor’s motion into a 3-D image. (It was the technology behind the recent Planet of the Apes movie, for example.) But here’s a novel idea: using the same technology not for entertainment, but for medicine. Runners from Britain will be using 3-D technology to assess their running technique and (hopefully) prevent injuries, reports The Engineer.
Blog – Best of 2011: New Type Of Entanglement Allows ‘Teleportation in Time’
Posted by Gsurface
on December 29, 2011
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Blog – More Reasons Not to Worry about Electric Car Fires
Posted by Gsurface
on December 10, 2011
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Battery packs are almost definitely less dangerous that a tank full of gasoline. Too bad.
GM says it’s a good idea to drain the power out of the Volt battery pack if it’s in a bad accident. That makes sense. After all, if a car is totaled one of the smart things to do is drain the gas tank. This bit of wisdom is one takeaway from an excellent article in The Economist that was written in response to some recent government tests that have caused Volt batteries to catch fire—after damaged batteries were allowed to sit for days or weeks.
Blog – Much-Needed Perspective on the GM Volt Battery Fires
Posted by Gsurface
on December 10, 2011
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250,000 vehicles catch fire on America’s roads every year, and exactly none of them are electric.
No electric car has ever caught fire under real-world conditions, but the battery packs of two Chevy Volts have in test crashes. The controversy that followed could have been predicted, unfortunately. For all our talk of embracing innovation, there is always someone ready to declare that the growing pains of disruptive new technologies are in fact their death knell.
Blog – Will Releasing WebOS Make HP Relevant Again?
Posted by Gsurface
on December 10, 2011
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Blog – Rules ‘n’ Rhymes
Posted by Gsurface
on December 10, 2011
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The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week
Kepler-22b: A 2.4 Earth-radius Planet in the Habitable Zone of a Sun-like Star
Blog – Getting Ultrafast Internet by Ditching the Phone (and Cable) Company
Posted by Gsurface
on December 10, 2011
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Blog – Social Networking Is About to Get Exponentially More Annoying
Posted by Gsurface
on December 9, 2011
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If you’re old enough to remember a time before the Internet, be prepared to reconsider your state’s prohibition on the right to die.
MagnetU is a $ 24 device that broadcasts your social media profile to everyone around you. If anyone else with a MagnetU has a profile that matches yours sufficiently, the device will alert both of you via text and/or an app. Or, as founder Yaron Moradi told Mashable in a video interview, “MagnetU brings Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and other online social networks to the street.”
Blog – Biophysicists Discover Four New Rules of DNA ‘Grammar’
Posted by Gsurface
on December 9, 2011
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For 60 years, biologists have known of only two grammar-like rules that govern the language of DNA. Now they’ve found four more
The Austrian biochemist, Erwin Chargaff, is famous for the two rules he discovered that now bear his name. At the time of this discovery, in 1950, the biggest problem in biology was understanding the structure of DNA. Chargaff’s rules turned out to be an important clue in this puzzle.
Blog – How Will Facebook Use Gowalla?
Posted by Gsurface
on December 9, 2011
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To further its claim on your digital identity, Facebook branches out in both time and space.
On December 2, CNN Money, citing “a source close to Gowalla,” reported that Facebook had acquired the location-based service, which was launched as a rival to Foursquare. Most of the Gowalla team is expected to move from Austin, TX, to Palo Alto, California, where Facebook is based. Gowalla declined to comment at the time, since it has a policy against commenting on “rumors and speculation,” but Foursquare found the acquisition believable enough to have issued a statement of congratulation to its onetime rival. (Foursquare has a half-million daily active users against Gowalla’s 10,000, reportedly.) Then, on the 5th, it became more than mere “rumors and speculation,” with Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams confirming the deal on the company blog.
Blog – Can We Achieve ‘Freedom’ from Our iPhones?
Posted by Gsurface
on December 9, 2011
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A chat with the creator of “Freedom,” software that shuts off your Internet connection, about why we can’t have similar software for iOS.
Fred Stutzman is the creator of Freedom, an application that shuts off your connection to the Internet for a pre-determined amount of time. Without this program, I probably would not have completed graduate school; I would certainly be a much less productive writer. I use it almost daily–sometimes for hours at a time, sometimes just for a few minutes to help get me over a hump of Internet-related distraction.
