Quezi

Artist's conception of Keplar 11 planetary system. Image by NASA/Tim Pile PD

The technology and techniques involved in hunting for new planets outside of our solar system has advanced in leaps and bounds in the past few years. Finding earth-like planets orbiting neighbouring stars had long been the dream of astronomers, but it was not until 1992 that the discovery of the first exoplanet or extrasolar planet was announced.

Since then over 729 planets have been discovered by using various techniques (as at 27 January 2012). For updated information on the current numbers see the Interactive Extra-solar Planets Catalog.

Today (27 Jan 2012) it was announced that NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has found a further 26 planets in 11 planetary systems.

This planet hunting is not just for astronomers and scientists, now you have a chance to help them and perhaps discover a new planet.

When seen from the earth, as a planet passes in front of its star – known as a transit – there is a slight but often discernible drop in the star’s brightness. The Kepler spacecraft measures the star’s brightness over a period of time. The collected data is plotted onto a graph which shows brightness over time. This is known as a light curve.

These light curves are then examined by NASA’s computer programs. The light curves are then released into the public domain.

At planethunters.org they believe that very subtle variations are missed by the computers and that the human brain can spot these subtle variations and patterns much easier than computers. They are seeking volunteers to help with their planet hunting.

They give good tutorials as to what to look for and no scientific knowledge is required. You do not have to worry about making a mistake as the same light curve will be shown to multiple users.

If you are the first to find a possible planet transit and after further research it is found to be previously unknown planet, then your name will be included as co-author in the discovery papers.

So far the site and its community has found 34 potential planets. So get hunting!

Flying Car (with Internet, of course) Liz Henry, flickr cc-by-nd

What is the future of the Internet?

If you were to put any stock in my predictions of the future, we’d all have flying cars and robot butlers by now. So far be it from me to make any guesses what the Internet will look like years or decades from now.

But when some of Microsoft’s most creative researchers offer up their opinions…as they did in Imagining the Future: Thoughts on Computing…then, just maybe, that’s something worth paying attention to. Their vision of technology, computers and the Internet of the not-so-distant future expands on many of today’s most interesting cyber-trends.

The Internet of Things. It’s no longer just computers accessing the Internet. Along with phones (and phones, and more phones), all sorts of items are embracing connectivity, from refrigerators and cars, to televisions, cash registers and even our home’s power supply. The authors predict more than 50 billion devices will be Internet-connected by 2020, and the vast majority will be things other than desktop and laptop computers.

Off in the Cloud. As we call on all these billions and billions of devices to do more and more things (everywhere and anytime connectivity) they won’t necessarily need oodles of processing power and memory to carry out their tasks. Storage and services will be handled in the cloud, creating a new era of both conveniences and security/privacy concerns.

Information Hyperload. The world produced 1.8 zettabytes of new information in 2011. That’s 1.8 trillion gigabytes, for those of you counting. Put another way, 90% of the information ever created was created in the past two years! Along with billions of Facebook postings and a seemingly infinite number of pictures of cats, an explosion of scientific data (genomes, climate models, high energy physics) has piled on to the data mountain, leading to a need for ever larger, more powerful, more numerous and more energy hungry data centers.

From WIMP to NUI. The traditional (if I can use that word for technology only a few decades old) means of using computers, window-icon-menu-pointing (WIMP) is giving way to natural-user-interface or NUI. Increasingly, we can access the Internet through natural speech (Siri…are you listening?) and through gestures, like those made possible in gaming systems like Wii and Microsoft Kinect. Our technology is even moving beyond NUI and learning to anticipate our needs by tracking our history, location, schedules and making some pretty good guesses about what we mean by asking “What’s up today?”

Society. Increasingly, the Internet is going to impact society, and society is going to (attempt to) define what is and is not acceptable in the cyberworld.  The crowding of available spectrum with ever more zettabytes will call for new technologies and new regulatory controls regarding who gets access to what. Privacy, security, intellectual property protection and even concerns about cyberwarfare will shape the Internet of the future. Our ever-so-cumbersome policy-making bodies may have to learn to become more nimble to adapt, in more-or-less real time, to the demands of rapidly emerging technological issues.

