#How to Make Smart Watches Not Worth Stealing Someday your fitness tracking band or smart watch could detect
providing a simple way to control access to your home, car, or office and perhaps dissuading would-be thieves.
Technology honed at Dartmouth uses four pairs of electrodes around the wrist. Electrical resistance between the electrodes turns out to be a biometric:
it is unique to individuals, depending on their body composition, flesh thickness, and bone size. After the device measures the correct levels of resistance,
It could allow you to personalize your environment, said Cory Cornelius, a researcher at Intel Labs who developed the technology while a Phd student at Dartmouth. f
I wearing the bracelet, my phone would be unlocked without a PIN code, or I could log into my PC
or provide a means of access control, he said. Given the boom in fitness monitors and other wearable gadgets tethered wirelessly to smartphones,
the technology could also allow confirmation that data streaming from the device is coming from the right person,
says Carl Gunter, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois, who was not involved with the project.
In a trial, the device worked with 98 percent accuracyood enough to sort out signals in a cluttered environment.
However, over the long term, aging, weight loss, or disease could change the impedance properties of the wearer wrist,
requiring the device to be recalibrated, Cornelius says l
#Sharp Demonstrates Ultra-Efficient Solar cells The best solar cells convert less than one-third of the energy in sunlight into electricity
although for decades researchers have calculated that exotic physics could allow them to convert far more. Now researchers at Sharp have built a prototype that demonstrates one of these ideas.
If it can be commercialized it would double the amount of power a solar cell can generate offering a way to make solar power far more economical.
The researchers figured out a way around a bothersome phenomenon: when sunlight strikes a solar cell it produces some very high-energy electrons
but within a few trillionths of a second those electrons shed most of their energy as waste heat.
The Sharp team found a way to extract these electrons before they give up that energy thereby increasing the voltage output of their prototype solar cell.
It s far from a practical device it s too thin to absorb much sunlight
and for now it works only with a single wavelength of light but it s the first time that anyone has been able to generate electrical current using these high-energy electrons.
In theory solar cells that exploit this technique could reach efficiencies over 60 percent. The approach is one of several that could someday break open the solar industry
High-efficiency solar cells would lower the cost of installation which today is often more expensive than the cells themselves.
and figuring out how to make them with high precision (see Capturing More Light with a Single Solar cell and Nanocharging Solar).
The Sharp device relies on the ability to make high-quality nanometers-thick layers of semiconducting materials (such as gallium arsenide)
which create a shortcut for high-energy electrons to move out of the solar cell. Another way to achieve ultra-high efficiencies now is by stacking up different kinds of solar cells (see Exotic Highly Efficient Solar cells May Soon Get Cheaper)
but doing so is very expensive. Meanwhile MIT researchers are studying the transient behavior of electrons in organic materials to find inexpensive ways to make ultra-efficient solar cells.
Each of the alternative approaches is at an early stage. James Dimmock the senior researchers who developed the new device at Sharp says he expects that his technique will initially be used to help boost the efficiency of conventional devices not to create new ones s
#With Fire Phone, Amazon Could Popularize Visual Search Amazon is evidently on a quest to make it as fast as possible to buy whatever you want,
and the smartphone that the online retailer unveiled yesterday is its newest tool for making that happen.
however, it may also be creating a powerful new mobile search engine that could evolve into a simpler way to find all sorts of information on the fly.
During yesterday event in Seattle, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the Fire Phone black handset that runs a modified version of Google android system and looks pretty similar
The phone, which will be available on July 25, is initially available only through AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract.
A few features do set the Fire apart, most notably a scanning technology called Firefly, which lets you not only shoot pictures of QR codes
or mostly flat with some curvature and featured some text.)Capture a few seconds of a song,
To make Firefly work, Amazon is matching what the phone camera sees with information from its database of products.
And, interestingly, it allowing developers to use Firefly in their own apps. That could mean anything from multimedia scavenger hunts to faster access to nutritional data.
