JetLib News

alobar72 writes “I have quite a few old maps (several hundreds; 100+ years old, some are already damaged – so time is not on my side). What I want to do is to digitize them and to apply geo-coordinates to them so I can use them as overlays for openstreetmap data or such. Obviously I cannot put those maps onto my €80 scanner and go. Some of them are really large (1.5m x 1.5m roughly, I believe) and they need to be treated with great care because the paper is partly damaged. So firstly I need a method or service provider that can do the digitizing without damaging them. Secondly I need a hint what the best method is to apply geo coordinates to those maps then. The maps are old and landscape and places have changed, it maybe difficult to identify exact spots. So: are there any experiences or tips I could use?”

Source: Digitizing and Geocoding Old Maps?

Barence writes “A debate that crops up time and again is whether it’s better to have a dedicated keyboard on your smartphone or whether an on-screen keyboard with text correction is adequate. Some phones with screen-based keyboards have started to provide tactile feedback, either using an ultra-quick spin of their vibration alert or, like the BlackBerry Storm2, using clever piezo-electric technology to simulate the feel of a button press. But which system works best? PC Pro’s Paul Ockendon gathered six of the most popular handsets around and put them through a timed typing test to see which proved quickest and most typo-free.”

Source: 6 Smartphone Keyboards Compared

ElectricSteve writes “It’s been a long time coming. While Arthur C. Clarke’s geosync satellites have taken to space, and James Bond’s futuristic mobile technology has become commonplace, still the dream of sustained personal flight has eluded us — until now. At $86,000, the Martin Aircraft jetpack costs about as much as a high-end car, achieves a 30-minute flight time, and is fueled by regular gasoline. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence.” Here’s a video of some indoor test flights. This isn’t Buck Rogers’s jetpack — it’s about 5 by 5 feet and weighs more than the average human. You won’t be able to commute with it (the FAA has not certified this class of device) so it’s recreational only for now.

Source: The World’s First Commercially Available Jetpack

When researchers rack up the carbon emitted across the world, the standard trends emerge: Europeans put less CO2 into the atmosphere than Americans, but China’s rapid ascent is sending its emissions shooting past those of the United States. However, this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researchers attempt to rejigger the numbers to reflect not just where the emissions are produced, but who is responsible for them—who’s buying and consuming the products that cause those emissions.

After study global trade databases, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera say that in 2004, 23 per cent of global CO2 emissions – some 6.2 gigatonnes – went in making products that were traded internationally. Most of these products were exported from China and other relatively poor countries to consumers in richer countries [New Scientist]. The researchers say that developed countries outsource about a third of the carbon dioxide emissions connected to their consumption.

When you look at the numbers this way, the per capita emissions in Europe don’t look quite as good: If those emissions were tallied on the other side of the balance sheet, it would add more than four tons of CO2 per person in several European nations [TIME]. The United States saw a lesser increase of 2.4 tons per person, though that’s not really a cause for celebration. Part of the reason is that the country has more carbon-intensive exports than Europe, the study says, and under the new accounting those emissions are going on somebody else’s books. The United States also takes in the lion’s share of China’s: 22.5% of China’s emissions are generated during production of goods and services consumed overseas, and 7.8% are embodied in exports to the US alone [BBC News].

This isn’t the first time that climate change experts have raised the question of how much responsibility consumers bear for carbon emissions produced on the other side of the globe. Other studies are trying to crack this same problem, tracking “consumption” emissions rather than just the “territorial” emissions produced inside a country’s borders. What they find could shake up how the world goes about trying to reduce emissions. The U.N. system is built around the idea of capping carbon emissions from individual nations. But which country is responsible for the carbon emitted in global trade? The buyer or the seller? [TIME]

Image: iStockphoto

Source: When China Makes Goods for the US, Who’s Responsible for the Emissions?

VJ42 writes “With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, The Pirate party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader Andrew Robinson has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.”

Source: Ask the UK Pirate Party’s Andrew Robinson About the Issues

CWmike writes “The typical home user running Windows faces the ‘unreasonable’ task of patching software an average of every five days, security research company Secunia said on Thursday. ‘It’s completely unreasonable to expect users to master so many different patch mechanisms and spend so much time patching,’ said Thomas Kristensen, the company’s CSO. The result: Few consumers devote the time and attention necessary to stay atop the patching job, which leaves them open to attack. Secunia says that of the users who ran the company’s Personal Software Inspector in the last week of January, half had 66 or more programs from 22 or more different vendors on their machines. … Secunia has published a white paper (PDF) that details its findings.”

Source: Typical Windows User Patches Every 5 Days

In this week’s Nature, researchers say they’ve analyzed a near-complete skeleton of one of the closest relatives to early dinosaurs, a silesaur called Asilisaurus. The fossil is more than 240 million years old, which is ten million years older than the earliest known fossils of true dinosaurs. The finding of this dino relative therefore suggests that dinosaurs emerged earlier than we previously believed, and it throws another surprise into the debate over their origins.

From the remains of 14 different individuals, the scientists managed to piece together what a whole skeleton looked like. However, the finished product didn’t look quite like they expected. After studying the bones for 3 years, the team concludes that Asilisaurus was about the size of a Labrador retriever. The animal walked on four legs, and the shape of its teeth suggests that it ate plants and maybe a little meat.[ScienceNOW]. That conflicted with the expectation of study coauthor Randy Irmis, who said the team would’ve thought small carnivores, and not mostly plant eaters walking on four legs, were the closest relatives to the dinosaurs.

