Monday, July 18, 2011

Internet Archive: WayBack Machine

Internet Archive


Coordinates: 37°46′56.3″N 122°28′17.65″W
Internet Archive
Type Digital library
Founded 1996
Key people Brewster Kahle (Chairman)
Website archive.org
Alexa rank decrease 230 (April 2011)[1]
Available in English

Internet Archive headquarters was in the Presidio, a former US military base in San Francisco, from 1996 to 2009.

As of November 2009, new Internet Archive headquarters at 300 Funston in San Francisco, CA, a former Christian Science Church

Mirror of the Internet Archive in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina
(Click on Image)
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php


The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."[2][3] It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996. It is a member of the IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium).[4]

With offices located in San Francisco, California, USA and data centers in San Francisco, Redwood City, and Mountain View, California, USA, the Archive's largest collection is its web archive, "snapshots of the World Wide Web." To ensure the stability and endurance of the Internet Archive, its collection is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

The Archive allows the public to both upload and download digital material to its data cluster, and provides unrestricted online access to that material at no cost. The Archive also oversees one of the world's largest book digitization projects. It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.[5]

In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.

The Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit operating in the United States. It has a staff of 200, most of whom are book scanners in its book scanning centers. Its main office in San Francisco houses about 30 employees. The Archive has an annual budget of $10 million, derived from a variety of sources: revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation.[6]

Contents

History

Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in 1996 at the same time that he began the for-profit web crawling company Alexa Internet. The Archive began to archive the World Wide Web from 1996, but it did not make this collection available until 2001, when it developed the Wayback Machine. In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the Web archive, beginning with the Prelinger Archive. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software. It hosts a number of other projects: the NASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information site Open Library. Recently, the Archive has begun working to provide specialized services relating to the information access needs of the print-disabled.

According to its website:
Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

Wayback Machine

Main article: Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive has capitalized on the popular use of the term "WABAC Machine" from a segment of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, and uses the name "Wayback Machine" for its service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed.[7] This service allows users to see archived versions of web pages of the past, what the Internet Archive calls a "three dimensional index". Millions of websites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a gigantic database. The service can be used to see what previous versions of websites used to look like, to grab original source code from websites that may no longer be directly available, or to visit websites that no longer even exist. Not all websites are available, however, because many website owners choose to exclude their sites. As with all sites based on data from web crawlers, the Internet Archive misses large areas of the web for a variety of other reasons. International biases have also been found in its coverage, although this does not seem to be the result of a deliberate policy [8]

Examples from the Wayback
Machine's archives:
The use of the term "Wayback Machine" in the context of the Internet Archive has become so common that "Wayback Machine" and "Internet Archive" are almost synonymous. This usage occurs in popular culture, e.g., in the television show Law and Order: Criminal Intent ("Legacy", first run Aug. 3, 2008), an extra playing a computer tech uses the "Wayback Machine" to find an archive of a student's Facebook style website. Snapshots usually take at least 6–18 months to be added.

Open Library

Main article: Open Library
The Open Library is another project of the Internet Archive. The site seeks to include a web page database for every book ever published, a sort of open source version of WorldCat. It holds 23 million catalog records of books, in addition to the full texts of about 1,600,000 public domain books, which are fully readable and downloadable.[9][10] Open Library is a free/open source software project, with its source code freely available on the Open Library site.

Archive-It

First deployed in early 2006, Archive-It is a subscription service that allows institutions and individuals to build and preserve collections of born digital content.[11] Through a web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, and within 24 hours browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted by the Internet Archive and available to the public with full-text search. Content collected through Archive-It is stored with a primary and back up copy, is periodically indexed into the Internet Archive's general archive, and a copy of the data can be sent to the partner institutions.

As of March 2009, Archive-It has 125 partner institutions in 42 US States and 11 countries who have captured over a 1.5 billion URL's for 963 public collections.

Archive-It partners are universities and college libraries, state archives, federal institutions, museums and cultural organizations, including the Electronic Literature Organization, the State Archives of North Carolina, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Stanford University, the National Library of Australia, the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and many others.

nasaimages.org

NASA Images was created through a Space Act Agreement between the Internet Archive and NASA to bring public access to NASA's image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource. The NASA Images team works closely with all of the NASA centers to keep adding to the ever-growing collection at nasaimages.org. The site launched in July 2008 and now has more than 100,000 items online.

