angelsandeggs.com

Perhaps your teen is one of those who, when exposed to the movie “The Exorcist,” begins to twirl her head around, declare she is the devil, and vomit green pea soup.

I feel sure this is a loving, Jonas Brothers-only teen couple.

“Download Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ for them,” was her reply.

Brian Primack, an associate professor at Pittsburgh, gave an interesting example of a degrading lyric: “After you work up a sweat, you can play with the stick.”

I asked one of the world’s foremost psychologists what parents should do if they examined their teen’s
iPod and found lyrics of unsound sexual power relations.

Think of all the supposedly mature and, no doubt, sexually active folks who thought “Puff the Magic Dragon” really was about a mythical creature called Puff. So shouldn’t we wonder whether teens are driven by words or merely by the thumping beat that raises their heart rates and brain impulses beyond the control of any public jurisdiction?

I have no idea what she meant. But one thought keeps reverberating around my head–if in doubt, ask yourself this question: Did Bristol Palin really listen to 50 Cent?

(Credit: CC Made Underground)

The academics are very careful not to suggest that the music causes rampant teen nymphomania. They limit themselves to showing the link between degrading lyrics and increased teen sexual activity. But they do point out that they analyzed around 300 songs, of which one-third had sexually explicit language, the majority of that language having degrading elements.

It’s also worth noting that some rap lyrics are, to the researchers, not degrading. They cite “Baby I’m Back” by Baby Bash. Whose allegedly nondegrading lines include: “I wanna be stronger than we’ve ever been, I’m here to cater to you.”

When I first heard this little couplet, from 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”, my immediate reaction was “field hockey.” However, the Pittsburgh team is convinced that “high exposure to lyrics describing degrading sex in popular music was independently associated with higher levels of sexual behavior.”

I am a touch skeptical of these results. And it is not merely because every single piece of social science research that has ever been performed by any academic institution leaves me wondering whether I have just listened to a duet between Roland Burriss and Joe the Plumber.

You see, I am not sure most teens of any generation are all that bright. I’m not sure how often they get even the broadest meanings of many songs.

Is there anyone who hears the word “cater” and doesn’t think kitchen scene in “Fatal Attraction?”

Well, then you will be one of those not surprised by research, from the University of Pittsburgh, that suggests any teen who listens to the bulk of 50 Cent is more likely to partake of sex early and often.

I am being unfair to Fitty. The academics looked at other musicians whose lyrics they deemed to include a “power differential”–that is, one of the sexes declaring its bodily dominance over another. Something you will probably not find in, for example, a Jennifer Lopez ditty. (Although “Let’s Get Loud” surely suggests serious antisocial tendencies)

Even if RIM routed information through a U.S. data center, the devices aren’t built to NSA’s security specs, he says. RIM declined to comment.

I’m all for bashing the competition (and Canadians), but this borders on the absurd. Besides the fact that the data stream can easily stay within the United States, Microsoft should have been able to come up with a better potential threat from those sneaky Canucks.

Microsoft, however, has questioned the wisdom of the president relying on a device whose maker is based in Canada. “You would be sending your data outside the country,” says Randy Siegel, a Microsoft enterprise mobile strategist who works on federal-government projects. “We wouldn’t want the casual musings or official communications of the most important person in the world being intercepted by others.”

It’s pretty amazing how Microsoft will go to such great lengths to stop competition. Or maybe Microsoft considers Canada a true threat.

Never one to be silent when its dominance is threatened, Microsoft is now suggesting that new U.S. President Barack Obama should use a Windows Mobile device to avoid letting those unscrupulous Canadians get hold of his supersecret e-mails.

More CNET coverage:
Video: Obama’s new ‘BlackBerry’

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Siegel argues that a better alternative would be a National Security Agency-approved device, such as the Sectera Edge. Made by defense contractor General Dynamics and powered by Microsoft’s Windows CE software, the Edge is a smartphone that secures voice as well as data use. It was certified by the NSA in December 2007 but didn’t become available until this month, and the 12-ounce device costs about $3,350.

REDMOND, Wash.–While gesture recognition, such as that seen in Project Natal can help gaming, Microsoft’s Craig Mundie showed how it will also transform the office.

Microsoft Chief Research & Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie, demonstrates natural user interface technologies during Thursday's Financial Analyst Meeting in Redmond.

