QOTD [Digital Daily]

QOTD [Digital Daily]

If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next time around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.

– Former Deputy National Security Advisor Mark Pfeifle

Source: All Things Digital | 23 Jun 2009 | 9:38 am

Conduit Launches Marketplace For Toolbar Content

Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox, is opening up its platform to allow for distribution opportunities.

Conduit’s SaaS tool lets companies create and distribute their content and products on a custom community toolbar. Conduit, which we have covered previously here and here, has amassed a network of more than 200,000 web publishers who distribute their toolbars to more than 60 million users.

Conduit is now letting publishers add other publishers’ content to each others toolbars via a marketplace. And consumers can also get additional content for their Conduit toolbars from the marketplace or the website of anyone who is a Conduit user. The toolbar can be a useful marketing tool for companies because it helps market brands by showing logos to users every time they surf the net. And now multiple brands can tap into this potential.The offerings include major brands such as Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace and more (disclosure: TechCrunch also uses Conduit).

To date, Conduit has raised close to $10 million in funding and is currently cash-flow positive.

Of course, nowadays everyone has a toolbar and space in the browser is competitive landscape. MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others are all either upgrading their toolbars or creating toolbars for their brands. But with its white label offering that can now distribute brands more widely, Conduit may have found the opportunity to help companies cross-promote.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch | 23 Jun 2009 | 9:30 am

iPhone In-App Purchases Already Leading To The Dreaded Two Words: Bait And Switch

Since it launched a year ago, Apple’s App Store has had a series of successes (50,000 apps, a billion downloads, transforming the market), but also some failures. While plenty of people talk about the abundance of junk apps in the store, I have never seen that as a problem since no one is forcing anyone to download them — and believe it or not, some people actually do, for whatever reason, love fart apps. But one real problem has been Apple’s uneven policy when it comes to the acceptance and rejection of apps into the store.

It looks like we should be seeing some improvements on that front shortly, as the new iPhone 3.0 software has parental controls built-in which will restrict kids under a certain age from using certain apps. While that won’t solve some silly rejections, it should ease the burden on app screeners having to look closely at apps that are clearly intended for a mature audience.

So, I’m hopeful on that front. But there’s a new potentially troublesome front opening up as well: Bait and switch apps. Yes, the old practice of luring customers with a shiny price, only to reveal the real cost after (in this case, the download), could find its way to the App Store, thanks to in-app purchases.

Let me be clear: I think in-app purchases are potentially the most exciting thing about the new iPhone 3.0 SDK for developers. I believe it will mean a boatload of money for a great many of them as well as Apple, which takes its 30% cut. But where there is money to be made, there is money to be taken. And we’re likely to see a rise in apps that seem priced way too good to be true — because they are, until you download them.

Now, this won’t be a huge problem because no app can force you to make an in-app purchase. But it could potentially clutter up the store with these falsely cheap apps. And depending on how misleading Apple allows some apps to be with the in-app purchases, we could see a bunch of people buying stuff they didn’t really want to be buying.

One of the first potentially troubling apps in this regard for the iPhone 3.0 software launched last week, Gokivo [iTunes Link]. The app sells for $0.99, but that doesn’t give you access to the biggest selling point of the app: Turn-by-turn navigation. That will set you back another $9.99 a month. Now, to be fair, Gokivo does give you plenty of other features for your $0.99, but as you can see on the App Store review board, most people believed they were getting the turn-by-turn functionality with that money as well.

Part of that was Gokivo’s somewhat tricky wording when the app first launched. That wording has been cleaned up now, but it’s still not good enough. Basically now you have a series of asterisks on the app page sidebar denoting the most important part of the app: That it’s $9.99 a month to use the turn-by-turn features.

Apple should create an obvious way to see that these type of apps feature in-app purchase components as a key part of them. Hell, there should be a prominent label any app that uses any in-app purchases, so consumers know what they’re potentially getting into. This should definitely be on the App Store page for these apps, but it should also probably pop-up when you go to download the app itself. Developer-made text asterisks are not going to cut it.

But it’s probably unfair to pick on Gokivo, because it is just the first of many turn-by-turn GPS apps that are likely to hit the App Store. And all will likely have the same type of pricing structure. It make sense, most GPS apps/units do charge a monthly fee, so why shouldn’t the iPhone versions? That’s why I think this is just all about the way Apple highlights these apps.

But that’s a reasonable example. Just wait until the first $0.99 games come out that feature basically no content for that price, and force you to buy additional content to gain any experience. Gaming is the obvious one, but really, it could be any app that does this. And I think those are coming.

Maybe Apple expects its app screeners to look to make sure all apps have an appropriate level on content for the $0.99 price point. But that’s a foolish dream given what we’ve seen so far from these screeners.

And what else is a bit annoying to a number of developers I’ve talked to, is that Apple is forcing you to charge at least $0.99 to have in-app purchases as an option. As I understand it, this is because Apple wants to maintain a section of the App Store that is totally free. But by doing that, it’s sort of creating situations like the Gokivo app, where it appears like they’re charging only $0.99 upfront to be deceptively cheap — that’s probably not the case, but it looks like it. And that’s a problem. Because it could make a lot of apps look like classic bait and switch ones. And why do that, when real bait and switch ones are coming too?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch | 23 Jun 2009 | 9:25 am

A Wiki For Cable and Connector Pin-Outs

Nicola Asuni writes to let us know about a new resource for hardware hackers: a wiki about pinouts — hardware interfaces of modern and obsolete hardware. "Created with the same MediaWiki software that was developed for the Wikipedia project, AllPinouts.org is a wiki that allows users to get and share information about hardware interfaces, including pinouts of ports, expansion slots, and other connectors of computers and different electronic devices (i.e. cellular phones, GPS, PDA, game consoles, etc.). All text is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and may be distributed or linked accordingly. The 'pinout' (or 'pin-out') of a connector identifies each individual pin, which is critical when creating, repairing or hacking cable assemblies and adapters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Gizmodo | 23 Jun 2009 | 8:29 am

See you next week at EuroPython in Birmingham!

I'm one of the keynoters at next week's EuroPython convention in Birmingham, England -- looks like a hell of a show, with further keynotes by Bruce Eckel and Professor Sir Tony Hoare and a whack of great talks and tutorials.

Being a Community Conference means that EuroPython is run entirely by volunteers, that means us the participants. Many of the things that have to be done to run a successful conference can be carried out remotely, and every year Pythonistas from all over Europe help...

EuroPython aims to provide inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere, designed to help people build contacts and learn from each other's experiences. EuroPython 2009 offers a talks programme oriented around the following themes:

* Python Language (featuring Python 3, Python implementations (IronPython/Jython/PyPy) and Python packaging)
* Python in Action (Python projects and deployments in government, industry and beyond)
* Mobile Computing (Python in mobile and embedded devices)
* Large Scale Python (Python in research, distributed computing, scientific computing)
* Web Programming (Python on the Web: Zope 3, Django and everything else)
* Database Programming (object-relational mappers and data management techniques)
* User Interfaces (across or beyond the Web, the desktop and the device)
* Games (featuring pygame, pyglet and other game-making technologies)

EuroPython : a Python Conference


Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 8:15 am

Socialtext Goes Freemium With Socialtext Free 50

Socialtext offers a compelling package of Enterprise 2.0 services, but it has a problem. While it can talk all it wants about how great its products are, the real selling point is getting customers to use them for themselves. While free-trials work somewhat, the time constraints are limiting. So that’s why Socialtext is moving into the freemium market with its new SocialText Free 50 offering.

Basically, Socialtext Free 50 allows companies to sign-up and get many of Socialtext’s services for free, for up to 50 users. That includes the service’s social networking, wiki, site building and messaging tools. The only constraints are that you’re limited to one wiki workspace (paid accounts offer unlimited), and there is no support beyond the basic online variety. “We think we picked the right line of what can we give away,” Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield tells us.

So, you’re pretty much free to open those up to 50 accounts and let the users roam around as they wish. And if you determine you need more accounts, or just more options, there’s obviously an easy path to upgrade. The paid service starts at $6-a-month per user for a hosted plan, or larger companies can opt to pay $1,000 per month, plus $1 or $5 per user based on if they want hosted or on-site capabilities. The full pricing breakdown is here.

Alongside the Socialtext Free 50 launch, the company is also opening up the beta of its new SocialCalc spreadsheet service. SocialCalc’s development was lead by Dan Bricklin, the co-createor of VisiCalc — the first spreadsheet program that was ever made for PCs. It’s been private beta testing for a little while now, but is ready for public testing, Mayfield says. The general release is expected at the end of Q3.

As you might imagine, SocialCalc is a social spreadsheet service. But Mayfield feels it bests competitors such as Google Spreadsheets and EditGrid, because they’re doing more than just reverse engineering the dominant spreadsheet client, Excel. SocialCalc was built to make group editing simple, and to eliminate potential conflict issues when multiple people are editing a document. It offers a way to “work with structured data in an unstructured way,” as Mayfield puts it. And, unlike Google Spreadsheets, SocialCalc can be deployed behind a firewall.

Perhaps more importantly, SocialCalc ties into all of Socialtext’s other offerings (though, unfortunately won’t be included in the Socialtext Free 50 offering as of right now).

We’ve been seeing a resurgence of the freemium model in recent months. It seems to be working pretty well for some consumer-facing products like Pandora, which had a nice offering a couple months ago. It will be interesting to see how it works in the enterprise sphere. CubeTree, another social enterprise offering, launched with the model last month as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: Gizmodo | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:27 am

Gawking at the Media World [Voices]

By Howard Kurtz, Staff Writer, Washington Post

Nick Denton is sitting amid the rows of screen-staring digital workers in the fourth-floor walkup that serves as Gawker headquarters, having neglected to build himself a private office.

“I would do it, but I don’t want to be mocked by the blogs,” says the company’s founder, retreating to the loft’s only semiprivate space — a pair of old couches next to a table with boxes of canned soda piled underneath.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:05 am

Will File-Sharing Case Spawn a Copyright Reform Movement? [Voices]

By David Kravets, Contributor, Threat Level, Wired

Thursday’s $1.92 million file-sharing verdict against a Minnesota mother of four could provide copyright reform advocates with a powerful human symbol of the draconian penalties written into the nearly-35 year old Copyright Act. Then again, maybe not.

A Minnesota federal jury stung Jammie Thomas-Rasset with the enormous fine after concluding she infringed copyrights on 24 music tracks by sharing them on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. It was the defendant’s second trial: The first ended in a $222,000 verdict for the same songs, but was nullified after the judge presiding over the case said he provided faulty jury instructions that favored the recording industry.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:04 am

MySpace International Head Travis Katz Is Out (Updated)

Update: MySpace sources now say Katz may still be at the company, although 2/3 of international staff will be terminated.

More bad news at MySpace. As we await what are likely to be significant cuts in MySpace’s international headcount, MySpace International managing director Travis Katz is out, we’ve heard from a source in the UK. MediaWeek is also reporting this.

Katz joined MySpace in early 2006 as Vice President International, taking a SVP and Managing Director title in October 2006. He is responsible for all non-US operations for MySpace, IGN and other Fox Interactive Media properties. He grew staff from 2 to more than 400 in a span of 2 years.

How many of those 400 international employees will shortly be following? We’ll likely know soon. International employees were spared from the 30% layoffs last week due to legal requirements for notice in some countries, particularly in Europe. But the clock is still ticking on those employees.

I almost interviewed Katz at Davos earlier this year, but he was not available at the time of the interview. Former CEO Chris DeWolfe went solo.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:03 am

ASCAP Now Claiming That Your Mobile Phone Ringing Is A Public Performance [Voices]

By Mike Masnick, Editor, Techdirt

Ah, those collection societies just never learn, do they? We’ve discussed in the past how ASCAP once threatened the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire, but in the past few years it’s been ASCAP’s counterpart in the UK that’s been in the news the most for things like threatening small business owners after calling them on the phone and saying they hear music in the background or threatening a stable owner for playing the radio to her horses. I guess ASCAP was feeling a bit left out.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:03 am

Twitter Will Flood You With Sponsor Offers. Or Not [Voices]

By Caroline McCarthy, Staff Writer, CNET

Memo to Twitter: If you’re really going to be making money with sponsored direct messages, as a New York Times (NYT) article hints, please make sure it doesn’t get annoying.

Twitter investor Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners told the Times that “e-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter.” That’s not too surprising.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:02 am

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners [Voices]

By Alex Williams, Writer, The New York Times

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Read the rest of this story on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:01 am

China Stands by Web Filter Program Despite Protests (PC World)

PC World - China's deadline for the installation of Web filtering software on new PCs hasn't changed, it said Tuesday, despite growing protests from the U.S. government and Chinese Internet users.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Jun 2009 | 7:00 am

Paul Krassner profile

John Rogers of AP profiled 77-year-old Paul Krassner, co-founder of the Yippies and publisher of The Realist, the newsletter that was a big influence on bOING bOING.

He was once a child music prodigy and in the decades since, Paul Krassner has been everything from political satirist to author, editor, anarchist and an advocate for both peace and pornography.

But the title he may favor is one he found buried in his FBI file.

"To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute," a letter in the file said in response to a favorable magazine interview with the co-founder of the Yippie Party, the group that notoriously disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut."

So Krassner titled his autobiography "Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut."

"I figured I might as well make use of it," says the author, smiling broadly as he sits in the living room of his modest tract home in this sandy, sagebrush-dotted corner of the Mojave Desert on a scorchingly hot morning.

Paul has a new book coming out, called Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today. Yippie founder Paul Krassner still testing limits


Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 6:21 am

Watch TV On Your Satnav

Barence writes "Satnav firm Mio is launching a device with an integrated TV tuner. The Mio Spirit range includes a digital television tuner that is intended to be used 'during breaks in the journey or at their final destination.' However, safety campaigners fear there's little to stop the television being used at the wheel. When the system is first turned on a warning message is displayed, telling the user not to watch television while driving. If this is ignored, a secondary warning message kicks in if the GPS chip detects the vehicle is moving at more than 5mph. But that's it!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 23 Jun 2009 | 5:57 am

The crap they built where the beautiful old train stations were

Jebediah sez, "This is a tour of impressive American train stations that were demolished in recent decades -- with photos of the original buildings are "after" pictures showing what's at the various sites today. It's a strange contrast in most cases between the grandeur of the train station and shabby replacement structure. In some cases it's just a parking lot. The most famous example, of course, is NYC's old Penn Station. But there are many other notable cases, including Memphis's amazing station that was replaced with a bunker of a postal facility surrounded by barbed wire."

Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball (Thanks, Jebediah!)


Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 5:33 am

Production stills from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Hell yeah: production stills from Tim Burton's lush-looking Alice in Wonderland adaptations!

Update: New Images From Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland! (via Tor.com)


Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 5:28 am

HOWTO communicate in repressive regimes

Patrick sez, "Unlike most of us, it looks like @PatrickMeier knows what he's talking about. He should, considering he's doing a PhD at Harvard on 'The Impact of the Information Revolution on Authoritarian Rule and Social Resistance: From Information Revolution to iRevolution?' Patrick has an excellent guide on How To Communicate Securely in Repressive Environments. He keeps it up to date based on his studies and input from readers, and will provide a more detailed guide on request (my guess is that not all requests will be handled equally). If you're a Farsi speaker, please translate it and email me, I will post it (or maybe Patrick will want to post it next to the original)."

