#This was a big week for driverless, anti-alcohol, and parking space-sensing cars For fans of automated autos that don need drivers, don like alcohol,
and sniff out empty parking spaces, this was a big week. On Thursday, the federal government National Highway Traffic safety Administration showed a prototype vehicle with alcohol-detection technology.
Called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety, or a parental-sounding DADSS for short, it features two methods for preventing drunk drivers from driving.
One is a breathalyzer on the steering wheel that reads the driver breath and determines if the blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) level is over 0. 08 percent,
which is the legal limit in every state. The other is infrared an scanner on the vehicle start button that detects the BAC below the skin of the driver finger.
While this is not the first such alcohol detection system, it does have the imprimatur of the NHTSA,
which already carries huge clout in the marketplace for its vehicle safety ratings. The systems, in development with major auto makers, are at least five years away from market availability
and are projected to cost $400 as an optional safety add-on. The American Beverage Institute, an industry organization
has raised questions about whether either method can detect blood alcohol levels immediately after drinking. For those of us who have spent too much of our lifetimes cruising for empty parking spaces,
The system uses algorithms that predict when parked cars will leave, which the company said is about 80 percent accurate.
Google has agreed to acknowledge accidents involving the testing of its driverless cars. The new transparency was announced at the end of the week
after Google cofounder Sergey Brin initially said on Wednesday his company would not release such accident reports,
and haptic feedback technology for the next iphones Apple is currently working on building orce Touchtechnology and haptic feedback into the screens of its new iphones,
The new features are very likely to show up in the next iphone, probably be called the iphone 6s,
which will debut this fall. Force Touch debuted on the Apple Watch, where it is used to change the watch face.
When you press harder on the screen, it senses the increased pressure by measuring the increased surface area occupied by the finger.
including the iphone. On the larger screen of a phone, it could open up all kinds of possibilities.
For instance, you may be able to Force Touch on any word on the screen to bring up a definition.
Or you may be able to Force Touch on the screen to change the backdrop image or animation on the home screen.
The end result could be the reduction of clutter in ios. A function that was activated once by a button might
instead be activated by a Force Touch, so the button is needed no longer. The source said that Apple will also couple the Force Touch feature with haptic feedback engine that might verify to the user that the for gesture has activated a feature.
The aptic Feedbackengine, as Apple brands it, sits just below the touchscreen and causes the device to vibrate
in order to alert you to incoming messages or other notifications. Venturebeat information dovetails with numerous earlier rumors that Force Touch would be part of the new phones.
Patently Apple reports that Foxconn, the Chinese company that assembles the iphone, expects its touchscreen subsidiary to see handset pressure sensor shipments increase by 4. 8 times this year.
A spike that big could be from advance orders from Apple for the new iphone
#The Backed Pack: Moky hides a trackpad in the surface of a keyboard The keyboard is a popular accessory for mobile devices
because it often much easier to type with than the tiny one featured on a smartphone or tablet.
But they take up a fair amount of space, and their footprints are made even larger by the trackpads that they sometimes bring along with them.
Moky is a twist on the typical mobile keyboard, featuring a large, invisible touchpad that controlled by the user gestures.
An infrared laser sensor module provides a thin optical surface on the keyboard. The device communicates wirelessly with whatever mobile device is used with it via Bluetooth Low energy 4. 0 technology.
The keyboard cover meanwhile, doubles as a portable device stand. Moky costs $149 and will ship in October.
Its maker is hoping to raise $30, 000 by July 9. The core technology may have broader potential.
Moky seems like a neat accessory for compatible mobile devices, but that means only Android and Windows for now, according to the Indiegogo campaign.
Only the keyboard itself is supported on ios devices as Apple doesn support mice or trackpads in that operating system.
Synaptics, for one, recently has shown off Smartbar technology that turns a keyboard space bar into a pointing device complement
and Apple is rumored also to be working on similar technology, perhaps for the Mac. From the campaign video, it not easy to tell just how easy it is to use Moky,
but the ability to conserve the space taken up by a trackpad would surely have allure for some users e
#El Ni#o Finally Arrives May Lead to Average Rainfall In July 2014, climatologists had predicted a 70 percent chance of a weak to moderate El niño in last August
along with an 80 percent chance of its occurrence by November. The predictions turned out to be wrong last year but last month the National oceanic and atmospheric administration Climate Prediction Center (CPC) reported a weak El niño condition.
