Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘web’

Giant webs give the landscape an eerie feel

During a humanitarian-aid trip last December, Russell Watkins, a photographer with the British government agency the Department for International Development, encountered the web-veiled landscape. “I wasn’t prepared for the scale,” he says. “Literally thousands of trees and bushes over dozens of miles were shrouded. It really was very spooky.”

While the floods displaced spiders, the mosquitoes were surprisingly unaffected. The stagnant water should have provided prime breeding grounds for the insects, but local inhabitants noticed that there were far fewer mosquitoes than expected. Although the spiders could have accounted for some of the mosquito population drop, John Gimnig, an entomologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that shifts in climate affect mosquitoes more than spiders do.

But how big does an asteroid need to be to cause major destruction? The new “Impact: Earth!” asteroid impact effects calculator will help you find out. The interactive web tool, developed by a Purdue University research team led by Jay Melosh, allows anyone to calculate the potential damage caused by a comet or asteroid striking the Earth. Users input information into several parameter fields, such as the diameter and density of the object, its angle of entry, and the location where it will hit. The calculator then estimates the impact consequences, providing information about debris distribution, ground shaking, size of the resulting crater, and whether a tsunami will be generated.

About 50,000 years ago, an asteroid about 164 feet in diameter scooped out the famous Barringer Crater (Meteor Crater) in northern Arizona. The new calculator estimates that if an asteroid twice as large as that one struck about 20 miles outside Chicago, it would generate impact energy equal to about 97 megatons of TNT—igniting a fireball with a 1-mile radius and triggering a magnitude-6 earthquake about six seconds after the impact.

The largest known impact threat in Earth’s near future is the asteroid Apophis, which scientists say has a small chance of striking the planet in 2036. The new calculator will tell you what will happen if Apophis falls in your backyard, Melosh says.

“Impact: Earth” is an update of an earlier impacts calculator that Melosh created with colleagues at the University of Arizona. The new user-friendly version includes more visual components, as well as calculations of tsunamis that would result from ocean impacts. Melosh is also a science team member on NASA’s EPOXI mission, which flew to within 435 miles of the comet Hartley 2 yesterday.

What’s really nice about the new Twitter is the way it puts a lot more information about a tweet in front of you navigating away from your Twitter stream. A two-pane interface keeps your stream on the left and fills the right pane with information about individual tweets as you select them. Click on a tweet in your stream, and the right pane populates with that user’s last few tweets, anyone mentioned within the post, people who have re-tweeted it, etc.

Also cool: the way the new interface lets you access media within individual tweets. If someone embeds a pic or a video within a tweet, rather than just linking out to that content on another page, it shows the full-size photo or video player in the right pane, letting you get right to the content and then back to cruising your stream without ever leaving Twitter. Even cooler: you can share an entire Flickr gallery via a tweet, which populates the right pane with thumbnails for the collection. You can even launch a Flickr slideshow in the right pane, again without leaving your stream.

Those are the highlights, which are punctuated by other little improvements, like a new set of hot keys (including one to refresh your stream), the display of people’s real names next to their Twitter handles, and a slimmer, less dominating “What’s Happening?” box – the one where you actually pen your tweets – letting the stream of content take center stage (according to TechCrunch's live blog of the announcement, this was to play up the idea that you don’t actually have to contribute to the Twitter dialogue to take advantage of it as a media exploration tool).

You don’t have to take our word for it. The new, sleeker Twitter is live here.

Sign in with your Google account and go to the main search page, and you’ll see it still looks the same. But start typing something — “Popular Science,” for instance — and Google brings up a page of instant results, which change as you keep typing. You don’t even have to type a full search term to find answers, because Google Suggest completes your thoughts for you.

Refining as you go allows for more effective searching — you can change topics mid-sentence if you don't see what you're looking for.

According to Google’s blog, developers realized that people read much faster than they type — they take about 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only about 30 milliseconds to glance at another part of the page.

Google Instant capitalizes on this, allowing you to scan a page full of search results even as you type.

There’s more coming from Google’s press conference today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. You can get the real-time updates from CNET’s insta-blog.

The much-hyped, rarely understood Google Wave project--essentially an email application with more intensive real-time collaboration and communication tools bolted on--will be developed no longer, Google announced in a blog post this afternoon. Can't say that it's much of a surprise.

Wave was composed of several technically innovative individual parts, like its real-time, as-you-type chat, an advanced spellcheck algorithm and the ability for developers to build their own add-ons. Innovative enough, in fact, to receive a Best of What's New nod last year. But the service lacked cohesion. Put simply: no one knew what to use it for.

Here at PopSci.com, we looked at using Wave as our command central for running the site (we currently use the web chat service Campfire), but found it too complex and in many ways ill-suited to the task. Having co-workers see what you're typing each keypress at a time--mistakes, recasts, backspaces and all--was more awkward than useful. And I still don't think I understand the methodology of storing conversations and projects in "Waves."

We, apparently, weren't alone. Google says "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." It will be maintained through the end of the year, and for those rarefied few that understood the service enough to start using it, they'll have a way to export all their data before the plug is pulled for good.

[Google Blog]

The robot is scheduled to be launched in November.

The agency may also open up parts of the spectrum for private experimentation

The tools on the FCC's Spectrum Dashboard provide access to information about the current spectrum allocations by frequency, type of use, and user. Study enabled by this dashboard can help us to better understand how portions of the spectrum are used and in what areas experimentation and innovation are possible.

The Spectrum Band Browser provides a color-coded breakdown of the current spectrum allocation scheme. Moving the mouse over a portion of the spectrum gives key details on the type of use.

If you find you like this spectrum chart so much that you would like to have a copy of your very own, the full chart is available for download here. Regrettably, the Government Printing Office no longer carries this poster, so you will have to make your own printing arrangements if you'd like to have this on your wall, as I do.

The Spectrum Dashboard also provides two tools for researching license holders and the portions of the spectrum to which they have been given access. Pictured above is a screen shot of the Map tool, which reveals license holders by county. Searching by both the legally registered and common brand name of the license holder is also supported.

The spectrum availability map by county provides a visualization of the amount of the licensed bands not currently allocated to license holders. For most of us at the present time, it is somewhere right around none.

If you find yourself interested in the details of the frequency bands, don't miss the "Search by FCC License Categories" tool. This is a search interface for detailed information about each of the allocated bands in the radio spectrum.

Radio-wave tinkerers may find something else to like. According to a recent New York Times article, "The plan will advise that some of the spectrum become unlicensed, so it can serve as a test bed for new technologies."

While there are already parts of the spectrum available for public usage, both through the portions allocated for amateur radio and the portions allocated for unlicensed operation, the FCC broadband plan acknowledges the benefits and innovations that have resulted from federal support of research and development and specifically addresses the issue of expanding the parts of the spectrum that are made available for research and experimentation. In section 7 of the plan, it states "Allowing research organizations such as universities greater flexibility to temporarily use fallow spectrum can promote more efficient and innovative communications systems."