Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

"This is Mike Weber. We received a cable through international programs which came from the Ambassador in Vienna, and we just want to alert you to this, not that you need to do anything with the information, but to make certain that you have awareness of it." [More]

The White House on Thursday vowed to raise the level of privacy on the Web through a series of personal data protection measures it calls the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights . The initiative calls for, among other things, companies that gather information online to provide users with greater control over what information is collected and how it’s used.

Scanning tunnelling microscope image of a silicon surface lithographically prepared for two electrodes and a single transistor atom in the center. Credit: ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication, at UNSW The shift from fragile, bulky vacuum tubes to solid-state transistors paved the way for the information age. And the steady downsizing of transistors has made the devices of the information age ubiquitous, thanks to processors that become smaller, cheaper and faster with each passing year.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Today’s most powerful telescopes collect huge amounts of data from the most distant locations of the universe – yet much of the information is simply discarded because it involves small length scales that are difficult to model. In an effort to waste less data from cosmological surveys, a team of scientists has developed a new technique that allows researchers to use otherwise unusable data by "clipping" some of the highest density peaks, which present the greatest challenge to models. This data could provide a way to address some unsolved problems in physics, including estimating the neutrino mass and investigating theories of modified gravity.

Four years ago Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow turned to her husband after looking up some movie trivia online and asked, “What did we do before the Internet?” Thus, Sparrow set out to investigate how Google, and all the information it proffers, has changed how people think.

As the recent flurry of articles about why portable electronic devices are restricted during air travel makes clear, the conclusion to be drawn from the information available is a very complicated: “We just don’t know.” For this reason alone airlines err on the side of caution, asking people nicely (and sometimes not so nicely) to turn off their gadgets during takeoff and landing.

Mutations alter the information contained in genes. "Epigenetic" marks on genes do not affect the information but do influence gene activity, as the simplified diagrams below show

Want to know whether Modern Family or your favorite TV show will be back next season? Check out that program’s presence in the social media arena, according to the Social TV Summit held Wednesday in New York City

Compared to familiar climate-saving programs that aim to stuff greenhouse gases into the ground or harness the power of the wind, ideas like "cloud computing" are hard to penetrate. Still, the practice is gaining attention as the information technology (IT) industry promotes it as a tool to save both energy and money. [More]

After people realize the facts have been fudged, they do their best to set the record straight: judges tell juries to forget misleading testimony; newspapers publish errata. But even explicit warnings to ignore misinformation cannot erase the damage done, according to a new study from the University of Western Australia

In 2007 Nobel laureate James Watson eyed his genome for the very first time. Through more than 50 years of scientific and technological advancement, Watson saw the chemical structure he once helped to unravel now pieced into a personal genetic landscape that lay before him. There was one small stretch of DNA on chromosome 19, however, that he chose to leave under wraps

By hooking up just a few cars to a grid that allows engineers to adjust conditions based on real-time traffic conditions, everyone would be blessed with congestion-free rides. It’s safe to say, despite Nevada's recent approval of fully automated vehicles , that we Americans are ambivalent about the prospect of networked cars

Do the laws of physics emerge from the laws of information?

Even in the information age, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics still gathers much of its data the old-fashioned way. Workers make phone calls to find out what dentists charge for pulling teeth, and they visit stores to write down the prices of CDs and Russet potatoes.

The idea of cloud computing is to make all the information and services run in data centers around the world available via the Web. The reality of this is daunting.