First time accepted submitter jcho5 writes “China’s 600-year-old Forbidden City is looking less forbidding these days. As part of a major restoration, the Chinese Palace museum will use 3D-Printers to re-manufacture and replicate many of the city’s most precious and unique objects. From the article: ‘PhD student Fangjin Zhang—along with her colleagues at Loughborough Design School in the East Midlands of England—had, for a number of years, been looking into the use of 3D printing as means to restore sculptures and archaeological relics. According to a Loughborough press release, Zhang developed a “formalized approach tailored specifically to the restoration of historic artifacts.” After reviewing Zhang’s techniques, the Palace Museum then invited Loughborough researchers to repair several Forbidden City artifacts, including the ceiling and enclosure of a pavilion in the Emperor Chanlong Garden.'”

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Originally posted here:
Restoring China's Forbidden City With 3-D Printing

If you’ve ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you’ve written), you’ve been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

I recently got an advance look at the latest version of a tool that helps bring SEO to the masses. InboundWriter, a web-based software-as-a-service offering, coaches bloggers and other writers for the web on how to tweak their content based on best practices tuned to the user’s site strategy. The latest version, due out next week, adds a feature that tracks topics on Twitter to find similar material—giving bloggers potential new sources, and marketers an eye on their competition.

Whether giving the masses the power of SEO is a good thing or not is another question entirely—while InboundWriter can optimize pages for search, following its advice to the letter doesn’t make you a better writer (though the new Twitter research tool certainly can make you a better-informed one). But like the honey badger, Google doesn’t care if you’re no Raymond Carver. To get a feel for what SEO experts think determines a “high-quality” page from the standpoint of a search engine, I used InboundWriter to search-optimize this story. I’ll let you be the judge of the outcome; InboundWriter gave it a score of 99 out of a possible 100.

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I am SEO and so can you: tool helps tweak content for search, Twitter

Short Version

Guys, this one’s such a no brainer that I shouldn’t even have to lay it all out. But I will.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is an excellent handset, comes packed with a fresh new operating system in the form of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and thanks to a nifty AT&T bill credit from Nokia, you can essentially get this $100 LTE-equipped phone for free until the 21st. Repeat: for free.

Like I said, this one’s a no brainer.

Features:

• 4.3-inch 480×800 AMOLED display
• AT&T 4G LTE
• Windows Phone 7.5 Mango
• 1.4GHz single-core processor
• 8MP rear camera (720p video capture)
• 1MP front camera
• MSRP: $100 on-contract (or free through April 21)

Pros:

• Beautiful unibody polycarbonate casing (matte)
• Well-built and premium feeling in the hand
• Windows Phone is a refreshing joy to use

Cons:

• Poor color reproduction on the camera
• The display is a bit pixelated
• If thin and light is your thing, this may feel clunky

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

The hardware on the Lumia 900 is top-notch. Nokia truly stepped it up, which says quite a bit considering that well-built hardware is one of the Finnish company’s fortes. The weight distribution is balanced, which allows the Lumia 900 to stand up on its own should you place it on the table.

It has rounded edges along the side, with a flat top and bottom. The matte finish feels great in the hand, and Nokia actually built the phone with blue and black materials so even a deep scratch shouldn’t leave an ugly mark. The volume, camera, and lock buttons on my review unit felt a bit loose in their sockets, but I’m fairly certain that’s my only complaint.

Micro USB is square on the top of the phone, and it always bothers me when phone makers get in the way of playing games while plugged in (battery suffers most during gaming, so we plug a lot as we play at home), but at least the design is beautiful.

The battery isn’t removable, but battery life is better than expected on this little smurf so I don’t see it as a huge setback.

To be honest, the phone is a bit bulkier than most of its competition but I see this as a good thing. It’s not cumbersome by any means, and actually feels a bit more expensive than an LG Spectrum or any other super light, super thin phone.

Software:

I’ve got a thing for Windows Phone. I’m honestly not sure where it came from — I’ve never been a huge Microsoft user — but I feel lucky to have seen the light.