Media collections

In addition to web archives, the Internet Archive maintains extensive collections of digital media that are attested by the uploader to be in the public domain in the United States or licensed under a license that allows redistribution, such as Creative Commons licenses. The media are organized into collections by media type (moving images, audio, text, etc.), and into sub-collections by various criteria. Each of the main collections includes an "Open Source" sub-collection where general contributions by the public are stored.

Moving image collection

Aside from feature films, IA's Moving Image collection includes: newsreels; classic cartoons; pro- and anti-war propaganda; Skip Elsheimer's "A.V. Geeks" collection; and ephemeral material from Prelinger Archives, such as advertising, educational and industrial films and amateur and home movie collections.
IA's Brick Films collection contains stop-motion animation filmed with Lego bricks, some of which are "remakes" of feature films. The Election 2004 collection is a non-partisan public resource for sharing video materials related to the 2004 United States Presidential Election. The Independent News collection includes sub-collections such as the Internet Archive's World At War competition from 2001, in which contestants created short films demonstrating "why access to history matters." Among their most-downloaded video files are eyewitness recordings of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The September 11th Television Archive contains archival footage from the world's major television networks of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 as they unfolded on live television.
Some of the films available on the Internet Archive are:
See also Wikipedia list of films freely available on the Internet Archive.

Audio collection

Main article: Live Music Archive
The audio collection includes music, audio books, news broadcasts, old time radio shows and a wide variety of other audio files.

The Live Music Archive sub-collection includes over 50,000 concert recordings from independent artists, as well as more established artists and musical ensembles with permissive rules about recording their concerts such as the Grateful Dead, and more recently, The Smashing Pumpkins. Jordan Zevon has also allowed anyone to share concert recordings of his father Warren Zevon on the Internet Archive.

Text collection


Internet Archive book scanner
The texts collection includes digitized books from various libraries around the world as well as many special collections. The Internet Archive operates 23 scanning centers in five countries, digitizing about 1,000 books a day, financially supported by libraries and foundations.[12] As of November 2008, when there were about 1 million texts, the entire collection was over 0.5 petabytes, which includes raw camera images, cropped and skewed images, PDFs, and raw OCR data.[13]

Between about 2006 and 2008 Microsoft Corporation had a special relationship with Internet Archive texts through its Live Search Books project, scanning over 300,000 books which were contributed to the collection, as well as financial support and scanning equipment. On May 23, 2008 Microsoft announced it would be ending the Live Book Search project and no longer scanning books.[14] Microsoft made its scanned books available without contractual restriction and donated its scanning equipment to its former partners.[14]

Around October 2007 Archive users began uploading public domain books from Google Book Search.[15] As of May 2011 there were over 900,000 Google-digitized books in the Archive's collection, out of a total of 2.8 million books. The books are identical to the copies found on Google, except without the Google watermarks, and are available for unrestricted use and download, like all Internet Archive materials.[16]

Controversies and legal disputes

National Security Letter
An NSL issued to the Internet Archive demanding information about a user
On May 8, 2008, it was revealed that the Internet Archive successfully challenged an FBI National Security Letter asking for logs on an undisclosed user.[17][18]

Scientology

See also: Scientology and the Internet
In late 2002, the Internet Archive removed various sites critical of Scientology from the Wayback Machine.[19] The error message stated that this was in response to a "request by the site owner."[20] It was later clarified that lawyers from the Church of Scientology had demanded the removal and that the actual site owners did not want their material removed.[21]

Healthcare Advocates, Inc.