In an interview earlier this month, Bill Gates told CNET News that Microsoft plans to use Natal far beyond the Xbox, including with Windows.

His demo included hologram-like video conferencing, a virtual digital assistant, and multiple surface computers along with voice, touch, and gesture recognition. The desk was a multitouch surface computer, and the office’s walls were also a display that could easily switch from being a virtual window and collection of digital photos to being a corkboard of sticky notes to various workspaces.

In a demo, Microsoft’s top research and strategy officer showed how the desktop computer of the future will use an entire office as both display and input device, with voice and gestures augmenting a number of touch screens.

(Credit:
Robert Sorbo/Microsoft)

The demo was similar in some respects, but more advanced in others, than the one shown by Office chief Stephen Elop earlier this year.

Mundie

“I’m not playing the Riccochet game, but I am using these technologies,” Mundie said. “This is our dream, but it is really not that far away. We see a pretty direct path to make this happen. We have all of the technologies to make this happen in our research labs.”

In one case, Mundie also used Natal-like depth cameras to put himself in the middle of an architectural demo, essentially putting himself inside a building that was not yet built. His talk followed entertainment chief Robbie Bach demoing the gaming potential of Natal, playing a breakout-like game called Riccochet, where one uses their body to push, block, and kick balls at various bricks. Microsoft showed Natal at the E3 trade show earlier this year but hasn’t said when the
Xbox 360 add-on will be commercially available.

“The real question is what killer apps (will mark the) new era and what will be the user interface that people use to get at them,” Mundie said, speaking at Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting here.

The father of an 11-year-old girl in the U.K. said Apple tried to keep him from speaking about his daughter’s
iPod after it exploded last month.

Apple declined to comment for this story.

Clancy said the documents show 15 “burn and fire-related incidents” that iPod owners blamed on the device.

To be fair, letters from companies in situations like this are most likely standard procedure. However, this isn’t the first time Apple has been accused of trying to stop people from reporting on faulty iPods.

Reporter Amy Clancy of KIRO-TV in Seattle said it took her more than seven months to get documents from the Consumer Product Safety Commission on iPods that mysteriously burst into flames. She said she had filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but Apple lawyers filed “exemption after exemption” with the commission to stop her from getting the over 800 pages of documents.

Speaking to The Times in the U.K., Ken Stanborough said after he dropped the iPod Touch, it began hissing and started to get hot. As a precaution, he threw the iPod outside and “within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10 (feet) in the air,” he said.

Apple agreed to give Stanborough a refund, but only if he signed a confidentiality agreement, agreeing not to disclose any information about the incident. Stanborough said he found the letter “appalling” and refused to sign it.

To do that, Odom said he came up with what is known as the “Scoop” scoring system. This is designed to reward participation in social networking–the source of all of Gelato’s information–as well as honesty. So, for example, a user gets 25 Scoop points for having an authenticated Facebook account with more than 25 friends; 25 points for an authenticated Twitter account; and 25 points if their Facebook relationship status matches what they’ve entered in their Gelato profile.

(Credit:
Gelato)

Will this approach to online dating work? It is, of course, too early to tell, and Gelato will have to contend with the fact that anyone interested in finding love online already has a myriad choices. But there is something to be said for giving people a better sense, up front, of what they’re really dealing with in the scary world of online dating, and if Gelato works as described, users will at least be able to know if their potential mates are as interested in Burning Man, USC football, and World of Warcraft as they are.

The idea is, as Odom put it, Friendfeed for dating. Users create a profile and then are able to peruse “life streams” of potential matches by viewing their Facebook profile and updates, their Twitter feed, the music they listen to on Last.FM and even what they’re watching on Hulu and Netflix and their pictures on Flickr.

For CNET News’ latest coverage from DemoFall 09, click here.

Ultimately, the point, Odom explained, is to give users a very realistic, in the moment, view of the person they might be going on a date with.

That’s essentially the elevator pitch of Gelato, an early-stage start-up that’s presenting at the DemoFall 09 conference in San Diego this week. Founded by Steve Odom, a recently divorced entrepreneur who found himself wanting a more effective way to meet someone new than what was available, Gelato aims to give singles a way to meet someone who might actually be a good match.

Online dating, meet the social network, meet real-time search.

