The barcode as bulletin board

Via KurzweilAI.net — Interesting idea, but boy does this seem ripe for abuse. Imagine a bored fourteen-year-old boy armed with an Android phone and this app left alone in a grocery store. Video message pron anyone? Or malware compromised webpage for that matter.

The Secret Lives Of Objects: StickyBits Turn Barcodes Into Personal Message Boards

TechCrunch, Mar. 8, 2010 Stickybits, a new iPhone and Android app that lets you scan any barcode and attach a geo-tagged message to that physical object, has been launched by Stickybits. The barcode in a greeting card, for instance, could trigger a video message from the sender. One on a box of medical supplies could inventory what is inside. A business card with a code on it could link to a resume or LinkedIn profile. The app lets you follow people and see their object stream, or get notified whenever one of your objects is scanned, moved, or new bits are attached to them. Stickybits is similar to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling’s concept of “Spimes.” Read Original Article>>

A new small business loan solution from a Congressman

Raise the cap on credit union small business lending. Sounds reasonable.

From the link:

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D., Penn.) has offered one solution to this problem: lifting the cap on credit unions’ loans to small businesses, allowing them to extend more loans to help the economy grow. When I spoke with Rep. Kanjorski about his proposal, he told me that credit unions lent wisely before the crisis, and are lending more now. Credit union business lending grew by more than 11% in 2009. Now credit unions are facing a statutory cap on lending. To fill a void in business lending, Rep.Kanjorski says credit unions need Congress’ help.

Treasury eases rules on exporting free speech tools

This move just makes sense.

From the link:

Looking to facilitate what it calls free speech rights in countries that don’t look favorably at such liberties, the US government today said it would ease the regulations around exporting Internet-based applications such as e-mail, blogging and social networking software to Iran, Sudan and Cuba.

Specifically the Treasury Department said it would add general licenses authorizing the exportation of free personal Internet-based communications services – such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking – to Cuba, Iran and Sudan. The amendments also allow the exportation of related software to Iran and Sudan, the department said in a release (the US Commerce Department controls software exports with Cuba). Until now all such exports were would have broken federal laws.

Online banking scams hit businesses hard

Cybercrime against companies is particularly damaging for the victims because commercial bank accounts don’t have the reimbursement protection of consumer accounts. The $25M cited below in small business losses in Q3 2009 were due to wire transfer fraud and ACH. The takeaway here? Make sure you close control over any commercial banking function, particularly if you are a small business that regularly carries a large bank balance.

From the link:

Ongoing computer scams targeting small businesses cost U.S. companies US$25 million in the third quarter of 2009, according to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.Online banking fraud involving the electronic transfer of funds has been on the rise since 2007 and rose to over US$120 million in the third quarter of 2009, according to estimates presented Friday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, by David Nelson, an examination specialist with the FDIC.

The FDIC receives a variety of confidential reports from financial institutions, which allow it to generate the estimates, Nelson said.

Almost all of the incidents reported to the FDIC “related to malware on online banking customers’ PCs,” he said. Typically a victim is tricked into visiting a malicious Web site or downloading a Trojan horse program that gives hackers access to their banking passwords. Money is then transferred out of the account using the Automated Clearing House (ACH) system that banks use to process payments between institutions.

Food for thought

(Hat tip: the Daily Dish)

Crowd-sourcing blog post ideas

I suppose the idea is alright for bloggers looking for larger audiences, or just too lazy to come up decent ideas on their own. Now on the reader’s side of the coin, being able to request posts on topics you want to read about is a pretty good concept.

From the link:

IBM’s internal records show, for example, that only three percent of the company’s employees have posted to a blog at all. Of those who have, 80 percent have posted only five times or fewer. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they stopped blogging–or never got started–because they didn’t think anyone would read their posts.

In an effort to fix this problem, IBM researchers have been experimenting with a tool called Blog Muse, which suggests a topic for a blog post with a ready-made audience.

“We saw this disconnect between readers and writers,” says Werner Geyer, a researcher at IBM’s center for social software in Cambridge who was involved with the work. The writers surveyed often weren’t sure how to interest readers, and many of their posts got little to no response. Readers, on the other hand, couldn’t find blogs on the topics they wanted to read about.

Martin jetpack hits the marketplace!

