There are plenty of iPad bags which are delightfully charming but lack proper pockets for all your mobile gadgets. The Booq Boa Push bag on the other hand not only looks decent, but has plenty of room for your other gizmos. More »
There are days when I want to shoot my iPad out of frustration, but I would never actually pull the trigger—unlike these crazy folks. More »
Multitouch is landing in Ubuntu's upcoming 10.10 release, with a particular eye on Unity, the netbook-optimized flavor of the popular Linux distribution. The new features are expected to eventually support a variety of touch devices, including Apple's Magic Trackpad. More »
ThinkGeek is now joking that its Samurai Sword Handle Umbrella should come with a warning label: "May incite SWAT teams." The reason? Panic on a Georgia college campus. More »
Data visualization is becoming increasingly important, so I'm always interested in seeing the various ways in which massive amounts of information can be portrayed in a human-comprehensible style. To that end, IBM's ILOG Elixir development team is working on a powerful and elegant interactive dashboard:
IBM's team is showing off the data rendering capabilities of Adobe Flex through an online demonstration of their World Factbook Dashboard. It's a heavily stylized application that contains various gauges, 3D column and pie charts, a radar chart, a treemap and a world map view, which are all coordinated and synced through some very smooth animated effects. The different views also allow for the dynamic, user-driven scaling of the color legend, while countries can be compared by those in their immediate neighborhood.
Think of the most complicated thing you’ve written. Maybe it was a report for your employer, or an essay while in college. It could even be a computer program. Whatever it was, think of all the stuff you packed into it. Now, pause for a moment to imagine creating all that without using a word processor or a paper and pen, or really anything at all to externalize thought to something outside of your head. It seems impossible. What we get with this technology–ancient as it is–is an amplification of our brain power. Besides their gorgeous techy looks, do interactive holographics like that shown in Iron Man 2, reminiscent of interfaces shown in Minority Report, offer up some of the same brain amping?
While I was still a doctoral student, I had the opportunity work with a relative of interactive holographics, 3D virtual reality data CAVEs. This particular one, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana Illinois (the birthplace of HAL) circa 1999, was a cube with back projection on five of the six walls. You wore a headset that tracked your head position and orientation, and goggles that were LCD screens that blocked images to your right eye when the projectors were rendering images for your left eye, and vice versa when the projector was displaying images for your right eye. As you walk through space or move your head, what you see in the virtual space changes as you would expect it to.
The problem that had pushed me to use this system was trying to analyze 3D motion data of a fish that I was conducting research on. I’d developed a motion capture system for the fish, which gave fantastic 3D data of the fish moving while it was attacking its prey, but looking at this 3D data on 2D computer monitors turned out to be quite difficult. Even replaying the motion from several different views didn’t quite do the trick. So Stuart Levy at NCSA put my data set into a system called “Virtual Director” and I was able to playback the data in the cave. It was something of an unbelievable experience the first time I tried it – suddenly I could walk around the animal as it engaged in its behavior, manipulate it to get any view, rotate the wand I held to wind the behavior forward or back at different speeds. Visitors particularly enjoyed my “Book of Jonah” demo where I positioned them so that they ended going into the mouth of the fish during a capture sequence.
For my technical problem, the VR CAVE was appropriate technology: 3D display and interaction for an inherently 3D data set. It helped me see patterns in the data that I had not clearly seen before, which were incorporated into some of my subsequent publications that analyzed the movement data. It was worth the effort, and the physicality of it was fine since I didn’t need to spend multiple days working through the data.
Other uses of these kinds of “direct manipulation” interfaces that mix 3D data and real world interaction have not found such a receptive audience, as people complain that it seems tiring to make sweeping (if dramatic) gestures to go through photos that would just as well be navigated through with an arrow key. As someone who still uses “vi” to edit my text with, I can relate to criticisms of interfaces that offer more than is needed.