Mobile Phones

* Purchase your mobile phone far from where you live. Buy lower-end, simple phones that do not allow third-party applications to be installed. Higher-end ones with more functionalities carry more risk. Use cash to purchase your phone and SIM card. Avoid town centers and find small or second-hand shops as these are unlikely to have security cameras. Do not give your real details if asked; many shops do not ask for proof of ID.

* Use multiple SIM cards and multiple phones and only use pay-as-you go options; they are more expensive but required for anonymity.

* Remove the batteries from your phone if you do not want to be geo-located and keep the SIM card out of the phone when not in use and store in separate places.Use your phone while in a moving vehicle to reduces probability of geo-location.

* Never say anything that may incriminate you in any way.

How To Communicate Securely in Repressive Environments

Previously:

• Iran Election Crisis: 10 Significant Web Videos - Boing Boing
• Iran SMS networks "mysteriously" fail right before elections ...
• Iran Elections Crisis: Online Reading List - Boing Boing
• Iran: What went wrong in the elections - Boing Boing
• Iran: Activists Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime - Boing Boing
• Iranian election uprising: Twitter tracks it real-time, Iranian ...
• Iran: Tim Shey on Observing Social Unrest Online at 32000 feet ...
• Twitter reschedules maintenance to avoid clobbering Iranian ...
• Iran: Neda (warning: graphic video) - Boing Boing

Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 5:25 am

Father's day photo-shoot ends with cops pointing guns, photographer face down on tarmac

A reader writes: "A photographer for Dallas' local alternative weekly was handcuffed and detained while photographing an old B24 Liberator (with permission, mind you) on father's day." (He wandered slightly ahead of the unmarked permitted zone, cops drew guns and rousted him):

Waiting for the plane to take off, I was surprised by the Addison police. An officer unholstered his gun, then handcuffed and held me until Homeland Security cleared my name.

I was not arrested, but according to Officer Pierce, I did break federal law and a report would be sent to Homeland Security. I will be hearing from them. I apologized to every one involved. The pilot told me the airport was shut down for a short while.

But according to one of the crew, they had ID'd me as one of theirs, and the tower knew and tried to call it off. But once the wheels were set in motion, it could not be stopped. The pilots were pretty much cool and laughed at me and were even willing to escort me to take more shots. One old-timer gruffed under his breath, "It's the U.S.A., not U.S.S.R. -- I didn't fight to protect this shit." One even offered me his seat on a ride.

How a Heartwarming, Kick-Ass Father's Day Photo Shoot Ended Up Face Down in Handcuffs on the Addison Airport Tarmac


Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 5:21 am

Katamari music remix -- Offworld

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's got exciting news about a remix of the music from the Katamari games, some of the coolest, most infectious video-game music ever recorded.

Kicking off a series of official posts for Sony's PlayStation blog on Namco's upcoming PS3 'tribute' release Katamari Forever, producer Kazuhito Udetsu relays a message from longtime series (and Noby Noby Boy) sound designer Yuu Miyake, who explains the process of collaborating with various Japanese acts to remix classic Katamari tracks.

Saying he wanted a split between 'organic' and 'electric' sounds, Miyake highlights oft-blogged NES-samplers YMCK and the chiptune swing of their "A Crimson Rose and a Gin Tonic" remix. Unfortunately, we don't get the whole track, but we do get enough to hear that it's going to be another must-buy collection.

Listen: YMCK remix classic Katamari for PS3's Katamari Forever

Discuss this on Boing Boing Offworld

Previously:

• Rockin' cover of Katamari Damacy music - Boing Boing
• BB Video: GDC Out-take - Radiohead Fan-Dance-Off with Giant ...
• Katamari Damacy cakes - Boing Boing
• Katamari Damacy multiplayer game coming to Korea -- Boing Boing ...
• Katamari Damacy 2 player collections 10^6 roses with oscillating ...

Source: Boing Boing | 23 Jun 2009 | 5:17 am

Water-Cooled Supercomputer Doubles as Dorm Space Heater

Massive supercomputers that devour electricity to keep them humming are not exactly the poster children for green technology. But IBM hopes to change that with its plans to build a supercomputer that will use water to keep the system cool and even recycle some of the waste heat to help heat the university where it’s housed.

The technology could lead to a reduction in overall energy consumption by at least 40 percent, when compared to similar air-cooled machines, says the company.

“Energy is arguably the number one challenge humanity will be facing in the 21st century,” says Dimos Poulikakos, lead investigator of the project. “We cannot afford anymore to design computer systems based on the criterion of computational speed and performance alone.”

Supercomputers are used in defense research labs such as Argonne National Laboratory, in space research by NASA and at universities for scientific research, all applications which have a nearly insatiable demand for processing power. The new supercomputer, called Aquasar, will be housed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and will have a top speed of 10 teraflops. (A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, a measure of computing capacity.) While that’s a lot of computing power — a Core 2 Duo processor is capable of about 20 gigaflops, or 1/500 the speed of Aquasar — it’s a fraction of what some of the fastest supercomputers today. For instance, IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer, which ranks fourth on the top 100 list, has a peak speed of 596 teraflops. Meanwhile, IBM has moved on to create its first supercomputer in Europe capable of one petaflop, or one thousand trillion operations per second.

Keeping these massive machines running isn’t as much a challenge as trying to maintain them in an optimal temperature band. Aquasar, however, hopes to offer more bang for the buck in terms of its energy consumption. Many of the chips used the supercomputing systems dissipate about ten times as much heat as a typical kitchen hotplate, says Thomas Brunschwiler, a researcher at IBM Zurich Research Lab. For optimal performance, the chips must be cooled below 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius).

Accomplishing that much cooling across a huge data center means a significant strain on electricity consumption. Researchers estimate that about 50 percent of an average air-cooled data center’s energy consumption stems from powering the cooling systems to keep the processors from overheating. Reducing that would be a big step towards energy efficiency.

The power consumption of one rack of the Aquasar will be around 10 KW, IBM officials say. By comparison, the Blue Gene L/P supercomputer consumes about 40 KW of power per rack, and the average power consumption of a supercomputer in the top 500 list is 257 KW.  Aquasar, set to be commissioned in 2010, will have two IBM BladeCenter servers in each rack.

Aquasar’s breakthrough lies in how it has successfully managed chip level water cooling, says Brunschwiler.

“One way to do it is to cool the air in a data center to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) , which means air conditioning units that take space and energy,” he says. “Or you can use liquid cooling to get there.”

In the Aquasar system, high performance micro-channel coolers are attached directly to the backside of the processor. In them, the cooler water is distributed through a fine network of capillaries that spread throughout the back.

It’s different from the water-cooled modules used in other supercomputers, says Brunschwiler. Water cooling on a module level brings the liquid between the processors, but not right up against them via micro capillaries.

“The breakthrough in our special package design lies in how we can bring the water as close as possible to the chips without letting it affect the chips’ performance,” says Brunschwiler.

The water-cooled supercomputer will require a small amount, just about 2.64 gallons of water for cooling. A pump ensures the water flows through at the rate of roughly 7.9 gallons per minute.

For overall efficiency, the entire cooling system is a closed circuit. The heated water from the chips is cooled as it passes through a passive heat exchanger and the removed heat is recycled. In this case, it is channeled into the University’s heating system.

“Heat is a valuable commodity that we rely on in our everyday lives,” says Bruno Michel, manager at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory. “If we capture and transport the waste heat from the active components in a computer system as efficiently as possible, we can reuse it as a resource.”

Photo: Aquasar/IBM Research

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:38 am

Gateway LT3100 netbook features 11.6-inch screen, AMD processor

Gateway (now owned by Acer) hops on the 11.6-inch LCD screen bandwagon (started by Acer) with the LT3100 netbook. Unlike Acer, however, this one’s got a — GASP! — AMD chip?

Yes, that’s right. The LT3100 features a single-core AMD Athlon 64 L110 CPU running at 1.2 GHz, ATI Radeon X1270 graphics, and 2GB of memory. The screen has a 1366×768 resolution.

Pricing will start at $399 (MSRP), so the machine falls into the same category as Acer’s current 11.6-inch offering, the Atom-based Aspire One 751. The LT3100 weighs in at 3.14 pounds and measures about an inch thick.

From the looks of the press release, this model comes standard with a six-cell battery which is good for up to five hours. With some Atom-based netbooks clearing the eight hour mark when equipped with a six-cell battery, let’s hope that Gateway’s AMD version packs a little more wallop to make up for the somewhat-shortened battery life.

The LT3100 comes in black and red, presumably available now or in the very near future as no far-off release date has been specified. Here’s the full press release:

Gateway’s First 11.6-inch Netbook Delivers Functionality, Performance

Customers Can Stay in Touch, Do More with Large Display, Performance-Boosting AMD Athlon Processor, Full-Size Keyboard

IRVINE, Calif., June 23, 2009 – Gateway today introduced the Gateway LT3100 netbook, the company’s first with a productivity-boosting high-definition 11.6-inch display. Complementing the new display are features that equip customers to do more with their netbook, including wireless connectivity and an AMD Athlon Processor. Weighing only 3.14 pounds and measuring about an inch thick, the Gateway LT3100 sports a sleek and compact design that can be taken anywhere.

Savvy mobile customers who are always on the move can stay in touch and connected using the new Gateway LT3100. Compact and easy to use, it is an ideal netbook for customers who want a reliable WiFi 802.11b/g wireless connection to the Internet to stay up-to-date on emails, post updates on social networks and enjoy online entertainment. Students and small business customers can use it for conducting online research, reviewing materials for class and communicating with colleagues.

Customers can do more with their new Gateway LT3100 netbook. The device’s Ultrabright™ high-definition widescreen display is a large 11.6 inches, providing increased screen real estate to view Internet sites as well as multiple applications and windows. As a result, customers can avoid extensive vertical and horizontal scrolling and can more easily move between windows for a better overall experience. The display on the new netbook line is LED-backlit and features an entertainment-enhancing 16:9 ratio and 1366 x 768 (WXGA) pixel resolution, so images on it are incredibly clear and crisp. Plus, the larger display size made room for a full-size keyboard, so even typing is easier.

“The Gateway LT3100 is a smart netbook choice – it gives customers the freedom to connect to the Internet for everything from staying up-to-date on the latest viral videos and enjoying digital music and photos, to checking on the status of projects and studying for classes,” said Ray Sawall, senior product marketing manager for Acer America. “At the same time, it delivers reliable mobile communications. Customers get the larger-sized 11.6-inch display along with enhanced netbook performance, so they can do even more while on the go.”

The Gateway LT3100 netbook delivers a heightened level of performance and usability thanks to its AMD Athlon 64 L110 Single-Core processor and ATI Radeon™ X1270 Graphics for enhanced performance when browsing websites, downloading music, moving through applications and handling multiple tasks. Ready for customers who want to take their digital media and files with them, the Gateway LT3100 netbook models will feature up to 2GB of DDR2 memory and up to a 250GB(1) internal hard drive. Available with a 6-cell battery, the LT3100 netbooks provide battery life of up to five hours.(2)

Customers can capture moments on the go in video with the integrated webcam. With it, consumers have an easy way to document their adventures in video, record video emails and enhance communication with “face-to-face” video-conferencing. It captures smooth video and high-quality images even in low-light conditions. Plus, the built-in digital microphone conveys excellent voice quality, keeping background noise levels low and minimizing echoes. Consumers will enjoy audio with the Dolby Headphones and two built-in stereo speakers.

The Gateway LT3100 netbook further enhances productivity with its Multi-Gesture Touchpad. Unique movements on the touchpad let users intuitively move through Internet sites and digital media. For example, customers can make an inward or outward pinching motion to naturally zoom in and out on photos. Customers can move two fingers horizontally to flip through photos, web pages and PDF documents. Also, customers can swirl their fingers in a circular motion to scroll through web pages, long lists of files and music playlists.

The sophisticated design of the new Gateway LT3100 notebook gives it a fashionable look and feel. The glossy chassis is punctuated with a subtle yet defining Gateway engraved logo and modern silver trim and is available in both NightSky Black and Cherry Red. Sleek and comfortable to hold and use with an incredibly portable form factor, the LT3100 has a starting weight of 3.14 pounds. The LT3100 measures only about an inch thick, so it neatly fits in a backpack or purse.

The Gateway LT3100’s ports make it easy to connect to peripherals such as printers, a display and consumer electronics such as digital cameras. It has an impressive three USB 2.0 ports for ample ways to connect as well as Ethernet and VGA ports. Plus, it features a multi-in-one digital card reader for accepting popular digital media cards.

Pricing, Availability and Configurations
The new Gateway LT3100 is available in several configurations at a starting manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $399.99. A sample configuration follows:

Gateway LT3103u

• AMD Athlon™ 64 Single-Core Processor L110 (1.20 GHz, 512KB L2 cache, 800 MHz FSB)
• 11.6-inch WXGA High Definition LED back-lit display (1364 x 768 resolution and 16:9 ratio)
• 2048MB DDR2 SDRAM Single Channel Memory
• Integrated ATI Radeon™ X1270 Graphics
• 250GB SATA 5400RPM Hard Drive(1)
• Multi-in-1 Digital Media Card Reader
• 802.11b/g Wi-Fi CERTIFIED®
• Integrated Web Camera
• Two Built-in Stereo Speakers
• Three USB 2.0 Ports
• 6-cell Li-ion Battery
• 11.26W x 7.99D x 1.03H inches
• NightSky Black
• Microsoft Windows Vista Basic with Service Pack 1
• One-Year Standard Warranty
• Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price: $399.99

The Gateway LT3100 netbook line comes with additional preinstalled software including Microsoft Works with Office Home and Student 2007 Trial, Gateway Recovery Management, Adobe® Reader®, and Norton Internet Security™ 2009 Trial.

Source: CrunchGear | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

How to Live by the Numbers: Nutrition

A Formula for Weight Loss

Everyone knows how to lose weight: Eat fewer calories than you burn so the body uses fat for fuel rather than just storing it.

Or, try p = (c/50) + (f/12) - (r/5). That's the patented formula behind Weight Watchers' Points system, which boils down a lot of information into one easy-to-track number. Points don't account for just the caloric content of food (the c in the equation), they also consider the fat content (f) and the benefits of fiber (r). Each member is allotted a certain number of points a day plus weekly bonus points depending on their current height, weight, gender, and activity level.

Turning a meal into a number offers Weight Watchers members something simple, precise, and substantive. As Karen Miller-Kovach, chief scientific officer of Weight Watchers, says, "The Points system creates a structure for people until that structure becomes habit."

And it works. A 2003 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly 40 percent of a group following the Weight Watchers program lost more than 5 percent of their body weight, almost double the success rate of a comparison group trying to lose weight on their own.