I first blogged about the Martin jetpack back in July 2008, and here not two years later the thing is available for sale — at a mere $75,000. No longer can you cry out, “It’s the twenty-first century and where is my jetpack?!”

From the second link (be sure and hit the link for a video of the jetpack in action):

Taking a leap into the future, the New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company plans to start selling commercial jetpacks to anyone with an interest and $75,000.

As a recent article in The Telegraph has reported, Martin has partnered with an unnamed international aircraft company, resulting in enough capital to produce 500 jetpacks per year. The partnership has brought the jetpacks closer to reality compared with a year ago, when Martin’s goal was to produce 10 units at $100,000 each.

More on electric fabrics

This time from Cornell, and sounds practically market-ready. Hit this link for previous blogging on the topic of electric fabrics.

From the first link, the release:

Cotton is the fabric of your lights…your iPod…your MP3 player…your cell phone

ITHACA, N.Y. — Consider this T-shirt: It can monitor your heart rate and breathing, analyze your sweat and even cool you off on a hot summer’s day. What about a pillow that monitors your brain waves, or a solar-powered dress that can charge your ipod or MP4 player? This is not science fiction – this is cotton in 2010.

Now, the laboratory of Juan Hinestroza, assistant professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, has developed cotton threads that can conduct electric current as well as a metal wire can, yet remain light and comfortable enough to give a whole new meaning to multi-use garments. This technology works so well that simple knots in such specially treated thread can complete a circuit – and solar-powered dress with this technology literally woven into its fabric will be featured at the annual Cornell Design League Fashion Show on Saturday, March 13 at Cornell University’s Barton Hall.

Using multidisciplinary nanotechnology developed at Cornell in collaboration with the universities at Bologna and Cagliari, Italy, Hinestroza and his colleagues developed a technique to permanently coat cotton fibers with electrically conductive nanoparticles. “We can definitively have sections of a traditional cotton fabric becoming conductive, hence a great myriad of applications can be achieved,” Hinestroza said.

“The technology developed by us and our collaborators allows cotton to remain flexible, light and comfortable while being electronically conductive,” Hinestroza said. “Previous technologies have achieved conductivity but the resulting fiber becomes rigid and heavy. Our new techniques make our yarns friendly to further processing such as weaving, sewing and knitting.”

This technology is beyond the theory stage. Hinestroza’s student, Abbey Liebman, was inspired by the technology enough to design a dress that actually uses flexible solar cells to power small electronics from a USB charger located in the waist. The charger can power a smartphone or an MP3 player.

“Instead of conventional wires, we are using our conductive cotton to transmit the electricity — so our conductive yarns become part of the dress,” Hinestroza said. “Cotton used to be called the ‘fabric of our lives’ but based on these results, we can now call it ‘The fabric of our lights.’”

###

For more information about the Cornell Design League annual fashion show, visit: http://www.rso.cornell.edu/CDesignL/shows.php

Unemployed? Be sure to take advantage of new tax break

It’s getting a little late in the game for this year’s taxes, but if you are unemployed you should make certain you take advantage of every tax break out there. You probably know within certain constraints you can deduct job search expenses, but this year offers a new break on unemployment insurance tax.

From the link:

Traditionally, every penny of unemployment insurance is taxed. But with 8.4 million job losses since the start of the recession, that rule is changing this year.

If you received unemployment checks last year, you can exclude the first $2,400 from your return. You have to remember to do this math yourself, since the documents from your state employment agency won’t exempt it. This benefit won’t be around next year.

Data processing faster than light speed

Theoretically possible, which lead to a theoretical superluminal computer — a so-called hypercomputer.

From the link:

Physicists have come up with a way to process information faster than the speed of light. But what could they do with such a hypercomputer?

The speed of light represents one of the fundamental limits of the laws of physics. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, right?

Well, yes and no, say Volkmar Putz and Karl Svozil at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. They say there are several ways that signals can cross the superluminal line, although none of them allow the kind of time travel paradoxes beloved of science fiction writers. For example, the quantum phenomenon of entanglement occurs when two quantum particles are described by the same wave function. These particles can be separated by the diameter of the universe and yet a measurement on one will instantaneously influence the other.

