There you are... Shadow?

nosql:

Today LinkedIn has announced that they are open sourcing the technology behind IndexTank, a company they acquired back in October. IndexTank was offering a hosted, scalable full-text search API.

The projects can be found already on GitHub: index tank-engine (the indexing engine) and the API, BackOffice, Storefront, and Nebulizer

scipsy:

The interesting story of Jay Traver, an entomologist who in 1951 published a paper about

“a mite infestation of her scalp that resisted all treatment and was undetectable to anyone other than herself […]

It is perhaps one of the most remarkable scientific papers ever published, not, as it turns out, because of the startling new discovery, but because the Professor had never been infected by parasites.

The bugs were hallucinated, the infestation a delusion and Traver was suffering from a mental illness.

Known as delusional parasitosis the condition consists of the usually focused delusion that the person is infected by parasites that crawl under the skin and which remain present in the surrounding environment. […]” 

via Retraction Watch.

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

nosql:

Starting today you can run your job flows using Hadoop 0.20.205 and Pig 0.9.1. To simplify the upgrade process, we have also introduced the concept of AMI versions. You can now provide a specific AMI version to use at job flow launch or specify that you would like to use our “latest” AMI, ensuring that you are always using our most up-to-date features. The following AMI versions are now available:

• Version 2.0: Hadoop 0.20.205, Hive 0.7.1, Pig 0.9.1, Debian 6.0.2 (Squeeze)
• Version 1.0: Hadoop 0.18.3 and 0.20.2, Hive 0.5 and 0.7.1, Pig 0.3 and 0.6, Debian 5.0 (Lenny)

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is the perfect solution for:

1. learning and experimenting with Hadoop
2. running huge processing jobs in cases where your company doesn’t already have the necessary resources

Original title and link: Amazon Elastic MapReduce Upgrades to Hadoop 0.20.205, Pig 0.9.1, AMI Versioning, and Amazon VPC (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

andrewgreene:

continuations:

The patent wars have really been heating up. For some time now Apple has been going around trying to get various Android devices off the market based on patent claims. Now the shoe is on the other foot as a court in Germany has found in favor of Motorola Mobility against Apple based on a…

Patent warfare is a waste of time and resources. It slows innovations.