French police: we saved millions of euros by adopting Ubuntu

France's Gendarmerie Nationale, the country's national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization. It gradually adopted other open source software applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and incrementally migrate to Ubuntu.

Solving symmetric disordered systems (by Tobias J. Osborne)

In this post I want to describe a solution to a special class of symmetric disordered quantum systems. This solution is probably not new (it is pretty hard to come up with any solvable system which hasn’t been discovered before!) but I haven’t been able to find anything quite like it in a preliminary search of the literature. So I thought I’d write it up here; if anyone has seen something like this before then please let me know! This research is intended to be part of a larger project focussed on the computational complexity of disordered quantum systems: I’m starting by collecting results on solvable models to subsequently utilise in the analysis of algorithms like the density matrix renormalisation group.

How’s “Wolfram Alpha” different from Google and other search engines?

According to Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha search engine will be different from Google and other search engines. Wolfram Alpha will offer exact answer, instead of showing up the links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer, like Google and other search engines. It'll be like typing a question and getting the right answer.

... Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What country is Timbuktu in?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" or "What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?," "What is the 300th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Physicists: They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street

Emanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985. After all, for almost 20 years, as a graduate student at Columbia and a postdoctoral fellow at institutions like Oxford and the University of Colorado, he had been a spear carrier in the quest to unify the forces of nature and establish the elusive and Einsteinian “theory of everything,” hobnobbing with Nobel laureates and other distinguished thinkers. How could managing money compare?

Dr. Derman, who likes to say it is the models that are simple, not the world, maintains they can be a useful guide to thinking as long as you do not confuse them with real science — an approach Dr. Taleb scorned as “schizophrenic.”
 
Dr. Derman said, “Nobody ever took these models as playing chess with God.”
 
Do some people take the models too seriously? “Not the smart people,” he said.

Norwegian Websites Declare War on IE 6

Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site that is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week, Finn.no posted a warning on its web page for visitors running IE 6. The banner, seen at right, urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. Dozens of other sites, including the influential tech news website Digi.no, have joined the campaign, but have widened the playing field by suggesting either upgrading to IE 7 or switching to an alternative like Firefox, Safari or, of course, Norway's own Opera browser. The drive is spreading to other countries. Sites in Sweden, Indonesia and Australia have joined in. Norwegian blogger Peter Haza is cataloging the participants, and an international wiki called "IE6 - DO NOT WANT" has been set up to track the spreading browsercide. There's a Facebook group, too.

Centimetre scale models could compute Casimir forces

The Casimir force is notoriously difficult to measure. So tricky is it, that the first accurate measurements weren’t made until 1997 and even today only a handful of labs around the world of capable of taking its measure. Of course there are various ways of modelling what goes on theoretically but even the most powerful simulations these struggle to cope with simple shapes let alone complex geometries. Consequently, our knowledge of the Casimir force and how to exploit it is poor.

Now Alejandro W. Rodriguez and pals at MIT are suggesting a rather entertaining third way: to calculate Casimir forces using scale models that work like analogue computers.

References

Alejandro W. Rodriguez, Alexander P. McCauley, John D. Joannopoulos, Steven G. Johnson. Ingredients of a Casimir analog computer.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0599

Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006

Criminals specializing in Internet fraud continued to ply much of their trade with the aid of security flaws in the Microsoft browser last year. In 2006, the company issued patches to fix a total of four "zero-day" flaws in IE. Zero-day (or 0day) attacks are so named because software vendors have no time to develop a fix for the flaws before they are exploited by cyber crooks for financial or personal gain.

Table of Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities in 2006

Click here

Why I (Aaron Greenspan) Sued Google (and Won)

In the end, printed on a baby blue sheet of paper by the clerk's aging dot matrix printer, the judgment was actually entered for $761.00 total, due to the $40.00 court costs. I couldn't help but to smile in front of the judge.

"But it's not fair!" Google's paralegal protested. "What if everyone whose account was canceled sued Google?"

It's a valid question. Yet until Google changes its policies to become more transparent, which might also reassure skeptics that AdWords and AdSense, which have oddly limited reporting capabilities, aren't just two sides of the same ponzi scheme (for why else would one want to terminate legitimate accounts with high monthly liabilities when they're supposed to be making money for Google on each click?)--I will give this answer:

Maybe everyone whose account was canceled, should.

Close Encounter: Earth-Asteroid Near Miss

The asteroid - about the size of a 10-storey building - flew past the Earth at roughly twice the distance of the highest Earth-orbiting satellites, according to website space.com. It is similar in size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908, flattening 80 million trees across an 800 square mile area. The impact had the force of a thousand atomic bombs, astronomers say. Asteroid 2009 DD45

was closest to the earth on Monday at around 8.30am, at just under 45,000 miles above the surface of the planet.

Astronomers knew it was coming after it was spotted last Saturday as a faint dot showing up in pictures at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. There was never any risk of collision, experts said, but anything flying within 50,000 miles of the Earth is taken very seriously.

