Smartphones. The more you think about it, the more the term just seems antiquated. A relic that just stuck around, sort of like the word “rewind.” With hulking phablets coming out more frequently and in larger sizes, it seems like the phone part of a phone is increasingly incidental. More »
When Arthur Buxton stumbled across a super-organized archive of Penguin’s science fiction, he thought it would be interesting to look at how the covers of the books had changed over time. He was right—and the labor of his work is this striking visualization. Buxton explains: More »
If you’re looking for more detailed insight about your Facebook network, such as your friends and your activity on the site, Wolfram Alpha announced a variety of updates to their Facebook analytics tool, which initially launched back in August. The tool allows users to see analytics on their daily posting activity, as well as friend statistics.
In the new update, Wolfram Alpha added a new categorization feature that arranges friends, family, and acquaintances into several different groups: Insider, Outsider, Gateway, Neighbor, and Connector. An Insider is a friend who has many mutual friends with you, an Outsider is a friend with very little common friends with you, a Gateway is a friend who has many friends outside of your network, a Neighbor is a friend with few friends outside your network, and a Connector is a friend who connects you with other groups.
All of this, combined with other information about your friends, such as location, age, gender, etc., will provide a bevy of different visualizations, and it lets you see certain patterns amongst your friends that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. Essentially, it’s pretty close to what Facebook’s new Graph Search can do, but this provides a visualized look into your network while you wait for Graph Search to launch.
To try out the new Facebook analytics features, you can type “Facebook report” into Wolfram Alpha’s search box, and after connecting their Facebook account with the search engine (as well as creating a Wolfram Alpha account), you’ll then see all sorts of information about your Facebook network.
Wolfram Alpha improves personal Facebook analytics tool is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Scientists from the European Bioinformatics Institute are squeezing unparalleled amounts of data in to synthetic DNA, and now they’ve achieved something absolutely amazing: they can store 2.2 petabytes of information in a single gram of DNA, and recover it with 100 percent accuracy. More »
There have been rumors floating around the internet for months suggesting Google has been considering building its own LTE network. Now, the Wall Street Journal claims that the search giant is secretly building its own new kind of wireless data network. More »
When Google receives government requests for personal data, does it spit in the G-Man’s face or invite him in for tea and crumpets? The search giant’s transparency report reveals that, 88 percent of the time, the US will be able to rifle through your emails while eating baked goods. The States tops the chart, demanding Mountain View release information on 14,791 users in the last three months — with 3,152 requested with a search warrant, 10,390 with a subpoena and 1,249 from processes including EDPA court orders. The list of the top five nosiest countries is rounded out by India, France, Germany and the UK. Tour the report and you may notice that, breaking with tradition, content takedowns are no longer mentioned — Google is planning to break out that data as a separate filing in the future.
Scientists have written MP3 files to DNA, according to a report published in the journal Nature. The data that can be written isn’t limited to just to audio files, however, and is achieved using trinary encoding. In this particular experiment, the researchers encoded all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as a part of Martin Luther King’s speech, a photo, a PDF, and the binary-to-trinary algorithm used for encoding.
The computer data had to be converted from binary to trinary due to the number of bases in a DNA molecule. While there are four bases, the researchers utilized one of the bases to avoid straight sequences of a single base, resulting in a total of three bases for data. This was done in order to avoid the errors that would result from utilizing the single base sequences.
The encoded data was split into sections, tagged with an ID, and marked to indicate its position within the overall file. In most of the instances, the files were then reconstructed correctly, with only one having a mistake in the sequence, although the mistake wasn’t so severe that the researchers weren’t able to recover the missing data.
The team responsible for the project stated that the storage density per gram was an astounding 2.2 petabytes. In this project, the DNA used was dried before being sent out, but for the purpose of long-term data storage, the DNA can be chilled, which will have longer lasting results. Estimates say that DNA can be used to archive data for 5,000 years, with it becoming economically viable for a shorter term duration (50 years) within the next decade.
[via ars technica]
Scientists encode MP3s, PDF, photograph, and algorithm to DNA is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
This week Google is releasing an new report on what they’re able to share about official Government requests for data across the second half of the year 2012. This is not the first report Google has done on such data, this type of report spanning back (in one way or another) to their first in 2010. What we’re seeing in this newest report is a rather sizable increase in the number of requests Google is getting from the government, but an ever-so-slight decrease in the percentage of these requests Google ends up filling.
This Transparency Report shows that 68 percent of the requests Google receives from government entities are subpoenas issued under the ECPA. That’s the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and are requests for user-identifying information. Google notes that these are “the easiest to get because they typically don’t involve judges.” Next on the list for most-requested are orders from judges under ECPA, that taking up 22% of the whole – these requests are based on “probable cause” that, “certain information related to a crime is presently in the place to be searched.”
The final 10 percent comes in under what Google suggests are from orders under the ECPA that are simply difficult to categorize. The total amount or requests received by Google for information about users was 21,389, this amount sitting between the months of July and December of 2012. The amount of users those requests regarded was 33,634 – this letting us know that some requests (quite a few, actually), were about several users at once.
The summary you see above shows that the number of requests has gone up since the last reporting period – 12/31/2011 that is, but the percentage of requests where Google produced data in response has gone down – now a lot closer to 75% than the near 90% they were at back at the end of 2010. It’s also important to note that these requests do not include those made to remove data, only to view data – takedown requests are a different situation entirely!
[via Google]
Google Government data requests leap up in late 2012 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Sony is utilizing its NFC (Near Field Communication) technology to develop the next generation in backing up and sharing data – “one touch backup”. Photos, videos can be backed-up, saved and shared in the cloud, or locally to its 1TB (terabyte) hard drive, all without going through a PC.
Data will be shared totally wirelessly by a simple wave of your smartphone, tablet, etc., making the whole process of saving, sharing and managing data much more efficient and less …
Great news if you’re a T-Mobile subscriber, as the company may just be a few short days away from launching its 4G LTE network in Las Vegas. The folks at FierceWireless recently had a talk with a representative of T-Mobile, who said that the original plan was to launch LTE in Vegas during CES 2013. That plan ultimately feel through as T-Mobile needed to make a few last-minute changes to its network, but now the launch should be coming up very soon.
How soon? The representative didn’t get into specifics, but the launch should be coming up within the next few days. If this turns out to be true, then Las Vegas could have T-Mobile LTE up and running as soon as next week, with other places like Kansas City following shortly afterward. What will be the first phones supported by T-Mobile’s LTE network? Apparently, the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II are first up.
That seems to confirm a report we heard a while back that pegged T-Mobile’s Note II with dormant LTE functionality. At the time, T-Mobile said that it could potentially flip the switch on the Note II’s LTE using a simple update, so it looks like that will be just what happens when the company’s LTE network is up and running. Get excited, Galaxy owners, because it sounds like you’ll be the first to taste T-Mobile’s LTE speeds.
T-Mobile has a lot of catching up to do. Verizon should be completing its 4G LTE roll out by the middle of this year, while AT&T has been making announcements about new LTE markets left and right. T-Mobile expects to have 200 million people covered with its LTE network by the end of the year, so it should certainly get off to a good start. Keep it tuned here to SlashGear for more on T-Mobile’s LTE network.
[via FierceWireless]
T-Mobile lighting up LTE network in Las Vegas very soon is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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