Archive for April, 2008
Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter
“The most important point of our work is that we can show that it is possible to improve fluid intelligence,” said Martin Buschkuehl, a psychology researcher based at the University of Bern, Switzerland. “It was assumed that fluid intelligence was immutable.” Fluid intelligence measures how people adapt to new situations and solve problems they’ve never seen before. Fluid intelligence differs from crystallized intelligence, which takes into account skills and knowledge that have been acquired — like vocabulary, grammar and math.”
Wired
RallyPoint Handwear Computer Input Device gives soldiers a hand
“The Handwear Computer Input Device (HCID) has a whole mess of sensors built-in, including push-button sensors in the pinky, fourth finger and index, finger, a mouse-like sensor in the index finger and a trio of accelerometers on the back of the hand. HCID plugs in via USB, and can be used to activate radio, navigate electronic maps and send commands.”
Engadget
Overnewsed but uninformed
“Stefan Brautigam is critical of the current news landscape, where according to him, it’s getting harder and harder for an audience to determine the authenticity of the news. With this project, Stefan wants to help users search for sources they can trust. The collection of diagrams describes processes, discloses ownership structures and dependencies within the companies involved in the processing, preparation and delivery of messages. It also allows for easy analysis of user data. The audience can now evaluate and categorize news based on real-life examples, such as the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis, in addition to having background information and analyses at their fingertips.”
visualcomplexity.com
One week of The Guardian
“This visual was pretty much focused on the relationships created between headlines, authors, pages, and categories. I wanted to see how much of a mess the relationships could make if they were all surrounding one container (like the square graphs we drew as children, linking adjoining sides by straight lines to create beautiful symmetrical perspectives)”.”
visualcomplexity.com
Photos: Art and tech sashay down the runway
“Amanda Parkes’ Piezing generates power using the natural gestures of the human body in motion. Around the joints of the elbows and hips of the garment is piezoelectric material that generates electricity in response to applied mechanical stress. The electricity is then stored as voltage in a centralized small battery and later can be discharged for use.”
CNET News.com
Gadgets: Manodo Display Makes You OCD About Your Home Energy Usage
“If you enjoy observing and controlling the minutiae of your daily life, down to how much CO2 your last shower emitted, consider moving to Sweden and taking part in the Manodo project. Nordic start-up Manodo has created the ultimate smart home gadget, which tells you everything you’ll ever want to know (and maybe some things you don’t) about the resources you’re consuming. In addition to utility usage, the device also gives you information ranging from when the next tram will pass by your stop to weather forecasts into the week to who’s milling outside your door.”
Gizmodo
PicoCricket – Invention kit that integrates art and technology
” You can plug lights, motors, sensors, and other devices into a PicoCricket, then program them to react, interact, and communicate. Meet the PicoCricket. For example, you can make a cat and program it to purr when someone pets it. Or you can make a birthday cake and program it to play a song when someone blows out the candles.”
PicoCricket
RFID-based robots come to the rescue
“rescue workers and robots can jointly apply RFID tags to buildings that have already been checked following a disaster, and write key information to the tags so other teams need only read them with PDAs to discern a particular building’s status, or to obtain a recommendation of where to proceed next. What’s more, as various teams and robots approach via differing paths and read the tags, data can be associated to calculate the tags’ location, and to generate a consistent map for use by the central command post. This is particularly useful, for example, if nearby building structures made of reinforced concrete obstruct GPS satellite signals from being read.”
RFID Journal
Gadgets: Seiko SlimStick Fitness Aid Explains Why You’re Fat
“Seiko’s Slimstick is a fitness device that will detail calories burned across a day, length of daily activity, total number of steps taken, as well as offer up a relative fitness score to keep you in check. The Slimstick will store 12-weeks worth of data and the aluminum clad gizmo will set you back ¥6,984 ($55.)”
Gizmodo
You Didn’t Realize It, But You Really Want Those Twitter Messages In Your Calendar
“Subscribe to messages from any Twitter user in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.). Those messages are then automatically added to the calendar, at the appropriate day and time. Useful? I don’t know. It’s certainly useful to closely monitor/stalk people (or yourself). “
TechCrunch
One Day Poem Pavilion
“Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice.”
Experiential Typography
Wix: The Bold Web Content Creator
“Once you pick a theme for your new website (or widget, just depending on your dimensions), you are taken to a popup Wix Editor that provides you with an overwhelming number of ways to spice up your creation. You can add shapes, clipart, photos, videos, songs and animations; you can tweak colors and set visual effects for user behavior; and you can add text paragraphs and headlines. Photos can be uploaded manually or pulled in from either Flickr or a royalty-free stock collection; videos can be embedded from YouTube; and there’s also a collection of free song clips that can be used in a range of skinnable music players.”