Sea surface temperature anomalies across the western and central equatorial Pacific is the primary driver of El niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO.
The potential applications for anti-icing surfaces involve protection of aerofoils, protection of aerofoils, pipes of air conditioners and refrigerators, radar or telecommunication antennas,
#Nvidia's Tegra X1 Powers Smart cars At the Consumer electronics Show (CES) last week, Nvidia released demos of two computing platforms, Drive CX and Drive PX, for cars.
These computing platforms are part of the venture called Nvidia Drive and are powered by the Tegra X1 mobile chip.
Nvidia Drive PX is for the actual driving side of the smart car equation, while Drive CX deals with digital systems on the dashboard and elsewhere in the vehicle.
Nvidia also released a recording of a demo drive of a car with Drive PX that was able to find a space in a parking garage traveling at a speed of 8 kmph.
The famous graphics card manufacturer believes that this sort of situational awareness will help prevent accidents. Meanwhile Drive CX has been described as the digital cockpit computer,
and it will be the lifeline of a car infotainment system. It will facilitate digital instrument clusters
It will be able to power four full-HD screens simultaneously or even two 4k screens.
Drive CX will also be able to recognize speech and faces of it users. Nvidia senior manager for CUDA Libraries and Algorithms Jonathan Cohen, said,
ecause this is a neural network, wee shown it lots of examples of these 40 mile-per-hour limited speed signs.
and has worked with HTC, Microsoft, Nike, etc. Horace said, ur products and business model will impact a variety of consumer areas to create a metropolitan ecosystem with better connectivity, easier access to energy,
It also has Bluetooth connection. It can be connected through a smartphone app, through which a user can change settings on the scooter.
Like every modern machine the key is wireless. The scooter can cover about 60 miles on one battery with a Panasonic cell.
The Gogoro electric scooter can reach 50 km h in 4. 2 seconds. The top speed is 100 km h,
The scooter features 30 onboard sensors, applications for Android and ios, cloud connectivity. The Gogoro electric scooter does need not to be plugged in for charging it.
Instead, when the power runs low, the user can visit special stores that will be placed strategically around the city.
#Nvidia Unveils Tegrax1 Soc Drive CX And Drive PX Nvidia has unveiled a chip that can pump out the quality of a high gaming console on your smartphones.
Additionally, the famous graphics card manufacturer also released demos of two computing platforms, Drive CX and Drive PX, for cars.
The smartphone chip, Nvidia Tegra X1 Soc has an 8-core 64-bit CPU and a 256ore Maxwell-based GPU.
Nvidia claims that it is the first mobile chip that will provide a teraflop of processing power.
They also added that it is equivalent to the fastest supercomputer in the world in 2000.
The Tegra X1 is also much more efficient than the Tegra K1. Nvidia showed a demo of the Unreal Engine Elemental sequence to display the power and efficiency of the Tegra X1.
Jen-Hsun Huang, cofounder of Nvidia, said, ast year, when next generation game consoles were released,
they consumed 100 watts when running Unreal Engine Elemental demo. Now we can do it on Tegra X1 at 10 watts.
Nvidia believes that the first beneficiaries of the Soc will be cars. The Nvidia Drive CX is based on a single Tegra X1 platform
whereas the Driver PX is based on the dual Tegra X1s. Nvidia Drive CX will act as the digital cockpit computer,
and it will be the lifeline of a car infotainment system. It will also be able to power four full-HD screens simultaneously or even two 4k screens.
Drive CX will also be able to recognize speech and faces of it users. Meanwhile, Drive PX is an image processing platform
and it will have the capability to work with inputs from up to 12 cameras. All these cameras will work in tandem
and provide improved accuracy in the autopilot function of the car. Nvidia also released a recording of a demo drive of a car with Drive PX that was able to find a space in a parking garage traveling at a speed of 8 km h.
With these two platforms Nvidia hopes to revolutionize the dashboard and give a boost to the concept of driverless cars s
#Unprecedented Details on Precipitation Revealed by Satellites Techniques of monitoring all the precipitation throughout the globe within a short span of time were not effective previously.
