Tibbits then uses a 3-D printer to apply materials that are known to shrink or grow under certain conditions.
or twist in various ways depending on the pattern produced by the printer. He and his colleagues are developing design software that simulates the way different patterns of these materials printed onto different kinds of composite materials will behave under different conditions.
So far Tibbits has demonstrated materials that respond to light water and heat. But he says it should be possible to make ones that respond to air pressure and other stimuli.#
#Inspired by Wikipedia, Social scientists Create a Revolution in Online Surveys Gathering data about human preferences
Today Matthew Salganik at Princeton university in New jersey and Karen Levy at New york University outline an entirely new way of gathering data inspired by a new generation of information aggregation systems such as Wikipedia.
Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents they say.
Projects like Wikipedia are the result of user-generated content on a massive scale. The question that Salganik and Levy ask is
and Levy created a free website called www. allourideas. org on which anybody can create a pairwise wiki survey
Since 2010 this website has hosted some 5000 pairwise wiki surveys that have included 200000 items
For example on Wikipedia most of the information is intuited by a tiny proportion of editors.
If Wikipedia were to allow 10 and only 10 edits per editor akin to a survey that requires respondents to complete one and only one form it would exclude about 95%of the edits contributed say Salganik and Levy.
when it comes to data analysis. And therein lies a significant challenge. Time for the statisticians to get busy y
Ali Shakouri a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University says the cost savings sound plausible given the material being used
or OLEDSHE same kind of technology used in some ultrathin TVS and smartphones. OLEDS could be used in large sheets,
because manufacturers typically use equipment developed for making high-resolution displays, says Michael Boroson, the chief technology officer of OLED Works.
The factory will be able to produce a million 15-centimeter-wide panels per month. Even with such advances, it will take years to bring costs low enough to make OLED lighting widely used.
Some engineers for instance have used the idea of grid cells as inspiration for new algorithms to control robots or autonomous submarines.
The hope is that it could also be distributed using the same global network of liquid fuel transport that moves petrol around the planet.
an Ad-Free Facebook Alternative The first thing I noticed on Ello a new ad-free social network is the abundance of white space.
Unlike Facebook which rages with status updates trending topics and ads imploring me to click on things my friends like Ello is quiet and calm.
and entrepreneur Paul Budnitz Ello contends that on social networks like Facebook we the users are the product as our data is sold to advertisers who hope to entice us with ads in our feeds.
and one of several manifestos posted on the site says that those behind Ello dislike ads more than almost anyone else out there.
It doesn t sell user data to third parties either and you can decide whether or not you want to let it gather information about your own Ello activity to improve the site.
To make money it plans to take up a freemium model where it sells features to users.
This anti-ad (and in many ways anti-Facebook) ethos coupled with a stark simple design that looks
as if the German industrial designer Dieter Rams had created a more social version of Tumblr is probably not causing many people to ditch Facebook
but it is making plenty of them curious about the new social network. Ello began its invite-only beta test in August with 90 people
and while Budnitz won t divulge how many people are currently using it he says Ello is now getting up to 31000 requests for invites per hour.
In a smartphone-obsessed world that s a lot attention for a social network that doesn t even have an app yet.
But since the social network is still so small it s hard to tell whether I ll need it in the same way
I do Facebook and Twitter where I m accustomed to paying with the breadcrumbs of data
your profile photo shows up within a circle and you can follow other users by dragging their circular icons into either a friends
which is the opposite of how it s done on Facebook or Twitter. And it s embarrassingly easy to delete a friend s comment on one of your posts by clicking a tiny gray x next to the comment which
but swelling user base Ello feels kind of like a party at a hip art gallery where the guest list is kept secret.
So Ello is basically a stripped-down (commercial-free for now) Tumblr/Twitter? Is that it?
Ello simply states that it will soon offer special features that users can pay a small amount to get;
Budnitz says one example many users ask for is the ability to control multiple profiles with just one login for
and for a number of other startups like Evernote and Strava but it s not clear how well it can work on a social network especially one that wants to grow.
and its sudden popularity appears to be straining the social network. The search function seemed really slow
While some features have already been built a long list of them are still to come such as the ability to block other users from seeing your profile to post music
Apps for iphone and Android are in the offing but for now the only way to use it on a smartphone
or tablet is via a mobile browser. Despite the long to-do list Ello is off to an intriguing start.
There s room for a social network that is both pretty to look at and a pleasure to use e
#A Promising Step Toward Round-the-clock Solar power If solar power is to become a primary source of electricity around the world,
The catalysts built on previous work showing that nickel hydroxide is a promising catalyst, and that adding iron could improve it.