In 2003, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey defended a client from a trademark dispute using the Archive's Wayback Machine. The lawyers were able to show that the plaintiff's claims were invalid based on the content of their web site from several years prior. The plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates, then amended their complaint to include the Internet Archive, accusing the organization of copyright infringement as well as violations of the DMCA and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Healthcare Advocates claimed that, since they had installed a robots.txt file on their website, even if after the initial lawsuit was filed, the Archive should have removed all previous copies of the plaintiff website from the Wayback Machine.[22] The lawsuit was settled out of court.[23]

Robots.txt is used as part of the Robots Exclusion Standard, a voluntary protocol the Internet Archive respects that disallows bots from indexing certain pages delineated by the creator as off-limits. As a result, the Internet Archive has rendered unavailable a number of websites that are now inaccessible through the Wayback Machine. Currently, the Internet Archive applies robots.txt rules retroactively; if a site blocks the Internet Archive, like Healthcare Advocates, any previously archived pages from the domain are also rendered unavailable. In cases of blocked sites, only the robots.txt file is archived.
However, the Internet Archive also states, "Sometimes a web site owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site. We comply with these requests."[24] In addition, the website says: "The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection."[25]

Suzanne Shell

On December 12, 2005, activist Suzanne Shell demanded Internet Archive pay her US$100,000 for archiving her website profane-justice.org between 1999 and 2004.[26] Internet Archive filed a declaratory judgment action in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on January 20, 2006, seeking a judicial determination that Internet Archive did not violate Shell’s copyright. Shell responded and brought a countersuit against Internet Archive for archiving her site, which she alleges is in violation of her terms of service.[27] On February 13, 2007, a judge for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed all counterclaims except breach of contract.[26] The Internet Archive did not move to dismiss copyright infringement claims Shell asserted arising out of its copying activities, which will also go forward.[28]

On April 25, 2007, Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell jointly announced the settlement of their lawsuit. The Internet Archive said, “Internet Archive has no interest in including materials in the Wayback Machine of persons who do not wish to have their Web content archived. We recognize that Ms. Shell has a valid and enforceable copyright in her Web site and we regret that the inclusion of her Web site in the Wayback Machine resulted in this litigation. We are happy to have this case behind us.” Ms. Shell said, “I respect the historical value of Internet Archive’s goal. I never intended to interfere with that goal nor cause it any harm.”[29]

Grateful Dead

In November 2005, free downloads of Grateful Dead concerts were removed from the site. John Perry Barlow identified Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann as the instigators of the change, according to a New York Times article.[30] Phil Lesh commented on the change in a November 30, 2005, posting to his personal website:
It was brought to my attention that all of the Grateful Dead shows were taken down from Archive.org right before Thanksgiving. I was not part of this decision making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead's legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it.[31]
A November 30 forum post from Brewster Kahle summarized what appeared to be the compromise reached among the band members. Audience recordings could be downloaded or streamed, but soundboard recordings were to be available for streaming only. Concerts have since been re-added.[32]

Opposition to Google Books Settlement

The Internet Archive is a member of the Open Book Alliance, which has been among the most outspoken critics of the Google Book Settlement. The Archive advocates an alternative digital library project.

See also

Wikipedia:Using the Wayback Machine - A guide to the Internet Archive's Wayback machine.

