02.11.11
Posted in society, technology at 11:24 pm by site admin
Check out this article about exabytes.
So much digital data now moves around the globe that those who endeavor to measure it employ a new – or new to non-nerds – term.
Meet the exabyte.
How much data is an exabyte? It’s a billion gigabytes – and it signifies just how digital and data-intensive the world has become.
In 2007, the global capacity to store digital information – on computer hard disks, smartphones, CDs and other digital media – totaled 276 exabytes, a new report finds.
How much is that? Imagine a stack of CDs – each holding an album’s worth of digital music – shooting from the top of your desk to 50,000 miles beyond the moon.
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Posted in Environment, technology at 11:14 pm by site admin
Check out this article on how carbon captured underground is escaping..
One proposed strategy for reducing the effects of carbon emissions is to try to capture the carbon as it is emitted and to bury it underground. But the technology is controversial. And a story from Saskatchewan is adding support to opponents of the technology. A farm couple whose land sits atop a carbon capture site commissioned an independent report into their land quality, and say that it appears to indicate that the so-called “captured” carbon has actually leaked into their land.
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12.15.10
Posted in technology at 9:52 pm by site admin
Check out this article about TSA proof underwear.
There’s been no shortage of outrage over the TSA’s“naked” body scanners, which have been compared to virtual strip searches. For those of you who want to protect your private parts from being ogled by TSA employees, crowdsourced online retail site Betabrand is now offering a scanner-proof undergarment, aptly called “Privates.”
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07.07.10
Posted in society, technology at 9:15 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology. The gist is that these technologies rely on general facial pattern with very specific composition and contrast of colors.
If you change the contrast in certain parts of your face — either through a watermark or by wearing a strategically-placed sticker or facepaint, recognition technology can’t identify that your face is a human face.
“It breaks apart the gestalt of the face,” he said. “That’s what original camouflage was supposed to do.”
Harvey said he got his idea from studying camouflage methods use during World War I and World War II. His project, CV Dazzle, is based on the original dazzle camouflage used by the military to hide ships in the 1940s.
While the flashy geometric patterns don’t seem like they could obscure a thing, they thwarted the enemy’s ability to tell the make or size of the ship. Similarly, zebra camouflage does little to blend the animal into the background of the savannah. But when zebras are in herds, predators like lions have difficulty picking out animals from the herd. (Dazzle camouflage was eventually phased out by the military as aviation technology and rangefinders improved.)
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05.26.10
Posted in technology at 9:24 pm by site admin
Saw this article titled The Little Black Piezoelectric Dress. While the idea of embedding high tech features / functions in clothing has been discussed for some time, I think technology is approaching the point where it is becoming realistically feasible.
ON A WEDNESDAY night in February, one week after fashion’s biggest names descended on New York for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, techy designer Diana Eng’s models were strutting a different kind of stuff: the Twinkle Dress, for example. As a striking brunette model slinked by, her flirty frock, embroidered with LEDs, conductive silverized thread, and microphones, lit up in response to tunes from a quartet playing homemade digital instruments. Off the runway, the dress’s microphones can pick up sounds from the wearer’s voice: when she speaks, she lights up in true diva style.
So what happens when these tools are part of our second skin—when instead of carrying our technology, we inhabit it, the way we inhabit a T-shirt? According to Andy Clark, a professor of philosophy and the author of Supersizing the Mind, cognition does not evolve solely from within our epidermal cloak. He argues that the tools we use also help shape our minds.
Take the M-dress, designed by CuteCircuit to solve the problem of digging through a purse in a dark lounge to find a cell phone. With a SIM card embedded in the dress’s tag, a microphone and speaker in the sleeve, and gesture-recognition software, the wearer can answer calls by simply raising her hand to her ear. There is no external device and no button to press—the movement alone activates a sensor that answers and ends calls. Our bodies become part of the communication tool, mediated by little more than fabric. “When our relation to something nonbiological is that close, and we’re secure in our access to information, then we feel the information is part of our mind,” says Clark.
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Posted in technology at 8:45 am by site admin
Check out this BBC interview with Tim O’Reilly about the current state of the web.