Not Programming Eugene Izhikevich thinks you shouldn t have to write code in order to teach robots new tricks.
Instead of programming you show it consistent examples of desired behavior. Izhikevich s startup Brain Corporation based in San diego has developed an operating system for robots called Brainos to make that possible.
To teach a robot running the software to pick up trash for example you would use a remote control to repeatedly guide its gripper to perform that task.
After just minutes of repetition the robot would take the initiative and start doing the task for itself.
Brain Corporation hopes to make money by providing its software to entrepreneurs and companies that want to bring intelligent low-cost robots to market.
Later this year Brain Corporation will start offering a ready-made circuit board with a smartphone processor
The chip on that board is made by mobile processor company Qualcomm which is an investor in Brain Corporation.
At the Mobile Developers Conference in San francisco last week a wheeled robot with twin cameras powered by one of Brain Corporation s circuit boards was trained live on stage In one demo the robot called
and could then copy its software to new robots with the same design before they headed to store shelves.
Brain Corporation s software is based on a combination of several different artificial intelligence techniques. Much of the power comes from using artificial neural networks
But they might eventually offer a more powerful and efficient way to run software like Brainos.
Brain Corporation previously experimented with reinforcement learning where a robot starts out randomly trying different behaviors
while faster than programming it produces less predictable behavior. You wouldn t want to use the technique to ensure that an autonomous car could detect jaywalkers for example he says.
Researchers from Carnegie mellon and Intel developed the prototype headlight which scans the road ahead using an infrared camera
The Carnegie mellon-Intel prototype includes a camera a computer and a digital projector. Information from the infrared camera is processed by a computer that tries to identify relevant objects on the road such as cars, pedestrians or road signs.
The projector uses a light source that is 4700 lumens (much brighter than a halogen headlight) with an array of almost 800000 micromirrors that can be controlled individually by the computer.
The ability to control the light with so many micromirrors provides a high-resolution, highly tunable system that can also turn on
says the Carnegie mellon programmable headlight could improve automotive machine vision. This is a great example of taking ideas from computer vision
and applying them to a challenging real-world problem, he says. This is a known stumbling block for self-driving vehicles
which recently presented its findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Zurich Switzerland is still modifying the prototype
In a mental flash he had pictured a strand of DNA threading its way through a microscopic pore.
Twenty-five years later the idea is now being commercialized as a gene sequencing machine that's no larger than a smartphone and
and gets its power from a USB port on a computer. Unlike other commercial sequencing machines
His flash of insight was that a molecule passing through one of these pores especially a long molecule like DNA would continuously change the blob's electrical properties.
if the sequencer was vaporware. By this spring Oxford had worked the bugs out enough at any rate to start mailing out beta versions of the nanopore sequencer to 500 hand-picked labs it is collaborating with.
Even with a supercomputer the puzzle often can't be solved there can be repeated too many sequences
#Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year according to chip maker Intel
which is providing the sensing technology to manufacturers. And tablets with 3-D sensors will hit the market in 2015 the company said at its annual developers conference in San francisco on Wednesday.
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer electronics Show in January (see Intel s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets.
It has developed two different types of depth sensor. One is designed for use in place of a front-facing webcam to sense human movement such as gestures.
The other is designed for use on the back of a device to scan objects as far as four meters away.
Both sensors allow a device to capture the color and 3-D shape of a scene making it possible for a computer to recognize gestures
Intel is working with software companies to develop applications that use the technology. In the next few weeks the chip maker will release free software that any software developer can use to build apps for the sensors.
Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft s Skype unit the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks and the 3-D design company Autodesk according to Achin Bhowmik general manager for Intel s
perceptual computing business unit. None of those partners showed off what they re working on at the event this week.
But Intel showed several demonstrations of its own. One developed with a startup called Volumental lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement something that could help with online shopping.
Another demonstration showed how a 3-D sensor could measure the dimensions of a sofa in a store
Bhowmik also showed how data from a tablet s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games where a virtual character viewed on a device s screen integrates into the real environment.
As the tablet showing the character was moved it stayed perched on the tabletop and even disappeared behind occluding objects.
Intel also showed how the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop
Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console which introduced gamers to depth sensing
Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCS in 2012 and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013
but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet. Some of Intel s demos were rough around the edges suggesting that their compact sensors are less accurate than the larger ones of Microsoft.