Similar projects

Other

References

  1. ^ "archive.org - Site Information from Alexa". Retrieved 2011-04-17.
  2. ^ Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions
  3. ^ Internet Archive: Universal Access to all Knowledge
  4. ^ Members (International Internet Preservation Consortium)
  5. ^ "Internet Archive officially a library", May 2, 2007.
  6. ^ CabinetMagazine.org
  7. ^ Green, Heather (February 28, 2002). "A Library as Big as the World: Brewster Kahle has the technology to assemble the ultimate archive of human knowledge. What's stopping him? Restrictive copyright laws". Business Week Online. Retrieved 2007-06-25.
  8. ^ Thelwall, M. & Vaughan, L. (2004). A fair history of the Web? Examining country balance in the Internet Archive, Library & Information Science Research, 26(2), 162-176.
  9. ^ Gonsalves, Antone (December 20, 2006). "Internet Archive Claims Progress Against Google Library Initiative". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
  10. ^ "The Open Library Makes Its Online Debut". Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wired Campus. July 19, 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2007-07-30.
  11. ^ Stefanie Olsen, "Preserving the Web one group at a time", CNet News.com, May 1, 2006.
  12. ^ "Books Scanning to be Publicly Funded", announcement by Brewster Khale, May 23, 2008.
  13. ^ "Bulk Access to OCR for 1 Million Books", via Open Library Blog, by raj, November 24, 2008.
  14. ^ a b "Book search winding down", Live Search Blog. Official announcement from Microsoft. Last accessed May 23, 2008.
  15. ^ Google Books at Internet Archive.
  16. ^ Books imported from Google have a metadata tag of scanner:google for searching purposes. The archive links back to Google for PDF copies, but also maintains a local PDF copy, which is viewable under the "All Files: HTTP" link.
  17. ^ FBI rescinds secret order for Internet Archive records, CNet.
  18. ^ Nakashima, Ellen, "FBI Backs Off From Secret Order for Data After Lawsuit", Washington Post, May 8, 2008.
  19. ^ Bowman, Lisa M (September 24, 2002). "Net archive silences Scientology critic". CNET News.com. Retrieved 2007-01-04.
  20. ^ Jeff (September 23, 2002). "exclusions from the Wayback Machine" (Blog). Wayback Machine Forum. Internet Archive. Retrieved 2007-01-04. Author and Date indicate initiation of forum thread.
  21. ^ Miller, Ernest (September 24). "Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine for Scientology" (Blog). LawMeme. Yale Law School. Retrieved 2007-01-04. The posting is billed as a 'feature' and lacks an associated year designation; comments by other contributors appear after the 'feature' .
  22. ^ Dye, Jessica (2005). "Website Sued for Controversial Trip into Internet Past". EContent. 28 (11): 8–9.
  23. ^ Bangeman, Eric (August 31 2006). "Internet Archive Settles Suit Over Wayback Machine". Ars technica. Retrieved 2007-11-29.
  24. ^ Some sites are not available because of Robots.txt or other exclusions.
  25. ^ How can I remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?.
  26. ^ a b Lewis T. Babcock (February 13, 2007). Internet Archive v. Shell (PDF), Civil Action No. 06cv01726LTBCBS.
  27. ^ Claburn, Thomas (March 16, 2007). "Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2007-07-29.
  28. ^ Samson, Martin. Internet Archive v. Suzanne Shell. via Phillips Nizer LLP.
  29. ^ Internet Archive and Suzanne Shell Settle Lawsuit, April 25, 2007.
  30. ^ Jeff Leeds; Jesse Fox Mayshark (December 1, 2005). "Wrath of Deadheads stalls a Web crackdown". International Herald Tribune (republication of article from The New York Times). Retrieved July 14, 2010.
  31. ^ Phil Lesh (November 30, 2005). "An Announcement from Phil Lesh" (Blog). Hotline. PhilLesh.net. Retrieved 2007-01-05.
  32. ^ Brewster Kahle; Matt Vernon (December 1, 2005). "Good News and an Apology: GD on the Internet Archive". Live Music Archive Forum. Internet Archive. Retrieved July 14, 2010. Authors and date indicate the first posting in the forum thread.

Further reading

External links

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Sunday, July 17, 2011

CERN brings hardware into the open

It good to see great minds think alike?:)

The Open Hardware Repository was inspired by the success of open-source software. (Image courtesy CERN.)
Hardware and software go hand in hand – one doesn’t work without the other. Despite being so closely linked, the two industries operate very differently. For the most part, hardware is produced in isolation and product designs are concealed by manufacturers, while software is created in a largely open and collaborative environment, available for anyone to use.

Javier Serrano, a hardware designer for accelerator systems at CERN, set out to change that. Three years ago, his software design colleagues were developing device drivers – the interface between a piece of hardware and software applications – with the Linux open-source operating system. Serrano noticed that they enjoyed being part of a community where they had access to high-quality products and could seek help whenever they needed it. CERN brings hardware into the open

See Also: My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Take Note: Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history.


Kernel (Mar 09 2006 Wikipedia)

In computer science the kernel is the core of an operating system. It is a piece of software responsible for providing secure access to the machine's hardware and to various processes (computer programs in a state of execution).
It's good to see where such thoughts originated at Cern with regard to this subject. This issue is one which I had proposed sometime ago in terms of broad band development as a non profit in order to establish some competition to what has become monopolistic control over the internet in Canada.  It is with the full compliance of the CRTC which supposedly is to represent some fairness to the internet and consumers, which it does not.

Linux (Mar 09 2006 Wikipedia)

Linux is a computer operating system and its kernel. It is one of the most prominent examples of free software and of open-source development; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, improve, and redistribute.

