#Cheap Earthquake Warning Systems While predicting earthquakes remains a dream, scientists have developed early warning-systems systems that give people precious seconds to run out of buildings
or take cover. Such systems are in place in Japan and Mexico. The U s. Geological Survey (USGS) is testing a system that gave a 5-to 10-second warning when a temblor hit California Napa valley in 2014.
That kind of warning might have saved hundreds of lives when a 7. 8-magnitude earthquake devastated Nepal on 25 april.
Earthquake-warning systems come at a high price, though, too high for countries like Nepal and others in quake-prone zones in South Asia,
But researchers are now working on more affordable, crowdsourced warning systems based on low-cost sensors and cellphone electronics.
Calif.,thinks he can get as goodr in some cases even betterarthquake data from a network of cheap sensor packages.
off-the-shelf cellphone equipment that manages data gathering and communication. he sensor packages used by the USGS cost about US $30, 000 each,
it will send information about the time of the event and the magnitude of the shaking to a cloud-based server;
algorithms will check reports from neighboring sensors to determine whether the vibration was localay, from a truck going byr felt elsewhere.
Why not tap into the GPS sensors in people phones and navigation systems, he says. GPS-equipped cellphones are ubiquitous in developing countries,
and such a crowdsourced system would offer early warning at practically no cost. country like Nepal,
They subjected a Google Nexus smartphone and a commercial GPS module to displacements ranging from 10 centimeters to 2 meters.
Next, the researchers performed simulations using data from a hypothetical magnitude-7 earthquake in northern California and from the real 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake that hit Tohoku-oki
They simulated smartphone responses based on census data around the earthquake epicenters and recorded a phone as triggered
If at least 100 phones were triggered, the system declared an earthquake. It took fewer than 5,
000 smartphones to detect the simulated California earthquake within 5 seconds, giving enough time to warn San francisco and San jose. For the Japan quake,
Brooks says. here would be challenges in terms of cellphone service in such a mountainous region, but we think it would be doable there eventually. d
#Full HD Voice Will Soon Give Your Phone an Audio Upgrade HD Voice, the first major upgrade to telephone sound quality since the vacuum-tube era, has finally become widely availableust in time for a new generation of phone service called Full-HD Voice to take its place.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, Fraunhofer IIS (Institute for Integrated circuits) demonstrated a system based on a combination of powerful standard algorithms that can encode
and decode in real time the full audio spectrum to 20 kilohertz in stereo. Switching to Full HD
would also mark the complete merging of voice into the mobile data stream, a goal long in the making.
Full-HD Voice converts speech into packets that can flow through the Internet along with data traffic, incorporating algorithms that can recover from packet loss,
which turns today Voice over internet Protocol (Voip) calls into choppy, unintelligible hash. The technology includes algorithms that encode music and other nonspeech audio,
sounds that are mangled typically by codes optimized to squeeze many voice calls into narrow slices of the spectrum.
Because Full-HD Voice carries the whole audio spectrum calls sound as if everybody in the same room;
like the faint clatter of fingers on a keyboard. And the powerful coding-decoding (codec) software can run as a smartphone app. e want to bring telephony into the 21st century,
just as HD television has done for video, says H p. Baumeister, director of Fraunhofer IIS U s. branch, in San jose,
Calif. There no doubt that voice telephony still has a foot in the 20th century. Modern landline phones have a frequency range of 300 to 3, 400 hertz,
a standard based on Bell labs studies of the requirements for intelligible speech dating back to the 1920s.
In 1988, the International Telecommunication Union approved the G. 722 standard for HD Voice, which allows digital phone lines to carry 50 to 7, 000 Hz.
because it would have required upgrading the landline phone network. The first three generations of cellular phones instead retained the 3, 400-Hz narrowband landline audio,
but they often sounded worse because of the way they compressed speech to squeeze more calls into the limited mobile spectrum.
See hy Mobile Voice Quality Still Stinksnd How to Fix It IEEE Spectrum, October 2014.
The broader bandwidth of the Internet allowed Skype and some other Voip services to carry 7, 000-Hz HD Voice,
but Voip calls into the phone network have been limited to 3, 400 Hz. Most 4g smartphones include dedicated circuits running algorithms to code
and decode 7, 000-Hz HD Voice, but they can connect at that rate only if both phones and every link between them can handle the signals.
