2011-09-30

Giant 3D Printers


Monster 3D printer unveiled | thingmakers


Voxeljet has just unveiled a monster 3D printer. We’re seeing scaling up to industrial levels very fast here. It won’t be long before BAE are printing aeroplane wings in one pass.








The VX4000 offers excellent features:
  • Build space of 4000 x 2000 x 1000 mm
  • Continuous operation with multiple building platforms
  • Variable use of build space for individual application
  • Effective and continuous operation through rugged design and high-quality components
  • Fast and economical manufacturing of large components and batches

The Urbee Hybrid: the First 3-D Printed Car | Fast Company


Think hybrid cars are futuristic? How about a hybrid car that has literally been printed out? Stratasys and Kor Ecologic recently teamed to develop Urbee, the first car ever to have its entire body 3-D printed with additive manufacturing processes (by printing layers of material on top of each other until a finished product appears).


Huge 3D Printer Makes Buildings Out of Sand [VIDEO]

We’ve seen 3D printers before, but none quite this ambitious. Italian inventor Enrico Dini’s D-Shape is on a scale large enough to print entire buildings out of simple components: sand and an inorganic magnesium-base binding material.



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2011-09-26

Singapore Punggol Eco Town -- Panasonic's Test-bed on Total Energy Solutions for Public Housing

Panasonic to Develop EcoTown Project in Singapore


Singapore’s Housing and Development Board, Energy Market Authority and Economic Development Board have partnered with Panasonic to develop an Eco Town. Ten apartments in a housing complex in Singapore have been selected to be models of the viability of energy efficiency in open housing; the project will be officially called the Punggol Eco Town.
[...]
The project will run from 2011 to 2013. Punggol Eco Town will gradually move to run entirely clean energy and reduce energy use by 75 percent. The Ecotown will have photovoltaic system to run their elevators; this means that their elevators will run by solar radiation that is converted to electricity. Solar panels will be installed throughout the units. The idea is that a resident will be able to open their garage door or switch on their TV without any environmental impact.





Panasonic Announces Asia's First Test-bed Project on Total Energy Solutions for Public Housing | Panasonic News Portal



Panasonic's photovoltaic systems will be installed to supply renewable energy to power common facilities; aiming to challenge zero emissions target and its Home Energy Management System (HEMS) will help households monitor and better manage energy consumption via an in-home display (IHD) which are provided as part of the test-bed project. Demand response will be achieved through Panasonic's Smart Energy Gateway (SEG) which connects the smart meter and home appliances such as air conditioners. As part of the bigger picture, the HEMS will be connected to the government-owned smart meters and smart grid technology; to enhance the efficiency and resilience of Singapore's power system.




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2011-09-23

Google Wallet

Visions of a Future Where Phones Replace Wallets - NYTimes.com

Plenty of companies would love to get their hands on our wallets. But Google wants to go one step further: it wants to be our wallets.

Its new phone software, called Google Wallet, is intended to replace the credit cards in our actual wallets.

It does sound pretty spectacular, doesn’t it? No fishing plastic cards out of wallets, no paper slips, no signatures. Everything is handled securely, instantly, conveniently, with one tap of your phone at the register.

Google Wallet - the vision



Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication, or NFC.

Google Wallet - how it works


  1. Look for these symbols at checkout.  
  2. Tap your phone on the reader.    Your phone sends payment, and, at some merchants, offers and loyalty information. 



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2011-09-20

Declassified US Spy Satellites One Day on Display


HEXAGON (KH-9) Viewing Opportunity, One Day Only - National Air and Space Museum Event

Please note, this event has ended.

HEXAGON (KH-9) Viewing Opportunity, One Day Only
Newly Declassified Satellite Saturday, September 17
10:00 am to 5:30 pm
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center
Admission: Free, Parking $15



Spy satellite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A spy satellite (officially referred to as a reconnaissance satellite) is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications.
These are essentially space telescopes that are pointed toward the Earth instead of toward the stars. The first generation type (i.e. Corona [1] [2] and Zenit) took photographs, then ejected canisters of photographic film, which would descend to earth.
Corona capsules were retrieved in mid-air as they floated down on parachutes. Later spacecraft had digital imaging systems and downloaded the images via encrypted radio links.


GAMBIT and HEXAGON Programs

The declassification of GAMBIT and HEXAGON was publicly announced on September 17, 2011. Two GAMBIT systems were developed for surveillance of specific targets. GAMBIT 1 initially launched in 1963 and was equipped with the KH-7 camera systems. GAMBIT 3 followed in 1966 and was equipped with the KH-8 camera system. The HEXAGON system was launched in 1971 and was developed for wide-area searches of denied territory. Together these satellitites became America's eyes in space.
Additional Information can be found under NRO's History and Studies page: Gambit/Hexagon Programs.