I was able to detect product(Bell, Shaw, Telus,) development around internet usage according to UBB, while there were still methods that these companies were "fully aware of"  back tens years ago that allowed such easy connections in terms of wireless internet?

The Cathedral and the Bizarre by Jeff Lewis(through use of Wayback Machine)

The problem there is that the 'capitalist trench' problem is just as real in OpenSource as it is in commerical product: once a group buys into a specific solution, the cost of changing grows with time. That's true even if the software is 'free' because the maintenance costs and time to convert to another solution are not
Update:New link supplied

These thoughts for me go back to the ideas around Netscape and Microsoft when Microsoft was trying to be the based software on computers placed into the market.
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Monday, July 11, 2011

Messier 8

Seen through small telescopes and binoculars as a fuzzy glow, M8 is a region of intense star formation with a characteristic pink hue from ionized hydrogen (Balmer H-α recombination line). While red is indeed the hydrogen emission in this image by the 8-m Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, the other colours are false. Ionized sulphur emission is coded in green and infrared starlight in blue.(Click on Image for larger viewing)
Thanks to Cern Courier for link to Picture of the Month

***

The Lagoon Nebula (catalogued as Messier 8 or M8, and as NGC 6523) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region.
The Lagoon Nebula was discovered by Guillaume Le Gentil in 1747 and is one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible to the naked eye from mid-northern latitudes. Seen with binoculars, it appears as a distinct oval cloudlike patch with a definite core. A fragile star cluster appears superimposed on it.

Contents

Characteristics

The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light years from the Earth. In the sky of Earth, it spans 90' by 40', translates to an actual dimension of 110 by 50 light years. Like many nebulas, it appears pink in time-exposure color photos but is gray to the eye peering through binoculars or a telescope, human vision having poor color sensitivity at low light levels. The nebula contains a number of Bok globules (dark, collapsing clouds of protostellar material), the most prominent of which have been catalogued by E. E. Barnard as B88, B89 and B296. It also includes a funnel-like or tornado-like structure caused by a hot O-type star that emanates ultraviolet light, heating and ionizing gases on the surface of the nebula. The Lagoon Nebula also contains at its centre a structure known as the Hourglass Nebula (so named by John Herschel), which should not be confused with the better known Hourglass Nebula in the constellation of Musca. In 2006 the first four Herbig-Haro objects were detected within the Hourglass, also including HH 870. This provides the first direct evidence of active star formation by accretion within it.[2]
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ALICE Enters New Territory

A computer screen in the ALICE control room shows an event display on the night of the first heavy-ion collisions in the LHC in November 2010.
A basic process in QCD is the energy loss of a fast parton in a medium composed of colour charges. This phenomenon, "jet quenching", is especially useful in the study of the QGP, using the naturally occurring products (jets) of the hard scattering of quarks and gluons from the incoming nuclei. A highly energetic parton (a colour charge) probes the coloured medium rather like an X-ray probes ordinary matter. The production of these partonic probes in hadronic collisions is well understood within perturbative QCD. The theory also shows that a parton traversing the medium will lose a fraction of its energy in emitting many soft (low energy) gluons. The amount of the radiated energy is proportional to the density of the medium and to the square of the path length travelled by the parton in the medium. Theory also predicts that the energy loss depends on the flavour of the parton.

Jet quenching was first observed at RHIC by measuring the yields of hadrons with high transverse momentum (pT). These particles are produced via fragmentation of energetic partons. The yields of these high-pT particles in central nucleus–nucleus collisions were found to be a factor of five lower than expected from the measurements in proton–proton reactions. ALICE has recently published the measurement of charged particles in central heavy-ion collisions at the LHC. As at RHIC, the production of high-pT hadrons at the LHC is strongly suppressed. However, the observations at the LHC show qualitatively new features (see box). The observation from ALICE is consistent with reports from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations on direct evidence for parton energy loss within heavy-ion collisions using fully reconstructed back-to-back jets of particles associated with hard parton scatterings (CERN Courier January/February 2011 p6 and March 2011 p6). The latter two experiments have shown a strong energy imbalance between the jet and its recoiling partner (G Aad et al. 2010 and CMS collaboration 2011). This imbalance is thought to arise because one of the jets traversed the hot and dense matter, transferring a substantial fraction of its energy to the medium in a way that is not recovered by the reconstruction of the jets.See: ALICE enters new territory in heavy-ion collisions