Now, there are inherent cons that come along with Windows Phone, for now. For example, you won’t find as many apps on the Marketplace as you would on Android or iOS (though that number is growing, and Microsoft is banking on quality over quantity). Another issue is locked-down specs, which happen to be just a bit outdated, that Windows Phone partners must abide by. One of those — the worst one, I feel — is a 480×800 display resolution, which bums me out on a 4.3-inch screen.

But, Microsoft is adding more high-res options with the launch of Apollo, though that won’t help you much with the Lumia 900.

But back to the point.

The baked-in features of Windows Phone are excellent. Threaded messaging is far and away my favorite, as it lets you conduct conversations with friends over a variety of formats (Facebook chat, text, Windows Live messenger) all from one unified stream. Local Scout, powered by Bing, is a welcome alternative to Yelp, and the People and Me hubs make me actually enjoy social networking. Of course, there’s still work to be done here, but if you haven’t given Windows Phone a chance I highly recommend checking out this emulator on your phone and seeing if you perchance have a crush on the new kid on the block.

Nokia also added some smart software to the phone including a contacts transfer app, which will help you transition from Android, iOS or BlackBerry.

Camera:

Now for a little bad news, if I may.

I love the UI of the camera app, to be sure, but the actual images produced by the Lumia 900 camera aren’t all that great.

Here’s what I’m noticing: When you open up the camera and look through the viewfinder, everything looks beautiful. Whatever you see in the viewfinder is almost identical to what you’re seeing in real life, in front of the lens. But once you snap the picture, the image produced instantly changes color. This happens most frequently on Auto, and adjusting the settings based on your environment will help this.

But the fact of the matter is, we take pictures quickly on our phones and don’t often want to mess around with settings unless we have the time. (None of us have the time.) Furthermore, some settings don’t quite match up with what you’d expect. White Balance in particular was a bit janky. That said, I wish color reproduction were a bit better.

On the other hand, I do like the physical shutter button on the side of the phone. It lets you half-press to focus, just as you would on an SLR, and then full-press to capture.

Video recording was smooth and I have no real complaints there.

Display:

Here’s the thing with this display. It’s the same exact size and resolution as the Galaxy S II (though the Lumia has an AMOLED display as opposed to a Super AMOLED Plus display), which was considered a beast for the past year. With the Galaxy S III on the horizon and 720p displays flooding the market, I’d be hard-pressed to recommend this phone to anyone who’s recently upgraded to a new super phone. In tech, it’s very difficult to go backwards.

At the same time, upgraders coming off of a one- to two-year-old phone shouldn’t have too much of a problem unless you’re really keen on display issues. Graphic artists and designers, for example, will surely notice the pixelated resolution. And Windows Phone only compounds that. It’s heavy on images, even on the home screen, and white text on a black background makes the resolution look even choppier.

However, one important win for the Lumia 900 display is its ClearBlack technology. I was able to use the phone in bright, direct sunlight (with my sunglasses on, mind you) and had absolutely no problem viewing everything on the display. I think this is a pretty big deal, since every phone I’ve ever used becomes really difficult to view in sunlight.

Performance:

It’s tough to measure the Lumia 900 against Android phones or the iPhone simply because any of the benchmarking we’d do would be irrelevant anyways — they’re different platforms. But I will tell you this: The Lumia 900, and specifically Windows Phone, is snappier than any Android phone I’ve ever played with.

Granted, animations and transitions are a half a second longer than they are on Android, but they’re beautiful and as a whole, the OS never shows any sort of lag. Pair that kind of speed with a little 4G LTE radio, and the Lumia 900 surely won’t disappoint in the performance department.

I’m also a big fan of the IE9 mobile browser in this bad boy. It’s quick like lightning, as proven by its BrowserMark score of 28769.

Battery:

Battery life on the Lumia 900 is actually quite impressive. In real-world scenarios the phone lasts through the entire day, even with 4G on the entire time. It seems like phone makers are finally figuring out what it takes to make 4G viable in the battery department, and we’re glad to see it.

As far as official testing goes, the Lumia 900 lasted a full five hours. Our testing includes a non-stop Google Image search — the phone never sleeps or rests from 100 percent green to death. At any point I can make a call, play a game, or browse the web, all of which I did with the Lumia.