Declassified US Spy Satellites Reveal Rare Look at Secret Cold War Space Program | American Spy Satellites, Military Space Program | US National Reconnaissance Office Satellites &Hexagon and Gambit Satellites | Space.com

The massive KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite on display at the Smithsonian National Air Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, 


This National Reconnaissance Office released graphic depicts the huge HEXAGON spy satellite, a Cold War era surveillance craft that flew reconnaissance missions from 1971 to 1986. The bus-size satellites weighed 30,000 pounds and were 60 feet long.







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2011-09-18

Supercomputer Analyzes the World News

Can Supercomputers Predict World Events? - Technology News - redOrbit


  • By using a supercomputer to analyze news stories, a University of Illinois researcher believes that he can predict major upcoming global events, according to various news and wire reports.
  • Writing in the journal First Monday on September 5, Kalev Leetaru, the Assistant Director for Text and Digital Media Analytics at the school’s Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science, writes, “Pooling together the global tone of all news mentions of a country over time appears to accurately forecast its near–term stability, including predicting the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, conflict in Serbia, and the stability of Saudi Arabia.”


BBC News - Supercomputer predicts revolution


Mood and location
  • Reports were analysed for two main types of information: mood - whether the article represented good news or bad news, and location - where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story.
  • Mood detection, or "automated sentiment mining" searched for words such as "terrible", "horrific" or "nice".
  • Location, or "geocoding" took mentions of specific places, such as "Cairo" and converted them in to coordinates that could be plotted on a map.
  • Analysis of story elements was used to create an interconnected web of 100 trillion relationships.

Leetaru

Contents

Introduction
Data sources
Method
Forecasting unrest: Conflict early warning
The spatial dimension of news
Mapping the “civilizations” of the world’s press
Conclusions

Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war | Video on TED.com



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2011-09-15

Gladiator School Found Buried in Austria

Gladiator-school ruins unveiled in Austria - YouTube
  • A group of Austrian archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient gladiator school east of the capital, Vienna.
  • Using radar technology, the archaeologists have produced a computer simulation showing what the school used to be in the third century.


Press Release | Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology

  • An international team of archaeologists, geophysicists and computer specialists from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology (LBI-ArchPro) is using the latest non-invasive technology to reveal archaeological remains hidden beneath the soil in unprecedented detail.  The team’s work attracted international attention last year after locating a new wooden henge only 900 m from the great stone circle at Stonehenge, and recent finds using ground penetrating radar includes burial mounds and settlements dating from the Viking Age in Norway and Sweden. Now, the interdisciplinary team has discovered a unique Roman building complex at Roman Carnuntum, 20 km east of Vienna in Austria and this will shed new light on how Roman gladiators lived and died in the provinces alongside the river Danube. 


Archaeologists discover remains of a Roman gladiator school in Austria | Mail Online


Mock-up: A virtual video presentation shows the Roman gladiator school discovered by underground radar on the outskirts of Vienna
 
Rare find: The school, which contains sleeping cells, a bathing area, a training hall with heated floors and a cemetery, is the only one of its type to have been discovered outside Italy

  • The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology is dedicated to the development of new techniques and methodological concepts for landscape archaeology.
  • It combines geophysics, computer science, geomatics and archaeology to develop efficient and universally applicable methods and techniques for the non-destructive detection, documentation, investigation, visualisation and integrative interpretation and spatial analysis of the cultural heritage of archaeological landscapes.

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2011-09-09

Cleverbot Chats Like a Human


Cleverbot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  • Cleverbot is an AI web application that learns how to mimic human conversations by communicating with humans. It was created by AI veteran Rollo Carpenter, who also created Jabberwacky, a similar web application. In the first decade of its existence after being created in 1988, Cleverbot held several thousand conversations with Carpenter and his associates. Since being launched on the web in 1997, the number of conversations has exceeded 65 million.[2]

  • Cleverbot, a learning Artificial Intelligence conversationalist, took part alongside humans in a formal Turing Test at the Techniche 2011 festival at IIT Guwahati, India on the 3rd of September. The results from 1,334 votes were announced September 4th 2011. Cleverbot was judged to be 59.3% human, far exceeding expectations. The humans in the event achieved just 63.3%.
PopSci's Future Of: Cleverbot : Video : Science Channel



How the Cleverbot computer chats like a human - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience - msnbc.com

  • So what magnificent algorithm lies in the gearbox of this brilliant machine, which can seem more human than not? How have its programmers equipped it with so much conversational, contextual and factual knowledge? 
  • The answer is very simple: crowdsourcing. As the chatbot's designer, Rollo Carpenter, put it in a video explainer produced by PopSci.com, "You can call it a conversational Wikipedia if you like."
  • The key to Cleverbot's success is that it doesn't respond solely on the basis of the last thing typed, but keeps track of words and phrases that have come up in the conversation already. As Carpenter explained, "It looks back to the whole conversation and says, there are maybe tens of thousands of people who have maybe responded to 'how are you?' in the past; which of those tens of thousands of responses is most suitable to use this time?" [How Do Calculators Calculate?]

AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other - YouTube




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2011-09-08

ITK's Handroid Robotic Hand



ITK's Handroid: a softer, gentler robotic hand (video) -- Engadget


  • Most robotic hands are built with a series of individual motors in each joint, making them heavy, expensive and prone to gripping everything with the subtlety of a vice. Japan's ITK thinks it's solved those problems with Handroid -- designed with cords that mimic the muscles in our meat-paws. No motors mean it's far lighter than the standard Terminator design, and it's controlled with a glove that allows it to mirror the operator's movement as it happens.

The “Multi-fingered Robot Hands”＜EMG prosthetic hand＞ -ITK


  • The “Handroid” is a remotely-operable five-finger movable robot hand.It can be used in engineering environments which are inaccessible or dangerous to human hands. Most of the existing robot hands do not use all five fingers. Other Five-finger models usually have servomotors in each joint in the fingers, which makes the robot hand heavy, complicated and expensive.ITK developed the Handroid lightweight and cheap, restricting it to basic hand. However, the range of movement does not restrict the Handroid’s capabilities and it should be able to perform to the needs of its users.

Handroid: Japanese Company Shows Advanced Robot Hand (Video) | TechCrunch


  • Operators can control each finger remotely (the Handroid can mimic the operator’s movements), for example in environments where it’s too dangerous to use human hands. At 740g, the Handroid is very light, prompting ITK to look into possibilities to develop a prosthetic hand that could be controlled by brain waves or cerebral nerves.



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2011-09-04

MeeGo: A Linux Platform for the Next Generation of Computing Devices

About | MeeGo
  • The MeeGo project provides a Linux-based, open source software platform for the next generation of computing devices. The MeeGo software platform is designed to give developers the broadest range of device segments to target for their applications, including netbooks, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, smart TVs, tablets and more – all using a uniform set of APIs based on Qt. For consumers, MeeGo will offer innovative application experiences that they can take from device to device.
  • The MeeGo project is hosted by The Linux Foundation

MeeGo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Overview

  • MeeGo is intended to run on a variety of hardware platforms including handhelds, in-car devices, netbooks and televisions.[10] All platforms share the MeeGo core, with different “User Experience” (“UX”) layers for each type of device.

System requirements

User interfaces



Screenshot of MeeGo’s Netbook UX


The Linux Foundation Video Site:: MeeGo - YouTube




Devices | MeeGo

MeeGo's common core supports development for a variety of devices.
Netbook
Handset
In-Vehicle
Smart TV
Media phone



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2011-09-01

Wacom Inkling Digital Sketch Pen

Wacom Inkling: Digital Sketch Pen
http://www.dexigner.com/news/23709

  • Wacom Inkling is a new digital sketch pen that captures a digital likeness of your work while you sketch with its ballpoint tip on any sketchbook or standard piece of paper.
  • The Inkling digital sketch pen is comprised of both hardware and software components. Hardware includes both the pen and a wireless receiver that captures a likeness of the sketch and stores it digitally. The ballpoint pen uses Wacom's pressure sensing technology (1024 levels of sensitivity) to detect how hard the pen is being pressed to the paper while sketching. These pressure variations will appear in the digital version of your drawing.
Inkling | Wacom Americas
http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Inkling.aspx

  • Highlights:

     
    Sketch your ideas on standard paper or sketchbooks while capturing a digital likeness of your sketch.
     
     
    Store hundreds of sketches on the receiver before transferring them to your PC or Mac.
     
     
    Export your sketches with layers directly from the Inkling Sketch Manager software into Adobe® Photoshop®, Illustrator® (CS3+), Autodesk® Sketchbook® Pro (2011+) or Autodesk® Sketchbook® Designer.
     
     
    Files can also be saved in: JPG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, SVG & PDF for use with other applications.
INKLING BY WACOM - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXbBA1DRE84&feature=player_embedded

TRANSFERRING SKETCHES FROM INKLING - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhvTQWjLw5g

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