Monthly Archives: December 2007

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With Knol, Google enters the knowledge market

The top part of an example knol

Google has announced a new wikipedia-like project, entitled ‘knol’. Short for knowledge, the project aims to have an encyclopedia type experience but with more emphasis on the author, rather than anonymous multiple contributors. There will not be editorial contributions from Google, but authors including ads will get revenue.

An example knol has been put up on the Google blog. Google says that the emphasis will be on large numbers of posts, ranked by users and views to encourage quality. Peer review seems to encourage good writers to become better rated and more successful. Added to the potential to earn money, this endeavour could provide a good potential way to create a freelance online writer business model. It looks like Knol will be less comprehensive/consistent across the entire volume of data than Wikipedia, but with better quality at the top end. It’s a similar model to Mahalo, only with the backing of perhaps the biggest internet company out there.

[via boing boing, image is the example of a Google Knol]

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U.P.S. drives efficiency with intelligent routing software

ups-logo-small.pngAs the holiday season progresses, it looks like it is going to be another great year for online retailers – which means fleets of delivery trucks will be hitting the streets. U.P.S. is doing its part to make sure those delivery trucks are operating as efficiently as possible, which improves their bottom line – but more importantly, puts less CO2 into the atmosphere:

When you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

The company employs what it calls a “package flow” software program, which among other hyperefficient practices involving the packing and sorting of its cargo, maps out routes for every one of its drivers, drastically reducing the number of left-hand turns they make (taking into consideration, of course, those instances where not to make the left-hand turn would result in a ridiculously circuitous route).

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.

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Friday Free Fiction for 14th December

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Friday night is free fiction night! Here’s your weekly dose of the good stuff from all across the intarwebs …

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New (well, new/old) free fiction at ManyBooks.net:

And a pair of much loved classics (thanks, SF Signal):

The Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, and

The Ultimate Weapon by John W. Campbell, Jr.

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I spotted another gem at The Daily Cabal; Sarah Genge‘s “Listen to the Hum” is my sort of flash.

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John Klima of the wondrous Electric Velocipede print zine recently edited an anthology called Logorrhea, and now he’s sharing lots of extras, including behind-the-scenes creation stories and podcasts:

“Part of the fun of putting together Logorrhea was seeing what the authors did with the words. While I have no favorites (that’s like picking your favorite child!) Jeff VanderMeer’s “Appoggiatura” was something else altogether. Not only did Jeff have his own word to write about (appoggiatura) he incorporated all the other words that the other contributors had written about.

At one time, Jeff had mentioned the idea of recording each section as a podcast. And I also thought it would be great to incorporate the rest of the contributors and come full circle. The contributors are going to post the section of Jeff’s story that features the word they wrote about. In addition, they’ll talk a little bit about why they chose their word.”

Click on through – there’s lots of good stuff to read and listen to right there.

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More from Jay Lake:

The current installment in this series is a 4,600 word story entitled “The Dying Dream of Water”. This originally appeared in Flytrap #3 back in 2004, ed. Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw [ Tropism Press ]. It was also the subject of last week’s podcast, if you’d like to hear me read this in my own voice.

This story is part of my ongoing unpublished (and unfinished) Old West fantasy, Original Destiny, Manifest Sin. As I said before, watch for it in a bookstore near you around 2017.

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Nick Mamatas on the return of Whirligig Zine:

It’s a paying market now and takes reprints. Or at least, it took my reprint of “April 29th“, which originally appeared in the slick Razor back in September 2003.

Check out [other] good schtuff from Jeff Somers, Kevin Dole 2, and other loveable scamps.

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Chris Roberson‘s back in the fiction-giveaway saddle. This time out he’s offering “Long Night, Holy Night“.

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Friday Flash Fictioneers – form up!

Shaun C Green has insects on the brain: “‘Farewell!’ Sings The Swarm“.

Neil Beynon is thinking about “Paths“.

Gareth D Jones has been lurking in the “X Factory“.

And yours truly has been thinking about grief – “Daddy in the Stone“.

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And if you were wanting to read ebooks on the go, but are resistant to the idea of carting a computer with you everywhere (and can’t afford a Kindle), you might want to download some software called eBook To Images – which, as the name suggests, will convert many ebook formats so you can read them on your iPod.

[Thanks to the indispensable Lifehacker for that little tip.]

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That’s your lot for this week, people. Don’t forget to tip us off to good free fiction, wherever you find it!

[tags]free, fiction, stories, online[/tags]
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More on reionisation

The universe has been expanding for 13 billion years

On Wednesday I talked about reionisation and how many of the new telescopes being designed are to study this side of astronomy. But what exactly does this mean? Well, ionisation just means that the electrons of an atom are separated from the protons and neutrons. This usually requires a lot of energy, especially if it occurs over a large area. When the universe began after the big bang (the far left of the picture), everything was close together and extremely hot. For a while even the quarks that make up protons and neutrons were independent of each other. Over time the universe grew and the temperature decreased. Quarks recombined into particles, electrons recombined with protons, leaving us with mostly neutral hydrogen, all across the universe.

Now, astronomers can’t see much from neutral hydrogen. It’s too cool to emit much EM-radiation as light, infra red or radio waves that telescopes can pick up. Today, however, we see lots of radiation – from stars, galaxies, black holes, quasars and ionised gas. If the universe was neutral 12 billion years ago, what caused it to reionise? Probably, the first stars caused this change. Over huge periods of time tiny variations in the density of the universe caused the hydrogen to collapse into stars, whose light then ionised the regions around them. By studying the ‘bubbles’ of ionisation so long ago we can work out why the universe has the structure we see today.

Astronomers have never seen that far back before in the key Radio and Infrared regions. The telescopes of the last fifty years just don’t have the power, as Scotty might say. The further back through time you want to look, the further the light has to travel and the fainter the signal. With the advances in computer technology over the last twenty years, we can finally start building equipment capable of seeing those first stars and galaxies. If people are interested, I’ll post the occasional update on how telescopes like JWST and SKA are progressing.

[photo by Nasa’s WMAP team via JSWT Science Case]

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I can haz bioluminesenz? Cloned red fluorescent cats

Bioluminescent-cats

It doesn’t get much more science fictional than this – South Korean scientists have genetically engineered white kittens that glow red under ultraviolet light. [Image cribbed from linked article]

Bioluminescent gene hackery isn’t a new idea – MetaFilter has the links for the history, starting way back (!) in 1994 with E. coli and roundworm cells – but this is a new level in cute for genetic science.

[tags]genetics, cloning, cats, bioluminescence[/tags]