So-called “nonlocal” phenomenon cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light but Putz and Svozil today ask whether it can be used to process it, to carry out computational tasks at superluminal speeds. They say there is no reason why not, provided the processing does not lead to any time travel paradoxes.

And:

Assuming that this device could actually be built, what could you do with a superluminal computer? That’s a good question that Putz and Svozil do not address directly. They say such a device would fall into a class of processing machine known as hypercomputers. These are hypothetical devices more powerful than Turing machines, that allow non-Turing computations. They were first discussed by Alan Turing in the 1930s.

In theory, hypercomputers can compute certain kinds of otherwise noncomputable functions. That sounds handy but even though there are uncountably many non-computable functions, it’s actually quite hard to come up with an example of one that might seem useful. If you have any ideas, post them in the comments section.

Cancer killing nanotech assassins

Nanotechnology is proving to have many medical applications, and the bulk of those apps are in cancer research. Here’s the latest from Cornell.

The release:

Like little golden assassins, ‘smart’ nanoparticles identify, target and kill cancer cells

ITHACA, N.Y. – Another weapon in the arsenal against cancer: Nanoparticles that identify, target and kill specific cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

Led by Carl Batt, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Food Science, the researchers synthesized nanoparticles – shaped something like a dumbbell – made of gold sandwiched between two pieces of iron oxide. They then attached antibodies, which target a molecule found only in colorectal cancer cells, to the particles. Once bound, the nanoparticles are engulfed by the cancer cells.

To kill the cells, the researchers use a near-infrared laser, which is a wavelength that doesn’t harm normal tissue at the levels used, but the radiation is absorbed by the gold in the nanoparticles. This causes the cancer cells to heat up and die.

“This is a so-called ‘smart’ therapy,” Batt said. “To be a smart therapy, it should be targeted, and it should have some ability to be activated only when it’s there and then kills just the cancer cells.”

The goal, said lead author and biomedical graduate student Dickson Kirui, is to improve the technology and make it suitable for testing in a human clinical trial. The researchers are now working on a similar experiment targeting prostate cancer cells.

“If, down the line, you could clinically just target the cancer cells, you could then spare the health surrounding cells from being harmed – that is the critical thing,” Kirui said.

Gold has potential as a material key to fighting cancer in future smart therapies. It is biocompatible, inert and relatively easy to tweak chemically. By changing the size and shape of the gold particle, Kirui and colleagues can tune them to respond to different wavelengths of energy.

Once taken up by the researchers’ gold particles, the cancer cells are destroyed by heat – just a few degrees above normal body temperature – while the surrounding tissue is left unharmed. Such a low-power laser does not have any effect on surrounding cells because that particular wavelength does not heat up cells if they are not loaded up with nanoparticles, the researchers explained.

Using iron oxide – which is basically rust – as the other parts of the particles might one day allow scientists to also track the progress of cancer treatments using magnetic resonance imaging, Kirui said, by taking advantage of the particles’ magnetic properties.

###

The research was funded by the Sloan Foundation and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, which has been a partner with Cornell since 1999 to bring laboratory work to clinical testing. The research is reported in the Feb. 15 online edition of the journal Nanotechnology.

Text by Anne Ju, Cornell Chronicle

From the “be careful what you wish for” department

You might just get it.

From the link:

Lobbyists for small businesses, construction companies, manufacturers and other trade groups are racing the clock to convince Congress to reinstate the federal estate tax they’ve fought for years to abolish.

The National Federation of Independent Business and more than 40 business organizations wrote Senate and House leaders last week asking for quick action on a proposed 35 percent levy on inheritances worth more than $10 million per couple. The Associated General Contractors of America is urging members to contact lawmakers about the plan.

The groups have changed positions in a bid to head off higher taxes on the horizon: Unless Congress acts, current law would raise the tax next year to 55 percent on estates after they exceed $2 million per couple, from nothing this year.

“Clearly, we can’t live with what’s going to come in 2011,” said Chris Walters, an estate-tax lobbyist in Washington for NFIB, the trade group for small businesses.

Things that make you go “oh, my”

Via KurzweilAI.net — Oh my, indeed.

