NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Weather Station for Mobile Devices

 

You may rely on your mobile device's pre-installed weather app to find out what it's like outside. However, if you like a little more atmospheric info with your morning coffee, you might want to check out the Netatmo weather station.

The app-controlled system comes with two silver cylindrical modules, one for the outdoors that runs on AAA batteries and one for indoors that plugs into the wall. After downloading the app and syncing the station to a Wi-Fi network, you can view the weather and temperature conditions inside and outside your home. This weather station measures everything from humidity to indoor acoustic atmosphere.

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Outside variables like humidity, weather conditions and temperature are measured and use the AQI (air quality indicator) rating system from the U.S. EPA's AIRnow program. That rating measures the kind of pollutants are in the air. The AQI ratings go from 0 to 200, the higher the number the worse the air quality. A color system ranging from green to red -- green being the safest, red being the most hazardous -- is used along with the AQI numbers to make noticing changes in air quality easier.

As far as the modules go, the slim cylinders are made from durable aluminum and are UV-resistant. Despite its strong exterior, it's best to keep the outdoor module in a spot outside where it won't get wet when it rains.

Alerts can be set up to let you know what levels of carbon are in the home, and when is the best time to open up your windows and let fresh air in. This section of the app also gives a monthly summary of weather and temperature conditions, like what minimum and maximum temperatures have been inside and out of your home. The app works along multiple devices, iOS and Android, so that everyone in the family with it installed can check the weather before heading out.

Credit: Netatmo

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Cassettes Coming Back In a New Way

Cassette tapes are dead. Long live cassette tapes! The music staple of the late 20th century is making a comeback in the form of big data storage. That's right, kids, the same thing that made the mix tape possible in the 80s could hold tomorrow's pictures and mp3 files.

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Fuji Film and IBM have created a prototype cassette measuring 4x4x1 inches that can hold up to 35 terabytes of information, or about 8,750,000 songs. The data is stored on a strip of magnetic tape made from particles of barium ferrite. But don't bust out your "Saved By the Bell" torrents to save them on tape just yet. As of right now, the cassettes are being developed for big data storage use only, i.e. server farms.

The cassettes are actually the opening act for the new computer from IBM called the Square Kilometer Array telescope. When it's finished in 2024, this radio telescope will be the world's largest, able to push out one petabyte of data per day, or about 1 million gigabytes. When news came out earlier this year about IBM developing this super-data pusher, they mentioned "next-generation tape systems" as a storage method. Who knew the next generation would have such a familiar face?

via New Scientist

Credit: Lawrence Manning/Corbis

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Boxee Combines Cable, DVR and the Cloud

For those of us trying to disconnect from cable subscriptions, getting the content we want is a challenge. It usually means waiting for a show to be posted online or dealing with less than reputable streaming sources. The Boxee TV is a set top device that combines the best of cable with DVR, apps and the Cloud.

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Boxee connects to your television's antenna and coaxial cable to gain access to unencrypted basic cable -- the free kind -- and view major broadcast networks. The device has a "no limits" DVR, which means that users can record as many shows as they want and then save them to a cloud service. (Most DVRs save shows to a hard drive, which has a finite amount of space.) Viewers can then watch the recorded content from any device through a Web browser. Access to apps for Netflix, Pandora and YouTube will also be available.

When Boxee TV launches November 1, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia and D.C will have access to the DVR service, with more cities coming online soon. Subcscribing to that service will cost $14.99 a month. But that sure beats a cable bill.

Credit: Boxee TV

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Does the Internet Have a 'Kill Switch'?

It’s an enticing premise out of a James Bond film: a device somewhere that, with the flick of a switch or the press of a button (or, somewhat more realistically, a typed code on a computer), can bring the World Wide Web to a sudden halt against an impenetrable wall of 404 Error codes.

No more e-mails. No more websites. No more adorable kitty memes. All of it gone, on the whim of arguably the most powerful person in the world.

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Rumors have circulated that governments in Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere have tried to develop just such a "kill switch" to disable the Internet. Sci-fi speculation aside, a recent statement on Yahoo News UK from the man who invented the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, pours cold water on that theory:

"Berners-Lee, who launched the web on Christmas Day 1990, said the only way the internet could ever be entirely shut down is if governments all over the world coordinated to make it a centralized system....The way the internet is designed is very much as a decentralized system. At the moment, because countries connect to each other in lots of different ways, there is no one off-switch, there is no central place where you can turn it off."

Governments and powerful individuals clearly have a vested interest in keeping some information off the Internet. Witness the concern over Wikileaks releases and even Mitt Romney’s tax records, which may or may not have been recently stolen by a hacker allegedly demanding ransom.

But killing the Internet to prevent dissemination of such secrets would be like killing a fly with a sledgehammer—and likely be ineffective anyway.

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Though it would be virtually impossible to switch the Internet as a whole off, there have of course been various countries that have blocked or restricted web access to their citizens for political purposes. China, for example, is notoriously censorious.

