Technology – Page 28 – David Bradley

Searching, Always Searching

I find it endlessly fascinating the things visitors to the site search for…hopefully, a few sciencebase readers are at leasst vaguely interested too, otherwise these posts are a total waste of time. Anyway, a selection from the almost virginal monthly log for May reveals some nice topics:

wiffle ball science, what is the origin of the asteroid belt, x chromosone recombination, physics problems in movies, x-ray vision fact or fiction (also), obliquity earth.

Maybe some day I’ll write some short items on each of those, but for now you’ll have to settle for the links I found.

One final search query has got me stumped – what in fact is its size in ratio compared to the earth – well, if anyone can tell me to what the “its” is referring I might be able to offer an answer

Lost in Translation

Altavista’s translation service Babelfish, named for the critter in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, does a superb job of providing very rough translations between dozens of different languages. But, have you ever tried translating an English web page into French, say and then back again?

Martin G at Really Magazine thought that might be fun and contacted Sciencebase with a sample of text from the site that he had two-wayed using a little form he’s created in his blog to demonstrate what a site might “look like” to a non-English speaker using autotranslation (http://www.reallymag.com/2Xlation.htm).

Needless to say the results are not at all pretty, this was from a current item:

“In the visitor the chance which puts out their opinion with voice in order period me is late in small quantity and recently the conference, in order to arrange a new poll that le or comfort in order to manufacture in SciScoop location the hazard was in the mongering disease which covers.”

Basically, Mr G picked up on my announcement of the SciScoop poll on disease mongering. But you cannot really get a sense of that from the 2x translation can you, which might suggest that a non-English speaker viewing the site with 1xtrans switched on really isn’t going to get the best out of SciScoop.

Martin had this to say about the process, “I thought it gave a nice real-world overview of how the engines are coping with (the admittedly very difficult job of) auto-translation.”

Give it a whirl with your favourite blog or site.

Nugache P2P Bot

Just as email worms are at their lowest ebb for years, a new threat looms on the horizon – the P2P (peer-to-peer) bot. These insidious creatures worm their way through instant messanging systems (naming no names, but anyone using MSN and AOL products might just be at risk).

Rather than doing the usual email address look-up that is common to most mail worms, this form of malware, of which Nugache is the current threat being popularised by the media, bypasses address books and even circumvents DNS lookup (the tool that converts net addresses into a numeric IP address) and instead scans for other infected machines with which to hook up and create a P2P network. These are not to be confused with the networks that P2P file sharing software uses. Once established, encrypted packets of information can be transferred across the bot network all-but invisible to the usual detection systems.

It looks like most of the antivirus companies have responded with appropriate updates (is it the companies themselves that write these darned things, by the way?) and I’d recommend you do an update immediately, even if it’s not convenient to ensure you’re safe from Nugache at the least.

For those with an interest in the ins and outs of this particular worm, it opens a back door on TCP port 8, and installs a bot to wait for commands from the attacker. The command and control channel it uses is unique and it is difficult to block commands issued to the bot. Anyone looking for the perpetrator would simply see the various peers in the bot network making tracking them down almost impossible.

Da Vinci de Leonardo

A letter in Physics Today this month discusses the archetypal renaissance man and his impact or otherwise on science, engineering and art…

Who is he?

According to the letter head, some fella by the name of Da Vinci. Perhaps he’s the same guy to whom Dan Brown is referring in his eponymous code book. I assume so. Either way, surely they don’t mean the Italian polymath born in Vinci in 1452 known to his mum as L’il Leonardo. I bet they do you know…

A Little Bit of Housekeeping

Proud to report that Sciencebase received a Good Housekeeping Site of the Day award today! From a quick glance at the site, which seems to have an archive of future awardees as well as those already given, it doesn’t look like it’s actually anything to do with the eponymous magazine, but it’s still nice to get some recognition for the site anyway.

If anyone can tell me who Good Housekeeping (not the magazine) actually are, I’d be interested to learn about them. Apparently, their hosting system has changed they were DailyinBox.com but that service is now run by BeliefNet.

Air Guitar

Imagine the hoards of adoring fans, sellout arenas, the groupies, these are now virtually within the grasp of anyone who can play a searing solo on the air guitar, thanks to researchers at Helsinki University of Technology.

The Virtual Air Guitar uses a computer to monitor the hand movements of an air guitarist and adds genuine guitar sounds to match the player’s fret work. The innovative application combines gesture recognition with musical interpretation software and could be a boon to all those who aspire for rock stardom, but really cannot be bothered to actually learn the instrument.

The idea emerged at HUT’s Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory and progressed to the Otaniemi International Innovation Centre (OIIC). It was further developed through the Tekes’ TULI programme to Technopolis Ventures Oy incubator services. The idea was processed into a business plan with the aim of establishing a significant international business.

A Virtual Air Guitar company was set up in February 2006, and in March 2006 it received an award in the second stage of the Venture Cup Business Plan Competition. At the moment, the founders of the company are in the process of negotiating funding and publishing contracts with various parties.

