Morph Monkey Spreads Chlamydia On Facebook

"A new app from the American Social Health Association aims to spread Chlamydia on Facebook to raise awareness of the disease."




I always thought spyware was the first unofficial internet STD - It's the "Browser Clap" picked up from shady domains.

read more at Techcrunch (source) | digg it here

Thoroughbred Germs Make Gas From Garbage

Imagine converting virtually any waste--grass, municipal waste, old tires, wood chips--into fuel for your car. A company called Coskata claims it can do this using a patented bioreactor and anaerobic microbes found in nature.

Unlike corn ethanol refining, Coskata's process essentially vaporizes, or gasifies the feed stock, and their patented colonies of bacteria are fed the gas created, and then emit ethanol as a byproduct. The science behind the process comes from Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma, and was developed and perfected at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.


Yesterday, the company announced a 40,000 gallon per year "demonstration plant" ethanol facility. It is estimated that they will be able to produce automobile fuel at wholesale sale cost for $1.00 per gallon. (Retail cost would likely be closer to $2.00 per gallon, but that's still an enormous savings from current prices of approx $3.75 per gallon/US.)


By 2011, they plan on having a 50-100 million gallon per year facility.



The smart money is behind them too, including General Motors and Koshla Ventures (Sun Co-founder's VC firm) The long term business plans of Coskata is to license their technology and colonies of "thoroughbred germs" to other companies who can build refineries and produce large amounts of low-cost biofuel.

read more | digg story

Deer Blogging Their location using GPS, cellphones, and free Google Products

A buck named Thor is the latest member of the animal kingdom to take up blogging. He and two other Bambi-bloggers named Laura and Kelsy are part of a deer research project at Bryn Athyn College in Pennsylvania that is tracking and automatically mapping their location in blogger, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

What's really cool about this project is the researchers ingenious use of email/sms & entirely free Google products-working in concert with one another- to accomplish this.



Every 5 minutes, Thor's GPS location is sent from the cellphone on his collar via SMS to a gmail account. The gmail account auto-forwards these messages as blog posts here. This Blogger account is tied into this Google Spreadsheet, that through some google-hackery and error-checking, automatically feeds Thor's location data to a Google Map (below) AND to a this Google Earth KML file that auto-updates. Detailed and Step-by-step instructions of this new "Mail-to-Map" hack can be found here.



View Larger Map


It's not entirely clear from the College's website what the purpose of the research is, or for how long they will be tracking the deer. As pointed out elsewhere, one wonders for how long the GPS/Cellphone units will hold power, or if the deer will meet their demise from a local hunter.

In any case, there appear to be at least 2 "firsts" here: Non-human members of the animal kingdom blogging and the invention of a free "mail-to-map" hack/application using all Google services. Well Done, "Siberian!"

Digg this Story Here.

Data Art: The Sheep Market

"Artist Aaron Koblin's phalanx of 10,000 sheep, all drawn by random strangers through Amazon's labor distribution mechanism, The Mechanical Turk. Koblin's goal was to raise questions about the emergence of new labor systems in the information age"

Techmeme over Time lapse

Digitial Inspiration has a great video up here of Techmeme screen shots animated over 50 hours in 50 seconds. It shows how blog posts move up through the homepage of this memetracker over time.

Jimmy Wales early Christmas present: A "Search Wikia" Alpha Launch?

Search Wikia, The open-source, community search engine effort backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could go live as an early test version as soon as next week. according to New Scientist.

Jeremie Miller, the project's technology chief, hopes an "alpha" version of the engine will be running by Christmas. As well as search, it will offer "wiki-style tools to improve search and basic social networking"

"Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor invade privacy by storing users' search terms...The effort's architecture is similar in fashion to the SETI@Home project...500 volunteers are running web-crawlers to compile Search Wikia's web index, which so far totals 100 million pages"

Wikia's Search is smartly boot-strapping off of the established open source distributed web crawler software/project that it purchased in July, Grub. An introduction from Grub's site:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will start to change all that.

Grub started back in 2000 with a simple concept of distributing part of the search process pipeline: crawling. In a way, we were a bit ahead of our time, but our intention then was what it is now. We want to help fix search.

Now, with the help of Wikia, community members, contibuters, and Open Source developers our time has come again. Come be part of something greater. Come help us change the World.

This is a very interesting project with altruistic motives. Google and Yahoo do good job at search, but as pointed out here previously, having an open source, and non-commercial democratic search index/application would be a welcome addition to the proprietary ones offered by the web giants. Time will tell if the Search Wikia can deliver the same kind of quality, relevant results.

digg the New Scientist story here

Google's "My Location" Makes your Phone a Real Beacon...GPS Not Required

Google's "Maps for Mobile" makes it so you can automatically send your phone's location to their maps application without GPS!

After this light-weight maps application is downloaded and installed on your phone, you just type the "0" key to activate the new, "My Location" Beta service.

It doesn't work on all phones, but if yours is one that does, It will then get your phones location data from the cell tower serving it, and it will plot your location on the map (within 1000 meters or better). You can then search for a destination, get directions, and more.

The MIT Technology Review has an excellent article about the underlying technology, and other developments in this kind of non-GPS related mobile tracking. Interestingly, Google does use some GPS data on the back-end of this "My Location" application:

"Google also uses data from cell phones in the area that do have GPS to help estimate the locations of the devices without it. In this way, Google adds geographic information to the cell-phone tower's identifiers that the company stores in a database."

So instead of "triangulating" your location by pinpointing you relative to two other towers, Google is just using the single tower that is serving your phone, and then using other people's Maps enabled GPS devices to help fill in the gaps! It sounds like quite an amazing mashup & cross reference of geo-location data. Integrating all of it with the maps application making it work with relative accuracy is a remarkable feat.

Not surprisingly for Google, they expect the service to improve and more "intelligent" with time.

"As the database grows, says Lee, the service will become more accurate. It will never be as accurate as GPS, but he expects that it could eventually find a person within a couple hundred meters"

Here's a wild thought: Since Google is the Authority on "Search" (and privacy issues notwithstanding) wouldn't it be something if you could search for another person by dialing their cell phone number and then find their current location on the map ?!?!