Synopsis: Ict:

#Why young Americans still aren't driving Since 2005, driving in the United states has been steadily declining.

Doug Short takes a look at the latest data (PDF), on vehicle miles traveled, from the U s. Department of transportation.

#Wi-fi network breaks speed record A new Wi-fi network is making even the fastest commercial Wi-fi networks seem sluggish by comparison.

that's like downloading an HD movie in less than one second or 2400 times faster than a DSL internet connection.

In the future, such radio links will be able to close gaps in providing broadband internet by supplementing the network in rural areas and places

Get more details on this incredible Wi-fi network. Via Discovery y

#Wikileaks: U s. fears unsafe nuclear reactors in China Diplomatic cables from Beijing say old designs lack passive cooling and pose a big risk.

These sensors connect to backend servers that process the data collected, and the information is displayed as requested by the customer.

or her field using a mobile phone, personal digital assistant or PC. Information that is collected includes temperature, humidity, and soil nutrients.

The solution was developed by Bulut Ersavas, a former electronics engineer with IBM and Sun who got the idea for a water-monitoring system

while he was earning his MBA. Val Babajov, president of Climateminder, says his company's goal is to help agricultural concerns produce the same yield with less water.

But the equally colossal pieces of Styrofoam that protected the computer in shipping more than two decades ago are gone long,

but in the future you may see it on your TV or in your car. I called Bayer Monday at his office in Green Island, NY.

which could even be your computer or TV. Steelcase one of the largest office furniture makers in the world--they ve been really happy with Ecocradle,

We re launching Ecocradle in the computer market. There s one big client that will be using it (we will be releasing the name in a couple weeks.

We see using it for all sorts of plastic material like the hard plastic around your TV.

#Google maps goes underground"in Japan's radioactive zone"This is not a place you'd want to hang around for too long Google is producing underground street maps of Japan's nuclear exclusion zone.

The radiation levels near the Fukushima site are spiking to record levels, but that hasn't stopped Google's Streetview from entering one area of the forbidden'zone.

The images are from 17 cities within Japan's Iwate and Miyagi prefectures, which were damaged heavily by the 2011 tsunami,

Google has catalogued also the interiors of over 70 flood-damaged buildings in the region. The panoramic images are an update to ones taken shortly after the disaster.

Google says that it has a higher social purpose. Our digital archiving project aims not only to make a record of the disaster's wreckage,

and Miyagi Prefectures for the first time since we#published the first panoramas back in 2011, Google's group product manager,

Kei Kawai, wrote on the team's#blog. By releasing this new imagery on Google maps

we hope people in Japan and from all around the world can virtually explore what these towns currently look like

Google is not the first nongovernmental entity to enter the exclusion zone. Organizations including#Animal Friends Niigata

Google maps, David Worthington) Related on Smartplanet: What the NRC really knew about Fukushima Fukushima ocean radiation could pose sleeper threat Nuclear meltdowns nearly made northern Japan uninhabitable do need we to worry about radiation in our milk?

#Google unveils deforestation monitor to combat climate change The philanthropic arm of Google, Google. org, introduced on Thursday a deforestation monitor that could be a useful tool to combat climate change.

Using a new platform, its"high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine, "the company can crunch the massive amounts of data stored on Google's servers to instantly produce,

using satellite images, detailed maps showing changes in forests over time. The platform, unveiled at the International Climate change Conference in Copenhagen, could be used as a tool for nations to comply with the United nations-proposed REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest degradation in Developing Countries) program

"Google. org wrote in a blog post.""Emissions from tropical deforestation are comparable to the emissions of all of the European union,

but Google. org plans to make it available within the year, perhaps as a"not-for-profit service"for only scientists, governments,

#Huge spike in bus riders because of Wi-fi? Everyone is taking the curbside bus . Or at least 30%more of us are.

Some say that it new Wi-fi enabled busses that is luring people to leave cars behind

so that they can surf the Web while traveling. Others say it just that with cheaper busses

Bolt Bus and Limoliner have jumped into the market offering cheap routes, Wi-fi, higher safety standards,

have nothing to do with Wi-fi at all. From the article: In other words, the Depaul data is consistent with total bus ridership actually staying constant, with the recognized curbside buses simply taking ridership share from unrecognized Chinatown operators.

Even this article in Bloomberg that angled the Wi-fi theory ended the article with this quote from the director of Megabus:

As Salmon notes in his piece the travel industry has to improve current Wi-fi access in hotels, planes,

Since tablet adoption is about to experience exponential accelerated growth, with tablets eclipsing lap top sales by 2015.

And tablets function with Wi-fi. From Salmon post: So far, no one really cracked the problem of the mobile web wee still in a world where connecting to the internet

when on the move is far too difficult, and needs to be configured (and often paid for) on a device-by-device basis

. Which means that for the time being it a bit of a stretch to say...that the mobile web is actually changing the way we travel from city to city. via Reuters t

#Leaked EU documents rank biofuel emissions higher than crude oil European union politics website Euractive has gotten its hands on official EU data reporting that many biofuel crops release more carbon dioxide than crude oil,

and approximate the emissions of the much-maligned oil mined from tar sands. The numbers were intended for release in the spring when the EU presents new proposals on biofuels,

Meanwhile, crude oil's efficiency value is 87. 5g CO2/mj. Here are the data (g CO2/mj) from the EU documents,

and It'll Heal Your Wounds in 15 Seconds Flat Bloomberg News reports on an incredible new invention that astounding people across the world and across the web.

The Youtube description for Bloomberg video states: A small lab in Brooklyn is working on a gel that can stop bleeding in 20 seconds.

