Bill Boards for Children Only....

ANAR Foundation in Spain manages a special phone number to aid children and teenagers who may be at risk of abuse or are activly being abused.

From the article:

• On this telephone number, only for minors, they can find the help they need in a totally anonymous and confidential way. But, how can we get our message to a child abuse victim, even when they are accompanied by their aggressor?

Here is where a brilliant piece of technology comes in.  The board in the video below had two messages.  One for adults that has a general awareness message, the other is directed at minor children and is invisible to adults.  The message to the children contains a phone number that only they can use that will aid them in getting help.

Knowing the average height for adults and children under 10, GREY, of Spain, using an outdoor lenticular system, showing the adults the awareness message, while children see a message where they offer them help and show them the telephone number. A message only for children.

Watch the demonstration video below:

John Karlin, Developer of All-Digit Dialing Dies at 94

As the home phone is posed to slowly fade into oblivion, many of us are unaware of the process that took the home phone from the realm of operator controlled call centers to completely automated digital call handling.  

Before John Karlin call handling had transformed from operators to mechanical switches.  But in the decades following WWII the number of home based private numbers outpaced the mechanical switch centers ability to absorb them.  

Enter the DTMF system or Dual Tone Multi Frequency dialing which mixes two tones to represent a single number and as little as five frequencies mixed to produce 0 thru 9 plus room for two special keys.  This technology allowed the call centers to transit to filters and digital switches and the ability to handle substantially more calls. 

But the shift to the new system required a paradigm shift in the design of the phone. 

From the article:

• The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the bottom, as on a calculator — all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin. 

2013 is the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone.  In those 50 years, Karlin's designs have affected many more technologies than the phone.  The keyboard design alone has become innocuous  finding itself incorporated in dissimilar items as the microwave oven to cellular phones.   And to consider that John Karlin made such stunning contributions to the very nature of how we use technology was virtually unknown outside his field.  

Original article in the New York Times 2/8/13 by By Margalit Fox

submitted by xnewsman

Star Trek's Universal Translator Much Closer

In answer to fans wondering why everyone in Star Trek universe spoke the same language. Gene Roddenberry  answered with the Universal Translator.  Though not often in evidence it did its job in realtime and with perfect accuracy.  

With the advent of increased computational power in the latter part of the 20th century, scientists began to work in earnest on a system that could do just that.  

Many software packages have at best been marginally successful with error rates of as high as one work in 5.  Plus most came no where near real time.  Word for word translators tended to be the slowest, pattern recognition fared only slightly better.  

Microsoft's chief research officer Rick Rashid  explained:

• The system works by recognizing a person's words, and then converting the speech into organized sentences. This data is then picked up by speech synthesizing software trained to replicate the speaker's voice and their unique cadence.

Many other programs exist to date Apple's Siri or AT&T's English to Spanish translator.  But according to Rashid:

• The big difference between these and Microsoft's breakthrough is the new software's ability to learn, process and pass along a human's voice and cadence.

Rashid was confident that the new software was a big improvement  so much so that he demonstrated it translating the system translating English to Chinese in China!  I  was enthusiastically  received by the audience.   

Check the Dvice article HERE

Human Skin as Car Upholstery?

EEEEEEEwwwwwwwwww!  What?!!  The title is essentially true, for the most part.  Here is what the Dvice article said: 

• Nissan engineers are working to develop synthetic materials that can replicate the touch and feel of a human finger.

You have got to be asking now....why would ANYONE want the inside of their car make them feel fingered?!  

The article states that Nissan considered (you can't make this stuff up!) four factors in the replication of the"feel" (swear to god) of the fabric:   examined were the flexibility, temperature, smoothness and moistness of a human finger (moistness?!! really? what, just like, just in the mouth moistness or oh Jesus someone help me, this is getting way out of....ummm hand already...omg even the author says that they can save a whole lot of time by just visiting an adult novelty store...oh I am so going to hell with this one...) 