Dark, dangerous asteroids found lurking near Earth

New Scientist Space, Mar. 5, 2010 NASA‘s WISE mission has spotted 16 formerly hidden near-Earth objects with orbits close to Earth‘s. WISE is expected to discover as many as 1000 near-Earth objects, but astronomers estimate that the number of unknown objects with masses great enough to cause ground damage in an impact runs into the tens of thousands. Read Original Article>>

DVD recommendation — “Moon”

“Moon” is the feature-length directorial debut from Duncan Jones (nee Zowie Bowie) and immediately belongs in the rarefied air of science fiction classics. The movie is essentially a one-man show, and even though the phrase is a cliche and over-used, tour-de-force perfectly fits Sam Rockwell‘s performance. The concept of the film is thought-provoking and quietly draws you into the tale, and you certainly don’t have to be a fan of sci-fi to enjoy Moon.

Even Jone’s short film, “Whistle,” included as a special feature on the DVD is worth a watch.

Hit this link to find “Moon” at Amazon.

Try Catch It!

A simple and addictive game from Robert Eisele courtesy of Chrome Experiments. After a handful of tries my high score is 208.

Look for the Fed to raise interest rates this fall

The Federal Reserve has already borrowed $200 billion and parked it in the Treasury for just this move.

From the second link:

Most U.S. business economists expect the Federal Reserve to raise benchmark interest rates within six months by between a quarter and a half percentage point, according to a survey released on Monday.

A majority of economists in the National Association of Business Economists’ semiannual survey found the Fed’s current stance of rates near zero percent is appropriate. A growing number, however, believe the U.S. central bank’s policy’s are too stimulative, according to a poll of 203 members taken February 4-22.

“A majority believes that a rise in interest rates is both likely and appropriate in the next several months,” said NABE President Lynn Reaser.

The schizophrenia of Islamists

Here’s a MEMRI report on Hama‘s response to the Goldstone report on the Gaza War of 2008/2009.

I bolded the final graf. Hit the first link for the entire report:

Following Hamas’ June 2007 Gaza coup, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas fired its ministers from the national unity government. Hamas, for its part, did not recognize the dismissal, nor does it recognize the legitimacy of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s government and of Mahmoud Abbas’s presidency. Instead, it regards Isma’il Haniya and his government as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Recently, it has instructed the media to stop calling it al-hukouma al-muqala (“the dismissed government”).

Hamas’ view of its government as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people was reflected in its recent response to the Goldstone report. The response, delivered to Curt Goering, head of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Gaza, was submitted not in the name of Hamas but in the name of the PA. Signed by Hamas’ Minister of Justice, Muhammad Faraj Al-Ghoul, it bore the PA seal and the PA Ministry of Justice letterhead (see image below). In fact, Al-Ghoul explicitly stressed that the document was not a Hamas response to the Goldstone report but rather the official response of the Palestinian Justice Ministry. He emphasized that “the government is the one issuing the response, because it is the body handling the issue, rather than the resistance factions,”[1] thereby indicating that the Gaza government does not represent Hamas, but rather the entire Palestinian people.

Apparently, Hamas’ goal in submitting this report is to improve its international status and to gain the UN’s recognition. The rationale is that by accepting the document, the UN would in effect be recognizing Hamas’ status as the official representative of the PA.

The Hamas response, which was published in the movement’s magazine Al-Risala, contained an apology for rocket attacks that harmed Israeli civilians; later Hamas denied issuing an apology.

Carbon nanotubes open new area of energy research

Nanotechnology is revolutionizing how we see and deal with electricity, everything from storage to wiring. Now a team at MIT has discovered carbon nanotubes produce electricity in an entirely new way, opening a brand new area in energy research.

From the final link:

A team of scientists at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the researchers say.

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

A realistic look at a close encounter of the third kind

This post from J. Storrs Hall at Nanodot, the blog of the Foresight Institute, offers a dystopian, and realistic, view of how mankind’s first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence will likely play out.

Hall’s premise is the most likely first visitor will be a civilization commanding “full-fledged nanotech” and “hyperhuman AI.” Given that construct we won’t be welcoming emissaries of  an alien race, we’ll be facing its resource seeking nanobots that will likely be looking to loot our solar system of raw material and harness the sun with a Dyson sphere. Kind of makes you long for little green men, hostile or not, eh?