However Bhowmik said that any such glitches would be unnoticeable in the fully polished apps that will appear on commercial devices.
Intel s two sensors work in slightly different ways. The front sensor calculates the position of objects by observing how they distort an invisible pattern of infrared light by a tiny projector in the sensor.
Intel s new sensors are roughly the same size as the camera components used in existing devices says Bhowmik.
On Monday Dell announced that the sensors will appear later this year in its Venue 8 7000 tablet which is only six millimeters thick thinner than any other tablet on the market t
however, this doesn mean you can actually bend the screen. As with other devices featuring flexible displays,
such as those from LG and Samsung, the display has been laminated onto a stiff pane, fixing it in place to prevent the damage that would come from repeated flexing.
Even so, the appearance of the first few flexible screens in commercial devices may be a sign of things to Come in fact
fully flexible electronic gadgetsith full-color displays that wrap around a wrist or fold upay be just a few years away,
chief marketing officer for Applied materials, a company whose equipment is used to make displays, is also extremely difficult to make a flexible backlighthe component needed to illuminate LCD pixels.
So the screen in the Apple Watch is almost certainly an OLED display. Rather than the pixels being illuminated by a backlight,
Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible. They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.
and afterwards the plastic, together with display and electronic components, is lifted off the glass. Manufacturers have known how to do this for years.
so you have to seal the display within robust, high-quality, flexible materials. This is costly, and there are challenges with ensuring that the seal survives being bent hundreds or thousands of times over the lifetime of a device.
Novel materials for touch screens that use flexible nanomaterials could also help. One patent application suggests Apple is already looking at this issue.
While the lithium-polymer batteries used in smartphones today are somewhat flexible they can survive being bent many times.
and which also have the potential to store much more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries (see onger-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices.
and Facebook Data Datacoup one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data has closed finished a trial of its service
and is now opening it to anyone (see Sell Your Personal data for $8 a Month).
Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts credit card transaction records and other personal information and will gleaned sell insights from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
Whether an individual user gets the full $10 a month or not depends on which streams of data he s willing to share.
Options include debit card and credit card transactions and data from Facebook Twitter and Linkedin. Datacoup won t provide raw data to companies.
For example a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.
Tens of thousands of people already receive $100 a month from a company called Luth Research in return for very detailed data from their smartphones tablets
The Michigan State university researchers developed software that makes it feasible to accurately match fingerprints of children under five with off-the-shelf equipment.
but the patient-identifying system has broader applications says Anil Jain a distinguished professor at Michigan State university s Computer science and Engineering Department and coauthor of the paper.
The Michigan State university researchers needed to process images taken from fingerprint sensors using software to compensate for the small size of the children s fingerprints as well as their sometimes wet and oily skin.
In a trial in Benin West Africa the software successfully matched about 70 percent compared to 98 percent in another test in Lansing Michigan.
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
Since 2009 Google has been working with controversial startup D-Wave Systems which claims to make the first commercial quantum computer.
And last year Google purchased one of D-Wave s machines. But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
Now John Martinis a professor at University of California Santa barbara has joined Google to establish a new quantum hardware lab near the university.
He will try to make his own versions of the kind of chip inside A d-Wave machine.
and make the qubits in a different way says Martinis of his effort to improve on D-Wave s hardware.
Martinis has taken a joint position with Google and UCSB that will allow him to continue his own research at the university.
Quantum computers could be immensely faster than any existing computer at certain problems. That s because qubits working together can use the quirks of quantum mechanics to quickly discard incorrect paths to a solution
Since showing off its first machine in 2007 D-Wave has irritated academic researchers by making claims for its computers without providing the evidence its critics say is needed to back them up.
Larger systems of such qubits could be configured to run just about any kind of algorithm depending on the problem at hand much like a conventional computer.
It can only run a specific algorithm used for a specific kind of problem that requires selecting the best option in a situation with many competing requirements for example determining the most efficient delivery route around a city.
It concluded that in the tests run on the computer there was no evidence of quantum speedup.
Without that critics say D-Wave is nothing more than an overhyped and rather weird conventional computer.
Martinis s work on D-Wave s machine led him into talks with Google and to his new position.
However Google has given not up on D-Wave. In an online statement the leader of Google s quantum research said that the two companies will continue to work together
and that Google S d-Wave computer will be upgraded with a new 1000 qubit processor when it becomes available e
#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
Over the last few decades we ve grown beyond the industrial economy to the IT economy and the Internet economy each
Social networks let billions of people collaborate in a variety of ways. Meanwhile business networks have enabled new types of frictionless commerce.
