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Tag: UC Berkeley

  • SETI@home Going Into Hibernation

    SETI@home Going Into Hibernation

    After more than 20 years of letting the average person assist in the search for extraterrestrial life, the SETI@home project is going into hibernation.

    SETI@home is one of the earliest examples of distributed computing, relying on volunteers’ computers to provide the bulk of the processing power. Each day the project records gigabytes of data that needs to be analyzed. Volunteers download a screensaver and when their computer is idle, the program starts working on its assigned data, with the progress displayed in the screensaver. Once the computer has analyzed its assigned data, it sends it back to SETI and retrieves a new packet to analyze.

    The project is going into hibernation, effective March 31, for two reasons. First, according to the project coordinators, “scientifically, we’re at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we’ve analyzed all the data we need for now.” Second, “it’s a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.”

    Despite the current hibernation, the project is not disappearing and there is hope it could start up again.

    “However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We’ll keep you posted about this.”

  • This 3D Printed Robot Can Flatten Itself

    This 3D Printed Robot Can Flatten Itself

    What’s up with 3D printed robots being based on bugs? Our last 3D printed robot was a creepy spider, and now the University of California, Berkeley has created a 3D printed insect robot that can flatten itself to fit under doors.

    In the UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, four men have created what they call the STAR, or Sprawl Tuned Autonomous Robot. As its name implies, the tiny robot can sprawl itself out to an almost flat shape to fit into tight spaces. When it’s not crawling, the robot can run at speeds of up to 5.2m/s.

    Here it is in action:

    So, where do 3D printers fit into all of this? The team at Berkeley says that everything except for the electronics in the robot were created on a ProJet 3000 3D printer. The team chose 3D printing for the robot’s manufacturing because of its ease of use and quick production time. In fact, they can go from the printed parts to a fully operational robot in about 30 minutes.

    Let’s hope the big guys like Atlas or Petman never find out about 3D printing. Humanity would rue the day that robots found out how to make other robots in less than 30 minutes.

    [h/t: 3ders]

  • HTML 5 Tracking Spreading, Says Berkeley Web Privacy Census

    The University of California at Berkeley Law School today released its quarterly census of web trackers, and the results point to a rise in sites’ use of local HTML5 storage. The report, titled The Web Privacy Census, was authored by Nathan Good and Chris Jay Hoofnagle.

    HTML5 local storage, according to the report, allows developers more flexibility and much more room to store data locally. Though the report states that the increase in HTML5 storage does not mean an overall increase in websites tracking users, the data stored through this method can persist and track users in ways that Flash cookies cannot.

    Speaking of Flash cookies, the internet’s top websites have begun shifting away from them in favor of HTML5 storage. As seen in the graph below, Flash has quickly fallen out of vogue with the top 100 sites on the web. The number of those sites that use HTML5 storage has doubled since last year, and the raito of Flash cookies to HTML5 has nearly reversed :

    HTML5 vs. Flash cookie storage

    The census concludes that this trend is likely to continue, and that, in general, third-party tracking will continue to increase online. In subsequent quarterly reports, the researchers hope to examine trends over time. Also, this census did not take any of its results while logged into a third-party service, such as Facebook or a Google account. The researchers state that, as many internet users do stay logged into such services while browsing the web, examining their tracking implications will be a future consideration.

    (Pictures courtesy The Web Privacy Census)