From the first link:

Star travel is expensive; it costs on the order of a ship’s own mass in equivalent energy to get it up to relativistic speeds. Any culture capable of that will be at least a Kardashev Type I civilization, and most likely a Type II.  And the reason they’ll be doing star travel is to work their way up towards Type III.  Any sentient creatures that actually get here will be nanotech-based robots, not water-based organisms.  They won’t have spacecraft, they’ll be spacecraft.  They will be unlikely interested in thecarbon-poor mudballs of the inner solar system, but reap abundant carbon from the outer planets and carbonaceous asteroids to build Dyson-sphere-like structures around the orbit of Mercury.

We simply aren’t going to see less sophisticated visitors due to the starship paradox: send a starship out now with all Earth’s current technological resources behind it, and then wait and send one in 50 years with full nanotech.  The second one gets there first.

For more background reading, here’s an explanation of the Kardashev scale cited above. And for a little reassurance Hall’s outcome isn’t all that inevitable read the comments at the linked post.

First time farce, second time tragedy

Read this whole piece on the Liz Cheney group Keep America Safe’s shameless attack on U.S. Justice attorneys who upheld American legal tradition and the Constitution by defending Guantanano Bay detainees. I blogged on this topic earlier this week here.

From the first link:

Interviewing Liz Cheney, Bill O’Reilly ran side-by-side photos of Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal and Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver who Katyal successfully represented in the Supreme Court. (Neal Katyal, I should mention, is my Georgetown colleague, on leave to the SG’s office.) Some readers might remember Steven Colbert’s hilarious 2006 interview with Katyal soon after the Hamdan decision. Colbert began, “You defended a detainee at Gitmo in front of the Supreme Court — for what reason? Why did you do it?” Neal replied: “A simple thing: he wanted a fair trial….” Colbert (cutting Katyal off): “Why do you hate our troops?” It brought gales of laughter from the audience. Watch the whole thing — it’s one of the few times that Colbert was actually upstaged by his guest.

First time farce, second time tragedy. Colbert’s joke is Bill O’Reilly’s reality — the reality of a nauseating reprise of McCarthyism. No one is laughing now.

(Hat tip: the Daily Dish)

Ahmadinejad joins the 9/11 truthers

Like the rest of his crazy statements, this one is calculated for effect in Iran. Doesn’t make it any less nuts, though.

From the link:

Perhaps concerned that his repeated suggestions that the Holocaust might not have happened have become less shocking over time, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad upped the ante on Saturday, telling intelligence officials in Tehran that the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was staged.

In remarks reported by IRNA, an official Iranian news agency, and translated by Reuters, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, “The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan.” Mr. Ahmadinejad also reportedly described the attacks in New York as a “complicated intelligence scenario and act.” Conspiracy theorists in the Middle East have suggested that the attacks were not the work of Al Qaeda, but carried out by Israeli or American intelligence operatives.

Saturday video fun — 1969 IHOP ad

Yep, I’m doubling down on the strange and unusual today. This gem from the mind of late-60s admen looks like the result of a little too much microdot with a splash of funny mushrooms thrown in for good measure. It’s weird, and it’s trippy, but does it really make you want to head down to the International House of Pancakes?

(Hat tip: boing boing)

Saturday video fun — “Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой”

Apparently the title translates to, “I am very glad, in fact I, at last, I come back home.” This thing is really making the rounds and seems to have become the new RickRoll. Over 1.2 million views as of this posting.

It’s weird and looks to be Soviet, and here’s the video … make of it what you will.

Small business loan relief courtesy of Congress

Finally.

From the link:

Added incentives for banks to make Small Business Administration-backed loans will continue through the end of March, thanks to a fresh funding infusion authorized by Congress as part of Tuesday’s bill extending unemployment benefits.

Since early last year, the SBA has waived its fees and offered banks guarantees of up to 90% on the small business loans the agency backs. Created as part of the Recovery Act, the deal sweeteners helped SBA-backed lending rebound from its near collapse in late 2008, in the wake of the financial crisis.

Congress initially authorized the incentives to continue through September of this year, but the measures proved so popular that their funding was quickly exhausted. The SBA has been relying since late November on temporary extensions to keep the incentives running.

The unemployment benefits extension bill — passed by the Senate and signed by President Obama late Tuesday after Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., dropped his objection — allocates $60 million to fund the program’s subsidies for another month.