GPM data is publically obtainable and NASA has collaborated with emergency managers to find out how the close to real-time view of precipitation can be utilized to strengthen emergency management.
The data obtained from GPM can also be used for updating climate and weather models as it provides a three dimensional view of precipitation.
With the help of GPM data, scientists can obtain a greater estimate of how these events will possibly adjust in future.
#China Blocks Google's Gmail According to Google, their Gmail service is virtually inaccessible in Mainland china.
After months of disruptions to its service, Google Gmail seems to have finally been blocked by the country reat firewall Large number of Chinese Gmail users said that they haven been able to access their emails for the past four days.
According to Greatfire. org, a China-based freedom of speech advocacy group, e think the government is just trying to further eliminate Google presence in China
Imagine if Gmail users might not get through to Chinese clients. Many people outside China might be forced to switch away from Gmail.
Google Transparency Report, which shows real-time traffic to Google services, displayed a sharp decline in the traffic to Gmail from China.
The company stated that there is nothing wrong on their end. The communist government of China maintains a tight control over the nation internet.
It is always quick to act against any signs of dissent or criticism of its party leadership.
The country also has the world most sophisticated internet censorship mechanism. Tech experts call it reat Firewall of China.
This year, which also marked the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations,
Google has been facing problems in the country, since June this year. However, its users could still access email downloads via protocols like Imap, SMTP and Pop3,
which let people communicate using Gmail on apps like the Apple iphone Mail and Microsoft Outlook.
Meanwhile, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, said, e do not know anything about Google being blocked.
China has had consistently a welcoming and supportive attitude towards foreign investors doing legitimate business here. We will,
Tech experts have said that using VPN (Virtual Private Network) seems to be the only answer against Chinese internet censorship.
The VPN allows unhindered access to blocked sites and services
#Google's Algorithm Masters Video games Google has stated that they have developed the first computer program capable of learning a wide variety of tasks independently, in
what has been hailed as a significant step towards true artificial intelligence. According to the engineers at Google, the program (or agent as its developers call it) learnt to play 49 different retro computer games,
and came up with its own strategies for winning. They added that in the future, the same approach could be used to power self-driving cars, personal assistants in smartphones or conduct scientific research in fields from climate change to cosmology.
The research was carried out by Deepmind which is a British company that was bought by Google last year for $500 million,
whose stated aim is to build mart machines The team of engineers stated that a total of 49 classic Atari arcade games from the 1980 were utilized as part of the experiment.
such as Space Invaders, Pong and Breakout, the algorithm significantly outperformed humans, while on others it fared far worse.
because the algorithm has no real memory. It is, therefore, unable to commit to long-term strategies that require planning.
and apply it to more realistic 3d computer games. Demis Hassabis founder of Deepmind, said, his is the first significant rung of the ladder towards proving a general learning system can work.
an expert in photonics at Stanford university who led the development of the mirror. n some situations the computations say you can completely offset the air conditioning.
#Google Presents Steady Spoon for Shaky Hands Using advanced technology, Google has engineering a spoon that promises to make the daily lives of people suffering from tremors easier.
The spoon uses a number of algorithms and helps in steadying the tremors so that the patients can eat without spilling the food.
The shaking pattern of a hand is sensed by the spoon which then instantly adjusts itself to remain in balance.
However, according to the experts, Google has utilized the technology in a unique way. Dr. Jill Ostrem, a neurologist at the University of California San francisco Medical center, commented t totally novel.
when Google indulged into no-shake utensil business and acquired a small startup called Lift Labs funded by National of Institutes of Health.
Over 10 million people across the globe, including Google cofounder Sergey Brin mother, suffer from tremors and Parkinson disease.
Anupam Pathak, the founder of Lift Lab, appreciated the shift of a four-person startup in San francisco to the colossal Google campus in Mountain view which has encouraged them to enhance their creativity.
Google (x) Life sciences is the department where his team works. It is involved also in developing a contact lens for measuring glucose levels in tears for diabetics
but now the scientists have existential data. The two new members of the subatomic family, known as Xi b and Xi b*-,are baryons.
