Category Archives: Tech News

Nasa unveils four-man craft that will take astronauts on 49million-mile journey to MARS


Instead of going back to the moon, President Obama announced that Nasa would aim to reach an asteroid by 2020 and after that send astronauts to Mars.

The capsule would then be on-call to take astronauts back to earth.

The latest MPCV craft is designed to be more versatile than previous capsules and also features an enhanced emphasis on crew safety.

Nasa Associate Administrator Douglas Cooke said it made sense to stick with Orion-based vehicle.

‘We’ve made a lot of progress on Orion,’ he told the Voice of America website.

‘We have a ground test article that is a full structure with a lot of the systems actually installed into it for testing.

‘So, it’s well down the road. It answers the requirements and represents a significant investment in that path at this point.’

The Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle being assembled and at Lockheed Martin

Although Mars is the objective for the MPCV, in the short term Nasa have more limited ambitions.

Before making any long voyages, it will be used to support missions at the International Space Station, which is just above the Earth’s orbit,

To facilitate this, designers Lockheed Martin have built a huge test area at its Waterton Canyon site south of Denver, where full-size mock-ups both the station and Orion can practice manoeuvres.

The test version of the pod, though bare of the ceramic covering on the outside, is complete inside.

Orion was originally part of President George W. Bush’s $100billion moon mission, called Constellation.

But President Obama cancelled Constellation in January last, saying the space programme would instead focus on more advanced rocket technology.

Mr Obama revived the Orion portion of the project two months later, with administration officials saying it would be the space station’s escape vehicle.

But experts say Nasa are pushing to use the MPCV for more than a replacement for the retiring Space Shuttle fleet.

Tariq Malik, who is managing editor of website Space.com says, the redesigned capsule is the space agency’s all-purpose vehicle for a variety of missions beyond earth’s orbit.

‘Visiting satellites if it’s needed. It’s going to have a spacewalk capability, which the original Orion capsule as it was prior to this announcement, would not have.

‘And then they would be able to use it as the core vehicle, the transfer vehicle for deep space missions.

‘You know you would attach a module or some other kind of addition on to it if they are going to be up in space for extended excursions, and then they use it as their truck,’ he said.

Mr Cooke says it will also be able to rendezvous with another, larger spaceship to continue its voyage to the Moon, Mars or beyond.

‘This vehicle would be just maintained in a more dormant mode, while the crew would be in another [spacecraft] which would have the longer term consumables and capabilities to support them,’ he said.

The craft is also many times safer than the space shuttle

Its launch-abort system – rockets that would propel the capsule away from a malfunctioning launcher – proved successful in tests last year in the Mojave Desert.

On a planet far, far away: How the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle will look as it descends to the surface of Mars

On a planet far, far away: How the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle will look as it descends to the surface of Mars

While a lot of work remains to build an integrated system, including a rocket to launch the crew vehicle, Malik is encouraged that Nasa and its aerospace industry partners are on the right course, with the goal of keeping America’s manned space program moving forward.

‘And they can use everything that they learned in the last five years in the previous program and re-purpose what they need to make that goal,’ he said.

New LED light bulbs will cost you $50 Each after 100-watt bulbs are banned

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Although it sounds bad to pay as much as $50 for a light bulb, considering the fact that these LED light bulbs have an average life span of 25,000 hours (22 years) the price isn’t bad at all and if these bulbs would indeed last that long, this could really mean a technological breakthrough.

Their power consumption is also lower, for example a LED light bulb that utilizes only 9 watts produces the same amount of light as a 40-watt “Thomas Edison’s light bulb”.

General Electric (GE) has just released its new Energy-Star GE LED Bulbscompliant LED light bulb. The revolutionary light bulb replaces its 40-watt counterpart and only utilizes 9 watts. The bulb is rated to last . Want the bad news? It costs $50 bucks. That’s right folks, a $50 standard sized light bulb. I have always been a fan of being long-term greedy,

A couple of bright sparks have developed ‘greener’ LED light bulbs bright enough to replace the doomed 100-watt bulb.

The new bulbs, due on sale next year, will cost an unenlightened $50 each however.

In light of the news those busy stock-piling Edison’s incandescent 100-watt bulbs ahead of the Government ban next year may not want to stop just yet.

America is set to be a darker place from January 2012 when the federal government’s war on traditional light bulbs begins.

