Roma. Firefox Geolocation. Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, has released technology that helps websites detect the physical location of computers. The system will allow users, for instance, to find local restaurants when they travel to a new town. The Geode project is an experimental add-on ahead of a full blown launch of geolocation technology in version 3.1 of Firefox. Users will have control over how much location information they give.
It uses technology from a firm called Skyhook which works out a computer's location from nearby wireless networks. Its so-called Loki system can determine location within seconds with an accuracy of about 10 to 20 metres. Local news Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering believes Geode will have a range of applications going beyond looking up restaurants. "People have got to eat but there is a lot more to it than that," he said. "We see location as adding an extra layer to help get people the information they need," he said. Irksome? Tech Know: A journey into sound. 27 May 2010Last updated at 11:14 LJ Rich builds a machine to play 19th century recordings after a band released a wax cylinder single The BBC Technology index has been writing about makers, hackers and other assorted tinkerers for over a year. Time, then, to see if any of the skills and crafts we have filmed and written about have rubbed off.
All we needed was a project. As if on cue, an e-mail fell into the inbox from Allegra Hawksmoor who told us about a band called The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing. One track of their next album, called Now That's What I Call Steampunk - Volume One, will be available on a wax cylinder. "As far as we're aware, it's the first album to be sold with (at least a partial) wax cylinder release for the best part of a century," she said. Anyone buying one of the 40 copies of the track on wax will also get instructions for building a phonograph to play the cylinder. Would we be interested in finding out more, she asked? Yes, we said, we would.
Tinker time. Organic transistor paves way for new generations of neuro-inspired computers. For the first time, CNRS(1) and CEA(2) researchers have developed a transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse(3). This organic transistor, based on pentacene(4) and gold nanoparticles and known as a NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor), has opened the way to new generations of neuro-inspired computers, capable of responding in a manner similar to the nervous system. The study is published in the 22 January 2010 issue of the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
In the development of new information processing strategies, one approach consists in mimicking the way biological systems such as neuron networks operate to produce electronic circuits with new features. In the nervous system, a synapse is the junction between two neurons, enabling the transmission of electric messages from one neuron to another and the adaptation of the message as a function of the nature of the incoming signal (plasticity). Notes. Grand unified theory of AI: New approach unites two prevailing but often opposed strains in artificial-intelligence research. In the 1950s and '60s, artificial-intelligence researchers saw themselves as trying to uncover the rules of thought.
But those rules turned out to be way more complicated than anyone had imagined. Since then, artificial-intelligence (AI) research has come to rely, instead, on probabilities -- statistical patterns that computers can learn from large sets of training data. The probabilistic approach has been responsible for most of the recent progress in artificial intelligence, such as voice recognition systems, or the system that recommends movies to Netflix subscribers. But Noah Goodman, an MIT research scientist whose department is Brain and Cognitive Sciences but whose lab is Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, thinks that AI gave up too much when it gave up rules. By combining the old rule-based systems with insights from the new probabilistic systems, Goodman has found a way to model thought that could have broad implications for both AI and cognitive science.
Desenvolvimento das celulas fotovoltaicas. ELECTRICITY from sunlight: bright hope for the future, or false dawn? Solar power has its share of detractors who'd go for the latter. Photovoltaic cells are too expensive, they say, requiring huge amounts of material and energy to make. And they are inefficient, too, converting at best about 20 per cent of the incoming solar radiation into usable power. So, the sceptics say, solar cells are only ever likely to be a small, disproportionately expensive part of our future energy mix. Such criticisms might be tempered by a new generation of solar cells about to flop off the production line.