And all this technological upheaval better get me my Internet-ready flying car sometime soon…

Photo by Podknox - CC-BY

The rise of meaningless garbage on the internet has worsened since the cloud-based ecosystem of the blogosphere went viral.  This distributed user-generated troll-platform is plug-compatible with e-chatter and cyber-empowerment.  The poster-child innovation capability is now hard-wired into six-sigma concurrent sessions at webinar workgroups.

The stuff and widgets of the information superhighway platform are like a gold-plated HDMI with its over-promised and under-delivered bitcoin-enabled Facebook integration. Going forward, the buy-in to the failsafe high-capacity emerging fault-tolerant geographic sysadmin capacity of the typical startup is a deal-breaker for the synergy price-point. With the kinetic standards and x86 64-bit Firefox XHTML webcasts of the intertubes, the dynamic liveware of social Wi-Fi 2.0 has googled the quantum webcasts of the impactful hypervisor.

If the God particle hadn’t been discovered by leet crowdsourcing within the twitterverse, management would have literally invested into it as a green enterprise system turnkey solution providing enhanced vendor lock-in with hard-coded 3.5G Dilbert troll bits.

Epic fail. Proprietary facepalm! Citation needed.

Before and after tweaking ... but which is which? (photo by dreamglowpumpkincat210 - CC-BY)

Today, it’s normal for fashion photos to be tweaked. In the March 2008 issue of Vogue magazine, one retoucher (Pascal Dangin) applied his skills to 37 fashion pictures and 107 advertisements! He made changes ranging from simple (removing a mole, a stray hair, some “crows feet” or a wrinkle) to advanced (changing breast size, leg length, or neck shape).

Occasionally one hears a call for the disclosure of modified images, but in the world of fashion and advertising almost all images have been tweaked in some way. Nor is image modification a new phenomenon: images were tweaked long Photoshop was used as a verb, and long before the Gimp open source image editor was created.

Already by the late 1980s it was possible to tweak photos on a computer. Although the tools were rudimentary, it was no problem to change the color of a bikini or remove a pimple. Before that, the photo itself—the physical print—would need to be modified. An airbrush was the favorite tool of the retoucher, because it enabled changes to be built-up gradually and rendered with smooth and imperceptible edges. With the aid of an airbrush, a skilled operator could remove blemishes and alter the model’s complection. It was also possible to delete unwanted objects by airbrushing over them. In this way, background clutter could be eliminated, or a landscape could be “improved” by rendering power lines invisible.

Before color potography became widely available, it was common to use watercolors to add tints to black-and-white photographs, to approximate the true colors. When done well, these hand-colored photos were almost indistinguishable from a color image.

Tweaking could also be done while a photo was being developed in the darkroom. A darkroom operator would move small opaque shapes over the photographic paper for part of the exposure time to modify the depth of development, in a technique known as “dodging” (if exposure was reduced in parts of the photo) or “burning” (if exposure was increased in parts of the photo). As with airbrushing, it was possible to remove a blemish or change the skin tone, but the technique was difficult to master.

Photos are routinely tweaked as they are being taken. Soft-focus can be used to downplay wrinkles, and a pimple can be covered up with makeup. Different lighting changes how a model looks: soft lighting from above and off to one side lends a feminine look, while harsh lighting or lighting from below can make even the most feminine model look like an ogre. Using a wide-angle lens and moving in close will make the model’s nose look much bigger, whereas a long lens will produce a more distinguished portrait. Clothing with a horizontal pattern makes a person look fatter, and clothing with a vertical pattern makes a person look taller.

Before the adoption of photography, everything was interpreted by the artist. A person commissioning a painting could specify exactly how they wanted the artist to represent the subject, and many historical photos depict the person as they would like to appear rather than how they actually looked. You could always rely on Picasso to correct the size and placement of someone’s nose, or on Lucian Freud to trim a few kilos from his Benefits Supervisor Resting. As for Priapus, I rest my case.

Manipulating images is as old as images themselves. However, we don’t always want to make everything as bland and symmetrical as possible; sometimes we want to go the other way. For that, there is caricature.

iPad navigation using GPS (photo by Karl Baron - CC-BY)

Much confusion has arisen over the level of support for GPS in Apple’s iPad 2, introduced in 2011. There are two reasons for this confusion.