It was George Bush who signed the unpopular Energy Independence and Security Act back in 2007.

Part of the bill requires most incandescent bulbs to be 30 per cent more energy efficient by 2014.

And by 2020 this rises to at least 70 per cent more efficient.

The 100-watter is the first bulb on the block in January next year, followed by the 75-watt in 2013 and the 60 and 40-watts by 2014.

The 100-watters have already been phased out in California. State energy officials ‘predict’ this will eliminate the sale of 10.5million 100-watt bulbs a year and save consumers $35.6million in energy bills.

The technology in incandescent bulbs, invented by Thomas Edison, is more than a century old.

There are, of course, some exemptions to the ban but overall the current alternative is compact fluorescent lights (CFL), which are almost exclusively made in China.

They also must be handled with extreme care and disposed of properly because of their mercury content.

And if one breaks it’s scarier still. The Environmental Protection Agency warns not to wash clothing or bed linen that has been exposed to the content of a CFL bulb.

The ‘mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage,’ it said.

This has been a cause of concern to consumers who must now recycle CFL bulbs rather than just throwing them in the garbage.

Howard M. Brandston, a lighting designer who relit the Statute of Liberty before its rededication on July 4, 1986, told the National Review last year: ‘I think the incandescent light bulb was one of the great contributions to the art of architecture in the 20th century.

‘If the federal government insists on banning the incandescent lamp, it significantly will decrease the quality of life in every home in America.

‘The CFLs cannot be dimmed properly. When you dim one, the spectral power distribution and colour quality of the lamp make people look cadaverous.

‘Most people who wear makeup will not need to do so to look like the Bride of Frankenstein.’

CFLs are at least cheaper than LED bulbs.

Lighting companies are now in a race to invent a suitable alternative that fits the energy bill and the consumer’s wallet and brightness requirements.

Osram Sylvania and Lighting Sciences Group Corp., a Satellite Beach, Florida-based company are both showing 100-watt-equivalent LED bulbs a U.S. trade fair this week.

Their 100-watt-equivalent bulbs won’t be available until after the Government ban but a 75-watt version will be in stores by July…but they could cost as much as $45 EACH.

Sixty-watt bulbs are the big prize however, since they’re the most common.

There are 425million incandescent light bulbs in the 60-watt range in use in the U.S. today, said Zia Eftekhar, the head of Philips’ North American lighting division.

To stimulate LED development, the government is ploughing $10 million of tax payers’ money into an ‘L Prize’ for the company who comes up with an energy-efficient replacement for the 60-watt bulb.

Creating good alternatives has been more difficult than expected, especially for the very bright 100-watt bulbs.

LEDs are efficient, durable and produced in vast quantities, but they’re still expensive. An LED bulb can contain a dozen light-emitting diodes, or tiny semiconductor chips, which cost around $1 each.

The big problem with LEDs is that although they don’t produce as much heat as incandescent bulbs, the heat they do create shortens the lifespan and reduces the efficiency of the chips.

Cramming a dozen chips together in a tight bulb-shaped package that fits in today’s lamps and sockets makes the heat problem worse.

The brighter the bulb, the bigger the problem is.

There is also the small matter of the price which the Department of Energy (DoE) hopes will plummet quickly.

They ‘expect’ a 60-watt equivalent LED bulb to cost $10 by 2015.

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Comet Elenin to pass through our solar system, VERY close to Earth Oct. 17th 2011

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Comet Elenin should be at its brightest shortly before the time of its closest approach to Earth on Oct. 16 of this year. At its closest point, it will be 35 million kilometers (22 million miles) from us. Can this icy interloper influence us from where it is, or where it will be in the future? What about this celestial object inspiring some shifting of the tides or even tectonic plates here on Earth?

Here’s the NASA link to their website to track the impact of planet Elenin:

comet Elenin

comet Elenin

There have been some incorrect Internet speculations that external forces could cause comet Elenin to come closer.

The important date regions are: (approximate, as the comet gets closer the trajectories get more accurate)

June 15th (comet enters our system)
October 17th (closest point …very large gravitational effects on the sun and earth)
November 5th (crossing the tail of the comet, much debris)

The effects on the earth’s magnetic field or the tectonic stability is not completely understood.

