Whether or not you are a gifted artist, theres a fun, free game on the interweb thats gonna make you feel like a seasoned professional. Its called Silk and you can make gorgeous little designs in an instant with vertical or four-way symmetry. Or, for you gutsy folks, no symmetry.
MORE: Image of the Day: Take a break with this interactive art game | DVICE.
In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized crime, he learned, but another shadow trade: Each driver paid a “spy” to record when the bus ahead of his had departed the stop. If it had left recently, he would slow down, letting passengers accumulate at the next stop. If it had departed long ago, he sped up to keep other buses from passing him. This system maximized profits for the drivers. And it gave Šeba an idea.
“We felt here some kind of similarity with quantum chaotic systems,” explained Šeba’s co-author, Milan Krbálek, in an email.
After several failed attempts to talk to the spies himself, Šeba asked his student to explain to them that he wasn’t a tax collector, or a criminal — he was simply a “crazy” scientist willing to trade tequila for their data. The men handed over their used papers. When the researchers plotted thousands of bus departure times on a computer, their suspicions were confirmed: The interaction between drivers caused the spacing between departures to exhibit a distinctive pattern previously observed in quantum physics experiments.
“I was thinking that something like this could come out, but I was really surprised that it comes exactly,” Šeba said.
Subatomic particles have little to do with decentralized bus systems. But in the years since the odd coupling was discovered, the same pattern has turned up in other unrelated settings. Scientists now believe the widespread phenomenon, known as “universality,” stems from an underlying connection to mathematics, and it is helping them to model complex systems from the internet to Earth’s climate.
MORE: In Mysterious Pattern, Math and Nature Converge | Wired Science | Wired.com.
In all, Retraction Watch published 22 stories on the implosion of Pottis career. In fact, three of the top four Google results for his name all point to the Retraction Watch blog the fourth is his Wikipedia entry. Despite the widespread attention to his misbehavior, Potti managed to get a position at the University of North Dakota where he worked earlier in his career. Meanwhile, he hired a reputation management company, which dutifully went about creating websites with glowing things to say about the doctor.
This morning, however, 10 of the Retraction Watch posts vanished. An e-mail Oransky received explained why: an individual from “Utter [sic] Pradesh” named Narendra Chatwal claimed to be a senior editor at NewsBulet.In, “a famous news firm in India.” Chatwal said the site only publishes work that is “individually researched by our reporters,” yet duplicates of some of the sites material appeared on Retraction Watch. Therefore, to protect his copyright, he asked that the WordPress host pull the material. It complied.
There are a large number of reasons to doubt this story. As Oransky told Ars, “WhoIs says the offending site didnt exist until after wed posted nine of the allegedly plagiarized posts.” And he noted one of the commenters at the site pointed out one of the supposedly plagiarized pieces visible on the News Bullet site refers to “Ivan’s Reuters colleagues.” The style of writing and format of the stories in question should also be very familiar to regular Retraction Watch readers.
A quick look at a number of other posts on the site also shows Chatawals claims of original reporting are bogus. Simple Google searches show sentences of the material appear at a variety of other outlets. See, for example, this story, which is apparently a direct copy of a Indo Asian News Service article.
This is the latest in a long line of spurious DMCA takedowns, but its the first that Oransky and Marcus have dealt with Oransky said theyve had a single cease-and-desist letter about a copyrighted image
MORE: Site plagiarizes blog posts, then files DMCA takedown on originals | Ars Technica.
The Federal Communication Commission is proposing a “Super Wi-Fi” network that could potentially give everyone free access to fast wireless Internet. The plan already has support from tech giants Google and Microsoft, but faces stiff opposition from telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon that fear a Super Wi-Fi network could destroy their existing business models and create interference with their cellular and TV networks.
As the The Washington Post notes, a free public Wi-Fi network that spans the entire nation would allow people to cut their cellular data plans, but more importantly, would grant universal Internet access to poorer folk. While Super Wi-Fi isn’t even based on traditional Wi-Fi tech and isn’t endorsed by the Wi-Fi Alliance, it is super, in that it could potentially deliver data speeds of up to 20 megabits per second over miles, passing right through thick walls and other solid objects that would normally reduce a Wi-Fi signal.
MORE: Free government-owned ‘Super Wi-Fi’ could kill your Internet bill
If you ever need a quick scratchpad to just write, not save what you write, but just write, you can quickly turn your web browser into an ultra-basic notepad with a single line of HTML.
This clever trick comes from developer Jose Jesus Perez Aguinaga who says that “sometimes I just need to type garbage. Just to clear out my mind. Since I live in the browser, I just open a new tab and type”
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
Thanks to the HTML5 contenteditable attribute and the modern browser’s ability to handle data URIs, your browser is now a notepad — just click to type.
MORE: Turn Your Browser into a Notepad With a Single Line of HTML5
You’ve probably already made sure to choose the appropriate format for each image as well as keeping its size (in pixels) to a minimum. Maybe you’ve reduced the JPEG quality setting as much as you can. (Although if you’re not quite confident in your knowledge of the fundamentals then the Designer’s Guide to Image Compression may help.)
The unfortunate reality is that, no matter how carefully you design your images, the graphics tool you’re using will not save the finished files in the most efficient way. And so passing those images through a compression tool can reduce their size considerably.
Exactly how much you can save is tricky to say for sure as it depends very much on your source graphics. Some JPGs may only drop by 50-100 bytes. It’s not unusual for regular web graphics to be compressed by 10-40%, though, with no loss of image quality (and lossy compression techniques, perhaps reducing colours or reencoding JPEGs can cut file sizes even more).
Which programs are the best, then? Good question. To help provide an answer we’ve pitched 18 of the top contenders against each other.
MORE: The best image compression tools
Recently, Twitter introduced Vine – a new mobile application that lets users capture a number of film frames, which are looped in short 6-second videos and shared on Twitter.
Vine – The Instagram of Video
Some argue that these 6-second video tweets are the next Instagram, as they can artistically capture spontaneous moments, but with motion and sound features. Brands are already experimenting with Vine as a new short ad format. The great news for brands is that they can communicate and entertain across social networks but are less likely to lose consumers attention than traditional advertising.
We monitored how often the Vine app has been used or mentioned on Facebook and Twitter by brands and media throughout the last week of January, after its launch on the 24th until January 29th:
MORE: The New Vine App: 5 Tips for Brands – Socialbakers.
Anyone watching the Super Bowl this evening saw a great game — and one of the greatest embarrassments in pro sports history: a power outage that halted play for a full half hour.
As the eventual champion Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers — and tens of thousands inside New Orleans Superdome and millions watching on TV — waited, Oreo came up with an idea so brilliant and bold that it out and out won the night.
“Power out? No problem,” the tweet read, along with a hastily-put together image of an ad showing an Oreo and the brilliant tag line, “You can still dunk in the dark.”
The tweet caught fire, and as of this writing had been retweeted 13,734 times.So how did the cookie company act so fast, and get so many talking — all with minimal time available, and negligible expense?
MORE: How Oreos brilliant blackout tweet won the Super Bowl