How To Fix Facebook's New Privacy Settings

How Facebook said good morning today.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

From CNET:

When logging in to Facebook Thursday, I, like millions of other people, got the directive to update my privacy settings to fit in to the new, "simplified," scheme.

But at their core, the Facebook privacy settings have not been simplified. Beyond the set-up page, Facebook's privacy controls are now more complex and more powerful. The new set-up page seems more designed to pry this privacy from you than give you access to the new, and excellent, controls that Facebook has put in place.

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Aid Agencies 'Must Use New Tools'

Photo: Ushahidi is a free and open-source information-sharing platform

From The BBC:

The "crowd-sourced" data that comes from victims of natural disasters and conflicts is now a crucial part in disaster management, says a new report.

The UN Foundation/Vodafone Foundation Partnership report outlines examples of new technologies that mitigate conflicts and save lives worldwide.

A report author said it reveals that aid agencies "fail to take advantage" of new tools available.

It says a number of challenges remain to maximise the tools' potential.

The partnership is a $30m, 5-year plan that joins the humanitarian arms of each group, with a focus on the technological aspects of aid.

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Drought Turns Governments To Cloud Seeding

Image: (CBS/iStockphoto)

From CBS News:

U.S. Behind Tide of Countries Increasingly Dealing with Water Shortages by Trying to Force Rain Fall.

(AP) On a mountaintop clearing in the Sierra Nevada stands a tall metal platform holding a crude furnace and a box of silver iodide solution that some scientists believe could help offer relief from searing droughts.

This is a cloud-seeding machine designed to increase rainfall by spraying a chemical vapor into the clouds. Under the right conditions, it can help water droplets grow heavy, coalesce and fall to the ground.

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NASA To Get Budget Boost For Exploration, Says Analyst

From New Scientist:

NASA is sure to get an injection of cash to rescue its faltering human space exploration programme, says a well-connected space policy analyst.

In October, a report by a White House panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine said NASA would be unable to support meaningful human space exploration without at least $3 billion more per year.

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Piercing The Plasma: Ideas To Beat The Communications Blackout Of Reentry

HOT STUFF COMING THROUGH: Computer modeling by Krishnendu Sinha of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay shows the heat flow a space capsule might generate during reentry. Hottest regions exceed 6,000 degrees Celsius (white, purple and red), coolest regions a few hundred (blue). Krishnendu Sinha Itt Bombay

From Scientific American:

Anticipating novel spacecraft and Mach 10 missiles, the U.S. Air Force considers new ways around an old problem.

The frustrating communications blackout that can occur when a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere caused some tense moments in the earlier years of the space age—perhaps most memorably during the crippled Apollo 13 mission. But the phenomenon could also affect communications with new aircraft and weapons systems being contemplated now by the U.S. Air Force, which hopes to find ways to pierce the blackout.

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Panhandling Hits The Internet

From Discovery News:

It's a recession Christmas. Even though retail and online sales improved this year over last year, the unemployment rate in the country was at 10 percent as of November. During the same month, the average duration a person remained unemployed was 28.5 weeks.
People are not rolling in dough.

In tough times, people sometimes reach out to friends, family, church or their community for help. Some take to streets and panhandle.

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Boeing's 787 Dreamliner To Attempt First Flight Next Week

Dreamliner in Hangar Aviation Explorer

From Popular Science:

Boeing announced early this morning that its next generation airliner, the 787 Dreamliner, will take to the skies next Tuesday, December 15 at the company's Everett, WA proving grounds--if the Pacific Northwest's finicky weather cooperates.

The plane, the first with an airframe made of primarily composite materials, has faced numerous delays, putting the program a full two years behind schedule. Most recently, a structural fault was found in the side-of-body portion of the airframe that connects to the wings, causing the initial first flight planned for July to be canceled just a week before it was scheduled to take place.

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Super-Massive Black Holes Observed At The Center of Galaxies

UKIRT infrared images of the four target galaxies show them in near-infrared color, where the images at different infrared wavelengths are assigned to represent red, green and blue colors. Observations with the Keck Interferometer have resolved the inner structure of the bright nucleus in all the four galaxies. The inferred ring-like structure obtained for NGC 4151 at the top-left is depicted in the top-right panel. The ring radius is 0.13 light years, corresponding to an extremely small ~0.5 milli-arcsecond angular size on the sky. The distance to each galaxy is indicated in million light-years, together with the redshift (z) of each galaxy. (Credit: M. Kishimoto, MPIfR)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 11, 2009) — An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.

Their findings are published in December's first issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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Did Ancient Sicilians Build Temples to 'Fit In?'

A Greek temple dating from the fifth century BC. It's more likely to have been dedicated to the Dioscuri (the Gemini twins) than Concord. Some researchers theorize that such temples on Sicily were built facing east as to adhere to Greek conventions. Credit: Dr. Alun Salt

From Live Science:

Ancient Greeks living in Sicily built their sacred temples to face the rising sun, new research suggests.

Almost all of the temples constructed on the island of Sicily during its Greek period over 2,500 years ago are oriented toward the eastern horizon, according to a new study by Alun Salt, an archaeoastronomer with the University of Leicester, in England.

Though many temples on mainland Greece also line up with the sunrise, it is less frequent on the mainland than on outlying colonies, implying an effort by outlying colonies to strengthen their ties to the home territory, Salt told LiveScience.

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Extreme Fear: Could You Handle It?

