November 27, 2005

• Experiment Gives Illusion of That Shrinking Feeling Within seconds, they could actually feel their waists begin to shrink. It would have been a great advance in the world of weight loss - if only it had been real. But the shrinking feeling was just an illusion, created by scientists who wanted to study how the brain creates body image, people's perceptions of their own size and shape. The researchers, led by Dr. H. Henrik Ehrsson of University College London, fooled 17 people into feeling as if they were getting skinnier by outfitting them with gadgets that stimulated a tendon in each wrist to create the false sensation that both hands were moving inward. The subjects wore blindfolds and placed their hands at their waists, and then the stimulators were turned on, while an M.R.I. scanner measured activity in different parts of the brain. For the subjects, the feeling that their wrists were flexing inward was so powerful that they felt their waists had to be getting smaller. Link	Sounds like my wallet!
  Great for Craigslist but Not for Newspapers The number of users of online classified advertising services increased 80 percent this year, according to a report released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project based on data gathered by comScore Media Metrix. In 2005, almost nine million of those visitors went to Craigslist.org, a 165 percent increase from 3.4 million last year. "It was a huge increase on top of a pretty large base to begin with," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project. Mr. Rainie said that Craigslist, which offers free listings for everything from apartments to furniture and personal ads, attracted more patrons by opening 15 city- or region-specific sites this year. The report is bad news for classified advertising sources like newspapers, which have historically dominated the market. Mr. Rainie cited Craigslist's relief services after Hurricane Katrina as an example of its ability to meet the needs of a large, diverse consumer group. "One of the most appealing things to users of Craigslist is how adaptable it is," he said. Link	If you've never used it, Craigslist is something else. There is certainly a cult following for it, some of my friends included. My experience is that you try a free listing on Craigslist then put it on eBay if it isn't working.
  Writing the Fastest Code, by Hand, for Fun: A Human Computer Keeps Speeding Up Chips SEATTLE - There was a time long ago when the word "computer" was a job description referring to the humans who performed the tedious mathematical calculations for huge military and engineering projects. It is in the same sense that Kazushige Goto's business card says simply "high performance computing." Mr. Goto, who is 37, might even be called the John Henry of the information age. But instead of competing against a steam drill, Mr. Goto, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has bested the work of a powerful automated system and entire teams of software developers in producing programs that run the world's fastest supercomputers. He has done it alone at his keyboard the old-fashioned way - by writing code that reorders, one at a time, the instructions given to microprocessor chips. Link	My granddad was quite excited by this article. Apparently, I'm supposed to buy a couple copies today on my way home tonight! He (my granddad) has a lot of thoughts about where the industry is and where it's headed. And well he should, he spent much of his career on the cutting edge, developing technologies we use today!

  • 7:47 pm
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