In practice, that means it works only between 4g phones on the same carrier. Full HD will be able to bridge the audio gap regardless of the network
or the device connected to it. The technological heart of Full-HD Voice is called a standard the Enhanced Voice Services (EVS codec.
Its speech compression algorithms are more complex and powerfulthan those used for the decade-old HD Voice system,
The codec also includes other algorithms developed to compress music. The separate algorithms are vital
because speech and music are compressed in different ways. Voice compression typically relies on algorithms called code-excited linear prediction (CELP),
which is built on the physics underlying the human vocal system. CELP can reduce the data rate of voice signals by about a factor of 10. hat coding did a good job on speech
says Richard Stern, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Music-compression algorithms,
such as the MP3 and AAC codecs used for streaming audio, are optimized for human auditory perception. For example, the algorithms don bother to accurately reproduce the soft components of sounds likely to be masked by louder sounds at other frequencies and times.
That method can represent a wider range of sound, but it requires more bits per second than a speech-based codec,
containing algorithms for both voice and music, and it switches between them as needed. The new voice algorithms are substantially more complex than those of the decade-old 7, 000-Hz codec.
Rather than being developed around characteristics of specific languages, as earlier codecs were, these are nearly language independent.
The music part is the latest low-latency version of the AAC algorithm, developed for real-time streamed communications.
and are inevitable on IP networks such as 4G LTE. To verify performance of the codec and its loss tolerance, Fraunhofer IIS and 11 partnersncluding Ericsson, Huawei, Qualcomm,
and Samsungpent millions of euros on human listening tests. Full-HD Voice quality was possible even at data rates as low as 9. 6 kb/s. The processing power of modern smartphone chips is a key enabler for the new codecs.
They can be implemented in digital signal processing chips as the 7 000-Hz codecs in 4g smartphones are,
or as apps running on a smartphone applications processor. The EVS codec s not complex compared to the apps in a smartphone,
says Baumeister. Because Full-HD Voice can tolerate packet losses, it could feed compressed data directly into the Internet data stream for routing directly to other equipped devices,
like a Skype-to-Skype call between computers or smartphones. Fraunhofer Mobile World demonstration did that using apps on Google Nexus 5 phones.
With no need for network upgrades, Baumeister says, ou could conceptually roll out service this year,
but next year is more realistic. ou can hear samples at http://www. full-hd-voice. com,
but be sure to use good headphones in a quiet environment. Stern compares the difference to the shift from standard resolution to HD television. t going to be subtle, not a huge difference in intelligibility,
but it will sound better and more natural, like a high-quality speaker system, he says. This article originally appeared in print as ull-HD Voice is Nearly Here. p
#Knitted Supercapacitors to Power Smart Shirts Researchers from Drexel University in collaboration with the U s. Naval academy, have invented a way to embed activated carbon particles into different types of yarn to form a knitted textile that can store
energy to power sensors and electronics integrated into smart clothing. Smart fabrics, which incorporate different types of sensors into garments,
"a small computer that records data and communicates to a user's smartphone or other systems.
using an area of about 3000 cm2 (about the size of the center back panel of a shirt) it is possible to store the equivalent energy of a 4 cm2,
Although we will probably not be using energy storage textiles to power our smartphones any time soon due to the low energy density of the current technology,
#Damage Recovery Algorithm Could Make All Robots Unstoppable For the last three years, wee been watching as the hexapods created by Antoine Cully
Using an exceptionally clever algorithm, the robots have demonstrated that they can shrug off absurd amounts of damage,
This illustrates how it possible to endow just about any robot with resiliency via this algorithm,
Recovering from damage is just one application for this algorithm: it can also be used to adapt to different terrain,
It links data from an implanted blood-sugar sensor to a computer, which then controls how a pump worn on the hip dribbles insulin under the skin through a pipette.
Then the algorithm figures out how to administer that dose from one minute to the next to keep the glucose levels within safe bounds.
