150 Years Ago: Sleep Technology

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July 1963

Laser Bloom
?The latest device to fascinate the technical community is the optical maser, or, as it is now often called, the laser. By conservative estimate about 500 research groups are engaged in laser development and exploitation in the U.S. alone. Much of this effort is directed toward the use of laser beams in communication systems. The amount of information that can be carried by a communication channel is proportional to its frequency, and in principle the visible region of the spectrum between the wavelengths of 4,000 and 7,000 angstrom units could accommodate 80 million television channels. ?Arthur L. Schawlow?

The author shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics.

True or False?
?A warning against the increasing and largely unrestricted application of lie-detector techniques in business and industry has been issued by a psychiatrist and a psychologist at the University of Virginia. The polygraph merely measures involuntary responses. It cannot determine whether the response was stimulated by conscious deception or by a factor which might be unconsciously motivated. Yet an examiner usually seeks to impress the subject with the idea that the machine ?can't be beat? and so to encourage confessions, he ?uses deception in his effort to detect deception.? The authors conclude that lie-detector tests ?should be carefully and continually scrutinized, lest we find that George Orwell's 1984 is upon us.??

July 1913

Eve of War
?Germany has devoted most time, money, and skilled research to the development of the various types of the dirigible; France, to that of the aeroplane, or avion, in all its forms. A similar comparison as to aeroplanes and trained pilots shows France to be much superior to Germany; and it is also stated that though the French machines are frailer looking, they are much better constructed than the German ones, which are still too heavy. Obviously, then, in case of war there would be a contest between German dirigibles and French aeroplanes?like battleships and torpedo boats.?

For a slide show on weapons and warfare from our archives of 1913, see www.ScientificAmerican.com/jul2013/warfare

July 1863

Salt Mine
?It appears from scientific investigation that the salt deposit at New Iberia, Louisiana, is of the most extensive and wonderful description. For vastness and purity it is unequaled on the globe. One account says: ?Imagine, if you can, the granite quarry of Massachusetts or the marble quarry of Vermont to be solid deposits of pure rock salt, clean and transparent as so much clear white ice, in one solid, inexhaustible mass, underlying the earth.??

The rock salt mine on Avery Island, Louisiana, yielded more than 10,000 tons of salt for the Confederacy.

Sleep Technology
?The engraving represents an improved mode of constructing spring beds; Letters Patent have been granted. In point of economy, ease, and durability these beds are unsurpassed. It is confidently asserted that they will last fifty years.?

Letter from Mr. Fix-It
?Messrs. Editors: All machinery requires attention, and occasional ?fixing?; and the women are not good at such work. Every now and then it is: ?John, I wish you would look at that sewing machine?; or ?John, that wringer has something wrong about it?; and so on. Well, the only way to meet that is to buy the very best machinery; you will then have little trouble. Some churls may say: ?I won't buy so-and-so; what else have the women got to do? Let them work!? All I have to say to such is that I hate to see the women of the family borne down with the fatigue of severe labor; and if it is a little troublesome to fix machinery for them, I for one am content to endure that trouble. ?John Gray?

This article was originally published with the title 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/basic-science/~3/CBNoWXsUd14/article.cfm

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Boost Mobile ships Samsung Galaxy Prevail II for $180 off-contract

Well over two years after the original graced Boost Mobile's shelves, Samsung's Galaxy Prevail II is being announced for the same carrier. Available for just $179.99 in off-contract form, the handset ships with Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean), a 4-inch WVGA touchscreen, 5-megapixel rear camera, 1.3 megapixel front-facing cam, and a 1.4GHz processor. You'll also find a 1,750mAh battery, inbuilt GPS / WiFi modules and Bluetooth 4.0. The prepaid carrier is hawking this on its contract-free $55 / month plan, which just so happens to shrink by $5 per month for every six on-time payments -- in other words, those who hang around long enough will eventually be paying as little as $40 / month for nationwide talk, text and picture messaging, as well as web access. Not too shabby, eh?

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung

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Source: Boost Mobile

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/12/boost-mobile-ships-samsung-galaxy-prevail-ii/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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Union County woman, estranged husband dead in murder-suicide

By? Holly Zachariah

The Columbus Dispatch Friday July 12, 2013 10:43 PM

OSTRANDER, Ohio ? As darkness swallowed the Union County house where authorities figured a suspect was holed up tonight, the tensions along Smart-Cole Road mounted: How would it end? Would the man come out? Or would the deputies force their way inside and, if so, what would they find?

