Japanese Dream Recording Machine. Touchscreens have no hand. Subversive apps help citizens fight state silencing - science-in-society - 17 September 2011. By Kat Austen WHEN the Egyptian authorities realised protesters were using the internet to organise themselves in January, they came up with a simple solution: in an instant they disconnected the nation, cutting off anti-government dissidents from an invaluable resource. The outage inspired James Burke and Chris Pinchen – both members of the P2P Foundation, a group that monitors how data is shared online – to begin work on the ChokePoint Project. The idea is to compile a real-time interactive map of the entire internet and identify potential choke points – the physical and virtual locations where internet access could be easily compromised – and who has the power to strangle them.
ChokePoint Project’s map would allow people to identify the degree and exact location of a network outage, says Burke. “With every country in the world sending network data, over time we’ll see the trends of big data patterns,” says Burke, comparing the idea to the patterns observable in financial data. 'Star-Trek' sick bay detects diseases.
British engineers have built a £1 million Star Trek-style 'sick bay' for the National Health Service, debuting at the Leicester Royal Infirmary's accident and emergency department. Designed to detect everything from bruising to cancer, the unit was developed as a byproduct of a joint project with NASA aimed at detecting the presence of life on Mars. The unit is equipped with a set of instruments which analyze a patient's breath, as well as another set that uses visual imaging to examine a patient's skin. A third suite of monitors looks inside the body and measures blood-flow and oxygenation in real-time. The team believes the equipment can be used to diagnose over 40 diseases, from sepsis through to bacterial infections such as C.
Difficile and some cancers. It's the first time all these technologies have been brought together in an integrated way - and developing it involved scientists working in space research, emergency medicine, engineering and IT. INKLING BY WACOM. Could Power-Scavenging Shoes Could Recharge Your Phone? | 80beats. IBM produces first working chips modeled on the human brain. IBM has been shipping computers for more than 65 years, and it is finally on the verge of creating a true electronic brain. Big Blue is announcing today that it, along with four universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have created the basic design of an experimental computer chip that emulates the way the brain processes information.
IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can. Dharmendra Modha (pictured below right) is the principal investigator of the DARPA project, called Synapse (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics, or SyNAPSE). He is also a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. We wrote about the project when IBM announced the project in November, 2008 and again when it hit its first milestone in November, 2009. You Built What?! A Homemade Scanning Electron Microscope. The hardest DIY project ever Cool Customer To keep the microscope’s vacuum pump from overheating, Krasnow used an air conditioner from a liquid-nitrogen generator he had built previously Cody Pickens Ben Krasnow has built his share of odd contraptions, including a liquid nitrogen generator made from an air conditioner, and the “thirst extinguisher,” a commercial-grade fire extinguisher that cools, carbonates, and dispenses his homemade beer.
Now, for no other reason than wanting a real challenge, the 28-year-old engineer picked the toughest DIY project he could imagine: a homemade scanning electron microscope, or SEM. “I wanted to see if it was possible,” he says. Scientific labs will pay upward of $250,000 for a high-end SEM, and as far as Krasnow could find, no individual had ever built one, so he had to improvise.
He first spent a few weeks teaching himself the complex physics behind the instrument. Krasnow made his electron gun out of a thin tungsten wire. Time: 100 hours Cost: $1,500. The high-tech industry: Start me up. Mischief and fraud in the crowdsourced workforce - tech - 11 July 2011. Once seen as a triumph, Amazon's Mechanical Turk has proved susceptible to dubious deals USER reviews have generally been good for Squibble, an app created by Canadian software firm MassHabit.
Last month, for example, a post on the website MacRumours complimented its "great graphics" and "addictive gameplay". "I just tried the best game from the appstore! " wrote a Squibble fan on another site. Glowing praise, indeed. But the sheen comes off the reviews when you find out that MassHabit appears to have paid for some of them. In a job advert placed last month on Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing website run by Amazon, a MassHabit employee offered people 50 cents to write positive reviews of Squibble that mentioned specific sound bites, including the phrases quoted. It's certainly ... Born to be viral: Vehicle levitates without magnets. MacGregor Campbell, consultant High flying isn't all it's cracked up to be. This vehicle, created by Yusuke Sugahara and colleagues at Tohoku University in Miyagi, Japan, attempts to fly as low to the ground as possible. Existing levitating trains try to minimise drag by using magnets, which reduce friction between the rail and cars.