Bezos used the example of an app called Myfitnesspal which could use Firefly to recognize something like a bag of Cheetos and show its nutrition data.
Bezos also indicated that developers could use Firefly with their own image-recognition technology and databases of known objects.
The high-end smartphone market is crowded already, but given the rise of mobile e-commerce, it a plunge worth taking (see hy Amazon Needs Its Own Phone.
It also clear that Amazon intends for Firefly to help it sell more stuff: 70 million of the more than 100 million things Firefly can currently recognize are products like books and video games,
and the rest are songs, which youl be able to order on Amazon com or add to your Amazon wish list.
But beyond perhaps changing how we shop, the feature could change how we search, encouraging us to use images to find out more about the world around usather than typing words into a search box. think it will be a very addictive capability,
says Ramneek Bhasin, general manager of mobile and vice president of product for shopping search engine Thefind. Bhasin is interested in using Firefly to expand the Thefind search capabilities.
The company already includes barcode scanning in its mobile apps for instance, but he imagines non-shopping scenarios where it could be useful for finding information.
In museums it could pull up Wikipedia articles when focused on a piece of art (Amazon says that it will add image-recognition for artwork to Firefly later in the year).
when their products appear on social networks, thinks that having a physical button to access Firefly on the Fire Phone will help popularize visual search simply by making it easier to access.
To use anything similar, users currently have to load a third-party app. don really know quite yet what the long-term use case is going to be here,
but I think we now assume everyone phone can recognize a song you hear on the radio
or a song you hear at the bar, and I think wel grow to expect the same thing from visual search as well,
but a lot of work still needs to happen for this to become reality. While a smartphone may be able to recognize somewhat flat items like books,
it still very difficult to discern objects like a purse or a stuffed animal. That because there are all sorts of factors to consider
so that it can be matched up against known objects in a database. And it can get trickiernd slowero determine a match with authority as the database gets larger. here still a gap between science and fiction there;
what we like to do and what the state-of-the-art allows, Shiftan says t
#Elon musk Needs a Very Big Factory for His New Solar technology The Tesla founder and private space entrepreneur Elon musk announced yesterday that Solar City,
the solar installation company where he is chairman, plans to acquire a startup called Silevo for $200 million (plus up to $150 million more if the company meets certain goals).
And with typical bravado, he also said that the company plans to build a huge factory to produce Silevo high-efficiency solar panels,
it will also become a major manufacturer of solar panels, with by far the largest factory in the U s. The acquisition makes sense given that Silevo technology has the potential to reduce the cost of installing solar panels,
Solar City main business. But the decision to build a huge factory in the U s. seems daringspecially given the recent failures of other U s.-based solar manufacturers in the face of competition from Asia.
Ultimately, however, Solar City may have little choicet needs to find ways to reduce costs to keep growing.
Silevo produces solar panels that are roughly 15 to 20 percent more efficient than conventional ones.
and they use copper rather than silver electrodes to save costs. Higher efficiency can yield big savings on installation costs
which often exceed the cost of the panels themselves, because fewer panels are needed to generate a given amount of power.
Silevo isn the only company to produce high-efficiency solar cells. A version made by Panasonic is just as efficient,
and Sunpower makes ones that are significantly more so (see ecord-Breaking Solar cell Points the Way the Cheaper Solar power.
But Silevo claims it could make its panels as cheaply as conventional ones if it can scale up from its current production capacity of 32 megawatts to the factory Musk has planned,
which is expected to produce 1, 000 megawatts or more. The factory plan mirrors an idea Musk introduced at one of his other companies, Tesla motors,
which is building a huge igafactorythat he says will reduce the cost of batteries for electric cars.
The proposed plant would have more lithium-ion battery capacity than all current factories combined (see oes Musk Gigafactory Make sense?
and esla Plans to Start Building Its Gigafactory Next Month. One key difference, says Travis Bradford,
who directs the Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, is that at least three other solar companiesirst Solar, Yingli Solar,
and Sharpave already built one-gigawatt factories. Still, the plant would be much larger than any now in the U s. By no means is it certain that Silevo will achieve the cost reductions it hoping for without sacrificing quality.
