Hasta La Gadget!

Historic audio recordings aren’t exactly easy to access and play back since they’re often in obscure or aging formats and sit within giant repositories and private collections, but the Library of Congress is gearing up to help change that for researchers and the average joe. The outfit’s freshly announced National Recording Preservation Plan is headlined by a recommendation to create a publicly accessible national directory of sound recordings that’ll act as an “authoritative discography” with details regarding their production and where copies are housed. You’ll still have to take a trip to a library to hear the recordings for the time being, but the Library of Congress is hoping to hammer out licensing agreements that would allow for online streaming. Developing new preservation standards and creating university-based degree programs for audio archiving are also among the 32 short- and long-term recommendations spelled out by the document. Click the second source link to peruse the paper yourself.

[Image credit: Ray Tsang, Flickr]

Filed under: Misc, Alt

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Via: Huffington Post

Source: Library of Congress, Council on Library and Information Resources

When Raytheon isn’t busy building a railgun or tinkering with exoskeletons, it apparently spends some time coding software to help keep tabs on what folks are doing online. The Guardian got ahold of a video from 2010 that reveals a Raytheon employee demoing such software with the moniker Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or Riot for short. Instead of sifting through streams of tweets and Foursquare checkins to figure out a person’s haunts and schedule, Riot collates data for users and displays it in everything from maps (saved in .kml files) and charts. Riot is even savvy enough to pull out location information saved in the exif data of photos posted online. One visualization feature in the program arranges a target’s info in a spider web-like view and highlights connections between them and people they’ve communicated with online.

According to The Guardian, Raytheon shared the Riot tech with the US government and “industry” organizations in 2010 through a research and development initiative that aimed to build a national security system that could analyze “trillions of entities” online. Raytheon says it hasn’t sold the software to any clients, but we think this is a fine reminder that your friends, family and secret admirers may not be the only ones interested in your tweets and check-ins. Head past the jump to catch a video of Riot in action.

Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Alt

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Source: The Guardian

P4 and P5 aren’t the sorts of names that impart the manner of excitement space exploration companies and organizations are looking to inspire in the next generation of enthusiasts (nor the customers, philanthropists and tax payers destined to fund those explorations). The SETI Institute, a private non-profit, best known for its ties to the eponymous search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, is looking to add a little bit of audience participation to the act of naming Pluto’s newly discovered moons, which sport those rather uninspired alphanumeric designations.

Beginning today, SETI will open up an online contest to name the moons, both of which were discovered via the Hubble Telescope fairly recently. As with the rest of the dwarf planet’s moons, the organization’s asking that the names be associated with Hades (the underworld), with ties to Greek or Roman mythology. SETI will pre-select candidates and is also allowing for write-in candidates (though it’s retaining editorial discretion here, so, for better or worse, we’re not likely to see a Baba Booey moon in the near future).

On a recent trip to the Bay Area, we had the opportunity to speak to Mark Showalter, the senior research scientist at the organization’s Carl Sagan Center, an astronomer who played a key role in the discovery of the celestial bodies. You can check out that interview just after the break, before heading off to vote. Showalter is also co-hosting a Google+ Hangout with astronomer Hal Weaver today at 2PM ET.

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Source: Pluto Rocks

Forget the rose-tinted view of the early digital era that we sometimes get from chiptunes. High Contrast’s new “Spectrum Analyser” music video triggers our nostalgia by embracing the messiness and imperfections of computing in the ’80s and ’90s — all while producing the kind of psychedelic journey we’d have expected from the ’60s. We almost don’t know where to start. The flood of Windows screens? The polar bear fighting game? The endless, purposeful video glitches? There’s no one frame that can illustrate just how much 8- and 16-bit history is packed into one space. As long as you’re a fan of drum-and-bass, it’s best to catch the video after the break if you want a trip down memory lane… just expect a few odd detours.

Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Alt

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Source: Hospital Records (Twitter)

Insect-inspired robots are nothing new, but an insect driving a robot is decidedly novel. Graduate student Garnet Hertz managed to get a cockroach to control a mobile robot back in 2006, but scientists over at the University of Tokyo changed it up a bit by having a silk moth drive a small two-wheeled bot in pursuit of a female sex pheromone. As with the cockroach, the male moth steered the bot by walking around on a rotating ball, no training required. This isn’t just for fun and games of course; the eventual goal of the study is to apply the moth’s tracking behavior to autonomous robots, which will be helpful for situations like hunting down environmental spills and leaks. Until then, we’re crossing our fingers for a moth-driven Monster Truck rally. Check out both cockroach and moth-driving videos after the break.

Update: The university has just released their journal article about the study, which we’ve linked to in the source.

Filed under: Robots, Science, Alt

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Via: CNET

Source: Institute of Physics (YouTube), Garnet Hertz – Concept Lab, Institute of Physics