TechCrunch
Presdo, The Magical Online Scheduler
“The home page is a plain, Google-inspired box. But instead of typing in what you are looking for, you type in what you want to do and with who: “Coffee with Eric in SF,” “Movie with Nadia Fri night,” “Meeting with Henry at 2:30 pm.” It then takes you to a page with pre-populated fields based on what you typed in: when, who, where, what. You can refine the details further on this page. If you typed in the person’s email in the first box, it appears in the “who” field. If you didn’t, you can enter it at this point.”
TechCrunch
Chilirec Is Like TiVo for Internet Radio
“You start with Chilirec by choosing from a preselected set of a few hundred channels. Two downsides: you can’t load your own channels and you can’t listen to them normally before choosing to record. But once you to start recording, Chilirec will begin loading the songs into its Flash-based player so you can play them back at your convenience (somehow it knows just when songs begin and end, and which ones they are). After you’ve built up a recorded collection, you can search through your songs using keywords that will match artists, titles and genres.”
TechCrunch
MIT Develops “Quickies”: Post-it Notes For The 21st Century
“Using RFID technology, AI and ink recognition, Quickies relay written information to our computers and cellphones—making the notes more effective as reminders, and much easier to archive.”
Gizmodo
Wesabe’s new recommendation service finds better competitors for the businesses you patronize
“Wesabe, a company that takes your anonymized financial information from your bank-statements and uses it to figure out how you can use it to spend smarter, has just launched its “Tips” tab — a service that automatically recommends competitors of the places you presently shop at, based on superior feedback, repeat visits and lower average spends by other Wesabe users.”
Boing Boing
Videophlow Makes YouTube a Group Experience
“Videophlow
, which takes the same dynamic community experience and applies it to YouTube. Groups of friends watch the same videos simultaneously as they interact with chat, emoticons, and gestures – viewers can even throw virtual tomatoes at the screen, complete with an animated splat. All users will see the same portion of a video at the same time, even if they skip to a different scene. And best of all, groups can seamlessly transition to new videos.”
TechCrunch
DigiWall
“Every climbing-hold is equipped with a sensor that registers hands and feet. In that way DigiWall can keep track on where on the wall the climber or climbers are. This opens up for a large number of games, exercises and competitions of various kinds. DigiWall is also a musical instrument. The climbing-holds acts as keys on a keyboard and music is played according to your climbing.”
Interactive Architecture dot Org
Capture Tools: Create or Browse Timelines at Dipity
“The service can create any sort of timeline you want, but it really shines when creating a personal timeline; that’s because Dipity integrates with tons of popular webapps, like Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, or any RSS feed, so that all you have to do is provide Dipity with a few usernames or URLs and it’ll automatically build your beginning timeline for you.”
LifeHacker
kinetic reflection media facade
“the Flare system consists of several tiltable metal flake bodies supplemented by individually controllable pneumatic cylinders. each stainless steel flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical stand-by position. when the flake is tilted downwards pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light & appears as a dark pixel.”
information aesthetics
Volkswagen demonstrates fully-automatic reverse parking system
“The fully-automatic, remotely-operated self-parking system lets you get out of the car and watch as it backs itself into even the skinniest of perpendicular spaces, using cameras located in the left and right exterior mirrors to gauge the dimensions of the parking area available and communicate this information to the computerized steering and drive systems.”
Gizmag
Holograms: Interactive Hologram Responds to Gestures
“This interactive hologram is controlled with gestures, allowing you to adjust what you see by pointing and moving your arm. It looks to be a pretty early prototype with rather rudimentary functions, but damn does it have awesome implications. I’d love to have something like this set up in my living room, using it as a gigantic “touchscreen” to sort through my media library with fancy 3D menus.”
Gizmodo
New Service Will Monitor Your Site For Typos
“Spellr.us
, currently in a registration-required beta, plans to offer hourly, daily, and weekly sweeps of your site, and will provide a visual snapshot of a page with errors clearly marked with strikethroughs.”
TechCrunch
NDrive Introduces World’s First Photo Mapping GPS
“The NDrive G280 and G800 GPS devices both feature photo mapping navigation. The system overlays your route information onto real photos of the location you are driving though. The system includes five different perspectives with four diagonal and one bird’s eye view of the surroundings.”
I4U News
Oosah: A Hub for Your Personal Online Media
“The new integrations allow you to drag-n-drop files between Oosah, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Picasa. The Oosah site itself is essentially a free 2GB online storage service with a snazzy, browser-based file management tool. Once you give it credentials to these other content-sharing sites, it becomes a hub of sorts that reduces the pain points to data transfer.”
TechCrunch
Honda Walking Assist Device
“Honda will showcase an experimental walking assist device for elderly and other people with weakened leg muscles.