Blog – The Emerging Art of Algorithmic Music
Posted by Gsurface
on December 8, 2011
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Blog – China’s Isn’t Building a Traveling Wave Nuclear Plant (Yet)
Posted by Gsurface
on December 8, 2011
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Rumors of a partnership between TerraPower and China aren’t true.
The word is that TerraPower, a company backed by Bill Gates that’s developing a new kind of nuclear power plant, is going to develop the reactor in cooperation with the Chinese government. But that word is wrong.
Blog – Will the Kinect 2 Be Able to Read Your Lips?
Posted by Gsurface
on December 7, 2011
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Some sources say that the next iteration of the Kinect will be so precise that it can lip read.
How will users hack this one? The Kinect is a device that inherently grows and expands: Microsoft itself has come around to acknowledging that the oft-hacked device really belongs to the world.
Blog – Physicists Develop ‘Weather Forecast’ For Purchasing Decisions
Posted by Gsurface
on December 7, 2011
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Blog – Germany’s Energy Mix Visualized
Posted by Gsurface
on December 7, 2011
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Blog – Daimler Tests Cordless Electric Vehicle Chargers
Posted by Gsurface
on December 7, 2011
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The inductive chargers could make charging more convenient.
Having a few electric vehicle charging stations here and there isn’t a big deal. But if they ever become common in cities, they’ll be an eyesore, with their long, tangled black cords clumped onto their sides or sprawling across parking spaces to the outlet on the side of a car. Charging stations could also be a tempting target for vandals.
Blog – A Smart, Sexy—Thermostat?!
Posted by Gsurface
on December 7, 2011
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Blog – Elastic Electrical Cables for Robotic Skin
Posted by Gsurface
on December 7, 2011
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The first-of-their-kind wires could take the hard edge off of robots.
A Japanese company called Asahi Kasei has developed the world’s first elastic electrical cable — and has taken the liberty of christening it “Roboden” (here’s a link, if your Japanese is good). In a somewhat unsettling comparison, TechCrunch notes that Roboden can stretch by a factor of 1.5, “like the human skin.”
Blog – Giant Casimir Effect Predicted Inside Metamaterials
Posted by Gsurface
on December 6, 2011
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Exotic materials should lead to new ways of observing and playing with one of the strangest effects in physics, say Chinese physicists
Metamaterials are exotic substances designed to steer electromagnetic waves in ways that are impossible with ordinary stuff. One of their more exciting properties is that they can bend light in a way that is mathematically equivalent to the way spacetime bends light.
Blog – Econophysicists Model Tax Evasion In A Country-Sized Population
Posted by Gsurface
on December 5, 2011
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Manipulating social pressures could have a dramatic effect on the rates of tax avoidance, according to the new model
Tax evasion is a serious problem for many governments. In Greece, the more or less ubiquitous avoidance of tax has brought the country to its knees and the European Union to the verge of collapse. So there’s more than a little interest in understanding the way this behaviour spreads and how to combat it.
Blog – Everything You Need to Know about CarrierIQ
Posted by Gsurface
on December 5, 2011
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Blog – The 10 Most Hilariously Geeky Fake Twitter Streams
Posted by Gsurface
on December 4, 2011
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Fake Twitter accounts are satire elevated to its highest expression.
In an age in which fans of The Daily Show shows are among the most informed citizens in the U.S. and The Onion doesn’t have to break character in order to report real news without embellishment, it’s clear that humor has become one of the primary ways an informed citizenry stays that way.
Blog – Ponds ‘n’ Lakes
Posted by Gsurface
on December 3, 2011
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The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week
Blog – First Demonstration Of Opto-Electronic Reservoir Computing
Posted by Gsurface
on December 2, 2011
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Blog – Bionic Contact Lenses Point to a Heads-Anywhere Display
Posted by Gsurface
on December 2, 2011
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Researchers at Washington University in Seattle are developing a contact lens that could project text and images before your very eyes.
It remains somewhat speculative, to be sure. But a group of researchers has made advances towards a Terminator-like era of augmented vision. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle recently established that their “bionic contact lenses,” which could someday stream text and images right in front of their wearer’s eyeballs, are “safe and feasible,” reports BBC News. Safety tests in rabbits have shown no ill effects, meaning research will continue.