And, he added, it means that users can search for a more broad range of criteria, given that Gelato can look for matches based on search terms on all the various social networking sites that members use. So, finding “women who are 30 to 40, who are nonsmokers, who are politically liberal and who recently mentioned Burning Man, USC football, or World of Warcraft” might actually bear fruit, Odom explained.

And, given this wealth of information, Gelato users are also rewarded for the truthfulness of their own profiles. In other words, the Gelato system looks for verification that, for example, someone who says in their profile that they’re single really is.

That means that Gelato users can easily see how many points someone else on the system has, and then take that into consideration when deciding if they think that person might be a good match.

To Odom, this combination of being able to see what someone is doing in real-time (via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and so on) and how active they are in various social networks means “you get a better sense of who someone is from what they’re actually doing.”

Gelato is a new dating service that aims to provide more accurate results by filtering user searches though a number of real-time social networking sites.

But seriously, this latest electronic tongue sensor could prove invaluable for anyone needing to closely monitor their blood glucose levels, or even for identifying toxic substances in foods or the environment at large, according to the researchers.

I can’t help but cut to an image of a white-tablecloth restaurant with a little sign that asks patrons to please be discreet when pulling out their tongues.

Suslick’s team spent a decade developing colorimetric sensor arrays (PDF), where chemicals in each of the 16 to 36 micro dye spots reacted with sweet substances to produce color changes. The colors tell not just which types of sweeteners are present, but also how much there is, shown through the resulting color’s intensity. It works–unlike its heavy, expensive predecessor–in two minutes.

Suslick’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and iSense is commercializing the technology.

While some efforts have been truly comedic (there was the one robot that confused human flesh with prosciutto–but who knows, we may taste more like pigs than we like to think), others have been more successful, including the announcement last August of an artificial tongue that can identify a wine’s age and variety. (Again, I find myself cutting to an image, this one of the proverbial wine snob with red puckered lips matched up against a row of posers all dipping business cards into their glasses.)

At the American Chemical Society’s 238th National Meeting in Washington Monday, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced “the first practical ‘electronic tongue’ sensor” that identifies sources of sweetness and then changes colors depending on the type and quantity of sweeteners present.

The electronic tongue can detect 14 common sweeteners.

Of course, getting other devices to work like the human tongue isn’t new. Several efforts have been made over the years in an attempt to update the current standard, a test called “high-performance liquid chromatography” that requires an expensive desk-sized machine and accompanying technician.

(Credit:
Kenneth Suslick/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Doctoral student Christopher Musto points out that more work is needed to develop a truly complete electronic tongue that can also detect sour, salty, bitter, and umami (i.e. savory). I know, I know, there are many great possible applications for this kind of technology, but I can’t help picturing a future me telling my grandchildren about the good ol’ days when we actually used our own tongues to tell us what we were eating.

Under the leadership of chemistry professor Kenneth S. Suslick–who may or may not return my phone call to explain, among other pressing matters, what is going on in his university Web site photograph–the Illinois team developed a sensor about the size of a business card that can simply be dipped into food samples. “We take things that smell or taste and convert their chemical properties into a visual image,” Suslick said in a press release.

Google Street View, which originally launched in May 2007, allows users to virtually navigate neighborhoods in 14 countries around the world. When the service first launched, it was only available in five U.S. cities.

Google's Street View is now live in Canada.

Street View has come under some fire since its debut for the service’s alleged potential to infringe the privacy of those people found in its images. To address that issue in Canada, Google said in a statement that it “has gone to great lengths to ensure Canadians’ privacy.”

Google announced on Wednesday that it has launched its Street View service to 11 cities in Canada, including Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, among others.

(Credit:
Google)

For its part, Google said in the statement on Wednesday that it “consulted with Canada’s federal and provincial Privacy Commissioners in developing Street View and its privacy safeguards.” Evidently, that has helped the company bring Street View to the country.

The company said that all the images in Canada’s Street View are already visible from public roads. Identifiable faces and license plates were blurred to ensure no one in the images could be identified. As with its other Street View services, Google’s Canadian Street View features a “Report a problem” link, allowing concerned users to request images be taken down.

Whether Google would ever be able to bring Street View to Canada was very much up in the air not too long ago. In September 2007, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart wrote to Google saying that she was concerned that the service might violate her country’s privacy regulations. She believed that Street View could infringe Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which went into effect on January 1, 2004.