Click no Image for larger viewing
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Saturday, July 09, 2011

My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Sir Tim, creator of the World Wide Web, pointed to open data and linked data as exciting examples of the way that the Web is promoting transparency of information and looked forward to the time when the current 20 per cent of the world’s population who can access the Web grows to 80 per cent, with all the changes this will bring in terms of technological and social developments, and new possibilities of communication and cultural change.(bold added by me for emphasis)
Profiting from the Web has it's connotation here in this blog entry to mean, development of societies in regards to the knowledge based and development of individual to widen their boundaries of perspective.

Open Hardware Repository
"Designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware." It is hard to deny that enthusiasm is inspiring and that it can be one of the factors in the success of any enterprise. The statement comes from the Manifesto of the Open Hardware Repository (OHR), which is defined by its creators as a place on the web where electronics designers can collaborate on open-hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the movement for open-source software. Of course, there is more to this than the importance of enthusiasm. Feedback from peers, design reuse and better collaboration with industry are also among the important advantages to working in an open environment.Hardware joins the open movement

Just have to legally read License application in order to see that it is actually a concerted effort to such establishment of an Open Internet agenda ? Why is this important?

***

OHR Manifesto

The Open Hardware Repository is a place on the web for electronics designers to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the free software movement. There are numerous advantages to working in a completely open environment:
  • Peer review. If you are a designer in a somewhat small team, or even alone, you can get very useful feedback from others by exposing your ideas in an open space. Chances are somebody has similar interests to yours and more experience.
  • Design reuse. The OHR has its origins (and initial scope) in the community of electronics designers working in experimental physics laboratories. One of its goals is to reduce the number of different teams working independently to solve the same problems, in order to make better systems with less time and effort.
  • Better collaboration with industry. The current business model for most commercial design companies is to keep the details of design secret. While this might maximize the margins of some companies it has no advantage for the customers. We believe that a business model based on companies designing in the OHR and getting paid for it is perfectly feasible, and would result in better products and the possibility for the customer to improve them and debug them more effectively.
  • Last but not least, designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware.
There are two different areas in the OHR:
  • Project pages are under the responsibility of a given project leader. There are two requirements for any project to qualify for OHR support:
    • Everything needed to review and modify the design and to produce the final hardware must be published. This includes schematics and PCB layout in some human-readable open format, bill of materials, mechanical drawings, manufacturing files, etc. Submitting the electronics CAD files in case someone uses the same design software and wants to modify the design is also requested. A project leader is free to use any licensing scheme for a given design, provided it is compatible with the OHR goals stated in this document. Two good candidates for open design are the TAPR Open Hardware License and the CERN Open Hardware License.
    • The project must present an interest to the community of electronics designers for experimental physics facilities. This community being very wide and diverse, we don’t think this is a very troublesome constraint.
  • OHR Support is a specific project devoted to the OHR itself. It contains useful information for users and any issue on OHR usage can be reported there.
We hope that the OHR will be a worthy contribution to a change in design paradigms and practices towards more openness and quality. See: http://www.ohwr.org/
 ***

CERN Open Hardware Licence

The CERN Open Hardware License was written for CERN designs hosted in the OHR and can also be used by any designer wishing to share design information using a license compliant with the OSHW definition criteria.

Access to the full text: CERN Open Hardware Licence.

It is important for "such distribution" to understand that the very development of internet through CERN and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as too, Cern being a birth place of internet. The origination of Internet Technologies as a development toward "advancing communication" other then corporate monopolistic control over the internet. Why,  non profit development detriment to not to consider it a  a right to all countries "access to information" with which to advance those societies?

To combat UBB and Vertical Integration. LHC development as a participation of many countries.

Cern must turn their views toward Canada and "current events" in order to understand the importance of such developments with regard to OHR Manifesto.If you can free the consumers/population in Canada then you can free the world to stopping advancing communications constraints and development toward a world population knowledge and developmental bottleneck..

