An important property of polyaniline (PANi), a polymer, is its electric conductivity. This makes it suitable for the manufacture of electrically conducting fibers. Consequently, PANi and other conductive polymers have been extensively studied for optical and electronic applications and many practical syntheses of one-dimensional (1D) nanostructured PANi have already been developed. However, preparation of water-soluble, conductive PANi nanowires with controllable morphologies and sizes, especially with good processibility, is still a big challenge. A possible solution could lie in the use of self-assembled proteins, such as plant viruses, as nanotemplates for the synthesis of these nanowires.

Nanotechnology uses plant viruses for materials development

Moving books onto the network and the ramifications for how we define reading, and our privacy.

Reading the Next Book

Mixx is your link to the web content that really matters.

Mixx - News, photo, and video sharing

Over the next decade, regulators will spend increasing time on the conflicts between the private interests of the wireless industry and the public's interest in the best uses of its spectrum. This report examines the practices of the wireless industry with an eye toward understanding their influence on innovation and consumer welfare.

This report finds a mixed picture. The wireless industry, over the last decade, has succeeded in bringing wireless telephony at competitive prices to the American public. Yet at the same time we also find the wireless carriers aggressively controlling product design and innovation in the equipment and application markets, to the detriment of consumers. Their policies, in the wired world, would be considered outrageous, in some cases illegal, and in some cases simply misguided.

Wireless Carterfone, by Tim Wu

Spotify is a new kind of digital music service designed to help you enjoy music a little more.

Currently in private beta.

Spotify

Print this on a poster at Kinkos.

This project was made for the Singapore International Design Festival and is about an imagined designer's day in the year 2030. The diagram goes through her day and explains how she gets things done with the help of all her smart things.

This is the work of Tom Klinkowstein and Irene Pereyra. See also, A Networked Designer's Critical Path, 1990-2090.

A Day in the Life of a Networked Designer's Smart Things or A Day in a Designer's Networked Smart Things, 2030

Provided that Google has the nerve and resources to try to remake wireless in its image, it'll either prove its greatest triumph or its Waterloo.

Google is as much an ideology as a firm and can resemble a nation-state in its pursuit of power rather than a mere corporation chasing quarterly numbers. Google and its allies are now trying to make the principles of openness—the commanding ideology of the Internet—the conquering principle of the wireless world, and the Android announcement is just the first step.

Yes, Google Is Trying To Take Over the World

It is our opinion that Google (GOOG) has designed and deployed home-grown 10GbE switches as part of a secret internal initiative that was launched when it realized commercial options couldn’t meet the cost and power consumption targets required for their data centers.

This decision by Google, while small in terms of units purchased, is enormous in terms of the disruptive impact it should have on 10GbE switching equipment providers and their component supply chains. It is as if a MACHO just arrived in the Enterprise networking business and the orbits of the existing satellites have begun to shift without observers knowing why - until now.

Google’s Secret 10GbE Switch

Because of the importance of technology to the operations of modern terrorist groups, the factors that affect the technological sophistication of extreme organizations are of great interest. In this article, the process through which terrorist groups seek out and deploy new technology is examined by bringing to bear the deep literature that exists on technology adoption by commercial organizations. A framework is described that delineates not only the factors that influence a group’s decisionmaking processes surrounding new technology but also the obstacles that stand in the way of the successful absorption and use of unfamiliar technologies by a terrorist organization. This framework, by taking a holistic view of the entire technology adoption process, sets out a methodology to both more reasonably predict the outcome of a group’s technology-seeking efforts and to speculate about its future innovation efforts. Such a technology focused viewpoint provides a route to more fully inform risk assessment, especially with regard to the low probability-high consequence technologies that have served as the focus of much recent counterterrorist deliberation. The lessons provided by the framework with respect to weapons of mass destruction terrorism and to novel counterterrorist routes are discussed.

As I've said before, AQIM runs SAP.

Technology Acquisition by Terrorist Groups

NYT profiles the author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, which I recommended when it was published in 2004.

“Good enough had never been good enough." But now, for listeners and even the industry, “good enough is good enough.”

An anecdote on the theme:

Fifteen years ago, a rotund man in his mid-40's walked into a mom-and-pop computer store. It was the dawn of CD-ROMs and "multimedia", of single-disc encyclopedias, offering ready recall of everything from JFK's moon speech to early Louis Armstrong, along with convenient playback through the combination of that new marvel, the Sound Blaster, and a pair of compact "computer speakers".

To the staff at the store, he would become known as Analog Man. He rejected everything about the Way New Multi Media, all the way down to its binary core. He insisted on the superiority of the analog production chain. To support his position, he claimed to be able to discern the subtlest murmuring from the noise on his pristine vinyl editions of The Dark Side of the Moon. He defied anyone to repeat the feat with digital equipment, spare no expense.

Analog Man did not buy a computer that day.

Hard to Be an Audiophile in an iPod World