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And it’s not just countries. In March of this year, people claiming to be members of the group Anonymous announced that they planned to gravely harm (albeit temporarily) the web by targeting the world’s domain name servers, thereby making it impossible to perform a domain name look-up, effectively rendering most of the Internet inaccessible (though hardly “dead”). It was supposed to have happened on March 31, though given the nature of the Anonymous organization it’s not clear if the threat was real (and unsuccessful) or a prank.

In response to claims that he was one of the few people who could pull the plug on the Internet, Berners-Lee joked: "I am afraid that now that you know I will have to shoot you."

Credit: Corbis Images

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Teenager Builds Cancer-Detecting Artificial Brain

The second annual Google Science Fair, a science talent competition for kids ages 13 to 18, was held this month in Palo Alto, California. This year’s winner, 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, wrote a cloud-based computer program that makes breast cancer detection less invasive. She called it the “Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer.” Wenger created computer programs coded to think like the human brain and then used them to locate mass malignancy in breast tissue samples.

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Traditional methods of finding mass malignancy use a minimally invasive, but painful, biopsy called a fine needle aspirate (FNA). Analyzing tissues collected with this method isn’t always effective and sometimes results in further invasive procedures. Wegner tested her method with 7.6 million trials to see how accurately it would detect cancerous tumors. It succeeded with a 97.4 percent success rate in prediction and 99.1 percent sensitivity to malignancy when analyzing samples collected from FNA. Employing this data to a cloud service could make it possible for doctors to assess tumors without employing more invasive testing.

For winning the competition, Wegner received $50,000, a trip to the Galapagos Islands and one year of mentoring and internship opportunities. As for her future, Wegner said in a recent interview that she plans to major in computer science in college and attend medical school.

via MSNBC

Credit: Andrew Federman

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Robot Doctor Will Now See You

We've heard about their potential for getting frisky in the bedroom. We've also seen how consoling they can be to someone on their deathbed. Now robots are set to conquer a new kind of bed -- a hospital bed.

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InTouch Health and iRobot are set to unveil their new medical robot called RP-VITA, or Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

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RP-VITA will be be cloud-connected, linked to your entire medical record and have special ports for plugging in diagnostic devices such as otoscopes and ultrasound. Plus, it will be potentially capable of autonomous navigation if its FDA patent is accepted. The robot is also equipped with the latest electronic stethoscope, a video screen and is controlled with an iPad.

"The RP-VITA is a game changer for acute care telemedicine, and it will become the cornerstone for many new clinical applications and uses. The RP-VITA is a platform that will immediately improve existing healthcare delivery models, and through additional collaboration and development will create new clinical innovations that we can only imagine,"  InTouch Health’s Chairman and CEO, Dr. Yulun Wang said in a press release.

As many hospitals struggle with the pressure of reducing operating expenses without compromising provided care, RP-VITA is expected to extend the reach and effectiveness of health care professionals.

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"The RP-VITA raises the bar for overseeing patient care remotely and allows me to proactively control a situation as if I were there,” said Dr. Jason Knight, Director of the Children’s Hospital of Orange County Transport Program and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of California, Irvine. “The robot is so easy to use that I can forget about the technology and just focus on the clinical needs at hand.

The robot will make its debut July 26 to 28 at the InTouch Health 7th Annual Clinical Innovations Forum in Santa Barbara, CA.

via iRobot

credit: iRobot

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Translation App Ready For 2012 Olympics

In science fiction movies everyone either speaks English or has a universal translator. Now the iPhone has one that works for 23 languages (all of them human, so if an alien shows up you're still out of luck).

The app is called VoiceTra4U-M. It translates voices from 13 languages and text from an additional 10. The application was designed by the Universal Speech Translation Advanced Research Consortium, or U-STAR. It's being rolled out in the App Store in time for the London Oympics, when millions of people from various countries will (one hopes) be having lots of friendly conversations.

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The app works in two modes: face-to-face (where you speak into the mic and it spits out a translation) or during a phone call. It works on an iPad 2 and iPhone 4G models.

There are limitations: chat time is only an hour and it's designed to work best with travel-related questions and answers ("How much is it to get from Grand Central to Wall Street by taxi?") rather than more complex exchanges about say, postmodern literary theory. By making it available during the Olympics, the designers hope it will gather lots more speech and vocabulary data and learn to do better translations.

The translation is offloaded to remote servers, which introduces a slight delay in the conversation but reduces the amount of computing power needed by the phone. That does put limits on the number of people who can talk at once, since there's only so much traffic that the servers can handle (at least for now). But that could change in the future.

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The app is also on an open platform, so in theory any country could set up a server and start supporting another language.

Google, introduced Conversation Mode for its popular Google Translate last year. The app was last updated June 20, to version 2.4.2. The Google app is reportedly not quite as accurate, however.