For a prototype the Honda walking device already looks pretty good.
Honda began research of a walking assist device in 1999. Some of the technology is derived from the Honda Asimo robot project.”
I4U News
energy
“The system works by using monitoring units that plug into the outlet, and then you plug whatever device or appliance you want to monitor into the monitoring unit. This works much like an existing product like the Kill A Watt. The difference with these monitoring units is that while you must go and look at a screen on the Kill A Watt to see how much power is being consumed, these units transmit that data wirelessly.
…This means that you can put many of these monitoring units all over your house or business and gather all the data at one point in a collector unit.”
jleblanc
FaceStat: a Mechanical Turk face judgment application
“FaceStat is a new application which makes use of Amazon Mechanical Turk to run a mini-survey on faces visitors pull from their Facebook profile. FaceStat reports back the results on axes such as perceived age, gender, ethnicity, intelligence, political affiliation, attractiveness, trustworthiness, funniness, wealth, weight, intoxication, and relationship status. They are currently letting visitors submit one photo a day for free, and from testing it seems they can get results turned around in a few hours.”
Smart Mobs
Oz to get satnav cemetery for Down Under dead
“The burial site is in bushland attached to the Lismore Memorial Park Cemetery in New South Wales and has been created to cater for a rise in the number of people seeking eco-friendly interments. Burial sites can be picked out personally, and Lismore Council then records the location’s GPS co-ordinates. Friends and relatives will be lent a GPS device each time they wish to visit the burial site, although Register Hardware is sure some people will just opt to record the location on their own gadget. By recording the GPS co-ordinates of each burial site, the council will also ensure that GPS trackers aren’t left to rot in the ground.”
Register Hardware
TwittEarth Makes Twitter A Global Experience
“TwittEarth, is eye-candy at its finest – a mesmerizing and mostly useless diversion that sticks you in space and whips you around the globe to see a new geo-located tweet every ten seconds. Tweets are accompanied by small, goofy icons that remain static on the map, eventually providing an interesting representation of usage distribution.”
TechCrunch
Peer-to-Peer Virtual Worlds
“NICTA’s system incorporates peer-to-peer networks, which help reduce the load of sudden crowds by getting bandwidth and processing resources from each new user who makes a demand on the network. Santosh Kulkarni, a senior researcher in the network information processing group at NICTA, says that the peer-to-peer networks will also reduce the cost of infrastructure for companies who use it in their virtual worlds, since the system allows more users to sign up for a world, without requiring the company to support them with more servers.”
Technology Review
Solar: Sungevity Web App Makes Installing Solar Panels a Piece of Cake
“Enter your address on Sungevity’s website and satellite-imaging software will zoom in on your home, calculate your roof’s dimensions, select the right sized solar arrays and calculate how much money you’ll save on energy costs. Once you place an order, the site will ship one of five off-the-shelf prepackaged solar arrays and dispatch an installation crew to your door. An on-line database tracks local building and permit requirements and sends the necessary forms to you for you to fill out.”
Gizmodo
Dial Plus Fetches Information As You Talk
“Upon dialing or receiving calls from businesses, users are presented with directions, business hours, and/or menus. During personal calls, the service fetches contact profiles from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.”
TechCrunch
Worldview
“Worldview is an urban installation for tourists that enables them to record their experience with both an instant-print postcard and a video clip and look through realtime windows into public spaces in other cities.”
Networked_Performance
Your Digital Camera Is Obsolete: Japanese Image Sensor 100x More Sensitive Than Current Chips
“Japan’s Research Center for Photovoltaics has developed a CIGS image sensor that’s 100 times more light-sensitive than the silicon chip inside your cam. It’s able to shoot in environments as dark as 0.001 lux, or about as dark as a “moonless clear night.” Obviously, it’ll be great for night vision gear, but it also picks up infrared, giving this some serious Sam Fisher applications.”
Gizmodo
Multi Chalk – Wearable Remote Controller by Tobi Kim
“It’s a soft electronic device designed to slip on anything with a button. It can be designed to compliment your outfit and style. With a little simple programming, just about anything can be controlled from it by turning the disk in various directions. Just be smart and don’t use it during a big football game. The guy with the colorful button is always the target.”
Yanko Design
Magic: Visual Search Engine Coming to iPhone in June
“ViPR allows you to take a photo of any movie, CD or book, send it to a server, and automagically get an email back loaded with information and links pointing to YouTube videos or iTunes Music Store links. It will also be deployed in Japan on KDDI’s au camera phones this Spring.”
Gizmodo
Meet SunView: the first commercially available pico projector
“little silver box is the first commercially available pico projector — created in by Sunlink International in collaboration with iView Limited — and is currently trickling out in small quantities (though there are plans to ramp up production). The device is an integrated PMP running Windows CE, is capable of producing a 640 x 480 projection, has an embedded 3.5-inch LCD display, and utilizes an SD slot for additional storage.”
