Monday, March 29, 2004

TUNA: HANDHELD AD-HOC RADIO FOR LOCAL MUSIC SHARING| From MIT MediaLab Europe comes tunA, a mobile wireless application that allows users to share their music locally through handheld devices. Users can "tune in" to other nearby tunA music players and listen to what someone else is listening to. Developed on iPaqs and connected via 802.11b in ad-hoc mode, the application displays a list of people using tunA that are in range, gives access to their profile and playlist information, and enables synchronized peer-to-peer audio streaming. |Gizmodo|
Posted by KO : 2:26:00 PM 0 comments


Wednesday, March 24, 2004

BRAIN WAVES CONTROL VIDEOGAME| The live demo of the wireless control was a first. A video game in which the character is controlled directly from a player's brain without the need for wires has been developed by researchers. Mind Balance was demonstrated for the first time using a new wireless headset, at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin last month. The game could help researchers develop brain-computer interfaces for those with limited body movement. |BBC News|
Posted by KO : 12:28:00 PM 0 comments



THE OUTSOURCING BOGEYMAN| According to the election-year bluster of politicians and pundits, the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries has become a problem of epic proportion. Fortunately, this alarmism is misguided. Outsourcing actually brings far more benefits than costs, both now and in the long run. If its critics succeed in provoking a new wave of American protectionism, the consequences will be disastrous -- for the U.S. economy and for the American workers they claim to defend. |Metafilter|
Posted by KO : 12:24:00 PM 0 comments


Tuesday, March 23, 2004

SUN TO MAKE LINUX 3D DESKTOP| Sun Microsystems, a company that has been making noise lately in the Linux desktop market with StarOffice 7 and Java Desktop, is currently working on an experimental 3D successor to Java Desktop that they believe will change the way we interact with computers, and in the end elevate the popularity of Linux in general. Looking Glass is still very much in the planning stage, but a demonstration on the Sun Web site offers a glimpse of what it could be capable of. |Slashdot|
Posted by KO : 11:02:00 AM 0 comments



SONY ERICSSON BANKS ON 3G APPEAL| Sony Ericsson's first foray into 3G handsets is the Z1010. The future looks bright for third generation mobiles, according to the boss of phone maker Sony Ericsson. Katsumi Ihara said that as more video and music became available to download, users would switch to the new mobiles. "With the 3G network, you can download rich content in a short period of time, so time has come for content companies," he told BBC News Online. Third generation phone services let users access the net at high speeds and allows them to watch and send videos.
|BBC News|
Posted by KO : 11:00:00 AM 0 comments


Sunday, March 21, 2004

MICROSOFT'S PAUL ALLEN CONTRIBUTES $25 MILLION TO FIND LIFE IN SPACE| "I am very excited to be supporting one of the world's most visionary efforts to seek basic answers to some of the fundamental question about our universe and what other civilisations may exist elsewhere," Allen said in a ceremony in Mountain View, California, where SETI is based. |Slashdot|
Posted by KO : 7:44:00 PM 0 comments



DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF INTERVIEW IN JIVE MAGAZINE| "I'm fighting 6 simultaneous tax audits - none grounded in anything, of course, but requiring me to find records from as far back as 1994. Plus we moved to Brooklyn, the apartment is falling apart, I've got teaching responsibilities at NYU, writing responsibilities to pay for life, and an average of 800 real emails each day. And a couple of interviews each day, too!" Its not easy being an author, a full professor, and the voice of millions involved in cyberbased subcultures, but somehow he found time in his busy schedule to answer a few questions for JIVE. |Rushkoff.com|
Posted by KO : 2:56:00 PM 0 comments


Friday, March 19, 2004

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST ROBOT| A robot Christ was used for crucifixion scenes in Mel Gibson's latest film, The Passion of The Christ. The electrical body double was made because the weather was too cold for actor Jim Caviezel to be filmed in just a loincloth, according to The Sun. |Gizmodo|
Posted by KO : 7:51:00 PM 0 comments


Wednesday, March 17, 2004

ECHOES IN THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE| Echo chambers are the direct descendants of the Invisible College concept, an oldie but goldie that served to form the British Royal Society. What makes them different comes from their visibility and open access rather than their exclusivity. What makes them valuable today is that visibility, because that way leads fresh thinking, and that way leads balanced thinking. |Black Belt Jones|
Posted by KO : 6:47:00 PM 0 comments



