Denise Plant and Murphy Houston are the morning drive team disc-jockeys at KOSI101 FM in Denver. Murphy is a Denver icon in radio and Denise is the queen of media in Denver - radio, television and commercials. I mention this because even seasoned pros can be surprised… especially when their producer invites yours truly in for a morning science experiment. Behind the scenes, I never told Denise what was going to happen. You’re seeing it just as it happened on the air.

Reminds me of my cool science teacher when I was just a kid...

Radio DJ Didn’t See This Coming/Fire Extinguisher Science Demo

The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is announcing a new version at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle today, and the big news is that the whole thing is being rewritten from the ground up. M2, as it's being called, will include all of the features of the current Ma.gnolia, but it's going to be entirely Open Source. A first look at M2 should be available by September.

So, why Open Source, and what does it mean to Ma.gnolia users? Well, you'll be able to download Ma.gnolia and run your own version of it, and that version will be able to interoperate with Ma.gnolia.com and other web services. Standards like OpenID and OAuth will be supported, allowing for maximum portability of your data -- which, in the case of Ma.gnolia, mostly means your bookmarks and tags --- between sites. If you're already thinking of creative uses for an Open Source Ma.gnolia, good! They're looking to make user feedback a big part of building M2, so keep an eye on their blog if you've got input.

Ma.gnolia to go Open Source

Public Service Announcements in the medium of comics regarding the dangers of... well whatever the popular perils of the time are, have been hoisting well-intentioned gibberish on kids for generations. PSA comics have touched on everything from drugs, to smoking, to famine, and land mines.

The latest in a long heritage of comics urging you to do right comes without any super heroes or association with an established comic outlet like Marvel or DC. Justice Case Files really... is an in-house effort from the National Center for State Courts, which we can only assume is a front for the RIAA, the most dastardly group of super villains to ever grace the pages of a comic book.

This disgrace to the label of propaganda bulges with misinformation so dense you d have to bushwhack your way through its pages to find even a kernel of truth.

Issue one centers around Megan, a student with a file sharing addiction that puts her freedom and scholarship seriously? jail time isn t motivation enough? at risk. Megan is charged with Criminal Copyright Infringement by her fictional city government and faces charges at the state level that could net her a total of $25,000 in fines and 2 years in prison. Of course, in real life Criminal Copyright Infringement involves the selling of copyrighted materials, not peer-to-peer file sharing, and CCI is prosecuted by the federal government not local courts, but who s paying attention? Apparently, not the legal non-profit handing out this mumbo-jumbo.

You can download the entire comic in PDF form here, or for those with a taste for the ironic, you can search Limewire and BitTorrent.

Major LOL!

Comic Book Does the RIAA s Bidding...

The tops carried slogans in German and Polish that translate as Jews forbidden from entering the park .

They were reproduced from Nazi signs from 1940 that targeted the Jewish community in the Polish town of Lodz.

Some 95% of more than 200,000 Jewish people there would die in concentration camps during World War II.

The sales assistant at the Parisian store, in the Belleville district, said one person had bought five of the grey, sleeveless garments for about 18 euros $27 each.

She said she did not understand what the inscription meant.

The neighbourhood of Belleville in eastern Paris has been the site of ongoing scuffles between groups of Jewish youngsters and youths of North African origin.

France has one of the largest Jewish communities outside Israel, numbering about half a million people.

Paris anti-Semitic T-shirt probe

Demonstrators who gathered outside the Mann Village Theatre, in Los Angeles, said the film "humiliates people with intellectual disabilities".

"intellectual disabilities"? That would include quite a few of my fellow Americans, mainly law makers, and co workers...

Protesters gather at Stiller film

About six months ago, I was invited by the North American Serials Interest Group NASIG to keynote their annual conference. After admitting that I didn t know what serials were think periodicals, journals and other similar things , I realized that this was a perfect opportunity to address a unique group, so I jumped at the opportunity. Serials librarians, and publishers of serialized works, have been at the forefront of understanding the relationship between physical objects, digital objects and how the two relate to each other. The music industry, as we know, tried to fight the conversion to digital of the physical objects with which they had traditionally made their money . As soon as Internet search engines appeared, and I suspect as soon as Google started indexing PDFs, the serials world realized that digitization of their content made it simultaneously more visible since now the most obscure journal could now be found and cited and possibly less valuable since it could not be copied easily . Moreover, libraries quickly realized that online access changed their understanding of what it means to the products of their subscriptions. Most people no longer look at the physical journal in the library, which the library clearly owns outright, but look at articles through online services. The questions then become: how is that paid for? What is owned? What happens to the owned content when publication goes out of business?

These are profound questions at the core of nearly all modern digital products, and instead of hiding from the problem, the serials world has quietly and methodically tried to articulate the questions and negotiate answers. Publishers, libraries and information brokers all participate in the NASIG conferences and discussions, and they've collectively come up with a range of fascinating solutions ranging from license models to technologies that preserve access to owned resources when the original provider disappears. In short, they've spent years trying to answer questions that are only starting to occur to folks in other disciplines.

