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Monday, 3 May 2010

8 Sessions You Shouldn’t Miss at Web 2.0 Expo

Tomorrow’s web is being built by a vast community of programmers and designers spread around the globe. They’re all forging new paths on their own, but it’s when they find the occasion to get together and compare notes that the sparks really fly.

Such a gathering is happening this week in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo, a conference put on every six months or so by tech publisher O’Reilly.

Just like other developer conferences, there’s an expo floor and parties at night, but the meat of the event is the mix of talks, hands-on sessions, keynotes and presentations about all things web. There are sessions on browsers, Flash, HTML5, geolocation, JavaScript, advertising platforms, cloud computing and online communities.

It can all be a bit much, so here are our picks for the sessions you simply shouldn’t miss at the Web 2.0 Expo. Certainly, there will be others of great importance to you depending on your area of expertise (and you can view the full schedule here), but these are the sessions that we Webmonkeys are most looking forward to.
All sessions are taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco. The conference sessions start Tuesday and run through Thursday morning. Intensive educational tracks are taking place Monday, May 3. Follow coverage here on Webmonkey and on Twitter under the hashtag #w2e.

HTML5 vs. Flash: Webocalypse Now?

Tuesday, 10:00am, room 2001
Design guru and author Eric Meyer leads this discussion about the future of Flash on the HTML5-powered web. Don’t expect a Flash-bash session, though. It’s true that Flash has been taking a beating lately, but it still has a place in the modern, media-saturated web. Meyer will examine issues central to the Flash vs. HTML5 debate, including openness, security and performance.

A Conversation with Paul Buchheit

Tuesday, 4:10pm, Main Hall
This keynote interview will occur on the main stage, as Web 2.0 Expo program chair Sarah Milstein dishes the tough questions to Facebook’s Paul Buchheit. Now one of Facebook’s lead engineers, Buchheit originally arrived at the social networking giant when it acquired his start-up, FriendFeed (he was also one of the engineers behind Gmail at Google). Facebook has since incorporated many of FriendFeed’s innovations around real-time social publishing into its core product, the constantly-updating News Feed that scrolls down your Profile page. But that’s just the beginning of Buchheit’s story at Facebook. We can expect some discussion around the company’s new Open Graph platform it launched in April.

A Conversation with Kevin Lynch

Wednesday, 9:30am, Main Hall
On Wednesday morning, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch takes the hot seat. He’ll be answering questions about the future of Flash on the open web, on Apple and Android devices, and on developer’s desktops as a programming environment. Lynch often stays close to the Adobe script, but it’s likely that whatever he says will add fuel to the HTML5 vs Flash debate — already a heated topic among browser vendors, mobile device makers, and proponents of open web technologies. Web 2.0 Expo program chair Brady Forrest is the interviewer.

The Search Platform: Friend Or Vampire?

Wednesday, 10:15am, Main Hall
Where do you get your news? If you’re getting it from Google, content providers like Rupert Murdoch are gunning to shut down your favorite delivery system. There’s currently a lot of chatter about whether search providers have the right (via fair use) to reprint excerpts of the news articles they’re linking to, and most of the negative rhetoric is being voiced by news publishers. But on a searchable web governed by the link economy, there has to be a balance between linking and re-publishing for anyone to extract any value. Danny Sullivan of the Search Engine Land blog breaks down what it will take for search engines and publishers to get along.

What to Expect from Browsers in the Next Five Years

Wednesday, 11am, room 2006
This open discussion examines where the browser is headed next. No doubt, it will be smaller (fits in your pocket!) and more powerful. And it will probably handle your identity on social networking sites and play videos without plug-ins, too. Ajaxian editor Dion Almaer moderates the panel, and Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford (a JavaScript guru), Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, Opera’s Charles “chaals” McCathieNevile, and Microsoft’s Giorgio Sardo are the panelists.

The Innovative APIs Fueling Location on the Web

Wednesday, 3:40pm, room 2006
Former Webmonkey contributor Adam DuVander runs down all of the free tools available on the web for creating geodata-driven location-aware applications. Before you go, also check out Adam’s most recent project: Geomena, an open database of wi-fi access points you can use for geolocation.

State of the Internet Operating System

Thursday, 9:00am, Main Hall
Mr. Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly kicks off the final day of the conference with his keynote presentation on what he calls the “internet operating system,” the collection of technologies and concepts — hardware sensors, identity, mobile phones, location APIs, advertising, cloud-based processing, et cetera — that are shaping the future of computing. Tied to our desktops no longer we are, young Jedis.

Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

Thursday, 1:00pm, room 2001
This panel looks at the state of typography on the web, and as you may be able to guess from the title, these guys think things are looking up. Fonts aren’t as limited as they used to be, thanks to innovations in CSS, JavaScript and web services like Typekit, which dole out really nice-looking fonts across the web using a new licensing model. Jeff Veen of Typekit is the moderator, and panelists include FontShop’s Stephen Coles and JQuery’s Paul Irish. For a preview on this topic, check out the very first episode of The Big Web Show, which discusses web fonts and features Veen as a guest.