Here is the link to the original Jalopnik article   

Happy fing...um motoring....

Fly By Wire, Where?

Here is a question for ya...name the conveyance that takes input from the controller, feeds it to various computers through digital input.  These computers then make changes to the various other control systems that control how the vehicle responds.  This system is better known as fbw in many of the systems it is incorporated into. 

Now if you had said the General Dynamic's F-16 Flying Falcon (or Viper) using Fly By Wire tech. you would be right.... but we are not talking about planes.  No, cars!

That's right, in a partial step towards driverless technology, Nissan plans to sell cars controlled by steer-by-wire technology as early as 2013. 

Nissan says that the fbw system would transmit the drivers intention to the proper systems much faster than hydraulic and mechanical systems. 

Also the FBW system insulates the driver from unnecessary feed-back from the road, like uneven or rough driving surfaces.

It is bound to be greeted unenthusiastically by some drivers.  From the article:

• In 2004 Mercedes-Benz faced customers complaints that its Sensotronic brake-by-wire system - which used an electrical link to control vehicles' brake pads - sometimes failed.
• Although the vehicles had a hydraulic back-up it meant some owners had experienced longer stopping distances.
• The firm ultimately recalled about two million vehicles and dropped the feature.

Fly By Wire article here on BBC

VR SHopping?

Take a look at the photo here.  This is a real Chinese super-market set to open set to open soon.  Nope, it is not some variation on a theme or some weird austerity program.  The shelves are in fact fully stocked with groceries!  Virtual Groceries. 

Yihaodian, the marketing group behind the scheme, has 1000, 13,000 square foot store fronts that will be stocked with virtual products.  The customer will be able to "see" the products using their smart phones and making purchasing decisions with the self same device.  The items would be totaled, charged, and delivery would be later the same day.

My comment here is....when is the last time you bought fresh veggies or cheese, preserved meat like a Genoa Salami without touching it, smelling it, getting the whole sensory input thing. How can you test if bread is fresh without tapping the end?

The reason I am taking it a bit personally is the article goes on to state:

• A couple of months ago Walmart did a little virtual shopping of its own, and purchased a majority share in Yihaodian.

Niche fur miche (yep, can't spell in two languages ....)


Here is the article link from Dvice had listed for the original in TechAsia

New York to London in an Hour?!

Xnewman sends in the really great article from a blog I had never heard of before but they have great articles.  This one in question revisits the bullet train or high speed tube trains.  However this one seems to take it an extra mile.  This tube train would be of the vacuum type, meaning that with no air to push around, speeds can be attained that are unheard of in today's various modes of transport.  

According to the article:    

• "vactrain technology" could have us traveling from New York City to London hitting speeds up to 4,000 mph, making the journey from NYC to London in just one hour.

The article also seems to state that the core technologies may be available in just a decade.  The overall makeup of the trains and transport are pretty standard to those of us that have been reading of this mode for the better part of a century,  Very little sounds really unique, but exciting none the less.  The tubes would be about five feet across, the "tracks" would be frictionless magnetic style.  Each passenger capsule would be about the size of a small car.  Each capsule would be accelerated up to speed and for the balance of the trip  no additional power would be applied.  At the end of the trip, the energy is recaptured regenerative breaking manner.  The writers of the article state that using this system provided 50 times more transportation per kilowatt/hour than electric cars or trains.    

You can read the complete article HERE

New Battery Tech May Triple Battery Capacity

Battery chemistry may have improved battery performance. Iron, to alkaline, nickel-cadmium, nickel metal hydride to the various lithium variations. Weight and recharargability were the driving motives. However most of the improvements in live were centered around packing in more storage media or making high density batteries which often proved problematic
in it's own problem.

Now I read about battery researchers at Washington State University have figured out a way to make lithium-ion batteries using an anode made of tin instead of graphite. Graphite, while easy to form does not perform optimally under high current loads. Tin anodes on the other hand could support 3 times as much storage. The problem with tin however is that over time it grows what can commonly be called "whiskers". These whiskers can become so bad that they can short out electronics or batteries.