El nanotubo de menor radio posible tiene una sección cuadrada

Los famosos nanotubos de carbono no son los únicos nanotubos posibles. Muchos metales permiten “fabricar” nanohilos huecos cuya sección transversal tiene muy pocos átomos.

Investigadores brasileños han observado con un microscopio electrónico de transmisión de alta resolución (HRTEM) los nanohilos de menor diámetro hasta el momento con una sección transversal de sólo 4 átomos de plata. En el vídeo podéis observarlos “en vivo y en directo.”

El diámetro del nanotubo cuadrado es inferior a 1 nanómetro. El descubrimiento nanotubos metálicos de sección transversal cuadrada es una gran sorpresa para todos los nanotecnólogos. Nos lo cuentan en “Brazilian research group discovers new family of metallic nanotubes,” January 27, 2009 , quienes se hancen eco del artículo técnico de M. J. Lagos et al., “Observation of the smallest metal nanotube with a square cross-section,” Nature Nanotechnology, Published online: 25 January 2009 .

Fish with human faces spotted in South Korea

The "humanoid" carp are attracting attention in the town of Chongju in the centre of the country where they live in a small pond. They are believed to be hybrid descendants of two carp species – the carp and the leather carp, also known as a tangerine fish. Both fish are females and more than three feet long. They appear to have distinctive human noses, eyes and lips.

Quantum paradox directly observed -- a milestone in quantum mechanics

In quantum mechanics, a vanguard of physics where science often merges into philosophy, much of our understanding is based on conjecture and probabilities, but a group of researchers in Japan has moved one of the fundamental paradoxes in quantum mechanics into the lab for experimentation and observed some of the 'spooky action of quantum mechanics' directly.

Hardy's Paradox, the axiom that we cannot make inferences about past events that haven't been directly observed while also acknowledging that the very act of observation affects the reality we seek to unearth, poses a conundrum that quantum physicists have sought to overcome for decades.

How do you observe quantum mechanics, atomic and sub-atomic systems that are so small-scale they cannot be described in classical terms, when the act of looking at them changes them permanently?

References

Kazuhiro Yokota, Takashi Yamamoto, Masato Koashi and Nobuyuki Imoto.

Direct observation of Hardy's paradox by joint weak measurement with an entangled photon pair.

2009 New J. Phys. 11 033011

Hope Launches World's First Beatles MA

Liverpool Hope University has launched a brand new MA in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society, the first of its kind in the world.

Why Skilled Immigrants Are Leaving the U.S. ?

As the debate over H-1B workers and skilled immigrants intensifies, we are losing sight of one important fact: The U.S. is no longer the only land of opportunity. If we don't want the immigrants who have fueled our innovation and economic growth, they now have options elsewhere. Immigrants are returning home in greater numbers. And new research shows they are returning to enjoy a better quality of life, better career prospects, and the comfort of being close to family and friends.

Eastwood da gracias a Francia mientras Cannes le rinde tributo

Clint Eastwood dio las gracias al cine francés después de que el Festival de Cine de Cannes le diera el premio a toda su carrera a la leyenda de Hollywood, quien presenta a los 78 años su nueva película.

Quantum Darwinism ( by Wojciech Hubert Zurek )

Quantum Darwinism describes the proliferation, in the environment, of multiple records of selected states of a quantum system. It explains how the quantum fragility of a state of a single quantum system can lead to the classical robustness of states in their correlated multitude; shows how effective 'wave-packet collapse' arises as a result of the proliferation throughout the environment of imprints of the state of the system; and provides a framework for the derivation of Born's rule, which relates the probabilities of detecting states to their amplitudes. Taken together, these three advances mark considerable progress towards settling the quantum measurement problem.

Darwin and Physics ?

Darwin and physics ?: The relevance of Darwin's ideas in physics, the wider context of Darwin's legacy and the controversy that rumbles on are explored in a special collection of articles marking the anniversary of the theory of evolution.

It is not obviously the business of a physics journal to mark the anniversary of a major development in biology. But the repercussions of Darwin's theory of evolution are relevant to all.

Why Doctors Hate Science ?

Thank God doctors in the United States are free to treat patients as they deem best, free from interference by faceless bureaucrats.

If bureaucrats were in charge, physicians might have to prescribe the newest hypertension drugs as a first-line therapy,

do MRIs to diagnose back pain and give regular Pap tests to women who have had total hysterectomies. Oh, wait—they do. All these medical practices are common, despite rigorous studies showing how useless or wrongheaded they are. Definitive studies over many years have shown that old-line diuretics are safer and equally effective for high blood pressure compared with newer drugs, for instance, and that MRIs for back pain lead to unnecessary surgery. And those Pap tests? Total hysterectomy removes the uterus and cervix. A Pap test screens for cervical cancer. No cervix, no cancer. Yet a 2004 study found that some 10 million women lacking a cervix were still getting Pap tests.

Centro Virtual de la Divulgación de las Matemáticas

Best Home Server Software

Media files, data synchronization, and remote backups, oh my! Home computing has advanced to a point where it's practical to run your own home server, and we're running down the five best tools for the job