Collective-Evolution notes that the solar panels embedded in the concrete bike path are not as efficient as panels installed on homes

David lynch is bringing Twin peaks back to television. The award winning director caused Twitter mayhem last week

when he sent out a cryptic tweet about some amn good coffee. It been a little

The two countriesleaders are reported to have talked via telephone on Tuesday. This is first time a presidential level discussion has happened since the Cuban revolution.

Held captive for five years, Gross was convicted for dissident after being caught smuggling cell phones to Cuba small Jewish population.

The airline did say in a Facebook post that it lost contact with flight MH17 over Ukraine airspace.//

js. src=//connect. facebook. net/en us/all. js#xfbml=1; fjs. parentnode. insertbefore (js fjs;(

document'script''facebook-jssdk';/'//> A reporter in East Ukraine spotted the wreckage and an official with the Russian Emergency Ministry told Gawker that bodies from flight#MH17 were scattered over a 10 mile radius.#BREAKING:

Reuters correspondent on the scene in Eastern Ukraine sees burning wreckage of air plane bodies on groundreuters World(@Reutersworld) July 17 2014photos of the wreckage have started also showing up on Twitter.

User Matevznovak has been posting photos of the debris to his account. These pictures have not been verified as authentic.

Flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine by Nadezhda Chernetskaya pic. twitter. com/z4bydeovcp legionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine.

Don t know what part of the plane is this. pic. twitter. com/kniwpcyfsglegionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine More photos pic. twitter. com/Xjaqytnidv legionar

(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez#Donetsk#Ukraine by Nadezhda Chernetskaya pic. twitter. com/nrokr3svtulegionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014flight#MH-17#Torez

#Donetsk#Ukraine by Nadezhda Chernetskaya pic. twitter. com/2o0sgvnjbe legionar(@Matevznovak) July 17 2014a video was posted also to Youtube that reportedly shows smoke from the wreckage rising over the hill.

You can watch the launch live here on Space. com, courtesy of NASA TV and Spacex, beginning at 3: 30 a m. EST (0830 GMT.

Cell phones are need already to link to GPS and Wi-fi services on top of 4g and other cellular networks.

And in the future theyl likely also have to contend millimeter-wave bands for 5g services. All those need antennas of different lengths and shapes to accommodate the sometimes widely spread wavelength bands.

I was drawn soon to continuous glucose monitors (CGMS. These report blood glucose levels every 5 minutes, thanks to a small radio transmitter attached to a fine sensor wire that runs under the skin (the wire is replaced weekly, the transmitter every six months.

Finger checks can give you the information that a CGM can, such as the rate of change of glucose levels.

but I knew that the Dexcom G4 receiver could furnish glucose data via its USB port.

Dexcom own Windows software was pulling data in this way, and fortunately, Dexcom supplied an API (application programming interface) library as part of its software installation.

It took about 3 hours to code A c#program that polled the receiver and uploaded the data to a Google spreadsheet.

We sent Evan to day care with a small laptop equipped with the receiver. While he was in his classroom,

we could see his blood glucose via either a simple website or an ios app I threw together.

It was life changing, as it allowed Evan some freedom from the typical type 1 diabetes regimen at day care.

Still, when Evan went out for recess or long walks, putting him out of range of the laptop receiver,

we were blind again. Thus began my work on a truly ambulatory solution, based on a smartphone rather than a laptop.

My family primarily uses ios devices, but power limitations and closed frameworks made hooking up the receiver to an iphone far more difficult than to an Android phone.

I got a Motorola Droid Razr M phone and once I had the basic USB enumeration downo my phone could eethe receiver

when it was plugged in started decoding the G4 communication protocol. Using the same C# program as before,

I ran commands and captured the USB traffic as it flowed between my computer and the receiver.

With this data, I wrote an Android app to extract glucose data and upload it to our Google spreadsheet via the cellular network.

In my excitement, I tweeted my discovery. What happened next was incredible. Another iabetes dad, Lane Desborough, contacted me.

He wanted to build a similar system for his son. I shared my C# program with him

and continued to refine the Android app over the summer, in preparation for Evan return to school.

Lane created Nightscout, a Web app with predictive alerts. These alerts are based on glucose levels uploaded to a database built using the open-source Mongodb platform.

Lane transformed my system into a tool that anyone could use. While Dexcom has released subsequently Share, a proprietary remote-monitoring system, it works only with ios devices.

By having reverse engineered the G4 communication protocol and created an open online database system, we can access the data on a wider range of equipment.

For example, I picked up a Pebble smart watch the first day they were available at retailers

and within a few hours, I had written software that lets me see Evan glucose level at a glance.

Lane and I (along with Ross Naylor) continued to collaborate, and in early 2014, we made the C# uploader, Android app, Pebble watch,

and Nightscout code open source. Subsequently, better software engineers than I have improved the code and made it easier to use;

a Facebook group for Nightscout, set up by Jason Adams, now has nearly 12,000 members, and our code made the semifinal round for the 2014 Hackaday Prize.

While remote monitoring may seem invasive, it is in fact liberating. Evan can play more, learn more,

and simply do more, because his life is disrupted far less by the demands of diabetes.

We can mitigate most hyper -and hypoglycemic events without interrupting his day. I am proud to have taken back some of

what we lost that day in August 2012 and blessed to know that my little boy diabetes has helped so many others.

But researchers are now working on more affordable, crowdsourced warning systems based on low-cost sensors and cellphone electronics.

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.

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

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

"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.

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:

Tuning these algorithms requires big data, gathered from both the individual patient and the larger community of patients.

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,

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.

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