Whatever limitations VoiceTra4U-M has, it's better than a fish in the ear.  

via New Scientist

Credit: Chris McKenna / Wikimedia Commons

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Apple's WWDC News: iOS Hits The Road

Apple is finally yanking the map out of Google's hands. That's the headline news of the keynote opening Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco: the replacement of the aging, increasingly-uncompetitive Google-based Maps app in the upcoming iOS 6 with an Apple-exclusive program.

But to me, the new maps app isn't the most important change revealed at WWDC (beyond those listed below, others included the arrival of a thin but expensive MacBook Pro laptop with an ultra-high-resolution Retina Display to match the new iPad and the ability to move a browsing session from one copy of Safari to another through Apple's iCloud Web service). It's more like the fifth-most important. Here's what tops it:

1. "Eyes Free" mode. When it ships sometime this fall, iOS 6 (a free upgrade for the iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S, the current iPod touch, the iPad 2 and the new iPad) will allow some drivers to request directions and hear and respond to text messages without even looking at the screens of their phones, much less touching them. They will need an upcoming vehicle from Audi, BMW, Chrysler, GM, Honda, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mercedes or Toyota with a "Siri button" on the wheel, but this still sets an important precedent. It's also a smarter response to distracted driving than trying to ban all phone use by drivers.

2. Facebook integration. The social network will be even more tightly integrated in iOS 6 than Twitter is in iOS 5, including automatically synchronizing Facebook events and contacts. (Many Android phones include a similar feature). The same integration is coming to Mountain Lion, a new version of OS X coming in July for $19.99. In the keynote, Apple bragged that Twitter's presence in iOS 5 has led to 47 percent of the photos shared on that service coming from iOS devices; imagine what this sort of Facebook tie-in might yield.

3. Passbook. This new iOS 6 app will collect electronic versions of shopper-loyalty cards, tickets and boarding passes, bringing up the right one automatically on an iPhone's lock screen when it detects it's at a relevant location. If enough vendors and merchants support this feature, this will insert Apple into the middle of an enormous number of transactions. And what if an upcoming version of the iPhone also supports mobile payments with an NFC chip? Let the rumor-mongering begin!

4. Notifications in Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion will copy a feature in iOS 5 (which in turn copied one from Android) by allowing background applications to request a user's attention in compact banners that scroll down from the top-right corner of the screen. (That, in turn, reminds me of a feature I appreciated in the Ubuntu version of Linux two years ago.) This should make Mountain Lion a less cluttered place for its users. It also seems a more sensible borrowing from Apple's mobile efforts than the interface elements Apple crudely transplanted into Lion, most of which I've since disabled.

5. Maps. The maps-and-directions program in iOS 6 looks uncommonly beautiful, with an eye-catching "flyover" mode that lets you soar over a rendered version of many major cities. On a more practical note, it will provide turn-by-turn directions that factor in traffic delays, include Yelp ratings of nearby establishments and let you book OpenTable restaurant reservations. But there's no word of an offline mode to match what Google says it's bringing to the Android version of Google Maps. And this app apparently won't offer walking, bicycling or transit directions, areas that I've found Google's app excels in. (Update, 6/13/2012: Grist's Philip Bump confirmed that it does provide walking navigation.) Apple says it will present third-party apps providing those services in Maps, but that's not as elegant. And elegance, as you may have heard, is kind of a big deal at Apple.

Images via Apple PR

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Sidewalk Stones Are Wi-Fi Hotspots

So, one day your walking down the street and you realize you need wireless Internet, ASAP! Whether it’s because you forgot to turn in a paper or you just have to check how much costs on Amazon -- you gotta get online. Instead of wandering into a coffee shop or bookstore, what if you could just step onto the sidewalk? A Spanish tech company designed sidewalk paving stones, called iPavement, that are Wi-Fi hotspots.

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The stones are wired to 1,000-watt cables and contain a 5GB microprocessor that will connect with devices via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to provide coverage. IPavement will also provide cloud-based apps that provide info on local area maps, recommendations for local shopping or dining as well as coupons. Building on the local amenities, the apps will also alert users when there are road hazards or sidewalk obstructions along the way. It’s recommended that iPavement stones be installed no more than 66 feet apart to ensure seamless coverage.

via Gizmag

Credit: iPavement

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Whack This Poster To Change Songs

 

While the rest of us have progressed from fast forwarding tapes to skipping CD tracks and onto shaking our iPod to skip songs, employees at London-based digital creative firm Agency Republic studios have yet another way to interact with music. They've created a sound system that’s controlled by a poster that changes songs when something is thrown at it.

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The poster is hooked up to a knock sensor that’s connected to an Arduino nano encased in a “magic box.” All of that is connected to Spotify, the digital music service. When someone throws something at the poster -- shoe, eraser, pen, copy machine -- it will move on to the next song in the Spotify queue. Put this in every office setting and you'll get to know your co-workers music preferences pretty quick, which could either lead to camaraderie or all-out music warfare. Check out the video below for demo:

 

via Laughing Squid

Credit: Agency Republic

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