Just this issue alone illustrates how Bunning’s so-called “principled” roadblock tactic put real short-term hurt on Main Street. Over 100,000 federal employees missed a paycheck because of that asshat’s grandstanding. How would you like to make a mortgage, or other bill, payment late because one Senator wanted to make an inane point about federal spending? Particularly a Senator who offered no fiscal backbone for eight years of profligate federal spending with zero attempt to pay for the outlay under the previous administration.

Multiple choice theories of everything

Back in January I blogged about “the most beautiful structure in mathematics,” the basis of a physics theory-of-everything proposed by Garrett Lisi, That theory is part of an article on “Knowing the mind of God” at NewScientist outlining seven different theories of everything.

From the last link, more on Lisi’s concept”

E8

In 2007 the physicist (and sometime surfer) Garrett Lisi made headlines with a possible theory of everything.

The fuss was triggered by a paper discussing E8, a complex eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points. Lisi showed that the various fundamental particles and forces known to physics could be placed on the points of the E8 pattern, and that many of their interactions then emerged naturally.

Some physicists heavily criticised the paper, while others gave it a cautious welcome. In late 2008, Lisi was given a grant to continue his studies of E8.

And here’s the article’s synopsis of string theory, one of the better known ideas out there:

String theory

This is probably the best known theory of everything, and the most heavily studied. It suggests that the fundamental particles we observe are not actually particles at all, but tiny strings that only “look” like particles to scientific instruments because they are so small.

What’s more, the mathematics of string theory also rely on extra spatial dimensions, which humans could not experience directly.

These are radical suggestions, but many theorists find the string approach elegant and have proposed numerous variations on the basic theme that seem to solve assorted cosmological conundrums. However, they have two major challenges to overcome if they are to persuade the rest of the scientific community that string theory is the best candidate for a ToE.

First, string theorists have so far struggled to make new predictions that can be tested. So string theory remains just that: a theory.

Secondly, there are just too many variants of the theory, any one of which could be correct – and little to choose between them. To resolve this, some physicists have proposed a more general framework called M-theory, which unifies many string theories.

But this has its own problems. Depending how you set it up, M-theory can describe any of 10⁵⁰⁰ universes. Some physicists argue that this is evidence that there are multiple universes, but others think it just means the theory is untestable.

Faking job references

Providing a bogus job reference in the form of a friend or relative is nothing new, but I had no idea the concept has become so organized and commodified.

From the link:

But a niche business has cropped up that takes that a step further. Web sites that offer fake job reference services are available for any job seeker whose credentials and references don’t stand on their own. That’s bad news for hiring managers, according to Jeff Wizceb, a vice president with HR Plus, a division of AlliedBarton Security Services that provides background screening services.

“You basically sign up and create your own company that you want to have worked at or create a position at a legitimate company,” said Wizceb. “You plug in references, position, salary, all that information, and if an employer were to call the number you provided, these sites will pose as a reference and it would be basically this fake company that would ‘verify’ the information.”

Don’t call it a comeback — portfolio management

Long ago I included a short bit on portfolio management in a larger piece on product development (yep, all that is about as exciting to both write and to read as it sounds) After some years in the biz-buzz wilderness, it looks like portfolio management is coming back into vogue.

From the link:

Portfolio management is poised to go “retro.” As organizations are preparing to come out of the recession, they are thinking more broadly about the types of investments that will be required to support business growth. As a result, some organizations are revisiting the idea of portfolio management as a way to organize and evaluate.

When portfolio management was a hot topic in the middle part of the last decade, it was driven in part by some good management thinking from people like Peter Weill at MIT CISR and Dr. Howard Rubin and in part by some software tool vendors. At the time, most companies added some kind of portfolio thinking or at least dabbled with it. As my partner Jim Quick and I recently discussed, most of the fanfare was confined to the IT organization, but some of the more pioneering organizations actually drove portfolio thinking higher in the organization. In fact, this is where it belongs, where a complete view of a business investment can be calculated and evaluated.

Many organizations likely found portfolio management too complex, too heavy on overhead, or too theoretical and, thus, they were unable to find value in it. So why would it come back into fashion now?

