Albert Arnó blog: April 2014

Apr 21, 2014

Electronic Monocle Uses Biofeedback to Track Your Favorite Websites

The internet is a fire hydrant of content. Keeping track of the pages you enjoy is a pain. A team of UK design students has a conceptual solution: Amoeba, an electronic monocle that files away the pages you find most interesting, as measured by your biofeedback response. It's the emotion-tracking Google Glass you always wanted!

Apr 17, 2014

Police Are Testing a "Live Google Earth" To Watch Crime As It Happens

In Compton last year, police began quietly testing a system that allowed them to do something incredible: Watch every car and person in real time as they ebbed and flowed around the city. Every assault, every purse snatched, every car speeding away was on record—all thanks to an Ohio company that monitors cities from the air.

Apr 16, 2014

Google Looked Into Space Elevator, Hoverboards, and Teleportation

An anonymous reader writes "Google has a huge research budget and an apparent willingness to take on huge projects. They've gotten themselves into autonomous cars, fiber optic internet, robotics, and Wi-Fi balloons. But that raises a question: if they're willing to commit to projects as difficult and risk as those, what projects have they explored but rejected? Several of the scientists working at Google's 'innovation lab' have spilled the beans: '[Mag-lev] systems have a stabilizing structure that keeps trains in place as they hover and move forward in only one direction. That couldn't quite translate into an open floor plan of magnets that keep a hoverboard steadily aloft and free to move in any direction. One problem, as Piponi explains, is that magnets tend to keep shifting polarities, so your hoverboard would constantly flip over as you floated around moving from a state of repulsion to attraction with the magnets. Any skateboarder could tell you what that means: Your hoverboard would suck. ... If scaling problems are what brought hoverboards down to earth, material-science issues crashed the space elevator. The team knew the cable would have to be exceptionally strong-- "at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have," by Piponi's calculations. He found one material that could do this: carbon nanotubes. But no one has manufactured a perfectly formed carbon nanotube strand longer than a meter. And so elevators "were put in a deep freeze," as Heinrich says, and the team decided to keep tabs on any advances in the carbon nanotube field.'"

Apr 2, 2014

Computers Are Now Able to Teach Each Other Pac-Man, The End is Near

Until now, humans have had one significant advantage over computers and robots: We meatbags were the only ones who could teach them how to function. Now, researchers at Washington State University have created computers that can teach other computers. And they're using Pac-Man to do it. Is nothing sacred?

Apr 1, 2014

FDA Launches Social Media Educational Initiative for Pharma

from Pharma Marketing Blog http://my.onmedic.com/1i04SLt

via IFTTT