THE FUTURE OF MONEY| At the Future of Money Summit, Bernard Lietaer argued that the malaise Japan has suffered since the early 1990s reflects an economic challenge the whole developed world has begun to face. Today, European and U.S. factories, too, suffer from overcapacity. The vaunted productivity growth spurred by the digital revolution has raised the economy's stall speed. If the natural growth rate of the U.S. economy has risen to 4% annually, anything less than that rate will cause firms to trim capacity. A firm's revenue growth often must come at the expense of competitors as well as its own profits because companies have trouble raising prices. In response, companies cut costs any way they can, usually by laying off employees and squeezing suppliers, which causes further layoffs. For developed countries, the safety valves that limited damage during contractions in manufacturing may not work. In past recessions, laid-off factory workers in the Great Lakes states, for example, could migrate to the growing Sun Belt to find new jobs. In the present transition, areas with job growth may lie overseas. |Metafilter|
Posted by KO : 3:17:00 PM 0 comments


Saturday, March 13, 2004

MORE WILD SPACE PLANS FROM THE PENTAGON| Robots building communications arrays hundreds of miles above the Earth. Electromagnetic pulses cleansing space of nuclear explosions' lethal effects. Raw materials turning themselves into orbiting sensors. That's just a small sample of what Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, has in store for space. |Wired|
Posted by KO : 12:51:00 PM 0 comments



MINI COOPER TO BIPED ROBOT CONVERSION| This is a must-see. "This ambition started to look possible when work began on the new Mini. I've always believed BMW overbuilds many of their parts, so the over-building of certain Mini applications for my robotics use went unnoticed. In 1998, I began tests in a remote location outside Oxford." Sketches with notes included. |Slashdot|
Posted by KO : 12:46:00 PM 0 comments


Friday, March 12, 2004

AS US JOBS MOVE ABROAD, MORE AMERICANS ARE WILLING TO WORK OVERSEAS| Today, experts say, there are about 30,000 foreigners working in India. That's a virtual drop in the bucket for a country that has a population of more than 1 billion -- and far less than the 250,000 foreigners (mostly English) living in India some 60 years ago, just before India's independence in 1947. But the number of people willing to uproot themselves from homes in New York to become expatriates in New Delhi is expected to grow in coming years. In fact, it's already become easier for Indian employers to attract foreign workers. |Slashdot|
Posted by KO : 1:32:00 PM 0 comments


Wednesday, March 10, 2004

ROBOT VEHICLE SUCCESSFULLY NAVIGATES TEST COURSE| A robotic vehicle designed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on Tuesday became the first driverless contestant to navigate a 1.36 mile test course in preparation for the Pentagon's $1 million robot race this weekend. |NY Times|
Posted by KO : 10:33:00 AM 0 comments


Monday, March 08, 2004

SMART MOBS AND SOCIAL CODES| From Howard's Rheingold's webcasted lecture on Social Code at Ars Electronica 2003 festival for art, technology and society: "Social activity is characterized by codes. If the new codes that have been designed and developed for interaction with technical interfaces change our social and collective actions or even contribute to the development of new types of social intercourse, then how will this process be played out? To what extent does the design of electronic devices play a role in this connection? Are network linkages and mobility enhancing collective action?" |Smart Mobs|
Posted by KO : 11:24:00 AM 0 comments


Saturday, March 06, 2004

PAYING FOR EMAIL SEEN AS ANTI-SPAM TACTIC| If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send. So Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates, among others, is now suggesting that we start buying "stamps" for e-mail. |Metafilter|
Posted by KO : 1:03:00 AM 0 comments



ROBOTALK HELPS POCKET TRANSLATOR| Jo Twist of BBC News writes: small robots with friendly faces have helped out in the development of handheld translation gadgets to be tried out by travellers in Japan. Visitors landing at Tokyo's Narita Airport will be able to hire a device which can translate the local lingo. The speech-to-speech technology was developed by NEC, tested in Papero robots and then put in PDAs. |BBC News|
Posted by KO : 12:50:00 AM 0 comments


Monday, March 01, 2004

GATES ON OUTSOURCING: PEOPLE ARE WAY OVERREACTING| Bill Gates went on a campaign tour last week, trying to reinvigorate his base, as they say in politics. The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So Mr. Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation's industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad. "Will this create more competition? It will," he told students at M.I.T. on Thursday. "It means the U.S. will have to keep its edge in skills." |NY Times (regis. required)|
Posted by KO : 10:44:00 AM 0 comments

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