“We’re at a point where we are making choices. Back in the mid-1980s, there was this robust developer ecosystem around the PC and Microsoft offered a kind of Faustian bargain: ‘Hey, let us take care of a lot of the hard stuff and it will be great.’
“But over time Microsoft put themselves in a stronger and stronger position and then they started to consume the ecosystem they had built. Early on, Microsoft was creating more value than they captured and then they started capturing more value than they created.
“I think we are seeing that right now with Google, where they built the company by sending traffic to sites and creating mechanisms for sites to get paid, and now more and more of their links point back to Google. And they are competing with developers and I think that is a real problem and their biggest weakness right now.
“The reason it’s crunch time is that we are going to be choosing what platform we use, whether it is Amazon or Apple or Google or whatever, and it seems to me that some of these guys are trying to build the same kind of ‘one ring to rule them all’ platform that Microsoft did. That is a reference to Tolkien; it means ‘We will own this thing’ – and that story doesn’t end well.”
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05.21.10
Posted in Evolution, technology at 7:47 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about the evolution of technology:
Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute believes that Technology evolves over time: “machines started as disparate pieces of seemingly unconnected technologies, but like humans, they also have an origin and a process of evolution.” He is arguably the first person to tackle the question of the origin and evolution of machines, eloquently laid out in his book, The Nature of Technology. Evolution is an increase in maturation and complexity, and does not have to necessarily follow the path of Darwinian evolution, which is modification by descent – nature introduces small variations in an existing form over a long period of time. Granted the results are staggering, but the journey, such as that of the ape’s evolution into mankind, can take millions of years.
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05.10.10
Posted in technology at 9:55 pm by site admin
Check out this post about a young designer creating a flower that booms using LEDs.
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04.27.10
Posted in technology at 3:38 pm by site admin
Check out this article. I couldn’t have said it any better….
Even when things go right, users are left to feel powerless and stupid. Installing almost any program on a Windows based system involves an inordinate number of clicks, all of them just saying “Okay” “Okay” “Okay”. No one reads the click-through EULAs, no one changes the default installation location, and no one selects specific installation options. They just keep clicking “Okay” because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And then they end up with four extra toolbars in their browser and a bunch of “helper” programs that don’t actually help the user in any way and which they user doesn’t actually want. And they don’t know how to get rid of them.
and more:
It’s so easy to amass a huge amount of data today — digital photo archives, MP3 collections, and video — that it’s a real pain to reliably back up. Not only is it a pain, it’s expensive. You shell out a couple hundred bucks for a fancy new camera, and you’ll need to shell out a couple hundred morebucks to get an external hard drive onto which you can duplicate all your photos for safekeeping. And then, of course, it takes a long time to actually copy your data from your computer to your external hard drive, and you just don’t have the time or patience to commit to that regularly, so you start to neglect it and them *bam* your computer blows up — hard drive failure, malware infection, whatever — and you lose weeks and months worth of irreplaceable data.
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02.18.10
Posted in Games, technology at 11:08 pm by site admin
Check out this page explaining the mechanics behind the Star Wars Force Trainer coming out later this year. While you don’t actually levitate objects directly using the power of your mind, it is pretty cool to have a toy that helps train you to focus your brain waves.
Ok. Seriously. How does it work?
The wireless headset reads your brainwaves through dry sensor technology and can determine the differences between alpha, beta, gamma and delta waves. This allows a chip inside the Force Trainer to use an algorithm to interpret the data and translate it to physical action, which in this case moves the Training Sphere into different sections of the cylinder.
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01.06.10
Posted in technology at 12:15 am by site admin
Check out this article about how freezing your hard drive can give you that extra time you need to save your data.
The running theory goes, your hard drive might be chugging it’s last death, clicking away its final moments, but there’s a chance you can save your data by freezing whatever parts are loosening up or losing contact together. You see, your hard drive contains a lot of moving parts. After spinning for so long, it’s only natural things can vibrate and get loose. Metal also expands as it gets hotter. Freezing the metal might just force everything back together again.
It sounds so ridiculous, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove that it can work, provided it’s a hardware problem and not a software problem.
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