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"I like to make real things and Iove the physicality of making sculpture" Tiny error - "love" has actually been spelled with a cap "I" rather than a small "l". (Looks exactly the same in a sans-serif font, only shows up when you switch to a serif.) That was a fine essay. Agree completely with your sentiments: I have always felt that the current iPhone was designed as an objet d'art rather than something to be held in the hand.
Touchscreens have no hand
Subversive apps help citizens fight state silencing - science-in-society - 17 September 2011
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.
'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.
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).
IBM produces first working chips modeled on the human brain
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.
The high-tech industry: Start me up
MICHAEL LYNCH, chief executive of Autonomy, a Cambridge-based software firm, is showing off Aurasma, its new smartphone application. It recognises objects and then displays related video, commentary and user-created graphics around them, creating an augmented version of what the smartphone “sees”. Mr Lynch hopes Aurasma will quickly capture the lion's share of a fast-growing market for web-browsing based on visual triggers rather than words. “It's a platform,” he says, “so it is hard to predict its use.”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.
Mischief and fraud in the crowdsourced workforce - tech - 11 July 2011
New Scientist TV: 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.
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.
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.
Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense
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.Post on Oct 08, 2010 by Andrea Kissack Topics: Environment , Radio Richard Lowenthal is CEO of charging company, Coulomb Technologies. Photo: Andrea Kissack
Reporter's Notes - Silicon Valley: The New Detroit? | QUEST Community Science Blog - KQED
robots
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A special report on smart systems: It's a smart world
10 steps to speed up a slow Windows PC | Ask Jack | Technology
Slow-running computers can be incredibly frustrating. Photograph: Lucidio Studio Inc/Corbis I have a slow-running Dell that's about five years old.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.pearltrees videos
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