Engadget
Tuning Terahertz
“Terahertz is the last spectrum band to be explored,” says Hou-Tong Chen, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead researcher on the project. It has great promise as a security-imaging tool because its frequencies, which range from 300 gigahertz to 3 terahertz, easily pass through clothes but reflect off biological tissue. And since the waves don’t have the energy that x-rays do, they don’t pose the health risks. In addition, terahertz waves oscillate much faster than microwaves used in Wi-Fi do, which means that they can carry thousands of times more information than today’s wireless signals can, albeit over shorter distances.”
Technology Review
Scientists Build World’s Smallest Transistor, Gordon Moore Sighs With Relief
“British researchers have unveiled the world’s smallest transistor, which measures one atom thick and ten atoms across.
The newly announced transistor is more than three times smaller than the 32 nanometer transistors at the cutting edge of silicon-based electronics.”
Wired.com
Will robots step up to help care for the aging baby boomer generation?
“One way is to employ remote robot carers like uBOT-5, which can quietly follow its owner around the house, take care of the cleaning, give reminders about medication, help with shopping and make communication with doctors and loved ones much easier. The uBOT-5 also has the ability to recognize when its owner has fallen or become unresponsive, allowing it to immediately dial 911 for medical attention and relay important information to caregivers en route.”
Gizmag
Clothes That Monitor Health
“Most clothing designed for health monitoring focuses on physiological measurements, such as body temperature and heart rate. This is one of the first attempts to continuously analyze biochemical signals using clothing. The team employed a novel approach for monitoring: a combination of hydrophilic and hydrophobic yarns woven together to channel the sweat to the sensors. By utilizing natural attraction and repulsion actions to move the sweat, the method also circumvents the need for additional power sources, which would add bulk to such a device and make it less convenient for everyday use.”
Technology Review
Researchers take aim at terahertz computing
“The key to this latest development, it seems, is the use of some sheets of stainless steel foil perforated with tiny holes, which can be arranged in different patterns to effectively form “wires” to carry the terahertz radiation. In their tests, the researchers were able to do so at a level of 300Ghz (or 0.3 terahertz), although they admit that they still have a long way to go, saying that “all we’ve done is made the wires” for terahertz circuits, and adding that there still needs to be devices like switches, transistors and modulators developed at terahertz frequencies in order for anything practical to become possible.”
Engadget
Samsung Says Texting is Good for Teens and Parents
“Samsung says that 6 out of 10 parents say that their kids helped them become better texters. 68% of American parents communicate with kids via text message. 56% of teens 13 to 19 say that they communicate more with their parents since they began texting.”
I4U News
Enkin: digitized signage for your Android device
“Put simply, the navigation app’s ace card is its “live mode,” which combines a plethora of sensory data — camera input, GPS, directional information, motion detection — to show the user an augmented view of what they’re actually looking at in their environment. Augmented with what, exactly? Placemarkers that indicate landmarks, that’s what, and the possibilities are pretty endless — restaurants in the immediate vicinity, a gentle reminder of your car’s location in the parking lot, the list goes on.”
Engadget
Pub jukebox delivers playlists, blogs and twitters
“The premise is simple – using a network-enabled jukebox and allowing mobile-phone access to it. But TouchTunes goes a great deal further by allowing you to create your own playlists and check out what tracks have been selected at your nearest venue. The jukebox is a good deal more complicated too, with a screen capable of showing photographs and feeds from popular social networking services: one’s Twitterings are now no longer limited to those who’ve signed up to receive them, but can be shared with the drinking companions one might have had if one didn’t spend one’s life creating Twitter postings and updating Facebook.”
The Register
More Money for Collective Intellect to Keep Fingers on Pulse of Internet
“The service is most useful for marketers who need to understand how well their brands are being received by the media and general public. It tracks discussions about particular topics being posted on news sites, blogs, and message boards. For instance, MTV could decide to check out what people think about “The Hills”. Collective Intellect will use graphs and lists of discussion items to show how sentiment has changed over time, and where the bulk of discussions come from. The analytics can be refined by choosing narrower topics, such as actress Audrina Patridge, to see what people are saying about her in particular.”
TechCrunch
Epson and E Ink partner on controller IC for e-paper displays
“In layman’s terms, this device should speed up the user interface considerably, as it will enable the display to “perform up to 16 tasks in parallel and support smooth and responsive pen input devices for annotations and sketches.”"
Engadget
Digital Sound Separator
“A new piece of software called Direct Note Access, first publicly demonstrated by Neubäcker and his company Celemony Software last month, will for the first time allow computers to analyze the digitized sounds of guitar or piano chords, or even multi-instrument recordings, and then extract and modify individual notes.”