A slew of improvements in sensors, actuators, algorithms, and insulin are coming together to create the artificial pancreas.
hooked through a cellphone with an algorithm and to a Roche pump, linked to it by a Bluetooth signal,
it beams data to the screen of a pager-size reader. He uses the information to help decide what to eat
Once the data is in the servers, there a lot we can do to affect disease management.
For instance, doctors could mine the data for patterns in which patients suffer from low blood sugar,
Finally, at the end of the rainbow, the Google self-driving car. The first step toward a robotic pancreas came in 1964,
it combined a pump with a large, complex continuous glucose monitor. In recent years, pumps have become smaller, more reliable, more programmable,
Continuous glucose monitors were approved first a decade ago, and they are beginning to replace the finger-prick method,
when its algorithm merely predicts that the patient blood sugar will drop. It on the market in Australia and is set to sell in Europe later this year.
Pumps clog, algorithms misfire, sensors get walled off by scar tissue. Some of the recent technical advances are proprietary and still under wraps,
and Dexcom have developed biocompatible coatings as well as sensors with multiple electrochemical sites that can be polled to see which ones no longer work properly.
says Roman Hovorka, a specialist in mathematical informatics at the University of Cambridge, in England. wo analogues in development are about 15 minutes faster than todaynd that nowhere close enough.
Besides the sensor and the pump are the algorithms, the secret sauce that allows the artificial pancreas to analyze,
Another one, sometimes called an expert system, sets up a table that pairs problems with responses in the form f this happens,
A third kind of algorithm tries to model human physiology, for instance by considering how quickly food passes through your system
and how long the insulin takes to work. he beauty of this approach is that it like chess programming:
when new data arrive, says Kowalski. Tuning these algorithms requires big data, gathered from both the individual patient and the larger community of patients.
Hovorka group at the University of Cambridge is conducting trials of advanced systems in the home, not just in controlled settings.
He says his algorithms learn by doing and so adapt to the patient. he algorithm analyzes during the day
and between days for short-term learning and also longer term, Hovorka says. f somebody goes skiing,
Every 10 to 12 minutes we run the algorithm for predictive control. We have a number of models running in parallel,
with each given a probabilistic value based on how well it fitted the data in the past. e can achieve
and also in displays because they have better light-transmission properties than glass, says Ma.
such as gallium arsenide and highly purified silicon, that are packed into electronic gadgets.""What we are looking at are future applications,
this allows a number of smart switching algorithms to be used, says Harper. he energy savings come
The heaters are linked with the control system via Wi-fi, allowing the system to learn your behavior as well as the optimum heating required to maintain a comfortable temperature. arper says the systems will be available in July 2015 through Xefro distributors in the UK.
and transparent displays, and graphene-based on-chip optical communications. n work published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology researchers suspended graphene above a silicon substrate by attaching it to two metal electrodes
While a handful of paralyzed people have used previously brain-computer interfaces (BCIS) to control robotic limbs, those subjectsimplants recorded signals from the primary motor cortex,
a brain region involved in planning movements. human os iconlead researcher Richard Andersen, a neuroscience professor at Caltech,
The researchers connected cables to the pedestals, bringing the neural signals to a computer that analyzed them and sent commands to the robot arm.
and picked up different neurons. ur decoding algorithms took that into account, Andersen says. If a given electrode was no longer contributing useful information to the decoding of a goal location
for example, the algorithm would ignore its signal and substitute other inputs. Andersen thinks such adaptive algorithms may enable a wide range of BCIS to record reliably over time.
Most of the prior studies in which paralyzed people used implanted BCIS were conducted by John Donoghue, director of Brown University Institute for Brain science and a pioneer in the use of implants in the motor cortex.
in a pattern devised by their computer. The different heights change the phase of the light bouncing off different parts of the cloak to mimic the phase it would have
says Boubacar Kante, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSD, who led the work, which appears in the latest issue of Progress in Electromagnetics Research.
This particular cloak exists only in computer simulation, though the team is working on building a physical version,
a dimension easily achievable by the photolithography processes used for making computer chips. But Kante points out that microwave cloaks could be useful for the military,
#Why Aren't Supercomputers Getting Faster Like They Used To? Currently, the world most powerful supercomputers can ramp up to more than a thousand trillion operations per second,
or a petaflop. But computing power is not growing as fast as it has in the past.
