Tag: Technology

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Great New Product, Science & Technology News

Smart headlight system lets drivers see through rain and snow

Smart headlights

I am sure everyone has noticed when driving through a pounding thunderstorm or heavy snowfall at night that your headlights illuminate the maelstrom of raindrops or flakes more than they shed light on the road ahead. This safety hazard can be greatly reduced by anticipating the movement and velocity of the drops or flakes and shining the headlights into the spaces between them, according to a team of researchers who’ve built just such a “smart” headlight system.

 

 

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Analysis, Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Are we addicted to our gadgets?

“The lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving.”

The New York Times has come out with another story about technology addiction. The Times‘ Matt Richtel talked with a some people in Silicon Valley who think we need to step away from our devices.  The basic argument is this:

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Breakthrough Thinking, Great New Product, Great Videos, New Inventions, People Making a Difference

GiraDora – a foot-powered washing machine that will change millions of lives

GiraDora – a foot-powered washing machine.

Two design students named Alex Cabunoc and Ji A You traveled from their homes in Los Angeles to Cerro Verde, a 30,000 person slum outside of Lima about a year ago. As students in the celebrated Design Matters program at Art Center College of Design, which focuses on social innovation, they had come to Cerro Verde as part of a special studio called Safe Agua Peru. Their goal? Develop a commercial product that alleviates issues related to water poverty, targeted at people who earn between $4 and $10 a day. (Video)

 

 

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Analysis, Business, Internet, Science & Technology News

The dark side of open data

Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek” a few days ago.  It is a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records. While this sounds like a good idea, it gave a wealthier, more powerful group a chance to erase older, traditional records that hadn’t been properly codified. One effect of passing laws requiring standardized, digital data is to marginalize all data that can’t be standardized or digitized, and to marginalize the people who don’t control the process of standardization.

 

 

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Analysis, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

List of things replaced by smartphones

The more we replace with our phones, the fewer consumer electronics we have to keep updated, and the less cluttered our lives can become.

We can easily get caught up in what’s new in smartphones, from novel applications of near field communication to their potential as detectors of environmental pollutants. But it’s also useful to occasionally look back on what they’ve granted us already. A recent survey in the UK found 4 in 10 smartphone users said their phone was “more important for accessing the Internet than any other device.”

 

 

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Analysis, Business, facebook, Internet, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Criticism against Instagram and what it says about the future of media

instagram

Most criticism toward Instagram borders on hatred.

Instagram is a simple service that lets people share their photos with others from a mobile device.  They get a lot of criticism, bordering on hate. And it’s not just because the tiny startup is being acquired by Facebook recently for $1 billion, which will make all of its employees exceedingly rich — it’s because some people seem to believe that the ease with which amateur photographers can post photos to the service, and the filters Instagram provides in order to add special effects to them, are ruining photography. This isn’t really that surprising: it’s the same kind of criticism that has been made about blogging, citizen journalism and Twitter, among other things — and in each case the critics have been somewhat right, but mostly wrong.

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Analysis, Business, Globalism, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Mobile phones will soon exceed the human population

mobilegrowth1-615 copy

A World Bank report details the astounding growth of mobile since the year 2000.  Just 12 years ago there were less than a billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. Today, there are more than 6 billion and the count will “will soon exceed that of the human population,” according to the Bank (it is common in many countries for one person to own multiple SIM cards). Three-quarters of the world population now has access to a mobile phone.

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Analysis, Business, Entertainment, Internet, Latest Trend, New Inventions, Science & Technology News

Is Kickstarter a crowdfunding platform or just another form of entertainment?

crowdfunding

The fact that OUYA raised so much money so fast speaks more to our fantasies than the market reality.

OUYA is the latest Kickstarter darling. It is “a new kind of video game console” that connects to your HDTV like an XBox but allows anyone to publish games like the Android Marketplace. The company behind the device raised their $1 million target in eight hours, and have reached $5 million with more than three weeks left in their campaign. Proponents of Kickstarter’s populist commercialism see OUYA as an unmitigated success.

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Analysis, Architecture, Robots, Science & Technology News

Swarms of robots could bring buildings to life

robot swarm

The more of these robots we have in our homes, the more intelligent they could be.

What does it take for a building to be considered smart? Add some lights that turn themselves off when nobody is around or install an “intelligent” air conditioning system to regulate the ambient temperature and you’re well on your way. But compared to the living buildings proposed by Akira Mita, today’s smart buildings are the architectural equivalent of single-celled organisms.

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Analysis, Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News

The obstacles faced by transformative technologies in medicine

littlemicrosocpe

A smart-phone add-on enables at-home diagnosis of ear infections.

There is a post on The Health Care Blog written by Eric Topol where he looks to a future enabled by emerging technology: “Just as the little mobile wireless devices radically transformed our day-to-day lives, so will such devices have a seismic impact on the future of health care. It’s already taking off at a pace that parallels the explosion of another unanticipated digital force — social networks.

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