The important question, for any given interface, is whether simplifies difficult problems of control or analysis, or gets in the way. My former colleague Don Norman at Northwestern University has contributed a great deal to our understanding of this question, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. One of my favorite examples from that book considers two different interfaces to manipulating the position of a car seat. In one interface, on a luxury American car, there is a panel of knobs and buttons almost hidden below the left side of the dashboard. To go from a state of discomfort to a new chair position requires translating your discomfort into a series of knob pulls and twists on a console of many controls with tiny labels below each. In contrast, a German luxury car had a small version of the driver’s chair in the dashboard. To move the back of your chair down, you manipulated the chair in the dashboard accordingly; to move it forward, you would move it in the direction the chair was facing, and so on. One interface placed a large cognitive load on the user to solve the discomfort problem, while the other placed minimal demands.
Another favorite example is the “speed bug” – a tab that a plane pilot puts on the edge of an airspeed indicator to mark the velocities for critical changes to shape of the wing. Were it not for those bugs, the pilot would have to remember the velocity to do the wing adjustments – and that’s not easy, because it changes with things like the weight of the plane.
The virtual fish, miniature car seat adjuster, and speed bug are all examples of interfaces that make problems easier, and in this sense, amplify our brain power. Interactive holographic interfaces can do the same for problems where space is a convenient or needed basis for navigating the information. This isn’t always apparent in sci-fi depictions of these interfaces, but their use speaks to our hope that such 3D holographic wizardry will help us cope with the flood of data we contend with on a daily basis.
Most of the youngsters who will be starting college this Fall were born in 1992. To help professors bridge that generational chasm, Beloit College prepares an annual list of cultural and technological touchstones for incoming freshman. Man, kids are weird. More »
The man charged with taking off a Colorado shopper's finger while stealing his iPad is in trouble again: He's charged with trying to have his victim killed. Apple lovers are a passionate bunch, just usually in a more productive sense. More »
FedEx driver Francisco Matute was having a normal Wednesday until four masked individuals stopped his truck at gunpoint. Then, two of the men got into the truck and took ten boxes full of Apple gear. They were FedEx employees too. More »
"She'll admire you for your car, she'll respect you for your position, but she'll love you for your waterbed." The waterbed undulated to 20 percent of the bed market by 1986. Now, they're gone. What happened? They were too sexy. More »
Flatfish are the closest living relatives to swordfish and marlins
At first glance, a swordfish and a flounder couldn’t seem more different. One is a fast, streamlined hunter with a pointy nose, and the other is an oddly shaped bottom-dweller with one distorted eye on the opposite side of its face. Their bodies are worlds apart, but their genes tell a different story.
Alex Little from Queen’s University, Canada, has found that billfishes, like swordfish and marlin, are some of the closest living relatives to the flatfishes, like plaice, sole, flounder and halibut. This result was completely unexpected; Little was originally trying to clarify the relationship between billfishes and their supposed closest relatives – the tunas. That connection seems to make more sense. Both tunas and billfishes are among a handful of fish that are partially warm-blooded. They can heat specific body parts, such as eyes and swimming muscles, to continuously swim after their prey at extremely fast speeds with keen eyesight.
But it turns out that these similarities are superficial. Little sequenced DNA from three species of billfishes and three tunas, focusing on three parts of their main genome and nine parts of their mitochondrial one (a small accessory genome that all animal cells have). By comparing these sequences to those of other fish, Little found that the billfishes’ closest kin are the flatfish and jacks. Indeed, if you look past the most distinctive features like the long bills and bizarre eyes, the skeletons of these groups share features that tunas lack. Indeed, billfish and tuna proved to be only distant relatives. Their ability to heat themselves must have evolved independently and indeed, their bodies product and retain heat in quite different ways.
Little’s work is testament to the power of natural selection. Even closely related species, like marlins are flounders, can end up looking vastly different if they adapt to diverse lifestyles. And distantly related species like tuna and swordfish can end up looking incredibly similar because they’ve adapted to similar challenges – pursuing fast-swimming prey. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – a few months ago, a French team found that prehistoric predatory sea reptiles were probably also warm-blooded.