The researchers however have said, well if we can not remove the whiskers, why not put them to our benifit. The researchers have succeeded in forcing tin whiskers uniformly at the quantum level and they have been able to take these tin whisker anodes and electroplate them! One of the other gains is that the electroplated tin anodes can be made much less expensively. Plus they would last longer, and recharge much faster plus holding 3 times the charge!

Check out the full Dvice article here

New Enhanced Touch Interaction

Goes without saying that just about everything we do now when interacting with various machines and hardware can or does have some form of "touch" for operation. Desk-tops, laptops, phones, bank atms, all types of cooking and other household items - the sky is the limit. However one of the major failings of the present system is that for all intents the present systems are binary. Either off or on depending on whether the object is touched or not a single channel if you will. There hasn't been much growth into the "type" of touch, like are you using 1 or a number of fingers, are you grasping turning, pushing, pulling - any number of variations. Now a system called Touché which in it's simplest form is a multiple channel sensing. With this configuration you not only can vastly increase the information of touch but use a much wider use of materials for sensing even human skin. Think of this a second. A system that could tell if you were say touching all your fingers together, or holding your hand in a specific position could tell Touché to say turn on you music system, touching your palm could change how the player works. Any number of things. Watch this video to see some ideas.

New Book Reader In the Past

I really enjoyed this article I came across in Boing Boing. The device you see in the graphic is from the April, 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics. In it we see what they envisioned as the future of machines for reading "electron" books. What I see is a technology that was used up until a few years ago, the microfiche machines. Also you can see the influences from the picture viewers popular a few years earlier. The technology to the best of my knowledge never made the transition to the consumer book field. But as you can see, it is based on tried and true technology.

The Retronaut via Boing Boing

Project KARA (tech demo for Quantic Dream)

Here is a short film written and directed by David Cage of Quantic Dream. The video runs real time on the PS-3 and was created as a demo of the software game engine to convey different emotions.

What we get though is a disturbing and poignant short about a new robot helper who seems to become self aware. This is grounds for instant disassembly while the android
begs for its' life.

As a tech demo, it's amazing, but its real calling is in the morality play that plays itself out in a few short minutes. It asks us to examine when and in what form can we accept a machine as an alive and thinking individual.

Youtube page

The Machines ARE Taking Over

Dan brought me this article by Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post that points out a fact that we all kind of suspect but never realized just how bad/good or just plain weird it really is. Cecilia writes that there are apx 328 million phones, tablets, laptops on cell networks. The weird thing is there are only 315 million Men, women and children in the US, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam. That's 4% more wireless phones than there are people, which kinda points to the likelihood that a lot of people have more than 1 cellular device....weird.

Also what people do with these wireless devices often vexes. Talking on the phone goes without saying....but where people choose to talk is...you know what I am talking about. Also it's a matter of not just talking on the phone but browsing the internet or sending email. Often the materials that are being sent on wireless devices that aggravate many recipients.

And what do I find today? That Weird Al has been aggravated by the same thing for many years and has written a well timed protest song. Check it out. "Stop Forwarding that Crap to Me" by "Weird Al" Yankovic

HP wants to phase out flash memory and SSDs by 2013

According to this Dvice article HP's new technology may well make DRAM and SRAM obsolete by 2015. flash memory in a year and a half, and they're planning on rendering. The computer giant plans on having new technology ready in a year and a half.

From the Dvice article:

• This new technology that HP is betting on is called the memristor. Memristors are wires made of titanium dioxide a mere 150 atoms wide.
  
• Like conventional solid state memory, memristors can store data without using any power. Memristors are also relatively easy to manufacture using existing technology.
  