By Michael Calore

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Making Rain Clouds With Lasers

Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a rain cloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.

The study is among the first to propose a direct test of how quantum entanglement, an effect that inexorably links two electrons in a way that Einstein called “spooky,” could change the behavior of whole animals.

Although the technique is unlikely to be an instant rainmaker anytime soon, it could plant the seeds for more eco-friendly cloud manipulation.

“This is the first time that a laser was used to condense water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. The work appeared in the May 2 Nature Photonics.

Atmospheric scientists have been trying to build artificial clouds since the 1940s, with mixed success. The most popular method, shooting particles of silver iodide into the sky, relied on the fact that raindrops need something to condense around.

“It’s just like when you take a shower with hot water — it’s very humid in your bathroom, but it’s not raining,” Kasparian says. Water droplets need a surface to condense on, like a mirror in a bathroom or a speck of dust or pollen in the atmosphere.

Previous experimenters hoped droplets would form around flakes of silver, salt or other materials just like on a bathroom mirror. “The idea is, you provide more condensation nuclei, you get more condensation,” Kasparian says. “It seems obvious, but in practice no one could really prove that it works.”

Kasparian and colleagues took inspiration from a mist-making apparatus that was invented in 1911 to detect cosmic rays, highly energetic subatomic particles that come from deep space. A physicist named Charles Wilson noticed that when cosmic rays strike a sealed container filled with water vapor, they leave a visible trail of water droplets behind them. This works because the cosmic rays knock electrons off the water molecules, leaving behind charged particles that act like specks of dust for water to congeal around.

“Our idea was to mimic what happens in a Wilson chamber,” Kasparian says. “If you get some condensation with cosmic rays, we should get even more condensation with a laser.”

Kasparian and his colleagues tested this idea by shooting a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber. The laser shot extremely short pulses of intense light, which each carrying several terawatts — or a trillion watts — of energy.

The view fogged up immediately. Droplets about 50 micrometers in diameter formed first, and grew to about 80 micrometers in diameter over the next three seconds. “The effect in the cloud chamber was very spectacular and visible by bare eye,” Kasparian says. “We expected an effect, definitely. But that magnitude was pretty much a surprise.”

Next, the researchers took the laser out in the backyard to try it on the sky. They rolled the laser, called “Teramobile” for its terawatt power and its mobility, onto the lawn behind the physics building at the Free University of Berlin on several nights in the fall of 2008. The clouds, if they formed, would be too distant to see with the naked eye, so the team used a second laser to confirm the cloudy view.

“It also worked quite well in the free atmosphere,” Kasparian says. “That was quite surprising, and a very good surprise.”

Kasparian thinks lasers could provide a more reliable and environmentally friendly way to build clouds. “If you can seed clouds and get some control or at least modulation on the weather, the implications are huge for agriculture, many other economic sectors, many aspects of human life,” Kasparian says. “There are potentially huge consequences.”

“It is a clever technique,” says John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. But he’s skeptical that laser-built clouds could actually make it rain on demand. “Rainfall production requires many conditions to be met,” he cautions.

Image: Jean-Pierre Wolf/University of Geneva
By Lisa Grossman, Science News

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Sunday, 2 May 2010

Believing is Seeing: How Mindset Can Improve Vision

PhysOrg.com) -- How you see isn't just about how good your eyes are - it's also about your mindset, according to a study published in Psychological Science. For example, in one experiment, if someone was told that exercise would improve their vision, they saw better after doing an athletic activity - jumping jacks - than an unathletic activity with the same effect on heart rate - skipping.

The researchers, led by Ellen Langer at Harvard University, were interested in how the mind and body connect, particularly how mindset affects the body's performance. Langer has studied this kind of connection for decades. "Many of the things that we think we can't do are a function of our mindset rather than our abilities to do them," she says. In this case, she was interested in whether what we think affects how well we see.

People expect to see only the first few lines on traditional eye charts. Volunteers in an experiment who read a eye chart arranged in reverse order (the letters got progressively larger, with the giant "E" in the last row) saw a greater proportion of the smallest letters than when they viewed a traditional eye chart.

Another experiment took advantage of the belief that pilots have good eyesight. College students in the ROTC were brought into a flight simulator, given army fatigues to wear, and told to fly the simulator. They did simple flight maneuvers, then did an eyesight test by reading markings on the wings of planes ahead - actually lines from an eye chart. A control group of ROTC students was put in the same conditions, but they were told the simulator was broken, and that they should just pretend to fly the plane. The people who had performed like pilots, as opposed to those who just pretended, saw 40 percent better.

These findings suggest that visual acuity is influenced by mindset and might be improved by psychological means. Just being aware of this might help people improve their eyesight, says Langer - if they pay attention to when they can see well and when they can't, for example, or simply believe that they can see better when they aren't sitting in a dark room at the optometrist's office. These findings along with others from Langer's lab lead them to question how many of our limits are of our own making. The research is part of a larger inquiry into the psychology of possibility.

Provided by Association for Psychological Science

Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089861