But subsidies from the state of New york, where Solar City plans to build its factory near Buffalo
should help provide a temporary boost. New york is putting in $225 million in infrastructure for the factory,
which might help offset the damage to U s. solar manufacturers that the U s. government says have been inflicted by subsidies in places like China.
More subsidies are being negotiated. Besides, Solar City may need to take the risk of investing in a large new manufacturing plant in New york. Existing subsidies that have helped the company grow quickly in recent years may soon disappear.
Meanwhile, utilities may start wanting to pay solar-panel owners less for the electricity they produce
because theye increasingly concerned about the intermittency of solar power and the stress this can put on the power grid.
But Solar City believes that if building huge factories to produce advanced solar panels can bring down costs,
the market for solar panels could still grow exponentially l
#How LEDS Are Set to Revolutionize Hi-tech Greenhouse Farming It won't come as a surprise to discover that consumers all over the developed world are increasingly demanding seasonal vegetables all year round even
when the local climate simply doesn't allow that kind of growth. Particularly sought-after are tomatoes cucumbers and leaf vegetables.
Which is why greenhouse farming has become a major factor in the food supply of the developed world.
Consequently the number of commercial greenhouses and the area they occupy is rocketing. In The netherlands for example greenhouses occupy around 0. 25 percent of the land area of the entire country.
And The netherlands isn t even the largest producer of greenhouse vegetables in Europe. That position is held by Spain.
And the largest producer of greenhouse vegetables in the world is now China. This kind of farming has a significant impact on the environment.
Commercial greenhouses have to be lit and heated in a way that optimizes growth. And up to 35 percent of the cost of greenhouse tomatoes comes from this heating and lighting.
So an important question is how to minimize the energy it takes to grow these crops.
One obvious answer is to convert greenhouses from the traditional incandescent lighting usually high pressure sodium lamps to more energy-efficient LEDS.
That might seem like an economic no-brainer but the industry has been slow to make this change because of the high initial cost of LEDS.
The question that farmers have pondered over is whether they will ever recoup the upfront cost of a brand-new system of lighting.
Today they get an answer thanks to the work of Devesh Singh and pals at the Hannover Centre for Optical Technologies at the University of Hannover in Germany.
These guys have compared the life-cycle costs of traditional high pressure sodium lamps against those of LEDS for greenhouse lighting.
And they say the advantages are clear. They calculate that the cumulative cost of high pressure sodium lamps surpasses that of LEDS after just seven years
and that after 16 years the cumulative cost of high pressure sodium lamps is more than double the equivalent cost of LEDS.
It s not hard to see where this saving comes from. Although high pressure sodium lamps are individually cheaper than LEDS they have to be changed every year compared to every 19 years for LEDS.
And of course LEDS use considerably less electricity wasting little as heat. But the most interesting part of Singh and co s analysis is in the potential of LEDS to change the way that vegetables are grown.
High pressure sodium lamps emit light across the entire visible part of the spectrum and well into the infrared where much energy is lost as heat.
By contrast LEDS can be adjusted to emit light in very specific parts of the spectrum. Plant physiologists have known long that chlorophyll absorbs mainly in the blue green
and red parts of the spectrum but absorbs a little in the orange and yellow.
So it makes sense to produce light only in these parts of the spectrum. That s easy with LEDS of course but impossible with sodium lampsat the same time various researchers have shown that flowering
and germination patterns are influenced by green light and that light frequency also influences the biomass of certain plants as well as their nutritional content.
For example higher levels of red light increases tomato yield and the Vitamin c content of mustard spinach and green onions.
Green light also contributes to the plant growth and development say Singh and co. Exactly how light of various frequencies influences plant growth biomass and nutritional content is understood not well.
Which is why plant scientists all over the world are currently studying this phenomenon in an effort to exploit it in future.
For the moment the strategy for greenhouse farmers seems clear: convert to LED lighting as quickly as possible.