• The advantages of memristors are that their read times are about 10 nanoseconds, with write and erase times of 0.1 nanosecond. Data stored in memristors lasts years, and you can read and write them about 1,000,000,000,000 times (HP is still counting) without data loss.
• HP says that it should have a version of what they're calling ReRAM (Resistive Random Access Memory) on the market by 2013 ...and over the next few years, they'll be rolling out memristor-based versions of both DRAM and SRAM, which ought to speed up computers immensely.

The Borg Will Be Us!

Here is a list of seven technologies that we have now or will have in the near future that will transform humanity into something very Borg like... oh yes and here it comes....I get to say the words....Resistance Is Futile!

1: Social Media. We can now share huge amounts of information, instantly and over huge distances.

2: Super WiFi. Of course all that data is useless if you can not get to it easily, no matter where you are. In the testing stage now, Super WiFi can handle copious amounts of data, physical barriers are almost no hindrance and has a footprint of miles instead of feet.

3: Augmented Reality. No, not virtual reality but augmented (any of you see the animated series call A Circle of Children? It was a near future world where children picked up the fad of wearing augmented reality glasses that would show the real world but also augment that with virtual pets, info, computer interaction ect.) Information supplied to you akin to a heads up display.

4: Truly Transparent Displays. like the glasses I just mentioned. The trouble with augmented info now is it usually is on a device that distracts you. It will really come into its own when you can access it in real time.

5: Nanocomputers. All of this information, connection and displays are going to take a lot of computational power to operate. The "wearable" computer never caught on for obvious reasons. What the upcoming tech needs is powerful but small computers. A fully functional computer today can be shrunk to fit inside of a USB shell. It is conceivable at this size to have a hundred or so secreted about your person, all of them connected by an adhoc network. For all intents a small walking around super computer. Downsizing them further, several hundred to several thousand could be in everything you wear to the devices you carry, in whatever vehicle you choose to ride in, even to others around you. Everyone becomes a node in a super consciousness.

6: Actual Retinal Displays: This would really push things along. You wouldn't have to wear the screen, your retina IS the screen. You might only need to wear special contact lens that would transmit the video / augmented info straight onto your retina.

7: and of course Bionic limbs. This is so close it's not even funny. Any missing or damaged limb could be replaced with something stronger and faster than you can know.

Good or bad, a lot of this type of tech is already here in one shape or another. The rest will be along soon.

Thanks to Device for the great post. You can read the complete article here

"My Blackbetrty Isn't Working"

Here we have two very funny gents, Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield, of the BBC's The One Ronnie.

How would marooned astronauts be rescued

Any fan of science fiction space or maybe the marooned in space genre of movie has seen this situation used more than once: An astronaut working outside a ship or something akin to it, for some reason becomes separated from the craft which all but assures that they will die an agonizing death through aphixia or loss of suit pressure. Every movie I had seen where someone had drifted even just a short distance was considered lost, no way to retreive them.

Well in a recent Gizmodo blog entry, this need not be a foregone conclusion and it seems that NASA has some pretty interesting contingency plan.

Of course we all know any EVA includes a teather. I just think we have never considered how strong the unit is. An astronauts teather is braided steel, which has a tensile strength of 1,100 pounds. Not something that is bound to fail under normal conditions. However if the unthinkable should happen and someone's teather failed then NASA's backup plan is a S.A.F.E.R. Yeah, I never heard if it either. It's a "Simplified Aid for Extra-vehicular activity Rescue," According to the article it's:

• a backpack with built-in nitrogen-jet small joystick to propel (the astronaut) back to the station.

There are a few really out there options but as Michael Curie, a spokesman for NASA's space operations puts it: "we are really happy with the tether-and-Safer approach."

So I would think that one of science fiction's old saws has been made moot by advancements in suit technology. Safer sounds so much like an off shot of something like what was experimented with in earlier projects like Gemini.

Read the complete Gizmodo article here

Did Bell Labs Slow Information Technologies by More than 50 Years?