Technology Review
Silent Energy
“Silent Energy is an interactive exhibition concept that helps us become aware of energy usage. The amount of energy we use has a direct effect on overall consumption. We usually think of energy as invisible so if that veil were lifted, and every moment clearly visualized, we’d might think twice about leaving lights on, turning off appliances, etc. This energy awareness is an important tool for all of us to learn if we’re to practice the first part of this mantra; reduce, recycle, reuse.”
Yanko Design
Family Tree: Map Your Family Tree at ItsOurTree.com
“In what feels a little like Google Maps for your family, enter your name and email address, then add your parents, your kids, their parents, etc. Each person node expands to a full profile with fields for the birth date, a photo, maiden name, place of birth, current location, and an area to free-type notes and stories, too. The result is a good-looking visualization of your ancestry—in fact, filling in the blanks becomes addictive quickly.”
TechCrunch
Motley Crue to release single on Rock Band game
“”Saints of Los Angeles,” the first single from the group’s upcoming album, will be available for download for 99 cents on Tuesday via Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Live Marketplace and on Thursday via Sony Corp’s PlayStation store, said Viacom Inc’s MTV Games.”
Reuters
Build A Book On Facebook With Blurb
“Want to compile a book with all of the photos that you and your friends took at graduation? Invite them to participate in a GroupBook project and they can contribute up to 20 of their own photos with a simple upload form on Facebook. Once the contribution period ends, you can turn these photos into a book with Blurb’s BookSmart desktop client. My only real gripe is that friends can’t submit captions along with their photos, leaving book owners to make ones up themselves. Also, you can’t pull photos directly from Facebook collections – a limitation imposed by the social network itself since Facebook doesn’t store and serve high enough quality images for print.”
TechCrunch
CSR demonstrates ultra low power Bluetooth
“ULP Bluetooth, which was previously known as Wibree, is a complementary Bluetooth technology that can be used to transfer simple data sets between compact devices and can run for up to ten years on one button cell battery. The technology has very low overheads, which makes it much faster to connect devices which results in much less power being consumed. End products based on ULP Bluetooth will therefore have battery standby times measured in years, not just days or weeks”
Gizmag
Wiki pinpoints Brazilian crime
“I am given a map of Brazil, and can zoom in to where I was robbed. After finding the street, I put a marker on it. I then fill in a series of question boxes regarding things like whether the person was armed and whether anyone else can confirm the crime happened. “
BBC NEWS
Vtech’s IS6110, an Instant Messaging Cordless Telephone
“It is a fully featured DECT 6.0 cordless phone that includes a full QWERTY keypad and lays claim to being the first cordless phone to deliver instant messaging capabilities. All you do is plug the base station into your PC and you will be able to roam around your house instant messaging to your heart’s content.”
Gizmodod
WorldChanging: How Affordable is that Subdivision, Really?
“This map combines both housing and transportation costs. The result is maybe a bit surprising. In-city areas tend to look pretty good, while far-flung suburbs — where you get a lot of square footage (and lawnage) for your money — don’t look so good at all. It makes a little clearer the tradeoff between floor space and travel costs, which tend to be higher than buyers imagine. Especially these days. In the maps below, the pale areas show places where housing + transportation are 45 percent or less of median income. It’s higher than 45 percent — and therefore not “affordable” by this definition — in the blue areas.“
WorldChanging
Revision3 And VideoClix Team For Clickable Videos
“VideoClix’s technology allows viewers to click on different objects within a video, including show hosts and products, for more information and facts on what they’ve clicked on. The product is pitched as offering curious TV viewers seeking more information on what they’re seeing on the screen the option to obtain that information.”
TechCrunch
Toward a Quantum Internet
“Kumar and his team have shown that they can build a quantum logic gate–a fundamental component of a quantum computer–within an optical fiber. The gate could be part of a circuit that relays information securely, over hundreds of kilometers of fiber, from one quantum computer to another. It could also be used on its own to find solutions to complicated mathematical problems.”
Technology Review
He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)
“Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.”
New York Times
Cyborg insects
“When the team delivered pulses of negative voltage to the brain, the beetles’ wing muscles began beating and the bugs took off. A pulse of positive voltage shut the wings down, stopping flight short, and by rapidly switching between these signals, they controlled the insects’ thrust and lift.”
ecopolis
HearWare: Your HearWare Apparel Changes Color to Match Their Mood
“A calming ocean surf might become a brilliant blue, perhaps, or that cabbie’s tirade about you stepping into traffic is expressed via your fabulous handbag as an angry sun-fire red. The intensity of light depends on the level of sound. The louder the environment, the more your apparel lights up.”