The measurements that pinpointed the baryons were collected based on data at the Large hadron collider during 2011 and 2012.
The giant LHC smashes proton beams together and the scientists are left with the job of trying to find the presence of the data of the particles,
as the data is massive the answers generally scattered amongst it. But with the case of these two particles it was slightly easier.
the data of the new particles was found surprisingly quickly. t reassuring, adds Dr Charles,
The catalysts which have been used in the system are adapted highly well as well as compatible with the conditions required for the bacterial growth.
One scenario being bandied about is using these CICADAS to monitor extreme weather situations, such as tornadoes. Within a few years,
Researchers claimed that the tiny man-made catalysts can purify drinking water and waterways by getting rid of oestrogenic hormones and pharmaceuticals,
Upgrades for the facilities with ozone or carbon-activated treatment technology will not only involve tens of billions of Euros,
#New Invention Boosts Fiber optic Transmission Up to 400%June 30, 2015-Just in case you were worried that we didn't have enough data traveling through fiber optic cables, engineers at University of California,
For the Internet backbone which is built largely on fiber optic cables, this has significant ramifications. Before this breakthrough fiber optic signals ran into a limit.
For the Internet this means an infrastructure of supercomputers strategically located at network nodes regenerating
The implications on Internet infrastructure will be significant. Eliminating repeaters will make the Internet cheaper to operate
while increasing the amount of information transmitted through the pipe. So what did these University of California engineers discover to achieve their success?
and entitled,"Overcoming Kerr-induced capacity limit in optical fiber transmission.""For the telecommunications industry this is a very big deal.
The engineers have filed a patent covering their method and application to transmission of data. Essays and comments posted in World Future Society
and THE FUTURIST magazine blog portion of this site are the intellectual property of the authors,
who retain full responsibility for and rights to their content. For permission to publish, distribute copies,
2015-Just in case you were worried that we didn't have enough data traveling through fiber optic cables, engineers at June 29,
2015-In his latest email blast Peter Diamandis talks about four revolutions in transportation that he expects will take place within this decade.
#Scratch Wireless Unveils New i-Fi Firstsmartphone for $99 Scratch Wireless is trying to make bills from wireless companies a relic of the past.
It an ambitious dream, and the Cambridge, MA, startup has taken a step forward by partnering with a Chinese manufacturer to release an inexpensive smartphone that could move it a little closer to its goal.
The new Coolpad Arise is powered an Android smartphone that can use Scratch software to make voice, text,
and data services free whenever smartphone users have access to a Wi-fi network. The device sells for $99
and can be bought from the Scratch Wireless website as of today. Users won have to pay Scratch anything more for service
as long as they use Wi-fi It the first time Scratch Wireless is opening up its service to the general public.
Scratch is betting that customers, especially those on tight budgets, will go for low-cost smartphones even if the devices are dependent on Wi-fi. Most of the time, that not a problem,
as users are in range of their home or office network. Plus, public Wi-fi hotspots are getting better,
cable companies including Comcast are offering subscribers access to their networks when theye away from home,
and Google is testing out Wi-fi-based mobile wireless services with its Project Fi. Wireless provider T-Mobile also is selling handsets that can make calls
and send texts over Wi-fi . But everyone is out of range sometimes, especially when commuting.
Scratch has a contract with Sprint that allows Scratch phones to use Sprint network for voice, texts,
and data on a pay-as-you-go model. Scratch users pay an extra fee that as low as $1. 99 per month for a limited amount of time on Sprint national 3g network.
In an interview last year with Xconomy, Scratch cofounder and CEO Alan Berrey said the startup approach is disruptive, both from a technical (the shift to Wi-fi) and economic perspective.
Scratch is going after consumers who want smartphones and data packages but with low-cost plans. ur biggest competitors are not AT&T and Verizon.
It actually more the entry-level folks, for people who want a low-cost service, Berrey said.