To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes.

Head-To-Head With The Lumia 800 and iPhone 4S:

Check out our thoughts on this match-up here.

Hands-On Video: Initial Impressions

Conclusion

My editors always tell me to close these reviews with a definitive stance, as I should, but this phone makes it difficult. I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, tell a smartphone enthusiast who’s been using a Galaxy Nexus or iPhone 4S to upgrade to this, simply because it wouldn’t be an upgrade. You’d notice the camera issues right off the bat, and the screen would probably bug you.

But this doesn’t make the Lumia 900 a bad phone at all. It’s a great phone. Nokia kicks ass at call reception, and while the specs are a bit outdated, hardware is beautiful and sturdy. As I said before, anyone coming off of a phone over a year old would be lucky to own a Lumia 900.

Especially for free.

Check out all of our Lumia 900 review posts here.

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Nokia Lumia 900 Review: This One’s A No-Brainer

In Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, recently published in Complex Systems, a Japanese-UK computer science team describe how they made functional logic gates by constructing a maze of narrow tunnels and spooking soldier crabs into running through them in predictable ways by exposing them to bird-of-prey silhouettes. Lead researcher Yukio-Pegio Gunji (Kobe University) and colleagues implemented a “billiard ball computer” (a computer that implements logic gates out of chutes through which balls are dropped, either colliding or falling straight through) using the crabs, who have a repertoire of deterministic flocking responses to various stimuli, including narrow passages and the presence of predator shadows. The result is a relatively functional AND gate and a less-reliable OR gate. A Technical Review blog summarizes the method well:

When placed next to a wall, a leader will always follow the wall in a direction that can be controlled by shadowing the swarm from above to mimic to the presence of the predatory birds that eat the crabs.

Under these conditions, a swarm of crabs will follow a wall like a rolling billiard ball.

So what happens when two “crab balls” collide? According to Gunji and co’s experiments, the balls merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities.

What’s more, the behaviour is remarkably robust to noise, largely because the crab’s individuals behaviours generates noise that is indistinguishable from external noise. These creatures have evolved to cope with noise.

That immediately suggested a potential application in computing, say Gunji and co. If the balls of crabs behave like billiard balls, it should be straightforward to build a pattern of channels that act like a logic gate.

Computer Scientists Build Computer Using Swarms of Crabs

(via Wired)

Originally posted here:
Logic gates made of live crabs

This week the University of Oxford and the Vatican announced a plan to collaborate in digitizing 1.5 million pages of rare and ancient texts, most dating from the 16th century or earlier. The project is expected to span about 4 years and was made possible by a donation of £2 million (approximately $3.1 million) from the Polonsky Foundation—a charitable organization that supports higher education, medical research, and other general matters in the arts and sciences.

Specifically, the texts will include pages from Oxford’s Bodelian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV). The digitized pages will include early printed books—called incunabula—from Rome and the surrounding area; Greek manuscripts including early church texts and works by Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Hippocrates; and Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. “With approximately two-thirds of the material coming from the BAV and the remainder from the Bodleian, the digitization effort will also benefit scholars by uniting virtually materials that have been dispersed between the two collections over the centuries,” a statement from Oxford read.

The aim of the project, as envisioned by the Polonsky Foundation is “to democratize access to information, [seeing] increasing digital access to these two library collections, among the greatest in the world, as a significant step in sharing the wealth of resources on a global scale.” This is not the Polonsky Foundation’s first gift to digitize rare and ancient texts, either. An earlier gift to the Bodelian Libraries from the Foundation allowed the Oxford libraries to upload images of 280,000 fragments of Hebrew manuscripts, called the Cairo Genizah Collection, which are now available to search and view for free online.

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1.5 million pages of ancient texts to be made accessible online

An anonymous reader writes “Another Mac OS X Trojan has been spotted in the wild; this one exploits Java vulnerabilities just like the Flashback Trojan. Also just like Flashback, this new Trojan requires no user interaction to infect your Apple Mac. Kaspersky refers to it as ‘Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a’ while Sophos calls it at ‘SX/Sabpab-A.'”

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New Targeted Mac OS X Trojan Requires No User Interaction