Gizmodo
Pharad: Wearable Antenna for Soldiers Won’t Make Them Look Like Ant Warriors
“The wearable antenna supports a whole host of communications standards, including EPLRS, 800 MHz radios, cellular/GSM, GPS and WLAN. While the design is currently aimed at the military, there’s no saying where Pharad’s Flextenna might end up—in the quest for constant connectivity, expect smart clothing companies to sniff around this one.”
Gizmodo
Cops Can’t Catch ‘Em — So Online Posses Are Now Nabbing Car Thieves
“A harried dealer in Calgary, Canada, handed over the keys for a test drive, knowing there wasn’t much gas in the tank. Hours later it dawned on him that the car was pinched. He posted information, including photos of the car and a description of the thief on Beyond.ca, an enthusiasts site in Canada. Within hours, not only had people caught glimpses of the car, they had photos of the thief. He was arrested.”
Wired.com
New RFID readers from Alien distinguishes between tags
“The company recently showcased its Intelligent Tag Radar reader firmware in Las Vegas, which essentially provides its ALR-9900, ALR-9800 and ALR-8800 Enterprise-Class reader platform with the ability to understand “information about the velocity and position of tags, in addition to the contents of tag memory.” Furthermore, the included ITR-Singulation features allows the reader to “easily discriminate amongst adjacent tagged objects on a conveyor such as items, cases or airline baggage.”"
Engadget
Omron’s Okao Catch measures the intensity of your smile
“According to Omron’s Yasushi Kawamoto, the Okao Catch technology is able to closely analyze “the curves of the lips, eye movement and other facial characteristics to decide how much a person is smiling.” In a recent demonstration, it threw up percentages as people moved in front of a camcorder and began to grin, and while a somber individual did net an astounding score of zero, it doesn’t seem that negative numbers are doled out for frowners.”
Engadget
Erepublik Combines MMOG And Social Networking
“Erepublik is a massive online multiplayer social strategy that aims to be intricate and accelerated enough “to attract a spectrum of both fanatical and casual gamers.” Players can be politicians, soldiers, entrepreneurs or journalists in different countries, and much of the environment is user generated. The game is still in invite only beta testing, but has 10,000 beta testers from 43 countries currently playing the game. A key pitch of Erupblik is the time required to play the game: 14 minutes a day.”
TechCrunch
Your Avatar Can Now Go Partying In Facebook While You’re Asleep
“Alter Ego was created by M iChameleon in conjunction with Coca-Cola’s digital team in London. It allows you to paste a photo of tyour face onto an avatar which can then be tweaked and customized with a selection of trendy threads. Your avatar can go partying with your Facebook buddies, or to go out and make some new friends at the Burn Alter Ego bar. The next day, photos of their (or rather your) exploits are automatically uploaded along with details of the evening, documented in a special blog. Cool idea indeed but not sure if your avatar would only be allowed to drink Coke on his/her night out.”
innovation playground
The Coming of the Holodeck
“The camera can translate human hand motion or body motion into the movements of a virtual character inside Second Life. The demonstration works by placing the camera near the computer screen and pointing it at the human navigator. It is possible to move forward by leaning forward and move backwards by leaning back. It is also possible to jump and even fly around in cyberspace with the correct hand gestures.”
New York Times Blog
How to Make Graphene
“Rutgers University researchers have developed an easy way to make transparent graphene films that are a few centimeters wide and one to five nanometers thick. Thin films of graphene could provide a cheap replacement for the transparent, conductive indium tin oxide electrodes used in organic solar cells. They could also replace the silicon thin-film transistors common in display screens. Graphene can transport electrons tens of times faster than silicon, so graphene-based transistors could work faster and consume less power.”
Technology Review
Ready for a CyberWalk?
“‘A key feature is that you need a relatively large treadmill to simulate natural walking,’ explains Ernst. ‘The one that will be demonstrated is 6m by 6m, with an active walking area of 4.5m by 4.5m.’ According to Ernst, this is the minimum size necessary for ‘natural walking’. The treadmill, or CyberCarpet, incorporates several new mechanical solutions, which ensure smooth and safe operation. The key to the CyberCarpet is a platform with a big chain drive. The chain elements are made of conventional treadmills.”
Primidi
This page generates names by combining the first and last…
“This page generates names by combining the first and last names from the 1990 US Census, creating names that may or may not actually exist.”
kottke.org
Arduino based sequencer makes you “drool”
“The “Drool” is an Arduino based midi interface that functions as a drum sequencer operated with a crank. The user can also use their hands to manipulate the rhythm of the beats and the data is sent as MIDI out to a circuit controlling 8 solenoids that produce a tapping sound.”