Points turn out to be especially effective when combined with an online component; the company's internal research shows that members who also use Weight Watchers.com lose more weight than those who don't. That success has inspired a slew of unauthorized points-counting apps, and from time to time Weight Watchers lawyers send out cease-and-desist letters. The company should remember that its Points system relies on the openness mandated by the federal Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. The law requires most food makers to disclose the amounts of fat, fiber, and calories in their products—the very three ingredients that, with a bit of math, allow the Points system to work.
—Thomas Goetz

5 Nutrition Tools

Livestrong.com Calorie Tracker
With a database of more foods than you'll find in the average supermarket, this mobile app makes counting calories easier than riding a bike.
$3, livestrong.com

Daytum
From number of sodas consumed to movies watched, this Web site will slice and dice any data you feed it, with easily readable reports showing your totals, averages, percentages, and more.
Free, daytum.com

Glucose Buddy
This iPhone app wrangles diabetes info for you, logging blood-glucose levels, food, exercise, and meds in a color-coded readout. It can also graph and export the accumulated stats.
Free, glucosebuddy.com

LabPixies Calorie Calculator
This software widget sets a daily calorie goal and then helps you keep it, tracking what you eat and showing your progress each time you fire up your browser.
Free, labpixies.com

Tanita BC-590BT Wireless Body Composition Monitor
Tanita's superscale not only measures your pounds, body fat percentage, visceral fat, and muscle and bone mass but also wirelessly sends that data to your Bluetooth-enabled desktop for long-term tracking.
$250, tanita.com

Diet Science

You're cutting calories — but how you allocate the remaining ones is important, too. Here's how several popular diets balance out a day's worth of calories, carbs, fat, and protein. — Mathew Honan

Breakdown of daily caloric intake (2,000-calorie scale)

Protein

Carbs

Fat

Good-bye, bread and potatoes. Hello, meat and, um, meat! By restricting daily net carbs (total carbs minus fiber), the hope is that our bodies will burn fat instead. But many medical experts worry about the diet's effect on heart disease.	A modern "Mediterranean diet" plan: Keep calories to no more than 1,600 per day and consume a monounsaturated fat at every meal, and those love handles will lose their grip. Prepare yourself for lots of oil, and hope to keep the weight off.	You'll purge carbs almost completely for two weeks, then maintain a diet of "good" carbs and "good" fats. But the purge diet is as appetizing as Miami sand, and it's a sobering undertaking — all alcohol is banned.

Keep Your Genes Young

We've long known that a healthy diet promotes weight loss and overall well-being, but there's new evidence that shows it may actually slow the aging process. A study by diet guru and UC San Francisco faculty member Dean Ornish, published in The Lancet Oncology, found that exercise, stress management, and a low-fat, low-sugar diet with lots of whole foods, fruits, vegetables, vitamins, and fish oils can reduce the rate of cellular aging. That kind of diet boosts levels of the enzyme telomerase, which in turn helps maintain essential DNA sequences called telomeres at the ends of your chromosomes. Think of telomeres as a protective housing—as the housing degrades over time, its contents are more likely to become damaged. Telomeres shield chromosomes from breakdown due to cellular aging, which is a risk factor for conditions like heart disease and cancer. Keep those telomeres long with a healthy lifestyle, and you very well may lengthen your life. — Mathew Honan

DATA POINT

Caloric Intake

Why is it so hard to cut weight? We know how much we're supposed to eat each day, but we just don't do it (or just overdo it). American men consume 113 percent of their daily recommended calories; American women consume 102 percent.

Calorie-Dense Foods Are Doing Us In

"When you're doing something that dramatically changes your eating habits, it's not sustainable," says Barbara Rolls, the Guthrie Chair of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University. "A lot of diets are very prescriptive, like ‘Just don't eat white foods.' People lose weight, but then those foods are singing to them in the night. We're not a species with a lot of willpower."

Rolls started to research satiety — or what makes us feel full. "The data clearly show that calorie density, which correlates to water content, has a significant effect on energy intake. It's not portion size per se that makes people overeat; we're eating big portions of calorie-dense food." Rolls' diet plan — called Volumetrics — focuses on the energy density of foods.

The key is to focus on foods that contain fewer calories per a given volume, so you feel full without consuming as many calories. Rather than a 100-calorie snack of raisins (a quarter cup), with Volumetrics you'd have 100 calories of grapes (two cups).

"The exciting thing about this as a strategy for weight management is it directs you to healthy, nutritious foods you should be eating anyway," Rolls says. "Because our eating behavior is so sensitive to volume cues, regardless of caloric density, there are a lot of opportunities to make changes and eat less. We have such good food technology now that we can get more vegetables in and get fat out and not lose taste. But the food industry is very slow to change. We need to motivate the people who provide food to us to do this."
–Joe Lindsey

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

Afghan Airstrike Video Goes Down the Memory Hole

Last month, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus and other American military officials strongly suggested that they were ready to show the public a classified video which they said would largely vindicate a series of deadly American airstrikes in western Afghanistan. Now, a CENTCOM report on the incident has been released. But the video is nowhere to be seen. And the report fails to address why massively lethal one-ton bombs and airbursting munitions were used during the fight, when civilians were in the vicinity.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

How to Live by the Numbers: Health

The Frequent Walker Program

Unless popcorn shrimp is on offer, many Americans are loath to walk any more than necessary. That chronic sloth is a drag for employers, whose health care costs can swell in tandem with their workers' waistlines. Now Virgin impresario Richard Branson thinks he can save businesses a bundle with a program that turns personal fitness into a game, complete with reams of stats to obsess over. When companies sign up with Virgin HealthMiles, their employees rack up rewards for staying active: The more you walk, the closer you get to earning HealthCash, which can be redeemed for real cash or gift cards from Amazon.com, Target, and (curiously) Omaha Steaks.

Participants are issued pedometers and challenged to take 7,000 steps a day. That's about 3.5 miles—40 percent more than the average deskbound adult's daily distance. Hitting that goal in a day garners 20 HealthMiles, the program's equivalent of frequent flier points. Bonuses are available for simply logging in to the HealthMiles Web site (10 miles), taking a no-smoking pledge (500 miles), or updating your blood pressure, weight, and body fat at a HealthMiles kiosk (200 miles).

I gave it a go and found that once my routine perambulation was assigned a numerical value—and valuable gifts were on the line—I began dedicating inordinate effort to meet that 7,000-step target. At first, I was aghast to learn that despite my 25-minute trudge to the office, I averaged only 6,600 steps per day. The problem? I'm tall, and my legs are longer than average. So I shortened my stride.

Alas, I'm still nowhere near reaching HealthMiles' vaunted Level Five, which pays $500 in HealthCash. Employers that offer the program pick up that tab, but it could be a worthwhile investment: Virgin CEO Christopher Boyce claims that corporate clients can cut $2,500 off the annual cost of health care provided to each participant. Imagine how much more they'll save if Virgin ever develops a pedometer capable of stopping people from walking into a Dunkin' Donuts.
—Brendan I. Koerner

5 Health Tools

Fitbit
Record the steps you take each day, the calories you burn, and how much you sleep at night with this little device. Then auto-upload all that data wirelessly to the Web for analysis.
$99, fitbit.com

iBP
Track your blood pressure and pulse rate with this iPhone and iPod touch app. You can even email cumulative, long-term data to your doc for review.
$1, iiwiisoftware.com

CardioChek PA
This portable cholesterol and triglyceride counter gives you instant feedback and stores your last 30 blood tests to assess plaque-prevention efforts over time.
$680, cardiochek.com

QuitKey
QuitKey uses a two-stage program to help you stop smoking. First it tracks how much you smoke, then it builds a plan to gradually reduce your daily lung-punches all the way to zero.
$60, quitkey.com

Ovulation Calendar Pro
Not only does this iPhone app monitor menstrual cycles and symptoms, it also charts basal temperature to show upticks that indicate ovulation.
$5, ovucalendar.com

Experimental Man

Tim Lundeen wanted to know whether taking omega-3 supplements would improve his mental abilities, as UC Berkeley psychology professor Seth Roberts suggested. So the software developer devised a quick test of cognitive alacrity: Each day, he'd solve a random set of 100 simple arithmetic problems and track how long it took. As he increased his omega-3 dosage, his time improved, suggesting that the supplements were working. Of course, such self-administered experiments are a far cry from the large, randomized, double-blind studies accepted by science. But Lundeen's effort indicates how easily we can explore new ideas—and maybe even make some self-discoveries in the process.
—Gary Wolf

The Power of Self-Deception

You've just arrived home after a long workday. Should you pop open a beer or go for a jog? The beer is what you want now, but in the morning you'll wish you'd laced up those kicks and hit the pavement. Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling describes this essential conflict between our immediate and long-term desires as "egonomics" (no relation to the pop-biz book of the same title). To tilt decisionmaking in favor of our future selves, he proposes the idea of precommitment. Think of Cortès torching his ships at Veracruz so his men couldn't return to the comforts of Cuba. Thankfully, you needn't resort to arson: Simply skip the beer or cholesterol-laden foods at the grocery, sign up and pay in advance for a race, or buy pants a size down to force yourself to shed a few pounds.
—Mathew Honan

DATA POINT

Caloric Intake

What are the most motivational numbers of all? $1, $5, $10, $20. A recent University of Pennsylvania study found that smokers who were offered $750 to quit were nearly three times more likely to succeed as those who weren't.

» Success Rate
Paid smokers...14.7%
Unpaid smokers...5%

Random Play Beats Outs Repetitious Drills

"Traditionally, the approach to practice for athletes has been very behavioral: You take one skill and do it over and over again until you master it," says Joan Vickers, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Calgary for 25 years. But her research shows that the best way to practice may be just to play, albeit in a very specific way.

In the early '80s, Vickers started using a corneal-reflection eye tracker to correlate attention and athletic performance. "There's a point in time in any sport where you have to initiate the crucial kinematic movement," she says. "What we call the ‘quiet eye' is the information you see just before you make that movement."

For an expert in almost any sport, "the quiet eye duration is longer, because the person gets to it early. The term is ‘predictive control': If you're very skilled at something you can predict what you need to do."

To help athletes improve their quiet eye and understand how it translates to athletic performance, Vickers devised a system of practice called decision training. "With the block-style behavioral learning approach, people are very successful in the short term, but if you come back to them a month after basic skill acquisition, their performance went down," she said. "We understand now that's because you turn your head off and all neural learning stops — only in challenging situations do people grow mentally."

Instead of, say, endlessly shooting three-pointers from the top of the key, DT emphasizes random and variable practice to develop a longer quiet eye. "You plunge them into the context; what they experience is the real context they have to deal with. Random practice is something easy, something hard, and no way to predict what's coming at you. Variability means instead of simple, basic skills, you put people in complex tactical situations where they have to learn the skill and the tactics at the same time."
—Joe Lindsey

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365

I got up at 6:20 this morning, after going to bed at 12:40 am. I woke up twice during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute, and my blood pressure, averaged over three measurements, was 127/ 74. My mood was a 4 on a scale of 5. My exercise time in the last 24 hours was 0 minutes, and my maximum heart rate during exercise was not calculated. I consumed 400 milligrams of caffeine and 0 ounces of alcohol. And in case you were wondering, my narcissism score is 0.31 (more on that in a moment).

Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep—a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you're unconscious—is yielding to the skill of the widget maker. With an accelerometer and some decent algorithms, you will soon be able to record your sleep patterns with technology that costs less than $100.

All this might once have seemed like a nightmare, the kind of thing that would be proposed by Thomas Gradgrind, the schoolmaster in Charles Dickens' Hard Times, who barks at his students by number—"Girl number twenty!"—and blasts every person he meets with unsolicited facts and statistics. Quantitative analysis by its very nature seems remorseless and inhuman. Numbers may be useful for epidemiologists and insurance companies, school systems, the military, and sociology professors, but what have they to do with the fabric of our personal lives? To be turned from warm flesh into cold arithmetic—what a terrible thing. As the hero of the cult TV series The Prisoner cried, "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

But two years ago, my fellow Wired writer Kevin Kelly and I noticed that many of our acquaintances were beginning to do this terrible thing to themselves, finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities. A new culture of personal data was taking shape. The immediate cause of this trend was obvious: New tools had made self-tracking easier. In the past, the methods of quantitative assessment were laborious and arcane. You had to take measurements manually and record them in a log; you had to enter data into spreadsheets and perform operations using unfriendly software; you had to build graphs to tease understanding out of the numbers. Now much of the data-gathering can be automated, and the record-keeping and analysis can be delegated to a host of simple Web apps. With new tracking systems popping up almost daily, we decided to create a Web site to track them. We called our project the Quantified Self. We don't have a slogan, but if we did it would probably be "Self-knowledge through numbers."

We're aware of how absurd this sounds. Self-knowledge through numbers. What could that possibly mean? Of course you can learn things about yourself through numbers—weight is probably the most common personal metric—but self-knowledge has connotations that go beyond quotidian facts. "Know Thyself" was inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, held up as an ideal in Latin and Christian philosophy, and recycled by generations of advice mongers. Self-knowledge was obtained through introspection and reflection; that is, through words.

But there has long been a parallel method of understanding ourselves. Athletes are among the pioneers: With their increasingly precise and scientific training regimens, serious competitors now commonly load databases not only with their practice results but also with stats on the biological precursors of optimum performance: heart rate, diet, metabolism, and dozens of other factors. Anywhere the goal is explicit—run faster, weigh less—the ability to plot progress is too powerful to ignore.

But the newest tools open possibilities for personal tracking in areas of life that had always seemed inaccessible to quantitative methods. Diarists often chronicle their moods, creating a paper trail that provides a sense of mastery over fleeting emotions. There is a problem, however, with this sort of old-fashioned journal-keeping: You record your mood only when you're in the mood to do so, which introduces a bias. If you impose a regular schedule, noting your feelings at the same time every day, you face the issue that mood varies predictably with time of day and regular cycles of activity. It might seem that we're simply incapable of reliably tracking our own subjective states, but social scientists solved this problem years ago: Just randomize the time of inquiry. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson reported early results using such methods back in 1983, launching a productive line of research in psychology. At the time, of course, this was work for professionals with programmed watches. It wasn't clear how you would direct a random inquiry to yourself.

With today's technology, such things are now trivial. There is open source software for random experience sampling. This feature is already embedded in tools like Happy Factor, a Facebook app that randomly pings you with a text message, to which you respond with a number indicating your happiness level. There are protocols for measuring mental fitness that take less than five minutes to complete and provide a baseline for experiments on your brain's agility. The Web site CureTogether lets users log an enormous range of conditions, symptoms, and feelings. Modern self-tracking systems can measure our bodies, our minds, and our movements.

But can they measure our narcissism? The question comes up often enough to require an answer. My original impulse, after I'd heard it three or four times, was to investigate it in the spirit of the self-tracking movement—that is, with a number. There is a well-validated psychological test for measuring narcissism that takes only a few minutes to fill out. I administered it to three dozen self-trackers, and the mean score was 0.38, which is within the normal range. But of course, that's not a real answer, because when people ask whether self-tracking is narcissistic, they're not wondering about clinical narcissism. They're wondering about selfishness, narrowness, a retreat from social engagement and social generosity into an egotistical world of self.

Oddly, though, self-tracking culture is not particularly individualistic. In fact, there is a strong tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it. People monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie counters; people following their baby's sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use online tools to match their chart with others'. The most ambitious sites are aggregating personal data for patient-driven drug trials and medical research.

Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life. The world is full of potential experiments: people experiencing some change in their lives, going on or off a diet, kicking an old habit, making a vow or a promise, going on vacation, switching from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, getting into a fight. These are potential experiments, not real experiments, because typically no data is collected and no hypotheses are formed. But with the abundance of self-tracking tools now on offer, everyday changes can become the material of careful study.

