ReadWriteWeb

Acoustic archaeology is a burgeoning field of inquiry into the past. The discipline seeks to understand how sound played a role in a given culture, using the artifacts of that culture and to abstract and reproduce sound from their artifacts. Also called archaeoacoustics, earlier explorations seems to have been a bit more oozy-groovy than how it is currently practiced. What makes recent explorations fascinating for us is how easy it is to share a direct experience of that past via social media.

We have found some hopefully representative examples, both of ancient sound and explorations of those sounds, to share with you.

In a remarkable series of articles on the World Policy Institute's blog, Anais Borja introduces this distressing thought.

"With easy storage made even easier by cheap disk space, our ability to create and save information has outpaced our ability to think critically about the theory and practice of archiving it."

Will this increase in materials force a democratizing of information and impress that on future historians or will it create an epochal informational garbage dump where real understanding will defy human and machine thought?

Even if your next computer isn't made of water, it may still outpace Moore's law. IBM has rededicated resources and personnel to its quantum computing project in the hope that a five-year push will produce tangible and profound improvements in quantum computing.

Recent advances at UC Santa Barbara and Yale seems to have inspired the company with a sense that such an effort might move quantum-based computing from a largely theoretical construct to actual, usable supercomputing.

With Thanksgiving and the holidays right around the corner, the urge to give may be welling up inside. Also welling up may be the laziness that comes with the cold, grey winter months, but don't let that stop you - giving can be as simple as a Tweet or Facebook update.

HelpAttack! is an Austin-based startup that connects your online activities with donations to the offline world and Twitter and Facebook are just the beginning for a company that looks to bring donations to the data-driven Web.

Facebook, the largest online social network in the world, will put a call to hit the polls at the top of millions of users' Facebook pages tomorrow and will attempt to help them find the nearest polling station.

Facebook told press today that the company will provide an official app on the site that locates the nearest polling place, badges that users can push out to their friends' newsfeeds to show that they have voted and live streaming video coverage of early results starting at 4 p.m. Pacific. As one of the fastest-growing communication channels in history, Facebook could shake things up tomorrow on election day.

Really "like" your local coffee shop? Soon, you'll be able to "like" the shop on Facebook thanks to NFC (near-field communications) pioneer Bling Nation, whose mobile phone stickers are also used to perform mobile payments at participating merchants.

With the new "FanConnect" platform, announced at PayPal's Developer Conference yesterday, businesses can connect with consumers on both Facebook and up-and-coming location-based network Foursquare. All the customer has to do is wave their phone near the store's accompanying NFC reader.

Benoit Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot is one of the few people in history whose face is completely unknown even as the designs based on his math are instantly recognized. He is also one of the few mathematicians to percolate through popular culture. In high school, t-shirts with designs of his "fractal" patterns first became popular. Earlier this year, I read a series of books in which the supernatural monsters that plague mankind come from "the bottom of the Mandelbrot set."

Before his death earlier this month in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 85, he had produced a new branch of mathematics, which he called fractal geometry. It was based on the observation of same-shape, different-scale repetition in an object or within a data set. It was a marvelous description of so much in nature, everything from flowers to river deltas to galaxies. The math that expresses this repetition is used in algorithms governing data compression on the Internet, in video games and even in financial analysis.

Take a look this morning at Reuters, the BBC, CNN or any number of other media sources and you'll read that WikiLeaks, the controversial wiki-based site for whistle-blowers, is about to release nearly half a million records pertaining to the Iraq War.

Wikileaks says that this news has been reported in more than 700 articles across the Web and that it's all based on "a single tabloid blog at Wired Magazine".

Facebook's track record, when it comes to standing up for users whose rights are threatened, is, to be gentle about it, rubbish. But GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has announced the cooperation of the social network in an effort end the online menacing of gay users. For this, Facebook deserves praise.

A Facebook page to honor teens like Tyler Clement, who took their own lives after homophobic abuse, was the target of human trash cans who littered it with slurs and filth. When GLAAD approached Facebook to encourage them to be more exacting in removing comments that violated the social network's terms of service, they responded strongly and immediately, making a commitment to quick turnaround on this and related pages.

This is the latest in an occasional series on people who have passed away, folks who have contributed in some way to the development of, or the way we look at, the Internet and Web. If you know of someone who should be featured, please let us know.

Andrew Witkin: Oscar-winning scientist. The phrase "Oscar-winning scientist" is rare. So was Andrew Witkin, a senior computer scientist with the animation studio Pixar. Witkin's exit was as creative as the technology he helped develop. He died while scuba-diving off Monterrey, California on September 12.