Care to read my portfolio management bit from around ten years ago? Here it is:

Portfolio Management

Portfolio management is defined as a dynamic process which a company uses to regularly review the list of product development projects and allocate resources to the projects in a prioritized manner. The activities involved in portfolio management include reviewing the entire portfolio and comparing the individual projects against each other, making go/kill decisions on individual projects, developing a product strategy for the business and making the strategic resource allocation decisions. This approach is not unlike concept of managing a portfolio of stocks where you constantly evaluate the entire group to maximize your return and weed out the weak links.

Without a good portfolio management system in place a company risks spreading their resources too thinly over a group of weak projects and not making effective go/kill decisions by allowing the weaker projects progress through the development process. Done correctly, the management of the project portfolio should be a funnel that keeps the effective projects in the stream and weeds out the weaker projects on a regular basis. This gives the strong projects more resources to help maximize their effectiveness. The difficulty in portfolio management is the fact that the process is dynamic and focuses on what might be and compares projects at differing stages of completion.

To implement a portfolio management system, a company should approach the process as though they were designing a new product (the new management system) for an end user (the company.) By doing this the process is broken into steps with particular goals in mind to ensure that the result will be successful. The first step is to define the requirements for implementing a portfolio management system. This step involves learning about what portfolio management entails by researching literature on the subject and taking a look at what other firms are doing with portfolio management. This step also includes creating a task force within the company to act as the “project team” that develops the process.

The second step is to design the portfolio management process itself. The first stage should provide a frame of reference to work from and should have defined problem areas that need to be addressed, like having a development process that is easily reviewable such as the Stage-Gate process. This step also involves creating a new product strategy and a portfolio review process. The result of this stage should be a portfolio management process that is down on paper and has been reviewed by the task force, users and top management within the company.

The last step is to implement the process itself. A portfolio process manager should be chosen to cover the day-to-day management of the system and there should be training for the project team members on the new process. All new and existing projects should be put into the new system as quickly as possible and performance measures, or metrics, should be defined to allow for evaluation of the entire process.

The result of the time and resources spent to develop a good portfolio management system is a more effective and accountable process of new product development.

If you’re into product management, or just a glutton for business punishment, head below the fold for my entire piece on product development. It was written for Office.com in the late 1990s, earliest 2000s back when Office.com was owned by Winstar and buying Super Bowl ads. I don’t think this particular piece ever ran on the site (couldn’t find it at the Internet Archive), and since the old Office.com has been long gone for eight years or so I’ve made a HubPages site out of the article. Be warned, it is long.

Detecting malware on mobile devices

Malware and other dark computer arts will become a problem for smartphones and other mobile devices. It’s definitely a matter of when, and not if. This idea to combat the problem seems pretty ingenious. The solution involves checking the device’s RAM for usage or anomalies that expose the presence of  malware.

From the link:

Yesterday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, a researcher presented a new way to detect malware on mobile devices. He says it can catch even unknown pests and can protect a device without draining its battery or taking up too much processing power.

Experts agree that malware is coming to smart phones, and researchers have begun to identify ways to protect devices from malicious software. But traditional ways of protecting desktops against threats don’t translate well to smart phones, says Markus Jakobsson, a principal scientist at Xerox PARC and the person behind the new malware detection technology. He is also the founder of FatSkunk, which will market malware-detection software based on the research.

Most antivirus software works behind the scenes, comparing new files to an enormous library of virus signatures. Mobile devices lack the processing power to scan for large numbers of signatures, Jakobsson says. Continual scanning also drains batteries. His approach relies on having a central server monitor a device’s memory for signs that it’s been infected, rather than looking for specific software.

Silicon nanowires may improve solar costs

Silicon photovoltaics offer incredible solar cell efficiency and now it looks like nanotechnology may offer a way to add low production cost to that mix. This type of headway and improvement is what will make solar a market-viable power option.

The release:

Trapping Sunlight with Silicon Nanowires

MARCH 03, 2010

Lynn Yarris

This photovoltaic cell is comprised of 36 individual arrays of silicon nanowires featuring radial p-n junctions. The color dispersion demonstrates the excellent periodicity over the entire substrate. (Photo from Peidong Yang)

Solar cells made from silicon are projected to be a prominent factor in future renewable green energy equations, but so far the promise has far exceeded the reality. While there are now silicon photovoltaics that can convert sunlight into electricity at impressive 20 percent efficiencies, the cost of this solar power is prohibitive for large-scale use. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), however, are developing a new approach that could substantially reduce these costs. The key to their success is a better way of trapping sunlight.