However the new design exploits air resistance - thanks to a phenomenon called ground effect - and hovers without the need for magnets. Due to the effect, when an airplane flies very low, it creates a cushion of high-pressure air. The plane's speed and lift also increase because the ground prevents drag-causing downwash and wing vortices from forming. Despite its low-flying design, the vehicle must still be controlled around three axes - pitch, roll, and yaw - just like an airplane. The vehicle was presented at the recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai, China.
For flying robots with a bit more agility, check out this video. Portal 2 - Insane Cube Tricks (Part One) One Per Cent: ZeroTouch makes any screen touchable. Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada A cheap way to turn a screen of any size into a touch-sensitive device. An ultra-precise game controller. A new way to manipulate images. These are just some of the possible uses for ZeroTouch, an interface unveiled this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing by researchers from Texas A&M University in College Station. ZeroTouch senses an object's position using a series of infrared LEDs and sensors mounted on the outside of what looks like an empty picture frame.
The LEDs create a grid of invisible beams that crisscross the space inside the frame. The system can be used to turn any screen, including supersized televisions, into a touchscreen. The Texas team demonstrated a ZeroTouch frame overlaid on a touchscreen that was controlled by a handheld stylus. Team leader Andruid Kerne says he would like to rig up a series of ZeroTouch frames that would be big enough for someone to walk through. Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense. Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it. It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds.
The responses are matched to the argument in question – tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun. Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. This incompetent robot will self-destruct - tech - 19 October 2010.
Video: Bad day for teddy bears Robots are usually designed to be useful, but an amateur robotics competition last weekend indulged in technology gone wrong. Organised by SparkFun Electronics in Boulder, Colorado, the Antimov competition mischievously subverts Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, one of which states that a robot must protect its own existence. Instead, the competition challenged people to build a robot that attempts a simple, menial task but fumbles it or fails, before destroying itself.
Participants could either submit their entries as a video, or present their creation live, at an event on 16 October. Spectacular failures The winning video (see above) features a teddy bear birthday party, where a robot tries to cut a cake, but instead emits a spark that sets fire to itself and its fellow diners – a toy bear and a clown. Spark of genius SparkFun hopes to run the competition again next year with more participants. More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by. Reporter's Notes - Silicon Valley: The New Detroit? | QUEST Community Science Blog - KQED. Richard Lowenthal is CEO of charging company, Coulomb Technologies.
Photo: Andrea Kissack Detroit has been at the center of the country’s auto industry ever since Henry Ford rolled his first Model T off the assembly line in 1908. But as hard times have fallen on America’s Rust Belt, there is a new region hoping to give Detroit a run for its money. Amidst start-up companies and corporate office parks, clean tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are plugging into an emerging electric car industry.
Tesla Motors The battery factory of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto is the cleanest factory I’ve ever seen. With its Roadster sports car, which does 0 to 60 in less than four seconds, the company has made electric cars seem…sexy. Tesla Headquarters in Palo Alto. Tesla Motors has just taken over the shuttered NUMMI auto plant in Fremont where it will build it’s next EV. Charging Companies It’s not just venture capital that’s flowing into EV related companies. Listen to Silicon Valley: The New Detroit?
A special report on smart systems: It's a smart world. 10 steps to speed up a slow Windows PC | Ask Jack | Technology. I have a slow-running Dell that's about five years old. It has been protected by Norton Symantec throughout its life and, after a recent full system scan, Norton declares it to be in good health with all threats under control. On the other hand, I am told that slow running is what happens when a PC is full of viruses, and I should consider reinstalling Windows. Which of these is right? And if my PC is clogged up, what is the point of Norton Symantec? It would be nice to be able to make an accurate diagnosis.J King A PC running Microsoft Windows XP should continue to run at the speed it did when you bought it. Also, new PCs "feel" fast because they usually are much faster than whatever you had before.