The investment should pay for itself within a few years and the advantages that should be possible in influencing yields
and the quality of output should begin to become clear in the next few years. This is a complex topic with numerous subtleties.
There is no shortage of arguments in favor of eating locally grown food because of the lower transport costs.
Greenhouses allow for a wider variety of fruit and vegetable for a given climate. LEDS give farmers greater flexibility at a lower cost and a smaller environmental footprint.
These are surely goals worth aiming for r
#Digital Summit: Microsoft s Quantum Search for The next Transistor Microsoft is making a significant investment in creating a practical version of the basic component needed to build a quantum computer,
the company head of research said Monday. Speaking at MIT Technology Review Digital Summit event in San francisco, Peter Lee likened the effort to research at Bell labs in the 1940s that produced the silicon transistor,
the basis of all computing today. his is our attempt to find the analogous device to the transistor,
said Lee. In an interview, he told MIT Technology Review that Microsoft had kept previously its quantum effort relatively quiet
but that positive results have convinced him to be more open. ne reason wee been a little cagey is that early on this was a fringe effortow the physics community takes us seriously,
he said. e are very serious about our quantum physics research and wee expanding. Microsoft has dedicated a quantum computing research lab, known as Station Q, on the campus of University of California,
Santa barbara. It has also been supporting labs around the world with grants and donations of tools to aid research.
Although the Canadian company D-Wave Systems has sold several machines it says are quantum computers experts say there is still no definitive proof that they exploit quantum principles
Microsoft is not currently attempting to build a quantum computer. Rather, its research effort is aimed at developing a reliable version of the qubit, the key building block of a quantum computer.
Just like a transistor in a conventional computer, a qubit can switch between states that represent either a 1 or 0 of digital data.
But a qubit can also exploit quantum effects to reach a uperposition statethat is both 1 and 0 at the same time.
That would allow a quantum computer to process data many times faster than any conventional computer.
making them impractical for anyone hoping to build a computer of any size. e believe that current approaches will said never scale
Microsoft research focuses on a type of qubit known as a topological qubit that theory suggests would encode data in a much more robust way.
around four years ago, Microsoft researchers led work to pose a series of key tests that could show
Microsoft funded several labs around the world to work on those questions, says Lee. wo years ago the results started to come in positive.
Work is now underway to actually build a working topological qubit. To support that effort,
Microsoft has developed specialized tools for quantum experiments and given them to the academic community. Those tools range from cloud simulation platforms for theoretical work to new types of electronics for use in the super-cooled temperatures of quantum hardware experiments.
Meanwhile Microsoft is already looking ahead to explore what could be done with a system of topological qubits once they are built. upposing that one day we have a quantum machine:
would it be good for anything? says Lee. oday we have clear ideas in classical computing about problems we can solve
but it very hard to conceive what possible with one of these theoretical machines. e
#Digital Summit: Facebook Puts Its Apps on a Data Diet as Part of a Global Internet Campaign As Facebook eyes the six billion or so people in the world who don use its services,
the company is learning to economize. Not with moneyrofits are growing healthilyut with the data demands that Facebook use places on mobile networks.
Software engineers are currently working to make Facebook apps leaner in order to make them more practical for people who have scarce bandwidth
and pay high data rates, said Jay Parikh, head of infrastructure at Facebook, at MIT Technology Review Digital Summit event in San francisco today.
The data diet campaign began after a group of Facebook product managers traveled to several African countries last year. ur apps were crashing all the time
and they maxed out their data plan in 40 minutes, said Parikh. e now have a whole team of people focused on reducing data consumption.
There continual effort to drive data use down. That effort has seen already the data use of Facebook main Android app drop by 50 percent.
That trend continues across all of Facebook apps, said Parikh. The move to be thriftier with usersdata is a part of the Internet. org project launched by Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year.
Its stated aim is to bring affordable Internet access to everyone on the planet an effort that could incidentally supply Facebook with many new customers (see acebook Two Faces.