Blog – Printing Bones in 3-D
Posted by Gsurface
on December 2, 2011
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Blog – With Chrome Ascendant, Mozilla Is a Dead Man Walking
Posted by Gsurface
on December 2, 2011
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Blog – A 15-Inch MacBook Air in 2012?
Posted by Gsurface
on December 1, 2011
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Digitimes reports a MacBook Air refresh could come sooner than expected, and with a larger screen.
Though a technology blogger by trade, I’m very circumspect when it comes to my own gadget purchases. I type this on an old, wheezing MacBook nearing its fourth birthday, and when I bring it into Apple Stores, the Geniuses marvel at it, as at an archaeological relic. Loyal Hello World readers will know, nonetheless, that I’m seriously eyeing a MacBook Air for my next purchase. This is fast becoming, after all, the era of the über-thin laptop–both Apple’s sleek models and its ascendant competitors, the Intel-branded “ultrabooks.”
Blog – Human Brain Is Limiting Global Data Growth, Say Computer Scientists
Posted by Gsurface
on December 1, 2011
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Evidence has emerged that the brain’s capacity to absorb information is limiting the amount of data humanity can produce
In the early 19th century, the German physiologist Ernst Weber gave a blindfolded man a mass to hold and gradually increased its weight, asking the subject to indicate when he first became aware of the change. Weber discovered that the smallest increase in weight a human can perceive is proportional to the initial mass.
Live Blog: The Spotify Special Event
Posted by Gsurface
on November 30, 2011
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Hot music startup Spotify is holding a special event in New York City this morning, where it’s going to unveil what it’s calling a “New Direction” for the service. Spotify hasn’t given any details on what to expect, but it obviously considers it to be a very big deal — enough so that it’s invited dozens of reporters to attend.
Several reports indicate that Spotify will be launching a new platform for third party developers, who will be able to integrate Spotify’s large catalog of music into new applications.
As seems to be Spotify’s style, the event has unusually high production values: waiters are handing out espressos and bite-sized breakfast foods that I’ve never heard of (but are quite delicious). The company has a custom backdrop for the stage featuring music-themed illustrations. And there are over a dozen flat-panel televisions lining the walls, which I suspect will be used to showcase third-party apps later on in the event.
TechCrunch
Blog – Is Personal Data the New Currency?
Posted by Gsurface
on November 30, 2011
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What if Facebook paid you? Several startups envision an era in which we are all the brokers, and beneficiaries, of our own personal data.
If you’re a Facebook user–and let’s face it, you are–you might figure that the price is right. “Free” has a nice ring to it, after all. You get a digital forum in which to interact with your friends and acquaintances, to share photos and notes, to poke and be poked–all for nothing. Zip. Nada. Sweet deal, right? How could it get any better?
Blog – Video Search Solves the News Segmentation Problem
Posted by Gsurface
on November 30, 2011
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The problem of indexing video news content has been solved by computer scientists at an innovative French search engine
Video search is one of the most difficult challenges facing search engines. Given a particular query, the task is to select from all stored videos the ones that the searcher most wants to see.
Blog – Why Apple is Already the #1 PC Manufacturer
Posted by Gsurface
on November 30, 2011
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Blog – The Fastest Tablet Ever (For Now)
Posted by Gsurface
on November 29, 2011
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The quad-core tablets are coming. First up: the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime.
The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime–let’s call it the Transformer Prime, for “short”–can now be pre-ordered online, report several sources. It may not be the most eagerly awaited gadget of all time, and it may not be the most elegantly named, but it marks a new era: the Transformer Prime is the first tablet that comes with a quad-core processor built in.
Blog – Apple Products Drove, Profited From, Cyber Monday
Posted by Gsurface
on November 29, 2011
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Cyber Monday comes of age, goes mobile, and gets fuel from Apple.
Six years ago, Cyber Monday was novel enough to require quotation marks when used in a headline. Today, as e-commerce becomes more and more important in our lives, it has become canonized as one of the most lucrative shopping days of the year. Today, IBM reports a record-breaking Cyber Monday for 2011–one that was particularly enriching (along with Black Friday) for Apple.
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