NASA has made a limited amount of information public, there seems to be an effort to down-play the event in the mainstream media. There are conflicting reports of the gravitational effect of the comet on the earth. The debris field the earth will pass through could also damage communication satellites from micro meteors.

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The iPhone is Secretly Recording your Movements Wherever You Go!

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It’s not just the iPhone 4 that records your movements, but all iPhones updated to iOS 4+.

Two security researchers in the UK have uncovered a disturbing truth. It appears iPhone 4?s everywhere have been tracking their users movements with startling accuracy (unbeknownst to the users) and what is more, the ease at which this information can be deciphered is apparently as easy to open.

To some this might not seem like so much of a problem, but invasion of privacy and secret data collection can be a serious issue. The seemingly undocumented tracking abilities appear to have started logging data since the iPhone 4?s June 2010 update and haven’t stopped since. The location tracking doesn’t use GPS so allowing or disallowing your location services won’t really make a difference. Instead the phone uses more traditional triangulation to pinpoint the phone’s whereabouts. Although Apple don’t really want to shout about it, some appear to have known about this for a while, mainly those in the computer forensics business, but still.

The innocuously named file in question – consolidated.db – records the phones location data, time stamping each log as it goes. Ever synced you iPhone to a PC or Mac? Of course you have and that means this file is there too, and as such, easy to locate and open up. Even restoring or pulling a backup to a new device will keep the logs going. Apparently the way in which the handset records data is unique to the iPhone, although carriers have been able to log location information for some time, as have the police. The data itself does not however transmit back to Apple so its use at this point in time is unclear.

Apple’s stance on matter appears to be covered under their iTunes Terms and Conditions, simply stating, “Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.”

Scary stuff and for the conspiracy theorists among you and another step towards Big Brother watching over us all.

from eutimes.net

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COMPUTERS Watch Us With Facial Recognition Software

Hundreds of correctional officers from prisons across America descended last spring on a shuttered penitentiary in West Virginia for annual training exercises.

Some officers played the role of prisoners, acting like gang members and stirring up trouble, including a mock riot. The latest in prison gear got a workout — body armor, shields, riot helmets, smoke bombs, gas masks. And, at this year’s drill, computers that could see the action.

Photobucket

Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. When two groups of inmates moved toward each other, the experimental computer system sent an alert — a text message — to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.

The computers cannot do anything more than officers who constantly watch surveillance monitors under ideal conditions. But in practice, officers are often distracted. When shifts change, an observation that is worth passing along may be forgotten. But machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants.

The enthusiasm for such systems extends well beyond the nation’s prisons. High-resolution, low-cost cameras are proliferating, found in products like smartphones and laptop computers. The cost of storing images is dropping, and new software algorithms for mining, matching and scrutinizing the flood of visual data are progressing swiftly.

A computer-vision system can watch a hospital room and remind doctors and nurses to wash their hands, or warn of restless patients who are in danger of falling out of bed. It can, through a computer-equipped mirror, read a man’s face to detect his heart rate and other vital signs. It can analyze a woman’s expressions as she watches a movie trailer or shops online, and help marketers tailor their offerings accordingly. Computer vision can also be used at shopping malls, schoolyards, subway platforms, office complexes and stadiums.

All of which could be helpful — or alarming.

“Machines will definitely be able to observe us and understand us better,” said Hartmut Neven, a computer scientist and vision expert at Google. “Where that leads is uncertain.”

Google has been both at the forefront of the technology’s development and a source of the anxiety surrounding it. Its Street View service, which lets Internet users zoom in from above on a particular location, faced privacy complaints. Google will blur out people’s homes at their request.

Google has also introduced an application called Goggles, which allows people to take a picture with a smartphone and search the Internet for matching images. The company’s executives decided to exclude a facial-recognition feature, which they feared might be used to find personal information on people who did not know that they were being photographed.

Despite such qualms, computer vision is moving into the mainstream. With this technological evolution, scientists predict, people will increasingly be surrounded by machines that can not only see but also reason about what they are seeing, in their own limited way.

The uses, noted Frances Scott, an expert in surveillance technologies at the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department’s research agency, could allow the authorities to spot a terrorist, identify a lost child or locate an Alzheimer’s patient who has wandered off.

