Interesting paper: Using Google Glass to correct color blindness. And more: “The approach can also provide augmented reality for human vision by adding the UV or IR responses as a new feature of Google Glass.”

Google has launched open-source tools for measuring cloud performance. “We wanted to make the evaluation of cloud performance easy, so we collected input from other cloud providers, analysts, and experts from academia. The result is a cloud performance benchmarking framework called PerfKit Benchmarker. PerfKit is unique because it measures the end to end time to provision resources in the cloud, in addition to reporting on the most standard metrics of peak performance. You’ll now have a way to easily benchmark across cloud platforms, while getting a transparent view of application throughput, latency, variance, and overhead.”

A silly article on Google (sorry, RB is starting out very Googly today) from the New York Times. Basically it says that Google won’t be on top forever. Which anyone watching search engines for the last 20 years could tell you. (What, you haven’t been watching search engines for the last 20 years? Why not? What do you mean, “you have a life”?)

A team at the Edinburgh College of Art is going to create a digital archive of tower blocks in the UK. (“Tower blocks” in the UK are what we in the US call “high-rises,” I think.)

Stanford Researchers have developed a comparative search engine to predict gene function. “Generating phylogenetic profiles is a complex process, but Meyer and his colleagues made visualizing them easy with the search engine. A Web page asks for the name of a human gene and outputs a phylogenetic profile and a list of genes with shared ancestry. The search engine translates the phylogenetic profile into a color-coded and labeled map in which each group of species has its own color….The researchers validated the search engine on 14 human genes of previously unknown function. They used the phylogenetic profiles, which identify shared ancestry between human and non-human genes, as a starting point to identify the function of the 14 genes, which were found to contain instructions for building proteins important to intracellular transport and signaling. By constraining the possibilities of gene function, the phylogenetic profiling method starts to demystify those parts of the human genome that are poorly understood. Dey estimates that their technique is capable of making useful predictions about function for about 600 genes with unknown function, or approximately 10 percent of the 6,000 human genes with unknown function.”

Event Web site Zvents apparently shut down at the end of October. Haven’t had occasion to look up events lately so I just noticed. Good morning, Internet…

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