Authorities already suspected that the man inside ? who authorities know but have not publicly named ? had killed his 51-year-old estranged wife earlier in the day. She had been shot.

But after a standoff of nearly five hours, a robot sent into the couple?s home near the intersection of Smart-Cole and Brown roads just before 9:30 p.m. found the answer: The man was dead, too, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The ordeal began at 4:10 p.m. when a passerby who saw the woman?s body lying in a ditch near the intersection of Smart-Cole and Brown roads called 911. Another passerby stopped and reported seeing a man walk away from the scene and to a nearby house where, authorities later said, the couple had lived together until a week ago, when the wife had moved out.

Deputies arrived almost immediately. They shut down the area and evacuated the eight closest houses, and the standoff began.

Sgt. Chris Skinner, spokesman for the Union County sheriff?s office, said one of the passersby tried to administer first aid to the woman. But it was too late. Union County Coroner David Applegate was at the scene, which isn?t far off Rt. 42 near the Union/Delaware county line, and said she was already dead.

All through the evening, specialized SWAT trucks and cruisers and pickups carrying officers from multiple departments rolled up and down the country roads as curious neighbors watched, mostly from behind their screen doors.

Skinner said authorities had been in no hurry to force their way inside the home. They knew the couple?s three children were safe and accounted for and there were no hostages.

They tried for hours to make contact with the suspect in a variety of ways before sending the robot in after dark. ?He?s a suspect, and we want him to walk out alive,? Skinner said. ?Right now, we?ve got nothing but time.?

Among the neighbors who did venture out was Melanie Williams, a schoolteacher who lives about a mile down Smart-Cole Road from the intersection where it all happened. She could see the flashing lights, and she came to offer a deputy and state troopers standing guard some bottled water.

Williams has lived in the neighborhood nearly 15 years and said nothing like this had ever happened.

?It?s the country. We ride our bikes down the road and wave to everyone,? she said.

Williams didn?t know who the dead woman was at the end of her road ? word of the woman?s identity hadn?t even filtered through the countryside ? but she said the standoff had everybody on edge.

?It?s usually quiet. Peaceful,? she said. ?But I guess you never can understand what will make someone do something awful.?

Then, she went back inside and shut her door.

hzachariah@dispatch.com

@hollyzachariah?

?

Source: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/07/12/Union-County-shooting.html

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NASA urged to seek live Martians with 2020 rover

Genome sequencers and other devices that could reveal whether anything is alive on Mars right now should be ready to launch with NASA's next Mars rover in 2020. The trouble is, the rover team may not want them ? and some astrobiologists are crying foul.

Earlier this week NASA announced its science goals for the next US rover headed for the Red Planet, known for now as Mars 2020. Essentially a duplicate of the Curiosity rover now on Mars, this robot has been tasked with searching for evidence of past life and collecting rock samples for eventual return to Earth. Sample-return has been at the top of the Mars community's wish list for decades. The caching component of Mars 2020 represents a revival of a well-studied plan to bring Martian rocks back to Earth for detailed study.

But others think the rover's approach to life detection is overly cautious. The Mars 2020 will primarily search for signs that something lived on Mars in ancient times, even though the technology exists to hunt for alien microbes presently living on or just beneath the surface.

"It is the same old depressing story of NASA vetoing any proposal to do biological experiments on Mars," says Paul Davies of Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. "I personally think this is absurd."

Martian genes

One potential life-seeking experiment is the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) project, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previous experiments for detecting existing life on Mars, such as the one on the 1976 Viking missions, focused on finding organic carbon, which is necessary for life as we know it but can also be produced by non-biological processes. Viking scientists initially reported such hints of life on Mars, but the results were ultimately deemed inconclusive.

"We went and looked for life on Mars with Viking, and since then we've been in the mode of looking for past life," says Chris Carr of the SETG project. "That's made sense. We didn't want to repeat Viking, where we couldn't make sense of the results."

Finding DNA or RNA would be a much less ambiguous signal of life, past or present. A gene sequencer could even figure out whether that life is related to Earth life, or if it had a unique origin. Doing DNA analysis on Mars rather than waiting for the Mars 2020 samples to come home also means you can be confident that the samples have not degraded in transit.

"Sample-return is an important mission and we should do it, but I don't think we should wait until we have all parts of that mission to look for extant life on Mars," says Carr. His team is developing a robust sequencer small enough to fit on a rover, and they are already field-testing prototypes. "I think we could produce something in time for the Mars 2020 mission," he says.