The future of law enforcement, national security and military operations will most likely rely on observant machines. A few months ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s research arm, awarded the first round of grants in a five-year research program called the Mind’s Eye. Its goal is to develop machines that can recognize, analyze and communicate what they see. Mounted on small robots or drones, these smart machines could replace human scouts. “These things, in a sense, could be team members,” said James Donlon, the program’s manager.

Millions of people now use products that show the progress that has been made in computer vision. In the last two years, the major online photo-sharing services — Picasa by Google, Windows Live Photo Gallery by Microsoft, Flickr by Yahoo and iPhoto by Apple — have all started using face recognition. A user puts a name to a face, and the service finds matches in other photographs. It is a popular tool for finding and organizing pictures.

Kinect, an add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console, is a striking advance for computer vision in the marketplace. It uses a digital camera and sensors to recognize people and gestures; it also understands voice commands. Players control the computer with waves of the hand, and then move to make their on-screen animated stand-ins — known as avatars — run, jump, swing and dance. Since Kinect was introduced in November, game reviewers have applauded, and sales are surging.

To Microsoft, Kinect is not just a game, but a step toward the future of computing. “It’s a world where technology more fundamentally understands you, so you don’t have to understand it,” said Alex Kipman, an engineer on the team that designed Kinect.

‘Please Wash Your Hands’

A nurse walks into a hospital room while scanning a clipboard. She greets the patient and washes her hands. She checks and records his heart rate and blood pressure, adjusts the intravenous drip, turns him over to look for bed sores, then heads for the door but does not wash her hands again, as protocol requires. “Pardon the interruption,” declares a recorded women’s voice, with a slight British accent. “Please wash your hands.”

Three months ago, Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., began an experiment with computer vision in a single hospital room. Three small cameras, mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling, monitor movements in Room 542, in a special care unit (a notch below intensive care) where patients are treated for conditions like severe pneumonia, heart attacks and strokes. The cameras track people going in and out of the room as well as the patient’s movements in bed.

The first applications of the system, designed by scientists at General Electric, are immediate reminders and alerts. Doctors and nurses are supposed to wash their hands before and after touching a patient; lapses contribute significantly to hospital-acquired infections, research shows.

The camera over the bed delivers images to software that is programmed to recognize movements that indicate when a patient is in danger of falling out of bed. The system would send an alert to a nearby nurse.

If the results at Bassett prove to be encouraging, more features can be added, like software that analyzes facial expressions for signs of severe pain, the onset of delirium or other hints of distress, said Kunter Akbay, a G.E. scientist.

Hospitals have an incentive to adopt tools that improve patient safety. Medicare and Medicaid are adjusting reimbursement rates to penalize hospitals that do not work to prevent falls and pressure ulcers, and whose doctors and nurses do not wash their hands enough. But it is too early to say whether computer vision, like the system being tried out at Bassett, will prove to be cost-effective.

Mirror, Mirror

Daniel J. McDuff, a graduate student, stood in front of a mirror at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. After 20 seconds or so, a figure — 65, the number of times his heart was beating per minute — appeared at the mirror’s bottom. Behind the two-way mirror was a Web camera, which fed images of Mr. McDuff to a computer whose software could track the blood flow in his face.

The software separates the video images into three channels — for the basic colors red, green and blue. Changes to the colors and to movements made by tiny contractions and expansions in blood vessels in the face are, of course, not apparent to the human eye, but the computer can see them.

“Your heart-rate signal is in your face,” said Ming-zher Poh, an M.I.T. graduate student. Other vital signs, including breathing rate, blood-oxygen level and blood pressure, should leave similar color and movement clues.

The pulse-measuring project, described in research published in May by Mr. Poh, Mr. McDuff and Rosalind W. Picard, a professor at the lab, is just the beginning, Mr. Poh said. Computer vision and clever software, he said, make it possible to monitor humans’ vital signs at a digital glance. Daily measurements can be analyzed to reveal that, for example, a person’s risk of heart trouble is rising. “This can happen, and in the future it will be in mirrors,” he said.

Faces can yield all sorts of information to watchful computers, and the M.I.T. students’ adviser, Dr. Picard, is a pioneer in the field, especially in the use of computing to measure and communicate emotions. For years, she and a research scientist at the university, Rana el-Kaliouby, have applied facial-expression analysis software to help young people with autism better recognize the emotional signals from others that they have such a hard time understanding.

