Interesting article:
The mission for 'Secret Agent', the 24th CGChallenge, was to depict characters and events involving espionage, gadgets, guns and evil geniuses, via a still image or video. The field of almost 1,200 undercover artists who took up the challenge did not disappoint.
ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2009) — In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source of inefficiency. But new research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable electricity.
Here is the Eurovision Song Contest statistics from 1994-2008, visualized. It's in Norwegian but it gives some good insights to neighbour voting, or not?
RoamBi transform your existing data from a variety of sources into state-of-the-art, interactive visualizations for the iPhone. Explore and analyze your data with the ease of playing a video game and the power of an enterprise reporting tool.
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted."
TED mission: Spreading ideas.
Since I still find TED very interesting, I bump the post (From July 2007 to 2009 March).
Kseve has put together a workspace-oriented desktop with a few programs.This desktop is a combination of several tools including layered wallpaper to establish boundaries between items, previously mentioned Fences to further enforce those boundaries by creating the gray corrals around the icons. Rounding out the computer-as-real-desktop theme is Launchy, skinned with a sticky note skin. The final tweak comes courtesy of Start Killer, which removes the start button in Windows Vista. The widgets are native to Vista, but Windows XP users can install the sidebar too.
Kseve's Work Desktop [Flickr]
Mygazines is a site that could turn out to be too good to be true. It allows users to share magazine articles by uploading them to the site. This then allows for anyone to view those magazine articles free of charge. It is very easy, and possible, to read an entire magazine right on the site. The folks running Mygazines say that they, “take great pride in providing a platform for people and businesses to share articles and magazines in an interactive and fun format.”If you thought for a moment that this doesn’t sound like it’s particularly legal, that’s because it’s not. They are encouraging their users to infringe on copyrights. 
a visualization of the 2008 US movie box office revenues. each graph shows the trends in the top 25 movies at the box office for each weekend in a year. the color is based on the movie's debut week so that long-running movies gradually start to stand out from newer movies with different colors.
Combine the Discussion arenas, Easy access to facts and Visualizations of the effects*, and you will have a powerful Lobby machine.
This is a Comparison of Spreadsheet Functions between Excel, Google Spreadsheets, EditGrid, ThinkFree - Calc, OpenOffice Calc and Zoho Sheets made in July 2007. It consists of more than 500 unique Spreadsheet functions.
A Swiss marine biologist and an Australian quantum physicist have found that a species of shrimp from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, can see a world invisible to all other animals.
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.
Chilirec is the latest Recorded to hit the internet. It is a Swedish "innovation" that lets you record a number of radio stations. I have tried the service for about 5days now and I have already recorded more than 300.000 songs. Even if the counter is wrong by a factor of x100, it is still amazing. All recorded song can be transfered to my desktop as MP3 files with a perfect id-tag.
I just bought this. The only drawbacks are 1) the internal fan is not as quiet as I would have like it to be. 2) I can't listen to music and up load music, at the same time. 3) It works flawlessly 98% of the time, but not 100%.
This is a Ferrofluid pattern. It is amazing what shapes can be made just by rotating a magnetic field. Some of the patterns makes you wounder if there is a life science link. Enjoy the movie. Here is another, more classical mystery. And another + Pool full of Corn starch - Walk on water.
Democratic (above) and Republican (below) poll average.
This morning, Richard Branson’s spaceship startup Virgin Galactic unveiled the second design of its suborbital vehicles, SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two. SpaceShipTwo is what the passengers will actually ride in, and White Knight Two is the launch vehicle that carries it to a high altitude before releasing the rocket.
2Advanced Studios have received the FWA award - the most influential flash site of the decade. The runner ups - like the 2006 award, In Sync Challenge - are worth viewing as well.
JOCR is a little program that can capture an image from any part of the desktop and perform optical character recognition (convert images to text) on the contents. It is free to download and use but it uses a resource provided with MS Office, and requires that Microsoft Office 2003 or higher be installed on the machine where it is used.The recognizable languages by MODI and JOCR are, in the alphabetical order, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish. Confirm your available language by executing "Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Document Imaging" and selecting "Tools > Options > OCR tab > OCR Language"
I’ve been looking for a freeware OCR program that does exactly this sort of thing. The only drawback with this is the MS Excel requirement; otherwise it is a very simple, straightforward program that works well.
Source:freewaregenius
LiberTV is a local client software that can download or stream films, videos, and podcasts from online sources. It promises quality “high definition” videos updated daily that you can browse through by category using a well designed user interface. Some of the content looks very interesting.
Adam Sporka is the designer of this compact 2008 Calendar. Weighting in at the size of a business card, the tiny Thumb Calendar makes it possible to keep a calendar on you at all times. The Thumb Calendar is two sided and in order to use it, you must cover the dates that are not directly below the month header with your thumbs.
Venus Express has been making the most detailed study of the planet’s thick and complex atmosphere to date. The latest findings highlight the features that make Venus unique in the Solar System and provide fresh clues as to how the planet is - despite everything - a more Earth-like planetary neighbour than one could have imagined.
“Anything great always starts with love,” says soul-music aficionado Vonnie “Honey” Woods, whose means of expressing her sincere, simple passion for the music and its artists, has grown from a small mailing list about new music finds, to an internet show called Soul 2 Soul.
The awards, founded in 1991, mark achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think".Pioneering research into a "gay bomb" that makes enemy troops "sexually irresistible" to each other has scooped one of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes.
Other winners included work on treating hamster jetlag with impotency drugs, extracting vanilla from cow dung, and the side-effects of sword swallowing.
Video: Chicken, Chicken, Chicken: Chicken, Chicken
Real research
The awards, now in their 17th year, are intended to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology".
Marc Abrahams, the editor of AIR, told the BBC News website: "When I became the editor of a science magazine, suddenly I was meeting all kinds of people who had done things that were hard to describe, and for the most part, nobody had ever heard of.
"For some of them, it seemed a great shame that nobody would give them any kind of recognition, and that was what really led to the birth of the Ig Nobels."
Like their more sober counterpart, the Nobel Prizes, the Ig Nobels are split into several categories and all research is real and published.
Medicine - Brian Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword.
Physics - A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled.
Biology - Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds.
Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.
Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.
Literature - Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the", and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.
Peace - The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.
Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, "bottomless" bowl of soup.
Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
Aviation - A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.
Source: BBC
Content aware image resizing will more than likely be a common occurrence in the future. It uses a seam carving technique to eliminate the less important portions of an image, thereby leaving only what people want to see. The two images above are a good example of how this works. The one on the left is the original, and it shows two red lines indicating the next two "seams" that have been marked to be stretched or removed. The image on the right is the result: wider than the original, but only half the height. It was most of the water that was removed, which is exactly what most people would want to happen.
The creators of the system, Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan, have thought a lot of things through, and they left me drooling. If there is a portion of the image that is marked to be removed, you can reverse that action and tell the software to preserve that area (useful for preserving faces). If there is a portion that you want removed first, you can do that as well which makes removing people out of images easier than ever!
Go ahead and watch this video to see what I’m talking about. The end is one of the most exciting parts, and I’m sure you’ll be wanting to get your hands on this after you see it:
How much do you know about Anime music? Probably as much as I did before I read this:
