academic
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CERN turns to open source software as Microsoft increases its fees
For the last 20 years, CERN -- home of the Large Hadron Collider -- has been using Microsoft products under a discounted "academic institution" rate. But in March, at the end of its previous contract, Microsoft revoked CERN's academic status. According to a CERN blog post, under the new contract, licensing costs have increased more than tenfold. In response, CERN is pulling back the curtain on a now year-old project to migrate to open source software, and it's calling it the Microsoft Alternatives project, or MAlt.
Microsoft co-founder's academic search engine adds neuroscience
Researchers, scientists and academics around the world publish roughly 2.5 million scientific papers each year, on top of a backlog of more than 50 million papers dating back to 1665. Plus, the rate at which researchers publish these academic papers keeps rising, a la Moore's Law. It's impossible for scientists to read every paper published in their fields, and searching for a specific study can be a daunting task. Enter: Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and leader of the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Allen Institute's latest effort is Semantic Scholar, a scientific-paper search engine powered by machine learning and other artificial intelligence systems.
Bing and Cortana will make it easier to research your school papers
Microsoft might just give you a little help finishing your next term paper. The company is integrating academic data into Bing and services that use it, like Cortana in Windows Phone 8.1. When the upgrade hits in the fall, you should have an easier time tracking down articles on given subjects, finding an author's other works or following news from a conference. Importantly, you won't have to visit a separate page to see academic info front and center, as you do with Google Scholar. If all goes well, you'll have the luxury of starting research on a big report from your Windows Phone; just don't expect Cortana to bail you out hours before the due date.
Dragon Nest Europe gets an Academic update
Games have some strange ideas about what certain professions entail at times. You've probably known a lot of academics in your life, and few if any of them carry enormous guns and hit things with wrenches. But the Academic class in Dragon Nest does precisely that. This new class has just been added to the game's European version, patched in alongside a major localization update that allows the game to be played in full German or French versions. Assuming you speak neither of those languages, the big update is the new class. Academics can damage dealers or healers, with a specialization coming at level 15; Alchemists focus on support while Engineers deal out exceptional amounts of damage. The class also features a choice between cannons and bubble guns for damage, with the former hitting hard but slowly while the latter is quick but weak. It should be an interesting addition for EU players, although it still raises the question of what's so academic about shooting people. [Source: gamigo press release]
Google's mysterious 'Solve for X' launching today? (video)
Google's X Lab is the search giant's top-secret facility even its own employees didn't know about. It's believed to be working on driverless cars, internet connected appliances and Majel: a Star Trek-inspired rebuttal to Siri. It's also apparently behind the Solve for X website, which hints at a TED-style public-presentation site featuring the great and the good talking about "redefining problems into challenges." The video (embedded below) and the site's background seem to agree, given one of the big box-outs reads "What is a Solve for X talk." Richard DeVaul (a member of the "[X] Rapid Evaluation team") mentioned on his Google+ page that the videos would be launching at some point today. Presumably we can expect to see innovative new solutions on dealing with Climate Change, new Cancer Treatments and awkward silence if anyone mentions a Canadian super-soldier program.
Researchers create spinal cord connectors from human stem cells, heralding breakthrough
It's taken many years and more than a bit of brainpower, but researchers at the University of Central Florida have finally found a way to create neuromuscular connectors between muscle and spinal cord cells, using only stem cells. Led by bioengineer James Hickman, the team pulled off the feat with help from Brown University Professor Emeritus Herman Vandenburgh, who collected muscle stem cell samples from adult volunteers. After close examination, they then discovered that under the right conditions, these samples could be combined with spinal cord cells to form connectors, or neuromuscular junctions, which the brain uses to control the body's muscles. UCF's engineers say the technique, described in the December issue of the journal Biomaterials, marks a major breakthrough for the development of "human-on-a-chip" models -- systems that simulate organ functions and have the potential to drastically accelerate medical research and drug development. These junctions could also pay dividends for research on Lou Gehrig's disease or spinal cord injuries, though it remains unclear whether we can expect to see these benefits anytime soon.
Apple tells education customers: no more boxed software
It seems Apple is about to cease (almost) all shipments of boxed software to its education customers. ZDNet has published an email that was sent to "a major academic institution" (ZDNet does not mention who wrote or distributed the email, but it sounds like it could have come from a member of the school's faculty or staff). From the message: "Apple confirmed today that, with limited exception, they will cease to ship boxed software to campus resellers. This includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard , iLife, iWork, Apple Remote Desktop, and Aperture, among others...The only products that will remain as boxed software offerings are Logic Express and Logic Studio. The email's author goes on to encourage interested parties to sort through the remaining stock of boxed software for anything they might need. Apple opened the Mac App Store in January of this year, which saw the beginning of the end for boxed software for consumers on the Mac. Now that Apple set to sever the supply of boxed software for educational institutions, it moves even closer to all-digital distribution. The exceptions, as noted in the email, are Logic Express and Logic Studio. However, that is presumably only because those two software apps aren't available on the Mac App store yet. When they are, boxed software from Apple will see its final day.
San Diego Supercomputer Center launches world's largest academic cloud storage system
A new cloud storage system may not exactly be big news these days, but it is certainly a bit more noteworthy when it's the San Diego Supercomputer Center (or SDSC) behind it. That new service, simply dubbed the SDSC Cloud, also isn't your ordinary cloud storage system -- it's designed specifically for academic and research use, and it's said to be the largest of its kind in the world. That title comes from an initial raw capacity of 5.5 petabytes, which the SDSC notes is scalable by "orders of magnitude to hundreds of petabytes," and which is accessible at sustained read speeds from 8 to 10 gigabytes per second (also promised to be improved over time). Those interested in signing up can do so right now through an application process, with rates starting at $3.25 a month for 100GB of storage. Additional details are in the press release after the break.
IBM's Watson set to tackle health insurance, takes 'Diagnosis for $1,000'
After tackling your tech support woes, the famed Watson is moving on to mop up the health insurance industry. That's right, the IBM showstopper we all know and love for trouncing trivia kings on Jeopardy has been hired by one of the largest health insurance company's in the US. WellPoint Inc. will make use of the system's breakneck speed and healthcare database alongside patient records -- allowing the supercomputer to guide treatment options and prescribe medicines. Once implemented, data will be combined from three sources in a matter of seconds: a patient's chart / records from a doctor, the insurance company's patient history and the medical knowledge that Watson already possesses. A pilot program will roll out next year to a number of cancer facilities, academic medical centers and oncology practices. No word yet on when The Watson School of Medicine will start accepting applications.
The Game Archaeologist and the What Ifs: Climax's Warhammer Online
Let's begin with a little personal history. Back in 2008, I decided to get into the blogging scene by jumping on board the latest MMO hotness -- in this case, Warhammer Online. As I was growing increasingly tired of World of Warcraft, WAR seemed to offer a refreshing alternative: a darker world full of brutal PvP and awesome new ideas. So I joined the elite ranks of bloggers (hey, stop laughing so hard) and spent the better part of two years jawing about Mythic's latest fantasy project. And while Warhammer Online was, in my opinion, a solid product, it certainly failed to live up to the extremely high expectations held by both the development team and the players. No matter how it turned out, I really enjoyed talking about WAR, especially in the days leading up to its launch. One of the first articles I ever wrote for my blog WAAAGH! dealt with the first attempt to bring Warhammer Online into the MMO genre (as a fun aside, it was one of the first times I got my name on Massively!). It's a "what if?" tale that's tantalizing to consider -- an entirely different studio, Climax Online, creating a much darker version of Warhammer than we've ever seen online. The tale of the game's rise and fall (and subsequent rise and fall again) captivated me, and I wanted to expand my old article as part of our recent series into exploring MMOs canceled before their launch. So what if Climax had brought Warhammer Online to bear? Would it have eclipsed Mythic's vision or been its own animal? Hit the jump and let's dive into the pages of ancient history!
Ultrawideband tech could connect your body to doctors, bring Tricorders to the mainstream
The academic paper 'Experimental Characterization of a UWB Channel for Body Area Networks' won't reshape your mental state, but that's because academic papers are rarely titled 'OMG. Tricorders!'. A team of scientists at Oregon State University have examined ultrawideband tech to see if it's capable of transmitting the enormous load of data required to monitor a human body. Imagine it; your heart rate is monitored on your watch, smart bandages examine your blood insulin levels and feedback-pants measure your muscle responses, all viewed online by a doctor. Sadly you can't rush to your nearest hospital and demand to be wired with some X Prize - winning kit -- there's a couple of hurdles to overcome before you can more efficiently post your bodily functions to Twitter. Transmission had to be line-of-sight and the energy needs are too vast for a handheld device. Still, given how sophisticated the network technology will be when it's perfected, don't be surprised if civilization grinds to a halt when Quake is ported to your temporal lobe.
British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
Oh paper, ye olde guardian of human wisdom, culture, and history, why must you be so fragile and voluminous? Not a question we ask ourselves every day, admittedly, but when you're talking about the British Library's extensive collection of tomes from the 18th and 19th century, those books, pamphlets and periodicals do stack up pretty quickly. Thankfully, Google's book digitization project has come to the rescue of bewildered researchers, with a new partnership with the British Library that will result in the availability of digital copies of works from that period -- spanning the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of the telegraph, and the end of slavery. In total, some 250,000 such items, all of them long out of copyright, will find a home on Google Books and the British Library's website, and Google has even been nice enough to bear the full cost of transforming them into web-accessible gems of knowledge. Jump past the break for the similarly digital press release.
'3D Towers' double disk storage capacity, don't require glasses
Here's some exciting news for all you data storage enthusiasts and academics out there: researchers in France have found a way to double the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives by constructing "3D towers" of information. The team from SPINTEC created these pillars out of bit-patterned media -- separated magnetic nanodots, each of which carries one bit of data. By layering the dots in specific formations, the team created a "multilevel magnetic recording device" with an areal density of two bits per dot -- twice what it started with. According to researcher Jerome Moritz, these findings could provide IT companies with a new way to circumvent physical limitations to their data storage capacities, allowing them to build up and over the vaunted one Tbit per square inch barrier. The team's full findings were recently published in the American Institute of Physics' Journal of Applied Physics. You can read the full article at the source link or, if you're afraid of paywalls, just check out the PR below.
Scientists use Wiimote to measure water evaporation rates
A recently published report in the Water Resources Research academic journal describes an experiment undertaken by a team tasked with measuring evaporation rates by monitoring water levels. How is this related to our favorite hobby? Well, rather than use a hypersensitive monitor or a high tech ballast system, they used a Wiimote. According to the report, the scientists pointed the Wiimote's IR LEDs at reflectors attached to a float in a water pan, and then used the reflected light (usually used to see where the sensor bar is relative to the controller) to check and see how quickly the water was evaporating. The results were pretty amazing, actually -- not only did the Wiimote pick up even slight changes in the water level, but it was able to compensate for other movement, due to waves or water displacement. That's impressive for a little $30 game controller. We've already seen Kinect do some pretty impressive things as well, including recreate a Minority Report-style interface, and recognize sign language. That leaves just one motion controller without its own academic degree -- better get a Move on, Sony.
Shocker: Geeks more likely to be bullied
Sadly, a review of scientific literature shows things don't quite play out as per the picture above. Analyzing 153 studies, researchers at two universities noted that bullies and their victims actually have a few things in common -- namely, poor social coping skills and negative attitudes -- it was the children with poor academic performance who were more likely to beat up on their nerdy brethren down the road. Still, we suppose it never hurts to double-check your firewall, eh?
Intel's 48-core processor destined for science, ships to universities soon
If you've been hankering to get your hands on that stamp-sized 48-core processor Intel introduced last year, you'd better brush off your doctorate -- the chipmaker says it will send samples of the CPU to researchers and academic institutions by the end of Q2. Clocked between 1.66GHz and 1.83GHz like Intel's Atom netbook chips, the 48 cores won't boost your framerates in Crysis -- rather, they're intended for linear algebra, fluid dynamics and server work -- but what we wouldn't give to try. Oh well -- suppose we'll just have to make do with puny 8- and 12-core chips for now.
Educators find common ground in Second Life, for now
There's no doubt in our minds that virtual environments are here to stay, for a significant fraction of the foreseeable forever. Love them or loathe them they're in their third decade now, and like the Web, it's now more a matter of how they fit in to the rest of the world, rather than if they do. In education, virtual environments are now a part of an educator's toolbox and as education continues to combine, refine, and recombine tools, virtual environments will find increasingly better, more effective uses in education. There's no doubt about that among educators, even if the technologies aren't ready for widespread educational uses today.
New study reveals insights into gender in MMOs
A new study has appeared over at the Virtual Worlds Observatory, the home of a team of social scientists interested in researching online games, and it delves into perceptions of gender in online games and the reality behind it. Utilizing EverQuest II, the study uses a sample size of over 7,000 players to measure player interactions along gender lines and learn more about the gamers behind the keyboards. Surprisingly enough, while males exhibited predicted aggressiveness and achievement-oriented gameplay, it was the female gamers that exhibited more "hardcore" behavior. The top 10% of male gamers only played an average of 48 hours a week, while the top 10% of female gamers played an average of 56 hours a week. Yet, during the study, females under-reported their playing habits more than male gamers, as if unconsciously reacting to a stereotype. The study is full of interesting details, and the full report is available for your viewing pleasure online. [Via The Border House]
Stop playing your favorite game
Do we have everyone's attention? Great. Now do exactly that. Stop playing your favorite game. Not forever, just for now. Just let it rest and play something else for a while. That's the idea proposed by Bio Break in an entry about letting go. The idea, as it's put forth, is that the best way to fight burnout is to prevent it from happening in the first place. If you're really enjoying a game and are just a few days away from a major goal, why not put it down and savor that instead of pushing forward until the game has stopped being fun? Of course, it's hard for us to behave that way -- if we're enjoying a game, our inclination is to keep playing until we aren't, at which point burnout kicks in and we start almost dreading logging in. But it's an interesting idea and a different approach to keeping ourselves engaged. It's a lot easier to go back to a game if you've just let it sit for a while and have had some time to think about it fondly without being reminded of its blemishes. Absence can indeed make the heart grow fonder, and perhaps you should let your favorite game be absent for just a little while. You'll still be almost at your next major checkpoint when you get back, after all.
The art of the expansion
Expansions are a fact of life for MMOs. We all know it, and while we might not necessarily like the fact that at least once a year we probably have to drop another chunk of change just to keep playing the game, we accept it as the price of progress. (And if you're a Guild Wars player, it's not like you also have a subscription to pay for on top of it.) Scott Jennings has taken his most recent regular column to talk about the ways expansions work -- both their benefits and the drawbacks they have. Because as he points out, more is usually better, but sometimes more just means more. Ranging from the free large content patches used by games like Lineage II and Darkfall to more conventional expansions, and discussing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm as one of the major points of deviation in the usual expansion model, the article talks about the benefits and drawbacks of the almost ubiquitous selling model for the genre. While it's not a revolutionary look, it's something that every MMO player -- and many designers -- could do well to look at. More understanding is never a bad thing, after all, and if we can avoid another Chains of Promathia we'll all be better off.