Indeed, that question remains open. According to the Nature editor’s summary, Asilisaurus is an early member of the Ornithodira line, the “avian” group that broke off from the crocodile group during the time before dinosaur emergence. What does that mean for the dinosaur ancestry? The balance of opinion has alternated between more reptilian ancestors, which walked on all fours, and two-legged animals that had bird-shaped bodies but couldn’t fly. Recently, the idea of two-legged dino ancestors had been winning out, but the new find yanks the trend back toward quadrupeds [ScienceNOW].

Paul Barrett of London’s Natural History Museum says: “The creatures share a lot of features with dinosaurs,” he said. “They show us an intermediate step between more primitive reptiles and the more specialised dinosaurs” [BBC News]. While dinos hung around for 165 million years or so, the silesaurs like Asilisaurus lived only 45 years before extinction. However, since silesaurs and true dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor, the two groups should have existed during the same time frame [National Geographic]. Thus, the earliest emerging dinos might stretch back even to the time frame of this Asilisaurus, more than 240 million years ago.

Images: Sterling Nesbitt, Marlene Hill Donnelly / Field Museum

Source: Labrador Retriever-Sized Herbivore Shakes up Theories of Dino Evolution

Bios_Hakr points out an ironic use of the DMCA: for the second time, a video tutorial on fair use that Larry Lessig uploaded to YouTube has been muzzled. This time the sound has been pulled from the video; last time the video was taken off of YouTube. (Video and sound for the new “webside chat” can be experienced together on BlipTV.) Both times, Warner Music Group was the party holding copytright on a song that Lessig used in an unarguably fair-use manner. TechDirt is careful not to assume that an actual DMCA takedown notice was issued, on the likelihood that Google’s automatic copyright-violation detectors did the deed. “The unintended consequences of asking tool providers [e.g., Google] to judge what is and what is not copyright infringement lead to tremendous problems with companies shooting first and asking questions later. They are silencing speech, on the threat that it might infringe on copyright. This is backwards. We live in a country that is supposed to cherish free speech, not stifle it in case it harms the business model of a company. We live in a country that is supposed to encourage the free expression of ideas — not lock it up and take it down because one company doesn’t know how to adapt its business model. We should never be silencing videos because they might infringe on copyright.”

Source: A Second Lessig Fair-Use Video Is Suppressed By WMG

Take a good look: according to a new study in PLoS Biology, what you see in this image is a snake about to prey on dinosaur eggs, a 67-million-year-old scene frozen in time and finally discovered. It’s the first time that a snake has been seen eating a dinosaur. The snake is that bit of bones on the left, lead researcher Jeff Wilson says. The egg in the top right contains a tiny titanosaur, one of largest dinosaur groups to ever walk the Earth.

“The snake (Sanajeh indicus) probably lived around the nesting ground and preyed upon hatchlings. They all died instantly when they were covered by a big pulse of sediment from a nearby hill loosened by a storm,” says Wilson [New Scientist]. Wilson guesses that a storm or some other malady might have led the enormous adult dinos to leave the nest, opening the door for the snake to slither in, wait for the baby dinos to hatch, and snack on them. But it never got the chance.

Unlike modern snakes, S. indicus lacked jaw joints that allowed it to open its mouth incredibly wide, so it relied on its large overall body size to prey on the fledgling dinosaurs [Wired.com]. However, researchers say it’s rare to find a snake specimen from the period, especially one as complete as the one here. Fully developed, the snake would’ve been nearly 12 feet long. And while the titanosaur would’ve reached immense size if it had grown to adulthood, the baby seen here is only 20 inches long—easy prey.

If at first you have a hard time seeing a snake in the jumble of fossils, don’t worry—the team did, too. Researchers found the fossil in India in 1984, but thought the area contained only dino bones. It wasn’t until 2001 that Wilson took a second look at it, and the team finally figured out they were looking at snake remains and began to piece the puzzle together. “It was such a thrill to discover such a portentous moment frozen in time,” said Dr Dhananjay Mohabey from the Geological Survey of India, who unearthed the fossil [BBC News].

Images: Jeff Wilson / PLoS, Tyler Keillor / Ximena Erickson / Bonnie Miljour

Source: Frozen in Stone: An Ancient Snake Poised to Devour Dinosaur Eggs

Kwang-il Kwon and Hye Gwang Jeong of Chungnam National University have discovered that drinking alcohol with oxygen bubbles added leads to fewer hangovers and a shorter sobering up time. People drinking the bubbly booze sobered up 20-30 minutes faster and had less severe and fewer hangovers than people who drank the non-fizzy stuff. Kwon said: “The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage reduces plasma alcohol concentrations faster than a normal dissolved-oxygen alcohol beverage does. This could provide both clinical and real-life significance. The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage would allow individuals to become sober faster, and reduce the side effects of acetaldehyde without a significant difference in alcohol’s effects. Furthermore, the reduced time to a lower BAC may reduce alcohol-related accidents.”

Source: Scientists Discover Booze That Won’t Give You a Hangover