Author Tim Wu writes of a Bell Labs engineer, Clarence Hickman, who had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal in the world, decades ahead of its time. If you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman's invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message. Oh yes, an answering machine - at it's heart, a magnetic tape recorder using magnetic tape. Hardly decades ahead of it's time though huh? Well what if I told you that this machine was built and working in 1930?! At that time we were lead to believe that sound could only be captured by pits pressed into hot Bakelite. Magnetic tape would make cassettes and video take possible and ultimately the medium that made it easy to store and transfer computer information and the tech at the heart of most every computer today - the hard drive. This information avalanche began in the 80s, decades AFTER the tech was shown to be feasible.

Oh it gets weirder! The information concerning the research and advancements made with magnetic tape research was not even discovered until the early 90s! Soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T, who controlled Bell Labs, ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman's research was concealed for more than sixty years! Historian Mark Clarke, came across Hickman's laboratory notebook in the Bell archives while doing research. Clarke writes AT&T "refused to develop magnetic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its development and use by others". Why? Well according to Clarke's research, has to be some of the most twisted logic that I have ever heard of. It seems "AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone."

It's definitely a surreal and twisted idea to think that tape recording would keep businessmen from signing contracts?!! You have got the read the Gizmodo article here. The short sighted paranoia will leave you stunned! But AT&T / Bell Labs execs thought it was reason enough to squelch technological advancement for better than half a century! Unbelievable !

How Close Are We to a Real Ironman?

In a recent Dvice article I was reading a question by a writer that basiclly asks, since IM2 is now in the theaters, just how close are we to having an Iron Man powered exoskeleton? It seems, closer than you might have imagined.

1. HULC

Creator: Lockheed Martin

Powered by: Four lithium ion batteries, 48-hour operation

What it does: ...system allows a soldier to travel 10mph while carrying a 200lb payload

2. HAL-5 (hybrid assistive limb)

Creator: Tsukuba University (Japan) (even now seeing limited use)

Powered by: Waist-mounted 100-volt battery pack

What it does: uses electrodes resting on the operator's skin to analyze muscle movements, and then enhances the wearer's strength by up to five times what it'd normally be.

3. Trojan T Series

Creator: Troy Hurtubise

Powered by: Helmet-mounted, solar-powered battery packs

What it does: Not a true powered exo/suit. Batteries power radio and range finders and even air conditioning, sometimes called a Halo suit because of it resemblance to the video game "Halo" suits. In truth may be too cumbersome to be practical.

FEATURE

Related Sections: Future Tech Lists Military

5 real Iron Man prototypes in the making

Iron Man 2 hits theaters today, telling a tale about a man in a suit of armor who flies around like a jet and shoots energy bolts from his palms. In the real world, we're not quite there yet, but you may be surprised just how close we are to an Iron Man of our own.

Powered exoskeletons are mostly sought after to enable the soldiers of tomorrow, who will be able to lift hundreds of pounds and run for miles without breaking a sweat. Beyond that, though, they could save lives in the wake of a terrible disaster, or even perform smaller miracles such as helping the paralyzed walk again.

Continue reading to check out five exoskeletons that do all that and more.

New Tech being considered for airport security

Xnewsman sends in an article from the Los Angeles Times detailing some of the purposed technology being considered for airport security after the recent aborted attack Christmas Day.

Some of the purposed ideas have already been rejected as too costly or at risk of rights violations. But some, have still managed to garner enough interest to still be considered.
One of the most unusual is for all intents, mind reading. The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and is testing in Israel projects images onto airport screens, such ... symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize. The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly, to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places.

Read the complete article for other ideas still being seriously considered

Ripley's Power Loader Suit a Reality!

Check it out! Sci-fi tech meets the real world. What am I blabbin on about? Well remember that scene in Alien when Ripley climbs into the powerloader exoskeleton to do damage to the queen? Well science fiction has again influenced real world tech thanks to Japan's Activelink. Check out this video of the real deal in action!