2009-11-26

News at Seven Virtual Newscast

A.I. Anchors Replace Human Reporters In Newsroom of the Future

A.I. Anchors Engineers at Northwestern have created an entire newsroom operation using artificial intelligence, even using avatars to anchor the evening news.

clipped from infolab.northwestern.edu

Projects News At Seven

News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show.

Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to artificial anchors for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.

Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents the content to its audience using avatars and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.

clipped from www.youtube.com

News at Seven

Kris Hammond, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and his research group have developed a new automated newscast, called News at Seven.

clipped from www.youtube.com

Virtual Newscast: News at Seven

Sources:

World's First Osmotic Power Plant

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Norway's Statkraft opens first osmotic power plant

The world's first power project that generates energy by mixing fresh water with sea water has opened in Norway.

The Norwegian renewable power company Statkraft has built a prototype osmotic power plant on the Oslo fiord.

clipped from www.google.com

New Norway power plant uses salt to make electricity

TOFTE, Norway — Norway unveiled the world's first osmotic power plant on Tuesday, harnessing the energy-unleashing encounter of freshwater and seawater to make clean electricity.
"While salt might not save the world alone, we believe osmotic power will be an important part of the global energy portfolio," the head of state-owned power group Statkraft, Baard Mikkelsen, told reporters.
Statkraft, which claims to be the biggest renewable energy company in Europe, is running the osmotic power plant prototype in a former chlorine factory on the banks of the Oslo fjord, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of the Norwegian capital.

clipped from www.google.com

Statkraft claims to be the biggest renewable energy company in Europe

clipped from www.google.com

Statkraft hopes to start building the first commercial osmotic power plant in 2015

clipped from news.cnet.com

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.

Once new membrane "architecture" is solved, Statkraft believes the global production capacity for osmotic energy could amount to 1,600 to 1,700 terawatt hours annually, or about half of the European Union's total electricity demand.

clipped from www.statkraft.com

HRH Crown Princess Mette-Marit arriving for the opening at Tofte.

Read more about Osmotic Power and the new plant

The oil- and energyminister's speech for the opening of the plant.
The Norwegian Government's article on osmotic power.
Statkraft's pages on osmotic power.

clipped from www.youtube.com

Statkraft - Osmotic Power Plant

clipped from www.youtube.com

Sources:

Metamaterials To Develop Invisibility Cloaks

clipped from www.asylum.com

Scientists Working on Invisibility Cloak

The Imperial College of London and the University of Southampton have been awarded a £4.9 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust to further research "metamaterials" that could hopefully bend light away as it reflects from the surface, tricking the human eye into believing an item made of metamaterials is not there. To create the materials, scientists have to alter the structure of an already existing material using complex nanopatterns. In other words, eerily floating chess pieces for everyone!

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk

We may be seeing Harry Potter's invisibility suit sooner than we think...

Fiction made real? Harry Potter goes invisible in the 'Goblet of Fire'

A photo of 'meta-material', which can deflect microwave beams so they flow around a 'hidden' object

clipped from www3.imperial.ac.uk

£4.9 million to develop metamaterials for 'invisibility cloaks' and 'perfect lenses'
Imperial receives major new funding grant from The Leverhulme Trust - News Release

The new grant is one of two The Leverhulme Trust is awarding for 'embedding emerging disciplines'. The project team is led by two of Imperial College London's Professors: Professor Sir John Pendry, a world-leading physicist and pioneer in the field, who first proposed that metamaterials could be used to build an invisibility 'cloak' in 2006, and Professor Stefan Maier who is a leading experimentalist in the field of plasmonics. Also collaborating in the project is Professor Nikolay Zheludev's team at the University of Southampton.

clipped from physics.aps.org

Taking the wraps off cloaking

$(Top) A hot desert surface causes a refractive index gradient in the air above, causing rays of light to be refracted continuously to form a reflection in the road and hence the appearance of water. (Bottom) Similarly, a graded refractive index cloak can guide light around a hidden object so that an observer sees only that which is behind the cloak.$

Illustration: Top: www.dreamstime.com; Bottom: Pendry et al. [7]

$(Top left) A ray of light in free space travels in a straight line. The undistorted coordinate system is shown. (Top right) The coordinates are transformed to exclude the cloaked region. Trajectories of rays are pinned to the coordinate mesh and therefore avoid the cloaked region, returning to their original path after traversing the cloak. (Bottom) In contrast, this cloaking scheme operates by cancelling scattering due to the hidden object. Here we show a high-refractive-index sphere hidden by$

A ray of light in free space travels in a straight line. The undistorted coordinate system is shown. (Top right) The coordinates are transformed to exclude the cloaked region. Trajectories of rays are pinned to the coordinate mesh and therefore avoid the cloaked region, returning to their original path after traversing the cloak.

$(Top left) The first implementation of a cloak: resonant elements, shown inset, are incorporated in a metamaterial and tuned to give a magnetic response graded from the inner to outer radius. Dimensions are shown in mm. The cloak is designed to operate at $8.5\ \textrm{GHz}$. (Bottom left) A proposed design for an optical version of the cloak, incorporating metal wires in a dielectric host and designed to operate at $632.8\ \textrm{nm}$ in a cloak approximately 4 microns in diameter. The latter$

Illustration: Top left: Schurig et al. [11]; bottom left: Smolyaninov et al. [21]; top and bottom right: Valentine et al. [19]

Illustration: Torrent and Sánchez-Dehesa [28]

Figure 5: (Left) Schematic view of the acoustic cloaking shell consisting of two different materials of the same thicknesses arranged in a cylindrical multilayered structure. (Right) Pressure map for a planar wave incident on a multilayer structure comprising 200 layers.

clipped from www.dailymotion.com

Sources:

LinkNotes

2009-11-26

News at Seven Virtual Newscast

A.I. Anchors Replace Human Reporters In Newsroom of the Future

Projects News At Seven

News at Seven

Virtual Newscast: News at Seven

2009-11-25

World's First Osmotic Power Plant

Norway's Statkraft opens first osmotic power plant

Read more about Osmotic Power and the new plant

Statkraft - Osmotic Power Plant

2009-11-24

Metamaterials To Develop Invisibility Cloaks

We may be seeing Harry Potter's invisibility suit sooner than we think...

£4.9 million to develop metamaterials for 'invisibility cloaks' and 'perfect lenses'

Taking the wraps off cloaking

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