Parikh described Internet. org as he next phase of the company. The highest profile parts of the project so far have been Zuckerberg spending on companies
and technology that could see wireless broadband delivered by drones or satellite (see acebook Drones Will Battle Google Balloons to Spread Internet Accessand ow Google Could Disrupt Global Internet access by Satellite.
Parikh said that slashing app data use fits into an equally important arm of the project focused on people that can access Internet infrastructure
but choose not to. here are three or four billion folks out there that walk around in a 2g
or 3g area but may not have devices or economic standing, or don think the Internet is valuable to them,
said Parikh. Making apps more economical with data is one thing that could help such people,
he said. Another is changing how mobile carriers meter and charge for data use. ee working with carriers to rethink how they price
and offer data plans, said Parikh t
#Designing Connections From the beginning, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab has focused on using digital technology to maintain human interaction and human connections at the community level.
The lab goal is truly to design technology around people, not the other way around from smart personal devices to smart cities.
Let look at some examples. The city of Brescia, in northern Italy, was facing a dramatic increase in the number of automobile accidents involving young drunk drivers.
The city wanted to be perceived not just as an enforcer of laws, but as a component of a social circle that could help young drivers achieve better outcomes.
Ride. Link a system designed for the city by the Mobile Experience Lab, combines wearable technology, mobile phones,
and a Web infrastructure to establish a peer-to-peer trust network in which Brescian youth address the social issue of drunk driving themselves,
but aided by government institutions. The UNICEF country office in Brazil trains young people to gather stories
and data about their communities using a smartphone application based on the Mobile Experience Lab Open Locast technology.
With it, youth can map their neighborhoods, identify where governmental and nongovernmental services exist or are missing,
address issues of accessibility for young people, and locate public social spaces where the community is coming together.
In Paris, the Mobile Experience Lab worked with the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens to create a bus stop designed not just to help people use the bus system itself
but also to serve as a local information kiosk. The Electronic Guimard, as it is known, keeps alive the key notion of an interactive urban artifact that reinforces social interaction.
What might a home look like with digital technologies that encourage social interaction between the house and its inhabitants, other dwellings and residents,
and the larger community and the world? The Connected Sustainable Home, a Mobile Experience Lab project in Trentino, Italy, is a non-technocentric smart home.
The house efficiency-related technologies function as a kind of personal trainer to encourage efficiency and thus sustainability and the technology relationship between the house and its inhabitants can be extended to a wider world.
Human connections are foundational to both the smart city and its smart inhabitants, uniting with technology to enable coordinated, efficient,
and sustainable urban policies across neighborhoods, institutions, and indeed the entire social fabric of an urban area.
Many technologists seem not to care whether their designs and inventions are pulling people apart.
Sitting alone at a computer seemingly connected to an entire world but lacking any physical contact with others in a real physical space,
or Skype them. The problem is real, and as our devices grow more and more capable, we had better do something about reversing this trend.
First Emotion-Reading Apps for Kids with Autism The first mobile apps that use emotion-reading software to help kids with autism are nearing release,
Affectiva grew out of emotion-detecting research at MIT Media Lab. The company software, called Affdex, analyzes images of faces to detect features such as smiles, frowns, raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, and smirks.
Though the early academic research focused on applications such as helping people with autism, so far the technology has been used commercially to help marketers understand
whether ads are effective (see tartup Gets Computers to Read Faces, Seeks Purpose Beyond Ads.
last year, the company released the software to app writers for ios, the operating system used in iphones and ipads.
And now the first apps are said coming el Kaliouby. utistic kids have trouble reading and understanding social and emotional cues,
she said. ust as people with hearing problems benefit from a hearing aid, people with social and emotional problems can benefit from systems that help them understand emotions.
We started out with research on autism, and we went out and did this commercial stuff.
and apply it back to autism again. The advertising work helped make the software more accurate by rainingit
she added. After three years analyzing faces seen on webcams, Affectiva database now holds more than a billion facial expressions
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