On Monday, the June 2015 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world revealed the beginnings of a plateau in performance growth.
There are a number of technical aspects and economic factors that interfere with supercomputing improvements. Experts disagree on the cause,
but the result could be a slowing of the pace of improvement in some scientific fields.
Computing hardware development projections are based on Moore Law which predicts that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double about every two years, causing an exponential growth in performance.
Supercomputer power is expected, for the most part to follow the same curve. In the past, that was exactly the case.
The rate of performance developmenthe change in aggregate number of petaflops between Top500 listsad doubled each year.
One reason, says IBM senior manager of Data Centric Systems, John Gunnels, is that the pace of Moore Law has slowed. f you can shrink these chips at the rate you were shrinking them before,
IBM researchers are trying to prop up Moore law using silicon-germanium transistor channels in effort to create a 7-nanometer chip within the next four years.
The cost of the electricity to power these behemoths has played also a role in slowing the speed of supercomputer development. an somebody make a computer that has higher performance?
Other laboratories could reach the performance of the number one supercomputer, Tianhe-2 if they want to pay US $390 million for the same technology,
Dongarra predicts that the China Tianhe-2 will remain at the top of the supercomputer pyramid for at least two more lists because of the lack of funding for new systems.
Though computer scientists in the United states say 2023 is a more feasible timeline to construct an exascale supercomputer
(and the U s. government is planning out an exascale supercomputer that would cost $200 million),
such as weather projection. he National Weather Service uses supercomputers to run physical models to predict what will happen in three to five days,
and faster computers will make those predictions better. r
#Diesel-Powered Fuel cell Produces Clean electricity Although several options to store hydrogen as a fuel for cars have been investigated,
asteroid mining firm Planetary Resources, aims to test critical electronic systems and software during its 90-day mission.
Prominent billionaire backers include Hollywood director James cameron and Google executives Larry page and Eric Schmidt. But the exact mineral wealth of the asteroids most easily accessible from Earth remains unknown.
and obtaining data on the presence of water or water-rich minerals. The A6 is scheduled to launch sometime later this year Planetary Resources says it wants to pursue a est oftenphilosophy in building the A3r
and the others that we manufacture using 3-D printers. t
#Nanowires Boost Hydrogen Production from Sunlight Tenfold Using the energy of the sun to split water into hydrogen
#System Does occupied Wi-fi in TV Channels Internet providers have been hoping to get their hands on precious low frequency UHF channels unused by broadcast TV.
created the first device that allows Wireless internet in a UHF channel that is already occupied by a TV broadcast. nstead of all television or all wireless connection,
Edward Knightly, Rice university Sending wireless data through this 400 megahertz to 700 MHZ slice of spectrum is referred often to as uper Wi-Fibecause of its ability to penetrate through buildings and travel long distances.
Such superpowers could allow Internet coverage in secluded areas that traditional terrestrial broadband cannot economically reach.
However, unused UHF channels, commonly referred to as TV white-spaces, are scarce. In big cities such as Houston, where the study was conducted,
In New york and Los angeles there are none. nstead of all television or all wireless connection how can we do both?
the professor of electrical and computer engineering who led the research. The Rice university engineers called their answer i-Fi in Active TV Channels or WATCH.
They had to gain approval from the U s. Federal Communications Commission to test it. The WATCH spectrum sharing system works on a feedback loop.
whenever a viewer is not watching a TV channel. The system consists of a special Wi-fi transmitter
and a receiver in a person home and requires a smart TV. The system could deliver 6 times as much data as white space schemes in use today Currently
TV towers occupy a whole channel no matter how many viewers are watching at a given time,
says one of the study researchers, Xu Zhang. ven though these channels are being occupied by TV broadcasters most people use cable, satellite,
or Internet to watch television, he says. hat means these TV broadcasters are wasting spectrum.
But under the WATCH system, a user TV viewing information is sent to a spectrum database by smartphone remote control and smart TV.
This database updates the WATCH receiver telling it that it can cancel out the TV broadcast
and use the channel to send data via the WATCH transmitter. If the viewer flips back to that channel
another signal is sent to the spectrum database, updating the WATCH system. The system then would move its data stream to a different channel to keep from interfering with the user TV viewing experience.
