[URL="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fla-mayor-fights-nuisance-signs-with-computer-program-that-hounds-companies-with-robocalls/2012/05/10/gIQAqaziFU_story.html"]Good use for robocalls[/URL]

[quote]
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The cheap signs smashed into lawns and along the corners of busy intersections are hard to miss. “We Buy Junk Cars!” ‘’Cash for Your House!” ‘’Computer Repair.” The eyesores have vexed Hollywood Mayor Peter Bober for the past few years as he wastes valuable resources plucking up the signs only to watch them pop up in even greater numbers.

While stopped at a red light a few months ago, Bober studied the unsightly signs and came to a realization that would help him fight their proliferation: The criminals had left their calling cards in the form of business phone numbers.

Hollywood, Fla. is fighting snipes signs along the city’s intersections with a computer program that hounds companies with robocalls. The companies can be fined between $75 and $250, depending on the number of violations.

“These people want us to call them, so let’s call them so much their head spins,” said Bober, who bought a $300 software program in March that makes robocalls to the businesses. The volume of calls has reached as high as 20 calls each to 90 businesses in a day.

The signs are eye-catching and cheaper than a billboard, and businesses place them mostly along the sidewalks and medians of high-traffic intersections where there are no homeowners to complain. Companies can blanket an area with signs for a few hundred dollars and have been emboldened to continue because there have been virtually no consequences.

To city officials, the signs are costly litter that require city workers to pick them up. Posting them is also a crime, a relatively minor offense that carries fines of up to $250 in Hollywood.

Bober and the company that sold Hollywood its software say they’ve gotten calls from other communities asking about using the software to fight the signs. A county in north Florida also uses the software to fight signs along picturesque beachfront roads.

Officials in Hollywood had struggled with how to discipline the companies because they are sometimes based in another state where they don’t have jurisdiction.

In 2009 Bober held a citywide contest, offering $500 of non-public funds to whoever collected the most signs. The signs were gone overnight, with the winning resident collecting nearly 500 signs.

But over time, the city was again littered with signs.

“For two years I’ve kind of pondered what to do,” the mayor said.

The robocalls, which leave pre-recorded messages, have been so successful that city officials say they’ve seen a 90 percent reduction of signs in some areas.

“This is a message from the City of Hollywood Police Department,” the message says, going on to say signs were placed illegally and alerting companies they will receive these phone calls until the signs are removed and the owners address the code violation.

The company that makes the calling software, Voicent, says New York City uses it to send emergency transit alerts and that the Federal Emergency Management has incorporated the robocalls in its Gulf Coast hurricane-warning system. Churches and political campaigns also use the software.

Jerry Scharf, marketing director of the California based software company Voicent, said Wednesday that 1,000 communities in the U.S. and Canada have downloaded the program. It couldn’t immediately be verified how many are using it to fight the nuisance signs.[/quote]

Now if only those behind robocalls on politics would be forced to give real numbers on caller id...

Humans are really terrible interfaces
 

[url]https://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/051112-researcher-runs-ip-network-over-259231.html[/url]

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
 

[url]http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/[/url][QUOTE]Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. He posted his syllabus and announced that his new, larger class was likely to create two separate hoaxes. He told members of the public to "consider yourself warned--twice."[/QUOTE]

Whelp, I was duped by that Abraham Lincoln article. In my defense, having lived in Illinois all my life, Abe Lincoln is cool enough to have done something like that.
:razz:

Major update to Google Search
 

[url]http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html[/url]
[QUOTE]The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.
Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.[/QUOTE]

Here's something I found below the search bar on Google's homepage:

[url]http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend/[/url]

(There's not really anything to quote.)

[QUOTE=Dubslow;299679]Here's something I found below the search bar on Google's homepage:

[url]http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend/[/url]

(There's not really anything to quote.)[/QUOTE]It's so cute, quirky and entertaining while at the same time blatantly promoting their corporate presence. It reminds me of the Disneyland ride "[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Thru_Inner_Space"]Adventure thru inner space[/URL]: Journey into the Microscope" by Monsanto.

added:
Here is the blog entry on your link: [URL="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/follow-emails-journey-with-story-of.html"]Follow an email’s journey with Story of Send[/URL].
[QUOTE]We’ve included videos and photos throughout the journey so you can explore certain areas more deeply. For example, if you’re curious what data center servers look like, we’ve included some photos. Or you can watch a video to learn about how we purchase clean energy from wind farms near our data centers. And because technology doesn’t always have to be serious, you might find a vampire or two lurking around or uncover other surprises on the journey. [/QUOTE]

Just pretent it doesn't happen and maybe it will go away by itself
 

[url]http://www.geekosystem.com/jailbreak-is-a-cuss/[/url]

[url]http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/pdfs/bw-newsletter-1201.pdf[/url]

[quote]The Blue WaTers project team had
several challenging months last year,
but what a comeback. Blue Waters
is now firmly back on track.
The Blue Waters system that our
new partner, Cray Inc., will install in
the National Petascale Computing
Facility will be a CPU-GPU hybrid
computing system. With its massive
computing capability; large, fast
memory subsystem; improved interconnect; and large, fast IO subsystem, it will bring sustained-petaflop
performance to a broad range of science and engineering applications
in fields like climate change, the spread of epidemics, earthquakes,
fundamental chemistry and physics, and materials science. And, with
its equally impressive GPU capability, it will serve as a bridge to the
technologies on which future supercomputers will be based.
Cray has already delivered the first forty-eight (48) computational racks
of Blue Waters. This initial system, a Cray XE6 system, is the Phase 1
Early Science System and will be made available to a select number of
the NSF-approved Science Teams next month. By mid 2012, the entire
set of Cray XE6 nodes and the racks for the XK nodes will be in place.
The Kepler GPU units will be installed in the XK racks in the fall of 2012.[/quote]
[code]Blue Waters Stats
Cray XE6 cabinets:     244
Cray XK6 cabinets:     32
Total cabinets, including storage & server cabinets:   >300
Compute nodes:   >25,000
Usable Storage Bandwidth:   >1 TB/s
Aggregate System Memory:   >1.5 Petabytes
Memory per core:     4 GB
Interconnect Topology:     3D Torus
Number of disks:   >17,000
Number of memory DIMMS:   >190,000
Usable storage:   >25 Petabytes
Peak performance:   >[U]11.5 Petaflops[/U]
Number of AMD processors:   >49,000
Number of AMD x86 cores:   >380,000
Number of NVIDIA GPUs:   >3,000
External network bandwidth:     100 Gb/s scaling to 300
Integrated near line environment:     scaling to 500 PBs
Bandwidth to near-line storage:     100 GB/s[/code]
That will put it at least in the top 2, and may or may not be 1st when it finally comes on line. My CS class this past semester was a block south of the building this is in :D

an interesting video
[url]http://vimeo.com/42340098[/url]

[url]http://www.elliott.org/blog/5-things-the-tsa-doesnt-want-you-to-see/[/url]