Update: See Also: CERN brings hardware into the open

Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history
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Friday, July 08, 2011

QGP Advances

Even the famous helium-3, which can flow out of a container via capillary forces, does not count as a perfect fluid.What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles by Clifford V. Johnson and Peter Steinberg....May of Last Year.

If helium-3 is used in cooling energy containment and was to be considered within LHC, wouldn't such example be applicable as to thinking about capillary routes as holes? Energy loss attributed too?

Layman wondering.


The notion of a perfect fluid arises in many fields of physics. The term can be applied to any system that is in local equilibrium and has negligible shear viscosity η. In everyday life, viscosity is a familiar property associated with the tendency of a substance to resist flow. From a microscopic perspective, it is a diagnostic of the strength of the interactions between a fluid’s constituents. The shear viscosity measures how disturbances in the system are transmitted to the rest of the system through interactions. If those interactions are strong, neighboring parts of the fluid more readily transmit the disturbances through the system (see figure 1). Thus low shear viscosities indicate significant interaction strength. The ideal gas represents the opposite extreme—it is a system with no interactions and infinite shear viscosity.


Perfect fluids are easy to describe, but few substances on Earth actually behave like them. Although often cited as a low-viscosity liquid, water in fact has a substantial viscosity, as evidenced by its tendency to form eddies and whorls when faced with an obstacle, rather than to flow smoothly as in ideal hydrodynamics. Even the famous helium-3, which can flow out of a container via capillary forces, does not count as a perfect fluid. What black holes teach about strongly coupled particles

The interesting thing for me as a layman  was about the theoretic in String Theory research is the idea of pushing perspective back in terms of the Microseconds. So for me it was about looking at collision processes and see how these may be applied to cosmological data as we look out amongst the stars.


At the recent seminar, the LHC’s dedicated heavy-ion experiment, ALICE, confirmed that QGP behaves like an ideal liquid, a phenomenon earlier observed at the US Brookhaven Laboratory’s RHIC facility. This question was indeed one of the main points of this first phase of data analysis, which also included the analysis of secondary particles produced in the lead-lead collisions. ALICE's results already rule out many of the existing theoretical models describing the physics of heavy-ions.
See: 2010 ion run: completed!


This is an important development in my view and I have been following for some time. The last contention in recognition for me was determinations of "the initial state" as to whether a Gas or a Fluid. How one get's there. This is phenomenologically correct as to understanding expressions of theoretic approach and application. Don't let anyone tell you different.

While we understand Microscopic blackholes quickly dissipate, it is of great interest that if such high energy collision processes are evident in our recognition of those natural processes, then we are faced with our own planet and signals of faster then light expressions through the mediums of earth?We have created many backdrops (Calorimeters) experimentally for comparisons of energy expressions. ICECUBE.

It is a really interesting story about the creation of our own universe in conjunction with experimental research a LHC


Our work is about comparing the data we collect in the STAR detector with modern calculations, so that we can write down equations on paper that exactly describe how the quark-gluon plasma behaves," says Jerome Lauret from Brookhaven National Laboratory. "One of the most important assumptions we've made is that, for very intense collisions, the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to hydrodynamic calculations in which the matter is like a liquid that flows with no viscosity whatsoever."

Proving that under certain conditions the quark-gluon plasma behaves according to such calculations is an exciting discovery for physicists, as it brings them a little closer to understanding how matter behaves at very small scales. But the challenge remains to determine the properties of the plasma under other conditions.

"We want to measure when the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a perfect fluid with zero viscosity, and when it doesn't," says Lauret. "When it doesn't match our calculations, what parameters do we have to change? If we can put everything together, we might have a model that reproduces everything we see in our detector." See:Probing the Perfect Liquid with the STAR Grid





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Thursday, July 07, 2011

Atlas Experiment :Tile Calorimeter Barrel

Atlas Photos

The tile calorimeter will collect the energy released in the LHC's proton-proton collisions. Special plastic manufacturing techniques have been adapted to mass produce the ATLAS elements.




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Monday, July 04, 2011

Strings 2011 in Uppsala, Sweden

Welcome to Strings 2011 in Uppsala, Sweden!

   Thanks to Lubos Motl for link too, "Jeff Harvey Summary Video" and of course,  the current state of String Theory. Of course conference has since past,  but hey, the information is great from many perspectives that were there.
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