When magnifying lenses were invented, they were aimed at the cosmos. But almost immediately we turned them around and aimed them at ourselves. The telescope became a microscope. We discovered blood cells. We discovered spermatozoa. We discovered the universe of microorganisms inside ourselves. The accessible tools of self-tracking and numerical analysis offer a new kind of microscope with which to find patterns in the smallest unit of sociological analysis, the individual human. But the notion of a personal microscope isn't quite right, because insight will come not just from our own numbers but from combining them with the findings of others. Really, what we're building is what climate scientist Jesse Ausubel calls a macroscope.

The basic idea of a macroscope is to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern. This means computers on one side and distributed data-gathering on the other. If you want to see the climate, you gather your data with hyperlocal weather stations maintained by amateurs. If you want to see traffic, you collect info from automatic sensors placed on roadways and cars. If you want new insights into yourself, you harness the power of countless observations of small incidents of change—incidents that used to vanish without a trace. And if you want to test an idea about human nature in general, you aggregate those sets of individual observations into a population study.

The macroscope will be to our era of science what the telescope and the microscope were to earlier ones. Its power will be felt even more from the new questions it provokes than from the answers it delivers. The excitement in the self-tracking movement right now comes not just from the lure of learning things from one's own numbers but also from the promise of contributing to a new type of knowledge, using this tool we all build.

Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com)blogs about self-tracking at quantifiedself.com. He wrote about the barcode of life in issue 16.10.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics

On June 6, 2008, Veronica Noone attached a small sensor to her running shoes and headed out the door. She pressed start on her iPod and began keeping track of every step she took. It wasn't a long run—just 1.67 miles in 18 minutes and 36 seconds, but it was the start of something very big for her.

Since that day, she's run 95 more times, logging 283.8 miles in about 48 hours on the road. She's burned 28,672 calories. And her weight, which topped 225 pounds when she was pregnant, has settled in at about 145.

Noone knows all of that thanks to the sensor system, called Nike+. After each run, she can sync her iPod to the Nike+ Web site and get a visual representation of the workout—a single green line. Its length shows how far she's gone, and the peaks and valleys reflect her speed.

For a self-described "stat whore," there's something powerfully motivating about all the data that Nike+ collects. "It just made running so much more entertaining for me," says Noone, who blogs at ronisweigh.com. "There's something about seeing what you've done, how your pace changes as you go up and down hills, that made me more motivated."

Noone is now running four times a week and just did her first 10-mile race. She's training for a half marathon and hoping to do a full marathon by the end of the year. And she attributes much of her newfound fitness to the power of data. "I can log in to Nike+ and see what I've done over the past year," she says. "That's really powerful for me. When I started, I was running shorter and slower. But I can see that progression. I don't have to question what I've done. The data is right there in white and green."

Noone has joined the legion of people, from Olympic-level athletes to ordinary folks just hoping to lower their blood pressure, who are plugging into a data-driven revolution. And it goes way beyond Nike+. Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to easily collect granular information about our lives—what we eat, how much we sleep, when our mood changes.

And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance.

Few things illustrate the power and promise of Living by Numbers quite as clearly as the Nike+ system. By combining a dead-simple way to amass data with tools to use and share it, Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled—more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.

There is a vast universe of personal metrics to capture. Start with these:

Vital Statistics
height // weight // age // birth weight // birth length

Vital Signs
body temperature // pulse // blood pressure // respiratory rate

Senses
visual acuity // auditory acuity

Blood
glucose level // blood-alcohol level // hemoglobin level // HDL level // LDL level // liver enzyme level

With such a huge group, Nike is learning things we've never known before. In the winter, people in the US run more often than those in Europe and Africa, but for shorter distances. The average duration of a run worldwide is 35 minutes, and the most popular Nike+ Powersong, which runners can set to give them extra motivation, is "Pump It" by the Black Eyed Peas.

The company couldn't have gathered all that information, and gained all those insights, if it hadn't reconfigured how runners approach their sport. Nike has done more than create a successful product; it has fundamentally changed the way more than a million people think about exercise.

A brown plastic box, emblazoned with Nike's iconic Swoosh logo, sits on the conference room table at the company's headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. It's a clunky thing, the size of a thick paperback book, with a waist strap and two ports on the front that look like miniature speakers, lending it the air of a shrunken mid-'80s boom box.

It was called the Nike Monitor, and it was the company's first attempt to sell runners a product that would tell them how far and fast they had run. The ports on the front weren't speakers—they were sonar detectors that would calculate a runner's speed, which would then be announced over a pair of headphones. The Monitor had to be strapped to the runner's waist facing forward. It may have been a good idea, but it was utterly impractical. Less than two years after its 1987 launch, the Monitor was dropped from Nike's product lineup.

How Nike+ Works

Capture The shoe sensor's accelerometer measures the amount of time a runner's foot is on the ground, which is inversely proportional to speed. Transmitting at 2.4 GHz, the sensor sends data to a receiver that's either attached to an iPod nano or built into the second-gen iPod touch.	Sync After the workout, the iPod is synced to a computer running iTunes, which automatically sends the data, including start time, duration, and distance, to the Nike+ servers, formatted in a specially structured XML file that can also be read by third-party and open source apps.	Share Users can access their run history at NikePlus.com, browse through a graph that shows all their activity, and then drill down to details about each workout. If they need more motivation, they can enter challenges or set individualized goals, like running 100 miles in a month.

Illustration: L-Dopa

Michael Tchao, head of Nike's Techlab, laughs. "You can imagine that this device, a little big, maybe not the most fashionable, wasn't the huge runaway success we had hoped. But even 20 years ago, we were experimenting in this space."

Despite Nike's shoe-centric business, its experiments in electronics continued. It launched a line of sports watches, made heart rate monitors, and even entered into an agreement with Philips to market an MP3 player. And Nike engineers constantly tinkered with what they referred to as a "smart shoe," a sneaker with built-in sensors that would automatically record the length and speed of your runs.

But a smart shoe, they realized, wasn't enough—you needed a device to save the data. By late 2004 the engineers started to notice that most of the runners they saw on Nike's campus were sporting white earbuds. The Apple iPod, which debuted in 2001, had mushroomed in popularity, with sales doubling every quarter. "Most runners were running with music already," says Nike president and CEO Mark Parker. "We thought the real opportunity would come if we could combine music and data."

Heart
resting heart rate // maximum heart rate // ejection fraction

Lungs
lung capacity

Body and Nutrition
body mass index // lean body mass // body fat percentage // basal metabolic rate // glycemic index

Nike engineers started to brainstorm. They cooked up various demos, even sketching a shoe with an embedded iPod. Finally, Parker picked up the phone and called a friend who worked at Apple—CEO Steve Jobs. After that call, teams from both companies got together at Nike headquarters. "We talked about the idea of Nike+ and actually had a little storyboard that showed it," says Tchao, who worked at Apple for 10 years before joining Nike. "Steve called it 'the speedometer for sports,' and we thought that was an interesting way to describe it. People drove around in cars before speedometers, and today you can't imagine driving without one."

Both companies saw profit potential if they could develop the system together, so the Nike and Apple teams each took on different parts of the project. Apple refined the sensor that Nike had prototyped, making it smaller and more durable. Nike focused on the shoes and the interface for the Web and the iPod. It created a simple system based around the idea of setting goals.

If a runner wants to run 5 miles, they enter that distance and press start. During the run, voice prompts let the runner know how fast they're moving, how far they've gone, and how much farther they need to go. At the end of the run, the user presses stop and the data is saved on the iPod. The next time they sync their iPod, the workout data is automatically uploaded to NikePlus.com, which adds the current information to the history of all their runs.

A Study to Determine the Biomechanics of Running in Skilled Trackman
Richard C. Nelson
March 11, 1970
Download PDF [4.1 MB]

The basic science that allowed Nike and Apple to capture this information is low tech, introduced in a 40-year-old study published by biomechanical researcher Richard Nelson at Penn State. Nelson filmed a mix of 16 freshman and varsity athletes at the university running at various speeds, on smooth and sloped surfaces. What he found was both simple and powerful—the amount of time a runner's foot is in contact with the ground is inversely proportional to how fast he's running and unaffected by slope or stride length. That means if you know how long that contact lasts, you can make a pretty good guess as to how fast the runner is going.

"People in biomechanics knew about this, but they felt it wasn't good enough for the lab, because it's accurate to plus or minus 5 percent," says Mario Lafortune, director of Nike's Sport Research Lab. "But for an application like Nike+ it's tremendously accurate."

The Nike+ sensor consists of just three parts. There's an accelerometer that detects when your foot hits and leaves the ground, calculating that all-important contact time. There's a transmitter that sends the information to a receiver, one that's either clipped onto an iPod nano or built into the second-generation iPod touch. And there's the battery. That's what Nike+ is.

What's more interesting is what Nike+ isn't. There's no GPS that automatically tracks your routes—if you want to map your run, you have to do it manually on the Nike site. There's no heart rate monitor, so even though you know how far and how fast you've traveled, you don't know what level of cardiovascular exertion it required. "We really wanted to separate ourselves from that sort of very technical, geeky side of things," Tchao says. "Everyone understands speed and distance."

In other words, Nike+ isn't a perfect tool; it wasn't designed to be. But it's good enough, and more crucially, it's simple. Nike learned a huge lesson from Apple: The iPod wasn't a massive hit because it was the most powerful music player on the market but because it offered the easiest, most streamlined user experience.

But that simple, dual-variable tracking can lead to novel insights, especially once you have so many people feeding in data: The most popular day for running is Sunday, and most Nike+ users tend to work out in the evening. After the holidays, there's a huge increase in the number of goals that runners set; this past January, they set 312 percent more goals than the month before.

There's something even deeper. Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: five. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves.

In the mid-1920s at Western Electric's manufacturing plant in Cicero, Illinois, the management began an experiment. The lighting in an area occupied by one set of workers was increased so there was better illumination to help them see the telephone relays they were building. Perhaps not surprisingly, workers who had more light were able to assemble relays faster.

Other changes were then made: Employees were given rest breaks. Their productivity increased. They were allowed to work shorter hours. Again, they were more efficient during those hours.

But then something weird happened. The lighting was cut back to normal ... and productivity still went up. In fact, just about every change the company made had only one effect: increased worker productivity. After months of tinkering, the work conditions were returned to the original state, and workers built more relays than they did in the exact same circumstances at the start of the experiment.

What was happening? Why was it that no matter what the Hawthorne plant managers did, the workers just performed better? Researchers puzzled over the results, and some still doubt the details of the experiment's protocols. But the study gave rise to what's known in sociology as the Hawthorne effect.

The gist of the idea is that people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed (which is why it's sometimes called the observer effect). Those workers at Western Electric didn't build more relays because there was more or less light or because they had more or fewer breaks. The Hawthorne effect posits that they built more relays simply because they knew someone was keeping track of how many relays they built.

When you lace up your running shoes outfitted with the Nike+ sensor and fire up your iPod, you're both the researcher and the subject—a self-contained experimental system. And what you're likely to find is that the Hawthorne effect kicks in. You're actively observing yourself, and just that fact not only provides information you can act on but also may modify your behavior. That's the power of Living by Numbers.

Keeping track of our lives is nothing new. Athletes have kept training logs to quantify and analyze their workouts. Counting calories has long been a popular and effective way to lose weight.

In the past, that required two steps. First, there was the recording of the information, then the actual effort to modify behavior. In study after study, this extra work turned out to be a huge burden. Compliance fell, and the outcome suffered: People would stop monitoring their caloric intake, fail to change it, and fail to lose weight. Make the data-gathering easy and you remove one of the barriers to meaningful improvement in our lives.

With Nike+ and other tools, that first step has become almost effortless. Dieters don't have to calculate the caloric content of meals manually; they can just log in to FitDay to enter the information in an online food diary. Keeping a training log doesn't mean busting out a pen and paper at the end of a run. It's as simple as listening to music on an iPod while exercising.

Women Only
estrogen levels // menstrual cycle

Men Only
testosterone levels // sperm count

Living
caloric intake // hours of sleep // exercise duration // exercise intensity // lactate threshold // steps taken in day // mood // medication taken // hours worked // cigarettes smoked

But the power of self-tracking is even more profound. It's not just that collecting this data can help us change our behavior all on its own. Using the immensely powerful tools now becoming available, we can set up positive feedback loops: We keep track of something, see how the data matches up with what we'd like to have happen, and then use that knowledge to modify our actions.

The effect of feedback on attempts to change behavior is well established. A 2001 study in the American Journal of Health Behavior showed that personalized feedback increased the effectiveness of everything from smoking-cessation programs to interventions for problem drinkers to exercise programs. Feedback is important and powerful; it works.

That feedback can be internal, too, because when we start to do things to make ourselves more healthy, our bodies react. When obese people lose as little as 7 percent of their body weight, the levels of adiponectin in their blood goes up—reducing their risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Or consider the five-run threshold that Nike has seen in the data. It might be that runners not only like the information they get; they might be getting positive feedback from their body after five runs as well.

Think of it this way: It used to be that to lose weight, you'd keep a diary of everything you ate. Stepping on a scale is easy enough and gives one data point—about the system's output, not its inputs. But develop a system that allows you to track not only your weight but also what you eat, how you exercise, even how you're feeling, and suddenly you can start to pull things together. You can see how all those variables interact and then put that information to use.

We tend to think of our physical selves as a system that's simply too complex to comprehend. But what we've learned from companies like Google is that if you can collect enough data, there's no need for a grand theory to explain a phenomenon. You can observe it all through the numbers. Everything is data. You are your data, and once you understand that data, you can act on it.

On August 31, 2008, thousands of runners lined up for a 10K race in Taipei. And in Melbourne, Australia. In Istanbul and Munich, in Paris and New York, in Austin and at Nike headquarters. In 25 cities, Nike organized what it dubbed the Human Race. But if you weren't in one of these locations, you could still participate—by running 10 kilometers on your own and uploading the data to Nike+. That day, 779,275 people participated both at the race sites and virtually, together running more than 4 million miles.

Gathering and connecting such a large community unlocks another powerful effect of Living by Numbers—the feedback loop that comes not from you but from the world around you. Simply put, other people can tell you to go out and run.

It's one thing if some company tells me that I'm slacking off, like when Nike+ sends an email reminding me to get out and exercise. It's a whole different thing if people whose opinion I care about get on my case. Nike+ lets a user create a goal—one that other people can see. Let's say I pledge to run 100 miles this month. I can then enter the email addresses of people I'd like to cheer me on—my wife, my mother, my boss. As I sync up after each run, the data is uploaded to the site, and my support group is updated on my progress. The hope is that they'll use whatever techniques they can to try to motivate me. (One imagines praise, guilt, and threats, in that order.)

Again, Nike is tapping into well-known science here—the power of communities. Nicholas Christakis, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, has been examining how social networks influence our behavior. For instance, in a network of more than 12,000 people in Framingham, Massachusetts, he found that smoking behavior tends to cluster: People quit smoking in groups, as part of a team effort; as more of them stop, the remaining smokers find themselves moving to the margins of the social network. Those community ties have direct effects on people's behavior.

Competition can be another great motivator. Nike+ has a feature that sets up challenges for a group of runners, from just two friends to the entire massive community. Software developer and Nike+ runner Cabel Sasser compares the system to a videogame. "Like any good online game, you can challenge your friends," wrote Sasser on his blog. "First to 100 miles? Fastest 5-mile time? Your call. These challenges wind up being incredibly inspiring ... Logging in after a long run, uploading your data, and seeing where you are in the standings is a pretty awesome way to wrap up your exercise. And more important, sitting around the house, wondering what to do, thinking about jogging, and then realizing that if you don't go jogging tonight you're going to lose points and slip in the standings—now that's true videogame motivation."

