Technology
gregladen | April 20, 2008... I'm talking about the "office suite" known as Microsoft Works. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft works.
Increasingly, more an more people don't know what Microsoft Works is because it has fallen into increasing obscurity. It is a kind of office suite that has a word processor, spread sheet, and maybe some other stuff. It is very inexpensive compared to, say MS Office.
In years gone by I've taught a number of classes designed for High School Teachers. I discovered that a lot of teachers used MS Works. I discovered this the hard way when I started receiving assignments and other…
gregladen | April 20, 2008AT&T is making the claim that the Internet will reach its full capacity limit by 2010.
... Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.
"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."
That's scary. The obvious solution is to find…
purepedantry | April 20, 2008Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode.
From the Economist Tech.view:
And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common.
Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in…
neurophilosophy | April 20, 2008
Currents carried by sodium and potassium ions through the membrane of the giant axon of Loligo.
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Docstoc is a useful tool for sharing PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and Word and Excel documents. It can also be used to embed files of these formats into a blog post in a customizable document viewer.
I've just set up an account, and have uploaded two papers by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, in which they describe their classic experiments on the giant axon of the squid. With these experiments, which were performed in the early 1950s, Hodgkin and Huxley…
pontiff | April 19, 2008We've seen these demos before, but Johnny Lee's TED talk still wows:
Not only does it seem that interfaces are undergoing some radical redesigning right now, but also methods to take existing "cheap" products and leverage them into something which would normally cost a lot more, seems to be catching on.
Just yesterday I saw a talk by Shwetak Patel from Georgia Tech which leverages things like existing power lines, plumbing, or HVAC systems to detect activities occurring in a house. What was nice about the work, in my mind, was the fact that it leveraged current infrastructure and thus…
clock | April 17, 2008I am having a blast in Trieste - FEST is fantastic, people friendly, program interesting, the smell of Adriatic evokes nostalgia (I learned to swim in the northern Adriatic), but I am really pissed with the Jolly Hotel I am in. Room is fine. But they charge wifi at exorbitant prices.
About a year ago, there was an outrage in the USA about hotels not providing internet access. But then, market forces kicked in as all the high-powered travellers started choosing those hotels that do provide free access. This forced most other hotels to do the same. Some still charge - but those charges are…
omnibrain | April 16, 2008A great new piece of technology turns you into old mister Pickard, your pissy, old, get off my damn lawn, next door neighbor.
Carmaker Nissan Motor is using a specialized driver's suit and goggles to simulate the bad balance, stiff joints, weaker eyesight and extra five kilograms (11lbs) that may accompany senior citizenry.
Associate chief designer Etsuhiro Watanabe says the suit's weight and constriction help in determining functionality and accessibility within cars by putting young designers not only in the minds of the mobility-challenged, but also in their bodies.
"Difficulty in…
gregladen | April 16, 2008Speaking at the first TED Conference in 1984, Nicholas Negroponte waxes prophetic on the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Years before anyone was using the word "convergence," Negroponte was thinking about TV screens as the "electronic books of the future" and computers as the future of education. In excerpts from his 2-hour talk (this was before TED's 18-minute time limit), he foreshadowed CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Oh, and there's also a fascinating project called Lip…
hrynyshyn | April 16, 2008The European Space Agency devoted some computer time to this representation of all the space junk orbiting the earth.
It shows trackable objects in low-Earth orbit from the aspect of the North Pole. Low-Earth orbit is the domain of many commercial, military, scientific and navigational satellites as well as debris, which drift for decades before eventually burning up in Earth's atmosphere.
Yikes.
revere | April 16, 2008Because of bird flu I probably spend too much time thinking about the world's industrially produced poultry. Arguably these chicken factories, with tens of thousands of birds crammed together under the most unsanitary conditions are the perfect bioreactor for virulent bird viruses, like influenza A/H5N1. They exit because chicken meat is a good source of relatively low cost protein and global appetite for Chicken McNuggets and its culinary cousins. So I guess we have to live with this vile industry. Or do we?
About a year and half ago I posted on growing meat in tissue culture. It got a very…
pontiff | April 15, 2008For those interested in accessing the arXiv on your iPhone, here is a web based iPhone page:http://arxiv.mobi. Sweet! This has been on my list of things to do, and now I can cross it off without having to do it myself!
gregladen | April 14, 2008I don't think this is too new, but I certainly missed it.
For the busy viewer, watch the first 15 seconds or so to get the idea, then skip ahead to 3 minutes 1 second to get to the meat of it.
(Hat tip: Frischer Wind)
It seems to me that all you need, with these devices, is a kind of "smoke detector" that detects anything wrong ... terrorists, disgruntlement among the passengers, running out of the preferred dinner option ... whatever. On activation, the "smoke detector" (let's call it a "Potential National Security Situation Detection Device") .. simply activates all of the EMD…
sciencetolife | April 14, 2008The largest road safety research project ever launched in Europe will usher in a series of powerful road-safety systems for European cars. But, in the long term, its basic, experimental research could lead to a car that is virtually uncrashable.
Read the rest of this Science Daily article.
ICT Results (2008, April 12). Road Safety: The Uncrashable Car?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 14, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com