The numbers of people-to-people connections##business networks social networks##they ve all been growing over the past 10 years says Dinesh Sharma SAP s vice president of marketing for the Internet of things.
But while social mobile and cloud computing helped set the groundwork for the Networked Economy it s important for businesses to understand that this revolutionary economic environment goes far beyond those technologies creating unprecedented new opportunities for collaboration and customization.
Google Waze an app allowing drivers to share local real-time traffic and road information; and Uber a mobile app that connects people seeking taxicabs or ridesharing services.
A business looking to purchase say a particular machine part can now turn to the ultimate consumer marketplace##ebay.
Now technology can easily extend a search via a consumer network like ebay. That dramatically increases the number of choices available
As the first generation of digital natives##people who have known never the world without computers
and the Internet##millennials are natural networkers. They re completely at home in highly connected collaborative spaces like those underlying the Networked Economy.
You can use an ipad to tap between different realistic-looking fabric options that change via an overhead projector.
and uses software to segment the resulting 3-D model into pieces, similar to the way in
ük re-registers the real couch location with Vizera server; and if I were to move the carefully positioned throw pillow,
#A Headset Meant to Make Augmented reality Less of a Gimmick Andrew Maimone thinks augmented reality hasn been much more than a gimmick so far.
Maimone, a Phd student at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, is developing a new kind of head-worn display that could make augmented reality hereby digital objects
While it possible to use a smartphone or tablet to, for example, conjure a virtual character
and place it onto a real world table viewed on a smartphone screen, this just sn very compellingsays Maimone. he experience doesn occur in one own vision,
Together with three other researchers from the University of North carolina and two from Nvidia Research
Maimone device, called a Pinlight Display, does not use conventional optical components. It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights
so the team has compensated for this by performing some image manipulation in software. ne could think of Pinlight Displays as exploiting how the eye sees an image that is out of focus,
says Maimone. he resulting hardware configuration is very simplehere are no reflective, refractive, or diffractive elementso we do not run into the trade-off between form factor
rather than something that exists only on external screens. There may be other potential benefits to the team approach. ince part of the image formation process takes place in software,
we can adjust parameters such as eye separation and focus dynamically, says Maimone. Therefore we can imagine incorporating the pinlights into the corrective lenses
or ordinary glasses, creating a display that looks like ordinary glasses with the addition of an LCD panel.
Anyone paying attention knows that his or her Web searches, Facebook feeds, and other online activity isn always safee it from the prying eyes of the NSA
or those of the companies providing a social networking service. While a substantial chunk of the populace finds all this tracking creepy and invasive,
Some startups hope to exploit this by buying access to your Web browsing and banking data (see ell Your Personal data for $8 a Month.
Luth Research, a San diego company is now offering companies an unprecedented window into the private digital domains of tens of thousands of people who have agreed to let much of what they do on a smartphone, tablet,
or PC be tracked for a $100 a month. Luth Q Intelligenceservice collects and analyzes data from preselected participantsphones and computers via a virtual private network connection.
Data is routed through the company servers where it is collected and analyzed for trends. The company doesn view the contents of messages,
but what it does gather includes where smartphone users are given at any moment, what websites they are visiting,
what queries they are feeding into Google, and how often they check Twitter. The program participants are asked also to answer questions about their behavior.
Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix. The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars.
Advertisers want better targeting because click-through rates for online ads now stands at less than. 01 percent.
Luth did a project for Ford motor company this yearord wanted to better understand customersath to purchase.
The company rounded up research subjects in the market for a car and then tracked the journey they took from researching to finally buying.
A customer might drive to a dealership, browse other automakerswebsites while there, and research financing options later.
If it turns out that consumer review sites are a prominent part of the process, for instance,
partnering with the sites, and buying ads there. Ultimately, Luth found that by the time a customer actually visits a car manufacturer website,
theye most likely ready to buy a car. hat a big deal, says the company senior executive for marketing,
But as many as 20,000 PC users and 6, 000 smartphone users are given, at any time,
Roseanne Luth, says participants can uninstall the software anytime they want (though theyl stop earning any money at that point.
In a survey of 1, 100 smartphone users by Punchtab, an advertising company, in April 27 percent of respondents said they would allow themselves to be tracked by retailers on mobile devices
Last month, Verizon announced a new loyalty program for its 100 million U s. wireless customers,
and Web browsing behavior to be tracked and sold to marketers. This kind of tracking will only get more sophisticated.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011