As Nike has slowly added features to Nike+, a small group of outside software makers have raced forward, showing how the system might grow and morph over time. Open source projects like Neki++ and Running Tracker give you control over your data, allowing you to download and analyze it directly, without going through Nike's site. Since the data is exported from the iPod in a standardized format, it's relatively easy for other services to manipulate. Users have hooked Nike+ into other social networks—Twiike automatically posts your run data to Twitter whenever you sync it.

In a stance that's uncommon for a company that has historically relied on patented technology like its Air cushioning system, Nike seems to be genuinely excited to see these tools sprout up. After all, the more apps out there, the more Nike+ gear the company can sell. "The more we can open up Nike+, the better," says Stefan Olander, who oversees digital content for the Nike+ site. "The only reason to close it out is because you actually don't believe that you have a strong enough product for others to want to take it and do good things with it." So far, Nike hasn't officially released a software kit to allow developers to hook directly into Nike+, but that's likely to come.

"The open sourcing piece hasn't been developed yet," says Nike CEO Parker, "but that's part of our plan moving forward. The technology here is still in its infancy."

The challenge Nike faces is that it's a hardware company, one that owes its success to deep understanding of cushioning foam and biomechanics. The genius of Nike+ isn't the hardware, no matter how clever and easy to use it might be. The genius is the software—the deeper insight it allows and the connections with others it helps make.

So while some athletes would like to see more features, like heart rate monitoring (the company says that it is looking into it for a next-generation product), that's almost beside the point. If Nike wants to make Nike+ into the universal platform where athletes track their workout data, it has to find new, unexpected ways to collect and share it effortlessly.

Nike has always tried to meet the physical needs of athletes with shoes and equipment, but Nike+ does something very different. Nike+ is about creating, and then meeting, a psychological need. "What Nike+ taught us about was context," says Trevor Edwards, Nike vice president of global brand management. "It lets the product live beyond its physical use."

There's a purity about running. All you need are a set of legs and lungs and the effort required to move forward, faster. For most runners, it's an intensely individual experience—you and the road or trail. The world shrinks, and you focus on yourself in isolation.

Of course, another word for isolation is boredom. For a lot of people, there's something excruciating about exercise—it's right up there with balancing your checkbook, visiting your in-laws, and flossing your teeth. That was the case with Rick Law. "I used to complain about how inactive I was and wish there was an interesting way to become more physically active," says Law, who works as a technology manager at Thomson Reuters in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2007, Law's wife gave him a Nike+ system for Christmas, hoping it would motivate him.

It did. The first run Law did was just over 10 minutes long, not even a mile. But day after day, he'd head out in the morning before going to the office, putting in the work to get stronger and faster. Soon he was up to 3 miles, then 8, then 10.

By tracking his effort—enhancing an analog experience with digital technology—Law found that running could be as interesting as his work. When you're Living by Numbers, what happens after the run becomes as important as the run itself. Law got feedback as he ran and enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that came from charting his progress as he got more and more fit.

For many Nike+ users, doing their exercise becomes inextricable from measuring it. Again and again, they tell you that without their unit, running is mundane, like listening to a symphony through laptop speakers "Forgetting my Nike+ sensor, or my iPod battery being dead, just takes the life out of my run," Law says.

A couple of weeks before Christmas 2008, Law ran the Dallas White Rock Half Marathon. "It was an endurance struggle for me," Law says. "But in a year, I went from the couch to a half marathon." He finished the 13.1 miles in two hours, 26 minutes, 28 seconds. Now, Law is training for the Chicago Marathon in October, tracking a new goal. All told, he's spent 75 hours and 27 minutes on the road, and he's put in 428.8 miles. And counting.

Senior editor Mark McClusky (mark_mcclusky@wired.com) wrote about performance-enhancing drugs in issue 15.01.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

How to Live by the Numbers: Exercise

The Algorithmic Workout

Marc Digesti logs on to one of the weight-free CPro resistance stations at the Core Performance Center in Santa Monica, California, and downloads a custom workout designed by his new coach: an algorithm. After tapping through a body-part map that allows him to note injuries, Digesti begins pulling a cord as directed by an onscreen video. As he guns through five reps of a biceps curl, the monitor displays his power output in watts for each arm. "You can see that I fall off a bit on these last reps," Digesti says breathlessly, while the screen message "Behind schedule!" prods him onward. "Next time the system might give me a little less weight."

At Core Performance, personalized workouts have been digitized and automated — think Club One run by Deep Blue. The gym's founders spent two years poring over decisions made by a coach and embedding them into workout equipment that compares a gym rat's goals (say, run a marathon) with their stats (like VO₂ max) and nutrition habits to calculate a progressive series of workouts. Data from each session is saved in order to improve subsequent ones. The principle is that workouts you measure are workouts that make you fitter — because you train more precisely and work harder when you're getting quantitative feedback.

Core Performance charges up to $65 a workout — what many gyms charge for a month. But the idea is spreading. At Wicker Park Fitness, a Chicago gym that costs $500 a year, customers can plug their USB drives into cardio machines and store info like time, distance, incline, and calories. And YMCAs around the country also now let customers use a similar system.

Wicker Park co-owner Mason Goldberg is convinced that obsessing over the numbers helps: "People love to track things. It brings out their competitive spirit."
— Jennifer Kahn

5 Exercise Tools

Garmin Forerunner 310XT
Garmin's latest GPS watch uses wireless ANT+ and networking to send data straight to your desktop. Plus, it's waterproof, so you can splish-splash without a crash.
$350, garmin.com

Training Peaks 3.0
Training Peaks sucks up data from dozens of fitness devices and reports back with visualizations of heart rate, power output, speed, distance, elevation, and much more.
$119/year, trainingpeaks.com

RunKeeper Pro
Turn your iPhone into a mobile fitness center. Using the GPS chip in 3G iPhones, this app tracks speed and distance and lets you upload and share your routes on the company's site.
$10, runkeeper.com

WeEndure
Performance monitoring meets Web 2.0 trash talk. This social network not only logs your data, it also shows your friends' numbers so you can "comment" on their workouts.
$20/year, weendure.com

SMHeart Link
This little gadget syncs with your favorite exercise gear — heart rate monitors, power meters, even fitness equipment — and sends the data back to your iPhone or iPod Touch wirelessly.
$125, smheartlink.com

GPs + Idaho = Gold Medal

In late 2007, when cyclist Kristin Armstrong first rode the course she would compete on in last year's Summer Games, it was so steep that she suspected her coach was punking her. It was no joke; the punishing route rose some 1,200 feet over the first 6.7 miles. But the 2006 world time-trial champion had a secret weapon: GPS. Armstrong exported the GPS tracks of the course from a Garmin Forerunner 305 and began looking for a similar training climb. She found a nearly perfect match right in her Boise backyard — the incline up Bogus Basin, a ski area 15 miles away — and started muscling her way up it every week. She also watched Google Earth flyovers of the Olympic course, memorizing its nooks and crannies. Those tech-enhanced preparations paid off: Armstrong struck gold in Beijing, winning by just over 24 seconds. "We're all great athletes and know how to train," she says. "It's everything else you do that's going to make you win that day."
— Mathew Honan

Bogus Basin Course GPS Coordinates

Beijing Olympics Course GPS Coordinates

Testing Your Limits

What's the single most important metric for athletic performance? Lactate threshold. During intense exercise, your body relies on carbohydrates for fuel. Carbs break down into lactic acid in your muscles, which becomes lactate in the blood. Your lactate threshold is the point at which your body produces more lactate than it can remove, causing fatigue; it's the biggest hurdle for endurance athletes. Training just below this threshold and crossing it for brief intervals improves your body's ability to process lactate, raising your lactate threshold heart rate (LTHR). The result is that you can work harder and longer, leading to faster race times. Here's a simple test to determine your LTHR: After warming up, strap on a heart rate monitor and run for 30 minutes as fast as you can. Ten minutes into your run, hit the monitor's lap button. Your average heart rate in the final 20 minutes is your lactate threshold heart rate.
— Mathew Honan

Power Meters Track an Athlete's True Mettle

During the National Hockey League's 2004 season-long lockout, veteran player Curtis Leschyshyn took the chance to completely change his workout routine. An avid cyclist, Leschyshyn looked for a new way to get in shape.

"Hockey training is a lot of short sprint efforts and weight work, simulating what we do on the ice," Leschyshyn says. But for an endurance sport like cycling, he had to meet different goals. His conditioning coach, Neal Henderson at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, helped set him up with a power meter, which directly measures the raw output a rider produces.

"When I'm riding, even if I think I'm going good, if the watts are off I know I'm not where I need to be," Leschyshyn says. "Power is a true indication of what's in the tank. It's not that I don't watch heart rate anymore, but I'm much more inclined to make sure I'm producing the watts. Heart rate isn't a true indication of your effort."

Right now, power training is limited to cycling, where the human-machine interface allows direct measurement. But improving GPS technology and algorithms offers the possibility that, someday, power training might transfer to other sports. Even hockey.

"If I could've worked with a power meter a few more years, I think I could have found a way of training to increase my power and quickness on the ice," Leschyshyn says.
–Joe Lindsey

DATA POINT

Heart Rate

Sure, your ticker speeds up when you're working out. But the benefit is that it works less the rest of the time. Conditioned athletes have much lower resting heart rates.

» Elite athlete
Maximum heart rate...200 bpm
Resting heart rate...32 bpm

» Average 30-year-old
Maximum heart rate...190 bpm
Resting heart rate...70 bpm

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

June 23, 1868: Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap ... Ding!

The first practical typewriter is patented. The nature of human communication is about to change forever.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 23 Jun 2009 | 4:00 am

Exclusive: OTOY Goes Mobile, Turns Your Cell Phone Into A Powerful Gaming Rig

Last week we posted a pair of videos showing off OTOY, the upcoming server-side rendering service that can stream complex 3D games to your computer through any web browser. It's a very impressive technology, requiring no plugins or lengthy installs — just open your browser and you can instantly jump into a game of Crysis or GTA4, streamed in HD quality. Today we've gotten our hands on a clip proving that when OTOY says its technology will work on nearly any browser-enabled device, it means it. As the video below shows, OTOY is going to bring modern games like Crysis and GTA 4 to your mobile phone. The phone in the video is a Samsung Omnia, which was released to the public last summer (in other words, you don't need a cutting edge phone for the technology to work). The game is running through the phone's built-in browser, with no installs required, and is being controlled via a Xbox gamepad connected wirelessly. OTOY Chief Strategy Officer Mark Tseng says that the company is working on a variety of control schemes, allowing users to control games using a phone's accelerometer, onscreen gamepad, or external peripherals like the Xbox controller.

Source: CrunchGear | 23 Jun 2009 | 3:41 am

Forget HDDs, forget SSDs, here come the HRDs

The debate between SSDs and HDDs will rage for years to come, but what happens when a real contender busts in? Now, I’m not talking about some holographic future toy that some physicist thinks might be ready by 2018. The “Hard Rectangular Drive” from DataSlide is a sort of hybrid between a solid state system and a normal platter-based hard drive. Think about a regular hard drive: you’ve got a read/write head in effect zooming around the hard drive, writing stuff onto an unimaginably long spiral. Now imagine if there were a million such heads all lined up, and they just moved up and down a million shorter tracks. Hmm? Sound good?

Well, I kind of oversold it a bit. At the moment, they’ve only got 64 heads running concurrently, but they believe they can work up something that will have many more heads, enabling 160,000 I/O operations per second and a 500MB/s transfer speed. That’s better than even the high-end SSDs — plus, the power draw is only 4W for enough HRD to fill a 3.5″ drive enclosure.

Unfortunately the semi-sequential writing mode means they’ll have to have their own drivers, but if this technology ends up advancing and getting picked up, that should be a piece of cake.

[via Reg Hardware and Tom's Hardware]

Source: CrunchGear | 23 Jun 2009 | 3:02 am

US Open Government Initiative Enters Phase Three

circletimessquare writes "The Obama administration opened a discussion forum in January of this year which has become an electronic suggestion box. It is now entering stage three, following brainstorm and discussion phases: the draft phase, in which the top subject matter is codified into suggestions for the government. 'Ultimately, the visitors advanced more than 3,900 ideas, which in turn spawned 11,000 comments that received 210,000 thumb votes. The result? Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama's true place of birth.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 23 Jun 2009 | 2:53 am

Pageonce’s updated iPhone app brilliantly combines all your online accounts into one app

Step aside, Mint. Pageonce just launched a major update to its iPhone application, and it blows you out of the water. Pageonce’s v3 update is absolutely fantastic, and Mint’s app pales in comparison. Pageonce’s premium app, A Personal Assistant Premium, allows you to connect all of your online accounts to one login (and one application). What do we mean by all accounts? We mean damn near everything: from Facebook and Twitter to American Express to AT&T Wireless, Pageonce allows you to connect with pretty much every account that you have online.

Quick disclosure: Pageonce recently provided refreshments at a CrunchGear meetup. I wasn’t at this event, though, and didn’t know about it until after I wrote this article.

Unlike Mint, which only focuses on financial accounts, Pageonce pulls information from six different types of accounts: Travel (i.e. frequent flyer programs), Finance (bank accounts), Social, Utilities (bills), Email and Shopping (Amazon or eBay). It is amazing how many different accounts they fit into those six buckets. Netflix? Check. Starbucks card? Check. LinkedIn? Check. YouTube? StumbleUpon? DirecTV? Allstate? Gmail? Check, Check, Check, Check and… Check. There’s no point in getting individual apps for each account anymore. As soon as Pageonce adds a few more features (more on that below) and allows you to wholly interface with each of these accounts from their site/app, it will serve as the primary hub to your various online identities.

The interface is clean and easy to navigate. It displays the most relevant information from your accounts, and doesn’t bother you with stuff you don’t need. For example, I could quickly browse my most recent credit card transactions and the outstanding balance on my bank account. Then, with one tap, I moved over to checking the time of my upcoming flight from DC to San Francisco. Two more taps and I was browsing the subject lines of my Gmail account. It was extremely intuitive to find what I was looking for, and the information was fairly up-to-date (though there were some things that were not up-to-the-minute). I even did a field test to compare its timeliness to Mint. I found 2 major transactions that were posted to my bank account in the last 24 hours that appeared on Pageonce but not on Mint (yes, even after I hit the refresh button and Mint claimed it was updated). That pretty much sealed it for me.

Though, honestly, I was sold from the beginning. Setup was a breeze. I just logged into Pageonce on my laptop and punched in my account information for everything I could remember off-hand. It even provided suggestions in each of the aforementioned categories of accounts, so I didn’t forget much. But, for the account or two I did forget to add, I could easily add the information from the iPhone app directly. There were a few hiccups, though. Facebook and a few of my bank accounts required additional steps to verify that I wasn’t some hacker trying to post nude pictures on my Facebook account.

