The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill. More and more interactive products are being returned.
In 2002, 48% of all returned products were technically fully functional but were rejected for failing to satisfy user needs (28%) or purely due to users’ remorse (20%). Even though a product may have all the features one can hope for, complexity and bad user experience can prevent users from integrating it into their lives. User experiences are subjective and dynamic, but by and large, interactive products are not designed to take people’s changing capacity and experience into account.
But they could. Here, I present a model for how designers can use the fundamentals of video games and the psychological principles of flow to design enhanced user experiences. Going With The Flow In 1975, the Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined his theory of “flow” in his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Video games Complex televisions What You See Is What You Can Do Conclusion.
Smarter Wind Turbines Help Wind Power Compete with Fossil Fuels. Superficially, wind turbines haven’t changed much for decades.
But they’ve gotten much smarter, and considerably bigger, and that’s helped increase the amount of electricity they can generate and lower the cost of wind power. GE’s new 2.5-120 wind turbine, announced last week, is a case in point. Its maximum power output, 2.5 megawatts, is lower than that of the 2.85 megawatt turbine it’s superseding. But over the course of a year it can generate 15 percent more kilowatt hours. Arrays of sensors paired with better algorithms for operating and monitoring the turbine let it keep spinning when earlier generations of wind turbines would have had to shut down. The technology is part of a trend that’s made wind power almost as cheap as fossil fuels.
A new generation of more productive wind turbines that’s coming on line this year could be what it takes to make wind widely competitive with fossil fuels. The biggest impact on electricity production comes from making wind turbines bigger. Immortality only 20 years away says scientist. SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future. The story of the slightly radioactive element thorium, a much-touted alternative fuel for nuclear power plants.
Abundant in the Earth’s crust, thorium has been used in various industrial processes since its discovery in 1828. Advocates, writes Martin, an award-winning journalist and senior research analyst for Pike Research, a clean energy firm, say the silver-gray element has another possible use: as an cheap, safe energy source with the potential to “solve our power crisis.” Expanding on his Wired cover story, the author explains that the element was actually used as a nuclear fuel in an experimental reactor built and run by American scientists at Oak Ridge in the late 1960s.
Since then, it has become a forgotten technology, losing out to uranium, which powers all reactors operating in the United States. A lucid overview of a still-developing chapter in the story of nuclear power. Richard Martin was the first to write about thorium in the mainstream press. Tech.