The two women are the co-founders of Affectiva, a company in Waltham, Mass., that is beginning to market its facial-expression analysis software to manufacturers of consumer products, retailers, marketers and movie studios. Its mission is to mine consumers’ emotional responses to improve the designs and marketing campaigns of products.

John Ross, chief executive of Shopper Sciences, a marketing research company that is part of the Interpublic Group, said Affectiva’s technology promises to give marketers an impartial reading of the sequence of emotions that leads to a purchase, in a way that focus groups and customer surveys cannot. “You can see and analyze how people are reacting in real time, not what they are saying later, when they are often trying to be polite,” he said. The technology, he added, is more scientific and less costly than having humans look at store surveillance videos, which some retailers do.

The facial-analysis software, Mr. Ross said, could be used in store kiosks or with Webcams. Shopper Sciences, he said, is testing Affectiva’s software with a major retailer and an online dating service, neither of which he would name. The dating service, he said, was analyzing users’ expressions in search of “trigger words” in personal profiles that people found appealing or off-putting.

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Steve Ressler: The War of Online Vs. Offline

People love controversy. And people love conflict. It’s often X vs Y. David vs Goliath. Cowboys vs Redskins.

I see this often in the new media space as well. Print is dead. Online is king. Traditional in-person meetings are out. Online communities are the future.

Well, guess what? The truth is: you need both.

As the founder of the largest social network for government, people are often surprised when I mention the importance of offline activities to spur increased online activities.

Last month, we launched our nationwide GovUps (think Meetups for Government Innovators). We are traveling across the country from California to NYC to DC to Alabama, bringing together government innovators to meet in person and learn from each other.

These in-person meetings are important as online friends are meeting face-to-face (often for the first time), shaking hands, breaking bread, and furthering the relationship. I believe these in-person meetings only strengthen online activities as people want to engage more with the people they meet.

You can see this trend as well in the broader social media space. That’s why there are in-person TweetUps (for Twitter users) and Foursquare day (for lovers of checking-in).

Government agencies looking to build both online community and offline community can look to NASA as a shining light. NASA has built a robust online community via Twitter with their NASA Buzzroom as a home base for the astronauts engaged online. In addition, they have hosted multiple Tweetups during shuttle launches where they give their top Twitter followers the opportunity to tour the center, view the shuttle launch and speak with NASA managers, astronauts, shuttle technicians and engineers.

By using both online and offline activities, NASA is building a broad, highly engaged community that identifies with the NASA mission and activities. This is hugely important for an agency that relies on the interest and imagination of the American public to remind their representatives to appropriate significant dollars to the space mission.

In the end, it’s really about building community, whether you are a government agency, non-profit, or private company. And you have to use all the mechanisms available (both online and offline) to build true engagement.

Read more: Nasa, Tweetup, Offline, Buzzroom, Govups, Online, Government, Foursquare, Gov 2.0, Social Innovation, Twitter, Tweetups, Civic Engagement, Community, Technology News

Michael D. Eisner: ‘Working Together’: Michael Eisner Highlights 11 Great Partnerships (PHOTOS)

Over the past two years, I’ve been at work on a project about a concept that’s fascinated me for decades: partnership. From my marriage (43 years and counting) to my business life (where I spent 16 years working alongside Barry Diller at ABC and Paramount, and then, at Disney, partnered with the late Frank Wells as well as my successor, Bob Iger), I’ve been fortunate to find success with partners. Along the way, I’ve met a handful of others who had similarly positive experiences in partnerships. And as I thought more about the idea, I decided to explore it in a book. Start with a look back at my own experiences with partners, and talk to some other people who succeeded in partnerships.

The list was easier to create than I first thought. The group of people profiled in the book have shaped the worlds of finance, technology, entertainment, retail, fashion, sports, and more for years — and they’ve done it by working together.

Read more: Business, Michael D Eisner, Working Together, Michael Eisner, Slidepollajax, Studio 54, Apple, Bill Gates, Joe Torre, Microsoft, Ceo, Chef, Gill and Melinda Gates, Gates Foundation, Books News

iTunes Costs Apple $1 Billion To Run

Between movies and TV episodes, books and music, and apps of all prices, Apple is swimming in profits from iTunes. But how much does it take for Apple to maintain that store?

Read more: Itunes Apple Download, Itunes Apple, Itunes, Apple, Itunes Cost, Technology News