WATCH also takes into consideration what channels neighbors are watching, so Wi-fi streaming doesn interfere with their TV signal,
says Zhang. If a next door neighbor wants to watch the channel WATCH is using to stream Wi-fi,
then the system will locate and use channel that has no nearby viewers. The engineers found that their system could provide six times as much wireless data4 megabits per seconds TV white-space systems in use today
which only utilize unoccupied UHF channels. he system provides a step towards improved utilization of UHF frequency bands,
says Knightly. here are implications that this could allow Wireless internet access in difficult to reach places and underserved areas.
Wireless companies, such as Carlson Wireless Technologies, are already looking to UHF channels to provide connectivity in underdeveloped countries.
There is a much larger need for Internet connectivity than television in developing countries, says James Carlson,
founder and CEO of Carlson Wireless Technologies. eople would rather leapfrog technology that will soon be obsolete.
Carlson Wireless plans to deploy 3-G wireless service over TV white-space in Africa and parts of South and Southeast asia later this year
and in the United states in 2016. For WATCH use in the United states, he biggest challenge is getting FCC approval,
The fiber, made from sheets of carbon nanotubes wrapped around a rubber core, can be stretched to 14 times its original length
In research published in the journal Science, the team describes how they devised a method for wrapping electrically conductive sheets of carbon nanotubes around the rubber core in such a way that the fiber's resistance doesn change when stretched,
The researchers have also been able to add a thin coat of rubber to the sheath-core fibers
in the press release. he rubber cores used for these sheath-core fibers are inexpensive and readily available.
The device inventors suggest the laser could find use in video displays, solid-state lighting, and a laser-based version of Wi-fi. Although previous research has created red, blue, green and other lasers,
each of these lasers usually only emitted one color of light. Creating a monolithic structure capable of emitting red, green,
In addition, he says that white lasers could also lead to video displays with more vivid colors and higher contrast than conventional displays.
Li-Fi ould be 10 times faster than today Wi-fi, but"the Li-Fi currently under development is based on LEDS,"
because the lasers can encode data much faster than white LEDS. In the future, the scientists plan to explore
may have just been given a boost that moves it from mere promise to likely future backbone of computing.
and make possible the continued trend towards ever more powerful computing. his is a discovery in the true sense,
high-energy photon has potential applications in biological imaging, high-density data storage, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDS) L
#Google s Unified Privacy Policy Draws Threat Of $15m Fine In The netherlands The national data protection authority in The netherlands has warned Google that it could be fined up to $15 million
to comply with Dutch data protection law. Google January 2012 decision to combine the privacy policies of some 60 different products in order for it to be able to gather more intel on webs users for targeting ads quickly triggered a data protection review in October 2012
led The french data protection watchdog. That action was followed by individual investigations by multiple data protection watchdogs in Europe with six member states,
including The netherlands, launching probes into Google handling of personal data in April last year. The Dutch data protection authority, the CBP, has evidently run out of patience with Google.
In a statement earlier this week, the CBP said it requires Google to gain unambiguous consent from users to combine multiple privacy policies across its products specifying that this consent cannot be gained by a general agreement to a privacy policy
but must be done ia a clear permission screen Google must also clearly explain what personal data is being obtained by which of its services and for what purpose,
and this information must be clearly and consistently conveyed in its privacy policy, it said.
The CBP is concerned also that Youbube be labeled clearly as a Google service albeit the Dutch DPA notes that Google seems to have taken already action on this point.
Commenting in a statement, CBP president Jacob Kohnstamm said: oogle captures us in an invisible web of our personal information without telling us that
and without asking our permission. This has been running since 2012 and we hope that our patience will no longer be put to the test.
The CBP does add that Google has sent a letter to the six data protection authorities which launched reviews namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
The netherlands and the U k. noting that the letters include details of a arge number of measuresaimed at addressing European privacy legislation compliance.
However the CBP said it has determined not yet whether Google proposed measures would resolve its privacy violations.
Responding to the Dutch threat of a fine a Google spokesperson told Techcrunch via email:
ee disappointed with the Dutch data protection authority order, especially as we have made already a number of changes to our privacy policy in response to their concerns.
However, wee recently shared some proposals for further changes with the European privacy regulators group,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011