And though you can’t directly post pictures on your Facebook account from Pageonce, one of the best parts of this app is that if you do want to dive deeper into a specific account, you can. For example, if you want to send a quick tweet out after looking over your finances, you can log into Twitter from within the app, without having to remember your ID and password. It was easy enough: a few taps on the screen and I was typing an update to my Twitter account. However, I don’t think it will replace TweetDeck (my favorite iPhone twitter app) just yet. It just doesn’t have all of the features you would want like an easy way to reply to a tweet or post a re-tweet.

Also, due to the fact that Pageonce aggregates all of your accounts, there were some limits in functionality. For example, though I could see a “summary” of my finances (the individual balances on my credit cards and bank accounts), Pageonce did not add them up to me to show me what my cash flow was like nor did it provide me with an estimate of my net worth. Honestly, though, that is just a matter of time, and I expect Pageonce to provide the financial tools that Mint does very soon.

Pageonce effectively combines all your accounts into one, and has created an accompanying iPhone app that will truly transform the way you interact with your online user accounts. Nobody wants to log into 15 different websites every time they are at a computer (or on their iPhone), and Pageonce has solved that problem wonderfully. If you have an iPhone and more than 3 online accounts (so, everybody who has an iPhone), buy Pageonce’s Personal Assistant for $6.99. You can thank me later.

What we like:

• The Value Proposition. Sometimes a company makes a product that just plain provides value. Pageonce has done that, and I can’t imagine the value proposition to the user being much better.
• Ease of Use. The UI is simple and clean. It gives you everything you want, when you want it, and nothing you don’t.
• Access to everything. I was extremely hard-pressed to find an online account that Pageonce doesn’t allow you to access. Pageonce even reminded me of accounts that I didn’t even remember I had.

What we didn’t like:

• Some missing functionality. Frankly, I don’t feel right making this complaint, but I will anyways: tweeting was a bit hard and I couldn’t write great e-mails from within the app.
• A summary of my financials. Again, I’m just nitpicking, but I didn’t get a full picture of my net worth or the ability to balance my budgets like I can with Mint.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: MobileCrunch | 23 Jun 2009 | 1:46 am

An Experiment In BlackBerry Development

ballwall writes "We've all read the stories about how lucrative selling apps on the iPhone can be (or not), but what about other platforms? BlackBerry accounts for twice as many handsets shipped as Apple, according to Gartner, so I decided to find out. I wrote about my experiences developing my first BlackBerry application including sales, platform issues, and a bunch of other things I thought new mobile developers might want to know about."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 23 Jun 2009 | 1:03 am

More than one million iPhone 3G Ss sold, Steve Jobs gives a quote

FROM APPLETELL - In just three days, from Friday to Sunday, Apple is reporting that over one million iPhone 3G Ss have been sold. The iPhone hardware update beat out the first run of the Palm Pre.
MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 23 Jun 2009 | 12:24 am

Teaser: The Pacific

The teaser trailer for the new HBO show, The Pacific, a 10-part follow up to what is perhaps my favorite piece of filmed media of all time, Band of Brothers. I am in goosebumps and on the edge of tears, and I haven't even freaking watched it yet.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 23 Jun 2009 | 12:09 am

Cyber Security Czar Front-Runner No Friend of Privacy

An examination of former Congressman Tom Davis' record shows that he's been on the wrong side of key privacy issues, including warrantless internet surveillance, and the controversial REAL ID Act, which aims to turn state driver's licenses into a national identification card.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 22 Jun 2009 | 11:57 pm

Gadget Lab Video: iPhone 3GS Picks up the Pace With New Features

Now that I’ve had an entire weekend to tinker with the new iPhone 3GS, I can officially tell you it’s pretty damn sweet. (That’s what the “S” should stand for — way cooler than “Speed.”)

My favorite feature? The improved 3.0-megapixel camera, now with video-recording capability. As you’ll see in the video above, the new camera furthers my transformation into “Crazy Cat Man.”

Some other cool stuff: The built-in compass, which greatly enhances the iPhone’s GPS. And, of course, the performance boost. To show you just how much faster the phone is, we pit the 3GS against its predecessor in a camera-loading race.

This video podcast was shot and produced by Annaliza Savage, with editing by Michael Lennon.

See Also:

• Gallery: iPhone 3GS Teardowns Reveal Underclocked CPU, More …
• Breaking: iPhone 3GS Camera Doesn't Suck
• T-Mobile Accidentally Posts Secret iPhone 3G S Specs
• How to Avoid Paying the iPhone 3GS Upgrade Tax
• Gear gallery: The iPhone 3GS, GPS Grandmaster and Split …
• Review: The iPhone 3GS By Steven Levy
• Apple Debuts Aggressively Priced iPhone 3GS, MacBooks
• Apple Bestows Cut-and-Paste, MMS on iPhone Users

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 22 Jun 2009 | 11:32 pm

HP introduces HP Photosmart Premium printer with an app store

Section: Computers, Hardware, Peripherals, Printers / Scanners

In this day and age, many households have broadband connections to the web which enables the user to perform many tasks.  Today, HP announced a new printer that takes advantage of the average house being connected to the Internet.

Interestingly enough, HP plans to launch their own app store, so to speak, which allows users to download these apps which have the ability to perform different tasks.  For example, some of the preloaded apps lets you navigate to a web page, then make it printer friendly in order to print out a page or two.  All these apps can be loaded from the 4.33-inch touch screen on the printer itself. 

Partners for the HP Apps Studio include USA Today, DreamWorks Animation, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, and Weathernews.  Keep in mind, these apps are not limited to printing apps.  With these apps, users have the ability to take advantage of the popular services each of these companies provide.  For example, “people will have free access to customized daily news, maps, coupons, coloring pages, movie tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a finger.”

If you like taking pictures and uploading it to the web, then you will be pleased to know that the printer comes with a direct connection to Snapfish, allowing you to upload pictures and print immediately.  HP encourages users to become developers, as you would have the ability to create, customize, and share apps later this year.  All the companies listed above will have their apps for free upon release of the printer.  Otherwise, it is your average inkjet printer that performs just like any printer should.  What makes this a cut above the rest is the HP Apps Studio. 

Expect the Energy star efficient HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web to begin shipping in the Fall for a retail price of $399.

Read [HP Press Release]

Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 22 Jun 2009 | 11:15 pm

Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs

Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 22 Jun 2009 | 11:13 pm

Neurons regulate fruit fly light avoidance

Canadian researchers say they have identified groups of neurons that regulate how fruit flies avoid light. McMaster University Associate Professor Ana Campos and researcher Veronica Moncalvo examined light avoidance after selectively deactivating groups of neurons in the larvae of Drosophila, a genus of fruit fly.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jun 2009 | 11:00 pm

New rheumatoid arthritis drug is promising

A French study shows the drug masitinib, being developed for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, appears to be well tolerated and effective, researchers say. The clinical trial, led by Olivier Hermine of Necker Hospital in Paris, included 43 patients with arthritis resistant to current treatments. In choosing which interventions to use for the management of rheumatoid arthritis, it is important to recognize that treatment should aim to keep the disease in remission and not be used intermittently to manage exacerbations, said Hermine.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jun 2009 | 11:00 pm

NIH Spends $400K To Figure Out Why Men Don't Like Condoms

The National Institutes of Health has given $423,500 to researchers at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute to figure out why men don't like to wear condoms. The institute will also study why men have trouble using condoms and investigate "penile erection and sensitivity during condom application." "The project aims to understand the relationship between condom application and loss of erections and decreased sensation, including the role of condom skills and performance anxiety, and to find new ways to improve condom use among those who experience such problems," reads the abstract from Drs. Erick Janssen and Stephanie Sanders, both of the Kinsey Institute.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 22 Jun 2009 | 10:59 pm

Review: Palm Pre

Now that everyone has had their say about the Palm Pre, I thought it wise to say a few words about the oft labeled “iPhone killer” that Sprint and Palm hope will bring each back from the edge of the dreaded deadpool. It seems as though every touch-screen device to launch since the first generation iPhone has faced an uphill battle and the Pre is no different. It’s unpolished, sure, but Palm’s webOS has managed to slip in right behind Apple’s iPhone OS, which is something the other smartphone operating systems have failed to do. But it’s not perfect and, let’s face it, nothing is ever perfect on launch day.

Having been left off the initial list of reviewers was irritating, sure, but now there’s no stress to rush a review out. In fact, I’m thankful for that because I’ve had time to really dig into the device and get over my own fanboyism. The Pre is a stellar device and I’m 80 percent sure that I will pass on the iPhone 3G S (iPhone fanboy I am not) and ditch my BlackBerry Curve. The only downside would be the lack of usefulness outside the US, which happens often enough throughout the year that I’m apprehensive about locking myself into a two-year contract with Sprint.

Giving a fully vetted and thorough review seems pointless, so I’ll share my thoughts on how the Pre does in real life, like walking down the street, on the subway, around little kids, etc.

Hardware has never been Palm’s strong suit and the Pre is evident of that. Is it horrible? No. Rough around the edges? Yes, both figuratively and literally.

The lip around the exposed keyboard could easily cut through cheese or my delicate flesh, but I don’t rest my thumbs on it. Who does that? As Joel pointed out, the plastic cover on the microUSB port was the worst thing Palm could have done.
Placing the 3.5mm jack in the center of the device is puzzling as well. I don’t like that the iPhone’s jack is on top either. Maybe I’m crazy, but if I pull a device from my pocket I don’t want to flip it around so the screen is oriented correctly. Am I being too nitpicky?

Now onto the keyboard that everyone seems to be lambasting Palm over. It’s not that bad, but the keys are too tacky. The width is comparable to the BlackBerry 8900, but the length is much, much smaller. It’s cramped, yes, but I can tap out messages just as fast as I can on my BlackBerry. Typing with one hand is easy, but a major roadblock comes up when you have to type numbers. Hard plastic keys would have been a better a choice, IMHO.

Every device should have a touch-screen going forward. I immediately try to swipe the screen of any device I receive for review these days including the Kindle DX that I received yesterday. I know it doesn’t have a touch-screen, but I do it anyway. The implementation and cohesiveness of the touch-screen with webOS is flawless. Gestures are immediately recognized and the speed of scrolling (up and down) is on par with the iPhone, but when you try to slow that motion down the Pre doesn’t know how to go from 100MPH to 5MPH. Is that a dealbreaker? No. Have you ever used the other highly touted touch-screen device available through Sprint? You know, the one made by Samsung.

With such a small screen, the gesture area reduces the impulse to throw the device against the wall. It’s my hope that Palm will better utilize the nipple that rests in the center of the gesture area in the Pre 2. An optical nub would better serve users. But that would negate any such gesture to go back even though an on-screen icon is available for such things.
It’s inevitable that all 3G devices with features like GPS, Wi-Fi and Web browsers (that are good) are going to have horrendous battery life. Pre owners and potential Pre owners might get lucky like G1 owners and get an update to correct battery life issues, but for now, it stinks. A normal day of use will kill the battery by dinnertime. The argument of “lightly” using the device is garbage. Who buys a device like the Pre, Bold or iPhone and doesn’t use it? I hear Seidio is selling an extended life battery, though.

The camera is nothing fancy and takes fairly good lowlight images, but you’re limited to turning the flash on, off or on auto.
I’d love to be able to correct the WB, but maybe a future firmware update will allow me to do that. Video would be nice, too.

Synergy works as advertised, but the syncing of every single individual I’ve ever emailed from my Gmail account is appalling and obnoxious. The initial sync takes a while rendering the Pre useless. Regular application use isn’t quite as appalling, but it’s not as smooth as we’re lead to believe. WebOS puts a beatdown on the processor and while it’s unclear which applications strain the Pre, it’s probably best to flick each card off the deck.

The iPhone is without a doubt the best iPod ever made. iTunes may recognize it as an iPod, but the comparison ends there. Every single video file I’ve tried to copy over to the Pre simply will not “work on this iPod” or something of that nature and it’s become a chore so I’m simply not going to use it. Playing music, however, is simple and I enjoy being able to flick through tracks with my finger rather than tapping an icon. That’s the one area where Palm trumps Apple. Oh, I can’t transfer approved image formats either and I refuse to go through the process of using iPhoto on my Mac just to sync images through iTunes. I want to drag and drop my content, so sue me.

E-mail on the Pre? Gmail (IMAP) is perfection (to a certain extent), but there’s no search and that’s an issue that needs to be resolved ASAP. But lengthy e-mails that might be truncated on the BlackBerry don’t appear to be on the Pre and everything you would see on your desktop is replicated on the Pre. This is where the BlackBerry gets trumped. E-mail on the iPhone stinks and it will always stink. I was never a fan of the way Android went about Gmail, so I tip my hat off to Palm.

Woe is me. The App Catalog is a blunder and needs to be filled immediately. The simple fact that there isn’t even a Facebook app is shocking. I loathe the web page that comes bookmarked on the Pre. But lest we forget that the iPhone went an entire year before Apple launched the App Store. That’s not an argument I’m going to use here because that was two years ago. Palm and everyone else needs to get their act together. Apple’s App Store is the only reason I use my iPhone 3G. Otherwise I’d just go and pick up an iPod Touch. For those curious about Twitter applications, Tweed is the better of the two available apps, but it doesn’t support Twitpic and has zero notifications.

Palm, please open up the SDK and let developers make future webOS devices the best it can be.

If you take anything from this review let it be this: don’t buy the Touchstone and always plug the Pre into a direct power source.

Now let’s get onto why I may or may not dump everything for the Pre. AT&T has me hooked if only because of the App Store. I realize I can just get an iPod Touch, but I want to be connected at all times. T-Mobile is the only network to support UMA and I travel enough overseas that my BlackBerry keeps those nasty roaming charges at bay. Verizon has nothing to offer me, so I won’t be going there. For now, I may have to carry three devices until I decide what’s best. That is the plight of a high profile tech blogger like myself.

My iPhone 3G is currently on the fritz and I haven’t been able to secure a Genius Bar appointment. I wonder why that is? Aren’t Apple products supposed to just work? If so, why do I have to wait more than a day to get an appointment? Are people just stupid? Anyway, I have the luxury of having multiple devices and I refuse to pick just one. As Gilly would say, “Saaarry.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: MobileCrunch | 22 Jun 2009 | 10:08 pm

High-Tech Tea Kettle Brings On the Heat

Want to add some precision to your geeky tea making? Better grab this kettle with mettle — you can tweak it to cook your water to the exact temp you want.

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 10:00 pm

Earlier severe storm warnings possible

U.S.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:28 pm

EU Ministers Leave Open Possibility Of Cloned Food

Authorities in Europe have resurrected the debate over so-called “Frankenfoods” on Monday by keeping open the possibility that cloned animal products would be sold in Europe.The move was met with opposition from various green groups, who warned of the dangers of cloned food.Meeting in Luxembourg, European Union (EU) farm ministers agreed to new rules for “novel food” products, of which cloned foods are a category.EU member nations want "novel foods to be authorized only if they do not present a danger for consumers, do not mislead them and are not nutritionally disadvantageous for them," said the farm ministers in a statement.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:26 pm

Retro Floppy Flash Drive

[via Guaraná Rosa via Book of Joe]

Previously:

• USB flash drive looks like a panda and saves them, too
• Steampunk Flash Drive
• Yes we can sell you Chinese-made flash drives with Obama holograms ...
• Airplane-shaped flash drive - Boing Boing Gadgets
• "Oh !*#%" flash drive looks like work of world's stupidest thief ...

