Cell phone tracking system reveals how traffic jams start

Boston-area roads. Red areas are the biggest sources of drivers. Yellow is next, then green, dark blue, and purple.
Credit: MIT/ Ars Technica

Amazingly, 98% of roads are under capacity in peak periods.  Traffic jams are caused when a small number of drivers in key neighborhoods make intensive use of the critical remaining 2% of roads.  On these critical roads, problems arise & then ripple outwards across the entire road system.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/cell-phone-tracking-system-reveals-how-traffic-jams-start/     / Smartphones changed the way we drive going GPS-assisted GPS assisted directions real-time information traffic jams help eliminate traffic jams warning goal study mobile cell phone records data track drivers vehicle movements identify sources of traffic MIT UC-Berkeley UC Berkeley UCB analyzed cell phone records Boston-area commuters call logs towers used to transmit calls researchers trace each individual commute, anonymously from origin destination most detailed maps of urban traffic patterns ever constructed journal Scientific Reports, U.S. Census Bureau travel diaries Boston San Francisco few drivers 98 percent below traffic capacity backups these roads ripple outward, causing traffic to snarl across the Hub drivers from those areas make particularly intensive use of the problematic roads in the system problem neighborhoods might be the key alternatives public transportation carpooling flex time and working from home problem areas /

Three months with Microsoft's Office 365

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6718/microsoft-office-365-review     / Windows Office 2013 experience RT form 15 Consumer Preview major change subscription-based subscription based model still buy Office traditional retail boxed edition standalone license four different options Home & Student Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote Home & Business Outlook Professional Publisher Access  volume-channel only Professional Plus InfoPath and Lync large businesses paying yearly basis multi-device licensing cloud storage naming scheme here latest version Office suite Office 365 subscription service Office 2013 applications Home Premium University with 20GB of SkyDrive storage 60 Skype minutes multiple device installation sleek system leveraged seamless experience cloud-based document storage backup fee is a bit ambitious, but the University edition at $79.99 for four years is actually a pretty great deal consumer product value devices licenses install Microsoft ID occupation pricing scheme setup executable .dmg Mac Macintosh Apple downloaded serial number no DVD-based install purely digital distribution installation tasks background /

Plimer & the merry band of fake experts

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator/plimer-and-the-merry-band-of-fake-experts/news-story/fde33857b97b2d66cb72387199132292     / global warming climate change CO2 carbon dioxide greenhouse gas /

Asteroid impacts: How to avert Armageddon

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/02/asteroid-impacts     / threats posed space rocks meteor meteorite asteroids hit Earth risk impact crater shock wave  passed overhead blew out windows injured hundreds of people 2012 DA14 zipping past Earth inside orbit some man-made satellites astronomers strikes NASA America's space agency watching the sky rock orbits bring them close to Earth near-Earth object NEO track tracking tracked down around 90% of the very biggest NEOs planet killers a kilometre or more across wiped out dinosaurs 7-10km heavyweights are smaller less dangerous damage hit town city hard harder to spot NEO-detection detection Japanese Space Agency universities ask for more money to expand their search researchers, meanwhile pondering what to do if an asteroid is detected that is indeed on a collision course with Earth blast dangerous asteroid apart using nuclear weapons doomsday scenario fracture large asteroid into several smaller ones 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty bans nuclear explosions in space The European Space Agency  mission called Don Quijote large heavy spacecraft to ram an asteroid out of the way send sending a rocket engine to an asteroid could work if the asteroid in question was relatively small and was detected with plenty of time to spare proposal paint one side of an asteroid in light or dark colours, tweaking its trajectory via a neat bit of physics called the Yarkovsky effect that describes the way in which sunlight gives celestial bodies a gentle push gravity tractor in orbit around an asteroid, and relying on its gravity to tug the rock gently out of the way /

Does watching TV lower your sperm count?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2013/02/15/ncbi-rofl-does-watching-tv-lower-your-sperm-count/#.USCZT_1hiK0     / physical activity television watching viewing semen quality in young men has declined over the past decades reasons unresolved concurrent increase in sedentary behaviour behavior  contributing factor  evaluate relationship physical activity television TV watching sperm parameters population young healthy men Rochester Young Men’s Study participated analysis physical activity hours per week of moderate vigorous exercise assessed via questionnaire semen quality was assessed by sperm concentration motility morphology total sperm count directly related to physical activity after multivariable adjustment /

The beautiful thing that happens when you project video onto falling snow (video)

Credit: Brian Maffitt/The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-beautiful-thing-that-happens-when-you-project-video-onto-falling-snow/273049/     / snow fell Chestnut Ridge New York brilliant idea project movie falling flakes screen camera Canon EOS 7D upstairs window pine tree dark backdrop started filming greatest color saturation music stock options Final Cut Pro video editor /

Visual tour: From abacus to iPod

Nordsieck's Differential Analyzer • an analog computer
Credit: Computer History Museum/ ComputerWorld

http://www.computerworld.com/slideshow/detail/22547#slide1     / abacus punch cards Herman Hollerith machine analog computer Nordsieck's Differential Analyzer computer ENIAC Univac Mainframe IBM System /360 360 disk disc drive The IBM RAMAC 350 Supercomputer Cray-1 Cray 1 Minicomputer DEC PDP-8 PDP 8 digital logic Moore's Moore law input output Xerox Alto computer graphics music art Utah Teapot mouse pointing device graphic games Pong Personal computer IBM PC MS DOS mobile computing Palm Pilot Networking Web spaghetti wires /