Science & TechnologyS


Network

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

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© Minh Uong / The New York Times
Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world's unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data. This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Eye 2

Saying "I'm sorry" influences Jurors

Apologizing for negative outcomes - a practice common even with children - may lead to more favorable verdicts for auditors in court, according to researchers at George Mason University and Oklahoma State University. The results of the study will be available in a forthcoming issue of Contemporary Accounting Research.

Telescope

Asteroid Search Spawns Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey

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© Robert GendlerThe arrow points to a supernova discovered in a nearby pair of colliding galaxies called the Antennae. The supernova was discovered in the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey that uses data collected by UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory observers using telescopes in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.
Astronomers have been mining a mother lode of astronomical data from The University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey and finding more "optical transients" than they can characterize during the past 17 months.

They have found more than 700 unique "optical transients," or objects that change brightness on time scales of minutes to years. They've also found 177 supernovae. That's more than dedicated supernova surveys have turned up during that time.

Their discoveries include the most energetic supernova ever seen, and a nearby stellar explosion in the Antennae galaxy that is helping astronomers refine the cosmic distance scale. Unlike most dedicated supernova surveys, Catalina Sky Survey telescopes cover the entire sky each month, allowing the team to record supernovae in dim galaxies where others weren't looking.

Blackbox

Citizen Sky Invites Public To Help Resolve A Stellar Mystery

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© www.CitizenSky.org / Nico CamargoAn artistic representation by Citizen Sky participant Nico Camargo of the epsilon Aurigae system as seen at low inclination.
This fall a bright star will begin a puzzling transformation that only happens every 27 years. To help study this event, astronomers have launched a new citizen science project called "Citizen Sky".

Epsilon Aurigae is a bright star that can be seen with the unaided eye even in bright urban areas of the Northern Hemisphere from fall to spring.

This fall it is predicted to gradually lose half its brightness until early winter. It will remain faint during all of 2010 before slowly regaining its normal brightness by the summer of 2011.

Since its discovery in 1821, the cause of this dip in brightness has remained a mystery to astronomers. But this time they have a powerful new resource to help study the upcoming event: thousands of citizen scientists.

Battery

Robot with bones moves like you do

You may have more in common with this robot than any other - it was designed using your anatomy as a blueprint.


Info

Neural networks mapped in dementia patients

Different types of dementia show dissimilar changes in brain activity. A network mapping technique described in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience has been applied to EEG data obtained from patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD, a less common type of dementia with more prominent behavioral symptoms).

Info

Online social networks leak personal information to tracking sites

Worcester, Massachusetts - More than a half billion people use online social networks, posting vast amounts of information about themselves to share with online friends and colleagues. A new study co-authored by a researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has found that the practices of many popular social networking sites typically make that personal information available to companies that track Web users' browsing habits and allow them to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people.

The study, presented recently in Barcelona at the Workshop on Online Social Networks, part of the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, is the first to describe a mechanism that tracking sites could use to directly link browsing habits to specific individuals.

Magnet

Let There Be Light: Teaching Magnets To Do More Than Just Stick Around

Megnets
© Daniel Gamelin/University of WashingtonStrong dopant-exciton magnetic exchange coupling in doped QDs can allow formation of magnetic polarons, where the spins of the dopants spontaneously align with the exciton spin.
That palm tree magnet commemorating your last vacation is programmed for a simple function - to stick to your refrigerator. Similarly, semiconductors are programmed to convey bits of information small and large, processing information on your computer or cell phone.

Scientists are working to coax those semiconductors to be more than conveyers, to actually perform some functions like magnets, such as data recording and electronic control. So far most of those effects could only be achieved at very cold temperatures: minus 260 degrees Celsius or more than 400 below zero Fahrenheit, likely too cold for most computer users.

However, researchers led by a University of Washington chemist report on Aug. 21 in Science that they have been able to train tiny semiconductor crystals, called nanocrystals or quantum dots, to display new magnetic functions at room temperature using light as a trigger.

Silicon-based semiconductor chips incorporate tiny transistors that manipulate electrons based on their charges. Scientists also are working on ways to use electricity to manipulate the electrons' magnetism, referred to as "spin," but are still searching for the breakthrough that will allow "spintronics" to function at room temperature without losing large amounts of the capability they have at frigid temperatures.

Sherlock

Relics Uncovered at University of Georgia's Building

A renovation project on one of the University of Georgia's oldest buildings has turned into an archaeological treasure hunt, and after weeks of digging, the treasure pile just keeps growing.

Another relic from UGA's past turned up in New College's historic North Campus building days ago: a ticket to a long-ago UGA baseball game, buried in the dirt.

Though some of the letters are missing from the faded piece of paper, enough remained to see clearly the 50-cent ticket was issued by the UGA Athletic Association's Baseball Department.

Campus Architect Danny Sniff hopes retired UGA tennis coach and media relations director Dan Magill or someone else familiar with Bulldog athletic history will be able to help date the ticket.

Telescope

Scientists Spy New Type of Death Star

Nebulae
© Royal Astronomical SocietyAn optical image of the brightest Radio Planetary Nebula, also known as super planetary nebulae, in the Small Magellanic Cloud, JD 04.
Astronomers have long wondered what happens to the dying bodies of stars somewhat bigger than the sun.

Objects roughly one-third to two-thirds the size of the sun blow out their mass into beautifully glowing shells of gas and dust called planetary nebulae.

But no similar structures have been found for stars about one to eight times the size of the sun.

Now a team of Australian and U.S. scientists think they have an answer: The bigger stars create planetary nebulae that radiate strongly in radio waves, as opposed to visible light. They call these new objects "super planetary nebulae."

"There's been a difference between what (these stars) should have shed and what has been assessed," astronomer Martin Cohen, with the University of California at Berkeley, told Discovery News.