Wired News reports: Rather than record companies having to make a new
run of CD pressings, Apple licenses some of their non-current titles
for iTunes. they’re not the only ones doing this but puting
significant energy into it. The upside is songs that might
otherwise not be available (legally?) now are. The downside is
some are exclusively licensed to Apple.
Turing is considered by many to be the “father of software.”
This, the first of a weekly series of BusinessWeek profiles on
innovators of the last century, considers his strange and eventful
life, and how Turing “Turing didn’t live to see the revolution he unleashed.”(Source: Slashdot)
Interesting. Some European researchers presented a program that
does this. But advocates for openness in gov’t info worry that
this will provoke increased secrecy.
(Source:beSpacific)
An article in Sunday’s Boston Globe Ideas section discusses innovations
in science lab architecture, the new Stata Center designed by Frank
Gehry cited as a particular example, the idea being that these
buildings are eye-catching on the outside and on the inside designed to
make people from disparate groups come into contact with each
other. Interdisciplinarity is the watchword. Does it really
work? This is the way Rowland has conducted business for quite
some time. Scientists exchange ideas at lunches, seminars,
reviews, or just walking around. And we have an electronics shop
and a machine shop which serve all the groups and really know their
experiments and can bring a different perspective. However, the
Globe article points out, things are not always so rosy with some of
the new projects. For the Stata Center, people complain about
noise and traffic and cost overruns.
“News that comes to you,” is one of J.D. Lasica’s ways of describing
RSS and newsreaders in a broad overview, pointing out that online users
are surfing web pages less and using syndication tools to filter
more. Lasica covers most of the bases, although he lists Blogger
as offering RSS/XML feeds, which comes as a bit of a surprise, as I
thought they only did Atom now. (Source: beSpacific)
According to Carl Zimmer’s forthcoming Discover article, a Harvard
medical school researcher aims to synthesize a life form without DNA or
proteins. Zimmer talks about how this sort of experiment may illuminate
the evolution of earthly life. (Source; The Loom)