MAKE
Exoskeleton: New Pictures of XOS Exoskeleton Send Sci-Fi Shivers Down Our Spines
“Basically the suit has an array of sensors that track the pilot’s movements, echoing them with its hydraulic muscles at the same speed. This takes some pretty fancy math so that the machine can react quickly enough to avoid introducing a very limiting motion-lag. Using XOS the pilot can run, walk, cope with stairs and ramps and chuck heavy weights around like there’s no tomorrow. It’s been in development for a while, and as you can see it has one major hurdle to overcome: that tether.”
Gizmodo
Brother Industries shows off eyeglass-mountable retina scanning display
“its use of a retina-scanning system as opposed to a simple LCD mounted in front of your eye, which effectively uses your retina as a screen to make it appear like images are actually floating in space in front of you. What’s more, while the eyepiece currently needs to be wired to a rather sizable contraption in order to pump out those free-floating images, the company says it expects to be able to switch to a wireless system and shrink things down to a decidedly more wearable size by 2010.”
Engadget
Where’s Waldo: Where’s Waldo? Available to Play on Google Earth
“Fans of Waldo, the geek in the striped beanie and glasses who’d pop up where you least expected, can now hunt him down on Google Earth. Canadian student Melanie Coles has installed a 55-foot painting of Waldo on a Vancouver rooftop, and expects other people to follow suit with their own Waldos. More below the gallery.”
Gizmodo
Soft pneumatic exoskeleton trades sci-fi for wearability
“…we’re rather intrigued by this pneumatic and highly wearable soft exoskeleton put together by some folks at the University of Michigan. The suit is a hybrid system with electronics responsible for pumping the leg around, and a roboticist from the Science University of Tokyo is working on a version for the upper extremities.”
Engadget
One Place for Your Many Online Lives
“FriendFeed is one of the first major efforts to break down these walls. With the startup’s service, subscribers can pull together on one Web page everything their friends and colleagues are doing on more than 30 Web sites. The goal is to organize the Web’s information in valuable ways, a bit like Google does. But instead of using search, FriendFeed uses people you know to uncover valuable information. To find movie recommendations or news items or provocative ideas, you can tap into the wisdom of friends.”
BusinessWeek
textour text analysis visualization
“3 circles represent the text (dot in the middle), the sentences, the words & the letters. every single spot represents an entity connected to the parent group it belongs to. the colors correspond to every single word & are attributed to the word the first time the word appears, they also show when a word appeared for the first time & how often it was found in the whole text. users can filter words. The current screenshots are based on a speech of George W. Bush announcing the war against Iraq in 1991, as it is a good example of how the words “people”, “listen”, “forces” and “saddam” are used.”
information aesthetics
Avoid Online Rejection, Get Your Friends Involved
“Engage differentiates itself from traditional dating sites (Match, eHarmony, PlentyofFish, etc) by getting friends involved in the process of finding you that perfect guy or gal. If you are looking for love (and Engage is certainly geared towards those looking to land serious relationships, not set up transitory encounters), you can invite your real-life friends to become friends on Engage. Once onboard, they sit in a friends list that stays with you on the left-hand side of the site wherever you go.”
TechCrunch
Travel: Get Flight Delay Predictions at Delaycast
“Enter the airport you’re flying from and to, at what date and time range, and Delaycast analyzes delay data from airlines and airports to give you the most likely scenario—the site owners state they’re “within 15 minutes 80-90% of the time,” and expect the predictions to get better over time.”
LifeHacker
Ledube: Networked LED Blocks Build Amazing Lightshows
“What you see above are Ledube bricks. Unplugged, they just look like abstract shapes in white. Clip them together and connect them up, however, and you have a pretty incredible light show.”
Gizmodo
A Training Tool for Athletes
“A high-tech armband is helping athletes find their rhythm on the basketball court by playing a special tune when the athletes move their arms correctly. The “interactive throwing sleeve” extends from the knuckles to above the elbow and is form fitting, like a compression garment. It has two sensors, one at the wrist and another at the elbow, that are connected by thin conductive fibers. As the athlete shoots the ball, the sleeve measures the position, velocity, and acceleration of the arm. The information is wirelessly transmitted to a laptop so that the athlete can be monitored in real time.”
Technology Review
Turning Pollution into DVDs
“Plastics such as polycarbonates are long chains of carbon atoms bonded to such elements as oxygen. The tough plastic is currently constructed from the long carbon chains, or polymers, made from fossil fuels. But Müller says that chemists could convert the nearly 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired power plants—if captured—into such plastics by applying pressure and using energy to trigger the necessary chemical reaction.”