Illustration: Matt Murphy

From The Guardian:

When disaster strikes, whether you live or die depends on how you react to the crisis…

If you suddenly found yourself in a life-or-death crisis and had to make a decision that would either save your life or end it, are you confident you'd make the right one? People in the state of Victoria, Australia, faced just such a decision in February and March this year. For five weeks, catastrophic brush fires swept across the state. Government policy held that when fire threatened a neighbourhood, homeowners were to make a choice: stay and fight to save their houses, or evacuate early. They were explicitly instructed not to wait until the flames were close. Trying to run from an advancing wildfire is the surest way to die in it.

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DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes

From Gadget Lab:

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.

Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products.

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Top 10 Yahoo! Internet Searches Of 2009

Photo: Britney Spears -- who dominated Yahoo!'s Top 10 Overall Searches for the past four years -- dropped from the No. 1 position to No. 5 this year. (CBS)

From CBS News:

Yahoo! Web Life Editor Shares the Hottest Internet Topics of the Year.

(CBS) One of the most telling ways to assess our national interest in economics, politics, and entertainment is to analyze the top web searches of the year. So what are the most searched topics on Yahoo! this year?

Heather Cabot, Yahoo! Web life editor, shared on "The Early Show" what the hottest web topics were in 2009 and what they say about Americans and our national consciousness.

TOP TEN OVERALL YAHOO! SEARCHES FOR 2009
1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto (Japanese Anime)
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

So what overall does this list tells us?

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The Perfect Way To Slice A Pizza

Solving essential life problems (Image: Eric Savage/Getty)

From The New Scientist:

LUNCH with a colleague from work should be a time to unwind - the most taxing task being to decide what to eat, drink and choose for dessert. For Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann it has never been that simple. They can't think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up. "We went to lunch together at least once a week," says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. "One of us would bring a notebook, and we'd draw pictures while our food was getting cold."

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Subsurface Gas Deposit Could Deflate Theory Of How Earth's Atmosphere Formed

LIFE LINE: Earth's atmosphere, as seen from space, allowed life to thrive on the planet, but how it originated and evolved remains an open question. NASA

From Scientific American:

Krypton trapped in Earth's mantle appears not to have been captured from the sun, as some models would predict.

A precision analysis of gases from Earth's mantle collected at a geologic formation in the U.S. Southwest points to a source for the gas that more closely resembles carbonaceous meteorites than it does the sun. If confirmed by further research, the new study would challenge a theoretical model for atmosphere formation in which Earth began with two reservoirs of solar gas captured during the planet's formation and youth—one surrounding the planet, the other buried beneath the surface.

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Massive Camera Sharpens Our View Of The Universe : Big Pic Gallery

The Beast -- A portrait of VISTA, a system developed by a consortium of 18 universities in the United Kingdom led by Queen Mary, University of London. This is the biggest survey telescope of its kind, revolutionizing ESO's capability of observing the southern skies, combining outstanding photographic capabilities with a huge light-collecting mirror. Image credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky

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Intense Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Sunday

The annual Geminid meteor shower lights up the sky over the 1600-year old fire temple of Niasar in Iran in a December 14, 2008 photograph. Photograph by Oshin Zakarian, TWAN

From National Geographic:

Late Sunday night is the peak of the year's most prolific annual cosmic fireworks show—the Geminid meteor shower (Geminids picture).

The meteor shower has been growing in intensity in recent decades and should be an even better holiday treat than usual this year, since it's falling in a nearly moonless week.

Coming fast on the heels of its more famous cousin the Leonid meteor shower—which peaked less than a month ago—the Geminid show should feature as many as 140 shooting stars per hour between Sunday evening and Monday morning.

The Geminids are slow meteors that create beautiful long arcs across the sky—many lasting a second or two.

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SCARE" Software Predicts Insurgent Weapons Cache Locations Based On IED Attacks

Cutting Down IED Attacks IED attacks such as these can provide basic intel for SCARE to predict weapons cache locations U.S. Army

From Popular Science:

The program generates hypotheses from available intel to finger IED weapons caches within a half a mile of actual locations.

Improvised explosives used by insurgents represent the top killer for warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now soldiers have a new tool for hunting down IED weapons caches. A new software package, called SCARE, can whip up a best hypothesis for possible locations, based on locations of past improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and, somewhat surprisingly, the Shiite vs. Sunni makeup of neighborhoods.

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Map Of Every Nuclear Explosions Since 1945

Our Century of Fallout: Every Nuclear Detonation, Mapped -- Gizmodo

Everyone's got a notion of how the last century went, in terms of nuclear explosions. There was Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. There were some nuclear tests out in the desert, and the ocean. But would you believe there've been over 2000?

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CSN Editor: A full sized version is here.

Sea Level Is Rising Along US Atlantic Coast, Say Environmental Scientists

New Jersey coast. New research shows that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years. (Credit: iStockphoto/Daniel Nydick)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Dec. 11, 2009) — An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years.

Sea-level rise prior to the 20th century is attributed to coastal subsidence. Put simply, land is being lost to subsidence as the earth continues to rise in response to the removal of the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period. Using sediment cores from the U.S. Atlantic coast, researchers found significant spatial variations in land movement, with the mid-Atlantic coastlines of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland subsiding twice as much as areas to the north and south. Coastal subsidence enhances sea-level rise, which leads to shoreline erosion and loss of wetlands and threatens coastal populations.

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New Device Makes Guns More Accurate

Timothy Kraft using opti-sight. Credit: University of Alabama, Birmingham

From Live Science:

A new technology may make it easier for gun owners to improve their marksmanship.

Opti-sight, a new pistol-aiming device, was developed to reduce the time law enforcement, professional and amateur shooters need for target practice to get better results at the firing range.

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