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:18 pm

Microfabricated Device To Measure Cellular Forces During Tissue Development

 A University of Pennsylvania-collaboration of bioengineers studying the physical forces generated by individual cells has created a tiny micron–sized device that allows researchers to measure and manipulate cellular forces as assemblies of living cells reorganize themselves into tissues.The new micro-tool created in the study allows researchers to gauge how cells' minute mechanical forces affect cellular behavior, protein deposition and cell differentiation in a 3-dimensional, in vivo-like environment that mimics how tissue actually forms in a living organism.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:10 pm

Pacific Region USOs to be equipped with Skype phones

Section: Communications, VoIP

Internet based device designer and manufacturer IPEVO has announced that 18 USO centers across the Pacific Region will be equipped with its S0-10 Skype Desktop Phone and S0-Wi-Fi Phone for Skype devices. This will allow the over 890,000 troops and their families who use the centers to stay in touch with loved ones back home for free. Both devices work without the need for a computer.

“The USO is excited to be able to connect our men and women in uniform with those who travel with them in spirit, silently supporting them from the other side of the world,” said USO Pacific Region Vice President, Tom Kolstad. “We appreciate IPEVO generously donating these VoIP phones to our region. The service that IPEVO phones will provide to our military and their families to call home is priceless.”

This is a wonderful thing IPEVO is doing.  Let’s hope that the 112 other USO centers around the world will eventually have the chance to be similarly equipped. Staying connected to home is so important for our troups-and the ones waiting for them to return

Read [Ipevo]

Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:08 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Great White Sharks Attack

Great white sharks hunt like serial killers, research shows. Watch them in action.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:08 pm

iPhone 3G S or 3GS? Apple Needs a Copy Editor

(Warning: The following is a silly, intrinsically useless post about copy style.)

The space in the name of Apple’s new iPhone — “iPhone 3G S” — is the bane of a copy editor’s existence. (How do you pluralize the thing?) Here at Wired.com, our copy desk voted to eliminate it. Most amusing is that Apple appears to be fickle about how to punctuate the new iPhone, too.

At the Apple Store web site, you’ll notice the third-generation iPhone is listed as iPhone 3G S. But in Apple’s latest press release, that space is nowhere to be found.

What gives? Perhaps the copy editor of Apple’s public relations team couldn’t stand the space either. But whoever writes copy for the Apple Store web site doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

And here we thought Apple was obsessed with consistency and quality. Personally, I think that redundant space is ugly, and I want it officially omitted!

How do you feel about the space in “iPhone 3G S”? Vote in the poll below.

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 22 Jun 2009 | 9:07 pm

Protein neuroligin helps make synapses

U.S.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Jun 2009 | 8:35 pm

Hack Your Holga: Get Quality Pics From Cheap, Chinese Plastic

Lens blur, color distortion, harsh vignetting in the corners -- all things the inexpensive, plastic Holga camera is famous for. Learn some tips for modifying these cheap film cameras to produce some brilliant, artistic pictures.

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 8:11 pm

Iran created their web spying monster with assistance from Western tech

Section: Computers, Networking, Security, Web, Websites

Siemens AG and Nokia Corp. should be so proud as they watch the news.  Look, Ma.  Look what I’ve helped to create.  A joint venture between the two companies helped lead to the massive spying technology being used by the Iranian government.  They’re using a practice called deep packet inspection.  This practice is one that is even more invasive than anything China is doing.  With deep packet inspection, it allows the government to block communications, monitor information, and alter it for disinformation purposes.  And this capability was provided by Siemens/Nokia in the later part of 2008 according to Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture.

There was a “monitoring center” installed within the government’s telecom monopoly, which was part of a bigger contract with Iran that was part of a mobile-phone network technology, Roome confirmed.

“If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them,” said Mr. Roome.

It was known even last year that the technology was there, just not how much the government could do with it.  “We didn’t know they could do this much,” said a network engineer in Tehran. “Now we know they have powerful things that allow them to do very complex tracking on the network.”

How it works is that equipment is inserted into a flow of online data, whether from internet phone calls or emails or images and messages from sites like Twitter or Facebook.  Then, every single packet of data is deconstructed and carefully analyzed for keywords.  It is then reconstructed again within just milliseconds. 

In Iran, this is all done at just one hub.  Whereas in China, where it is done to a lesser extent all over the place through several ISPs.  Here, every piece is analyzed through one single choke point.

Users in Iran have been complaining of the horrifically slow internet speeds.  This deep packet inspection would obviously explain that.  Unless there is a massive increase in processing power, deep packet inspection will delay transmission of online data.

This may also explain why the government has been allowing the ‘Net to work instead of totally knocking it offline like they did briefly recently.  They want to see what is being said and readjust it accordingly as well.  Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc, says that Iran is “now drilling into what the population is trying to say”.

Obviously, human-rights groups have not had very nice things to say about selling this kind of equipment to Iran, or other regimes considered to be repressive.  When asked about it, Mr. Roome of Nokia Siemens Networks said the company “does have a choice about whether to do business in any country. We believe providing people, wherever they are, with the ability to communicate is preferable to leaving them without the choice to be heard.”

Ummm…ok Mr. Roome.  So, you’re saying, yeah, it’s probably better to let them talk, but hey, business is business and we’ll give you the means to do the opposite anyway?  That’s what I like to see - strong character.

They aren’t the only government with this kind of filtering technology by the way.  Most start out nice and innocent.  Spam, porn, that sort of thing.  The Australian government is trying one out to protect its kids from online porn right now, Britain has blocked sites, and Germany is thinking about it.  And the good ‘ole US has the capability as well since the whole “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” although White House Officials won’t comment on how or if it is currently being used under the Obama administration.  If not, why aren’t they talking though?

Even in Iran, the justification they used for starting the whole censoring bit was blocking online porn (as well as other material “offensive” to the regime) according to people who studied the country’s censoring.

And it spiraled from there.  In 2001, ISPs were required to install filtering systems, and all international connections had to link to a single gateway controlled by the country’s telecom monopoly.  Over 5 million sites were then blocked in recent years, according to Reporters Without Borders, a press-freedom group.  During the ‘05 Presidential election, the internet was shut down for hours and it was blamed on a foreign cyberattack, a claim that was later proven false according to several Tehran engineers.  A few years ago, OpenNet discovered the government was using filtering equipment from the US company, Secure Computing Corp. which is now owned by McAfeee Inc.  They denied any knowledge of the use of its products in Iran at the time.

Internet experts say that building online content inspection on a national scale and coordinating it at a single location requires “hefty resources, including manpower, processing power and technical expertise” and they apparently have it.  But watch out, because Iran isn’t the only country that does.

Via:  [WSJ.com]

Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 22 Jun 2009 | 7:33 pm

SLIDE SHOW: Extreme Space Tools

For space construction, engineers must build tools that hold up under extremes.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 Jun 2009 | 6:38 pm

HP Introduces Web-Connected Touchscreen Printer

In a bid to inject some spark into stodgy home printers, HP has introduced a new all-in-one touchscreen printer that can directly connect to the web and print coupons, maps, movie tickets, news and weather information without the need for a PC.

HP has also taken the idea of apps, popularized by smartphones such as iPhone and T-Mobile G1, and extended it to its product. That means the company’s latest printer will come preloaded with HP applications that can be accessed via the touchscreen panel. HP will also allow users to create and download apps from their site later this year.

“By giving people access to the content they want at the touch of a finger, the ability to customize their printing experience and create their own apps, we are driving a significant shift in how people will be printing in the future,” says Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president, imaging and printing group, HP.

That means picture yourself just turning on this printer going to Fandango and printing movie tickets or accessing Coupons.com for the latest grocery deals, or printing directions right off the device.

The new printer comes with a rather clunky name–the HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web, and a hefty price tag.  It will be available starting fall for $400.

The printer will have a 4.3-inch LCD touchscreen and can print, fax, copy and scan. It can also print directly from Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, Bluetooth-enabled devices,  iPhone and the iPod touch.

The device’s user interface seems fairly easy to use and it will have the ability to browse the web, though it is not likely to be a complete browser. Among the early HP app partners will be USA Today, Google including mpas and calendar, Fandango, Coupons.com and Web Sudoku. The printer will also connect directly to a user’s Snapfish account to view, print and upload photos.

Bringing maps, news and coupons functionality to a printer makes it more likely that the average user will get more value from their printer. But unless HP can bring that $400 price tag down significantly, this could end up as a niche product.

Photo: HP Photosmart Premium/HP

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 22 Jun 2009 | 6:37 pm

Flash Player 10 coming to Android, Symbian, WinMo, and webOS in October

If you’re rocking an iPhone and are looking to get Flash up on your handset, continue holding your breath. If you’re on an Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, or webOS-powered handset, however, we’ve got good some news.

In Adobe’s earnings call last week, CEO Shantanu Narayen slipped in one little meaty morsel on Flash on the go:

We are bringing Flash Player 10 to smartphone class devices to enable the latest web browsing experience. Multiple partners have already received early versions of this release and we expect to release a beta version for developers at our MAX Conference in October. Google’s Android, Nokia’s Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, and the New Palm Web OS will be among the first devices to support web browsing with the newest Flash player.

Companies including ARM, NVIDIA, Broadcom, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm are optimizing Flash player for their processors and platforms. We continue to see momentum for the open stream project and now have 25
participants on board to use Flash as a consistent run-time across screens.

From that, we can gather than the first inklings of Flash for Android, S60, Windows Mobile, and webOS ought to start showing up around October and the months that follow. Remember, however, that this is all beta stuff; we’d be surprised if it started showing up for the masses until sometime in 2010. Regardless, progress is progress. There’s been an endless clamor for it for years; at long last, you’ll finally be able to punch the monkey and win a free iPod Touch no matter where you are.

[Via Google Android News]

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Source: MobileCrunch | 22 Jun 2009 | 6:36 pm

Wood iPod Mini

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 6:12 pm

Review: iPhone 3G S, the best phone out there, but power users should wait it out

First, an anecdote: when the iPhone first launched in 2007 I took it on a tour of Central Europe, namely Budapest and Warsaw. Communism had just fallen and the dreams of these benighted nations were dashed. But as I pulled the iPhone from its protective cozy, the eyes of those present were filled with hope again, hope that there was something better out there, something magical. That something was called the iPhone and it was this promise, the promise of a Jobsian escape from the gristmill of history. All of this in a cigarette-pack-sized cellphone.

Fast forward two years. With the release of the iPhone 3G S we can safely say that the bloom is off the rose. The 3G S looks exactly like the iPhone 3G in every way. There is no outward identification and, in those intervening years, Hungary, Poland, the UK, Russia - heck, everybody - got the iPhone. Pulling one of these out is like pulling out something like a tin of Altoids - a bit against the grain but common enough to discourage gawking. So we must answer a few questions in this review. They are:

* What are the major improvements?
* Who is this phone for?
* Should you buy one/should you upgrade?

And so we begin.

What are the major improvements?

Unless you live on the veldt with your family of Stone Age bushmen, I expect that you have a working understanding of the current iPhone 3G. To recap, it is a touchscreen, multi-touch phone - which means it supports multiple finger gestures including “pinching” to zoom in and out. It has a color screen, an earphone jack, and little else in terms of external characteristics. There is a silence switch and volume controls and it still uses the standard iPod jack found on every iPod since the dawn of time. It supports podcast playback with skip-back and fast forward play modes.

This is a 3G phone which means you get about 200 Kbps up and 500 Kbps down on AT&T’s network. Your mileage may vary while roaming. You’ll pay $60 to $120 a month for unlimited data and a bucket of minutes. The phone itself costs $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB, which presupposes you’re coming in as a new AT&T subscriber. Costs for upgrading are dependent on your current status at AT&T.

Now for the improvements. The main improvement is VGA video recording and upload. This is a huge deal. Before the iPhone, cell phone cameras were an add-on, something that you used in a pinch when you didn’t have anything else. Now the camera is a must-have and Internet syncing comes standard on almost every phone out there. It was the iPhone that started this charge and with the ability to upload video to YouTube, they are about to own the casual video market.

In short, the ability to upload video is great. You can shoot some video of junior at the park, compress it, and begin the upload in about a minute. The upload itself takes considerably longer - don’t try to upload anything over a few minutes using 3G - but it runs in the background and uploads, slowly but surely. Other casual video cameras, like the Flip, are done for.

The photos it takes are also quite nice. Here are a few I took in bright sunlight:

[PSGallery=2nyx58o35c]

Other than that, you’re looking at nearly identical hardware with a slight speed bump, more working memory and storage, and a magnetometer. Everything else about this phone - cut, paste, search, etc. - appears on the iPhone 3.0 firmware update, accessible to the entire range of iPhone devices. Hmm… why is this familiar?

That’s right: Apple is going MacBook on their phone line. They’re upgrading the hardware in a very specific and almost imperceptible way. Just as the current crop of MacBook Pros are almost indiscernibly different from the previous crop, this iPhone is indiscernible from its older brother. Why? Because Apple makes “Apple” hardware. It doesn’t take to flights of fancy like Dell or HP and it doesn’t feel the need to change trade dress from one iteration to the next. The next iPhone might look different but this is an evolutionary step designed more to showcase 3.0 than anything Apple designers can come up with. It’s almost as if Apple was keeping the lid on Snow Leopard improvements and instead focusing considerable energy on the iPhone OS.

The phone also has a magnetometer and can act as a compass, which makes for great walking directions and future turn-by-turn apps, but there are none to test right now so I can’t add this into the “compelling” file.

So this is really a video-recording iPhone. It’s faster, sure, but that is not the point here. This cements Apple’s position in media sharing.

Who is this phone for?

It is now a phone for everyone. My buddy, a programmer for a financial house, has been using a Blackberry for years. He wants to switch to an iPhone and now with search, he can. My mom wants to see pictures of her grandkids - she could feasibly get an iPhone 3G for $99 - the same price she paid for the pink Motorola RAZR she was carrying.

But if you are an early adopter and Apple lover, you may need to pass up this version. It does little your current iPhone 3G can’t do and unless you really love sharing video, you’d be hard-pressed to justify the upgrade costs.

The Apple hardware upgrade model works like this: take last year’s model, update the speeds and feeds, and add one compelling extra. The MBPs have gone unibody with an SD card slot. That SD card slot is vaguely interesting and you’ll stare at your old MBP thinking “Darn, I wish I had an SD card slot.” And you’ll sell your old MBP and buy the new one. The next iteration will have two more USB ports. Or a Blu-ray drive. Or a vibrator. You get the picture.

So here’s the iPhone upgrade - kind better performance with VIDEO. Is video worth the extra $200-$300? Potentially, if you’re a video buff. But could you wait until the upgrade is truly compelling? Sure.

Should you buy one/should you upgrade?

If you’ve read this far, you’re still unsure whether to upgrade. I, as an Apple fanboi, am sitting this iteration out. The wife has expressed interest in the video but I worry that the next iPhone iteration, which will probably come next year, will contain more compelling upgrades and that all the muss and fuss related to upgrading - not to mention the cost - will be repeated for the next model… and the next… and the next. Obviously, this is Apple’s plan and I’ll probably ignore my own advice sooner or later, but Apple power users can get away with avoiding the 3G S upgrade for the next few months.

I know you won’t listen to me, so go ahead and upgrade.