“Through the fabrication of thin films from ordered arrays of vertical silicon nanowires we’ve been able to increase the light-trapping in our solar cells by a factor of 73,” says chemist Peidong Yang, who led this research. “Since the fabrication technique behind this extraordinary light-trapping enhancement is a relatively simple and scalable aqueous chemistry process, we believe our approach represents an economically viable path toward high-efficiency, low-cost thin-film solar cells.”

Yang holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, and the University of California  Berkeley’s Chemistry Department. He is a leading authority on semiconductor nanowires – one-dimensional strips of materials whose width measures only one-thousandth that of a human hair but whose length may stretch several microns.

“Typical solar cells are made from very expensive ultrapure single crystal silicon wafers that require about 100 micrometers of thickness to absorb most of the solar light, whereas our radial geometry enables us to effectively trap light with nanowire arrays fabricated from silicon films that are only about eight micrometers thick,” he says. “Furthermore, our approach should in principle allow us to use metallurgical grade or “dirty” silicon rather than the ultrapure silicon crystals now required, which should cut costs even further.”

Yang has described this research in a paper published in the journal NANO Letters, which he co-authored with Erik Garnett, a chemist who was then a member of Yang’s research group. The paper is titled “Light Trapping in Silicon Nanowire Solar Cells.”

A radial p-n junction consists of a layer of n-type silicon forming a shell around a p-type silicon nanowire core. This geometry turns each individual nanowire into a photovoltaic cell.

Generating Electricity from Sunlight

At the heart of all solar cells are two separate layers of material, one with an abundance of electrons that functions as a negative pole, and one with an abundance of electron holes (positively-charged energy spaces) that functions as a positive pole. When photons from the sun are absorbed, their energy is used to create electron-hole pairs, which are then separated at the interface between the two layers and collected as electricity.

Because of its superior photo-electronic properties, silicon remains the photovoltaic semiconductor of choice but rising demand has inflated the price of the raw material. Furthermore, because of the high-level of crystal purification required, even the fabrication of the simplest silicon-based solar cell is a complex, energy-intensive and costly process.

Yang and his group are able to reduce both the quantity and the quality requirements for silicon by using vertical arrays of nanostructured radial p-n junctions rather than conventional planar p-n junctions. In a radial p-n junction, a layer of n-type silicon forms a shell around a p-type silicon nanowire core. As a result, photo-excited electrons and holes travel much shorter distances to electrodes, eliminating a charge-carrier bottleneck that often arises in a typical silicon solar cell. The radial geometry array also, as photocurrent and optical transmission measurements by Yang and Garrett revealed, greatly improves light trapping.

“Since each individual nanowire in the array has a p-n junction, each acts as an individual solar cell,” Yang says. “By adjusting the length of the nanowires in our arrays, we can increase their light-trapping path length.”

While the conversion efficiency of these solar nanowires was only about five to six percent, Yang says this efficiency was achieved with little effort put into surface passivation, antireflection, and other efficiency-increasing modifications.

“With further improvements, most importantly in surface passivation, we think it is possible to push the efficiency to above 10 percent,” Yang says.

Combining a 10 percent or better conversion efficiency with the greatly reduced quantities of starting silicon material  and the ability to use metallurgical grade silicon, should make the use of silicon nanowires an attractive candidate for large-scale development.

As an added plus Yang says, “Our technique can be used in existing solar panel manufacturing processes.”

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov.

Peidong Yang (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

Additional Information

For more about the research of Peidong Yang and his group, visit the Website at http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/pdygrp/main.html

For more about the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS) visit the Website at http://mint.physics.berkeley.edu/coins/

National Broadband Plan seeks $25B

The United States lags in broadband access, plus infrastructure investment of this nature is an investment in the future of the nation. An example of good government spending.

From the link:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s coming National Broadband Plan will propose up to $25 billion in new federal spending for high-speed Internet lines and a wireless network for police and firefighters as part of a broader plan that appears to be a win for wireless companies.