Reference: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2010.04.022; images by Luc Viatour and NAOA
Ancient death-grip scars caused by fungus-controlled ants
Forty-eight million years ago, some ants marched up to a leaf and gripped it tight in their jaws. It would be the last thing they would ever do. Their bodies had already been corrupted by a fungus that, over the next few days, fatally erupted from their heads. The fungus produced a long stalk tipped with spores, which eventually blew away, presumably to infect more ants. In time, all that was left of this grisly scene were the scars left by the ants’ death-grip. Today, David Hughes from Harvard University has found such scars in a fossilised leaf from Germany.
Today, hundreds of species of Cordyceps fungi infect a wide variety of insects, including ants. Like many parasites, they can manipulate the way their hosts behave. One species, Cordyceps unilateralis, changes the brains of its ant hosts so that they find and bite into leaves, some 25cm above the forest floor. The temperature and humidity in this zone are just right for the fungus to develop its spore capsules. In its dying act, the ant leaves a distinctive bite mark that’s always on one of the leaf’s veins on its underside. And that’s exactly what Hughes saw in his fossil leaf.
Hughes originally thought that the marks were made by an insect cutting the veins of the leaf to drain away any potential poisons, something that modern insects also do. But these marks look very different – those on the fossil leaf bear a much closer resemblance to those of Cordyceps-infected ants. This is the first fossil trace of a parasite manipulating its host, but it’s not the oldest evidence for such a relationship. In 2008, another American group found a 105-million-year-old piece of amber containing a scale insect, with two Cordyceps stalks sticking out of its head. The war between insects and their Cordyceps nemeses is an ancient one indeed.
Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0521
If the citation link isn’t working, read why here
Built in 1841, you'd expect that the last ever wooden whaling ship would need a bit of patching up by now. Luckily, state-of-the-art 3D laser systems are on hand, able to scan for weak structural points in need of fixing. More »
Our old hero, futurist, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller is the subject of an exhibition that starts in Madrid in two weeks. More »
I need the level switches (tuning fork type) which can handle the process tempearture up to the 260 Deg C. Please anybody tell such a brand, who can provide me this, its very urgent
Web site Hipmunk re-imagines flight search, translating the information you're most interested in to a user-friendly chart of possible flights. More »
Hello, we're looking for some fall interns, in New York and San Francisco. More »
New York - Business - Intern - United States - Employment
Here's an unsettling product: the iPhone Spy Stick. It's a USB stick that, when plugged into an iPhone, can recover all sorts of info that you thought you deleted. More »
How do you white balance your camera? Aim it at a piece of paper. How do you white balance an Earth-monitoring satellite? Aim it at a Turkish salt lake.
At least that’s the hope of scientists headed to southern Turkey to study a salt lake named Tuz Gölü (Turkish for “salt lake,” natch) later this month. During July and August, most of Lake Tuz evaporates into reflective white salt, making it perfect for satellite-calibration, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites said, recently endorsing the spot as one of eight calibration sites.
Just as white balancing your camera is important to keep your friends from looking jaundiced, calibrating satellites makes sure that they can take accurate climate and coastal degradation measurements.
As Popular Science reports, the team led by the UK National Physical Laboratory will spend nine days at lake Tuz measuring the reflectance of test sites from a variety of angles. From above, several satellites will simultaneously take recordings of the white lake for comparison. The NPL hopes this will be the first step for an automated system “LandNET” using all eight sites.
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Image: NASA
The post this morning claiming the BB Torch has been discounted for low sales was incorrect. Amazon has been selling the phone at $100 since launch, and we have corrected the original story to reflect this. More »
Audio equipment maker Bose will have some new in-ear headphones available on at the end of the month: The IE2, the MIE2, and the MIE2i. The latter two headphones are designed specifically for mobile phones—in-line microphones and all. More »