As for non-AT&T customers and customers looking to upgrade at the standard pricing or customers upgrading from the first-gen iPhone should run, not walk, to the AT&T store. This is the best phone on the market, bar none, and will change the way you think about phones. Praise not high enough? The iPhone has changed mobile telephony forever and the sooner you hop on the iPhone train the better. Everyone else is now playing catch up and unless you know you have very specific reasons for sticking with RIM, WinMo, or Symbian, you need to check the phone out. I don’t add Android or WebOS/Pre to that list because those platforms have not been tested nor are they particularly earth-shattering - yet.

Bottom Line

Current 3G owners could potentially sit this upgrade out. New users thinking about a feature phone on AT&T should go iPhone. No matter what the guy at the mall kiosk says, no matter how many phones he pulls out with a little keyboard, the iPhone is better. You say you need a physical keyboard? You don’t. I started using the iPhone after using a Sidekick for a few years and I haven’t missed the physical keyboard one bit.

In short, make the move.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: MobileCrunch | 22 Jun 2009 | 5:30 pm

Ultimate BlackBerry accessory: Visor

Section: Communications, Accessories

I use a visor speakerphone regularly in the car, so when I came across BlackBerry telling me about their new one, my ears perked up.  Blackberry introduced the VM-605 to compete with speakerphones on the market but does one thing more than most: transmits the caller’s voice over your FM radio.  That’s pretty neat.

This Bluetooth accessory works as you’d imagine: very simply.  The VM-605 has 13 hours of talk time, support for voice activated dialing, and announcements of callers in your phone’s memory.  The design is sleeky-thin and attractive looking; certainly nothing that will detract from your car’s appearance.

Presumably, you’d have your tunes rocking then when a call comes in, turn to that preset FM station to hear the caller through your car’s stereo system.  That, unfortunately is as close as I am going to get to a custom install.  Why the auto industry isn’t making cell phone integration into every car makes no sense to me.  Even the Microsoft Sync was cumbersome for me to use.  It’s almost 2010, let’s get this going.

This visor speakerphone is compatible with other phones that support Bluetooth as well.  BlackBerry devices must be running 4.2 or later software.

The $99 accessory is available straight through the BlackBerry store and looks to be available immediately.

Product Page: [BlackBerry]

Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 22 Jun 2009 | 5:18 pm

Quickfire returns to AT&T, no longer Quick to start on Fire

Four months after the Quickfire got pulled from the shelves for being a fire danger, it has returned. We’re can only assume they’ve fixed that nasty little charger-of-fiery-death issue. After 4 months and a recall warning, these things probably weren’t going to fly off the shelfs at the original $99 dollar price tag - so AT&T went ahead and chopped it down to $30 bucks.

At $100 bucks, we’d skip it. At $30, it’s a good pick for anyone looking for a dampened Sidekick. Make sure you pick up a headset adaptor if you have any interest in listening to music on this thing, as neither an adaptor nor compatible headphones are included in the box.

[Via EngadgetMobile]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: MobileCrunch | 22 Jun 2009 | 4:41 pm

Caribou Populations See Rapid Decline

Caribou and reindeer herds have dwindled by nearly 60 percent on average.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 Jun 2009 | 4:38 pm

Simulation Shows How Sunspots Evolve

High-resolution computer simulations of sunspots reveal how they form.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 Jun 2009 | 3:58 pm

Geodelic Raised $3.5 Million For Location-Aware Recommendations

On a mobile phone, the more you can automate search, the more likely people are to use it. Or at least that is the principle which seems to be guiding Geodelic Systems, a startup which is creating a "search-less search" experience for mobile phones. Today in a press release, it revealed that it raised $3.5 million in an earlier round possibly in 2008 from Clearstone Ventures (where it was incubated) and Shasta Ventures. The company was founded by Rahul Sonnad, who previously founded thePlatform, a Web video publishing service he sold to Comcast in 2006. Geodelic is creating a location-aware search engine for restaurants, movies, stores, flights, hotels, and local attractions which recommends results based on their distance from you. A "location carousel" brings up nearby results on a map by category and it learns from you behavior which places, stores, and brands you like the best, and will target you accordingly. The app is designed to be as passive as possible, eliminating or minimizing the amount of typing required. However, it doesn't go as far as some augmented reality tagging apps such as Layar or Sekai Camera, which add a data layer on top of the view through a phone's camera.

Source: MobileCrunch | 22 Jun 2009 | 3:45 pm

The $1,500 netbook

Sony heads into la-la land with the latest Vaio P model, which adds a 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 128GB SSD to bump the price to $1,499.99. Engadget points out that all still come with Vista, whose bloat does serious damage to the P's usefulness. So that's a $1,500 ticket to a day of tinkering just to get a productive machine. [Engadget]

Seriously, I love my $800 Vaio P with Windows XP, but this? You can get a MacBook Air for a grand and a half.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 3:42 pm

Lynx Brought Back from the Brink

The severely endangered Iberian lynx is making a slow but steady comeback.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 Jun 2009 | 3:41 pm

Acer puts out cheap Blu-ray enabled notebook

Section: Computers, Hardware, Laptops

Last week, Sony announced a line of cheaper notebooks that featured Blu-ray drives.  While nobody would ever accuse Sony of being the cheapest anything, the Vaio NW starting point at $880 was one of the cheapest entry level Blu-ray notebooks.  Not to be outdone by anyone in price, Acer is now putting out an even cheaper Blu-ray notebook.

The notebook will start at $750 and be part of Acer’s media-focused Gemstone Blue line.  Specs give it a 15.6” screen, 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, 250GB of storage and an nVidia GeForce GT 130M GPU.  Certainly not a bad price for the spec sheet, though also nothing particularly mind blowing outside of the featured 8X Blu-ray drive, and a multitouch trackpad.  Just in time for the summer back-to-school season the Aspire 5739G will be ready this June.

Acer also announced two budget laptops.  One, the 5536, ships with an AMD 2.1 GHz CPU, integrated Radeon GPU, and other fairly boring specs that put it as a decent entry level laptop for those who can’t afford much more.  The 5536 is selling right now for the netbook-esque price of $480.  There’s also a desktop replacement laptop for $600 with a 17” screen, 2 GHz Pentium dual-core, 4Gb of RAM and 320GB of storage that’s also available now.

Overall nothing particularly mind blowing fro Acer, which isn’t much of a surprise.  Acer looks to be attacking Dell in terms of pricing, and these laptops can certainly help.  Acer seems to be going in a direction where they offer cheap, barebones machines.  Given the current economic state that’s not a bad idea at all.

Read [Electronista]

Full Story » | Written by Shawn Ingram for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 22 Jun 2009 | 3:11 pm

Apple Sells One Million iPhone 3GSs in First Weekend

Apple sells one million iPhone 3GS's on the opening weekend.

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 3:04 pm

Atari Cart Clocks

Can't Afford Em Crafts describes itself as "two people with a passion for finding clever ways to reduce waste creatively." A part of me finds this Atari abuse horrifying, but let's face it: most of their arcade conversions sucked.

Product Page [CantAffordEmCrafts Geeky Gadgets via CrunchGear]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 2:54 pm

One Million iPhone 3GS’s Sold in Opening Weekend

However you slice it, Apple’s newest iPhone, the 3GS, is a success. The early reviews like it, and more importantly, the public likes it. So much so in fact, that Apple has shifted one million of them in the first weekend.

Compare that to T-Mobile’s G1 Googlephone, which took half a year to reach the same total, or the Palm Pre, which sold a measly 50,000 units in its opening weekend, according to one analyst’s estimate.

For the iPhone 3GS, these are the official Apple numbers, not some analyst’s guess. One million isn’t bad, but if we look at it another way, it shows that the iPhone is truly a superstar. Let’s translate those figures into real cash money:

We suspect that Apple sold more 32GB iPhones than 16GB, but for the numbers we’ll call it a 50/50 split. We’ll take the unsubsidized prices, as the is what AT&T will be paying Apple for the handsets, more or less. That gives an average unit price of $650. Multiply that by one million and you get $650,000,000. This is $2 million more than Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones has managed worldwide in seven years. Not bad.

One more takeaway from this announcement: Even Apple is struggling with the plural form of “3GS”, opting in its headline to use the term “3GS Models” instead of “3GS’s”. Or is it “3GSes”?

Apple Sells Over One Million iPhone 3GS Models [Apple]

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 22 Jun 2009 | 2:54 pm

Planet 'Restlessness' May Predict Big Quakes

The planet may have reached a state of "criticality" just before the 2004 tsunami.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 22 Jun 2009 | 2:51 pm

Leather laptop bag folds 8 ways

Hard Graft's 2UNFOLD laptop bag is, well, my kind of laptop bag: leather, lots of pockets and compartments, and unnecessarily complicated. Designed to transform into 8 different styles--briefcase, shoulder bag, rucksack, reversible courier (leather or canvas) and reversible clutch--it can fit a 17" or 13" laptop depending on which config you fold it into, and is made in Italy.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 2:36 pm

Bing Mobile concept screenshots surface, looks to be a simple rebadging

Microsoft just launched Bing a few weeks ago with lots of fanfare and media coverage. Already the service has gained market share, but it seems that Microsoft is ready to be in the mobile field as well. But, unlike the Internet site which received an extreme makeover, the mobile client might simply be a rebadging if these screenshots are true.

These screenshots come from an April-build of the Bing mobile app. (Kumo was the codename for Bing, btw) It should look familiar as, well, it’s basically Live Search. That’s not all bad though. Live Search isn’t a bad app. In fact it had voice search and location-based services a while before Google’s app did.

The real news here is that the app should be available in BREW and Sidekick devices when it launches shortly. Plus, Verizon is going to build the service directly into all its BREW-supported devices starting in November, which could be huge for the service.

Integrated search is a must for Bing mobile. Google has it on the browser-side, being the default search engine in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. But if Microsoft can get more wireless providers and hardware manufacturers to include the Bing mobile app into the phone, the service might have a fighting chance in the mobile world.

Hopefully, the app will launch with a refreshed look too instead of this simple rebadging that we’re seeing now. Hopefully.

CrunchBase Information

Bing

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Source: MobileCrunch | 22 Jun 2009 | 2:20 pm

Gigabit powerline ethernet

Belkin's new Powerline HD starter kit claims to offer gigabit speeds through your home's power wiring. [Belkin]

Because of its high Gigabit speeds and consistent connection, Gigabit Powerline reduces online gaming latency and provides large bandwidth, making it ideal for online PC gaming and ultrafast high-quality transmission of multiple video streams. While the current fastest powerline technology runs at 200Mbps, Gigabit Powerline delivers content at 1000Mbps of speed.

My experience with this sort of gadget is that throughput drops hard and fast with distance -- a 200MBps model I tried offered only a few megabits worth of actual transfer over a 60ft run.

This one, however, is much prettier.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 2:09 pm

Android’s last great chance: T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile

T-Mobile announced today that the myTouch 3G phone will go on presale July 8th, a mere 15 days away.  T-Mobile has priced this phone at $199 and believes it can compete with its Android operating system with today’s hottest smartphones.  Let’s take a look at T-Mobiles positioning of this phone.

All about you

The myTouch 3G is pitched as totally customizable to you.  You get to create your own mobile experience, customize menus, themes, skins and even a 3rd party application that knows you better the more you use it.  T-Mobile touts Androids widgets to put whatever info is important to you on the home screen.

Google as a feature

T-Mobile is using Google to lure more customers to this phone.  The phone integrates Google Search, GMail, Google Maps, Picasa, YouTube, and even a Google Search widget on the home screen.  T-Mobile goes so far as to offer to add July 8th, the presale opening day, on your Google Calendar via a link.  Pretty cool if you love the Google network.

Apps, front and center

On the myTouch website page, viewers will find a “Featured Exclusive App.”  Interestingly, this app, Sherpa, is supposed to learn about you through your searches and provide you customized results based on your past search history.  According to T-Mobile:

At the heart of the T-Mobile myTouch, Sherpa is an application with a built-in learning engine that automatically customizes itself to your preferences. Created by Geodelic, the application learns your likes and dislikes through behavior and user feedback, prioritizing recommended retailers, restaurants and attractions. Seamlessly blending behavior recognition, a recommendation engine and location-relevant information, this combination of learning is exclusive to Sherpa and unlike any experience currently on the market.

I find it interesting that T-Mobile is paying to get an exclusive app on a mobile OS.  Surely, it is one way to set T-Mobile apart from other Android phones (more are inbound this summer) but it seems counter intuitive to the 3rd party app system.  It seems to be a statement that the Google App catalog doesn’t have everything you need.  That’s how I read it, anyway.

No G2?

The myTouch 3G is the second Android powered phone on the T-Mobile network.  Following on the success of the G1, which sold over a million phones, the myTouch looks to be a step in the right direction.  The phone features a software keyboard, no odd angle at the bottom of the phone, which allows for a much thinner piece of hardware.  Early testers say the phone has a “plasticy feel” compared to other smartphones.

MG Siegler of Techcrunch who got his hands on the myTouch early had this to say about the phone:

I’ve only played with the iPhone 3G S for a few days, but I think it’s safe to say that for day to day use of any application and browsing the web, the new iPhone blows past the myTouch in terms of speed. But again, the myTouch seems noticeably faster in many regards then the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G.

Can it compete?

“Can it compete?” is a two part question.  First, would the 1 million or so G1 users see fit to upgrade to the myTouch?  After all, one of the big selling points of the G1 was the physical keyboard, which the myTouch lacks.  The younger crowd tends to gravitate to physical keyboard, which may have helped the G1 fly off the shelves.  Will they be disappointed with that the myTouch?

Second, if the Android OS was the big draw to the G1, what does the myTouch have to lure upgraders?  The biggest spec change was a doubling of internal memory to 512MB to help the phone load and exit applications in a much more rapid fashion.  Other vitals, screen size and resolution, camera and processor all stay the same.

I lied about the two part question.  Let’s make it a three-part.  Third, if G1 users are not the target market (the above seems to indicate they’re not) who is?  Perhaps it is those that have yet to be tempted to join the smartphone fun but haven’t committed.  GMail users tend to be tech-aware which should mean they have or have a good lead on a smartphone for them.  Everyone uses Google though so maybe they’ll push the Google angle hoping to cast a wide enough net to find another million users. 

Android is a good OS that just needs users and some time to build an app catalog to rival others.  In truth, if their market is “any Google user” and their pitch is “create your own experience” I believe they will have a hard time moving phones.  Joe Public doesn’t know a darn thing about creating mobile experiences and having someone who does build his experience, and do it now for just $99 (Apple iPhone 3G) might be too much of an offer to pass up.

The phone will go on presale July 8th with an anticipated delivery in early August for $199.

Product site: [T-Mobile myTouch]

Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 22 Jun 2009 | 1:12 pm

Nikon Herb Garden

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 1:12 pm

AT&T Screws Up iPhone Launch, Apple Cleans Up Mess with $30 iTunes Credit

Apple must be sick of cleaning up after AT&T, but it's done it again -- this time offering a $30 iTunes credit for a botched iPhone 3 GS activation system.

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 1:10 pm

iPhone 3.0 software features at a glance

Apple offers a chart explaining which iPhone software features work on each edition of the handset. [Apple]

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 1:09 pm

T-Mobile (Finally) Announces Second Android Phone

T-Mobile unveils the MyTouch, their second Googlephone, and on paper it is smaller, lighter and just plain better.

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 22 Jun 2009 | 12:49 pm

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