Scientific American
Lost Voicemail of Man’s Dead Wife Restored by Phone Company
“An 80-year-old man who thought he’d lost the only recording of his dead wife’s voice can hear her again, any time he wants. When Verizon upgraded Charles Whiting’s telephone service, his wife’s voice, saying, “Catherine Whiting,” disappeared from his voicemail system. She had died in 2005 and Whiting said he listened to her voice every day for comfort. He blamed Verizon for the loss, saying, “Now they took her voice away.”
FOXNews.com
Think tank envisions robots filling jobs en masse in Japan
“It’s suggesting that the jobs of 3.5 million people in Japan could be filled not with younger folks, but with mechanical creatures by 2025. Currently, Japan’s population is declining, and the proportion of those 65-years and up is continually swelling; analysts are asserting that the nation could save around ¥2.1 trillion ($21 billion) in elderly insurance payments by 2025 if it relies on robots (instead of humans) to monitor the health of the geriatric set.”
Engadget
I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day
“It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you. Location is based on the triangulation feature of the iPhone, which is accurate enough to get this going.”
TechCrunch
newsvisual business & legal news
“an impressive business news website that uses IntellectSpace FN to show the ‘story behind story’ by visually mapping key relationships that shape financial & legal headlines.”
information aesthetics
When Roses Won’t Do, E-Mail a Fragrance
“A trial of the service will take place later this month during which users will be able to select and send certain fragrance recipes to an in-home unit that is responsible for concocting and releasing the various fragrances. Each holds 16 cartridges of base fragrances or essences that are mixed to produce the various scents in a similar way that a printer mixes inks to produce other colors.”
New York Times
When Roses Won’t Do, E-Mail a Fragrance
“A trial of the service will take place later this month during which users will be able to select and send certain fragrance recipes to an in-home unit that is responsible for concocting and releasing the various fragrances. Each holds 16 cartridges of base fragrances or essences that are mixed to produce the various scents in a similar way that a printer mixes inks to produce other colors.”
New York Times
Miniscule device gets injected into tumors, tracks radiation dosage
“Gurus at Purdue University have conjured up a prototype device which, when injected into a tumor, can actually track the “precise dose of radiation received and locate the exact position [of the tumor] during treatment.” Currently, the needle-sized device is held within a hermetically sealed glass capillary, contains a miniature radiation dosimeter, operates without batteries and instead relies on “electrical coils placed next to the patient” for activation.”
Engadget
Guitarati Sees a Rainbow Where Others See Music Genres
“Guitarati, which launched its public beta Tuesday, assigns one of a set number of hues to each MP3 uploaded to the site. To find music that suits your current mood, you first decide which color best represents it. Clicking on the color ostensibly brings up music that fits your state of mind. While browsing any color, you can switch a shade lighter or darker, narrow your focus by genre or change to an entirely new color.”
Wired.com
Cool G108 watch phone is Maxwell Smart-approved
“Boasting what appears to be an electroluminescent keypad (is that a rotary dial design we see?) and a convenient flip-up screen, this watch / cellphone mishmash also features quad-band GSM / GPRS support, a 1.5-inch (160 x 128) internal display, 1.3-megapixel camera, multimedia player, Bluetooth, 0.5MB (generous, we know) of built-in memory and a MMS expansion slot in case you need more than a single Duran Duran track on your wrist.”
Engadget
Fully Automated Robo-Restaurant Tested (Verdict: Delicious, Fun, No Bloody Tips)
“As we already knew, everything in this restaurant in Nuremberg is completely automated, from the ordering process—using a touchscreen which also allows you to surf the web or email while waiting for our order—to the delivery of the food to your color-coded seat. Only the cooking is manual, which is done by some Elzar apprentices, 70% human-30% iron chefs, somewhere in the building.”
Gizmodo
Zeemote wireless controller for mobile phones
“Created by the team that developed the first force feedback joystick for PC gaming, the Zeemore controller fell into the hands of Dave Weinstein at CTIA and Dave reports the new phone peripheral is responsive, ergonomic and functional and just might help us past trying to game comfortably on a phone using controls designed for some other purpose”
Gizmag
‘The 21 Steps’ by Charles Cumming
“The 21 Steps is told by following the story as it unfolds across a map of the world. Follow the trail by clicking on the link at the bottom of each bubble.”
We Tell Stories/Penguin
DIY picture frame does IM, Skype notifications
“There’s no fancy LCDs here, however, just some plain old pictures housed in clear frames with an LED placed on top of each, which light up whenever the person is on IM or Skype.”
Engadget
Former professor creates vibrating Braille handset
“Dubbed the world’s first vibrating Braille cellphone, the device is programmed to emit pulses depending on which key is pressed; more specifically, a pair of terminals attached to the handset “vibrate at a specific rate to create a message.” Those currently involved with the project are now toiling to make the keypad-to-vibration converters smaller, but there’s no word just yet on whether the technology will be picked up commercially.”
Engadget