The first source of confusion is that there are two types of iPad 2. There is a 3G-capable model (which can use the cellphone network), and a WiFi-only model. Apple’s specifications state that GPS is supported by the “iPad 2 WiFi + 3G”, but this doesn’t mean that both types of iPad 2 have GPS. To make sense of this, we need to see how Apple describes the two models:

• iPad 2 WiFi
• iPad 2 WiFi + 3G

So when Apple says that GPS is supported by the “iPad 2 WiFi + 3G”, they mean that it is only supported by the cellphone-capable model. Presumably this is because hardware support for 3G cellphone and GPS is implemented within the same silicon chip, so you get both or neither, depending on whether your model includes this circuitry.

The second source of confusion arises from the term “Assisted GPS” (AGPS) in the specification. Assisted GPS uses the cellphone network to obtain orbital data that speeds up the process of locking onto the GPS satellites. It’s also possible to speed up a GPS application by determining the position of nearby cellphone towers. However, the 3G iPad does not require these sources of assistance: it has a real GPS chip. If you remove the SIM card from the iPad (so that it cannot access the cellphone network), the GPS will still lock onto the satellites and determine the location of the iPad.

Without A-GPS, it can take several minutes to get a position fix, particularly if the location has not been recently determined. Once the location has been determined, subsequent fixes are acquired in a few seconds. With Assisted GPS, it rarely takes more than a few seconds to get a GPS fix.

So what about the WiFi-only version of the iPad 2? Can it use applications that rely on location services? It certainly can. To determine its location, the WiFi-only version cannot use GPS, but will use whatever other information is available. If the WiFi network has a location that is known to Apple (such as in a coffee shop, or on a home network whose position has been registered), a reasonably precise location can be determined (though not as accurate as the location provided by the GPS system). In the absence of a known WiFi network, the iPad may be able to deduce its location from the user’s IP address, but this can be very approximate indeed. It may indicate the user’s city, or the city of the user’s ISP, but sometimes the best it can do is to identify the center of the country in which the user is located.

Bill Gates in 1977 (PD)

Many people wear their religion on their sleeve, and others keep it private, but some people don’t have a religion. Atheists do not believe in the existence of deities, while agnostics neither believe nor disbelieve in the existence of deities. Here are seven well-known agnostics:

1. Warren Buffet – One of the world’s richest men, he made his billions as the head of Berkshire Hathaway. He kept his religious beliefs to himself until asked whether or not he believed in God. He responded that he was agnostic.
2. Bill Gates – The world’s most famous nerd is also among the agnostic. He is best known for founding Microsoft and revolutionizing the world of computers and the software they run on. In a 1995 interview, he said that there is “a lot of merit in the moral aspects of religion” but “I don’t know if there’s a god or not.”
3. Madam Curie – The first name in female scientists broke barriers, won awards, and was an agnostic. She was born in Poland as a Catholic but later renounced her religion in favor of becoming an agnostic.
4. Matt Groening – The executive producer of the longest-running show in television is also among the agnostic. Because The Simpsons is never hesitant to poke fun at religious institutions, he was asked by the Denver Post on his own religion. He replied “Technically, I’m an agnostic, but I definitely believe in hell — especially after watching the fall TV schedule.”
5. Annie Lennox – She has been a force in the world of music for decades. She also answered questions on her beliefs in an interview with Nick Thorpe in 2011. In describing her Christmas album she said “I started to see the words as being very metaphorical and, even though I am not a Christian, I could interpret them more broadly to be more about the miracle of all creation.”
6. Tom Bergeron – Try and turn on a television without seeing him. He is best known for his hosting duties on shows such as Dancing With the Stars and America’s Funniest Home Videos. He has even referred to being agnostic as “atheism for cowards.”
7. Zac Efron – If you are a teenage girl, you need no introduction to the heart-throb from the High School Musical movies. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Zac tells about his growing up in an agnostic household.

This is a guest post from Casey Roberts, a student who also writes for Radiology Assistant, which helps students find the right radiology degree.