‘The company’s first product will be a console game which will be on the market in time for Christmas 2007, and later on other games applications will be added to the product family. We are working on completely new and unprecedented applications,’ explains Virtual Air Guitar MD Aki Kanerva.

Rejected Elements

A perennial point of contention among chemists is the issue of naming the chemical elements. At least at the top end of the periodic table. However, the periodic table of rejected elements provides some light relief while concentrating on this crucial chemical conundrum. Where else can you find delirium, sin, and crouton?

I’m sure they meant element 15 (Bs) to be Bosphorus, but somehow missed the s, although Boss Porous would be a great name for a Dukes of Hazard revival set in a lab…

Crystallized Ink

I haven’t mentioned search terms for a while, but one that drew in the punters to the sciencebase site stood out in my recent trawl of the site logs – “crystallized ink”. Now, what’s all that about? I wondered.

At first, I assumed it was someone worrying about their little pot of Indian blue going all glacial on them (as is the wont of certain types of honey and concentrated acetic acid solutions). But, then I thought maybe the pen manufacturers, in a bid to recapture a dwindling market for handwriting implements, had come up with a way to add a glittery appearance to the extruded product of their implements…

A quick Google, however, revealed that crystallized ink, at least on the basis of the page one SERP is a product of science fiction – an ink that can oscillate between two states: visible and invisible. This product could thus be used to create animations on the page without the need for a conventional computer screen. The main citation is on this page http://lattice.mysteryandmagic.com/reference.a.html. Pull back to the top-level and you will a sci-fi game called The Lattice (semantically the name is reminiscent of another sci-fi genre, I’d say). So, that was an intriguing find.

But.

Trawling the logs a bit deeper revealed the keyphrase “clogged printer head”. A quick cross-check revealed that the search had come from the same IP within a couple of minutes. So, I suspect our inkvestigator was actually just looking for information on how to unblock their printer rather than either anything as archaic as Quink or as futuristic as animated ink.

Shame.

Blogging Tag Cloud

This post is no longer relevant as I switched tag cloud systems.

One aspect of the Sciencebase science blog that seems to be of perennial interest to regular visitors is the cloud of keywords to the right of the page. This tag cloud changes continually as new posts appear in the blog, shifting the emphasis on that part of the page between the various categories and subject areas that I cover.

So, how does it work, that’s the usual question from visitors. Well, it’s presumably obvious insofar as the size and shade of each keyword in the cloud reflects the number of posts associated with a particular tag. size and shade of each word reflects how many entries there are in my blog with a particular tag. Hence, chemistry is big and black because I’ve posted lots of chemistry entries whereas the word worm is small and so faintly gray as to be almost invisible as there are only very few entries with that tag. This particular post is in “Geek”, so it will have added a small amount of extra weight to that keyword in the cloud. Mouseover each tag in the cloud to see how many articles are available under that tag (I’ve not tagged up all articles though, so those are only numbers for those posts that have appeared since the switch to WordPress).

Anyway, lots of blogging software has plugins or builtin functionality to create such a tag cloud, so search the web for that phrase (tag cloud) together with the name of your blogger to find out how to add it. The Sciencebase blog uses the amazing Ultimate Tag Warrior together with a clever bit of extra coding in the template file to create this ephemeral and ever-changing menu.

September 2008 update: Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the tag cloud has been missing for a while now. I disabled UTW some time ago and am now using Simple Tags and working my way through 1500 posts on Sciencebase to add useful tags and to resurrect the tag cloud at a later date. Watch this space.

Phishing attack or dodgy marketing

I just received an email purportedly from an academic publisher offering me the chance to win an iPod simply for taking part in a survey of my usage of their products. Fair enough.

But, when I click the survey link, the anti-phishing filter in my email program is tripped revealing the message to be a potential security risk. The reason? When one clicks the link to the survey, the link is apparently to “xyz321.con”, but the actual link is pointed to “uvw123.nob”. In other words, they don’t match, a discrepancy that is usually indicative of an internet fraud. Similar things happen with those “Validate your account” messages that appear to be from your bank, eBay, or Paypal, viz, click on something that looks like www.paypal.com and end up at a phishing page on www.abcxyz123.info or whatever.

To an inexperienced user, there is no quick and easy way to validate that the Springer email is genuine, so most would, I’d hope, follow their IT deparments didacts and simply delete the message as a phish.

If I were running such a marketing mail out, then I’d ensure the URL and anchor pointed to the same domain, in this case it would look far “safer” if both pointed to “publishersite.com” rather than some other obscure domain that is unrelated to the company’s genuine domain. This looks and is much safer for the end users and so would ensure a much high percentage take-up of the offer.

For more information on phishing and other computer security issues, I’d recommend you check out http://www.sciencetext.com where I host a stack of tech and security tips, just in case you haven’t got an IT department to offer the software and knowledge to back up those didacts.