My presentation, called Information Shadows: How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things (1.2MB PDF) is my attempt at showing how ubiquitous computing technology is, in essence, turning whole classes of everyday objects into serials, or services, by creating pervasive digital access to the objects' metainformation, their information shadows. In the process, I talk about blenders, timeshares, Cuddle Chimps, City Carshare, and Exactitudes. I think it's a fun talk, and I'm really happy to have had the opportunity to articulate these ideas in this forum.

How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things

Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear".

The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.

The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people.

The findings, by scientists led by Xiang Zhang, were published in the journals Nature and Science.

The new system works like water flowing around a rock, the researchers said.

Because light is not absorbed or reflected by the object, a person only sees the light from behind it - rendering the object invisible.

The new material produces has "negative refractive" properties. It has a multi-layered "fishnet" structure which is transparent over a wide range of light wavelengths.

The research, funded by the US government, could one day be used in military stealth operations - with tanks made to disappear from the enemies' sight.

Invisibility cloak 'step closer'

In recent months, I have been made aware of two such instances of this scientific rumor mill. In May of this year, I received an e-mail from someone describing himself as a cancer researcher who wanted to know why I was ignoring the proven danger of cell phones: My colleagues in Sweden and Japan tell me that exposure to microwave radiation from cell phones are potentially dangerous -- and that this should be acknowledged by the phone companies which they don t bother acknowledging . He went on to describe his colleagues experiments with mice in RF fields that had increased incidence of brain tumors. I found the description of this research to be surprising, since no such research has appeared recently in the scientific literature.

In July of this year, a more extreme example of the same type of underground science hit the news. Dr Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, circulated a memo to 3000 faculty and staff members at his Institute, warning them that children should use cell phones only for emergencies because their brains are still developing. He also said that everyone should keep the phone away from their heads and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset. He even warned against using cell phones in public places because it exposes others.

On what does Dr. Herberman base this warning? Early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science. Really, at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe, rather than sorry later, he stated.

Hijacking Science

They are accused of stealing more than 40m credit and debit card numbers before selling the information.

They allegedly hacked into shop and bank computer systems using a technique known as "wardriving" and installed software to access the data.

Prosecutors said the alleged fraud was an "international conspiracy".

'Increasing vulnerability'

Three of those charged are US citizens. The others come from Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus and China.

The 11 suspects are alleged to have illegally obtained card numbers, account information and password details by driving around neighbourhoods and hacking into wireless equipment.

They are said to have then concealed the information in computer servers both in the US and Europe.

US cracks 'biggest ID fraud case'

Crashing right after launch is, apparently, a startup rite of passage. If, however, you ve touted your new search engine as a Google killer, you might want to make sure crashes can t happen. Google never goes down, and quite simply, can t be killed with overloaded servers.

After Powerset s sudden sale to Microsoft, the blogosphere needed a new contender. A former Google search architect and her Stanford professor husband, along with other former Googlers operating under the protective wing of the anti-noncompete laws of California a law, ironically, Google likes to leverage when it can , thought for sure they could provide that new challenger.

And then all went blank at Cuil cool , which was touted to have thrice the index of Google, scanning 121 billion web pages. Servers today couldn t keep up with demand, illustrating what Powerset foresaw as their biggest hurdle: scalability. Microsoft provided that, along with enough cash to see it through. Even if you could get a query to return something today, though, reviews of the results have been mixed.

The results are supposed to be an alternative to Google s ranking system, which is often criticized for being more of a popularity contest among a myriad other criticisms in the search results. Hence all the Wikipedia and YouTube returns.

Cuil is said to operate differently from Google s distributed server, load-balancing concept—which incidently handles about a trillion URLs several times daily and manages to stay online—and has its servers divided according to category. If one searches for a sports-related query, for example, there are designated sports servers to handle that. One issue, as we re seeing today: If a spike in sports queries knocks the sports servers offline, other non-specialized servers specializing in, say, cooking, will handle the results instead.

In that event, you get either no results or bad ones, which is likely the cause of all the subsequent, to put it lightly, disappointment following initial launch hype. I thought an ego-search would be sufficiently simple for it—there couldn t be that many sources to pull from. After a few minutes, Cuil did bring back several instances where my articles have appeared on TechMeme, and once from the New York Times Blogrunner. A few images accompany the results, none of which are of me, one of which appears to be a female.

There s an interesting Explore by Category section currently more than a few minutes later unclickable to see where they lead, categorizing me, interestingly, under Critics of Scientology, Investigative Journalists, American Bloggers, Scottish Premiere League Players, Villages in Illinois, and Black and White Films.

Cuil Crashes And Burns At Launch