It is certainly true that malware can make a PC run slowly, and you should double-check Norton's opinion by running an alternative as a one-off test. Both debugging your current PC and reinstalling Windows XP will take time and effort. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Levytator: The World's First Free-Form Escalator | Design for Good. Since its invention in 1859, the escalator has been the most widely used mode of non-vehicle urban transpiration, ubiquitous everywhere from airports to shopping malls to subways. It is estimated that an escalator is used over 90 billion times a year in the US alone.
But the traditional moving staircase has many technical and architectural limitations, with its rigid design and linear structure. Enter Levytator, the world's first escalator capable of following free-form curves. Named after its inventor, Jack Levy, an Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering at City University London, the device uses a continuous loop of curved modules, reducing the cost compared to a traditional escalator where redundant steps move underneath each other. Levytator greatly broadens the architectural vocabulary of moving stairs. Via. I Am a Cyborg and I Want My Google Implant Already - Arikia Millikan - Technology. About nine months ago, I sat in a conference room at Google Headquarters in Mountain View with my boss, Nate Silver, and the company's Chief Economist, Hal Varian, talking about the Google of 2020.
The previous night, Nate and I had been hanging out with one of my childhood friends in downtown San Francisco, brainstorming questions to ask Hal in our interview the following day. I'd been working with Nate as his research assistant on a book project that examines forecasting and prediction in a variety of different fields. Going off on a tangent, we conceived of the concept of a Google Singularity -- an event where the amount of information known by Google surpasses the amount of information it's possible to know.
I laughed as Nate drew a graph on a piece of my friend's Hello Kitty stationary illustrating the theoretical point where this event would occur. Nate: What will Google look like in 2020? Hal: Now you Google things on your computer -- of course. "The implant! " Images: 1. TechGrumps 9: Could Lord Whitty learn Vim? « TechGrumps. Yeah, yeah, we’re back. Three people, three topics: Ian rants about vi/Vim (Tom defends it zealously and Nic schools us all with a text editor history lesson). Tom rants, from his book-filled ivory tower, about this e-book video where poncy designers imagine the “future of the book”. Nic grumbles about the movie industry, the content industry, DRM, Lord Fucking Whitty and the goddamn failure of said buffoons to adapt to the Internet despite having a decade or more to do so.
Download MP3 – Torrent Download OGG – Torrent Like this: Like Loading... I Have Seen the Furniture, and It Is Robotic | Science Not Fiction. As part of my irregular series on Improbable Robotics (such as my post a couple of weeks back on a robot that rocks you to sleep), today we peer into the mind of a creative roboticist from Switzerland, Auke Jan Ijspeert, who is leading a project to develop robotic furniture. I visited Ijspeert’s lab, and the astonishing Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne building, a few weeks ago. Ijspeert’s project, called Roombots, builds on the idea of “modular robotics.” Modular robotics is like roboticized LEGO: Instead of having to build every robot from scratch, we build modules that each have capabilities to sense and to move. These modules have built-in mechanisms to self-assemble into different robots. Modular robotics is inspired by biology on two different levels: 1) The understanding that the secret of the dizzying diversity of life is modularity: having basic building blocks of the body that lead to mutations in which whole functional modules are duplicated or removed.
***WoWee *** INNOVATIVE TOYS. SECTOR: PUBLIC | American Progress Through Technological Innovation. SECTOR: PUBLIC - A New Site About Technology For Public Good - Mark's Cheeky Posterous. Snake Robot Climbs a Tree. Avatars learn gestures to match your tone of voice - tech - 10 September 2010. Monitor: An online medic. 10 Places to Find Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable. Learn and think about Robots. The Internet of Things: The Difference Engine: Chattering objects.
Arduino Up and Running - O'Reilly Media. Tutorials. A house that knows when you’re happy and sad. Frog cells give artificial nose the power of super smell - tech - 23 August 2010. Wonder conductors will spin up cooler computers - tech - 01 September 2010. Readers.