SingSmash App Teaches Music Theory →
Gamers have to sing into their phone or tablet. By hitting the required note at the right moment, a chunk of translucent wall is briefly rendered impermeable – hopefully in time to bounce a constantly moving ball back at the opposite side, knocking out blocks to progress to increasingly complex levels.
Once the user beats a level, they are then shown the musical theory they just learned, reinforcing the learning process after the actual learning in a way music lessons don't.
MSI Installation Humor From Work Today
MSI (s) (D8:0C) [14:39:58:347]: Running as a service. MSI (s) (D8:0C) [14:39:58:347]: Hello, I'm your 64bit Elevated custom action server.
Well hello there.
Searching Genomic Data Faster →
In the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology, MIT and Harvard University researchers describe a new algorithm that drastically reduces the time it takes to find a particular gene sequence in a database of genomes. Moreover, the more genomes it's searching, the greater the speedup it affords, so its advantages will only compound as more data is generated.
The new algorithm is anywhere between 2 and 4 times faster than BLAST in initial trials, increasing at a rate proportional to the unique elements of each sequence, with an accuracy of 96%. This is a huge breakthrough for genomics, but possibly also for other applications in big data in which comparison between elements with lots of similarity are required, as the researchers have built a system that indexes directly on the compressed data.
Well that's interesting.
The U.S. basically does what it wants when it comes to the Olympics. I don't see anything changing.
— Mark Dyreson, America's Refusal to Dip the Flag Has Complicated Olympic History
VMware Pays $1.26B for the Future of Networking →
VMware has agreed to pay $1.26 billion in cash and equity to acquire Nicira, less than six months after the startup officially announced its existence.
OpenFlow is a really interesting technology, and it makes a lot of sense that VMWare is interested in buying the leader in network virtualization.
Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? →
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college.
Definitely is true for me so far. It's harder to make friends with the people I see at church only once a week or with people at work where politics or competition may come into play, and many of my friends from college are still some of the strongest relationships I have.
The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.
— Anonymous
Eulerian Video Magnification →
Pretty cool technology to filter and amplify tiny changes in video.
How Software-Defined Radio Could Revolutionize Wireless →
Traditional radio chips are hard-wired to communicate using one specific protocol. For example, a typical cell phone has several different chips to handle a variety of radio communications: one to talk to cell phone towers, another to contact WiFi base stations, a third to receive GPS signals, and a fourth to communicate with Bluetooth devices. In contrast, software-defined radio hardware works with raw electromagnetic signals, relying on software to implement specific applications.
Software-defined radio can increase the rate of advance of wireless technologies and bring interesting combinations of radios and functionalities to the same chips and the same devices.