eBooks2: Wow

Books Continue to Evolve - Check Out E.O. Wilson's 'Life on Earth' iBook

Life on Earth is a digital biology textbook for high school students. It's currently "under development" (it isn't being written, it's being developed) by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The free download offers a preview of the book and a sample chapter about ecology. New chapters will be "released" (not published) over the next 2 years to the Apple iBookstore.

DIY Hovercraft

Make a very lovely hovercraft! This super awesome DIY project requires a bit of parent or teacher supervision (sharp needle needed to make a hole), but overall, it answers all of my wishes: Not only does it teach about physics and get kids making things that are fun, but it gives us a great use for the old CDs that we have in boxes around the house! (And there are quite a few.) That alone makes this project a gem in my book.

Millenium Falcon 10179 Animation Construction on CAD/3DS

Lego Millennium Falcon Stop Motion Assembly 3d from Francisco Prieto on Vimeo.

Facebook faces more Class-Action

Facebook Faces Nationwide Class-Action Lawsuit

A Baltimore law firm filed a nationwide class action lawsuit against Facebook Friday, claiming the social network illegally tracked user activity on the Internet.

In its claim, the law firm Murphy P.A. said the company "repeatedly ignored" warnings from a user who noticed Facebook continued to track users' activities on the Internet even after they had logged off. Facebook finally confirmed the practice in September and promised to make corrections within 24 hours.

Open Source your Car

Have You Jailbroken Your Ford Lately?

At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.

Understanding Credit Card Fraud online

How Advanced Fraud Detection Services Work

As anyone who has ever had a valid credit card charge questioned knows, there is a lot of fraudulent use of cards, and the Internet has made it even easier for the bad guys to exploit them. According to comScore, last year ecommerce in the U.S. reached record levels of spending with more than $160 billion in transactions. With all this activity, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a very large haystack to try to track down fraudulent transactions. But a look into a couple of new fraud detection and prevention technologies shows that perhaps the good guys are making some inroads in this war.

MIT Continues Free, Open Learning Initiative Online

MITx 6.002

MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.

The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012.