The first thing to understand is why flash memory can be a good disk cache. This boils down to its much faster access times: microseconds, not milliseconds. Flash can actually take much longer to write than a hard disk. But for reads, it’s really quick. So if you can be smart about putting the right hard-disk data in the cache, especially by choosing the right time to do those write operations, you can save huge amounts of time on future disk reads.

I think Turbo Memory also failed because Intel didn’t provide enough flash memory to help much: just 512MB or 1GB in Turbo Memory 1.0, and up to 4GB in the 2.0 generation. Microsoft’s guidelines for ReadyBoost–the generic version of this feature, which worked from ordinary thumb drives–recommended providing one to three times as much flash as the RAM in the system, and 3x worked better than 1x. With most performance-sensitive users already equipping their systems with gigabytes of RAM, Turbo Memory needed a lot more flash than Intel was offering.

As I noted back in 2007 (”Flash drives–now a pricey but reasonable option”), a moderate amount of flash–say, at least 16GB, a retail value of $15 to $20 in the Braidwood time frame (later this year and into 2010)–can hold every file needed to run the operating system and the popular applications. That’s something Turbo Memory could never do.

But if Braidwood is smart enough, it could be more effective to treat that flash as a cache rather than a separate drive, as I suggested back then. A caching solution would reduce boot time and application launch times substantially, and be easier to manage. If there’s room enough to cache all the disk directory structures, paging files, and commonly accessed user documents as well, so much the better. We’ll have to see just how smart Intel’s software really is, but with enough room, these benefits should be realizable. As they used to say about Soviet tanks, quantity has a quality all its own.

Braidwood–like its predecessor, Intel’s Turbo Memory technology (formerly code-named Robson)–is basically a solid-state cache for all the disks in the system.

As Handy explains in his report, Intel was relying on Microsoft to provide the smarts for Turbo Memory, but Vista’s support for it was weak to begin with. And when the early version of Turbo Memory fell short in performance, Microsoft saw no reason to invest in more software development.

But then I read an EE Times article this week by Mark LePedus describing a new report from Jim Handy of analyst firm Objective Analysis.

I heard about Braidwood earlier this summer on CNET (see “Intel ‘Braidwood’ chip targets snappier software” by Brooke Crothers). But I shrugged it off, assuming it would be no better than Turbo Memory, which left a bad taste in the mouth of many PC makers, end users, and Microsoft execs. Turbo Memory (and Turbo Memory 2.0) wasn’t cheap, and it definitely wasn’t worth the cost. The PC industry operates on such slim margins that every dollar’s worth of hardware has to earn its keep–and Robson didn’t.

The 62-page report is titled “Intel’s Braidwood: Death to SSDs?”

Handy’s report summarizes all the arguments I’ve ever heard in favor of flash cache, plus some I hadn’t heard before. It also goes on to explain Braidwood’s likely effect on system cost (though I think his price estimates are high), to predict how rapidly Braidwood will be adopted, and to show how Braidwood could actually slow the growth rate for DRAM in PCs, since it reduces the need for excess DRAM to act as a disk cache.

Handy’s report said Braidwood’s new drivers will help solve the software problems (though he describes some potential further improvements), and I assume Moore’s Law and the crashing prices of flash memory will solve the capacity problem.

Much has been made lately about the trend toward solid-state drives. Now a new Intel technology, code-named Braidwood, may delay that trend, blending the performance of solid-state drives with the economy of old-style hard drives.

So I sent Handy a note, and he sent me a copy of the report. And now that I’ve read it, I’m inclined to agree with his conclusions, assuming the information he’s obtained about Braidwood is accurate. It does seem reasonable, at least.

Handy’s report argues persuasively that Braidwood might actually be worthwhile, and that got my attention. I’ve known him a long time, and he’s a very good analyst–he’s been covering memory and caching technology a lot longer than I have. He wrote one of the standard references for computer system architects, “The Cache Memory Book.”

I think Handy’s report is good work. If you’re in the mass-storage business, you should take a look.

The bottom line is that the combination of flash and standard hard disks deliver almost all the advantages of pure solid-state disks, but at a lower overall price.