Typically those customers have relied on prepaid services instead of using major carriers. Scratch would not say how many customers it has said,
but it it has operated on an nvitation onlybasis since launching in 2014. nder the invitation only wall,
Scratch has had hundreds of thousands of consumers express interest in purchasing a Scratch phone, a representative said. ith the introduction of this new Coolpad device,
Scratch will be removing the invitation only wall and make phones generally available to consumers. ith the new product,
theyl have access to a capable Android smartphone with a 4-inch display, rear camera,
and ability to run apps from the Google Play Store. Scratch also says Wi-fi call quality, multimedia messaging,
and call handoffs across networks are improved. The phone is made by Coolpad, a Chinese company that makes low-cost handsets.
Coolpad is a virtual unknown in the U s. he company only entered the market in 2012ut it expects to sell about 100 million smartphones
and is one of the five largest sellers in the Chinese market. The Coolpad Arise is the second model that works with Scratch.
The previous phone was the Motorola Photon Q, an Android phone that sold for $269.
Scratch Wireless has raised $5 million from investors including Commonangels and has the equivalent of 20 full-time employees.
It declined to release sales and revenue information. Michael Davidson is the editor of Xconomy Boulder/Denver.
Contact him at mdavidson@xconomy. com. Follow@Michaelxb
#Surge Focusing on More Mature Energy companies, Raising Bigger Fund The change of one word can signify a lot.
Surge Accelerator has become Surge Ventures, a name change that reflects the maturing mission of the cleantech accelerator in Houston.
The shift comes amid a downturn in the oil and gas industry as a whole: Oil prices are down to about half of their peak of $100-plus a barrel a year ago.
Both the economic times as well as Surge new focus were apparent recently at the accelerator annual demo day for its fourth class of startups.
The American Cancer Society estimates that ovarian cancer is the fifth-deadliest in the U s. he animal data have been compelling,
#Mysql Cluster 7. 4 out now: It's faster, more manageable, says Oracle Tomas Ulin:
Oracle Some 20 months after version 7. 3, the latest iteration of the open-source Mysql Cluster database is now generally available, with a promise of new management features and improved performance.
which acquired Mysql when it bought Sun microsystems for $7. 4bn in 2010, Mysql Cluster 7. 4 has faster in-memory processing
and can run analytics workloads more efficiently. As well as enhanced geographic redundancy features for faster maintenance, the latest version of the ACID-compliant transactional database also provides better reporting on distributed memory use and database operations,
and performance-tuning options, Oracle said.""Feature-wise, I wouldn't say there's really anything new.
"Oracle vice president Mysql engineering Tomas Ulin said.""It's faster if you have more cores on the system,
so it can run on bigger machines with about a 50 percent improvement. It's also more scalable
and you can run with better performance on more data nodes. We haven't increased the number of nodes you can use.
But at the higher node counts with more cores, it performs better.""Ulin said version 7. 4 of the technology,
which provides shared-nothing clustering and auto-sharding for the Mysql database, showed the fruits of work in improving the speed of table scans."
"Cluster has always been a great database for fairly simplistic queries with extreme performance and latency requirements-so simple Nosql-type operations,
key-value type operations, "he said.""We've always had the capability of doing complex joins.
"On the management side, Olin said the ability to add nodes on the fly added in an earlier release brings with it the need to redistribute the data to run evenly across the system and on all the additional machines."
is to be able to see the distribution-to see how the data is distributed on the different machines
-and how much data is being used. Also, when you start going in and deleting data, you get gaps.
You need to see what that can mean and when you can start reclaiming memory,
"It becomes very important-also in these kinds of in-memory databases -because memory is expensive
not only about the data distribution itself but also the usage pattern.""Being able to see whether specific data in the system is being utilised heavily
and causing the overall system to perform badly is also important.""You have very typical cases.
where you get very hot data for some reason because there's just an excess of people watching whatever he's writing
You can get similar usage issues either from hot data or from a faulty part of the system,
"It doesn't have to be the actual database but it can be for some reason that the other system that's accessing the database is going there
and doing a lot of pinging of some hot data or wrongly designed, so you create some hotspots in the data.
In this release you can now get a lot more information if there are particular fragments in the data
which are being accessed heavily and therefore getting an uneven distribution of the load.""Other significant aspects of Cluster 7. 4 are improvements to geo redundancy capabilities and online maintenance,
which Olin said is now five times faster.""For mobile operators, for example, maintenance windows are shrinking.
A lot of these databases serve a much greater geographic span. If you were just running France,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011