Encourage life

An even simpler experiment would create habitable hot spots on Mars. Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University and colleagues argue that if microbes are currently present on Mars, they may be lying dormant to survive the planet's extreme dryness and cold. If you could warm them up, protect them from radiation and give them a refreshing drink, they might bloom.

Their project, outlined in a paper published this week in the journal Astrobiology, is called Detection of Mars Extant life in the near-Subsurface (DOMES). A rover would scratch out a trench to expose the Martian subsurface and put down a clear plastic cup containing water and organic compounds, inverted like a tiny biodome. Similar schemes have encouraged lichen and moss to flourish in the otherwise sparsely populated sands of the Namib Desert.

Gil Levin of ASU, who led Viking's life-detection efforts, still hopes to see that experiment vindicated. "NASA says the greatest question confronting us is, are we alone?" says Levin. "Thirty-seven years ago, they got at least an ambiguous response. What do you do with an ambiguous response? You settle it. You don't run away from it."

Together with Davies and Ariel Anbar, also of ASU, Levin is currently developing a capsule that would carry multiple small, dart-like instruments, which could shoot away from a rover or lander, plunge down into the soil and repeat the Viking experiment several times with different controls. "That would not only verify that we had detected life previously or disprove it, but would also begin an investigation of what kind of life that is," he says.

Mars rocks

NASA is throwing open the door for proposed instruments to fly on Mars 2020, so while these experiments may go beyond the rover's stated goal, they can still compete for a spot. And if they are not selected for this launch, the sample-return effort may give them another shot.

The most likely strategy for returning samples stored on the 2020 rover will involve two more spacecraft heading to Mars, says Charles Whetsel of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Another rover will need to pick up the cache and loft it into orbit, and an orbiter or flyby mission will have to pick it up. Both of those missions would offer opportunities for new science experiments that could search for extant life, either carried on the pickup rover or dropped by the orbiter.

In the meantime, Whetsel defends the decision to hold off on searching for existing life right now. "It's probably easier to prove there was once life on Mars than to prove it survived and it exists today," he says. "It would definitely be front-page news if we determined there is currently life on Mars. I think it's equally front-page to say there was once life on Mars."

Journal reference: Astrobiology, DOI: 10.1089/ast.2013.0995

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News Says Captain Of Crashed Asiana Flight 214 Is ?Sum Ting Wong?

Information is still coming in about Asiana Flight 214. KTVU, a news channel in San Jose, California, aired the names of the flight crew. But there was a problem: The names were actually an incredibly racist joke on the names of the people operating the plane.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/m9fnTrEdQzk/san-jose-news-mistakes-racist-joke-for-asiana-flight-21-759160087

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Why do we enjoy listening to sad music?

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Sad music might actually evoke positive emotions, reveals a new study by Japanese researchers.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/living_well/~3/OSHBp8C4IHo/130711135459.htm

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Does change management need to change? | Linkage, Inc.

?As a recognized discipline, change management has been in existence for over half a century,? writes Ron Ashkenas on www.hbr.org. ?Yet despite the huge investment that companies have made in tools, training, and thousands of books (over 83,000 on Amazon), most studies still show a 60-70% failure rate for organizational change projects?a statistic that has stayed constant from the 1970s to the present.

?Given this evidence, is it possible that everything we know about change management is wrong and that we need to go back to the drawing board? Should we abandon Kotter?s eight success factors, Blanchard?s moving cheese, and everything else we know about engagement, communication, small wins, building the business case, and all of the other elements of the change management framework?

?While it might be plausible to conclude that we should rethink the basics, let me suggest an alternative explanation: The content of change management is reasonably correct, but the managerial capacity to implement it has been woefully underdeveloped.?

Click here?to read the rest of the story.

Mitchell Nash, our own change and transition expert, wholeheartedly agrees. ?It is not enough to just have all leaders and managers be held?accountable for the results or outcomes of the change initiative. They also need to be accountable for the buy-in and engagement of their employees. Understanding the challenging transitions that people go through in dealing with change, and being able to coach them through it, is what we see as the ultimate accountability for successful change leaders.?

Are?you and your organization experiencing?changes that are more traumatic than transformational? It doesn?t have to be that way. Click here to learn more.

More about Mitchell

Mitchell Nash is a Regional Vice President, Principal Consultant, and leader of Linkage?s Change and Transition Leadership practice. He has over 20 years of experience leading, facilitating, and supporting large-scale change initiatives and has unique expertise in facilitating organizational impact by using technological, organizational, and leadership development solutions.

Source: http://mylinkage.com/blog/does-change-management-need-to-change/

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