Getting your free Windows 7 upgrade is handled through the company you bought your PC from, not by Microsoft, and in most cases you’ll have to register and fill out some online forms. At some point after October 22, you’ll receive a physical copy of Windows 7 via snail mail. The upgrade path looks like this:

Windows Vista Home Premium→Windows 7 Home Premium
Windows Vista Business→Windows 7 Professional
Windows Vista Ultimate→Windows 7 Ultimate

Let’s take a look at some of the specifics for the brands you’re most likely to buy. Click the gallery link below and we’ll show you the details for your favorite PC brand, including Dell, HP, Gateway, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Sony, complete with upgrade terms and instructions, and links to each PC maker’s free Windows 7 upgrade request forms.

If I buy a laptop now, can I get
Windows 7 for free?
Yes, with some important caveats. From June 26, 2009 through January 31, 2010, Microsoft and many major PC makers are offering free upgrades to Windows 7 for those who want to buy a Vista-powered laptop now. The deals are all essentially the same, and, as expected, have some exceptions and asterisks.

Photos: How do I get my free Windows 7 upgrade?

Do I want to deal with the hassle of upgrading?
Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista was not a trouble-free process for many, to put it mildly. In our handful of tests, however, we have been able to move from Vista to Windows 7 without killing our machines–although, generally speaking, a clean install is more likely to be trouble-free. Wanting to start fresh with a Windows 7 laptop would be a legitimate reason to wait, but not a deal-killer if you need a new laptop right now.

> Need more? Follow me at twitter.com/danackerman.
> More laptop news every week on the Digital City video podcast.
> See CNET’s full Windows 7 review here.
> Missed the big gallery link above? Brand by brand details on getting your free Windows 7 upgrade are here.

Using Vista basic? Tough luck! Also worth noting, upgrades are arriving via DVD, so you’ll have to have a DVD drive available. Also royally screwed are Netbook buyers who have Windows XP. Not only do you not get a free upgrade, you can’t do a direct upgrade to Windows 7–instead you have to do a clean install, wiping your hard drive in the process.

Will a laptop bought now be obsolete in a few months?
To be certain, with the launch of Windows 7, many PC makers will no doubt release new models and revisions of current models. Still, the same could be said of virtually any consumer electronics purchase–there’s always something newer, faster, and maybe even less expensive, coming around the corner. Especially if you need a new back-to-school system, it’s generally not going to make a huge difference if you rely on your laptop for Web surfing, e-mail, office docs, and media playback.

As we’ve just completed a massive 30-plus system roundup of retail back-to-school laptops and desktops, that’s a key question being asked by students, parents, and anyone in the market for a new laptop. There are likely several considerations going through any potential new laptop owner’s mind right now, such as:

(Credit: Null0/Flickr)

One can only hope those hologram-like figures don’t resemble the chaps from Google too closely.

And I am not entirely sure I am persuaded by the concept of virtual sex. Perhaps worse would be the concept of some Googleperson-like hologram talking one through virtual sex. And whispering to one after it.

And, thankfully, so does celebrated large brain and, who knows, maybe “Kids from Fame” aficionado Ray Kurzweil.

“If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go,” said Kurzweil. “Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram-like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening.”

Yes, you can be 28 again. You can drink yourself stupid and let those nano-nano folks just slip you a new liver. You can have sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and still be able to perform Whitney Houston karaoke better than Whitney herself can these days.

I can’t wait. No, really. I can’t.

In an article reported by the Telegraph, Kurzweil says that our technological and genetic know-how is marching at such a furious pace that in 20 years’ time we should be holding in our sweaty, excitable hands the nanotechnological secrets of our existence.

Extraordinary nanotechnological secrets should allow us, according to Kurzweil, to replace our kidneys, livers, hearts and, hey, what about minds, with functioning vital organs made by human hands.

Still, Kurzweil’s passionate certainty offers us all hope for a very different future from the one we might have imagined.

This charmingly optimistic view is but another string hanging from the nano-forecasting bow he’s been wearing for years, along with his rather singular vision of the way men and machines will cohabit happily ever after.

Kurzweil’s contemplations, first published in The Sun, offer us these vast nuggets of hope: “I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogram our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, aging. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.”

I want to live forever. I want to learn how to fly. High. I feel it coming together.

They say Kurzweil is 61. He doesn't look a day over 43 to me.